petra vanburen | one | fin

one of these days a comin'
i'm gonna to take that boy's crown
there's a serpent in these still waters
l y i n g   d e e p   d o w n

She knows she's caught the second they make their move; it's not the first time they've tried, but it's the only time she hasn't been ready. Her free hand clenches into a fist while the other flicks a cigarette onto the ground to be stamped out by a high-heeled boot.

If they want her, they'll have to work for it.

Percival Vanburen was an envied man. Well-bred, they said. Really, they ought to have used some other words, like lucky, or wealthy, because that was what they always meant: he was a rich man with a lot of power, even though he was from the Districts, even though he was never meant to be rich or have a lot of power.

He was sure to cross his t's and dot his i's as he was expected to, vocally declaring his support of the Capitol during the war, offering his vast and growing amount of retail to the soldiers who were invading his district, his home. He was an envied man, this was true, but many held no respect for him because of his support for the Capitol, and he'd accepted that his own name being besmirched was a necessary evil if he and his family were to ever carry out their true motive to its fullest extent. The more One hated him, the more the Capitol trusted him. The more soldiers they sent his way.

It was only after a few years that the Capitol soldiers began to question things, dubbing the mansion they slept in the Early Grave for its notorious reputation. It seemed that soldiers who had stayed with the Vanburen family had a tendency of dying shortly thereafter in combat. Every time, like clockwork. Always found as one of the many: bodies butchered and sliced, blood trickling from the mouth, eyes wide with fear.

It took another year before someone finally realized the bodies were being planted there, and that they were dead before they got there. And suddenly Percival Vanburen was the most wanted man in District One.

The walls of the Vanburen mansion spoke, secret compartments allowing bodies to crawl through vents and unlock doors if they were small enough and brave enough. This was Petra's first job: watching Capitol soldiers through the vents, waiting for them to fall asleep, sneaking into the rooms, unlocking the doors from the inside, and running as fast as she could before the screaming started.

She was young. Too young to experience something like that, no more than 8 or so. Her brother was a year older and somehow vastly more capable of handling the situation than she; she loved him and feared him all at once: aspired to him and resented him as if it made any sense to do both at the same time. He, like his father before him, would grow to be an envied man some day.

Eventually, she was too big to crawl through the vents, so the family just had to risk unlocking the doors and hoping the soldiers were asleep on the other side. Sometimes they weren't. Sometimes they were wide awake, and sometimes, if one listened closely enough, they could hear the shots of a gun from deeply within the Vanburen mansion.

Their mother taught them to fight as her father had taught her before. Never start a fight, always be ready to win one. That was the rule.

She was decidedly not ready for a fight. She wore thigh-high leather boots, her hair was down, the fake press-on nails were only just still attached, and the gun tucked into the back of her waistband would only be good enough to kill maybe one of the soldiers before the rest of them shot her down in the street. People were staring; she tried to keep her head down for fear of being recognized now that they could look without fearing backlash. Her only thought was that she should've just listened to Peter and stayed at the bunker.

Once she'd outgrown the walls, she was largely left to her own devices: playing with toys, trying to ignore the occasional scream in the middle of the night. But once she learned to fight, she and her brother began to feel a sense of responsibility. Their parents were doing the work of twenty men, secretly making the Capitol fear sending more soldiers to One because there was a real chance they wouldn't come back alive. They did that. Even for the people who might've, at any moment, launched an attack on their home. Blown it up, them and their kids and all the bodies they'd slain still inside. No one would even realize it until it was too late. It felt... right for them to start helping. And Peter was every bit as tall as his father by the time 14 rolled around, though he still had quite a bit of growing to do before he caught him in weight. He did just as well as expected, somehow separating it all from himself. Petra came to know two different version of her brother. There was the one she'd grown up with, who never took her seriously, who always added pink food dye to her cookies because, even though she refused to tell him, she preferred them that way.

And then there was this: a fearsome boy with venom-laced lips, hands closed around throats, primal growls like a feral animal escaping him until the prey stopped moving beneath him. There was no right or wrong with this version. No love, no loyalty. Berserker, Blood-lust. Call it what you will; they both answered to the same name.

When he was drafted for the war, a couple of things happened. The people of One laughed at Percival, whose own son had betrayed his cause, whose own son would be fighting in the other side of the war. Percival let them, and then he kissed his son on the forehead, and reminded him to do what he was trained to do.

When he was gone, it was Petra who was expected to take over for him. And she did, but she felt her old self, that tiny little girl she had been so desperately trying to cling to, disappear until one day, she had her own alternate self. Cold, and hard, and detached. At some point she realized she couldn't even remember the last time she'd cried, and then she just rolled her eyes at the thought of why she would bother anymore.

Even when they came at last, guns pointed at the door, voices shouting for her parents to come out with their hands in the air, she did not cry. Even when she discovered that she was not, in fact, too big for all of the vents. Even when she heard the gunshots. Even when she heard the invading voices looking for her, she didn't cry. Even when she heard them decide she wasn't home and leave, even when she smelled the smoke, she did not dare to cry, she didn't even move until she had no other option. She couldn't cry if she wanted to.

He would be home any minute now. Well, not home, but the place they were staying in after sneaking back into the district for supplies. It was never the same place when they came back: a house that had been torn apart in the war, a warehouse that was no longer in use, an old mining shaft that had been forgotten about with time. He was only going to be gone for a half hour, at most. That's what he'd said, and then he'd told her to just stay inside until he was back, and she hadn't listened, because she had problems listening and she was tired of him getting to have all the fun, and now she was surrounded by peacekeepers with very impressive guns and she knew that he'd been right. Now, he would come back to find her gone, and he would wait for her and she would never return, and he might have done something awful like leaving and never looking back, or something even worse like trying to stay and find her.

"Petra Vanburen," one of the keepers said. his voice sounded pleasant, like he'd just found a rare collectible, like he'd been waiting for this moment for quite some time. Maybe she should've been flattered. A pair of hands grabbed her wrists from behind and, out of instinct, she kicked her leg back and buried the heel of her boot into a crotch. A man's groan made it even more satisfying and she felt him crumble beneath her, but her victory was only short-lived as the gun fire sounded and suddenly there was a sharp pain in her right shoulder. She only realized she was on the ground when she noticed how blue the sky looked, how it seemed so much more vibrant with the pain radiating through her. Even then, though, she did not cry.

She did not dare to.

cause i am a little wicked
hands red, just like you said
no one calls you ' h o n e y '
when you're sitting on a throne