But I am Not the Enemy [Charade]

Sebastian Rothul

Sebastian strolls across a grassy landscape. A large conical rock jutting out from the center of the ground in front of him. Birds whiz by overhead, and somewhere in the distance, an elephant trumpets, the ruddy tempo meshing with the saddened tune of a morning dove. He passes a swine and some form of rodent rooting around in a log. Angered for some unknown reason, he kicks the rotting wood, causing it to explode into a slithering shower of insectile glee. Grubs inch along underneath the scuttling of many-legged crawlers. The shiny black carapace of an enormous beetle reflects his visage back at him as it tries to escape the questing mouths of the unlikely duo. Engorging themselves on their disgusting feast, they stare quizzically in his direction.

Shift. Cut. Print.

A group of dogs gnawing on a pile of desiccated bones. The whitened sticks have been picked about many times over, with not a single shred of meat clinging to anywhere on the surfaces. the canines attempting to break them open and lap up the liquid marrow that is held inside. Watching them briefly, Sebastian pulls a meaty hunk of raw beef from out of thin air and tosses it at their feet. They tear into it greedily, slobber running down the sides of their mouths to coalesce with the blood and grease from their meal, forming a viscous puddle that slowly soaks into the ground, turning it a sickly maroon beneath their churning paws.

Cut. Shift. Print.

A small cat clings desperately to the side of a sheer cliffside. It’s tiny claws can barely dig into the hard rock that makes up its only lifeline. It stares pleadingly up at Sebastian, its eyes pools of watery compassion. Far below it, the tundra groans with the pounding hooves of a thousand frightened steers. The cattle snuffle and snort as they run, their quadruple lines leaving no room to see the ground being torn apart by their eager hooves. The miniscule feline reaches for him and he laughs, his voice ringing cold and hollow in his own ears. A booted heel comes crashing down on its whiskered face, sending it tumbling down with a plaintive cry to vanish beneath the mass of moving bodies.

Print. Shift. Cut.

An old man walks with a cane across the rock;nestling in the crook of one arm is a baby boy. The infant is held up to the adoration of an invisible crowd who oohs and ahhs, before erupting into a full-on cheer. Sebastian stands in the shadows, willing the crowd to appreciate him as well. They do not see or hear his attempts at making himself noticeable. behind him stands another, trying to move out of Sebastian’s shadow and failing miserably.

Lights. Camera. Action.

A boy tumbles across a flowery field with a girl. The light crescendo of stringed instruments floats in and out of his ears as his nose is filled with the sickly cloying scent of crushed wildflowers. They stare at each other with a look that confuses his mind. More so, for he knows the pair, and would never associate with them. A waterfall burbles cheerfully in the background, sending strangely multicolored bubbles spinning throughout the air.

Action. Lights. Camera.


Massive skeletons rise up out of the field. The tumbling couple are replaced with a boy with spear facing off against a girl with short hair and murky colorless eyes. The scene is familiar to him, something he once saw on a screen. It is a graveyard for pachyderms, but it is not the large grey beasts who die this day. The girl was from his district, a little blind thing that sometimes ran the streets. The boy from three, spinning on his heel to plunge a cruel spear into one of her grey orbs, snuffing out her life as one would blow out a candle. She falls far slower than gravity should allow, winking at him with her remaining eye as the ground rushed up to meet her face.

Camera. Action. Lights.

The pair are replaced with other former tributes as the scene begins to rain.The pale girl from five and a half-crazed career from district two. The boy hurls insults her way, and the two dance a dance a violence, him claiming an eye from the girl the way the boy from three claimed the eye of his love. Is that what she was? A partnership born of nothing more than chance and the wish to be something more, to be remembered. A fatal blow is struck, and the boy falls into the mire. Mouthing some form of final words as his frame slid down the shocked body of the pale one. The boy stares in Sebastians direction and their eyes lock. An overwhelming sense of deja vu washes over the Rothul Boy, mixed with the bittersweet tang of something half-known and the pang of lives cut down in their very prime.

Curtains.

