Hunger Games: Lyme's First Tribute [6/6]
IT'S DONE! :D
Title: Nobody Decent
Rating: PG
Warnings: mentions of past child abuse
Characters: Lyme, Artemisia
Summary: District 2 Victor Lyme, two years fresh from the Arena, gets her first tribute to mentor. Her vow to remain aloof to avoid getting attached lasts until she finds Artemisia: wicked, irreverent, blase and a little unhinged, whose childhood photos showed bruises her Games training never put there.
Chapter Summary: After the Tour there are a few more hurdles to go.
The Victory Tour is a two-week parade of hell for fresh Victors, coming off six months of medication and relaxation and throwing them back into the fray. For kids who just started to move past the horror, standing face to face with the blank-eyed families of the dead and the grieving, disapproving, or furious district citizens tears everything loose and jumbles it up again. Those who managed to escape the Arena guilt until that point find themselves stumbling at the finish line, and the ones who convinced themselves that honour above all made everything all right have to square that away with daily evidence that their existence brings misery to hundreds of thousands of people.
But the shine of good, pure metal appears when you clean away the blood; for Victors who distrust their mentor, or think they don’t need one, or any other reason that sullies the bond in the months previous, the Tour strips that all away. The districts are not on a Victor’s side, not ever; the Capitol citizens love the spectacle but not the human soul behind it, and the president is to be feared and obeyed and loved but remains apart. Through the fog and confusion and guilt, one person stands clear: the mentor, the one who can be relied on to understand a Victor’s every need, to see past the blood and gore and anger, to know every weakness and every ugly secret and never flinch.
After the Tour is when the most problematic of Victors realize that their mentor is an ally who will never, ever leave. After the Tour, no matter how bad the initial recovery, is when things get better.
At least, in theory.
Everyone told Lyme that in mentor training; Nero confirmed it, said that was when she managed to shed the last of her suspicions and stop acting out. Brutus had only argued with Odin once or twice in his entire recovery and therefore belonged on a pedestal with magical unicorn tributes, but as far as Lyme could find out from talking to the others, everyone else with a Victor of their own agreed.
Lyme always knew Artemisia was special; it only makes sense that she would buck this convention, too.
The Tour wreaked its havoc on Artemisia like anyone else, leaving her with a head stuffed full of confusion and betrayal and guilt, with a good helping of anger that she’d managed to fall prey to any of that. After they returned she’d been quiet for a few days, letting Lyme take care of her and make her food and set up a pile of blankets by the window. She’d picked up embroidery as her private talent after making cat clothes with Callista, and so Artemisia practiced her stitches and watched the birds flock to the feeder that Nero built and set up for her. For a little while Lyme thought it was working, that Artemisia finally trusted her after everything they went through together.
Lyme has two weeks, give or take, to enjoy this illusion before it breaks. One night, Artemisia asks for stir-fry for dinner. Lyme was never an amazing cook but she’s learning for her girl, and stir-fry at least isn’t difficult. Toss vegetables and meat in a pan, add sauce, and hey-presto, instant food; good for Victors who need to keep their strength and weight on and mentors who don’t have a lot of time to fiddle with complex recipes. Lyme gives Artemisia a knife sharp enough to cut through the softer vegetables but too blunt to hurt herself (her girl hasn’t shown any signs of wanting to, but no point in playing with fire), and they work and talk and Lyme shoves down the urge to pump her fist in the air.
The other day Emory had shown Lyme how to thicken sauce with cornstarch (“You don’t need to use butter or eggs like you do if you use flour,” she said. “I know we have whatever we want now, but in the quarries that’s a hell of a waste.”), and as it turns out, yet again her folk wisdom actually holds true. The first time Lyme tried to make stir-fry the sauce managed to be weak and lumpy at the same time, but today it’s just right. Maybe she can learn to cook and maybe she can get a handle on this mentor thing and maybe things will be all right after all.
It’s fine until they eat. Artemisia takes one bite, drops her fork onto her plate, and shoves the whole thing away. “I don’t want it.”
Patience, Nero told her. Victors look for a reaction, and you have to learn to give the right kind. Lyme sure pushed Nero as far as she could, back during her recovery, searching for the edge and how far it would be until she shoved him over.
Lyme raises an eyebrow and takes another bite. “You sure? It’s good. And it’s Emory’s recipe.”
Invoking the name of the woman Artemisia still sort of has a crush on usually works, but today Artemisia only scowls. “I don’t want it anymore, I want something else.”
Lyme’s memories of her childhood are fuzzy by design, but her mind clutches at an image of a kitchen table just too high for her, a plate of something undercooked and overcooked at once and a man’s voice shouting “You’ll eat what your mother gives you to eat or you won’t eat at all!” She grips her fork tightly enough that an ache spasms through her fingers, but Artemisia has her eyes fixed on Lyme’s face, prying for weakness, and so Lyme only nods.
“Sure,” she says. “There’s bread in the fridge and fixings for all kinds of sandwiches. I can make you one if you tell me what you want, or you can do it yourself if you’d rather.”
Artemisia exhales hard through her nose, and yeah, that’s reaction-seeking sure enough. Lyme would say she’d never been that bad, but she isn’t that good at self-deception. “I want to go out.”
Lyme’s first instinct is to say yes just to show Artemisia that she’s not a spoilsport, but that’s what the training is for. Boundaries are just as important as freedom, they told her; if a Victor thinks they can get away with anything they’ll stop feeling safe and protected and start feeling anxious, even if they don’t know why.
“Tomorrow afternoon we can look at restaurants and see where you feel like going,” Lyme says easily. “If you don’t feel like stir-fry anymore I can make you a sandwich or heat up the leftover pasta from yesterday. Which would you like?”
She’ll never pull off the beatific, intentionally oblivious smile that Nero used to pull on her when she acted out, but that’s not Lyme’s deal. Artemisia stares at her for a long moment, fingers drumming against the tabletop, but then she sighs and picks up her fork. “Never mind,” she says, her tone peeved, and shoves her mouth so full it takes her three swallows to finish the bite.
Lyme doesn’t say a word.
A few days later Artemisia breaks the code of providing two options to give an illusion of choice. Lyme figured it out herself soon enough, back in the day, and she’d been a mix of irritated and grudgingly impressed. Artemisia, for her part, fights back. If Lyme asks if she wants to go for a walk or spar, Artemisia chooses watching TV; if Lyme offers pasta or soup for lunch, Artemisia wants lasagna. It’s typical, and the training warned Lyme it would happen, except that timeline-wise it’s all off. These are baby games, played by Victors in their first three, maybe four months of recovery. They should be past this by the Tour.
Lyme reacts as she’s been taught, calmly and without judgement, and every time Artemisia fails to provoke her mentor she only boils hotter. There’s nothing Lyme can do but wait it out, but every night she goes to bed and stares at the ceiling, wondering what she’s done wrong.
Only shitty mentors blame their Victor, Nero told her. If a Victor loses it and sets the house on fire, it’s on the mentor to have seen it coming, to be there to take the matches away.
One night Lyme misses the extra knife at the table right before Artemisia comes at her with it. In the split second it takes her girl to reach her, Lyme flashes through half a dozen options - let her fight it out; knock her down; dodge out of the way - but settles for twisting the knife away and pinning Artemisia against the wall. Her Victor snarls and struggles and flings insults at her like she’s back on the first day of drug withdrawal, but Lyme takes all the hits and lets them roll off, even if they stick on their way down.
“Okay,” Lyme says once Artemisia runs out of ways to insult Lyme’s parentage and sexual prospects. “You don’t actually want to kill me or you would’ve tried me while I was sleeping, so. What is this?”
“Nothing,” Artemisia snaps. “Nothing’s wrong, nothing is ever wrong, just pat me on the head and let me go back to dinner, right?”
Lyme would be extremely shocked to hear she’d ever patted anyone on the head in her life - other than Brutus, when they both shotgunned a beer at the annual spring Village barbecue and he choked on his - but that isn’t the point. She takes a second to process (thinking time is never bad unless the question is ‘do you love me’ or ‘will you leave me’, Nero told her, where the answer should be automatic and instinctive) and leaves her arm firm across Artemisia’s chest.
“If I were going to be killed with a dinner knife I wouldn’t be here,” Lyme says finally. “But I can demote you to plastic utensils if that’s what you want from me.”
