sober to death. / goat's victor aus.

Jequirity finally falls a week into the Games. Odile’s final link to stability is gone, struck down by the girl from Four. Jeq had killed her ally— Rodrick, the boy from Ten, the boy who had choked Leo to death with his own arm— two days ago. Odile had felt nothing over it, no relief, no sense of revenge. It was just another dead body on the ground of this arena. Now, she feels everything. She stands over Jeq’s body and screams, over and over, like she’s releasing every demon from her chest. She hopes she screams loud enough that another tribute will hear and come over to kill her, but nothing happens. The voice in her head is quiet for the first time in a very long time. She is alone. Truly, absolutely alone.

When she kills Daria the next day, she feels nothing again. A vicious cycle complete.

On the final day, there are four of them left. Heather takes down Septys, and Harbinger brings down Heather, and then Odile is staring the boy from District 11 in the face. The fight is quick. She isn’t expecting to bring down Harbinger Rhodes, but he falls at her feet as her blade cuts one final time through his skin. She jumps back in shock, staring down at him, and then the fog around her begins to shift. She wonders, then, if she was right about none of this being real, but then the final hovercraft begins to descend and the wind whips her skin too hard for it to be a dream.

She passes out in the hovercraft and wakes up in a Capitol hospital. Somebody she doesn’t recognize comes in to speak to her, tell her where she’s going to go from here, and then she’s alone again. With all the strength she can muster, she pushes herself out of bed and makes her way to the bathroom. She stares at herself in the mirror. Her eyes are red and glassy, the skin around them dark. Her hair is knotted and greasy, and when she gathers it back she can see the spot where her left ear once was. Her limbs are scarred and still ache when she moves, and she knows she shouldn’t be out of bed yet, but she needed to see herself. She needed proof. She stares at herself in the mirror and watches as her lips move—

I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.

They give her a home in the Victor’s Village back in Three. She wanders around all the empty rooms in bare feet, spreading her arms out like a bird as she goes. It seems a thousand times bigger than the apartment she’d shared with her mother. Her mother, who had met her at the train station and whispered in her ear, “I wanted you dead.”

To which Odile whispered, “You are never getting rid of me now.”

Her mother had decided not to move into the new home. Odile doesn’t mind that one bit. She likes living alone, having a place that is hers and hers alone. Nobody is there to criticize her when she hasn’t showered for days. Nobody is there to make fun of her when she speaks to herself in hushed tones. Nobody is there to berate her for being useless, a burden. For the first time in her life, she is allowed to simply exist.

That does not mean that things are easy. She sees the faces of her allies at night, their broken corpses projected onto the inside of her eyelids. On her victory tour, she had to confront the districts and families of the twenty-three dead tributes, and she was not allowed to tell them that she did not care their children were dead. She had only cared about her allies, and herself, and she had made it out. She did not care about anybody else. They were not her responsibility. She would not be made to feel guilty for their deaths.

But she was not allowed to say that, so she screamed it at herself in the mirror every night until her escort told her to stop.

When the tour finishes, she goes back to her new home and continues to live alone and likes it that way. She goes to the doctor and starts taking pills, and while they don’t get rid of the voice in her head, they make it easier to function, easier to survive what she’s been through. She meets her sister, the sister she didn’t know she had, and it is the first time she cries since she was standing over Jeq’s body.

In a way, she is still the same as she was before. She is disconnected from reality, existing in her own world, thinking mainly of herself. She likes having a sister, but Holly doesn’t always understand the way she acts. She doesn’t have anybody to speak to who understands what she has been through, so she attempts to manage on her own. She reads the lines, attends the parties, does whatever the Capitol tells her to do because she is afraid they will kill her if she doesn’t.

She knows that, when it is time for the next Games, two more children from Three will be offered up for slaughter. She does not know how she’ll tell them that she doesn’t know how to help them. That she’s useless, she only got as far as she did off the backs of her allies (her beautiful allies, all dead now, and she is still alive, for some reason she’ll never know). She does not know how to tell them that, frankly, she doesn’t care what happens to them. They are her responsibility, in theory, but she will stay alive whether or not they do, and that is all that matters to her.

If she cannot help them, there is no point in trying.