never_very_good | }| 14 |{

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Look. I don't know how many of you there are now, I can't remember everything... but... I know I attacked people over the weekend. I wasn't-- I can't say I wasn't myself, but I wasn't who I am now. I was lost and sick and fucked up.

[Awkward pause, Frankie's not really the sort for public apologies but he probably owes one at this point...]

The important thing is-- I can fix it. If you got bit, if I did or someone I bit got you... I can fix you. Just... don't bite anyone else and let me know where I can find you.

[As he switches off, under his breath-- probably to himself, he mutters,] not too late.

[ooc; per his plot, let the vampire babby cleanup begin <3]

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When he approaches, she peers up at him from her narrow position, catty-cornered between the uneven rock faces hedging the cave into an almost triangular slant at the back. Her hands are curled at her sides and her knees pulled up to her chest as if compacting herself will make it easier to keep everything together. A helpful trick more than anything else, but if it works, it works and up until now it has. No drinking blood. No attacking anyone. She had enough of attacking and being attacked in the arena, where she had to. In this case it could be argued for all she knew she had to as well, but to Katniss it simply isn't the same. It doesn't take looking into a mirror or a river to let her know she is worse for the wear, abraded flesh, reddened whites that clash with the golden hue her once gray eyes have adopted. Not eating any food on top of that which cravings tell her she needs is less the problem here; she's gone long periods of time without food before. Most people from District 12 have. It's just the way of things, particularly in The Seam.

But when she moves to uncurl slightly it is a slow motion, catching on itself as if she can feel the aches through to her bones, hollowed out and toward a frailty she dislikes. Blinking at the stranger, she plants both hands flat on the ground, everything dirty but not as bad as it could be. Uncomfortable and not certain she wants to fuel too much faith in feeling a heartbeat again (it isn't the kind of let-down most would deal with well and she suspects least of all her, and just shy of that, Peeta), she shivers a breath before speaking.

"H--" her voice seems to snag as if parched. She tries again. "How?" Simple, to the point. And at least in this respect, not much different from how she usually is.

He takes another few, slow steps; Frankie knows, he remembers, how hard it is when your eyes catch the throb of someone's pulse, how all the best intentions in the world can't keep you from going for it. "Your, uh," he trails off, inclining his head in the direction he came from at the man who calls himself her fiance, though at the moment he seems more of a bodyguard. "Said you haven't taken any blood. I'm gonna have to ask you to have a little." He pauses. This isn't an ideal place to do it, but he can manage. "It's gonna hurt. Bad. Worse than turning, probably, but it'll bring you back quick."

If all she had was good intentions, there is a fair enough chance Katniss would not have refused as long as she has, as she continues to do by not attacking, but it's not just that. Hardly, in a sense. What familiar with hunger and stubbornness itself does not account for, revulsion manages to seal. Ever aware of the pulse in the man before her, she still needs only to think of how blood reminds her of President Snow, how the scent was on his breath, how everything she loves or has ever cared about could be blown away by a nod from him...it's all she needs to think of to scramble backward to keep from going forward, preempting herself as she listens to him.

Worse? The flinch is more a reflex than anything else but when she clenches her jaw, teeth gritted and a hallowed look from thinned out form, she couples it with a short nod, jumpy as if she doesn't quite have control over her movement. The nod is not a yes to the blood so much as acknowledgment of what he has said.

"But," she licks cracked lips, swallows sharply. "...blood," she thinks she might vomit on the spot even as she knows it's what the burning of her insides seems to demand. "...it's the only thing?" Her next breath shakes through the whole of her, as if it took all her effort to get that much out, and in a way it did; she's so tired. Beyond Frankie's shoulder, she can see Peeta with moonlight glancing off of pale blond hair, but then she starts, jerkily and sudden as another form seems to be there. Not near Peeta, never near Peeta, but right beside the other man. Impulse strikes her down on the spot because for all that logic says they aren't there, it certainly looks like Cato is there. Cato who could break her, who could kill Peeta; Cato who she killed but the dead can walk here. Lunging at the phantom boy only serves to make it look as though she is going for Frankie, however, and as she has been able to keep the hunger stopped up, the burst of aggression is, maybe, not entirely unexpected.

