[fic] My Heart Will Be Blacker Than Your Eyes When I'm Through With You - 1/1
Title: My Heart Will Be Blacker Than Your Eyes When I'm Through With You
Author:
garnetice
Pairing: Kendall/James, mention of Kendall/OMC and Kendall/OFC, mention of James/Dak
Rating: M
Word Count: 6,893
Warnings: Sex, bad words, AU.
Summary:
Disclaimer: BTR and THG are not mine.
Author's Notes: It's incredibly nerve-wracking posting something when I haven't since November. I didn't realize it would be this weird. It's not that I'm not writing for BTR anymore, because I'm incredibly loyal to fandoms, even practically dead ones. It's more that grad school has sucked all the creative energy out of me, and the only things I remember how to write are policy memos and OpEds. Anyhow, I hope this isn't completely terrible - it's dedicated to lilahfrost, who a looooong time ago wanted sex!fic following James's Hunger Games.
Now, the spiel: this fic is based in the same universe Stardust, where the aforementioned lilahfrost wrote the considerably longer and more beautiful Finnick!Kendall and Annie!James fic and these fluffy drabbles. In this universe, I have also written: I Loved You Then (And I Love You Now), The Taste That Your Lips Allow, Lionheart, Give Me Mouth To Mouth, and most recently Evil Don't Look Like Anything. Stylistically, much like the previous installment, this is different (and heavily influenced by what I'd been reading when I first began writing it; ask for references and I will provide). Named for Black Eyes by Radical Face. Also, mega props to jblostfan16 for the awesome beta.
Now don't hate me if this sucks, guys.
---
Red-orange is the color of sunlight streaming in through Kendall’s driftwood shades every morning in District Four. It falls across his skin, golden hued, demanding wake up, wake up, go greet the new day. Always the same pretty shade, at age one when he is cradled in strong arms, treated like precious cargo, and at three, when he is what they call precocious. Five and six and seven and eight, and Kendall lives for daybreak, when his dad whisks him from his bed, upupup, flashes of sky, and then he is caught, held safe between two huge hands.
He thinks he wants to have hands that big one day.
It’s a kind of tragedy when Kendall’s hands grow large and strong but his dad is gone, and red-orange-gold becomes a color he sleeps through, tugging a downy blanket like the tide across his face and trying to catch a few more hours of sleep each morning. He no longer cares to see dawn in all its pretty glory because his life is full of red, although not so much with the orange or the gold.
Red represents:
Starfish, clinging to rocks, half-submerged beneath the waves; his mother’s hair, coppery and ocean-perfumed, hiding the weathered lines that crease her eyes; rust left too long, eating through a ship’s hull and baking dark in the heat; and his own skin, after he lies on the beach for hours on end.
It is the precise shade of a Capitol girl’s painted smile before her lips settle over his hip, the hue of President Griffin’s favorite suit, and. Blood.
Blood.
Blood.
Kendall is so sick of red.
Woken up early, but unsure how or why, he wraps his arms more tightly around James’s waist, anchoring them both to the bed they share. He blinks sunrise from his eyes (red, too red, the enduring glory of morning concentrated and skewed between slats of bamboo, cutting the room into puzzle pieces) and resents the hours of sleep that have slipped from his grasp.
James’s skin is chalky pale, chipped from sandstone and marble, where he used to let the sun kiss him the color of driftwood. He never goes outside anymore.
Kendall touches the ridged cliffs of his shoulder blades and the dimples at the base of his back, appreciating the way James curls into the cupped warmth between them, his spine a spiral of ammonite.
James sighs in his sleep, an exhale sweet as a tropical breeze.
He’ll rebel against all the cuddling, later, when he’s awake, because for the past year James has done nothing but hate and hate and hate. He lashes out at everything - loud voices, spilt tea. Kendall, existing. But for now, it’s okay. Kendall is allowed in the red-orange glow of the dawning sun to do this.
Which is nice. There aren’t many things he gets to do these days.
He never thought much about the word Career growing up, knowing only in an abstract way that it was a label that could be applied to him.
Every child in District Four is given a subversive form of training for the Hunger Games - spear fishing, shark wrestling, pearl diving, creature gutting, elocution and now what have we learned? - and Kendall used to play all the games. It was easy to pick up the tricks of the trade, to grow tall and resilient just like he was supposed to, but he never actually wanted to be a contender.
Not like poor, poor Camille, or Kat, or half a dozen other dead friends Kendall’s lost to the games.
(He can tick them off on his fingers, and how they died. One, two, three, heart, neck, kidneys.)
They all were gunning for it in a way Kendall never could have, but in the end, he’s just like them, a Career, and that is a career in and of itself.
(Nine, ten, eleventwelve, spine, head, disemboweled.)
He smiles and waves and wears tailored suits at cocktail parties, and when the night is over, he lets some lovely lady or distinguished gentleman have their way with him (and there are so very many ways to have, on his hands, on his knees. His mouth, his ass, his dick, or all three.)
Soon enough, James will have to do that too.
The smiling and waving, not the other part, because Kendall will die before he lets anyone lay a finger on him. He can say that definitively now, because these are the good days (the bad days). There’s nothing left to fear but what hot messes they both are inside.
For years, seeing James or Katie in the arena was Kendall’s worst nightmare, but the worst has already happened. He can breathe again.
President Griffin won’t leverage Katie against Kendall, not when he’s got the shivering, shattered catastrophe that is James as a bargaining chip to force Kendall’s hand. There’s no end to the array of new and delightful scenarios Griffin’s twisted brain can conjure up, but none of them involve bleeding James dry (yet).
The Capitol will never loosen its chokehold on Kendall’s neck, but the war is over. The battle’s lost. All that’s left is for Kendall to mop things up.
---
Orange is dawn sunlight, but also marigolds, a handful in his pocket for a snack, later on. It’s the colorful coat of clown fish, the raw edges of unbaked clams, the world outside that beckons and calls.
Come out, come live, the morning shouts, a breath of warning as it adds, While you can.
Six days until Kendall has to go back to the Capitol. Six days and then he won’t see James again for months, or Katie, or his mom. He’ll have nothing but the gleaming orange brocade that lines the walls of his pied-à-terre, lonesome except for the strangers who frequent his stoop
(their hands are callused or soft, gentle or tough, and they all pretend they know the lines and shapes that make up this boy named Kendall Knight).
“I’m going to the market. Do you want to come?” Kendall asks of James, already aware of what his answer will be.
Beneath the fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen, James’s eyes reflect yellow, burning firefly bright from the inside out. Yellow like honeysuckle growing on the roadside; fresh drawn butter melting over a crustacean dinner; lemons cut to line a plate of oysters; or the exterior of a seahorse, hidden against the camouflage of sand.
He says, “I’m not going out today,” and Kendall pretends like it is not what he’s said for months now.
Nineteen years old, and everyone gives them a wide berth, the District whore and his ragdoll best friend, poor, mad James Diamond, who has always deserved so much more. They step outdoors to be met with subtle barbs and veiled pity, everyone in town too polite to provoke a Victor, everyone in town too judgmental to accept one either.
(What’s to accept? The Capitol skank and his psychotic lover, see how they are bespoke for each other.)
The honest truth is, as much as he’d worried about it, Kendall had never once actually believed James could be wrecked, and now that he’s faced with the reality, he doesn’t know how to fix him. (Boys aren’t like boats; hammers and nails and a decent spit shine don’t put them to rights.)
He says, “Shocker,” and kicks back on his stool, awaiting the storm to come, because it will inevitably happen. James is pissed off and aching, at himself and the Capitol. Kendall is a handy, available scapegoat to target both emotions at.
The leaves outside, limned pale corn yellow, turn their faces to the sky, anticipating the flashbang of lightning.
Like clockwork, James screams. He yells and he squawks. It’s only when a glass shatters against the kitchen wall that Kendall stalks out.
He comes off every one of his encounters with his James exhausted and wretched, but never on the verge of giving up. Maybe that makes him an idiot.
One of the finer points of salvage involves the ability to recognize which parts of sunken cargo ships are worthless, what’s a deathtrap and what rates rescuing. Kendall’s never been great at either, swimming headlong into rotted wrecks because he’s what other people kindly refer to as reckless (not so kindly as suicidal, but Kendall couldn’t care less what anyone else thinks).
He knows he’s doing the same with James, ignoring all the warning signs and getting crushed beneath the weight of his catastrophic temper againagainagain. But James handled all of Kendall’s bullshit for years. Kendall owes him the same, and fairness aside, he still loves him so deep and so raw that his bones feel brittle with it when they are apart.
(Apart means other yellow things, the isolation of starlight, the pale glow of Capitol street lamps, the cheery quilt draping another boy’s bed while Kendall rakes through the new secrets in his head.)
