𝙵𝙰𝙻𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙳𝙾𝚆𝙽 | 𝙵𝚒𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝙾𝚍𝚊𝚒𝚛

𝚘𝚗𝚎

BY THE TIME Alexis had stopped crying, the two teenagers exited the Justice Building to find it well past dark and the square turned into a deserted town. Rael offered to walk Alexis home despite the fact that she lived in the opposite direction of his house.

"No," Alexis shook her head as Rael watched over her in concern. "I don't want to go home."

Not knowing what else to do, Rael offered to let her crash at his place for the night. If Alexis would've been in her right mind, she never would've intruded on Rael as much as she had that day, but she was still reeling from the hurt and shock from not being able to see Finnick before he was shipped off to the Capital.

Bringing Alexis Ribbon back home certainly wasn't what Rael thought his day would look like when he woke up that morning, but years of being forced to adapt to certain situations allowed him to get the girl settled as comfortably as he could. His house wasn't the best in District 4, he had known this since he was just a small boy, however, he felt ashamed at how tiny and shabby his house was compared to Alexis' in the upper District, although the girl certainly wasn't in the right mind to judge as Rael sat her down on their minuscule couch. He knit his eyebrows together in concern as Alexis seemed unresponsive to her surroundings, simply staring straight at the wall with a hollow look in her eyes.

"Who's she?" the soft, shy voice of Maisie Finely filled their humble shaft of a house as Rael's eyes snapped to find his younger sister standing in the corner, staring at Alexis with wide and curious eyes.

"She's... a friend," Rael answered after struggling to find the right words to describe the blond in front of him. "She's going to crash here for the night."

Maisie nodded her head before disappearing back into the room Rael and her shared, reemerging several seconds later with her tattered blanket. Without hesitation, Maisie shuffled over to Alexis, handing the blanket out for her to take. It wasn't much, but it seemed to be enough to temporarily shake Alexis out of her dazed state as she gratefully took the blanket from the young girl and sent her a small, and quite forced, smile.

Maisie grinned back at Alexis, showcasing the quite noticeable gap where her two front teeth were supposed to reside, before she returned by Rael's side. Alexis stared down at the blanket in her hands, her hands trailing over the overly simplistic, but interesting pattern of waves on the old cloth.

"Let her sleep," Maisie tugged her brother's arm, snapping out of his concerned daze as he stared at the blonde girl on the couch. 

Maisie may only have been a mere seven years old, but she understood how the world worked. She had known the word loss before she was even four, as her father died out in sea during one of his jobs, and seen her mother die from a sickly, incurable disease when she was just six. Death, loss, grief - Maisie was a stranger to none of them and by a simple glance at Alexis Ribbon, Maisie understood.

Another tug on his sleeve and Rael followed his sister back to their meager room, but not without throwing one more concerned glance at the blonde over his shoulder. They entered their room, Maisie jumping onto her small mattress stuffed in one corner of the room. Rael made his way next to Maisie, where instead of a mattress laid a pile of hay on the ground for his makeshift bed. Having a bed was a luxury Rael couldn't afford, the only reason they had Maisie's was because the baker's wife had thrown it out when remodeling their home last winter.