``glory; a pound of flesh; {kirito vt}

That year, there are twice as many pine boxes passing through District Two's train depot. Unlike every other aspect of the Hunger Games, there is no ceremony to it. They could just as easily be new mining equipment straight from the forges of District Nine, snow white uniforms fresh off of District Eight's looms, arms and ammo from District Three. This is a capitol train, however, and nobody ships equipment in a box that's seven feet long and two and a half wide.

The crude caskets are otherwise anonymous.

Surely someone on that train knows the difference between the box bound for the Revenues, the boxes for the Lyons and the Hammerfells, and the one that Bruce Johnwayne is here to follow home. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. They're all going in the ground.

He isn't sure what they've scraped together to send back to the small shack on the wrong side of District Two. Charred bones, a pile of ash, burnt cash - it doesn't matter what they've given Bruce to bury. Elya's already had a funeral fit for District Four royalty, better attended than any sorry ceremony she'd see in Two.

Each box is loaded on the back of a truck, and Bruce has to jog to keep up with the dismal procession. He stops at the main junction to catch his breath. The truck is headed in the wrong direction, anyhow. Towards the Revenues, he thinks. Or maybe the Hammerfells. He's not sure exactly where everyone lives, but it will have to come back this way to make its last delivery.

He sits, the cobblestones smooth and cool beneath him, despite the summer heat. Why are you doing this? a small voice in the back of his head chimes up. He folds his arms across his knees, buries his head in their intersection. He doesn't have an answer. It isn't as if they were close.

The truck comes grumbling back, one box short. Bruce pushes himself to his feet, eager to resume running. If he's busy racing, his mind can't be.

The sun is heavy and orange in the west, the dreary gray District Two awash in golden light. With the workday nearing its end, the streets are heavy with foot traffic, hampering the truck's progress more than the Johnwayne's.

Just the same, Bruce is all huffs and puffs fit to blow the house down by the time the truck reaches its next stop. He didn't pay enough attention to the sharp spokes and angles of District Two's roadways and rotaries, has never been out this way before. If he didn't know better he'd think he'd climbed some magic beanstalk without noticing — at least with all the giants pouring out to receive their delivery. Hammerfells, must be.

Feeling as though his eyes are an intrusion, he averts his gaze and his attention. Still out of breath and unsure how many more miles he can keep pace with the vehicle, he hops into the bed of the truck, sandwiches himself between the two stacked caskets and the cab. If the peacekeeper riding shotgun noticed, he didn't give a shit. Bruce sprawls out flat on his back, exhausted from the long jog.

The driver returns to grab a smaller crate, which he passes off to one of the large boys. Bruce hadn't noticed the secondary stack before, but it makes sense. Even if they didn't bring a token into the arena, each tribute was shipped off with clothes from home. Perhaps in lesser districts, the prospect of hand-me-downs was too valuable to pass up. Nice of the Capitol to deliver personal effects on the side, to keep the caskets from being looted.

With a bang the truck backfires then grumbles to an unhappy start. Well-off though he is, Bruce has only had a handful of car rides in his life — most of them stolen, like this one. A smile breaks over his somber countenance, air whipping through his hair. He sits up, looses an uneasy laugh, lets the wind bring water to his eyes — and lets the wind bring it away. He isn't crying. He doesn't cry. It's just the wind.

But a drop or two might register for a loss he hasn't been able to put into words. There is an emptiness within Bruce Johnwayne that he didn't expect himself to feel. From the safety of the back of an unsecured truck that's bucking against the first unpopulated stretch of road, he lets himself let blink out a tear for the girl who would smack him upside the head and tell him not to be a little bitch if he let her see.

He can't figure out why he's feeling — whatever it is that he's feeling. Loss. Sorrow. It doesn't make sense. Elya and her brother had been a constant source of aggravation for Bruce, and at best the feeling was mutual. He felt little else but relief when Dan had made his one-way journey. Why was this any different?

He leans back against the two stacked boxes as the truck begins to slow. The streets grow more and more familiar — but this is wrong. They've reached Bruce's neighborhood, not Elya's. His stomach clenches. Why are they dropping off her bones at his house? Even Dan's body was sent back to his father and sister, and the cowboy had lived in Bruce's house for the better part of the year before his Games. His lips fold into a helpless frown. This is too far, he can't wrangle the big box all on his own, not back to the small plot near his half-brother's dingy house. And not with his father watching and sneering.

