⌜ i will become eclipsed .:. kaige ⌟

The Victor's Village was silent that night. Three houses with people living inside, and only one light on. Feint, flickering, coming from my bedroom long after I had told my father I was going to sleep. Peppermint breath and eyes not yet weary from lack of sleep, and I thought about what other boys my age were doing.

They were all living life in the fast lane, and each of them passed me with a careless press of the foot. I guessed they were all afraid of slowing down, or that they were only racing to get somewhere else. The difference with me was simple: I had nowhere to go. My closest friends were either dead, related to the dead, or the reasons people were dead.

Or Paige Lowe.

She came and went like a storm, and I was always left wondering if today would be the day her lighting struck me down, or if she would keep me close long enough that we could watch safely from the eye. But she had kept her word so far, and many irreparable bridges suddenly didn't seem quite as impossible to rebuild. She was trying, and that was more than she was willing to do before.

Still, I was not too sure about Paige Lowe since the night we danced. Maybe she didn't act any different, and maybe I didn't, either, but I couldn't swallow down the memory of my eyes and hers, locked together and both waiting for what came next. Another second of dizzying daydreams, and my lips might have been on hers and surely we wouldn't have been able to look at each other the same.

But, sometimes, I wondered if a new perspective would have been the worst idea, or the best.

I chewed on a peppermint leaf and watched as Tamron Rhodes caught Shelby Leviane with a ninja star in the leg, and before I could see the girl from Eight's retaliation, my window slid open and slammed shut with prideful force, and suddenly Paige Lowe was standing at the foot of my bed. I looked down at myself, suddenly grateful that I hadn't changed for bed yet.

I stared at her, waiting for some kind of explanation. What kind of expedition would have led the girl through my bedroom window, I wondered.

"Kieran, let's get out of here. Right now. I want to take you somewhere."

Her voice made it sound urgent, and I opened my mouth to ask if everything was okay. Before I could get anything out, however, she was speaking again: "You can trust me, okay?"

I stood for the first time, in no rush to get the pretty girl out of my room, and grabbed my jacket. As I carefully shrugged it on, I nodded to her.

"Are we going to be doing anything illegal tonight?" It wasn't that I cared -- I didn't. My life thus far had only been a lot of train rides and camera flashes and magazine articles. I was good at being who they expected me to be, but sometimes, I simply did not give a fuck what people would say.

I held up two pairs of gloves, shaking them toward the fire-haired girl.

"Always better if they can't find finger prints."

Darkness befallen, and a star climbed out the window, waved for me to follow. Her red hair was the easiest thing to find in the lost light, catching every silver ray and glinting like the first sparks of a fire, inviting me further away from the safety of my home and into the night.

"You stuck the landing. The audience is absolutely roaring." Her voice was a pleasantry to which most of the world was not afforded; not the one she was using then. Cheerful, warm, excited— completely unlike Paige Lowe.

("I can't promise it'll happen, but — I will try.")

Maybe she had meant it.

Most would have known only her calls for fire and the icy aftertaste, bitter, and neither hot nor cold, but still painful.

I bowed professionally, and after a lifetime of practicing, anything less would have been an insult. It was never easy finding the balance people expected me to find: equidistant from cool to poised, graceful and dangerous. Perhaps it made me a puppet before the games had the chance to truly play me, but I considered myself a professional.

"Sorry. I'm a little on edge. Not a bad edge! I didn't mean it like that. I'm having fun, I promise."

She was rambling, tripped over her own words, doing things that I did know know Paige Lowe's phoenix heart was capable of.

" I'm just — I don't know. I'm not used to this. Banter isn't really a skill of mine. Usually when I go out with guys it's strictly physical." I watched as her eyes widened and her face took on something along the lines of horror. I could not tell in the faded light, but I thought she may have blushed. My heart began to hammer against my chest again, and I felt the feeling from the night we had gone camping creep back into me. I pressed my lips into a smile, my eyes looking at her while she looked at anything other than me.

"I-" I tried, but she was already carrying on and trying to explain something I was rather fond of without an explanation. "Not that this is a date! I'm not saying it is. I just — uh, I'm just super stoked to hang out with you."

My hand found hers, and we were left to the silence as we walked. My heart still beat ferociously against its chamber, but I braved it long enough to convince myself it was normal. Phoenix hearts may have burned out at times, but they never stopped beating.

Midnight to some was stars and vivid dreams; to others, red lipstick and cigarette smoke. To me, midnight had always seemed most like a safe place, with constellations to keep me company on the nights when I couldn't sleep. I wondered what the stars meant to Paige, or if they meant anything at all, or if I was dumb for thinking such peculiar thoughts.

