if i'm wrong :: [ cricket + ara // day eight, morgue ]

Less than two days ago, you wanted Nell Cyprus dead. Never viciously, but enough to outweigh the wish to see her safe and with any luck someday happy, and not abstractly, either—she wasn't a number in a slot, she was Nell Cyprus, who reached into acid and offered Kassandra freeze-dried ice cream and stargazed with her friends and insisted on the right to her own regret and bled and screamed and did nothing to you, ever, except not be Cedar. She was Nell and she was eighteen and you wanted her to die right up until, abruptly, you didn't, because it wouldn't make a difference anymore and because you know a little about split skulls and guns you never really meant to fire and the pieces of friendly faces that never quite wash off your hands; even through the cold splash over your heart, you still wanted her safe and you didn't want her dead anymore, why would you, how would you—

And now she is anyway, and you have no right to mourn her.

You do anyway. What else is there? What are you, at all, if not layers of grief laid like sediment and pressurized?

You wonder sometimes—constantly—whether it makes you a bad mentor, that unwillingness to focus. Would a better mentor have shifted every bit of attention to Red before the blood finished spraying, or cheered her on today unequivocally instead of watching with their heart in their throat? Should you want that?

Maybe you could be both a better strategist and a better person. It feels more likely that you'll never be either, and that you should have left the antivenom Arbor worked so hard to send you with Dru, who for better and for worse alike was only ever her own person. A second dose in case of emergency would have gone to waste, but then you've never quite been convinced that it didn't.

Slowly, the way Isabel reminds you when you're too lost in your own head to remind yourself, you breathe. It's a remedy for the wrong problem; you don't remember the last time you felt this present this late in the Games. Every year your friends cast one another glances they think you don't notice when you come home a step behind your own skin, and a month later you think you understand, but a year later that first death lands and you let yourself turn off again anyway because it's better than a sea of noise and breath and thought trying to weather you down to nothing. You just can't this year—won't, this year. Can't. Cedar lingers: a decade-old echo of a voice tangled with Kieran's tumbling out of a hiding place they thought you adults didn't know about, a flutter of air not yet at rest in the suite, an afterimage on a plush maroon sofa not entirely unlike one you once knelt beside to ease off Eden's small shoes and Cedar's smaller ones after they fell asleep in the careless, loose-limbed way that only children can. You can't get away from him; you wouldn't if you could, and if you pretend to try, your feet make a liar of you. Here is the fishing practice room, where flashes of color caught a child's eyes and you swallowed your own discomfort to stand close enough to catch him if he leaned too close. (He didn't.) Here is the hallway that, not that you've often tried, is the closest you've ever been allowed to the morgue.

Here is the next hallway after that, your footsteps echoing around the next corner and the next in suspicious silence.

You've held bodies before, and seen more, and burned one. They're only bodies, still as stone and infinitely emptier. You step forward anyway, caught like water rushing into a vacuum, murmuring under your breath to the polished tile scouring your fingertips and the door you still half-expect to find locked; it opens easily, with only the unfamiliar pattern of its creaking and a chill rush of air to remind you that you haven't crossed this threshold a thousand times.

The only upright figure in the room withdraws a hand so quickly that you would call it a flinch if not for the practiced poise of it. That alone might have identified her, if you hadn't already guessed by process of elimination—only so many people could dismiss the guards, and who would draw Montague or Minorae here? Still, you exhale sharply at Cricket's voice, a rush of furious disbelief that fogs the air, fails to find purchase, and scatters.

"I thought it had been made very clear that you were not—" she says, then pauses, so briefly that you might not have caught it had there been any other sound to distract you. Electric light or the ambience of death or both wash her face death-pale itself; against that her eyes are dark and impossible to miss as they flicker, just for an instant, before she finishes, "allowed to be here, Aranica."

You know that kind of flicker from the mirrors where you watched it until you knew how it felt the moment before it happened, knew how to grab it and entomb it before anyone could drive down a manicured chisel. It's—nothing. A startled moment. Not a week of Arbor looking like his own ghost, not the deceptively gentle whir of machines around Lethe, not the flicker of a life as yet another dot on a screen blinks cleanly out of messy existence. It's—

It would be so much easier for it to be nothing.

"And you are?" you ask as you elbow the door shut behind you, your voice both quieter and rawer than you meant it to be. You take your eyes off her only long enough to flick them down to Cedar's body, an echo as real as any other but no realer. More visceral, perhaps—Capitol morticians do good work, but they do better work more quickly with less evidence to make disappear. (Don't look, Ms. Cherise told you once, and you let her hold your forehead to her sternum in an uncharacteristically open display of protectiveness as another mortician back in Twelve transferred Anani's body from Capitol packaging to his final casket. Don't look, and you didn't, but you can't not, now.) "He's dead, Cricket, he can't—" miss you? blame you? forgive you? love you? You exhale hard enough to cloud the air again, trying not to shake any more than you have to in the chill. "Why are you even here?"