Mistake. Never ask a Victor what she wants, because young Victors either have a thousand contradictory ideas or none at all and either way the panic works out the same. No matter how much Artemisia (and Lyme, in her day, and likely Callista before them) might chafe at the restrictions and carefully-offered choices, it’s better than letting her muddle through everything by herself.
Sure enough, Artemisia’s expression darkens. The angrier she gets the younger she looks, funny enough, eyebrows pulling together and mouth turned down in an insubordinate expression that must have frustrated the hell out of her trainers. It matches one of the photos in her file, back in her early days at the Centre, when she’d refused to smile or pose and sat slumped in the chair with her whole face screwed up into the definition of sullenness.
She’d sported a bruise on her cheek, then, starting on the outside edge of her face and spreading inward - the kind that came from a backhand slap, not an honest punch to the face. Lyme recognized both the injury and the expression that came from it, and now -
(Artemisia on the roof last fall, giving Lyme a stare both evaluating and lazy at the same time. I don't mean what are you gonna give me, I mean what am I gonna get?)
“Artemisia,” Lyme says slowly, “I’m not going to hit you.” This time the knife hits the target; the lines around Artemisia’s eyes go tight, and her mouth thins. “I mean it. Whatever you do, however far you push me, I won’t ever hit you. Not ever.”
“I know.” Artemisia’s eyes flick to the sides, wildly, like a trapped animal’s. “I can do whatever I want, right? I can fucking try to stab you and you won’t stop me.”
“I did stop you,” Lyme points out, pressing hard with her arm so Artemisia will feel the pressure against her throat. “And I will. But not like that.”
Artemisia sags, going deadweight, and Lyme knows what a feint looks like, that when she moves to counterbalance Artemisia will strike and try to knock her down. Instead Lyme backs off, leaving nothing but her hand just below her girl’s shoulder. “Upstairs,” Lyme says. “There’s more room.”
There’s an empty room on the second floor that could be converted to a spare bedroom in case Artemisia has a Victor of her own one day who might want to spend the night, and Artemisia pulls away and stalks up the steps.
Right from the start, it’s not going to be a good fight. Even on their messiest days Artemisia always fought her for real, trying to get under Lyme’s guard or cause her to overbalance or find her weak spots. Today she’s not holding back - her fist hits Lyme’s ribs hard enough to bruise - but when it’s time to dodge or duck or block Lyme’s returns, there she drops her guard. Not obviously, not entirely, but after a decade of learning the language of fights, Lyme catches the shift a split second before her blows connect and has to yank it back.
Artemisia is angling for a beating, and if Lyme won’t give it to her then she’ll do her best to make it happen herself.
For a second Lyme almost knocks her down and pins her again - but no. It didn’t work before and it won’t work now, and so all she can do is stay on her edge and pull back at the last second instead of landing a hit. It doesn’t take long for Artemisia to catch on, and after doing her best and failing to provoke Lyme for the umpteenth time, finally she flings herself back out of range.
“Why won’t you just do it?” Artemisia demands, breathing hard, voice gone ragged with the edge of hysteria. She pushes a hand into her hair and yanks at the brown strands, then starts a round of frantic pacing. “How am I supposed to get better if I’m scared all the damn time?”
Lyme stops dead. The mentor handbook didn’t have a page on this one. “You’re scared - because I won’t hit you?”
“Fucking duh,” Artemisia snaps. “My old man, I knew exactly how far I could push him and when I had to stop. I bet it was the same with yours. But you, oh no, you’re all with the ‘everything is fine, let me hold your hand and clean up the mess’ bullshit and I don’t know where the fucking line is!”
Always set limits, they told her, or Victors will feel unsafe. For Lyme that had been Nero saying ‘no’, taking away the knife and putting bandages on her wrists and checking her arms for new cuts. Even that had been enough to drive her half insane until she snapped at him, but she’d respected that in a way she never had her father’s fists.
If Artemisia only ever learned boundaries enforced with violence -
This time Lyme does knock her down, holds her shoulders hard against the floor and settles all her weight so even if Artemisia flings herself sideways or tries to bring her legs up it won’t throw Lyme off. “This is the limit,” she says, stressing the words. “When I hold you down, that’s what this means. It means I’m telling you to stop, and it means I’m not going anywhere. You got it?”
“Bullshit,” Artemisia says again, eyes wide. “Bullshit! Everybody hits.”
“No.” Lyme leans her weight down. “Shitty people hit. Everybody doesn’t.” The sparring is supposed to speak for itself, that’s how it’s meant to work - it’s a way for the Victor to understand the mentor without words, without explanations. Nero fought Lyme again and again and again until it clicked for her that he wasn’t leaving no matter how much she pushed him away, that she wasn’t an experiment or a curiosity or a temporary diversion. But maybe Lyme’s not old enough, maybe by the time she’s been out a decade or more she’ll have it down, but for now -
“If you try to kill me, I’ll stop you and then I’ll hold you down,” Lyme says. “If you try again when I let you up then I’ll hold you down again, and we’ll keep going until you get bored or fall asleep or you finally get that there’s nothing you can do that will make me hurt you.”
“Yeah, because you don’t give a shit,” Artemisia snarls, and suddenly she’s clawing and snapping and Lyme nearly loses her balance wondering where it came from until the light glistens off the moisture in Artemisia’s eyes. “You don’t care, if you did you’d hit me! How am I supposed to count on you, huh, if you won’t even show me who’s boss?”
It’s all Lyme can do not to demand Artemisia tell her what her father’s name is so Lyme can track him down and rip off his fingers. “I’m the boss because I’m telling you I’m the boss,” Lyme says, and no she isn’t, she’s twenty years old, over her head and terrified, but she puts on her best Victor face and holds her girl steady. “I’m the boss because you might be the best with swords but I can knock you on your ass any day of the week. I’m the boss because I’m your mentor and that means I went through hell for you. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, I drank coffee so thick I had to chew it. I memorized idiot fluffy women’s taste in poodles so I could compliment them and get you that water bottle. I did a hell of a lot more than stick my dick in your mother and shoot off a load without a condom, and that means I’m the boss. And if after all that you still think the only way I can prove it is to belt you one, then we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Artemisia stares at her, then, incongruously, lets out a burst of startled laughter. “I think you just insulted my mother there, mentor.”
“Just her taste,” Lyme says easily. “Though more, if she did the same.”
“Nah.” Artemisia closes her eyes, and they’ve gone off track but it doesn’t matter. “She’d just watch. Maybe sigh a bit, real disappointed through her teeth.”
“I’m not disappointed,” Lyme says. “You’re perfect.”
Artemisia raises her eyebrows. “Perfectly crazy, maybe.”
“No, just perfect.” Lyme digs her fingers hard into Artemisia’s shoulders. “I like you crazy, I wouldn’t have chosen you if you weren’t. And I sure as hell care about you more than those fucksticks ever did. I’ll keep knocking you down until you believe me.”
Artemisia falls quiet, then her entire body deflates and she sags back against the floor. “Whatever you say, boss.”
“Good girl.” Lyme rolls off, waits for Artemisia to sit up, then takes the plunge and pulls her in for a hug. Artemisia goes stiff and still like Lyme just stabbed a knife in her spine, but Lyme holds on until finally the hard line of her back loosens and her head drops onto Lyme’s shoulder. She doesn’t hug back, but her fingers toy with the bottom hem of Lyme’s sweater and her breath hitches and good enough.
Lyme doesn’t soften the hug, doesn’t rub Artemisia’s back or pet her hair, just stays there, solid and steady until Artemisia’s heart stops hammering against her chest. Finally Lyme pulls back, ignoring the telltale sheen in her girl’s eyes and flicking her in the forehead instead. “You want to go build a snow fort out in Brutus’ yard, then pelt him with snowballs when he comes outside?”
“Are we going to go make Brutus’ life miserable every time I have an emotional crisis?” Artemisia asks, her mouth twitching.
“There are worse traditions,” Lyme says.
Artemisia laughs, but then she runs a hand over her face. “It sounds fun, but - could we just stay in? It’s getting late and I’m tired.”
“Sure,” Lyme says. “I’ll get blankets, we’ll set up on the couch.”
Artemisia studies her face, eyes narrowing a fraction, and Lyme readies herself for a test. “Can I paint your nails?”
