CHAPTER TWENTY TWO;
memories of home

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As the sun dips beneath the obscured horizon, a pathetic fire crackles and spits embers into the air — it is the duo's best efforts. But for once, after Vesper and Icarus slip slithers of cooked frog down their gullets, they don't stamp out the fire immediately. Illuminated by its glow, there is a fragility in the air tonight. A hyper-awareness of the stakes. They do not want to sleep yet, even if they should.

     Even if their muscles tense and their weapons loom near, they do not want to fight. They want to forget. Just for a little while.

Like sap being drawn out from a tree, Vesper can feel her body slowly being drawn out with fatigue. It worries her — of all the times to begin this physical catharsis, it's happening now? She needs this strength, maybe more than ever, and yet she fears she might not have much left...

     It is Icarus who leads into the conversation first. "What d'you think the others are doing at home right now? You think they're asleep yet?" he asks. If he had posed this question any other day, it probably would have been wrought with gloom and homesickness — but now, he speaks it with more of a nostalgic silver lining.

     Vesper shrugs tiredly. "For all we know, the Gamemakers could be messing with us. It could be the crack of dawn in District Six while it's pitch black here."

     Still, she doesn't doubt that the Brunels are losing sleep over Icarus. She knows she already is.

Icarus leans his weight onto his floor-planted palms, craning his head up to look at the sky — he can't see anything. Just the branches of cypress trees, only showing glimpses of stars like holes torn into the arena's fabric. He stays like this for a while, contemplative beyond his thirteen years of age. Her head lulling back against a tree trunk, Vesper almost starts to let her eyelids flutter closed, until the boy's voice abruptly catches her from careening out of consciousness.

But she doesn't catch what he says the first time, so she has to ask again.

"I said, did Axel ever tell you about his friend who died in the Games?"

Vesper sits up straighter, snapping to alertness. She shakes her head. What? She has so many questions — who, what, when where? Even if she isn't the most emotionally aware person she knows, she likes to think she would have remembered this if Axel had told her. Vesper gets the feeling she is going to find out, anyway, as Icarus quietly draws his knees up to tell the story.

"It was a few years ago now," he says. "One of the guys from work. Fender, I think his name was."

     A flicker of recognition warms Vesper's mind with a memory like candlelight — she has to cradle the flame carefully, in order to find the strength to remember, but once she does she can picture him clearly. Fender was one of the older mechanics at the workshop when she started there. A mop of bark-brown hair over olive skin, he was a little rough around the edges and, although only seventeen at the time, carried himself with the kind of composure you might find in an old worker sat at the bar over a glass of whiskey. Vesper can recall him quietly watching over her, a supervisory pair of eyes as she picked up sharp tools for the first time, only interfering if she wasn't watching where her fingers were going. He was a steadying presence, the kind of worker you don't realise is so essential until they are gone — an instant kill in the Bloodbath, now that she remembers it reluctantly.

     She had no idea Axel knew him well, or on such a level that Fender's death would mean that much to him. If it were Vesper, she would have tried to just suck it up and move on, and it's exactly what she tried to do. Then again, she didn't know Axel in his first years at the workshop.

     "He was kind of like Axel's mentor when he started working," Icarus continues. "I can't remember this, I was too young, but apparently he used to come home and talk about Fender like... like he was his big brother."

     Vesper wrings her hands together, considering this.

     "Hey, isn't this all a little personal?" she asks, suddenly self-conscious as she searches for a way to dip out of opening up. "You know, we have listeners everywhere..."

     The kid scoffs slightly, staring down at his lap. "I don't care anymore. Let them hear what they wanna hear."

"I... I never knew that about him."

"He's pretty private actually. Even with me."

She knows he is right. If Vesper thinks about her friends, she likes to believe she is knowledgeable about them through and through. Kirk, for instance, she knows like she does the lines on her hands. The twin hearts of Bolt and Cheyenne have also never hidden themselves from her. Icarus, of course, she now knows better than ever. But Axel... he was different. She never harboured the kind of curiosity to nose into other people's affairs, far too complex and messy for her liking, but it still bothered her that she only knew Axel on a surface-level — even after all these years.

     "But he isn't alone," Vesper says, her best effort at reassuring Icarus. "He's got you, me, Blythe, everyone else... what're you smiling at?"

     The Brunel boy has started grinning through the darkness at the mention of Blythe, and tries to shake it off at first. But a feverish mischief soon seems to override that, and he gives in. "They're real close, aren't they? Blythe and Axel, I mean."