The lioness stalks towards him, her palms facing up in a sign of acceptance? Of Indifference? Her eyes alight with the spark of a strange fire that sears him straight down to his core. She is wearing white, a strange color to see, as it makes the dark tan of her skin stand out all the more. White being a symbol of purity, of newness, it is an odd concept to contrast with the girl he knows as Zanita. A smile adorns her face, shining like a firefly in the dark. She reaches for him as her hands begin to elongate into talons.

***

Sebastian's eyes widen in surprise as his subconscious instinct told him someone was near. Still half asleep he couldn't be sure what had awoken him; whether a stifled grunt, or a shadow that had momentarily blocked the warmth from his fire, it was nigh impossible to tell. But, his arm shot out to grip the rough ankle of someone that was standing nearby. A yank and the form came crashing down onto his, driving the breath from his lungs as it hit his stomach. A quick roll, and he sat atop the other,his elbow digging into their throat.

Blinking the sleep away from his heavy-lidded eyes, he waited for his sight to adjust to the night to see what the struggling form had to say for itself. Hadn't he told them all to not bother him as he slept? it was probably Stinky searching for some scraps, as he couldn't fathom anyone else being stupid enough to disturb his slumber. The firelight cast her face in stark relief, and he raised an eyebrow in measured suspicion."Z-Zanita? What... what are you doing over here? I coulda killed you."

Sebastian Rothul

Hands, like secrets, are the hardest thing to keep from you

Had she been watching him sleep? Was this something she did every night and now was the first time that he had caught her in the act? If so, he supposed he had better step his game up for surely his instincts were lacking in that department. The fire revealed shining tears trickling down the side of her cheek. Was she injured? True, his elbow was jammed into her throat at the moment; which meant it might be more painful than he had imagined it to be. And there was the punched feeling in his gut again, creeping up on him the way a predator would on its pray. Once again, he had the clear upper hand, and it only made him feel awful.

"Sebastian?"

His name twisted its way into that hole in his stomach, widening the feeling of a void, slipping into his vitals like a knife to the back in the still of the night; like a silver blade creeping its way down the front of his face, searing his cheek like a red-hot iron would brand a rancher's livestock. Vaguely aware that his face felt hot with a blush, he simply stared down at her, trying to correlate a reason for this to have come about. She gripped onto his arm, fingers digging into the skin with a fervor and an urgency that matched the cat from his dream. It was reminiscent of how he felt around the time of the reapings; the one time of the year he was not the master of his own fate, as the peacekeepers collected the street urchins and marched them to the district square with everyone else.

"Sebastian..."

"Lines and phrases, like knives, your words can cut me through."

Zanita was sobbing now, and he struggled to come to grips with what he felt and what he wanted to say;and what he desperately wanted to push to the back of his mind and completely forget. There were only a few times in the past few weeks that he had tried to alert her to the words that picked and pecked at the back of his mind, threatening to spill out and reduce him to something he wasn't quite sure he was even ready to be.

Moving off of her, he knelt, and then pulled the lioness to her knees as well, letting his gaze lock with hers as he tried to make sense of the roiling emotions that threatened to overwhelm him like a tempest crashing down on the shores of a psyche's beach. "Zanita... you.."

"Dismantle me down,You dismantle me."

Sebastian turned away, attempting to pierce the veil of night that hung around them to see if any of the rest of them were anywhere near and awake. But, after a minute or so, the only sounds continued to be the soft crackle of the fire and and the quiet sobbing of the girl who had woken him up. She seemed so vulnerable in that instance, that it hearkened back to what he had been dreaming about. It was said somewhere that dreams are sometimes the subconscious thinking about the things you ignore with your waking mind.

If that was indeed the case... Was it really worth it to ignore it any longer? Sebastian turned back to her and roughly pulled her other arm close."Will you quit that sniveling?" he said with a sneer. "You look far more beautiful when you're angry."Drawing her close, his lips fiercely met hers, not unlike the time she said kissed him to throw him off balance, and yet it felt so very, very different.

"With downcast eyes, there is more to living than being alive."

