Body Double

Content Warnings; Violence, Death, Torture, Usual Hunger Games Suffering Body Double on AO3

[bodydoublefanfic]

Body Double Chapter Masterlist

The 69th Hunger Games. Won by the female tribute of district 12. But, the true winner would not travel home. A body double is sent in her place, and Haymitch has to navigate keeping this strange girl safe while Panem, and Snow, watches.

Content Warnings; Violence, Death, Torture, Usual Hunger Games Suffering

Also readable on AO3

Part 1; Farewells and Hellos

Chapter 1, A Toast

Chapter 2, Funeral Pyre, artwork

Chapter 3, Mirror Image

Chaper 4, Selfishness

Chapter 5, Un-Birthday

Chapter 6; Capitol Issue Frivolity

Chapter 7; Gratitude

Chapter 8; Cattle Brand

Part 2; Spare Parts

Chapter 9; No-mans Land

Chapter 10; Grey, art

Chapter 11; Tendon

Chapter 12; TV Glow

Chapter 13; Lie

Chapter 14; Just Children

Chapter 15; Cookie

Chapter 16; Helios

Part 3; Broken Things

Chapter 17; Pillage

Chapter 18; Blockade

Chapter 19; Requiem

Chapter 20; Loathing

Chapter 21; Defetive

Chapter 22; Fault

Chapter 23; Rope

Chapter 24; Reverberating Echoes

Chapter 25; Blood, Sweat, Tears

Chapter 26; Sunrise, Sunset

Part 4; Cold, Cold, Cold

Chapter 27; Bruised Fruit

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 28; Pocket Full of Trinkets

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

Effie pulls out a long, elegant glass vial from her pocket. The liquid inside was pale, slightly cloudy. She delicately unscrews the top, stepping closer to Vee. My own frown deepens even more. 

“Open.” Effie asks Vee, holding the vial up to Vee’s mouth. 

“What is that?”

“Morphling.” She rushes through the word in a forced nonchalant way, as if she hoped I wouldn't notice it. My hand moved quickly to grab hers, my brow raising. Effie never gave off the impression of a morphling addict. She was too put together, too stylish and much too (at least for Capitol standards) sane. Or maybe… maybe the morphlings purpose was to keep her sane? 

“Morphling? Why do you-” I say, scrunching my brows. 

“It’s a long story,” Effie pauses, as if trying to conjure up something to placate me out of thin air. She must come up empty. “For another time.”

“I can keep my mouth closed, Effie. You know that…”

She takes a deep breath as if considering, her eyes fixing somewhere over mine and Vee’s shoulders. “I suppose I do… but you have to promise-”

“Who am I gonna tell, Effie? The bottom of a bottle?” 

“Point made; though maybe you should find yourself better friends to talk to than alcohol.” Effie replies with a tight, chiding smile and small huff. 

“Point made.” I counter, adjusting Vee a little against me. “We both promise not to tell.”

“Promise?”

I nod, fairly sure that she is about to break down and cry at my feet, lamenting about how hard it is in the Capitol, how the murder of innocent district children is destroying her, how the guilt of ferrying them to slaughter is eating her alive. That the morphling it to dull it all. 

I’d understand it. I do the same.

But no. Instead, she lifts the edge of her plush skirt and uses the heel of her alarmingly high stiletto to scoop the shoe off from the other foot. She spares one final glance at the door to check it is indeed shut, and one more glance at me before she turns her ankle for just a moment towards me. I can see the burning rise of embarrassment in her cheeks before my eyes move down to the gnarled skin of her feet. The flesh is pocked with blisters and cracks and bruises, deep bloody fissures that separate her skin. The bottom of her silky stockings are dappled with dried and fresh blood. 

She must see the shock on my face, because she quickly tucks her foot away back into the shoe.

“Fuck, Effie. Did you run over hot coals?”

She huffs again, a little amused, rearranging her skirt. “It feels like it sometimes, without the morphling;”

“How are you even walking?” She simply shakes the small morphling vial in reply, smiling at me sheepishly. She steps closer to Vee again, ready to give the drug to her.

“For how long?” The softness of my voice surprises me, and her as well, because she freezes again. 

“Oh… I’ve lost count.” She says, turning her gaze away. “I have it refilled weekly… doctors orders, of course.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to wear something less ridiculous on your feet? What’s the point if-”

“Social suicide is not quite my style!” She retorts with genuine offense, though she can’t seem to hide the undercurrent of sadness to her words. It's pitiful to think that she has to do this just to fit in. 

“So you chug back morphling so you can keep looking all pretty, got it.” I find myself having to push down a hot bubble of anger. I’m not proud of much but I am proud that I never touched morphling. I found my addictions in other places. 

She doesn’t skip a beat; “Well, it’s either that or having needles stabbed into my feet every month.” She practically scowls. “And you know how much I hate needles.”

“Almost as much as I hate whiskey!” I scoff, turning my head away from Vee to cough up a laugh. Effie's perfect complexion and carefully sculpted, artificial features that have barely changed since I first met her catch her in that lie. She might have been scared of needles when we were both younger, but that certainly isn’t true anymore. “Only mine doesn’t smooth out my wrinkles.” I pull back the skin of my cheek with a hand before gesturing to her smooth complexion with a wry smile. It’s nice to have what seems like a normal conversation with someone for the first time in what feels like years.

“Oh don’t, I’m due another appointment.” She laments, pulling her own skin back taut.

“You look fine.”

“Oh shush.” She waves a hand at me to silence me, finally turning her full attention back to Vee. “Now Vesper, it doesn’t taste very pleasant - I do keep asking for some more palatable flavours - but it will help you feel a little better.” 

I support Vee’s head as Effie lets a few droplets fall into her mouth. She winces, groans and frowns at the taste, but it only takes moments for her breath to begin to calm. 

“Now, let's finish cleaning you up.” Effie doesn't wait for a reply, picking up the cloth left behind by Quintus and beginning to gently cleanse Vee’s face. It's obvious it's still quite painful, but with the pain killing effects of the morphling and Effie's delicate touch, Vee endures it without complaint. 

Effie is extra careful with Vee’s still swollen eyes, letting the warm water from the cloth soak and soften the scabs and dried pus before wiping it away. She scans the swelling, the still oozing blisters.

“I think I have some salve that might help with the swelling.” She turns and rummages in her pockets again. I sit wondering how deep they are, and what other wonderful things might be held within them. I wonder how many secrets those pockets might hold that would give Effie an edge in the area. She pulls out a small tin, and I recognise it immediately.

I don't think I've ever learnt the name of it, but I've seen it sent by way of sponsors to a few children in the hunger games. It's some kind of healing ointment, the Capitol kind that soothes wounds quickly. It would be considered a miracle in 12. 

It's an expensive gift, extremely expensive. None of my kids had ever been sent anything even close in value, of course. It's mostly the careers, the fan favorites. I want to feel annoyed, disgusted even, at the idea that Effie just carries around such an expensive, miraculous item that could save so many lives in the districts in her pocket. Instead, I just feel thankful. 

“For your feet as well? Or do you have a mysterious and concerning rash you've yet to tell me about?” She scoffs, rolling her eyes and wagging a finger at me. 

“Yes it is for my feet, Haymitch.” She says with a scowl, unscrewing the lid and scooping out the pale, greasy ointment. The smell reminds me of Sage’s shop, a strong, astringent, herbal sort of smell. Effie smears the stuff onto Vee’s skin, somewhat awkwardly to avoid poking her eyes with her claw-like nails. 

“That should help.” She wipes the salve from her fingers, straightening up. “That'll do for now, I think. We can sort your hair and everything else in the morning. You'll feel much better after some food and rest.”

Between the two of us, we help Vee dress in a soft pair of pyjamas left in the drawers. Things seem a little more manageable now that Vee is cleaner and soothed by the morphling and the ointment. Supported by soft pillows and wrapped in a clean blanket, she looks more like a sick kid now then the otherworldly creature I have been trapped with for the past 6 days. 

I turn to Effie, whose satisfied expression has turned to one of disgust. 

“You absolutely stink.” She wrinkles her nose before pinching it closed with her fingers. I know I stink, but I still lean my head down and inhale. It's a stupid idea, my own odour making me gag. 

“Sorry.” I shrug, actually apologetic for once. 

“Go get washed up.” She shoves me towards the door. “Get Euphemina and Quintus to help you.”

I hesitate, looking back at Vee. We've been practically glued together, the idea of leaving her feels wrong.

“Go go go!” Effie orders. “We will be fine for half an hour while you get rid of that awful stink!”

“I-”

“Shoo!” She waves her hands, moving towards the bed and sitting next to Vee. 

The weight on my chest eases a little, the heavy stress of being solely responsible for Vee lifting. Already Effie is rearranging Vee and her pillows so she sits more comfortably, smoothing out her tangled hair with her fingers. It takes a bit of effort for me to step into the doorway, looking back only to smile softly at them both.

“Take off your shoes and give your feet a break, Effie. Vee won’t mind.” 

Effie blushes again, but I’m already closing the door behind me. As ordered, I go and find Euphemina and Quintus. They are both gossiping over the dining table, gawking and squawking and scrubbing Quintus’ arm with what I assume is disinfectant by the smell. I clear my throat, glowering at them. I did think about leaving them alone and sorting myself out, but I am still tired, hungry and pissed, so maybe they deserved a little punishment. I cannot make the Capitol as a whole suffer, but making these two busy bees squirm would have to do. 

“Effie said you two gotta help me get cleaned up.” I say gruffly, folding my arms across my chest. Both seem a bit dumbfounded that they would be asked to do such a hazardous task.

“C’mon, idiots. We don’t have all night!” Neither move, still blinking and wrinkling their noses. I groan, rubbing the sore stop between my brows.

“Right. You,” I point to the girl. “Go get me whatever booze is on this train, a bowl of something hot, a coffee and a change of clothes. And you,” I turn to Quintus, who physically recoils from my pointing finger. “Go run me a hot, steamy bath, and grab whatever wonder soap you have in those bags of yours.”

I let my words sink into their spongy, useless brains before throwing my hands at them like I'm shooing chickens away.

“GO!”

They scatter, chittering nervously to each other as they do. 

My bath is run, a cloud of fresh, lemony steam floating above it. Even just the moisture in the air of the small train bathroom makes me feel refreshed. I don’t concern myself with modesty, pulling off my clothes and throwing them at Quintus without a care. I stifle a chuckle when he gags. The water is hot, almost silky, as I slide into it. My muscles contract, shocked by the heat, but after a few moments the days of tension held in them begin to melt. I let out a long, low bellow of a groan. It’s a noise I must have been gripping onto tightly in the depths of my lungs. Releasing it feels so good, almost cleansing. I know this feeling won’t last, mine and Vee’s troubles will continue on into oblivion, but right here in this moment, I’m going to let it take over. 

It soothes my soul to make Quintus awkwardly wash my pus matted hair. His attempts to stifle his gags and grumbling burps of vomit might be the most joy I’ve gotten from something in the past few months. 

Being clean and fresh gives me a sense of humanity again. The soft pyjamas help, and by the time we are done, I feel almost normal. 

But, that creeping worry about Vee bubbles up quicker then I wish it did, so I return to her room. Effie is sat beside her, spooning the dregs of a bowl of what smells like lamb stew into her mouth. Already, the swelling around Vee’s eyes has begun to ease, and she seems much more content with a belly full of proper food. She looks at me, almost lucid, almost, and she lets out a weary sigh. Whatever has been keeping her going this past 6 days has gone now, and she seems so exhausted.

I turn my eyes to Effie, who quickly pulls her feet under the hem of her skirt and turns her eyes away in embarrassment. Her heels lay on the foot of the bed. I suppress a smile and pretend I haven’t noticed.

“You two have fun without me?” I aim this at Effie mostly, knowing Vee is unlikely to respond.

“Vesper’s had some food, and some more morphling.” She sits up, careful not to let her feet slide out from beneath her skirt. “I do think it is bed time for all of us now, though. It is a big day tomorrow!”

“It is?”

“Well… it is a semi-big day. They cancelled the celebrations because of Vee’s illness, so they arranged a much smaller homecoming. Just a few cameras at the station.” She stands, keeping herself behind the bed. I still pretend not to notice the shoes on the mattress. I move closer, and we both settle Vee down into the pillows again. 

“Good night, Vesper.” Effie trills in a sing-song way, pressing her hand into Vee’s cheek. “Good night, Haymitch.” In her rush to leave inconspicuously, she forgets her shoes.

“Effie-” I whisper before she gets to the door.

“What? Oh-!” She follows my gaze to the shoes, her white skin turning bright pink again as she rushes to grab them. She tries not to meet my eyes as she shuffles quickly out, but she does, and both of us smile. 

“G’night, Effie.” I watch her sneak down the hallway to her room, clutching her heels to her chest, looking this way and that to ensure her podiatric secret remained under wraps. 

The weariness begins to grab at my ankles, so I turn and tuck Vee in.

“You alright, kid?” She looks at me with glazed, exhausted eyes. “Get some rest, Vee. You’ll feel better in the morning.” I really do hope she will. I hope tonight she can rest without nightmares or memories or hallucinations. I turn the light off, though I do switch on the little lamp on the bedside table. Already Vee’s eyes are closed, and the gentle fall and rise of her chest tells me she's already floating into sleep. 

I leave her door open, just in case.

My room is filled with the smell of rich stew and whiskey. Euphemina had clearly made somewhat of an effort with my orders. The tray of food and coffee, and the bottle of whiskey deplete quickly. The diet of milk and bread has left me starved and malnourished. I must have been too stressed to notice it before, but now, the hunger rips through my stomach and I find myself wolfing down what is before me. Then I order another. And another. I throw the hunks of soft Capitol bread into the corner of the room. 

At some point, I begin to cry. 

I can't actually pin point when the tears started to flow down my cheeks, but by the time I noticed, they fall freely and without restraint. I sniffle, rubbing them away with my sleeve, spooning another mouthful of stew. Eventually though, I can't ignore the rising, overwhelming feelings that I cannot quite identify. My chest feels tight, my breath coming in faster and harder. 

