fighting with shadows {justice&jacinta}

stick, stick to your stones
'cause that's all you know
i was caught in the middle
i swallow my words down to the bone

Everything hurts but is numb all at once. It's like a dull stabbing — a pain that should be sharper cuts through her nerves and reverberates through her body. In some places, she can feel nothing at all, like rifts of nothing. Whatever medicine they have used on her, they seem to have focused it on the side of her head, where her ear should be. She hasn't reached up to touch it, but she knows it isn't there.

She knows that she must be alive because she can still feel. If she were dead, she supposes that she would have no sense of consciousness at all, and she certainly would not be able to feel the beat of her heart or the cold air moving in and out of her airways.

Her eyes flutter open and glaring fluorescent light floods her vision. Jacinta squints against the harsh light and sits up to avoid it, but immediately regrets it. Blood rushes into her head and black spots form in her vision like blots of ink, disorienting her. For a moment, everything blurs and then quickly comes back into focus, like her eyes are faulty, flickering camera lenses. But she doesn't have to see to know where she is; in a hospital bed in the medical wing of the Training Center. The IV in her arm tells her enough to know that.

Although she expects the room to be empty, to her surprise, there is a man standing by the door. He has a familiar, rather handsome face with dark hair and brown eyes, and it takes a few seconds longer than it should for it to register in Jacinta's mind exactly who he is: Justice Fray, the most recent Victor of District One. (Whose mentee she killed.)

But why . . . why is he here? she wonders. Jacinta just blinks at him in confusion. Maybe to chastise me for killing Cynthia.

Justice Fray takes a deep bow and she just blinks again, unable to comprehend the context of the situation. He starts talking but his tone isn't harsh like she expected it to be — nothing about him is predictable and it throws her off. "I come bearing gifts," he says, pulling up a chair to her beside. There is something off-putting about his speech and his movements, how clumsy they seem. She turns her head to look at him and he leans all the back on the chair, so far that Jacinta thinks he may tumble backwards, until he falls back into place.

He's drunk, isn't he? she realizes. What a mess. Still, she doesn't shoo him away; she allows him to sit in her room and keep talking. Hopefully, drunk Justice Fray is somewhat pleasant.

"Also you're looking lovely, they fixed you right up, didn't they?" Justice continues. She would have rolled her eyes but stops herself, unsure of how the drunken Victor would react. Instead, Jacinta just stares at him blankly, unable to form any words. She isn't completely certain of what he means by "fixed you right up" until she reaches her hand up to where her should be and finds, with a sudden flinch jerking her torso up — skin. Jacinta expects to find nothing but a stump, but just as if the Seventy-Seventh finale had never happened, her left ear is exactly where it should be. It takes a moment to process, but then it hits her: the Capitol replaced her ear, of course. Just as Justice has a prosthetic leg, she now has a prosthetic ear; the Capitol's technology appears so convincingly real that if she hadn't seen Roger cut off Justice's leg, she would never have known that its insides were not flesh and bone, but rather steel and wires. The same goes for her ear — it feels just as she remembers it, as if she had never lost it at all.

Jacinta would have gasped, but her lungs still feel weak and she doesn't want to imagine what it might feel like if she breathes in too sharply.

"You gonna drink that?" Justice Fray asks her. She is still too astounded by her prosthetic ear to respond, so he just takes the bottle, pops the cap and drinks from it. "Thanks," and he sets it back down.

And just when Jacinta thinks he is finished talking, he speaks again. "Oh, oh, and," he starts suddenly, as if he just remembered something, and pulls out a napkin with words scribbled on its front. Jacinta catches the words "forever" and "suffer", but it doesn't sink in that they are her words; Justice has written down something she said in the finale.

"Just some advice. You said, 'I would rather suffer forever than die.'" His eyes move from the napkin to her as he speaks. She blinks at him again with those tired eyes of hers as she remembers what it felt like to say those words. "I would rather suffer forever than die" — she had been so desperate then, just barely holding onto consciousness, to life, on a fragile thread. They were the words of a dying girl, a girl who seems so out of reach now that her heartbeat is stable. Everything she felt then, the determination, the adrenaline, the fury burning through her body and her bloodstream are gone and it makes her feel so empty.

"And I just wanted to let you know," Justice sets down the napkin on the table and takes another swig. "You're wrong. And trust me," Justice places the bottle down on the beside table again and pats it with his hand, "you're gonna need this." She eyes the bottle and her gaze moves from it to Justice. He leans back again and props his feet up on her bed, just barely missing her legs with his own. (If she believed she had the strength, she would have shoved his legs back onto the floor.)

"You're welcome," her fellow Victor tells her with the biggest grin he can muster.

"I'm not dead," she states, still disoriented and not quite fully present yet. It just feels so surreal, but here she is. Her pulse is even tracked on the heart monitor against the wall and she watches the jagged lines fluctuate up and down. Her eyes dart around the room, taking it all in again, and then finally settle on Justice. "The eclipse was the last thing I saw and . . . I thought it might be the end."

But here I am. Here we are.

She furrows her brow and looks at the bottle of wine on her beside table. Her reflection is bent in the glass, her features distorted around the cylindrical shape. Jacinta looks back at Justice again and shakes her head, but only halfway, as she quickly finds that her vision spins if she moves too fast.

"Why am I wrong?" Jacinta asks him, her eyes moving up to meet his. He may not be able to give her a serious answer in his current drunken state, but it is better than nothing. "Is surviving after the Games really that bad?" She already knew what was ahead when she decided to kill, when she decided to live. She knew the price and the toll it may take on her soul, but she had always been willing to pay it. Jacinta is still unsure of what exactly victory entails other than throwing away everything she believed in, but does it really matter? She is alive — and that, after all, is what she decided was the only thing she truly wanted.

"I fought for this," she goes on. She is alive — and she fought for every breath she takes, for every beat her heart makes, for every moment she experiences. Screw the price, she decides. She got what she wanted; what more could she need? "And maybe whether I deserve to live is debatable, but that doesn't change that I fought just to be breathing right now, just to be here. How could that be all for nothing?"

'cause nothing's that simple
late at night you pour it out
know that only brings you down
but go ahead and give me all the blame