if teardrops could be bottled [Steel/Lysander/Callum]

The vibrancy of the Capitol in all its ominous glory burns his eyes, carving its way into his memory and crushing the fantasy dreams of kingdoms and castles. The first night he had arrived here, he has expected the blaring lights and screams of glee to die down as the sun fell from the sky. Yet, like so many other things in his life he had been wrong, and through the windows of the training center he had watched the city pulse and teem with life, vibrant hues of pink and blue bleeding from the rooftops and filling the streets with reminders of what he would never get to experience.

When he had gone to sleep, the soft blurs of pink and blue had danced across the ceiling above him, rising and falling into one another and he had wondered: is this what he will become when he dies? A shadow on the wall, a burst of color, the scraps of a celebration? His eyes hadn't been able to see shapes in the glows, not anything that he had wanted to recognize anyways. Before his head hit the pillow, he had remembered that when they were kids Elijah and him used to look up and try and find shapes within the clouds. Elijah had stopped seeing things when he hit twelve. Drowning in satin sheets and a coffin of glass and platinum, Callum can't blame him.

The Capitol is in celebration at the thought of their deaths, and the tributes stories are scrawled in blood within the very places that they stand and speak. He watches a woman across the street lift glass to lips, wiping away orange lipstick from the rim. There's bars within the training center too, monuments to forgetting stacked to the ceilings and pretty men in white carrying diamond glasses. Different it was from Twelve, but as he watches the woman across the street stumble and sway he can't help but picture Elijah and his pre-reaping ritual. Creaking floorboards and desperate offers of brotherly love, glasses left on tables and shattered when the sun comes up. He did not have a history with alcohol, but maybe alcohol had a history with him.

So maybe it's fate, or chance, or destiny that he finds the wine bottle on the way back from training, standing at attention to the Capitol on a hallway table. 

He would have could have should have felt fear in taking it, but Callum Leare's story has already been written, finished, and cast into the void. After all, what would they do if they found him with the bottle, kill him? Yes, they will.

Now he sits, alone at nightfall watching the lights of the living tumble and fall into the streets. He can almost hear them screaming, celebrating the stories they have yet to write.

"Bastards." He whispers, before the sound of someone approaching behind him makes his blood turn cold.