A Shadow, At the Most {Reaction </3}

There is nothing abnormal about the day; no portents for disaster, no ill winds brewing in the east or shivers coursing down the back of Tallow Tansy’s spine. Her mom has coaxed her into shelling peas at the kitchen table, her father slumped in his chair cradling a mason jar of homemade gin lovingly as though it were an infant. The Games are playing in the background, quietly horrific but mostly ignored as the lazy heat rises through the air of the kitchen, highlighting the stale smell of fat and cleaning fluid that lingers around the oven’s gas rings and spreads tinged with old cigarette smoke from the threadbare rugs thrown over concrete flooring. There is no sign of the gathering storm but for those shapes moving on a screen just outside of Tallow’s eye line.

So she’s not expecting her father to jerk from his chair as quickly as he does, sloshing gin over the sides of the jar, unaware that all along Loomis Tansy has been keeping one bleary eye turned towards the screen. His fingers fall on the button for the volume as a piercing sickening sound followed by a scream fills the kitchen. “Where’s the boy?” he growls, fumbling for his crutch, hauling himself to his feet.

Turning, Tallow’s eyes fall on Noreen Lexington miles and miles and miles away in a position that she had once dreamt happily of but now only leaves her heart lurching and her breath catching cold in her throat. “Get the boy.”

She’s dying. There are no two ways around it. A group of boys- including Elon Emberstatt, Tallow notes with a bitter tang- a little girl with blades rimed thick and black with the blood of so many dead piercing the skin, carving white hot tunnels into ragged ripped flesh, mangling and maiming but shit, oh shit Noreen is trying to hold on. Tallow doubts it’s for Scutcher but she wills her to for his sake anyway, knowing as well as Noreen must do that it’s just no good. If Noreen dies, for all of her presumed ambivalence, she’ll still take Scutcher with her.

Tallow can vividly recall the evil groan of a straining rope, rasping rattling breaths choking out for air dying away as her brother swings prone and slipping from out of Tallow’s usually so firm grasp.

“No!” she cries, clutching out for her father, grabbing and twisting on the material of his shirt while he tries to make for the yard where Scutcher will be working, dutiful as always, unaware of all that is unfolding.

There is blood filling up the screen, drenching the entire world in crimson and Tallow holds fast.

“No. If you make him watch, I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you,” she shrieks around anguished tears that begin to fall, arms shaking as Loomis Tansy growls and yanks at her. Toppling from the chair, the bowl of peas goes with her and hits the floor with a shatter of china shards, a million pieces that echo the sounds of a girl screaming far away. Her arm hits the concrete, grazing against shards of the bowl, smashed peas under her skin and pain ripping through the very marrow of her bones but it is nothing, nothing compared to the agony in her ears, the curling fear that sends her heart skipping in her chest.

Loomis Tansy has the head start, but Tallow scrambles to her feet as quickly as she can, heart thumping in her chest as her father swings the screen doors open so voraciously that the entire tin can house shakes with it. He stops at the edges of the threshold, as far as his one shaky leg will take him but Tallow takes off sprinting down the yard as fast as she can will herself to go.

“SCUTCHER,” Loomis hollers, his sound outstripping her as she runs barefoot through the mud, slipping and desperate with needles in her chest and a thunderstorm in her spine.

At the sound of his name, Scutcher pulls his head from a bundle of straw he’s laying out in one of the pig arks- not entirely sure what he’s done this time, when a flash of hair and girl falls into his arms.

Tallow throws herself against him with such force that he has to stagger back a little, leaving Scutcher with a mouthful of her hair and lost in a fog. Her hands fumble at his neck, pulling onto his chin, fingers gripping hard pinching and desperate as she whispers feverishly, “I’m your friend, Scutcher. I’m your friend,” tipping her head up and grazing her lips against his ear, his neck, the corner of his mouth, their cheeks brushing until he can feel the cold salty sting of her tears, her hot breath on his skin, the frantic beat of her heart against his chest. “I’m your friend…I’m your friend…” Well of course she’s his friend, Scutcher can only think, can’t piece together why on earth it should be making her weep and clutch at him the way she does.

