like an omen — francisco. & denali.

She has been wondering if she would have visited Minx, had she not been held captive next door. The peacekeepers eye her warily, as if uncertain that Denali should be allowed contact with the new tributes any more than she was last year. Their eyes flash behind the shields of their helmets, forgetting that some barriers can be seen through, suspicion on display. They stare and she turns her face to glare back, eyebrows raised. Why shouldn’t I be here?

Because you never cared before.

The truth is that she knows she wouldn’t have asked to meet Minx, despite Zion’s death, because outside of the Games he was nothing to do with her brother. Outside of the arena she had other pieces of home to care about. Outside of her guilt over Lex killing him and the way she was so grateful, but so unable to admit that to herself, she had other worries to focus on. Even today, even now... all she can do is be thankful that she doesn’t know the names that were called up for death. Neither of them are hers, thank Ripred. Everyone she cares about is safe.

She shouldn’t meet them, shouldn’t be walking into the room where some kid named Francisco Bloom! waits to die... into the room where Denali once sat on the floor next to her unconscious brother and contemplated whether or not she should smother him to save him from the horrors that were coming. Sometimes, when footage of the Seventy-Ninth Games is replayed on the television — Zion’s limbs and face being hacked away on a blue beach — Denali regrets not killing him herself. She could have pet his hair the way she ran her fingers through Lex’s as she died, could have hugged him close and made it so the last thing he ever heard was Zion, you are so loved.

There’s a shattering crash and suddenly the peacekeepers are rushing into the room behind her, grabbing her arms to hold her back. Panic screams at her to fight back, to claw and kick and bite her way to freedom, but somehow she remembers where she is and what's happening. Her eyes flick across the room, trying to process the situation quickly enough to prevent herself from doing something stupid. "It's a vase!" She screeches at the top of her lungs, shrill enough to give the guards pause — the way a dog hears a whistle. Lungs heaving, she gasps as the hands holding her back loosen slightly. "It's a vase... just a vase... Ripred." Suspicion continues to glint off their helmets, thinly masked in the gleaming reflections of the overhead lighting.

For a moment no one says anything. Finally Denali steps forward and the guards pull back into the hallway, leaving her to stoop down beside Francisco, her hands shaking ever-so-slightly as she begins picking up the broken shards of the vase. "Are you always looking for the element of surprise?" He asks and she doesn't know why, but she can't bear to look at his face. Instead she stares at the floor, where water soaks his sock, his toes curling against the puddle. "Why aren't you visiting the other girl?" Because this door opened first... The truth sounds pathetic and useless, so she doesn't give it a voice, doesn't admit that while she came here to meet both of this year's tributes, it doesn't really matter to her about who comes first. They're both strangers.

"I —" Denali begins quietly stacking the pieces of the vase into pointless little towers, the same way she did in last year's arena after Lex smashed one of the battle drums. Those colored glass shards were prettier somehow, sparkling with the lure of danger... and uglier somehow, loved and lost and laced with hateful frustration. "I think I want to be left alone." Pausing, fingertips held awkwardly against the next broken fragment, Denali swallows and exhales. She knew it might be offensive to come here, to walk into this horrible room as the living embodiment of a second chance that absolutely won't be extended to Francisco, but she thought...

She thought...

Victors can only offer advice about how to survive. No one ever said anything to Denali to prepare her for dying. Lethe can't help him with that. Patricia can't help him with that. They don't know what it's like... it's different. "Nobody tells you about anything other than surviving. They don't tell you what it's like to be one of the other twenty-three kids," Denali whispers, picking a handful of flowers out of the wreckage. "No one else is gonna tell you about burning alive or how they — how I — wish that I'd have died another way. Even now." She sighs. It's too heavy, too honest. "I don't blame you for not wanting to hear about it or for wanting me to leave. I'll leave if you want me to, if that's the best thing I can do for you." Carefully pressing the flowers to her skirt, she does her best to dry them off without damaging them any further and holds the small bundle out to the boy next to her, like an offering. "But there were things I wish I'd known, except there was no one to ask. So I thought..."

Her chest hurts, but not as much as the flawless skin of her hands still does. There are no freckles on her knuckles, no scars on her forearms where the knives tore her open again and again. Her fingernails may have grown back, but the abrupt seam of skin at her elbows — joining perfectly smooth, grafted flesh to her own — still causes a surreal effect of looking as if she's wearing gloves made from someone else's body. They could be prosthetics if it weren't so obvious that they're not.