One of the last things Lyme ever wants to do is put chemicals on her skin, especially ones that the Capitol stylists fought Nero over until he argued them down to a clear polish. But when her Victor asks… “Sure,” Lyme says. “Anything but pink. My stylist says I don’t have the colouring to pull that off.” To put it mildly.
Artemisia shakes her head. “Nah, you look like a blue to me,” she says, and her expression brightens. “I don’t have any, but I bet Callista would let me borrow some.”
“I don’t think Callista has anything but silver or blood red,” Lyme says dryly. “But I can make a call and have someone deliver it.”
Artemisia laughs again, this time startled and joyous. “Man, there’s the reason I won the Hunger Games, nail polish delivery to my door in the middle of winter.”
“Is that a no?” Lyme cocks an eyebrow at her.
“Didn’t say it was a no.” Artemisia grins.
There’s still an edge of wariness in her posture, and she keeps flicking her gaze over Lyme’s face, checking for a reaction, but it’s better than it was an hour ago and for now, Lyme will take it.
“Let me get my phone,” Lyme says. “You get the blankets.”
Lyme stays on the couch until morning, afraid that if she moves the spell will break. After painting their nails an alarming shade of blue, Artemisia had rolled a blanket around her shoulders like a human-sized cannoli and flopped down on the sofa with her head in Lyme’s lap. Lyme froze until her fingernails no longer felt tacky and then slowly, slowly, ran her hands through the girl’s hair.
It’s the most honest affection she’s shown that Lyme can remember without having been pumped full of mood stabilizers or jangled from a nightmare, and in case this is a dream or a hallucination from the acetone vapours she sits still all through the night.
Come morning Artemisia crawls awake with a groan and stretch like the entire existence of any time between dawn and noon offends her. Lyme blinks rapidly to bring herself back, and she’s there with a reassuring hand on the girl’s shoulder when Artemisia starts at the strange position and sits halfway up. “Oh, right,” Artemisia says, yawning and lying back down. “Did you stay there all night?”
“You had a rough day,” Lyme tells her, and somewhere in the distant part of her memory she’d promised herself and Nero that she would be a professional mentor, not one of the ones bogged down in messy feelings. So much for that. “I thought I should let you sleep.”
“Sap,” Artemisia says, sounding inordinately pleased, and Lyme gapes down at her. “What, nobody ever called you that before?”
“No,” Lyme says, poking her Victor between the eyes. Artemisia scowls, but judging from the exaggerated expression it’s an attempt to trap Lyme’s finger in the frown lines than actual annoyance. “Do you want breakfast?”
Artemisia considers, partially unfolding the blanket, then making a face and curling back up. “No, it’s cold. I’ll eat if you make me something but I don’t want to move.”
Lyme raises both eyebrows, but it’s all she can do not to kiss the stars that they managed a breakthrough and so she gives up. “If I get up to make you breakfast, you don’t get to complain about how the eggs are cooked,” she says. “That’s the deal.”
“A hard bargain, but at least I don’t have to kill somebody to get an apple,” Artemisia says. “Wait, that was Brutus. What did I get?”
“Pears,” Lyme says immediately, and now she would really rather stay on the couch and never leave or let Artemisia out of her sight again, but instead she eases herself up. Artemisia makes a noise of protest at being jostled but accepts a cushion as a lap alternative, and Lyme tousles her hair on the way to the kitchen.
One afternoon Artemisia drags her outside to make a snowman. Lyme never liked snow; her second kill test happened in the winter, and she’d stared at the red splashes across the spread of white as the hot blood melted tiny divots in the frozen surface. In her Arena, a savannah baked by the Gamemakers’ artificial sun during the day, the temperatures plunged below freezing as soon as the nightly anthem played.
But her girl wants a snowman and a snowman she will have, and so Lyme pulls on her jacket and gloves and mostly stands watch as Artemisia rolls the snow into giant balls and heaves them up on top of each other. “Too bad logs wouldn’t stay,” Artemisia says, poking at the sticks she’s jammed into the sides. “You have such beefy arms. Snow-Lyme doesn’t do you justice.”
“Snow-me, huh,” Lyme says, staring at the mostly-shapeless hunk of ice. “You gonna make a you, then?”
“I’m gonna make the Village,” Artemisia announces grandly and likely over-optimistically, and Lyme says absolutely nothing.
Predictably, while Artemisia manages to build a tall, skinny snowman to represent herself, she tires halfway through snow-Nero. He’s a hulking beast twice the size of snow-Lyme, and after making him half the white cover in the yard is gone, dried grey-green grass poking through the long, bare tracks where the snowballs rolled. “This would be easier if we were an outer district,” Artemisia says, packing snow around Nero’s neck so his head won’t fall off and then leaving him featureless. “There’s too many, and everyone is huge. I’m like the littlest Victor over here.”
Artemisia stands nearly six feet tall and is leggy like Callista, but that still puts her nearly half a foot shorter than her mentor. Lyme laughs as Artemisia pokes experimentally at her bicep through the thick wool sleeve of her jacket. “We like you little,” Lyme says. “Let’s take a break and then give poor snow-Nero a face or the real one will sigh at us next time he comes over.”
She’d brought out cocoa in a pair of thermoses, and they sit on the porch and drink, the steam rising up in a cloud around their faces. Artemisia leans against Lyme’s shoulder just a little and surveys her handiwork.
“What do they do with the ones who die?” she asks out of nowhere, and Lyme steels herself just in time to avoid flinching.
Breathe, Lyme reminds herself. She curls her fingers around the thermos and lets the warmth permeate through to her fingers. “They’re buried in the field of sacrifice. The Centre bought the land and pays for the upkeep.”
Artemisia leans back to stare at her. “We do not seriously have a field of sacrifice. I thought that was a joke.”
“No, we really do,” Lyme says. “I’ve never been there. It’s bad luck to go before - before you have to.”
Callista would’ve gone there last summer with Jasper. Brutus put his first girl in the ground the year before that. Brutus chose black eyed susans as his memorial flower; Lyme never asked about Callista’s, but she guesses it’s something red and unapologetic. Odds are, the next kid Lyme takes after Artemisia will end up there, too. She shudders, sets the thermos down and wraps her arm around her girl’s shoulders. “Why did you want to know?”
Artemisia shrugs, staring down at her cocoa. “I dunno, just curious I guess. What do you think they do with them in the other districts?”
“Give them back to the families, probably,” Lyme says, warning bells ringing in her mind, but they can’t hide from death forever and it’s better Artemisia talk about it than have it bubble to the surface on its own later. “I’ve never really thought much about the traditions elsewhere.”
“They probably burned what’s his name, from Six,” Artemisia says. “I saw that shitty district, nowhere to bury anybody. I bet they burn people and just let the ashes go wherever and people are always breathing in the dead but they can’t tell because the air is full of shitty, shitty smog.” Her voice goes tight, and Lyme stays very still and says nothing. “They didn’t even have snow, did you see? Just grey slush mixed in with all that city dirt. What a shithole.”
Artemisia sniffles loudly, wetly, and turns her face into Lyme’s shoulder. “I hate Six. Nobody cares when you’re born and nobody cares when you die and you just get mixed up in the same shit you breathe your whole life. What’s the point of that?”
She hasn’t talked about Six since her Tour when she refused to apologize, and Lyme hasn’t touched it. Guilt and grief hits in its own way, and now Artemisia sucks in a hard breath and scrubs a hand over her face. “I’m not sorry,” she says, her voice thick, and Lyme doesn’t argue. “I’m just sad for that shitpile of a district. It’s just so stupid and pointless and terrible, I don’t know why anyone gets out of bed. I’m glad I live here.”
“Me too,” Lyme says, and she holds her girl as she cries. Finally she peels off her gloves to wipe away the moisture from Artemisia’s cheeks without scraping her with the frozen fabric. Artemisia lets out a long breath, then pulls away.
“Okay, let’s give Nero a face,” she says, and Lyme claps her on the back.
Artemisia doesn't complain about the food, the temperature of the house, or anything else for upward of two weeks. When the weather isn't blowing icy pellets in their faces from the wind Lyme takes her out for walks, and they go the perimeter of the fence and up a short way through the trails out to the frozen lake. Artemisia scoots forward on her stomach to stare at the frozen plants suspended below the surface, and Lyme curls her hands into fists in her pockets to stop herself from darting forward to make sure her girl doesn't go through the ice and into the water.