Frankie has been half-braced for this all along, remembers being in her position himself; and even if her lunge is a little off, he moves to meet her just in case she veers off, in case she tries to make a break for it. The look on her face is enough to tell him how she feels about the idea of blood, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that she could flee-- but if she does, he knows, it's bound to end in trouble for the both of them. He does put an arm up to catch her if she goes for his throat, because he'd rather not be bit at all but if he has to, better to have it somewhere less dangerous and less conspicuous.

Frankie may be merely human now, but he has the advantage of experience; caught unawares she could have bowled him over and eaten him or whatever she liked. But as it is he holds his own, not trying to push her away but to get a hold on her, to still her movements. He tries not to think of Alison Bromley struggling against him, though the roles are reversed. And he's doing the right thing, now, because wrong has already been done.

"I don't want to force you," he says through gritted teeth, coldly forceful. "But the longer you go without the worse you're gonna get. Much more and I might not be able to fix it."

It's like something snaps back into place when he catches her, but her mind as muddled as it is takes a moment to catch up her instincts as she tries to wrest out of his hold and get to Cato before Cato gets to Peeta, except that in said snap Cato is gone and suddenly she hears Frankie speaking. To her, she realizes and when he stops, her remnant twisting also stops, the stillness amplified by the contrast of how even a toss of moonlight seems to make her want to jump out of this decaying skin. To a degree she has always seemed a little older, older at least than sixteen but she attributes this to the things she has seen and been through and none of that prepared her very much for a death-like existence. So right now she has the distant feeling of being younger again, smaller, an animal ready to bolt if she could and she doesn't want to hurt anyone.

And it isn't the prospect of all that pain that puts her off but the blood again, and she almost thinks she pales beneath the already sickly pallor, battered looking though it's only the result of not eating and nothing else. Trembling is weak so she ignores it when it happens, as if she could be cold but she has already gotten used to that, trying to keep down the beginnings of bile in her throat and reminding herself why she has to trust this man, why she has to do this. Some would say it isn't a big deal; that he offered, that he won't die, and that if what he says is true she'll be fixed so there is nothing to lose, but Katniss has spent long years of a comparatively short life eliminating her fears, and one of those that she hasn't been able to escape carries the smell of blood--thick as death--on his breath, on his person, in everything he does. She can't stand the idea of being anything like a man who sends Peacekeepers into the District 12 area, who knows what will happen to people like her and people like Gale and in a ricochet effect, someone like Peeta.

But that brings her harder to the present. Peeta.

That's why. He's why. They only have each other. She goes over all of this in her mind and it seems to take a very long time but in truth lasts maybe a minute, which is long when no one says anything perhaps.

...worse...might not be able to fix it...

She hones in on those specifics and remembers the boy at the mouth of the cave, the boy with the bread, the boy she will never stop owing as hard and as much as she tries. To run away from a chance to at least right things as who and what they are is a disservice to him and god knows she's already racked up enough of those. Dimly she thinks of his bad leg, of bleeding hands, and that brings her back to blood. Again, she shivers, dark hair stressing down in tangles as she swallows sharpness and raises her eyes to find Frankie's. Is he tired? Little thoughts tug at the corners of her mind, distracting her from saying anything immediately. How many others were there? Not knowing the mechanics of this much, she tenses under his hold, her breaths shallow though she tries to temper them to something quieter.

"I don't..." a pause. "I don't want to..." I can't, I don't understand how this works...how..., "Do I have to...bite?" she forces the word out, heavy and pointed and a problem she can't seem to be clearer about, but she has a feeling he'll understand, not based on faith in empathy but because he seems familiar with the situation and if there is something she can recognize and appreciate, it's that.

Still...

...blood.

But Peeta...

She stops her thoughts there, tries to revolve them around that boy like he's a sun to be circled; tunnel vision of a sort to get herself to do what her body both wants and rejects, contradiction incarnate.

