A/N: For Caesar's Palace Monthly Oneshot Contest December 2016. Enjoy.
He wants to rub his rheumy eyes, to clear the black spots that hang over his eyes. His paper crinkled hands twitch under the covers, but he can't move. He's not strong enough to do so. The covers are thick and woolly, warm and necessary to keep his frail body from convulsing in the winter chill, but they weigh him down like there's shackles over his arms, clamping him down to the bed.
"Cecelia," Bridel whispers, his voice a wisp of smoke, dissipating the moment it leaves his lips. He tries again. "Ce-cecelia," he groans, a little louder this time. The dust just sits on the mantel of the smoldering fire place and the rusty ceiling fan hangs motionlessly above him. "Cecelia! Cecelia Rheys!" No answer. Bridel Castro shivers and presses his thin, wrinkled body into the pillows.
The door clicks open some time later; it might have been an hour, or maybe a month. Time is just a figment of humanity's imagination, after all. When one is closed inside a motheaten old room, their aging body shutting down bit by bit, figments are simply that, figments. They're not important. Bridel doesn't know when it is morning or night. He only knows when he wakes and when he sleeps.
An older woman, older than Cecelia, walks into the room.
"Lycra," Bridel murmurs. "Lycra, come," he barks quietly, like a master, like Lyrca is a dog. The middle aged woman obliges, her face shadows behind her long black hair. She sits on the foot of the bed and stares at her father's toes sticking out from under the covers, wrapped in thick woolen stockings. There's a hole in one of the socks, and the tip of Bridel's left pinky pokes out. Lycra pulls the covers over his foot before looking up at him.
"Why are you shouting Mom's name?" Lycra inquires, her voice soft and distant as she stares at the intricate headboard behind Bridel.
"Where is Cecelia?" Bridel says in reply, his words breathy and breviary. Lycra just holds her father's hand in her own. His hand is clammy, cold, hers warmer. She shivers at the touch but plasters on a false smile.
"Where is Cecelia?" Bridel insists. Lycra's eyes fill with tears, and she turns her head to look at the window, the motheaten velvet drapes hiding the cold, warped panes of glass from view. She sighs, a shuddery, hideous thing.
"Mommy's dead," Lycra finally manages to utter. "She died forty five years ago, Daddy. In the Quell. How...how do you not remember? Brutus grabbed her by her hair and slashed her throat with his-"
"Where is Cecelia?" Bridel growls, his voice guttural and stony, sharp. Lycra gulps.
"In the graveyard with all the other Victors," Lycra hisses finally, after a minute of silence. "They're all gone now. Tex was the last one to go a couple of years ago. Mommy, she's with Woof and Organza and Tex, her friends, and she's with Abraham, too, Daddy."
"Take me to Cecelia," Bridel commands, his airy voice gaining a quality of acerbity. Lycra obliges.
O0oo0O
The cold air bites across Bridel's feathery-light body, lashing him with its ice cold whip called wind. Bridel stares at the slate gray skies with the slowly burgeoning clouds, thick and dark gray and limp in the heavens above. He relishes what must be his final time out in the open winter air; God would only prepare such an ominous greeting if his end was nearing. Lycra pushes the wheelchair over the cracked pavement. The haunting, broken down houses of Eight's Victor's Village cast shadows across them, and Lycra squeezes her eyes shut and stops. The house she grew up in, the house where she and her brother Abe and sister Camille were born, stands to the left, and Bridel doesn't even notice it. The memories are an onslaught on her emotions, and Camille's soft hand rests on her shoulder. Camille's come in from the Capitol where she works in the government to see their father. His end is drawing near. They look at the abandoned house and walk along, Camille now pushing Bridel while Lycra hugs her arms around herself and tries to fend off the cold.
In the center of the village, a small island of green, once manicured grass rose from the sea of pavement driveways and cul de sac. Lycra and Camille and Abe played on that little hill in the center of the Village when they were little. They would pretend it was a magical desert island and they were inventive castaways, and aging Woof and Organza would watch with light smiles, and their mother Cecelia and the more youthful Tex would sometimes join in, and so would Tex's wife Abilene and Bridel himself. Then one day Cecelia and Woof were taken away, and then bombs rained from the skies on a day when everything was black and red. Organza didn't make it out, and their paradise died. It was a paradise lost to them through the fires of hell, and they never really came back. They only came back to bury the slashed remains of Cecelia, the crumpled remains of Woof, the charred remains of Organza. In the years that followed, Abe died of cancer at age thirty one and Tex died soon afterwards from heart failure. Five dark gray granite headstones rise out of the now wild island of vegetation in the desolate ruins of the Victor's Village of District Eight. Five headstones, reading the names Woof Parsons. Cecelia Rheys-Castro. Organza White. Abe Castro. Tex Hannon. Camille wheels Bridel Castro up the hill and settles him in front of the five graves. Lycra walks up behind them and falls to her knees in front of Abe's grave. It is silent for eternity as five names, etched forever in granite stone, speak volumes in an empty world.
"Are you afraid?" Lycra asks after an eon. Bridel does not respond for a long time. His eyes are locked on the headstone, and he remembers meeting Cecelia on a night when the moon hung in the sky like a ripe piece of fruit and the heat of the summer day hung around. He remembers the ceremony of matrimony and making love to his new wife. He remembers the birth of his children, and then watching their mother get ripped away from them at a Reaping while he watched in tears. He watched her die on screen after she'd already survived the Games once, and he laid in bed for two months and did not get out, he didn't get out until they bombed the village. He wanted to stay there and let the fire claim him, he wanted to die, because he had let her die. He remembers the end of the Games, the end of the rebellion, the beginning of a new government, but politics weren't important, never were important to the simple man from District Eight who had his lover and his three children and a modest home in the Victor's Village of Eight to make him happy. That was all he needed.
"I'm afraid. How couldn't I be?" Bridel murmurs back. He heaves his wheelchair closer to his wife's grave, and he reaches out and traces the letters of her name, carved smoothly into the sleek grave marker.
"You've dealt with death forever," Lycra responds, her voice tired and limp in the cold winter air.
"I've always been scared of death. Death is an end. Death is inescapable. I...I always thought I would be the first one to go. I didn't want to see any of you die. I...I...I wanted to leave first. I was selfish. I wanted to die with all of you left. But...but now Cecelia's dead. Abey's dead. I'm dead. We're all dead. None of us will ever live. We're all just dead. Dead." His words hang in the air, and Camille draws in a sharp breath.
"Some wounds will never heal," Camille says quietly, placing her hand on Bridel's shoulder. "I love you, father."
"I love you, Daddy," Lycra whimpers from the ground, where she's dissolved to tears. Camille crouches between the two of them, trying to comfort the both of them but not doing a good enough job. Some wounds never heal.
"I think I'm ready," Bridel murmurs. "I'm ready to go home." The two daughters wheel their father back to his home. Three days later, Bridel let his last rattling breath escape his lips. He quivered with fear as the breath faded into the night and his body was suddenly so weightless. He sagged against the pillows, and she swore he heard Cecelia's sweet voice serenading him as he fell into the darkness.