Aurelia Adams🗡️ D2🗡️

That anger fueled me, so much that I got tired of knives and wanted to play more dangerous games of war hammers, swords, and glaives. My favorite and first love would be the axe. It was an easy transition from the knives, but it was beautiful to control a heavy beast in an intrinsic dance. You’d have to fall in step, since one wrong swing and you’re vulnerable with no defense. Mom grew proud of my choice, and would praise me whenever I came home after a hard day. By fourteen she could rest easy knowing she sculpted me into the perfect career. I didn’t like the thrill of the hunt that coursed through my veins when fighting, but it wasn’t towards the others. It was to prevent my fall, to prevent the vase from shattering continuously, since I don’t want to find out what happens when mothers like mine have kids too shameful to not get reaped or for the ones that die trying.

She said she would be proud, but Antoinette was a chess game with an unpredictable and reckless strategy. Like oil ignited atop water, mom would light fire in safer waters as a means of abandoning ship once the reward had been won. That's what happened with my dad, and all I could wonder was what did my other half do to deserve that. Then again, I heard that he only liked leading her in chases, and one thing I knew about mom was she hated being out played. I guess that's one thing I gained from her, since my temper grew worse. I don’t think anyone could blame me though, since everyone gets tired after having to swallow someone’s shit with a smile on their face for years. I think by fifteen she started to grow disappointed. Since I was three away from eighteen and by then it's too late for glory. You just become a washed out mistake, a woman like my mom who drinks to forget what she could have been.

When I was younger, I hated whenever she would compare her to I. It felt like she was constantly reminding me of how I'll never be enough; that life in Two could never satiate the drive of Antoinette Adams. A hunger I don't even think the Capitol or One could satisfy. And then, her favorite month rolled around to roll around in her own shit. April showers may bring May flowers in some areas, but here all I felt was a drowning instinct. There wasn’t any water in a room, but the suffocation felt all the same since I knew by the sense of her chilled presence the flood gates would erupt, ones not even Ripred could protect us against. Ones that no matter how I harness that gravitas, my blade strikes ceased to protect me against her disappointment.

Rock bottom finally came for her the day I went to take a shower and I found her in the tub. It was a school day, but I ditched instead to go on a run, I always did in late April, since there was no point exploding at someone in the academy when I’ll get a lecture at home, regardless. She should have been helping others train at hers, but when I came to the bathroom, the entire liquor cabinet laid on the floor. A bare foot hung from out the tub, my mother slouched against a corner wearing an outfit that showed she had chosen to go to the bar instead of her typical gym wear that she adorned for training future potential killers. Normally year round she wasn’t this bad, and hell some months she would stay sober. But it always was in December, April, and July when she’d bottom out.

In months like those, I had to walk on eggshells, and I did so once more. I tried reaching and grabbing her arms to help her out of the tub, but her hands clawed at my neck and eventually, mom jutted her palm up my nose, Blood gushed down my lip, and with a curse shot at Ripred I shoved my mother back into her pit. Her forearm hit the tiles, and she held that wicked grin and cursed gaze as if our metaphorical vase had finally taken its true form. “Come on big girl, show me what you’ve got” she’d muse, her eyes shifting into a prowl as if another teen I’d face off from in the academy. “You want to keep rotting away as if the world owes you something for peaking when you were a teen? Have at it, mom. But at least don’t hog the fucking shower is all I ask.” The door’s wooden frame clanged abruptly against the metal frame, encouraging the sloppy drunk to stumble after me.

This only warmth in the home that day was the alcohol tinged sweat that glided off mom’s skin, and of mine trying to outrun problems that bound me in a perpetual loop. Yet she finally did it, she finally blatantly asked, “why can’t you just be like her?”

Heat and tension traveled past my jaw, hands bawling into fists that I opened and closed, running a hand through my mane that I allowed to flourish on my own accord, comb or Antoinette be damned. “Like who? Please, enlighten me who this mystery girl is because guess what mom, she isn’t here! I’m the one here.” My throat croaked at the final delivery, heart racing, heat tugging at the corner of my petal lips. But I knew her next words, that I would never be her; and in turn she knew mine, that I never would want to be a washed out drunk like her.

This is how we fell apart. How our vase cracked and how we both perpetually fell off skyscrapers in dreams like the ones mourned over from the remnants of before in Two. Before we would hug each other, in hopes our golden shells would help us bounce, but we’ve let go for a while. And I knew better than to hold on to dead weight that’ll only make me fall faster in my descent.

By the 86th I wanted nothing more than to go in. So I can escape my time loop, and finally prove my worth and stake to claim. That I was the one, I wasn’t her two. But I ended up meeting my other half that day. We met in passing but I instantly knew who she was. Since her elongated and arched nose fell in the same way as mom’s, her espresso curls bounced like mine in the heat of July. We both stood tall in tawny skin and dauntingly high cheekbones to take on the world before us. I recognized her and had heard of her. She was the girl from the academy down the road, the one who handed ass to a boy with the use of only a weapon that people couldn’t control. And then she disappeared just like she appeared; she truly was a fable, something that didn’t belong in Two.

In my tweed skirt and puffed blouse, I reached out for her only to get a side eye from the other girls that filed in lines of two as if they owned the plaza themselves. After her towering frame stepped onto stage, alongside another infamous boy, she dazzled and burned out just as any career did, with sultry waves and cocky grins. Even on the TV, that demeanor never wavered in her chariot rides. On the way back from that day, I suggested mom go talk to her. All I heard was “I’m sixteen years too late, Aurelia.”

I brewed mom’s sobering chamomile tea at her request, a fragrant weed that she consumed a month earlier than her break. Her pores had sweated the following days as she watched the opening ceremony. Waving and appearing as beautiful as how I could only imagine victors appear, clad in a dress of armor, mom knew she was the one too. “I only was hard on you, Aurelia, since I wanted you to be like her. I never got to know her, since I was afraid of her.” I sat still on the rickety rocking chair, the grain digging into me while we stared ahead at the archaic monitor before us. Our days blended the same in summer time, since there wasn’t much else to do. I usually trained to give me some purpose other than being a teenage caretaker. Instead, on days like these I stayed, watching through the black mirror that reflected a girl like me. But then it happened, a fight so gruesome my mom wailed in a way I have never heard from her. She collapsed, and I turned off the tv, holding her as she rocked, seeping streams of remorse into the seams of my grey tank top. I thought it would be an honor to die for Two, that she wouldn’t behave this way, but through fire, blood, lost limbs, and ice, mom knew she was right.

That girls like us didn’t have a chance, no matter if we were the ones who had it all from the start. Mom fell into the deep end once again, shoving me away and locking herself into her room. My fist pounded against the thin wood, pleading to be let in, afraid she would relapse, but she cursed and shouted for space. So I gave her that, picking up my bag and jogging back to a place that I ruled. A homemade eggplant scrunchy made from a torn scarf, slid off my wrist, weaving into mocha coiled mane that my doppelgänger would never see. I ignored what was currently being taught, interrupting a class in the back as I dropped my bag wordlessly, staking claim to  an axe off a nearby rack.

And then my siren’s song cried out from my throat, as it had within Antoinette half an hour before. I drove my blade into a punching bag of all things, hacking with such a ferocity that the hourglass had spilt, time slipping out of its stomach, grains spilling at my feet; just like I did in my dreams, just like I did through mom’s cupped hands. The vase’s edges bled into one like Domitia had in the frost far away, and at that moment I realized we were all trapped here in Two. And no matter how we tried, we were doomed to die the same. There was no glory in the games, and no glory for those outside. All we were left with is lowered expectations, so we didn’t have to fall too far.