FAILURE TO COMPLY ┃ f. odair

5.13 death itself

Calypso was more than aware of the slavery that took place within the Capitol, from threatened victors forced to sell their bodies to avoxes forced to work for nothing. For the most part, avoxes were people charged with crimes, their tongues forcibly removed, identities stripped from them and livelihoods stolen. Her mother had been one of them, placed in the District Five tribute apartment just to taunt her husband and daughter.

Pollux did not speak for the fact his tongue had been cut out, but Calypso wondered if he would've spoken even with it. He was a quiet and gentle soul, crushed under the weight of terrible memories. While she'd always had the privilege of being rather explosive with her feelings, people like him reminded her that there were others hiding even deeper into those shadows than she was.

And Pollux had been in the shadows indeed, working sanitation, as his brother put it, deep underground in the city's train tunnels. It was nigh impossible for their eyes to adjust to the darkness, despite the white lights on the walls. The tunnels were too wide for it to extend quite far enough, and so she found herself staring at the darkest spots she could, while Pollux kept as close to the lights as possible.

It only got worse as they descended from the train tunnels, that Katniss claimed were too exposed, into the dank sewers that anyone on the surface of the Capitol had most likely never ventured into. Vast, seemingly infinite, enclosed. It was this that she hated. Not the darkness, but being cornered. If the Peacekeepers came, there was no way out. And Monica now had Calypso's nightlock pill. There was no way out at all.

Dry tunnels turned to water-logged chambers. Finnick's arm stayed around his wife's waist as they waded through it, not quite deep enough to swim. Their smaller unit within the squad - Calypso, Finnick, Monica and Peeta - kept hands to shoulders in a linked line that would not allow them to be separated.

When the time came to settle down for a rest, Calypso could not bring herself to sleep again. She'd managed an hour earlier in the day before their death announcements and Snow's speech, but not she was running on pure adrenaline that was sure to run out eventually. Sat at the very edge of their small nest, she kept her eyes on the long dark tunnel they'd come through. The shadows danced, took the form of her usual ghosts as the sleep deprivation started to kick in once more.

"Katniss?" she heard Jackson whisper. She wasn't sure how much time had passed again, lost in her own empty mind. "Your watch."

There was some shuffling, and then Katniss was sat opposite Calypso and Peeta. The two women exchanged small, tired smiles, but said nothing. It was a comfortable quiet, testament to how used to each other they'd grown. No longer wary. They trusted each other wholly.

"You know, the Capitol," Peeta broke the silence. "They used tracker jacker venom on me. That's what the doctors in Thirteen said. You said you saw me?"

"Real," Calypso replied. She didn't want to think about it, but they'd all promised him answers if he sought them. "There was a screen in the room where I was kept. I watched most of the Capitol propaganda, but they made me watch you and Johanna too."

"You know what they did, then?" he questioned. "How they did it?"

"Yeah," she acknowledged. "I remember having to pick apart the truths myself, try and remember how things really happened and how they'd changed them. You resisted at first, said the truth, but you became less and less sure of yourself until they were able to really feed you the lies, warp your reality."

Peeta rubbed his hands over his knees anxiously. He remembered being in that room, but he didn't remember slipping into such falsehoods. His eyes turned to Katniss.

"You were stung once, too. Real or not real?"

"Real," Katniss replied.

"When they used the venom on me, they would show me pictures of my life," he explained to her. He looked at Calypso as if for reassurance on the matter. "But some weren't real. They changed them. At first, they all... They all blurred together. But now... Now I can sort them out a little. Like, the ones that they changed, they have this quality. It's like they're shiny. They've been glossed over."