leftovers /avriel oneshots

In the end, I'm alone again.

Pissed off Flynn, of course I did. I've never been too good at building friendships, even in the arena, it took days for Areto to warm up to me and that was out of necessity anyway. But no one needs someone like me here. Cold, the tips of my fingers are always pink with cold and I never know what to say. So of course I pissed off Flynn.

I play with the idea of going to see Patricia on floor Five but I don't even know if she's here. Then last time I saw her was out of obligation anyway. My hair's grown long again since then.

Scout and I spend a lot of time walking the halls. We count the vending machines and then we count the lights and then we count the fire extinguishers. All around us, the games play out and I keep an eye on things but it's hard to watch, it's like one moment I'm watching the screen and the next my eyes are shut and my forehead's against the wall and I'm breathing too hard, the scar on my shoulder is burning.

And Aspen is saying, "It's just me and you," then her spear digs a little deeper.

There are two snack machines on each floor, except the lower levels, they all have three. I take a hundred in change out and give Scout so many quarters that he jingles when he walks. I like this mindless way of living, where I just walk and walk until my feet hurt and the sky's gone dark outside. Then I go sleep in my bed and do it all again the next day.

But I'm okay; I think I'm okay.

It's just a few more days anyway, then someone wins and I get to go home. The trees are turning in Nine, victor's village will be lined with decaying yellows and reds and I will be alone there too.

Even in the house, with Duke in the kitchen and Billie doing homework at the table, I'll be alone.

I turn a corner on the first floor and there's someone standing in the hall ahead of me, eyes on one of the tv's. They haven't seen me yet. I pause, studying what I can see, eyes on their shoulders, the fall of their hair– a victor but I don't know them. The doorway to the training rooms stands beside me, darkness leaking out, all the tributes are gone.

I slip inside and lay my back up against the wall, out of sight in the dark except for Scout's gentle glow. My heart races, I can't feel my legs and I remember the blackness of the arena, of the fear of dying in the dark, a knife in my back because I never saw my opponent coming. It's stupid to think that a victor would hurt me, I know that, part of me knows that.

But I feel paper-thin these days, bad again, I'm getting bad again.

Guess I'm still a coward.

Took the card lock on the apartment door apart a couple nights ago and put it back together but wrong. Now when Gloria tries to come in, the door only beeps angrily. When she comes back with a new key, it eats the card and then spits it back out scorched.

bang. bang. bang. Her fist hits the door and I can practically see the look on her face. Bet her brow's all knit together and her lips are turned down.

"Avriel! You fucking child, open the door!" She gave up begging twenty minutes ago.

I sit on hardwood flooring, pieces of the remote for the holo wall in my bedroom on my right, lined up all neat. On my left is my foot, panel open, wires pulled out. I don't really know what I'm doing with it. I was thinking it'd be cool to add holotech capabilities to the foot's exterior. I'd only ever have to buy one shoe.

"You're killing me, Baptiste! I'm dying young because of you!"

I wasn't expecting her to try for so long. I thought she'd knock for a bit, call me an asshole and leave. I'm glad she hasn't yet though, there's something soothing about her rage.

"The interview was supposed to start half an hour ago! You ungrateful shit!"

"Scout, hey, come away from there," I wave my hand at the door. It's trying to peak under the small slit beneath, probably curious about all the noise that Gloria's making. The Kodama straightens and then comes over to where I am to sit against my thigh. I tap it gently on it's little head then get back to the parts sitting around me.

It's easy to focus in and let Gloria's voice just fade away. I've always been good at ignoring everything else when I'm working on something. It used to annoy the hell out of my mom. Screwdriver falls out of my hand, bottom hits the hardwood with a clatter and I pause.

Blood pools on the hardwood and I push all the windows open to get the scent of burnt pie and iron out of the house.

Pick the screwdriver back up and start putting the scraps of the remote together into something less advanced than what it was. My robotic foot now holds the bulk of its goods.

I guess I do that, I take good things and cut them down into nothing.

