FAILURE TO COMPLY ┃ f. odair

5.14 blood

Calypso could not remember her mother's final words to her, said long before her death, considering she was an avox. She could remember her Aunt Millie saying something along the lines of 'good luck' and 'I love you' before the Quarter Quell, before she'd disappeared. Her father spent his final moments telling her to be strong, telling her he loved her.

Monica was only afforded one final word, one final name to scream.

Calypso.

It rattled through her empty mind as Finnick pulled her to her feet. She was numb. Utterly, completely numb. The sounds echoed in her head. The whispers, the words they'd repeated, the gunfire, the cries.

"Come on, love," Finnick whispered. The real world came back to her as he gently tapped her cheek. Gale was yelling, telling them to move, but Finnick was not going anywhere until she did. Calypso forced herself to take one step after the other, following the rest of their team back into the light beyond the sewers, but up towards the city surface. "Let's go."

As soon as he'd said those words, the next thing came. There was never a break, only death and destruction and the dark void between. He pulled Calypso behind a pillar, her body beginning to feel like dead weight. As a bullet from the firing Peacekeepers grazed her arm, she made no sound, didn't even flinch.

They ran again, watching Messalla turn to ash under a hot light in the subway. Calypso picked up his gun, firing blindly at the enemy with squinted eyes. The lights she'd spent so long fearing had finally proven to be as deadly as she thought they were. No longer a delusion. The barrier between reality and fiction was breaking apart, and she might as well have gone with it.

While her bullets reigned, an equal number came for them. With whatever little sense she had left, she kept herself positioned purposefully in front of Finnick, not daring to let anything touch him. She felt another sharp pain on her neck this time, then a thwacking impact on her shoulder as a bullet went clean through. The ground itself started to crumble beneath their feet and she threw Finnick forward. Emptying the ammunition from the gun, Calypso abandoned it and put everything she had left into her pounding footsteps.

"Peeta! Come on! Katniss yelled. Calypso turned to see her tortured friend clutching his head, losing all sense of himself. "Peeta, we have to keep going!"

"I'm a mutt," he yelled. "I can't keep control! Leave me! I'm a mutt!"

"Yes, you can!" Katniss reassured him. Her weapon was abandoned in favour of clutching her love's face between her strong hands. "Look at me! Look at me!"

And she kissed him. It was short and sweet but battled those demons in his mind like nothing else. Calypso could not stomach looking at them for much longer, feeling as though she were witnessing something not meant for her or anyone else's eyes. It was too songs becoming reacquainted. Two people realising the love was not gone.

"Stay with me," Katniss whispered.

"Always," he replied.

Tears pricked at Calypso's eyes as she released a breath she didn't realise she was holding. She looked to Finnick, who was already looking at her. Now that they'd taken a moment, she could see his own resolve crumbling under the weight of his pent-up love and sadness and grief. She wanted to fall into his arms and never leave his space. She wanted to tell him everything was fine even when it wasn't. She wanted to say she would stay with him always, no matter how impermanent life truly was.

But Katniss and Peeta were up on their feet and moving again. They had no choice but to follow.

"I know where we are," Cressida called out. "I know a place. Up those stairs."