domingo en fuego, i think i lost my halo // hannah

I have always loved the stars, blazing pearly clusters of fire and might and beauty. And oh, how they grace our midnight skies with their ghostly silver kisses and romantic gazes, sweeping me away in a whirlwind of, "You're safe, Hannah."

I have always loved the winds, how they swoon, their voices a hollow lupine howl, less like a battlecry and more like a haunting lullaby. And oh, how they dance across my skin, paper doll ballerinas performing a swan dance, each elegant footstep a comforting embrace.

I have always loved the sun, how its steady hands brush my back, each fingertip a tongue of flames to harmonize with my own fire. And oh, how its light folds around my skin in a blanket of warmth, a shield from the hisses of winter gales.

But the stars and the sun and the winds have abandoned me, have abandoned us. They have cast a wad of silver glitter from Glamour Kinky's makeup drawer into the sky and slapped the title of stars upon it, they have hung a great, plastic lantern in the sea overhead and deemed it a sun, they have roared their savageness through the arena and allowed winds to slide off their tongues

Control panels can only craft so much - a kingdom with castles of bones and blood spatters for drapes and carpets, a horrific wonderland painted black and red in our honor. They have forged a faux hell with several presses of a button and a hurricane of darkness rampaging through their minds and forcing its way to their fingertips, fluttering in a frenetic tango across the controls.

And I -

I do not belong here, beneath their crystalline stars and oil black sky, on their cursed ground of old, stacked graves. For I am not theirs, not made of their steel and screws, not their machine to order into battle - NOT YET. But they had woven my soul into their precious arena long ago, the moment Snow placed Colgate's crown oh so tenderly on his head, claiming the Capitol's new prize and all of my brother's blood. They snatched our family tree years ago, uprooted it and clung to its branches, draped it with gold and showered it in a meteor storm of fame, hung a medal around Colgate's name, and nailed wanted posters of each and every O'Leary into the trunk.

But I do not belong here, with Annora and Someith and Saxton's touch ghosts on my skin, dancing with the flames flickering on a ballroom soaked in gasoline. The guilt crawls coldly through my veins and snarls through my head, a violent diatribe spinning spinning spinning on a wheel of agony.

I do not belong here, but there will be no tears,

for the only rain that belongs in the arena is blood.

("I will not cry," I condemn myself.)

[Hannah picks up items from U Tried RE
further actions/inventory in trib maint]

[table: thundy]