catapults and cannon fire | {tobias}

throw me over these walls
high up in the atmosphere
if i could catapult my heart
watch the empire fall

When he woke from his dreamless sleep, it was just in time to see the world end. Words, like fire, scorched his skin, steam hissing so loudly that he couldn't. fucking. think.

("It's strange, how you were willing to to protect him without a second thought,")

Tobias was no hero, but Ansel was the villain of this story.

Quillon was bleeding. Badly. The cut on the forehead was one thing, but this— Tobias clung to a hopeless hope, because even before it happened, he knew what was coming. The others were circling them like the vultures they were, talons glinting especially silver in the moonlight, ripping at flesh that was not theirs to take.

The boy from Eleven, whose blood stained the end of Toby's baseball bat, the girl with a last name that had a taste for LaChance boys, that boy Toby had met on the roof the night before the Bloodbath— and him.

"Doesn't matter anyway," Ansel hissed. Tobias saw it in his movement, felt an aura of bad intentions, a hunger for more blood.

"No!" he choked, but it was done in a flash. His eyes trained on Quillon for a moment, then two, watched as his expression relaxed from shock to fear to... to nothing, all with a fucking spear stuck in his neck.

White noise and a distant vibrations, somewhere far off in the atmosphere. The lines of Toby's existence were blurry in his vision, paint smears following his every movement, as if he were shedding a skin.

"No."

Even his own voice was lulled into a dull roar, thrown to the other side of the room like he was listening in on a conversation from the other side of his parents' bedroom door.

Quillon fell, and Tobias caught him before he landed, sputtering, eyes fading too quickly to show the pain he must have felt.

"FUCK!" His hands were balled into fists, fingernails digging into the flesh of his palms, veins of his wrists sticking out, knuckles turning white from the pressure.

Boom. Another vibration, quite different from the first. One must have been his cannon, but what the fuck could the other have been?

His eyes met with ones of a serial murderer. Two days in this place, and Tobias had watched the boy carry three lost souls across the threshold of life and what came after. Harbinger of death, though not clothed in black. He did not carry a scythe, and he was more than a skeleton, so the childhood stories Tobias had been told were all lies.

Grim reapers did not look like monsters.

They looked like this boy.

"An...Ansel?" Fog filled his mind, pulse hammering against his temple so evenly that it was the only thing he could focus on. He looked back down at Quillon, whose body came in and out of focus, a camera lens trying to figure out what was most important in the shot: the boy or the blood.

The others stood around him, maybe waiting for him to stand, maybe considering doing to Tobias what the others had done to Quillon.

"It's strange, how you were willing to to protect him without a second thought," Ansel had said.

And Tobias realized something: he had not ever lost. Not a bet, or a battle, or a quiz. Not a lover, or a friend. He always came out stronger, better. His hand found the place on Quillon's chest where his heart should have been beating. It wasn't.

He fucking hated losing.

In an instant, sadness turned to grief, grief to anger, anger into a blind rage. Everything he saw was bathed in furious red shade of hell fire, and he grabbed his baseball bat from where in laid next to him, squeezing so tightly that it hurt. A midnight as cold as this was not a place for young boys and girls to die. It was a place for monsters to burn.

But they were gone. He searched his surroundings, fumbling over his own feet, mumbling in confusion. None of them were there, except Clementa and Jacinta, who stood a little too closely together for him not to notice.

Sound came back with a biting comment: "What? Think I've lost it?" He laughed a humorless laugh.

Crickets chirped again, no longer caring about the very violent act that had taken place only moments before. Or minutes. He trained his gaze steadily between Clementa and Jaci, this one and that one.

"Because the fucker was wrong," he took a step forward, "I don't care. About him or... or any of you."

Lie.

And the worst of it was that he knew they knew. The saw how he had acted before, how he was acting now, and it all led to one logical conclusion: he did care. He really, really fucking cared.

"I—"

He lowered his bat.

"Which way did they go?"

If the girls knew, and Ansel knew, the Capitol knew. There would be no escaping this. And there was an annoying thought in the back of his mind, prying, almost aching to be dealt with.

Did Quillon know it?

Not the surface level stuff; of course he knew that much. He probably never doubted that Toby was just doing what was in his best interest, probably didn't mind because it was helping Quillon out as well. But did he know what that look in Toby's eye was for? Or did he think it was a part of the show?

Too fucking bad, regardless. He was dead.

As he reached the mouth of the forest, he looked over his shoulder at the motionless silhouette one last time. He had half a mind not to leave, just so the Capitol couldn't have him, but then what good would that have done? Quillon had a brother who needed to say goodbye, so Tobias only bowed his head for a moment, signature sign of respect in District Seven, and then he turned on his heels and never looked back, even when his heart begged him to.

That night, he laid awake, thought about the second explosion he had felt. The others had sworn they didn't hear or feel anything, and as confused as Tobias had been at the time, he was certain he had felt it. At first he thought it might have just been hyper sensitivity, his brain choosing to overreact to everything in his surroundings. Perhaps he had only felt footsteps.

But ultimately, he decided to believe it was the sound of Quillon's soul being catapulted into the stars, never coming back to this piece of shit planet again. He liked that. Made more sense.

Be there soon, he thought.

Catapults and Cannon fire; both signified the fall of a great man. And somewhere, deeply into the night, when Tobias finally drifted off to sleep, it was with a hunger for vengeance taking root in the pit of his stomach and demanding to be fed.

He would find a way to ensure Quillon's death was not in vain.

i'm gonna get you out of here,
if i could catapult my heart
to where you are