how not to drown {patricia/avriel} .:victory tour:.

"It's already raining."

Avriel blinks up at the grey skies, only half aware of the stylist team scrambling for their umbrellas. Gloria, his escort, pulls a clear hood up and holds it in place, a look of annoyance on her face.

"What, they not got weather in the Capitol?" he asks.

"Not if you don't want it," says Gloria.

Avriel doesn't answer that, it doesn't make any sense to him. He's come up against that issue a few times on this tour, people keep telling him things like he should know everything but he doesn't. He's still just the same old Avriel, just with a few more scratches and blood on his hands.

"Pull your hood up, you'll ruin your hair," she snaps at him.

Avriel does as he's told, even though Robbie doesn't seem to care about it himself. Perhaps he just knows by now that as soon as Av is out of sight, the hood will come down again.

He's taken to the rain.

He used to hate it back home but maybe that's just because in the winter, it'd get so cold and he'd come home soaked to the bone to a big empty house he couldn't afford to heat.

Now it doesn't matter, now he never has to look at a hydro bill again.

As they approach Five's Victor Village, Avriel starts to slow down. It doesn't matter how many districts they bring him to, how many Victors he meets, he's never been ready to meet any of them. He's been told over and over that these are the people who are supposed to understand him but with each one he meets, he only feels more separate.

None of them could know how it feels to drift alone in the middle of a lake in complete darkness. They can't know how it feels to lay there with an axe in your skin, staring at a tribute just as scared of him as he is of them through the eyeholes of a mask.

And he hates the way that they look at him, he hates the way it feels to stand in front of them and be told that they know what he's going through because they don't, Avriel doesn't even know what he's going through.

The wort part is how nice they are to him, though it's still better than the ones who hate him for living. That's been hard for him to work out, with twenty-three tributes destined to die, even holding out hope that your tributes will come back seems like a fool's game to him.

But how is Avriel supposed to know the way that feels? He's never had to watch two kids in a position he's been in before disappear up those tunnels into the Bloodbath. He doesn't have that pain to relate to yet so he can't understand.

He will, but not yet.

This is his year and he's spent the last five minutes of it standing on the street, staring up at–

"This is Victor Patricia Valfierno's home," Gloria says, "She won th-."

"The 68th," Avriel interrupts, "Twenty years before mine, fought in the dark, I wasn't even born yet."

Gloria still doesn't know him that well though she pretends to. He's seen her at all the events, watched as she's spoken about him like he's little more than a product.

"Yes, well then," Gloria sounds annoyed with him but Avriel doesn't care enough about her to be sorry. "We'll leave you to it, as always you have as long or as little as you please."

Gloria and the stylists leave him at Patricia's front door but the Peacekeeper escort stays. Avriel watches silently as they walk back towards the District Centre, umbrellas bobbing above their heads.

They look kind of stupid all walking together like that.

The large chest pocket on the jumpsuit Robbie put him in moves suddenly and then Scout appears slowly and blinks twice before looking up at Av.

"I know," he tells it, "I'm gonna knock I just needa sec."

He's never been good with meeting people but he's learned over time how to survive the process out of necessity.

He shuts his eyes for a moment.

"le monde peut te haïr, souviens-toi juste que je ne le fais pas."*

He's three years old and his mother's hand is brushing the hair off his forehead to kiss the scratch there.

Avriel knocks.

Patricia is smaller in real life.

Every time he sees her on the television, the angle they use make her seem taller or something. Maybe it's just that personality, still shining through after years of being a victor.

He blinks at her, nearly eye-to-eye, and a droplet of water runs down a strand of hair onto his cheek. The rain has picked up quickly, enough so that Avriel actually does pull his hood up despite that stubborn streak that tells him to leave it alone.

If he got sick enough, would they end this stupid tour early? He makes a mental note to ask.

Avriel watches Patricia talk to the two peacekeepers and something within him starts to bend. She doesn't seem the least bit scared of them. Avriel lived through the District Nine riots though, he knows those guns are more than just props, seen bodies laying in the streets full of holes, and he knows just how easily the white suits pull the trigger.

He can't tell if the District Five victor is brave, stupid or just smarter than everyone else in the room.

"Hi," he says back.

Social anxiety doesn't allow for much small talk.

In all of Patricia's propaganda, she's this young girl who survived the dark for a week but here, standing in front of her, he sees crows feet and a tired expression. It's got to be pretty repetitive meeting new victors.