As they approach his house, Bruce already has half a speech prepared to ask the driver to drop the Johnwaynes' boxes elsewhere, at the risk of losing his ride. But the truck drives right past the brown brick two-story and pulls up to a different house. He didn't realize how close the Lyons lived. It certainly explained why he'd often spot Elya prowling the neighborhood without stopping by. And here he thought she'd just lurked around the area to mess with his head.

Holy fuck he could be a... self-centered asshat. The jibe surfaces without effort, a flat smile cracking his lips. Always the oblivious fuck, aren't you, Bruce?

Yes. Always.

Hoping the last casket is enough to conceal him, he presses himself flat to the truck bed as Circe Lyon's pine box is lifted, the stack-of-two reduced to a stack-of-one. He may be a self-centered asshat and a top contender for Panem's most oblivious fuck, but Bruce Johnwayne has the decency to feel like he's intruding on the girls' final parting.

He lies flatter, wishing he could completely disappear into the floor.

Eventually, the doors slam and the vehicle groans back to life. There isn't much distance between here and John Johnwayne's house, but the truck's suspension demands a slow journey over the shitty pothole-laden roads that surround that shitty stone dwelling. Bruce is jostled about regardless. The smaller crate has it worse. No longer pinned by the weight of the others, it slides around at will, ricocheting off the sides of the truck bed, off the other box. For the first time in his life, Bruce has the instinct and to see what's about to happen next. He scrambles over the pine casket, log rolls toward the box.

His outstretched fingers brush the coarse wood as it tumbles from the truckbed and into the dusty street. It bounces once, twice — then smashes open in a bloom of splinters and dull fabric. Something inside Bruce breaks with it as Elya Johnwayne's meager assortment of personal effects take to the wind.

Ever-stupid and ever-impulsive, he launches himself from the moving truck after them. His shoulder catches a rock, the friction scrapes his face, his knees bear the brunt of the fall, but he is otherwise unharmed. He stands, not bothering to brush the dirt off his back. He limps toward the wreckage.

By some small kindness, the wind abates, leaving everything that accompanied his niece to the Capitol in the dirt. Bruised knees groaning, he stoops to gather the pathetic collection: an old belt, the leather worn soft. Left boot, right boot, still lashed together by the laces — a bend knot, as always - from the last time they'd been taken off for the night. Dan's old coat, the nice sheepskin one that the cowboy had stolen one winter, the one she'd co-opted before the weather got cold.

He shakes the dust off and slides his arms through the sleeves. It's too hot for any sort of jacket, especially after the running he's been doing. But he needs his hands free to carry everything else, and it's too bulky to sling over his shoulders the way he'd done for boots and belt. The sleeves come halfway down his palms, still a little too big for him. In that sense, it is a better fit for Bruce than it had been for Elya.

In every other, it feels like trespassing.

He wipes the sweat and the chill from the back of his neck and tosses the broken splinters of the crate off to the side of the road. A pair of socks hides beneath the wooden debris. Leaving them feels just as weird as taking them. What is anyone going to do with an ancient pair of threadbare socks? There are holes in the soles, in the toes, and he can't even identify what color they were originally. But he can't just leave them in the middle of the street. He wrinkles his nose and stuffs the pair into her left boot, and returns to collecting the diaspora of useless items.

Pants and shirt are conspicuously missing — likely left behind in someone else's bedroom as medals of honor, as tokens of appreciation, as casualties of war forgotten in the heat of conquest.

The only thing left on the ground is a leather eyepatch. He stares, transfixed. With no eyes, it stares back. Minutes pass before he can muster the courage to pick it up and turn it over in his hands.

Stained with blood — more than just Elya's, he realizes — and grime and graymatter, the otherwise unembellished leather patch is exactly as he remembered. Despite its tenure in the arena, its close calls with knives and arrows, with axes and flare guns, it's hardly any worse for wear. He stretches it across his hand, closes his left eye and stares at the patch cupped in his palm. Hello, Elya.

Three girls died wearing the eyepatch, but that isn't why this feels wrong.

