Title: symphony of screams

Author: angels entwined

Disclaimer: I don't own the Hunger Games.

Summary: She hadn't played into the Capitol's hands - she might be dead, but it was by her own choice, and that was what mattered. She died the way she wanted to. At long, oh-so-long last, the symphony of screams receded into silence.

Written For: the Monthly Oneshot Challenge at Caesar's Palace, December.

A/N: I'm not satisfied with this. I'm not. At all. I'm beyond mortified when I read this. But hopefully, it's not that bad, considering I'm dying of embarrassment every time I read something of mine anyway. XD

EDIT: If you couldn't tell from the summary. . .guess who won the monthly oneshot challenge? Me! The other contestants did amazing, though. :D Thank you to everybody. Just because.

-angels entwined

"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."
― Edgar Allan Poe

Her first time.

She visualized the blood on her hands, staining her flesh and marking the booming of a cannon. She could feel the deaths she had brought - see them, smell them, taste them, touch them, hear them.

Their screams haunted her nightmares. A horrible, horrible symphony entwined with the wish to die, like them. A selfish, selfish pleasure - to let someone else take her place, slip into her bed with a colorful stranger, speak to the nation about victories and joy, all coated with lies and secrecy and a devious whisper.

She instinctively pushed them back, as usual, but then rememembered what she was here to do. She decided to let them flow freely; they washed over her like acid.

She stared at the murky vial of liquid, white and swirling like clouds. Yes, this will fix it.

She let herself forget, drowning in morphling. She had overdosed on her very first time.

But no victor could ever overdose on something so blissful, could they?

President Snow was beginning to take notice of her slowly deteriorating appearance - the hollow cheeks, the sunken eyes.

"You've been taking drugs, haven't you?" he asked, facing her. He lounged in a simple wooden chair in her home, and she felt the deepest loathing of him.

Her home. He had no right to be here.

She looked at him coolly. "So what if I am? Wouldn't be the first time for us oh-so-wonderful victors, huh?"

She knew that one sarcastic line could kill off everyone she loved, but right now, she didn't care. It was so. . .so wonderful to defy the president of Panem. She felt a flare of fury at the man opposite her, one that she had squashed for so long inside her to keep her family and friends alive.

Snow returned it with a piercing gaze, as if he was reading her. She pressed her lips together, casually flicking a strand of dark hair over her shoulder.

"I'm afraid that some of your customers have been complaining about this," he said softly. "There hasn't been much pleasure among them about this. You have been unable to cover this addiction with makeup."

"More observant than they seem," she replied.

"Yes, well, there's no longer much profit from you, is there?" he asked rhetorically, a smile crawling to his lips. Suddenly, she knew what was coming, and even as he said, "You will have to suffer the consequences," she leapt to her feet and burst out, "NO!"

Snow shook his head, still smiling, and he left with a laugh and a slam of the door.

The next day, she found every last of her loved ones dead.

She fled like the coward she was, despising herself, and she collapsed in her bedroom with a vial of cloudy liquid clutched in her hand. Pleading with it insanely.

Please.

[Dignity and pride no longer mattered. There was nothing sweeter than escape, where everything was blurred and colorful and away from real life.]

She used to be a beautiful woman, with a curtain of glossy dark hair, tinted with a bit of red, with pale skin so easily colored and huge dark eyes.

Now, she was a wasted mass, thin and ugly and damn it, she didn't care. She probably wouldn't ever be happy again, so why did it matter?

She walked through life the same way she walked through death, because they blended together. She felt deadened, certainly, and when she stumbled through the rain on her way to her so-called home (no, it wasn't a home anymore, she didn't have a home), she passed a cemetery - and she thought that she belonged there.

[She didn't; she was deluded. But she wanted to belong there.]

She could hear their screams echoing from the graves in an awful chorus - she remembered that her district partner's funeral had been held there.

She tore away from the place so quickly her lungs were on fire when she reached her house. Even if she was in absolute agony, she would never, ever be one of them. Life was worse than death.

Her symphony latched itself onto her dreams that night.

[Tributes were born to die.

Victors were born to be broken.]

She met him soon after the nightlock berries, when Katniss Everdeen had flung out her hand to share the option of death.

She saw him at the District Six black market, heading toward her usual stall with a fistful of coins in her hands. She was carrying as much as she could - the more shriveled and despicable-looking she became, the more she relied on morphling.

He'd bought all the morphling.

The seller looked at her in dismay at her anxiety, indicating his silhouette as he strode away in the darkness of the evening. Frantic, she ran to catch up with him, yelling at him - she needed it, didn't he understand? She needed it!

Twilight had fallen upon the district, and now she was panicking. Whenever she went - went under the surface (that was what she called it), everything was so hazy and blurred, and in the dull browns and grays of the district, she could only see clouds of color. But now, she saw everything so distinctly, and it was entirely black-and-white, like her arena - where everything was still and unmoving and just dead.

[She couldn't stand being among the dead, because so many tributes' blood were on her hands, and they would be there at the end of the walking path, etched with thousands of footprints.]

She grabbed his shoulder, demanding loudly - pleading for maybe just a bit of morphling, because the next load wouldn't be for weeks.

