Fluff Prompts Roundup, Part II
This one is less soul-crushing than the last one, but I still don't think it's fluffy. T__T
For
xanify: a pack of fangirls follows Claudius home from a bar
Arena senses never fully fade, and Claudius feels the prickle of warning as he rounds the corner behind the bar. It's not danger, exactly -- Claudius could walk through the worst alleys in the dirtiest parts of town with nothing but his hands and make it out safely -- but that doesn't mean he likes being followed, either. There are dozens of reasons why someone would stalk him, and none of them are good. Worst-case scenario, one of his private comments to Lyme about the Games have reached angry ears, and they've sent someone to tail him. If that's the case, his only hope is to make it to the Village now, because if he disappears with a black bag over his head in a back alley somewhere, Lyme will never find out where he went.
Fortunately he doesn't have more than a second or two to ponder that possibility, because after that comes a fit of giggles, followed by frantic shushing. Claudius slaps a hand against his forehead and pinches the bridge of his nose. Great. This is an entirely different kind of threat, and one that the Centre did a much, much poorer job of preparing him for.
To be fair, anyone who saw Claudius' face staring him in the mirror for the first eighteen years of life would not expect that admirers would ever be a problem. The handsome forerunners used to talk about it during free time, all the pretty girls (or boys, sometimes both) they'd score after their victory; Claudius always rolled his eyes and left, heading for the gym to do a few rounds on the parallel bars or the rings. Even before the Arena, he'd always preferred the burn in his muscles from hard exercise to gossip over the kind of sex he'd have later.
They laughed at him, but they got cut and Claudius got a crown, so ha ha to them.
The girls are still behind him -- Claudius can't identify how many by their footsteps and hushed voices like Misha and her party trick but he makes it around five, maybe -- and he keeps walking until he hits the street. He stops in the orange glow of a streetlight, since they might not be out to kill him but that doesn't mean Claudius wants them cornering him with his back against the wall, either.
"You can come out," Claudius says, and he parks his hip against the lamppost and crosses his arms in what his image trainers decided was appropriately cocky but still inviting. "I won't bite, I promise."
Some of the handsomer Victors might be able to pull off the expected quip about asking permission, but that's never been Claudius' game. The cutesier he tries to be the more awkward he comes off. The good news is that Claudius doesn't need Finnick Odair levels of smooth; he has a sharp face and a sharper smile and that's why people like him. He's not like the pretty ones, where people want to forget the blood and screams. With Claudius they like him because he makes them remember.
None of them are ex-Careers as far as Claudius can tell; they move like civilians, sticking together in a group and inching forward in spurts, like they gain courage for a few seconds only to lose it again. Ex-Careers tend to find Claudius a bit more frightening; either they're his age and they remember him from their days in the Centre together, or they're smart enough to have seen the madness in his eyes when he won and know to take it seriously.
For civilians, talking with Claudius is flirting with danger; it's not fun for ex-Careers because they know better. Two civilians tend to be better than the Capitol, but even these girls followed a notoriously unstable Victor down a dark street without identifying themselves. Sometimes Claudius thinks a year in the Centre should be mandatory for all kids in Two; maybe then they wouldn't have so many dumbasses running around.
The group of girls -- and one boy, in the middle, Claudius supposes he should be flattered that he crosses demographics -- finally gets close enough to talk without it being awkward. "Hi," says one of them, clutching a notebook to her chest. "Hi, sorry, wow, I hope we didn't freak you out or anything back there."
"Not at all," Claudius says, using the lazy drawl that counts as his least intimidating voice. "No offence, but you'd have to try harder than that to sneak up on me."
"Oh, of course," she says, nodding hard enough that she probably just made herself nauseous. Claudius almost wants to tell her to relax and take a deep breath. "Sorry again. I'm Carla, the president of your fan club, it's just really amazing to see you. Is this okay, do you have somewhere to be?"
Claudius knows he has a fan club because the letters arrive from headquarters every month when the Victors get together and have their fanmail-signing party. He doesn't get anywhere near the pile of letters that Enobaria and Brutus get, but he's young and new and memorable enough that he usually beats out Emory and her cohort. At least it means he's not blindsided to meet them in person.
"I'm all yours," Claudius says, and that sends a ripple through the group that makes him bite down on his tongue to stop the laughter. He shouldn't mock, anyway, since as a kid he used to pore over the Victors Monthly he'd steal from other kids because his parents wouldn't get a subscription.
They end up chatting about nothing in particular, and Claudius signs everything they hand him and poses for what feels like an entire Capitol photo shoot's worth of pictures with their camera phones. The one nice thing about Two is that even though Claudius has no idea what they have to be excited over, nobody talks about the Arena. Nobody asks him how it felt to slit little Seven's throat, or if he ever managed to talk with the boy's mother on his Tour, or if he and Nikita really were rivals like the cameras said.
They don't try to touch him, either, which is another five points to District Two. All in all it's not too weird, until near the end when one of the girls -- her name is Melissa and she was sixteen when he won -- starts talking about Lyme. "It's just, I think what you guys have is so beautiful," she says, clutching her magazine so hard it crumples. "For you guys to find each other, it's just -- it's the best thing about the Games. Not just that you won but you got her."
She actually has shiny eyes, and it's funny how Claudius can kill and bleed and cry on camera and think nothing of it, but as soon as some stranger starts talking about how meaningful his relationship with Lyme is, now he wants to run away. It's even more ridiculous considering that they sold it to the cameras in the first place and can't exactly take it back now, but it sticks under his fingernails. Absurdly, Claudius thinks of being fifteen, the first time they dragged him into the white room and told him to strip down to nothing with a whole group of trainers staring at him.
"Uh, thanks," he says finally, and he turns on a smile far more easygoing and charming than anything the Centre would ever have recommended for him. "Look, this is great, but I've gotta go, so you girls have a good night."
It's funny, but Claudius just left the bar and already he feels like he needs another drink to settle his head. He pulls out his phone and texts Lyme, asking her if it's okay to stay up for a while and share a bottle.
Something happen? she replies immediately.
uh sort of? Claudius texts back. fangirls. think theyre attracted to my stoicism. sure aint my nose. they wanted to talk about how touching you and me are and stuff but i ran away
A pause, then Lyme sends, hahahahahahahahha awww and after that, Poor D, breaking hearts. Come back, I'll break out the good stuff.
