Explosions {The Detective}

On the day you wake up
Needing somebody and you've learned
It's okay to be afraid
And I'll find you another time
I'll love you, another time

I watch her fall with a silent curiosity, eyes glued to the large screen in the District Square. I'd been walking, I'm always walking now, it seems. I can never seem to find the right route. It's been hidden from me. I always knew where to go before, but there have been nights where I end up in an alleyway beside a bar that I thought I had forgotten the route to. There's always one, solitary voice plummeting out of the door, and it's never tasted right. It's occurred to me that I've been searching for someone specific, that had always managed to turn up sooner or later in the darkness. He'd seen her once, in the river that ran somewhere through the outskirts of District One, and met somewhere in the city to create a little canal.

"Talking to the water again, dear?"

She hand't been startled to see him, her perceptive skills better than most. I had been pleased about that, pleased that her intellect level was higher than other's. I hadn't thought about why that had pleased me. I never really thought to think about anything, it had always come to me so quickly. I remembered thinking that she looked close to a goddess in those murky waters. Feathers had been in her hair, and her legs were wet, her shirt a little too. It didn't bother her, she didn't shiver from the cold. Her hands were poised above the water, as if she were going to part it with those lithe fingers. I wouldn't have been surprised to see her do it, her relationship with liquid so intense, that I had wondered once if it actually did speak to her.

"Detective," she said, her smile at his name bringing a smile to his own lips. "We were just talking about you, in fact." Smile turning into a smirk, I leaned against the side of a brick building, the stones uneven, they were so old. Cupping my hand against the wind, I light a cigarette, and take a drag, letting the smoke burn my throat before I finally let it go. It hurts, but I like it, the painful rasp that it gives me. It helps me think. She's smiling in a fond way, one finger skimming along the surface, just enough to create ripples, but not enough to create waves. It stirs something down below my throat, and I can't place it.

She's not done yet, I think, I watch her slip slowly, but she's not done. She's always been so strong, and has held on so long already, almost half done. She could win, even with this little slip of the mind. She's always been a little nuts, but aren't we all? I watch her movements, but even as I do, I note in the analytical way that I do anything, her shaking legs, and the tension in her face. She's giving up, I do believe. I don't understand why though. I see the weariness in her body, I do. But I also know that she said she could win, in a tiny little room in a justice building once. She's the type to be as steady as a river, decisions made swiftly and with accuracy. It is a trait I admired about her. I did admire her, the strength she held, the strength in her belief.

The sun is only just beginning to rise, the sun inching up to meet the pale quiet of the square. A few lone figures sit there, ones not rich enough to have a telly, ones who have a loved one in the games. Careers who study the games with their morbid fascination. I am separate, alone, as I always am, as I watch the alliance crack and splinter despite it's definition. I don't wear a coat, I forgot one when I left the flat sometime at three to wander. Vests was asleep, finally. He had tried to slip something into my tea, to make me sleep, he said. He was concerned for my health apparently, and he's a doctor now, or about to be. Something like that. He tells me he understands, that his sister died in the Sixtieth. I don't understand why he tries to comfort something that does not need comforting. It was too easy to slip something back into his tea. Mine left untouched. The gesture was strangely appreciated, but not needed. Too sentimental. Not when I must be alert.

"I'm sorry."

Her face is big on the screen, and her eyes are wrong. Those aren't her eyes. They are not the eyes of the strong, confident young woman that I had seen only weeks ago. They have zoomed in on her, for the drama I presume correctly. I don't have to ask who she is apologizing to, I know it is me. I don't know what she is sorry for, sorry for failing, sorry for making me feel something, sorry for what, I can not say. I don't want to watch this, it occurs to me, and I turn on my heel, shoes making no sound as they hit the stonework floor. I am almost gone, almost slipped into the first alley when I hear her voice break and I stop. It's the first time my body has not listened to my mind. It is the first time my body has not let me react correctly. But her voice cracks, and I slowly turn, and it's as if she is staring right at me.

"Come into the water, Detective." She's beckoning, but I don't move. I know what she does to those that step in, like a siren, she is. I've seen the bodies that collect, seen the crime scenes where the body has gotten stuck on something or other. Once one made it almost to District Two. I am not such a fool to blithely step into the water while Kiera is standing there so prettily. A viper in the water, and yet she calls it a service. She calls it a blessing to kill you in the water, to hold you down until you have to open your mouth and water breaks you down. Maybe it is lovely in a way, but I am not ready for death, not done here. I find myself stepping away from the wall anyway, feet making their way down slow steps until the ends of my pants are wet, and my boots are filled with water.