     "Yeah... they are."

     "I think my brother likes your sister," he smirks.

"Oh yeah?" Vesper chuckles.

But then she thinks about it... really thinks about it. In truth, Vesper has never been good at reading signs of attraction — the early flirtations with something more than friendship, two souls being drawn to one another. She is often the last to connect the dots. However when she thinks of Blythe and Axel, Vesper is reminded of a certain tenderness that has always existed between them. He was always the first to bid her good morning when they departed for work, as was she. It wasn't uncommon to catch their wandering glances at the other, whether he watched Blythe cast out a washing line above the apartment, or she gazed down at Axel polishing his boots on the doorstep. He also seems to be one of the few people who can make the hard-working girl relax, perhaps the only one who Vesper knows will look out for Blythe unconditionally while she is gone...

     An epiphany truly hits Vesper then — the realisation that, every time she thinks of Blythe in the arena, it always ends with the reassurance that somewhere, back home, Axel is taking care of her. It felt totally natural to assume that, but until now, she never thought why. Why him? Suddenly it all makes sense.

     Axel and Blythe really do 'like' each other.

"Well," Vesper nods slowly, "I'm sure Axel's very pleased you just broadcasted that to all of Panem."

"At this point, that's his last hope of finally making a move. He's been gooey-eyed for Blythe ever since she moved in with you guys..." This sets them off, the two of them muffling hushed giggles in the night; the feeling of her cheeks throbbing with a smile feels entirely foreign to Vesper. Icarus then sighs, turning reflective again. "You see it though, don't you? The spark?"

     "Yeah. I do."

     "D'you think she feels the same?"

     She looks up at the sky, as if Blythe is up there somehow, omniscient. "... I've got a pretty good feeling."

     Icarus nods conclusively, satisfied with her answer — it is as though he has checked something off a list, tied a delicate bow to seal up a loose end. He starts chewing on some dried skin on his lip as he seems to want to ask something else. "Hey, uh, how did Blythe come along?" he asks cautiously.

     "You mean, how did she end up living with us?"

     The boy blinks attentively, confirming this. Of course. He must have been too young to remember. Vesper leans back and sighs — usually she would wriggle out of getting nostalgic like this with everything she had, but this felt different. It was as if she wanted to revisit the first time too... in case she never got another time again. However, she is also aware of the Capitol audience watching them somewhere like vultures, bound to regurgitate anything that comes out of her mouth. This particular thing she would rather keep under wraps.

     So, when she tells Icarus, it is the watered down version. Only a few words long. The vast memory of it that expands in her mind is much, much longer...

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     When Vesper was eight years old, District Six was crippled by one of the unluckiest years in its living memory. First a series of strikes met with almighty Peacekeeper brutality, followed by food shortages that led to famine, and finally a vicious diphtheria epidemic in the usually influenza-infested winter — it was suspected to have been brought in by cargo handlers commuting from District Eleven. The result was catastrophic. It wiped out whole families, the ones locked behind doors marked with crosses to signify an infected member inside. It drove people onto the streets, becoming beggars or Morphling addicts hooked to its sweet release. It forced usually-faithless citizens to look to the Gods, trembling through prayer to free them from this hell.

     She and her father had only just moved to Vagary, and she was staunchly in superstitious... but if she was, Vesper had thought it as good a sign as any that moving here was a bad idea. In her first steps into the urban world of her district, she was exposed to all its claustrophobic ugliness in one hit. Vesper spent most of that winter locked inside their house, shivering under blankets and waiting for her father to come home — he still had to go to work. He had no choice in his job. Every day the girl would wonder, after every touch of his lips on her curls and the sound of his boots clanging down the fire escape steps, if that would be it. If one day, he just... wouldn't come home. Vesper had seen it happen to other families.

     By some miracle, her father survived. It took some time for epidemic to get under control, and even longer for Vesper (like many) to shake the lingering fear. A single cough or sneeze on the street would bring back memories — people lying feverish and fatigued in the streets, croaking out for breath, throats coated in a grim grey sheen.

     But before he made it out, Apollo Alfaro did something else. Perhaps the unthinkable at the time.

     Numerous people who he worked with came in contact with the disease, one of his dearest succumbing to it with his wife, and tragically leaving behind their only daughter. Vesper's father could not accept this. After ensuring she wasn't infected, he came home from work with a new visitor, much to the surprise of a judgemental Vesper.

     "Mija," he had told her, standing in the doorway, "this is Blythe Hadzhiev. You remember her dad, don't you?"

