so we drift; rook Katelyn + Patricia

k a t e l y n .

So keep it on the surface, and tell me there was worth in
All the ways that it would break.

It was nothing like the garden she had at home. Like everything else in the Capitol it felt over the top. Commercial. She longed for the scent of rosemary and thyme crushed in her hands, baked lovingly into bread or added to a piping bowl of chili with basil. There was no spearmint or anise for her tea in this garden. No cilantro for a plate of soft tacos. She missed her kitchen too; the one in the eleven quarters was stocked with a great many things, but everything was chrome. Impersonal. Katelyn rubbed the back of her neck and kept her eyes on the skyline.

Patricia had bleached her hair at some point. It took away some of the fire she’d always associated with her. As Patricia had been one of the victors she’d studied when coming up with ways to guide Kirito, she knew her games journey very well. But in truth, Katelyn didn’t know what to say to her. It was rare that she encountered other people up her. She had half a mind to just excuse herself and go back down the elevator. The other victor solved that issue for her with three simple words.

“How are you?”

It was an invitation, one that Katelyn readily accepted. Sometimes the floor that eleven had was suffocating. Too many people now, which while a good thing, made it harder and harder to get some quiet and peace of mind. There was only so much she could say to Cyro and Arabella before she ran out of platitudes and advice about surviving. And Opal was busy. She could identify with that. It was clear that Opal wanted to get a tribute home, and no doubt Ridley Le Roux was concerned about her brother.

“I’ve been better,” she said honestly. “But I’ve also been a lot worse.” She sat down on the edge of one of the thicker planters, one for a sapling. The soil had been recently disturbed, flecks of dirt and chunks of those little white nutrient pellets were on the ground, the edge of the planter and Patricia’s hands. Katelyn stared quizzically for a moment, but let it be. “Old regrets coming back to haunt me,” she continued, thinking of Cyro Krane and curling her lip in annoyance. “But we all have those.”


She’d heard through the grapevine that Patricia had disappeared shortly before her own return, and while she didn’t keep up with every other victor out there, she had noticed her absence after a while. There were hardly more than twenty or so victors in the Capitol any given year, and while absences could sometimes be explained, other years were more unsettling. The redhead from five had been a mouthy victor when they’d been young. She remembered that much. She wondered if Patricia had been taken like her, made to see the "error" of her ways. Of course, you didn’t just ask a person about that sort of thing.

There was a kinship that they all shared; baptized in blood, born from the sacrifice of twenty-three others. It tied them together, and the older she got, the more convinced she was that only other victors truly understood what each other had been through. She was quiet for a moment, her mind drifting between topics. Like many of the younger victors she’d talked to recently, Patricia looked drained. The heaviness on her chest was easy to feel, to empathize with. Katelyn sighed, looking away from the skyline and wishing it were the rolling hills and fields of eleven as she turned to face Patricia.

“How about you? Holding up alright?”

k a t e l y n .

So keep it on the surface, and tell me there was worth in
All the ways that it would break.

IIt was rare that she bothered to look at the mosaics, but upon following Patricia’s gaze she’d come to realize they weren’t just depicting any scenes, but scenes from the last couple of quells. There was Saffron Lowe, a tiny figure against an exaggerated landscape, a giant ice cube behind her. And past that was a tiled clock tower, Kirito a dark-tiled silhouette in the clock face. How often did they redecorate the roof anyway?

“Not really, but I’ll get there.” The other victor mimed taking a drag on a cigarette with a look of concentration on her face. Maybe she was trying to quit. Good for her. “It just feels like they won, y’know? They always win.” Katelyn knew that all too well, thinking of the injections and the chair, and his mouth by her ear, reminding her that this was for her own good while he whistled that damnable tune. The years she'd lost. And now, now she was forced to play the game without complaining.

Even in death that bastard had the last laugh.

When the deck was stacked against you, the opponent prone to flipping the board when you started to make headway, there was no way to win. Truth was, the game was rigged from the start. A handful of platitudes pressed up against the back of her teeth, but she swallowed them. They rang hollow when she knew there were social events she was being made to attend. People she’d have to talk to that she’d rather not. In the coming weeks, she and many of the other victors would be put on display for the Capitol citizens to salivate over, lustful looky-loos worshiping at the throne of the games with their money, treating the victors liked trading cards or shared trophies. The game never truly ended.

They were supposed to be these people’s heroes, but more often than not they were simply their toys. Easily broken, easily replaced. Katelyn looked up at Patricia from her impromptu seat. “I admired you back then, you know? When we were teenagers.” Without a mentor to look up to, she’d taken the time to learn about the victors from other districts, never daring to hope that she would be joining their ranks. She’d watched clips from Mace’s games a dozen times, from Arbor’s, Aranica’s, Heron’s, Saffron’s and Colgate’s, desperate to find something, anything that would help a girl from a lower district survive.