I begin to gasp, sucking in the air, wanting to open the window but knowing that the windows on this hellish train. The stew threatens to come back up, I have to swallow hard to keep it down. The world around me feels as if it is collapsing in on me. The trains metal shell crushing inwards. The terrain outside curling up to swallow me whole. The air and the sky and the the stars above crashing downwards on top of me. 

I clutch at my chest, willing this to stop.

It doesn't. 

After a while, I just let go. 

I grab my pillows, burying my face into them.

I sob, keening for Vee, for me. For what we've both been through. I cry for Vesper, and how lucky she is that she isn't here anymore. I cry for Lenore Dove too, and Ma and Sid. Maysilee. Lou-Lou. Louella. Wyatt. I spare a sob for Effie as well, with her battered feet and quiet endurance. 

I cry for them all, somehow comforted by the fact that I still have their memories nested in my heart.

The release of my pains and sorrows is more cleansing than the bath.

Eventually, I slump down into the bed, hiccuping and wiping my snot-covered face. I stare at the ceiling, the soft lights of the night dancing across the white surface. I slowly calm, my breathing returning to normal. I let my eyes drift shut, let the quiet and the loneliness take over and drag me into dull, boring, black sleep. 

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 27; Bruised Fruit

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

“We are going to be LATE!” 

Effie stands, looking almost bedraggled, among a flurry of avox and Vesper’s prep team. It’s not her face that we are looking at, but a charcoal grey collection of coiled hair at the back of her head. It isn’t until she sees the look on the faces of the two prep team - whose names are somewhere in the haze of recent events - that she seems to realise we are here. 

“I know you’ve been unwell, Vesper-” She turns, her painted face tense. “But that is no! excuse! for tardi-! oh-” Effie’s brain must have registered the state of me and Vee, all matting and bruises and stench, because the panicked anger disappears out of her body with the little ‘oh’ that put a stop to her words. She steps forward, the corners of her painted eyes creasing as she searches the mountains and valleys of swelling on Vee’s face. There is nothing in her face except pure pity.

“Unwell?” I clear my throat, taking a step forward and bringing Vee with me. Effie lingers, staring off into the space that Vee’s face left before shaking herself out of it and following us as I set Vee down onto the couch. 

“Yes I, uh-” She lets out a small ‘ah-hem’, a hand pushing a strand of wig hair from her face before she manages to find something adjacent to her usual bubbly demeanor. 

“Everyone is talking about it. An allergy to those clams at the party. Such a shame.” Ah. So that's the story they've gone with, to explain our absence. Vee didn't even eat at the party, but I know no one would have noticed except me and Snow.

 “Quite a few people, myself included-” Effie seemed almost proud of it despite the obvious apprehension in her voice, “are on strike from eating seafood in solidarity! It's all the rage right now! So-!” She leans close to Vee, taking her hand and squeezing, “No seafood for you anymore. We don’t want to disappoint all those people sacrificing clams, do we..?” Something in Effie’s voice is unconvincing.

Vee’s face doesn't change except the soft opening of her lips as her heavy tongue forces out a weak;

“Yes Effie. I'm sorry, Effie.” Her voice is so hoarse, I can hear the air scraping against tears in her throat as she forces the sounds out. I think I see Effie’s heart break a little. She catches her chin, pulling Vee’s head up gently. It's not an aggressive move, not the kind that Snow or that latex faced man did. There is sadness in the move as she looks at Vee’s swollen face. 

“We can get this sorted.” She says after a lengthy moment, in the definitive sort of way a mother tells a child she will fix their shattered toy. Hope and determination and absolute confidence. I hate to say it, but sometimes I envy Effie for those traits. She then looks at me, appraising my pus-matted beard, my greasy hair, my whisky laden breath. A raised brow, I clearly am less deserving of her sympathy, maybe it's my fault Vee is in such a state. She isn't wrong. “We can get all of this sorted.” 

She waves a long nailed hand, and Vesper’s stylists -  their names still evading me - appear almost out of thin air with bags in tow, rushing to Vee’s side and speed talking over each other. They seem less moved by my charges state, more disgusted.

“I don’t know how you will survive! I know I couldn't go a day without those delicious baked clams!”

“Oh it's simply awful! You're all anyone is talking about!”

“Everyone was so worried!”

“And disappointed! By the sounds of it they had planned quite the celebration for you in 12!”

“What on earth are we going to do with your hair!”

“Your skin is a mess!” 

“Oh the smell!”

“I don’t even know where to start!”

“Maybe the hair?” “No, the body for certain!”

They hover, touching her face, her hair, the still oozing lumps of skin. They pull at the dress without a single hesitation, no thought or care as they unbutton the fabric like vultures ripping open the skin of carrion to get to the rotting viscera inside. The girl - maybe her name is Euphemina? - gasps as the deep purple bruise on Vee’s stomach that is beginning to fade to sickly yellows and browns around the edges. 

“I didn’t know allergies could do that…” I don’t bother to correct, or to explain that a fist did that. I don’t comment that no one seems shocked by Vee’s exposed chest. It is not the flesh that upsets them, but the blemishes that set us apart from them. I know they just see us as meat, not human. Our bodies aren’t as theirs, our lives aren’t as theirs. We are just animals, naked and stupid and lean. Bruised fruit.

I’m not quick enough to stop them from trying to pull her to her feet. She groans lowly with the pain, her knees not even locking before her body folds. They don’t catch her, don’t consider trying to. Vee’s eyes roll back into her head, her whole body dropping. I'm annoyed that the boy's name, Quintus, comes to me as I watch him jolt back to avoid Vee as she falls. I don’t have time to be pissed or disgusted with them, to call them idiots, because I'm already scooping Vee up.

“You alright, kid?” Her swollen eyelids struggle to open, but she looks up into my eyes. She forces out a squeaky sound that might have been a ‘yes’, or could have been something else entirely. I scowl at the two young Capitol fools, at their carelessness, at their stupidity, before Effie's voice breaks my fuming gaze. She appears next to me, her hand grabbing Vee’s. 

“It's ok, we can take things slow.” There is such tenderness in her voice, it's easy to forget that buried beneath the layers of wigs and makeup is humanity and kindness. I know it's not really a common trait in the Capitol, but I see it so often in Effie, even if I usually ignore it. 

“All we will do right now is get you clean, comfortable and in some warm clothes.” Even she turns her eyes to Euphemina and Quintus with a glowering kind of disapproval. “We can do the rest in the morning before we arrive at 12.” 

Back to 12?

At least we could maybe rest on the train. 

I am so tired. And drunk. And hungry. Nothing but bread, milk and whiskey for the past… 

“How long has it been, Effie? I mean, since the party?” Days seem like such a fickle thing now, each one has blurred into another. 

“6 days, I think.” 6 days. 6 days in refined wheat and dairy and gumdrop purgatory. It feels like such a long time, yet no time at all. We should have been there for years, or maybe mere seconds. 6 days feels… wrong. 6 is too mundane of a number. She counts on her fingers, muttering under her breath. “Yes, 6. Isn't it so lovely that Vee got to recover at the tribute center? Almost like home!” I look at her, and she really does believe it. No doubt that the Capitol knows what's best for us. Not a hospital, or a doctor. Just the two of us, there, alone. 

I don't try to hide the disdain in my voice. 

“Yeah. Real fucking lovely that they left us in there alone for 6 days without a change of clothes or a doctor.”

Effie’s face takes a long second to catch up with what I said, what it means, the implications that it wraps her precious Capitol in. When it does, the corners of her lips twist downward. Her nose scrunched. Another long moment.

“Well that's just unacceptable…” Effie’s voice is unconvinced, a floating sort of ‘this doesn't feel right’ before she finds her convictions. “Entirely unacceptable!” Firmer, tougher. She looks between me and Vee, her mind obviously trying to work out some recourse. 

“Ah! I will definitely be having a word with… with… I'll write a complaint to… someone.”

“Thanks, Effie.” I wanted my voice to be a bit sarcastic, but it comes out more sincere. I know it's nothing in the face of everything we have suffered, but for Effie, it is really the biggest rebellion she can muster. Complaining to someone higher up than her. 

Strangely, I feel a little mote of gratefulness towards her. Her soft smile, and the pat she gives to Vee’s hand, makes it grow a little. 

“First, we will get you clean. Ok? Body odour is rather unbecoming…” A hand goes upward into the air, waving at Euphemina and Quintus as they linger nearby. “Bring some wash cloths and bowls of warm water to Vesper’s room.” A snap of her fingers sends them scurrying. 

The floor beneath us begins to subtly vibrate, and the Capitol outside the window jolts and begins to move away from us. Vee’s eyes lock onto the dimming world outside, and her whole body tenses into my chest. Another train taking her to another place. Back to her fake family and her fake life.

“It's ok…” I murmur a little haplessly into her ear as I scoop her up and carry her through the train cars to her room. I'm almost glad that she is too weak and out of it to really put up a fight like she had when we left 4. Effie is already milling around ordering Euphemina and Quintus to place their bowls of warm, soapy waters in certain spots. A towel has been set out on the bed. I carefully sit Vee down onto it, sitting behind her and supporting her body. I make sure to face her away from the window. 

I help them remove Vee’s dress while Effie holds Vee’s hand. I glare at the two Capitol bees when they fail to hide their disgust at Vee’s broken body. They treat her as if she is soiled meat, trying hard not to let their skin come into contact with hers. No compassion, no empathy. Just disdain. My eyes follow their hands as they begin to wipe Vee’s mottled skin of mauve, brown, yellow and stained green with wet cloths of soft cotton. The water has a strange, disinfectant-like smell to it. I take one too, wiping the sweat from her shoulders, neck and back. I'm careful not to let any of them see her brand. It occurs to me that maybe they already have, but I’m sure it would have sent all of them into a tizzy. I envision them all gawking, squawking. If the Capitol could make an allergy fashionable, Vee’s brand definitely would be the next fashion trend. Either way, I am gentle and cautious when I wipe the warm cloth over the still sore looking skin marking the Capitol’s seal.

The stink of putrid sweat, vomit and blood slowly is erased from her skin. I can still smell it on myself, but Vee’s flesh begins to look a little less grubby. Even the bruising seems less intense when her skin is no longer shellacked by sweat. The process isn't easy for her. Each movement of her limbs makes her groan and sigh in pain, and neither of them are gentle. The boy grabs Vee’s face as he begins to scrub at the dried gunk on her cheeks. He pushed the cloth into the fluid filled flesh around her eyes, causing air to sharply suck through Vee’s nose. A bubbling groan pushes up through her teeth, and Quintus’ face twists in horror when Vee’s thin hand grabs at his wrist to weakly try and stop him. He squeals as if he has been touched by the hand of a disease ridden, rotting corpse. 

“Get off of her!” 

Effie beats me to it, shoving Quintus away and soothing Vee’s hand. 

“Don't they teach you how to be gentle at the academy anymore?! She's a victor! She deserves better than you two idiots!” Her clawed hands wave both of them away. “Out, both of you! Out of my sight!” They scurry away like cockroaches, and Effie gently strokes Vee’s cheek. 

“Are you in pain? Those silly children are absolutely useless!”

Vee doesn't respond. I can feel the muscles along her spine clench.

“Vesper?” 

A small whimper. Effie's voice grows smaller.

“Vee?” I'm shocked to hear Effie use that name, but Vee does respond by way of a small groan and a slight move of her skull.

“Are you in pain, Vee?” 

“... Yes.” The word comes out embedded in a cry, forced through tight vocal chords. It's the clearest answer she's been able to give since before the party in the Capitol. Effie straightens, covering Vee’s still naked body with one of the towels. The small consideration for modesty surprises me as well. Effie had seen me naked more times then I think I can count, Vesper and Vee as well. I wonder sometimes if she ever actually considered our bare skin ‘naked’ or if she considered our naked bodies the same way she would a dog or cat. 

Her brows knit together, eyes floating between me and Vee. It's obvious she's trying to make a decision, and whatever it is, the twist of Effie's mouth makes me curious. 

“What?”

“Well, I-” Her frown deepens, and for a moment I feel a twinge of worry. Whatever it is though, Effie clearly makes a decision that me and Vee are trustworthy. Her hand located a pocket in her bluish grey puffy dress (how on earth do they hide pockets so well on those things??), but she hesitated briefly;

“You can't tell anybody-”

“What-?” Now I'm frowning. It feels as if she is about to reveal some state secret, something big and groundbreaking. Something that could get us imprisoned, or maybe even killed. Was Effie a rebel? I almost laugh out loud at the absurdity of my own stupid idea. But there is a glimmer in me that thinks maybe it could actually happen.

Effie, the Capitol poodle, turned into Effie, the Revolutionary.

“You can't tell anybody. Do you promise? Both of you?” 

“Yes.” It's not a lie, either. She can trust me, at least in this moment. And Vee? She doesn't seem like she's even aware of this conversation. “Yeah we can keep a secret.”

“Promise?” She asks once more, the flakes of worry in her tone beginning to chip away at the amusement I'm trying to hide. 

“Yes Effie. We promise.”

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 26; Sunrise, Sunset

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

I just hold her. My arms wrapped around the swaddling of the quilt that envelopes her. I watch the sky begin to bleach with sunlight. I feed her more bread and milk. More of it appears in the refrigerator. More bags of red gum drops pile up in the corner. 

I drink. 

She moans and groans, more pus leaks out from her eyes which I mop up with my sleeve. Her head and hand twitches and jolts as if still animated by the electricity. I half-carry her back and forth to the bathroom. She burns up with a fever, I bundle her up more to try and let it burn out. I second guess myself, and strip off the blanket, just holding her sweat soaked naked body in my arms. She chills again, shivering and chattering her teeth, so I swaddle her again.

 The TV just emits buzzing static. 

The sky is dyed again to its black hue. How many more times will the sky be bleached of its darkness, only to be forced back to its original state of black, before the world ends? We are both trapped here, in this monotonous cycle of dark and day, a cycle of crying and bread and milk and whiskey and nightmarish sleep. The sun will always rise on us in this hell, and the darkness will always swallow us. 

How many more times can Vee be bleached of her colour and life before there is nothing left to salvage? How many times can she be re-dyed before she disintegrates?

I don't bother counting the sunrises.

