your bones or your soul | { mackenzie / nico }

When the hovercraft comes, Nico is still standing.

For a moment, he had left his head tip back, and he just stood there with his eyes closed, facing towards the sun. Later, years from now, he knows that people will look at the image and remember the look of absolute peace that fell over Nico Thorne when the games finally came to a close. They will see him bathed in sunlight and warmth and think it was a celebration.

But Nico is a hollow tree on fire.

Every year, the Capitol will play back this moment and force him to watch, will make him remember the moment where it felt like he had burned away all the parts of himself that he had fought so hard those games to earn. Standing there, with the sun painting his olive skin gold, he feels the moment when the cameras shut off, and knows that he has only a moment of true quiet here before he will be taken away from this place. It almost makes the hollowness in his chest ache, and he whips his eyes open to take it in one last time. Diana is dead at his feet, but he doesn't even see her anymore, looks only to the sunflowers that had claimed Francis as one of their own. "I'll look for you everywhere," he says to the flowers, knowing that somewhere among them is the soul of the boy that he loved. He wants to say more, wants to say that he knows he lives on among every atom of nature, that Nico will look for him among the tall pines outside Twelve as well, that he'll see him in the floating specks of dust one sees when the light shines just right, that the dragonflies in summertime will make him think about Francis flying, that the thought of it makes him happy.

He wants to tell him both that he hopes he made Francis proud and that he's so so sorry, that he fulfilled the promise he made to the boy that he loved, but he had done it at a terrible price, that he had lost the teachings he had fought so hard to learn along the way.

Was your promise worth it?

He knows his answer.

It does not change the cost.

He remembers getting on the hovercraft, but he does not remember what came after that, thinks that perhaps the put a syringe into his skin and made him sleep. "You're going home now," a woman who had thought she was being kind had said to him as his eyes fell shut, desperate to get one last look at the place where everything had changed.

Then there's only disorientation.

The sound comes first.

He knows that there's a voice coming from somewhere nearby, a woman's voice he thinks at first. She babbling to him about the numbers, about how it looks like he's finally getting ready to open his eyes, something about brain waves that he doesn't catch and the pattern of his heartbeat, but then she's quiet again and Nico can feel himself starting to slip back into the darkness—or was it fire? Nico can't remember anymore. He tries to though, knows in the back of his head that people will ask him how he felt right after he won, that people will ask him what he drempt about in that sleep, but he can't remember. All he can see is endless darkness, an abyss so wide he doubts it will ever be filled.

But then—there she is again.

Nico? she asks, like maybe he won't remember himself anymore, like maybe he needs reminding. Are you in any pain?

He doesn't know how to answer that yet,
but he flicks his eyes open all the same.

It's the light that hits him next.

It's all wrong, blue-toned and terrible, too crisp and too white and too much. It makes him close his eyes again almost immediately, and on an instinct he had nearly forgotten, he lifts his hand to try and block out the light. But—that hand had been taken from him, severed clean off at the elbow by the very same girl he had killed... how long had it been? He'd been about to say to himself he'd killed Raven two days ago, but that can't be true. The weight of his arm back makes his eyes flash open again, and he stares down at it in complete confusion.

It's his own body that disorients him next.

He stares at the palm of his returned arm once again, and for just a flash, he wonders if maybe he was right, maybe he had woken up the next day and realized that it had all been a long nightmare and none of it had ever happened. He had never been reaped, he had never changed, he was still just a boy from Twelve with murder in his fate rather than in his past. But then he turns his hand over, and his knuckles are free of scars, unmarred and pristine brown skin there instead of the ruined knuckles of his first.

"Uh, hey," he hears, and is suddenly brought crashing back into reality, into truth. ""I don't think we ever met before. I'm Mackenzie." It's absurd, really, that the boy introduces himself, as though Nico hadn't watched with eyes riveted on the screen three years prior as the boy from Seven became a victor, as if he wasn't exactly one of the people Nico had thought about in the moments after killing Diana and becoming a victor himself. "I'm not the face you wanted to see," he huffs, and even in his disorientation Nico can read the discomfort in the other mans voice. "You probably don't think you need to see anyone right now, but trust me, you do."

"I know who you are, Pryce."

He can't help it that old habits die hard, and unkindness has always been his fatal flaw. Though, he's not sure his tone fits his words, a kind of incredulity coloring the words that in another time would have been spat out with a roll of his eyes and a half-huff of sardonic laughter. He's not wrong that Mackenzie is one of the last people Nico would want to see, but the list of people he does includes too many dead people to be taken seriously anyways.

Not my arm.
Not my arm.
Not my arm.

The thought rattles around as he stares down at it, and in a flash he tries to sit up more fully to look down at the place where he had lost a leg too. Had they really done this to him? Made him whole and healthy without asking if he wanted it? He brings his hand to the left side of his face, trying to trace the place where Hisidrio's weapon had sliced across his skin and opened up a wound that ran through his eyebrow and down his face, over the other that had matched it across the hollow of his cheek.

In there place is only smooth skin.

"The scars?" he asks, feeling panic starting to take hold, setting every nerve ending on fire. "Do I still have the scars?"

He needs them, those scars, the ones that Francis himself had helped Nico to patch up, the ones that Francis had run the tip of his finger over, the ones that Francis had kissed. They were like a permanent mark of Francis on his body, a thing that would remind him every time he looked in the mirror of the man that Francis had fought to help him become, a reminder that he had to fight that fight all over again for the sake of the boy he had lost.

The scars? he thinks again. Where are your scars?

Was your promise worth it?