shake off the rust

"Welcome back."

He can't place the voice at first. The sound settled oddly in his ears. He wanted to move his head, but he couldn't summon the strength. A blurry face broke the silver-white.

"Vibim?" His voice croaked and it didn't sound like his own.

The blurry face seemed to smile and nodded. Vibim's voice sounded despairing despite the words and the unfocused movement like he was smiling. "Congratulations. You're the Victor of the 48th Hunger Games."

It knocked the wind out of his lungs. He could scarcely breathe around the lump in his throat. He wanted badly to cry, but he couldn't.

----

He slipped in and out of consciousness. Time was suspended; time should have stopped for him. Occasionally when he woke, he could hear a watch ticking next to his bedside.

He dreamed, drugged and feverish.

Gray lizards with sharp teeth chased him through his elementary school and drooled black slime that burnt his skin.

Callan dragged his severed torso through the mud, screaming, trying to find his legs.

Thalia's skin was grayed and rough like bark; she cut pieces of herself from her sides and breasts, and fed him the strips of meat. He begged her to stop but she merely smiled, and he was too starved to spit the flesh back out.

Darcy followed him through dark courtyards, whispering poems against the back of his neck.

Nee and Tesla were his kid sisters playing hop scotch with chalk and knuckle bones in the back alleys of Three.

Thalia smiled at him and slipped her hand down his chest. It rained for forty years but he couldn't wash her blood away. Thalia's face turned into Darcy's and all his teeth fell out from the holes beneath his eyes.

He ran through deserted streets until his feet split and bled, but he always ended up in the same place as he started.

He was six years old and sick with the flu. His mother put her hand to his forehead but the palm that touched his skin was calloused like Vibim's.

Thalia smiled at him and reached out her hand. He could never seem to grasp it.

----

Eventually he woke and realized time has passed. Was passing. He blinked and he could make out the sterile Capitol hospital room around him. Vibim, looking tired and almost sallow, sat in a chair at one end of the room. Vibim smiled wanly to see him awake and apparently lucid.

"Hey. How are you feeling?"

Nik swallowed thickly. His throat felt dry, parched. He was clean and warm, but aches had set back into his frame and the bandages over his head and arms itched. He looked at his pocket watch on the bedside table and didn't answer for a long time.

"I should have died," he said at last. "I should be dead."

Vibim made no sign of disagreeing.

----

For all of the stylists' attempts to remove them, traces of his scars still remained. Where the burnt rubber had sloughed off most of the skin on his arm, they had grafted new flesh on, but it puckered and sat strangely in places. There was a cleft, a dip in the skin, on his other arm where a nasty infection had taken hold and gas gangrene had begun to set in. In a matter of hours on the last day of the Games, his arm had swollen and become one enormous violet bruise, dotted with blood black blisters.

Darcy, as it turned out, had succeeded in marking him. They couldn't save his eye. The flesh on the left side of his face was leaner than on the right, the skull beneath it more defined. The skin of his cheek and over his eye was stretched taut and for all their attempts at reconstruction, it would always have a tinge of umber red and would never look quite right. It looked, curiously, somewhat like a burn a scar.

They gave him a false eye, not unlike the one given to Thalia after she was reaped. And also like Thalia's, it didn't quite fit his socket and gave him headaches. He wore it only when he was forced to by the escort and stylists. Otherwise he preferred a simple patch.

In short, the Capitol medics had been mere minutes away from losing their Victor to any of a half dozen causes.

Lucky him.

----

The post-Games interview with Caesar Flickerman was little short of disastrous. Nik started hyperventilating shortly before he was supposed to go onstage, and had to be physically restrained from trying to bolt from the building. Vibim, in the interest of avoiding a panic attack on national television, gave Nik a dose of sedatives.

Nik was nearly catatonic for most of the interview. He appeared mutely apathetic to the proceedings and only answered Caesar in monosyllabic responses.

The recap of the Games filled in the gaps he missed, the clashes and deaths he didn't see. Darcy and Bryony pressed together, mouths joined fiercely like they were fishing for each others' organs. Little Tesla crushed to death, horridly abrupt. Thalia running into the Cornucopia at the first Feast. Huck and Fern sharing a smile as he squeezed her hand. Darcy cracking her skull open while he bled out on the ground.

The footage of himself--which was the focus, of course--unnerved him the most. Especially the moments he couldn't quite remember. He could see himself on the screen, clear as day, but sometimes his recollections of the same moments were blurry, choppy. Some of the things the him on the screen said and did were completely absent from his memory. It was like watching his doppelgänger.