“Up.” The voice is monotonous and hard. I concentrate and peel my eyelids apart, blinking at the halo of light surrounding a blank faced peace keeper cradling a gun in his hand. 

I look down at the tangled mess of hair in my lap, and at Vee’s face partially hidden by it. Her eyes are open. I'm a little shocked to actually see the pitch colour of her pupils surrounded by lines of bloodshot between the still puffy lumps of her eyelids. The skin still looks so sore, raw and cracked, but at least the swelling has eased a little. 

“Up!” He repeats, louder this time. I blink and try to wake myself up from the dregs of whisky-exhausted sleep. Another peace keeper grabs at the bundle of fake-Vesper in my arms, pulling her up to a sit and not bothering to support her as her head drops suddenly forward with the gravity of brief unconsciousness. Even with the weight of weariness and alcohol, I manage to be quick enough to catch and steady her. The narrow eyelid-windows of her eyes flutter open again and dazed pupils try to focus on my face. 

“Up!” I bat a hand away from her.

“Give us a bloody minute!”

“Get up, get dressed and get into that elevator.” A bundle of clothes lands in my lap, pointed at by the muzzle of a rifle. Plain, a simple pair of trousers and a shirt for me, and a pale grey dress for Vee. How kind of them to bother to give us clothes. I assume we are to go somewhere, maybe to our own personal gallows, but at least Vee won't have to do it naked. 

I change first, quickly and without embarrassment, stripping off the sweaty, pus armour that my clothes had become. I've become accustomed to the stench, but removing my clothes sends a cloud of it up into my face. I have to hold my breath to not gag. I know my flesh must reek. The smell may have even set into my bones. 

When I unwrap Vee from her swaddlings, I'm a lot more mindful to maintain her modesty. I've met too many peacekeepers with predatory daggers in their eyes. It's hard, pulling on the light cotton dress to Vee’s semi limp, stiff body. But eventually she is no longer a naked child in my arms, and the strange little, almost peaceful corner of hell we have carved out for ourselves in this apartment dissolves away. 

“Up.” I resist the urge to tell him to fuck off. My arms are used to Vee’s feather-light weight now, so I move to scoop her up. 

“No. She walks.”

“But-”

“She walks.” 

I stare at Vee’s gaunt face, my lips pulling back into a tense frown. The sweat of her armpit almost immediately soaks through my shirt as I pull her arm around my shoulder, trying to take as much as the weight as possible. 

Vee does try to set her feet and take a step, but I end up mostly dragging her to the elevator. We are joined by the 3 peacekeepers, surrounding us in this glass box like flies. Vee’s head lulls again, and I jostle her.

“Deep breath kid, deep breath.”

She obeys, sucking in the air like a hungry bird, her lungs rasping angrily. Thankfully it's enough to pull her from the edge of unconsciousness again. 

The door pings open, and Vee tries again to walk. Each step drags and skips, echoed by hitching, gasping breaths from the effort. It's late afternoon I think, and I get the strange sensation that we have gone back in time, even if only by a couple of hours, and that our time within the tribute center was nothing more than a dream.

A van sits outside the tribute center, the doors open and the black void within awaiting us. 

“Where are we going?” Why do I ask? I know it's pointless, we won't be told, we never are, but it is somewhat comforting to ask anyway. 

“In.” Well, what more did I expect. 

We aren't shackled, I'm able to settle Vee on the seat beside me and support her weight when we are plunged back into darkness. We rock back and forth with the movement of the van, and at some point in the long black, I hear Vee wretch and vomit. The smell of curdled milk fills the small metal space. Acidic and tangy, the smell of rotten dairy and bakery goods.

Her hand finds mine, and despite the tremor, she grips it. 

We aren't driving for long, though I do suspect that my sense of time has been warped so I don't trust my own judgement. It’s almost evening, the sky darkening a little on the horizon, and the sinking sun sending yellow rays over the roof of the train.

The train.

The train back to 12.

The Capitol train with its soft beds and warm food. 

Not a noose. Not a firing squad. 

Maybe those awaited for us back home, but for now, we appeared safe. 

The knot in my chest unravels momentarily. We are going back to 12. I cannot pinpoint where between surprised and afraid my feelings lie. I clear my throat to try and dislodge the image of burning family homes from behind my eyes.

We are nudged forward, and I pull Vee towards the open door. I can already hear Effie’s shrill, panicked voice ordering Capitol lackeys around with an intense kind of urgency. 

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 25; Blood, sweat, tears

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

I try to place her down gently in the cold shower cubicle, but her body slides out of my arms like a sack of potatoes, hitting the tiles a lot harder than I intend. She groans, head lulling and body slumping into the corner like a rag doll.

Her smell - that of fear-sweat, iron, purulence, bile, urine - lingers in my nose even as I stand to look at the panel of buttons on the wall. I've used them often enough to know what button brings forth the fresh, warm Capitol water. The kind that the kids in the seam can only dream of. 

What had little Vee dreamed of? 

I push the thought away, knowing that little Vee didn't exist, not truly. Thinking about it won't help me or her. 

I push the button, the pipes grumbling for a moment before spitting out its precious liquid. 

Vee squeals, scrambling helplessly further into the corner and out of the water's spray, trying to shield her body as if she awaits pain. 

“Kid, kid,” I reach out and hold her shoulders, leaning closer to her and into the waters fall. 

“It's ok, it's just water.” Her fingers grip my arm, weakly, she has no strength in her now, and I'm not sure if she's pulling me closer or pushing me away. I don’t give her much choice, pulling her into the warm flow and cradling her skull.

The water runs down her face, turning shades of cloudy green and red, the blisters hissing and popping. Vee screams again, trying to pull away, but I grab her face and force it upward. Maybe I should have thought of it sooner, to flush the venom and foulness from her eyes. 

She is too weak to fight, at least not in a way that would matter. So I hold her, letting the wall support her body , turning her head this way and that, watching the blisters pop and leak yellowish liquid. My fingers find the two swollen lumps that must be her eyelids, and as gently as I can, I pry them apart. 

I cannot see her eye in the thin crevice between the swelling. Only congealed pus and blood, stained neon green. Infected and poisoned. Rotting, the smell of rotting flesh. The water flows in, flushing out chunks of peeling flesh and gunk. It must burn, she emits a watery yelp as she weakly tries to pull my hands away. 

For a moment I doubt myself. Maybe this would make her eyes worse. But I remember my Ma gently bathing my tracker jacker sting in cool water to soothe the skin. I hold her face still, watching the space between what should be her eyelids slowly empty of their vile liquid. 

“I know it hurts kid, I know. But it will help, I promise.”

I don't bother with soap, I worry it will burn her already painful skin. I just let the water do its job, flushing away the sweat in her head and the urine from her skin. It takes a long while for her to calm, but eventually she quiets again. Maybe her pain is easing. Or maybe she's just given up. It might just be my own wishful thinking, but with the ooze and blood washed away, the bulging mass of maroon that are her eyelids seem a little less angry. 

Vee has gone limp against the wall, her only movement the rapid, irregular rise and fall of her chest. Each inhale comes with a low groan, barely audible above the sound of the shower, a laboured sort of noise. I leave her, just for a moment, in the waterfall. I stand, my suit feeling heavy with water and flooding the floor as I strip off the jacket and dump it on the tiles. I grab for one of the luxuriously thick white towels nearly folded in the cabinet. Generous of them to leave us towels. 

She doesn't react to the water stopping except the slight shiver of her skin as she cools. I swaddle her in the towel, just like I had done to Sid so long ago, pulling her to my chest and scooping her up. She feels light again, frail and bird like. Like Wellie. A lost little bird with broken wings wrapped up in my arms. 

I carry her, precious broken cargo, to the enormous couch in the common area of the district 12 apartments. No point taking her back to Vesper’s room, the bed will be wet and I don't want her getting sores. I prop her up against the pillows, tucking the large towel around her to try and keep her warm. 

I rush back to the room, grabbing the comforter, plate of bread rolls and the jug of milk. Her wet clothes are still in the corner, and no clean clothes have been put out. When I return, she is distant again. She may as well be a ghost. I don't bother unwrapping her from the towel, I just throw the comforter over her, sitting her up a little before and frowning at the film of sweat already beading again on her brow. I press my hand to her face, feeling the burning heat of a fever brewing below her paper thin skin. 

I tuck her up tighter, before tearing little bits of bread from the rolls. Maybe food would help? I push each piece between her lips, and she chews absentmindedly so slowly. When she does eventually swallow, she gags a little, but doesn't react otherwise. It's much the same when I pour the milk into her mouth. Strangely, I don't find myself anxiously anticipating blood spewing from her mouth. Somehow, the lack of fear is what causes worry to vibrate through my bones. 

If not death by poison now, at my hand, then when and how? 

I try not to let the thought linger, but it does. 

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 24; Reverberating Echos

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List Content Warning; body horror

I’ve given up trying to comfort her, trying to reason with this writhing, twitching animal crying on this bed. My head is ringing from the impact of her flailing, fighting limps. Her skin is bruised and bleeding from her scratching, digging claws. I've resigned myself to simply holding her. Wrapping my arms around her, holding her wrists, trying to keep her safe from her own attacks. 

I try to make sense of the incoherent stream of muttering that flows from her lips. Her voice is almost non-existent, each word gritty. But still she calls out. Crying like a child. Sobbing, calling out for her Pa. Screaming fragmented puzzle pieces of her song. Begging for her mother. Humming discordant melodies that I don't recognise. Jumbling through what must be names so fast I struggle to catch any of them. 

The hours tick by. They must do. The room gets darker and darker. Then thin rays of moonlight work their way between the curtains. 

“She's too small…” 

Her hands reach out to something beyond this place and time. Her words are roughened by the grit in her throat, but it cannot mask the stark sting of helplessness in it. 

I can see the outline of her face, illuminated by unfeeling whispers of moonlight. She is…

Grotesque.

Eyes swollen, the skin ballooning and bubbling in a rotten purple, oozing lime pus that illuminates her cheeks in a sheen of neon wetness. I don't think she can see any more. Whatever it is that she reaches for, she is seeing it within the endless horror of her mind. 

She moans, cries, growls.

The hours tick by. 

Her monstrous silhouette becomes more defined, the bulbous lines haloed by a creeping dawn that claws its way through the curtains.

The screaming starts again, filled with grief and terror. Otherworldly, like the cry of the earth when the mines collapse. Wailing like a baby.

I hold her tighter. I press my cheek into her shoulder, steadying my breathing and trying to block it out. 

Eventually, she devolves into manic chanting. 

“I'm so grateful to the Capitol. I'm so grateful to the Capitol. I’msogratefultotheCapitol I’msogratefultotheCapitol I’msogratefultotheCapitol.” 

At some point, it becomes background noise to me. I find myself rocking both of us gently back and forth. Not to comfort her, I know she's unreachable, but to comfort me. If I try hard enough, maybe I could imagine her as Sid, holding him in a warm embrace just before bed. Maybe her mutterings could become giggles. If I close my eyes, maybe we could be somewhere else. 

When I open them again, me and Vee are bathed in the bright golden light of evening filtering through the curtains. She's stopped screaming, now she only whimpers. I see her face clearly now, all snot and pus and tears and swelling. It takes a moment for my hands to obey, to open up and release her wrists. Each finger creaks painfully as I pull away. My grip has left deep outlines of pinkish red on her skin. 

She doesn't move. 

I realise quite how sweaty I am, how nauseous and dizzy I am. I stand, and the room whirls a little. I am hungry, parched. And starved of liquor. 

I need alcohol. 

I'd love to say it's concern for Vee, knowing she needs to eat and drink something, that pulled me from her side and out into the common area. But it's not. It's concern for myself, worry for the impending withdrawal. The horror I've been forced to witness the past few days pales in comparison to the horror of a life sober. 

I find the small kitchenette set back into the common area. I can smell the tang of whiskey even before I see the ornate crystal decanter sat on the smooth metal counter top. Not with one, but two small glasses next to it. 

I don't hesitate, pouring myself one, then two glasses. It's the good Capitol stuff, silky, rich, a little sweet. It's soothing. Calming. Warming. I am grateful to the Capitol. And I despise it. 

I pour one more, draining it in a couple of gulps. It settles my weary mind, hazing the edges of my worry just a little. I take a deep, steadying breath. Right. Food and drink for Vee. For me, too. I rummage through the small cupboards, that usually are filled with snacks and the like to fatten up the tributes between meals. Empty. Devoid. I half expect the refrigerator to be empty, and the fine whiskey to be our only sustenance. 

Suddenly, I'm 16 again. Trapped in the orange tribute rooms. Gnawing through bread and milk. The breaths I take now do nothing to calm the tightness that grabs my chest. The cool air sends shivers along my skin. 

Neatly arranged on the plastic shelves, is a plain glass pitcher of clean white milk, a plate piled high with soft golden bread rolls, and a small paper bag. I don't need to open it. It doesn't have the Donner’s logo on it, but I know what's inside.

 I open it anyway. 

It's filled with blood red gumdrops, encrusted with tiny diamonds of sugar. 

My organs drop out from my abdomen, and it feels as if my whole body is falling forward. My knuckles crunch the paper bag closed, and it takes a few moments for the sensation - and Lenore Dove’s dying breath echoing in my ear - to subside. I don't close my eyes, if I do, I know that Lenore Dove’s face will fry itself into the blackness. So, instead, I shove the bag back into the refrigerator, right into the corner, and pull out the plate and jug. 

Strangely, I'm not worried about them being poisoned. 

It doesn't make any sense, really. Why go through all of this effort, torturing Vee, torturing me, setting all of this up, just to kill us. And if they're poisoned, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. A quick end for Vee, a quick end for me. 

But they wouldn't let us go that easy.

Regardless, I don't feel fear. Not in the face of milk and bread. There's no one else for them to take from me, anyway. 

I gather up the unused cup, balancing it on the plate and carrying my quarry back to Vesper’s room. I try, before I enter, to center myself, to dispel the blood dripping visage of my love from my head. It doesn't work but I push the door open anyway. 

