what the morning holds :: larceny

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It's cold.

He feels small, his body recoiled into a ball of sheets and skin. The voices of night creep in through the cracked window, but they sound more like softened screams. Something smashes outside on the street. A bottle? A bag of groceries? It doesn't matter, Larceny's body bends unnaturally out of the bed. Panic corrupts the clarity of the blue ocean eyes the boy - no, the young man, owns. He's shaking. He can tell because the gun he grabbed from the nightstand is shuddering in his fingers. It feels wrong, like the bullets are burning inside of the chamber. It falls from his hands onto the swath of sweat stained sheets as his body crumples to the carpet. Arms instinctively pull knees into his chest as the sound of the softest sob leaves his lips.

Broken breaths escape as visible threads of life just as tired eyes catch the clock before walking out into the early morning. A quarter past three in the morning as here he walks alone with a gun in one hand and the other keeping closed the lone coat that covers his skin. Even his walk is fractured practically falling over his feet. Anyone he walks past he hears what whispers they say, the same he hears every morning like this. There goes that Theft boy, one of them half alive kids from the arena. That's why he walks like that so late at night. Larceny laughs at them as he ignores the salt his tears bring to his tongue. As a matter of fact, this is exactly how he walked through the Garden of Death and plucked the rose of rebirth from beneath His horned head of ice and fire. It's a trophy. A flower who's scent they shall never know. The perfect mixture of blood and decay.

The rusted gate of the cemetery cries as Larceny lurches it open. As a teenager, Larceny saw himself as a Titan. He turned tragedy into triumph. He wrote his story as half of the most mythic thieves in Panem's history. One of two twins to not only survive, but belittle the Capitol constantly. But he didn't count on the variables, the other characters who came into the story. The boys whose graves he stands at in the dead of night except not as dead as them. Larceny could live with his corrupted crown of revival, but he can't escape the phantom faces of the ones who fell for him. He can't ignore the boys who sit in the Garden in his stead. The boys who remind him what happens when Larceny Theft lets himself love.

Ollivander's face flashes through his mind.

"No!"

Larceny screams shoving his face into his hands, feeling the gun's side press against his salt stained cheek. He can see his blonde hair. He can hear the pages he flips through. He can feel his curious eyes watching him walk out of any room. He can see the small smile that sometimes slips onto his shy lips. It all emerges as an angry cry against the darkness of the morning.

The gun clicks.

Larceny is a single shadow standing alone surrounded by the tragedies of his heart. His eyes rise to the moon, blue circles of confusion. Maybe Maxwell was right. Maybe he is waiting for him right now. A broken breath breaks free and Larceny's eye lids shut.

The gun fires.

.

.

.

.

.

The soft shine of morning spills into the same room the blonde boy sleeps. Outside the world is beginning to stir. A sound comes from the hall, the soft spinning of the door handle. Larceny shuts the door to the room behind him, the coat covering his shirtless and sweat stained skin falls to the floor. He walks to the side of the bed staring at the now open eyes of Ollivander, confusion clouding their edges. Larceny's hand rises to the other boy's face, pausing a moment before clearing a tendril of blonde away. Then he climbs onto the bed beside the other boy with only two words.

"Hold me."

In the cemetery, the early rays of light fall upon the graves of Severus Ward and Orion Starcrest. In between the two sets of stone is a gun and a bullet hole. Several other stones spell out a message: no more fear.

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