Chapter Text
“Wyatt, Wyatt!” His Ma calls out to him, even though it was no use. She was screaming into an endless abyss. Despite the ruckus around them, her echo rang in his ears like a bell. Desperate, broken. Her voice losing itself in the darkness that was closing in on him. “Wyatt, look at me, baby! Look at me!”
And Wyatt tries. With the Peacekeepers’ grip puncturing into the thin sleeve that coated his arm, piercingly tight as if there were thorns, he looks for her in the crowd. For those dark eyes that always mirrored his own, her frizzy hair and sunken cheeks. His eyes even search for his father, his brothers and cousins and everyone else that would soon be met with betting slips with his name on it.
But the Peacekeepers who guard the stage, dressed in rose white, are consistent in inflicting more pain amongst District Twelve today. Just as his Ma tries to climb on stage to follow him into his fate, a baton slaps her right across the face.
A cry disguised as a weak gasp comes out of his mouth, and right when that childish noise escapes, he watches a man with a fistful of money get thrown off the very same stage as if he were a ragdoll. The green paper flies into the sky, and begins to drift down like snowfall, eventually joining the mess of confetti on the concrete below.
Vision blurring with both delirium and tears, his gaze flicks back up to the rugged stage. There’s two girls looping together like knots on rope just ahead, a flowery mix of purple and pink and dread.
That is the last sight he sees before he’s finally tossed into the doors of the Justice Building.
He hits the thick wood with a hard thump, pulsating amounts of ache blooming past his shoulders and along his back, a bruise surely was fixing to form. A bruise he would have to ice alone; without his Ma’s hands running through his hair. Without his brother poking fun at him. Alone. All alone.
Then, a new thudding sound follows, and so does a rush of purple.
The girl he knows as Maysilee Donner crumples onto the carpeted floor like a sack of potatoes.
He’s barely catching his own balance when she rises to her feet. There’s a trail of a tear trying to make its way down her cheek, but she wipes it away fast, and he pretends like he’d never seen it when she turns to look at him.
At least he’s not one-hundred-percent alone.
The air in the Justice Building is so silent and heavy it felt like he was drowning. He’s never actually been in here before, but he’s always thought of it as some kind of graveyard. He’s seen so many kids go in, and never come back out.
Wyatt would soon be one of them.
He could hear his own heartbeat, the blood rushing through his body, the sounds of both his and Maysilee’s panicked breathing, trying to recover. The pressure in his skull pounded on his temples, he wouldn’t be able to get that sight of his Ma out of his head. All he could hope for was that she was tended to as quickly as possible.
His lungs strained to intake a breath, his chest burned like hell along with it—but he’s somewhat thankful for the separation. Just for a little while. From all the cameras, the sorrow. All that misery brewing together like a typhoon.
Wyatt adjusts the hat on his head right as Maysilee begins to dust off her dress.
It’s everything but calming: eyeing one another, flushed cheeks, broken hearts. He doesn’t want to speak, and he can visibly tell she doesn’t either. He’s grateful for that.
Even though their words don’t dare to leave their tongues, he maps out the bonfire of blue in her eyes and knows they’re both asking—thinking—the same thing. Where were the other two? Louella McCoy, and the boy who had just been chosen as a replacement for bloodied Woodbine Chance: Haymitch Abernathy.
He can still hear people out there. Hollering and crying. His heart felt like it was being tugged on, so brutally he was sure if his heartstrings snapped he would be strangled from the inside out.
The expression on his face must have slipped through the cracks of his usual, framed mask. Because as his eyebrows clinch closer, settling on the rusty doorknobs, a voice he’s heard be described but hardly heard for himself comes to him like a faint breeze.
“They’ll kill them like animals if we go back out there.”
His interested stare shifts to her easily, surprised to hear her talk despite their losses. Her features are strung taut into something Wyatt aligns with anger. Cheekbones strong like blades, flesh pink with fresh blood. Her fingers are trembling as she digs them into her skin.
He wasn’t thinking of doing that. But the thought to warn him was an act of kindness Wyatt’s never experienced before.
As she hesitantly studies him, he crinkles into himself like paper and resorts to letting his sweaty hand delve into his stitched pocket. Plucking at his chosen coin, searching for solace in the ridges.
“I know.” He says back, because it’s all he can manage to get out.
Maysilee nods, her eyes settling low onto his in understanding.
A strange buzz vibrates between them then. Instead of lingering on his inevitable death, how he would die and how badly it would hurt, he thinks of how he’d heard Maysilee’s father yelling for her while his own Ma screamed for him. The way she was thrown in here just as he was, how they were both plucked away from their families together. Isolated between the shrunken walls of the Justice Building on the Fourth of July.
Like her voice, Wyatt’s only caught wind of her. And he is certain she’s never seen him until today. They don’t know each other. But in spite of it, this feeling that fogged up the room was exactly what Maysilee’s current look toward him signaled. Understanding.
And that is enough for him to trust her.
The doors burst open again. Peacekeepers reemerge, but this time, they have two new guests. A girl whose pigtails were woven into two braids, and a boy whose legs are as limp as the jelly Wyatt uses to wipe on his sandwiches for lunchtime at work.
He straightens up at the sight of handcuffs on their wrists, while Maysilee tips up her chin. Soon enough, the Peacekeepers look to them, unlatched chains in gloved hands. “Cross your arms behind your back, both of you.”
As the electricity of one of their tasers burn threateningly, he obliges. He’s swallowing down enough emotional turmoil, he doesn’t need even more physical pain to add onto it. When he glances to his left, he’s grateful to see Maysilee unharmed. He’d bet everything she’s bottling up a mountain of grief as well.
With batons pressed into each of their spines, the two other unlucky tributes trailing behind, Wyatt and Maysilee’s footsteps fall eerily in line as they’re forced closer and closer to the metal stairs that lead to the train.
To the engine that would rip them from home and catapult them into the mouth of the Capitol’s Hunger Games.