"Will you dance?" I ask it softly, and she takes my hands in her's, as I pull her close. My cigarette falls out of my mouth, and drifts away in the drowsy current as we sway back and forth, movements made slower by the water. The end of my coat is heavy and damp with water, and it's cold, but neither of us pay any mind. There's a calm before the storm sleeping over our heads as we dance quietly in the water. She moves close and rests her head on my shoulder, and we sway. We stay that way for a while, bodies moving in sync. Her hair smells nice, like the crisp autumn air around us, and like peaches. I love peaches, I remember them from when I was growing up, they'd be in a bowl on the table. I was never allowed to touch them, they were there for decoration. I was there for decoration. Kiera is not here for decoration, she is here for duty, and she reminds me promptly as she slowly pushes me down, until my head is below the water.

I remember another night, watching the screen intently as she involved herself in coitus with a boy from her alliance. Riley had bent to turn it off, but I had stopped him, studying the screen, watching her as she made love to the boy. There was a vague feeling of something within myself shattering. I had watched anyway though, half of me wondering why the capitol had chosen to show this, as if they knew. As if they knew I would watch because they wanted to punish me for leaving. I thought that she was punishing me for allowing her to volunteer, as if she had finally woken up and realized what she had done, but she never had. She lay with him, limbs tangled, and I did not touch my tea. I did touch the instrument sitting in the corner though, and played it, far into the night. Vests might have gone to bed, but he didn't complain for once as I sat playing. In the morning, when he woke up, I was gone. Doing a poxy case for Lestrade, immersing myself in what I knew best, running from what I knew least.

It hadn't hurt this much though.

Her face as she looks at the camera is one unsettled, so unlike her normal, fierce demeanour. It is one that is asking for something, but she has never asked in her life, it is an unusual asking for her, but one she intends to do. It isn't very much of a question at all, not really. One who didn't know her or myself would find themselves confused at this. This simple declaration, but I couldn't. I was frozen, one foot in an alleyway, the other almost touching the sunlight that was inching across the square in the dark. Half in darkness, half in light as I have always been, she says something that I was not expecting, that I hand't calculated. She says something that tells me she has given up, and I cannot seem to find it within myself to bare it.

""It was you. It was always you. I never said it, but I love you. And... and I pretended he was you. It felt a little closer to right that way."

I resist for a while, in the way that the human body does, holding my lungs until they have shrunken too tightly in my grasp. Too soon, my mouth opens and water finds it's way in. My body jerks, as I try to fight her strange strength. She's so slight, but when it comes to her beliefs, she is the strongest person on the planet. I choke on murky water, and I feel flooded, completely immersed, and for a small moment, almost divine, like I've completed myself, or like she has completed me. For a moment of pure lunacy, I understand. She still holds one hand above the water, the other shoving my body down. That hand is cold, incomplete. It is warm from long fingers that keep mine from lashing out and hurting her. She knows what she is doing, has done this before. I can imagine the satisfied smile playing across her lips as she sacrifices me to her water goddesses. I am calm, as I will always be. In that moment, she could kill me. She doesn't.

Agony splits through, cracking me in half as my mind and heart finally connect the dots with a lazy vapidness that tells me they have been withholding information for a long time. I watch silently, every atom exploding as she dies, her sorry tasting salty on my lips. I stand there for a long while, feet going numb, even as the screen flicks to someone else for a while, her death going relatively unnoticed because the game maker was stupid and didn't understand. Before I realize it, my feet are taking me away, into the bowels of the district, along an alleyway, over a rooftop, until I am lost completely, until I am so lost I cannot find where I am. I walk until my feet must surely be bleeding, and then I walk some more, and I at the fence, but I do not step past, I walk some more. After a moment, I see someone trailing me in what they must assume is secrecy, but is obvious tailing. It is Vests, there is no harm. He must have woken up to the telly on, seen a death and come to find me. I'm surprised he did, he deserves a cookie. I do not care. I do not care, I do not.

"No?"

