#ah126

[maverickmontana]

He didn’t speak to Alder as they left the building behind, headed towards somewhere Alder told him would be safe. Safe for who? he wanted to ask, because his own position was confused now.

The rebels had killed his mother. The Capitol had shot him. They’d starved him. They’d pressed him for information, and he hadn’t given it.

Now blinking in the light of the day he wasn’t sure what was right or wrong. All he knew was the weight of Alder’s arm around him, and it was both a comfort and a burn.

At the safe house, which was in a mostly-empty apartment complex on the edge of town, he was taken by a nurse into a bedroom. She gave him water, watched him with sharp eyes until he drank all of it. Next came soup; he thought he’d vomit it up, but he didn’t, he ate it slowly, one spoonful at a time. With the soup she gave him pills, which he took readily, wanting the pain of his back to ebb long enough that he might have some hope of thinking beyond it.

She left him in the room, closing the door behind her, telling him that she was going to keep anyone from coming in so he could sleep. He laid down on the bed, on his side, and he must have slept because when he opened his eyes to Alder sitting next to him, there were flames licking the sides of his vision.

“H’lo,” he said, his voice scratchy, the first words he’d spoken since the prison.

@alder-reid​

[everettlance]

He had left the Capitol swearing not to speak to Cade again, not only because he had woken embarrassed about what had happened with him and Abel, but because he couldn’t go down the path Cade seemed to want to lead him down.

Or maybe Cade didn’t give that much of a shit about him.

Abel’s place was nice, and pretty central, but Abel was often not there and it was lonely. Cade had texted him, and he’d ignored it for a few days, days which he spent watching boring Capitol TV from Abel’s couch, taking the pain meds that the doctors had given him which were equivalent to the shit they sent down in the Arena, which meant they hardly touched the pain.

And there was a lot of it.

His skin was brittle and hurt all over his body, worst in the places where the burns had been more serious, but it made even just sitting or laying down painful. He had no other choice, though, as the cast around his leg made it impossible to go anywhere without the wheelchair or crutches they’d given him.

He was fiddling with his phone, it was nine, maybe ten o’clock at night, and the pills had worn off but he didn’t have the energy to get up and take more. They didn’t really touch the pain anyway. He didn’t really mean to text Cade back, to send him Abel’s address, to invite him to come over, and yet, he did just that. Did it matter what he intended, really, when the outcome was the same?

He crutched over to the door when he heard the knock, opened it, acting almost confused, as if he hadn’t invited Cade over explicitly. “What’s up?”

@cadebentley​

[slateskylar]

Slate had a backpack full of propaganda literature against the government when he ran into Luca. And no, he wasn’t really ashamed about that, but he was leafing through the latest issue of TH3 T0MMYKN0CK3R, checking out the pro-rebellion lyrics his friend had printed, and he did shove it behind his back immediately upon seeing Luca in Victor’s Village.

“Oh, hey, long time no see,” he said, smiling coolly, taking a few steps away from him. He wasn’t really worried about Luca seeing the zine and sending him to jail, but rather, Luca seeing it and telling Hestia. This was the first pro-rebellion issue they’d printed, so where the others had simply poked fun at Battyberg, this one featured a comic with Prim at a guillotine, the aforementioned lyrics, and an allegorical story about the oppressed penguin proletariat written by Slate. He didn’t think Hestia would find that very funny.

@luca-acero​

[alder-reid]

Across Panem, there was rebellion as he’d always envisioned it. Clashes in the streets, fires, all adrenaline and sweat. This was not one of those things. He had a scarf pulled up his face to conceal everything but his eyes, and was crouched behind a bush with Willow next to him as Peacekeepers paced the front of the lumber mill. By the perfection of their gait, the preciseness of their turns, he clocked them as robotic Peacekeepers almost immediately, which he considered to be both good and bad. Good because they could act more indiscriminately, attack with full force at standardized chinks in their armor. Bad because they could not be fooled, and their range of sense would far surpass a humans.  “We’ll have to get around them somehow,” Alder breathed to Willow, turning to look at her. “I don’t think we could take them without raising an alarm, they’re too far away.” The goal wasn’t to attack anyways-- it was to get in and lay the groundwork for one.

@willow-tree-lindber​

[cadebentley-archived]

Cade had always thought he’d make a great Victor. As a child he’d picture himself living in one of the homes tucked into the heart of District Six, smaller than his own but plenty lavish. He’d be universally recognized for the things he had done, not his father. Despite so few Victors actually coming from Six, he always envisioned every home in the circle occupied. He imagined community. What a joke. Alone, he stumbled into the Village, teetering as the sidewalk pitched and rolled under him. Despite it being mid-morning, he took another pull from the bottle, something clear and strong. He wondered if he was high, too, couldn’t remember what he’d been doing all the night before. Cade wandered into the middle of the circular road that formed the Village and laid down on the asphalt, staring up at the sky as the reassuring repetition of the homes cradled him. Was this was community felt like? Stability? Family? He couldn’t remember why he’d come here in the first place, but maybe he’d hoped he’d find something here that he’d imagined.  He closed his eyes, then, vaguely registering some footsteps nearing him, but he didn’t pay any attention. It wasn’t like anyone really lived here anyways, who would run him over?

@auri-cartwright​

[coletteneptune]

Though the city had descended into chaos, and Colette was making plans to evacuate herself and Olympia if need be, she wanted to find the time to see the new Victor. She had met her briefly in training, but always found it difficult to attach to any tributes before the Arena, since it was so likely they’d simply be gone.

She was glad Nvidia had lived, though, and was even more glad when she heard that she was at university in the city. Colette herself had fond memories of her days on campus, and so on a lunch break, she found herself walking into the library, where she’d heard Nvidia spent much of her time.

On her way to find her, she passed the psychology stacks, and she paused to pull one of her favorite theoretical texts, one written decades ago that compared the Games to an experiment from a world ago, one whose records had survived the Dark Days — the Stanford prison experiment.

She set it down next to Nvidia at a table, and pulled out the chair beside her. “Is this seat taken?” she asked, already sitting.

@finis-ccronat-opus​

[hestiaember]

“How are you holding up?” The question came with an offering of tea, long after all of the children had all gone to bed. Things had quieted in Twelve in the last week, but there was an unspoken, deep sympathy she felt for Trixie, KyAnne, and Valkyrie since they’d moved in in Twelve. She knew what it felt like to lose a home. To lose everything and somehow keep going. She sat beside her on the couch, patiently awaiting an answer-- or to be brushed off.

@trixanna-quartz​

[georgia-plains]

He had spent a day cleaning the cabin, which sat low in the several acres of property he owned. Out back was a garden that was much more well-tended than the inside of the home, which ascribed to what he liked to refer to as ‘maximalism’ but was really just mess he didn’t mind. It was never dirty, but rather, had the things that he’d accumulated over his lifetime, and never really knew what to do with.

But when Clementine arrived, he’d tried to pile things in corners, put stuff in cabinets, make it all into a kind of sense or order for her. “So,” he said once she’d come in and put her stuff down, “this is it, my humble abode.”

@lastpetals​