By the time I finish, the sun is setting and Scout is curled up asleep in my crossed legs. I lift Scout up gently so as not to wake it and then I push my leg out slowly. My foot feels like it's asleep, I can feel the sand shifting in my foot, except it's not. My leg ends just above my ankle in a stump.

Strange how it does that, still feels so much even after being taken from me. I sit there for a little bit, waiting for the feeling to settle. Golden light from the open blinds lays across my shins and makes lines across the floor, near the dining room table.

The apartment was designed to host people. Too bad it has someone like me living in it.

After a moment, I click my foot back into place and wait for it to sync with the chip in my brain. I've gotten really good at telling the exact moment that it happens. It's like a switch flicks in my head, I get a dopamine hit every time. The chip is programmed to trick me into believing that everything is normal, that that's my real foot down there.

Unfortunately, I'm not as stupid as I look.

I pick Scout up and then stand carefully, making sure everything is fully synced before I take a step. The room shifts a little bit and I blink. Suddenly I'm lightheaded and I lean into the wall for support. "Forgot lunch, Scout," I murmur.

There's no Duke barging into my little work shed with a sandwich for me, no Billie sitting cross-legged on the work bench throwing popcorn for me to catch in my mouth. Sometimes I forget how much my brother and sister take care of me, I'm always so focused on caring for them.

I grab the remote and flick the television on as I cross the apartment to the kitchen. The games come on, noise explodes through the quiet apartment and I pull leftover kimchi stew out of the fridge to eat cold.

Missed a lot today. The cameras are showing scenes of a wreckage and I watch carefully as I drink cold soup, looking for Zane. It's easier just trying to keep track of one tribute instead of two. It's also harder somehow, just having one hope left.

Some piece of me thinks that if I shut my eyes too long, Zane might be dead when I wake up. I catch little naps here and there but I don't let myself go too deep. Lately all I dream about is a knife in one hand and blood on the other anyway. Sometimes I dream that I'm laying on a beach, a spear in my chest and I'm watching a helicopter leave me to die.

"I don't know if 'wanted to die' is the right way to describe it for me," Zane says, standing in front of Bastian Fray's wreckage. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and place the empty bowl in the sink. So he isn't dead yet I guess. He's talking to the boy from twelve and I listen quietly, wishing that they weren't letting us see this.

It'd be nice if they just shut the cameras off and let Zane and Cedric have their moment together.

Zane talks about wanting to die so easily that I'm almost jealous. All things I could never say, things I could have said any time last year and didn't. That easy skin to slip into, the Avriel from before always clawing its way back to haunt me. Sometimes I feel him sitting on my chest at night and it's so heavy I can barely breathe.

Must have been around the same time last games when I decided I wanted to live.

I sit on the couch and lay back until I'm staring at the ceiling.

"You might be alive because you're lucky, but you might be alive because you're just better than everything you've faced so far," Cedric says to Zane.

"What made your life worth more than theirs?" Reece asks me.

I furrow my brow. I can't remember what I said to Reece after that. I just remember the blade hitting him just right and him laying there, dead. I guess that was the moment I chose to live.

The sun sets slow and the apartment goes dark around me. I lie there quietly. For a moment, I think I hear footsteps walking down the hall. They stop in front of my door but don't do anything, then they leave a few seconds later.

I spend the night on the couch, watching the tributes sleep.

Abel, Six' brother, is alive too. The mouthy kid I met in the elevator last week, just another person who decided they knew how I was feeling. I didn't get mad at him for that, I could have, I didn't. He was just a kid, he didn't know.

Something he said to me then, it reminds me of what Credric said to Zane only a few hours ago.

"You aren't sorry and that's okay. I won't be sorry at the end for being alive."

I should have told him then that might not be true but I didn't have the heart at the time. It's not something you can understand until you've been through it anyway.

I watch as greyish blue light settles over the furniture in the room, then the sun follows slowly. The Sun rises in the arena too and something in me settles. I relax as pale yellow rays wash over the furniture in the apartment. Scout unfurls from its place on the cushion beside me and then tucks into my side to sleep some more. It's still so early. My eyes shut for a few moments and I doze a little.