The rain seems to get louder but Avriel doesn't ask her if she still wants to go, not when she's already just said that they're going for a walk. He turns around on her porch and goes back down the walk, figuring she'll be right behind him.

"You're not scared?" he asks and hooks a thumb over his shoulder at the peacekeepers following them a little ways back, "The way they watch me, I dunno if being a victor'll save me if I mess up."

Talking to Patricia is simple, as if this isn't their first conversation and they've been going on walks like this for years.

He keeps pace with her as they walk but not because he tries to, they just fall into a rhythm easily. She doesn't look at him very hard, doesn't lay a thousand weights on him with every word and that's new for him. It feels as if everyone has had a new burden for him to carry this tour.

"You're too valuable to them now for it to matter," she tells him. Her words should be reassuring but Avriel is smarter than he looks and he knows that there are other ways to keep people in line.

If the gangs in Nine can think to hold the safety of his siblings over his head, there's no way that the Capitol won't go there too.

He shivers a little bit and tries to tell himself that it's just the cold but that isn't entirely true. It's not the first time he's thought this during his tour but that nagging feeling is coming back, that one in the back of his mind that likes to tell him that Billie and Duke would be better off without him.

"Right, yeah," he mutters in the pause between those words and the next. Then she tells him of a hydro dam and Avriel can't help but be excited. He's read about Dams and how they work but he's never seen one in person. "I built a model one once in year six," he tells her, mouth running with the non-story before he can stop it, "It'll be cool to see a real one."

Five's a little greener then he expected and Avriel finds himself distracted by the mossy forest floor. It makes him think of that day in the hiking trail, when he'd left the girls for a little bit and found a stream to clean himself in. The forest had seemed beautiful for a moment then, when his friends had still been alive and the only pain he'd felt had been the scratches in his legs.

Av doesn't realize he's stopped walking until the other victor speaks again.

He starts a little, "Yeah, sorry," and follows her to a new looking bench on the bank of the reservoir. The water is dark under the grey skies, the rain falling makes hundreds of little ripples and something within him settles. A part of him was nervous that this lake would be too much like the one in the arena.

Patricia speaks simply, so bold and round that there are no corners to get lost in but it also doesn't leave much room for hiding from the topic.

She doesn't seem in a rush for his answer either and Avriel sits in silence, eyes shut, face turned up to catch raindrops to kill time.

"I learned all their names on the train ride in," he says finally, "Just so that when I was killed, I'd know who I was dying to but then I didn't die and I have all their names anyway. I remember each anthem, each face and each stat attached to them. Half of me wants to forget all of it and the other half can't bear to."

He scoops a few rocks up off the ground beside the bench and tosses them into the lake one by one, making a game of getting the next one in before the ripples of the stone before it can properly end.

"I wish I could regret their deaths but I can't because the only reason I'm here is because all of them died. That's fucked right?"

That makes me a monster, right?

"You want the truth?"

He's not certain that he does. Avriel hoards responsibility easy, always has. It feels good to carry various burdens because at the end of the day when he crawls into bed, he knows why he's so tired all of the time.

“They were all dead the minute that gong sounded.”

Avriel pauses, the next rock held tight in a closed fist as he stares at the lake. He still remembers that sound of course, it's likely that he always will. It marked the beginning of the end for all of them, for him too. He remembers that Avriel, that boy who stared across the green lawn and knew that his end awaited him in the arena but went running in anyway like the rest of them.

There'd been no other choice.

Patricia goes quiet for a moment but Avriel has nothing to fill the silence with. He throws another rock, fingers rolling off the side of it as he flicks his wrist perfectly. It skips twice before sinking.

Maybe it would have been better to die in there. Maybe it should have been him guiding Areto's hands over his stomach, knife gripped tightly.

That moment in the dark is still unfathomable, he can't look at all of it at once.

"You're a survivor," Patricia says.

Avriel can't help but ask, "Is that what you tell yourself to make it alright?" He knows that she's had twenty years to think about it, and it's almost odd sitting here with the woman who won two decades before him after meeting Stella, who was ten years after.

They're in three different stages of erosion.

"I did kill them," he says, hands in his lap, full of rocks. Water drips down the back of his neck and each new drop of water is icier than the last, but Avriel barely registers it anymore. "I can't just shift the blame like that. I felt my knife, I felt the give when Areto's body stopped fighting it. She died on my shoulder, I did that."

He drops the rocks then and they fall beneath him, bouncing and scattering on the cement platform the bench sits on.

"I know I can't change things," he says, "I wouldn't, but I don't want to excuse what I've done to get here, I can't."