symphony of death — nico. [ day 7 ]

Ash to ash, dust to dust
Everything in God above
Shed a tear, shed your blood

"i guess that makes us strangers."

the words leave his lips before he can stop them, before he can even think twice about them. a part of him regrets them the second that he says them, wants to take them back and say something kinder. he wonders what else there is he could say, wonders if there is anyone else that he knows how to be without francis there to show him the light.

the pitchfork drives itself through her eye.

nico doesn't flinch. 

he doesn't remember deciding to go straight for the killing blow, doesn't remember deciding that this was the moment jayne ashbrook-laws would die. one moment his hand is at his side, loose and unhurried, and then next he had struck out and claimed the life of a girl he had known from a distance these past years.

the mayors daughter.

that was all she had ever been to nico, someone privileged, someone with opportunity, someone who could be something other than what the word had told her to be.

someone free.

nico never had that.

it had made him hate her, had made him hate anyone who came from the same part of town as his mother had once been a part of. the part of town that had turned her out, the part of town that had scorned and ruined her, that part of town that a peacekeeper had been changed with protecting from men like nico's father.

this is all that nico has ever known from people like jayne: pain and ruin. the only things that they have ever given him. even jayne, with the flowers in her voice and in her eyes and in her soul, she had been a part of the world that had taken everything from nico and left him hollow and aching, had left him vulnerable to the teachings of a mother who would never be able to love him, of a mother broken long before her time. it was her people, the wealthy and the powerful by twelve standards who had set the rules, her people who hadn't batted an eye when a peacekeeper buried a blade in the belly of an innocent man, a man who's only crime had been standing up for a little girl being pushed around by a peacekeeper thirty years her senior.

"fuck you, nico thorne."

he doesn't cry for her.

the canon sounds, and nico knows that she has gone, the part of jayne that made her who she was abandoned her body and left only flesh and bone behind in its place.

he knows that a ship is going to come soon, remembers watching as the hulking metal thing came and stole francis away. it had been the first time he watched it for himself, hadn't been there to watch as the bodies of myrcella or jessica had been hoisted into the stars.

he knows, and yet—

"i wish i was sorry," he says to her, and thinks he almost means it. thinks that in another world, in another life, in another arena or another games, nico might have felt badly about stealing more life from district twelve. but something inside of him has been shattered and reforged

—his heart,
he thinks,
maybe.

he can't bear to leave her yet, and even as he knows he needs to walk away, to turn his back and go in search of more death, he can't bring himself to do it. he collapses at her side for a moment, just stares down at her lifeless body and wonders why he can't feel it.

why he can't feel the pain.
why he can't feel the anger.
why he can't feel the heat of war.

"you turned out to be wrong about me," he says absently. he feels as though his body is a million miles away from his voice, like his heart has been broken and put back together too many times since he left district twelve and now he doesn't know what to do anymore. he pulls the backpack off of her body, a sparkling thing that he can't make sense of, and he barely spares it a glance before unzipping it and looking inside. "do you remember?"

because i do, he thinks.
i do. i do. i do.
i remember every word.

"you said i was going to have a lot of people who hated me." he purses his lips, inhales, feels something sharp prick at the back of his eyes and has to bite his tongue to stop the shivers creeping up his spine. "but i didn't."

i didn't. i didn't. i didn't. 
                                            i've been loved.

he slips the armor she's wearing off of her body, undoes all the straps from the pieces that he wants, ignores the one's that he doesn't. "they're the one's who make me wish that i was sorry," he says, forgetting to make the connection between his thoughts and his words aloud. he bites the inside of his cheek, then puts everything that he took into his own carpet bag. "then again, they're also the reason i'm still here, the reason i made sure you're not." he does the latch up on his bag, hoists it over his shoulder. he takes the canteen out of her pack, then tips it upwards, hovering over his mouth. he knows that his own is full, but there's something familiar about the wanting, something that gives him comfort.

"i think i wish i was sorry,
but it's for them that i'm not."

nico tries to think about what francis would do, remembers every time he decorated a corpse with flowers before death came and stood before the, and plucks one of the nearby sunflowers from its stem. he places the bright, golden thing over the place where his pitchfork spilt blood, hides the hole in her face where life escaped.

he slips up and onto honey's back. he does not look back at her one more time. he does not need to see her again to remember her, does not need a final image burned into his skull. 

jayne's blood is on his hands now, too.

You cannot give enough
Finally become second to none
In a kingdom of one