We'Re aLL FAlliNg DoWn {OPEN d7 tribs}

One breath before the civilians looked at him with shock flooding their eyes. Two pairs of white tipped knuckles that wrapped around the lies of his arms, crushing every uttered truth and spoken lie with their grip. 

Three skitter steps backwards and that Justice Building door slams shut, slicing his last breath in two in it's wake. 

His grandmother sat in a half broken wheelchair, with rust gripping it's metal handlebars. Her bones were that of toothpicks, barely strong enough to hold the scarce memories she had left that sat on her shoulders. She wouldn't be making the journey across the district to see him. He doubted she even knew he was gone. He doubted she'd even remember his name. 

They drag him, those men in white, and as his eyes meet the blacks of their helmet he sees the stretched reflection of his own face in it, wrapping around their helmets, his lies coming full circle back to haunt him. And in his eyes, in those distorted, misshaped eyes there's a bubbling poison, with one two three toxins boiling out of it. 

It burns his irises with his own manmade venom, forces him to rip his stare away and down to the ragged carpet below. He counts steps like the words he spins,

one two three, one two three 

click creak, push slam 

and he's alone in a room filled with the faces of the dead. Oh, how he wonders what he'll look like up their, if they'll paint his lips, his face his mind how it really is.

There was only one visitor that broke the silence that threatened to consume him, a boy who he'd met in the snarling woods of District Seven.

And he spun lies like the deadly spiders that hang from trees, and as the boy left his hands drifted across the cracking coffee table in front of him, with dust clinging to his fingertips as he lifted them back up. 

When the peacekeepers came back, he told them he didn't need them to strangle his arms. They gripped them tighter.

There's too many windows to throw his reflection back at him on the train, so he occupies himself by walking up and down the train car they stuck him in, watching the woods of District Seven fade into the distance.

Until his reflection came into focus, and he turned away from the glass.

The train was metallic beauty, and with every step he took through it, every door he slid, it seemed to grow in beauty.

He smelt of wood chips and sweat, lies and sin. 

One door slid open and as he turns to close it he sees not only himself, but a boy in the same car. Vague memories of death sentence and the word volunteer, and when his eyes meet the boy's he can only manage to force a sad smile. 

One two three steps and he's sitting across from the boy, awkward silence grasping their throats.

He sniffs twice before nodding, smiling a little. 

"Sorry. The car back there smelt like shit."

Eyes drop before climbing back up.

"I'm Sue, Sue Tate. Ash-Asher, right?" 

District Seven sat in silence, the sound of the train against the railroad tracks, metal on metal. The sound of the wind as it whistled by, grabbing at whatever shreds were left of their souls that it could take, before it carried on to the next car.

One cough and two scratches at his beard, sin covered fingernails scratching lies into the hollowed out pits of his cheeks. The pronounce their names one by one, like it's the first day of school all over again.

When he had been a child, still scrambling at the edges of youth and the harsh reality of the world he was put in, he had, for some reason, found inside himself a desperate urge to be called Joey. And he didn't really know why, perhaps because the name Sue had been the cause of more than a few stifled and not so stifled laughs from across the room. 

Scribbled out name tags and the wrong answer to the most basic question.

"what's your name?"
"joey." 

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Teachers frowned and his classmates gave looks of confusion. He spun that web for exactly two weeks and five days, because on the sixth day, before the web became too thick for a human to tear down, his grandmother swatted it away, and while her voice was still there and her memories too she had explained that lying to others was not okay. And he'd nodded, and he'd agreed because, at the time, he'd believed it was over with.

And somewhere he's conscious of it all, a database set to record every single uttered sin that he'd ever spoken. Problem was, he had no idea where it was.

"what's your name?"
"liar." 

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The boy across from him connects head to hand in an act of grief, hands running through jet black hair before he raises his head back up again. The silence doesn't help the action, either, if anything it serves to magnify it, front row seats to a one man show of despair and panic. 

But is it really a one man show? 

Sue Tate was not a mind reader, nor was he a stoic. So why, as he sat here, were his emotions not spilling out onto the floor of this train car, dragging the contents of his stomach with them, turning every glass window black with the pit of his mind. It was eery, to be this calm when he had just volunteered to destroy himself for someone he hadn't even known. 

"It will be alright." 
No, no it will not.

As alcohol finds it's way into the bloodstream of Asher's body, Sue's eyes go from carpet to glass table, from table to window, and finally to the two female tributes with them. One hand scratches the beard on his chin while the other reaches into his pocket to grab the nail he'd ripped from it's home from the floorboards. 

They don't look afraid, or on the edge of breaking.

But their minds could not be read, and they were not stoics. So why, as they sat here, were they so calm? 

He wonders.

Irises make contact with the glare of a plastic digit, and as they follow the trail up her arm, eyes going from hand to face, elbow to face, shoulder to face, his eyebrow creases in confusion, half frown dancing across his face before disappearing.

One long finger reaches out to point at her arm, before pulling back and tapping against his own. 

"What happened there?"

Part of him tells him he should have let it go. But with Death crawling down their throats, his words weren't particularly of concern.

Then again, they never were, apparently.