left me broken | blitz | finn&nat

If the reaping was a round of poker, I’d be all in.

I had been tucked behind the walls of the Krigel home for seven—eight months now, a constant reminder of the bag I had left against the wall, unpacked and fading from existence in my mind. I would have been fine leaving it to rot in my own home, but after three weeks of borrowing Leon’s clothes he insisted we make one trip back to those white-washed walls.

When I imagined entering the first circle of hell, passing through my front door never crossed my mind.

Time passing and seconds wasting I had begged Leon to drag me away from my own grave, clinging to his sleeve like the shadows cast upon the walls were there to fuel my fear of the dark. (“Leon, please we can’t stay.”)

Locked behind Leon’s doors the voices of two others resound against the walls, two blood ties to a dying brother and neither had any idea. Arissa was too narrow-minded to pay attention to anything that wasn’t inside her direct line of thought and Nat was absorbed in something—something I couldn’t put a price to and it struck a nerve so similar to Leon’s I could do nothing but ruffle his hair when the four of us file out the front door.

Notebook in pocket and pen in hand I fall in step one pace behind Leon Krigel, victim of the victor. Desperation lingered on his tongue like a bad memory, our time spent in that justice building three years ago a memory I would never dare to ask him to recall. A hand on his shoulder and he’s collapsing at the touch, leaning into the rock ever-crumbling.

“Nat Krigel.”

Victim of the victor they were.

With the snap of three syllables Leon’s tearing from my touch, and without hesitation I let him fall, desperation tearing through his veins like the memory of three years ago tied around his pinky finger. I leave him to Arissa—she cleans up the bloody messes anyway.

Stone steps; stone heart—I carry the pen and notebook in one hand before being led through those wooden doors.

“If you’ve come to say goodbye, goodbye.”

A smirk threatens to spill over and I can do nothing but chuckle, setting the notebook and pen on the corner of the table, “I don’t do goodbyes—they just don’t fit with the routine.” Finding a seat across from him the picture of Leon’s desperation becomes laced into Nat’s face with the passing seconds, “I didn’t even tell your brother goodbye, so no, Nat, I haven’t come to say goodbye.”

Young eyes and a tired mind Nat Krigel is already on his way to being the carbon copy of Leon I so dreaded. His attention settles on me to begin with, folded arms and piercing stare, “So why are you here?” Three years later and the question still remains unanswered, an assumption of the fact that I hadn’t felt compelled to cross the threshold of the building in the first place.

When I had come to see Leon Krigel three years prior, my sights had been set on settling a score, yet the crown that sat upon his head dissipated any hopes I had of this.

Luck could play its hand once, but twice was a probability I refused to put stock in.

“What’s that?” And so we shift from a question I could not answer to the familiarity of worn pages and scrawled handwriting. Three years later and I still have the note of Leon Krigel’s bookmarked among the petty requests and desperate grabs at drowning out reality. One step to the table and the black leather is grasped by calloused fingertips, one night too many spent in counting its pages.

Kneeling in front of him I thumb through the pages, careful to do so quickly enough that no specific detail falls to eye, but slow enough that his brother’s name flashes in front of his eye. “The answer to your first question and your second is satisfied by this notebook.”

Luck doesn’t play its hand twice.

Flipping to the next empty page I smooth the surface after bending the binding—I was preparing to write his obituary. “When your brother was reaped, I came here to offer him a deal—anything he wanted. He never happened to take me up on the offer, so I’m here to extend the privilege. So tell me, Nat, what do you really want?”

Three years was far too long for a score to remain unsettled.