He's halfway back to the village when his phone buzzes again, this time with a group message from Lyme to him and Brutus.
Hey caveman, D got attacked by a group of hungry fangirls today. Any advice?
His phone stays silent for a minute, then finally Brutus says, TIME TO RUIN
Claudius raises an eyebrow. they werent that bad
After a minute and Lyme's the fuck?! Brutus finally types, RUN. RUN I SAID RUN. DUCK THIS DUCKING PHONE ITS TIO DMAN SMAK;L..1!!
Claudius snickers all the way back to the Village. He's not surprised to see Brutus at Lyme's when he gets there, the two of them trading insults as they lob the stopper to Lyme's bourbon at each other's heads.
"There's Mr. Popular," Lyme says, and Claudius snorts and throws his phone at her before dropping onto the couch and letting her tug him down against her side. "Tell us all about it."
"Yeah, I've got my tissues all ready in case you two are so touching you make me wanna cry," Brutus says, teeth sharp in a grin, and Claudius laughs.
For
herosquad: Claudius & Clove bonding (C&C win the 74th AU)
Claudius wakes up to see Clove sitting on his bed, twirling a knife between her fingers. The good news is it's been long enough since his Games that the combat-reflexes have faded a little, and now instead of jumping and screaming or whatever it was she hoped for, Claudius just closes his eyes again.
"Gonna need more than that to freak me out, kiddo," Claudius drawls, but he's on alert now, senses stretched out and testing the distribution of Clove's weight on the bed, the movement of the air, and he catches her hand before blade touches his throat. He still doesn't open his eyes. "Seriously, go back to bed, what are you doing?"
"I could put a dead bunny in the bed," Clove says conversationally. "Would that work?"
Funny thing is, she actually sounds curious.
Claudius finally cracks one eyelid, and man he knows that it's never helpful to contrast two Victors and their recovery because everyone's situation is different, but he swears he was not this difficult for Lyme. "No," he says with exaggerated patience. "I could take a shit in yours, doesn't mean anything. That's not scary, it's just gross."
"Hm," Clove says, frowning, and she slides off the bed. "You're boring."
After a lifetime of training to murder a bunch of kids and have their lives and loved ones murdered by the President if they step out of line, you'd think Clove might share Claudius' appreciation for finally getting to be boring. "My favourite food is oatmeal, what tipped you off?" Claudius snarks. He's clearly not going back to bed, and so he pulls himself up onto his elbows and studies her.
She's wearing shorts with a shirt so enormous it has to be Cato's, her hair pulled up into the pigtails that make her look like a killer doll. Her finger twitch at her sides, and she keeps flicking a knife into her hands and making it disappear again.
It's been six weeks since the Arena. Claudius recognizes the urge. "You should talk to Brutus if you're feeling edgy," Claudius says. He's not going to be the Enobaria to her Claudius if she decides she wants to pull the same trick he did and fight someone crazy to get a taste of the Arena back.
Clove's frustrated expression darkens into a full frown. "I don't want to. He's not scared of anything, I tried."
Claudius raises an eyebrow. "And so you thought you'd try me?"
She shrugs. "He said to leave Petra alone."
Claudius tries to imagine the mentor meltdown that would occur in Brutus' brain if his newest Victor tried to hurt his previous one because she's feeling the Games-itch. It's not a pretty thought. "Look, if you want to fight or something, ask Brutus, and if he says yes we can, but I don't think he meant you should crawl into my bed and try to knife me."
Clove huffs out a hard breath through her nose, and the knife disappears so she can cross her arms, fingers digging into her arms. She's small, tiniest Volunteer that Two has sent to the Games, as far as Claudius knows, and she lost a lot of weight in the Arena like they all did, but she's solid like any of them. Solid and filled with a killing urge developed for over a decade and now told it has nowhere to go because she has to be a respectable citizen.
Claudius gets it, he does, but he's not a mentor and he should probably be phoning Brutus right now. Except that Clove's expression spasms like someone hit her, and she says, "I can't spar with Cato anymore." Her mouth goes hard, but her eyes flicker, and there's a desperation in her voice that only ever made it on cameras near the end. "We used to. But now it's -- weird."
Fuck. There should be a flare he can send up in moments like this, to let Brutus know Claudius is in over his head. But his phone is on the dresser and Clove will know if he goes for it, so Claudius swallows the fear that he'll somehow screw this up and Clove will slit her wrists right in front of him. "You thought you'd have to kill him for months," Claudius says. Lyme always told him that the first part of helping someone is to repeat the facts, so they know you're listening. "You guys were in the Arena for two weeks before that rule change. It's going to be weird."
It also makes sense why she can't talk to Brutus until she squares some of it away, not when he spent those months crafting all the ways to play it so Cato came home in a box instead of her.
His first thought is to pass this off to Lyme, but Clove can't exactly go to her when Lyme was doing the same thing for Cato in reverse. The countdown clock in Claudius' head starts ticking. Clove has a wildness in her eyes that Claudius recognizes from his own post-Arena haze, once the meds started to taper a little bit and the craziness returned alongside the increased bouts of lucidity. He checks her wrists out of habit, and they're clean but the backs of her forearms aren't. They're scored with pale, healing cuts that come not from wanting to cause pain or damage but the desire to see blood.
"Shit," Claudius mutters under his breath, but he can't call Brutus and he can't call Lyme and he's running out of time. "Okay, give me the knife," he says.
"Fuck you," Clove says immediately, her posture bristling.
"I'm not confiscating it." Claudius holds out his hand. "I'm going to do something that's going to get me grounded from now until the end of time. Lyme's going to find out and kick my ass, and then she's going to call Brutus and he's going to kick my ass, and in exchange this means you have to go talk to Brutus about this after. Okay?"
Clove gives him a skeptical look, her mouth twisted in disbelief, but she hands over a different blade than the one he saw earlier. "I don't like this one," she says simply. "So it won't matter if you get your germs on it."
"Thanks." Claudius takes a deep breath, flips the tiny weapon over in his hand, and drags the edge of the blade down his palm, wrinkling his nose at the sharp sting. A line of scarlet blooms on his skin, and Claudius tips his hand sideways so the blood beads up and trickles downward, catching it before it drips off onto the quilt. Clove sucks in a breath, and she takes half a step forward. "Don't make more," Claudius warns her, and he moves his hand until it's within her reach.
