fault lines { savior // justice building }

They are both destined for disaster, tricked into thinking only one of them would be left without the other and only now realising that fate is a cruel thing. Of course the damned should find each-other, cursed children finding solace in a temporary sanction and letting hope slip under their skin. Children of Panem should not hold hope in their hands but Xavier holds his in his arms and doesn't want to let her go.

He is breaking, falling apart at the seams. She was never supposed to share his burden. She was never supposed to count down his days. And now she counts down hers, an invisible number with an inevitable finale and the miracles they both need are not granted to cursed children such as themselves.

Furious hands find his chest and her recounts of promises that won't be kept strain fragile tendons underneath his skin. He promised she would have more time than him. Swore it. It was definite, scalded into the truth of life by statistics and medicine and declarations of impending death. But they promised his parents he wouldn't live past 5 years old and here he stands with his love in his arms, lighting the fuse to which she will destruct from.

"If I could give you whatever time I have left, I would." He swears it with a kiss on the top of her head, sobs cracking the walls around him and the bones that house his being. He follows suit - quieter, softer, a trail of liquid sorrow falling down his cheek.

"I would give you an eternity."

TIME IS NEVER TIME AT ALL
YOU CAN NEVER EVER LEAVE
WITHOUT LEAVING A PIECE OF YOUTH

I have learnt to evade my mother's queries and my father's long stares, making their worried glances disappear with a grin from ear to ear. I have learnt to take the long way home, an alternative route to that of passing the medical clinics and familiar faces who insist I go inside to be told the same diagnosis over and over and over again. I have learnt to hide the truth from strangers save them from giving me sympathy and pitiful glances and words that don't mean anything.

I hate lying. It broke me when she learnt the truth. It broke me again when it had to come from my mouth and fall into her ears and I watched her hope dance out of the window. Now mine escapes through the air as she kisses me goodbye and I don't know if she's telling the truth about being able to save me, but she needs to save herself first before my broken heart has any chance of being healed.

"We will find each other again. Sooner than you think." That is the truth no matter how our destinies end. I press my 248th bottle cap into her palm and stop counting them. The only thing left to count that matters is her days, her hours, her minutes.

"I promise you that." 

NEVER MEANT TO BREAK MY OWN PROMISES

I will not watch her die and now I have a reason to justify my promises in shaking hands and trembling lips. In a moment long gone I told myself with vigour that she would not watch me die. "I won't", I tell both our souls. "I won't give them that satisfaction."

I told myself I would not give fate and her cruel self the satisfaction of stealing one's heart by stopping another. But here I stand, feeling myself been torn away from ligaments and blood vessels and capillary veins and try to fight them, but I was not raised for battle. I was raised to die an untimely death and only now do I wish that I had screamed my name out from the crowd just to give us more time, but all that would fall from my lips was hers in quiet disbelief.

"I will remember, until my heart stops-" I manage through the prison of white arms dragging me away, "-and after that. I promise you, I promise-"

The door slams in my face and I am thrown out of the room into a reality without meaning.

There's a hole in my chest filled with memories of a girl who will die too young and a boy that will follow suit. I name the cavity Saxton and curse my damned self for loving a ghost and giving her a faulty heart.

I WISH TIME WAS STILL
WE'D STAY RIGHT HERE WITH TIME TO KILL
IN OUR HEARTS WITHOUT CHAINS