70th Reaping [D8]

I'm drifting through the halls with the sunrise
Climbing up the walls for that flashing light

This is the last year that I could be taken into the same fate as Savannah. I have never felt more distant from her and my other sisters. Sometimes it feels like she's still with me but then I try to reach out to her and she's gone. My drawing sits on my desk, my eyes blurring in and out of focus as I just hope to remember how to breathe. Eighteen, my hands clench on the edge on my desk, white knuckled and slowly growing stiff, Savannah was eighteen. I am now her age, or what she was those four years ago when she was stolen away from us.

Something feels different about this year.

My eyes are squeezing shut so tightly that it hurts but I can only see red and black. Nothing comes to me, nothing rises behind my eyes to tell me how to feel. I'm lost and I'm losing. Just one more year. If only that were true. Nothing would be settled or fine or over until Helen was safe too, and she had a few more years of anxiety ahead of her. I was never meant to be the strong one, I have my head in the clouds too much. I'm a dreamer but lately all I've been having is nightmares.

Skeletal creatures reach for me, their bones bleached or rotting. They grin at me from bare skulls, empty eye sockets staring at me until I get swallowed into their blackness. Even there I can't get away. I am scratched and tugged at until I eventually am torn to pieces. I always wake up the moment before they rip my heart from my chest. They couldn't have done it anyway because I don't have a heart anymore, or even if I do it isn't working right. When I put my hand to my chest I don't feel a rhythm. The bird that once flapped against the bars of its cage has now died.

A voice calls to me, telling me we have to go. I haven't even changed yet. I haven't even breathed yet. My diaphragm suddenly drops and my lungs suck in air in a violent burst. That was one problem solved, for the moment. Now I only had to find something to wear. "Go ahead of me, I'll catch up." All the faces seem to stare through the walls at me but I can't go join them yet, I am not composed and I am not presentable.

As soon as my eyes settle on Savannah's clothes I know I have to wear them. They fit me, though not as well as they had fit Savannah, but I feel suddenly closer to her than I had in a long time. The bird in my chest stirs feebly, trying and failing to lift its head. I take comfort from that. I twist my hair into a bun but then I look too much like mom and I just can't bear it. The moment I pull my hair from the bun I look like Sav and I want to burst into tears. Instead, the bird in my chest gives a twitch and clenches tiny feet like it wants to stand. Savannah I miss you and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

It takes me longer than it should to cross my room, and right at the door I have to turn back because I realized that the drawing of Savannah is sitting on the desk still. I lift it and fold it gently. sliding it into a pocket and carefully stroking the paper. This is my heart, I carry it around on paper because otherwise I would lose it. My fingertips trace the lines of rips that I once had made when I was so broken that I thought Savannah should be too. I had to piece her back together again, and I hoped that one day she would piece me together too.

I cross once again to the door, my eyes catching each glint and twirl of the glass shards I've tied to the ceiling. I reach out to touch one of the few whole bottles, the green colour sparking in the light from the window. It reminded me of dreams and it reminded me of hate. My father had thrown it at me but I had caught this one. There had been a bit of beer left in it so I had dumped it out the window. It was a masterpiece in my collection of the shattered and broken. This was the one whole thing left in my life

and it was worthless.

I brush past the rest of my assorted glass pieces, setting them to clinking and clicking against each other like a breeze rustled in my room. I blew out of the room, riding the breeze as I made my way to my family. In the square we are herded into our pens and I try to keep hold of a hand but it's pulled from my grasp. I am isolated in a sea of bodies and faces and lives, trying to fight the tide that is drawing me further and further from shore. Inside of my chest the bird is growing restless and anxious, pushing and tugging in an effort to right itself. I don't feel any more alive than I had this morning but now I realize that maybe I was never as dead as I thought.

I'm staring at the screen and for a moment my scrambled brain has no idea what anything is until I see President Snow and I see his smirk and I want to scrape it off of his face with a knife. He is the reason my sister is dead, not the allies she came to love and protect, not even the boy who killed her. I would die to see her live again, and I would die to see Snow suffer.