“SCUTCHER,” Loomis Tansy cries again, more urgently this time and Scutcher pulls his head away from her to look up at the house.

He’s hopelessly confused again and his father is yelling and Tallow is crying and it’s just too much chaos. Too many people are whispering, touching which he doesn’t even like at the best of times and calling his name for reasons he just doesn’t know. Figuring the best thing to do is just to go inside and simply take whatever punishment he’s due, Scutcher tries to pull away from his sister, but Tallow catches him, holds him fast and buries her head into his neck.

“No…no no Scutcher don’t go up there, Scutcher. Please Scutcher…let’s just go…forget this fucking place…we’ll just go.” Pulling away from him, he sees her; hair bedraggled, tears tracking two murky streaks along the length of her face, afraid, desperate and -for the first time in a long time- every bit her age.

“Tallow?” he starts timidly, thumb swiping away the fat droplet of a tear from her face. Don’t cry Tallow, please. Whatever it is- don’t cry.

“IT’S YOUR GIRL, SCUTCHER. THEY GOT HER.”

Gripping onto him, Tallow lets out a guttural, aching moan like a wounded animal that hits Scutcher in his gut as, oh so slowly, his mind begins to unfurl the meaning behind his father’s word, unfurling with it a sense of slow trepidation.

Until something seizes at his chest like a cattle prod to the heart and his whole body leaps with it, each organ and nerve and bone, rearranging his innards, sending his hand up to his mouth as he draws in with one short sharp breath that his body doesn’t seem to want to let go of.

Noreen…they got….no, it can’t be happening. This can’t be real. He looks down at Tallow to see it confirmed or oh please, oh please denied but all she can do is groan and paw at him mumbling, “Scutcher,” in a weak, strained voice.

No is the only thing he can think, the only word slipping through the swirling in Scutcher’s brain. No. It’s not possible, not fair, not…allowed to happen. The only thing real is the hurt in his chest, tightening worse than ever. And yet, he has to see – can’t believe it, won’t believe it, even if watching will tear his heart to fine shreds like churned up meat in a mincer.

Wordlessly, he tries to escape Tallow but she tugs so hard “Don’t Scutcher, no don’t, please,” he has to yank away from her, leaving Tallow to stumble in the mud. He doesn’t stop to help her up, hardly remembers she’s there at all as the world around him, the pig arks, the muddy quagmire of the yard and the swallows swooping in a lazy circle over head in that bluest blue sky seems to melt and fade away. He barely feels himself running away from his sister hysterically calling his name over and over to match the steady drumbeat of no, no, no, NO that skitters through his head like soaring, falling autumn leaves.

Inside the tin can house there is nothing.

No dirty old kitchen units mostly salvaged from the waste of others, rusting and crusting over with dirt, but stinking of turpentine and cleaner fluid all the same.

No broken shards of a china bowl serving as a clue to the scene that Scutcher has missed or the dozens and dozens of fresh peas, pale green things against all the dark and the brown like new life.

Nothing, until, silent and grey faced his parents part like a thick black curtain to reveal the screen.

Each breath is a splinter in his heaving chest as Scutcher grips his hands, balling them into a fist so tightly that his nails pierce the skin.

She still belongs to the garden, a flower blooming in the darkest of spaces doing her best to flourish only now she is ragged and forlorn, crumpled under foot, stem snapped and petals torn apart. A hand goes to his forearm, his back, cupping firmly at his neck, tracing the lines of blood, her wounds- wishing they were his. Scutcher is beat up and bruised and broken already but she…she’s as close to perfect to Scutcher as a person can ever get, needed so desperately back here while he’s just a useless nothing.

"The Emberstatt boy just stabbed her in the back and then they all went at her," he barely hears his father say.