Clove slips her fingertips into the blood, rubbing her thumb across her fingers and smearing red into the crevices of her nails. "I used to make Cato bleed all the time," she says, her voice faraway. "But now I can't. If I put a knife near him --" she snaps back, and she looks at Claudius with wide eyes. "I can't cut him anymore."
"He probably doesn't want to choke you anymore either," Claudius says, hazarding a guess, and Clove shakes her head. "Yeah. Welcome to life after the Arena. Look, I'm sure Brutus has told you, but we all die in there, even if we win. The people who walk out aren't the ones who go in." Clove flinches, and so Claudius makes another slice down the pad of his thumb and lets her wipe the blood off onto her fingers before smearing it across her cheeks, closing her eyes. "We all have to figure out who we are once the trumpets go off, that's one of the things that sucks about winning, but it's good too. And the good news is, you two get figure it out together. So you can't cut him anymore, and he can't pin you down. You'll find something else."
Clove doesn't say anything, just stands there staring at the blood caked under her fingernails, and Claudius sighs. "Talk to Brutus about the blood thing. I promise you, whatever you say, it won't be the craziest thing he's ever heard." Clove scowls, and Claudius shoves his bloodied hand in her face. "You promised. You gave me your knife, that's as good as swearing, so let's go and get the ass-kicking over with."
Finally Clove blinks and comes back to herself. "Cato's house," she says, and there's a shiver of fear in her voice now. "He's been alone too long."
Not a lot of the other Victors like Cato and Clove. They broke the rules and they nearly brought the President down on the whole Village, and Snow only knows what kind of repayment he'll demand from Two in exchange for this oh-so-generous favour. Chances are Cato and Clove will be finding it out themselves pretty quick, but any tributes Brutus and Lyme take after this will be going in with mentors far short of favours to call, and maybe the other mentors, too.
Claudius can't pretend he didn't feel the burn of jealousy when the two stumbled into the Village, wrapped around each other. But unlike the other Victors who earned their win without bending the rules, Claudius is here because Lyme threw convention into the fire to get him out. They're too involved with each other to let anyone in and too far down the victor roster for them and Claudius to be friends, but he understands the resentment that comes from being given an exception that will never happen again.
"Cato's house," he agrees, standing up and not bothering to swap out his sweats for anything more decent.
"I want my knife back," Clove says on the way downstairs, and Claudius hands it to her.
"If you want to keep your hand in with throwing," Claudius says, toeing on his shoes by the door, "I could use the practice dodging. We can ask Brutus after he rips my head off and reattaches it up my ass."
Clove doesn't laugh, just gives him a blank stare -- no one can make her laugh except Cato, who threw her over his shoulder and threatened to toss her in the lake while she screamed fuck you fucking motherfucker and pounded his back -- and Claudius gives up. He wipes his palm on his pants before he remembers why it was wet, and only just stops himself from smacking his forehead with the same hand.
Brutus answers the door in his workout gear, and Claudius sucks it up and tells him what happened. Brutus, predictably, looks at Claudius like he's imagining pulling all his arteries out through his nose and playing jump rope with his intestines, but he puts a massive arm around Clove as they make their way back to Cato's house. Cato's awake and sitting on the porch, bleary and nervous, and he drapes himself over Clove's shoulders and nuzzles her hair in relief.
"Go find your handler," Brutus snaps at Claudius, who raises his hands in surrender and takes off toward the east corner of the Village.
He doesn't even try to hide it when he knocks on Lyme's door. She takes one look at Claudius, the blood smears on his pants and up his arm, and lets out a long breath as she listens to his explanation. "I think Cato might need you," Claudius says when he finishes, and wow that is a weird thing to think and be okay with, instead of jealously hoarding every second of Lyme's time. "Clove left him alone to come see me, not for long but he was awake before we got back." He smiles a little, not trying all the way for humour but to cut some of the tension building up like a cloud of poison gas. "If you tell me my punishment I can get on that while you're gone."
"I'm gonna tell Brutus to control his Games-damned kid is what I'm gonna do," Lyme says, somewhere between exasperation and a snarl. "You shouldn't have had to deal with that, you're not trained. Go home, wash your hand, I'll swing by once I'm sure Cato's all right."
Claudius swallows the relief. "Do you think they'll be okay?"
Lyme winces. She looks tired, and it strikes Claudius that just like after Prosper died, she's letting him see it. Times change. "They'll be okay," she says finally. Claudius recognizes the kind of confidence that comes from hoping that a fact repeated becomes a fact believe. "Seriously, D, calm down. You did fine."
"I told her I'd let her throw knives at me if Brutus said yes," Claudius says as an afterthought, turning on his way down the porch steps. "I forgot to mention that. Or maybe I was afraid he'd use me for target practice right there if I didn't leave fast, and spears are a lot bigger than daggers."
Lyme's mouth twitches. "I'll bring it up," she says, and she shuts the door and sprints off toward Cato's house.
Five days later, Claudius wakes up with a start when a knife hits his window frame. He heaves up the sash and looks down, and there's Clove on the lawn holding a sleeve full of knives, while Cato has brought half a house's worth of blankets and made a nest in Claudius' backyard.
"You coming or what," Clove calls.
What the hell has he gotten himself into, Claudius wonders, but he gives her a thumbs up. "Getting dressed, be down in a second," he says.
Cato mumbles something, and Clove rolls her eyes at him before turning her face back up. "Bring chocolate if you have any, Cato forgot his and the house is too far."
Claudius grabs a bar from his bedside stash and throws it; Clove catches it one-handed and tosses it down to Cato, who snakes out one arm, snags the chocolate, and drags it back, amoeba-like, into his nest.
"Welcome to another day in the Village," Claudius mutters to himself, and roots around in his dresser for his workout gear.
For
marble_sharp: Lyme during the war
"Mandatory broadcast coming in," says one of the techs, poking his head inside the door. "Signal is originating from the Victors' Village in District Two."
Lyme's blood freezes in her veins, and her hand immediately moves to cover the bare patch of skin on her wrist. (She'd thought, when they burned her tattoo off, that they'd give her the communicator cuff to cover it, but they assigned her one for the left wrist. They really do think of everything.)
