Fluff Prompts Roundup, Part I
....... I don't think I know what "fluff" means, either.
For
deathmallow: Two victors and puppies
"This is a terrible idea." Claudius stares down at the writing mass of fluff and rears back like he expects it to devour him. "This -- can I get paid to be an escort? Because it sounds to me like they get way too much money for getting high and then implementing whatever comes into their minds when they're out of their gourds."
Lyme clucks her tongue and gives him a whack on the back of the head, not because she disagrees -- no Two does -- but because Claudius has gotten a little too used to the freedom of the Village. If he's going to do a photo shoot he needs to remember to keep his mouth shut, and since it's Lyme's fault for over-indulging him, she has to rein him in. "Behave," she reminds him, and Claudius pinches the bridge of his nose.
"They know I killed puppies, right," Claudius says, his voice scratching, and Lyme read his file until she memorized it but the only thing it said about the animal test is that he passed, not what it was. Fuck. "Like, literally, this is the worst idea, I have literally killed a puppy with my bare hands, this is not going to help mitigate my baby-killing image."
"I can cancel it right now," Lyme says, kicking herself. "You don't have to do it." She should have asked, should have called the Centre to see if they had the records somewhere to make sure. Claudius was a mean little boy who hurt other kids much older than him if they made him mad; she assumed they'd given him the standard chipmunk or squirrel and left it at that. Only a handful of kids ever get the puppy, and most of them don't pass.
"No, it's fine." Claudius' hands spasm at his sides. The photographers are running around setting up the lighting and backdrops, so at least they have a minute, and Lyme takes the risk and tugs him over to lean against her side. They can't show too much here, but Claudius won his Games on their connection, and a few "leaked" candids of them having a moment won't ruin anything. "I'm fine, just, yeah."
Lyme sighs, and she slides her hand up to grip the back of his neck, hold him steady. "I got a chipmunk," she says in an undertone. It's something they don't talk about but somehow everyone manages to share at some point, usually late at night when the conversation is subdued and memories crowd in at the edges of your vision. "I think they were trying to see if I'd freak out at something so small. But look, these dogs, you don't have to hurt them. You don't even have to pet them, just let them run around and be cute."
"Ridiculous," Claudius reminds her, but he leans back into her touch. "This isn't going to fool anyone."
"I know, I know." Lyme will never forget her post-Arena trip to the orphanage, where she had to sit and get crawled over by children who smeared snot on hr and pulled her hair and hung off her arms like monkeys. Afterward she'd told Nero that if she had to endure a pile of children or another Arena, she'd seriously have to think about it, and he promised no more appearances with kids.
It's a weird game the Capitol plays, constantly balancing the Twos and their all-too-real killer image with awkward attempts at softening them to make them palatable for the cameras in later years. Some, like Odin -- who genuinely loves children in a way Lyme will never, ever understand -- manage to walk the knife's edge of humanizing themselves without becoming a joke, but most of them have to grit their teeth and bear it while explaining how flower arranging really fills their free time now.
It ends up working well in the end; the more the Capitol tries to smooth down their edges, the more incongruous it looks, and so what people remember when Brutus strides into the sponsor den is not that they had him pose with a bunch of five-year-olds who wrote essays to try to meet him, but how big and terrifying he looked in comparison.
"I can do this," Claudius says, running a hand down his face. "One hundred twelve kids have died from mutt attacks. I can sit with a bunch of puppies. It won't kill me."
"And you don't have to kill them," Lyme reminds him, and Claudius lets out a long breath and loosens the tight line of his shoulders. "Even better, the dogs don't care. It's not like kids, where even if they're excited to see you, they know what you did to get here. They're just dogs. They don't even know where they are."
"True." Claudius crouches down and sticks one hand through the enclosure; one of the fuzzy things runs over and licks his fingers, and Claudius flinches first but forces himself to stay.
"Oh, there, look at that," Elianora coos, sashaying into the room. Claudius picks up a puppy and holds it close to his face, which means he must be making an epic expression. "Look at you, making friends already! This is going to be a huge success, I know it!"
Lyme twitches. She knows that next week there will be doctored versions of the photos all over the network, crude knives stuck onto Claudius' hands and the puppies' throats smeared with red, but it's not her call. They want a photo shoot with puppies and that's what they're going to get. It's never over, she told Claudius that first day in the hospital, just like Nero told her, like mentors will tell their victors when all three of them are long dead because that's the way it is.