No.

It did not matter, for I knew the girl in my hands, even if there were some versions of her that I was only now discovering. I knew of her bravery and her wisdom, her temper and her stubbornness. I knew Paige as much as Orion must have known the beauty in her twinkling belt of stars.

I let her hand fall, and after a few moments, she began to speak again, taking up the space just a couple steps ahead of me, which was something I had already gotten used to. "There's this place I used to visit a lot. It's nothing special, and it's hardly illegal, but I really wanted to do something nice for you." My eyes widened with wonder, and I nodded for naught, because she definitely  hadn't noticed.

"I'm intrigued," I cleared, quickening pace long enough to catch up with her. "And to what degree of illegal is hardly?" I snickered playfully at her. She was quite a wondrous thing, and there was no denying that. But she was still just a person, and she probably had a heart that was beating just as rapidly as mine, and a brain that worried too much about things that should have been exciting. There were certainly cracks in the golden armor she chose to carry around with her, and some of them, I had decided, were ones that she wanted someone to find.

"I'm sorry for being awkward. I'll try to cut back on all the ranting. Thank you for coming."

I breathed through my nose, playfully nudging her with my elbow. "No... I like it. It's nice."

I wondered what this was, or if it was anything at all. She had not opposed when I held her hand, and then there was the night when we were camping; plus she was acting the way I felt, and I did not know exactly  how I felt, but I thought I liked it.

"Stay still. I want to remember this," she whispered, and I did not move an inch.

"Then let's make this a night we'll never forget."

Skies sometimes cried, and those with paper walls were always most damaged by the storm.

Heartbeat on the tips of my fingers, humming against my throat, and the rain felt nice on my skin-- it did. It was gasoline to an engine living on fumes, a wake up call that this did not have to be as scary as the thoughts I was imagining. She was just Paige. Any other day, and I may have mocked her about smiling more, warned her of premature frown lines. She had been an every day part of my life for three years, ever since I had hugged my mother goodbye and made sure the proper paperwork was in my suitcase.

Once, she was only a single tree in the burning forest of my new life. Another face that had a name I was expected to remember when Dad was introducing me to the strangers who had built him. It was an odd feeling, hearing him talk about his brothers and sisters, the lady he considered to be his mother, the boys he went to school with. It was one of the first times I had gotten to see him as more of a person than the super hero I had conjured up in my head to make up for his absence.

And now, all those years later, when he found me on the rooftop with tears in my eyes and a world falling apart around me, he knew what to say and what to do because, well, he had been around enough to learn.

It was the same with Paige. She was so much more than a burning trunk and hissing limbs, ashen leaves. Rings upon rings could be found within her, and no amount of burning would ever destroy what was there before the flames were-- not until she was damn well ready for it to.

We took shelter in an abandoned place off-grid, somewhere forgotten by all except the vines that climbed the walls and the birds who nested in the corners. The roof was leaking in some places, and shards of broken glass shimmered when the light could find them. It looked a bit like a place where bad things had a habit of surfacing. We stood on the porch of the first floor, watching the rain for a moment, catching our breaths, before I shook the rain out my hair and laughed.

"Guess I spoke too soon on that one, huh?"

Paige looked at me, flashes of lightning illuminating her feline-like features in scattered showers, like a pack of paparazzi had discovered her in the woods with that darling Emberstatt boy.

I wished I held the confidence she pretended to have.

"I'll never forget this, Kieran. Never."

I scoffed, braving myself and stepping through the doorway. "We haven't even started yet," I retorted, before surveying the area. It was a shame, truly. The house looked like it was once beautiful. Maybe it was some relic from a section of the Victor's Village that got shut down before its completion, or maybe it was so old that it had somehow withstood the tests of time since even before the dark times and the wars. It couldn't have been any younger than a hundred years old from the looks of the structure.

Yet, now, after all this time of going unnoticed and gently returning to the nature that had created it, two strangers waltzed in and demanded a show. It somehow still had stories to tell that I was interested in hearing. There were claw marks along the walls, chipped paint and rogue leaves swept up in piles by the wind. The entire house groaned with displeasure from the storm.

All this time unnoticed, and there we were.

I stumbled on something hard, and had to catch myself on a door frame so that I wouldn't fall. When I picked the object up, I noticed it was a lantern.

So the house was not as hidden as I had thought.

I pulled a matchbook out of my pocket, ignoring the confused look Paige gave me. I could hear the question "why the hell do you carry around a matchbook?" hanging in the air, so I offered a simple explanation: "I like to be prepared. Remember? The gloves?"