(It's stupid. They've all been flung into a frozen lake before, and it's not like the pond behind the Village has a current that would drag her under. Afterward Artemisia runs back to the bank with pink cheeks and a wide grin, and see, it's fine. Mentorship does something very, very strange to the brain.)
Then, one afternoon, Lyme suggests they take the trail a little further up to the first level of cliffs. "It's pretty in the winter," she says. "The sky's clear, and you can see the frozen river going out through the centre of the district."
"No," Artemisia says.
Lyme blinks. It's the same mulish tone from the early stages but mixed with deliberation, and Artemisia darts her eyes toward Lyme as though to make sure she caught the insubordination. "All right," Lyme says instead. No sense picking a fight over something that small. "We could go into town and look at the shops instead."
"No," she says again, curling her fingers and examining the chipped polish on her nails.
This time Lyme lets her eyebrows creep up. "No? Do you want to stay in and embroider me something?” The 'no' this time comes as predicted, and Lyme taps Artemisia's shoulder. "Up, let's go, we're sparring."
It's a quick fight; Artemisia puts up a bit of an effort, but soon enough Lyme shoves her up against the wall and gets her hands pinned above her head. There's no wildness in Artemisia's eyes this time, and the stubborn light dies and her shoulders drop. "You good?" Lyme asks, and Artemisia nods. "Tell me what you want to do."
"It's cold," Artemisia says, flexing her hands but not struggling to break free. "Can we stay in?"
"Sure," Lyme says, stepping back, and she's pretty sure she offered that option but she isn't going to point that out. Sometimes things go squirrelly in a kid's head and they need a match to set things straight, that's all. "You pick the channel, I'll make popcorn."
It happens again the next day, and again two days after that. The time after that it's twice in one day, and each time Artemisia picks a fight for no reason Lyme can figure out, only to agree with a spurned suggestion or eat the food she'd refused earlier once the sparring bout finishes. It's newbie behaviour, like the boundary testing all over again, and when Artemisia has gone to bed for the night Lyme sits with her notes from the training sessions trying to figure out what has gone wrong. Victors don't push unless they feel unsafe and need reassurance, but as far as Lyme can track down, nothing changed between last week and this one.
She could call Nero. She probably should, that would be the quick and responsible thing to do, but the idea of calling her mentor and asking for advice instead of figuring it out herself --
The next time Artemisia announces that all her clothes are ugly and she refuses to wear any of them. After a long round of sparring that ends with her on the floor, Lyme's elbow at her throat and one foot pinning her hand to the ground, Artemisia consents to borrow one of Lyme's sweaters.
The sight of Artemisia swimming in her mentor's sweater triggers a memory in the back of Lyme's mind. She'd had a bad time of it when Nero started going to the Capitol to fuck his horde of cougar sponsors, and once to cheer her up he'd left her a shirt to wear. Lyme told him she didn't need it, but once his truck left the Village gates she'd hauled it on over her clothes and curled up in the corner of the couch, knees tucked up under the bottom edge.
Lyme drops down next to Artemisia, and sure enough her girl tips sideways against her side. "Hey," Lyme says slowly, because if she's wrong then this could blow the whole thing to the Arena and back. "You know if you want to spar you could just ask. You don't have to act out like that."
Artemisia stops humming, and the line of her arm goes tense. "I don't --"
"I like sparring," Lyme says, cutting off the flustered denial before it takes root. "It's fun. There's no reason why we can't just spar for the hell of it. If you want to, just say something."
Artemisia tugs one of the sleeves down over her hands, plucking a loose thread at the end. "It -- I don't want to," she says, and Lyme waits because she trails off instead of ending it. "I mean, I don't want to ask. It feels stupid, or babyish or something. You and Nero don’t.”
Lyme could go the Adessa route, find out statistics of how many Victors continue sparring with their mentors. She and Nero don't, true, but it's more because his size makes it awkward for them to have fun with it and she doesn't want to whale on him full out the way she does Brutus. Brutus and Odin still have matches at least once a week, and Emory talks about sparring with Brutus with such open honesty that she likely wouldn’t understand why anyone else might be embarrassed. The numbers are there, but Lyme looks down at the top of her girl's head and she thinks, no. No, logic and statistics wouldn't have worked with her, and she's betting it won't for Artemisia either.
"What about a code?" Lyme says.
Artemisia tilts her head back and squints up at her. "What kind of code?"
"A way to tell me you want to spar, but we don't have to say it. And if anyone else is around they won't know what it means."
Artemisia lets out a breath and stretches, pushing her feet against the side of the coffee table. "That... could be good," she says, and Lyme gives herself a mental high-five. "I'm not -- I didn't think, I don't know. I hated it when my mom tried to cuddle me, and she did it all the time. She'd try to pull me into her lap and I started hiding pencils in my pockets so I could stab her and make her let me go. My old man belted me for it but I'd rather get hit in the face than hugged when I didn't feel like it.” She reaches over and takes Lyme's hand, lacing their fingers and twisting them this way and that to examine the last of the matching polish on their nails. “But I feel like it more with you. Is that weird?"
Careful, careful. Lyme taps her foot against the floor, but in the end she takes the jump. "I used to sit in Nero's lap."
"You did not!"
"I did, when I was upset." The day Lyme found out what Nero did to earn her sponsor money, she'd crawled on top of him and refused to move until he had to carry her to the kitchen for dinner. "Sometimes I'd fall asleep on him while he was working and I watched TV, or whatever. Last spring when I was getting ready for you I passed out on him going over your files." Artemisia laughs, but it's light and incredulous, not mocking, and Lyme tugs the ends of her hair. "My point is, there's no magic age when you're suddenly too old for sparring or whatever else. If you want to keep going then we can keep going. I don't mind."
Artemisia ducks her head. "Really? I mean, I like it when my head's screwed on funny, too, you were right. It's much better than getting smacked. But I think I'd like it when I don't need it, either."
"Yeah," Lyme says, a warm glow in the centre of her chest threatening to spread out through her body and make her say stupid, soppy things. "It's nice."
"I'll think of a code," Artemisia says, sounding pleased. "I like that. In the Centre a few of the girls and I had one for sex." Lyme chokes, and Artemisia grins at her. “Don’t worry, that’s weird. I just wanted to see your face."
"Yeah, well, now I think you need a bit of a reminder who your mentor is," Lyme says, standing up and tugging her girl up after her. Artemisia gives her an impish smile, and Lyme snorts and shoves her into the wall.
A few days later, Artemisia hands Lyme a small square of fabric, sort of like a handkerchief but made of something thicker and heavier than the classy white things Adessa keeps on her. “What’s this?” Lyme asks.
“Look,” Artemisia says, bouncing a bit on her heels, and she clasps her hands behind her back. “Seriously, it’s right there.”
It’s a mess of knots and sticking-out ends and long stitches stretching across blank spaces, and Lyme blinks at it for a long moment before looking up. Artemisia rolls her eyes. “That’s the back side. I haven’t learned how to make the underside look nice yet, it’s hard. Turn it over.”
Lyme does, and this time she laughs. It’s a house with two little stitched people in front of it, one with long hair and one with short, and underneath Artemisia has picked out the phrase ‘Kick my ass, why don’t you’ in red thread. “I like that,” she says. “It’s subtle.”
Artemisia taps the side of her nose with a knowing expression, then laughs. “So what do you think?”
“I think I feel like sparring,” Lyme says, handing it back, and Artemisia grins and pockets it.
After that, Lyme finds that or other pieces of embroidery stuffed behind couch cushions, into her pockets, or waiting on the table under her plate. Whenever it happens Lyme finishes what they’re doing, then drags Artemisia up to the nearest clear space for a play-match. Afterward Artemisia takes back the fabric square to pull out the stitches and try a different design without having a hundred of scraps lying around the room, and Lyme ruffles her hair and gives her a hug.
Once Artemisia hides a pocket square in the toe of Lyme’s boot, and when she pulls it out and unwrinkles it Lyme nearly has a coronary to see ‘BEST MENTOR’ stitched in navy across the front without any ironic embellishments. It’s a nice fabric, plain blue linen, and Artemisia has learned to sew so that the back no longer makes a mess. It would go well with the charcoal suits Lyme wears out on business, and so this one Lyme doesn’t give back, just squirrels away in her drawer. Much later she wonders whether that wasn’t the point after all.
It’s spring when Artemisia tells Lyme she wants to have a campfire.