The sound of metal.

I open my eyes and Zane's on the screen, fighting the girl from Twelve. I tell myself I don't care. I can't care. My body gives me away, I shakes with nerves and I can't pull my eyes away from the screen.

It's laying there in the afterglow of the sunrise, watching kids kill each other when understanding starts to blossom within me. My chest is tight, my cheek raw from biting down and this is going to be my life now, every year from now on I'll watch kids from nine kill people and then die, reminding me over and over of what I've done.

I won't be able to look away anymore, someone has to watch.

I get a pang of hunger as Zane cuts off Maddox' leg. Something inside me settles, that's game. It has to be, no way that girl can keep going with her leg like that. I don't celebrate the moment, I just stand up and cross to the kitchen to flick the coffee maker on. While I wait for a cup, I put toast down.

So Zane lives a few more hours I guess.

I crack an egg into a frying pan and stand there quietly, enjoying the sound of it sizzling. It's there, before I can stop it, the image of Duke at the counter, mixing something to bake. Billie at the kitchen table, cutting coupons out of the paper out of habit even though we don't need them anymore. Then there's Zane and me, sitting on the kitchen floor, a deck of cards between us.

I shut my eyes and I do my best to banish the idea before it can haunt me.

It's too soon to hope for that, for the understanding that I've been so desperately craving of someone in Nine whose just been through what I have. Fresh still, not muted from decades of healing.

But It's too late.

I've burned the egg.

This time, the bottle comes from ten.

Little golden vineyards mark the glass but precious gold filigree pressed carefully into engravings is wasted on the victor from Nine.

The Brute isn't for him though, crisp, strong, like Ariel. This is for her.

Wind runs through his hair, tugs at his sweater and dives over the edge of the roof of the training centre. His eyes are shut, his arms wrapped around the bottle like it's an anchor. It's an odd thing to stand there and not even hear the sounds of the Capitol below.

Moment of silence while he grows a little bit more deranged.

Avriel opens his eyes and looks to his right, half expecting to see the girls there. Part of him forgets sometimes that they're gone. He catches himself talking to Blade throughout the year, her name always on the tip of his tongue. It's strange that when he turns around, she's not there.

He pauses, mouth formed around the vowels of her name. Then he turns back around on his work bench and goes back to work. Aimless tinkering on things that don't need fixing, working just to keep his hands busy.

"Do you think this ever ends?" he asks.

The friendship bracelet on his wrist has started to decay. He burned the frayed edges back in an effort to slow it down but threads have begun falling away. The colours are greying, relationships rotting away slowly. None of them would have even mattered to Avriel if it hadn't been for the games but he'd take the loneliness of never knowing them over this.

Sometimes he wakes up in the night and it feels like there's a knife in his stomach.

"Are you disappointed in me?" he whispers.

He turns the bottle over and over in his hands. The glass is cold, the bubbles inside sift as he turns, agitating them. If anyone else had made it out of that arena, maybe it would already have been drunk in celebration. Avriel wouldn't have been more than a second thought for the rest of them. Just the quiet boy from Nine, not worth more than any of them, less depending on whom you ask. Definitely not victor material.

Maybe, to anyone else, the rest of them wouldn't have mattered, they would be over it by now, moved on with their lives two years on. Panem doesn't care anymore, the 88th might as well have been a century ago. Avriel's been stuck in place for so long and he doesn't know how to disentangle himself from it. Part of him wishes he could shut this part of him off. It'd be easier not to feel anymore.

Better if he could just be the big brother that Billie and Duke need instead of the one they have.

Maybe things would have been better for them too if he'd never made it home.

His hands ache from holding, his grasp slips and he nearly drops the bottle over the edge of the roof.

"Go on," they tell him.

His fingers find the edge of the gold seal, he peels it back, untwists the metal cage around the cork and releases it without ceremony. Champagne spills over the edge and rains down to the far away street.

"Two," he mutters.