losing

A camera flash goes off and Avriel turns his head away, fingers working at the ascot tied like a noose around his throat as he rushes down the front steps of Fenwick Entertainment.

"Avriel! Have you heard the news?" someone calls out to the left, hurrying to keep pace with him. Another camera flashes and Avriel cringes, throwing a hand up in an attempt to hide his face.

He knows it isn't right, the look in his eyes, it's never what they want it to be. His brain is moving at a hundred miles a minute and he's mentally already left, eyes shut in the silence of the car that will take him back to the training centre. Back to safety, to the place where the journalists snapping photos of him can't follow.

"Avriel!" a microphone is shoved into his face and he swerves to get out of the way. "Avriel, Carly Volkov is dead!"

He knows that.

It's why he left the photoshoot in the first place. Five minutes after they asked him how it felt to be in the top four with two prospective victors and he'd answered with, "Great," an intern had entered and whispered something into his interviewer's ear.

She said nothing for a long moment, just watching as the photographer repositioned Avriel against the backdrop a few more times.

Then, "Avriel, Carly has just been killed by Tex," she'd said, tone eerily calm, as if she was only announcing the weather outside. "We'll have to put a new spin on this editorial, let's talk about Storm."

"What?" he'd said.

"Carly is dead, so is this story."

He stood there, too quiet for too long, the studio's lights shining into his eyes. It didn't make sense, when he'd left his dressing room, Carly and Storm were both just getting up for the day. Carly had survived seven days of the games and before that the District Nine riots, everyone knew about that. She'd tried to tell the world about what was going on and been shot in front of the camera for her efforts. Lived through it, all so she could end here, slain by a kid from Twelve.

"Are you lying?" he asked, "To get a response you wanted?"

The interviewer had the decency then to show the smaller bit of sorrow on her face and she didn't even need to speak. Avriel knew she was telling the truth.

Scout was still in his pocket and the doors were right there.

His driver is standing beside the car, the door to the backseat open and Avriel dives in, body curling to protect the kodama. The door slams shut behind him and locks but it doesn't stop cameras from being shoved up agains the window in an attempt to get more photos. Avriel protects his face with his arm until the car pulls away from the curb and the banging against the window stops.

He lowers his arm but he doesn't move to sit up. It's quieter somehow like this, laying across the seat, the window high above his head, the world stays out a little better like that. He needs that because he's bad at this, the part after, when another one of them has died and he's supposed to handle it graciously.

Avriel isn't well trained though. He grew up stowing his grief, pressing it into the cracks in the floorboards, under the couch cushions, anywhere it would fit when it became too big for his body. Or he'd run from it, feet on pavement, body moving beneath him until he couldn't keep going, until Billie caught up with him and made him talk.

Scout crawls out of his pocket and then turns around to pull his phone out behind it. The phone slips out after a good pull and slides down his hipbone to land on the seat cushion with a dull smacking sound. Scout's learned Avriel's routine this by now. It knows that car rides are for calling home.

"I-" Avriel starts and then stops. "She's not there, Scout," he says, blinking quickly up at the car's roof, "Billie left."

And for a long time he told himself it's what he deserves. Billie went to six, Duke asked for boarding school to get away from him. It's all he deserves after what he did.

Knowing that it's his fault, that he made them leave him, it doesn't stop their absence from crushing him.

Scout rattles and then presses the stub of its hand on the call button. The line starts to ring and Avriel shuts his eyes, waiting for the click of the receiver and the sound of silence on the other end. It doesn't come. The line just keeps ringing, over and over again.

He tries again as the car pulls into the training centre's underground parking and the gate closes behind them. He lays there across the seat for too long after the car has stopped, eyes on the display, willing Eden to pick up. Avriel calls agains as he slips out of the car to the little door in the corner that leads to the stairwell.

He enters it, phone pressed against his ear, marching up the stairs past the screens on the walls that jump from Storm's fight to Carly's body, laying there on the riverbank, blood oozing from her wounds, Tex long gone.

Somewhere around the fifth ring on the seventh call, Avriel pulls the phone away from his cheek and clicks the 'leave message' button. He leans against he railing on the sixth floor landing, sweat and hairspray dripping down the back of his neck and puts the phone back to his ear.

"You're there, right?" he asks, hand shaking against his ear, vision blurring as tears start to well up in his eyes. Avriel lets out a long sigh and presses the thumb and pointer finger of his free hand under his eyes. "Don't know why you're not answering, you're safe right?"

He slides down the railing, crouching there between floors, fingers pressed into his eyes now as if that could be enough to stop tears from falling.

"Carly's dead," he says, "And I'm not... I'm not...?" Avriel trails off, hand squeezing the phone too tight. "But you're okay right?" he asks, "Eden."

The phone slips from his hand and it falls to the floor, bounces once on the cement and then tumbles down the stairs where it lands on the landing between the fifth and sixth floors. Avriel gazes down at it, at the web of cracks across the screen, it's dark, dead.

Carly's face suddenly fills the screen on the wall beside him. They replay her morning, for those that were still sleeping when her fight began and missed the moments before. Avriel stays there, watching through it all, even though he watched all of this already in real time.

She throws the glaive away, the one Tune left her before leaving and the camera pans down from above to catch the heartache written plainly across Carly's face. "I love you," she whispers to her ghosts, "Both of you."

He knows that kind of pain too well.

The scene fades out then and cuts to another tribute. Avriel doesn't look away from the screen, arms resting on his knees in front of him, gaze transfixed as he lets his mind be quieted by the white noise of the commentator. He stays there for awhile, after Scout leaves his pocket to go off in search of food, long after the stairwell's motion sensor lighting flicks off and he's left in the dark with only the glaring light of the games playing out in front of him.

The screens flick off after the last tribute goes to sleep. The Stairwell goes pitch black and Avriel squeezes his eyes shut, light from the screen still playing in rough shapes against the back of his eyelids. He pulls himself in tighter, afraid to move, afraid that the dark will notice him.

"Sorry," he whispers, and his voice rises up through the hole in the stairwell and bounces off the cement, echoing up to the highest floor.

"I'm so sorry."