queen of ice | sundra, 59th victor
Sept 22, 2019 16:39:11 GMT -5
Post by shrimp on Sept 22, 2019 16:39:11 GMT -5
cw: pregnancy discussion, abortion discussion
(last half of piece)
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(last half of piece)
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"Let's take a walk," Flickerman chirps to the crowd, holding a hand out to his interviewee. His nails are sharp, filed to gold-tipped points, off just slightly from his dandelion eyes.
She, accepting the host's hand, feels the prick on her palm. Her expression does not change: demure, a soft smile sketched out with perfect teeth and rosy cheeks. She is grateful, after all, for the opportunity.
On cue, the sound stage blooms. Wildflowers in shades of silver and gold and precious bronze, unique as snowflakes, spiral outwards. A television screen emerges from the ether, the texture of the panel behind them turning from matte gypsum to a pristine sheen. As they pass through the threshold and settle in lounge chairs, white lilacs — larger than the ones dusted in her hair — unfurl and bunch in the corners.
He begins.
"Ms."
He halts.
"Mrs."
He pauses, leaning forward and resting his chin on his palm. Golden eyes bore into hers, slowly blink. His mouth is tilted upwards, a wry grin that says more than he needs.
"Yes, Caesar?"
"All these years, and I'm still never sure what to call you."
She laughs with the audience, a soft alto drifting, like willow trees in the breeze. "How long have we known each other? A little late to ask."
She crosses her legs and leans forward, impish in her whisper. "Sundra is fine." The audience chuckles, makes a note in their own brains. Her hands, clasped together, imperceptibly rotates the band around her finger.
---
It is rough against her skin.
She is, still, getting used to the weight: it hasn't been long since wearing a ring would ensure it'd fall off in the stable, the fields, the expanse that shrinks with each new rig. There are moments when she forgets: when her hand is buried deep in dough and she realizes she's left impressions of serifs, or pressed in the distinct stamp of an emblem that sends chills up her arms. But the heaviness, the color, the memory, makes those seconds rare.
Instead, it is the opposite. Metis, the personal stylist ushered in upon her victory, is smart: she takes a lap around the ceremonial garb and throws on silver bracelets, or pearlescent earrings that twine up her ears like branches. Yet when cameras float about, they are moths: gravitating towards the familiar warmth of copper.
With Lethe on her arm, they'd kicked off her first year with that ring in the spotlight, outshining Topaz's looks or Camalia's curiosity. For three days she and those think-pieces had been front-page news, beating the Ceremonies, second to the training scores. Even now the Capitol still argues.
(The sponsorships she earned, for Ink, for Blythe, cascading and tumbling into their palms, were worth it.)
When the jeweler, The last from Five, met her and Metis for their consultation, there had been a worry in his eyes — beyond the arduous process of customization — that he didn't dare speak aloud. Instead it was wrapped in smaller words, a daisy wilting in a firestorm.
---
"First and foremost: for those of you not up to date this is your spoiler warning, cover your ears!"
There is a cackle. Who shouldn't be caught up, on the eve of a finale?
"Sundra I'm so sorry for your loss. District Five's own Pixie Ruined, and Blythe Godwin-Sears. One-of-a-kind. If we could have a moment of silence for our incredible tributes."
The quiet — ten seconds, less — is punctuated by the distinct sound of shuffling feet, a cough, a sneeze, a mother shushing her children, a drunkard giggling at nothing. They are not used to this sign of respect. But they are accustomed to its shallowness.
It should be twice, three times, as long, spanning across years and decades: for Blaire, Erebus and Luna, Claude and Laila (so close, too young), Cassie Radke and Shadow Bison (too young, so young). From Luciana all the way to Edison Grieve. Devon Mercier. The first. The brave. But pacifism does not satiate a hunger. They will never be quelled.
Still, as Io argues, justice sparking in the teenager's throat, she feeds them from her own plate.