They played the footage of him and Thalia on the last night in the Arena. How he took the dagger, how she woke in confusion, how the blood spread over his hands. Caesar asked him what was going through his mind that night. Nik started laughing hysterically and wouldn't stop. The broadcast cut quickly to a commercial.

When the interview returned, with Nik finally calmed down, he replied in the most words he would say at one time in the entire conversation: "I was just playing by the rules."

To say that the feelings toward Nik winning were mixed would be perhaps too kind. Those who'd supported his and Thalia's relationship didn't take well to his ruthlessness in killing her. Those who might have been taken in by that same ruthlessness, were none too impressed by his apparent madness. And nearly everyone agreed that his anticlimactic victory had been undeserved.

The night before he's officially crowned as a Victor by President Snow, he woke screaming during the early morning in the midst of a night terror. The two Peacekeepers that had to restrain him had to be treated for minor injuries. One particular bite wound required three stitches. The next day he smiled and waved to the crowds, and bowed respectfully before the President of Panem. President Snow looked at him as one might regard a coat rack. Nik wanted nothing more than to bolt, but he just smiled and accepted his just rewards.

----

The Victors Village in District 3 had three occupied houses now, with many more still empty and unoccupied. The houses were large and their lots expansive compared to the claustrophobic press of factories and tenements in the rest of the District. To Nik, it felt terrifyingly empty. It made him long for their old too-small apartment with the too-small room he and his brother had shared.

His family had met him when he got off the train from the Capitol. His parents embraced him, Christoph smiled at him; it all felt strained, false. Alice was the only one who wouldn't touch him; she could barely even look at him. She was afraid.

There were some things in how they acted that made him think they were genuinely glad to have him home, grateful that he had survived. But any shred of joy was layered under all the things they didn't (couldn't) talk about. He knew he couldn't blame them if they hated him. He wanted their love, their forgiveness, he wanted everything to go back to the way it was before. He couldn't put any of it into words. He only knew that he had become a stranger in his own home.

He shut himself up in his new room in their new house when he got back. He shut the blinds and curtains, buried himself in a tangled nest of blankets on the floor (the bed was too soft, too much like the beds in the Capitol, too much like the bed he'd shared with her), and didn't leave, didn't move for four days. On the morning of the fourth day, Chris barged in, dragged him upright, and wouldn't let him alone until he'd swallowed some food and water. Nik resisted, feebly, for a while, before finally giving up. He didn't have the words to thank Chris, so he just held his hand for a long time. He tried to think of the last time he and his brother had held hands. He couldn't remember, could only recall that he'd been so young that the world didn't seem so terrifying yet.

He didn't sleep well. He had nightmares, and most nights he tried not to sleep at all. If he went too long without sleeping, he eventually dropped off in strange places, like a self-imposed narcoleptic. Vibim offered him sleeping tablets--not the same ones that had made him sick before of course--but he didn't take them often. The pills killed his insomnia, but they didn't do anything for the bad dreams.

He tried to keep busy after the first couple weeks. His initial crush of depression gave way to his usual nervous, live wire energy, but it seemed a hideous mutation of what it was before, more powerful, more... insistent. He would work for days without stopping, until his fingers bled, until exhaustion forced him to halt. He built things, and fixed things, and tore things apart to find how they worked. The machines, parts, and assorted junk he collected quickly took over a couple rooms of the too-large house. It wasn't enough--it was never enough--but it kept him busy.

He found it hard to work with the loss of his left eye at first, but it didn't take too long for him to adjust. Once in a great while, he even forgot the eye was missing. At least until he caught sight of himself, or the impaired depth perception caused him to misjudge a distance, and the moment of forgetfulness went up in smoke.

The three occupied houses in Three's Victors Village sat right in a row amidst the empty lots. There's Nik and Vibim, and the third was a madwoman who had won while the Games were still in their teens. Her name was Copper, and she had once been brilliant and lovely. She had mentored Vibim for the 25th Games in the loosest sense of the term, as she'd already been well out of touch with reality at that point. Now she could scarcely speak and seldom left her house. Her spinster sister dutifully took care of her, and Vibim often visited to help out in caring for Copper.