Lucy thinks Kendall’s handling everything wrong. She says if he really cared about James, he’d let him go, because that’s the only endgame she knows.
“Griffin’s never going to stop,” she declares, as if Kendall isn’t aware of that. Her advice ever-flowing, she counsels, “Get some distance. You could both come out the other end of this thing alive and sane if you weren’t so damned co-dependent.”
Fuck off is Kendall’s well thought-out answer to that.
Lucy means well, he’s sure she does, but her credo is that love is weakness; it will get him killed.
She doesn’t understand that living’s not worth it if James isn’t there to come home to.
---
He pricks his finger like a princess in a fairytale. He pricks his finger on an urchin’s spine, and when he bleeds it is greengreengreen.
Green like rosemary cream and basil garnish, limes, asparagus, apples. Green like life, flickering chartreuse along a moray eel’s slinky body and the camouflage the District uses for hunting. It’s the strange emerald glow of fog banks caught on the brink of twilight and dawn and the minute long flash of viridian when the sun dips beyond the horizon.
It’s the prettiest color, green like breathing, but also like death, the honeydew edges of blood dissipating beneath skin, the sickly tinge of flesh before it turns necrotic. Like the forest that held him trapped during his Games, and the strange pus he saw on one girl’s arm before she kicked it under his trident.
(The urchin bleeds. Kendall bleeds. Kendall bleeds death.)
Maybe he’s obsessed with blood.
Green, first and foremost, is what Kendall sees when he looks in the mirror. His irises ring pupils that hide deepdarkscary things, but they are innocuous, mint leaf green, spring-bud green. Sometimes the color brightens, turns as shamrock as the hair ribbons Katie wears to school.
Sometimes it dulls, so pale it’s yellow-gray, this jaundiced hue that’s barely even green at all.
His mom has a shawl that shade; once it was a rich, lovely hunter green, but it’s been washed and worn, tumbled and torn. Like his mother, who counts off birthdays with new lines on her face. (The year of Kendall’s Hunger Games was special, celebrated with a new shock of white hair blazing down from her temple, curling soft around her neck.) Green is the color of her enduring love, wrapping Kendall in that shawl (at four, nine, thirteen). It’s soaked through with saltslicktears - bruised knees and bitten tongues, a man-shaped hole where someone once stood.
Funny how Kendall at nineteen stills cries about the same exact things.
It’s funny, right?
Green is a good thing, or maybe it’s not. Envy’s green too; that’s what they say.
Kendall should probably know for sure. The last few chapters of his life were colored in varying degrees of jealousy. He and James found an uneasy balance in the final year before the Seventieth Hunger Games, where James would say it’s okay and Kendall would pretend he wasn’t lying, but he’s always known:
What he does will never be okay.
The first time he let a stranger touch him, all he could think about was James.
Telling James.
Hurting James.
Losing James.
Griffin put him in a green suit, somewhere between sea foam and ridiculous, but terribly stylish. Everyone said so. They also said, Do it for your country. Do it for Panem. The part where if he didn’t do it, everyone he loved would die went unspoken.
Kendall was not thinking of his country when the man he didn’t know and would never see again peeled that pretty suit off his body. That man was not gentle. He was not kind or dear or beloved. His teeth gleamed eerie in the verdigris light edging the heavy curtains, patterned with ferns.
The worst part was how Kendall responded, his low mewls and needy groans. Roughangryhard, that’s how Kendall gets his rocks off, and this unknown entity got that better than James ever had. Knuckles twisted brutal inside him, calling forth a serrated edge of pain, and still, it was good, better than it was supposed to be.
His nerve endings danced, twinged, screamed, You’re here, you’re here, you’re alive, you’re here.
In the far corner of Kendall’s eye, he could see the suit Griffin tarted him up in, shamelessly crumpled in a corner. Green like betrayal, green like devastation. And even though he didn’t want to, Kendall let himself be fucked into the mattress on his hands and knees, losing the thread of his own sullen self-loathing, coming and coming and coming again.
(He broke his own heart that day.)
And in mirrors, he stopped ever being able to meet his own greengreen eyes.
“What are you doing?” James asks, gruff and unhappy.
Kendall frowns down at his own hand, stained green with the guts of an urchin, squeezed too tight. (Not blood after all. His veins don’t run with death. Kendall doesn’t know if that’s a relief or not.)
He brought the urchins home from the market for dinner. Well. There goes that idea.
A little helplessly he says, “I’m sorry.”
James scowls. “You say that a lot.”
He does, these days. He apologizes too often. “I’ll make us something else.”
In James’s eyes, he can see the reflection of his own, green like the money they used to use before the war. Green like lies and secrets and the dark depths of the sea.
He turns away, searches out his rucksack full of market-bought goodies. It’s better not to see.
“Wait,” James says, something hollow in his voice. He grabs Kendall’s wrists too tight and forces them beneath the sink. He runs the water until all traces of the urchin are gone.
James doesn’t like green things either.
---
It’s not like he wants to play babysitter. If Kendall could live his life belonging only to himself, without needing to answer to anyone, he would.
But every time he’s in James’s proximity he recognizes how impossible that idea is.
He is beholden to this boy, who glares at him with slow-simmering fury, with antipathyrepugnancedisgust. This is Kendall at ten, eleven, sixteen; James Diamond’s boy, his first love, his first.
Kendall belongs to James no matter what he does in the Capitol, even when he’s stretched around another man’s cock.
That’s why his entire being revolts when James announces, “I’m so tired of you and me,” blue-black shadows clinging to his face like cobweb, coloring it like a bruise.
Quietly, Kendall tells him, “I can leave,” barely aware he’s speaking the words. “I can go back to the Capitol early. Will that help?”
James folds his arms across his broad chest, skin cockleshell pale, and in the darkness cast with watercolor wounds. His injuries from the Games have long since healed, but he wears the ghosts of them every night. The second the sun dips beyond the horizon, they slither and writhe against his flesh.
(Kendall knows exactly what that’s like. He can feel the phantom weight of his trident in his hand.)
Pissed off and boiling over, James demands, “Did you going away help last time?”
Last time Kendall was drowning, every minute and hour without James dragging him down until he could not breathe, could not see anything that wasn’t bathed in monochrome shades of bleakness. Low enough he can barely hear himself, Kendall replies, “No.”
James digs his fingers into his own biceps, slumping back against the wall. The Prussian blue outline of his veins is stark beneath skin. His bare feet curl into the carpet, hiding his toes from view. He is a jagged thing, pointed as a jellyfish’s barbs, stabbing into Kendall’s heart.
“What do we do?” Kendall asks because he has to, because he’s panicking in a real, visceral way. The kitchen is closing in on him, with its paisley walls in sky and violet, with deep indigo trim.
The walls are a cage masquerading as freedom, because blue is home, blue is joy. (It’s the tug and pull of the currents in the sea, it’s the hulking, shadowy behemoth of shore. It’s the dazzling cornflower flash of the sky overhead, the striped concentric circles lining the outer shell of mussels, and the sleek silvery cyan of the hunting knife that pierces Kendall’s insides every time James casts a genuine smile his way.)
Joy is not this box of a room, the counter biting into his flesh sharp as pincers, the bulky jab of cabinet knobs at his knees. He’s stuck in James’s hidey hole, and Kendall wants and he needs and he has to get out. He has to go home, where he can hide under an afghan knitted by his grandma, the threadbare stitching gentle as her touch would be, could have been, if he’d ever met her.
Kendall absolutely, positively can’t wait to go to a place where James isn’t looking at him like this, like neither of them will ever smile again.
James bites his lower lip, creating an indent that Kendall wants to run his tongue over. He says, “We can’t keep on this way. I hate you.”
The words drip ice against Kendall’s spine. It’s not like he didn’t know. Hearing it out loud just makes it realer.
This is the end, probably. This is the part where his lungs are crushed, his heart shattered, and his reason for everything simply disappears.
Because James…James is the world, and he is crumbling, fading, disappearing.
(He is ether and he is air, and Kendall is gasping around his loss.)
Trying not to sound like he’s barely survived a cataclysm, Kendall replies, “Yeah. I know.”
James winces, eyes flashing black with sorrow that is lost too quickly under a flood of anger and hurt. He asks, “Are you really going back to the Capitol?”
Kendall is weary, stinging and sad. “I have to. I don’t have a choice.”
“You always say that! You’re the only one who has ever had a choice-“
“It’s for you,” Kendall tries, talking over him, raising his voice. “It’s to keep you safe.”
Rage flashes across James’s face, blue-violet as fish tails and scales winking up at Kendall through bubbles that James used to kick up, but that is just a memory, because James never swims anymore.
Thunderous in the too-large kitchen, James intones, “Then you must be a travesty of a whore, because the arena wasn’t safe.”
Kendall recoils.
