Chapter Text
I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, but instead, I forestall sleep until it’s just Porter and I again, still awake in the main car of the train. Hela and Norman have already gone off to their rooms.
“So how do you feel?” She asks, looking straight ahead, “you can tell me for real. Not for the cameras or Hela or anything.”
“Everyone’s asking me that now, as if I’m supposed to have some kind of coherent answer.”
Porter gives a close-mouthed laugh. “Ha,” she says with no inflection.
“Could I--” I look at her hands. She’s turning Sola’s hair clip around in her fingers. “Could I ask you more questions? Like I did in the hospital? There’s still some… some things, logistically I’m not clear on and… yeah.”
“Fire away, Tesla.”
“Fire, yeah…” I look back at her face. She’s got high, haughty cheekbones. The oil on her skin reflects the shine from the overhead lighting fixtures. “I guess in the arena… the big thing I was wondering about since they didn’t, uh, show a lot of my… whatever you’d call it. Mountain days. How did I manage to lose all those matches? I had a full box of them when I left the camp.”
The corner of her lip curls up. “Oh, wow. You really were out of it, huh? You threw them all in the fucking river. One by one. Hela and I were losing our damn minds when we watched that, shouting at the screen and everything. You must’ve been running, like, a hundred and five degree fever, you were hallucinating so badly.”
“...ah. I think I… yeah. I sort of remember now.”
“Crazy how you lived through that. It was just like--” she sighs. “It was such a ride watching you in there. Just pulling off miraculous bullshit after miraculous bullshit. There were about five times where Hela and I were sitting just like, yeah, this was a good run for District Five but he’s fucking dead now. But here you are.”
“Here I am.”
She puts her head in her hands, now laughing. “Your brother Jules was like-- everyone liked how Volta called you a magician, or whatever, but Jules said that you were going to win because you could talk your way out of anything. We were all a little skeptical of that but, Tesla, you literally talked your way out of bleeding to death.”
“I guess I did, when you put it like that. It’s just like, I knew Thunder was the one out of them who actually cared about who- who she physically killed and stuff, and I thought if I could just--”
She shakes her head, “--and yeah. That’s so weird. You barely even fought anyone. You just knew them all so well, it was insane. But I sidetracked us, didn’t I? You’re supposed to be asking me questions.”
I shrug. “It’s alright. It’s not like… it’s not like I’m gonna get hunted down in the fucking woods if I sleep in late anymore, you know?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“So I…” I try to think of another question. I know, just a minute ago, I had a million. “What day of the week is it?”
“Oh,” she says with a laugh, “Thursday. People in the district will probably still have the day off from school and work tomorrow, though, because it’s actually a celebration this year.”
“Oh, fuck, I guess it is. How old were you when Hela won? Or weren’t you born yet?”
“Four. I barely remember.” She purses her lips and adds, “I was actually born the year Tellurium won.”
“Oh shit? They were that close together?”
“Mhm. Yeah. He was only fifteen when he won, so. Pretty close in age, too.” She gives the hair clip another rapid turn. “It’s so weird how much Five’s forgotten about him. Sorry, sorry. Did you have another question?”
“You seem spacey right now. I can figure it out later, if you want to sleep or something.”
She shakes her head adamantly. “No. Couldn’t sleep now if my life depended on it. I don’t mind sticking around if you don’t mind my stupid, scattered answers.”
“Okay,” I say, furrowing my brow. “After Sola… I don’t know how much you had to do with my sponsors, and what I was doing and stuff, but I was just wondering… who sent all the Careers those energy pills? I was so confused by that gift. I figured Two, but I didn’t think any of the others would go in on it.”
“Oh,” she says with another laugh, “that was actually brilliant. Weird day, socially, though. Messalina and Hela were the brains on that one, but then they roped poor Amy into it convincing her it might be good for Thunder, too, and then Brutus actually chipped--”
I clench my eyes and smile. “Wait, slow down. Hela? That was fucking Hela? And Messalina is--”
“Right, right. You’re not in the know yet on all the other victors. Hela, well you know Hela. District Five, 24th, etc. Messalina was Cobalt’s mentor, 48th, so that’s where it gets messy, you probably know where I’m going with it.”
“She killed Amethyst’s brother, right? That was her?”
“Right, yeah. You know. You remember those Games. But Amethyst, 49th, Thunder’s mentor. You’ve met her.”
