frostbite | beck day six

He's one year past expiration. A truth that has stitched his lips to his cheeks in the semblance of a smile. Not quite right, like he can't really remember how it's supposed to make his cheeks ache. No one knew the day he turned nineteen, it was one of many secrets he'd kept stashed beneath his tongue like the pills he hasn't been taking and -

he's not sure if he ever wanted that day to come.

Birthdays were always full of mourning, another stuttering step down steep cliffs and into deeper graves but none so much as nineteen. He'd locked himself in his room, blinds drawn so that he couldn't even make out the blurry outlines of his stolen body. Hoping to free himself of his hatred for an evening, hoping that might finally render him weightless. He was desperate when he pressed his back against the door like that was enough to block out the voices; living and dead all too heavy with their resentment and their pity and their love. All of it is burdensome. Only ever a burden.

Funny, he doesn't really remember bringing a bottle into the room with him but he woke up next to empty ones. Really, he was just grateful for the small mercy of stolen memories. He has far too many of those.

He's got so, so many of Luke. A symptom of shared childhood.

Maybe the Capitol has pills meant to suppress those too, it couldn't hurt to ask.

He was angry at him for a while. Anger is too fucking easy. Leaning into fire means it's harder to feel its burn, to feel anything but the gentle warmth of retribution. Then you can justify the pain when all is said and done. When you simply got what you deserved.

At least he can finally tell those who promised healing to go fuck themselves. Life does not go out of its way to be palatable. Gashes do not ebb to scars does not ebb to skin. They cling with claws in fragile brains and nightmares are just the remnants of whatever you're too weak to process.

But Beck Hailsham is defined by the way he clings to his heart's beat. Desperate and bloody as he holds it within his palms and counts every feeble convulsion. Luke volunteered and it soared into his throat, held in his mouth for the last six days tasting not of dread but of hope.

He's tired of being the one who survived.

He'd expected to break when Luke died. Or maybe yearned for something to shatter within him, a release of the tension wound around his throat like the frayed threads of an aging noose. Because anything was better than the way his eyes stung, sightless and dry as he stared at a television screen and made himself watch his friend's final moments.

It's only a little different on this side of the Capitol, there's no television grain to obscure their last expression.

It felt fucking awful and it felt much of the same.

He'd retired to his room not long after the canon's scream, in the dark again and nursing bottles again and glaring at dawn's light peeking through the blinds like it was a personal affront. There's shattered glass and crimson wine seeping down an adjacent wall from where he'd tried to get angry, the remnants of dried tears on his cheeks from when he'd tried to cry.

It always ended with his back to the door, in the dark again, glaring at nothing again.

He calls himself broken because it's better than callous.

Than numb.

Than complacent.

His prosthetic arm is discarded beside him, ruined in an attempt to remember what it once felt. His breaths come heavy through borrowed lungs and sometimes he holds his breath long enough to make his vision swim. "You're lucky." His phone screen lights up with a missed call, so he turns it over and lets his head fall back against the door with too much force. "I promise, you're the lucky one Luke." His voice is stained, rough and lazy with self imposed solitude.

He's lying, but he believes it too.

"I'm sorry."

He believes it too.