war of hearts . kopal

k a t e l y n .

Trapped in my old ways.
Can't seem to break free from anything
'Cause this is all that I've ever known
And I'm afraid it won't let me go

It was the kind of fight that really made a person feel the weight of their years, she thought as she entered the room and realized what was on the screen. She couldn’t remember the last time one and eleven had been up against each other. She hadn’t felt this concerned about what Opal thought about the games since Harbinger came home.

That year, Septys Lexig had made the four-person finale too, but he’d been killed by Heather from seven before Harbinger had killed her and come home. Opal had congratulated her that year, albeit sorrowfully and stiffly. It would have meant a lot to her to finally bring a tribute home. At least she managed to, two years after that, with Justice Fray. On the screen, Jade and Arabella picked up their knives. She was sick of the catacombs already, the Capitol always found a way to make things worse.

How was she supposed to pick a side?

Opal looked like hell and it made her heart hurt. Katelyn’s hand found hers for a moment, but she moved behind where Opal was sitting and placed her hands on Opal’s shoulders, softly kneading the tension with her fingers, before putting more pressure. “I know you haven’t been sleeping,” she chided reproachfully. She wanted to say she could make it better, but she didn’t think she could. “You’re beyond tense, babe.” She said quietly as she ramped up her massage.

Jade had been sent to the catacombs for the capitol to work their abominable science on by Callum. That lonely boy from twelve had found a spine and people were going to suffer for it. Despite the fact that they’d proven themselves time and time again over the years, tributes from twelve were not expected to kill careers. Opal would suffer for this, even if Callum’s final blow hadn’t actually killed Jade.

Or maybe it had.

Fuck if she understood the science behind it, she just knew it existed, just like the chemical cocktail they’d kept injecting her with to take her mind from her. One of the only things she understood was that Patricia had been wrong about Lysander after all. The girl hadn’t died after five minutes. In fact, she’d outlasted all of her allies. Well, Arabella’s second chance notwithstanding.

She couldn’t believe it at first, but there’d been no resurrection for the girl from two. Arabella would have no help in this fight. She wondered if the body had truly been too damaged to repair, or if it had simply been more cost effective to not waste resources reviving a tribute who wanted to die. She watched the screen in muted silence as Jade scrabbled at the door in a panic.

A little late to find your conscience, Jade.

Arabella demanded the career face her, and Katelyn felt a flash of something familiar. This fight here was a prime example of why careers never won as much as the Capitol would have liked. In the upper districts kids were trained, taught they were better than everyone else; or else given a reason to prove themselves. Lower district kids were treated like scum, belittled and made to feel small by their government.

The Capitol’s problem was that they failed to understand what happened to those two ideologies when faced with the stark reality of the games and the trauma it caused. Generally, it only took a few days for careers to realize that all the training in the world couldn’t prepare you to actually kill someone. It only took a few days for tributes from lower districts to realize that they were stronger than the world that had spent years beating them down.

In the time it took for career minded tributes to find their hearts, tributes from the lower districts lost theirs.

Katelyn held back a scoff as Jade went to pieces, as Arabella found an inner strength in the midst of the confusion. If she was watching this alone or with the boys, she might have spat something unkind, said aloud that she hoped Arabella would use that fire, that hurt about Cyro to gut Jade like a fish and get things over with. But hadn’t Opal said she’d gone above and beyond to teach her tributes to fight, to kill? For Ky’s sake. And those lessons stood a good chance of taking Arabella away from Matthew and Ellen.

God have mercy, Lysander reading that letter out loud had all but broken her. She couldn’t bear the thought of apologizing to Arabella’s parents in person. Of attending another double funeral. Arabella had brought life to those old bones and if that spark got extinguished in was on her abilities as a mentor. As the senior victor. There was a young girl that had parents that needed her home.

But they all did, she reminded herself. There were twenty-four families praying that their kid would come home. None of the kids’ lives were worth more than the others. That’s why she’d given Callum some pointers about medicinal herbs. They all deserved a shot. It was sick, the way the Capitol pitted the districts against each other, forced them to value one life above another.

Sick because it worked.

Katelyn knew that deep down, she only had enough energy to care, really care about a few people. And everyone else was the same. You could talk a big game about helping your fellow man, but family came first. Friends. The community. Sometimes you had to choose. You couldn’t save everyone. She’d had sixteen years to learn that. It was the way the system was built. Fuck the rest, she didn’t know jackshit about them, their families, or their hopes and dreams. They were strangers with loved ones sure, but they were strangers.