Before this moment, he'd never so much as touched his half-niece's defining feature. To have it in his hands was unsettling. Like holding a severed finger, a knocked-out tooth, a lopped-off ear. A gouged-out eye. It didn't belong between Bruce's thumb and forefinger.

He hides it in his fist, crams that into the pocket of Dan's coat, where it remains for the fifteen minute trudge to his half-brother's rundown house.

A pine box, seven feet long and two-and-a-half wide, waits under the overhang that passes as a porch.

John Johnwayne isn't back from work yet. Perhaps Bruce ought to wait for the old miner to stumble home roaring drunk, to pour one back instead of pouring one out, oblivious to the special delivery on the porch. There had been little acknowledgment and less ceremony for his eldest child, and there is no reason to expect more for his youngest.

He doesn't know how he's going to do this. Logistically, conceptually.

Rooted in place, he stares, hoping that some solution will come to him. He never was much of a planner. But he's strong enough to compensate, he figures. The box can't be that heavy - all but bone has been given to flame. It's just a matter of carrying the thing.

He drops her boots by the door. Tied together, upright and orderly, socks paired and poking out of the top - it fits ever mental image Bruce has of the tiny foyer. In their proper place, they look as though they've just been ditched after a long day. His eyes glaze over as he returns to the task at hand.

The box is too long to carry in front of him, too tall to balance across his broad shoulders like a yolk, too wide to lash to his back. How the hell did Elya manage? Bruce can't for the life of him remember. The best he can do is balance the crude coffin on one shoulder.

When he'd watched the younger Johnwayne bearing pall for her brother all those years ago, he never expected to retrace her steps. It is slow going. He ought to have offered help then, he muses. Despite his strength and the relative weights of their remains, Bruce finds himself struggling with the bulk of it. She would've turned him down, and he was still nursing a broken jaw and sore pride. He was a little shit back then.

Each step paired with a grunt, he trudges toward the district fence. He isn't supposed to know about the hole hidden by the bushes; that was a secret shared between the two Johnwaynes that had always kept him on the outside.

Leaving the district is easier than he'd expected, even with the pine coffin in tow. It's still too early in the evening for most in this neighborhood to be off of work - not when they clearly need every cent they can scrape together. No one is out and about.

The grass beyond the fence is tall and brown, scratching at Bruce's legs and grabbing at Dan's coat as the Johnwayne soliders on. Arms trembling and drenched in sweat, he makes his way across the dying field and up a short hill. In the shade of an old thick tree, the one-man funeral procession comes to a rest.

Catching his breath, he sits on an exposed root. As soon as he does, he realizes it is a mistake; his body is too tired to force himself back up. All he can do is stare at the coffin and wonder why he's playing Charon for the one-eyed girl who hated him while she still had breath in her body.

The grave isn't dug yet, and he lacks the shovel and the energy to do the job. Foresight has always eluded him; he curses his poor planning now more than ever.

The sun is down by the time he musters the willpower to go get the tools he needs. "Be right back," he promises as he rises to his feet. His legs and back complain from his toil. "Stay put."

Before he'd retraced his steps in the dark, Bruce hadn't realized quite how long the journey was. No wonder his shoulders are giving him grief.

When he returns, the house is still empty. Before he enters, Bruce grabs the shovel from around back. It has an old iron blade, spotted with rust, but the handle's been replaced recently. The new spar is ash, sanded smooth, and free of splinters. He gives his silent thanks to whoever replaced it.

He leans the spade against the side of the darkened house and slips in. He stumbles around blindly for a few minutes before finding a book of matches and a lighting the gas lantern that hangs in the front room. The iron frame and smudged glass cast eery shadows. Ghosts and skeletons sneak across the kitchen table, across the rocking chair by the hearth, across the small television that's gained a fist-sized hole since Bruce has last seen it.

But the lantern illuminates the small main section of the house well enough. Bruce doesn't remember where anything is kept in the kitchen, and his cursory exploration is interrupted by a thud from behind him.

Quiet as a crashing train, John Johnwayne wrecks his way through his own front door. A gust of wind howls in with him, and with it the reek of bathtub gin. Even from across the room, the fumes burn Bruce's eyes.