James doesn’t back down, big and brawny, the wild eyed man who floated in detritus for half a day before the Capitol deigned to pick him up, to stick a crown on him and call him a Victor. He shouts, “Stop trying to protect me. You’re probably the reason I got chosen in the first place.”
It’s a punch to the gut and Kendall sees stars, cobalt, cerulean, blue, and winking, winking with laughter. He stares at James wide-open and wounded, and secretly, in a bruised space that might once have been his heart, half-convinced that James is right.
His voice can cut as easily as it can charm, and now he wants it to slice through James’s bones, to saw him in half like a bad magic trick. He means to say IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou hard and violent, to make James feel it the way Kendall always has (at eleven, sixteen, now, Kendall has always loved James).
What he actually says is, “You’re right. I’m so tired of you and me.”
James doesn’t look like he expected it, and he should have.
This is Kendall Knight, the Capitol slut, and the words he says are never at all what he means.
---
The night before Kendall leaves, his stylist shows up at his front door with boxes in tow. Inside the first is a suit the color of the night sky and twice as soft. Nineteen years old, and he has never owned anything quite so fine.
(Being a Victor; it isn’t all bad.)
Kendall thinks James might look nice in black and then reconsiders, because that is the color of the handprints strangers leave across Kendall’s body, the shape of their lips and the hard dig of their fingers. Even when Kendall doesn’t bruise, he can still see the brands left behind, shadows with the consistency of guilt and tar.
He knows that James can see them too. Not that James has tried to look at his body even once since the Seventieth Hunger Games.
This is not a thing Kendall blames him for. Not even a little bit.
What he blames James for are the other things, for the childhood they gave up without a fight, the lies Kendall tells that he refuses to swallow, and the beauty he wears like a shield, like a weapon.
Kendall blames James for trusting too easily, for his insatiable curiosity and his gigantic heart.
He blames him for accepting the thing that Kendall cannot; that the two of them are a lost cause.
(Even thinking it burns, because who is Kendall supposed to be without that little boy, the one brave enough to swim in neon plastic floaties, even when he didn’t know how.)
A knock cracks through the house, rumbles like the wheels on the train that will carry Kendall back to the Capitol, to everything he doesn’t miss. Automatically, he plants his feet in the carpet and hopes for quicksand to whisk him away.
Visitors after midnight don’t ever bring good news.
Katie’s fast asleep, tucked away in her bed like an otter in the kelp. His mom’s gone under too, an entire ocean of dreams between her and the door.
They won’t save him. They never have known how.
Reluctantly, Kendall pries himself away from the oilslick surface of his carrying case and brand new clothes, steeling himself for the crow’s caws of a message he likely won’t want. Shoulders squared and jaw tight, he reaches out. He twists.
The door creaks on its hinges as it swings back, wood turned to rot in the thick salt air of District Four. Kendall demands, “What do you want?” and then stops, because.
Because.
Kendall’s hand on the knob springs moisture, a leak, a hole, his nerves staging a mutiny. His vision blacks a bit, and the image of James in his doorframe blurs, like the sun sparkling on the water, blinding pinpricks of light distorted into dazzling, shimmering things.
He watches Kendall with big, wide, lantern eyes, daring him to say something else, but all of Kendall’s words have dried up on his tongue, his thirsty throat searching for a rhyme or a reason.
He wasn’t so sure he was ever going to see James again.
(The first time Kendall told James he loved him, it was on the heels of a confession, of how he’d let Griffin change him. It was a chain of words that spilled messy and bloodied out onto the sand and did nothing to cover the stain of guilt that burned under Kendall’s skin. And as a reply, James gathered the clouds and the sea and the rugged swell of the dunes around him, the absolute, unrelenting force of his fury mirrored by the landscape. He was going to bury Kendall alive, and he did. Months went by where Kendall was oxygen-less, obliquely smothered by James’s inattention. He’d thought and he’d worried that this would be the same. He’d die alone, without solace, black-and-blue handprints on his ass and his heart and his soul.)
“You’re leaving,” James says hollow, unhappy.
Kendall never meant to make him sound like that, but then again, his entire life has devolved into a series of hateful things he never intended to do.
“Yes,” he agrees, because there’s no way to change that. James gets an out from mentorship because no one at the Capitol believes the wild man-creature that graced their televisions last year could possibly lead anyone else to victory, but Kendall Knight?
He’s worth too much to the Games to ever be allowed to stay in District Four.
James grimaces at the bulk of his travel bags, conspicuous gray against the white linoleum of the kitchen. “Were you even going to say goodbye?”
“I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.”
Men and women of every size, every shape, all of them staring at Kendall with lust in their eyes; none of them have ever looked at him the way James does. There is something inside him that is darkness and flame, a possessive burn that also speaks of love and unmatched joy - or, right now, unspeakable sorrow.
Kendall wants to tell him, I don’t want to leave you. He wants to say, Because of you, I know the shape and weight of my own heart.
These are things that won’t sound right out loud, not from his lips, not any time soon.
(They’re so fucked, so much in love, in so much pain. They’re too young to be in this much pain.)
Shaky and frustrated, James tells him, “I hate it when we fight.”
“Is that all we were doing?” Kendall lifts an eyebrow, a cool move to cover the way he bunches his damp hands against his pants. “Felt more like we were breaking up.”
“Are we even together right now?” James counters, because he’s brave, even when he doesn’t want to be.
Kendall laughs. He is bitter, macadam dark. The reverb in his throat tastes of ash. “Honestly? I’ve got no idea what we are anymore.”
They’re Victors that feel like losers, lovers who never fuck, best friends who can’t stand the sight of each other, and District pariahs. They’re never what they were, and Kendall can’t forgive himself for that, for letting starlit nights and black velvet skies and the tornado force of James dissipate into a distant memory.
He’s a killer and a murder and up until recently a little boy, and if he’d known back then how to stand up for what was right, he likes to dream he would’ve.
(He would’ve done a lot of things if he’d known the anatomy of the fault lines holding together their hearts.)
“Tell me,” James commands, framed by the thick wooden beams of Kendall’s doorway. Determination creases his forehead, carves an abyss in the curvature of his scowl. “Tell me what we are, and I’ll believe you.”
Decay blackens Kendall’s bones, bags beneath his eyes, kisses his joints and ligaments with rot, but he pushes it all aside and steps into James’s space. James, who at (tentwelvesixteen) nineteen smells spicy and clean, the engine grease and metal-rust that used to sit beneath his fingernails washed away in the sterile en suite of his Victor’s home. James, who is warm and familiar, even beneath citrus shampoo, and
Kendall wants to lick every trace of the Capitol away from his skin. He reaches up and cards his hands through James’s thick hair, brown slipping silky between his fingers.
Acutely aware of the space between their sternums, bellies, thighs, and how much he wants to make it disappear, Kendall’s hands skim the sides of James’s ribcage, the protrusion of bone ridged beneath his fingers. He presses a wobbly kiss to the hinge of James’s jaw and tells him, “You’re James. I’m Kendall. And I’m not gone yet.”
James’s breathing is ragged, stilted, unsure. He accepts Kendall’s mouth against his with startled gentleness, his kisses fractured moonlight, silver cool on Kendall’s lips.
They make each other glow from the inside out, every kiss flimsy and fleeting. Kendall tongues against the crevices of sadness that line James’s mouth, and James in turn licks heat into the places where Kendall’s turned cold. His arms are strong at Kendall’s waist, solid as the places he was raised up, in all that grime and iron and pitch.
Without even meaning to, Kendall takes it too far. He bucks his hips and wants, wants James to take him to bed and make him remember all the ways they fit. And James doesn’t quite shy away. He moans against him and pants, “Wait, wait.”
Kendall is so sick of waiting, but he pulls back anyway, rests his forehead against James’s and tries to control the rapid-fire sob of his breath.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I wanted to tell you I. I,” James says, so close and kissable. “I fucked Dak Zevon.”
And Kendall’s heart blackens, dies. The thick, chunky mixture of oil and water and rust that clogs boat engines and stalls them mid-voyage is bleeding through his bones. He inhales, raspy and thick. Then he stitches himself back together again, replying, “I know.”
It’s harder to cop to than he’d like, but this has never been a secret. Kendall found out practically the day it happened, because Dak hadn’t been able to resist bragging.
That was fair. Kendall hadn’t been able to resist beating his face to a pulp.
People should know better than to mess with a Victor.
“You know,” James repeats slowly. “Did you know I let him - I, he.” Words are an obstacle course he can’t quite navigate, the inky blackness of his pupils expanding and contracting in the too-harsh light of the kitchen. When he says what he needs to, it stumbles free, a stray punch, an unrestrained jab. “I was a virgin that way, I guess, before him.”
Kendall’s throat closes, but that’s fine. What’s he supposed to say? He lost whatever high ground he had to stand on long before James ever let Dak Zevon touch him, kiss him, fuck him - no.