By now, at least, Lyme is used to her Victor’s more esoteric requests. “It’s a bit chilly out there today,” she says, pushing the curtain aside and checking the thermometer outside the window. “Not near freezing, and we’re past the snow, but you’re still going to get cold pretty quickly.”
“That’s what the campfire is for,” Artemisia says in an exaggeratedly patient tone. “Fire, hot. Heat, good. And like you said, it’s not freezing outside and we’ve both been in worse. I feel like a campfire, and sticking a marshmallow on a cooking skewer and holding it over the gas range isn’t going to cut it.”
“No, let’s not with the fire in the house,” Lyme says dryly. One of the notes in Artemisia’s early files mentioned a tendency toward pyromania, and while the Centre had given her weapons to play with instead and the interest waned, Lyme would rather not risk reactivating an old love. “You really want a campfire now?”
Artemisia shrugs. “Yeah. I don’t want to wait until summer, and anyway it would just feel like the Arena if it was warm out.” She’s stitching again, a pretty garden scene with the words ‘Fuck you and your face’ sewn in looping pink cursive, but when she pulls the thread tight the fabric puckers unevenly under the pressure and she scowls.
Lyme reaches over and takes it away, setting the needle and cloth on the table. “Get your coat,” she says. “Nobody’s going to die, but if either of us catch cold we’ll get made fun of until we wish we had.”
And so they end up outside in front of a small but crackling fire, clumps of chilly dirt and grass digging into their legs. Artemisia holds her hands out close to the flames to warm them, watching with an expression of quiet satisfaction that was miles away from her twisted Arena glee. It’s not that cold, really, and Lyme tosses in another branch to see the fire turn the bark black.
“So, mentor,” Artemisia says, pushing her hair back out of her face. “Was this one of the perks to having a Victor they mentioned to you in training?”
Lyme snorts, leans over and wraps her arms around Artemisia’s shoulders. “You be quiet, you’re perfect.” She actually kisses her girl’s hair, and Lyme did not give herself permission to do that but too late now. Artemisia doesn’t pull away, at any rate, so Lyme opts to let it go. “And no, I consider it a bonus.”
Artemisia knocks her head against Lyme’s. After a minute of quiet she says, “What were you going to be if you didn’t make Volunteer?”
That, at least, is an easy answer just because there isn’t one. “I didn’t have a backup plan,” Lyme says. “It was the Arena or nothing. I guess if I’d washed out I would’ve figure something out, but I didn’t want to think about it.”
“Me neither.” Artemisia leans forward and picks up a stick, poking it at the edge of the fire. “I was just thinking. Emory, I could see her as a Peacekeeper, one of the ones who stays in Two and takes care of the quarry towns. I bet if she’d come second that’s what she would’ve done. Brutus too, or maybe they’d both go back home and take up mining. Adessa could’ve gotten a job working with the district mayor or something. Me, though.” The end of the stick snaps against the ground, and she tosses it into the middle of the blaze. “It was this or the other side.”
Lyme frowns. “What do you mean, the other side?”
Artemisia stares into the fire, the light dancing across her face. “I used to steal things and break into houses and set shit on fire. One time the Peacekeeper who dragged me home told me I’d better do well at the Centre because if I didn’t, she bet I’d be staring at a kill test from from the opposite end of the sword.”
Nero said a similar thing once, that after he killed his stepfather they’d told him his choices were Residential or breaking rocks at one of the youth penitentiary mines. Lyme herself had wondered, once or twice, what she’d have done with all her seething, roiling anger if she hadn’t had the kill tests and the vicious, violent sparring matches in training to expel it. Maybe she would’ve stuck a knife in her old man’s jugular one night; maybe she would’ve mixed the rat poison he used to leave around his shop into his beer and wait for him to drink it. She’d thought about that and a dozen other ways to make it end, and only knowing that Residential waited for her if she sat on her hands and took his shit for another year had kept her from doing it.
“You’re not the only one,” Lyme says finally, and Artemisia’s glance flickers back at her before a tiny smile twitches at the corner of her mouth. “Look, it’s not like the Centre picks sweet kids and turns us into monsters, all of us had a killer underneath somewhere.”
“Except maybe Emory,” Artemisia says wryly.
Lyme stifles a laugh in an attempt to be mature. “Except maybe Emory,” she agrees. She’s never asked the older Victor what her life was like before the Centre, but Lyme can’t see her running around bashing heads. “Some of us might’ve been trained into it more than others, but there’s no shame in being born for this.”
“I blame my mother,” Artemisia drawls, and she usually brings up her father but this is twice now for her mother, and neither time happy. Lyme stills. “Not like that, I meant my name. The only people called Artemisia are Victors and socialites, and I sure as the Reaping wasn’t going to be a socialite.”
“Did they call you that when you were a kid, even?” Lyme asks. It’s dangerous territory, wading into the pool of childhood memories, but she’s here and the fire is warm and grounds them in the present. Once she’d asked Callista if her parents had ever called her ‘Calli’ like Nero does and the woman skewered her right through with a horrified gaze. Her parents, apparently, believed children had dignity. “I can’t imagine calling a little girl a name longer than she is.”
“Oh, sure.” Artemisia laughs, flat and fatalistic and dusted in bitterness, and Lyme still catches herself sounding like that when she lets herself remember the people who raised her. “My mother sighed it all disappointed, like, Arte-mi-sia, any time I broke something or came home bloody or set the neighbour’s garden on fire. She wanted a perfect little princess and she got a perfect little muttation in hair ribbons. Meanwhile my old man would shout it through the house until it shook the walls. I swear when he said it he gave it six syllables, still can’t figure out how.”
“Well it is a good Victor’s name,” Lyme tells her, and Artemisia smiles at her, sharp and bright. The beginning of a thought starts working its way into her head. “But not much for after. ‘Artemisia’ doesn’t sound like the girl who paints my nails and demands cuddles.”
Artemisia snickers. “Well, if you come up with anything better let me know, because I get the feeling you’re good at that.”
Lyme tilts her head. “How so?”
“You really want me to believe some parents went and named their baby girl Lyme?” Artemisia raises her eyebrows in a fair imitation of Emory’s polite but incredulous expression. “You changed it when you signed the papers, I know you did. What was it before?”
Her birth name, soft and feminine and giving birth to a dozen cutesy nicknames, starts a treacherous whisper in Lyme’s ear before she stomps it down. “Never mind,” Lyme says, sharper than she intended. “That girl is dead.”
She curses herself for losing her temper over something so stupid - so personal, so weak - but Artemisia, to her surprise, only nods. “My bad,” she says. “You told me we don’t ask other district Victors about their Games. I probably shouldn’t ask Twos about before the Arena unless they bring it up, right?”
Lyme unclenches her hands, slowly, and her fingers twitch to pull her sleeves down over the fading scars on her wrists but she keeps herself steady. “Probably better,” she agrees. “Everybody deserves a few secrets.”
“Fair enough,” Artemisia says, and she shifts in closer, warm against Lyme’s side.
The next morning Lyme wakes up early, and rather than stare at the ceiling she pulls on her jacket and boots and takes a walk down to the city centre. The temperature runs a few degrees warmer down at the base of the mountain, and by the time she gets there Lyme has shed her coat and tucked it under one arm.
The early vendors are setting up on the sides of main street, and the quiet bustle is soothing in a chaotic sort of way. Lyme wanders the road, picks up some fresh bread and a basket of muffins from the bakery, and she’s about to turn back and head up when the sharp, sweet scent of fresh produce hits her. Lyme stops by the seller’s stand and picks up a soft, yellow-pink fruit. “Is this a peach?” she asks, surprised. “I didn’t think they were in season.”
“No ma’am, that’s an apricot,” says the man pleasantly and without condescension, and his eyes flick to the Victor tattoo on her wrist and back up again without comment. “You see how the skin is smooth? Peaches are fuzzy. We can’t grow them so easy here in Two, they don’t take the cold so well. Apricots are much hardier.”
“Huh,” Lyme says, turning the fruit over in her hand. Nero used to bring her peaches all the time; she hadn’t realized he would have had to order them from out of district. Funny, the things mentors don’t tell their Victors. “Do they taste different?”
“Apricots are sweeter,” he says, warming up to his subject the way Emory does when anyone asks her whether you can make jam out of who knows what. “Dry ‘em and they taste just like candy.”