“Mhm.”
“And Brutus, 46th. He scares that shit out of me, but he’s pretty hands off. He was Petra’s mentor and he chipped in a little. He wasn’t stoked on your plan, but he recognized Cobalt and Petra were the strongest of them and needed out of that clusterfuck alliance somehow. It was a whole thing,” she says with another laugh. “And then it was Hela and Messalina who sent you that cake. The two of them actually got on a little bit, it was so weird.”
“I don’t think Hela would’ve made a bad Career. Honestly.”
“It’s weird, but you know, you’re right. You’re so right,” Porter says.
“There were lots of young mentors this year, weren’t there? Amethyst, and the ones from Two.”
She drums her fingers on her thigh. “Districts with more victors can afford to keep it fresher, I guess. There’s some of those psychos who really love coming here and being in the action year after year, but it’s mostly the younger ones who are actually enthusiastic about it. Or else the older ones who can’t be assed anymore kind of bully the younger ones into it--”
“Amethyst didn’t seem like she enjoyed it that much.”
“--yeah,” Porter says. “She was definitely kind of pushed into it. But like I said, she’s also weirdly chill for a Career victor. You learn to get along with people here. You’ll get to like some, genuinely, but the main thing you learn is just how to get along with people.”
“Noted. But that’s… yeah. I guess that gift did kind of help me the most out of all of them, huh? That’s so crazy, I didn’t even suspect Hela had anything to do with that.”
“Yeah,” she sighs, “yeah. It is what it is.”
Porter keeps turning the clip over in her thin, dexterous fingers. With the other hand, she taps on her chin. I notice I’m playing with Sage’s necklace. What I’ll do, I wonder, when I give it back. Maybe I’ll get one of my own; I can certainly afford it now. “You picked up Sola’s things? From her room at the Tribute Center?”
“Yeah,” she says tepidly, “I did.”
“I could… I could go with you, when you give them back to her family.” They would’ve already had the funeral by now. I’m not sure if that’s a relief or not.
“Would you really do that?”
I nod. “Yeah, Porter, I’d like to.” I look back at the clip. “You know, Eddie was buried with his ring.”
“I know.”
“The mayor brought us his clothes back when he gave us that stupid fucking medal.”
“Hela never likes to do that part. She takes the losses a lot harder than she lets on.”
“I can picture that.”
Porter looks down at the clip. I never looked at it closely in the arena, but it’s a small, intricately carved wooden thing. It’s quite beautiful, actually. “Do you?” I ask.
“It is what it is,” she says again. “She was never going to win.”
“You thought so, too?”
“...yeah,” Porter admits. She’s still looking at the clip.
“Yeah.”
“It’s not that she was dumb, or anything, or- or anything bad, really. I actually liked her a lot. It’s just… you know. You’ll start to develop it, too. The sixth sense.”
“Hela said you can smell the death on them.”
Porter wrinkles her nose, like she’s actually smelling it. That or gasoline. “No, I know she does. I don’t like that. And I don’t think it’s like that for me, anyway. I don’t smell anything, I just know. It’s like they’re… or… I don’t know. I just know.”
“Are you getting tired?” I ask her. She’s got permanent bags under her eyes, but they’re more pronounced now than they were even ten minutes ago.
“Sort of. Might lay down and look at a different ceiling for a little bit, I don’t know.”
“I… can I ask something kind of crazy?”
She gives me a mildly surprised look. “Sure, Tesla.”
“Um. Would you want to… would you want to sleep in my room?” I spit it out to get it over with. I just needed to ask.
Her tired eyes droop and she says, quiet and with more delicacy than I’ve heard her say anything, “Tesla I… don’t think that’s a good idea.” Trying to affect humor but not succeeding, she adds, “I’m too old for you.”
I’m taken aback. “Porter I… what? What the fuck are you talking about?”
She, too, is now deeply confused. “Weren’t you…?”
“No…? I--” I point to the necklace, then say, completely direct now that the situation seems to call for it, “I don’t really like girls, Porter. Not in that way.”
It takes a second for it to compute, then she smiles, her eyebrows raised. “No shit? You’re actually gay? I thought you and Hela just made that up for sponsors.”
“Ha! Do I really come off like I’m that good of an actor?”
