Daydream// -Katelyn onshot- Final part of a series
Jan 21, 2019 17:14:27 GMT -5
Post by charade on Jan 21, 2019 17:14:27 GMT -5
KATELYN PERSIMMON
*The following post is set during the year of the 80th hunger games*
Read part 5 here Click me
***
They’d come for her within the week. It had been foolish to assume they hadn’t seen. That the man she’d bribed hadn’t talked. But the woman that sat across from her was nothing like Harold.
“We can be reasonable.” Jen, she said her name was. A brunette with sharp features and a frosty gaze.
“You can return home after the quell. Under the cover of the victory tour. “
“But why not—”
“You know why we can’t let you out of our sight for now. No, we have to monitor you.” The woman folded her hands on the table. “My predecessor’s unfortunate accident will remain as such as long as you remember your place.” A look of amusement colored her features. “I can’t say I’m not impressed, but really, you gave us the perfect material to blackmail you with. If you ever step out of line again, you'll be thrown in a hole so deep and dark the sixty-eighth arena will look like a summer day in comparison.” She looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Besides, it wouldn’t do to have you reappear right before an election.”
“I’m just one victor.”
“It only takes a single snowflake to start an avalanche. We can’t have that.”
***
Katelyn sat at a table in the City square and cried in relief. The quell was over. Strange how a quell had started right after she was taken. And another had ended before she could head home.
It was poetic in a way.
But Carmen Stirling and Faux Rhodes were coming home too. Not as victors.
But not in coffins either.
Lord have mercy, he’d been twelve the last time she’d seen him.
What were they? Androids? Zombies? Or had the capitol truly successfully resuscitated all of them from the brink of death?
What was it Harold had said to her the first time they met?
You live because we allow it, and die when we demand it.
Katelyn heard her before she said anything. The click of her boots on the pavement.
“Hello again Ms.Persimmon.”
“Jen.”
“The train will be leaving in two hours. Don’t be late. You’ll be riding in the peacekeeper cart. No one should notice. And you’ll be let off in eleven. We’d prefer there not to be any commotion as we begin the victory tour for our latest pet.”
Katelyn refused to let the woman get a rise out of her. “Okay.”
“There’s a building in the city circle you need to visit before you get on the train. You can’t miss it. The National Hunger Games Museum.” Jen smirked, the corners of her mouth turning up. “You might find it to be an…informative experience.”
***
As the woman had said, it wasn’t hard to find. The building with the holographic posters touting the Morrison girl as the latest and greatest.
As soon as she paid for her ticket and stepped inside she regretted it.
It was maddening, making her way through the rooms. It was cruel, disgraceful, defiling. The tributes were the capitol’s playthings, no rest, even in death. Through the capitolite children laughing and speakers blaring names and places, she could hear them.
The ghosts of yesteryear.
Flitting among the wraiths, she wondered if she was one. Katelyn walked through a glittering cornucopia, past the boys and the girl that danced around it, across the three tributes bobbing like apples in a wine-dark sea. Their voices cried out remember us as she walked, her heart hammering in her chest until she thought it was going to burst.
Oh, believe me, Blue Killio, I already know I’m lacking a soul.
Give Dru back, let my sister go, you give dru charlesburg back to me this fucking moment!
And still they came. The damnable museum had no end.
New holograms flickered to life in every room. She hiked past pillars, through pits filled with mushrooms and graveyards filled with elephant bones.
And still they called out, the echoes of the past.
Yeah. Yeah, I loved her. Still love her. And yes I killed her.
Did you kill Engima Lane?
Why delay the end Lethe—Is that a lizard on your shoulder?
An iceberg gave her pause for a moment, as did the tributes upon it. A young Mace Emberstatt glared through her at a boy he once called brother. But even that faded, replaced by a blood-red desert and a sunken ship.
I’m in life with you, Sundra Bloom, even in death.
Welcome to my finale Reyes Moreno!
Brother, Put up your arms.
Eventually, it all blurred together but the voices.
I don’t want to play anymore!
The reason Py’s not dead yet is cause I’ve been watching his back!
Why do you hate me, Opal? What have I done?
This is not your palace, and you are not the queen.
The Capitol never pulled my name out of a bowl.
I know. I had to do it, Leon. In order to get here I had to do it.
Well, here we are! Here at the end of all things Galaxy!
I killed them you know.
I know. Goddammit, will I ever escape those words?
I’m a liar and a murderess, but you can make me immortal.
What’s a king to a God?
Delta. Cecilia. Basil. Eryn. Iain. Celia. Astrid. Danny.
I’m not going to lay down and die for you, Iris. That’s not how this works.
I am ready for you Hyacinth.
Do you know what his name was? Tamron.
You carry the lost to live again.
Surely you know what happens anytime a one and a seven meet in the finale
I don’t want to be a God. I don’t want to be immortal—
I regret taking life, But I don’t— I don’t regret fighting for mine.
I am not yours to control.
Katelyn dry heaved and sank into a corner. If there was a hell for victors, it was this place.
But the words clung to her soul. They were just kids. Every single one of them.
Kids whose soulfire could never be extinguished as they passed into history.
Into legend.
Anatalia faded away and was replaced by herself. Seventeen. When was I ever that young? No. No I don’t want to watch this. But she did. Ending Dillon’s life in front of the cornucopia. Sitting by Chaske as he died. She forced herself to her feet as her teenage self was stabbed through the throat and headed for the nearest exit.
Jen had told her to go here for a reason. A final reminder of the part she played in their world before they let her go. This holographic abattoir was meant to crush the last vestiges of rebellion in her soul.
They fanned the flames instead.
A part of her had died in the years she had spent in the Capitol. She knew that.
But she was a survivor.
And at long last, she was going home.
Jen had told her the same as Harold. She was to play her part without fail.
Perhaps she would, for a time.
But as the Capitol lackey had so graciously told her—
It only took a single snowflake to start an avalanche.
And Katelyn?
Well.
Ice was her element.
table coding (c) ghosty