Artemisia needs to dump half a pound of sugar into one cup of coffee before she’ll screw up her face and knock it back like a shot, so that’s probably a good thing. “I’ll take some then,” Lyme says, and the man smiles and runs her up a tab that Victor Affairs will pay from her stipend at the end of the month.
She takes the long way back up to the Village, still thinking about the night before. Artemisia is the kind of name that drags down a baby with the weight of expectation, and now that her girl is a Victor that kind of pressure won’t ever back off. The Village, on the other hand, should be a place to calm down and relax, where some of that stress can slide off.
Lyme keeps musing all the way back to her girl’s house. The sun is coming up over the trees by the time she gets in, and she knocks on the door and waits for Artemisia’s mumbled “’s’open” before slipping inside. “It’s nice out if you want to go for a walk,” Lyme calls out.
“I had my nature yesterday,” Artemisia says in a half-muffled tone that means she’s likely face down at the kitchen table, angling herself to catch the morning sunlight against her back.
That’s exactly what she’s doing, and she’s dressed in one of Lyme’s oversized sweaters with her hair pulled back in a sloppy braid, blinking sleepily up at Lyme and stifling a yawn. It throws Lyme back to the night before the Arena, when the layers of showmanship and gleeful murder peeled away to reveal the teenager underneath. There’s nothing grand or wicked about her at all as she raises her head and props herself up on her hand, her eye half-closed as the skin of her cheek pushes it shut.
“I got some fruit down at the market,” Lyme says, setting the bread and muffins on the counter. “You should try some, they’re good.”
Artemisia sits up, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Cut it up and put it in my mouth for me,” she says, yawning again. “Too tired.”
Lyme snorts, and just then it clicks inside her head. “C’mon, Misha, catch,” she says, and lobs one of the fruits at her.
Her girl’s eyes go wide, but she snatches the apricot out of the air without looking. After a second she stares down at it. “It’s not fuzzy,” she says slowly.
“Peaches are fuzzy, this is an apricot,” Lyme says, and it’s probably stupid to feel as pleased as she does about having a new fact to share, but oh well. “What do you think?”
She takes a bite, teeth slicing through the skin and juicy flesh with a loud slurping sound. “It’s different,” she says, then ducks her head a little and grins. “I like it, though.”
“Good, me too,” says Lyme, tugging the end of her braid on the way past to put the rest of the apricots in the fridge.
Misha grins and takes another bite.
Title: Nobody Decent
Rating: PG
Warnings: mentions of past child abuse
Characters: Lyme, Artemisia
Summary: District 2 Victor Lyme, two years fresh from the Arena, gets her first tribute to mentor. Her vow to remain aloof to avoid getting attached lasts until she finds Artemisia: wicked, irreverent, blase and a little unhinged, whose childhood photos showed bruises her Games training never put there.
Chapter Summary: After the Tour there are a few more hurdles to go.
The Victory Tour is a two-week parade of hell for fresh Victors, coming off six months of medication and relaxation and throwing them back into the fray. For kids who just started to move past the horror, standing face to face with the blank-eyed families of the dead and the grieving, disapproving, or furious district citizens tears everything loose and jumbles it up again. Those who managed to escape the Arena guilt until that point find themselves stumbling at the finish line, and the ones who convinced themselves that honour above all made everything all right have to square that away with daily evidence that their existence brings misery to hundreds of thousands of people.
But the shine of good, pure metal appears when you clean away the blood; for Victors who distrust their mentor, or think they don’t need one, or any other reason that sullies the bond in the months previous, the Tour strips that all away. The districts are not on a Victor’s side, not ever; the Capitol citizens love the spectacle but not the human soul behind it, and the president is to be feared and obeyed and loved but remains apart. Through the fog and confusion and guilt, one person stands clear: the mentor, the one who can be relied on to understand a Victor’s every need, to see past the blood and gore and anger, to know every weakness and every ugly secret and never flinch.
After the Tour is when the most problematic of Victors realize that their mentor is an ally who will never, ever leave. After the Tour, no matter how bad the initial recovery, is when things get better.
At least, in theory.
Everyone told Lyme that in mentor training; Nero confirmed it, said that was when she managed to shed the last of her suspicions and stop acting out. Brutus had only argued with Odin once or twice in his entire recovery and therefore belonged on a pedestal with magical unicorn tributes, but as far as Lyme could find out from talking to the others, everyone else with a Victor of their own agreed.
Lyme always knew Artemisia was special; it only makes sense that she would buck this convention, too.
The Tour wreaked its havoc on Artemisia like anyone else, leaving her with a head stuffed full of confusion and betrayal and guilt, with a good helping of anger that she’d managed to fall prey to any of that. After they returned she’d been quiet for a few days, letting Lyme take care of her and make her food and set up a pile of blankets by the window. She’d picked up embroidery as her private talent after making cat clothes with Callista, and so Artemisia practiced her stitches and watched the birds flock to the feeder that Nero built and set up for her. For a little while Lyme thought it was working, that Artemisia finally trusted her after everything they went through together.
Lyme has two weeks, give or take, to enjoy this illusion before it breaks. One night, Artemisia asks for stir-fry for dinner. Lyme was never an amazing cook but she’s learning for her girl, and stir-fry at least isn’t difficult. Toss vegetables and meat in a pan, add sauce, and hey-presto, instant food; good for Victors who need to keep their strength and weight on and mentors who don’t have a lot of time to fiddle with complex recipes. Lyme gives Artemisia a knife sharp enough to cut through the softer vegetables but too blunt to hurt herself (her girl hasn’t shown any signs of wanting to, but no point in playing with fire), and they work and talk and Lyme shoves down the urge to pump her fist in the air.
The other day Emory had shown Lyme how to thicken sauce with cornstarch (“You don’t need to use butter or eggs like you do if you use flour,” she said. “I know we have whatever we want now, but in the quarries that’s a hell of a waste.”), and as it turns out, yet again her folk wisdom actually holds true. The first time Lyme tried to make stir-fry the sauce managed to be weak and lumpy at the same time, but today it’s just right. Maybe she can learn to cook and maybe she can get a handle on this mentor thing and maybe things will be all right after all.
It’s fine until they eat. Artemisia takes one bite, drops her fork onto her plate, and shoves the whole thing away. “I don’t want it.”
Patience, Nero told her. Victors look for a reaction, and you have to learn to give the right kind. Lyme sure pushed Nero as far as she could, back during her recovery, searching for the edge and how far it would be until she shoved him over.
Lyme raises an eyebrow and takes another bite. “You sure? It’s good. And it’s Emory’s recipe.”
Invoking the name of the woman Artemisia still sort of has a crush on usually works, but today Artemisia only scowls. “I don’t want it anymore, I want something else.”
Lyme’s memories of her childhood are fuzzy by design, but her mind clutches at an image of a kitchen table just too high for her, a plate of something undercooked and overcooked at once and a man’s voice shouting “You’ll eat what your mother gives you to eat or you won’t eat at all!” She grips her fork tightly enough that an ache spasms through her fingers, but Artemisia has her eyes fixed on Lyme’s face, prying for weakness, and so Lyme only nods.
“Sure,” she says. “There’s bread in the fridge and fixings for all kinds of sandwiches. I can make you one if you tell me what you want, or you can do it yourself if you’d rather.”
Artemisia exhales hard through her nose, and yeah, that’s reaction-seeking sure enough. Lyme would say she’d never been that bad, but she isn’t that good at self-deception. “I want to go out.”
Lyme’s first instinct is to say yes just to show Artemisia that she’s not a spoilsport, but that’s what the training is for. Boundaries are just as important as freedom, they told her; if a Victor thinks they can get away with anything they’ll stop feeling safe and protected and start feeling anxious, even if they don’t know why.
“Tomorrow afternoon we can look at restaurants and see where you feel like going,” Lyme says easily. “If you don’t feel like stir-fry anymore I can make you a sandwich or heat up the leftover pasta from yesterday. Which would you like?”
She’ll never pull off the beatific, intentionally oblivious smile that Nero used to pull on her when she acted out, but that’s not Lyme’s deal. Artemisia stares at her for a long moment, fingers drumming against the tabletop, but then she sighs and picks up her fork. “Never mind,” she says, her tone peeved, and shoves her mouth so full it takes her three swallows to finish the bite.
Lyme doesn’t say a word.