And there isn’t even anyone to hold her. There’s already been so much blood spilled on the cornucopia, no flowers, no light in all that rain. This can’t be the place. If she has to die, if this awful diseased rock won’t let her bloom then why can’t it have been around things that were fresh and green and alive?

His stomach lurches and Scutcher fights the urge to be sick.

“Don’t leave me Scutcher!”




What?




He hears her weak garbled barely-there voice (the pain to be found in it ripping through him) speaking to him through the screen- unsure if it is real or imagined. Don’t leave me Scutcher. She remembers him, even in the last twitchings of her body. Scutcher is on his knees in an instant. Bashing against the concrete floor, he reaches out, touching the screen desperately as though somehow he’ll be able to reach through and take a hold of her hand. Take it easy, don’t crash, a voice tells him firmly but Scutcher is sure that he’s going to- he can’t help it.

“I’m here, Noreen. I’m here,” he whispers, voice cracking and straining at the edges. Scutcher can’t ever get close enough to the screen, close enough to her, pushing his temple and his nose into the cold hard surface until the picture is nothing but blurs and pixels; tiny little things that make up something so beautiful.

He is here- to keep her safe, and close, to take away the pain and make sure she’s never lonely. But she’s so far away and he can feel each mile of the frigid distance between them like a knife wound.

Shutting his eyes tight, Scutcher can smell the far off last lingering traces of lavender freshly in bloom, pale green shoots rising from the surface of the earth, remembers the sounds of thrushes far off in the thicket, a bumble bee hiding safely in the cupped petals of a snapdragon flower and the way that he feels when he says her name. Nor, the ‘oor’ like a question, the answer an elongated ‘ee’ in een that draws his lips upwards.

You can’t say that name and not smile; and he could say her name over and over again. Those two syllables forming the perfect sound to describe exactly what it feels like to be so in love with someone that it hurts.

Noreen, Noreen, Noreen, he whispers like a prayer, heart in his throat, as he hears her say his name one last time. Scutcher don’t go.

Never, he promises her solemnly, shutting his eyes tight against the world, palms balling against the wall. Never ever. “I’m here.” She isn’t dead yet, there might still be hope. She has to live. The two of them will live a thousand years or more because if Scutcher wishes hard enough then he can make it so; she’ll come home and he’ll find her in the garden just like always. There would only be the garden, no Jack, no pain, no blood or fear. And they’ll hold each other close and never leave each other- just sit and watch the turning seasons, the flowers dying and being reborn, forever and forever.

But when his eyes, robin’s egg blue and watery like clear shallow pools, open she’s already left him. If you could ever say that she’d been his to begin with.

“Noreen?”

His answer is a cannon fire.

Scutcher should have stayed with his eyes shut, should have stayed in the garden where everything was always in colour, smelled sweet and felt safe, where he can be with Noreen, working silently in a small patch of weeds, looking up to see her smile and feeling for all the world like the sun has come out.

And how is it all still just…happening? The games, the hard bite of the floor against his knees, the horrible panicky rattling of his breath through a shaking chest, this kitchen, the tin can house?

But the camera has already panned out, slowly over her lifeless form and to a clumsy jumpcut as the gamemakers decide that a boring boy who just happens to like other boys from District 3 with something stupid stuck in his face is infinitely more exciting than the death of the nicest, the best person in the entire world. Like that is just it, there’s no more time for her. Panem had lost interest and now she’s nothing.

He hates them for all their shallow pettiness, their ugly cruelty and their arrogance. Hates them in ways and with words that he can’t even comprehend.

Scutcher wants to punch the screen. Raises his arm and his fist to do so, but just can’t; drooping limp and numb and hollow into a mess of something that doesn’t feel like a boy at all.

Scutcher barely feels the hand on his shoulder, but after a minute of shaking unsteady breaths he turns his head up, expecting to find his mom looking down on him with the same smiling, pitying look she wears a lot when dealing with Scutcher. “Up,” Loomis Tansy says in a low voice as the grip turns into a hard, too-firm squeeze that Scutcher can’t ignore. “Get up.”