"This one's kinda cute," Claudius says, lifting up a scruffy thing with one inside-out ear and a lip curled into a permanent sneer. He gives Lyme a thin smile that means it's hard but he's trying, and that's all any of them can ever do. He holds the animal up to his face and doesn't even flinch, and tonight Lyme will make him a batch of brownies and a big bowl of peanut butter and jam oatmeal and spar until he stops shaking for getting through this.
"So precious," Elianora says, clasping her hands. Claudius catches one of the puppies lifting its leg, and he picks it up and sets it down right next to Elianora's jewelled shoe. Lyme coughs and looks the other way.
For
morbane: Thresh and Rue before the Games, district solidarity
The first time Thresh sees the little girl, he hates her so hard it digs into his gut and pulls everything out. Two seconds later the disgust catches up with him and he hates himself twice as much. It's a good thing his resting facial expression is a scowl, what with his face twenty feet high on the screen behind him.
She stands next to him, a quiet, pretty little girl, her head level with his elbow, her eyes big and brown and wide, and the crowd stays silent when their escort calls for applause. They applauded at Thresh's turn, though, of course they did. Big boy like him, strong and hard with eyes that say I hate you because they can whip him for opening his mouth but they can't control everything, he looks like he could win it. He looks like he could murder a handful of other children and bring home enough food to feed the district for an entire year.
But that was before the little girl. Now no one's looking at Thresh. Now he's just another angry kid who might turn out a killer, but he's not a tragedy. Nobody will be sobbing into their popcorn over him when some mutt tears him to pieces. They might throw their betting slips across the room in disgust, but it ain't the same as a little girl with four even littler sisters standing there in the square, clinging to their Mama and crying.
Thresh loses the rest of the speech because the roaring in his brain drowns out everything else. Soon enough it's time to turn and head into the Justice Building, and the only consolation is that they get shuttled into separate rooms. This is bullshit enough without him having to stand there and listen to their messy goodbyes. Maybe if he doesn't have to see it, he won't think about the part where her Mama has four more children to see her through the loss when he's the only one his parents got.
He gets three minutes with them, and they're the longest and shortest three minutes of his life so far. Ma hugs him tight, and Thresh pulls her in close and tries not to think about how thin she feels in his arms. He was a big boy who came out breach, and he damn near killed her once and looks like he's going to do it again. Thresh looks over her shoulder at Pa, and the years might have dulled the blade of Pa's anger to a blunt edge but it's there now in his eyes, anger and despair and hopelessness. Thresh thinks of the first time he came back from the fields with his shirt in tatters and his back all over blood, and how Pa raged and burned but couldn't do nothing, just thanked the overseer for returning him in one piece.
They don't tell him to come back whatever it takes. Saying 'whatever it takes' means he's got to be prepared to do anything to do it and that might mean wrapping his hands around that little girl's throat and pressing down until her big, brown eyes bug out and bruises mar her little neck.
"Do what you can," Ma says instead, and if nothing else her voice is strong. Pa's eyes say what he won't, that if Thresh walked back here with that little girl's blood on his hands Pa would find a way to live with it, but maybe if they don't say it aloud that won't make it real.
In his head, the little girl's smallest sister unwraps a hair ribbon from her pigtails and hands it over, eyes wide and solemn, and her Mama wraps it around her hair and ties it tight. Or maybe she loops it around the little girl's wrist instead, pressed against the pulse point so she can feel it with every heartbeat.
Thresh will have no token because they got nothing to give him. Except that Ma takes his hands and pulls him over to the hard bench -- too short, too thin, nothing ever fits Thresh here -- and sits down beside him, strokes her hand over his forehead and begins to sing.
Funny enough, it's Pa who breaks. He turns his back, and his shoulders shake and he sucks in big, wet breaths while his fists clench, but Ma just keeps singing, her voice never cracking, never hesitating. It's his cradle song, and Thresh has heard it so often that it creeps into his dreams even now, when he's too old to hear it except once a year on his birthday when Ma says she's allowed and he can hush up and stop trying so hard to grow away from her. He turns nineteen in two weeks, and this will be the first year in his memory that she's not there on the side of his bed when it's time for sleep, her voice rich and warm in the hot summer air.