I say it experimentally, almost as if I am questioning my very surroundings, asking the long grass growing from the ground a question. It changes nothing, no one answers, and I stop in my tracks. The word had no change on anything. "No." I say it again, this time more firmly, and I grow more confident, and start walking again. SMiling now, I say it again, "NO!" This time it comes out as a shout, how glorious it feels. If I refute it, it does not exist, a theory someone made once, which is the dumbest thing on the planet. Refuting something, an object, or an event does not make it disappear, but I yell into the wind all the same. I begin to run, coat flying out behind me as I run around and around, feet hitting the ground with solid thumps, chest heaving as I scream it into the wind. "NO, NO, NOPE!" I run and run, nothing stopping me, nothing stopping my acceleration until I'm almost tripping over myself. I want to run and run until I'm dead, until I can't stand any more.

I cough up water as she pulls me up, and I feel emptiness returning as it slips out of my nose, my ears, my eyes, my mouth. It slithers up my spine, the emptiness in such a way to force air into my lungs that are suddenly so expanded they don't know what to do with them selves. My heart, my sternum is beating wildly, and I feel such a rush of adrenaline that it's all I can do to stay standing. She is supporting me, my body weak from the near death experience. We begin to sway again, dancing again, in the quiet of the middle of twilight. I lean against her for a while, and then softly, voice hoarse from the ravage of water, I ask her why she did not kill me. She does not answer right away, but when she does, she says it right against my ear, and the softness of her hair sticks to my cheek. "It wasn't your turn to drown yet, darling."

The ground comes hurtling up to meet me as my speed proves to be my downfall and I slip, every limb crashing about. I land flat on my back, eyes staring up at a sky that still isn't fully lit. I'm not shouting anymore, I'm simply lying there, the wind knocked out of me, everything knocked out me. I am skin and bone. And all I can think about is her, and her face, and her voice. All I can think about is the simple fact that I believe that I loved her back. She was dear to me, and I never told her because I was afraid to. The dots have been connected, and the image is complete, something that I was too proud, too afraid to admit to her before. Something I should have said to her the very first moment I met her, and every moment after her. It was something I could have easily told her in the Justice Building before she went away. How could I, I was too afraid. Caring is weakness. I know that now, and I can't believe that I forgot that simple words that were stamped into me by force from a very young age. I won't forget them again.

I wasn't aware of this. The intensity of the pain that it would bring. I didn't understnad before at all, that it could hurt so badly. I have been sad before, before I grew older and began to understand. I never understood, not ever. If I had known that it would twist inside me, worse than the poison that they would give during training to build up resistance. I never knew that it could kill to need someone so badly, to need the lionheart that you began to rely on to be there. I never understood what it felt like to feel cheated by Death like this, to understand. It is not understood, I can't place it, it doesn't fit. I want it to go, please. I don't ask for things? I need it to go. I cannot bare it. I am not strong enough. It needs to be expelled like a toxin, this feeling of my heart breaking into five thousand little pieces. They fill up the sky and shine so bright with a love that I didn't understand I carried until this day. I want to reach through a screen and tell her about it, about this love that I have for her. I cannot, she is dead, and it would be impossible. I should stop.

So I begin to.

I lay there for a while, and I guess Vests decided to give me time, because he doesn't come to check on me for a long while. I think I've bruised myself, and I'd rather like him to come and give me a hand up. It does give me time to slowly build a damaged wall higher than it has ever been before. I am grateful for the time. I don't care though. Caring is weakness. Finally, his silly head does appear above me, and he's looking at me like I'm fragile. I am not fragile, I never was fragile, never will be fragile. "How are you?" He asks it simply, and for a moment, I remember that he lost his sister, and I could tell him that I feel like I have been split in half and crudely sewn back together. Caring is weakness. He reaches a hand down and pulls me to my feet. Carefully, I dust myself off, and start walking, expression in it's usually neutral state, before she was there. Before she gave me such a fragile gift.

He contemplates me for a while as we walk, unsure if I've gone mad or not, I suppose. "Detective?" He finally asks. It's a question all in his voice. Why does it always have to be questions, even if I do have answers.

"I do believe that I have drowned."

I do blame him for not understanding exactly what I mean, but that's my life trial I suppose, to be surrounded by unperceptive idiots. "Come along Vests."

So we go.

And as the floods move in
And your body starts to sink
I was the last thing on your mind
I know you better than you think
I'll love you, another time