all my oxygen { darius | train }

She was summer, once upon a time. Fiery nights and splintering days and not a single drop of liquid in sight. Kicking up dusty roads and laughing, not screaming, as it filled her lungs and consumed her insides. She was summer - warm, welcoming, fierce and endless. Delight and carefree, it seemed as if her life would never end.

And then, suddenly, it did.

Now she feels the fall as it creeps through her body, aging her years in a day. (She thought she was dying in that arena. She swore she did at one point. Her heart stopped and she laid down in the snow and felt the world stop - but she got back up again and lived.) She watches the world go by and tries to smile, just for a little while. It's not a lot but she's hanging on to summer by the skin of her teeth. A lot of people left her behind but she's still got people to love in her kingdom: Paige, her mother, Mace. So she hangs on, as she did in that arena, for them. And only them.

She feels winter approaching - bitter, cruel and merciless. It bites at her tongue and she spits it out at everyone and everything.

There's something about sending another two children off to die and all that people seem to be worried about is her hair that makes her particularly heinous. Like a switch she'd jumped from pleasantly polite at breakfast to a bratty child but what President Snow doesn't know won't hurt her. Or her family, or what's left of her friends. ("Fuck off Olive!" she seethes at her escort, a floury of angry arms as she slumps down to the leather couch of her compartment. They flinch and she scowls - furious as ever at anyone whom she disapproves of.) Autumn falls, in-between the summer and the winter, kind to those she cares for and terrible to the rest. She's dressed in black from head to toe ("I'm not wearing anythin' frilly or colourful or girly" she'd demanded, settling on the plainest outfit they could throw her in) and the minute they left her be she'd attacked her eye makeup, smudging it at the corners just for good measure.

I hate this, she thinks to herself as she stares out the window, wanting to scream into the abandoned fields that flit by. I hate this, I hate this, I hate thi-

There's a knock at the door and she flips.

"Olive I said go awa-"

And yet it's not Olive, no. Olive wouldn't knock - they don't ever knock. None of them. Too caught up in their material world to worry about her privacy (a concept so foreign to them it might as well be from another universe) - no, they'd just barge right in. In a blur of orange hair and red cheeks she turns and sighs - half in relief, half in devastation - at District 10's latest sacrifice.

"Hello," she nods politely, forcing a small smile. "You must be Darius."

I'm terribly, terribly sorry.