He turned, and it was like looking in the mirror - the same yellowed skin and sunken face.

She screamed and was about to run (she'd had far too much experience running) until she noticed the shorter, lighter hair, the bewildered expression. And she recognized the greedy, unwilling face as he clung to the box, and she knew that the man was one of the victors.

But he understood, because he was a victor too, and knew what paradise it was to tear oneself away from the Capitol and from reality.

And there, that was how they got to really know each other, and reluctant - it was an every-person-for-herself, after all, she thought - they decided to share.

She didn't realize how much she craved sympathy - not just drugs, but sympathy and someone to understand.

[He couldn't be a friend, not really. Victors no longer had friends, they had allies.

But she had a reason to live - a reason other than going under the surface.

It wasn't that she would heal - more like she had a companion to tell her the shards would be all right.]

Colors.

Of course, it was all she ever saw going under the surface.

Pretty, swirling colors like a handful of undeveloped butterflies, dancing in the wind.

She liked colors, she decided with a childlike thought the moment the idea of it crossed her mind. She told this to him, and he looked up from the box of morphling for long enough to nod and agree.

"Colors," she repeated, saying it with such a calm firmness it shocked even her. He looked up again, clearly wondering if she was going nutty. He was still sorting out the morphling in an almost businesslike way.

[She still couldn't survive without it, even with someone else.]

She hurried upstairs to grab her paintbox from when she was a child. Leaving her old home, before winning her too, too black-and-white Games, she couldn't leave any of her possessions behind, even though she'd never used the paintbox.

She set down the paintbox and dipped the brush in a blob of red, swiping it across the table's smooth surface when suddenly he swiveled around in his chair, staring at the crimson smudges on the table. His hands were shaking - he dropped a vial so that the stuff inside it splattered across the floor, stunning her so entirely she dropped her paintbrush, too.

He never let morphling go to waste. It was a precious, precious thing, more precious than food and money and life.

"Red," he said, trembling in his seat. "Red. Blood."

She understood immediately, and the pain of murder pierced her too. Red - splashing against the walls in her arena, so distinct the a black-and-white photograph it was.

She dropped the paintbox so a hodgepodge of colors smeared the floor, and she stomped on it with all the force she could.

Memories were meant to be blurred by morphling. Not brought back to life by art. They tried to use the paint again and again, but red burned behind their eyelids.

[They were drowning like the other victors, strangled by the Capitol's chains and thrown into a sea of tragedy.

But it was better to drown together than drown alone.]

She saw the screen go black (she still hated black-and-white, but not as much as that universally hated red), and she screamed.

I'm going into the arena again. I'm going into the arena again. I'm-

The words were blending together into a chaotic mixture. There was absolutely no way she wouldn't be reaped after rebelling against Snow, and besides, most of the other District Six victors were swimming in morphling like her and would probably die in their age and addiction soon, anyway. Morphling was a district-wide problem here.

She didn't realize what she was doing, but she found herself in the cemetery she had walked past that day - that day which had seemed like hell then but was now practically normal - in the pounding rain, where wind and water mixed and ripples chased each other into the gutter.

She could hear her heart pounding as rain poured down onto her, raising her face to see the sun dart behind the clouds. Breathing quickly, she tried to process how she'd ended up here.

She heard someone whisper her name, and turned in a flurry of movement to see him hurrying up the street.

"We're going back in," he said, facing her. There was an unexpected wildness in his voice - she never looked in a mirror and the idea of such a shriveled, wrinkled being capable of speech was foreign. He rarely did speak; he was practical, whatever else he was, and he never did more than necessary.

[But to become a victor, it would always be necessary to kill.]

She barely registered what he was saying. "How did you know to come here-?"

"My sister's buried here - she was in the Games with me," he responded, and she flinched and suddenly hated herself for never asking before. She'd forgotten he, too, had a history - because all she'd ever thought that he was just the male morphling who shared the victor's pain.

He didn't seem to care.

[Neither of them cared for much. Them and morphling and colors, that would be everything they cared about.]

There was a sudden harshness in his voice, which hadn't been used for so, so long. "You're going to be reaped, aren't you, I heard about what you did. And I'm going to be too-"

"Why?" she demanded, her voice shrill. What had he done?

"My sister rebelled, we were in the final two, she killed herself and tried to bring me down with her, wanted to defy the Capitol." It was a rushed, rushed sentence, and the adrenaline that rushed through her veins, inactive from the sluggishness of going under the surface for so long, made the rain seem to be pounding against her temples as they flew downwards. She felt as if she were shrinking in on herself.

Makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitpl easestop.

She felt as if she was losing her mind. But really, she had long ago.

He looked at her almost distantly, and she knew that he didn't want to come back. She didn't either. It was better to die. Victors suffered a fate worse than death.

Oh, this was their chance.

She sobbed in relief at the thought. She would never, ever have to suffer anymore. No more loss. No more insanity. No more of this horrid ugliness and obsession and irrational fears.

