Road Block {briar}

Dim lights. Cold walls. Floors iced over by the shadowy fear hovering in the room like savage hawk impatiently awaiting a mouse to emerge from the protection of its hollow. The interrogation room is not a vast stretch from the winding labyrinth of hallways, with the exception of the lighting, dark as night in contrast to the bared teeth of the fluorescent light glaring throughout the halls.

In the grayscale Detention Center, I feel as if I am locked within the frames of an old black and white film on a television hissing static through its speakers. (But I can leave for color to bathe my skin once more.) No arctic handcuffs leave rings of scarlet around my wrists, no needles of despair dare prick against my eyes.

Orion's brother is trapped within the cage of his own mind, empty of the sight of the blood of his brother. He should be drowning with singed lungs from fleeting air in a sea of the crimson misery, diluted by his own tears. He should not be - he should not be allowed to be - a statue in a park as a hurricane screams and rips its teeth through the heavens.

I am an ice king upon a gray throne in a gray room in a gray prison. My clasped hands are resting on a gray table, my eyes are fixated on the closing gray door. They have assigned me to a frigid wasteland and sucked away the color with their vampiric fangs, opening the portal to long, prowling shadows and new rainstorms of deep grimness to those cast behind these bars.

Three Hammerfell brothers, each tucked away into their own prisons. Mason and Orion crammed into cages thrust into the void of oblivion, the end of the sword driving through their flesh the thrown away key; Odysseus, here, where screams are a symphony and pain is a delicacy.

Padlocks but no keys. This is the bleak reality of the Hammerfells.

(But Odysseus's reality is too bright for my black taste.)

"Why don't you tell me what happened, Odysseus? Why are you here?" I would sound like a sympathetic therapist coaxing a patient if not for the mockery was not sneering beneath my voice, anything but subtle; stark black against white snow.

A raise of the gaze, a bite of the lip, and a whisper of wind slips from the mouth of a tortured boy.

"I assaulted a Peacekeeper," he admits. I had expected fire or ice to clash with my own. I had hoped for it, longed for it, the steel shards of defiance in eyes turned towards me like a sword pressed against paper flesh.

I am met with nothing, none of the glorious flames of teenage rebellion screaming louder than the heavy beat of a drum, none of the crystalline ice cutting the very tongue that releases them. Nothing but disappointment sitting sourly in my stomach like cold mud.

Odysseus Hammerfell has surprised me; I thought I had seen everything through these hollow eyes.

I have seen guns bolt through skulls and decorate the ground with crimson. I have seen the bruised wrists of citizens thrown to the ground in a violent warning that sets into their minds more like omens. I have seen children die in the streets, in the arena - everywhere. Death never leaves us though his chilling winds and dark clouds recede, but do not be fooled, for he takes no vacations or sick days.

The Hammerfell boy has not felt death's scythe tear through his heart yet again, as he deserves to, as he needs to. He did not see the blade skewer the eye of his brother. He did not see Orion's murderer trod along his red carpet of blood straight to the crown.

He must know.

He must know, and he must hurt.

["While you're at it, Gray, give 'im hell," his commander had laughed to him. Despite the light-hearted screen, the true dark, sadistic intentions were too prominent beneath the mist that flowed from the tip of his tongue. What he wanted from Gray was dark, dark red under a white veil.

"He is already in Hell."

"You know what I mean."

"Not to worry. Adding more fuel to the fire is what I do best."

"This one better be scorching; they're here to be punished. We gotta put 'em in their places, Gray, or we'll have an uprising on our hands. Panem today, Panem tomorrow -"

"Repeating the same phrase over and over again doesn't make it anymore meaningful, Commander."

"Whatever." The word is a grumble. "Just do what you're supposed to."

He pressed a tape into my hand.]

The same tape rests in my pocket, burning into my side, but it is not time, no, I need the rebellion, first. I need the defiance to drink in and recede when the skies shatter and rain his misery.

"And, why is that, Odysseus? Anger issues? Perhaps, family problems?"

One slight movement of a pair of fallen shoulders and my fine embroideries of horror and anguish along the strings of my words tumble down a gaping drain like grains of sand. Pain is artwork and Odysseus Hammerfell is knocking over masterpieces like a clumsy child in a museum.

Panem and I will not stand for it.

"You're a bit out of touch, Hammerfell, aren't you?" I say frigidly, unraveling the first folds of the plan, the commander's plan.

["Give 'im hell."]

"There's quite a few family problems, you could say, that have arisen since your departure from District Two. I would tell you the story, but I think a visual representation would give you a better understanding."

My words rush between my teeth, a river bursting from the prison of a dam like wild mustangs from a cramped stable. No road blocks, no crippling reluctance. A wave, a roaring TSUNAMI that WILL NEVER BE SILENCED for

ODYSSEUS HAMMERFELL MUST FEEL PAIN he must -

he must feel what I have felt:

A swell of agony. A cold winter of regret. An endless abyss, the purest, blackest emptiness.

I am gliding to the television in the back of the room, tape in hand and I don't stop, not for any road block, not for the breaking boy behind me. My finger presses the on button, summoning hissing static to the screen.

The tape is a boulder in my rigid hand, but the crushing weight lifts as the television devours the tape -

and so it begins.

The shadows fall away at last, unveiling the image of Kirito Miristioma and Orion Hammerfell.

"Watch," my heavy command hits the ground with a slap and weaves itself through the air like a boa constrictor, a new addition to the mountains of chains. A threat is hiding in the wings of my words, a threat is the lurking shadow behind "watch". "You will watch, and you will do nothing more than watch. Close your eyes, and you may not have any more eyes to close."

Panem and I will not stand for anything less than this.