sound of my heart . meredith vs will vs mutt . day 6

Will moves quieter on his own. He tells himself that's good, because it is. Stealth. Subtlety. The element of surprise. There's no reason to feel uneasy about moving through the arena alone. This is his element. Dagger in hand, he's not afraid of anything — his name's Johnwayne, he is the thing that goes bump in the night — it's just that it's different. Uncanny.

He sleeps alone, nothing and no one keeping watch but the headstone at his back. He sleeps quieter on his own, too. It's not as restful as it sounds. He's up with the sun, already packed — no tent to tear down, no one else to rouse — and gets to walking again. No longer beholden to wherever anyone else wants to go, he wanders aimless, zig-zagging through the grave markers on a quiet patrol.

He doesn't remember which one he'd perched on during the bloodbath, pointing with his sword and hollering challenges. Feels like months ago. He doesn't remember who he'd swung at, doesn't remember who hit him, doesn't remember much beyond Helle's hex right at the end. For someone good at keeping grudges and keeping score, there's so much Will has forgiven by forgetting. Those bruises have faded. He owes bigger debts than petty payback.

If he hadn't been positive that no cannons had fired yet that day, at first glance he'd have thought Meredith was dead. No, he's seen the dead. She looks worse.

Skill, luck, or some combination thereof have left Will relatively well-off for the Hunger Games: he won food, he's had water, and the few scrapes and bruises he's accrued have been easily patched with the supplies he earned in the wealth. Even yesterday's poisoning is in the distant past. Will feels fantastic.

It's easy to forget how quickly things change in here. Since the last time he'd seen his district partner, it looks like she's gone through a cement mill. Down one leg, bones poking out, one arm at a disconcerting angle, covered in blood, dehydrated, famished, sunken and hollow — it's a wonder she's conscious at all. No, it ain't — he knows why she's here, and knows she's a fighter.

He matches her tired smile with a grin of his own. It tries to be reassuring. He knows that it isn't. Even her voice sounds wrecked when she tells him: "You gotta save me now, Will."

He sighs. 'Save' is one hell of a euphemism, even when they both know the only salvation that Mer is looking for is at the end of Will's knife. Any other means is beyond both of them. 'Save' is not what she means, but that's for the best. Will Johnwayne ain't the boy you want to count on to save you.

Butchery, though — that's in his wheelhouse. That's the sort of favor you ask of a boy who could hold a knife since before he could talk.

"Okay."

Even though he isn't clear on what it's for, Will takes the firewood as it's handed to him, nodding along when she reiterates that she doesn't want to come back. It makes sense. She'd told him on the train that she'd come here to die. Why do that more than once? He's not sure he ever really understood why she'd stick it out this long in the first place — that's not his flavor of vengeance — but his role in the end of Mer Strauss's life costs him nothing, and he doesn't need to puzzle out the whole sordid context to put the final piece into place.

He stacks the firewood at his feet, her intent finally clicking as she says "They can't put me back together if there's nothing left of me." Focusing purposefully on the stack as he hears her voice tremble — he never learned how to do anything for tears but give them space — he nods again.

Focused on lining up the logs into an optimal heap, not sure there's enough for a pyre, he agrees to this too. "Got it." A schoolyard arsonist like Will knows there's always something to burn if you get creative. He'll figure it out. "A Johnwayne family funeral. I can do that."

It's not the whole truth. Televised cremation is nonstandard, but notable, in terms of Johnwayne funerary rites. Just beyond the fence in District Two, there's a centuries-old oak tree — Bruce took him once. There's a boot caught upside down in the fork of a branch, its laces snapped and frayed with the weather. Scars carved in the trunk tell a legacy in bark, legends and stories Will always resented too much to learn. Skulls and snakes, scorpions and crowns, rifles, axes, shotgun shells, a sea of fists raised to the sky — a heritage and history he'd always denied. Everyone knows that Johnwayne is synonymous with traitor no matter where you've ever stood. The world has plenty of reason to hate Will without all the added baggage. Maybe it's not right to pass that association along to Mer Strauss in her grave, but it's the only funeral pyre he knows how to build.