     Vesper nodded and looked the girl up and down. Blythe looked a little older than her, although no more than ten or eleven. Her cheeks were hollow but flushed with the icy rouge of winter's chill; her knobbly knees, elbows and knuckles aflame with the same complexion. She had a pair of pale grey eyes like steel, glassy and staring at her for acceptance, framed by strands of mousy brown hair hanging drably at either side of her face. Vesper took it all in with a hint of scepticism — even at her young age, she was incredulous at her father just waltzing in with a potentially infectious stranger. But so far she looked healthy... so perhaps it was alright.

     "Her parents are sick... very sick," he explained, "and we need to look after her. Can you do that?"

     Naturally, Vesper had agreed, only thinking the visitor would stay exactly that — a visitor. Over the weeks Apollo was occupied at work, trying not to contract disease, while the two girls traversed the liminal space of their draft-swept flat. Except when the diphtheria ended, Blythe did not leave; her parents died, she had nowhere else to go, and Apollo Alfaro was too good of a man to release her onto the streets.

Before she knew it they were family, and Vesper found themselves being associated as sisters... sisters. She had been repulsed by the idea at first. She had always been comfortable with the idea of she and her father as partners in crime — it was those two against the world. But suddenly, there was this other girl, and selfishly Vesper wanted to keep having her father all to herself. He wasn't anyone's to share, for he was all Vesper had.

But now with the bittersweet gift of hindsight, she sees how blind she had been. How her tunnel vision had left her only other family in the dark — her sister, Blythe. All she had ever wanted to do was belong somewhere, and she really tried. It had been easier for Vesper to try and resent her at the beginning; but the more Blythe cared, in her own stubborn and pragmatic way, she wore her down.

The definitive moment came a few winters later, when Vesper's father was away at work for a few nights and she came down with a cold. It was a particularly horrible one, her chest heavy with mucus and her sinuses blocked — she knew she had stayed out too long at work, still adjusting to the new labour of working as a mechanic. Blythe had forced the fatigued grudge-holder to bed, insisting on gathering medicine. Buying it would have been too expensive, but she managed to concoct a soothing drink to ease Vesper's knife-torn throat.

"Is that better?" the fourteen year-old had asked, watching as Vesper sipped away.

In response, the twelve year-old shrugged, not wanting to seem too grateful. And Blythe didn't seem to mind either — no huge display of affection was needed. Although she pretended to be asleep when they finally put out their oil lamp, Vesper was acutely aware of two steel grey eyes watching carefully over her. They traced every rise and fall of her chest, ears attuned for any wheezing or difficulty breathing — perhaps out of paranoia for what had happened to her own parents.

Vesper knew then that she couldn't hate her. Not really. It would be cruel.

And yet, she had tried to hate her. Even after Vesper's– no, their father had died, the olive branch failed to reach either of them. All of it was so petty. Apollo Alfaro had done a thing closest to complete compassion as one could get, taking in an orphaned girl without batting an eyelid — and he had given both of the girls a new family. In fact, now Vesper thought of it, she had never asked Blythe about her feelings after he died. Maybe that question had been hidden under layers of pent-up anger, more at herself, for not being there when he passed. At least someone was there with him — at least one daughter got to be with her father in his last moments. She used to be bitter about that, but these days, she was more glad than anything.

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     ... But of course, she doesn't say all of this to Icarus — to the eager Capitol audience listening in. Her summary of all the messy, broken, complex feelings are the stone cold facts. "Blythe's parents died in the diphtheria epidemic, and Dad took her in so she wouldn't live on the streets or get infected," Vesper says. "The rest is history." There. That's it. All you're getting.

     Still, it seems enough to blow Icarus away, a contemplative exhale slipping past his lips. "That's amazing. He just dropped everything to take in a stranger."

     "That's just the kind of person he was. He was just... better. Better than any of us."

Vesper can feel goosebumps crawl across her skin — just the thought of her father seems to paralyse her now, everything threatening to bubble over at one more word. Instead she is seized with an urgency to change the subject, sifting frantically through any topic shift she can salvage. Finally, she comes up with something that can at least get Icarus talking, and give her time to recover:

"Hey, so what's all this about flying?" she asks him. "You mentioned it to me on the way to the Epicentre... you know, on Reaping Day, before everything went to shit. Where did that come from?"

A twinkle appears in Icarus's eyes that mirrors the stars — a look she hasn't seen in what feels like forever, and she realises she's missed. However, it only lasts a moment, like a brief comet shooting past that you'll blink and miss. "I don't know," he shrugs honestly. "I just... I never felt like I fit into the kind of jobs you guys have. You know, mechanics and all that stuff. I'm born in Vagary, so it's where I was bound to end up. But up there? Man..."