"I'd prefer if you didn't," he answers her flatly, not letting her go when she stills simply because he doesn't trust her to relax just yet. To be honest, the blood never bothered him; when he'd turned vampirism was still a novelty, and plenty of people were willing to share out of fascination, or for cash. The taste had put him off but it could just as easily be slipped into something else; and by the time he should have been morally outraged by the industry that developed around the human resource, he was too accustomed to his state to question it. Nearly everyone was; and though in retrospect it makes him a little sick to think about, the substance doesn't hold much terror.

"If there's a cup or a bowl or something..." he trails off, finally letting her go though he remains braced to pin her again if needed. She's not very large; and already showing that strange hollow boniness that comes of the virus going unchecked, though he's relieved to see her fingers don't seem too long, her joints don't have that knobby stretch around them, sagging the skin. The last thing Frankie needs-- for any number of reasons-- is subsiders in the City. Which is why this is so important. More than the sense that he owes them something, he needs to keep things from getting any worse.

"If not you'll have to suck it out, but I'll cut."

If she had been holding her breath she would have let it go when he answered, but she wasn't. Instead she nods again, half of a movement that clips itself in the middle because everything aches in a way that makes her feel old, though she knows it more as being a particularly caused type of malnourishment. The mention of a bowl combined with his release of her prompts her to look for a bowl or a cup that they do not have. When they drink, they drink from the river with cupped hands, and when they eat it is much the same; Katniss cannot get out of her habit of distrust of cities with such high buildings and implications of difficulty when escape could be necessary. Laughable in an inescapable place to begin with but again it is a hard learned lack of faith and so even harder to disrupt. Her lips tremble and she can feel them instinctively inclined to curl back but she presses them thin, bows her head, shakes it in a curtain of dark tangles and straighter lines that have fared better.

"I'm sorry," even those two words alone feel empty, no matter how much she means them, no matter how much it is Frankie himself who has offered this solution. It is still sickening and it still isn't right, but what is right and what can make other things right are not often one and the same, if ever as far as Katniss has been able to tell. It was not right to kill the other kids her age in the arena, her age and maybe a little younger, a little older, but kids nonetheless; all of them are...were. Only Peeta and her remain of course, still kids...except not. It's hard to distinguish based on looks alone but what they share of each other is knowing, is experience, the history that does separate them even if no one else knows it. She draws on some of that now, a conjunction of strength and necessity, the former greatly gathered by the latter and she tells herself to think of it like a poison. This may seem counter-intuitive to just about anyone else, but for Katniss it is a coping mechanism, a way of paralleling what she must do now to something she has had to do before. Of course the similarity ends abruptly at the part where she actually swallows instead of spitting it out, but she thinks she can force herself to follow through. Again, she needs to.

And it helps, truth be known, that it isn't just hunger keeping her awake. Nightmares are bad enough when they're kept to her dormant hours but worse when they're there when she has both eyes open too. She can't do anything in this state, can't protect herself and certainly can't protect Peeta and that's really the end ruling. She didn't risk their lives to get them out of the Games together to have some City and happenstance overturn her. Besides, she knows if one of them was stuck here, she would never forgive herself and she thinks it likely that Peeta would find some far-removed reason it could have been his fault but that could be up for debate if she ever found reason.

So there's just one more question she has, tucking her arms against her ribcage, curling her hands as she looks up at the barely-more-than-a-stranger, the one who can fix this even though it doesn't occur to her that it's his responsibility to do so. Her mind simply hasn't wrapped around the whole of the situation still, hard enough to come to grips with the little she has.

"How much?" Will he tell her when to stop? Is it hard to stop? What does the pain feel like, if anything she's felt before? It's natural to wonder, but she doesn't waste much time on it.

"Not a lot," he says quietly, the tone and the sad smile quirking his lips implying an apology he can't quite make outright, because the more she struggles with this the worse he feels about other things, and somehow it seems unfair. If he feels like shit it ought to be because of this girl-- she's younger than he'd thought at first, he realizes, and taking it better than he'd expect. All things considered. He half-folds his arms, resting one hand on the somewhat sore spot he's been cutting to fix the others. Whether it makes a difference to explain it or not, he can't be sure; how well she can process it, whether it will afford any comfort or any aid in remaining rational is anyone's guess.

