pressing flowers .| saffron/emberly

i can't hold it, but i feel it in my bones
throwin' roses with my faith and skipping stones
everybody knows every single soul's looking for heaven
everybody knows but you

Her sleep was taken hostage by panicked love, clinging to the wooden rails of her daughter's cot and the rise & fall of her chest. Stinging, sunken eyes refused to blink or close as insomnia stapled her eyelids open, terrified something might happen. Could happen. Would happen.

Quinn slept soundly - finally, her tired body sighed, but Saffron ignored its whispers. She was a guardian now, and the Capitol was her biggest threat. For she was theirs and Quinn was hers and in some ways, her daughter was the Capitol's, too. They liked to remind her of that - the gasps as Mace had exited the train with one child too many, the screams outside the training centre, the clamoring hands, flashing cameras, polling booths and hungry eyes that drank up any sight of her daughter. That hunger would stay unfed for as long as Saffron could let it.

Paranoia was not an unfamiliar feeling for any Victor, but it reaped it's ugly head the second her feet had met the train station grounds. She knew that she could not keep her child a secret forever and the sound of Quinn's name spreading across the Capitol terrified her. For once it reached President Snow's ears she would be trapped, forever - no longer a child of the summer sun but a piece of this cold, cold winter that would never pass.

She was foolish to bring her daughter into this terrible world and an even more foolish to think she could protect her from it.

That feeling sat with her like an old friend, like family. Like Myara, Emberly-

Sweet, kind, delicate Emberly. Oh, how she broke Saffron's heart.

Soft footsteps approached her and hands she could call her own found her tired, sinking shoulders. Her lover kissed the top of her head and she felt safe, for all but a second.

"Go," he whispered softly. "I'll watch her."

For he saw the nerves that stole her voice and her sleep and her mind and the guilt that tore her heart in two. Emberly, Quinn, Emberly, Quinn. 

She settles on Emberly, if only for tonight - though she knows the girl deserved far more than Saffron could ever offer. For she was not enough to save Myara, however hard she tried. Her light, her love, her last name. It was not enough.

It would not be enough for Emberly, either.

She swallows that somber thought down with her nerves and manages to stumble through the hallways, exhausted and simply not enough.

"Can't sleep?"

She stops mid-step behind her piece of family, red hair and stars in her eyes. Maybe Emberly would be just fine without Saffron's failures to drag her spirit down.

The Victor joins her tributes side, the night sky mirroring the galaxies across their skin. 

"I never can in this place."

Her time with Emberly was far too precious for sleep to steal away.

i'll be walking slowly while the seasons come and go
no, i won't be lonely even when i'm all alone
and calling your name
and counting the days