Vee is where I left her, sat up, muscles tight and strained, body swaying ever so slightly backwards and forwards. The dress of ephemeral grey silk doesn't flutter around her anymore, the fabric is heavy now with sweat, blood, pus. It looks like she is bedecked in steel. Her hands are doing that movement again, the twisting, pulling, tying motion, and I can hear the muttering under her breath. 

Daylight, the full force of morning, drags itself in through the curtains, smothering her horrid swollen face in light. She seems like a monster of the deepest dark, dragged up and shrinking in its first taste of sunlight. The swelling has blistered in places, leaking yellowish fluid which mingles with the neon lime pus that drips slowly down her cheeks. The stripes of green trace the creases of her mouth, sliding around under her chin. I force myself not to wince. 

“Vee?”

It's the first time I think I've properly spoken to her in hours. My voice feels foreign to me, like it doesn't belong here. I clear my throat, but it doesn't help. I set down the plate and the jug on the side table, turning to her and gently touching her arm. She flinches, her twisting hands freezing in place. 

I wrinkle my nose at the smell of urine that floats up from her. Carefully I move the crumpled blanket that tangled around her legs, and I make a point not to react to the spreading puddle under her. She's just Sid. I just need to pretend she is Sid. Just Sid the morning after a nightmare. 

“Hey kid. We gotta go get you cleaned up.” I support her torso with my shoulder, and begin to pull apart the long line of tiny buttons that keep her confined in the dress. Her head lulls onto my shoulder, the wetness of her face seeping through the fabric of my black shirt to my skin. It stings, a subtle acidic burning. I don't pay it much mind. I slowly peel away the sweat-stiffened fabric, keeping my breath steady at the line of small round bruises down her spine from the buttons pressing into her skin as she had thrashed. I don't let my eyes linger on her brand on the small of her back. 

Vee doesn't resist, so it doesn't take long for me to fully free her from the dress. I throw the wet thing into the corner, discarded like the vile thing it is. I look at her properly then, huddled naked on the bed. There is a spreading bruise on the tense flesh of her stomach. She is a mottled mix of ash and mauve. 

I don't bother to try and get her to walk, I simply scoop up her feverish, clammy body into my arms. I hold her tightly, her quick shaky breath warming my neck. Her hand reaches up, fingers finding my jaw and gently stroking the stubble. It must confirm to her that I am me, someone safe, someone she trusts, because she leans her head into my shoulder and wraps her damp hand around the back of my neck. 

“C’mon, kid.” I say softly into her ear as I carry her to the bathroom.

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 23; Rope

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List Content Warning; descriptions of hangings, including that of a child

Falling.

Long, coiled loops of fiber wrap around my bruised, bloodied fingers. I am tying, I am twisting. I am good at knots. I know I am, I help Pa tie the hitch for the b-

Falling. 

I rush. But there is more fiber, more knots to tie. 3. 8. 11. 

The number sticks in my head. 

Eleven. 

Eleven. 

I'm falling. 

This is a choice. 

My fingers are sore, raw. 

Move faster. 

I am ordered. 

Eleven.

Falling. 

I stare at faces, through eyes that must have already seen this before. It feels so new, yet I know I've seen this before. 

Eight.

I wreath each with my knots and my loops. I search their faces, but the features shift and pull and warp like waves. The adult bodies all in a row, topped with a slideshow of children's faces. Their eyes, panicked and afraid, fill me with dread. 

Eight ghosts, mingled from my two lives, the life of salt, sea and clouds and the life trapped with a girl who shares my face, watching dying children behind a television screen. 

They are here because of me.

My fault. 

“Who helped you?” Words echoing in my mind, underscored by my own screams. 

Betrayal.

I had named them all. I had screeched out their names, a desperate beg for relief from the hunger and the darkness and the isolation and the pain. 

Drowning. 

This is my choice. 

I betrayed them.

Eight accomplices. Eight friends. Eight people who had helped me.

I blink, and the image changes. 

3 more ghosts. 

So much clearer than the memory of what had come before. My heart fills with love and despair. 

“It's ok.” A woman's voice, quivering and gurgling a little with the snot that runs down her throat. I stare into her face, with its vague, bruised features that never become clear to me. Her eyes, full of love and pity and forgiveness, are lost to me now. I don't think I'll ever get her face back. 

Ma? 

I drape my necklace of rope around her neck. I can feel the pounding of blood in her jugular as I adjust it. 

This is my choice. 

I have chosen this. 

“It's not your fault.” A man's voice. No. Three voices rolled into one, a tumultuous storm of notes. I try to pick them apart, to separate them. A three headed creature. One, clearer, made of coal dust, lined with worry and sorrow. Another, the features blurry and stained with salt. The last, beer-haggard. Haymitch. I frown, wondering why his face sat here in this lineup. Was this a memory? Maybe a premonition? Or maybe my mind is using his face to fill in the hazy space where I think my Pa should be. 

Pa? 

I adorn him with my necklace, sliding the knot down to his nape. I can feel the stubble on his jaw when I pull my hands away. 

My fault. 

My choice. 

No words come from the next face. Only a soft, gentle, small sniffling that draws my eyes down. Just for a moment, the face I see is the clearest of any that came before. A little girl. Freckles, autumnal hair. Eyes the colour of the sky. I try to focus on those human features, but I can't stop my view of her from being consumed by how scared she was. Gaunt, starved. Dried blood leaving a trail from her nose to her lip. She's confused, terrified. 

My choice. My fault. 

My choice. 

I have chosen this. 

They made me choose this. 

My punishment for what I did.

Their salvation. 

I don't think I control my own body as I reach up to the rope. I try to pull it down, but it doesn't reach her tiny body. She's too short. Too short for this mercy I am forced to enact upon her. 

“She's too small.” 

Is that my voice? It sounds so wrong. It's not the voice I've grown accustomed to, not the corpse voice that inhabited my vocal chords. This one is deeper, earthier, and so so afraid. 

I am aware of shuffling behind me, of the grinding of plastic on the wooden floor. A stool slides into the frame of this macabre painting of the little girl.

“Pick her up.” A command. I know I can't deny it. I know this choice is a kindness. 

I lean down, and her frail little arms wrap around my neck. She smells like home, under the smell of fear, sweat and urine. I feel the wetness of her cheek against mine.

I envision myself carrying her into waves, as she giggles and gasps at cold water lapping at her toes. We splash and laugh. 

We are sisters. 

I love her so much. 

But there is no ocean here but our tears, as we anoint each other in the salt water blood of our home. 

This is my fault. 

This is my choice. 

This is mercy.

It is a kindness that I am allowed to choose this for them. 

I am careful as I set the noose around her tiny neck, the same way I had placed a garland of seaweed and shells around a sleeping babe, fresh and new, in our mother's arms. The memory of it is so crystal clear. The lingering smell of birth-waters, the smell of the soap used to clean away the blood. The smell of the knitted blanket carefully woven from recycled rope. The smell of my mother's sweat, her milk. 

The stench of guilt invades the holy space of this sacred memory. 

My fault.

I am brought back to this reality, and I know, even despite the fractured and distorted nature of my mind, that this is one of the realities I have endured. I want the memory to go away, for this slideshow of horror to stop. For something else to take root and spread like a weed though my mind so I'd never have to see this again. 

But it continues. I am powerless to stop it. Just as powerless now, trapped in the echoes of it, as I had been trapped in that room with my friends and family's salvation at the end of a rope.

My choice. 

We are pulled from each other. We both reach out, grasping and screaming. Her hand is so warm and sweaty. I never want to let go, but I am forced to. My hand turns to ice without her love and terror to warm it.

This is kindness. 

Someone signals another, and I see a faceless man step closer to the lever.

Am I screaming? 

Is my father gently weeping?

Is my mother calling out my name?

His hand grips the handle. 

This is mercy. 

This is quick. 

This will be a quick death. Like drowning. A few moments of pain, of terror, then blissful floating. Like drowning. 

My choice. 

“Pick. Kill them all. Or let them live.” 

My choice.

My mercy. 

My responsibility. 

My fault. 

This is my fault.

I'm screeching. 

This is quick. This is mercy. This isn't unrelenting darkness and famine and torture. This is mercy. 

This is freedom from what I know they will do to me. 

I stare at my sister's young face. The split second of confusion as her body drops from beneath her. Then the sudden rush of panic that turns her bright red. Then bruise purple. Then, as the blood drains to her bare feet, white. 

A child of the village was murdered today.

Falling. 

My mother isn't struggling. 

She's already free, I think. 

Fallen. 

My Pa claws at his neck. Choking and spluttering. He's drowning, not the quiet, soft kind, but the flailing, fighting kind. 

She choked him and beat him

To death, for a joke

Drowning. 

Think of waves and shells and sea foam and knots and home and rope and explosives and sabotage and fire raging through the harbour and burns on my hands and sprinting and not looking back at the sounds of chaos behind me and rebel verses screeched from my lungs as we tried to dismantle the world. 

Think of guilt and blame and fault and mercy and kindness and freedom and release. 

I am wailing. 

Their bodies twitch. Animated by my memories and my guilt. By the hope that maybe this was just another pain induced nightmare. 

With one hand she strangled

A strong little boy.

My fault. 

My choice.

I cannot see anymore. The swaying garland of my family has become hazy blobs of vague colour. Shrouded by tears, by the shattering of memories. I feel them slipping away again, obscuring into oblivion. They're leaving me again. 

My fault. 

I'm falling. 

I'm-

I'm grateful. 

I'm grateful to the Capitol.

I'm grateful for their mercy. 

I'm grateful to the Capitol. 

I'm grateful. 

Eleven. Eight. Three. 

My fault. 

It's all my fault. 

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 22; Fault

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

My feet struggle to keep up with the rapid pace at which I am shoved along. Vee isn't even able to, the Peace Keepers either side of her are practically dragging her along. I can hear the toes of her fine shoes squeaking along the linoleum floor underscoring her pained, panicked whines. 

The sun is blinding, I try to locate it in the seemingly endless haze of blue above us, to try and figure out what time it might be, but we are shoved into the back of a windowless van before I have the chance. 

Vee is thrown in, her body rebounding against the metal corners of the van and crumpling like discarded fabric. I'm pushed in after her, forced to the ground and my wrists clamped with iron. They don't bother to shackle Vee, I don't think there would be much point anyway. The doors slam, plunging us in a swaying black as the truck begins to move. 

I miss Vee’s humming. The only noises she makes now, amplified by the darkness, are the grunts and growls and whines and moans of a beaten hound. So bestial and inhuman. So pitiful. I want to reach out to comfort her, to touch her hand and try to make her feel more human to me, but the short wires of my cuffs keep me away. And in truth, I think I may be afraid to reach out to her. Maybe I am afraid that what my hand finds will no longer be the frightened, broken girl, but instead an aberrated Capitol mutt, mutated and transformed by their cruelty. 

There are momentary lulls in the sounds coming from the dark, and every time it does, I am terrified that her heart has stopped.

I don't feel relieved when the noises start again. 

They must be driving us around for a while, maybe to torture me a little more with the consequences of my failure. Maybe to torture her with this seemingly endless blackness. Everything must be endless to her; pain, sorrow, the constant warping and rewriting and destruction and rebuilding of her realities. Neverending, never ceasing. Maybe even if she did die, I wonder if the nightmare would continue on for her. Maybe her death would make no difference to her. 

I don't even register the sudden stop of the truck until the small space is flooded with the fading golden light of dusk. I'm unshackled, pulled out and forced to my feet. One of the Peace Keepers grabs Vee’s ankle, dragging her body out. She drops to the floor in a tangle of limbs, a groan coming from deep within her lungs. The hand of a faceless mercenary grabs the back of the neck and pulls her up. She is shoved into my arms, she seems much too heavy for such a slight thing, the weight of all the horrors she has endured filling the space where her soul and memories should be. 

She looks at me, distant, unseeing. The low-hung, blazing sun bathes her in a strange orange glow. The pitch hue of her irises turn into a deep brass in the light, but the soft colour is but a thin thread surrounding the impossibly large, blown out holes that are her wide pupils. I see myself reflected in the blackness, my pity, my own sorrow. I seem to extend on into a ceaseless eternity, the light of the sun following me into the depths of the abyss, searching for her inside this well of pain barely contained by her eyelashes. The mirrors sit within a sea of red, twisting capillaries oozing out blood and turning the whites of her eyes into pools of crimson. 

We are both shoved, hard, by the butts of guns, up steps that seem too familiar to me. I try my best to hold Vee upright, to hoist her up the stairs, but her body seems to be pulling downward. We both stumble, my hip hitting the concrete of the steps. I managed, somehow, to keep her from harm, at least in this singular moment. No time to recover, though, before we are dragged up again and thrown towards a set of glass doors.

They swing open.

A flood of recognition hits me, like a horrible wave of fever. 

The Tribute Center. 

The barren foyer seems colossal, so much bigger and desolate. A desert. Or an abandoned coal mine. Dim, unlit now by the lowering sun.

I pull Vee through the door, and the guards don't follow. I see the elevator, that I've taken so many times now, open. It sends a beam of unnatural light across the floor in a wide arch. I don't have to be told, I know where we are supposed to go. 

Are me and Vee to be forced into our own, private games? Why are we here? Why not a cell or a cage or the train back home?

The door pings shut behind us, and I let myself look at Vee again. She is sweaty, I can feel the wetness across her back through her soaked dress. She is white now, except for the bruised swelling around her eyes, and the specks of blood on her lips and chin. We stand, in silence, as we ascend, and I once again expect a gun squad or a noose or another torture chamber. 

The jolt of the elevator coming to a stop seems to sap the last of her energy, and she crumples to the floor despite my best effort to hold her up. 

“Vee cmon you need to get up.” I say weakly, unable to force any firmness into my voice. She groans, but that is all she does. I steel myself, shoving my arm underneath her and scooping her up. The movement makes her splutter, a new collection of brown bile spilling out of her lips. 

I move, as quickly as I can with my load, rushing almost out of reflex, to the bedrooms. I try to push the handle of the first door I find, which usually ends up being my room,  down with my elbow. The handle doesn't even rattle. The second, usually Effies, locked as well. The third, for the boy tribute. No. 