As soon as he steps out of this room, the cameras will be on him, and they won't stop until twenty-three kids are dead and maybe never after. They're probably watching this, too, but the footage from the Justice Building never gets aired and that's good enough to count as the last private moment Thresh will have in his life. This ain't how Thresh planned it, but he leans forward until his forehead rests against Ma's shoulder while she gives him one last gift, the freedom to soak the coarse linen of her dress with nobody watching.
"You take that with you," Ma says when she finishes, and she pulls back and wipes Thresh's eyes with two firm swipes of her thumbs. "We'll be watching. Until --" And now she falters, her face jerking like somebody slapped her, and she tries again. "We'll be watching you," she says finally.
Pa's got himself under control now, and he grips Thresh's shoulder hard enough to hurt and offers his handkerchief so Thresh won't leave the room with snot on his sleeve. "We love you," he says, and Thresh still hasn't said a damn word to either of them. But then the Peacekeeper opens the door and yanks them out, and now it's too late and Thresh never will again.
It's easier after that, standing on the train platform while the crowd in front of him sobs for the little girl, though a few with their eyes on the prize catch Thresh's gaze and raise their fists in preemptive triumph. Thresh stares out without making eye contact with anyone, letting his face harden into the mask he wears when the overseer raises his whip and tells him to walk to the stocks. It's familiar even if the situation isn't, and it carries Thresh through the last of the goodbyes until they're on the train and the doors slide shut behind him.
The little girl sits down in one of the big plush chairs, smoothing her Reaping dress over her skinny knees. Thresh grits his teeth and sits in a chair on the far side of the room, steeling himself for when she asks him to protect her because he can't, he won't. The last thing he wants to do is be in the final two with her. He tries to hold onto the anger that gripped him on stage, that dark, sliding fury and envy and everything else, but she's so small and so young and she's going to die and it won't be Thresh who does it. It won't.
She lets out a breath and this is it, here it comes -- except instead of begging, she looks out the window. "I want you to stay away from me in there," she says, low and quiet and calm. There's a tremor underneath but she holds it steady, and Thresh raises an eyebrow before he can stop himself. "They'll want to see us together but I know what it means in the end. They all do. I don't want that."
Thresh drums one finger against his forearm. "No District 11 solidarity?" The words are bitter on his tongue like the time he was a boy and picked a handful of pretty blue berries before Ma caught him and smacked his head so hard he spat them out. He had a dull headache for days, like an icepick behind his eyes, and it starts up again now.
"Let someone else kill me," she says, a pretty little thing with big brown eyes and soft brown skin saying words like that, and Thresh hates everyone and everything. "That's enough solidarity."
The train lurches forward, and Thresh presses his forehead against the window to watch home disappear behind them until their mentors show up.
For
inthespout: Lyme learns to cook
Smoke stings her eyes and scrapes in her throat. She's in the Arena, running as the wall of flames chases her across the savannah, the low tangle-bushes catching her pants and tearing gashes in her skin (no natural fire could keep going over hard rock and sand with nothing to eat but scrub grass, but this isn't a natural fire now is it). There's metal in her hand and blood on her tongue and later Caesar will tell her that the chase was one of the most exciting moments of her Games, except how does she know that, and why aren't her leg muscles burning, she remembers them burning --
"Hey, little girl." Hands on her shoulders, steering her back, and Lyme follows the voice and the hands up and out because this isn't the Arena. This is her house, and the smoke is from the oven, not the Gamemakers' fire, and the smell of seared flesh is from the steak she tried to cook and not the twisted, screaming body of the girl from District Eight who tripped and fell.
Lyme gasps and opens her eyes. Nero bends and rests their foreheads together, holds the sides of her face in his hands and anchors her until her brain stops skidding and remembers where she is. "And now you know why you cook steak on the top of the stove," Nero says, brushing his thumbs across her cheekbones and slipping on liquid. "Also, if you're gonna roast potatoes you're supposed to cut them first, or at least poke them with a fork. You don't just shove all the shit in a pan and hope for the best."
"Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know that?" Lyme counters, but it helps ground her. "It's not like the Centre had an optional 'gourmet chef' track."
