everyone you know goes away :: Fridae & Fitz

It's on the third day that he realizes he's built himself on an empire of dust and dirt, as easy to destroy as it was to build.

It takes the form of a restless night, tossing and turning in sheets that have been bleached one too many times for the blood of Three's past tributes to still linger on in the folds. They feel heavy and broken by the time midnight rolls around, cloak turned chain and he's dragged down and down until eventually his eyes close, holographic images of Three's smog-stained skies the last thing he sees before slipping into the silence.

Maybe that's his curse, yeah, to miss a place he'd claimed as home but had never felt it claim him back, to miss the soft warmth of a fire made only to last the night, to yearn for the feeling of white-knuckled fists pressed into his stomach until he finally collapses to the ground and lets himself taste the dirt.

That's what he misses the most, that type of pain. The physical kind, that dances across the skin and threads itself in blues and blacks and purples and screams when you touch it, that stains your skin red with the blood of a split lip as it dribbles down your chin. The kind that ebbs and flows and goes away with time, always prominent but never permanent.

The kind that is nothing like what he feels now, all icy heart and shortened breaths and the inability to stare at himself in the mirror without seeing a husk of rotting flesh and exposed heart, like nothing he's ever seen before. Every morning that he awakes he buries it, sneaks a swig of a bottle and cracks his knuckles and hisses at the fluorescent lighting of the training center whenever he enters. Easier to hold a scowl on the face than sadness, he tells himself.

When he sees a girl with calloused fists and swinging hooks and a training dummy wobbling on its feet he feels his eyes widen, feels a smirk slide onto his face as for the first time since he's entered the Capitol he sees home. 

"I know fists that have seen a fight or two when I see 'em." He says as he approaches her from behind the training dummy, feeling the hollow clanks as it wobbles back and forth from her punch before he puts a palm to the head and stops it, devilish grin still dancing on lips that are begging to be split and bleed.

"You're a fighter too, huh?"