district six train :: [ maeve + tarquin ]

Maeve doesn't have the strength of body or the strength of will to put one foot in front of the other. It's the shock; it's the bitterness. Even she's uncertain whether the larger truth is a matter of can't or won't and if she feels heavier or lighter being pulled away from her sister. It doesn't really matter. The peacekeepers hauling her to the train hardly notice the way the tips of her toes drag across the ground because her limp body is so inconsequential in their arms. It's effortless to carry such a small thing, especially when her mind is the only place she's ever known how to dig her heels in.

It's not until they reach the train station that she's actually set down on her own two feet instead of floating along in the air completely ungrounded. Her tap shoes click! click! as she touches down on the concrete platform and one of the peacekeepers looks at her for the first time, a little startled, before glancing around trying to figure out where else the noise might have come from. Even now, publicly called up for slaughter, it feels impossible to get anyone to pay her any attention. She's contemplating screaming at the top of her lungs, just to see what would happen — if anyone would bother looking — when she notices the boy being escorted alongside her.

He looks so much older than her. It's not just his face and the scruff growing from his chin and upper lip or his solid frame, broad shouldered and muscled. When Maeve makes eye contact with him there's just something in his expression. Sure, there's some of the same fear in his eyes that must be wild within her own, but he clearly has enough courage to hold it back. It's like this isn't his first time facing death, as if he's seen something like this before and has a little practice with being afraid and taking ownership of that fear. He's certainly older than her in age — probably eighteen, but closer still to nineteen — but there's no denying that he's much, much older than her in life too. That boy is no naive suburban girl, sheltered to the point that it was easy to forget war was happening at all if there wasn't gunfire splitting the air apart at the District border, echoing through the relative safety of the inner city neighborhoods and in through her bedroom window at night.

The peacekeepers don't hold onto him the way they hold onto Maeve. He takes his own steps, supervised only for the sake of ensuring that those steps are onto the train instead of into the runaway distance. Meanwhile Maeve has two set of hands holding her up on either side because thus far she hasn't been strong enough to support herself. Not now, not before. The realization makes her flush with embarrassment, which only deepens as she thinks about how stupid it is to be embarrassed about having a hard time right now.

Cheeks itching from her earlier bout of crying, she tries to reach up to scratch her face but isn't allowed to move her arm that far. The peacekeepers have such solid grips that they don't even notice the weak attempt at resistance. It's such a small thing, but it adds further insult to an already unfair situation. It's always her drawing the short straw. Her sister has always gotten the highest praise and the most attention and even got the girl that Maeve liked, whether she actually wanted her or not. Now this stranger, despite being in the exact same terrible situation as Maeve, has this small luxury that she isn't allowed. They're both being held captive, but he still gets this piece of freedom she's denied.

He's escorted onto the train slightly ahead of her, a faint limp in his step as her tap shoes click-clack! click-clack! click-clack! evenly behind him. The peacekeepers all turn to glare at her shoes as if they were ghost-empty and walking themselves, clearly annoyed by the sharp noise of the taps on the train's metal floor. It still feels as if her presence isn't being acknowledged, just her shoes. "Why would anyone wear those?" One of them sneers, obviously rhetorical, at the ridiculousness of it.

"A cat peed —" (— on all of my other shoes.) Before an explanation can fully leave Maeve's mouth, she's immediately smacked upside the head. It doesn't take much for her vision to spark and go fuzzy. She blinks it back with a gasp so sharp it feels like swallowing knives.

"No talking."

One of the keepers sniggers quietly to himself over the cat pee, but otherwise none of them respond further. It's not until they've passed through several train cars, silent except for Maeve's shoes, that she dares to defy them again. She can't stop thinking about the other boy's eyes and wondering how he's been holding all of this in so stoically. He doesn't look like he cried and, even with his limp, he walks without any apparent difficulty in being responsible for his own body. She's jealous. She wishes she'd ever been that self-sufficient a day in her life and she can't help wondering what he's been through to make him able to shoulder all of this and still hold himself up all on his own. Nothing good. Nothing easy. All Maeve has ever known is an easy life. She's never experienced anything that would teach her the emotional skills necessary to handle today with grace. "I bet you —"

SMACK!