Jealousy isn’t something he’s entitled to or allowed, even if it burns through his veins with all the speed and fizzle of a sodium light.
“Why are you telling me this?”
James frowns down at his hands, at the way he holds Kendall between them like something hallowed and good. He says, “You never wanted to.” He says, “But I want you to.”
There’s magma in Kendall’s veins, heat that goes straight and unapologetically to his dick, because hell if he’s never fantasized about taking James over the side of every piece of furniture he owns. It would be fantastic, Kendall would make it fantastic, because he can - he’d be so much better than Dak fucking Zevon - he knows how.
Only.
The thing is.
He tries so hard to be the man his father was. Brave, strong, true. He wants to be noble, but James makes him human, again and again and again. They belong to each other, wholly, but not wholly. They’ve still got this, this one place they haven’t gone.
An escape clause.
Kendall doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to leave if he’s got James, sobbing underneath him, imprinted on his soul.
“Are you sure?” is what he asks, because that escape clause has always been for James.
Kendall’s not a runner. If he was, the past five years would have been so much easier, un-caged, carefree, never once plagued with guilt that clings spectral to the surface of his flesh. But he knows who he is and what he’s willing to do to make sure nobody else ever suffers like he has, and he wanted - wants - James to be free of that.
(If only James wasn’t every bit as steadfast and loyal as Kendall tries to be. But he is, he is, he can’t help but be. James gets called crazy because he had the gall to be so stupidly brave, because he loved too much and too hard and every death in that goddamned arena pulsed beneath his skin, made him feel the murder of every good, strong, courageous kid the Capitol sent out to tear at each other likes savages. And Kendall’s scared out of his fucking mind that he’s always going to feel James the same way, an erratic drumbeat under his wrist, in his throat, a constant staccato rhythm he’ll never be able to shake, even after James leaves him behind for someone safer, tamer, for someone who didn’t revel in the killing or the blood. A man with the compassion of a saint doesn’t deserve to be saddled with a murderer and a whore.)
Kendall clenches his eyes shut and waits for the axe to fall, because if his life thus far has taught him one thing, it’s that gravity’s a cruel bitch
and is rarely on his side.
His ribs ache just thinking about it.
“I always knew it would be like this,” James replies quietly, instead of answering.
“Like what?”
“The Capitol’s built you up to be a hero. A part of me wanted that. You’ve always been - invincible. Untouchable. Nobody’s ever called me a hero. Now they never will.” He rolls his shoulders back, sags against the island that separates the floor into rivers and streams, because god forbid anyone in District Four ever got used to too much space. “They think I’m broken, and so do you. I’m not going to shatter if you fuck me, Kendall.”
He inhales sharply. “I’ve never thought that.”
Kendall hasn’t. Not once. If anything, it’s the reverse; for all the people he’s been with, James is the only one who has ever made him feel like he might die if they stop touching. He could fragment into kaleidoscope colors, hit the floor in pieces and never fit back together again.
“Then what? Why won’t you? It’s because you only like it when I give it to you rough, right?” James snarls. “Because you think I’m-“
Kendall bounds up on his toes and kisses him. “Perfect. I think you’re perfect.”
The kiss tastes like nothing, like air and chapped lips. But somehow it calms the storm-tossed churning in Kendall’s stomach, the roiling pit that made him trust that this was the end, this time, for sure.
James’s hands, callused and trembling, cup Kendall’s elbows, a parody of strength undermined by the stunned exhalation that gusts against Kendall’s mouth. He draws back with eyebrows twisted, arched, saying, “That’s the most ridiculously blatant lie I’ve ever heard,” and he kisses Kendall again, like he can’t do anything else.
This is what exists between them now, momentum and half-truths, and Kendall will take it, if only because he misses the feel of James’s callused palms against his hips. They rock against each other, urgent but gentle, all too aware that the ground beneath them is broken and sharp, tremulous as a ship’s deck, but with more risk of drowning.
“I want to fuck you,” Kendall tells James, loud in the dark, empty kitchen. He doesn’t sound scared - because he’s the Capital Whore, Kendall Knight, and he’s never scared - but reputations lie. Kendall’s heart is in his throat. “I want to, I promise, I want to.”
James pulls Kendall into him, closer when Kendall thought they could spare no more room between them. He growls, “Prove it.”
Kendall Knight never could turn down a challenge.
He strips James of his pants, freed cock bobbing beneath the soft, worn fabric of a t-shirt that’s seen better days. Kendall stares. He licks his lips. He stares some more.
“Cold feet?” James asks, his smile shy, but growing bolder by the minute. This isn’t the James Diamond Kendall had sex with so long ago; no matter what James says, he is changed - cocky, less confident, less a boy-god and more a new man.
Kendall can’t bear to look at him. He bends him over the kitchen island and fumbles with the front of his own pants, which are unbearably scratchy and tight. James yelps, but obligingly grips the glossy edges of the counter, his skin pale and soaked through with moonlight.
The fabric of that shirt is worn and weathered. It’s been through every storm that James has; it’s as threadbare as Kendall’s soul. Victors can afford nice things, but it’s been nearly a year since James has wanted anything nice. Until now. Until Kendall. James’s asshole against his cock is a tease, hot and thrumming with nervous energy and want.
He circles his dick, tiny motions, rubbing precum against James’s skin.
Even now, he’s hesitant.
“Can we keep going? Can we?” James asks plaintively, as if this is a gift that Kendall’s giving him, like Kendall hasn’t had his way with a million other men in the Capital. He bucks his hips back, making sure that Kendall can feel him.
Kendall can feel him all the way down to his toes.
He strokes some salve onto his cock - whores are always prepared - while James whines and waits, and then he repositions himself and breathes, “Now.”
Sliding into James is like coming home. He’s painfully tight, too wired to relax, and even then - even then - Kendall feels like he can breathe for the first time in a year. He moves, experimentally. James cries out, squeezing the edges of the counter. He’s got too much strength in his biceps and his thighs. Kendall watches the strain of his muscles and tries, valiantly, not to come.
He’s not about this; self-restraint is usually his middle name. But James is insanely tight, virgin territory, and more than that, he’s beloved. (His name is written across every organ Kendall owns, inscribed in his marrow and sitting on his tongue.)
“James,” he breathes, and because of that, Kendall takes his time, works him open slow until James’s muscles relax, and his forceful thrusts give way to easy glides. James stops cringing, low, keening moans erupting from his throat. He leans back to kiss Kendall, sloppy and open, his eyes wider and more awe-struck than Kendall has seen them since adulthood hit, and everything wondrous in the world turned mundane.
He murmurs, “I love you,” and hopes that the words will melt beneath James’s skin like the last tinge of sunlight dissolving into the horizon, with palpable beauty. “I love you, I love you.”
James bucks back against him, sighing it back. Kendall didn’t think he was worthy of those words any longer.
He sinks into James and splays his hand across his heart, the erratic thump-thump-thump beneath his fingertips a steadying anchor. James tilts his head toward him, his face shaded with a bewildered smile and threads of shadow and moonlight.
“Why’d you stop?”
As honestly as he can, Kendall replies, “I thought I lost you.”
James stares him down. Quietly, he says, “That will never happen.”
Kendall’s never known such relief. He moves slow, with purpose, memorizing every twitch and shiver, because this is new and innocent. Their hands lace together, and.
James is bleeding red, his heart an open wound that Kendall can't stop probing at, digging in and squeezing every last ounce of love and hate and whatever else James has left to give since the Games beat the shit out of him. He is rusted over, orange and brown and creaky from the disuse of his smile, but still edged with perfection. He's sweet like yellow lemonade, too-sugared and the best thing Kendall's ever tasted on a hot summer day. And he's hazel flecked eyes that reflect back the green green storm tossed sea, a hurricane ready to plunder and remake everything in its path.
James is broken apart, but James is also this: the sun and the sand and the sea on a lazy spring day, when they all blend into each other in one long stretch of blue. He's the shade of veins, running beneath skin - something that Kendall cannot live without.
Not at fifteen, or sixteen, nineteen or twenty, not at thirty or forty, or fifty five. Kendall will live his entire life lost to James Diamond, asphyxiating on his love for this boy, and that’s the scariest thing he’s ever had to face - worse than death, worse than blood. Worse than looking in the mirror and knowing he’s a killer.
Love’s fucking awful, and somehow it’s also okay.
So Kendall lets go, melting across the span of James’s back as he comes in long, shuddering strokes and short, thunderous spasms, flooding his best friend's insides at the same exact moment as James spills wantonly over the kitchen counter, hotbeautifuladored and sobbing Kendall’s name.
This is a conclusion as well as a beginning; the two of them together, breathing, panting. At any age, loving and hating and screaming and touching and tied, interlaced, indestructible as a whole in ways they’ll never be apart. It’s how they are fated to be:
Victors and killers and lovers and losers and paired, together forever, at the end of the world.