"You been in the sun since it happened? It burns. This, too." He lets loose a breath, taking out the knife with what's becoming a practiced gesture, though he doesn't open the blade or roll his sleeve. "I can't measure it without something to put it in, but... once you've had enough you'll know. Like a kick in the chest, and then your heart beat pulls the rest of you to pieces. But after that you'll be fine."

He does roll his sleeve now, though he pauses before folding it up over the half-healed divot in the skin, giving her a last moment to get used to the idea before spilling the fresh scent of blood. "You'll want to bite down. I won't blame you if you do," he says softly, because losing control scared the shit out of him and Frankie was a vampire for a good long time before it happened; for someone new, someone who didn't want to feed to begin with, it's got to be a thousand times worse. Eden won't like it if he comes home with bite marks. He won't much like it either, for that matter; but really. Whatever it takes, as long as he cleans up all this mess.

"When you're ready."

This time she does breathe relief for a fractured second, closes her eyes against what little moonlight scrapes in by its teeth over dirt and stone. All around them is the smell of the forest, the not so distant rush of the river, the flickering rustle of leafy branches, and Peeta at the cave's mouth trying to give them space. She guesses that he knows this makes her uncomfortable, guesses that he knows she doesn't want him to see this, guesses that he knows her, period. All of it is true. She does not think Frankie should be held as responsible for a curse, but then she does not know enough of all that has happened and the why of it to make criticism one way or the other. When he tells her it will burn she tries to re-imagine the fire in the arena. Burns. Like that? Or different? Biting her words down into nothing, she keeps them to herself. What does it matter? It will feel how it will feel but the point stands; she is doing this.

"Okay," she hears herself say like a stranger, only a little appalled at how young she thinks she sounds right now, but her controls have all been shifted. The constants are not constant and Katniss needs her bearings to feel more like herself. Her brow knits and her jaw clenches so hard she thinks she feels it slide out of place when blood pulses out, catching her as if by the shredding feeling itself that starts in the pit of her stomach and stretches up through her lungs like a reminder to keep breathing. This is different from the stuff from the butcher that Peeta tried to get her to drink, different from everything else as she fixates on it. If the idea was to refuse, this would go differently from here; she could still, in spite of the hunger, in spite of all of it, but the point is to not refuse this time. It still battles with the revulsion that will only go away--she suspects--when she's dead, the kind of dead where people get covered with a good solid ten feet or so of earth. Or more.

The way his voice softens is almost like reassurance and she has enough sense left in her to appreciate that graciousness even though there is nothing truly gracious about the entire situation. It can't be helped and neither of them meant to be in it in the first place. But it is as if the allowance for biting only further tightens her resolve not to. Like poison, she reminds herself; treat it the same. You can do this Katniss. Control has so long been the one thing she's been consistent with--control over her feelings, control over protecting Prim and their mother, control in surviving the Games come whatever hell the Gamemakers could think up...and to bring Peeta home too. Don't let it go now, she thinks.

Her first step forward is more like a stumble but whether this is hunger weakness or fear or something else entirely she doesn't wonder too much before reaching out, her fingertips pressing against his arm as she lowers her mouth to the open cut. She can't describe it. Disgusting. Wanted. Hated. And she thinks she's going to spit it all up, to retch everything of the nothing in her stomach but she presses her mouth closed against this impulse and swallows. She has been burned before--remembers being asleep, hiding in that tree when she felt the roar of flames too big to be an accident. But this is like her whole body has caught afire from the inside out, burning through the blood and the skin like a swear and in the midst of it she can feel her teeth bared more than she thinks to do it outright. Again she grapples her way back to herself, another forcible swallow and she worries at some point something is wrong; that she won't know.

Then she feels it, like a blow to her chest almost that makes her dizzy as the burning recedes or exits rather, as if driven out and she drops to her knees. Warmth. A pulse. But her focus is hyper-centered on the taste of her tongue and with the life returning to her it's somehow even worse, darker, despite its antidote qualities. Her throat chokes up and she is quick to turn away, covering her mouth with both hands. She doesn't know if vomiting after changing back would render her as she was but she won't take that chance. Shoulders normally strong, she can feel them shake as she hunches over, now feeling the ordinary hunger of days of refusing normal food but that is much more manageable. A deep breath later she turns slowly to face him, her brow drawn not in worry or confusion, but something perhaps without a word to it just yet. What should she say? She doesn't know, so she simply stands again, carefully, as if suspecting her legs to give out.