Click-clack! Click-clack! Her feet stumble forward and then backwards from the force of it, even as the peacekeepers hold her firmly in place, her insubstantial body swinging between the steady pillars of their matching uniforms as if she were just thin skin fluttering in the wind. (— didn't deserve this either.) She finishes the thought in her spinning head as a pair of doors are unlocked and she's thrown into a holding room that's little more than a glorified closet.

There's a cot and a tiny window. Nothing else. The window doesn't open and the cot isn't comfortable, but the sheets are clean. For a while Maeve just sits, staring at her stupid shoes and the way the obnoxiously glossy patent leather shines even in the dim light of the room's single bulb. Eventually she remembers the pencil and pad of neon green sticky notes in her pocket and she starts scribbling the same two words over and over again: Why me?! There are enough of them to cover an entire wall. In a space this small it doesn't take much.

When she started she thought the repetition or maybe just the angry push of the pencil against paper would help to lull her into a calm like it has so many times before. It doesn't. Instead each word winds her chest tighter as if her frustrations were coiling into themselves to create a trap. Each breath comes faster than the one before, honing their edges as they're forced through her clenched teeth.




Finally she screams, the sound divided into awkward bursts by her frustrated sobbing. Either the peacekeepers can't hear her hysterics or they don't care because there's no knocking, no yell from the other side of the door to shut up, no faint click of the lock to signal someone preparing to check in on her. There's nothing. And nothing and nothing and nothing. No one cares that she's upset or that this is unfair and her throwing a fit over it won't change that.

Hurling her pencil against the wall, the plastic cracks and the miniature eraser pops out as thin pieces of lead scatter across the room. She stomps them into dust. Then she continues stomping and kicking until it turns into one of her signature tap dances of rage, carefully choreographed over the years to be as loud and annoying as possible.

The movements come automatically. Muscle memory. This is the dance of Roux's report card being a column of straight As while Maeve's was a list of A-s and B+s made all the more inferior when they were put up side by side on the refrigerator. This is the dance of four different people asking Roux to Homecoming while Maeve went stag. This is the dance of Holland Ramsden kissing Roux on the cheek right in front of Maeve's stupid broken heart. And now this is also the dance of Maeve getting sent to her death while Roux gets all her sympathy hugs and everyone thinks about how pretty she looks when she cries — fragile and vulnerable. Not like this. Not screaming and stomping as her nose runs and flecks of spit fly through the air, eyes bloodshot and knuckles white from her hands clenching into fists.

Not like Maeve.

Not like a naive suburban girl, sheltered to the point that it was easy to forget war was happening at all if there wasn't gunfire splitting the air apart at the District border, echoing through the relative safety of the inner city neighborhoods and in through her bedroom window at night.

Not like an innocent child being punished for a war she didn't commit.

Maeve doesn't have the strength of body or the strength of will to put one foot in front of the other. Roux doesn't have the strength of body or the strength of will to watch as her sister is hauled away, but she can hear it. It's the faint whisper in the air as the tips of her toes drag across the ground. It's the easy thudding of the peacekeeper's boots growing fainter as they leave immediately for the train station. It's the way the kids around her whisper and stare and go silent again as people leave and Roux is left hugging her knees, huddled on the ground.

She can't move. The only thing she can do is cry quietly as she imagines her dads trying to figure out if they should try to run after Maeve and delay the last moment of seeing their death row daughter as long as they possibly can or if they should run to Roux and comfort each other in this moment where the three of them need each other so much. There isn't a right answer. There isn't a wrong answer. There is only wasted time. No one comes. Later when they tell Roux about running after Maeve and desperately yelling things like we love you! and please no! please don't take her! we'll do anything! take me! take me! take me! please take me instead! and how they don't think they got close enough for her to be able to hear them before they were arrested... Roux will tell them they did the right thing. She won't ever tell them how horrible it felt to be left all alone right then.

There's more than enough guilt rotting in her gut before Holland Ramsden crouches down beside her, laying a comforting hand on Roux's back as she asks, "are you... are you okay?" There wasn't a way to tell her that this was suddenly so much worse than being stranded on her own in this moment. "That's stupid, oh god, I'm so sorry. What a stupid fuckin' thing to ask. Of course you're not. Urgh. I shouldn't have —" Roux can't bring herself to say anything to this girl that her sister had a massive crush on, a crush that made Maeve miserable thanks to Roux. Not right now when she's consumed with thoughts about how Maeve must be boarding the train and how lately every time she's convinced herself that things can't get worse between the two of them she's immediately proven so wrong. She'll never see her sister again. She'll never have the chance to fix things. Maeve is going to die hating her. "I'm probably just making it worse." At least she knows. "I'm sorry. I've never been very good at making people feel better. Not that, like, I think I could do that for you right now even if I were. I mean. Fuck. Why can't I stop saying dumb things... I'm so fucking sorry. For, like, everything right now. I... Sorry. I just —" There's nothing anyone could say to make anything better right now, but it turns out there's plenty that can make it worse. "Sorry."

