D3SPAIR | klaus & atticus

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Klaus Goravich

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The merry-go-round kept on turning. It refused to stop. Nobody was getting off. Thirty-four years of the spinning made Klaus question why he had fought so hard to climb aboard. 

On the train to the Capitol each year, it was quiet. Years ago, it had been different; Daisy and Penelope had come along, until they were old enough to be left with Klaus' sisters. The very last year they had travelled to the Capitol with him - Daisy had been eleven, Penelope had been nine - was the year that Atticus had climbed aboard. Giving up is a gradual process. A spark of hope can dwindle and falter for a long time before it finally goes out. Klaus had warned the children to stay away, as he always did. 

They don't come home, he'd promised, a gift of truth he had learned the hard way. 

But Daddy, Penelope had said, her eyes wide and earnest, you came home, didn't you? 

Klaus had stroked a loose curl behind her ear and smiled sadly at his daughter. "I was very, very lucky. I got to come home so I could be with you."

The child had accepted this. After all, she had seen the pantomime play out many times before herself: the tributes go to the Capitol, and the tributes do not ever go back. But that year, Atticus did, and Klaus watched as this boy of eighteen climbed back aboard the train, and went back to District Three. 

Sometimes, they are lucky. Sometimes, they go home. 

That had been the last year he brought the children. That had been the last year that his ember of possibility had been fully extinguished, trodden down and put out by a heavy boot. Regardless of what happened in the arena, he had realised, the children who boarded the train would never, ever go home. Someone else would go home in their place. A strange, terrible monster, who has a hollow inside of them they'll forever try to fill. A mirage, a shadow, a ghost of who they had been. It was irrelevant what happened in the arena; the train ride home was filled with ghosts. They took up all the seats. Klaus thought that this might be why Atticus spent so much time hiding in the storage cupboard. He didn't blame the kid. (The kid! The kid was forty-one! The merry-go-round spins faster and faster every year until you lose count of its rotations and just allow it to take you where it pleases.) 

There had been nothing he could say to Atticus, not really. Of course, he had done all of the things that had seemed right and polite, but he had always understood Atticus' reluctance to exchange more than obliging small talk with him. What was there to say? They understood each other inherently, carried the weight of each year's failures together, spread out across their combined shoulders. Each of their death tolls climbed sky-high as they failed, again and again, to bring anybody home. Together they collected jars of apologies to hand out to families - to parents and sisters and brothers who looked upon them as strangers who had been given, inexplicably, exactly what had been taken away from their own children. There was nothing to say. Just companionable silence, a shared misery, a mutual sorrow that went deeper than words.

It wasn't that they ignored the tributes, either. They did what they could when there was nothing to be done. It was like swimming against an unrelenting tide: may the odds be ever in your favour may the odds be ever in your favour may the--- Klaus just had nothing to give. There was no secret to victory. It was an unfortunate accident, a twist of fate that grabs hold of you with iron grip. It happens, for better or for worse, and it doesn't seem to matter, really, what you do. The coin will flip one way or another. The only real secret is that the answer is arbitrary, and Klaus continues to wrestle with the question of whether or not any of it really matters either way. 

Atticus didn't get lucky. Neither of them got lucky. You lie to your children, sometimes, because its the only thing you can do. Klaus had told Atticus, a couple of years ago, on a train ride just like this one: Your job is to protect them. It's more important than being honest. It was perhaps the closest thing the two men had come to confession. He wondered what Atticus would tell his children this time. He wondered if they would ask why Daddy couldn't have saved the tributes this year, kept them safe. Klaus was glad his children were all grown up now, hardened by the world and old enough not to ask stupid questions. He was getting tired of lying. 

The train began to move slowly, and then gained pace. Klaus fixed his gaze on the horizon to give the impression that they weren't moving so fast, and then adjusted it to the foreground. It blurred. He looked up. Atticus was standing in the aisle, apparently emerged from the space between compartments. "The back is a mess, as always," he said, reasonably cheerfully, referring to the storage compartment. Klaus didn't go in there very often. He was worried he might find somebody crying inside. 

Atticus set himself down in a seat (near Klaus, but not so close as to impose) and began flicking through one of the magazines the Capitol provided for them. He caught a flash of the cover; District Three. Somewhere in there there was a double-page spread about Klaus' newest film, the one he had spent the previous year making. It had been a documentary about The Rose Plague. In particular, the critics had loved the scene in which a small boy had succumbed to the disease. He had died holding hands with his sister. They'd had to pry apart their fingers, because he had died in the night, and when the girl awoke he had stiffened so much she couldn't get free. She had died, too, four days later. Klaus had to stop himself from reading the reviews. He averted his eyes from the magazine in Atticus' hands. 

"I think they've given up on keeping balloons and party streamers in the storage room, too. The 'Victor' ones. Would've been funny if this year was the year." 

