Hunger Games: Claudius & Claustrophobia
Title: No Room to Breathe
Rating: PG
Warnings: past/referenced child abuse, child-on-child violence
Characters: Claudius, Lyme
Summary: Claudius, from District 2, has never liked the dark. As a child his mother punished him by locking him in closets; after he escapes to the Career Centre it happens again, once as a hazing and once in training. Years later he follows Lyme to District 13 and ends up trapped forty levels underground as bombs fall above him, because life is fun like that. At least this time he's not alone.
It's just a stupid prank. Hazing happens to all the new kids in Residential for at least a year -- until they do their human kill, usually -- but Claudius is only eight and his human kill is a long time off. Plus Claudius is special, he's in Residential six years early, and it's not just because his parents hate him because they could have put him anywhere and they chose to let him stay here. It makes sense that he'll get pranked the same as any of the thirteen-year-olds.
Lucky for him Claudius is mean and clever so they usually can't catch him, but there's only so much he can do when four sixteen-year-olds grab him on his way back to his room after evening free time. "Where are you going, little runt?" Jason asks, and Claudius twists and flails and tries to bite them but there are too many and he can't.
The good thing is that unless Claudius has some kind of growth deficiency the Centre doctors haven't detected, he will never be in the Arena with people that much bigger than him. He keeps that thought in his head while they laugh and carry him through the hallway with his hands pinned to his sides and hands in his hair keeping his head still, all the way until they open the door of a side cupboard and throw him inside.
"We'll be back," calls Castor through the door, and the lock snicks into place. "If we don't forget, anyway."
It's just a prank. It's just a stupid prank; they'll have to come get him before lights-out, and when they do Claudius will be ready for them. As soon as the door opens he'll bite their hands and stomp on their toes and punch their kneecaps, and when they collapse it'll be the throats next and then the noses and then the eyes and no one will ever, ever put him in a closet again. Claudius doesn’t get as many 'excessive force' warnings when he's retaliating against hazing, because that's not excessive, that's justice. The Centre understands the difference.
He counts off the minutes in his head -- the trainers teach them that early, because when someone tells you to do five minutes of wall sits they don't have time to stand around and time you but they will know if you leave early -- and ticks off how much time he has to stay here. It's just over an hour until lights-out, and that's not that bad. Claudius has stayed in closets and cupboards for longer. If they think he'll get scared or bored they're wrong.
It is dark, though. Claudius feels around inside, and his fingers hit some cleaning supplies and he almost trips over a bucket but there's no flashlight or anything he can use to make light. He even climbs the shelves and swipes his hand along the ceiling, but either they didn't bother to put a lamp inside or it's too far toward the middle because he can't reach it.
That's fine, too. Dark is just dark, it's not like there are monsters or anything. Claudius sleeps with the nightlight Laverna gave him but he doesn't need to, it's just because why should he stub his toes on the desk when he doesn't have to, that's all. Claudius doesn't care about the dark. He finds a corner and flattens his hands to the walls on either side of him and counts away the seconds, and it's fine except the walls keep trying to move closer and the ceiling presses down and was that box right up against his feet a second ago, he didn't think so but it's here now and boxes don't move so that must be the walls --
How long have they been gone? Four thousand seconds, that's longer than he's ever counted, which means they should be coming to let him out soon. Claudius closes his eyes, because if he closes his eyes then it's not that it's dark, it's just that he has his eyes closed. He wraps his arms around himself and rocks back and forth because that keeps his butt from falling asleep. That's all.
Five thousand seconds.
Six thousand seconds.
Seven thousand seconds.
They're not coming. No one is coming. Claudius is alone in the dark, and he tries to go through the death list -- he doesn't know much yet, just the first decade or so -- but he can't count the seconds and get all the names right at the same time. He loses his place with both. It's easier to pick up the list than remember where he was -- somewhere after eight thousand, higher than he’s ever counted before, what's going on -- and so Claudius starts over again with the deaths.
He can't usually remember past the first two hundred-fifty, but he tries. Oh, he tries. Maybe if he remembers more they'll let him out, because bad boys get locked in closets until they remember how not to be bad. Claudius has to prove he's good, that he'll behave, that he won't do it again, only he doesn't remember what he did and that means no matter how many times he says sorry it won't count. "You know what you did," she always says to him, her fingernails sharp in his shoulder. "You know what you did, now tell me what you did so I know you've learned."
"I don't remember," Claudius says to the dark, and the dark laughs at him. He doesn't remember and she won't tell him because that's not the point, Claudius, won't you ever learn, and the only good thing is that he's crying. He can feel it on his face and on his fingers, wet and slimy, and when he cries that makes her happy because only little boys cry, not monsters, and it reminds her that he's still her little boy. At least until the next time he lets the monster out and she has to lock him away again.
Only she's never locked him away this long before. Claudius lost track but he knows it's a long long time. He's stiff and cold and maybe she forgot about him, maybe he'll stay here forever. Maybe she and Jeremy packed up their things and left him here. Maybe they're laughing and driving to the nearest children's home to pick up a new son who doesn't have a demon inside.
Except that Claudius can't find the demon or the monster or anything else, it's just him and the dark and the blood sliding down his fingers because he's been trying to open the door with his bare hands and tore his fingernails off against the hinges.
Claudius scoots back against the far wall, and he throws himself backwards, hits his head against the wall again and again and again until the pain shoots through his skull and finally everything goes away.
Daniel is growing up to be a good boy. Laverna's proud of him. He does all right in school -- not amazing, but all right -- and he gets by in sports, but Laverna's proudest that he knows what's important. This morning when getting ready for school he took out his favourite jacket, the one with all the pockets that could hold everything from a whole family of frogs to all his marbles and still have room for more, and he looked up at her and said, "Mom, do you think Claudius would like this?"
He's a good boy, her son, and so today Laverna walks to the Centre with a spring in her step, Daniel's jacket tucked under her shoulder. Claudius will probably steal half the knives from the supply room and secret them away in the pockets, along with all those jam tarts the cooks like to slip him when they think no one notices, but it's good. He's a trainee, sure, but he's still a little boy, and it's a long way to go before he's only allowed to be one of those things.
Laverna barely makes it inside the complex when a group of Sixteens accosts her in the hallway, hanging back and pressing themselves back against the walls like they've been skulking a while. Laverna doesn't deal with the Seniors and Intermediaries, but they've obviously been waiting for her. She raises an eyebrow. "Your trainer know you're skipping morning sessions?"
"We needed you," says the biggest boy, his face pale. "It was a joke, but we forgot about him, kinda, and then it was lights out and I figured he'd just sleep, kids need to sleep, right --"
Just like that, Laverna's polite curiosity face drops, and the boys jerk back, grimacing. "Where is he?"
"He's still in there, we were gonna let him out this morning but he'd pissed himself, the whole place stank, so we thought we'd better get a trainer --"
"You," Laverna snaps, pointing to the big one's cronies, "You go to the weight room and you start doing chin-ups and I don't want you to stop until I come find you, even if your arms fall off. Do you understand?"
They say "yes sir" and run off, and one thing about trainees, they're almost grateful when you punish them because then they know what to do. Once they disappear around the corner, Laverna puts them out of her mind. "Take me," she says to the ringleader.