Pushing himself up with all the effort he can muster, Scutcher continues looking down at the floor. Please not now, not something else, he thinks shakily, breathing hard, face twisting and contorting to suppress each agonising, inconsolable emotion that roars up inside of him like waves- feeling as though he might collapse with the effort. Whatever violence, whatever cruelty his father has cooked up, Scutcher can’t do it now, not when he’s already so close to broken.

Part of him wishes that his dad would just kill him, get it over with- it was kinder now, like he always says. And the other just wants to slink away to the pig houses, to be alone, to wallow in the mud and the misery, this private torment carved out for him with blades and sticks into tunnels of mangled flesh.

When Loomis raises his hand to Scutcher, he flinches, instinctively puts his arm up to guard himself as their bones collide. Loomis tries again rougher this time, grabbing the hair on the nape of his son’s neck and yanking while Scutcher jerks and wriggles like a worm on a hook. There’s a little fight left in him, but it’s mechanical and automatic with no real meaning behind it. Just like the lacklustre way his heart keeps on beating, blood keeps on pumping. No real meaning behind anything at all.

Only Loomis Tansy doesn’t try to hit him, doesn’t wheel him round and send his face into the corrugated iron wall of the tin can house like he’s done so often before. He pulls his son in close and roughly by the hair, right into his chest which smells of alcohol, tobacco leaves, tar and disinfectant holding fast until Scutcher finally stops struggling, until his arms which pushes on his father’s shoulders to try and get away sort of just rest there limply and the hold becomes what other people, happy families, would call an embrace.

“I know, son.” Scutcher feels rather than hears the deep rumbling words in his father’s chest. “I know.”

It rips through the whole of him like a stone against a pane of glass and Scutcher shatters in his father’s arms.

Tomorrow he might think of the twins, missing their momma, all the things that they’ll never know firsthand, he might even think of Jack- who despite everything is the closest to Scutcher in all of this agony- and be filled with sorrow for them. But for now, right now, Scutcher can only shake and heave and sob for himself. And for her. It’s always for her.

Scutcher can’t even really comprehend what it will be like to miss her yet; she’s just there -so pervasively always and forever and ever, those vivid days in the garden still so close to now and to this dank darkness that he could probably go on waiting for her to be back there for a lifetime. Could always recall the way her hair curled and her eyes looked when they caught the light in the narrow gaps of the trees in the thicket of their garden.

He thinks that he might stay like this forever, soaking the front of his father’s shirt, amazed when he has room in his mind to think of other things that Loomis Tansy is actually letting him. It won’t fix anything, won’t stop the shaking but it isn’t so like being alone and he can almost find comfort in the warmth, the enveloping darkness, the stale smell of tobacco and turpentine.

In the pig yard, Tallow Tansy balls at the dirt with a rattling exhale, standing and paying no heed to the mud on her dress, bare arms and legs. She curls an arm around herself and sniffs sharply, frantically wiping away her tears while every atom in her body screams ‘go to him’ still trying to kid herself that she’s going to be enough. They should have gone. Into the woods, left district ten and all the shit behind them. And now…now she’s let him drown in it.

Finding Scutcher up at the house, face pressed to the screen, her heart aches. Starting towards him, butterfly hands tremble at the surface of her lips but fingers catch her, gently holding her back. Loomis Tansy shakes his head, as over the screen, filling the kitchen she hears her brother’s name and her stomach drops from under her entirely. Tallow has to ball her fists into her hair and choke on all of her frustration.

Tallow has always lied to Scutcher, for good reasons, for the best of reasons. Lying when she told him that things were going to be okay, lying at the interviews to do all that she could think of in order to help Scutcher forget, to take the sting away from this inevitable day. She would have lied about this too, kept Noreen alive for Scutcher for as long as she could have done and then, when she couldn’t keep it from him any longer; there would have been no blood, no long drawn out pain. Something peaceful, and above all enigmatic and silent. It wouldn’t have been wrong, not to Tallow; the lies are just how the world ought to be and what is so wrong with giving her brother something neat and clean in amongst all of this festering mess?