John trips and kicks and curses, a bloodshot, steel-eyed fury pointed toward the kitchen. Instinctively, the teenager crams a fist in his pocket, feeling for the pocket knife his mother gave him two birthdays past. This isn't his coat; his knife is hanging up in a closet on the nicer side of town. His fingers curl around Elya's eyepatch instead. Useless.

"Daniel," John seethes, pointing an accusatory finger at the silent Bruce. The career goes cold. "Rooting around in my liquor cabinet again, I see." Graceless, the large miner lurches toward the kitchen, slamming one angry palm onto the knotty oak of the kitchen table. The table and the quarryman wobble in tandem, but John is not jarred from his tangent. "No dinner on the stove. No fire in the hearth. You're not pulling your weight, boy, and I don't take kindly to being mooched off. Fucking useless, aren't you?"

"And tell your sister to put her damn boots away." The shoes fly at Bruce's head. He doesn't move, doesn't flinch. His fist closes tighter around Elya's eyepatch, but otherwise, he is stone. They sail past his ear and smack against the window behind him. With a gunshot-bang, the glass splits: one clean line broken right down the middle, enough to shatter Bruce's resolve but not the window fully.

"You're drunk." Though no louder than a whisper, the words bring confusion and clarity to John Johnwayne.

The miner frowns. "You're Bruce."

Bruce nods.

"Dan's dead."

Bruce nods.

"Elya's dead, too?"

The question hangs in the air, John Johnwayne's mouth hanging open with it. With his eyes wide and desperate, he no longer looks the fierce mountain of a man that so terrified Bruce as a child. The crags and crevices in his weathered face reveal themselves to be worry lines rather than battle scars. He must know the answer, else he wouldn't have asked it, but the realization has left him an animal grievously wounded, pleading to be put out of his misery.

Bruce nods.

With that final blow struck, the quarryman's face stops struggling against itself. It contorts and closes itself off as he collapses into a chair. In the instant before John buries his head in his arms, the younger Johnwayne spots a few tears drip down the worn stone of the miner's face. Bruce doesn't know how to deal with the drunk old man, so he fills his pockets with the small treasures he'd come here for.

He opens up Dan's coat, surveying the seemingly-infinite pocket space available to him. In goes a bottle of whisky, already half-drunk. In goes a candle and a book of matches. In goes a dull paring knife, in goes the whetstone. The jacket never seems to fill. He grabs the boots off the kitchen counter as an afterthought, slinging them over his shoulder before slipping past the earthquake of sobs in the front room and slipping back out into the night.



By the light of the full moon, Bruce makes his way with his borrowed supplies back to the thick tree. Unloading his haul, he stabs the shovel into the earth next to the pine box, and starts emptying the pockets. First comes a candle, tallow and tan, which he molds onto the head of the pine casket. Next, he produces the matchbook and a flame in turn. The boots, the knife, the whetstone all take their places. He stops to uncork the half bottle of whiskey, takes a deep breath, and then a sip.

That first hard swallow of whiskey choking him, Bruce sets the glass bottle down on top of Elya's pine casket. The poor quality of it overwhelms him, and he is reminded of the first startling sip of the stuff he'd taken. He'd just gotten his ass beaten by a couple of girls, and she'd taken him back to her father's house to patch him up. What was it she'd said when she offered him a sip? For the pain, he recalls without effort.

He takes another swallow. No shit.

He roots around in the pockets to make sure he hasn't forgotten anything. His fingers catch on Elya's eyepatch and his breath catches in his throat. He makes a fist around the worn leather and slowly places it on top of her coffin. Something metallic clinks against the wood as he unfurls his fingers. Like a coin, it rolls on edge, until it finally comes to rest signet-down. Brow furrowed, Bruce picks up the iron ring, squinting at the four-leaf clover on the crest.

"Now ain't that lucky."

The single context he had for the polished metal was a brief segment from the first day of the 67th Hunger Games. Overshadowed in District Two by stolen wagons and hacked off limbs and the district's effortless dominance, but oft replayed nonetheless, had been a clip of the Cowboy hooting and hollering and playing with his food without eating it. The last in Dan's infamous brandings.

Since that day, Bruce hadn't given a single thought to the ring in his hand. Never wondered where it had come from, where it had gone to. Never thought to think himself lucky that the hot iron was never held to his skin.