She doesn't chitchat with him as they move through the corridors, and Laverna still has Daniel's jacket slung over her arm. The boy is jittery, as he well should be, because teasing might be part of Centre life but no Sixteen should be proud of harassing a boy who's too young to be here and he knows it. Laverna's impulse is to slap them all with a black mark on their record, but if being a mother has taught her anything, it's that children -- even ones who've taken several lives -- are often little idiots who seldom think about repercussions. Trainees who face death on a regular basis have an even more skewed idea of acceptable behaviour.
Finally the boy leads her to a closet along a side corridor, and Laverna nods. "Your idea?" she asks, and he hesitates for a second but then nods. "Find the weight room, you go until your arms drop and you have to go to Medical. When you get there, you tell them exactly why you're there."
"Yes sir," he mumbles.
Laverna flips the latch on the handle and opens the door, where the smell of stale urine hits her in the face like a slap. She lets herself flinch for a brief second before it washes over her, and then she kneels down on the floor. "Claudius," she says softly, pushing the door as wide as it will go so the pale hallway lights creep into the dark. "I'm here, it's okay.'
He's curled in a ball in the back, sobbing quietly the way children do when there's no point in being loud because no one who cares is around to hear. "I'll be good," he whimpers. "I will, I'm sorry, I'll be good, I won't do it again. Tell me what I did and I won't do it again, I promise, I'll be good, I'll be good."
The rage spikes, and Laverna allows it to build before swallowing it down. "You've been very good," she tells him, slow and soothing. "Those other boys were very bad. But I'm here now."
Claudius unrolls a little and peers at her with one swollen, reddened eye. "Boys? What boys?" he sniffs, then frowns. "You're not Mom."
Oh. This time Laverna has to do a ten-count before she can push back the fury. Asshole children are one thing, especially when they're trained to murder. A grownup has no excuse. "No, I'm not, because she's not here. You never have to see her again. Remember?"
Claudius lets out a long breath, and he digs his nails into his palms. Finally his expression clears, breaking Laverna's heart at the same time from the sheer relief of it. "I'm at the Centre."
"That's right." She holds out a hand like she would to a stray dog. "You're safe now. You want to come out?"
He starts to crawl toward her, but then he freezes, his face screwing up in a grimace. "I had an accident. I tried to hold it," Claudius says, anguished, and then he's back in the corner, heaving with the force of his tears. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm a baby, I ruined everything."
It's been decades since Laverna applied enough pressure to someone's arm to break it on purpose, but the urge creeps up now. "You didn't ruin anything. We'll get you to the shower and you can clean off, and I'll bring you some nice clean clothes while we wash the other ones." Claudius shakes his head, pressing himself further into the corner, and finally Laverna steps into the closet and picks him up.
"No," Claudius protests weakly, but once Laverna heaves him up he buries his face in her shoulder. This close the stench is strong, but Laverna is a mother and she's dealt with worse. "I'm sorry," Claudius says into her hair, and she'll have to take a bath too by the time she gets him clean but she doesn't care.
"Don't be sorry," Laverna says, carrying him through the hallway toward the dorm showers. "Make them pay."
For the first time, Claudius stirs, and the frantic pattering of his heart starts to slow. "I could make them pay," he says slowly. "I'm good at that."
"Good." Laverna ruffles his hair, and if anyone heard her she'd be up for a reprimand but ask her how much she cares and you'll be waiting around for a long, long time. "Nothing permanent, or somebody might ask questions, but accidents happen."
"Accidents happen," Claudius repeats. He smiles against her neck.
Claudius takes his time.
At first it's just because the humiliation stings too much. Once he's away and showered and dressed in clean clothes, Laverna tells him he has the day off because this wasn't his fault. If it was just bullies that would be one thing, but because of the stuff with his mom -- because he's technically too young to be here -- he won't get marked down. Which is good, because otherwise Claudius is pretty sure that crying for hours and peeing all over himself would get him kicked out faster than refusing to throw a punch.
For the first couple of days Claudius thinks of schemes so elaborate he almost scares himself, but that's mainly the point of taking his time. When he's furious it bubbles up inside him and he can't control it, and Laverna told him not to get caught. He'll get caught if he jams his thumbs into their eyes and pops them like grapes, or if he slips knives in the pockets of his new jacket and hides in their bedrooms and stabs them while they sleep.
Besides, that's not appropriate retaliation. Claudius is still learning about that, but the trainers are doing their best to teach him. If someone laughs at him, he can hit them, or kick them, or elbow them and make them lose their air, but it's probably too much to break a bone. It's definitely too much to make them bleed until they pass out, or to kick them after they're down until things crack. It makes life less fun, but Claudius wants to be a good trainee and so he tries to listen.
In the end, ignores Jason's cronies. They're dumb, and they wouldn't do anything without him telling them. Claudius really, really, really wants to pick them off one by one, but the more times he does something, the more likely he is to get caught, so that means he has to choose. Out of all of them, Claudius chooses Jason. He's the biggest and the loudest and he's the one who thinks he rules everything just because he's the top of his class. If Claudius takes him down, the others will fall.
Always look for the linchpin, the trainers tell the bigger kids when Claudius sneaks into the back to listen.
And so, one afternoon when Jason and his cohort are due for agility training, Claudius slips into the room and shimmies up to the top of the ropes course, where he hides himself between the netting and the ceiling beams. The trainers focus on the beams for now, sending Jason and the others over rotating platforms while holding heavy weaponry, and Claudius leans his face on his hands and dozes until the climbing session starts.
Claudius hangs back while the others in Jason's cohort go first; the trainers always let a few ahead of him because it makes him mad, sparks up his competition, and Claudius stays out of sight while they take their turns. Finally it's Jason's turn; he climbs slowly, his movements deliberate like one of the trainers really worked him over recently, but he's not dumb and he knows how to pace himself so he doesn't fall.
Yet. Claudius waits until Jason makes it to the top, and the point of the exercise is to grab one of the rings looped around a bolt on the ceiling and climb back down, which means they have to hang all their weight on one hand while reaching with the other.
"Hey," Claudius says, keeping his voice low, because he's still little and the trainers tell him that high-pitched voices aren't scary. He twirls a knife around his fingers, and he's not going to use it but Jason doesn't know that.
"Shit!" Jason nearly loses his grip on the last bar, but he catches himself at the last second and swings one-handed. "The fuck are you doing?"
"Nothing." Claudius smiles, and he slides his knife under Jason's fingertips, between his skin and the metal, and pries his fingers back one by one. "I'm not even here."
He smiles when Jason's hand finally slips; smiles when he falls, tumbling toward the ground. He's still smiling when Jason hits the mats with a thump and crack of several bones breaking, and Claudius crawls back out of the rigging and escapes before anyone can catch him.
Laverna finds him later when he's eating lunch. "I heard the boy who put you in the closet had a bad fall today. He broke both ankles and one wrist."
"Really?" Claudius opens up his sandwich and takes out the pickles and tomato, laying them on the plate so they won't make the bread soggy. "He should've bent his knees. That's what the trainers tell us to do if we fall."
Laverna puts a fist over her mouth like she wants to laugh but knows there are cameras everywhere. "He could have died, Claudius."
Claudius makes a face. "No he wouldn't. Not unless he landed on his head, and he fell feet-first. It wasn't high enough for him to flip all the way over like that." As if he'd be stupid enough to make a mistake like that. If ever there's a day Claudius really wants someone dead, they'll be dead, and that's that. One day they’ll be dead, and dead, and dead, and then he’ll win. But not yet.