---
They pan through her childhood like a watercolor painting, blurring the background into a vague collection of skies and sunsets: the orange tree that grew outside her window, the periwinkle clouds overhead as she took care of the ranch (even now they talk of her and Mace Emberstatt, same sides of the same coin, forever intertwined with brick and mortar and psychedelic highs). They are not chronological, jumping forward a few years, looking back when the topic eases. There is the sense of two friends, chatting over tea and a tray of biscuits.
"Tell me about Storm," Caesar says, more command than question. "We all remember those heroic days spent with Victor Heron Kimberling, and his stalwart assistance. He truly was a knight in shining armor."
An unspoken but hangs in the conversation, and she tries to work around it.
"He used to give Europa piggyback rides. They'd walk for miles after she got home from school, along the south end of the ranch." She lays out the land with her hands, gesturing at the expanse: the landscape of sloping hills that oil painters wished to witness, that oil barons worked to destroy.
It is not a lie, but it is not the truth. Europa was too big for those afternoon treks, but Sundra's first lesson digs its heels deep — if a lie is half truths, is mundane enough, they will not delve deeper.
(Unless if they hate you.)
For two more years she will bury Io in the earth with her own two hands, before she lets the Capitol raise a narrative ripe for a Reaping.
---
Patricia will learn her own lessons soon enough. It's been a year — and she knew, already, that her victory meant Pixie's doom. But while Lethe is Innocent, while Sundra is Astute, their third member is Righteous.
The game is more dangerous now — The Capitol loves to proclaim undying love for The Triad while spitting curses at them behind closed doors: three lucky girls from Five — a district that should have stayed quiet, stayed humble, should have known their place in the world and not dared to venture forward. Patricia refuses, stands her ground, and where she earns respect she paints a mark on their backs.
Sundra does not know when the next knife, the next penguin, the next rock slide will land. It must be soon.
(This is her second lesson: it is always soon)
Still, she tries to dig their way out with the lifting timbre of her voice, with folded hands and crossed ankles. She spends when she can, on stale bread and intrepid cheese and the various inventions that sprout from an opalescent gold mine. She poses and twirls slowly for cameras, for fashion brands, jewelers and juice companies. She subsidizes a medical program with the local apothecary. She hires a bodyguard when she ventures out of the Training Center and doesn't dare speak ill of zealots, still writhing after a decade.
---
In six years, it will not be enough.
The only thing she will be able to do is hold Lethe close as her heart rips in two, as guilt becomes a chasm. She saved Sundra, they saved Patricia, but they could not save Eden.
She will wonder what happened to the girl who used to call her Aunt Sun, who'd stay over when the nights were too tough and let her tell tales of when the district was bright. She will wonder how the three of them created a hope so false, a future so bleak, that Eden chose to throw herself into the Capitol's maw. She will wonder what would have happened if she died instead of Mace. Instead of Monaghan. Instead of Aesop. Would two have been enough to quiet a storm? One?
In eleven years, it will not be enough.
After the circumstances, the bravado and crocodile tears she will smash a hand mirror, webs crackling outwards. The shards will tumble, refracting and flickering, and she'll sit down on her bed in disbelief. With rage as white as roses.
She'll think of mothers: of factory workers and shepherds, refinery techs and mathematicians. Of her own, who excuses herself during thunderstorms and always lights a candle on Storm's birthday.
A baroness could revive her child, while generations could not. And she'll know it's not right to judge Denali Lyons for her parents' sins, and she'll love her babbling and her love letters. But she is not Io, who grabs onto and lets go of grudges like an unsteady flame. Sundra's wick burns steady. Slow to light, but unrepentant.
---
"Every love story has a beginning — but yours starts even earlier than expected, hm?"
An autumn wind gusts on screen. A boy, stocky but still a boy — so much younger than she remembers, steps into frame, and she can still hear the clank of his steel-toed boots. His soft drawl, his blushing face. Then it cuts to the reaping, his hands in chains. The cell is cold, hollow, everything he never was.
"Seems like you have a thing for bad boys, hm?"
The audience chuckles. She closes her eyes as she laughs, hopes the sharpness in her eyes dull before they open once more.
