Cinna and Katniss. Mockingjay AU. Post-war. [Closed]

[setfires]

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.

Comments

[inciting]

Haymitch had found her in one of her usual hiding places, wrapped up in layers of soft fabric that didn't rub too much against her patchwork skin, and trying hard to sleep away the whole day. Soon they would be going "home" and she had felt her heart jump into her throat when he had plucked her up, still wrapped up, think it was time. Too many emotions had hit her, too quickly, and she struggled, only to be set down in a room and left alone.

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.

For whenever they get there.

[peacekeeperavox]

http://string-theory.dreamwidth.org/3105.html

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.