Denali looks up and finally brings herself to make eye contact with a boy that she doesn't know anything about... except for having lived his future in a past life. "I thought I should offer. Just incase there's something you want to know," her voice catches in her throat, "about the things Lethe and Patricia can't teach you."

I'm sorry, he says and Denali knows immediately that hers is not the ghost that should be reaching out to him. If their places were switched, she wouldn’t apologize to him. There are plenty of people in this world who owe her their remorse, but Francisco isn’t one of them. Even if he were one of the people who watched her Games and scoffed at her desperation, who took her portrayal as a villain in the competition at face value, who thought she was only getting what she deserved... even then, the moment his neck was called onto the chopping block, he would have been released from that unknowable emotional debt. But that’s not him. I’m sorry that you died, he says and she knows he couldn’t have been one of the people savagely rooting against her. Someone like that wouldn’t bother with sympathy, wouldn’t go on to worry about the inevitable deaths of children he hasn’t met yet.

The killing — how heavy of a weight is it? On a scale of sapling to a... to a hundred years old tree, how much does it crush your chest? There is no one answer to a complicated question like that. It changes. Every moment. Every day. Before and after. Then and now. From person to person and thought to thought to thought. A heart is not a static thing until it dies.

Denali only died for a moment. It's difficult to say if her heart gave up even then.

"You shouldn’t apologize to me. You don’t owe me that — my death wasn’t your fault." Balling up her hands on the knees pulled to her chest, she rests her chin on top of them, staying huddled where she crouched down to clean up the broken vase as she tries to figure out where to begin. "Anybody you kill in there won’t be your fault. You don’t have a choice, not really. Anyone who tells you to feel guilty about wanting to live is the real person in the wrong. It’s like... even if you choose to die? Then you’re choosing that someone else should live with crazy guilt and that doesn’t make you a good person. That’s not heroic." Furrowing her brow she thinks of Maxwell trying to kill her the same way Zion died, so it would be harder on her parents when her corpse was sent home; she thinks of Annie yelling sorry at her after being told that word was the worst thing she could do to Denali. "No one is any better or worse than anyone else in there. That’s the hardest thing about it. I didn’t kill Maxwell or Quest or Shy. The Games killed them." Annie didn’t kill me, the Capitol —

Even now it’s too difficult to believe the truth of it. She’s convinced that she doesn’t owe anyone an apology, but when it really comes down to it, she can’t deny that she still owes forgiveness.

"You and me, we’re different people, like, really different, I think. Being the hands that killed somebody wasn’t as hard to bear as I thought it would be, because I didn’t feel it the same way someone who wanted them to die might, but... it was the not feeling sad and guilty about it afterward that was the worst part for me. I threw those knives again and again and I didn’t regret it. But I knew the cameras were there? And I knew everyone was watching? And I knew they didn't understand. So I judged myself because everybody tells you that you should feel a certain way and I didn't feel what I was supposed to." Looking at his soggy sock and the flowers in his hands, he’s obviously too sentimental for his own good. Flowers won’t do him any favors where he’s going; he's going to want to lay them at every grave he digs. "You seem like the kind of person who’s going to cry over knifing someone in the eye, but that didn’t hurt my chest anywhere as badly as me getting stabbed in the heart. I don’t know if I’m different than other people or just... more honest."

She tries to smile, but it ends up looking more sad than any frown. "Whatever the weight is for you, it's okay. Feel it or don't feel it. You're not a tree. You don't have to pretend to be a sapling or a hundred years old or anything else —" There's a pause as she considers his question once more, wondering if Lex would have a better answer, if knowing more about trees would be helpful right now. "— but there were these super giant trees where I was. The television doesn't do them justice." Getting to her feet she stands on tiptoes, pretending herself as tall as she can be and holding her arms up with her fingertips stretched all the way out. "Sometimes closing my eyes feels like standing in their shadows." There's a sigh and a dull thud as her weight suddenly drops back onto the flat soles of her feet. "I don't remember any flowers. I only remember the trees: some of them impossible to look at all at once, some of them made of stone, some of them alive like me and bleeding like me and dying like me." Sometimes she feels sorry to the tree she killed, in exactly the way she had been told to feel sorry for everyone else. "An orchard sounds much nicer than all of those."