champagne glasses { sin/nan }

He hadn't meant to go to the roof but the elevator had gone up instead of down and Sin had stepped out of it before he'd noticed. Then the elevator had left again, leaving a gentle ding in its wake. He'd stood there for a moment, staring at the closed doors, but then the wind had moved through his hair.

The roof was quiet. So far away from the city below that, it was near silent. For the first all week, Sin felt that he was alone. He hadn't had that in a while, the last time had been in the woods back in twelve. Even then there'd been birdsong.

He sat down carefully on the safety wall and let his feet dangle over the edge. It was easy to let himself drift like that, brain turning all the thoughts in his head over to see what was underneath.

He'd already experienced so much in just a few short days, more than he ever had in his short life it seemed. Maybe he should have been sad to know that he would be dying soon, that he was weak, malnourished and mistreated.

Sin wasn't afraid though. He'd lived so far, it would take more than a few scrapes to take him down no matter how small he looked. He was a survivor, always had been. Years in the Mortuus hospital had twisted him in some ways. He'd seen wounds so grotesque it felt as if death was imminent only to watch as his sisters pulled the poor sod back from the brink.

Humans were far more resilient than they thought.

There'd never been any question for Sin, he knew what he was capable of, had been through enough to know what he could withstand. Scars littered his body, slight, long, clean and ragged. All of them had stories but that didn't mean he remembered them all.

In the end, that's all they were anyway, stories.

Memories washed up slow and Sin spent much of the evening there, eyes shut against the setting sun.

"Hey, have a drink with me."

He opened his eyes, gaze falling on a girl from one of the career districts. Higher districts tended to ignore him, thoughts only on what they considered their real competition. Maybe when there were no other choices, he was good enough.

The bottle in her hands seemed sticky from the overflow that she'd let fall over the roof's edge only moments ago. On a cloudless night, Sin wondered if there was someone below who thought it was raining anyway.

Drinking had never been part of his life in Twelve. Such things weren't meant for a person like him. He was too young for it anyway.

There were days left though, in his life.

He took the bottle carefully and sniffed it, a chemical smell filling his nose. It smelt like the cleaner he'd used to clean the floors every night in the hospital. It wasn't something he'd ever considered drinking before.

The girl seemed insistent though so he took a sip gingerly. It wasn't as bad as he thought it was going to be but he still made a slight face at the mouth of the bottle before passing it back.

She didn't wait for a response, which was good. There'd been many times in the past week the other tributes had spoken to him where he'd stared back blankly for too long. Their cheeks had reddened, they'd said, "Oh yeah, sorry," but no one had ever apologized to Sin before then. They didn't know that it was precious to him and he wanted to open his mouth and say thank-you but he'd forgotten how.

It seemed such a simple concept to push air up through his throat and catch the chiming of his vocal cords along the way. Sin hadn't made a sound in so long. When he used to walk to the market in twelve, kids would stand along the road and make barking sounds at him, just trying to get him to speak. It was fear at first that kept him silent, then it was just habit.

No one here seemed to mind but then, the less attached others were to him the easier it would be for them to kill him.

So he understood.

And he didn't mind being a sounding board.

Her story was sad, so he kept it, much like the whispers that sill followed him from the graves in twelve. Maybe that's what he could be, what he'd always been, some strange sort of keeper of the disappeared and gone.

But who was going to keep him when he was gone? If he had all those stories but couldn't tell them, they'd die with him. It'd be like he was killing them all over again.

Nanette was spilling everything to him, much in the same way that the dying always had. Secrets had a way of coming out, always, most people didn't get that but Sin did. It's why Eirlys had told him he wasn't allowed to talk and why he was still afraid to.

She was dead, but she wasn't.

Sin wished he could tell Nanette that he understood what it was like to lose a mother. It wasn't entirely true though. Eirlys hadn't been his mom and he could barely remember his birth mother. She'd sold him to Eirlys for morphling from the hospital stock.

Nanette's relationship with her mom was probably better than that though. She seemed genuinely sad. He didn't know what that was like, but Sin was beginning to understand that he didn't have to know exact details. Nanette's sadness existed with or without him.

If he did something, said anything, he didn't know if that would help lessen it. The old Sin wouldn't have tried, would have just kept on staring into the distance, and lived inside his own head.

But Nanette's voice broke in all the wrong places, and it wasn't fair that someone would actually miss her when she was gone.

He wanted someone to miss him too.

So he reached out carefully and placed a hand on hers, fingers always so cold to the touch as if he really were a warden of death.

Then he slipped the bottle from her grasp and dropped it over the edge of the building.