A few days later Artemisia breaks the code of providing two options to give an illusion of choice. Lyme figured it out herself soon enough, back in the day, and she’d been a mix of irritated and grudgingly impressed. Artemisia, for her part, fights back. If Lyme asks if she wants to go for a walk or spar, Artemisia chooses watching TV; if Lyme offers pasta or soup for lunch, Artemisia wants lasagna. It’s typical, and the training warned Lyme it would happen, except that timeline-wise it’s all off. These are baby games, played by Victors in their first three, maybe four months of recovery. They should be past this by the Tour.
Lyme reacts as she’s been taught, calmly and without judgement, and every time Artemisia fails to provoke her mentor she only boils hotter. There’s nothing Lyme can do but wait it out, but every night she goes to bed and stares at the ceiling, wondering what she’s done wrong.
Only shitty mentors blame their Victor, Nero told her. If a Victor loses it and sets the house on fire, it’s on the mentor to have seen it coming, to be there to take the matches away.
One night Lyme misses the extra knife at the table right before Artemisia comes at her with it. In the split second it takes her girl to reach her, Lyme flashes through half a dozen options - let her fight it out; knock her down; dodge out of the way - but settles for twisting the knife away and pinning Artemisia against the wall. Her Victor snarls and struggles and flings insults at her like she’s back on the first day of drug withdrawal, but Lyme takes all the hits and lets them roll off, even if they stick on their way down.
“Okay,” Lyme says once Artemisia runs out of ways to insult Lyme’s parentage and sexual prospects. “You don’t actually want to kill me or you would’ve tried me while I was sleeping, so. What is this?”
“Nothing,” Artemisia snaps. “Nothing’s wrong, nothing is ever wrong, just pat me on the head and let me go back to dinner, right?”
Lyme would be extremely shocked to hear she’d ever patted anyone on the head in her life - other than Brutus, when they both shotgunned a beer at the annual spring Village barbecue and he choked on his - but that isn’t the point. She takes a second to process (thinking time is never bad unless the question is ‘do you love me’ or ‘will you leave me’, Nero told her, where the answer should be automatic and instinctive) and leaves her arm firm across Artemisia’s chest.
“If I were going to be killed with a dinner knife I wouldn’t be here,” Lyme says finally. “But I can demote you to plastic utensils if that’s what you want from me.”
Mistake. Never ask a Victor what she wants, because young Victors either have a thousand contradictory ideas or none at all and either way the panic works out the same. No matter how much Artemisia (and Lyme, in her day, and likely Callista before them) might chafe at the restrictions and carefully-offered choices, it’s better than letting her muddle through everything by herself.
Sure enough, Artemisia’s expression darkens. The angrier she gets the younger she looks, funny enough, eyebrows pulling together and mouth turned down in an insubordinate expression that must have frustrated the hell out of her trainers. It matches one of the photos in her file, back in her early days at the Centre, when she’d refused to smile or pose and sat slumped in the chair with her whole face screwed up into the definition of sullenness.
She’d sported a bruise on her cheek, then, starting on the outside edge of her face and spreading inward - the kind that came from a backhand slap, not an honest punch to the face. Lyme recognized both the injury and the expression that came from it, and now -
(Artemisia on the roof last fall, giving Lyme a stare both evaluating and lazy at the same time. I don't mean what are you gonna give me, I mean what am I gonna get?)
“Artemisia,” Lyme says slowly, “I’m not going to hit you.” This time the knife hits the target; the lines around Artemisia’s eyes go tight, and her mouth thins. “I mean it. Whatever you do, however far you push me, I won’t ever hit you. Not ever.”
“I know.” Artemisia’s eyes flick to the sides, wildly, like a trapped animal’s. “I can do whatever I want, right? I can fucking try to stab you and you won’t stop me.”
“I did stop you,” Lyme points out, pressing hard with her arm so Artemisia will feel the pressure against her throat. “And I will. But not like that.”
Artemisia sags, going deadweight, and Lyme knows what a feint looks like, that when she moves to counterbalance Artemisia will strike and try to knock her down. Instead Lyme backs off, leaving nothing but her hand just below her girl’s shoulder. “Upstairs,” Lyme says. “There’s more room.”
There’s an empty room on the second floor that could be converted to a spare bedroom in case Artemisia has a Victor of her own one day who might want to spend the night, and Artemisia pulls away and stalks up the steps.
Right from the start, it’s not going to be a good fight. Even on their messiest days Artemisia always fought her for real, trying to get under Lyme’s guard or cause her to overbalance or find her weak spots. Today she’s not holding back - her fist hits Lyme’s ribs hard enough to bruise - but when it’s time to dodge or duck or block Lyme’s returns, there she drops her guard. Not obviously, not entirely, but after a decade of learning the language of fights, Lyme catches the shift a split second before her blows connect and has to yank it back.
Artemisia is angling for a beating, and if Lyme won’t give it to her then she’ll do her best to make it happen herself.
For a second Lyme almost knocks her down and pins her again - but no. It didn’t work before and it won’t work now, and so all she can do is stay on her edge and pull back at the last second instead of landing a hit. It doesn’t take long for Artemisia to catch on, and after doing her best and failing to provoke Lyme for the umpteenth time, finally she flings herself back out of range.
“Why won’t you just do it?” Artemisia demands, breathing hard, voice gone ragged with the edge of hysteria. She pushes a hand into her hair and yanks at the brown strands, then starts a round of frantic pacing. “How am I supposed to get better if I’m scared all the damn time?”
Lyme stops dead. The mentor handbook didn’t have a page on this one. “You’re scared - because I won’t hit you?”
“Fucking duh,” Artemisia snaps. “My old man, I knew exactly how far I could push him and when I had to stop. I bet it was the same with yours. But you, oh no, you’re all with the ‘everything is fine, let me hold your hand and clean up the mess’ bullshit and I don’t know where the fucking line is!”
Always set limits, they told her, or Victors will feel unsafe. For Lyme that had been Nero saying ‘no’, taking away the knife and putting bandages on her wrists and checking her arms for new cuts. Even that had been enough to drive her half insane until she snapped at him, but she’d respected that in a way she never had her father’s fists.
If Artemisia only ever learned boundaries enforced with violence -
This time Lyme does knock her down, holds her shoulders hard against the floor and settles all her weight so even if Artemisia flings herself sideways or tries to bring her legs up it won’t throw Lyme off. “This is the limit,” she says, stressing the words. “When I hold you down, that’s what this means. It means I’m telling you to stop, and it means I’m not going anywhere. You got it?”
“Bullshit,” Artemisia says again, eyes wide. “Bullshit! Everybody hits.”
“No.” Lyme leans her weight down. “Shitty people hit. Everybody doesn’t.” The sparring is supposed to speak for itself, that’s how it’s meant to work - it’s a way for the Victor to understand the mentor without words, without explanations. Nero fought Lyme again and again and again until it clicked for her that he wasn’t leaving no matter how much she pushed him away, that she wasn’t an experiment or a curiosity or a temporary diversion. But maybe Lyme’s not old enough, maybe by the time she’s been out a decade or more she’ll have it down, but for now -
“If you try to kill me, I’ll stop you and then I’ll hold you down,” Lyme says. “If you try again when I let you up then I’ll hold you down again, and we’ll keep going until you get bored or fall asleep or you finally get that there’s nothing you can do that will make me hurt you.”
“Yeah, because you don’t give a shit,” Artemisia snarls, and suddenly she’s clawing and snapping and Lyme nearly loses her balance wondering where it came from until the light glistens off the moisture in Artemisia’s eyes. “You don’t care, if you did you’d hit me! How am I supposed to count on you, huh, if you won’t even show me who’s boss?”
It’s all Lyme can do not to demand Artemisia tell her what her father’s name is so Lyme can track him down and rip off his fingers. “I’m the boss because I’m telling you I’m the boss,” Lyme says, and no she isn’t, she’s twenty years old, over her head and terrified, but she puts on her best Victor face and holds her girl steady. “I’m the boss because you might be the best with swords but I can knock you on your ass any day of the week. I’m the boss because I’m your mentor and that means I went through hell for you. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, I drank coffee so thick I had to chew it. I memorized idiot fluffy women’s taste in poodles so I could compliment them and get you that water bottle. I did a hell of a lot more than stick my dick in your mother and shoot off a load without a condom, and that means I’m the boss. And if after all that you still think the only way I can prove it is to belt you one, then we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Artemisia stares at her, then, incongruously, lets out a burst of startled laughter. “I think you just insulted my mother there, mentor.”