Though it's a good thing to know about potatoes; she wonders if that works in a fire, too, or if it's just the pressure from the oven. If it works with any heat then she could probably get a few potatoes from sponsors without too much trouble. Potatoes are cheaper than weapons, and she could stick them in a fire and use that as a diversion --
No, no, no. No more diversions, no more Arena strategies. She's done, it's over, and Lyme never, ever has to go back there again.
And a lucky thing, too, if the best she can come up with now is homemade potato bombs. It's almost a wonder she won at all.
Nero shifts to keep one hand on the back of her neck as he leans over and opens the kitchen window, then snags a towel and waves the smoke toward the gap. Lyme finally notices the knife in her hand, and it's an ordinary kitchen knife but she's not holding it like one -- she has it flipped around in her fingers, ready to slash through skin and arteries -- and she lets it drop, jerking back. It hits the floor and lies there, blunt and harmless (except not harmless, never harmless, Lyme knows six different ways to kill a man with eating implements alone) and Lyme stares at it, her mind jiggering back and forth until Nero squeezes her neck and calls her back.
"Let's see if there's anything we can save," he says, opening the door, and it's funny to see his giant hand shoved into an even bigger oven mitt as he pulls out the pan and its charred remains.
It's not a person -- it doesn't look like one, and it doesn't smell like one and Lyme knows the difference, she knows the difference -- but Lyme turns and vomits all over the floor anyway.
"Okay," Nero says, crouching down next to her and rubbing her back. "It's okay, breathe, I'll get you some water, but don't worry about the floor." He stands up, and Lyme closes her eyes and focuses on the splash of water from the faucet into the glass because there were no streams or rivers in her Arena and that, at least, won't set her off. He comes back, pushes the glass into her hand and helps her raise it to her mouth. Lyme swishes the water in her cheeks until it turns bitter, then she forces it down and takes another swallow.
Each time Nero says "good girl" like she's a three-year-old, but it's nice to get praise for something that isn't designing a trap to take out three tributes at once, and anyway no one will know. Finally Lyme swallows the last of the water, and it sits uneasy in her stomach but it'll probably stay there. "Okay," Nero says again. "You go sit on the couch while I clean this up, then let's see what we can do about dinner."
Lyme sits on the couch and pulls her knees up to her chest, staring at the fabric that makes up her sweatpants. She drags her thumbnail up and down the tiny Vs until they start to unravel, the strands of yarn pulling apart, then Lyme clicks her tongue in disgust and lets her hands drop.
Nero comes back after a while and drops down beside her, the couch creaking beneath his weight. "So," he says, all fake-casual. "You wanna tell me why you set the kitchen on fire when you've still got people bringing you everything you need?"
Lyme tips her head back until it hits the sofa cushions. It leaves the line of her throat open, practically screaming for a knife or a wire, but Nero's here and that won't happen and Lyme forces herself not to hunch. "I just thought I should learn," she says, and it made more sense in her head. It also felt more important, pressing against the sides of her skull until she thought she'd explode, but in words it just sounds silly, marbles plinking into a ceramic bowl. "I -- wanted to make something, for once, instead of wrecking things. Except I ended up wrecking it anyway."
She doesn't finish the thought because that would push it into melodrama, and that's not Lyme's angle. She's understated, big and brawny but not brutish, she can't be screaming about how she ruins everything she touches.
Nero stays quiet for a minute, then nods. "Well, we can still do that, but maybe let's stick with things we don't have to cook, for now. If we can get our hands on some chocolate, we can whip up some mountain bars. All you have to do with those is leave 'em in the fridge for a while first."
Lyme raises an eyebrow in spite of herself. "That's not dinner, that's dessert."
"My girl here won the Hunger Games," Nero says, blunt, and Lyme might have shoved her crown in the bottom of a drawer underneath her scratchiest wool socks and covered up her tattoo with long sleeves but that doesn't chase away the part where she earned both. "If she wants to have dessert before dinner, she damn well can."
"I knew there was a perk somewhere," Lyme says, and it feels a little like pressing a hot knife to a wound to cauterize it, but the discomfort passes. "Where are we getting the chocolate?"
"I beat Callista the other day at cards and she gave me an IOU," Nero says, standing up, and he reaches down to offer Lyme a hand. "Let's go collect."
He steers her through the side door so they don't have to pass through the kitchen, and Lyme takes a deep breath of the thick summer air, heavy with the smell of pine. She curls her bare feet in the soft, green grass -- nothing like the knifelike blades of razor grass from her Arena -- and follows Nero down the path.
