burn together | {saffron/kieran}

i'm my own best friend
and my own worst enemy
we get on like a house on fire
you wouldn't want to burn with me

He could still smell her perfume.

Four days past, four showers, endless amounts of changed clothes, and he still caught himself thinking she was standing behind him when his guard was down. And he couldn't think about the night before the reaping without smiling, or blushing, or covering his face while holding his head higher in the air.

His girl. His love. His Paige Lowe. Bent but not broken, torn and sewn up time and time again, sometimes using the very needles he placed into her hands. And just when things seemed easier, well...

They got harder.

Emberly being reaped, Mace's election, Quinn's birth, Clementa being reaped. Not always bad. Almost never good. But hard either way. And he had picked her up off the ground so many times that skinned knees and a bruised pride seemed normal. And it was tiring. Of course it was. But Kieran had learned that loving someone meant signing up for a life's worth of tiring and hard. So when his eyes opened and he noticed he could hear car horns and city noises happening beneath him, he didn't bother giving it any thought. His father wasn't even in the Capitol. District Ten had two other mentors, and he could as least say that Saffron tried.

So, why was he even there?

Because, when you love someone, you sign up for a life's worth of tiring and hard, and if he could do anything to save Clementa, he was going to do it.

He rolled out of bed, sighing against an empty silence, and pulling a shirt over tousled hair. Floor-to-ceiling windows meant there would probably be some creepy shot of him getting dressed in the tabloids this time tomorrow, so he made it a point to look at all the rooftops so that they could at least catch his good side before he closed the door behind him.

His room was only one door down from Kraygon, poor guy. He wasn't really one for finding gray areas in matters as black and white as this, but even Kieran could empathize with him. Dead sister, and his means to live were all focused on his district partner. He made a promise to himself to at least try. And he would, so long as Kraygon kept his hands off of Clementa.

He crept past the doorway, then past the room where Quinn would have slept had things been easy for once in their lives, and came to rest on a kitchen bar stool, directly across from Saffron. He wondered if the bags under her eyes were any indication of her lack of sleep, or if they had just permanently taken up residence on her face sometime in the past few months, and then he reached out and grabbed her hand for a moment. No speaking, no weird I know what you're going through look on his face. Just his hand on top of hers for a moment, and then,

"Sleep well? There was a damn car crash last night on my side of the building, so I sure as hell didn't."

i'm my own best friend
and my own worst enemy
we get on like a house on fire
but that fire keeps burning me