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[prodigaljaybird]

It's strange to be outside again after so long spent indoors; first the endless dark of Rapture, and then the shuttered quiet of his own bedroom. He's seen the sunlight in bits and snatches, trickles through the slatted walls of the hut and shining through the door, but no more than that.

It feels good. Warm on his face when Jason tips it skyward, comforting. It feels good to know that in spite of the whole world ending, the sun and sky, the trees, the island is still here.

And going on as normal, if the sounds that greet Jason as he shuffles down the boardwalk are any indication. That feels good, too, and Jason feels better for every step he takes. In many ways, he feels like he's been ill, like it was a fever that's kept him indoors and not his own insurmountable dread. He feels raw and worn out, too hollow, but under the sun again...Bucky was right. He feels better.

He has no aim for where he's walking. There are faces he wants to see, but even now, he's afraid to seek them out. What will they say to him, what have they heard, or worse, what if they didn't care to notice he was gone?

The familiar hurt turns in Jason's stomach, and he takes the path not to the Compound, but down to Robin's Gym. Outside of class, the place is like a graveyard, but the wooden structures are familiar and sunlit. As ever when he's here alone, Jason thinks of Tim, and he smiles a little. "Way to miss the fireworks, little brother."

[ooc: wide open to familiar faces~ find him at Robin's Gym or on the way there]

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[burnwithus.livejournal.com]

She's never seen anything like it, white hair in a perfectly healthy young person. It looks like a ridiculous fashion choice spawned in the Capitol, where people have hair and skin and eyes of every color of the rainbow, all artifically made. Jason's not like that, though, which is exactly why the reasons behind this make her nervous.

"It's...white," Katniss mumbles, taking a strand and tugging it down to show him. "Not all of it. Just a little bit."

What the hell happened to him?

[prodigaljaybird]

Eyes rolled so high they're practically crossed, Jason still can't see it, but he trusts her. White, his hair's gone white. No wonder Bucky knocked him the hell out to drag him topside.

"That's a new one," he murmurs, touching what he can't see. "Do you remember the day we met? When I got here, and you sewed me up?" Releasing the scar on his head, Jason reaches for the one at his throat instead. "The person who gave me this showed up in Rapture. That's why I was hiding. I didn't know what to do." Jason swallows. "I still don't."

[burnwithus.livejournal.com]

She remembers. It's not something that Katniss will easily forget, all of that blood slick underneath her fingers. Shaky stitches that she was sure wouldn't hold. The flash of needle and thread. Her hands had been shaking. All these little details form in her mind as the calloused pad of her thumb brushes against his scar. They've both got them in spades.

And suddenly, a sick sort of anger dawns on her. A rage that used to be familiar but was something she thought had faded in time. The person who had inflicted that cut on Jason had made it deep. Probably deep enough to kill. Her expression darkens, brows pulling together in order to try and retain some semblance of normalcy in her face.

"Who? Who is it?"

She killed four children once upon a time, because she loved her sister. And as much as she hates herself for it, Katniss knows she'd do more. Loyalties are not easily made, but when they are she never lets them become tarnished.

It's one of the only things Katniss can stand about herself, actually.

[prodigaljaybird]

"Katniss." Jason lifts his hand, fingers wrapping in a loose circle around her wrist. He wonders if she even knows she's made a fist. "You can't touch him. I planned and trained and prepared for a year, and I couldn't beat him. I think he..."

Bucky'd told Bruce to stay away, but how long would that hold? Jason doesn't know, and he can't wonder anymore, not without going as mad as they all say he is. "I don't think he wants to hurt me now. And even if you could hurt him..." Jason drops his gaze. "He's my dad."

[burnwithus.livejournal.com]

You can't touch him.

How familiar. Where has she heard that before? It's been branded into all of their minds: don't fight, don't make any noise or think about anything that the Capitol doesn't approve of because there's nothing you can do about it. And for the first 16 years of her life, she was okay with accepting that fact.

It's only when the people around her were being threatened that Katniss had acted. She doesn't have any huge ideals or moral notions, couldn't care about the world at large - she just had this urge to protect the few that she holds to her chest.

So when he tells her that it's his father that rage translates into shaking, because her father might be dead but he'd never laid a hand on her. Because Peeta's mother used to hit him all the time, he used to show up with bruises on his cheeks and half-hearted excuses about how he ran into doors. Because adults always, always managed to hurt children and she's sick of it.

"I hate him," she hisses, trying to calm herself down. "He hurt you. I hate him."

[prodigaljaybird]

"I'm sorry," Jason murmurs, sick with it, but his hands are steady when he cups her face, trying to still the way it trembles with anger. She hates so much already, and for reasons that could withstand no argument. He's given her another thing to hate, but standing here, Jason finds himself unwilling to go it alone.

"I hate him, too," he says, and doesn't add that it's just as true that he loves Bruce, a war he lives with every day. "It'll be okay."

[burnwithus.livejournal.com]

Hatred is a familiar feeling. Indeed, it's a feeling, which is already a marked difference from the apathetic numbness of earlier. Katniss remembers her time in District 13 vividly now. She remembers how her hatred for President Snow, her insistence that she be the one to put a bullet in his brain kept her going. Kept her alive, and while perhaps not strong, functional at the very least. Hatred had been the one thing she'd had while Peeta was in the Capitol and even now she looks back on it as one of the only things she's ever had.

If Katniss could pick only one emotion to describe herself with, it would be hate. Because there isn't much more that she sees. But his hands cup her face, and eventually the calming gesture works. The shaking stops, but the fire in her voice doesn't go away.

"What if he hurts you again? I'm not going to lose anyone else."

Essentially, what she's saying is, I'd kill him for you, if I had to.

[prodigaljaybird]

"I don't think he will," says Jason again, and won't fault her if she doesn't believe it this time, either. The world he came from, the world she grew up in, they're different from this place, but they just keep bleeding in. Fear, uncertainty, rage, they don't leave a person as easily as walking through a door into a tropical island. She can't let go of her dread anymore they he can; Jason's just better at hiding it.

"He doesn't want me to kill bad people, but there aren't any here," he says, passing his fingers through her hair. "None to stop. He won't see me as a threat until there are."