I've been having some weirdness with the formatting in Doc manager so hope this works.

Sky Larch- Wandering Souls D12F

Naturally Beth was mentoring me and Zebulon, since we were both from Four. Oh wait, neither of us was. Anyway, they were mentoring us. Probably she wasn't officially our mentor, and was officially assigned to some of the Fours, but they had plenty of mentors, whereas us Twelves had two. No one seemed to care that Beth had abandoned their post and gone back to their friends.

"So, you two have any interesting discussions lately?" Beth asked, looking at Zeb with an expression I couldn't place.

Zeb suddenly had a coughing fit. He wiped at his eyes and looked away guiltily. What, did he prank me and I haven't found it yet? Zeb's not much of a pranker.

"There's something I should tell you," he started. I'd never heard him sound so old. "I just didn't know how." He paused again. "It's kind of bad. Really bad."
"Oh, you did something in the Games, didn't you?" I asked. I was about to go on with something like "that's okay, we all had to do things we didn't want to", but I stopped at his violent flinch.

"It's bad," he said, his voice thick.

"It's okay," I said. I laid a hand on his. "I'll be cool about it."

"I killed Jack," he whispered. He shrank into himself, still looking at the table.

"What'd you do that for?" I was so surprised I didn't even think about how underwhelming my response sounded. I just didn't even sound real. It sounded like a joke, or like someone had attacked Jack and Zeb felt bad for not saving him and phrased it weirdly.

"We took him into the alliance," Zeb started, glancing at Beth like he needed to remind himself it was real and someone else had been there. "I kept thinking about how only one could win, and about how people would sponsor the cute little blind kid-" he drew in a sharp breath, his eyes growing haunted. "And how scared he would be when he died- no, I was just lying to myself."

The air fell cold around me as he kept on steadily. "While he was sleeping, I killed him. I told myself it was easier and he wouldn't have won. It wasn't true. I just killed him."

I sat for a minute, not really in horror, but just trying to figure out how to even respond to that. "Well... you seem really sorry," I ventured.

"I'm so sorry." Zeb's voice broke. He put his hand to his face as Beth awkwardly patted his shoulder.

"And... Jack's not back, so you're not going to do it again," I said, half-smiling just to pretend there was something to joke about here. We'd all known we'd have to kill people. This was worse than I thought, but honestly nothing made sense and I really wasn't emotionally prepared to deal with something like this. "And I didn't see it, so... I'm just going to ignore it. Not like, ignore it, but it's the past and we can't fix it so let's just, like, move on."

"You still want to be allies?" I squirmed at the vulnerability on his face.

"I told you I'd be cool."

Zebulon Charles- Wandering Souls D12M
Sky went way better than I'd expected. I got the feeling she just really didn't know what to make of it and defaulted to supporting her friends instead of going into the moral ramifications, but I'd take it. If she didn't want to speak of it again, that gave me an excuse not to bring it up, either. One thing was for sure: I didn't think there was anything I wouldn't do to keep her safe in the Arena. She was the only one of us who hadn't been there when it happened, and her refusal to watch the tapes meant she still thought of me the way she did before. Yes, this had happened, but she seemed content to let it be a thing she was aware of but didn't really know. She was the innocent in all this and if I kept her safe, that meant there was still a bit of innocence in me.

Beth, now- Beth was a different story. Beth was harder than Sky. Not harder as in more difficult, but harder as in harsher. Beth seemed largely unchanged by their victory, and I envied her peace with her own demons. But still, she'd killed, just like me. She understood things like Sky couldn't.

I stood outside Beth's door for a long time before I knocked. And when I finally did knock, I still winced when she answered.

"Do you have a minute?" I asked.

"Sure, no problem," she said, her expression uncertain as she saw my bearing. She held the door open and I slunk into her room.

"It's okay if you don't want to answer," I said. I gathered from her demeanor that she quickly grasped what I was going to say. "Yeah. You know. I want to know how you deal with it."

Beth sighed as she dropped down onto an overstuffed couch. "It's about Kade," she said, nodding.

"I'm glad you seem like you've moved past it. I don't hold it against you. I just want to know how." What cosmic odds they were, that Beth won by doing the same thing I did. I wished for all the world they hadn't had to, but I couldn't deny the selfish happiness in me that she knew what I was going through.

"It's so easy to brush it aside. You can say they would have died anyway, though we were the last two, so that wasn't the case with me. You can say it wasn't your fault the Capitol started this, which is more true for you than it is for me. But honestly, all those stories only go so far."

Beth's hands wrung in their lap as she went on. "In the end, I faced it. I killed Kade. She is gone because of me. I took her life and she will never finish it. It's a horrible, sad thing. The worst in my life. But my life goes on." Beth looked out the window as a tear traced down her cheek. "People have bad things in their lives. They never go away, and often they don't even really heal. But you can go on with something unhealed in you. You'll always be different, but it's your new normal. It's not as good, but it's good enough, and you learn to be happy with it."

"It was a lot harder for you than you want us to think, isn't it?" I asked.

Beth smiled sadly, still looking out the window. "That's the part I feel worst about. That it's easier than I wish it was. I don't think I really get how much sadness I caused so many people. Maybe I should feel guiltier about being so happy. But that won't change anything. It won't make it better for them."

I saw how true it was when she said it. Jack was gone. There was no Jack. No matter what I did, it was done. I should recognize what I did and never, ever do it again, but drowning in guilt didn't make Jack better off. It only made me worse off. My normal would never be the same, but it was my normal. All I could do was bear it and perhaps come to accept it.