Something other than the bad whiskey twists in his chest. The weight of it forces him to hunch over, kneeling over the casket as if to give some final rites. He sets Dan's ring on top of Elya's eye patch and forces himself to his feet, bottle in hand.

Hard swallow.

The alcohol is catching up to him now, but he teeters around to the other side of the broad tree. He stares down the three-year-old carvings: a skull (one tooth missing) and a scorpion.

Here lies Dan Johnwayne, it says (but does not say.)

Rest in Peace, it never would. Dan Johnwayne did not know peace in life, would take no comfort in a peaceful death.

And beneath Bruce's feet, there he lies. Six feet down and three years dead, yet he can still feel Dan's judgmental scowl piercing the earth between them. He presses the glass to his lips, draws back a swallow, then rips it away from his teeth.

Bruce narrows his bright gray eyes at the dried grass beneath his boots. Like a reflex, he tips his hand and watches a trickle of pilfered whiskey water the grass on the Cowboy's grave. "Goodnight, nephew," he murmurs, all traces of irony gone from the familial classifier.

Knife in hand, he has at the tree on the other side. Even sober, his finesse could never hold a candle to Elya's. Still, his reckless strokes do the job — before the whisky is halfway gone, he's given her a gravestone to match her brother.

A skull stares back at him, one eye socket patched. Beneath that, he's carved a single hatchet, askew, as though in midair. As though it hasn't made up its mind where to land. As though it hasn't made up its mind which life it's going to sever.

His chest twists again, and in reflex he slams the knife into the tree. But the wood's too much for the cheap knife. Point caught in the wood, the steel bends then breaks, and the Johnwayne finds himself pummeling the bark and shrapnel both. "Fuck!"

Blood trickles down his fingers as he pulls away, but he hardly feels the bite. Half an inch of blade is still lodged in the tree, splitting her skull in just the right place, and dripping with the blood of the wrong Johnwayne. Leaving the other shards of knife where they lay among the roots, he brings his attention back to Elya's pine box. The tallow candle at the head is burnt most of the way out, casting evening shadows over the landscape of the coffin. One last sunset.

He gulps down one, two, three more swallows of John Johnwayne's cheap liquor. It rakes the inside of his chest the whole way down, but once it reaches home, he is set alight. Every shake of his head is a battle against distraction; his vision lags, and in the dark he has no landmark on which to anchor his focus.

Every movement feels like exaggeration. He slams the glass on top of Elya, the last half inch of whiskey splashing against the sides of the bottle. He snatches the pair of boots off the top of the box and hurls them up and up and into the tree. Somewhere above his head they must hang, because gravity makes no effort to tear them back down.

At long last, he's grown too smothered for Dan's coat. With all the delicacy he can manage, he pulls the sheepskin off his back, and lays it over the foot of her coffin like a funeral pall.

He rips the shovel from the dirt and digs.



By the time the grave is dug, the candle has burnt to nothing, and Bruce is belligerently drunk. All the same, he stands at the foot of the grave, bottle in hand, muddled eulogy on his tongue.

"I wish we hadn't spent so long hating each other," he slurs. It's the best he can muster. Even sober, he is no wordsmith. But he means every syllable, and that has to count for something. "I think we could've been okay."

With the flick of his wrist, Bruce pours the last one out for her.

He slings Dan's coat back over his shoulders, crams the tokens back into his pockets. It seems wrong to leave them in the ground to be forgotten with the rest of the Johnwaynes, six feet under and a mile and a totalitarian state away from the possibility of foot traffic.

He slides the coffin into the grave, feet first. Tears well in his eyes again, making mud of the dirt that covers his every inch, but this time he cannot blame the wind. He wipes them on the back of his hand, too paranoid that wiping them on the sleeve of Dan's coat will raise the Cowboy from the dead just to beat Bruce's ass one last time.

A leaf falls from the tree and lands on the pile of soil he'd spent the better part of the night excavating. Everything else is quiet. Dead quiet. He makes a fist around handle of the shovel, as if strangling something else will stop him from choking up, then stares at the pine box beneath his feet.

"I didn't hate you," he promises, hoarse and hollow. "Not that you care."

Shovel in hand, he pauses at the yawning maw of her open grave.

"Leave me alone now, Elya."