This time Laverna actually snorts, and she gives Claudius a wink that he does his best not to react to. "Daniel asked if you like the jacket."
Claudius takes a big bite of his sandwich and nods. "It holds lots of stuff," he says with his mouth full. "Tell him thanks. I'd send him something back but I don't think he'd like the Centre protein bars.”
"No, I don't think he would," Laverna agrees, and Claudius grins.
Jason's ankles never heal right; the impact shattered too many bones, and even after the doctors fix everything, he'll never move at any pace faster than a shamble again. After a few months of failed rehab, the trainers write him up a formal discharge and send him home.
No one will ever shove Claudius into a closet again, either. He considers it an even trade.
Claudius had never heard words like ‘claustrophobia’ before he entered the Residential portion of the Career Program officially at the age of thirteen. Residential teaches him a lot of fancy words, though not the kind he could use in polite conversation if he ever found himself in one (doubtful). Words like ‘asphyxiation’ and ‘blunt-force trauma’ and ‘hypothermia’, though the trainers also teach him the short, nasty, simple words that don’t make the deaths sound so pretty and detached. ‘Exsanguination’ sounds a lot nicer than ‘bleeding out’, but for the most part Claudius and the others prefer the terms that sounded like they meant.
(It does make for a fun week after they learn the terms officially, when all the kids throw the fancy-pants words into everyday conversation. “Hey, watch out or I’m gonna give you a splenic haematoma!” “Oh yeah? I’m gonna kick you so hard you’ll have hematuria for a week!” It wears off soon enough and they revert to “bash your skull in” instead of “cranial fracture”, but it’s fun while it lasted.)
The week before they’d been taken out into the mountains and tossed into a frozen lake, and Claudius clawed his way out with the rest of them and got three days off to recover from the shock. The older kids who’d passed their own test years back laughed and gave them high fives when they trudged back into the Centre compound, shivering and blue-lipped and shell-shocked, hair dripping as the ice melted at room temperature and slid down the collars of their shirts. Claudius caught sick like half of the trainees, but he managed to fight it off well enough that he made the cut.
After that, Claudius is almost relieved when the trainers bring him and a small handful of his cohort to a room deep inside the facilities and tell them to stand and listen. Whatever happens next, it probably won’t be freezing, and Claudius figures he could handle anything right now if he doesn’t have to worry about his fingertips falling off from frostbite.
‘Claustrophobia testing’, one of the older kids whispered when they passed, but didn’t have time to explain what that meant. Claudius’ imagination went haywire in the few minutes they spent following the trainer through the corridors, wondering what sort of mutt could be hiding behind one of the doors and what kind of claws it would have. Poison, maybe, but as long as they gave him a weapon -
Then the trainer says they’ll be locked inside a small room to see how they react to being in a dark, enclosed space, and Claudius almost asks if he could jump in the lake again. A couple of the other kids react, shifting nervously even though they know better than to mutter and whisper to the others, and some just shrug or look bored or put on a tough face. Claudius keeps his own expression blank, slowly shifting to clasp his hands behind his back and squeeze his fingers hard.
“What kind of monitoring?” asks one of the others, and oh, Claudius hadn’t thought of that. Sometimes for the stress tests the trainers hook them up to measure their heart rate and respiration to see how well the trainees are able to mask their real fears. Claudius’ heartbeat already kicked up just looking at the row of doors along the wall.
“Visual and behavioural,” says the trainer, and Claudius exhales a hard sigh of relief through his nose. As long as he can fake it, he’ll be fine. Maybe. “After you pass this one we’ll move on to deeper conditioning, but no point wasting our time checking pupil dilation when half of you are going to burst into tears.”
“What’s the failure point?” another asks, and normally Claudius is right there trying to get information but today his tongue sticks fast in his mouth and his fingers slide in their grip.
“You’ll know when we tell you,” the trainer says with grim amusement. “Keep as calm as you can. Once you’re out we’re going to ask you how long you think you’ve been in there, so do your best to keep a count.”
“Is it a contest to see who can stay the longest?”
“No. That will be later. For now we just want to monitor how you handle enclosed spaces and whether we’ll need to work on that before you move on.”
Claudius is third in line, and he enters his block without a word, mouth pressed thin and eyes wide no matter how much he tries to keep his expression even. He only gets to see the inside of the room for a moment -- smooth grey walls, air vents on the low ceiling, no light fixtures or protuberances except a small, round camera lens on each wall behind plate glass -- before they usher him in and the door hisses closed.
Claudius taps the first seconds against his thigh as soon as the pressure changes, and like they were all taught years ago he runs the count in the back of his mind as he examines his surroundings. He thought there might be low-level illumination built into the walls, maybe red like the emergency kind that didn’t destroy night vision, but when one hundred, two hundred, three hundred seconds pass and nothing changed, Claudius gives up on the hope of even a hint of light.
He touched the walls at the start, measuring the angle of his elbows as they bent out to remind himself of the distance. Any time his mother locked him in a closet for being bad - the time the asshole boys a few years up did the same thing as a joke - he’d become convinced the walls were moving in on him secretly. Like that game they played during free time sometimes, close your eyes and hold up your fingers an inch apart and try to stop them from touching, except you couldn’t, no one could -- and Claudius can’t let that happen, not now. His mother didn’t care if he cried, and when he’d been a kid and shoved into a closet for hazing he’d gotten a pass for being young. Not anymore.
Not enough room to sit cross-legged, but Claudius pulls his knees up to his chest and draws himself up straight and that works well enough. If he doesn’t move, if he sits very still, then the walls won’t touch him. He measured them; he knows for sure. Everything else is a trick of the mind.
(One thousand seconds)
Claudius closes his eyes to pretend the dark was nothing but his own eyelids. He keeps up the count, and at first he started in his head but now he speaks out loud to counter the arrhythmic distractions of his breaths and pulse as they kick higher and higher. Some of the other kids will be trying to measure with their heatbeats and they’ll end up wrong.
Ghosts and memories brush against his skin --
(his mother’s voice through the closet door; his fingernails peeling back and his fingertips slick with blood; the sick cocktail of relief and humiliation when the pressure inside him eased and a warm wetness seeped through the fabric of his pants; the sharp tang curling inside his nose)
-- but Claudius fights them back. No. Not here. It’s a test, just a test, and no one wants to hurt him, no one hates him. The trainers are helping him overcome his fear - it’ll be in his file - preparing him, getting him ready for the Arena so he won’t jump in useless and confused like a meat tribute. The trainers will let him out. They won’t forget about him. And once he passed he’d get an apple, maybe, nice and crisp and tart, or maybe even some applesauce with his oatmeal tomorrow morning because the Centre always remembers his favourite treats.
(Two thousand seconds)
They will let him out of the closet and Claudius will pass the test, and he will go on to win the Hunger Games and get a house in the Victors’ Village all to himself. He will have applesauce and oatmeal with Lyme every day because she mentored him and that’s the deal. And once he wins he’ll never have to go back in the dark again, never have to sit and feel the press of the darkness and the horrible choking feeling in his throat and the walls just touched him, they did, he was sitting straight and tall and unmoving but he feels the hard line of the wall against his arm and oh shit what if the walls are moving, what if this is an extra test --
Light explodes in his vision as the door slides open, filling his lungs with a burst of fresh air. “Three thousand, six hundred and five,” Claudius gasps out, blinking away the pain in his skull and forcing himself to breathe slow and even. “Seconds, I don’t -- I can’t do the math. I don’t know how many minutes.”
“Sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour,” the trainer reminds him, and Claudius swallows a spike of rage because he hates the math after a stress test, hates it when he struggled with numbers anyway.
But no, he knows this, and Claudius closes his eyes and traces the numbers against his leg. “One hour,” he says finally, relief hitting in a wave when the trainer nods, though was that all? It felt so much longer. “Plus five seconds.”
“Good,” she says. “Get up and join the others.”
“I fell asleep,” brags one of the other kids when they’re all milling and waiting to be taken back. “Too bad they didn’t measure heart rate, mine would’ve been steady as a rock.”
Claudius rolls his eyes to the ceiling, because yeah, sure okay, try sleeping through the Arena and seeing how long that lasted. You could technically defeat hunger that way too, but that was a quick trip to a pack of mutts tearing you to pieces because the audience got bored. Nobody who slept through it will be here next week; you have to take the training seriously if you want to last.
Later that night when he changes for bed, Claudius pulls his shirt over his head and stops at the sight of five dark finger bruises on each upper arm. He hadn’t even noticed he’d been squeezing, but the purple splotches tell him far more than his fragmented memory. Oh well -- they hadn’t checked for that this time, had they, so he won’t get docked for it.
The next morning Claudius picks up his breakfast tray and grins at the small bowl of applesauce sitting next to his plain oatmeal and protein shake. It even has a light dusting of cinnamon on top, and Claudius takes a seat in the corner and eats it with his fingers to make it last longer. Three of the others from yesterday have an extra something on their trays; two don’t, and everyone knew what that meant.
Claudius grins to himself and licks a smear of mashed apple from his thumb.
Dust rains down from the crack in the cement beam overhead, showering the floor with a hiss and rattle of tiny pellets against the concrete floor. The orange lights flicker but hold for now, and the instinctive shrieks of the civilians die down as the latest wave of bombs ends.
Claudius pushes his fingers into his hair and grips hard, the black of his Victor tattoo swirling around his wrist barely visible in his peripheral vision. Forty levels below ground in District 13, sealed inside to stop debris and who knows what else from getting in the ventilation shafts, waiting to see if the Capitol would get bored of dropping explosives on them before they all suffocated.
Distant rumbling sounds as a new round of bombing begins, and Claudius pulls his feet up onto the mattress of the rickety bunk bed and measures out his breathing. In for four seconds, hold four seconds, out four seconds, hold four seconds, the most basic meditative technique but the most he can handle right now and even that leaves him shaking.
No one else notices yet another panicked citizen trying to stave off a mental breakdown, so at least that’s a mercy. No doubt some of the Thirteen soldiers would have a good laugh at the nasty Two scared of the dark; they resent anyone from the Capitol-lapdog districts being here but can hardly turn down the help, so they take it out where they can.
Claudius doesn’t fear death, not like the rest of the refugees from Twelve and elsewhere who scream and cling to each other and pray to the uncaring universe to save them. He doesn’ want to die and isn’t going to go out and do it on purpose or anything, but it isn’t the idea of death that scares him. They’ll all die one day, and like all Two Victors Claudius takes everything after eighteen as a miracle he should never stop appreciating.
Death, no, but dying -- and not just bleeding out in an Arena or torn to pieces by some sharp-toothed Gamemaker creation but crushed to death under falling rocks, suffocating slowly as he claws at his throat to make room for more air -- that is different.
With a weapon in his hand and something to do, Claudius could deal with almost anything. But the waiting, the hours of sitting in silence while the building above them threatened to collapse, old memories creeping around in the back of his mind --
A bomb hits with a room-shaking shudder, and the lights stutter and cut out. A collective wail rises up from the crowd, and Claudius squeezes his eyes shut and rolls over on his side, pulling his knees up tight and pressing his forehead against the bar. The darkness sits on him as a heavy weight, the recycled air passing thinly in and out of his lungs and leaving him gasping and light-headed.
Flashlights flick on in the bunks around him, but Claudius can’t recall if he has one or where it is and he can’t unclench his hand to search for it. The air in his chest presses out until he aches, a high ringing starting up in his ears, and Claudius can’t breathe and the walls are creaking and they were all going to die here, choking on rubble and the dank stink of sweat from so many bodies pressed together --
“Hey, D, you’re okay.” Lyme’s voice cuts through the panic, and her hand falls on his shoulder. Claudius sucks in a hard breath and shakes his head, and the cheap mattress dips under her weight as she sits down beside him. “I’m so sorry, I tried to find you but there’s no organization going on down here. I’ve been checking every bunk for the last three hours.”
Lyme doesn’t need this. She has a war to win and their district to salvage in the meantime, and she’s still mourning over losing Brutus and abandoning Nero and Misha and their home and everything else. She doesn’t have time for Claudius needing a nightlight and a security blanket. “I’m fine,” Claudius grits out, clenching his teeth to keep himself from gasping. “It’s -- it’s fine, this sucks but it’s fine.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lyme says, and go figure that his mentor sounds the calmest she’s been in weeks while the Capitol hammers the entire compound with wave after wave of bombs. She scoots over farther onto the bed, tugs Claudius up out of his tightly-curled ball and hauls him up half into her lap like a damn baby. She wraps her arms around him and holds him tight against her chest, her chin resting on his hair, and Claudius closes his eyes again and focuses on the steady thump of her heart, barely elevated given the circumstances.
“I’m fine, boss,” Claudius insists, but he curls his fingers in her belt and clings tight.
Lyme runs her fingers through his hair, and then, there in the middle of the cries and the explosions and the rattling of the furniture comes another sound, low and soft and crooning, one that Claudius has never heard in his life despite being a tribute and a Victor and a traitor and all the things in between.
“Are you singing?” Claudius asks. The ceiling shakes overhead, the air thick and oxygen thin, and he presses closer.
The sound stops. “Nope,” Lyme says, rubbing her fingertips over his scalp and down to work on the taut muscles in his neck. “You’re hallucinating out of fear.” A few seconds after she quits speaking, the song picks up again.
Claudius lets it carry him away, hallucination or no, and when he opens his eyes later the lights are back to their usual levels. The air no longer tastes of sweat and the metallic tang of several layers of recycling, and no sound of explosions rattle down from above. “We made it?” he asks, blinking.
Lyme runs her hand over his military-cropped hair in lieu of ruffling it. “We made it,” she confirms. “They’re moving us all back upstairs in batches. I thought you needed the sleep in the meantime.”
Claudius releases a long breath and sits up. “Thanks,” he says, unable to look at her in spite of all the times she’s seen him flayed open and vulnerable. It feels different here in the catacombs, surrounded by people who want them dead almost as much as the hovercraft crews above them.
“Hey,” Lyme says, and she grips him by the back of the neck and rests their foreheads together. “Are you my kid, or aren’t you?”
“Always,” Claudius says without thinking. He killed seven kids in the Arena and more in training to make it out to her, and he packed up his whole life in a satchel and followed her when she left for District 13 without a second thought. His life might be upside-down but a mentor is forever.
Lyme smiles, thin and tight compared to the open affection she used to show him before Brutus died and the world exploded around them, but still. “Good. Now come on, let’s slip in with the next group up and see if we can snag something not terrible for breakfast.”
Claudius follows her into the crowd of orderly bodies, and in the press and bustle, Lyme reaches over and gives his arm a comforting squeeze.