I stare at the plain door to the room that had, for a short time at least, belonged to Vesper. It has been left ajar, just a crack, to taunt me, to entice me. Guilt swamps me again, and it's only Vee’s moaning that keeps me afloat. I push the door open with my foot, the whole thing swinging open and hitting the wall. 

The room is exactly how it had looked the day Vesper died. I know this place had been cleaned, I watched them do it. But someone has recreated that horrible, rebellion scene with disturbing accuracy. 

The drawer is still on the floor, broken apart as if Vesper had only just done it. No screws though. They had been meticulously removed. They wouldn't make the same mistake twice. 

The blanket is crumpled, exactly how it had been when the medics had thrown it off of Vesper’s still warm body. The sheet is clean, but I can see the rusty shadow of the blood stain on the mattress clawing its way through the thin fabric. 

There's an empty bottle of booze on the small table next to the plush armchair. The foam still seems to have the impression of my slumped body captured in it. I'm sure the impression of my lips will still be on the mouth of the bottle. 

The room still smells of hot, tangy iron, or maybe it's just my imagination. Maybe I can still hear Effie ordering the Avox around. 

It takes a lot of effort to stop myself just staring at the void where Vesper’s body should be, and to step forward and place Vee within it. Their bodies merge, blood soaked, bile covered, two girls almost indistinguishable from each other. Vee’s body breaks away from the shadowy confines that Vesper’s memory has left on this place as she writhes on the bed. 

Even in the dimming light, I can see her muscles ripple, stretch and contort against her bones. She gurgles, growls, chokes, hisses. Broken machinery. I feel as if I am watching her on a screen, just another child of the hunger games, out of my control, far from my mercy, my pity, my love. 

This is my torture, now. To stand in this tomb, to relive Vesper’s blood soaked death, to witness the death of Vee’s soul. 

This is mine. 

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 21; Defective

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List Content Warning: Depictions of physical and psychological torture

I'm expecting a blood bath. A room filled with red gum drops. Electric butterflies to zap us to death. A bear made of spun gold that will tear us apart. Guns, knives, a dungeon without a door where we would be forgotten about, all of that is what I expect at the end of this grimy, dimly lit hallway. 

I didn't expect a clean room with white walls and an even cleaner floor. We are pushed in, and there is a sharp smell of disinfectant, and an acrid tang of iron. There is a chair, shiny and almost gleaming, made of white plastic in the center of the room, heavy manacles of steel that look like teeth. A steel table, with a closed box on top, a tall cabinet with a face of dials and wires. Despite the shining whiteness of this room, it feels dirty and rancid. 

I turn to look at Vee, at her expression that reminds me of a young robin that Burdock's snare had captured. No longer fighting against the inevitable, to weak and small and powerless to do so, but nonetheless terrified. Trapped and afraid and distant. 

My eyes fix on the unnatural, marble smooth skin and pinkish nails that are now clamped around Vee’s arms. I follow up his joints, to the almost iridescent latex of his coat, and finally to an artificially chiseled face that seems bloated. His skin is not just pale, it's pure white, the same colour as this bright room. It is stretched across his face, like a mask pulled too tightly, and his lips jut out like a horrible pout. A sickly pink, almost peeling away from themselves. His eyes bulge, not quite set right into his too small eyelids. And there is something off about his eyes. Both a rich hazel, but one looks distinctly more alive than the other. One has an unnatural shininess to it, like glass. And, as both wander around Vee’s face and body, it lags behind. Its range of movement seems limited compared to its counterpart. A fake. 

Get her off me! Get her off me! Help! My eye! Help!

Vee’s spoon-gouged demon. Stood behind her like a shadow made of marble. 

Those fat lips peel back over his teeth, it is no more a smile than a snarl is. Those smooth porcelain fingers run along her collarbone, up to her jaw line. 

“Hello, Vesper.” His words are almost a sigh, embedded in a deep inhale like a predator scenting his prey. That grotesque hand grips at the back of her neck, before pushing her forward gently. She obeys, like she's compelled to do so by some otherworldly force. She sits, and places each of her wrists and ankles in the yawning jaws of steel like it's a reflex. Like she's done this before. 

Whatever bravado she had mustered in the face of Snow has fizzled out. She, in this vile demon’s gaze, is nothing more than a terrified child. I am frozen, not by this place, or the monster circling her like a vulture as he closes the manacles around her limbs, but by the look of sheer desolation in her eyes. Reflections of untold horrors that were forced upon her, maybe even in this very room. 

This man's long fingers begin to unravel the arrangement of braids on her head. It's almost gentle, almost loving. Bit by bit, loose strands of hair fall around her shoulders. He brushes through her locks slowly, arranging her waves carefully and parting a straight section from her temple to her crown. She doesn't move, doesn't blink. 

I've been trying to ignore the machine against the wall, with its wires hanging down like viscera. But I can't anymore, not when he wheels it closer to her and pulls one of those long coils of gut out. It has a wicked spike on its end, barbed and sharp and surrounded by a disk of serrated teeth. 

“What are you going to do?” My voice echoes around this tiny room, it startles me because I didn’t expect to even be able to speak. 

“Hm?” He sets those inhuman eyes upon me. It's the first time he's acknowledged my existence since we entered. It's as if I've asked a silly question, like I am a child bothering to ask an uninterested adult why the sky is blue. His grin turns wry and sinister.

“She's defective.” She closes her eyes when he brushes her hair away from her forehead. 

“We didn't quite-” He pressed a finger into her forehead hard, his teeth gritted, “get it all out.” 

He pulls at the cord again, moving closer to her and covering my view of her. 

“I take pride in my work,” The sudden clench of her shackled hands and the vile crunch sound tells me she's in pain, but I'm rooted to the spot. 

“I can't let faulty goods parade around like she has, not when I worked so hard on her.” He steps to the side, and my eyes fix on the line of red that begins to trickle from the wire’s teeth now embedded into her skull. 

The machine begins to rumble, a low buzzing sound like a hornet. He flicks switches, turns dials. Vee flinches as each little click. 

I can't move. 

I am a coward. 

He leans down, his face so close to hers. 

“You’ve disappointed me, Vesper. You've disappointed the President.” She just stares down at her clenched fists. I can see the line of tension that runs over her eyebrows. 

“You remember what happened the last time you disappointed President Snow, don't you?” His marble hand grabs at her chin, forcing her to look up and at me. I can almost feel his breath on my own neck as he leans down. 

“I'm sure you don't want to do to Haymitch what you had to do to your family, hm?” The word, even to me, is a gut punch. Vee’s expression shifts to confusion, painful confusion as she searches her mind for whatever memory this man is trying to torture her with. Her eyes dart around, exploring ghosts of reality and fiction, what is real to her, what she believes, and the nightmares that might actually be true. 

Her hands begin to move, a slow, restrained version of the tying, pulling, twisting motion I've seen her do so many times before. It must jog a memory, because she gasps a horrible sob, and her hands move more frantically. She remembers. 

Did she sell out her family? Did they force her to have a hand in their torture? Whatever it was, I know it haunts her. I've seen her do that thing with her hands too many times. 

“Oops!” His hand goes to his mouth, his face twisting with mock embarrassment. 

“Slip of the tongue. Of course, your family is safe and well, back in 12.” The reality she had just been forced to face crumbles again, she seems suddenly so unsure of what she knows. What family is real? The family buried in the darkness beneath pain and suffering, or the family sat in the bright spotlight of lies.

“Maybe what you did, what we made you do… that horrible horrible day, maybe what you remember is just an awful nightmare,” A finger brushes a tear from her cheek. He brings her lips so close to her ear, I barely hear his words. 

“We can make that nightmare real again, though, if you're not careful. We can make it happen again and again.” Her eyes lock on mine, filled with fear not for herself, but for me. 

I'm all she's got, the only one who shares her burden. She fears for me. For what they will do to me. 

“No-” Her fists clench, her face darkening with memories of grief and horror. 

“P-please don't. I- I didn't mean to.” She is a child again. Begging to avoid punishment. “I didn't-”

Vee's body lurches forward violently against her restraints. It's just a moment, a split second of pain delivered from the whirring machine behind her into her skull, before her shoulders slump down and she's left sucking in horrible rasps of air. Between gasps, she forces out painful words.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I’m-”

The sound of static as electricity jolts through her body. Her muscles try to contort against steel and plastic. The sound of air trying to escape her constricting throat is animalistic and guttural, like a strangled dog. 

“I'm so grateful to the Capitol, I'm so grateful. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm so grat-” Her screamed begging is cut off again by the brutal shocks that wrack her body. Her jaw hinges open, lips pulled back over her teeth, eyes almost bulging out of her head. 

He stands, calm and almost content, like a cat watching its injured prey squirming on the floor. He isn't sickened by her writhing body, or the horrible way her facial muscles tense and pull back into the gaps between her bones. This is just another day, another moment of casual cruelty, while I'm sitting staring at the nightmare unfolding in front of me. 

I don't know how long it goes on for. He barely gives her enough time between each burst of pain to breathe. She is drenched in sweat, her eyes bloodshot. 

The sweat on my own hands has made the skin pressed against the wall sticky. 

She slumps forward, her breath shuddering. And he sighs, adjusting his shoulders and moving closer to her again.

“Who are you?” 

She doesn't respond. 

“Who are you?” 

Still nothing. His voice gets impatient.

“Who are you?”

“Stop it.” 

That's my voice. It startles me, and I think it startles him as well. Maybe he had forgotten that I was even here. Slowly he turned, boring those cruel eyes into me. Considering. 

“Stop it. You don't- you don't need to do any more.” I try to keep my voice even and convincing, but I cannot hide the anxiety and disgust that makes my voice quiver. I force myself to take a step forward, a movement that threatens to drop my body to the floor. 

“Mr Abernathy, if you interrupt me, this process will be far longer and far more painful for her. Is that what you want?” 

Vee lifts her head just a little behind him, her glazed eyes meeting mine. The moment stretches out, and I'm lost in her pained gaze. Then I shrink away, the wall welcoming me back to its embrace. He grins a hideously wide grin.

“That's what I thought, Mr Abernathy. Now,” The monster swivels on his heels, his attention back on Vee. “Who are you?”

She swallows, I can hear her saliva force down her dry throat. 

“Vesper Gallows.” 

Her body violently jolts again.

“Who are you?”

“Vesper Gallo-”

Another tense of her muscles and a gargled scream. 

Why does he keep asking? She's giving the answer he wants. Unless…

“Who are you?”

“Vespe-” 

A writhing screech.

Convince me. 

Snow wasn't convinced. This monster in a man suit isn't either. 

“I'm Vesper.” Her words are beginning to slur, her tongue struggling to work around each letter. 

“I'm Vesper, I'm Vesper I'm Vesper I’m-” 

The noise she makes is so inhuman. Her hands open and close, like she's clutching for something. For me, maybe, to get me to stop what's happening to her. But I can't. 

I'm a coward. 

“Vesper!” 

I can hear the confusion, even anger, beginning to rise into her words. The sound carries over into her strangled cries.

“Vee! I'm Vee!” 

She looks right at me as she says it. And her struggling voice is tinted with whispers of defiance. It's such a small little hint around the edge of her words, but it's there. Maybe she's clinging to the identity I gave her, like it's a life raft among all the pain and uncertainty. 

Then her eyes roll back into her head, and her body convulses again with the newest surge of volts that course through her skull. I try to count the seconds, the long seconds that she cannot breath and that her body seems like a weak willow bowing and breaking in a lightning storm, her electrified limbs straining against the restraints.  But it seems to stretch out into forever, and at one point I wonder if the electricity is simply animating her corpse. 

It stops again. Vee splutters, a foul foam bubbling up out of the corners of her mouth. It's dripping out of her nose as well. Maybe it's her brain, liquified and draining out of her skull. She doesn't speak, I'm not sure she is able to.

“Who are you?” A satisfied purr, his doll-like fingers caressing her sweat slick shoulder as he moves in front of her. Her whole body heaves with her heavy, gasping breaths, her muscles shaking. I don't know if it's from fear, or from the currents that still ripple through her. 

Her lips take a moment to form around what she wants to say, feeling out the sounds before her voice commits to it. 

“What's that?” He grins, victorious, like he's won, like he's broken her. 

Slowly, she forces her head up. I can hear her grunt with the effort, the strain visible on her face. She no longer looks afraid. Instead, each line on her face is drawn with pure fury. Violent and accusing and mad. A rabid animal. Justified and righteous.

I hear the sharp intake of breath, the hiss that begins to work up her throat. There is a look of freedom and defiance and a foreign sense of surety in her eyes. Something's changed, something in her mind has been shaken loose. 

“Who are you?”

The sound builds up in her lungs, like the crescendo of one of Lenore Dove's songs. The world seems to stop as the screamed notes leave her lips. 

“PO-” 

Her name. 

The sound of her name, or at least part of it, stretched out into a thousand seconds, cut off by an explosive sound of his hand connecting hard with her cheek. I watch it in slow motion, the way she fires out her name like it's a bullet, the transformation of the sound to spit and foam, the sudden snap of her head to the side against the pure force of his slap. 

I wish I could reverse time, so I could have grabbed his hand and allowed the full sound of her name to bloom. But instead, I stand dumbfounded at her body half slumped over the arm of the chair. Her jaw hangs loose, bubbly spittle dropping out of her mauve tinted lips and forming a pool on the clean floor. I can hear her tongue move in her mouth as she mutters almost inaudible sounds that I cannot make out.

The sound of the hinges of the metal box on the table pull my eyes from the collection of saliva to the man again. His too-tight skin mask barely manages to contain his seething, malevolent fury. The corner of his jaw bulges with the effort as he pulls out a long, thin glass vial filled with a sickly green liquid. As he turns, the stark light filters through it, making it appear almost neon. 

With a harsh movement, he grabs her hair and yanks her up back into the chair. Her face is shiny with sweat, the foul bile discolouring her lips and chin. The look of indignation fades in a flash when her purple ringed eyes fix on the vial in his hand. Then it's fear again. Not the quiet, resigned fear I've seen so often in her, but a manic, wild panic. She struggles, screeching and growling like a cornered dog, feral and terrified. She stumbled over slurred words that fight to punctuate the noises of her struggle.