When Nik first met Copper, she had beamed at him and gave him a delicate, hollow cicada shell she unwrapped from a handkerchief in her pocket. Vibim told him later that she must like him, that she normally didn't take so well to new people. He felt guilty for it, but he tended to avoid visiting Copper. Perhaps he saw too much of himself in her detachment from reality.

Nik found he spent what was perhaps an unseemly amount of time at Vibim's house. Nik knew now what he'd meant when he talked about the stain on his mind like the wine-dark sea. They very rarely brought up the Capitol or the Hunger Games, but there seemed to be a mutual understanding between the two of them. Nik realized they were alike in a way that was almost uncomfortable, too close to be easily acknowledged.

Where Nik felt alienated from the rest of the world, even his own family, at least Vibim knew what he'd gone through. Vibim might not approve of what he'd done, but there was a sense of understanding, of commiseration, perhaps even forgiveness. When others, like his family, would wake him from nightmares or night terrors, they often asked him what he'd dreamed. Vibim never asked; he already knew.

----

One night he and Vibim stayed up far too late and got drunk on a bottle of cheap, oily gin. Vibim told him about the girl from his tenement block who he'd been in love with. How she visited him on the day he was reaped and kissed him just before the Peacekeepers led her away. When he came back home to her, she cried she was so happy and relieved. They talked a great deal about how they would get married once they both turned eighteen. He would tell her about how they would live in the Victors Village and she would want for nothing.

"But things were never like before." Vibim turned the turpentine-reeking glass over and over his hand as he spoke. His eyes were bloodshot and his voice was flat, almost as though he were talking about someone else's life. "There was this distance between us now and it just grew and grew."

He went on in a slightly slurred monotone about how they drifted apart. They stopped talking about the future--their future--together. Then they stopped talking altogether. She didn't see him anymore. Eventually she met someone else and got married. Now she worked on a factory line, had two beautiful children, and lived in the same dirty, poor tenement building. He often sent the family money and food anonymously. He was sure she knew it was him, though. District Three was small and they would run into each other occasionally. They would chat, friendly enough, but neither of them would ever mention it. They never acknowledged what might have been.

Nik poured himself another glass.

----

He tried not to think about Thalia. It never worked, not for long. He would get his mind focused on something else for a little while, but every time she would sneak back up on him. She hid in mundane things--pencil lead, pillow cases, candle flames. The smell of rain or the sight of wild flowers brought her rushing back. Sometimes there was nothing at all to trigger it, her face just there waiting behind his eyelids when he blinked. When sleep deprivation would start getting to him, he sometimes heard heard her voice in his ear, calling his name softly. He would bite his lips until they bled and repeat to himself it wasn't real.

Sometimes, alone in his room late at night, he would think of their night before the Games, of her delicate fingers against his skin. He brought himself off roughly enough to make the act more like a sort of self abuse. He would gasp her name like a prayer as he came, then lie in the aftermath hating himself.

Her memory was the albatross around his neck. All his attempts to extricate himself from it only compounded the weight. He was haunted.

----

One night in the week before the Victory Tour was set to depart, he stuffed a bottle of morphling pills in his pocket and walked out into the snow of the Village. He ducked inside one of the empty houses, settled on the tile floor of its dark, bare kitchen, and began methodically swallowing the pills a few at a time.

It was silent. The snow outside muffled the sounds that so often rang too clearly in the bite of the winter air. He finished the bottle. His stomach started to hurt, nauseated, and his heartbeat skipped here and there. He traced his fingertips over the scars on his arms, on his face.

He took the eye patch off and tossed it on the floor. He could feel the heart of that black hole, that void that threatened to overtake him in the last day of the Games, still in him. Its crux had settled in his empty eye socket. He felt drowsy, sort of warm despite the winter winds that chilled the unused house. His heartbeat kept skipping in a staccato rhythm, blood pounded in his skull, and the room around him wavered and tilted.

He smiled and let himself be pulled down into that black hole.

(thank you)

----

When he surfaced from the darkness, someone's rough fingers were in his throat and then he was vomiting on the floor. His heart stuttered against his ribcage and he shook all over. Stomach bile, yellowish saliva and thick swirls of half-digested white pills spread over the kitchen tiles and his unsteady hands. The rough fingers held him by the back of the neck and their owner's voice made cursing noises. Everything was still an incomprehensible jumble of dim and dark and sound and cold.

He retched until nothing more came up, and then he dry heaved until the tilting kitchen was blurred through his tears. The hands jerked him upright and then they were forcing something down his throat. Pills, smaller, and something that tasted like ash. Charcoal. He tried to spit them back out, but the hands clamped his mouth shut and massaged his throat until he was forced to swallow.