For
deathmallow: Two victors and puppies
"This is a terrible idea." Claudius stares down at the writing mass of fluff and rears back like he expects it to devour him. "This -- can I get paid to be an escort? Because it sounds to me like they get way too much money for getting high and then implementing whatever comes into their minds when they're out of their gourds."
Lyme clucks her tongue and gives him a whack on the back of the head, not because she disagrees -- no Two does -- but because Claudius has gotten a little too used to the freedom of the Village. If he's going to do a photo shoot he needs to remember to keep his mouth shut, and since it's Lyme's fault for over-indulging him, she has to rein him in. "Behave," she reminds him, and Claudius pinches the bridge of his nose.
"They know I killed puppies, right," Claudius says, his voice scratching, and Lyme read his file until she memorized it but the only thing it said about the animal test is that he passed, not what it was. Fuck. "Like, literally, this is the worst idea, I have literally killed a puppy with my bare hands, this is not going to help mitigate my baby-killing image."
"I can cancel it right now," Lyme says, kicking herself. "You don't have to do it." She should have asked, should have called the Centre to see if they had the records somewhere to make sure. Claudius was a mean little boy who hurt other kids much older than him if they made him mad; she assumed they'd given him the standard chipmunk or squirrel and left it at that. Only a handful of kids ever get the puppy, and most of them don't pass.
"No, it's fine." Claudius' hands spasm at his sides. The photographers are running around setting up the lighting and backdrops, so at least they have a minute, and Lyme takes the risk and tugs him over to lean against her side. They can't show too much here, but Claudius won his Games on their connection, and a few "leaked" candids of them having a moment won't ruin anything. "I'm fine, just, yeah."
Lyme sighs, and she slides her hand up to grip the back of his neck, hold him steady. "I got a chipmunk," she says in an undertone. It's something they don't talk about but somehow everyone manages to share at some point, usually late at night when the conversation is subdued and memories crowd in at the edges of your vision. "I think they were trying to see if I'd freak out at something so small. But look, these dogs, you don't have to hurt them. You don't even have to pet them, just let them run around and be cute."
"Ridiculous," Claudius reminds her, but he leans back into her touch. "This isn't going to fool anyone."
"I know, I know." Lyme will never forget her post-Arena trip to the orphanage, where she had to sit and get crawled over by children who smeared snot on hr and pulled her hair and hung off her arms like monkeys. Afterward she'd told Nero that if she had to endure a pile of children or another Arena, she'd seriously have to think about it, and he promised no more appearances with kids.
It's a weird game the Capitol plays, constantly balancing the Twos and their all-too-real killer image with awkward attempts at softening them to make them palatable for the cameras in later years. Some, like Odin -- who genuinely loves children in a way Lyme will never, ever understand -- manage to walk the knife's edge of humanizing themselves without becoming a joke, but most of them have to grit their teeth and bear it while explaining how flower arranging really fills their free time now.
It ends up working well in the end; the more the Capitol tries to smooth down their edges, the more incongruous it looks, and so what people remember when Brutus strides into the sponsor den is not that they had him pose with a bunch of five-year-olds who wrote essays to try to meet him, but how big and terrifying he looked in comparison.
"I can do this," Claudius says, running a hand down his face. "One hundred twelve kids have died from mutt attacks. I can sit with a bunch of puppies. It won't kill me."
"And you don't have to kill them," Lyme reminds him, and Claudius lets out a long breath and loosens the tight line of his shoulders. "Even better, the dogs don't care. It's not like kids, where even if they're excited to see you, they know what you did to get here. They're just dogs. They don't even know where they are."
"True." Claudius crouches down and sticks one hand through the enclosure; one of the fuzzy things runs over and licks his fingers, and Claudius flinches first but forces himself to stay.
"Oh, there, look at that," Elianora coos, sashaying into the room. Claudius picks up a puppy and holds it close to his face, which means he must be making an epic expression. "Look at you, making friends already! This is going to be a huge success, I know it!"
Lyme twitches. She knows that next week there will be doctored versions of the photos all over the network, crude knives stuck onto Claudius' hands and the puppies' throats smeared with red, but it's not her call. They want a photo shoot with puppies and that's what they're going to get. It's never over, she told Claudius that first day in the hospital, just like Nero told her, like mentors will tell their victors when all three of them are long dead because that's the way it is.