Loomis has ruined that, like it’s all just a sick game- which it all is in the end, isn’t it?- and Noreen has undone all of her careful damage control with the single heart wrenching utterance of the phrase ‘Scutcher don’t leave me’. The teenage mother was dying but all the same Tallow wishes that she could have thought for a moment, that she could have realised that what she said will now be nothing more than a thick heavy chain tight around Scutcher’s neck. . Don’t leave? Tallow knows her brother and he always tries to do as he’s told. . Don’t leave? It’s basically an order to grieve and hurt for an eternity and how the fuck can Tallow even begin to fix that?

But what good will righteous anger do against Noreen, now? She’s already dead and Tallow can’t help the curl of pity in her gut, despite everything. It’s no way to find your end, for anyone; afraid and set upon by people equally afraid and distressed. Tallow can only imagine what it would be like to feel the hideous warping pressure in the ill air of the arena, born from so many broken hopes and despairs.

So she turns all of her rage towards Loomis Tansy, instead. For making Scutcher watch like he didn’t know what it would do to him. Stepping forwards, Tallow is about to take her brother by the hand, do her best to comfort and heal the way she always does, when Loomis steps in for her. Her mom grips Tallow at the wrist, shakes her head and it has to be jealousy that seizes Tallow above all else.

It’s jealousy, cutting through the fear and the sadness and the worry as she watches her father hug Scutcher, listening to the sounds of sobbing. He hadn’t cried in years, never once in front of Tallow or anyone probably and he’s decided to do it in the arms of their father of all people? This is all Tallow needs. Teach Scutcher to be terrified, wield fists and furious words and then, when he’s finally broken down, offer the smallest morsel of comfort- it isn’t fair.

Lip curling, Tallow shakes away her mother’s arm and grips the back of Scutcher’s shirt, pulling him back- pulling him always closer towards her and away from everyone else. Ending the hug and the gross affectation of a father/son relationship. “Get off him,” she snaps, her eyes meeting Loomis’ and she narrows them as if to say ‘whatever your game is, I don’t like it’.

Scutcher wipes his eyes on the cuff of his sleeves in trembling hands, face unfathomable, barely carrying any emotion- those blue eyes in another place, another time entirely. He’s spent too long there over the years, but Tallow isn’t about to bring him back to the here and now, not today. “Scutcher, come on,” Tallow whispers miserably- unable to force the usual sing song tone of her voice when she speaks to him- wrapping her fingers around his, pulling him away from these people, that screen. He shadows silently after her, as though he barely remembers how to walk but doesn’t have the strength to do anything other than what she tells him.

Tallow has been asked, more than once, how she can bear to have her brother trailing around behind her like a stupid little puppy and the answer is always the same, rage and righteous indignation. Of course she doesn’t mind; he’s one of the good ones and she doesn’t have enough love in her to care about anyone else but him because fuck knows no one else will love her like he does.

But deep down, in a shameful hidden place, sometimes- only sometimes- she honestly can’t bear it. Can’t stand his slack jawed mouthbreathing in her ear, the way he can hardly understand some of the simplest of instruction and the slow whine of her name “Tallloooow?” before every stupid fucking question. There’s no nice way to say it; he’s been a weight round her neck for as long as Tallow has been alive. A fucking embarrassment. Tallow had to teach him to tie his shoelaces, to shave, basic personal hygiene and a million other things that are supposed to come as easy as breathing. It’s something that no young girl; pretty, intelligent and youthful should ever have to muster and there have been brief moments when Tallow has hated him for it.