"Hold my hand. Please, Will."

Right hand reaching and left burrowing into his cloak, he meets her gaze at last. He finds the knife first, fist clenching around the handle when the smoke obscures his line of vision. A vibrant curtain rises between them, and he curses himself for invoking his own name. Pyrotechnic punishment, suddenly the only thing in his view is a starburst of butterflies. "Stay down," he directs, not wondering about the stupidity required to protect a dying girl right before finishing her off. There's a difference between an expert knife slipped surgically between the right ribs and getting devoured by a swarm of voracious butterflies. Not thinking, just reacting, he whips his knife into the iridescent cloud.

Stay up all night thinking it's twisted
My life's been survival of the fittest
But I did it
I did it

There’s not much to life, it all ends with death, regardless of what you’ve achieved or who you’ve loved or killed. No one escapes it, it is inevitable. There is something to be said for being able to leave a mark on the lives around you. There’s something about Will Johnwayne that leaves a mark on the people he meets, something there that he can’t even see. It’s a blurry picture before her, pieces of a puzzle she’s slowly sliding into place as she figures it out for herself.

JJ, Terra and Helle had seen it. Meredith had seen it the moment she’d met him on the train, but she’d never been good at words, unable to decipher what it meant. Fumbling through her own feelings had always been a challenge, balancing delicately against the side of calmness and a raging storm, unable to find any semblance of normality within the Strauss household. Meredith had never learned how to respond to her emotions, and she danced from one extreme to another, unable to reign them in.

Stay down," he said, the hand that had reached for her yanked away in one moment. The relief in her chest instantly vanished, that peace that had been only minutes away snatched from her time and time again. Closing her eyes she let a pain-filled breath loose, feeling the crackle in her lungs as more blood seeped inside.

Even when he’s there to kill her he tells her to stay down, still trying to protect her. After a moment a wry smile crossed her lips as the smoke slowly started to vanish, revealing a swarm of butterflies before them.

She could see it. Just a little bit more clearly now, sitting on his back glowing ever so gently. Anabelle would call it a heart, a breath of humanity that existed in every one of us. Was that what she had glimpsed? She'd seen it inside the train as he had tried to disengage but slowly opened to her. She had seen it shining in his eyes as he had condemned Cyro for making his son suffer, a hurt within him that begged to be heard. And again when he’d told Meredith to run, and right before her, here and now as he turned his knife onto the mutt instead of into her heart.

Her one remaining hand scratched at the dirt, tired fingers searching for the twisted dagger she’d buried in the backpack. She couldn’t let him do this by himself, she might not be able to stand beside him, but she was still every part a member of district two as he was.

“You can’t have him,” she gasped, dragging herself forwards, elbow digging into the dirt as she gritted her teeth, fighting against the pain. “He’s gotta make it home for the both of us,” sweat beaded on her forehead as her body screamed in protest with every movement.

Where were Terra and JJ? Her gaze flickered around the Cornucopia, there was no one else around. There was no way they were dead, those two were strong and they had made each other stronger. For all her anger, Terra had been a reflection of her own concern and worry, another person who was not quite so capable of expressing her emotions. JJ had seemed attached to Will in a way that had made Meredith’s heart warm, yearning for her own best friend.

“Will, where are Terra and JJ?” she asked, more blood falling to the ground in front of her. She pulled herself forwards once more, ducking her head against her chest as she fought back a scream as her body was set on fire, protruding bone scraping against the dirt.

She just had to push a little further, one more problem before her and then it’d all be over. She could do this. Her hand shook as she reached, fingers numbly swiping at the mass before her with all the strength she could muster.

