☆ CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR! ☆
034. mind boggling.
||THUNDERCLOUDS ||
❝here in the ashes
your soul cries
out, but don't be
afraid of these
thunderclouds.❞
➳➳
HER HEAD HURT like it was being pounded with a hammer.
She felt it every time the Peacekeeper returned. Each moment that she watched him take off his helmet labelled TR730 was filled with a cloud of both uncertainty and anger-driven pondering. It was that helmet that made her label him TR when she wrote about him on paper- something that he noticed almost as soon as she gave him the most recent passage she had taken more than 30 minutes to write in a legible font.
Not that it meant much to him when he did, because it was the exact same words he had read a day before in a cursive a little let sure of itself.
Still, when she watched his eyes scan every curl or small pressure change in the words she felt the heat of the unknown warm her temples and the tips of her ears. Each time he sucked in a breath through his chapped lips discoloured by his own teeth, she rubbed her finger along the outline of her bottom lip to remember what it felt like to be wrapped in a comfort thick enough to tickle her nose, and she pulled at the ends of her hair until the weaker strands fell onto the wooden floor.
She just wanted to know what the words meant, even if the bloodied walls of her voice hadn't picked up the pieces enough to say it yet.
"TR?" The man asked finally after minutes of silence. It wasn't the kind of silence she had been forced into when the soldier left her- this one had been hollowed out to let the tension hang where her comfort use to be.
"TR730." Lorna tried her best to mutter. He heard it when she pointed to the white helmet placed on the table without much care, and then glanced down at the badge engraved into his sleeve.
"You're very observant."
There was nothing left for her to refine. She couldn't learn another language, or spend her hours practising her writing for much longer without breaking the small amount of equipment they left her with, but her sight was free. She could glance around the room without an extra assault on her mind; her eyes could scan the walls a thousand times without her breaking a sweat from her seat. She had nothing better to do then really notice the little details in a space filled with so many obviously large things- she could feel proud that she could see the small mole under his left eyes that almost looked like a shadow.
"What-" she caught herself as she tried to push more air into her words, only for them to seem flatter than ever. "-does it mean."
"They're randomized for each Peacekeeper."
"No."
She shook her delicate hair as she pointed to the words he had read between each conversation they had. He seemed to understand what she wanted faster than Lorna had understood exactly why her feet were so cold when they were left against a floor that felt strangely warm- the corners of his mouth turned down almost immediately like her own had when she figured it out.
"I don't think that's a good idea, I don't know what's too much for you."
With that word, another wave of throbbing came to the front of Lorna's head so that the back of her eyes felt like they were being plucked like a guitar string. Every time her iris moved from the wall to the floor, or the paper she needed so desperately, she felt a new pluck. A new dagger into her forehead, and another warm spell against her cold hands that stayed pinned to her temple.
"Please."
When she asked, even Lorna could tell the reluctance that flooded between his brown eyes at the thought of turning her simple requests away. A guilt for how young her ignorance had become compared to those around her- how somebody so new to not knowing could be more aware of their own faults than those that had been able to be self aware for their entire lives. She was trying to be better; TR730 couldn't say the same for those around him.
"Not all at once." He sighed, and then glanced down at the words on the page once more. "Rebellions are when a group of people resist control."
She knew that, but the girl was so afraid TR would stop talking to her that she nodded anyway as if she had no idea.
"We're in the Capitol- the place people get controlled from- but there are others that want change."
With each word, another string was plucked behind her eyes that made her entire face ache from discomfort. But she didn't stop listening- each time that string was pulled she felt an itch in her very memories as they tried to join the dots the man was drawing on her subconscious thoughts.
"The rebellion." Lorna wheezed, quietly enough to let the man know she wasn't planning to interrupt anything he wanted to tell her. She just wanted to test the words; it felt like she had used them so much the vowel combination had worn it's way onto her tongue.
"They want to end death, but most of all, they want to put a stop to the Capitol's hold on the rest of them. They want to end the Hunger Games."
With the word, a pain sharper than a thousand blades cut through the string that had been plucked. It left behind a fumbling mess of words Lorna had never seen together- words she knew the meaning of even if she'd only used them flippantly before. It made her hands shake with intellect she needed to write down, and her eyes became insistent on watching the lines on the page as she grabbed the pen beside her with the strength of the pillar keeping her room up.
When she began to scrawl out more words, TR felt a jolt in his chest as he considered that her actions could of easily been more violent then she intended.
She could of thrown a pen that sharp right into his own eyes- hard enough to embed it into his skull as he fell to the floor dead. She could of used it to end the words that came into her line of sight; Lorna could of used her newly released memories to escape if she truly remembered the things TR knew of her.
Tributes, Quarter Quell, Victor. Lorna wrote each within a story that came to her mind one sentence at a time. Like she didn't truly put them together until she read it through at the end.
"Did I-" she couldn't finish as she imagined the horrible things on the paper. Blood was everywhere, like the colour red was the only that existed among the black and white of the world around her.
"Yes."
He didn't have to say anymore, all the boy had to do was watch as she wrote something else for him- something far more heartbreaking than the murder Lorna had just forced herself to remember.
➳
TR730 couldn't leave the letter placed in his hands alone, even though he was sure the girl that wrote it intended for it to remain private. It wasn't addressed to the soldier, or to the many people that had gone through her mind so fast she barely registered their faces, but to nobody at all. It was supposed to remain her own little secret; she wasn't aware of how hard it was to keep information away from the people that wanted to find it.
The paper was indented with her heavy words- her writing unneat despite her hours of practise.
8, 8, 4, 11, 2, 1, 5.
She had written each number out letter by letter with hands as shaky as the legs of an old worn down chair. But when the Peacekeeper glanced at them he couldn't make out anything more than whispers of possibilities that the blonde had missed, because he didn't know enough to understand what she was trying to say. They were simply numbers- completely random as she wrote them down with an ink that looked to be close to running out.
That wasn't everything, underneath the line of numbers rows and rows of writing remaind. Nothing clear; three words were repeated in paragraphs that never ran into each other or linked to the words she had written before, like she was forced to write them out until she knew why she needed to learn how to spell them.
Perhaps she felt her mind was trying to let her own guilt escape it's fortress, because the words were as morbid as the rebellion she had started to remember.
MURDERER, she wrote over and over, the phrase IM SORRY littering the margin and next line below it.
It wasn't much, but it told TR730 everything he needed to know about the former Victor's recovery from ignorance. It seemed his words had started to unchain the parts that had been formerly kept safely under the haze of sickness, and that was only the start.
As his white gloves sent wrinkles through the paper in his hands, the man made a vow to not only himself but the young adult he looked over. He promised that he would try to make her better, and that he wouldn't give up.
•••••••••••
1656 words.
OK I NEED A MINUTE
TO PROCESS THIS. 20K
READS ON SPARKS?????
My head is blown, I never
thought people would
love Lorna as much as
I do. My smol bean that is
trying to save the world.
I promise more Finnick
action soon, that's what
you're all here for 😂 xx.
P.s happy wattpad
one year to me :)