Now, though, Tallow wants to push every last memory of ill thought and resentment from her body like stomach bile, is only too happy to gently ease him into a sitting position on the bed in his room and stoop to untie his shoe laces and remove his shoes with tenderness. He stares at the floor through dead eyes, barely breathing through dead lungs and slowly swaying in his spot as she moves upwards, unbuttoning his shirt with nimble, practised, fingers.

And Tallow is breaking too, really she’s been cracking since the day that she realised it had stopped just being the two of them- the only two people on the planet who mattered, the rest of the world can go suck it- after all.

Threading her hands through his hair, Tallow presses their temples together, breathes heavily and slowly, trying to get his shallow wheezing to match hers, back down to normal. Pushing down til he falls against the sheets, she supposes that she ought to feel happy now that it’s finally back to the way things ought to be. Scutcher and Tallow Tansy against the world, a weight around her neck but one that means she’s never alone. Only, Tallow is frightened that the boy she loved is slipping out from under her. Wrapping her arms around him, she can’t hold him tight enough.

Picturing Noreen on the screen, Tallow finds it only too easy to interchange it with herself, Scutcher pressed against the screen for her, then with him in Noreen’s place bleeding out messily into the earth.

Shutting her eyes Tallow sends out a silent prayer, if one of us has to die first, please let it be Scutcher.

Not because she deserves to live more or ever wants to without him close.

But if one of them has to live with the agonising pain a life without the other, then let Tallow take the burden. She owes her brother that.

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. Scutcher couldn’t say how long he’s been lying on his bed for. It feels like a hundred years, a heartbeat, the time it takes for the last rattling breath to leave Noreen Lexington’s lungs. A brief, stretching and endless period of time interposed only with swelling blankness and the words Don’t leave me making up the threading of blood in his veins.

Curled into him under the sheets, Tallow keeps him anchored- keeps him trapped almost- her arms twining around him, their legs tangled up like ropes, almost every inch of them joined as one person. For a while she’d stroked his hair, whispering, “it’s okay,” in a way that was supposed to be comforting but never seemed to reach him over the roar of blood in his ears but she’s given up now and there is only a heady, weighty silence washing over them.

His fists are still firmly clenched, his body stiff as he feels the slow steady hum of life in her. Warm and always moving, her pulse, her organs, the rise and fall of her chest pressed into his torso.

He can’t help but think about Noreen’s body, cold now and waiting to be sent home. For all his years of living around death, bypassing hanging pig corpses in the smokehouse with not so much as a second glance, the idea curdles the contents of his stomach.

Most of all he doesn’t like to think of her alone, even now wants to thread a warm hand through her cold one and whisper I’m here, I’m here. And then they could do what they wanted, put him in the ground with her because he’d promised that he’d never leave.

And in this room, this cold hard tin can house she still feels so far away from him. Scutcher is gripped by the sudden desire to feel closer to her. He can’t go to the capitol, to her body but there is a place that he might be able to feel the last stirrings of her; the whispering sound of her voice in the rustle of the trees, her scent in lavender blossom. Reaching up, he lightly pulls at Tallow’s hands, so that she will release him and she must have been dozing lightly because she shifts only slightly, barely moving her head from the crook of his neck where her nose and lips lightly scrape the knotting veins and jutting of his collar bone.

“Scutcher?” Tallow mumbles, gripping harder but he pulls away as firmly as he dares.

The effort of standing, pulling on his pants and buttoning up his shirt is almost insurmountable- the smallest of tasks that seems so futile now. Tallow curls into a sitting position and watches him, worrying on her bottom lip, “Come back to bed, Scutcher. Don’t leave me.”

His fingers stop working at his buttons as the breath that escapes his lungs feels like it had a two tonne weight behind it. Don’t say that, he almost snaps, sure that Tallow is stealing her words on purpose- to get her to stay with him. It’s a nasty trick to play, cruel and insulting to Noreen’s memory. And that was all there was now. Nothing but memories- and Scutcher doesn’t even have nearly enough of those.