We all die in the end. Some just die sooner than others.

Like Savannah.

The bird is standing now, its head tilting and twisting as it inspects its cage. There's a gleam in its eye that was never there before and now, when I put my hand to my chest, I feel a presence. The bird is not dead, I am not dead, and Savannah is not gone.

"Imp Stole"
"Samael Razier"
"Noah Bowers"

The names come, the names hang, the names go. None of them are me, and none of them are my sisters. Relief, a breath, a flutter in my chest. The bird is restless still, it's growing stronger with each tiny breath until it spreads its wings. Then it lets out a cry, not one for a bird of its size but that of one a hundred times larger. This is no canary, this is an eagle. I am not the little bird peeping at the window, I am now on the hunt. I am the shadow, and I am the sky, and I am death. My wings spread just like hers had when she had hugged me and I'm pushing people aside.

Savannah is not dead.

Evaline is dead.

"I volunteer."

My voice is not loud, it is not shaky, it is not questioning. I know why this year felt different, I understand that now. Savannah is here with me, here inside me, and I will give myself to her.

"I am Sevannah Carey, and I volunteer as tribute."

But my words fall on deaf ears because a girl much younger than I was moved forward and proclaimed that she would take the spot. Another girl had tried to call out, too, but this little girl was the only one any eyes looked at. They certainly didn't look at me, even with my arms spread wide and my freshly restarted heart bared to the world.

It seems the skeletons might actually get me now.

My arms fall in the same motion as the eagle's wings and I am left perched on a ledge. I had thought that I might finally be able to make Savannah proud, that I might actually be able to kill the skeletons that drag at me, but now I never could. I would be stuck now, stuck to endure the endless nightmares and loss. I am lost and I am losing.

The bird in my chest has shrunk back into a canary and I am beginning to slip back into the dark tunnels of my grief. Four years has not been long enough for me to forget, but that wasn't all of it. I held a grief for the person I had been in those short moments, I held a grief for my failed attempt to make President Snow pay, I held a grief for my lost chance at freedom.

I am lost and I am losing

but at least my sisters are safe.

I turn, unable to watch a little girl like my own sisters be taken into the clutches of the Capitol. It should have been me, for my own sake and for the sake of all the girls here, yet it wasn't. I was standing here, with my back turned to the stage, as some child sacrificed herself.

She couldn't live. If Savannah hadn't been able to live then how could this girl?

The bird in my chest stayed quiet. We were alive, but somehow there was something not fully living about us.

I walked away, brushing past Peacekeepers who gave rough sighs, and went home.

My glass shards greeted me, clinking and sparking in welcome. The bottle glinted at me accusingly, as though it hadn't expected me to be back. "In all honesty, I hadn't either." My voice is soft now, so I don't wake up my drunken father, and shaking. It was only at this moment that I realized how fully I hadn't been expecting to come back. A glass shard clinked against the bottle, making a sound like "tsk tsk". I reached up and closed my fist around the bottle. "You know what, I've had about enough." My fingers squeezed tighter, like I was strangling it. I couldn't let it be so whole while I was so broken.

Glass exploded everywhere when I struck the bottle against my desk. I had used all my strength and now the pieces flew with that same strength to clatter all over the room. The jagged edges of what was left of the neck gouged into my hand and bright red blood spilled from the wounds to patter against the floor. The sound was so much softer than the explosion that had just occurred and it was almost calming in a way. Silence filled the room, only interrupted by the drip of blood from my hands. Even the glass shards had fallen silent, as though scared by my outburst.

I was scared too.

I could feel cuts in my legs, though they were simply scratches compared to the deep marks in my hands. They bled only slightly, but it was enough to make me feel like I had walked out of some murder scene. I had, in two ways. I had walked out of the reaping, and then I had just murdered the one whole thing left in my life. Bits of the bottle were scattered everywhere, but I couldn't bring myself to move right now. I simply sunk down until I was sitting on the floor, turning until I could lean my back against my desk

and I cried.