After a few tries, I got the lantern burning and suddenly the entire room was glowing in a shade of amber. There was enough oil in it to last a couple of hours, and hopefully we would have been long gone by then. Even with the light, I kept feeling as if there were eyes on me, just around a corner, or just far enough into the darkness to remain concealed.

Before I could think about it too much, I found Paige on the other side of the room.

"Better?" I asked, and patted the space next to me.

Her head was against my shoulder again—

(thump, thump, thump)

"Do you believe in ghosts, Kieran?"

My father did. But from my understanding, ghosts were dizziness and the tingling feeling when your foot fell asleep. They found him in his mind, in his dreams, where he had no power against them. Bloody figures. People he had known— loved.

Did I believe in ghosts?

The atmosphere tried persuading me to say yes. That feeling like breath on the back of my neck, that thought that there could have been eyes on us without our knowledge was sitting on the base of my tongue when I opened my mouth to speak:

"No. I don't."

I stepped away from her, biting my bottom lip and examining the dusty floor. There were places where the dust had been wiped clean. It looked like something had been dragged across the surface. Probably— hopefully— definitely just some animal hiding away for its meal.

I pictured Eden's face appearing on the screen, remembered seeing the stars through my tears.

"The dead can't stay living, Paige. Not for me." Maybe I simply was not worthy.

"I wonder what secrets are here. Do we want to find them?"

I grabbed her hand in mine, led her through the house. "Do you think it looks any different in daylight?" Part of me loved the wonder of the house, the character of something left behind. Part of me feared it. All of me understood it.

I squinted into the darkness as we came to a set of stairs leading into the basement. Distant sounds of water dripping into puddles could be heard from within the depths. Lantern held to the doorway, and the stairs were in much better shape than the ones leading up.

"Ready to do something stupid?" I asked. Without waiting for an answer, I stepped inside.

The entire room smelled stale, like clothes had been washed and left to mildew. The scent brought me back to District Twelve. Everywhere outside my mother's home had smelled like something similar to this: riddled with poverty and loss and unfortunate circumstances. I remembered wrinkling my nose as an elderly woman smiled down at me, and Mom nudging me and giving me a look that said 'be nice!'

I tried to breathe through my mouth.

The floor was uncovered earth, dirt packed tightly in place, except for the parts reduced to mud from leaks. Overhead, a lamp swung slightly, a busted bulb still screwed into place. This was a place where things should have come to die, wasn't it? The room was perfectly square, with cement walls, and it was completely empty, pardon a single wooden table against the far wall.

I walked over to it, my eyes curious about the box's contents. Part of me expected to find old clothes, or spare parts that were never used. Maybe someone had once tried to bring the place back to life once upon a time. Still, I wasn't sure why, but something about it seemed foreign. I was surprised by the lack of exposure it had. No dust covering it, no dry rot. The tape on top of it was still perfectly glued until I ripped it off.

This box was new.

I peered into it, hands fumbling around with piles of paper. "What is—" When I noticed a picture of my father, I nearly dropped the lantern. My cheeks began to burn, my brow creased as I looked more closely.

In the picture, he was talking to Mayor McFadden. He wore his old wedding ring, which meant the picture was taken when he was still with Julian. I stared at the picture for a long moment, dumbfounded. How? Why? I looked back into the box, even though the rest of the contents were surely no different.

There were pictures of Saffron sitting in a train, much younger. I guessed it was around the time she was reaped. A picture of Ansgar Todd and his brother moving into their house in the Victor's Village, pictures of Myara Lowe in the Capitol.

Pictures of Paige and I sitting in front of a campfire.

Calmly, I sat the pictures down and walked over to Paige. My heart thumped against my chest again, only it was different than before. It was panic. Confusion.

Fear.

I opened my mouth to speak, still not sure what to say and—

CREAK!

The floor above us hissed under the weight of something. Someone? I pulled Paige in for a hug, resting my mouth next to her ear.

"Paige, we need to leave. We are not supposed to be here." I held her for a second longer, before pulling away. I stared at her to let her know I meant what I said.

A single half-window was above the table. I could see grass swaying in the wind on the other side. Would it even open if I tried? I hoped.

Another creak from the floor above.

"Paige. Now."

When I was ten years old, I watched my father's games for the very first time. I didn't get to watch my mother's until I was older, and I thought it was because of how young she was. But I did get to watch my father's, and from the moment his head broke the surface of that frozen arena, my father was a fighter. He towered other every other tribute, pardon the boy from One, and it was quickly realized that the boy from One was slaughter cattle more than he was a bull, because he died in the bloodbath.

Through my father's journey of mushrooms, and snow, and death, and pennies, he hadn't ever stopped fighting.

Even after, with failed marriages and children in other districts and cameras in his face, he had not ever stopped fighting.

