burn the book (too little too late)

Nothing about this is mercy.

That's how they'll play it—never expecting anyone in the Districts to believe it, of course, only to nod and force smiles while the Capitol cheers. But mercy was Mackenzie holding a sword, hearing make it fast, and saying you deserve better. Mercy was Yusei staring down the jaws of a Lupinia and deciding her life was worth something, too. Mercy was Argent saying don't cry and Semper keeping his promise to a terrified twelve-year-old and it is not the province of people who send one thousand, eight hundred, forty-fucking-five children to their deaths only to point to the hundred and three traumatized survivors to say, aren't we kind, to let them live? aren't we just? Hell, ending the Games entirely wouldn't be merciful; it wouldn't even be the right thing, any more than tossing someone dregs from your feast is generosity, but fuck knows the Capitol doesn't care to manage that, either.

Two thousand lives shattered, shrapnel through thousands more, countless quiet preventable deaths that never make a screen, and what does Aranica have to hold up against the storm? Nothing meaningless, but never enough. Money, wherever and whenever she has the reach to funnel it. Hugs and kind words for children sent to slaughter. Iodine, bandages, armor—the chance to live a few hours, minutes, seconds longer, siphoned from someone else.

She can name them. Not everyone, after a lifetime of this, but many: her peers, her wards, their friends, their victims. (Her friends, her victims.) The youngest ones, the one she can't help but see a little of herself in. The ones from other Districts that she considered her responsibility anyway, if only away from the cameras, because her infinitesimal weight only has a prayer of tilting Twelve's scale but she refuses to forget that a life is a life. Names from before her time, some that reached her in school and some she looked up on her own, fingers tracing over the letters as she wondered what they were like and who still missed them.

If half this crowd can name this roster in two years, she'll eat every hat Bellezze ever puts in her hands again.

Bellezze, fuck. She's going to be delighted. She's going to expect Aranica to be delighted, and in a way she won't be wrong, and it will never so much as occur to her that none of the last month should have happened at all.

The moment Snow blinks off the screen, Aranica whirls. For once, she doesn't look for the other Victors, either to seek comfort or to offer it; she sees only straight ahead, and barely that, the erupting crowd blurring around her as she brushes past the vultures with their cameras and microphones—overwhelmed with relief, she can already picture the headlines calling her. Fuck reporters, and fuck her for knowing that past the heat of the moment she'll find gratitude, sickly as poison, for the relative safety of the Capitol seeing her as a child instead of a dissident.

At some point her name rises out of the crowd behind her. She walks faster. If it's someone she cares about, she'll find them when she's not shaking so hard she can't speak, and if some handler doesn't want her meandering, they can keep up or they can put their money where their mouth is and shoot her.

In the safety of the empty elevator, she leans her umbrella against a corner and allows herself five seconds folded inward—long enough for two ragged sobs, holding her rock close with Anani's old chain wound around her fingers so tightly it digs into her skin. Then she takes a shuddering breath, untangles her hand, and straightens her shoulders. It's a long ride, but not long enough.

They never give anyone long enough.

Still trembling, her right hand glances against the hidden clasp at her other wrist. With a muttered curse she tries again; this time, the prosthetic slides off in a cascade of clicks to thud heavily against the hollow elevator floor, trailed more softly by the liner and sock. Her dainty flats follow, then a cascade of plinking beads as she tears inelegantly through the plait that Bellezze's team spent half an hour weaving.

Tiny, meaningless choices, all of them. The beads are fine. The hand is fine. Only the theft of them matters, and only in the way that every shred of debris looks like a life raft when land beneath your feet drowns.

The elevator dings. She pats the doorframe in thanks for her safe delivery, but only out of absent-minded habit, her attention already outward and upward as she crosses the still-opening doors to walk unshielded under Capitol clouds for the first time in decades.

"When is it enough for you?" she screams at the sky, her voice so loud it cracks.

Nothing answers but a rush of cold wind that throws her hair across her face and sends her gold dress—Bellezze's dress; the Capitol's dress—fluttering around her ankles, bright as sunlight and not nearly as comforting. She doesn't know what she expected; the clouds left her in silence so long ago she only remembers the sound of their laughter in her dreams.

Hell if she'll beg for them back now.

She tears her hair out of her face, slams her fist against the railing at the edge of the roof, and leans over it as if to vomit or to batter herself on the force field below until she cracks through it or dies trying. Instead she screeches, wordless and ragged, until her voice gives out and leaves her gasping—then again, and again, until she can't distinguish her own voice from her rock buzzing in furious chorus against her heart, pouring out a quarter century of rage and helpless grief.

And love. Still, always, ardent and seething and excruciating and unwavering long after the Arena carves out even hope, love.



Title songs are Metric's "Too Little Too Late" and "Art of Doubt" (burn the book that says you took the high road [...] murder's worth it, we're told / there's a promise on the way / I don't believe what they say).