Coin picks up a sheaf of papers and straightens them against the edge of the desk with a few hard taps; Lyme learned to hate that officious, self-important gesture her second day here. "Well, well," the commander says in a brisk voice. "Since the President thinks it's so important for us all to hear what his lapdogs have to say, we may as well oblige." She turns to Lyme, the unnerving, cool gaze sending a shudder down her spine. "You said you left nothing behind, no messages?"
"No," Lyme says, straightening her shoulders. The crisp grey uniform scratches the back of her neck. "I had no time, and I didn't want to implicate anyone else in case I got caught before I reached safety."
"Hm," Coin says, lifting the remote and turning on the television just in time for the spinning Panem seal to disappear.
Once when she was fourteen, Lyme talked back to a trainer and had to stand in the main practice room with a stack of weights piled on her arms for the entire afternoon. By the end her arms were jelly and her legs nearly collapsed underneath her, but she made it out standing. She's grateful for it now, for the strength and muscle memory that keeps her upright when her mentor's face appears on the screen.
Lyme grips the edge of the table until her knuckles whiten, but no one turns to look at her. None of the other Victor-traitors are in the room with her (rebels, Lyme reminds herself, they're rebels and she's a renegade, but she can't rinse the taste of the word traitor from her mind) and maybe the others don't know. Why would anyone in Thirteen know or care who mentored Lyme twenty years ago? Nero is the same as any other Two to them; as far as they know, he was chosen because he's the biggest and most formidable of them now that Brutus is --
-- her mind slams down on that before she can make a sound that would embarrass herself and amuse everyone else.
"People of District Two," Nero says, looking straight at the camera and into Lyme's soul. "Citizens of Panem, my brothers and sisters. I'm here because our country is under attack. We are under attack by our own people, people who would rather see this nation and its innocents burn than live in peace."
It's not his words, not his natural cadence, even though he sells it because he's a Career and a Victor and he's the best, but this isn't Nero's speech. It has Capitol written all over it; they've tried to imitate District Two's calm grandeur and steady strength, but it's overblown and overwrought. Nero would never back into a statement like this; he's short and to the point, like the best of them.
Lyme will not wonder what they're holding over him to make him give this statement. One of the soldiers snorts and rolls her eyes. "Peace," she scoffs. "Sure, buddy, okay."
"I urge you, in this time of chaos and fear, to stand your ground. Remember that the roots of Two run deep, and that whatever happens around us, we will not be moved." Nero raises his head. "Trust the Capitol. Trust the government that has kept us safe these past seventy-five years. Do not listen to those who tear down with no plan to rebuild. These so-called 'rebels' would take away our safety, our livelihood, and leave us with nothing. Don't be fooled."
Lyme's gaze flicks to Coin, who regards the screen with her usual impassive stare. If she has a plan for the reconstruction, she hasn't mentioned it to Lyme, but it's only been a handful of days. Hopefully Lyme will hear what it is soon. And even if not, even if their only plan is to tear down Snow and his government and start anew from the ashes, that's still better than what they have now.
It could be worse. It helps to hear Nero parroting the Capitol byline, even if she aches to see him like this and know how he must have felt when she left without saying goodbye, but it's nothing that anyone else hasn't said before.
Except that Nero's gaze sharpens, and Lyme's eyes widen because there's pain in the clench of his jaw and the tightening of his eyes. Whatever they made him say before, what's coming next is real. She knows all of Nero's tells, and this is what's important.
"To those who have already turned away, remember this. You made your choice. The Capitol may be merciful, but District Two is not. Turn your back on your people and you turn your back forever. You turn your back on your Victors, who fought and bled for you so your children may always be safe. You spit in the face of everything that we hold dear; you make the sacrifice of every child who died in the Hunger Games mean nothing. If, however, it's not too late -- if you doubt but haven't made your choice -- remember that once you leave, there is no coming back. A Two's loyalty is paramount; it is written into our very history, from the Dark Days and beyond. To forfeit that means to forfeit everything we are."
A ringing sound fills Lyme's ears, and for a moment she's eighteen and stunned again as the first three tributes leapt from their platforms and straight into the maze of land mines surrounding the Cornucopia. Nero keeps talking but she registers none of it, and she digs her fingers into her wrist until her nails bite through the skin and draw blood. Her vision tunnels, her breath harsh and heavy in her chest, and now they're starting to look at her. One by one they turn to gauge her reactions, and Lyme aced all her acting tests but now she can't even remember how to open her mouth.
Finally the broadcast ends, and Coin switches it off. "Well, there we have it," she says, shaking her head. "So much for your family. Now, at least, you see you made the right choice by coming here." Her slush-coloured eyes stick Lyme through the chest. "They only loved you so long as you obeyed them."
(Nero kneeling next to her as she heaves her guts into the toilet, hands stroking her hair and rubbing her back. Holding her when the nightmares come -- not just the bodies and the blood and the smell of burning flesh but her father, standing over her and snapping the belt in his hands -- and driving them away with his voice. Scrubbing the blood from her fingernails after she dragged them down her forearm over and over and over, bandaging the scratches and kissing her forehead when she cried in shame.)
Lyme stands up, the chair legs scraping against the floor before the whole thing tips over backwards. "I have to go," she says, her tongue thick and heavy in her mouth. "I'll have those figures on Capitol personnel in Two for you by the end of the day."
"Very well," Coin says, and it takes every last drop of control Lyme has not to run for the door.
She turns the corner and slams into Claudius, who must have sprinted full-tilt through the hallways to get there that fast, evidently knocking into people on the way, based on the dirty looks being shot their way. His face is white, eyes red. "Boss," he says, gripping her arms. "I saw. You okay?"
Lyme nods, blinking back the burning behind her eyes. He doesn't know it, but Claudius' presence gives her strength, reminds her why she's here. He's her victor and he trusted her enough to follow; this was the right choice. It has to be. "Yeah," she says, prying his fingers from her sleeves and squeezing his hands before letting him go. "They'll turn with us soon. We just have to show them there's another way."
Claudius runs a hand through his hair, newly chopped short in proper District Thirteen fashion, and grimaces when his fingers hit air too soon. "Okay," he says, letting out a breath, and he gives her a smile that's not quite genuine, but trying. "Let's save the world."
