it is good & it hurts /calamity's end

You didn’t want to be like the boys in the picture frames in the justice building of district twelve. A moment was given, though brief, before the train ride to the capital and you gazed at those grim expressions streaked with coal dust as if they’d been pulled straight from the mines before being carted off.

And you knew, you didn’t want to be like them.

(like what?)

Dead, perhaps.

In the end, beneath the war paint and the pretty words and all the grandeur that comes with your position of cult heir, you’re just a child.

(You were only ever just a child, Calamity.)

Jane.

Your mother, your real mother, she wanted to name you Jane. Oh she knew even from the moment that she first felt you growing within her, she knew that you weren’t hers, that you could never be hers. Still, in the dark and the night and the heat of those long summer nights when she was so big with you that she could hardly sleep, she whispered you songs and stories.

”My Jane,” she said, ”My little Calamity.”

Because after all, you’d uprooted her life.

You devoured her from inside her, stripped her of all being until she was no longer a woman but just the vehicle for your foretold arrival. Imagine being reduced to an automation and still being unable to stop loving the very thing that was killing you.

People pay money for that, people pay money for just the idea of being loved.

To be honest, no one’s ever really loved you like your mother did. Deep down, you know that. You never knew her but your soul did and she ruined you, in a way. She stripped your divinity and sewed it back onto you, adorning your skin with the idea of it, but the minute she started loving you was the minute that she killed you.

Because a mere blade should not be sharp enough to kill a godling and yet here you lie in a pool of your own blood that’s only growing larger and there the blade stalls above you, ichor running in a stream into the katana’s shinogi.

As if it is devouring you in turn.

And you lie there and you wonder if this is how your mother felt the day that you were born and if she still loved you in the end or if this pain, intense, near blinding, drew hatred into her heart the same way it beckons it into yours.

For a moment, one too long, you can’t hear anything. You can’t feel, or taste, as if all sense and being has been stripped from you. There is pain, blasting through you and hot to the touch but there’s nowhere to run from it. It merely consumes you, devouring you in the same way that you devoured your mother but you don’t remember this.

But the axe forgets, doesn’t it?

It’s always the tree that remembers.

”H-help,” you stagger, a hand raising up to clutch at your throat as your legs give out beneath you. "Joh-?”

You fall to your knees in the shallow stream, skin hitting cold water, stone hitting knee, stinging, it barely registers.

Blood slips out past your hand, inevitable in its departure now that it has been released. You were only a vessel for the infinite brewing within you after all, it was hardly ever you that was divine, you only possesed it for a fleeting time.

The front of your Hakama is drenched in no time and you kneel there, shivering from the cold and the loss as you slip away down the shallow stream to feed the koi fish.

And there’s a pause, a stunned silence around you as you die in front of everyone.

”Karl,” you whisper, somehow, a hand raising and then falling again towards him, ”My heart.”

But the cut in your neck, it is fatal.

And you knew that, from the moment the ha slit your skin open, you knew that you were dead. And it’s peaceful somehow to know that. It’s like rain finally falling at the end of a very long day of heavy heat.

All your life, you’ve been burdened with the knowledge that one day you’d bring about the apocalypse. It’s a relief that your work is over, that you don’t have to worry anymore.

So much so that a tear slips down your cheek as you gaze at the three you tied your fate to.

”You have to do it,” you tell them, "Take it."

You offer them the knife, hilt first and you remember it without ever having been there, the moment your mother offered it to you.

The tree has to remember.

The axe gets to forget.