❝if a victor is considered desirable, the president gives them as a reward or allows other people to buy them for an exorbitant amount of money. if you refuse, he kills someone you love. so you do it.❞
ontari nightfall wants revenge after seven year...
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CASSIAN HAS LOCKED himself in his bedroom. When Ontari arrives in the Victor's Village, she heads straight toward the house they share, not the family one she had left him in the day before. She hears her mother's distant voice from the second floor as soon as she enters.
"Cassian? Cassian, honey, open the door."
She doesn't bother to pause to kick off her shoes or remove her coat before she's heading up the wooden stairs two at a time. Her mother waits at the end of the hallway where Cassian's room is, the closed oak door a firm message to keep out. The woman's face crumples even more at the sight of her younger daughter.
"Oh, Ontari." Her mother wraps her in a hug as soon as she's within reaching distance. Ontari returns the gesture, relishing in the familiar scent of lavender in her slightly graying hair. When she pulls back from the comforting embrace, her mother's eyes, as crystal blue as her own, are filling with tears.
"Don't cry, Mom," Ontari warns in a slightly wavering voice. She brushes her hand along the barely-visible wrinkles imprinted in her mother's cheek. "You'll make me cry."
Again. But Ontari doesn't say the last bit out loud, knowing it would wreck her mother even more.
The shorter woman sighs and directs her saddened gaze toward her son's door. "He's been in there for hours. When Snow announced it, I don't think he reacted. He just walked over here and hasn't come out."
Ontari's lips press into a thin line. Cassian used to do this when he was freshly out of the arena— lock himself up for days, not even coming down for meals. The episodes have since died down, but the news must have caused him to relapse into old habits.
Snow is already destroying them piece by piece and the Quarter Quell hasn't even started yet.
"You should go," she advises her mother. "I'll handle this."
The woman looks like she's about to object, but glances at the look on her daughter's face and hesitantly obliges. Her eyes are cast downward as she walks down the hallway, shoes thumping on the floor.
Ontari only appears so calm because every remaining tear inside of her was shed on the train back to Eight. She feels an overwhelming sense of emptiness now, no more sobs able to be mustered up. She'd experienced a whopping variance of emotions within the past seven hours: numbness, amusement, hysteria, despondency, and now nothing.
"Cass, it's O," she calls through her brother's door, not that it's necessary. He'd probably heard her voice when she was speaking to their mother. "I'm coming in."
Cassian never truly locks his door. After being sealed in the tube that lifted him into the arena, he never stays in any sort of room without an easy means of escape. He usually just sets the knob so it seems like it can't be turned. But Ontari has been dealing with this for six years— she knows his tricks.