Klaus remembered his surprise when, after Atticus' victory, they had brought out the streamers. There had been such a fuss. Daisy had filled her pockets with party poppers and set them off unexpectedly, the sudden noises making Klaus irritable and jumpy all the way home. He didn't recall any streamers after his own win. Maybe they'd done the same back then, cleared the storage room after years and years of empty trains. Nobody had expected him to break the cycle. Or, maybe he just forgot all about it, blocked it out. 

Klaus looked out the window again, as though suddenly interested by the scenery. "Would've been funny." He blew air through his nose, a half-laugh, half-sigh. "You know I've done this journey thirty-four times now? Thirty-five if you count the first time." Outside, the Capitol was already rushing away from them, the sparkling skyscrapers of the inner city dwindling, threatening to retreat completely into the lull of the districts. "Why do you think you're the only one who's ever come home, in all that time?"

Around and around and around and around. May the odds be--- Klaus gripped the table to try and stop the spinning -- ever in your favour. Lucky. Lucky. Lucky. The train was silent. The ghosts in their booths listened in to see what Atticus had to say. 

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Klaus Goravich

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He had counted at the beginning (how could a person help it?) but it had all faded away over time, until the numbers and names were all mixed up. Now Klaus doubted he could even name all of the failed District Three tributes who had died under his mentorship, not without prompting of some kind.

It had never been a job he had put much time into. It had seemed, immediately, like a losing game. His own victory made so little sense to him he had felt he had nothing to pass on. How do you win the games? You get lucky. You let other people sacrifice themselves in the name of your health, one after the other, until twenty-three martyrs have given their life for yours. Klaus knew he didn't win because of any incredible swordsmanship, or strategy. He won because nobody lay a hand on him. He won because right at the end, it had been an undamaged Klaus against a near-death Fitz Ripley. The winning blow had been a strike that barely grazed Fitz's thigh; that was how weak he had been when Klaus was declared the final survivor, the captain of the ship. How could he translate that into advice for his terrified tributes? Hope everybody overlooks you until there is nobody else left to look at? 

His contributions were instead marked by apologies. Words spoken, money given. Although it could be said that Klaus was a terrible mentor, it could not be said that he wasn't generous. Fantastic. At least when your child dies in the arena, you'll be guiltily reimbursed by the only man who had ever made it home. His filmmaking began as an apology of sorts, too. Sorry I can't say this, maybe I can show you. He turned the camera on broken things, things that hurt, things that Panem needed to see. This, he had been certain, was his legacy. And yet on the empty train home, it did not feel like nearly enough. It's much harder to do right the first time than it is to say sorry. 

Atticus didn't respond to Klaus' question for so long that Klaus thought he hadn't heard. It was easy to lose your grip here, to spin away into the blur of the scenery, to be in every District, everywhere but there. When his fellow Victor finally responded, Klaus jumped a little, having almost forgotten that he had asked.

"Logically speaking... well, probability and chance and the like... We should have had another person sitting with us by now." Klaus glanced about himself, skimming his eyes over rows upon rows of empty seats. "But that's not the case." That much was certainly true. "Perhaps the Games don't lend well to Three's kids these days. They're all so smart and have good ideas, but the training they get tells them the only way to kill is with a sword or a spear."

"District Three's edge comes from creativity. Maybe we should take an unconventional approach to mentoring to suit that better." The corners of Klaus' mouth twitched in response to this. Hadn't they already been taking an unconventional approach to mentoring? "Of course, that implies that every kid in Three has the time or resources to start with. I had them, and lots of kids certainly do, but there are just as many who don't. And they all have the same odds of being reaped."

Klaus considered this. A tale as old as time. Districts with money -- One, Two, Four -- bringing home success after success, while those with less struggled along, sending weaklings into the Game to battle with Panem's strongest. Klaus had money. Atticus had money. And Klaus knew they both gave it away liberally. It wasn't enough. It would never, ever be enough. There was something else missing. 

"That's one assessment, anyway," Atticus said, his tone shifting from serious to something Klaus couldn't quite name. "the other is that we might just be horrible teachers." At this, Klaus laughed out loud. It was funny because it was true. (But it was not funny, because none of this was funny at all.)

"You're right, you know. About all of it." Klaus couldn't believe how quickly Atticus had grown up in front of his eyes; a child, and now, his equal. The two of them, really, were just the same. Two lucky ones amongst a hundred unlucky soldiers, never really knowing why the pieces fell into place the way they did. Just thankful. Just resentful. Just lost, still, despite everything.

"Against all odds, we suffer still. They're born into poverty, they spend their lives learning, but not learning anything that matters in there. I just can't put my finger on exactly what it is that matters in there." 

Klaus sighed. "I'd never picked up a sword in my life before I reached the Capitol - had you?" 

He realised that he knew very little about Atticus' childhood. Had it been warm and loving, a house full of children, with food on the table every night, just like his own? Had he had a mother who read him bedtime stories, brothers that teased him, sisters who thought he was the most important boy in the world? Was that the difference? Something intangible, something far more valuable than money. 

"Sometimes, I think they've lost before we even meet them."