“I don’t know, Tesla, you’ve lied about all sorts of shit. And it’s not like you were being super open and direct about it on the screen.”
“...was I not?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. You never really said it. When tributes leave stuff like that even a little bit ambiguous-- lovers or sob stories and what not-- I usually just assume it’s a lie. You talked about him, your boyfriend or whoever, for like, a whole minute during your interview today without using a single gendered pronoun.”
“Well, yeah, that’s what I was doing, but I’m still… gay, I guess.” It’s strange, how gummy and awkward that sentence feels in my mouth. It’s a word I’ve rarely heard someone call themselves , let alone with any kind of positive feeling. I’m not sure what else I’d call it, though, as long as I’m sort of taking ownership of that part of myself now.
“Oh yeah, I guess we don’t talk about it much in the district. It’s not as uncommon to talk about in the Capitol. To put a label on it and everything.”
“Gay bar on Aspen. That’s a thing Amethyst said.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” Porter says with a laugh. “Aspen is a street name. There’s a lot of bars there on the West Side of the city. It’s so dark that they named a drink after you. Sort of funny, too, if you think about it.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying, though.”
“Fuck,” she says under her breath, “a molatov cocktail, that’s terrible.”
Suddenly somber again, despite her newly good mood, I ask, “but you’d sleep in my room? Now that you know I’m not… like, trying to make a move on you?”
“Fuck it, sure.”
“Okay,” I say softly. “I just don’t want to be alone.”
She nods. I know she understands without her having to say it.
It’s similar to the way Sola and I slept in the arena, facing one another. She’s smaller than me so she settles her face onto my chest. She’s the least warm of any person I’ve slept next to and she’s all sharp angles, but I like her here anyway. It’s not really about physical warmth anymore. I slow down my thoughts to the timing of her deep, calm breathing. I fill my brain with this single desire, to match my breath to hers exactly.
After a while, once I think she’s asleep, she says, cutting through the still air, “I’m glad you’re here, Tesla. I’m glad you came back.”
I rub my hand in a circle in between her shoulder blades. I mean it as an answer and she takes it as one. So many people over these past few weeks: I’ve accrued fake friends, temporary friends, and tenuous future friends. But now I feel, with her sleeping against me, that she and I will truly, actually become friends. Right now, it’s the only part of my future that presents itself to me clearly. I could love her , I think as I fall asleep, I could love her a lot some day . It brings me some peace and I sleep.
Eddie and I sit quietly on the balcony; he’s rocking back and forth in Grandpa’s old chair. He looks at me every one in a while and smiles as blood trickles out of his nose. I think he finally forgives me. When I get up to look over the ledge at the district down below, I see a pile of corpses.
“Don’t look,” he says quickly after I already have.
“Why not?” I ask, still looking.
“Just not yet. Don’t look.”
I move back to the chair. “Okay. I won’t.”
We spend the rest of the dream in silence. At some point, I reach up and realize I’ve got a nosebleed, too.
Porter’s already gone when I wake up. I suppose whatever we were doing last night would’ve been tiresome to explain to Hela, or anyone who came in and saw. Not exactly bad, just tiresome. Lots of things, I suppose, are just too tiresome to explain. It is what it is , Porter says.
No one’s come to get me yet, so I assume we’re a ways out from Five still. I slept late, but not through the whole morning. I head to the shower so I won’t be sweaty and disgusting when I see everyone again. I take a minute to look in the mirror, just like I did on the way to the Capitol when I couldn’t even imagine that I’d actually be making it back. Perhaps I could, but only in the abstract, distant way: this is something that, conceivably, may be able to happen if you get insanely lucky. And wouldn’t you know it. I got pretty lucky.
The train, too, makes a low hum like the hovercraft does. It’s not as loud, but in the still quiet of the morning I am able to hear it. All of these industrial contraptions, trains and hovercrafts and wind turbines, they must all make the same sorts of sounds. The machinery from Porter’s arena, I remember it made a similar sound when the District Three tributes figured out how to restart it, this little hum. It sighed, too, in long breathy gasps, because it was so old.
What is there to say, really? My ribs show now, not just an outline, but the full shape of them. My cheeks are a little sunken in. Tesla Zhang, 5’8”, 110 pounds, Victor of the 51st Hunger Games . No, not much else to say. I look almost genderless in the mirror, like a child. Smooth-faced and thin. I put the water on so hot that it’s uncomfortable, but I can’t bring myself to make it any cooler. I’ve had enough cold for a lifetime.
