an act of kindness [wu brothers;jb blitz]

My chest aches. His hand has torn my still beating heart away from my broken body and I cannot breathe. They take him away. They take my brother away again and I can only watch as everything I have ever known turns his back on me. "Cai..." I whisper but the words are strangled by sorrow, lost in even the slightest breeze.

It's as though I have been consumed. Grief is like a monster, black tar seeping into my lungs and coating them so thickly that every breath only breaks me further. I press my palm to my stomach, trying to hold whatever is left of me together but it's hopeless. I'm hopeless. They move around me, eyes downcast because to ignore the ugly bits of this world is all we can hope to do. Today, I am the ugly.

But I've always been.

It took my mother three weeks to lock me out of the house. It took my father a month to slit his wrists. The world went to shit without Mordecai and when I got him back I knew damn well nothing was going to be better but at least I wouldn't be alone. Until this day, I never doubted my brother loved me.

But now I watch him leave. The back of his head bobs among a crowd of peacekeepers and I feel so alone. He leaves me a wilted flower among a field of radiant beauty- he lets greedy hands snap his stem and take him from his home. From me. And this time he does not fight. He does not tell me it will be okay.

I'll never forgive myself for being so fucking foolish.

My hands are heavy, bracing bruised knees as blood begins to boil beneath the surface- staining my flesh a painful red. But I cannot even feel it with this chaos that surrounds me. When I stand I'm not quite sure how I mustered the strength. A ghost pulls me by the hand, tugging me toward the building in which my brother has buried himself. I don't want to go. I don't want to see him again.

I think I'd rather die.

But soon enough I stand in front of him, staring at the floorboards because his bare feet upon them is easier a scene to stomach. I can't tell if I'm mad, I can't tell if I understand him. I hate me too, I want to say but my lips shake and my tongue won't move. Tears are acid down my cheeks, silence turning my heart to mush.

"So this is it, huh?" The words are little more than a feather's touch, doing nothing to break the silence that destroys me. "You could have just told me to go and fucking die I'd rather that than this."

The anger is sudden, uncontrollable and laced with desperation.

"If you didn't want to be around me all you had to do was say so."

I melt when he pulls me into his chest and it is like I am ten years old again, biting back tears as thunder roars above the ocean's belly. It's impossible to imagine that this is it. That this may be the last time my brother sees me. His life will go on in the Capitol until it doesn't and I will be left behind. Lost and alone, wandering the district in search of a ghost who pressed a microphone to his lips and told the world he didn't want me.

My fingers are hungry, taking desperate fistfuls of his shirt so that maybe I can trap him in the moment forever and I can believe for a second that the word love is more than a lie meant to soothe the weak. I love you, Mom said and then she locked the door. I love you, Dad said and lost himself within a bottle of booze.

I love you, said Mordecai. It'll be okay, said Mordecai.

I don't know why people bother lying to me. Saying that they care when I could not even keep my own brother in my life. Everything is immaterial and everyone dies and my trust is earned by no man. Not after being burned so many times over. And I want to feel nothing, I want to tell Mordecai that I will be okay but there is nothing okay left.

How long will Ira put up with me?

It took Cai six months to slip a noose around his throat.

After a long while I look up at him, head throbbing and eyes watering- my skin burns and acid pours down my cheeks; no matter how hard I try I cannot stop. My world is spinning out of control and my hands are shaking, my lungs are collapsing and my body is cold. There are no words for my pain, the type that takes and takes even when I have nothing left to give.

"I don't-" The words barely escape numb lips, tumbling clumsily into the space between our locked gazes. "want to bury you."

And just like that, the words begin to fall. Rapid and warm and angry like the tears pooling at our feet.

"You're my home. You're my home and you're leaving me and I don't know what to do."

Because I am ten years old and the train that approaches are the reapers hands clasped so tightly around my brother's throat that I can see his blood beginning to spill.

"Just tell me what I'm supposed to do Cai because I've spent three years being lost and I thought-"

But what I thought was foolish. Wishful thinkings and happy endings that only appear upon the pages my mother used to read every night before bed.

"the tide never came in. I thought it had but I'm just standing in the shallows and you're being swallowed up by the sunset."