"Thanks," she does manage. That seems...right enough. Not right, but she'll take what she can get.

He glances away as she presses her mouth to the cut, not exactly embarrassed but slightly uncomfortable. She's remarkably gentle, all things considered, which makes Frankie curious; it's not strictly normal to see such steely self-control in someone so young. He doesn't know what to make of it. Still, it feels somehow untoward; and if he'd realized he would have brought something with him to bleed into, but it's too late to regret now. Strictly speaking it's not the first time he's been fed on (since, after all, he was turned once himself,) but the time and distance and change of circumstance makes it a novel experience, one he doesn't like but can't really mind. Because there is no other way; even if the others' blood is like his now, which he doesn't know (and it isn't,) he can't ask his victims to offer themselves up to their own. And though he understands dimly that Ed had taken a different way back, he knows better than to imagine he can replicate the process on his own with nothing better than Elvis' hasty description of it, vacuums and sunlight and careful dousing of the flames. No better for his purposes than the freak accident that had been Elvis' own path into sunlight.
There's no other way, here. There's only Frankie's blood.
He flinches in sympathy as she turns, wracked, and waits a moment before he turns his attention to cleaning himself up at last, not wanting to watch her turn because his tired mind can't separate things well enough for him to forget his doing what he's undoing now, the sights of Sookie and Lucy (more imagination than memory, since he can't recall most of the details of his weekend,) and mostly of Alison hitting the ground.
He meets her gaze, his tension and his energy alike draining from him as the gold color seeps out of her irises. Katniss is the last dead end in the chain of infection, which means that while the City's not safe and never will be, it's at least safe from his world's fate.
Maybe doing the right thing doesn't count for much when you're only fixing your own fuckups, but it's the best he can manage. Like how leaving was all he could do after the executions, how saving Ed's life is the only way he can apologize at all for taking it (and saving it then too, in an odd way; the wrong thing for the right reasons with the right results.)

"Sorry it had to be this way."

"It's not your fault," she says and it isn't a compassionate thing, nor a merely polite reply. It is what it is: factual. Katniss places a premium on truth as rare as it is that the truth can be involved in anything in life--particularly where she comes from, where she and Peeta come from--but here things are at least different in that respect. A curse is no person's fault here and while it does not fix what happened, Frankie already has of his own volition, having been able to at all which is more than some can say for the cleanup that often follows such curse-induced messes. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she shudders a little and suppresses it even as she feels it from the crown of her head down to the tail of her spine, hyper-aware of her bones and the thinness of everything suddenly, that alien hunger completely replaced now by ordinary hunger so fierce that even being accustomed to it does not stave off a wave of nausea.

Briefly, she looks away.

"But that's it...?" She has to ask, but when she lifts her gaze it isn't to Frankie but to the boy standing in the near distance, waiting for them to be done. As she has done before with other situations, Katniss reverses their places in this scenario and the pain of biding time when they are all the other has is sharply edged, unkind; not something to be prolonged but similarly not something they cannot manage either.

Frankie agrees that the responsibility isn't really his; like so many other things, this is the City's doing, or perhaps the Deities more specifically. But, at the same time, it's the result of actions he can't disavow-- not because he would do it again, but because (obviously) there was a time when he would have. Frankie would like to think he's been a better person since showing up in the City-- since before that, even, beginning after Alison Bromley's second death-- but as he sees it, part of that is acknowledging that he hadn't been a very good person before.

"That's it," he assents. And since for obvious reasons this is the last of Frankie's stops, that's it for him as well, which is sort of a comforting thought. It also means that, for the first time he can let himself feel how tired and, well, literally drained he is, because after a while all that blood adds up. He's been careful, of course, to drink up between them and rest as much as reasonably possible, but it's taken a toll. All he wants now is to get home and try to forget all that's happened, if only for a little while.

"You guys gonna be okay out here...?"

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and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes

and set to try to take away the shadows from your eyes