disbelief {part three || d11 mentors day eight reactions}

She knows what’s coming. It was inevitable. The Capitol lives for finales like the sixty-seventh. Two careers at the top of their field battling to come out on top. They cannot chance a one hundred percent chance of eleven taking the crown. Not when their other alternatives are eight and twelve. She thinks that someone will be losing their job as game-maker if Nell Cyprus does not come home. They cannot let Nico Thorne become the next Katelyn Persimmon. And they cannot let her district have hope again when it has been all but stamped out.

Flickerman is on the edge of his seat, his ponytail flopping back and forth as he wildly gesticulates. The fight feels like an eternity, but it takes only a moment. Kassandra is not fighting for Killian’s lofty ideals. Jacob is no longer afraid. They are fighting to kill. They are fighting to live. A brilliant beam of light lances its way into Jacob’s chest and he hits the ground. A cannon fires. It is an old sound. A familiar sound. A sound that has haunted her dreams since the moment Quartz Caplin dashed Velocity Rush’s skull on the ice. She knows this one will haunt her too.

It’s been years since eleven has come this far. For Jacob to fall here, at the hands of Kassandra? It is almost too much. The knowledge that one of her tributes had made the finale is bitter in her stomach. Ashes on her tongue. It is a high price to pay, and there is only a fifty percent chance that Kass will make it home.

But Jacob’s death, and the promise she was unable to keep to his mother are hard to grasp. They dance in the background of her mind, enveloped by the words she didn’t hear her brother say. Because they can’t be true. He was joking. It’s not right. These are the things she hears about happening to other people and then she offers them her sympathy. Condolences. It’s not supposed to be the other way around.

It’s not supposed to be her family that suffers tragedy after tragedy.

And yet, somehow it always is.

She tears her face away from the screen to look at the bottle of painkillers on the table. To the face that is hid by trembling hands. She heard him of course. She had to have. But she didn’t hear him. Just like she didn’t see the signs. Because she didn’t want to. Because it was unfathomable. Because if there was really something going on, he would have told her beforehand. When she could have done something. Not for the first time, she wonders just how much harm her absence has really caused. Do they still consider her a sister? Why wouldn’t he have told her?

Her hand finds the back of a chair and she sits down hard. She hasn’t even had time to process the death of one of her charges. There is no time to now. Not when her brother is hurting. When he’s been suffering in silence. There are tears pricking the back of her eyes but she leaves the tears unshed. She is the strong one. She’s always had to be. The hits never stop coming; she’s made her peace with that. She covers her mouth with her other hand and stares at the bottle in accusation.

“How— how long? Is it, is it treatable?”

The question is blunt. Point blank. Katelyn Persimmon has wasted enough of her life on mincing words for the cameras to care about sugar coating things now. Now is the time for answers. Soon it will be time to pick up the pieces as best she can.

It's what she was born to do.