"This one's kinda cute," Claudius says, lifting up a scruffy thing with one inside-out ear and a lip curled into a permanent sneer. He gives Lyme a thin smile that means it's hard but he's trying, and that's all any of them can ever do. He holds the animal up to his face and doesn't even flinch, and tonight Lyme will make him a batch of brownies and a big bowl of peanut butter and jam oatmeal and spar until he stops shaking for getting through this.
"So precious," Elianora says, clasping her hands. Claudius catches one of the puppies lifting its leg, and he picks it up and sets it down right next to Elianora's jewelled shoe. Lyme coughs and looks the other way.
For
morbane: Thresh and Rue before the Games, district solidarity
The first time Thresh sees the little girl, he hates her so hard it digs into his gut and pulls everything out. Two seconds later the disgust catches up with him and he hates himself twice as much. It's a good thing his resting facial expression is a scowl, what with his face twenty feet high on the screen behind him.
She stands next to him, a quiet, pretty little girl, her head level with his elbow, her eyes big and brown and wide, and the crowd stays silent when their escort calls for applause. They applauded at Thresh's turn, though, of course they did. Big boy like him, strong and hard with eyes that say I hate you because they can whip him for opening his mouth but they can't control everything, he looks like he could win it. He looks like he could murder a handful of other children and bring home enough food to feed the district for an entire year.
But that was before the little girl. Now no one's looking at Thresh. Now he's just another angry kid who might turn out a killer, but he's not a tragedy. Nobody will be sobbing into their popcorn over him when some mutt tears him to pieces. They might throw their betting slips across the room in disgust, but it ain't the same as a little girl with four even littler sisters standing there in the square, clinging to their Mama and crying.
Thresh loses the rest of the speech because the roaring in his brain drowns out everything else. Soon enough it's time to turn and head into the Justice Building, and the only consolation is that they get shuttled into separate rooms. This is bullshit enough without him having to stand there and listen to their messy goodbyes. Maybe if he doesn't have to see it, he won't think about the part where her Mama has four more children to see her through the loss when he's the only one his parents got.
He gets three minutes with them, and they're the longest and shortest three minutes of his life so far. Ma hugs him tight, and Thresh pulls her in close and tries not to think about how thin she feels in his arms. He was a big boy who came out breach, and he damn near killed her once and looks like he's going to do it again. Thresh looks over her shoulder at Pa, and the years might have dulled the blade of Pa's anger to a blunt edge but it's there now in his eyes, anger and despair and hopelessness. Thresh thinks of the first time he came back from the fields with his shirt in tatters and his back all over blood, and how Pa raged and burned but couldn't do nothing, just thanked the overseer for returning him in one piece.
They don't tell him to come back whatever it takes. Saying 'whatever it takes' means he's got to be prepared to do anything to do it and that might mean wrapping his hands around that little girl's throat and pressing down until her big, brown eyes bug out and bruises mar her little neck.
"Do what you can," Ma says instead, and if nothing else her voice is strong. Pa's eyes say what he won't, that if Thresh walked back here with that little girl's blood on his hands Pa would find a way to live with it, but maybe if they don't say it aloud that won't make it real.
In his head, the little girl's smallest sister unwraps a hair ribbon from her pigtails and hands it over, eyes wide and solemn, and her Mama wraps it around her hair and ties it tight. Or maybe she loops it around the little girl's wrist instead, pressed against the pulse point so she can feel it with every heartbeat.
Thresh will have no token because they got nothing to give him. Except that Ma takes his hands and pulls him over to the hard bench -- too short, too thin, nothing ever fits Thresh here -- and sits down beside him, strokes her hand over his forehead and begins to sing.
Funny enough, it's Pa who breaks. He turns his back, and his shoulders shake and he sucks in big, wet breaths while his fists clench, but Ma just keeps singing, her voice never cracking, never hesitating. It's his cradle song, and Thresh has heard it so often that it creeps into his dreams even now, when he's too old to hear it except once a year on his birthday when Ma says she's allowed and he can hush up and stop trying so hard to grow away from her. He turns nineteen in two weeks, and this will be the first year in his memory that she's not there on the side of his bed when it's time for sleep, her voice rich and warm in the hot summer air.