Charybdis Kincaid- No Way Down D2F
I read somewhere it was impossible to imagine a new color. It used to break my brain when I tried to think of how that would work. I understood it now. I looked at the world and saw an entirely new color. Maybe it wasn't exactly like that, since it was more like I'd been hit in the head and was just now regaining memories that had been completely lost to me. Once I saw this color, I remembered I'd once seen it before, before losing it so entirely I lost even the memories. That was what it was like to wake up one day without depression.

Color. The world had color. I looked around the building, or out the window, and it brought joy. How could it be possible? To be happy just by existing? I bit into a cookie one day at dinner and was blown away by how phenomenal Capitol cooking was. How could it just explode on my tongue like this? Then I remembered- that was just tasting. I hadn't noticed everything had tasted like sand for the past few years. This was normal. This was what cookies tasted like.
Training felt so easy. I didn't get tired after five minutes. I actually liked running around the track a few times, until I got sore and remembered I was still a normal person and normal muscles didn't like working out for very long. For long stretches I just wandered around the building, not particularly happy but knowing that I could be happy. Knowing that when something good happened to me, I'd be happy, not just numb.

A lot of people still lived like I once had. It sat in my stomach like I'd eaten a rock. All around the world, right now, there were people living like I had lived. Some of them, like me until recently, didn't even know they were like that. That was just normal to them. They thought life was just normally a sterile, exhausting slog. I sat up one night unable to sleep, thinking that some people lived like that until the day they died.

Everything seemed so clear now. I'd thought the car crash was just one of those things, just part of living in a dangerous world. Now I could see what a blessing it was. I'd seen something in the coma, something I'd thought was God. This was their way of contacting me, of guiding me toward my purpose. This was the change God sent me to make. Isn't that what people call God? A light in the darkness? There was nothing darker than how I'd lived before this. There was nothing lighter than bringing people out of it.

Alysanne Audren- No Way Down D6F

Somewhere in this building, right now, Clair was training Oaken. The two people who'd killed me were right here, living their lives and hoping one of them would outlive me again. I didn't really know how to feel about that. It wasn't fair to blame them, when I'd also been trying to stay alive. I could say it was an unfair fight, two against one, but that would just be petulant whining. What did I expect, for them to risk their lives for no reason fighting "fairly"? In the end, I just tried not to cross paths with them. I couldn't see anything helpful coming of us talking to each other.

It was much more sensible to spend my time with Lacey. We could prepare for the Games and talk about things like what we'd do for each other's families if we won. It was also just good to have someone to be normal with. We couldn't spend every minute of the day training. Sometimes we just lounged around our rooms and had sleepovers.

"If I win, I'm mostly going to be smart, but I'm also going to buy a new dress every day," Lacey said, dangling her feet over the side of the bed. "Maybe not every day, since how often can I really change my clothes, but most days."

"I'm going to put a pool in my house with a water slide and maybe dolphins. Like, they swim around in the pool with you," I said.

Lacey twirled her hair like she was trying to say something she was shy about. "This really is our best chance, isn't it?" She was trying to smile but not quite making it. To get home before too much changes?"

It didn't mean as much for me as it did for her. I had my family and my hobbies and all that, but obviously Lacey was thinking about her sister. Via was just about Lacey's age now. So much time had gone by, but at least they still had some things in common. If one more Resurrection Games came by, If we even got picked for the next one, Via would have an entirely new life. There would be nothing, not even a sliver, for them to pick up like normal.

"I thought about that once or twice," I admitted. "If I won and a hundred years had gone by. Who's been dead the longest before they won? Ava, maybe?"

Even then, technology moved faster and faster. Fifteen years of change for her was only like five for us.

"I guess things would have been different no matter what," Lacey said. "This is just depressing. You want to do crazy hairstyles or something?"

I was just as glad for the distraction. "That does sound like more fun," I said. And it was.

Lacey Weaver- No Way Down D8F

Dear Via,
I miss you. I don't know if you miss me like you probably did when I first died, since it's been so long. I hope you don't. Tillo says Aunt Silkie and Uncle Isaac took you in and you've been doing really well. That's good.

There was so much I didn't want to say, even though I was thinking it. I didn't want to say that Via was probably better off with a stable family, and probably would have been even before I died. As hard as I tried to hold our little family together, I couldn't do as well as Aunt Silkie and Uncle Damask, with their two incomes and their quality of life. One thing I would never have the strength to say, and that I prayed Via hadn't thought of, was that it might have been selfish of me to even try it. I hadn't known then that our relatives would be willing to take Via in. They hadn't mentioned it when our parents died. I should have asked, though. I should have tried to find someone who could give Via a real life instead of living in a tiny room with me eating spaghetti every day.

You're just about my age now. That's really weird for me to think about. I guess it's just normal for you. Soon you'll think of me as the little sister. Have you gone on any dates yet? You must have started your first job by now. I didn't ask if it was something she enjoyed. People like us didn't have the luxury of picking jobs we enjoyed.

I don't know how many more letters I'll get to write. A tear plopped down on the paper as I wrote the lines. How did I even know what to put down into this possible last message to my baby sister? There's so much I want for you. To get married, if you want. To have your own family, or career, or both. I just thought I'd be there for it. There's so many things I wanted to be able to say to you. So, congratulations on getting married. I know they're perfect for you and you'll be happy. Congratulations on your job. You earned it. Your kids are beautiful. I wish I could have met them. I love you. Please, I hope you have the life you deserve.

Sidenote: Charybdis joined the Nice Careers