Her third lesson was her first mistake. People die; tributes die. And to have loved, liked, lost — it was worse. So much worse.
"Trace and I went on one date before the 56th," she says. "He was spitfire and rash, probably how he got locked up in the first place." Above screen, the boy is cut down by a blood-soaked girl from twelve. She watches, the blood dripping down.
"And he was kind. And he wanted to live. To love. At the end, don't we all wish that, Caesar? I'm sure you've had your days with special someones."
Her parry is quick but so is Flickerman; he yields the higher ground as the audience hoots, eager to hear from the true voice of Panem. Should the tabloids speak of Caesar instead of her, that would be true bliss.
"Oh, y'all aint getting a word out of me," he dramatically sighs, taking a generous sip of champagne. It's water — she knows he would be unable to be as clever with something in his system. She does not dare pick up her own glass; it would be on brand for the Capitol to play with loaded dice.
"First loves though, always something, huh."
"Always something."
A moment passes. His tone is almost sincere.
"Are you ready to talk about him?"
She takes a moment, closes her eyes, shifts the placement of her hands. The copper ring, their penny rendered eternal, glints in the stage lighting.
---
"You're my brother. She's my wife."
The blood oozes down her neck like molasses as she struggles to reach for her quiver. The knife's wedged itself deep, but not enough to kill. At least, she hopes — she is still breathing, after all.
"Please."
She gasps, strangled and warbling, wanting to cough but knowing she can't, the arrows bouncing like a bow on violin strings. The men flock about each other, a murder of ravens, leaving her to bleed out onto the ice. As if she's already forsaken, as if pity is the only thing she deserves.
Silence reigns. The three do not turn to look at her.
"Hey Mace," Swayer musters, poison in his voice, laughter like a wet tambourine. The boy, caught between half-baked alliances and unspoken betrayals, balks, sneers, digs in. "Did I tell you Charas was a good lay?"
Mace stiffens, the blade now wedged deep in his back. And — on instinct, maybe, or anger, or pain — he draws his blade at Aesop, standing unluckily in front. His voice is like an earthquake.
"We were never brothers–"
She, now kneeling, all her weight on her left, lets one arrow fly, then another. Another. Another. They race ahead and interrupt a war, finding their way into Emberstatt's joints, immobilizing in the worst way. A fifth strikes through the heart and Monaghan leaps, scurrying backwards as she unleashes the rest of her ammo on the boy from Three.
They would ask her, after the end, to consider a talent in archery. But gone were the days where she could ride among the hills and practice aiming at cans, lined up on fenceposts. There was an innocence in shooting for joy. There was no joy in this.
The darkness' grip grows stronger; her finale looks to escape; there is only one more left and no more arrows. She rips the knife out of her neck, sending it soaring at Monaghan's back. He falls forward, hitting the bottom of his raft with a solid thunk.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
A hovercraft approaches. A boat goes up in flames.
---
"That night before it all ended, staring at the stars, we promised to each other. I keep him close every day."
It is the best she can do. Even if it hurts, even if she keeps everyone else away: the florist who she stops by every Sunday, the rancher who tips his hat across the way, the head of the orphanage who greets her with the nicest eyes she's ever seen. Sundra does not let herself compare, to hope. She has already lost enough.
At the end, she is as clueless as the rest over how she feels. It's complicated. As the days pass it grows ever unclear. But there is an intensity that lingers: how kind he was, under layers of bravado and multitudes of selfishness, magic trick after magic trick. There is a fury that stays, Aesop's string knotted with her own, weighing her down, cocooning her in silk.
It hurts, sometimes, to speak his name. They made a house together knowing nothing could last, met in-laws and dreamed of the sun. Yet the end does not arrive.
They have warped instead, reaped every time someone looks at her face, dying every moment someone speaks her name. She is not Topaz Ross, who killed Nash because she was commanded to. She watched Aesop fall. And because she struck instead of crying, breathes instead of decaying, she must have not cared at all.