Trying to figure out what made them special. Why they had lived when everyone around them had died.

But she’d watched Patricia’s too. Only the year before, and the first time in a long time that anyone in eleven thought their tributes might have a real shot at coming home. And she’d based her strategy off that. She’d found allies she could rely on; people she could trust to have her back. But she’d stayed away from romance. She’d avoided the careers, and kept moving, never tarrying in one area for too long. “The sixties don’t seem that long ago,” she murmured. “But there’s a whole new generation now, two more years and all the tributes will have been born after either of us came home.”

It was a sobering thought, that so much time had passed and so little had changed in the grand scheme of things. Katelyn was quiet for a moment, watching the setting sun illuminate the rooftops. It was a thought she kept coming back to, that seventeen had never seemed so close yet so far away. “It keeps going and going, and half the time if doesn’t seem worth it,” she stated. Because it was true. There had been many times in her life where the fire had been dampened, where she’d been knocked down and had to dig deep to find the will to stand back up, to drag herself out of the water and back to the shore. But she did. She always did, and the older she got the more she had come to the realization that not everyone was capable of doing that. “It’s up to us to make the other half of the time worth it. Not fair, but that’s life right?”

More often than not, when someone started to sink, they kept sinking and drowned. Or they floated precariously, bobbing in a sea of depression and wondering which day would be the day they no longer had the strength to keep their head above water. “Listen,” she said, clapping her hands to her knees. “I try to keep my cooking skills sharp while I’m stuck in the Capitol. If you ever want to join the four of us on the eleventh floor for dinner, you’re welcome to. We victors have to stick together, right?“ Katelyn was tired of seeing people alone. Not when she could do something about it.

Everyone could use a friend.

k a t e l y n .

So keep it on the surface, and tell me there was worth in
All the ways that it would break.

There was nothing healthy about holding grudges. Katelyn was a firm believer in that. She realized that Patricia had a history with her boys, but bygones could be bygones, couldn’t they? Kirito wasn’t one to hold grudges; she felt she knew him enough to say that. Harbinger on the other hand—well, he’d been pretty pissed at her for some time, but they’d moved past that. Did he still hold it against Patricia for killing his brother? She hoped not, or things would get awkward pretty quickly.

In the end, all of them had simply done what they’d had to do to survive. It was never pretty. Every one of them had done things they’d never imagined they could be capable of. Every one of them carried that with them. She supposed even victors like Cricket did, even if that bitch had spit on every one of them by designing arenas. Different methods of coping for different people, she supposed. But she would never understand that woman. On the other hand, Patricia she did understand, even the coy implication concerning her girlfriend.

Katelyn laughed quietly. “Well, some nights it could be six. Or two. Depends on which one of us is working with the tributes. Or who’s got other stuff to do.” She got the impression that Kass didn’t enjoy sitting down with the adults; but that was to be expected. She was a kid, after all. “Opal and Ky might swing by if they have the time, but she’s been spending a lot of time working with Emmett Le Roux. Ridley’s brother who chose to volunteer.” A look of mild annoyance briefly flashed across her face at that.

Emmett was—not among the people she liked. He had an air of false bravado about him, the type of tribute who, when faced with the possibility of their impending demise, tried to play off the fear with machismo. Did volunteers ever think about what they were doing before signing their lives away? Or were they just empty-headed and prone to spur of the moment decisions?

Perhaps that was unkind of her, but she’d heard that he’d been disrespectful to Opal and she had half a mind to hang around his next training session. Smile sweetly at him any time he made a mistake and suggest he pay more attention to his mentor. But Patricia didn’t need to know about that.

Katelyn stood, the acrid taste of cigarette smoke bitter on her tongue, and moved towards the glass, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. Emmett. Cyro. What was the world coming to that fully half of the tributes were so ready and willing to throw their lives away? “Twelve volunteers,” she muttered. “Everyone but Shelby and the Emberstatts have at least one.” She glanced back at Patricia. “Cyro, the volunteer from eleven?” Katelyn sucked at her teeth. It had been some years since a tribute had weighed this heavily on her mind. But as long as Patricia was willing to hold a conversation;

“This is probably going to come up in his interview with Flickerman, but—“ Katelyn shook her head. “He’s got a kid. He’s got a toddler and he volunteered because that was the best plan he could come up with to give his son a future.” It was difficult not to keep coming back to that. She expected that it would weigh on her until Cyro died, when it would weigh on her for different reasons. Oh, she wanted to believe he’d come back. Or that Arabella would. And she'd try.

Oh how she'd try.

But she’d told the girl that the games weren’t like the stories she dreamed of. Every year, twenty-three kids didn’t get their happy ending. And sometimes, the one who did wasn’t the one that deserved it. “You think the lock down made the kids stir-crazy? Twelve. I just can’t wrap my head around it.”