no throat can hold me // terra one-shots.

When you finally arrive back in District Ten the air feels heavier. The silence heavier still.

Anyone who looks at you, even the Keepers, has an edge about them. Their eyes don't linger for long, darting away as soon as you catch their curious, mortified gazes. At first you think it the gross scar across your forehead, or that you're hurried from place to place surrounded by Peacekeepers, but after a while you realise that the reason nobody wants to look at you is because they're terrified of you.

It was easier when nobody knew what you could do. And now the whole world knows. If they whisper about you, you can't hear what they say - but the way they shuffle, avoid your eyes, the way they make you feel so terribly lonely speaks volumes.

And why should they want to be near you, let alone talk to you? The only friend you ever had and you sent him tumbling to his early death. And the worst part is, you didn't even try. It was just instinct. Muscle memory. An innate reaction drilled into you for as long as you can remember: survive.

Who knew wanting to live would be such a lonely thing.

You turn to walk home and a Keeper grabs your arm, tells you they have a home built for you instead. The way he grips your skin lightly with a shaking, clammy palm tells you he knows you could poke both his eyes out right then and there with a grip too tight, too firm, too sudden. That you'd killed a dozen men like him, that he knows it.

Even you're a little terrified of you. But you're a good girl, trained to follow orders and never ask questions, so you follow him into a Keeper van and let him take you to your new home. It's natural for a girl of the Circle to simply do.

It's natural for a girl of Panem, soon to be paraded around for all to see, to wonder why a van of armed Keepers drive in the opposite direction toward your side of town. So when the clock in your new, grand living room strikes twelve you grab your coat and a kitchen knife and set off, comforted by the familiarity of the night and the invisibility it gives you.

The stars do not shy away from you, welcoming you back into their light like you hadn't slaughtered child after child on national television. They told you tomorrow you would leave, to spend the night getting to know the house in what they called the Victor's Village, and although you're used to a large home you're not used to the never-ending quiet, the emptiness of the halls, the unnerving stillness of a home uninhabited. If not tonight, then never again.

Childish of you to want to see them one last time. But they were all you knew before your life as Victor, some of them all you knew before the beginning of Terror, back when you were just a little girl called Terra. They deserved a goodbye. Boss deserved a thank-you.

They deserved it, but you should have known they'd never give you what you wanted. Not now. Not after what you did. Children from Ten aren't supposed to know how to slaughter six children. Street-rats shouldn't know how to wield a blade so skillfully. Little girls who live in a house full of children shouldn't have been able to drive a sword through another's skull in the blink of an eye.

Orphans shouldn't be able to tell that these children were poisoned before the Keepers littered their bodies with bullets, but you stand in the dim lamplight of Montague House and see in-between the bulging irises and blood soaked clothes the little remnants of foam at the corners of their mouths, the blood-shot whites of their eyes, their green tongues, the half-finished food in each and every one of their bowls.

Ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing.

They're all dead. Afraid, your ears tell you, afraid - and you should be. You should be petrified, staring at a scene so familiar. Breakfast. Blood. Bullets. It's like fragments of your memories have crashed together at the same point in time and you're standing in the wake of their destruction.

You should be terrified at what you're looking at. You should shake and scream and cry to see the only home you've ever known reduced to a morgue, spend your whole life wondering whether it was the Stroms or the Copperheads or the Cottonmouths or whether Boss himself decided it better to kill the children himself before the Keepers did.

Instead you just stare at the six symbols carved on the wall, smothered with blood and bullet holes, and light the place on fire.

Destroy the evidence - muscle memory.

You walk away from the blazing building and know now why they're all so terrified of you.

Terror of Montague.

Now simply:

This house is too empty and the world is too quiet. You wanted to bury him but they had already burned his body to ash. You wanted to visit his family but they were long gone. You wanted to see where he grew up but the war had long since destroyed it.

He had no-one left. Nothing. Not even a voice. And you took it from him.

You gave him all that you had and in the process, you took all that he had left to give.

And you dare to still want some of him left for yourself?