“The garden….I need to…” he starts and has to stop, agitated at trying to find the right words to explain. Now more than ever, they feel strange and heavy on his tongue, like a mouthful of hot ash. “It was our place…she’s….she’s in there…”

Frowning, Tallow’s blue eyes become very round, full to the brim with pity as she shakes her head, getting up on her knees and shuffling over.

“Oh Noodle, no she’s not. She aint coming back… you do know that, don’t y-”

“Shut up!” he hisses, plunging a hand into his hair and tugging at strands. How can Tallow even ask him that? When he’s seen it all, heard it all and felt it, right at the core of him. Why does she feel the need to repeat it? As though he doesn’t know that she’s gone, forever and entirely- no more smiles, no more cool blue eyes meeting his with a depth that only ever suggested an understanding between the two of them. He hasn’t seen her at peace the way that they are supposed to be, only bloody and hurting and confused, calling out for help. His help. And he couldn’t even keep her safe and close when he wanted to.

“Shut up!” Scutcher can’t help but choke out another sob ripped from somewhere deep and primal inside of him, knock sideways into his wardrobe with a thud that sends a trill along his ribs and slide down the length of it and onto the floor. His eyes are already too hot, too swollen, his throat sore and his lips dry, by rights he shouldn’t still have to sob like this, shouldn’t have enough left inside of him. But the aching is endless, dull and ever-present until it roars again like an all consuming ring of fire across the charred remains of him.

Head tucked into his knees, he wishes that he could just extinguish it all like flickering match. Turn out the light on the tin can house, let darkness fall. He feels a hand, her hand- the lightest ghost of her touch, at his neck, another on his forearm as lips like whispers brush against his own. And that was all he’s ever wanted really. Just once.

But it’s only Tallow, pulling away from him, eyes round and shimmering with tears. Noreen died asking for him, but she died Jack's; clutching onto the memory of him without even knowing it was Scutcher's heart, Scutcher's love she held tight in a clenched fist. Squeezing the life out of it, hands and finger nails dragging it to whatever far off blankness she has found.

I’m here, Noreen- I always have been. But where are you? Please don’t leave me.

“Okay,” she says gently. “We’ll go to the garden. If you still want to?”

He wants to. Wants to plunge his hands into the soil and scream. Wants to pull out the spinal cords of the ones who killed her, her district mate- from home- who stabbed her first marking her for death and everyone else who let her die. Wants every girl in district ten who wouldn’t volunteer to go in her place to feel some kind of terrible pain and to make thin, bloodied ribbons out of the gamemakers who made her fight. Wants to choke the life from the whole of Panem and then carve out his insides with a butcher’s knife so they won’t hurt him anymore. He can almost taste blood in his mouth, running a hot river of hate up from his throat. She matters and he wants to show them with ugly words and ugly knives.

Mostly though, he just wants her back.

That won’t happen though; there is no goodness, no mercy in anything. The last of it has died with Noreen. And the world sat back and watched. It deserves to burn.

So he nods his head at Tallow’s suggestion, still not getting up from the tight ball he’s made from his body as his sister gets dressed, retrieving her underwear and dress from a crumpled up pile at the foot of his bed. “Here,” Tallow says with a smile, fixing to help him with his shoes and tie up his laces. She’s being nice, Scutcher supposes, but he grabs the shoes from her hands and does it himself- doesn’t need to feel anymore helpless than he does already.

The fates have conspired against him, plucked Nonnie from the earth and cast him adrift in a heavy, undulating mist- but Scutcher Tansy can at least tie his own fucking shoe laces.

In the beginning he’d just called it the garden and not his because that suggested a level of ownership that had never felt right to attribute to this place. Before Noreen, the land had belonged to itself no matter what Scutcher had done with scraps of wood and seeds. But after that first night, when she’d helped him bury the dead, pregnant pig whose bones and the bones of her babies still lay beneath the blooms and the earth slowly, to Scutcher, the garden had become theirs. It had chosen her and him all itself, and slowly revealed its secrets.