Lyme touches her fist to her chest in the Two gesture of solidarity and tries not to think of the betrayal in Nero's eyes.
For
xanify: a pack of fangirls follows Claudius home from a bar
Arena senses never fully fade, and Claudius feels the prickle of warning as he rounds the corner behind the bar. It's not danger, exactly -- Claudius could walk through the worst alleys in the dirtiest parts of town with nothing but his hands and make it out safely -- but that doesn't mean he likes being followed, either. There are dozens of reasons why someone would stalk him, and none of them are good. Worst-case scenario, one of his private comments to Lyme about the Games have reached angry ears, and they've sent someone to tail him. If that's the case, his only hope is to make it to the Village now, because if he disappears with a black bag over his head in a back alley somewhere, Lyme will never find out where he went.
Fortunately he doesn't have more than a second or two to ponder that possibility, because after that comes a fit of giggles, followed by frantic shushing. Claudius slaps a hand against his forehead and pinches the bridge of his nose. Great. This is an entirely different kind of threat, and one that the Centre did a much, much poorer job of preparing him for.
To be fair, anyone who saw Claudius' face staring him in the mirror for the first eighteen years of life would not expect that admirers would ever be a problem. The handsome forerunners used to talk about it during free time, all the pretty girls (or boys, sometimes both) they'd score after their victory; Claudius always rolled his eyes and left, heading for the gym to do a few rounds on the parallel bars or the rings. Even before the Arena, he'd always preferred the burn in his muscles from hard exercise to gossip over the kind of sex he'd have later.
They laughed at him, but they got cut and Claudius got a crown, so ha ha to them.
The girls are still behind him -- Claudius can't identify how many by their footsteps and hushed voices like Misha and her party trick but he makes it around five, maybe -- and he keeps walking until he hits the street. He stops in the orange glow of a streetlight, since they might not be out to kill him but that doesn't mean Claudius wants them cornering him with his back against the wall, either.
"You can come out," Claudius says, and he parks his hip against the lamppost and crosses his arms in what his image trainers decided was appropriately cocky but still inviting. "I won't bite, I promise."
Some of the handsomer Victors might be able to pull off the expected quip about asking permission, but that's never been Claudius' game. The cutesier he tries to be the more awkward he comes off. The good news is that Claudius doesn't need Finnick Odair levels of smooth; he has a sharp face and a sharper smile and that's why people like him. He's not like the pretty ones, where people want to forget the blood and screams. With Claudius they like him because he makes them remember.
None of them are ex-Careers as far as Claudius can tell; they move like civilians, sticking together in a group and inching forward in spurts, like they gain courage for a few seconds only to lose it again. Ex-Careers tend to find Claudius a bit more frightening; either they're his age and they remember him from their days in the Centre together, or they're smart enough to have seen the madness in his eyes when he won and know to take it seriously.
For civilians, talking with Claudius is flirting with danger; it's not fun for ex-Careers because they know better. Two civilians tend to be better than the Capitol, but even these girls followed a notoriously unstable Victor down a dark street without identifying themselves. Sometimes Claudius thinks a year in the Centre should be mandatory for all kids in Two; maybe then they wouldn't have so many dumbasses running around.
The group of girls -- and one boy, in the middle, Claudius supposes he should be flattered that he crosses demographics -- finally gets close enough to talk without it being awkward. "Hi," says one of them, clutching a notebook to her chest. "Hi, sorry, wow, I hope we didn't freak you out or anything back there."
"Not at all," Claudius says, using the lazy drawl that counts as his least intimidating voice. "No offence, but you'd have to try harder than that to sneak up on me."
"Oh, of course," she says, nodding hard enough that she probably just made herself nauseous. Claudius almost wants to tell her to relax and take a deep breath. "Sorry again. I'm Carla, the president of your fan club, it's just really amazing to see you. Is this okay, do you have somewhere to be?"
Claudius knows he has a fan club because the letters arrive from headquarters every month when the Victors get together and have their fanmail-signing party. He doesn't get anywhere near the pile of letters that Enobaria and Brutus get, but he's young and new and memorable enough that he usually beats out Emory and her cohort. At least it means he's not blindsided to meet them in person.
"I'm all yours," Claudius says, and that sends a ripple through the group that makes him bite down on his tongue to stop the laughter. He shouldn't mock, anyway, since as a kid he used to pore over the Victors Monthly he'd steal from other kids because his parents wouldn't get a subscription.
They end up chatting about nothing in particular, and Claudius signs everything they hand him and poses for what feels like an entire Capitol photo shoot's worth of pictures with their camera phones. The one nice thing about Two is that even though Claudius has no idea what they have to be excited over, nobody talks about the Arena. Nobody asks him how it felt to slit little Seven's throat, or if he ever managed to talk with the boy's mother on his Tour, or if he and Nikita really were rivals like the cameras said.
They don't try to touch him, either, which is another five points to District Two. All in all it's not too weird, until near the end when one of the girls -- her name is Melissa and she was sixteen when he won -- starts talking about Lyme. "It's just, I think what you guys have is so beautiful," she says, clutching her magazine so hard it crumples. "For you guys to find each other, it's just -- it's the best thing about the Games. Not just that you won but you got her."
She actually has shiny eyes, and it's funny how Claudius can kill and bleed and cry on camera and think nothing of it, but as soon as some stranger starts talking about how meaningful his relationship with Lyme is, now he wants to run away. It's even more ridiculous considering that they sold it to the cameras in the first place and can't exactly take it back now, but it sticks under his fingernails. Absurdly, Claudius thinks of being fifteen, the first time they dragged him into the white room and told him to strip down to nothing with a whole group of trainers staring at him.
"Uh, thanks," he says finally, and he turns on a smile far more easygoing and charming than anything the Centre would ever have recommended for him. "Look, this is great, but I've gotta go, so you girls have a good night."
It's funny, but Claudius just left the bar and already he feels like he needs another drink to settle his head. He pulls out his phone and texts Lyme, asking her if it's okay to stay up for a while and share a bottle.
Something happen? she replies immediately.
uh sort of? Claudius texts back. fangirls. think theyre attracted to my stoicism. sure aint my nose. they wanted to talk about how touching you and me are and stuff but i ran away
A pause, then Lyme sends, hahahahahahahahha awww and after that, Poor D, breaking hearts. Come back, I'll break out the good stuff.