Was it all a lie, then?
They build a fountain dedicated to them in the National Museum. She is there to cut the ribbon, at an opening celebration with lemon-syrup soda that's far too sweet, an ice-themed parfait that hurts her teeth. People toss in pennies behind their back and make a wish, and she can't help but feel that they are asking for a curse. Others protest outside of the building, finally having something to scream about.
Watch out for widows, they jeer.
Watch out for people like her.
---
People like her are everywhere.
She remembers the days after the finale, the cyclical beeping of monitors as the doctors prolonged her stay. "More tests," they would say. "You've encountered a lot in there."
It takes a week for her to be able to talk again, raspy and hoarse as her voice is. Lethe has her write everything down on a portable whiteboard, brings over markers in every color of the rainbow. To pass the time she draws flowers and fruit, never the chill that has settled, deep.
Another week passes. The feeling in her fingers comes back — they'd found the digits lying next to her passed out frame, preserved by the cold. A thin, delicate line wraps its way around her ring finger. "An engagement scar," her escort says, giddy for a moment before realizing his faux pas.
They take her urine for a quick test, and an hour later she realizes why.
She doesn't tell anyone what she suspects: not Lethe, who refuses to leave her side but doesn't know what comes next; not the nurse, who changes her bandages and makes sure she takes her pills; not the doctor, who looks at her strangely every time he enters the room.
It is a waiting game, a silent competition over the rest of her life. She hadn't thought that far ahead. There had been her, and there had been him, and death had been ready to strike. It was foolish, but the arena is for the lost: Emberstatt was tall and imposing. Harp had gotten a twelve on her training score. And all she'd left with after the bloodbath was a crowbar and her beating heart.
What would her parents think? Nausea knocks her over.
She'd wanted kids, someday. At some point, where the ground was steady. She'd raise them to be smart, to be brave, to know when to wait out a storm. She'd teach them how to farm on their oil-slicked pastures and ride a horse through a maze of metal towers. The stories she would tell, of a cow let loose in a kitchen, of a druid living in a rusted world. They would be a bastion, a buoy shining bright amid the muck.
Not like this.
To raise the remnants of a battle, of a ghost that cannot leave, terrifies her. What would it mean if they had his eyes? His smile? His impulses? She sees a boy who collected a backpack full of limbs and feels her stomach turn. She sees a boy who danced with snowmen and pleaded for mercy, and feels heat welling up in her eyes.
Lethe, sensing her ward needs to be alone, goes to find the commissary.
There are other ramifications, political, cultural, for a child born from destruction. She can imagine the vitriol should she choose. Socialites cursing out her name for aborting history, rejecting a love so pure and sweet. Snow, reading a baby announcement and placing Europa in the reaping out of a twisted sense of vengeance. A life for a life.
But not her own, hers was already taken.
---
"You did well," Metis says, when the car door closes. "I mean it."
"Well enough," Sundra acquiesces, softer than a lyre. She takes the tablet out of her purse, scrolling through Games data, catching up on a day of absence. There is no longer much to do, when both tributes are dead. She can't reach out to the parents until she gets back. The extra sponsorship has already been returned.
It is the cold, that drives her. It is far too similar to her own. She knows, even if it gives her frostbite, that she won't be able to resist.
Tomorrow, when Katelyn Persimmon wins the 69th Games, there will be more parallels, threads and stories coursing a path. And Sundra will be there, two Queens of Ice sitting on their thrones. It will have been a long time since someone deemed her a ruler, not a crafter; in a cruel way, she'll welcome the change. She'll welcome another to their ranks.
There is anger, there is grief, but there is no regret. Standing alone before she was lifted up into the stratosphere, President Snow wielding her crown, she'd asked herself what she would make of the future. Of twenty three others cut short.
On that threshold, that precipice, she made a choice. So she smoothed out the wrinkles of her charcoal gown, and lifted the veil high above her head.
Until death, life.
Thank you to d10f ekta ram // [earthling] , L△LIA , and charade for blocking/dialogue.