Meredith is determined to believe that Will Johnwayne is anything but the stupid asshole that he is, and Will can't bring himself to correct her. What's the point? That ain't the thing worth arguing over this close to the end. Instead he scowls as she calls him out for a liar, ears burning red, counting the blue confetti of butterfly bodies that dot the ground. Forty, forty-one, forty-two... Glimmering puddles spill between them. ...sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-... Vivid constellations in the dirt map out chronicles too storied to be appreciated in the span of the breath — ...eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five... — be it crowned serpent or the mason's hammer or hammer and chisel or the people's fist or shapes and combinations that have not yet been claimed.

As if taken away on a gust, the smoke and the remaining nakom recede all at once. Will is left with nothing but the fancy bone-hilt dagger in his hand and a pounding heartbeat. He slips the knife up his sleeve when Mer lays a laurel of trust on the crown of his head.

"I'm glad I met you." She says it like it's simple, but Meredith Strauss wields her heart like a brick hammer. She says it, chiseling off facets in the name of edifying, as confident as any stonemason worth her salt that cutting and hewing is fundamental in the act of constructing something better than raw, unpolished granite.

Brows knitted together, Will contemplates that for a long time. No matter the circumstances, it's an odd thing to hear from someone dying to be on the opposite end of his knife. It's a hard thing to believe for someone who's been the elephant in every room he's ever been in. He doesn't refute it; it's not worth her breath to argue.

"Yeah," he agrees at last when the silence becomes hard to bear. "I wish I knew you sooner." He knows it wouldn't be the same if they'd ever crossed paths back home. What reason would he have to humor Mer Strauss? What reason would she have to put up with him? He can't — shouldn't — wish that they knew each other sooner; they wouldn't have been friends. As much as Will likes to think that these circumstances are ordinary for him, he knows he's been a different person these days. Maybe that's what he means when he says it: I wish I was someone you'd've wanted to skip rocks on the quarry lake with. He wasn't. Still wouldn't be, probably, outside of the fucked circumstances that brought them together.

There's no use in wishing that he'd been a better person sooner. That was never in the stars for Will Johnwayne. He could wish that he didn't need to spend his childhood making sure to glower at everyone before they sneered. He could wish that he never cared when they did in the first place instead of training himself to glare harder and glare first. There's no denying he'd be a different Will Johnwayne; there's no guarantee he'd be a better one.

He could say the same of anyone else. You could take a snapshot of Will Johnwayne in this very moment and drop him into another universe with other rules, but who's to say that whichever Mer was sitting beside him would do so willingly? Who's to say that another JJ Wolfram would answer the phone when Will called if they got to go home when all this was over? That under different circumstances Terra wouldn't punch his lights out first chance without a second thought? That some strange Helle would look at him and not through him?

Doomed by mutual circumstance, they had no option but to find each other. Will doesn't delude himself that he'd be anyone's first choice when the chips aren't down. He's long since made his peace with that. He's never been a good man in a storm; he's the wind that howls. He's the breakers in the red waves, poured from proletarian concrete and not a marble statue hewn and strewn on the shore. He's the hatches battened down, shutting out the water and the light both. Functional. Brutal. Invaluable when needed; an eyesore in the daylight.

It's okay. He is whatever he's needed for, and that's enough for Will Johnwayne. It doesn't matter how ugly his reality is the rest of the time; when he draws a knife he knows how to use it. When he draws a knife he knows where to point it.

He locks his left arm on her good wrist and hauls Meredith to her feet. For as little as the Johnwayne cares about constructs like chivalry and honor, it still don't feel right to end someone sitting down in the dirt. Not when she's gone and decided on Will's behalf that she matters to him. He pulls her into a tight hug; she hardly reaches his shoulders and he lays his cheek on the top of her head.

You'd have to be some kind of psychopath in a moment like that to be thinking about how returning a hug brings the shoulder blades forward and leaves the heart unguarded.

He slips that beautiful bone-hilted dagger out of the sleeve of his cloak.

With a deep breath, Will irons the shakes out of his lungs so that his voice is the pinnacle of practiced composure when he whispers, "Don't come back now, y'hear?"