The Past & Pending [Quest/Flynn]

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Something like this was inevitable, likely a permanent feature to my now lifelong schedule that has been written by someone else. I have not had a say in this and neither has the Capitol, the Capitol only cares about fixing my physical health. They cannot have a broken and battered looking annual star on their televisions. Nah, this is all Teddy Ursa. I am just not sure this is a field of medicine I can get my head around. Haha my head because that is what this is all about. Trying to get my head around the so-called trauma that is not engraved into it. Its shit and its there, it is called scars.

I sit deep into the leather chair in Quest Hertz’s office. It is good to see the resurrected has done something with their life, not like that one who lives in Teddy’s house across the road. The cat clock is a bit of a distraction though, my eyes draw to it every time I scan across the room, trying to pick up on anything else that looks fancy. But no, just the ticking clock that makes a funny noise. It is something I would expect in a Capitolite’s house. Maybe someone like Sardonyx Crowe.

Is this going to be like an interview with Sardonyx Crowe? A quickfire of questions, trying to shoot out the agony, the pain and grief in my mind. Except there is no audience, no cameras, no bright lights to blind me. Just a dull beige room with a cat shaped clock. Quest Hertz in a leather seat, wearing something normal. Not a flower headdress that reaches the ceiling.

I guess this will be good practice before the victory tour. They cannot have me breaking down while delivering dozens of speeches. Fuck, I really have all those speeches to practice.

“Why don’t we start off easy. Care to tell me how you’re feeling?”

This is probably the hardest question I have been given since being scooped up by that helicopter. Both of my palm’s rest on the arms of the leather chair and my finger grip onto it tightly. Just the tips, I do not dig my fingernails into the cow’s skin. I do not have any nails left anyway. ”I don’t know how I am feeling. There is a lot to feel.” All my emotions have been thrown into a blender and whisked together. ”I am alive. That makes me feel great but how I got to be alive. All those dead. That is not a great feeling at all.” I release my fingers from the grip, my hands now flat on the seat’s arms. ”I wish it was like your games, I guess you don’t have those ghosts like I do.”

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A whole week of fighting to keep a lifetime. To keep future that has not yet been explored. There are some chapters already written, not by me, by so many others. Even grandpa says he has plans for me, he will have to fight the Capitol to try and get whatever it is on the table. It is a whole lifetime that would have been a totally different path if for not the two words I volunteer. Those two words aimed me at two paths, the I for I am probably going to die and the volunteer for it is time to volunteer for the next interview. Life and death, they really do have their own battle.

But now I am here. Alive, not exactly whole but one little missing puzzle piece is not much to fret about. I am right here, while Nanette will be fresh under the ground. While Lorraine’s family will be welcoming their daughter back in a coffin. I am here in the flesh while all the others are now just memories.

I am here but at what cost?

“Being alive is probably preferable to being dead,”

I am here at the cost of twenty-three others. I prefer to be here. I prefer to be alive but not with the price I have paid. The price I set up for myself. One fact that keeps haunting me is that I decided it. I was not unlucky to be reaped, I literally threw myself into the impossibilities of life versus death. Now I am a thirteen-year-old boy with such a deep heavy burden to carry…for life. I am going to need the distractions. So many distractions. Therapy like this. Anything.

I rest both of my palms on the arms of the chair. My fingertips dig into the smooth leather skin, my hands do not stay still for a single moment as I am left with another question to answer. Do I wish it were me instead of them? ”No, I want to live.” I halt my hands finally, my fingers extended as I internally punish myself for probably smudging or creasing Quest’s nice leather chairs. ”I just wish we could all still be here. I just wish I did not have to fight to live with such a heavy cost but I guess… but I guess that is just life.”

That is just life. It is what my mum says when I whinge when something does not go my way. It is just a fact of life that I will not always be in control. ”Do you have anything to drink? Water?” I am not quite old enough for the hard liquor yet, not that I plan on throwing this second life of mine down the drain. Just I feel this session will get a little tense. I can question this mental medicine all I want but I need someone to pick at this big brain before it starts to wilt even more. I have a chance now to save myself before I go down the next path.