Rating: PG
Warnings: past/referenced child abuse, child-on-child violence
Characters: Claudius, Lyme
Summary: Claudius, from District 2, has never liked the dark. As a child his mother punished him by locking him in closets; after he escapes to the Career Centre it happens again, once as a hazing and once in training. Years later he follows Lyme to District 13 and ends up trapped forty levels underground as bombs fall above him, because life is fun like that. At least this time he's not alone.
It's just a stupid prank. Hazing happens to all the new kids in Residential for at least a year -- until they do their human kill, usually -- but Claudius is only eight and his human kill is a long time off. Plus Claudius is special, he's in Residential six years early, and it's not just because his parents hate him because they could have put him anywhere and they chose to let him stay here. It makes sense that he'll get pranked the same as any of the thirteen-year-olds.
Lucky for him Claudius is mean and clever so they usually can't catch him, but there's only so much he can do when four sixteen-year-olds grab him on his way back to his room after evening free time. "Where are you going, little runt?" Jason asks, and Claudius twists and flails and tries to bite them but there are too many and he can't.
The good thing is that unless Claudius has some kind of growth deficiency the Centre doctors haven't detected, he will never be in the Arena with people that much bigger than him. He keeps that thought in his head while they laugh and carry him through the hallway with his hands pinned to his sides and hands in his hair keeping his head still, all the way until they open the door of a side cupboard and throw him inside.
"We'll be back," calls Castor through the door, and the lock snicks into place. "If we don't forget, anyway."
It's just a prank. It's just a stupid prank; they'll have to come get him before lights-out, and when they do Claudius will be ready for them. As soon as the door opens he'll bite their hands and stomp on their toes and punch their kneecaps, and when they collapse it'll be the throats next and then the noses and then the eyes and no one will ever, ever put him in a closet again. Claudius doesn’t get as many 'excessive force' warnings when he's retaliating against hazing, because that's not excessive, that's justice. The Centre understands the difference.
He counts off the minutes in his head -- the trainers teach them that early, because when someone tells you to do five minutes of wall sits they don't have time to stand around and time you but they will know if you leave early -- and ticks off how much time he has to stay here. It's just over an hour until lights-out, and that's not that bad. Claudius has stayed in closets and cupboards for longer. If they think he'll get scared or bored they're wrong.
It is dark, though. Claudius feels around inside, and his fingers hit some cleaning supplies and he almost trips over a bucket but there's no flashlight or anything he can use to make light. He even climbs the shelves and swipes his hand along the ceiling, but either they didn't bother to put a lamp inside or it's too far toward the middle because he can't reach it.
That's fine, too. Dark is just dark, it's not like there are monsters or anything. Claudius sleeps with the nightlight Laverna gave him but he doesn't need to, it's just because why should he stub his toes on the desk when he doesn't have to, that's all. Claudius doesn't care about the dark. He finds a corner and flattens his hands to the walls on either side of him and counts away the seconds, and it's fine except the walls keep trying to move closer and the ceiling presses down and was that box right up against his feet a second ago, he didn't think so but it's here now and boxes don't move so that must be the walls --
How long have they been gone? Four thousand seconds, that's longer than he's ever counted, which means they should be coming to let him out soon. Claudius closes his eyes, because if he closes his eyes then it's not that it's dark, it's just that he has his eyes closed. He wraps his arms around himself and rocks back and forth because that keeps his butt from falling asleep. That's all.
Five thousand seconds.
Six thousand seconds.
Seven thousand seconds.
They're not coming. No one is coming. Claudius is alone in the dark, and he tries to go through the death list -- he doesn't know much yet, just the first decade or so -- but he can't count the seconds and get all the names right at the same time. He loses his place with both. It's easier to pick up the list than remember where he was -- somewhere after eight thousand, higher than he’s ever counted before, what's going on -- and so Claudius starts over again with the deaths.
He can't usually remember past the first two hundred-fifty, but he tries. Oh, he tries. Maybe if he remembers more they'll let him out, because bad boys get locked in closets until they remember how not to be bad. Claudius has to prove he's good, that he'll behave, that he won't do it again, only he doesn't remember what he did and that means no matter how many times he says sorry it won't count. "You know what you did," she always says to him, her fingernails sharp in his shoulder. "You know what you did, now tell me what you did so I know you've learned."
"I don't remember," Claudius says to the dark, and the dark laughs at him. He doesn't remember and she won't tell him because that's not the point, Claudius, won't you ever learn, and the only good thing is that he's crying. He can feel it on his face and on his fingers, wet and slimy, and when he cries that makes her happy because only little boys cry, not monsters, and it reminds her that he's still her little boy. At least until the next time he lets the monster out and she has to lock him away again.
Only she's never locked him away this long before. Claudius lost track but he knows it's a long long time. He's stiff and cold and maybe she forgot about him, maybe he'll stay here forever. Maybe she and Jeremy packed up their things and left him here. Maybe they're laughing and driving to the nearest children's home to pick up a new son who doesn't have a demon inside.
Except that Claudius can't find the demon or the monster or anything else, it's just him and the dark and the blood sliding down his fingers because he's been trying to open the door with his bare hands and tore his fingernails off against the hinges.
Claudius scoots back against the far wall, and he throws himself backwards, hits his head against the wall again and again and again until the pain shoots through his skull and finally everything goes away.
Daniel is growing up to be a good boy. Laverna's proud of him. He does all right in school -- not amazing, but all right -- and he gets by in sports, but Laverna's proudest that he knows what's important. This morning when getting ready for school he took out his favourite jacket, the one with all the pockets that could hold everything from a whole family of frogs to all his marbles and still have room for more, and he looked up at her and said, "Mom, do you think Claudius would like this?"
He's a good boy, her son, and so today Laverna walks to the Centre with a spring in her step, Daniel's jacket tucked under her shoulder. Claudius will probably steal half the knives from the supply room and secret them away in the pockets, along with all those jam tarts the cooks like to slip him when they think no one notices, but it's good. He's a trainee, sure, but he's still a little boy, and it's a long way to go before he's only allowed to be one of those things.
Laverna barely makes it inside the complex when a group of Sixteens accosts her in the hallway, hanging back and pressing themselves back against the walls like they've been skulking a while. Laverna doesn't deal with the Seniors and Intermediaries, but they've obviously been waiting for her. She raises an eyebrow. "Your trainer know you're skipping morning sessions?"
"We needed you," says the biggest boy, his face pale. "It was a joke, but we forgot about him, kinda, and then it was lights out and I figured he'd just sleep, kids need to sleep, right --"
Just like that, Laverna's polite curiosity face drops, and the boys jerk back, grimacing. "Where is he?"
"He's still in there, we were gonna let him out this morning but he'd pissed himself, the whole place stank, so we thought we'd better get a trainer --"
"You," Laverna snaps, pointing to the big one's cronies, "You go to the weight room and you start doing chin-ups and I don't want you to stop until I come find you, even if your arms fall off. Do you understand?"
They say "yes sir" and run off, and one thing about trainees, they're almost grateful when you punish them because then they know what to do. Once they disappear around the corner, Laverna puts them out of her mind. "Take me," she says to the ringleader.