She knew Arabella now. Had done her best to ready her in the weeks leading up to the games. Arabella was more important than some girl who lived hundreds of miles away and were it not for the games, Katelyn wouldn’t even know that Jade existed. Never mind that if not for the games, she probably wouldn’t know who Arabella was either. But there wasn’t enough room in her heart. For years she’d tried to shoulder her district’s burdens, tried to be a beacon of hope to anyone who needed it. But it was impossible to care about everyone all of the time.

This was why some people saw her as cold, wasn’t it? When she threw herself into the role of mentor, she strategized, calculated, and saw her tributes as more important. She could be shrewd, and cold if she felt the situation warranted it.

It was agony, knowing that Jade’s survival was tantamount to Opal and Ky’s continued well-being. Because she couldn’t bring herself to care about yet another run of the mill career who clearly enjoyed fighting until the shoe was on the other foot. "You need to relax." she told Opal. "This isn't healthy, pushing yourself like this. Ky needs you, and you can't help him if you're on the verge of passing out."

"Why do you care so much if it's me? I'm just a silly girl, remember? You're the career, the warrior..."

There were plenty of warriors moldering in their graves while the survivors dealt with what came after the war. Jade was nothing special, she wanted to tell Arabella. Just another face in the crowd. It had to be that way. If she spent too much time seeing her as a person she wouldn't be able to stomach it if Arabella killed her.  And on the flip side, she wouldn't be able to stomach it if  Jade died and Ky and Opal suffered because Opal had failed the task the man in the suit had set for her. 

Katelyn moved her thumbs to the back of Opal's neck and hated herself for her hypocrisy.

k a t e l y n .

Trapped in my old ways.
Can't seem to break free from anything
'Cause this is all that I've ever known
And I'm afraid it won't let me go

“He’s what?” she said sharply, ignoring Opal’s bitter jabs at the current state of career training. “How? What happened? She was horrified. “Is Ky okay, what did they do? Opal??” Her eyes flicked to the screen as their remaining tributes had a heart to heart. Fuck, they really wanted district one to reclaim and keep its status at the top. Were they bothering Justice and Ridley like this too? Or just Opal since she had seniority?

Stop your bitching, she wanted to tell Jade through the screen. You made your bed, now lie in it. This is a trap, she wanted to tell Arabella. Don’t fall for it. In the end Jade would choose herself. People always did.

And then the conversation took a turn for the worst.

It was a knife to her heart.

Years ago, she’d have never thought she’d find comfort or love in the arms of a career. She’d treated Leon like crap in the old days. Butted heads with Cricket a few years ago. Ignored most of the others. She’d seen them all as being the same, incompatible personalities, only out for themselves. But she was friends with Annie now, wasn’t she? And Opal was—

Jade was quickly becoming a reminder that careers were people too. And maybe she had more in common with Opal than either of them would have admitted. She didn’t want to think about that. She wanted Jade to be a nonentity, just another faceless statistic that they all had to live with.

She wanted to scream at Arabella for throwing away her advantage, for not eviscerating the career while Jade was still in a panic. But then, that’s not what she would have done all those years ago. In the end, she’d tried to understand Chaske, even as he pushed her to the brink of death. She’d pitied him in his dying moments. And now she found herself pitying yet another career who had been taught to kill, but not how to love.

"I-- I think I...love you. I don't know what kind. I don't know much about love. I don't want..."

Fuck this. Absolutely fuck this. Jade didn’t get to play that card. Not now. Not when so much was at stake. She darted forward and the laceration she carved into Arabella’s arm bled like crazy. Is that how the two of them had been all those years ago? Opal being crushed under the pressure to perform for her family. Katelyn finding her inner strength but staying true to herself until the end? There were parallels here, she thought. And she didn’t have the energy to deal with them.

Arabella had taken a page from her book and was trying to get Jade to toughen up. Admirable, but not the time, place or person. Katelyn hissed in anxiousness when the career opened up a fearsome gash on Arabella’s arm. It was a good hit. A deadly hit. A hit that cost her an ear a moment later. God, she couldn’t handle this right now.

“Opal, talk to me, how is he doing?” she said instead, tearing her gaze away from the tributes. Ky was in the hospital. And he was the only person that took up as much space in Opal’s heart as her, if not more. Opal was sure to collapse soon if she didn’t get a break.