---
Author:
garnetice
Pairing: Kendall/James, mention of Kendall/OMC and Kendall/OFC, mention of James/Dak
Rating: M
Word Count: 6,893
Warnings: Sex, bad words, AU.
Summary:
Disclaimer: BTR and THG are not mine.
Author's Notes: It's incredibly nerve-wracking posting something when I haven't since November. I didn't realize it would be this weird. It's not that I'm not writing for BTR anymore, because I'm incredibly loyal to fandoms, even practically dead ones. It's more that grad school has sucked all the creative energy out of me, and the only things I remember how to write are policy memos and OpEds. Anyhow, I hope this isn't completely terrible - it's dedicated to lilahfrost, who a looooong time ago wanted sex!fic following James's Hunger Games.
Now, the spiel: this fic is based in the same universe Stardust, where the aforementioned lilahfrost wrote the considerably longer and more beautiful Finnick!Kendall and Annie!James fic and these fluffy drabbles. In this universe, I have also written: I Loved You Then (And I Love You Now), The Taste That Your Lips Allow, Lionheart, Give Me Mouth To Mouth, and most recently Evil Don't Look Like Anything. Stylistically, much like the previous installment, this is different (and heavily influenced by what I'd been reading when I first began writing it; ask for references and I will provide). Named for Black Eyes by Radical Face. Also, mega props to jblostfan16 for the awesome beta.
Now don't hate me if this sucks, guys.
---
Red-orange is the color of sunlight streaming in through Kendall’s driftwood shades every morning in District Four. It falls across his skin, golden hued, demanding wake up, wake up, go greet the new day. Always the same pretty shade, at age one when he is cradled in strong arms, treated like precious cargo, and at three, when he is what they call precocious. Five and six and seven and eight, and Kendall lives for daybreak, when his dad whisks him from his bed, upupup, flashes of sky, and then he is caught, held safe between two huge hands.
He thinks he wants to have hands that big one day.
It’s a kind of tragedy when Kendall’s hands grow large and strong but his dad is gone, and red-orange-gold becomes a color he sleeps through, tugging a downy blanket like the tide across his face and trying to catch a few more hours of sleep each morning. He no longer cares to see dawn in all its pretty glory because his life is full of red, although not so much with the orange or the gold.
Red represents:
Starfish, clinging to rocks, half-submerged beneath the waves; his mother’s hair, coppery and ocean-perfumed, hiding the weathered lines that crease her eyes; rust left too long, eating through a ship’s hull and baking dark in the heat; and his own skin, after he lies on the beach for hours on end.
It is the precise shade of a Capitol girl’s painted smile before her lips settle over his hip, the hue of President Griffin’s favorite suit, and. Blood.
Blood.
Blood.
Kendall is so sick of red.
Woken up early, but unsure how or why, he wraps his arms more tightly around James’s waist, anchoring them both to the bed they share. He blinks sunrise from his eyes (red, too red, the enduring glory of morning concentrated and skewed between slats of bamboo, cutting the room into puzzle pieces) and resents the hours of sleep that have slipped from his grasp.
James’s skin is chalky pale, chipped from sandstone and marble, where he used to let the sun kiss him the color of driftwood. He never goes outside anymore.
Kendall touches the ridged cliffs of his shoulder blades and the dimples at the base of his back, appreciating the way James curls into the cupped warmth between them, his spine a spiral of ammonite.
James sighs in his sleep, an exhale sweet as a tropical breeze.
He’ll rebel against all the cuddling, later, when he’s awake, because for the past year James has done nothing but hate and hate and hate. He lashes out at everything - loud voices, spilt tea. Kendall, existing. But for now, it’s okay. Kendall is allowed in the red-orange glow of the dawning sun to do this.
Which is nice. There aren’t many things he gets to do these days.
He never thought much about the word Career growing up, knowing only in an abstract way that it was a label that could be applied to him.
Every child in District Four is given a subversive form of training for the Hunger Games - spear fishing, shark wrestling, pearl diving, creature gutting, elocution and now what have we learned? - and Kendall used to play all the games. It was easy to pick up the tricks of the trade, to grow tall and resilient just like he was supposed to, but he never actually wanted to be a contender.
Not like poor, poor Camille, or Kat, or half a dozen other dead friends Kendall’s lost to the games.
(He can tick them off on his fingers, and how they died. One, two, three, heart, neck, kidneys.)
They all were gunning for it in a way Kendall never could have, but in the end, he’s just like them, a Career, and that is a career in and of itself.
(Nine, ten, eleventwelve, spine, head, disemboweled.)
He smiles and waves and wears tailored suits at cocktail parties, and when the night is over, he lets some lovely lady or distinguished gentleman have their way with him (and there are so very many ways to have, on his hands, on his knees. His mouth, his ass, his dick, or all three.)
Soon enough, James will have to do that too.
The smiling and waving, not the other part, because Kendall will die before he lets anyone lay a finger on him. He can say that definitively now, because these are the good days (the bad days). There’s nothing left to fear but what hot messes they both are inside.
For years, seeing James or Katie in the arena was Kendall’s worst nightmare, but the worst has already happened. He can breathe again.
President Griffin won’t leverage Katie against Kendall, not when he’s got the shivering, shattered catastrophe that is James as a bargaining chip to force Kendall’s hand. There’s no end to the array of new and delightful scenarios Griffin’s twisted brain can conjure up, but none of them involve bleeding James dry (yet).
The Capitol will never loosen its chokehold on Kendall’s neck, but the war is over. The battle’s lost. All that’s left is for Kendall to mop things up.
---
Orange is dawn sunlight, but also marigolds, a handful in his pocket for a snack, later on. It’s the colorful coat of clown fish, the raw edges of unbaked clams, the world outside that beckons and calls.
Come out, come live, the morning shouts, a breath of warning as it adds, While you can.
Six days until Kendall has to go back to the Capitol. Six days and then he won’t see James again for months, or Katie, or his mom. He’ll have nothing but the gleaming orange brocade that lines the walls of his pied-à-terre, lonesome except for the strangers who frequent his stoop
(their hands are callused or soft, gentle or tough, and they all pretend they know the lines and shapes that make up this boy named Kendall Knight).
“I’m going to the market. Do you want to come?” Kendall asks of James, already aware of what his answer will be.
Beneath the fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen, James’s eyes reflect yellow, burning firefly bright from the inside out. Yellow like honeysuckle growing on the roadside; fresh drawn butter melting over a crustacean dinner; lemons cut to line a plate of oysters; or the exterior of a seahorse, hidden against the camouflage of sand.
He says, “I’m not going out today,” and Kendall pretends like it is not what he’s said for months now.
Nineteen years old, and everyone gives them a wide berth, the District whore and his ragdoll best friend, poor, mad James Diamond, who has always deserved so much more. They step outdoors to be met with subtle barbs and veiled pity, everyone in town too polite to provoke a Victor, everyone in town too judgmental to accept one either.
(What’s to accept? The Capitol skank and his psychotic lover, see how they are bespoke for each other.)
The honest truth is, as much as he’d worried about it, Kendall had never once actually believed James could be wrecked, and now that he’s faced with the reality, he doesn’t know how to fix him. (Boys aren’t like boats; hammers and nails and a decent spit shine don’t put them to rights.)
He says, “Shocker,” and kicks back on his stool, awaiting the storm to come, because it will inevitably happen. James is pissed off and aching, at himself and the Capitol. Kendall is a handy, available scapegoat to target both emotions at.
The leaves outside, limned pale corn yellow, turn their faces to the sky, anticipating the flashbang of lightning.
Like clockwork, James screams. He yells and he squawks. It’s only when a glass shatters against the kitchen wall that Kendall stalks out.
He comes off every one of his encounters with his James exhausted and wretched, but never on the verge of giving up. Maybe that makes him an idiot.
One of the finer points of salvage involves the ability to recognize which parts of sunken cargo ships are worthless, what’s a deathtrap and what rates rescuing. Kendall’s never been great at either, swimming headlong into rotted wrecks because he’s what other people kindly refer to as reckless (not so kindly as suicidal, but Kendall couldn’t care less what anyone else thinks).
He knows he’s doing the same with James, ignoring all the warning signs and getting crushed beneath the weight of his catastrophic temper againagainagain. But James handled all of Kendall’s bullshit for years. Kendall owes him the same, and fairness aside, he still loves him so deep and so raw that his bones feel brittle with it when they are apart.
(Apart means other yellow things, the isolation of starlight, the pale glow of Capitol street lamps, the cheery quilt draping another boy’s bed while Kendall rakes through the new secrets in his head.)
Lucy thinks Kendall’s handling everything wrong. She says if he really cared about James, he’d let him go, because that’s the only endgame she knows.