I remembered the next time I saw him in the Capitol, I had ran to him and given him a hug, which as something I had not previously been comfortable doing. Seeing his games, for me, had opened my eyes and helped me see that he was not this monster who never stayed. He was just a boy like me, who wanted to live.

Looking back, it all made sense.

My hand grabbed Paige's moments before it shattered the glass.

"We can't make any noise!"

She stepped down from the table, eyes alight with something better than fear but worse than hope. Determination, I thought: the will to live.

"We have to go out the way we came," My stomach burned and my throat closed up. No. No. No. This was stupid. That was an awful idea. No way in hell should we have gone back up those stairs, especially since we did not know what the hell was waiting for us if we did.

Desperation, I surveyed my surroundings for something— a n y t h i n g that could be of use to me. Wall, table, stupid defective fucking window, wall, Paige, me, broken light, wall, door, stairs. Nothing. Her and me, me and her. Hearts still beating for the time being. My face burned with rage and terror, but I swallowed it down. Paige was being brave.

We were not supposed to be here.

Deep breath in.

But we were going to get out.

Deep breath out.

"We can't get this window open, and if we're quiet, we can make it around whoever's up there. It's dark. We turn off the lamp, we stick to the shadows, and when we make it to the door we run. We can do this, Kieran. We're going to be fine," she spoke like I was a firework with a fuse that might have been messed up. She approached me with caution, perhaps fearing that I might explode once she was naive enough to think everything would be okay.

My dad never stopped fighting.

I clenched my jaw, steeling myself.

"Are you with me? Nothing can take down the both of us." Eyes on fire, and the taste of copper on my tongue.

"Let's go."

I yanked the wick out of the lantern, watching as the flame quickly deteriorated into nothing. What we were left with was darkness. Cold, lonely, insufferable, and violent. The shadows seemed so plentiful, as if I could actually feel them pushing on my face, weighing on my shoulders. Tangible. I worried if I reached out to grab a handful, it would still be there when I made it out.

My hand in Paige's again, but for different reasons this time. Not for fear of the unknown, but for fear of death. There were worse things, I supposed, but that didn't mean I hated it any less.

Quiet steps up the stairs, careful not to make them squeak. Before we reached the top, I turned to Paige. "Stay close to the walls and in the shadows." I remembered before, when we had to squint to see all the edges. Shadows swallowed everything that wasn't the center of the room, and if we were to remain concealed, out best shot was to stay on the outskirts.

The door was still cracked open, so I peaked through the opening to make sure there was no one close by. The room was empty. I was sure of it. A slight push on the door, no noise.

I fought the urge to smile, then pushed it a little further.

No noise again.

How the hell was I this lucky?

There was enough space for us to shimmy our way through, so I gave her hand a squeeze and ducked through as slowly as possible. No one. The presence that I was being watched was still terrifyingly real, though. In fact, it was stronger than ever now that I had seen those photographs. Some of them had been so recent that there was even proof of the relationship I wasn't even sure had started yet. And there were some that were so old I didn't even remember them, like my mother carrying me off of the train back in Twelve. Someone had been watching us for years.

And they were in this very house with us.

Tears welled up in my eyes, and I was surprised when I realized it wasn't even out of fear, but intensity. I was scared. I was mortified. But the tears came from the thrill, from the danger element. It was hard to explain, but a part of me thought I might have liked it. My fingers tingled and my legs were shaking and the back of my neck was cold. I bit my tongue in concentration and my eyes were windows to a very dysfunctional main attraction between my ears.

Another step, Paige worming her way out of the opening as well.

I pulled her close so that my face was buried in hers, my voice surely lost in her hair and her skin: "Clear. Let's keep moving."

Tiptoe across the floor, free hand on the wall, desperately hoping my fingers wouldn't run across a face or a hand.

The door was only a few feet away, and when the darkness was no longer there to keep us hidden, we ran. We sprinted as quickly as we could. I didn't let go of Paige's hand, even as the door slammed shut behind us, seemingly on its own, even as we jumped off of the porch and into the rain. I held on to her through the lightning and the storm and the mud and the wind, until both of us were too exhausted to keep going.

I collapsed beneath a gigantic willow tree, kneading my back against the trunk. Heavy breaths fell from my mouh as my chest rose and fell at a violent pace. After a few moments, I stood, my hands on Paige's shoulders.

"We just fucking did that!" I screamed. I pulled her into a bear hug, lifting her feet off the ground and spun circles. Wet hair and clothes and skin and pulses. We still had our pulses. We made it through. I sat her down, eyes on eyes. Flashes of lightning told us to get home, but I still just stared at her.

"We're unstoppable." I said.