He's halfway back to the village when his phone buzzes again, this time with a group message from Lyme to him and Brutus.
Hey caveman, D got attacked by a group of hungry fangirls today. Any advice?
His phone stays silent for a minute, then finally Brutus says, TIME TO RUIN
Claudius raises an eyebrow. they werent that bad
After a minute and Lyme's the fuck?! Brutus finally types, RUN. RUN I SAID RUN. DUCK THIS DUCKING PHONE ITS TIO DMAN SMAK;L..1!!
Claudius snickers all the way back to the Village. He's not surprised to see Brutus at Lyme's when he gets there, the two of them trading insults as they lob the stopper to Lyme's bourbon at each other's heads.
"There's Mr. Popular," Lyme says, and Claudius snorts and throws his phone at her before dropping onto the couch and letting her tug him down against her side. "Tell us all about it."
"Yeah, I've got my tissues all ready in case you two are so touching you make me wanna cry," Brutus says, teeth sharp in a grin, and Claudius laughs.
For
herosquad: Claudius & Clove bonding (C&C win the 74th AU)
Claudius wakes up to see Clove sitting on his bed, twirling a knife between her fingers. The good news is it's been long enough since his Games that the combat-reflexes have faded a little, and now instead of jumping and screaming or whatever it was she hoped for, Claudius just closes his eyes again.
"Gonna need more than that to freak me out, kiddo," Claudius drawls, but he's on alert now, senses stretched out and testing the distribution of Clove's weight on the bed, the movement of the air, and he catches her hand before blade touches his throat. He still doesn't open his eyes. "Seriously, go back to bed, what are you doing?"
"I could put a dead bunny in the bed," Clove says conversationally. "Would that work?"
Funny thing is, she actually sounds curious.
Claudius finally cracks one eyelid, and man he knows that it's never helpful to contrast two Victors and their recovery because everyone's situation is different, but he swears he was not this difficult for Lyme. "No," he says with exaggerated patience. "I could take a shit in yours, doesn't mean anything. That's not scary, it's just gross."
"Hm," Clove says, frowning, and she slides off the bed. "You're boring."
After a lifetime of training to murder a bunch of kids and have their lives and loved ones murdered by the President if they step out of line, you'd think Clove might share Claudius' appreciation for finally getting to be boring. "My favourite food is oatmeal, what tipped you off?" Claudius snarks. He's clearly not going back to bed, and so he pulls himself up onto his elbows and studies her.
She's wearing shorts with a shirt so enormous it has to be Cato's, her hair pulled up into the pigtails that make her look like a killer doll. Her finger twitch at her sides, and she keeps flicking a knife into her hands and making it disappear again.
It's been six weeks since the Arena. Claudius recognizes the urge. "You should talk to Brutus if you're feeling edgy," Claudius says. He's not going to be the Enobaria to her Claudius if she decides she wants to pull the same trick he did and fight someone crazy to get a taste of the Arena back.
Clove's frustrated expression darkens into a full frown. "I don't want to. He's not scared of anything, I tried."
Claudius raises an eyebrow. "And so you thought you'd try me?"
She shrugs. "He said to leave Petra alone."
Claudius tries to imagine the mentor meltdown that would occur in Brutus' brain if his newest Victor tried to hurt his previous one because she's feeling the Games-itch. It's not a pretty thought. "Look, if you want to fight or something, ask Brutus, and if he says yes we can, but I don't think he meant you should crawl into my bed and try to knife me."
Clove huffs out a hard breath through her nose, and the knife disappears so she can cross her arms, fingers digging into her arms. She's small, tiniest Volunteer that Two has sent to the Games, as far as Claudius knows, and she lost a lot of weight in the Arena like they all did, but she's solid like any of them. Solid and filled with a killing urge developed for over a decade and now told it has nowhere to go because she has to be a respectable citizen.
Claudius gets it, he does, but he's not a mentor and he should probably be phoning Brutus right now. Except that Clove's expression spasms like someone hit her, and she says, "I can't spar with Cato anymore." Her mouth goes hard, but her eyes flicker, and there's a desperation in her voice that only ever made it on cameras near the end. "We used to. But now it's -- weird."
Fuck. There should be a flare he can send up in moments like this, to let Brutus know Claudius is in over his head. But his phone is on the dresser and Clove will know if he goes for it, so Claudius swallows the fear that he'll somehow screw this up and Clove will slit her wrists right in front of him. "You thought you'd have to kill him for months," Claudius says. Lyme always told him that the first part of helping someone is to repeat the facts, so they know you're listening. "You guys were in the Arena for two weeks before that rule change. It's going to be weird."
It also makes sense why she can't talk to Brutus until she squares some of it away, not when he spent those months crafting all the ways to play it so Cato came home in a box instead of her.
His first thought is to pass this off to Lyme, but Clove can't exactly go to her when Lyme was doing the same thing for Cato in reverse. The countdown clock in Claudius' head starts ticking. Clove has a wildness in her eyes that Claudius recognizes from his own post-Arena haze, once the meds started to taper a little bit and the craziness returned alongside the increased bouts of lucidity. He checks her wrists out of habit, and they're clean but the backs of her forearms aren't. They're scored with pale, healing cuts that come not from wanting to cause pain or damage but the desire to see blood.
"Shit," Claudius mutters under his breath, but he can't call Brutus and he can't call Lyme and he's running out of time. "Okay, give me the knife," he says.
"Fuck you," Clove says immediately, her posture bristling.
"I'm not confiscating it." Claudius holds out his hand. "I'm going to do something that's going to get me grounded from now until the end of time. Lyme's going to find out and kick my ass, and then she's going to call Brutus and he's going to kick my ass, and in exchange this means you have to go talk to Brutus about this after. Okay?"
Clove gives him a skeptical look, her mouth twisted in disbelief, but she hands over a different blade than the one he saw earlier. "I don't like this one," she says simply. "So it won't matter if you get your germs on it."
"Thanks." Claudius takes a deep breath, flips the tiny weapon over in his hand, and drags the edge of the blade down his palm, wrinkling his nose at the sharp sting. A line of scarlet blooms on his skin, and Claudius tips his hand sideways so the blood beads up and trickles downward, catching it before it drips off onto the quilt. Clove sucks in a breath, and she takes half a step forward. "Don't make more," Claudius warns her, and he moves his hand until it's within her reach.