“Griffin’s never going to stop,” she declares, as if Kendall isn’t aware of that. Her advice ever-flowing, she counsels, “Get some distance. You could both come out the other end of this thing alive and sane if you weren’t so damned co-dependent.”
Fuck off is Kendall’s well thought-out answer to that.
Lucy means well, he’s sure she does, but her credo is that love is weakness; it will get him killed.
She doesn’t understand that living’s not worth it if James isn’t there to come home to.
---
He pricks his finger like a princess in a fairytale. He pricks his finger on an urchin’s spine, and when he bleeds it is greengreengreen.
Green like rosemary cream and basil garnish, limes, asparagus, apples. Green like life, flickering chartreuse along a moray eel’s slinky body and the camouflage the District uses for hunting. It’s the strange emerald glow of fog banks caught on the brink of twilight and dawn and the minute long flash of viridian when the sun dips beyond the horizon.
It’s the prettiest color, green like breathing, but also like death, the honeydew edges of blood dissipating beneath skin, the sickly tinge of flesh before it turns necrotic. Like the forest that held him trapped during his Games, and the strange pus he saw on one girl’s arm before she kicked it under his trident.
(The urchin bleeds. Kendall bleeds. Kendall bleeds death.)
Maybe he’s obsessed with blood.
Green, first and foremost, is what Kendall sees when he looks in the mirror. His irises ring pupils that hide deepdarkscary things, but they are innocuous, mint leaf green, spring-bud green. Sometimes the color brightens, turns as shamrock as the hair ribbons Katie wears to school.
Sometimes it dulls, so pale it’s yellow-gray, this jaundiced hue that’s barely even green at all.
His mom has a shawl that shade; once it was a rich, lovely hunter green, but it’s been washed and worn, tumbled and torn. Like his mother, who counts off birthdays with new lines on her face. (The year of Kendall’s Hunger Games was special, celebrated with a new shock of white hair blazing down from her temple, curling soft around her neck.) Green is the color of her enduring love, wrapping Kendall in that shawl (at four, nine, thirteen). It’s soaked through with saltslicktears - bruised knees and bitten tongues, a man-shaped hole where someone once stood.
Funny how Kendall at nineteen stills cries about the same exact things.
It’s funny, right?
Green is a good thing, or maybe it’s not. Envy’s green too; that’s what they say.
Kendall should probably know for sure. The last few chapters of his life were colored in varying degrees of jealousy. He and James found an uneasy balance in the final year before the Seventieth Hunger Games, where James would say it’s okay and Kendall would pretend he wasn’t lying, but he’s always known:
What he does will never be okay.
The first time he let a stranger touch him, all he could think about was James.
Telling James.
Hurting James.
Losing James.
Griffin put him in a green suit, somewhere between sea foam and ridiculous, but terribly stylish. Everyone said so. They also said, Do it for your country. Do it for Panem. The part where if he didn’t do it, everyone he loved would die went unspoken.
Kendall was not thinking of his country when the man he didn’t know and would never see again peeled that pretty suit off his body. That man was not gentle. He was not kind or dear or beloved. His teeth gleamed eerie in the verdigris light edging the heavy curtains, patterned with ferns.
The worst part was how Kendall responded, his low mewls and needy groans. Roughangryhard, that’s how Kendall gets his rocks off, and this unknown entity got that better than James ever had. Knuckles twisted brutal inside him, calling forth a serrated edge of pain, and still, it was good, better than it was supposed to be.
His nerve endings danced, twinged, screamed, You’re here, you’re here, you’re alive, you’re here.
In the far corner of Kendall’s eye, he could see the suit Griffin tarted him up in, shamelessly crumpled in a corner. Green like betrayal, green like devastation. And even though he didn’t want to, Kendall let himself be fucked into the mattress on his hands and knees, losing the thread of his own sullen self-loathing, coming and coming and coming again.
(He broke his own heart that day.)
And in mirrors, he stopped ever being able to meet his own greengreen eyes.
“What are you doing?” James asks, gruff and unhappy.
Kendall frowns down at his own hand, stained green with the guts of an urchin, squeezed too tight. (Not blood after all. His veins don’t run with death. Kendall doesn’t know if that’s a relief or not.)
He brought the urchins home from the market for dinner. Well. There goes that idea.
A little helplessly he says, “I’m sorry.”
James scowls. “You say that a lot.”
He does, these days. He apologizes too often. “I’ll make us something else.”
In James’s eyes, he can see the reflection of his own, green like the money they used to use before the war. Green like lies and secrets and the dark depths of the sea.
He turns away, searches out his rucksack full of market-bought goodies. It’s better not to see.
“Wait,” James says, something hollow in his voice. He grabs Kendall’s wrists too tight and forces them beneath the sink. He runs the water until all traces of the urchin are gone.
James doesn’t like green things either.
---
It’s not like he wants to play babysitter. If Kendall could live his life belonging only to himself, without needing to answer to anyone, he would.
But every time he’s in James’s proximity he recognizes how impossible that idea is.
He is beholden to this boy, who glares at him with slow-simmering fury, with antipathyrepugnancedisgust. This is Kendall at ten, eleven, sixteen; James Diamond’s boy, his first love, his first.
Kendall belongs to James no matter what he does in the Capitol, even when he’s stretched around another man’s cock.
That’s why his entire being revolts when James announces, “I’m so tired of you and me,” blue-black shadows clinging to his face like cobweb, coloring it like a bruise.
Quietly, Kendall tells him, “I can leave,” barely aware he’s speaking the words. “I can go back to the Capitol early. Will that help?”
James folds his arms across his broad chest, skin cockleshell pale, and in the darkness cast with watercolor wounds. His injuries from the Games have long since healed, but he wears the ghosts of them every night. The second the sun dips beyond the horizon, they slither and writhe against his flesh.
(Kendall knows exactly what that’s like. He can feel the phantom weight of his trident in his hand.)
Pissed off and boiling over, James demands, “Did you going away help last time?”
Last time Kendall was drowning, every minute and hour without James dragging him down until he could not breathe, could not see anything that wasn’t bathed in monochrome shades of bleakness. Low enough he can barely hear himself, Kendall replies, “No.”
James digs his fingers into his own biceps, slumping back against the wall. The Prussian blue outline of his veins is stark beneath skin. His bare feet curl into the carpet, hiding his toes from view. He is a jagged thing, pointed as a jellyfish’s barbs, stabbing into Kendall’s heart.
“What do we do?” Kendall asks because he has to, because he’s panicking in a real, visceral way. The kitchen is closing in on him, with its paisley walls in sky and violet, with deep indigo trim.
The walls are a cage masquerading as freedom, because blue is home, blue is joy. (It’s the tug and pull of the currents in the sea, it’s the hulking, shadowy behemoth of shore. It’s the dazzling cornflower flash of the sky overhead, the striped concentric circles lining the outer shell of mussels, and the sleek silvery cyan of the hunting knife that pierces Kendall’s insides every time James casts a genuine smile his way.)
Joy is not this box of a room, the counter biting into his flesh sharp as pincers, the bulky jab of cabinet knobs at his knees. He’s stuck in James’s hidey hole, and Kendall wants and he needs and he has to get out. He has to go home, where he can hide under an afghan knitted by his grandma, the threadbare stitching gentle as her touch would be, could have been, if he’d ever met her.
Kendall absolutely, positively can’t wait to go to a place where James isn’t looking at him like this, like neither of them will ever smile again.
James bites his lower lip, creating an indent that Kendall wants to run his tongue over. He says, “We can’t keep on this way. I hate you.”
The words drip ice against Kendall’s spine. It’s not like he didn’t know. Hearing it out loud just makes it realer.
This is the end, probably. This is the part where his lungs are crushed, his heart shattered, and his reason for everything simply disappears.
Because James…James is the world, and he is crumbling, fading, disappearing.
(He is ether and he is air, and Kendall is gasping around his loss.)
Trying not to sound like he’s barely survived a cataclysm, Kendall replies, “Yeah. I know.”
James winces, eyes flashing black with sorrow that is lost too quickly under a flood of anger and hurt. He asks, “Are you really going back to the Capitol?”
Kendall is weary, stinging and sad. “I have to. I don’t have a choice.”
“You always say that! You’re the only one who has ever had a choice-“
“It’s for you,” Kendall tries, talking over him, raising his voice. “It’s to keep you safe.”
Rage flashes across James’s face, blue-violet as fish tails and scales winking up at Kendall through bubbles that James used to kick up, but that is just a memory, because James never swims anymore.
Thunderous in the too-large kitchen, James intones, “Then you must be a travesty of a whore, because the arena wasn’t safe.”
Kendall recoils.
James doesn’t back down, big and brawny, the wild eyed man who floated in detritus for half a day before the Capitol deigned to pick him up, to stick a crown on him and call him a Victor. He shouts, “Stop trying to protect me. You’re probably the reason I got chosen in the first place.”
