With thanks to Katrace and Cocobeetles for your reviews of the last chapter. :)
She lay on a bed that felt too soft, too luxuriant. Her arms were rigid, and her eyes were only shut because she made them. The bed felt like it was sucking her down, offering no support but gravity, darkness.
Behind the confines of her eyelids, her father played on a loop, collapsing in a pool of his own blood. The feeling of bile in her throat. The screams of her brother writhing on the ground.
The sound of a gunshot, painfully loud, ringing in her ears still.
She stood. The rhythmic thrum of the train's engines became a rock she held to, reaching through the numb machinery of her mind to latch onto it. She stood, swaying, in the darkness and could not focus on anything more than the train's movements.
She did not want to focus on anything else.
Finally, as if awakening, she tore herself from the dreamlike state she had sunk into like the bed, dark and sucking.
She could not retreat into herself again; no matter how easy it is. She had done it before, when her mother died so suddenly- she had done it again, when her father had announced her marriage to a man she could never truly love.
Perhaps childishly, she had despised the concept with a passion. She knew it was the way of her district, the tacit understanding of her parents of her person, of who she would match well.
They would know better than her.
It was the way.
And she had run from Henry, her father's choice- she had run from her father. She had rejected the way, and she had killed her father. She had destroyed her brother.
If she did not win a game she was likely too young to succeed in, she would die. If she did not kill, she would die. Which was ironic, truly; she had killed already.
She had killed already.
She had-
Emma felt pain leach into her head, dull pain panging in her mind, ricocheting, amplifying. Feeling returned, horrifying, dark. The guilt crushed her and her heart thumped in her chest, reverberated in her neck, and her lungs squeezed and Emma could not breathe, she could not-
She crashed through the doors of the train carriage, breathing too fast to relieve her lungs with oxygen, walking too fast to understand where she was going. She wanted help and she wanted to be alone. She had been on this train for a day and she had felt nothing, felt numb; now she felt everything, too much, and she had caused her father's death and she wanted out, she wanted to go home, she wanted to plunge into the sea and feel the rush of the elements and the sting of saltwater in her eyes and all she had were tears and heartbeat, poor replicas for what she knew.
She had found the end of the train now, a window stretching in a smooth semicircular pane around her to show her the stars above and the trees around. They were dark, but what she could see blurred past her vision, from speed and tears.
She still could not breathe, and every breath she took came more shallowly. Her limbs were shaking and she could not stop moving them, and every movement depleted more oxygen but she paced and paced still, the mocking stars offering her no consolation for her pain.
She was a child who had killed her father in a race to kill herself, and she was too young and weak to kill anyone else.
In a month's time, she would be dead, and her death would be shown to her brother, and nothing could happen to stop it.
Her breath hitched and she created sounds without shape, strange breathy moans that had no purpose beyond Emma's lack of capacity to stop them. She paced and paced, breathed and breathed, both losing in a battle against one another, neither capable of a win.
"Emma?"
She gasped, choked on the breath, made another forced moan, and turned, gripping one arm with the other, laced over her abdomen as she dragged in each breath and exhaled it just as quickly.
Ronan stood at the doorway, her fellow tribute as unshakeable and resolute as the skies above them. He sighed, long and slow, at the breaking girl in front of him; a girl who only days before had placed a sword on his neck with complete ability to swing it against him.
He walked forward, firmly took her by the arm and guided her down to the carpet beneath their feet. It was thick and it muffled their movements, and the luxuriant feel of it gave them both pause- the feeling that they resided where they were not allowed, like children in their parents' bedrooms.
"Emma's the name you use, right? Not Odyssea." Emma nodded, untrusting of her voice to be steady. She had only ever seen Ronan at the Training Center, and training to kill others did not give a clear impression of anyone's stability or personality. She could not trust him with much; especially not anymore.
"You're not gonna like it, but I need ya to breathe in and out slowly. About five seconds in, seven seconds out. Can ya try that?"
Emma could barely manage it, her lungs as desperate to expel the air as they were; her breath hitched minutely on every intake. Ronan seemed to notice the issue, and tried a different tack.
"Alright, forget that. Just tell me- uh- do you have any pets?"
"What?" She spluttered, eyes wide.
"Don't question me, just tell me."
"I, ah, I, yeah."
"Really? What are they?"
"A dog. We never really named her anything, she's just Dog." Emma replied softly, breath shuddering on every intake. Ronan pressed further.
"Old? Young? Big? Small?"
"She's big and old; real fluffy, too." Emma said, casting back to memories of burying her head in the large dog's yellow fur.
"Right," Ronan replied, his tone less conversational than it was determined. "And a swimmer, too, I bet."
Emma, to her own surprise, laughed weakly. "You kidding? She loves the sea, but she always freaks out if it's deeper than her paws. She's awful at it."
Ronan nodded, leaning back off his crouched position into a sitting position to match Emma's. And Emma finally realised what was going on; in forcing her to speak on a neutral subject, Emma's breath had naturally begun to regulate itself again, and while she was shaky she was beginning to feel more natural for having a good breathing pattern. Her chest no longer squeezed; her heart beat more softly.
She sat there in realisation for a few moments, shakily drawing in breaths slowly, and letting them out more slowly. Ronan nodded, resolute and calm, and stood to go.
"-Wait!" Emma called after her fellow tribute. Ronan turned.
"-Why'd you do that?" Emma asked, clutching guiltily at her new silk pajamas and staring down the tribute who now unconsciously did the same.
"I dunno," Ronan muttered quickly. "We're both gonna be in the Careers together- I want good people watching my back." It was a hasty excuse; not exactly untrue, but perhaps hiding more feeling than he wanted to express.
"And how'd you know how to do that?"
Ronan did not answer; his gaze was instead drawn by the large window stretching behind Emma.
"Holy shit."
Emma turned; then, upon seeing what Ronan did, stood. The two tributes, awed into silence, knelt on the back seats of the last carriage of the train, and watched the Capitol roll into view.
The first thing Emma noticed was the moat; the rolling, shimmering water, cleaner than anything she had ever seen before, surrounding the nighttime city, reflecting lights of different hues. The lights drew her attention up to the city itself; and it was breathtaking. Spires of steel and glass rose into the air around the edge of the city, their sheen caught by the brilliant hues of a million million lights, shining even at night, glowing and sparkling and shimmering like a mirage.
Towards the center of the city, Emma could mark two buildings only through the haze of brilliant light; one rose in a straight, thick line, strong and resilient, a deep black rectangle of darkened glass. Emma knew that as the Training Center- the true one. Not the tiny academy branches of the Districts, not her father's rusted shack of concrete and weaponry; this was the true icon of power, the real danger.
The second building wasn't made of darkened glass, and didn't rise in the solid rectangle of its partner in the skies of the Capitol. This one was spiralling, majestic- it rose in a tall, slim pyramid to tower even above the Training Center, and it shone. Every surface was brilliant steel and glass, and it was resplendent in light from the buildings shining around it. It did not give off light, it merely reflected it, amplified it- it shone in the brilliance of a thousand suns, when Emma had only ever known one.
The Capitol burned with light, so brightly that Emma almost feared it would burn itself out.
The Capitol burned with light, and Emma was about to step into its fire.