Clove slips her fingertips into the blood, rubbing her thumb across her fingers and smearing red into the crevices of her nails. "I used to make Cato bleed all the time," she says, her voice faraway. "But now I can't. If I put a knife near him --" she snaps back, and she looks at Claudius with wide eyes. "I can't cut him anymore."
"He probably doesn't want to choke you anymore either," Claudius says, hazarding a guess, and Clove shakes her head. "Yeah. Welcome to life after the Arena. Look, I'm sure Brutus has told you, but we all die in there, even if we win. The people who walk out aren't the ones who go in." Clove flinches, and so Claudius makes another slice down the pad of his thumb and lets her wipe the blood off onto her fingers before smearing it across her cheeks, closing her eyes. "We all have to figure out who we are once the trumpets go off, that's one of the things that sucks about winning, but it's good too. And the good news is, you two get figure it out together. So you can't cut him anymore, and he can't pin you down. You'll find something else."
Clove doesn't say anything, just stands there staring at the blood caked under her fingernails, and Claudius sighs. "Talk to Brutus about the blood thing. I promise you, whatever you say, it won't be the craziest thing he's ever heard." Clove scowls, and Claudius shoves his bloodied hand in her face. "You promised. You gave me your knife, that's as good as swearing, so let's go and get the ass-kicking over with."
Finally Clove blinks and comes back to herself. "Cato's house," she says, and there's a shiver of fear in her voice now. "He's been alone too long."
Not a lot of the other Victors like Cato and Clove. They broke the rules and they nearly brought the President down on the whole Village, and Snow only knows what kind of repayment he'll demand from Two in exchange for this oh-so-generous favour. Chances are Cato and Clove will be finding it out themselves pretty quick, but any tributes Brutus and Lyme take after this will be going in with mentors far short of favours to call, and maybe the other mentors, too.
Claudius can't pretend he didn't feel the burn of jealousy when the two stumbled into the Village, wrapped around each other. But unlike the other Victors who earned their win without bending the rules, Claudius is here because Lyme threw convention into the fire to get him out. They're too involved with each other to let anyone in and too far down the victor roster for them and Claudius to be friends, but he understands the resentment that comes from being given an exception that will never happen again.
"Cato's house," he agrees, standing up and not bothering to swap out his sweats for anything more decent.
"I want my knife back," Clove says on the way downstairs, and Claudius hands it to her.
"If you want to keep your hand in with throwing," Claudius says, toeing on his shoes by the door, "I could use the practice dodging. We can ask Brutus after he rips my head off and reattaches it up my ass."
Clove doesn't laugh, just gives him a blank stare -- no one can make her laugh except Cato, who threw her over his shoulder and threatened to toss her in the lake while she screamed fuck you fucking motherfucker and pounded his back -- and Claudius gives up. He wipes his palm on his pants before he remembers why it was wet, and only just stops himself from smacking his forehead with the same hand.
Brutus answers the door in his workout gear, and Claudius sucks it up and tells him what happened. Brutus, predictably, looks at Claudius like he's imagining pulling all his arteries out through his nose and playing jump rope with his intestines, but he puts a massive arm around Clove as they make their way back to Cato's house. Cato's awake and sitting on the porch, bleary and nervous, and he drapes himself over Clove's shoulders and nuzzles her hair in relief.
"Go find your handler," Brutus snaps at Claudius, who raises his hands in surrender and takes off toward the east corner of the Village.
He doesn't even try to hide it when he knocks on Lyme's door. She takes one look at Claudius, the blood smears on his pants and up his arm, and lets out a long breath as she listens to his explanation. "I think Cato might need you," Claudius says when he finishes, and wow that is a weird thing to think and be okay with, instead of jealously hoarding every second of Lyme's time. "Clove left him alone to come see me, not for long but he was awake before we got back." He smiles a little, not trying all the way for humour but to cut some of the tension building up like a cloud of poison gas. "If you tell me my punishment I can get on that while you're gone."
"I'm gonna tell Brutus to control his Games-damned kid is what I'm gonna do," Lyme says, somewhere between exasperation and a snarl. "You shouldn't have had to deal with that, you're not trained. Go home, wash your hand, I'll swing by once I'm sure Cato's all right."
Claudius swallows the relief. "Do you think they'll be okay?"
Lyme winces. She looks tired, and it strikes Claudius that just like after Prosper died, she's letting him see it. Times change. "They'll be okay," she says finally. Claudius recognizes the kind of confidence that comes from hoping that a fact repeated becomes a fact believe. "Seriously, D, calm down. You did fine."
"I told her I'd let her throw knives at me if Brutus said yes," Claudius says as an afterthought, turning on his way down the porch steps. "I forgot to mention that. Or maybe I was afraid he'd use me for target practice right there if I didn't leave fast, and spears are a lot bigger than daggers."
Lyme's mouth twitches. "I'll bring it up," she says, and she shuts the door and sprints off toward Cato's house.
Five days later, Claudius wakes up with a start when a knife hits his window frame. He heaves up the sash and looks down, and there's Clove on the lawn holding a sleeve full of knives, while Cato has brought half a house's worth of blankets and made a nest in Claudius' backyard.
"You coming or what," Clove calls.
What the hell has he gotten himself into, Claudius wonders, but he gives her a thumbs up. "Getting dressed, be down in a second," he says.
Cato mumbles something, and Clove rolls her eyes at him before turning her face back up. "Bring chocolate if you have any, Cato forgot his and the house is too far."
Claudius grabs a bar from his bedside stash and throws it; Clove catches it one-handed and tosses it down to Cato, who snakes out one arm, snags the chocolate, and drags it back, amoeba-like, into his nest.
"Welcome to another day in the Village," Claudius mutters to himself, and roots around in his dresser for his workout gear.
For
marble_sharp: Lyme during the war
"Mandatory broadcast coming in," says one of the techs, poking his head inside the door. "Signal is originating from the Victors' Village in District Two."
Lyme's blood freezes in her veins, and her hand immediately moves to cover the bare patch of skin on her wrist. (She'd thought, when they burned her tattoo off, that they'd give her the communicator cuff to cover it, but they assigned her one for the left wrist. They really do think of everything.)