Shrugging Holland's hand off her back, Roux finally looks up. Her bottom lip sucked into her mouth, her chin quakes as she tries and tries and tries to hold herself together because it doesn't feel right to let anyone make this about her, even if Maeve being taken away to die affects her too. The steps her name was called out on are right there. The grass beside Roux is still crushed from where her sister stood as it happened. The apologies that Roux never figured out how to word correctly enough to have them accepted are still somewhere, useless, inside of her. "It —" Roux's voice cracks and falls apart into the invisible dust of its own shame. "It wasn't from me." It's too late to put things right, but that doesn't release her from her duty to Maeve. If anything she owes her this more than ever.

"Huh?" The two girls stare at each other for a while. "What wasn't from you?" The longer Roux stares the more obvious it becomes that Holland already knows exactly what she's talking about. She's procrastinating. They both are.

She says it anyway: "The letter."

Holland swallows and breaks eye contact, turning her gaze to the podium nearby. "The..." She doesn't say it. Her expression looks something like Maeve's the day Holland kissed Roux's cheek.

"Maeve wrote it," Roux's voice shrinks smaller and smaller with each syllable because she knows what has to be said next for all of this to truly be sorted out — the real reason everything went so wrong.

"I know," Holland admits, turning her face back to Roux. There's a ghost of the expression she wore when Roux gave her the letter, awkward... and painfully hopeful. "I mentioned the letter to Rachel Haffield at a party that night and she told me how she'd heard all about how —" She is all bright pink hair and bright pink cheeks, knowing this is the worst possible moment for them to be talking about all of this at the exact same time they both know this is the only moment left for it. "— how you'd been helping Maeve."

There's nothing to say, really. Roux knew the second Holland had looked at her like that, unguarded and open. She'd just been pretending not to know this whole time, as if denial could change the truth. As if Maeve's letter could sway a heart that had already made up its mind.

Plucking a blade of grass, Holland picks at it until it begins splitting into stringy threads and the green bleeds onto her fingertips. "When I transferred schools there were rumors, you know, the way there always are when someone shows up out of nowhere. They weren't..." She takes a deep breath and exhales a long sigh. A year and a half later and it's obvious that some part of it all still crawls around beneath her skin, feeding off the wounds of her insecurities in a way that prevents her from healing. Roux probably heard some of them, but she can't remember what they were about. Nothing good. Nothing easy. "They weren't nice rumors. People didn't really talk to me unless it was to say something mean and it just wasn't a great time for me." Dropping the disfigured remains of grass, she looks back at Roux — skittish and struggling to resist the impulse to look at anything else, but doing her best to be courageous for this. "You always smiled at me in the hallway. Sometimes you even said hi. Like, I knew — I know — you're always nice to everybody and that I wasn't special, but... you were the only one who didn't look at me like I was a freak or turn to whisper just because I walked by. It meant a lot to know there was at least one person who wasn't saying horrible things about me."

This is it. This is the truth Roux saw in Holland's strange smile that day.

"I liked you before the letter and I —" There's a guilty pause. "— I liked pretending it was from you." All the courage and hope falls right out of her, her shoulders sagging as her spine curls defensively over her knees. "I shouldn't have done that. It just felt like it was my only chance. What other excuse was the weird kid ever gonna to get to make a move on the most popular girl in school? I just thought... maybe getting to pretend for a couple days would be enough. I thought it would be worth it."

There's an inevitable question that Roux knows she has to ask. It might be a mistake, she doesn't know. Still, there's a chance it could make them feel better, that each small word of it might fix something broken inside all of them — in Roux, in Holland, in Maeve. It doesn't. "Was it?" Instead each word winds her chest tighter as if her frustrations were coiling into themselves to create a trap. Each breath comes faster than the one before, honing their edges as they're forced through her clenched teeth.

Holland has to answer it. She has to answer it for all of them.

"Not right now."