It’s a punch to the gut and Kendall sees stars, cobalt, cerulean, blue, and winking, winking with laughter. He stares at James wide-open and wounded, and secretly, in a bruised space that might once have been his heart, half-convinced that James is right.
His voice can cut as easily as it can charm, and now he wants it to slice through James’s bones, to saw him in half like a bad magic trick. He means to say IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou hard and violent, to make James feel it the way Kendall always has (at eleven, sixteen, now, Kendall has always loved James).
What he actually says is, “You’re right. I’m so tired of you and me.”
James doesn’t look like he expected it, and he should have.
This is Kendall Knight, the Capitol slut, and the words he says are never at all what he means.
---
The night before Kendall leaves, his stylist shows up at his front door with boxes in tow. Inside the first is a suit the color of the night sky and twice as soft. Nineteen years old, and he has never owned anything quite so fine.
(Being a Victor; it isn’t all bad.)
Kendall thinks James might look nice in black and then reconsiders, because that is the color of the handprints strangers leave across Kendall’s body, the shape of their lips and the hard dig of their fingers. Even when Kendall doesn’t bruise, he can still see the brands left behind, shadows with the consistency of guilt and tar.
He knows that James can see them too. Not that James has tried to look at his body even once since the Seventieth Hunger Games.
This is not a thing Kendall blames him for. Not even a little bit.
What he blames James for are the other things, for the childhood they gave up without a fight, the lies Kendall tells that he refuses to swallow, and the beauty he wears like a shield, like a weapon.
Kendall blames James for trusting too easily, for his insatiable curiosity and his gigantic heart.
He blames him for accepting the thing that Kendall cannot; that the two of them are a lost cause.
(Even thinking it burns, because who is Kendall supposed to be without that little boy, the one brave enough to swim in neon plastic floaties, even when he didn’t know how.)
A knock cracks through the house, rumbles like the wheels on the train that will carry Kendall back to the Capitol, to everything he doesn’t miss. Automatically, he plants his feet in the carpet and hopes for quicksand to whisk him away.
Visitors after midnight don’t ever bring good news.
Katie’s fast asleep, tucked away in her bed like an otter in the kelp. His mom’s gone under too, an entire ocean of dreams between her and the door.
They won’t save him. They never have known how.
Reluctantly, Kendall pries himself away from the oilslick surface of his carrying case and brand new clothes, steeling himself for the crow’s caws of a message he likely won’t want. Shoulders squared and jaw tight, he reaches out. He twists.
The door creaks on its hinges as it swings back, wood turned to rot in the thick salt air of District Four. Kendall demands, “What do you want?” and then stops, because.
Because.
Kendall’s hand on the knob springs moisture, a leak, a hole, his nerves staging a mutiny. His vision blacks a bit, and the image of James in his doorframe blurs, like the sun sparkling on the water, blinding pinpricks of light distorted into dazzling, shimmering things.
He watches Kendall with big, wide, lantern eyes, daring him to say something else, but all of Kendall’s words have dried up on his tongue, his thirsty throat searching for a rhyme or a reason.
He wasn’t so sure he was ever going to see James again.
(The first time Kendall told James he loved him, it was on the heels of a confession, of how he’d let Griffin change him. It was a chain of words that spilled messy and bloodied out onto the sand and did nothing to cover the stain of guilt that burned under Kendall’s skin. And as a reply, James gathered the clouds and the sea and the rugged swell of the dunes around him, the absolute, unrelenting force of his fury mirrored by the landscape. He was going to bury Kendall alive, and he did. Months went by where Kendall was oxygen-less, obliquely smothered by James’s inattention. He’d thought and he’d worried that this would be the same. He’d die alone, without solace, black-and-blue handprints on his ass and his heart and his soul.)
“You’re leaving,” James says hollow, unhappy.
Kendall never meant to make him sound like that, but then again, his entire life has devolved into a series of hateful things he never intended to do.
“Yes,” he agrees, because there’s no way to change that. James gets an out from mentorship because no one at the Capitol believes the wild man-creature that graced their televisions last year could possibly lead anyone else to victory, but Kendall Knight?
He’s worth too much to the Games to ever be allowed to stay in District Four.
James grimaces at the bulk of his travel bags, conspicuous gray against the white linoleum of the kitchen. “Were you even going to say goodbye?”
“I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.”
Men and women of every size, every shape, all of them staring at Kendall with lust in their eyes; none of them have ever looked at him the way James does. There is something inside him that is darkness and flame, a possessive burn that also speaks of love and unmatched joy - or, right now, unspeakable sorrow.
Kendall wants to tell him, I don’t want to leave you. He wants to say, Because of you, I know the shape and weight of my own heart.
These are things that won’t sound right out loud, not from his lips, not any time soon.
(They’re so fucked, so much in love, in so much pain. They’re too young to be in this much pain.)
Shaky and frustrated, James tells him, “I hate it when we fight.”
“Is that all we were doing?” Kendall lifts an eyebrow, a cool move to cover the way he bunches his damp hands against his pants. “Felt more like we were breaking up.”
“Are we even together right now?” James counters, because he’s brave, even when he doesn’t want to be.
Kendall laughs. He is bitter, macadam dark. The reverb in his throat tastes of ash. “Honestly? I’ve got no idea what we are anymore.”
They’re Victors that feel like losers, lovers who never fuck, best friends who can’t stand the sight of each other, and District pariahs. They’re never what they were, and Kendall can’t forgive himself for that, for letting starlit nights and black velvet skies and the tornado force of James dissipate into a distant memory.
He’s a killer and a murder and up until recently a little boy, and if he’d known back then how to stand up for what was right, he likes to dream he would’ve.
(He would’ve done a lot of things if he’d known the anatomy of the fault lines holding together their hearts.)
“Tell me,” James commands, framed by the thick wooden beams of Kendall’s doorway. Determination creases his forehead, carves an abyss in the curvature of his scowl. “Tell me what we are, and I’ll believe you.”
Decay blackens Kendall’s bones, bags beneath his eyes, kisses his joints and ligaments with rot, but he pushes it all aside and steps into James’s space. James, who at (tentwelvesixteen) nineteen smells spicy and clean, the engine grease and metal-rust that used to sit beneath his fingernails washed away in the sterile en suite of his Victor’s home. James, who is warm and familiar, even beneath citrus shampoo, and
Kendall wants to lick every trace of the Capitol away from his skin. He reaches up and cards his hands through James’s thick hair, brown slipping silky between his fingers.
Acutely aware of the space between their sternums, bellies, thighs, and how much he wants to make it disappear, Kendall’s hands skim the sides of James’s ribcage, the protrusion of bone ridged beneath his fingers. He presses a wobbly kiss to the hinge of James’s jaw and tells him, “You’re James. I’m Kendall. And I’m not gone yet.”
James’s breathing is ragged, stilted, unsure. He accepts Kendall’s mouth against his with startled gentleness, his kisses fractured moonlight, silver cool on Kendall’s lips.
They make each other glow from the inside out, every kiss flimsy and fleeting. Kendall tongues against the crevices of sadness that line James’s mouth, and James in turn licks heat into the places where Kendall’s turned cold. His arms are strong at Kendall’s waist, solid as the places he was raised up, in all that grime and iron and pitch.
Without even meaning to, Kendall takes it too far. He bucks his hips and wants, wants James to take him to bed and make him remember all the ways they fit. And James doesn’t quite shy away. He moans against him and pants, “Wait, wait.”
Kendall is so sick of waiting, but he pulls back anyway, rests his forehead against James’s and tries to control the rapid-fire sob of his breath.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I wanted to tell you I. I,” James says, so close and kissable. “I fucked Dak Zevon.”
And Kendall’s heart blackens, dies. The thick, chunky mixture of oil and water and rust that clogs boat engines and stalls them mid-voyage is bleeding through his bones. He inhales, raspy and thick. Then he stitches himself back together again, replying, “I know.”
It’s harder to cop to than he’d like, but this has never been a secret. Kendall found out practically the day it happened, because Dak hadn’t been able to resist bragging.
That was fair. Kendall hadn’t been able to resist beating his face to a pulp.
People should know better than to mess with a Victor.
“You know,” James repeats slowly. “Did you know I let him - I, he.” Words are an obstacle course he can’t quite navigate, the inky blackness of his pupils expanding and contracting in the too-harsh light of the kitchen. When he says what he needs to, it stumbles free, a stray punch, an unrestrained jab. “I was a virgin that way, I guess, before him.”
Kendall’s throat closes, but that’s fine. What’s he supposed to say? He lost whatever high ground he had to stand on long before James ever let Dak Zevon touch him, kiss him, fuck him - no.
Jealousy isn’t something he’s entitled to or allowed, even if it burns through his veins with all the speed and fizzle of a sodium light.