“No please I'm sorry I'm sorry I'll be good I'm sorry No No No No.” 

He isn't smiling anymore. He glowers at her, his hazel eyes darkening with the storm of his anger. He isn't moved, isn't shifted to compassion. His hand reaches out to grab at her face, but her wild squirming makes it difficult. He doesn't hesitate when he drives his fist into the soft flesh of her stomach. She doubles over, almost collapsing into herself as she struggles again to breathe. Fresh, acidic mucus spews up from her mouth. But doesn't give her time to recover, he doesn't wait. He grabs a fistful of her hair again, the skin of her face pulled upward for just a moment as he forces her upright again. He rips the wires' teeth from her skin, its jaws clinging onto a clump of her flesh as a fresh stream of blood slides down the side of her face. 

“Stop it.” It's such a weak, pathetic whine that comes from my mouth. I'm disgusted by my own cowardice, at my own complicity in this torture. 

“Stop it.” I force my voice to be a little louder, and I try to set my shoulders into something more brave. 

“Mr Abernathy, if you do not keep quiet, her fate will be yours as well.” 

I stare at her, and in her face see images of everything that has happened to her, nightmares I can only imagine, horrors I can't even comprehend. I see Loulou too, and everything she was and everything that made her that way.

And I wither. 

I am a coward. 

She tries to resist against his probing fingers as they pull her eyelids apart, but it seems pointless. Her eyes flirt around, as if trying to break free from her skull and run. It is with precision that he holds the vials dropper over her, and under his breath counts;

“One, two,” He speaks through gritted teeth, before moving and forcing her other eye open with clawed fingers. His voice is underscored by the rambling vibrato of Vee's pleading.

“Three… Four.”

The final drop hesitates, clinging onto the tip of the dropper, before finally releasing. It falls in slow motion, and I feel as if I'm staring at it through a magnifying lens as it lands on the surface of her eye. 

There's a long, stretched out moment where nothing happens except greenish tears sliding down her cheeks and her anticipatory breathing. 

Then her pupils expand, turning her dark eyes into pits of pure darkness. Her fists clench, and her breath turns rapid and frantic. It's a slow build up, like a kettle on the stove. Sweat beads up on her forehead, in the bright light the droplets almost look like jewels. I must be imagining it, because I can hear the rapid, out of rhythm drum beat of her heart pounding against her ribcage. 

“What did you do to her?” My mouth is dry, and my voice barely rasps out of it. He has calmed, satisfied again as he gently places the now empty vial on the table. He doesn't bother to look at me as he speaks. I am beneath him, and he speaks as if I should be lucky he is even lowering himself to talk to me. 

“Distilled and concentrated tracker jacker venom.”

I've been stunk by one before, when I was very young. I was very lucky that it had just been a single stray insect. The sting was so painful, I remember the blinding pain and the feeling that the world was melting. I remember my mother's face, sliding off of her bones, falling to the floor. I was violently sick for days, and incoherent with the horrific hallucinations that the venom caused. 

I look back at her, at her shaking hands. The blood vessels in her eyes seem to burst, leaking red across the whites of her eyes. She groans, limbs twitching, head snapping to the side. 

His face, grinning once more, appears just behind hers. A hand grabs her shoulder and stills her for just a moment. His puffy lips move, whispering something so I cannot hear. He says it slowly, each letter sliding out of his mouth and into her ear. 

He locks eyes with me. 

Her name. 

I know it's her name. 

Then she begins to scream. It's unlike any noise I've ever heard her, or really any other living creature, make. Its inhumanity pushes it beyond animalistic. It is cold, like metal grinding against metal, the pitch makes my ear drums ring. The sound isn't that of a frail, broken girl. It's that of a machine falling apart, the gears breaking down. The sound of a capitol made robot being stripped down to the most basic parts. 

He whispers to her again, lips so close they almost kiss her ear. 

She flails against her restraints, trying to flee from whatever nightmare her mind has conjured. Between those inhuman screeches she calls out incoherent words, begging, pleasing, I don't know. 

Again he utters it to her. Her feral eyes have become blind to all but the images the venom forces her to witness. His hands clutch at her shoulders, reaching down onto her chest, and perverted aberration of comfort. 

Her name. 

She calls out for someone, I think. Even with the restraints, she tries to reach out. I wonder if it's for me, for me to help her, to end her pain. 

I should have killed her when I had the chance.

I should have. 

I should have. 

I slide down the wall, wrapping my arms around my knees, helpless and useless and cowardly and vile and cruel and pointless. 

I know witnessing this is as much my punishment as it is hers. Just like witnessing Lenore Dove’s death. This is as much my fault as Lenore Dove’s death was. 

It's my fault. 

At some point in the long hours - had it been hours? It may have only been a few minutes -, Vee’s voice gives out. She makes no noise anymore, but her mouth gaps open like a corpse as she screeches her anguish in warped silence. 

Her eyes are ringed with bruised purple, the skin beginning to swell. 

I can see specks of blood colouring the drained flesh of her tongue.

I should have killed her when I had the chance. 

I should have.

I am a coward.

It's my fault. 

I should have. 

It's my fault.

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 20; Loathing

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

3.

2. 

1.

The Capitol. 

Vee has put her mask on again, but it's cracking. We've gotten through the other districts. She smiled, waved, read her Effie-made speeches, but every now and again there would be a fissure appearing in her facade. There would be a flash of rage, boiling and threatening to bubble over. So quick and subtle, the barest change of her face. It flashed like a wildfire in her black eyes whenever she looked at the projected faces of the fallen children of the 69th Hunger Games. It also burned in those voids when she looked at me. 

I can hear her singing at night. Muffled and quiet, like she's chanting under her breath. I'm sure there are new words, though it's too low to make out. She does it for hours, a never ending cycle of hums and melodies and sudden stops when she reaches the end of what she knows. Her song has begun to tear through my mind. I sing along with her silently, counting the beats, trying to create lyrics in the spaces she leaves. I come up as blank as she does.

She doesn't sleep, and neither do I. 

I am starting to wonder if I will end up like her. 

Or maybe she will end up like me. 

Just the Capitol to go, then we can go home. My life has become a cycle of ‘just’s. Just a few more districts. Just the Capitol. Just a few more hours. Just the next thing we need to get through to survive. 

We just need to survive. 

Just survive. 

I'm not entirely sure if either of us really want to survive, but I don't think either of us have an option. I don't think we've ever had a choice. 

I have been forced by Effie into a ghastly maroon suit with black gems sewn into the cuffs. She had even taken the time to cover the angry circle of reddish purple that pools on my cheekbone with makeup. 

“You know, I have heard it’s very common for Victors to throw a little ‘tantrum’ at some point.” She had said as she patted skin hued paste onto my skin. “It's good that she's got it out of her system!” 

Yes. A tantrum. That's all it was. The screaming and the crying and the hitting and the begging. Just a tantrum. 

Just the Capitol to go.

Vee has been dressed in a floating dress of what I assume to be translucent silk. It's a pale grey, tinted darker at the edges. It flutters around her gently. Her hair has been arranged into neat little braids that curl around her head like wisps of smoke. Somehow her stylist has managed to make her look pretty instead of garish. 

She doesn't look at me as we wait before the doors, ready to make our entrance to the party laid out at the president's mansion in her ‘honour’. There's nausea in the pit of my stomach. Vee is an actress, and all the other districts have been rehearsals. This night, with Snow as our audience, will be the biggest performance of her life. 

The doors open, and we are blasted with trumpeting fanfare, but Vee’s face doesn't take on that bright, forced smile. It's strangely calm looking, but it's not the blank, distant look that I've seen so often. Her jaw is hard, her stare resolute. Determined. Defiant. The same expression I had seen on Maysilee. 

That expression doesn't shift as we begin to walk down the mirror buffed marble between lines of ridiculously dressed Capitol pigs. They cheer, yell congratulations. Vee ignores them, just staring ahead. 

Then she suddenly stops. Just a moment, where her feet seem unable to move. The determined look in her eyes has burned up and transformed into pure loathing. It's frightening, to see such a visceral emotion in her eyes beyond fear and grief. I follow her gaze, and see Snow, standing at the top of the extravagant staircase, staring right back at her with a wicked grin. Cold, stern, battling with her burning fury. I wonder what is being said in the silent glare between them. What battle of wills, of power and anger and loathing reside in the silence that stretches between them despite the music and chatter. 

Then she speaks. Low, almost a whisper, but laced with venom. I turn, and watch the awful expression on her face as her lips move. 

“A treacherous smiler

With teeth white as milk,

A savage beguiler

In sheathings of silk”

She almost chants it, in and out like breaths, and I recognise the tune. I've heard it enough times now. 

More of her song. 

That stupid, rebellious, seditious, dangerous song. 

A song that I'm certain wound Vee up in this horrible situation and that is important enough to her to remember. 

A song that will get us both killed.

Does she want me to die?

“Vee?” The hatred fizzles out to embers, and she begins to move again. Steady, deliberate movements, towards Snow, towards the viper in the pit. I'm sure she intends to march right up to him, but his raised hand to silence the noise of this gaggle of brain-dead Capitol residents seems to place an invisible barrier in front of her. She stops dead at the bottom of the stairs, glaring up at the grinning monster. They lock eyes again. She doesn't seem afraid, and I know he's noticed. I know he's accustomed to being looked at with terror, and I know he knows when it's lacking. 

He lingers on her as he begins to speak before sweeping his eyes to the crowd. 

“Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the winner of our 69th Hunger Games, Vesper Gallows!” Vee hardly blinks as the crowd cheers around her. 

“Today we celebrate her victory against her fellow tributes. Their sacrifice is a reminder of the might of the Capitol, and Miss Gallows is a reminder of its mercy.” A raised brow as he looks down not at Vee, but at me. I resist the urge to cringe, and I'm glad I had necked some whiskey before we came out. I know what he is saying, his voice is crystal clear in my mind. 

You are only alive because I allow it. She is only alive because I allow it. She is only here to cover up your mess, Haymitch Abernathy.

There's more cheering, and music begins to play again. We stare at each other, before his eyes move to Vee again. 

Convince me. 

We are going to die.

Capitol peacocks surround Vee, and it takes a moment for her ‘training’ to kick in again. There is that false smile and false laugh. She is dragged to the dance floor, twirled around like a doll, handed between jeering partners in ridiculous outfits. She struggles to keep up, her ankle sliced by a surgeon's blade lags behind. Those around her seem to find this lack of grace amusing, and they dance faster. She keeps stumbling, but there are always hands to catch her and sweep her into the next move.

Vomit threatens to spill out through my teeth, so I do the best thing I can. I leave Vee to her squawking horde of puppeteers (I can't do anything to stop that anyway) and stumble to the drinks table. I grab a glass of the strongest thing I can find, and I drain it in a few gulps. I wish it would settle my nerves, but it doesn't. I'd need a lot more than one glass, and I need to say sober ‘enough’ to get through tonight. 

Who knows. Maybe Vee will pull it out of the bag and be the most convincing Vesper Hallows. Or maybe we will be shot come dawn. 

The anticipation is the worst. Waiting for something to happen. For poison or a noose or a gun or mutt squirrels to strip us to the bone. The future is horrifyingly uncertain. I’d just like to know how I'm going to die, and when that will be. 

The night drags, the people around me get drunker and drunker. I do drink a little more, desperate to erase this fearful anticipation, but I force myself to go steady. For Vee. 

Vee’s efforts to uphold her crumbling mask slips more the higher the moon climbs over the glass domed roof of this opulent symbol of tyranny. Those around her don't notice, too enveloped in their own selfish ignorance, food and booze. Even Effie and the rest of the prep team have been swept up in the festivities. 

But her eyes fix on the President, sitting on his plush chair on a balcony above the rest of us zoo animals. They are brief moments at first, but as the night wears on, she gets bolder and more obvious with her smouldering glare. After all he had done to me, I don't think I would have been able to muster the courage to look at him like that. 

Snow’s eyes follow her all night, like a snake coiled in a tree watching a sickly rabbit hop around just out of striking range. Waiting. Poised and ready. There is a self satisfied smile on his face, calm and superior. I don't want to know why. 

It's not far off of dawn, and the party fizzles out until only a few shit-faced people are left sprawled over chairs. Vee stands in the middle of the dance floor, weary and pale. But despite the exhaustion evident on her face, she hasn't lost the anger. Without an audience now, the lines of rage on her face are obvious. She is almost aflame with it, I worry her smoke-wrought dress may catch fire from the sparks of her anger. 

“Vee?” I reach out and touch her arm gently, and her glare at Snow, still sat sipping his blood red wine on his balcony, breaks just for a moment as she turns to me.

“Haymitch?” 

Black gloved hands clamp onto her arms, the shock registers in her face before I feel hands grab at me too. They aren't peace-keepers like I expect them to be. Tall men, dressed in jet black, their faces covered by masks that make them appear featureless. Faceless. 

We are half shoved, half dragged, towards the double doors. I turn to see Snow, raising his glass to me and Vee in a grinning, awful toast. The brief moment that our eyes meet, I hear his voice in my head.

What is about to happen is your fault, Mr Abernathy. It is going to happen because you failed. This is your fault. 

His face lingers in my mind, even as the doors to the van shut behind us and trap us in darkness. 

All I am left with is the sound of the wheels against gravel and Vee's nightmarish song as she begins to murmur it under her shaky breath.

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 19; Requiem

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

The melody won't stop. Again and again. My throat feels rough and gritty, like I've swallowed sand. In the darkness I can see strange apparitions, wraith-like personifications of the song I'm trying so desperately to recall. Swirling, rising and falling with the tune, halting suddenly when I reach the end of what I know, falling apart, clattering to the floor, reassembling as I try again. 

Even in silence my mind races with the notes. Even as the tears begin to haze the visions of music before me, and sobs replace my hums. 

