Gotta Burn Those Blues Away // [Safe]

Her daughter is three years old when she first screams bloody murder.

Toddlers, are in fact, exhausting. Wonderful, at times, but Saffron is so goddamn tired, always, and she loves her daughter but Quinn is at that stage where everything she wants is wrong and everything she doesn't want is right and it takes all that the Victor has to stop herself from smashing her own head into the nearest wall. She cries when her Dad is away and she cries when her Dad is here, on to the next person she misses. 

And then she doesn't cry at all. Just sits in the corner and stares, aimlessly, at the wall. It makes Saffron shudder, so eerily similar to the way she would greet her own ghosts - she scoops up her daughter and kisses her gently, asking her what she's looking at.

"No-one," her daughter mutters through tired thoughts and blinks at her with grey, drooping eyes. "Someone."

Ghosts are someone, too.

Quinn is awfully quiet for a while - and then she isn't.

"I'LL KILL YOU!" her daughter screams amongst a struggle over ice-cream for breakfast and Saffron stops breathing.

"What?" she shakes, dark hair and furious little fists all a blur in her vision.

"I'LL KILL YOU I'LL KILL YOU I'LL KILL YOU I'LL KILL YOU-"

Saffron floors to the floor and her mother steps in, scooping up a screaming Quinn and takes her away, yelling right back at her still.

In the distance her mother bellows down the hall and tells her protesting grand-daughter to never say that again, but it's all white noise. Panic, Saffron looks at her hands and sees them blood-red, she blinks -- they're clean, but shaking violently.

A door slams shut.

Three years old and Saffron should have known this would happen eventually. Her daughters brain is hard-wired to drink up everything around her but it's been months since they left the Capitol and the television is always turned off.

Her mother tells her it's nothing - childish words, that it doesn't mean anything. Saffron disagrees but pulls herself up off the floor, insists she's okay, sits on her hands to stop them trembling. She's in shock, that's all. A familiar feeling. A temporary state of mind.

It doesn't make sense -- but it's in Quinn's blood. In her very DNA. Just as freckles and dark hair and grey eyes and rosy cheeks are her exterior, within her lies a fighter. A survivor. Perhaps she inherited Saffron's rage. Perhaps she inherited her parents memories of death at the palms of their hands. 

Ghosts aren't just people. They're memories, too.

They're nothing.

They're something.

After a while, as she sits in the living room and stares at the corner of the wall as her daughter does so similarly, Mace returns home.

He's here, and then he isn't - and she finds them drifting. Ever so slightly, but their worlds are filled with so much at once that they are passing ships, only together before she falls asleep and when she awakes in the morning. Tonight she hovers around him, in need of his strength and so desperate not to let him drift away.

She can't handle this on her own.

But she smiles inside at his chivalry that night, and in most circumstances she would jump at the chance for time alone. She craves it, misses it - and she wants to beam at his suggestion so badly, but Quinn's echo seals her mouth shut.

All she can do is glance at her hands, take a deep breath, and be brave.

With Mace, she is enough to beat her demons.

"Yeah," she sighs, her words half-hearted and voice terrified. "I'd like that. I'd love it. I-"

"Tell me what you're thinkin', right now."

She's thinking that she's scared, of course. She's always scared. Walking on eggshells, terrified of what may be, what could be, what has been and what may repeat again. She's thinking about Myara, Emberly, Clementa -- and how she threw her life away.

She's thinking that perhaps it's in her blood, both fight and flight. She's thinking about what Quinn will choose, and if their daughter will ever have to make that choice, and what Saffron would do to prevent it.

"Today Quinn told me she wanted to kill me."

Its even scarier to admit it aloud, for all her ghosts to hear.

"She was furious over something stupid, of course, and so was I, and I know she didn't mean it, but-"

She's crying, now, looking into Mace's eyes and feeling like a failure. 

"I can't stop thinking about it, Mace."

A failure of a victor. A failure of a mentor. A failure of a niece, a daughter, a sister, a mother. 

In his arms she is safe, she is home. So that is where she goes.

"Where'd I go wrong?"

saffron.