You Are September {South}

River has always hated being pitied.

She tells herself that that's why she feels like she's burning up from the inside when the Keeper guarding the door looks at her, takes in the drying tear streaks on her face and Brooke in her arms, and says a silent I'm sorry with his eyes that she doesn't want, feels it crawling along over the surface of her skin like something vile and dark that she can't quite place. She meets his sympathetic gaze with a stare that carries the full force of her hate, consuming and white-hot and rapidly swallowing all of the agony and fear that thrum alongside it in the broken remnants of her heart. The Capitol has taken everything from her, and she will never forgive them, will curse them with her dying breath. They have made her a widow, made it so that her daughter will never remember her father, and there is nothing that will ever redeem them as anything but mindless murderers in her eyes.

The Keeper must realize this; he averts his eyes and opens the door, ushering Theron out into the richly decorated halls of the justice building. Their gazes meet for a second, hers fierce and unyielding and his weighed down with the heaviest sadness she's ever seen, but River knows she's on the clock and saves her words to him for another time, taking a deep breath and stepping through the open door.

She doesn't know why the tears won't come, doesn't know how the strength has returned to her limbs when she sets Brooke carefully on the couch and steps into his waiting arms. She wants to cry, shake, scream about the unfairness of it all, but instead she kisses Fledger the same way she did back in the square before her world fell apart, hard and pressing and almost desperate, trying with all her might to take this moment and hold on to it for the days ahead. Because maybe if she can remember how he smells like the sea and cologne, how he tastes like sunshine and fresh air, maybe she won't feel quite so lost. "Come home to us. Please. Please just come home."