She doesn't chitchat with him as they move through the corridors, and Laverna still has Daniel's jacket slung over her arm. The boy is jittery, as he well should be, because teasing might be part of Centre life but no Sixteen should be proud of harassing a boy who's too young to be here and he knows it. Laverna's impulse is to slap them all with a black mark on their record, but if being a mother has taught her anything, it's that children -- even ones who've taken several lives -- are often little idiots who seldom think about repercussions. Trainees who face death on a regular basis have an even more skewed idea of acceptable behaviour.
Finally the boy leads her to a closet along a side corridor, and Laverna nods. "Your idea?" she asks, and he hesitates for a second but then nods. "Find the weight room, you go until your arms drop and you have to go to Medical. When you get there, you tell them exactly why you're there."
"Yes sir," he mumbles.
Laverna flips the latch on the handle and opens the door, where the smell of stale urine hits her in the face like a slap. She lets herself flinch for a brief second before it washes over her, and then she kneels down on the floor. "Claudius," she says softly, pushing the door as wide as it will go so the pale hallway lights creep into the dark. "I'm here, it's okay.'
He's curled in a ball in the back, sobbing quietly the way children do when there's no point in being loud because no one who cares is around to hear. "I'll be good," he whimpers. "I will, I'm sorry, I'll be good, I won't do it again. Tell me what I did and I won't do it again, I promise, I'll be good, I'll be good."
The rage spikes, and Laverna allows it to build before swallowing it down. "You've been very good," she tells him, slow and soothing. "Those other boys were very bad. But I'm here now."
Claudius unrolls a little and peers at her with one swollen, reddened eye. "Boys? What boys?" he sniffs, then frowns. "You're not Mom."
Oh. This time Laverna has to do a ten-count before she can push back the fury. Asshole children are one thing, especially when they're trained to murder. A grownup has no excuse. "No, I'm not, because she's not here. You never have to see her again. Remember?"
Claudius lets out a long breath, and he digs his nails into his palms. Finally his expression clears, breaking Laverna's heart at the same time from the sheer relief of it. "I'm at the Centre."
"That's right." She holds out a hand like she would to a stray dog. "You're safe now. You want to come out?"
He starts to crawl toward her, but then he freezes, his face screwing up in a grimace. "I had an accident. I tried to hold it," Claudius says, anguished, and then he's back in the corner, heaving with the force of his tears. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm a baby, I ruined everything."
It's been decades since Laverna applied enough pressure to someone's arm to break it on purpose, but the urge creeps up now. "You didn't ruin anything. We'll get you to the shower and you can clean off, and I'll bring you some nice clean clothes while we wash the other ones." Claudius shakes his head, pressing himself further into the corner, and finally Laverna steps into the closet and picks him up.
"No," Claudius protests weakly, but once Laverna heaves him up he buries his face in her shoulder. This close the stench is strong, but Laverna is a mother and she's dealt with worse. "I'm sorry," Claudius says into her hair, and she'll have to take a bath too by the time she gets him clean but she doesn't care.
"Don't be sorry," Laverna says, carrying him through the hallway toward the dorm showers. "Make them pay."
For the first time, Claudius stirs, and the frantic pattering of his heart starts to slow. "I could make them pay," he says slowly. "I'm good at that."
"Good." Laverna ruffles his hair, and if anyone heard her she'd be up for a reprimand but ask her how much she cares and you'll be waiting around for a long, long time. "Nothing permanent, or somebody might ask questions, but accidents happen."
"Accidents happen," Claudius repeats. He smiles against her neck.
Claudius takes his time.
At first it's just because the humiliation stings too much. Once he's away and showered and dressed in clean clothes, Laverna tells him he has the day off because this wasn't his fault. If it was just bullies that would be one thing, but because of the stuff with his mom -- because he's technically too young to be here -- he won't get marked down. Which is good, because otherwise Claudius is pretty sure that crying for hours and peeing all over himself would get him kicked out faster than refusing to throw a punch.
For the first couple of days Claudius thinks of schemes so elaborate he almost scares himself, but that's mainly the point of taking his time. When he's furious it bubbles up inside him and he can't control it, and Laverna told him not to get caught. He'll get caught if he jams his thumbs into their eyes and pops them like grapes, or if he slips knives in the pockets of his new jacket and hides in their bedrooms and stabs them while they sleep.
Besides, that's not appropriate retaliation. Claudius is still learning about that, but the trainers are doing their best to teach him. If someone laughs at him, he can hit them, or kick them, or elbow them and make them lose their air, but it's probably too much to break a bone. It's definitely too much to make them bleed until they pass out, or to kick them after they're down until things crack. It makes life less fun, but Claudius wants to be a good trainee and so he tries to listen.
In the end, ignores Jason's cronies. They're dumb, and they wouldn't do anything without him telling them. Claudius really, really, really wants to pick them off one by one, but the more times he does something, the more likely he is to get caught, so that means he has to choose. Out of all of them, Claudius chooses Jason. He's the biggest and the loudest and he's the one who thinks he rules everything just because he's the top of his class. If Claudius takes him down, the others will fall.
Always look for the linchpin, the trainers tell the bigger kids when Claudius sneaks into the back to listen.
And so, one afternoon when Jason and his cohort are due for agility training, Claudius slips into the room and shimmies up to the top of the ropes course, where he hides himself between the netting and the ceiling beams. The trainers focus on the beams for now, sending Jason and the others over rotating platforms while holding heavy weaponry, and Claudius leans his face on his hands and dozes until the climbing session starts.
Claudius hangs back while the others in Jason's cohort go first; the trainers always let a few ahead of him because it makes him mad, sparks up his competition, and Claudius stays out of sight while they take their turns. Finally it's Jason's turn; he climbs slowly, his movements deliberate like one of the trainers really worked him over recently, but he's not dumb and he knows how to pace himself so he doesn't fall.
Yet. Claudius waits until Jason makes it to the top, and the point of the exercise is to grab one of the rings looped around a bolt on the ceiling and climb back down, which means they have to hang all their weight on one hand while reaching with the other.
"Hey," Claudius says, keeping his voice low, because he's still little and the trainers tell him that high-pitched voices aren't scary. He twirls a knife around his fingers, and he's not going to use it but Jason doesn't know that.
"Shit!" Jason nearly loses his grip on the last bar, but he catches himself at the last second and swings one-handed. "The fuck are you doing?"
"Nothing." Claudius smiles, and he slides his knife under Jason's fingertips, between his skin and the metal, and pries his fingers back one by one. "I'm not even here."
He smiles when Jason's hand finally slips; smiles when he falls, tumbling toward the ground. He's still smiling when Jason hits the mats with a thump and crack of several bones breaking, and Claudius crawls back out of the rigging and escapes before anyone can catch him.
Laverna finds him later when he's eating lunch. "I heard the boy who put you in the closet had a bad fall today. He broke both ankles and one wrist."
"Really?" Claudius opens up his sandwich and takes out the pickles and tomato, laying them on the plate so they won't make the bread soggy. "He should've bent his knees. That's what the trainers tell us to do if we fall."
Laverna puts a fist over her mouth like she wants to laugh but knows there are cameras everywhere. "He could have died, Claudius."
Claudius makes a face. "No he wouldn't. Not unless he landed on his head, and he fell feet-first. It wasn't high enough for him to flip all the way over like that." As if he'd be stupid enough to make a mistake like that. If ever there's a day Claudius really wants someone dead, they'll be dead, and that's that. One day they’ll be dead, and dead, and dead, and then he’ll win. But not yet.
