heavy hands, fire away! // { adder vt }

Ostensibly, this tour is in your honor. Thrown together as hastily as the Hunger Games themselves despite the handful of months it's been since you were reluctantly crowned and sent home to your broken district, you see it for what it is: a reaction. A punishment. You wouldn't feel like a hostage or a prisoner if this were an honest celebration of your victory.

It's hard to imagine such a thing being possible, when nothing the Capitol has ever done has been genuine. The Hunger Games are a mockery; this tour a farce. And you, their victor? You are a fool if you play along and a fool if you do not.

You will yourself to be an adder in the grass, biding your time until something is in striking distance. In the meantime, you allow yourself to be frogmarched onto the marble steps of District Three's justice building, heavy crown atop your head. Where they found the gold after six years of shortage, you haven't the slightest idea. Easier to keep on hand than lead and iron, you suppose. No one's loading gold into a shotgun. And despite the incisor marks from where you tested its legitimacy, it can't be eaten. Worthless in war.

You've been to District Three before. The barbed wire is new. Twin screens have been erected facing you, improvised podiums beneath them. Somewhere a generator hums and the electronics flicker to life, and you find yourself making eye contact with a portrait of your little Vanguard. The caption at the bottom calls her Yejide Jonquil. The other screen shows a boy named Ambrose Pixel, whom you may have crossed paths with once or twice, but don't remember fighting — with each other, against each other. The true enemy or the two-dozen false ones.

A short recap is shown, clips cut too propaganda-quick to hint at the true story. It isn't that there was any glory to be fought for or won down on the pitch, but the short highlight reel would have anyone believing there was little more to the game you played than gore. Maybe it was right. You can't deny that you spilled a lot of blood that day, yet you still bristle at the lie they've made out of your little Vanguard's end. Her body is broken and crumpled on the ground, but implied to be your doing with the context removed; your knife drawn across her throat no longer seems merciful with your instructions — "Close your eyes." — delayed half a second until after the deed is done.

Jaw clenched, you stand still as a soldier. They want a reaction out of you, some sound bite they can play out of context, or a violent gesture made mid-protests, that paints you — and the whole rebellion — in the darkest light imaginable. You refuse to give it to them. If they want to stand you up in front of the entire nation, up on the steps of the justice building like a criminal facing her execution (again), to hold you up for derision as the monster they've portrayed you as, you — you will not prove them right.

Dropping to your knees, you find yourself just above the eye level of the crowd. They are faces you recognize but don't: a firebombed, half-starved people, hard rebel stares on children too young to wear them, citizen casualties trembling with terrified uncertainty over what comes next, scars and burns, eyes and ears missing. People that thought they'd already lost everything who are discovering there's still more that can be taken from them. Sadness. Exhaustion. Pain. People you'd fought for, whether alongside or against. Maybe Circuit's grandmother is down in the back. Maybe everyone from District Three you ever knew personally is dead.

You tilt your head forward as though bracing for a beheading, as though readying a prayer for a god you've never believed in. Your crown tumbles down the stairs of the justice building, bouncing on each marble step with a light metal clink that echoes in your chest. Capitol gold clatters its way back to the people it was taken from and listening to it you feel lighter, even with your neck exposed.