As soon as he steps out of this room, the cameras will be on him, and they won't stop until twenty-three kids are dead and maybe never after. They're probably watching this, too, but the footage from the Justice Building never gets aired and that's good enough to count as the last private moment Thresh will have in his life. This ain't how Thresh planned it, but he leans forward until his forehead rests against Ma's shoulder while she gives him one last gift, the freedom to soak the coarse linen of her dress with nobody watching.
"You take that with you," Ma says when she finishes, and she pulls back and wipes Thresh's eyes with two firm swipes of her thumbs. "We'll be watching. Until --" And now she falters, her face jerking like somebody slapped her, and she tries again. "We'll be watching you," she says finally.
Pa's got himself under control now, and he grips Thresh's shoulder hard enough to hurt and offers his handkerchief so Thresh won't leave the room with snot on his sleeve. "We love you," he says, and Thresh still hasn't said a damn word to either of them. But then the Peacekeeper opens the door and yanks them out, and now it's too late and Thresh never will again.
It's easier after that, standing on the train platform while the crowd in front of him sobs for the little girl, though a few with their eyes on the prize catch Thresh's gaze and raise their fists in preemptive triumph. Thresh stares out without making eye contact with anyone, letting his face harden into the mask he wears when the overseer raises his whip and tells him to walk to the stocks. It's familiar even if the situation isn't, and it carries Thresh through the last of the goodbyes until they're on the train and the doors slide shut behind him.
The little girl sits down in one of the big plush chairs, smoothing her Reaping dress over her skinny knees. Thresh grits his teeth and sits in a chair on the far side of the room, steeling himself for when she asks him to protect her because he can't, he won't. The last thing he wants to do is be in the final two with her. He tries to hold onto the anger that gripped him on stage, that dark, sliding fury and envy and everything else, but she's so small and so young and she's going to die and it won't be Thresh who does it. It won't.
She lets out a breath and this is it, here it comes -- except instead of begging, she looks out the window. "I want you to stay away from me in there," she says, low and quiet and calm. There's a tremor underneath but she holds it steady, and Thresh raises an eyebrow before he can stop himself. "They'll want to see us together but I know what it means in the end. They all do. I don't want that."
Thresh drums one finger against his forearm. "No District 11 solidarity?" The words are bitter on his tongue like the time he was a boy and picked a handful of pretty blue berries before Ma caught him and smacked his head so hard he spat them out. He had a dull headache for days, like an icepick behind his eyes, and it starts up again now.
"Let someone else kill me," she says, a pretty little thing with big brown eyes and soft brown skin saying words like that, and Thresh hates everyone and everything. "That's enough solidarity."
The train lurches forward, and Thresh presses his forehead against the window to watch home disappear behind them until their mentors show up.
For
inthespout: Lyme learns to cook
Smoke stings her eyes and scrapes in her throat. She's in the Arena, running as the wall of flames chases her across the savannah, the low tangle-bushes catching her pants and tearing gashes in her skin (no natural fire could keep going over hard rock and sand with nothing to eat but scrub grass, but this isn't a natural fire now is it). There's metal in her hand and blood on her tongue and later Caesar will tell her that the chase was one of the most exciting moments of her Games, except how does she know that, and why aren't her leg muscles burning, she remembers them burning --
"Hey, little girl." Hands on her shoulders, steering her back, and Lyme follows the voice and the hands up and out because this isn't the Arena. This is her house, and the smoke is from the oven, not the Gamemakers' fire, and the smell of seared flesh is from the steak she tried to cook and not the twisted, screaming body of the girl from District Eight who tripped and fell.
Lyme gasps and opens her eyes. Nero bends and rests their foreheads together, holds the sides of her face in his hands and anchors her until her brain stops skidding and remembers where she is. "And now you know why you cook steak on the top of the stove," Nero says, brushing his thumbs across her cheekbones and slipping on liquid. "Also, if you're gonna roast potatoes you're supposed to cut them first, or at least poke them with a fork. You don't just shove all the shit in a pan and hope for the best."
"Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know that?" Lyme counters, but it helps ground her. "It's not like the Centre had an optional 'gourmet chef' track."
Though it's a good thing to know about potatoes; she wonders if that works in a fire, too, or if it's just the pressure from the oven. If it works with any heat then she could probably get a few potatoes from sponsors without too much trouble. Potatoes are cheaper than weapons, and she could stick them in a fire and use that as a diversion --
No, no, no. No more diversions, no more Arena strategies. She's done, it's over, and Lyme never, ever has to go back there again.