He remembers when he’d met her here, and that little pocket of calm they’d found while Noreen helped him with the weeds. He’d been thinking back then that it wouldn’t last, that it was a fleeting thing like the first sip of hot cocoa dowsed in cream or the very first moment the sunlight hits you on a bright summer morning. But he couldn’t have predicted just how much it would hurt to be right.

The longest day of his life is far from over; it isn’t even dark out- though Scutcher would have expected the sun to have shattered like a broken light bulb. The birds that are singing startle him, but there is nothing mocking in their music; to him they seemed desperately sad too, hiding in the trees, not daring to venture from their safety as they sing out their sympathies.

“Oh, Noodle, it’s beautiful,” Tallow says from somewhere behind him in a hushed voice, because of course-she’s never been here. It was their secret. The colours are as vivid as ever, snapdragons springing forth in purple, yellow tipped buttercups swayed on thin stalks and lavender filled the air with sweetness that reminded him of her, while the vines and thin, weak thorns coiled upwards towards the sky from blackberry and raspberry plants and nothing about them seems muted. On a day when the world should be daubed in black, it is all brightest blue skies and gentle winds making the flowers sway.

The zinnia has finally come out- his favourite- like a fire, shifting from yellow into red in twisting vibrant color and he’d wanted Noreen to see it. Now she never would.

Tallow stands beside him, all is quiet, all is private and peaceful. But Scutcher feels none of the closeness, none of the comfort that he thought he might. No matter what he’d said to Tallow, maybe some unspoken part of him was still expecting her to be here; smiling in a floaty dress like she’d ridden on a cloud, beyond luminescent, like a star up close, or a supernova about to explode. The way that a person appears so real and full of colour yet too perfect to be anything other than a dream that you know you’d be able to see even when you shut your eyes.

That’s not happening though, and he can say I’m here, I’m here over and over in his head but there won’t ever be any response. He can remember but he isn’t smart enough to imagine her fresh from the ground up, in all of her intricate detail and grace, to think of what she might say to him now. He isn’t smart enough to make her real. There’s no whisper of her in the rustle of the trees, no trace of her touch spreading out like the fine wisps of dandelions that float on a breeze. She’s just gone.

This shouldn’t be a surprise and yet Scutcher still trembles with the realisation of it, slips down into the soil and threads his hands through the delicate petals of a snapdragon flower. She will be gone tomorrow when he wakes up, hauls himself out to the yard to look after the pigs, gone when he comes here next to pull out the weeds and dead head the sickly dying flowers which will soon begin to turn and fade. Gone, gone, gone for always and forever.

Bruises fade with time, wounds scab over, they start to heal and to scar- but this will always be raw and open.

One day at a time, minute by minute, Scutcher will think of Noreen and start bleed all over again.

"I want to make them hurt," he mumbles into his arm, but he isn't sure who. It could be any number of people at the end of it all.

As Tallow sighs and sits next to him, Scutcher expects her to say in her slow explaining-things voice that hurting people won't solve anything, won't bring her back or make anything feel any better. But she places her hand over his in the earth, blue eyes flashing steely and hard in the dying light. "I do too."

Far off somewhere the crows begin to screech frantically, disturbing the peace, perhaps smelling all the blood in the air, the piles and piles of carrion and corpses that line the earth.

"And we will."

He can hope that it’ll fade with the forgetting, carry on regardless and muster up what strength he has inside. Scutcher can move on from this place and let the garden grow wild if he wants to, there’s nothing keeping him here, nothing to keep him tethered to her the way that Jack has the twins. Tallow will want that for him- perhaps that is why she offers him platitudes now, will want to see him smile and go back to being the same old Scuctcher from before Noreen Lexington (Jack's until the last) had ever walked into his life; it was why she told him at the interviews that Noreen didn’t care. Scutcher can’t blame her for that. Maybe putting Noreen out of his mind would make this all hurt less…in time.

But she’d asked him not to leave her. And the endless ache will be his response.

Never.