He looks up right on cue, searching for scraps of sky again. "It just seems like it would be so free up there in the sky. Way above everything, all of the pain and the suffering, looking down on it without a care in the world. The sky has no boundaries — it's just there. There's all that space, just for you, and you could go anywhere you wanted... if there is anything outside Panem..."

     Vesper just sits, listening to every word. How can she hear him say all of this and not want to bring him home? His mind if a few leaps and bounds ahead of his years, even if some of it is just childlike naivety... whereas Vesper just considered it an achievement if she made it out of another year alive.

     Something hardens in Icarus, a muscle flaring in his jaw. "But... I think, if I ever did fly now, I'd want to fight."

     "Fight? What for?" she asks, puzzled. They weren't at war, so whose side would he be on?

     "I don't know," Icarus just shrugs, as if even he doesn't have the answers. "I just know I'd want to make myself useful somehow. I think... I could do it now. Maybe fly fighter jets or something. I could fight in a way I couldn't before, you know?"

Vesper wrings her hands together and her lips thin into a smile. "Yeah, you could."

Icarus smiles back at her, and for a heart-wrenching moment, she has a horrible feeling this might be one of the last she sees. Her weakness is consuming her bit by bit, to the point where she is afraid she won't be able to protect Icarus anymore. So what good will she be to him anymore? That used to be her fear. But now, looking at him, she senses a coming of age in him — and not the celebratory kind. The kind that forces you to grow up too fast. Still, it means he might be able to do this without her... if he really had to.

"Hey, listen," Vesper suddenly begins to say, with no clue where she is going with it. "I have no idea what's gonna happen these next few days, but I just wanted to say... I'm proud of you. Since your name first got picked, you've been through more than most kids your age could say, and that takes a pretty... a pretty brave person to do. And I guess, also, thank you — for being a great district partner."

The boy's eyes glisten with gratitude; he also isn't an idiot. Icarus ebbs and flows with empathy, and he seems to instantly pick up on the underlying tone, which is that Vesper might be trying to say goodbye. Lifting his hands from the ground, he shuffles forward on his knees and wraps his arms around her. In their second embrace today, Vesper clings his shirt tightly and hugs him back.

"Right back at you. I couldn't have done any of this without you..." Icarus says softly. "But hey, the game isn't over yet, remember?"

"I know, I know..." she pats him on the shoulder, where he has lost a little weight over the past week or so.

Swallowing thickly, Icarus rubs his eyes. "I'm tired."

"Me too. You wanna go to sleep?"

"... Actually, no. Only for a little while. You should sleep too."

Her eyes already thrumming with the promise of some shut-eye, Vesper doesn't even try to argue. Both of them lay their bodies down on the plastic sheets they previously used to shield from rain, their best attempts at covering the damp ground. Her bloodstream already dwindles in her resting position, letting her eyes lull slowly. She can see Icarus's face only a little way from hers, his bow hugged dutifully to his chest. "I'll keep watch for now, you sleep," he whispers to her. "I'll nudge you when we can switch, or if anything happens..."

Vesper nods. Feeling his small sigh breathe a puff of warmth onto her face, she can't help but smile at the brotherly arm that slings itself over her body for a few moments — as if she might roll away at any given moment. She doesn't see Icarus staring worriedly at her with unblinking, unmoving eyes, willing her to still be able to awaken whenever he is ready. Meanwhile, she rolls into a dreamless slumber, empty of nightmares for one merciless night...

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A/N;

this chapter was, whilst acting as a filler, a much-needed quiet moment for vesper and icarus... also feeding in some more backstory! we got some parts about axel and blythe themselves, as well as the blaxel feels 🥰 how did people feel about the story of vesper's dad taking blythe in, by the way? vesper has been struggling with complex and messy pent-up emotions for a while about it, and this is the first time she's really stopped to think about them... we're getting closer to a catharsis 🙏

this is probably the last "filler" chapter for the rest of the book, as the remaining chapters are either going to be action-packed or super duper important to the story. for that reason, i might start gaining momentum with updates, so who knows? we could be finished rather soon if i've got the time/inspiration.

so buckle in folks, because next chapter it is time for a key point of any hunger games fic: THE FEAST.

as always, thank you for reading, and hope you have a lovely day/evening!

[ published: 15th september, 2022 ]

— Imogen