The rough fingers let go and he gasped for air, sobbing. Vibim was crouched over him, wiping spit and vomit from his hands. Nik leaned back bonelessly against the cabinets behind him, and the two sat in silence as Nik choked over his own breathing.

"You're lucky I found you when I did," Vibim said at length, and there was a rigidity in his voice Nik had never heard before.

"God damn you," Nik rasped and glared up at him. "Damn you, why couldn't you just let me die?"

The slap echoed through the empty room as Vibim struck him hard across the face. It stunned Nik into silence.

"Don't you dare," Vibim said, and Nik realized what that rigid quality was in his voice. It was rage. "Don't you dare act like you're the only one who's been hurt, who's suffered, who's lost someone."

Even through his tears, Nik could see Vibim's shoulders trembling. Nik couldn't manage to look him in the eye.

"Nothing about this life is easy, you understand?" Vibim continued and he was practically shouting now. "You don't get to take the easy way out, not now. You made your decisions, now you have to live with the consequences. That's how it works, that's the price of survival."

Nik tried to move, but the most he could manage was curling his fingers and drawing another breath. "I can't," he choked, voice breaking over the words, "I can't do this anymore."

Vibim grabbed his chin and forced Nik to look at him. "You think you can get away with something as stupid as this--why? Because you think you have nothing to lose?" Nik looked at him, trying and not quite succeeding to process his words. "You may not believe it right now, but there is so much more they can take from you. You do this, and you might as well hand your family a death sentence. The Capitol would ruin them." Vibim stared directly at him, and the sheer intensity in his eyes made Nik want to squirm away and hide somewhere.

"Victors don't commit suicide. We don't get that luxury."

Nik's head spun as Vibim let him go and stood. Nik didn't say anything in reply, but when Vibim walked away, he staggered to his feet and followed him. He slept in Vibim's house that night, partly because Vibim wouldn't allow him to be alone and partly because Nik didn't want to be alone.

----

It rained the day he left on the train for the Victory Tour. Each day since the Games had seemed impossibly long, but the months had been all too short. He wasn't going off to die like the last time he'd left on a train from District Three, but he didn't feel any happier. He smiled for the cameras all the same.

They passed through mountains to reach District Twelve. The tall stands of trees were unfamiliar, but the broken fences, the soot smeared faces felt a bit like home. He wore his mask and spoke the words he was supposed to. The crowd clapped when they were supposed to. It was a game of pretend under threat of violence, but it was comfortable in a way. He allowed himself to wonder if it wouldn't be so bad, this trip, as the train left the mountains that had once been called Appalachia.

But then they came to Eleven.

He recognized their Justice Building and the dusty town square from Thalia's Reaping Day footage. It felt strange to see it in person, from all angles, not just the fixed points of the cameras. The tension in the air was palpable. It wasn't volatile, it didn't crackle like electricity. It was a weight, immense, unyielding. In every sun-haggard face he could see betrayal and weary loathing.

He stumbled over his scripted words. To say the applause that followed was halfhearted would be to grossly overstate their enthusiasm. He was glad to be getting to the end of this little song and dance, was eager to get out of sight from so many eyes. He was turning to leave the stage when someone climbed the Justice Building steps and approached him.

The Peacekeepers bristled and tightened their hold on their weapons. Nik's breath caught, the air suddenly gone from his lungs, and he froze. Willowy frame, long dark curls, slender hands reaching out to him--

(Thalia?)

He blinked and the illusion broke. Her hair was graying, her face lined with years of toil, no trace of old scars over her face. The woman stood from the platform where the dead tributes' families sat in a place of perverse honor. Her mother, he realized. Before he could react--more importantly, before the Peacekeepers could intervene--she embraced him and clasped his hand in her own.

She pulled back with a smile that made his heart ache, then disappeared into the crowd. His escort ushered him offstage with a series of whispered reprimands. Nik paid him no mind, instead intent on the folded piece of paper the woman had pressed into his palm.

He sat in his quarters on the train later that evening and studied the piece of paper, still folded carefully. He took a deep breath and began to open it. He saw one word, his name, in Thalia's curving, graceful hand. He threw the paper away as if he'd been burned. He shook. The tears still came too readily. He couldn't bring himself to pick the letter back up.

