slow burns . chapter one: the two brothers [Callum]

slow burns . chapter one: the two brothers [Callum] Jun 20, 2020 8:23:22 GMT -5

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Post by pogue on Jun 20, 2020 8:23:22 GMT -5

C A L L U M

The bloodbath still plays each time he closes his eyes, blurry swords and bloodied bodies dancing and twirling through his vision and stitching into the foreground of his thoughts. The silence of the lake in front of them betrays the soft screams and whirls of the storm that has embraced them with open arms, swallowing them whole and spitting them back out. He runs his fingers against the purple bruises that rest against his skin, staining his pale skin with menacing portals of purple and blue, twisting and falling into one another and engraving words of pain whenever he brushes fingertips against them.

Kestrel’s blood is dried to his skin now, a sort of sickening armor that burns to the touch. He’d sewn words of hope and lies of deceit in between all three of them, interlacing promises that were meant to be broken as him and Bird had worked to fix Kes as much as they could. He feels the weight of the world and the weight of the words press down against his shoulders, digging claws into the skin and marking him with a symbol of the damned. She’s resting now as the sun begins to fall from grace, soft melody from the storm of reds and pinks a chorus to her own pain, and as he glances over at Kes he sees Bird sitting next to her, a shared glance between the two of them before he turns back away, feeling the soft whisper of folded paper escaping from his uniform pocket as he goes to pull his legs up into his chest.

He’d felt it briefly as he’d listened to his fate being counted down above him, a brief memory before he’d fallen from his throne and into the Bloodbath. He’d ignored it then, but as he wraps his fingers around it and listens to his heartbeat thump and hammer against his chest he can tell immediately who it is from. He can practically feel the sadness soaked into the paper, bright red Capitol stamp betraying the closed letters true intention. Desperation and a deep, hollowing longing plays his heartstrings as he removed it from his pocket, flipping it over and over within his hands. Perhaps, if he flips it enough it will disappear completely, carrying with it the sane things from home he wishes he could forget, the same things he wishes could forget him.

”I’ll be right back.”

He says to his allies, bones creaking and groaning in dried bloody protest as he stands from his position. The blankets of rose petals give and take under his weight, slowly giving way to the ice white sand that exists between the petals and the waters of the lake in front of him. He kneels first, running his fingers through the water and watching the ripples echo and dance with one another, the entire lake shaking in response to such a small action. The sun of the arena smiles down on him as he runs finger eights through the water, casting a bloody array of oranges and pinks into the waters. Fitting, he thinks to himself.

You are stalling. his mind tells him.

You are afraid. his heart follows suit.

They are both correct.

Finally, he sits, crossing one leg under another as he slowly goes to open the letter. It feels like home in his grasp, and as he unfolds it he cannot find it in himself to decide whether or not that is a good thing anymore. Green eyes dance across the words and his heart finds itself falling, cracking and shattering against his bones with every word. He feels tears well up behind his eyes but he does not dare let them stain his skin, he won’t give the cameras the satisfaction, won’t let them make him into something he never was.

The words are a reality forced down his throat, poisoning his veins with the same lies he had managed to tell so many people before he’d been damned for it. He had managed to make Twelve into a fairy tale, weaving a crown into his skull and a throne in the shape of a classroom chair. Coal mines to castles and knights diamond armor interlaced into his skin, stitching lies into the bleeding hearts of the children he read to.

He looks at the dried blood that cakes his fingertips, shaking softly with a fear he’ll never be able to spin a tale to conquer. With every blink he sees Kestrel’s mangled body and hears her shallow breaths, and every thump of a heartbeat in his chest sounds like her cannon in the distance. As the letter falls into his lap he glances at the soft stain of blood that his fingertips leave on the back of the paper, a bright contrast to the cold white Capitol paper. Fluttering petals bleed into his vision as he takes his journal out next, dirtied and tearing leather rubbing softly against his fingertips.

It’s a memento to moments lost, wondrous stories etched into the pages as remnants of a more innocent time, and the rhythmic sound of the pages turning as he looks through seems to pull his mind into a desperate and dangerous state of reminiscing. He watches his life and lies pass by as the pages turn, turning from fairy tale to reality as the pages bleed into one another, clashing forces battling for dominance before reality sets in with the notes he’d had every person he’d interacted with in the Training Center write, signing their own names within his little book of death.

But he is not focused on those. At least, not yet.

His heart sinks for the second time when he finds it, words scattered across one of the final pages of his journal. Half-written, no, written then cut in half with the desperate scribbles of a boy who realized his own story had already been written. He scans it over and over, again and again, green eyes soaking in every hastily scribbled sentence that is etched within the paper. Words that should have could have would never be said again, written and lost to the same winds that drown him inside this arena.

Castles fall and coal mines rise in his mind, kings crown cracking and shattering and being replaced with the weight of his own death. He had realized it as soon as his name had been drawn from that bowl and he’d watched his own kingdom slip away from him from the train windows, as soon as Nico had done all of his everything to comfort him, as soon as it had not worked. Knights armor breaks and is replaced with the blood of his own ally, his own friend.

His life was never truly a fairy tale, but a story to be told.

A story to end.

A story to be forgotten.

The fall of night carries with it the fall of a knight, the realization that no reality will ever exist within fairy tales, no matter how fair he tells them.

His journal feels heavy when he lifts it now, the weight of stories to tell and stories to end bleeding from its pages, and the sound of the paper screaming as he rips the note to his brother from his deadly little book sends a shiver down his spine. He lays it down with the letter from Elijah, their final resting place against the scattered rose petals and quiet water.

Darkness spreads across the arena and his fingertips tingle at the heat coming from the match pressed between fingertips, screaming light bouncing and dancing against the ever-darkening waters of the lake in front of him.

Stories to tell, stories to end.

Piece by piece, page by page, he would end it for them.

The flame catches the pages and he leaves the chapters to finish themselves, soft crackling of a smoldering kingdom fading from his mind as he turns and walks back to his alliance.

[ Uses 1 match to burn letters (thanks Thundy and WT for answering all my ?’s ]