Cinna (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
setfires) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
string_theory2013-02-19 03:09 pm
setfires) wrote in string_theory2013-02-19 03:09 pm
Cinna and Katniss. Mockingjay AU. Post-war. [Closed]
He doesn't feel like a man anymore. Something deep inside of him is broken. He doesn't even really remember how that happened. When he tries to think back to the moment when Cinna ceased to be he only comes up with a vague haze and memories of intense pain. There had been questions, so many questions. They hadn't even cut out his tongue because they had been so desperate for answers. His answers. He didn't have any more to give them and he had thought they would let him die.
Instead he's here, staring blankly at what he suspects is carpet. It's soft, plush and a deep, deep green. The color distracts him for a moment, the way that colors used to, only now it doesn't bring with it images of cloth and shape.
He's standing, he knows that. These are different people than the ones he was with a month ago, days ago, seconds ago? Time is so hard to keep track of now. This is a different room than the cell that he had been kept in. There are colors here. Something big has happened, but he can't remember what.
His arms are folded close to his chest as he instinctively protects his hands. They had targeted them so much that his fingers are twisted into inhuman, monstrous shapes. Broken, re-broken, broken again, they had healed incorrectly and now constantly hurt as the bones were forced into shapes that made them impossible to use.
It was supposed to stop him from creating anything ever again, but what had they been afraid of? He couldn't even think properly anymore, what creation would come to his mind when it was surrounded by fog.
He doesn't know that he's in Snow's home. That people who brought him here are from District 13. That they're purposely reuniting him with the one person left in this world he cares about in an effort to give her something to do. Something that will get her out of her slump but won't involve ruining Coin's plans.
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She had tried the door, and was about to go to the next, or find another place to hide, to shut down when she realized she wasn't alone.
Turning, her heart started to pound. There was...there was no way. It was impossible, she had seen...but...but how else could it be, why else would they have put her here...
"Cinna?" She finally managed, softly.
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"No," he said. "No. You're not here."
That voice was one of the few scraps of hope he had left to him. How could they have it too?
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Although she was also about as happy about it as he seemed to be. Still, the reaction hit her deep. Misunderstanding it. If she thought it through, it wouldn't, but right at that moment, right with her brain still it's own enemy, she thought it was a rejection. Much deeper than she was ready to deal with.
And she was locked in here.
So she did what she was getting good at. She sat down against the door and tried to ignore the world.
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If he didn't have to see her, he could tell himself it as just a hallucination brought on by hunger or thirst. When had been the last time they had fed him? He couldn't remember because it dealt with that time thing again.
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Then, "I did win."
It sounded so hollow. It was hollow. She didn't care if she won. Maybe the war was won. She lost.
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"Katniss?" he asked. The moment of clarity wouldn't last. He knew it too. The fog was at the edge of his vision threatening to overtime him. "Where are we? This isn't my cell. Or the Arena. You went into the Arena again. They were going to get you out. Did they?"
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She left out that she had killed Coin. Even deep in her own issues, she knew that would be too much to explain right now.
She looked up at him, finally making eye contact. not wanting to. Her appearance didn't shame her, didn't care except...she'd ruined his canvas.
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Still, broke was better than dead. Burned. She tried to fight back from that though, it's hooks so deep in her, so easy to drag her down.
"Yes. Burned. And shot."
Broken.
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The outside, put back together with science bordering on magic.
Magic that couldn't put Prim together.
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Had anyone asked her that? Maybe, but not so sincerely. Still, such a simple question was far to big right now. She opened her mouth to tell him. About Prim, the bomb, Peeta, Gale, her mother, District 12, Finnick, Effie, Coin, Prim, Prim, Prim...instead it closed again and she hung her head, shaking it.
No. No she was not ok.
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She was broken. Everyone she cared for was broken.
She leaned forward, hesitantly, before pressing her face against his shoulder. Her tears just slid out, her body too tired to sob anymore.
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"Katniss..." he said after a while of quiet but he wasn't sure what he wanted to say. He thought he should find a way to comfort her, but words were failing him.
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Except her eyes didn't really meet his, focusing on his hairline, his cheeks, not his eyes.
"How?"
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She looked up then, finally, too curious not to. She had seen him....and none of the others...
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The corner of her lip twitched up, but to call it a smile would be far too generous.
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It was like a little spark of hope, and she didn't know if she could keep it lit.
" It's more than a lot of people have."
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"You're not alone."
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She wished she could say more, could elaborate on what she meant.
But she was too tired, her brain was too twisted up.
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"It was beautiful. Brilliant."
She felt a pang of guilt as she realized she had no idea where it was anymore. If it even was anymore.
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"We can..." Fix things? This couldn't be fixed. Nothing could be fixed. She trailed off there, staring at their hands.
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"We'll find a way."
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Calling it a smile would be a bit much. But it was the closest thing she'd had in a long time.
"Betting isn't allowed."
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Instead she just pressed her lips together, shaking her head. "Sorry."
For whenever they get there.
Darius was luckier than Cinna, in some ways. Tortured too, yes, but impersonally. All they had wanted from the Avox were his screams. In front of Peeta Mellark, they had beaten him and cut him and wrung scream after scream from him when they could have had them for the asking. And when the victor began to talk, they had just stopped, left him in a corner, then an unlit cell. Forgotten. He was sure they'd meant to just let him die, like Lavinia had, but there had still been food brought by, and water too, both delivered by another Avox, one who never looked at him but fed him with her own hands.
The first he knew of the rebellion's success was when he was finally brought up out of the dark and given into the hands of the medical team. Two of the men in it were the same men who had cut him. They had been in charge, then, but now they were hollow-eyed and harried, treating the many wounded under the eyes of a few armed soldiers. The soldiers wore gray, he noticed. Not white. There were no peacekeepers to be seen, and that was how he knew.
They did what they could for him, but there had been weeks between the beatings and the healing. There were two surgeries, he thought, and a haze of drugs, but they needed the beds, and medicine was precious when no one knew when more was coming. So one day, he found himself sitting in a plastic wheelchair, narrow and hard, as his mind came slowly clear and his body shook. He did what he had done in that room with the men and Mellark and stared up at the ceiling, chose a spot and pretended he was there, part of the building and not in this body at all. A building couldn't lose an arm and a leg, couldn't have only one eye or ribs that would never heal quite right. A building wouldn't still miss its tongue, or be afraid of words or shaking. It would be so nice to be a building.
All of the avoxes had been freed, someone had told him, and that thought fluttered at the edges of his mind like a moth to flame. It made no sense. An avox didn't want freedom, any more than a building did. And they didn't want idleness, but that was apparently what freedom was, now. He was assigned to a room with three other 'freed' avox, and the four of them sat there, those three on their assigned cots and him in his chair, and stared at nothing, given nothing to do. Being told to eat was such a relief at mealtimes, simply because it was something to do, an order to follow.
He wasn't sure how long that uncomfortable, idle limbo had lasted when a familiar face came to the room where they were fed one day. Haymitch Abernathy didn't say anything at first, only watched. Darius could feel his eyes on him as he ate, awkward with his one hand. And then he was standing beside him on his blind side, putting a hand on his shoulder.
"Darius, right?" he asked, and when Darius looked up with an obedient nod, he saw him suck in a breath, saw his jaw work in anger when he saw the brand that had been burnt across Darius's cheek and eye, the shape of a bird pierced by an arrow. Internally, the Avox cringed, but he sat so still, still and waiting like an empty house until Haymitch spoke again. "Do you want to get out of here?"
Four days later, he was on a train, and going home.