This time Laverna actually snorts, and she gives Claudius a wink that he does his best not to react to. "Daniel asked if you like the jacket."
Claudius takes a big bite of his sandwich and nods. "It holds lots of stuff," he says with his mouth full. "Tell him thanks. I'd send him something back but I don't think he'd like the Centre protein bars.”
"No, I don't think he would," Laverna agrees, and Claudius grins.
Jason's ankles never heal right; the impact shattered too many bones, and even after the doctors fix everything, he'll never move at any pace faster than a shamble again. After a few months of failed rehab, the trainers write him up a formal discharge and send him home.
No one will ever shove Claudius into a closet again, either. He considers it an even trade.
Claudius had never heard words like ‘claustrophobia’ before he entered the Residential portion of the Career Program officially at the age of thirteen. Residential teaches him a lot of fancy words, though not the kind he could use in polite conversation if he ever found himself in one (doubtful). Words like ‘asphyxiation’ and ‘blunt-force trauma’ and ‘hypothermia’, though the trainers also teach him the short, nasty, simple words that don’t make the deaths sound so pretty and detached. ‘Exsanguination’ sounds a lot nicer than ‘bleeding out’, but for the most part Claudius and the others prefer the terms that sounded like they meant.
(It does make for a fun week after they learn the terms officially, when all the kids throw the fancy-pants words into everyday conversation. “Hey, watch out or I’m gonna give you a splenic haematoma!” “Oh yeah? I’m gonna kick you so hard you’ll have hematuria for a week!” It wears off soon enough and they revert to “bash your skull in” instead of “cranial fracture”, but it’s fun while it lasted.)
The week before they’d been taken out into the mountains and tossed into a frozen lake, and Claudius clawed his way out with the rest of them and got three days off to recover from the shock. The older kids who’d passed their own test years back laughed and gave them high fives when they trudged back into the Centre compound, shivering and blue-lipped and shell-shocked, hair dripping as the ice melted at room temperature and slid down the collars of their shirts. Claudius caught sick like half of the trainees, but he managed to fight it off well enough that he made the cut.
After that, Claudius is almost relieved when the trainers bring him and a small handful of his cohort to a room deep inside the facilities and tell them to stand and listen. Whatever happens next, it probably won’t be freezing, and Claudius figures he could handle anything right now if he doesn’t have to worry about his fingertips falling off from frostbite.
‘Claustrophobia testing’, one of the older kids whispered when they passed, but didn’t have time to explain what that meant. Claudius’ imagination went haywire in the few minutes they spent following the trainer through the corridors, wondering what sort of mutt could be hiding behind one of the doors and what kind of claws it would have. Poison, maybe, but as long as they gave him a weapon -
Then the trainer says they’ll be locked inside a small room to see how they react to being in a dark, enclosed space, and Claudius almost asks if he could jump in the lake again. A couple of the other kids react, shifting nervously even though they know better than to mutter and whisper to the others, and some just shrug or look bored or put on a tough face. Claudius keeps his own expression blank, slowly shifting to clasp his hands behind his back and squeeze his fingers hard.
“What kind of monitoring?” asks one of the others, and oh, Claudius hadn’t thought of that. Sometimes for the stress tests the trainers hook them up to measure their heart rate and respiration to see how well the trainees are able to mask their real fears. Claudius’ heartbeat already kicked up just looking at the row of doors along the wall.
“Visual and behavioural,” says the trainer, and Claudius exhales a hard sigh of relief through his nose. As long as he can fake it, he’ll be fine. Maybe. “After you pass this one we’ll move on to deeper conditioning, but no point wasting our time checking pupil dilation when half of you are going to burst into tears.”
“What’s the failure point?” another asks, and normally Claudius is right there trying to get information but today his tongue sticks fast in his mouth and his fingers slide in their grip.
“You’ll know when we tell you,” the trainer says with grim amusement. “Keep as calm as you can. Once you’re out we’re going to ask you how long you think you’ve been in there, so do your best to keep a count.”
“Is it a contest to see who can stay the longest?”
“No. That will be later. For now we just want to monitor how you handle enclosed spaces and whether we’ll need to work on that before you move on.”
Claudius is third in line, and he enters his block without a word, mouth pressed thin and eyes wide no matter how much he tries to keep his expression even. He only gets to see the inside of the room for a moment -- smooth grey walls, air vents on the low ceiling, no light fixtures or protuberances except a small, round camera lens on each wall behind plate glass -- before they usher him in and the door hisses closed.
Claudius taps the first seconds against his thigh as soon as the pressure changes, and like they were all taught years ago he runs the count in the back of his mind as he examines his surroundings. He thought there might be low-level illumination built into the walls, maybe red like the emergency kind that didn’t destroy night vision, but when one hundred, two hundred, three hundred seconds pass and nothing changed, Claudius gives up on the hope of even a hint of light.
He touched the walls at the start, measuring the angle of his elbows as they bent out to remind himself of the distance. Any time his mother locked him in a closet for being bad - the time the asshole boys a few years up did the same thing as a joke - he’d become convinced the walls were moving in on him secretly. Like that game they played during free time sometimes, close your eyes and hold up your fingers an inch apart and try to stop them from touching, except you couldn’t, no one could -- and Claudius can’t let that happen, not now. His mother didn’t care if he cried, and when he’d been a kid and shoved into a closet for hazing he’d gotten a pass for being young. Not anymore.
Not enough room to sit cross-legged, but Claudius pulls his knees up to his chest and draws himself up straight and that works well enough. If he doesn’t move, if he sits very still, then the walls won’t touch him. He measured them; he knows for sure. Everything else is a trick of the mind.
(One thousand seconds)
Claudius closes his eyes to pretend the dark was nothing but his own eyelids. He keeps up the count, and at first he started in his head but now he speaks out loud to counter the arrhythmic distractions of his breaths and pulse as they kick higher and higher. Some of the other kids will be trying to measure with their heatbeats and they’ll end up wrong.
Ghosts and memories brush against his skin --
(his mother’s voice through the closet door; his fingernails peeling back and his fingertips slick with blood; the sick cocktail of relief and humiliation when the pressure inside him eased and a warm wetness seeped through the fabric of his pants; the sharp tang curling inside his nose)
-- but Claudius fights them back. No. Not here. It’s a test, just a test, and no one wants to hurt him, no one hates him. The trainers are helping him overcome his fear - it’ll be in his file - preparing him, getting him ready for the Arena so he won’t jump in useless and confused like a meat tribute. The trainers will let him out. They won’t forget about him. And once he passed he’d get an apple, maybe, nice and crisp and tart, or maybe even some applesauce with his oatmeal tomorrow morning because the Centre always remembers his favourite treats.
(Two thousand seconds)
They will let him out of the closet and Claudius will pass the test, and he will go on to win the Hunger Games and get a house in the Victors’ Village all to himself. He will have applesauce and oatmeal with Lyme every day because she mentored him and that’s the deal. And once he wins he’ll never have to go back in the dark again, never have to sit and feel the press of the darkness and the horrible choking feeling in his throat and the walls just touched him, they did, he was sitting straight and tall and unmoving but he feels the hard line of the wall against his arm and oh shit what if the walls are moving, what if this is an extra test --
Light explodes in his vision as the door slides open, filling his lungs with a burst of fresh air. “Three thousand, six hundred and five,” Claudius gasps out, blinking away the pain in his skull and forcing himself to breathe slow and even. “Seconds, I don’t -- I can’t do the math. I don’t know how many minutes.”
“Sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour,” the trainer reminds him, and Claudius swallows a spike of rage because he hates the math after a stress test, hates it when he struggled with numbers anyway.
But no, he knows this, and Claudius closes his eyes and traces the numbers against his leg. “One hour,” he says finally, relief hitting in a wave when the trainer nods, though was that all? It felt so much longer. “Plus five seconds.”
“Good,” she says. “Get up and join the others.”
“I fell asleep,” brags one of the other kids when they’re all milling and waiting to be taken back. “Too bad they didn’t measure heart rate, mine would’ve been steady as a rock.”
Claudius rolls his eyes to the ceiling, because yeah, sure okay, try sleeping through the Arena and seeing how long that lasted. You could technically defeat hunger that way too, but that was a quick trip to a pack of mutts tearing you to pieces because the audience got bored. Nobody who slept through it will be here next week; you have to take the training seriously if you want to last.
Later that night when he changes for bed, Claudius pulls his shirt over his head and stops at the sight of five dark finger bruises on each upper arm. He hadn’t even noticed he’d been squeezing, but the purple splotches tell him far more than his fragmented memory. Oh well -- they hadn’t checked for that this time, had they, so he won’t get docked for it.
The next morning Claudius picks up his breakfast tray and grins at the small bowl of applesauce sitting next to his plain oatmeal and protein shake. It even has a light dusting of cinnamon on top, and Claudius takes a seat in the corner and eats it with his fingers to make it last longer. Three of the others from yesterday have an extra something on their trays; two don’t, and everyone knew what that meant.
Claudius grins to himself and licks a smear of mashed apple from his thumb.
Dust rains down from the crack in the cement beam overhead, showering the floor with a hiss and rattle of tiny pellets against the concrete floor. The orange lights flicker but hold for now, and the instinctive shrieks of the civilians die down as the latest wave of bombs ends.
Claudius pushes his fingers into his hair and grips hard, the black of his Victor tattoo swirling around his wrist barely visible in his peripheral vision. Forty levels below ground in District 13, sealed inside to stop debris and who knows what else from getting in the ventilation shafts, waiting to see if the Capitol would get bored of dropping explosives on them before they all suffocated.
Distant rumbling sounds as a new round of bombing begins, and Claudius pulls his feet up onto the mattress of the rickety bunk bed and measures out his breathing. In for four seconds, hold four seconds, out four seconds, hold four seconds, the most basic meditative technique but the most he can handle right now and even that leaves him shaking.
No one else notices yet another panicked citizen trying to stave off a mental breakdown, so at least that’s a mercy. No doubt some of the Thirteen soldiers would have a good laugh at the nasty Two scared of the dark; they resent anyone from the Capitol-lapdog districts being here but can hardly turn down the help, so they take it out where they can.
Claudius doesn’t fear death, not like the rest of the refugees from Twelve and elsewhere who scream and cling to each other and pray to the uncaring universe to save them. He doesn’ want to die and isn’t going to go out and do it on purpose or anything, but it isn’t the idea of death that scares him. They’ll all die one day, and like all Two Victors Claudius takes everything after eighteen as a miracle he should never stop appreciating.
Death, no, but dying -- and not just bleeding out in an Arena or torn to pieces by some sharp-toothed Gamemaker creation but crushed to death under falling rocks, suffocating slowly as he claws at his throat to make room for more air -- that is different.
With a weapon in his hand and something to do, Claudius could deal with almost anything. But the waiting, the hours of sitting in silence while the building above them threatened to collapse, old memories creeping around in the back of his mind --
A bomb hits with a room-shaking shudder, and the lights stutter and cut out. A collective wail rises up from the crowd, and Claudius squeezes his eyes shut and rolls over on his side, pulling his knees up tight and pressing his forehead against the bar. The darkness sits on him as a heavy weight, the recycled air passing thinly in and out of his lungs and leaving him gasping and light-headed.
Flashlights flick on in the bunks around him, but Claudius can’t recall if he has one or where it is and he can’t unclench his hand to search for it. The air in his chest presses out until he aches, a high ringing starting up in his ears, and Claudius can’t breathe and the walls are creaking and they were all going to die here, choking on rubble and the dank stink of sweat from so many bodies pressed together --
“Hey, D, you’re okay.” Lyme’s voice cuts through the panic, and her hand falls on his shoulder. Claudius sucks in a hard breath and shakes his head, and the cheap mattress dips under her weight as she sits down beside him. “I’m so sorry, I tried to find you but there’s no organization going on down here. I’ve been checking every bunk for the last three hours.”
Lyme doesn’t need this. She has a war to win and their district to salvage in the meantime, and she’s still mourning over losing Brutus and abandoning Nero and Misha and their home and everything else. She doesn’t have time for Claudius needing a nightlight and a security blanket. “I’m fine,” Claudius grits out, clenching his teeth to keep himself from gasping. “It’s -- it’s fine, this sucks but it’s fine.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lyme says, and go figure that his mentor sounds the calmest she’s been in weeks while the Capitol hammers the entire compound with wave after wave of bombs. She scoots over farther onto the bed, tugs Claudius up out of his tightly-curled ball and hauls him up half into her lap like a damn baby. She wraps her arms around him and holds him tight against her chest, her chin resting on his hair, and Claudius closes his eyes again and focuses on the steady thump of her heart, barely elevated given the circumstances.
“I’m fine, boss,” Claudius insists, but he curls his fingers in her belt and clings tight.
Lyme runs her fingers through his hair, and then, there in the middle of the cries and the explosions and the rattling of the furniture comes another sound, low and soft and crooning, one that Claudius has never heard in his life despite being a tribute and a Victor and a traitor and all the things in between.
“Are you singing?” Claudius asks. The ceiling shakes overhead, the air thick and oxygen thin, and he presses closer.
The sound stops. “Nope,” Lyme says, rubbing her fingertips over his scalp and down to work on the taut muscles in his neck. “You’re hallucinating out of fear.” A few seconds after she quits speaking, the song picks up again.
Claudius lets it carry him away, hallucination or no, and when he opens his eyes later the lights are back to their usual levels. The air no longer tastes of sweat and the metallic tang of several layers of recycling, and no sound of explosions rattle down from above. “We made it?” he asks, blinking.
Lyme runs her hand over his military-cropped hair in lieu of ruffling it. “We made it,” she confirms. “They’re moving us all back upstairs in batches. I thought you needed the sleep in the meantime.”
Claudius releases a long breath and sits up. “Thanks,” he says, unable to look at her in spite of all the times she’s seen him flayed open and vulnerable. It feels different here in the catacombs, surrounded by people who want them dead almost as much as the hovercraft crews above them.
“Hey,” Lyme says, and she grips him by the back of the neck and rests their foreheads together. “Are you my kid, or aren’t you?”
“Always,” Claudius says without thinking. He killed seven kids in the Arena and more in training to make it out to her, and he packed up his whole life in a satchel and followed her when she left for District 13 without a second thought. His life might be upside-down but a mentor is forever.
Lyme smiles, thin and tight compared to the open affection she used to show him before Brutus died and the world exploded around them, but still. “Good. Now come on, let’s slip in with the next group up and see if we can snag something not terrible for breakfast.”
Claudius follows her into the crowd of orderly bodies, and in the press and bustle, Lyme reaches over and gives his arm a comforting squeeze.