The first spadeful of earth scatters across the top of her coffin.

On the day of the victory tour, he doesn't claim his place under her two-story scowl. The platform dedicated for the family of Elya Johnwayne is empty, the only one of the four.

Bruce can't stop himself from casting glances back at her lonely banner. His father wouldn't have wanted him to claim the space designated for relations of twenty-fourth place. He's lost himself in the crowd, much as he did three years ago, when it was Dan's larger-than-life glower aimed at the crowd, aimed at the Krigel on the stage. When Elya was the only to stand with the Cowboy.

Bruce doesn't deserve to be up there. Elya wouldn't have wanted him to be that for her. The only one with any right to stand beneath the last honor given to Elya Johnwayne was honored thusly three years ago. She's already joined him in the ground.

He forms fists around the sheepskin cuffs of Dan's too-large coat and crams them into his pockets, trying in vain to keep the icy wind from sending chills up his sleeves. He has goosebumps enough from watching the young victor paraded about on the stage, a battered boy from the lowest district that the Quell Twist had to offer. Who had traveled with Olivia Revenue until the day of her death. Who had - inexplicably - given aid to the Lyon girl following the bloodbath. And who - even more inexplicably - felled the last of District Two's titans with a decisive knife through the eye.

Who now bears the mark of Elya Johnwayne.

There had been a lot of similar wounds given out these Games. Bruce had heard speculation that the Capitol must've hired a new trainer with a flair for the eye as a target; though he never had alternate theories to offer, in his gut, he does not believe that.

(He pulls Elya's eyepatch into his fist.)

The crowd thins as that year's coronated tribute is dismissed from the stage, but Bruce hangs back. He is one broad-shouldered career boy among hundreds, and fading into the background has always come naturally to the mediocre third son of an impatient man.

It's been months, but he still hasn't been able to free himself from the ever-lingering influence of the terrible twosome, his niece and nephew. Every bruise, every black eye, every sarcastic quip and every whiskey sip harkens back to the Cowboy and his sister. With it comes an ache, a grief he's never felt before: persistent, permeating. He didn't even like them, he thought, but he must have - or else, why can't he put them out of his mind?

Maybe, he thinks, he can get some closure on the 70th Games if he can see eyes-to-eye with the victor. It is the last-ditch effort of a haunted boy, but anything is worth a shot.

He has a whole spiel prepared, but it abandons him as soon as the victor comes into his sights.

"Kirito," he starts, hands still balled in his pockets. He scowls against the cold of the District Two winter.

"I — here." He pulls a fist from Dan's coat, shoving it at the newest victor. Before he can change his mind, his fingers unfurl to reveal the worn leather eyepatch. He sighs, an ache in his chest accompanying the decision to give up the last piece of the best of the Johnwaynes, the one permanent fixture in his pocket over the last half year. This is better, he reminds himself. Let go.

"It was... it was hers. Elya's. I'm her —"

Uncle, he could've said. She'd've hated that. And he didn't care to explain having nieces and nephews older than him, not that he'd expected the victor to ask.

Family, he could've said. It was the truth by blood, vague and all-encompassing enough to cover their relationship. But it felt disingenuous. They weren't family. At best they were relatives. He didn't belong in the same category.

"My name's Bruce Johnwayne," he finished, redirecting. What did it matter to the District Eleven, anyhow?

He offered the patch to the one-eyed victor, his voice dropping to a solemn hush. "Would you wear it? For all of them?"

The ineloquent sixteen-year-old can't force the names past the lump in his throat, but they lean on his heart all the same:

For Wyatt O'Connor, he thinks, who emptied that socket for you.

For Orion Hammerfell, he thinks, because you did the same to him.

For Circe Lyon, who wore it to her death. And for Gunner La Torre, who claimed it for a time.

The list goes on: For Lily Hope, the young girl who died with a knife through her eye — one Circe had thrown, with a dedication signed with kiss — and for one Stella Summit, whose ally had mistaken her mechanical copy for the real thing and aimed accordingly. For Olivia, Kirito's once-upon-a-time ally, and for Geo Venn, who met similar fates. For Maya from nine. For Noah Bowers who threw the axe, a favor returned in kind by the very arena itself.

And, as always: "For Elya?"