places I dont belong [d8 train]

The boy who had been reaped was tall. He towered a good foot over you, maybe even a foot and a half. You felt like you had seen him before, but you had no interest in approaching him. He was going to die. You were going to die, too. There was no point in making a connection with someone if it was going to be rendered meaningless in a short week.

You were sitting against a window, waiting for the train to start moving. The reaping scene outside the train station had dissolved and now things were returning to normal— storefronts opened, women swept entryways, cats scurried around people’s legs. Your sister was probably still crying. She had sobbed the entire time you were in the Justice Building, holding you as tight as she could, and she kept telling you to do whatever it took to come home, and you wished you could tell her nothing you could do would be good enough, but you couldn’t. It would crush her, even more so than she’d already been.

There was a rustling in front of you, and you shifted your head to see the boy sitting in front of you. William, his name was, or Bill, or something like that, whatever. You weren’t the expert on people’s names. You weren’t the expert on anything. You blinked at him, once, twice, before turning your attention back to the window. The train finally began chugging away from the station, and the sights you had grown used to your entire life grew smaller and smaller, never to be seen again.

Bill stood, the sudden motion making you flinch. He went off somewhere and you, suddenly fearing being left alone in that big shiny train car, scrambled out of your seat to follow. You followed him out to the limbo between train cars, where he was half up a ladder that was there for who knows what reason. Clearly not this. It seemed he hadn’t noticed you had come out, so you balled your hand into a fist and knocked on his calf to get his attention.