a conqueror and the lost | {tom/dars}

"lover, hunter,
friend and enemy
you will always be
every one of these"

Candor was a vice in situations like these. The trainer was a stern, pretty woman with droopy features, and clean skin. Capable arms crossed over a proud chest, her chin tipped up and her eyes looking down upon Mackenzie. He sat in the floor, legs folded out in front of him, with the beginning of a poorly made net in his lap.

"I'm a combat specialist, but that net—"

She might as well have pointed her finger at him and laughed.

To be fair, the net was, in most aspects, an abject failure. There were holes bigger than his fist in some places, knots he'd incidentally skipped over. To admit he was doing this bad of a job on purpose would have only brought on more questions: Why? What are your motives? Perhaps he was just trying to appear weak to the other tributes, unable to do even the more simple tasks. Perhaps he really was that weak.

The truth was that he was trying to recreate the safety beneath his family's treehouse back in District Seven. He remembered exactly how it looked on that last day, Mackenzie's hand against the bark while Max sat on the swing for a moment. It had been riddled with holes and rips and years of neglect, and he wouldn't have preferred it any other way. He missed it, as stupid as that sounded. But, he was finding that even the smallest, most minuscule things in his past were the things he noticed he was going without now the most.

The floorboard on the other side of his bedroom did not squeak as a warning that he had incoming visitors. That had saved him from a number of awkward encounters. He never woke up to the smell of his mother's coffee from the first floor, or the sound of song birds outside his window. They liked taking a rest from their long voyage south during the fall in the big oak tree where the tree house was.

And that was another thing, there was no tree house for him to gaze at through his window.

He'd tried, every morning, and he was instead met with rooftops and cement and concrete and asphalt; crowds of people waited for him to die.

"Yeah," he agreed, untying the knots and setting the unraveled rope back in its rightful place, "I'd probably be better off serving my attention elsewhere."

He smiled warmly at the woman, who seemed pleased enough, slowly walking in one direction while Mackenzie walked in the other.

Just in time, Mackenzie rounded a corner to watch as the boy from District One severed the head of a dummy in one swipe. His initial reaction was to turn away and go back the way he came. Trainer-lady wasn't afraid to ask him questions, sure, but at least she wasn't in the business to decapitating things for fun.

But, also, the boy from One had already made eye contact with Mackenzie, and turning away now would only look like fear. Frightening people did frightening work once someone showed them just how frightening they could be. Mackenzie did not want an enemy, or a rival. Those were the thing that got people like him killed.

"Nice," he said, leaning against the door frame with his arms crossed over his chest, just as trainer-lady had done, "I guess practice makes perfect?"