Sebastian Rothul

The kiss ended as suddenly as it had begun, her arms entwined around his neck, a rose-tinted blush creeping into her cheeks. “You don't need any lessons," she mummered before her lips found his again. Letting his hands roam across her like the sincerest of lullabies. It had been folly to ignore what he felt for her for this long, and it was all out in the open now. There was no going back from this. Sebastian’s heart fluttered like a piece of paper in caught in a draft of wind, feeling an urgency he hadn’t really felt before. For a moment, he wanted the daybreak to never come, so that he could just kneel here with her under the stars and not think about his plans and those he needed to exact vengeance upon. This gave him the same feeling of completeness , but in a way he was only just now coming to terms with.

He thought he was putting his heart in fragile hands; what was their relationship built on but necessity and fragility? The night was full of deception, but no more than that they held in their hearts. Sebastian leaned forward, moving her towards the ground as his lips found the side of her neck and began leaving small kisses that burned or tiny bites like the stabs of icicles.

That is, until his knee struck something.

Breaking his actions, he reached down, feeling around blindly until his hand closed around the handle of ...a knife. Sebastian froze. He didn’t own one of those. Was it real? The dreams he had dreamt had been intoxicating, but he wondered if they had been a warning. Hadn’t the lioness in his dream come towards him with a smile as she unsheathed her claws? Would her words have any meaning if he chose to listen to any explantion she might have? Did she care, or was she playing the most dangerous game?

As he stared at the blade, he felt he shouldn't take it personally. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised it seemed she couldn’t hold herself together, the conflicting emotions he felt, were only mirrrored by the one person he thought could understand him, but could he hold onto her? Skeptically, critically, he had figured he might have a place among the cold outcasts on the streets. But in the back of his mind, he knew that they didn’t want him around, same as the ones in the mansion; same as everyone he had ever dealt with.

He had never let it bother him, so why did he care about her opinion?

Scooting away from her, he sat with his legs stretched out towards the fire, the offending object held thinly in one hand. Looking around for the one to blame with his eyes, but knowing in his heart he had no further to look than the hands that belonged to himself. Staring into the flames, he spoke ever so quietly, his thoughts putting together a thousand answers, lies, half-truths and bitter motes of oblivion.

“Do you want to explain this?”

The smoke from the bonfire stung his eyes and made his vision blur.

Yeah. That had to be it.

Because boys like him weren't supposed to cry.

Sebastian Rothul

Sebastian refused to look at the lioness, feeling something inside of himself that threatened to crush him. The knife was more than just a physical weapon. It represented the fear and mistrust that had ruled his existence ever since he could remember. He had thought he could escape it out on the streets, but her actions proved him wrong. How could his chest feel like this? Like a powerful drum beating so loud and so hard he could hear the blood rushing in his ears. It felt like the knife was stabbing his heart and not held carelessly in one hand.

"I... It was something I thought I had to do but now..." There was a rustling in the grass behind him, she was moving towards him, whether in apology or like a snake ready to strike,he could not tell, nor was he sure he even cared. Her arms appeared, wrapping around his neck in a way that felt like a hangman's noose. The softness of her cheek touched her shoulder and he tensed, even as her embrace enveloped him. Let her choke the life from his body. He hadn't felt alive in a long time, and to have that spark quelled so quickly... "Now I know what I feel is... is real and I know what I want."

What did she want? What did she feel? Sebastian struggled to wrap his mind around it. Or... What did he want? He wanted... or thought he wanted, to be a part of something greater. To know that he was not alone in the world; that he could feel something special for another, regardless of the roads that life had taken them across, or the ones he had traveled himself. To know that no matter how near or far, no matter the degree of separation, there was an individual who could understand him on a mental level. What did he feel? He felt strange.

Strange being the only word he could think of to describe how he felt. Why did he feel like slapping her upside the head, and yet feel like apologizing and promising her that everything would be alright, that they could make it work, and just forget about everyone else out in the country of Panem. "I couldn't do it," The words caressed his back like snowflakes twirling their way down from cloud nine.

Her breathing came in short gasps as her arms began to quiver from where they encircled his neck. She about to start whimpering again, part of him said. She's in just as much pain as you are, said another facet of his mind. Sebastian was dimly aware of tears beginning to make their way down the side of his face.

"What do you want then? What are you capable of?"

Bending his head back, his lips met hers again in a blissful locking as his hands found hers and gripped them tightly.

He was hurting.

He was confused.

He was drowning in a tidal wave of emotion.

But he felt more alive than he ever had before.