By noon I’m back in the main train car looking out the window and sipping slowly from a warm mug of coffee. The air conditioning is on again. They’ve got all the same little pastries, some of those so eerily like the ones Cobalt and I got in the arena. I take one because I slept past breakfast and am too nervous to eat lunch. Soon enough I start to recognize the scenery; we’ve pulled into the northern outskirts of the district. The solar panels, the power plants, the wind turbines, scattered cacti, the far end of the river. The sight of it makes my eyes water. The city, too, lit up as if to say, finally, welcome home .
When the train stops at the platform, Hela takes my arm to help me stand just like she did after the replay. Porter, hanging behind, will help Norman out once the excitement dies down. My whole body feels like the cheap cherry gelatin my family would have for dessert sometimes when we were kids. When the crowd cheers, my brain floods with nothing. I feel guilty and enthralled all at once.
The first familiar face I spot in the crowd is Marshall, friendly and inoffensive as always. I think it’s because I’m not quite ready to look at my family or someone I know a little better yet. It’s like dipping your toe in the river before you dive in. He notices the eye contact and waves exuberantly. He stands next to another friend of mine, Aubade, who shakes Marshall’s shoulder with recognition and waves as well. I wave back. It’s not all been good this past month, in fact most of it has been quite bad, but I decide to let myself enjoy this moment. I won’t look at the corpses just yet.
Someone calls my name (or, I suppose, a bastardization of my name,) cutting through the white noise of applause. “Lala, over here!” I see Volta before I see the rest of them. He’s the tallest and the loudest, I guess.
I ask Hela, “am I allowed to--”
“Give it another minute. Give another smile to the camera. But then…” she smiles at the ground, “then you can go say hi.”
All of them are standing there beaming, Mom and Dad, Franklin, Jules. River and Sage are closeby, too. Hela must notice how badly I want to go down there and loosens her grip on my arm, granting me permission a little before she might’ve liked. Before I even realize it I’m in the crowd and Volta has me fully enraptured in a hug.
“My side , Volta, lighten up a little--”
“Shit fuck, holy shit fuck balls shit you’re actually back, holy fuck,” he says, loosening his grip on me just a little bit. Not quite enough, but I let it slide. “Do you think the cameras picked all that up?” he asks me, laughing through tears, moving back so I can see his face.
“Who cares anymore?”
He laughs louder. My parents come next awed, gentle, both of them also crying. Both are more attentive to the fact that I am still injured than Volta was. Franklin, next, pulls me into a tight but gentle hug. “I told you you could do it,” he whispers, “I told you you could.”
Jules comes last and gives me a tired, lopsided smile. He says nothing at first and ruffles my hair.
“Jules--”
“You did it, champ. Magician.”
“Magician,” I repeat, embarrassed. It’s like I forgot this month that I am first and foremost, a little brother.
River, standing next to him, says, “now don’t you feel stupid? You made such a show of saying goodbye to me.” She tries to say it confidently, snappy almost, but even she’s choked up.
I bring her into a hug. “Come here, you dumbass.” Her lip quivers and she buries her face in my shoulder.
Last I come to Sage, the two of us, after all this, are still shy of one another. He just looks at me, already crying like my parents, and trying to wipe it away. Still so unsure of what to do. “Hey, Tess,” he says.
I shake my head and look at the ground. “Hey, Sage.”
He moves closer to me. I brush the tips of our fingertips together. He hugs me with his other hand and presses his forehead against mine. It’s so comfortable and yet entirely new. He leaves the option open, but doesn’t press. Some victors, especially Career victors, will run into the crowd and sweep up a boyfriend or girlfriend in their arms, plant a flashy kiss on someone, or do something quite romantic, at least, upon their homecoming. I think whoever is still watching, likely just the Capitolites who were rooting for me, might like that. But this, I will not give them. I’m not sure if Sage is disappointed, or if he’s even really thinking about the cameras, but when I bury my face in his shoulder instead he seems to understand. At last, in this sea of cheering faces, alone.
Here it is, then. The rest of my life. I suppose there’s nothing left to do but live in it. Sage squeezes me tighter, and my neck is wet with his tears and his breath. You may rely on it.