patchwork empathy {VT squad/Katelyn}

never took your side
never cursed your name
i keep my lips shut tight
until you go

Oh wicked eye of the warrior, judgemental and just, but just that judgement too far and boom smack down in the dirt, he's no one again. One step too far, one misplaced word in a pixel game of minesweeper. Sad face, red square. Start again, because that's all we can do. It's so much easier to start over when everything around you is destroyed. Broken chairs and glass, crunching like snow under my boots. Wasn't me. That wasn't my reaction. I'm an impulsive girl. I aggressively made love to another girl that night. Perhaps love is the wrong word, it felt more like making hate. Although hate it not made, it is forged. Forged on television screens and frozen arenas.

Now I stand with my head tilted, wishing someone would snap my neck. That would be nice and quick. Of course, life is the opposite of nice, and technically speaking it's the longest thing any of us will ever do. Maybe if I find Drace, and stand on his foot, he will kill me. He's hurt people for less. I don't want to make a scene, though. Not on Katelyn Persimmon's Big Day. Oh how I despise everything before me. The white hot sun, the vacuum of life in the District Square, the complete void where Margaret used to be. Katelyn is that void. She's like dark matter condensed inside a human body. The anti-Margaret, greedy eyed and repulsive. My stomach barrel rolls at the sight of her.

Margaret was, and always will be, my right hand man. Woman. Whatever. I feel like I'm missing an limb now that she's dead. But dead is dead, and life goes on, painfully. I screamed my throat raw, refusing to believe that one of my best friends had fallen at the finale hurdle, after so much pain and sacrifice. One minute she was an aeviternity, the next she simply did not exist. Dead. Undone. A beautiful creation and someone went and clicked the little X in the top right corner. Poof. I want to undo the moment, but it is stuck there in time, a singularity that can not be altered. Margaret has died, right when she was so close to coming home. I dry heaved, vomiting air, and then I broke a finger by driving my fist into a plaster wall. Frustration, pain, anger. Round and round it went, recycled.

Broken ideology. Loud music blaring through my ears, so loud that I can't hear myself screaming at the top of my lungs. Your fist hits my face, and my face hits the floor. Sand in my teeth, watery eyes. A hammer in one hand, lighting teasing with gravity. You want the money, but I don't have it. I spent it all on things I didn't need. It's a fever, you can only sweat it out of your system. Sweaty, sweaty money. Don't swim with loan sharks, you're gonna get bit in two. Too late for that, I'm afraid. Far too late. It's sink or swim time, and there I was, bait floating on the bare surface of all my bad decisions.

Of course. Have faith in your brothers, and they will reward that. Reward is its own reward. Maybe I should have sat quietly and let it all pass me by, but I needed to numb it, I needed to feel good, and is that such a crime? I recall a time where every day was a good day, scheming and plotting with my frienemies. Now they're all soot, clouding me, polluting me. I don't mind, I just need a little something. Bottled zeitgeist, or injections of halcyon, something to make my eyes cloud over in languor. I wanted to be indifferent, so it wouldn't hurt. But it hurts. It's like being dropped from the edge of space, falling and falling, and knowing that you're going to hit the ground and die, but you try not to think about it, and you can see the ground getting closer and closer, and you close your eyes for some reason. And it hits you, and your chest compresses, and your entire insides fold over. That's what it felt like.

I'm a fool. Figure out why, go ahead. Put one and one together, make three, because you can't explain me. Maybe I am allowed to feel these things, and no one can tell me that it's wrong to try and change the way you feel, when it all becomes too much. Isn't that what makes each and every one of us human - Our adaptability? If not, then we are just here to exist, and breathe, and then die. We would just be metal that is rusting. There's no point to that. There's no point in standing still when there's so much else you can distract your mind with.

I love Margaret DuBois, but she is dead. She was my sister. Ingénue as she was, she was my everything. I suppose this band of thieves complete me, and without one, I fall apart. An engine dependent on each gear. I think Margaret was different though. She wasn't like the rest of us, she came from something very militaristic and harsh, some unorthodox upbringing. I mean, none of us are exactly normal. Draco has battle scars, Ratts and Garrett have a long history of crime, and then there's me, punk ass kid who ran away from home at a young age, hoping to carve myself into someone new. Truth is, I'm exactly the same. I don't know, but when I think about it, Margaret was the cleanest of all of us. She was an assassin, raised to kill, but I don't think she ever wanted it.

What did she want? Friendship, that golden unicorn snorting sherbet. She wanted comradery, she wanted to belong, and for a while, she did. Where is the laughter now? Where is the fun times, the late nights, the spilled alcohol? Huh? Where is it, if not stabbed in the heart and dumped in a cheap wooden coffin? We are empty sacks of meat now, grey and cold. Us four, no longer united. I can't look Ratts in the eye, I can't stomach Garrett's concerned glances, I can't deal with Draco's short temper. I had to get out, I had to get money, spend money, need money. Cycle, recycle, aluminium promises crumpled up, an empty can crushed and thrown to the side of the road. Throw the mustard gas, because when I inhale it, it won't be any worse than the grief that has filled my lungs.

I was in a dark place for a few days, with people looking to put a gun to my head. Debts can't just be wiped out, or so I thought. Life is full of surprises, and the last thing I expected Draco to do was take his frustration out on the loan sharks. I'm still not sure if he was doing me a magnificent favour, or dealing with loss in his own frightening way. I owe him so much, because it was him who reached down and pulled me out of that abyss. It was him that brought me back into the open.

Attention boys and girls, because here comes the victor, the dark matter girl. Striking features, dark eyes. I hope she's not getting much sleep. She is a fanfare fugitive, hiding behind false speeches and Capitol escorts, going along with it, because she's too scared to stand still and face the consequences of her actions - actions she didn't have a choice in. What a beautiful contradiction. I don't know if I hate her, so much as the things she had to do. I understand the way the Games work well enough to know that it's kill or be killed, and hating Katelyn Persimmon because she tried to stay alive is stupid. And yet here I am, loathing her existence because she killed my best friend, and I can't help it. It just feels natural to hate her.

I wade through the crowd, dressed head to toe in white. They say you should wear black when you are grieving, but black is such an infinite color, and I hate it. White is solidarity and simplicity. A white skirt barely covers my scruffy knees and poorly shaven legs, whilst my crisp blouse is buttoned all the way to my neck, so tight that I can barely breathe. Good. I'm never gonna be comfortable again, so what does it matter? What does anything matter? The only matter that matters is the dark matter that personifies Katelyn, head to toe she is a negative entity. Judge her while you can, because the Capitol will soon paint her into someone she's not.

My mind trails back to that night. The music, the alcohol. Underground speakeasies are few and far between in Panem, but they exist, if you know the right people. I always know the right people - Quentin Peters is connected, always. My head buzzed and my words were angry, speaking slanderous treason to anyone with the patience to listen to my story of the magnificent Margaret DuBois. I hooked up with a girl, a girl who's name I don't even remember. In the early hours of the morning, I forgot about Margaret, I erased her. I woke up on the other side of District Seven, in a bed that was unfamiliar. Inevitably, it all burned back into my mind, and I threw up my everything, for real that time.

I taste it now, pushing past the people who don't matter, trying to get to my friends. I see Garrett's head towering above anyone else, and make my way towards him. Of course, Ratts is beside him, tiny compared to him, like his pet (it's really the other way around). I budge past someone and stand wordlessly beside the girl.

i'm in misery where you can seem
as old as your omens
and the mother we share will never keep
your proud head from falling

word count: 1643, graphics: rook
theme: the mother we share by chvrches