lost in a daydream // beck x bell!hologram

He craves stale cigarette smoke, the twilight curling off her lips as they lay on moldy rooftops and waited for dawn. He remembers the way he'd tangle his fingers in her hair, just in case he was finally high enough to feel something. Beck doesn't know if he loved Bell, only that they were perfectly content with using each other up. Burning themselves from the inside out in a race to see who'd cave first.

It should have been him, but it wasn't.

Yet another victory he'd had the pleasure of weaving into that victor's crown.

Beck told himself the next time he saw Bell would be the day he hung himself on rock bottom. She was, after all, the catalyst to his grand descent. The first ghost he'd have the pleasure of greeting on the other side of paradise.

Today, Beck decides, that is close enough to the truth.

For what it's worth, she's an absolutely breathtaking lie. A convincing string of algorithmic code that tells those empty eyes to light up just like he's used to. They're strange though, full of a steely bloodlust he'd only ever seen on a television screen. This is not his Bell, it is the Capitol's. Even if it speaks with her voice, teasing just as he knows it would have been if she were still alive.

He smiles, fingers curling around the cold metal railing in an attempt to remind himself what's real. "So I'm a few years late, boo hoo." A few years older and far too sober. He's everything Hailsham had wanted him to be at twenty-one: a fucking husk. "If you wanted to see me so bad, you should have come home."

Bell has been dead for five years, these words can't hurt her.

"You should hate me." He grins, though blood and dirt and every nightmare she's caused him, "Or is this what the Capitol thinks I want to hear?" They don't know him half as well as they think.