Another tune floats through the wall, soft and gentle. It takes a moment, but this new melody begins to seed itself in my head. I don't know it, at least it doesn't spark any churning nausea of memory in me, but I recognise its meaning. I envision arms embracing, lips kissing foreheads, blankets being tucked. A lullaby. A song to chase away the nightmares. I let it consume me for a moment, this unknown song of comfort carried to me on the spectre of Haymitch’s voice. But my unfinished melody begins to worm its way back in. The two begin to merge, one black, one white, twirling and combining and separating and clawing and embracing. Monster and protector. I try to focus on one, no, on the other. I try to make sense of the cacophony that now swells inside my head. An orchestra of shattered memories and barely remembered songs and lullabies that don't belong to me. 

I cover my ears, to try and drown it out, but the noise in my head has descended into blaring, screaming, writhing, crying. I can't hear the melody anymore. 

The dawn is here. I open my eyes. Effie and my prep team stand in the place of my musical ghosts. I am dressed and prepared. I am fed, though the food is lead in my mouth. The train stops. My melody comes again. I grit my teeth, willing it to leave. But it won't, and I'm almost glad. I don't want to lose it. Not yet. 

I blink, and a crowd is before me. Words on a card. I am reading them, I think. I can feel my lips moving, my voice rumbling in my aching throat. There is grief and pain and numbness and rage in the faces before me. They hate me. I blink again, willing them to disappear. They do, and I wonder where they could have gone. Time seems such a fickle thing, moving by me so quickly, leaving me behind, dragging me rapidly into an uncertain future. My body continues on, I can feel my mouth continue to speak, but I am not there. My song consumed me again. It jitters, dissected by Haymitch’s melody, and I try my hardest to piece it back together. Each note separates into its own moment that stretches into eternity. 

A child of the village was murdered today.

She leaps on her prey

A child

A child

Murdered

The Sea creeps to pillage

A child, murdered

She leaps on her prey

A child of the village was murdered today

Murdered

Murdered

Murdered

I open my eyes, and I am now standing on a pier. The wood groans, like the door to my forever daylight room. I force myself to look up from the salt stained planks. I find myself grabbing at my chest, at the place where my broken heart should be.

It is a mosaic of reflected pinks, deep blues, cool purples. Fragmented images pulled together and secured with salt before me. Cool breeze and brine air and foam. I close my eyes and I still see this place, only the sky isn't pink. The sky is blue and clear, there is laughter. I can't see who makes the noise, there are so many different laughs and giggles and chuckles, but it surrounds me like a blanket.  My feet are bare, gripping onto rocks as I jump and leap. The sweet brine of plucked shells sits on my tongue. My belly is full. Pain and misery feel a distant thing. I feel… loved. It's such a foreign feeling that it nearly makes my knees fold beneath me.

Someone is calling for me. 

I am not afraid.

The voice does not feel me with fear. 

Instead, it fills me with a foreign sensation of joy. I swivel, the wind whipping the voice around me. It calls again, for me, it calls my name. I can't hear what it is, it is garbled and distorted into sea foam, but I know it is my name that they call. My melody, stunted and short, begins to play on the breeze. I start running, clambering over rocks and pools on a wave of excitement. I do not know why, but I am expecting an embrace and a hand stroking my hair when I reach the end of this voices trail. 

The glistening surface of the water rapidly approaches, and I slide to a stop. I teeter here, on the tightrope between the heavens and the depths. It looks so cool and inviting. The waves lap at the rock, pawing upward and tickling my toes. I hear it again. Louder, clearer. I can almost grab it, it's so close. Again, please. Please say it again. I plead to the tide. Just give me my name. 

The waves below are so inviting. Full of secrets. Cold and unfeeling and full of life and hope and despair. The sounds of my name roll in the melodic current beneath. Faces linger beneath the surface, obscured, but I'm sure I know them. Ma? The word stings the back of my throat, but I cannot recall its meaning. It is lost to me, as is the face it accompanies that linger beyond my reach. 

An unknown voice sings my melody back to me.

I know what I seek is just below the waves. Rest, peace, warmth. I hope my name and my life are below as well, but I'd forfeit them for a guarantee of freedom from the torment of my existence. I just want peace. 

I step forward, momentarily suspended in a void. Then I fall, sliding into the water. Cold surrounds me, squeezes me. Impossible weight that somehow makes me feel light and carefree. I think I should be drowning, but as water fills my lungs my breath transforms into salt. My blood pumps with the current. Memories of pain begin to wash away, my scars fade. I am no longer a beaten, starved, trapped animal. I am now made of the depths, of brine and foam and shimmering shafts of light. I can hear the churning of waves, the vibration of the sea as she scrapes along the sand. It transforms into my song, beautiful and blue. 

Warmth wraps around my wrist, resisting against my body's urge to sink deeper. I take a deep breath, but air fills my lungs instead of water. I am a creature of flesh and blood again. The wind's fingers run through my hair. I blink, and I am no longer sinking down into inky blues dappled with ethereal sunlight. I am standing on a rickety pier, lingering on the edge. I stare at wooden planks and the ocean and the sky. I try to step towards it again, back to the peace and the voices and the song and my name, straining against whatever holds me back, but the sea doesn't come closer. Please come back. Don't leave me. Not again.

I look back and see Haymitch, gripping my wrist, holding me back, shaking his head softly. The setting sun reflects in his eyes, I can see the pinks and purples. I wish I could disappear back into the world that is held within his eyes, but I can't. He begins to pull me away, to follow the others who walk away from this snippet of tranquility. I am powerless to stop it, powerless to return to the salt and the sea. 

I watch over my shoulder as the water grows further and further away. The memories of it begin to jitter, and I try to cling on to them. I don't want to lose them again. I can still hear the voices, though they slowly become distant murmurs. I pine for the embrace I'm sure was at the end of the trail of voices hidden deep beneath the waves.

I try to think of the faces that might belong to those voices. The faces of people who I think must have loved me. Only someone who loved me could cause such a painful ache of joy in my chest. I conjure an image of a man with dark eyes, dark hair. His expression is one of pity, but also of love. Pa? It hurts, because I know the face I create is not my Pa. It's not a face beaten by the sea and the wind. It's a face cracked with seams of coal and grief. I feel grief too, at this image of a man who is not my father. He is in the place of another man whom I cannot remember. Would he leave me too?

Please don't leave me.

I blink, and we are on the train again. I am in my room. I don't think I am alone.

I see the sad face of the moon, creeping its way over the ocean horizon. She is so far, so distant. An ebbing lantern in the eternal dark. I reach out for her, for this mother of night, but my hand is stopped. My fingers press into the invisible barrier that holds me from my moon and my sea. Glass. I press my fingertips hard into its smooth, crystal surface, willing myself to push through, willing myself to transform into motes of moonlight so I could just simply glide through. 

The old moon

So far away, so silvery. Is she singing to me?

Tarnished.

Then the world framed by this window lurches to the side. I've seen this image before, in a different time. A frame of jagged steel, a tiny pin prick hole. I remember the thin shaft of moonlight. I had to strain against something heavy and rusted around my wrists to be able to look through the hole as everything I had ever known began to disappear at rapid speed.

It'll be ok, sweetheart.

The words claw their way up from the darkest depths of my mind. Burning, searing into my head. So soft and gentle and filled with fear. The sound of home. 

My home. My home. Home. 

It's leaving me again. 

Please don't leave. 

I can hear the voices try to pierce through. Muffled, melodic, calling my name, singing my song. It transforms into a wraith again, elongated fingers scratching to get to me from the outside of the glass. 

I can't reach it.

Thudthudthudthudthudthudthudthud

My heart is beginning to pound. The sound threatened to overwhelm the fading choir of the sea. 

The moon watches, rising and rising. Still despite the world below her whizzing past. Why won't she help me?

Smoke of the flood.

The sea has transformed from water to leaves. The endless horizon of the sea has become rolling hills. The ghost of my memories that tries to break in starts to lag behind. It can't keep up. Its fingers are losing its grip on me. They are slipping. I am slipping. I- it's all slipping away again. No, please come back. Please don't leave me.

Panic hits me square in the chest. I cannot breathe. I am drowning. Drowning in this air that doesn't feel like real air. I dig at the skin of my throat, trying to rip it open so this fake air can fill my lungs. It doesn't work. I pound at the glass, trying to break it, to get through to the air and sea and the moon and my ghosts and my memories. 

I feel my nails break. Skin bruise. Blood pooling under my skin. 

Arms wrap around me, trying to drag me away. I've been dragged away like this before, dragged to a dark train that whisked me away to somewhere evil. I screech, a banshee wail. I can't go back. Please let me go home. I must be begging, pleading, but I cannot hear my own voice. Hands grip my wrists, pulling my arms back.

My ghost begins to stutter. Weak. The moonlight barely illuminates its sad, wispy form. I can barely hear the melody anymore. This moment will be torn from me, just like every fragment of myself has been torn from me. 

Its voice is filled with anguish, sorrow. But I hear it. Familiar, melodic, melancholic.

The old moon is tarnished

With smoke of the flood,

The dead leaves are varnished

With colour like blood.

A parting gift. 

A piece of my song, of my memory, of myself.

My face burns with tears, salty and cool, like the sea I know in my heart I'll never see again. 

My soul is ripped from my body. I feel it, the tethers sliced through with a knife made of anguish. 

I stop fighting. 

I begin to wail. A high pitched keening. A requiem for what I've lost, what I am losing. Grief and sorrow and guilt smother me, I am crushed under the weight of it. My lungs are bursting, my heart re-shatters into dust. My legs give out beneath me, the sheer volume of my pain too much for me to bear. 

The arms begin to cradle me. I half expect the arms of a monster, but I know that it's just Haymitch. But, at this point, what's the difference?

 They're all monsters.

[secretumpoeta]

It was all a dream, until it wasn't. I broke that day. It felt as if my heart were pulled from my chest and I breathed hollow. Empty. I looked at a world that was nothing. Everything feels cold and lifeless. And so I sit and I wait. For what, I don't know. ~ B.T.

[writingdose]

I don’t know about y’all but my first draft is literally always my final draft and this has been the case since I started writing fics almost a decade ago. I proofread my works for typos, plot holes or grammatical errors but that’s it 😭

[itsabeautifulmayday]

Haymitch: That’s my dead best friend’s kid and my dead girlfriend’s relative so I must protect her at all costs

Katniss the unreliable narrator: I don’t think the guy who’s job it is to help me stay alive is actually trying

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 18; Blockage

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

Our train hasn't exploded yet. Poison hasn't found its way into our food yet. A noose isn't dangling from a door waiting for our necks. Somehow their absence, and the absence of any repercussions from Vee’s tangent, is worse. The waiting.

Vee had been quiet all evening, her usual puppeted joy dampened.

I can hear her through the wall that separates our rooms on this opulent Capitol train as we whizz to District 4. The low, droning, cyclic hum. She must be huddled, pressed against the wallpaper, because I swear I can feel the vibrations running through my body. She repeated the tune she had hummed for me, again and again and again. Then the tune developed. Just three extra notes. There is silence for a moment, a pause of shock. More memories. Then she starts up again, her hum hurried as she rushed through the melody to the new notes. Then she does it again. And again. And again.

I should stop her.

Every note is rebellion.

Every breath of that melody will be the death of us.

But I can't bring myself to do it.

My legs are going numb from standing, so I slide down against the wall, leaning my head against it. I envision her doing the same, mirroring me on the other side of this wall. I find my breath begins to move in time to her bassy, repetitive song. Soothing, in a way. Like wind.

I force myself to remember what she had said, and place them into the rhythm she creates.

The Sea comes to pillage, She leaps on her prey.

I try to decipher what it might mean. It's obvious this fragment is from a song of defiance, just like the hanging tree, but who is the sea? Peace keepers? The Capitol itself?

A child of the village Was murdered today.

I see the District 5 boy’s face. Why was he the one who moved her to this momentary break away from her training? To this flash of memory? Why did he inspire her to recite such rebellious words?

She continued her melody, but I have no words to continue with. What came next? Is that what she's trying to do, figure out the next verse?

The humming is increasing in speed. The sound is becoming frantic. A roadblock at the end of her broken melody, one that she can't seem to push through to the rest of the song. She rams against it, again and again, her notes becoming dissonant. I half expect the melody to suddenly continue on, but it doesn't. Instead, she's just stuck cycling through the last few notes of what she does know. I envision her rocking back and forth, face contorted with distress, an animal cowering in the face of her own memories.

The sound has devolved into something guttural, like a fearful growl.

I can't take it anymore.

I slam my elbow hard into the wall, the impact vibrating through my bones. Vee is quiet. No, I think I can hear soft sobs. Guilt, again.

I feel an urge to go and comfort her, but I am rooted to this spot against the wall. I can't face her, not her tear stricken face, the face of another girl that doesn't belong to her. So, instead, I find myself humming. A soft tune that I barely remember the melody of. Lenore Dove had sung it to me once. She had cradled my head in her lap and gently stroked my hair, singing it softly under a blue sky. It's a lullaby, something for children. About meadows and sunshine and the hope of a better tomorrow. The lyrics elude me, the years and spirits have eroded them away, but I remember the vivid feeling of comfort.

I turn, pressing my cheek to the wall, and I imagine Vee doing the same. She has gone quiet, and I hope Lenore Dove's song soothes her.

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 17; Pillage

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List

It is uncanny, how Vee manages to act so human and perfect when it is required of her. She stands at the train window, waving at the crowd of people standing on the platform of District 6. Even as the train pulls away and begins to pick up speed, she stays there, waving and grinning at concrete buildings and graveyards of trains and construction yards shielded by wire fences. 

Only when the urban gives way to vast prairies and lakes does she stop. She freezes for a moment, hand held in the air before she drops the act. The smile disappears, her hand slumps back to her side. She sways, like she's trying to catch her balance, and an expression of exhaustion greys her face. I know how exhausted she is. Beneath the layers of makeup and blush that her prep team insisted would ‘brighten her up’ are dark rings around her eyes and sallow skin. This charade, this performance she is forced to put on is draining her. I leave her there, to this moment of solitude. When she returns to us in the sitting room, she will be required to perform again.

I am right, she joins us with a smile and a light but weary walk. She eats the food she is given, she laughs and banters with Effie and Mellona (her jewel studded stylist) and swoons over her twittering prep teams talk about their latest fashion obsessions. Everyone breaks off to go to their rooms for the night, and it takes my touch to her shoulder to awaken Vee from the trance she had slipped into. I usher her to her room, and leave just as she collapses onto her bed.