After a bout of nightmares that night, he padded down the corridor of the train car and slipped quietly inside Vibim's quarters. He fell asleep curled on the floor next to the bed. When he woke later in the night, a blanket had been spread over him.

Much of the rest of the tour passed in a blur. He survived on a steady diet of fried eggs, red wine, and sedatives. He went on sleeping in Vibim's quarters after they left 11. Vibim made no comment on it; if anyone else noticed, they didn't mention it. He kept the letter on him at all times, but he still couldn't muster the courage to read it.

Eight was too much like home. It made him weary. There was only one family for the dead there; no one held vigil there for Nee. It gave him an unexpected rush of guilt.

The air in Four smelled crisply of salt and brine. A boy in a wheelchair glared at him viciously as he recited his scripted lines. Sometime past midnight, sick of drinking whiskey that stung his eyes and throat, he slipped away as best he could. He saw the brilliant stars over the dark ocean, and he wept without making a sound.

The people of Two and One looked at him like those in Four had, like he'd stolen something from them. Something he sorely didn't deserve.

The Capitol was bright and loud and overwhelming. When he looked back on that episode there later, all he could remember clearly was the monstrous headache he'd suffered the entire time. Caesar laughed and cajoled through the interview, Phosa's only acknowledgment of him was a series of glances that screamed her disgust, and all in all Nik made it through by the skin of his teeth.

He sat several hours in the dimly lit car as the train made the return trip to Three, and just stared at the folded letter. He reached out several times, reluctant, but it was a long time before he finally pulled it open and laid the paper flat. He bit his lips hard and made himself read the words it held.

"Nik, It probably seems really silly that I am writing this in my journal to you, but I feel like I need to. I know I can go over to your room and wake you up, talk to you, just be there with you before we go into the arena in the morning. But, I don't want to disturb you, so...I hope you think this is okay. I'm sorry if this makes no sense at all; I'm just writing this as I go. I don't mind if you throw it away if you do get this; you probably won't need it anyway. Anyway...I'm really scared, Nik. It's getting hard for me to write; I'm shaking so much. To think that I would be right here, right now...it's scary. Everything seems to hard to believe, the fact that we will be going so soon, the fact that just a few hours ago we...did it...(I can't write it on the page; I'm blushing so much, Nik. I'm sorry.) Everything is moving too fast. I just wish it can slow down so I can be with you longer, treasure moments with you longer. I think it was because of training that made me need to do this. It took a while for me to come to this realization, but I need to do this because I doubt myself, my ability in the arena. All I can do is draw and make art, really...it's not enough for me to make it. I know I won't make it. But you will make it. I know you will."

The paper warped here and there, and he could make out stains like tear drops over her words. His hands trembled, making the letter unsteady in his grasp. He forced himself to keep reading.

"I've never met anyone with a brilliant mind such as yours. You work hard with everything that you do, trying to do the best you can do. And, well...if anyone can make a difference either in the Games or after them, it is you. I hope that one day after coming back you'll use your mind to change the world. Panem would be such a better place with your knowledge on how to better machinery, and with the potential that I see in you, I can see you grow to be even more knowledgeable and even spread this knowledge for the good of us all. Maybe with your help, Panem can be more peaceful of a place; perhaps you can figure out a way to stop the Hunger Games. I know if anyone can figure it out, it is you. Nik, when I told you that I loved you, I meant it. I mean, no one has made me feel this way before. Never before have I been so vulnerable in front of another person. Yet, because it is with you...I'm finally okay with that. Little by little you showed me how to open up, to be the best person that I could be. I know that without you, I couldn't have done this. With you, I just feel complete. When you held me, whispered into my ear, held me close, I've never felt more loved by anyone than that moment.  People either looked at me with pity or disgust because of my face...but you held me gently and loved me, more than anything precious that anyone could ever have. And the fact that you see me this way...I want to thank you. I want to thank you for seeing past the scars and saw the real me, and cared for me so much. Thank you so much for making me feel the most happy and fulfilled I have ever been. I know I won't be seeing you much longer, but I truly wish for you to be happy and safe. That's all I ever want. I love you so much, more than any words could possibly describe. ...I'm sorry that my crying is making this hard to read; I'm trying my best to stop but it is difficult. I guess this means I should stop. In any case, I guess this means I should head to bed. If you do find this, please don't be saddened by this. Wherever I am, I am sure that I am all right. Stay safe. ~ T"

His own tears fell to join the old stains on the paper. He clasped the letter to his chest as he curled in on himself and wept.

----