Coin picks up a sheaf of papers and straightens them against the edge of the desk with a few hard taps; Lyme learned to hate that officious, self-important gesture her second day here. "Well, well," the commander says in a brisk voice. "Since the President thinks it's so important for us all to hear what his lapdogs have to say, we may as well oblige." She turns to Lyme, the unnerving, cool gaze sending a shudder down her spine. "You said you left nothing behind, no messages?"
"No," Lyme says, straightening her shoulders. The crisp grey uniform scratches the back of her neck. "I had no time, and I didn't want to implicate anyone else in case I got caught before I reached safety."
"Hm," Coin says, lifting the remote and turning on the television just in time for the spinning Panem seal to disappear.
Once when she was fourteen, Lyme talked back to a trainer and had to stand in the main practice room with a stack of weights piled on her arms for the entire afternoon. By the end her arms were jelly and her legs nearly collapsed underneath her, but she made it out standing. She's grateful for it now, for the strength and muscle memory that keeps her upright when her mentor's face appears on the screen.
Lyme grips the edge of the table until her knuckles whiten, but no one turns to look at her. None of the other Victor-traitors are in the room with her (rebels, Lyme reminds herself, they're rebels and she's a renegade, but she can't rinse the taste of the word traitor from her mind) and maybe the others don't know. Why would anyone in Thirteen know or care who mentored Lyme twenty years ago? Nero is the same as any other Two to them; as far as they know, he was chosen because he's the biggest and most formidable of them now that Brutus is --
-- her mind slams down on that before she can make a sound that would embarrass herself and amuse everyone else.
"People of District Two," Nero says, looking straight at the camera and into Lyme's soul. "Citizens of Panem, my brothers and sisters. I'm here because our country is under attack. We are under attack by our own people, people who would rather see this nation and its innocents burn than live in peace."
It's not his words, not his natural cadence, even though he sells it because he's a Career and a Victor and he's the best, but this isn't Nero's speech. It has Capitol written all over it; they've tried to imitate District Two's calm grandeur and steady strength, but it's overblown and overwrought. Nero would never back into a statement like this; he's short and to the point, like the best of them.
Lyme will not wonder what they're holding over him to make him give this statement. One of the soldiers snorts and rolls her eyes. "Peace," she scoffs. "Sure, buddy, okay."
"I urge you, in this time of chaos and fear, to stand your ground. Remember that the roots of Two run deep, and that whatever happens around us, we will not be moved." Nero raises his head. "Trust the Capitol. Trust the government that has kept us safe these past seventy-five years. Do not listen to those who tear down with no plan to rebuild. These so-called 'rebels' would take away our safety, our livelihood, and leave us with nothing. Don't be fooled."
Lyme's gaze flicks to Coin, who regards the screen with her usual impassive stare. If she has a plan for the reconstruction, she hasn't mentioned it to Lyme, but it's only been a handful of days. Hopefully Lyme will hear what it is soon. And even if not, even if their only plan is to tear down Snow and his government and start anew from the ashes, that's still better than what they have now.
It could be worse. It helps to hear Nero parroting the Capitol byline, even if she aches to see him like this and know how he must have felt when she left without saying goodbye, but it's nothing that anyone else hasn't said before.
Except that Nero's gaze sharpens, and Lyme's eyes widen because there's pain in the clench of his jaw and the tightening of his eyes. Whatever they made him say before, what's coming next is real. She knows all of Nero's tells, and this is what's important.
"To those who have already turned away, remember this. You made your choice. The Capitol may be merciful, but District Two is not. Turn your back on your people and you turn your back forever. You turn your back on your Victors, who fought and bled for you so your children may always be safe. You spit in the face of everything that we hold dear; you make the sacrifice of every child who died in the Hunger Games mean nothing. If, however, it's not too late -- if you doubt but haven't made your choice -- remember that once you leave, there is no coming back. A Two's loyalty is paramount; it is written into our very history, from the Dark Days and beyond. To forfeit that means to forfeit everything we are."
A ringing sound fills Lyme's ears, and for a moment she's eighteen and stunned again as the first three tributes leapt from their platforms and straight into the maze of land mines surrounding the Cornucopia. Nero keeps talking but she registers none of it, and she digs her fingers into her wrist until her nails bite through the skin and draw blood. Her vision tunnels, her breath harsh and heavy in her chest, and now they're starting to look at her. One by one they turn to gauge her reactions, and Lyme aced all her acting tests but now she can't even remember how to open her mouth.
Finally the broadcast ends, and Coin switches it off. "Well, there we have it," she says, shaking her head. "So much for your family. Now, at least, you see you made the right choice by coming here." Her slush-coloured eyes stick Lyme through the chest. "They only loved you so long as you obeyed them."
(Nero kneeling next to her as she heaves her guts into the toilet, hands stroking her hair and rubbing her back. Holding her when the nightmares come -- not just the bodies and the blood and the smell of burning flesh but her father, standing over her and snapping the belt in his hands -- and driving them away with his voice. Scrubbing the blood from her fingernails after she dragged them down her forearm over and over and over, bandaging the scratches and kissing her forehead when she cried in shame.)
Lyme stands up, the chair legs scraping against the floor before the whole thing tips over backwards. "I have to go," she says, her tongue thick and heavy in her mouth. "I'll have those figures on Capitol personnel in Two for you by the end of the day."
"Very well," Coin says, and it takes every last drop of control Lyme has not to run for the door.
She turns the corner and slams into Claudius, who must have sprinted full-tilt through the hallways to get there that fast, evidently knocking into people on the way, based on the dirty looks being shot their way. His face is white, eyes red. "Boss," he says, gripping her arms. "I saw. You okay?"
Lyme nods, blinking back the burning behind her eyes. He doesn't know it, but Claudius' presence gives her strength, reminds her why she's here. He's her victor and he trusted her enough to follow; this was the right choice. It has to be. "Yeah," she says, prying his fingers from her sleeves and squeezing his hands before letting him go. "They'll turn with us soon. We just have to show them there's another way."
Claudius runs a hand through his hair, newly chopped short in proper District Thirteen fashion, and grimaces when his fingers hit air too soon. "Okay," he says, letting out a breath, and he gives her a smile that's not quite genuine, but trying. "Let's save the world."
Lyme touches her fist to her chest in the Two gesture of solidarity and tries not to think of the betrayal in Nero's eyes.