District 5 tomorrow. Then 4. Then 3. Then 2. Then 1. Then the capitol. Then home. Even with Vee's perfect performance, it feels like I am waiting for the bomb to drop on us. We just have to get home. Vee just needs to maintain this charade and whatever grip she has on herself. I know her hold is slipping, but we just need to get home.

The train slows again. We all stand waiting at the door as orderly thickets of wires and cables and spires of steel slide into view. Then the level wooden platform of the station. Vee is smiling again, dressed in a charcoal grey dress, her eyes ringed with smokey shadow. I think her team were going for a mysterious look, but it just makes her look gaunt and ghostly. 

We are welcomed, as we have been for every district we've visited so far, by a mandatory gathering of the district's people. They all stand in the square, sombre and quiet. Vee is ushered up onto the stage, with the cards Effie had written her speech on. She stands there, her face the picture of joy. Bathed in pale rays of a weak sun that forces its fingers through the cloud, the wind tousling her hair. She begins, just like she has for the last 6 districts, all smiles and soft words and ‘proper manners and appreciation for the task’ as Effie puts it. It is easy, with the lilting monotony of Vee’s voice as she works her way through the cards and the low humming of machinery around us, to allow myself to shift out of focus. She becomes background noise for a moment, and I don't bother to listen to what she's saying. 

“And Sol Sychar,” The slight change in her voice pulls me back. I watch her, as her eyes finally turn to the face of the boy tribute projected onto a screen above his family. Her expression changes, the smallest of flickers. I struggle to figure out what she's feeling. Her eyes search his face. I know his face, the game makers had taken particular delight in the broadcast of his long, slow death as the sun baked his flesh and flies filled his mouth. Claudius Templesmith had merely announced his jealousy at the sun the tributes were so privileged to experience when the weather in the Capitol was so grim. 

“He was-” Her breath catches in her throat, and her expression changes again. It's subtle, maybe only I’ve noticed it, I hope I'm the only one who's noticed, because her face has become marred with rage. For a brief moment she looks like Maysilee, like Lenore Dove, like all of the faces of parents and siblings and family of my disemboweled, torn to shreds, starved and eviscerated tributes. 

“H-he- He died.” Then there is a set in her jaw. Another change in her body. Determination, loathing, defiance. And her voice changes when she next speaks. She speaks with effort, like the words hurt, but she forces them out. She stares hard at the boy’s picture, into his dark eyes that were so full of life once. The card in her hand crumples from her shaking grip. 

My organs knit together in a tight clump when her almost whispered words, amplified by the microphone, bounce across the square. 

“The sea- the sea creeps to pillage,” Her eyes sweep towards the peace keepers, her stare cold and hard. 

Accusation.

“She leaps on her prey;” The knot in my chest grows tighter.

Blame.

“A child-” She looks back to the boy’s picture, eyes filled with sorrow and anger, 

“A child of the village

Was murdered today.”

The silence is heavy. 

My mouth is dry.

I'm trying to hide the shake in my knees. 

Then, she transforms again. Back to the puppet she is. Smiles. A cheery voice as she continues her speech. 

“Sol Sychar’s death is a reminder that we are nothing without the Capitol. We cannot survive without the Capitol's mercy. I am so grateful that the Hunger Games reminds us of the districts need for the might of the Capitol. They keep Panem safe from harm.”

The usual sincerity of her words is missing, there is a strange sort of apathy, a certain amount of disbelief in her own speech. 

She finished, and there is a stunted, uncomfortable applause that ripples through the crowd. I rush forward, trying to appear calm, and try to usher her into the justice building behind us. I'm gripping her arm maybe a little too hard, but it doesn't matter, because I'm certain a bullet is already cutting through the air at a great speed to greet her soft brain matter. But there is no such quick mercy, and the doors of the building close behind us. I can hear Effie already exclaiming her outrage that her perfect speech had been ruined, but I don't stop. I push Vee into a side room, and slam the door behind us. I'm sure Effie is on the other side aghast at my rudeness but I do not care. 

“What the fuck was that?” My voice is loud and angry and afraid. I know this place is probably bugged, but it doesn't matter right now. 

“What was that Vee? Why did you say that? Why would you do that?” My fingers are digging into her shoulders, and I am shaking her. 

“You are going to get us killed, Vee. Do you want that?” I shake her harder, and I see her hands raise up. In a moment of shameful fear, I pinch my eyes shut and bring my hands to shield my face, expecting her nails (or some phantom spoon) to start clawing my eyes out. Her cool fingers clamp around my wrist like a vice, and my hand is yanked towards her. When I open them again, I see my fingers pressed to her throat, with her hand pushing them into the soft flesh. 

I hate that the temptation to squeeze hits me again. 

Vee makes a small noise, barely audible, but I feel it in her throat. The gentle vibrations. She does it again, and I look at her carefully. There is still lingering rage in her expression, but there is what I think might be excitement? Or maybe, clarity? 

The sound comes again, and I realise it is a beat, a rhythm. I move my free hand, cupping her throat and jaw with both hands. She repeated the vibrating tune, louder now. Her hum is low and bassy, but there's definitely a melody there, or at least a fragment of one. 

“Is that- is it a song, kid?” 

“Song, yes.” She exhales, and relief softens her expression again. It's as if I've given her an answer to a decade long question.

“It's a song.” Her relieved words move back into the low, droning half melody. 

She remembers something. 

She remembers a broken tune and a verse to a song. 

Dread hits me again. 

Lyrics that reeks of rebellion, of sedition. Of the injustice of a little boys murder at the hands of the Capitol. 

You'll murder us! You'll murder us! You'll murder us! 

Loulou's voice rips through my memories like a hail storm.

The fear I had felt for Lenore Dove, with her songs about stolen geese and hanging trees, is amplified now for this strange girl. I know, whatever this song was to her, that it is likely the reason she's here now play acting as another girl.

Had Vee been Covey? No, no I don't think so. They're aren't many of them left, a missing girl of their own would have been noticed.  

My questions about whoever Vee had been grow, but I have to bury them. It doesn't matter, not now. She is Vesper, and I worry dragging up her memories would break her.

I withdraw my hands from her throat, taking a breath before cupping her face with my rough palms.

“Kid - Vee. You can never say those words again. Or sing them. Or hum the tune. Do you understand?” She stares at me, blinking slowly, a frown beginning to pull her brows down.

“You can't.” The humming has stopped.

“If you do, they will kill you.” She seems more confused than afraid. 

“They will kill me.” There's the fear. I feel guilty, but I push on. “They will kill your family, your pa.” I stress the word, and I know my point is being made by the sudden glassiness of her black eyes. She tries to look away, but I force her to look right into my eyes. 

“Do you understand?” 

A soft nod. 

Then I find myself embracing her. I'm not sure why, but my arms wrap around her and I pull her head into my shoulder. She doesn't resist, though she doesn't respond. We stay there for a moment, as I breathe, gathering my composure. When I push away from her again, her face is grim and weary. 

[bodydoublefanfic]

Chapter 16; Helios

A Hunger Games Fanfic

Body Double Master List Trigger Warnings; Descriptions of torture and medical procedures

I don't blink, not yet at least. If I do, the image will disappear too soon. So I stare hard at the fluorescent, buzzing bulb above me. My eyes are beginning to burn, but I don't look away. If I stare at it long enough, I can conjure up flickering memories of the sun. I think I remember staring at the sun long enough to hurt my eyes, that's the sensation I try to capture. The burning white, eternal light has become my sun. It never sets, never rises, never ceases with its probing fingers made of vicious starlight. It is unnatural, unfeeling, devoid of warmth or life. I feel as if I'm beginning to forget the warmth of the sun. Though now, just like everything else, the memory of the sun and a blue sky is drenched in uncertainty. Was the sun ever warm? Did its rays ever dance across my skin? Or is this just another falsehood, a memory that I cannot trust. The true sun must just be another fluorescent bulb. This must be the most logical conclusion. 

The door to my room of perpetual daylight cries mournfully as it is opened. A long, lowing bellow of suffering. I’ve begged my carers to ease its pain, to offer it medicine, but no one seemed to care enough to tend to its injuries. I wish I could help it. I close my eyes, letting the dazzling burst of light seared into my eyes send a dizzying sensation over me. My sun stains the darkness behind my eyelids, clinging to my memory. You may have forgotten the sun of old, but you cannot forget me. I’m sure my tiny, unnatural sun is speaking to me, it's voice made of static and metal and wires, not of bird song and wind and morning. 

I open my eyes again, to try and erase its voice. I do not wish this lie to pervade within me, I do not want my memory of the sun, however hazy, to be replaced by this false image. But even with my eyes open, my vision filled with grey walls and a pale face, the outline of my counterfeit sun persists.

I let the face of the man before me consume me instead. I blink, pushing the dazzling shadow further and further from him. Finally he is clear again, unmarked. Skin pulled back far too tightly, stretching across his bones like rubber. Grim, callous, eyes that seemed so similar yet so incredibly different from each other. I can't hold his gaze, not without a rising acidic nausea. The light touch of his unnaturally soft fingers, lily white, to my cheek doesn't startle me, not any more. I have come to expect it, these little touches, little moments of falsified human connection that I'm sure are manufactured to comfort me, before whatever he planned was to be inflicted upon me. I despise their presence in the moment, but long for them in the ancient, endless, ceaseless stretches of eternal noon that yawn like an abyssal gorge between each beat of my heart. I think I'd view it as repugnant, if I didn't know what isolation could do to a creature, what isolation has turned me into. 

My chin is tilted up, and I am no longer in my room, though this one is no less familiar. I am no longer slumped on the floor, but sat now in a smooth, heavy chair made of white plastic. Despite the clean surface, I imagine it bile drenched and blood stained. My blood, my bile. The blood of ghosts and phantoms. Latex hands manoeuvre my limbs, iron fingers enclosing around my joints to hold me in place. The warm plastic of the chair is sticking to my skin. 

I blink, and now there is a bright light being forced into my eyes. I try to blink again, but I can't. I try again, harder, trying to shield myself from more false suns, but all I receive is a sharp pain in my eyelids. Spikes tear them open, apart, claws of vicious animals. I can't move my head either. The eternities between my heartbeats suddenly compress to micro moments as panic erupts in my chest. 

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump

“Hush now.” Soothing, low tones, his hand touching my neck, silken fingers tracing my throat. The light is too bright, all I can see are vague shadows of inhuman monsters. But I know he is there. My handler. My doctor. The sound of metal clicking, machines whirring. The glint of the light against steel as it moves closer to my eye. 

“Let’s get started, shall we?”

Piercing, scraping, slicing.

I want to die. 

I lose all sense of myself, of my body. My limbs no longer exist to me, I no longer exist except for in this stretch of agony. Whatever sounds I try to make are silenced by my own constricting throat. I become nothing more than burning nerves. Eternity returns to the gaps between the beats of my heart, eternities of pain. Just like the endless day, it is relentless. My vision flickers in and out, wiring disconnected, reconnected. I see black, then oozing red. The haze of crimson is dazzling in the bright light. Something warm and viscous slides down my cheeks and drips onto my lap. 

I am torn apart. 

I am disassembled. 

Pieces of me are ripped away and replaced.

I can feel the probing tubes as they worm their way up through my veins like snakes. The cold, burning sensation as things are implanted into flesh. 

I can't see anymore. It is not the merciful hand of oblivion, because I still feel everything that is being done to me.

Where is my sun?

I am fractured.

Bones are cracking, creaking as they are pulled and manipulated. I am opened. Something metal presses into muscles and sinew, sinking claws into flesh to hold itself fast. Skin is pulled back, pierced and stitched and sewn back together. 

I miss the sky.

Rubber hands scrub and scrape and pound. I am pulled and moulded and reshaped. 

Is this room my cocoon, and this symphony of cruelty my metamorphosis? Is the caterpillar subjected to the same nightmare I exist in now just before its transformation? If only I could become a butterfly and soar away from here. Gossamer wings and flower nectar is not a fate I can ever be bestowed. I am too unholy, my body desecrated beyond hope of a beautiful end. 

I miss the sand.

The piercing, ripping, tearing. It has stopped. My body is wracked with swelling, swirling throbs, and I find it hard to breath through the weight that now sits heavy against my lungs and beneath my skin. Tender hands clean my face, something cool wipes my eyes. The black begins to dissolve to show me a world shrouded in red haze. 

“Who are you?”

He only asks to tease me. He knows the answer, he knows I can't give an answer at all. I'm not anything anymore beyond a creature made of spillable blood and breakable bones and burnable skin. My face is turned to the side by his hand, and a man clothed in a fine suit of grey stares at me. White haired, lines marking his face. A rose. I can't summon a memory of him, but his image sends an instinctual urge to flee through my restrained body. This man is not safe, he is not kind. He is evil. Yet I don't know why. Every fiber of my being wants to run from this blood stained visage. 

I am meat. He steps closer. I am examined. A prized catch. Even through the stained glass distortion of red, I can see how pleased he is. His voice is cold and fresh. Like snow.

“She's Vesper Gallows, of course.” 

A strange face is suddenly staring at me. I stare back at her, at the eyes that are bloodied and a deep pitch hue. The gaunt, sallow face. The expression of unfathomable sorrow and pain. She blinks, fresh drops of ruby tears sliding down her face. I feel the warmth of them on my cheeks. 

What little breath my lungs managed to suck in grows stale. 

Me. 

My face.

My eyes.

My hair.

My flesh.

Me. 

“Who are you?” He is gripping my thigh, and my twin disappears. Then a warm hand, not the one I am used to, turns me to look up at him. The monster grins at me, teeth sharp and treacherous. Lips fat and pulled back over those milky fangs. 

“Who are you, dear?” The words are ice in the white haired man's mouth, laced with far more malice than I think my doctor could ever be capable of.

I hesitate. The words begin to form in my mouth unbidden, unwanted, yet my soul is so willing to grasp at this puzzle piece, at this shred of identity. It feels like a life raft among the sea of nothingness inside my head. Not my life raft, it doesn't belong to me, but something to cling on to. Something to make sense of. 

“I- I am Vesper Gallows.”