This house is too empty and you cannot hear them coming to get you. Coming to kill you for what you did. You had the idea to wait them out, spot them coming from afar, tried to perch on the roof and slipped. They said your balance never the same with the ringing and you wanted to prove them wrong, foolish stubborn girl. Thank god you still have your hands to catch your fall. Or maybe not, you had thought, dangling at the edge with copper roofing cutting scars into your palms. This is no gift, nothing to thank, nothing to celebrate.

Ringing, ringing, ringing, you cannot turn as sharply as you once did without faltering. You cannot sleep. You cannot run without falling. You cannot stand up quickly without feeling the world tilt. You cannot shake the paranoia that creaks and groans in-between your bones. You cannot communicate. You cannot connect. You cannot, and likely never will again.

This is a curse.

So you pulled yourself to safety, climbed down slowly from your rooftop and waited. Curled up and crouching barefoot in your living room, as still as glass. A purple curve of the moon embedded below each eye, sharpening the knife in your hands, twitching at every false movement in the windows and waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting in the ringing ringing ringing ringing ringing afraid afraid afraid afraid they're coming to kill you they're coming to kill you they're coming to kill you they're coming to kill you even though they're all dead.

Afraid, your broken ears demand you listen.

He was afraid. He told you so.

And you took everything he had left regardless,

The dark is pillaging. You become empty, raw, the ringing leaving you with nothing but fear and rage.

Their ghosts will get you. You won't hear them come in. You wait and wait and wait until you're crying, howling, screaming into the polished wooden floors of the house they tell you to call a home and it's not fair that this home stands untouched and Lachlan's home is rubble, that he is dust, ash like Montague House.

You scream and scream and scream, desperate to drown it out, the hunger to hear your voice once more ripping down your throat. Six words, over and over and over, you can feel your grief in your chest, in your lungs, in your pounding head. But you cannot hear your voice.

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

You have nothing left. Not even a sound.

They want you to remember that.

Forever, the last thing he said to you.

Forever, you had responded.

Afraid. Forever.

You rise with the sun, empty girl in the echoes of Lachlan Renwick.

You sign on the metaphorical dotted line.

There is no bargaining, for you have nothing and no-one left for them to bargain with. They know that as well as you do. Boss poisoned the children of Montague, the Capitol riddled their bodies with bullets, and you burned down the building just to be sure of it.

It is a stalemate. You have something they want. You want nothing at all. They could put a bullet in your skull but the world has already seen too much of what you can do. Everyone will see right through your execution and this brave new world is too young to survive another uprising.

No-man's land, you oblige with three words;

I'll do it.

The Capitol representative sighs with relief through her nostrils, masking it with a curt nod.






You find a poster drifting across the street walking up to the Justice Building of One, your face designed to disgust and intrigue at the same time. A reminder, a warning, an offering. Terra Montague is a martyr, an apostle, somehow one in the same.

Only a few turn up at first, the most deranged and desperate children. But as words you cannot hear spread, more come. A handful, a dozen, a whole hall full. These children, and their parents, are smarter than they seem - it pays to have a trick up your sleeve should your name be called. Teleprompters ask you questions, some specific to the games and some far-flung. You respond with short words you cannot hear and the language you've spent years mastering.

Blades fly across the room, faux limbs are snapped, throats are slit but nobody bleeds. You show them how you used the sinking ship to your advantage, ricocheting off of a wall and slicing through the air. Quickly, efficiently, quietly. For the first time since the canon exploded on your ship, you're thankful you cannot hear their responses to your wickedness.

They watch first, then mirror your actions. Some have a natural talent, some none at all, some catch on after the first few sessions. They have questions, mostly about weapons and movements, but one girl stands at the front row and you know just by looking at her that she would have been recruited by the Circle if this awful world had orphaned her in Ten five years ago.

// how did you do it?

the teleprompter asks.

Do what? you inquire, looking her square in the eyes. It's a sign of respect, and you think of Teddy King boarding your ship - equal, in all ways but one.

// hide in plain sight?

It is the only question you cannot answer.






Later, you close your eyes and see that girl's steely gaze, asking yourself the same question over and over and over again. There are some things, some people, some forces you can't hide from, even when you're a ghost in the shadows.

You know what awaits you back in Ten. But you try not to think about it as the train slips closer and closer to District Two with every passing mile.