And a lucky thing, too, if the best she can come up with now is homemade potato bombs. It's almost a wonder she won at all.
Nero shifts to keep one hand on the back of her neck as he leans over and opens the kitchen window, then snags a towel and waves the smoke toward the gap. Lyme finally notices the knife in her hand, and it's an ordinary kitchen knife but she's not holding it like one -- she has it flipped around in her fingers, ready to slash through skin and arteries -- and she lets it drop, jerking back. It hits the floor and lies there, blunt and harmless (except not harmless, never harmless, Lyme knows six different ways to kill a man with eating implements alone) and Lyme stares at it, her mind jiggering back and forth until Nero squeezes her neck and calls her back.
"Let's see if there's anything we can save," he says, opening the door, and it's funny to see his giant hand shoved into an even bigger oven mitt as he pulls out the pan and its charred remains.
It's not a person -- it doesn't look like one, and it doesn't smell like one and Lyme knows the difference, she knows the difference -- but Lyme turns and vomits all over the floor anyway.
"Okay," Nero says, crouching down next to her and rubbing her back. "It's okay, breathe, I'll get you some water, but don't worry about the floor." He stands up, and Lyme closes her eyes and focuses on the splash of water from the faucet into the glass because there were no streams or rivers in her Arena and that, at least, won't set her off. He comes back, pushes the glass into her hand and helps her raise it to her mouth. Lyme swishes the water in her cheeks until it turns bitter, then she forces it down and takes another swallow.
Each time Nero says "good girl" like she's a three-year-old, but it's nice to get praise for something that isn't designing a trap to take out three tributes at once, and anyway no one will know. Finally Lyme swallows the last of the water, and it sits uneasy in her stomach but it'll probably stay there. "Okay," Nero says again. "You go sit on the couch while I clean this up, then let's see what we can do about dinner."
Lyme sits on the couch and pulls her knees up to her chest, staring at the fabric that makes up her sweatpants. She drags her thumbnail up and down the tiny Vs until they start to unravel, the strands of yarn pulling apart, then Lyme clicks her tongue in disgust and lets her hands drop.
Nero comes back after a while and drops down beside her, the couch creaking beneath his weight. "So," he says, all fake-casual. "You wanna tell me why you set the kitchen on fire when you've still got people bringing you everything you need?"
Lyme tips her head back until it hits the sofa cushions. It leaves the line of her throat open, practically screaming for a knife or a wire, but Nero's here and that won't happen and Lyme forces herself not to hunch. "I just thought I should learn," she says, and it made more sense in her head. It also felt more important, pressing against the sides of her skull until she thought she'd explode, but in words it just sounds silly, marbles plinking into a ceramic bowl. "I -- wanted to make something, for once, instead of wrecking things. Except I ended up wrecking it anyway."
She doesn't finish the thought because that would push it into melodrama, and that's not Lyme's angle. She's understated, big and brawny but not brutish, she can't be screaming about how she ruins everything she touches.
Nero stays quiet for a minute, then nods. "Well, we can still do that, but maybe let's stick with things we don't have to cook, for now. If we can get our hands on some chocolate, we can whip up some mountain bars. All you have to do with those is leave 'em in the fridge for a while first."
Lyme raises an eyebrow in spite of herself. "That's not dinner, that's dessert."
"My girl here won the Hunger Games," Nero says, blunt, and Lyme might have shoved her crown in the bottom of a drawer underneath her scratchiest wool socks and covered up her tattoo with long sleeves but that doesn't chase away the part where she earned both. "If she wants to have dessert before dinner, she damn well can."
"I knew there was a perk somewhere," Lyme says, and it feels a little like pressing a hot knife to a wound to cauterize it, but the discomfort passes. "Where are we getting the chocolate?"
"I beat Callista the other day at cards and she gave me an IOU," Nero says, standing up, and he reaches down to offer Lyme a hand. "Let's go collect."
He steers her through the side door so they don't have to pass through the kitchen, and Lyme takes a deep breath of the thick summer air, heavy with the smell of pine. She curls her bare feet in the soft, green grass -- nothing like the knifelike blades of razor grass from her Arena -- and follows Nero down the path.