“Why are you telling me this?”
James frowns down at his hands, at the way he holds Kendall between them like something hallowed and good. He says, “You never wanted to.” He says, “But I want you to.”
There’s magma in Kendall’s veins, heat that goes straight and unapologetically to his dick, because hell if he’s never fantasized about taking James over the side of every piece of furniture he owns. It would be fantastic, Kendall would make it fantastic, because he can - he’d be so much better than Dak fucking Zevon - he knows how.
Only.
The thing is.
He tries so hard to be the man his father was. Brave, strong, true. He wants to be noble, but James makes him human, again and again and again. They belong to each other, wholly, but not wholly. They’ve still got this, this one place they haven’t gone.
An escape clause.
Kendall doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to leave if he’s got James, sobbing underneath him, imprinted on his soul.
“Are you sure?” is what he asks, because that escape clause has always been for James.
Kendall’s not a runner. If he was, the past five years would have been so much easier, un-caged, carefree, never once plagued with guilt that clings spectral to the surface of his flesh. But he knows who he is and what he’s willing to do to make sure nobody else ever suffers like he has, and he wanted - wants - James to be free of that.
(If only James wasn’t every bit as steadfast and loyal as Kendall tries to be. But he is, he is, he can’t help but be. James gets called crazy because he had the gall to be so stupidly brave, because he loved too much and too hard and every death in that goddamned arena pulsed beneath his skin, made him feel the murder of every good, strong, courageous kid the Capitol sent out to tear at each other likes savages. And Kendall’s scared out of his fucking mind that he’s always going to feel James the same way, an erratic drumbeat under his wrist, in his throat, a constant staccato rhythm he’ll never be able to shake, even after James leaves him behind for someone safer, tamer, for someone who didn’t revel in the killing or the blood. A man with the compassion of a saint doesn’t deserve to be saddled with a murderer and a whore.)
Kendall clenches his eyes shut and waits for the axe to fall, because if his life thus far has taught him one thing, it’s that gravity’s a cruel bitch
and is rarely on his side.
His ribs ache just thinking about it.
“I always knew it would be like this,” James replies quietly, instead of answering.
“Like what?”
“The Capitol’s built you up to be a hero. A part of me wanted that. You’ve always been - invincible. Untouchable. Nobody’s ever called me a hero. Now they never will.” He rolls his shoulders back, sags against the island that separates the floor into rivers and streams, because god forbid anyone in District Four ever got used to too much space. “They think I’m broken, and so do you. I’m not going to shatter if you fuck me, Kendall.”
He inhales sharply. “I’ve never thought that.”
Kendall hasn’t. Not once. If anything, it’s the reverse; for all the people he’s been with, James is the only one who has ever made him feel like he might die if they stop touching. He could fragment into kaleidoscope colors, hit the floor in pieces and never fit back together again.
“Then what? Why won’t you? It’s because you only like it when I give it to you rough, right?” James snarls. “Because you think I’m-“
Kendall bounds up on his toes and kisses him. “Perfect. I think you’re perfect.”
The kiss tastes like nothing, like air and chapped lips. But somehow it calms the storm-tossed churning in Kendall’s stomach, the roiling pit that made him trust that this was the end, this time, for sure.
James’s hands, callused and trembling, cup Kendall’s elbows, a parody of strength undermined by the stunned exhalation that gusts against Kendall’s mouth. He draws back with eyebrows twisted, arched, saying, “That’s the most ridiculously blatant lie I’ve ever heard,” and he kisses Kendall again, like he can’t do anything else.
This is what exists between them now, momentum and half-truths, and Kendall will take it, if only because he misses the feel of James’s callused palms against his hips. They rock against each other, urgent but gentle, all too aware that the ground beneath them is broken and sharp, tremulous as a ship’s deck, but with more risk of drowning.
“I want to fuck you,” Kendall tells James, loud in the dark, empty kitchen. He doesn’t sound scared - because he’s the Capital Whore, Kendall Knight, and he’s never scared - but reputations lie. Kendall’s heart is in his throat. “I want to, I promise, I want to.”
James pulls Kendall into him, closer when Kendall thought they could spare no more room between them. He growls, “Prove it.”
Kendall Knight never could turn down a challenge.
He strips James of his pants, freed cock bobbing beneath the soft, worn fabric of a t-shirt that’s seen better days. Kendall stares. He licks his lips. He stares some more.
“Cold feet?” James asks, his smile shy, but growing bolder by the minute. This isn’t the James Diamond Kendall had sex with so long ago; no matter what James says, he is changed - cocky, less confident, less a boy-god and more a new man.
Kendall can’t bear to look at him. He bends him over the kitchen island and fumbles with the front of his own pants, which are unbearably scratchy and tight. James yelps, but obligingly grips the glossy edges of the counter, his skin pale and soaked through with moonlight.
The fabric of that shirt is worn and weathered. It’s been through every storm that James has; it’s as threadbare as Kendall’s soul. Victors can afford nice things, but it’s been nearly a year since James has wanted anything nice. Until now. Until Kendall. James’s asshole against his cock is a tease, hot and thrumming with nervous energy and want.
He circles his dick, tiny motions, rubbing precum against James’s skin.
Even now, he’s hesitant.
“Can we keep going? Can we?” James asks plaintively, as if this is a gift that Kendall’s giving him, like Kendall hasn’t had his way with a million other men in the Capital. He bucks his hips back, making sure that Kendall can feel him.
Kendall can feel him all the way down to his toes.
He strokes some salve onto his cock - whores are always prepared - while James whines and waits, and then he repositions himself and breathes, “Now.”
Sliding into James is like coming home. He’s painfully tight, too wired to relax, and even then - even then - Kendall feels like he can breathe for the first time in a year. He moves, experimentally. James cries out, squeezing the edges of the counter. He’s got too much strength in his biceps and his thighs. Kendall watches the strain of his muscles and tries, valiantly, not to come.
He’s not about this; self-restraint is usually his middle name. But James is insanely tight, virgin territory, and more than that, he’s beloved. (His name is written across every organ Kendall owns, inscribed in his marrow and sitting on his tongue.)
“James,” he breathes, and because of that, Kendall takes his time, works him open slow until James’s muscles relax, and his forceful thrusts give way to easy glides. James stops cringing, low, keening moans erupting from his throat. He leans back to kiss Kendall, sloppy and open, his eyes wider and more awe-struck than Kendall has seen them since adulthood hit, and everything wondrous in the world turned mundane.
He murmurs, “I love you,” and hopes that the words will melt beneath James’s skin like the last tinge of sunlight dissolving into the horizon, with palpable beauty. “I love you, I love you.”
James bucks back against him, sighing it back. Kendall didn’t think he was worthy of those words any longer.
He sinks into James and splays his hand across his heart, the erratic thump-thump-thump beneath his fingertips a steadying anchor. James tilts his head toward him, his face shaded with a bewildered smile and threads of shadow and moonlight.
“Why’d you stop?”
As honestly as he can, Kendall replies, “I thought I lost you.”
James stares him down. Quietly, he says, “That will never happen.”
Kendall’s never known such relief. He moves slow, with purpose, memorizing every twitch and shiver, because this is new and innocent. Their hands lace together, and.
James is bleeding red, his heart an open wound that Kendall can't stop probing at, digging in and squeezing every last ounce of love and hate and whatever else James has left to give since the Games beat the shit out of him. He is rusted over, orange and brown and creaky from the disuse of his smile, but still edged with perfection. He's sweet like yellow lemonade, too-sugared and the best thing Kendall's ever tasted on a hot summer day. And he's hazel flecked eyes that reflect back the green green storm tossed sea, a hurricane ready to plunder and remake everything in its path.
James is broken apart, but James is also this: the sun and the sand and the sea on a lazy spring day, when they all blend into each other in one long stretch of blue. He's the shade of veins, running beneath skin - something that Kendall cannot live without.
Not at fifteen, or sixteen, nineteen or twenty, not at thirty or forty, or fifty five. Kendall will live his entire life lost to James Diamond, asphyxiating on his love for this boy, and that’s the scariest thing he’s ever had to face - worse than death, worse than blood. Worse than looking in the mirror and knowing he’s a killer.
Love’s fucking awful, and somehow it’s also okay.
So Kendall lets go, melting across the span of James’s back as he comes in long, shuddering strokes and short, thunderous spasms, flooding his best friend's insides at the same exact moment as James spills wantonly over the kitchen counter, hotbeautifuladored and sobbing Kendall’s name.
This is a conclusion as well as a beginning; the two of them together, breathing, panting. At any age, loving and hating and screaming and touching and tied, interlaced, indestructible as a whole in ways they’ll never be apart. It’s how they are fated to be:
Victors and killers and lovers and losers and paired, together forever, at the end of the world.
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