She kissed him fiercely - so much more fiercely than she had ever dared to kiss anyone who had ended up in her bed. She was hurtling toward her happiest moment, death, and it was eerie how much she wanted it. But she didn't think about that - her heartbeats, already slowed by going under the surface, were numbered, and she'd use it.

In those torrents of rain, as lightning and thunder struck with huge sheets of water pelting them, she was happy with her face pressed against his. It wasn't the blissful oblivion going under the surface brought, but all fire and adrenaline and absolute insanity that consumed her.

She could see out of the corner of her eyes the graves of the blessed, those who had been lucky enough to die. And she smiled just slightly, knowing she would join them soon.

She forgot that symphony of pain as something so very different blazed through her.

[Of course, it never lasted, but she wouldn't forget it.]

There was a flurry of decisions following that. Her obsession with colors. Her eagerness to rebel. Her sobs that echoed through the night, steadied by the cold, solid fact this would end soon, and the decision to confide how close she was coming to capitulating.

She didn't remember any of that as distinctly as she remembered him.

He hadn't even made it out of the bloodbath. His life had been snuffed out in seconds as she'd seen that knife caress the air before puncturing the flesh of his throat.

Now, she was even more eager to die, but this was different. There was no euphoria, no ecstasy, no adrenaline.

Why? she wondered as she hiked through the jungle. She'd been following around Katniss and her alliance since the Games had started to make sure Peeta was safe, though several times she'd found herself fainting. Every minute in the arena was spent with a pounding headache because of withdrawal - but no, she didn't regret going under the surface once, twice, a thousand times.

She had barely avoided the fog, but she wasn't afraid. She thought of Mags, the poor old woman who had convulsed to death; it had looked fairly quick to her, after all, and she wouldn't mind dying that way. Even so, she had a duty to fulfill, and she couldn't possibly die until she did it. She didn't break her promises.

The memory of his lips on hers broke free, just for a moment, but she pushed it back until it vaporized into a wisp of smoke.

She dragged herself after the alliance, a little nonplussed they hadn't seen her yet, but she was at least a quarter mile behind, so they were really nothing but a few specks up on the next slope. Sometimes they vanished completely when she was hurrying sluggishly up a particularly steep patch of ground.

Honestly, she didn't know how she had survived this long. She guessed it was from sheer force of willpower (not that she had been aware she'd had any left; she could never control temptation). She hadn't had anything to drink, though she was mainly eating some plants she'd seen. Whether they were safe, she had no idea, but it wasn't like it mattered, right?

And then she caught up, just as the monkeys swarmed over the group.

She could feel her heart beating. How strange.

It was weak, of course, but she couldn't tell how much damage had been done. She knew she was beyond repair [and nearly sighed in relief at it, she wanted it to be over] - but it didn't hurt. Maybe because she was numb to all the pain anyway. Or maybe because she wanted it, wanted to know for certain she was dying - and she never got what she wanted.

She watched the monkeys vanish, her chest heaving as she struggled to breathe. That was her one issue - it was nearly impossible to breathe. It seemed like her blood couldn't flow through her veins anymore.

She was called back to reality when the boy kneeling over her murmured, "With my paint box at home, I can make every color imaginable. Pink. As pale as a baby's skin. Or as deep as rhubarb. Green like spring grass. Blue that shimmers like ice on water."

She swallowed, trying to imagine it. Beautiful. Beautiful colors.

Rhubarb - no, blood wasn't all red, whether she remembered it that way or not. She smiled slightly, but it took so much effort the smile lapsed almost immediately into a gasp for breath. Rhubarb. She chanted the word over and over in her head. When she finally meets him - the male morphling - she would tell him this.

"One time, I spent three days mixing paint until I found the right shade for sunlight on white fur. You see, I kept thinking it was yellow, but it was much more than that. Layers of all sorts of color. One by one," the boy continued. Peeta.

Layers. The morphling had tried layers of color, but it never worked for her. The berry juices at the camouflage station were too thin and watery. If only she hadn't smashed so many paintboxes, she might have gotten something thick enough to resemble the prettiness she was picturing. As if hoping for layers, she dabbed a hand in some of her blood.

No, it's too thin, don't be silly, she thought.

"I haven't figured out a rainbow yet. They come so quickly and leave so soon. I never have enough time to capture them. Just a bit of blue here or purple there. And then they fade away again. Back into the air," Peeta said softly.

The District Six tribute finally managed to get some bl - paint on her hands and as she was shaking so badly, she lifted it and drew something on his cheek.

She was gratified he didn't seem disgusted. It was a flower - something she had seen on one of the graves of the dead.

"Thank you," he whispered. "That looks beautiful."

She smiled, knowing she didn't just save him for the rebellion - he was a boy worth saving.

She hadn't played into the Capitol's hands - she might be dead, but it was by her own choice, and that was what mattered. She died the way she wanted to.

The tributes of the 75th were born to die broken, but they were the blessed - they would have peace.

[And she plunged through a whirlwind of black and white, but she didn't feel any fear. She landed on her feet so much more gracefully than she could have if she was alive.

And she flitted down the path, knowing who was waiting, her smile still plastered to her lips.

At long, oh-so-long last, the symphony of screams receded into silence.]