“Just her taste,” Lyme says easily. “Though more, if she did the same.”
“Nah.” Artemisia closes her eyes, and they’ve gone off track but it doesn’t matter. “She’d just watch. Maybe sigh a bit, real disappointed through her teeth.”
“I’m not disappointed,” Lyme says. “You’re perfect.”
Artemisia raises her eyebrows. “Perfectly crazy, maybe.”
“No, just perfect.” Lyme digs her fingers hard into Artemisia’s shoulders. “I like you crazy, I wouldn’t have chosen you if you weren’t. And I sure as hell care about you more than those fucksticks ever did. I’ll keep knocking you down until you believe me.”
Artemisia falls quiet, then her entire body deflates and she sags back against the floor. “Whatever you say, boss.”
“Good girl.” Lyme rolls off, waits for Artemisia to sit up, then takes the plunge and pulls her in for a hug. Artemisia goes stiff and still like Lyme just stabbed a knife in her spine, but Lyme holds on until finally the hard line of her back loosens and her head drops onto Lyme’s shoulder. She doesn’t hug back, but her fingers toy with the bottom hem of Lyme’s sweater and her breath hitches and good enough.
Lyme doesn’t soften the hug, doesn’t rub Artemisia’s back or pet her hair, just stays there, solid and steady until Artemisia’s heart stops hammering against her chest. Finally Lyme pulls back, ignoring the telltale sheen in her girl’s eyes and flicking her in the forehead instead. “You want to go build a snow fort out in Brutus’ yard, then pelt him with snowballs when he comes outside?”
“Are we going to go make Brutus’ life miserable every time I have an emotional crisis?” Artemisia asks, her mouth twitching.
“There are worse traditions,” Lyme says.
Artemisia laughs, but then she runs a hand over her face. “It sounds fun, but - could we just stay in? It’s getting late and I’m tired.”
“Sure,” Lyme says. “I’ll get blankets, we’ll set up on the couch.”
Artemisia studies her face, eyes narrowing a fraction, and Lyme readies herself for a test. “Can I paint your nails?”
One of the last things Lyme ever wants to do is put chemicals on her skin, especially ones that the Capitol stylists fought Nero over until he argued them down to a clear polish. But when her Victor asks… “Sure,” Lyme says. “Anything but pink. My stylist says I don’t have the colouring to pull that off.” To put it mildly.
Artemisia shakes her head. “Nah, you look like a blue to me,” she says, and her expression brightens. “I don’t have any, but I bet Callista would let me borrow some.”
“I don’t think Callista has anything but silver or blood red,” Lyme says dryly. “But I can make a call and have someone deliver it.”
Artemisia laughs again, this time startled and joyous. “Man, there’s the reason I won the Hunger Games, nail polish delivery to my door in the middle of winter.”
“Is that a no?” Lyme cocks an eyebrow at her.
“Didn’t say it was a no.” Artemisia grins.
There’s still an edge of wariness in her posture, and she keeps flicking her gaze over Lyme’s face, checking for a reaction, but it’s better than it was an hour ago and for now, Lyme will take it.
“Let me get my phone,” Lyme says. “You get the blankets.”
Lyme stays on the couch until morning, afraid that if she moves the spell will break. After painting their nails an alarming shade of blue, Artemisia had rolled a blanket around her shoulders like a human-sized cannoli and flopped down on the sofa with her head in Lyme’s lap. Lyme froze until her fingernails no longer felt tacky and then slowly, slowly, ran her hands through the girl’s hair.
It’s the most honest affection she’s shown that Lyme can remember without having been pumped full of mood stabilizers or jangled from a nightmare, and in case this is a dream or a hallucination from the acetone vapours she sits still all through the night.
Come morning Artemisia crawls awake with a groan and stretch like the entire existence of any time between dawn and noon offends her. Lyme blinks rapidly to bring herself back, and she’s there with a reassuring hand on the girl’s shoulder when Artemisia starts at the strange position and sits halfway up. “Oh, right,” Artemisia says, yawning and lying back down. “Did you stay there all night?”
“You had a rough day,” Lyme tells her, and somewhere in the distant part of her memory she’d promised herself and Nero that she would be a professional mentor, not one of the ones bogged down in messy feelings. So much for that. “I thought I should let you sleep.”
“Sap,” Artemisia says, sounding inordinately pleased, and Lyme gapes down at her. “What, nobody ever called you that before?”
“No,” Lyme says, poking her Victor between the eyes. Artemisia scowls, but judging from the exaggerated expression it’s an attempt to trap Lyme’s finger in the frown lines than actual annoyance. “Do you want breakfast?”
Artemisia considers, partially unfolding the blanket, then making a face and curling back up. “No, it’s cold. I’ll eat if you make me something but I don’t want to move.”
Lyme raises both eyebrows, but it’s all she can do not to kiss the stars that they managed a breakthrough and so she gives up. “If I get up to make you breakfast, you don’t get to complain about how the eggs are cooked,” she says. “That’s the deal.”
“A hard bargain, but at least I don’t have to kill somebody to get an apple,” Artemisia says. “Wait, that was Brutus. What did I get?”
“Pears,” Lyme says immediately, and now she would really rather stay on the couch and never leave or let Artemisia out of her sight again, but instead she eases herself up. Artemisia makes a noise of protest at being jostled but accepts a cushion as a lap alternative, and Lyme tousles her hair on the way to the kitchen.
One afternoon Artemisia drags her outside to make a snowman. Lyme never liked snow; her second kill test happened in the winter, and she’d stared at the red splashes across the spread of white as the hot blood melted tiny divots in the frozen surface. In her Arena, a savannah baked by the Gamemakers’ artificial sun during the day, the temperatures plunged below freezing as soon as the nightly anthem played.
But her girl wants a snowman and a snowman she will have, and so Lyme pulls on her jacket and gloves and mostly stands watch as Artemisia rolls the snow into giant balls and heaves them up on top of each other. “Too bad logs wouldn’t stay,” Artemisia says, poking at the sticks she’s jammed into the sides. “You have such beefy arms. Snow-Lyme doesn’t do you justice.”
“Snow-me, huh,” Lyme says, staring at the mostly-shapeless hunk of ice. “You gonna make a you, then?”
“I’m gonna make the Village,” Artemisia announces grandly and likely over-optimistically, and Lyme says absolutely nothing.
Predictably, while Artemisia manages to build a tall, skinny snowman to represent herself, she tires halfway through snow-Nero. He’s a hulking beast twice the size of snow-Lyme, and after making him half the white cover in the yard is gone, dried grey-green grass poking through the long, bare tracks where the snowballs rolled. “This would be easier if we were an outer district,” Artemisia says, packing snow around Nero’s neck so his head won’t fall off and then leaving him featureless. “There’s too many, and everyone is huge. I’m like the littlest Victor over here.”
Artemisia stands nearly six feet tall and is leggy like Callista, but that still puts her nearly half a foot shorter than her mentor. Lyme laughs as Artemisia pokes experimentally at her bicep through the thick wool sleeve of her jacket. “We like you little,” Lyme says. “Let’s take a break and then give poor snow-Nero a face or the real one will sigh at us next time he comes over.”
She’d brought out cocoa in a pair of thermoses, and they sit on the porch and drink, the steam rising up in a cloud around their faces. Artemisia leans against Lyme’s shoulder just a little and surveys her handiwork.
“What do they do with the ones who die?” she asks out of nowhere, and Lyme steels herself just in time to avoid flinching.
Breathe, Lyme reminds herself. She curls her fingers around the thermos and lets the warmth permeate through to her fingers. “They’re buried in the field of sacrifice. The Centre bought the land and pays for the upkeep.”
Artemisia leans back to stare at her. “We do not seriously have a field of sacrifice. I thought that was a joke.”
“No, we really do,” Lyme says. “I’ve never been there. It’s bad luck to go before - before you have to.”
Callista would’ve gone there last summer with Jasper. Brutus put his first girl in the ground the year before that. Brutus chose black eyed susans as his memorial flower; Lyme never asked about Callista’s, but she guesses it’s something red and unapologetic. Odds are, the next kid Lyme takes after Artemisia will end up there, too. She shudders, sets the thermos down and wraps her arm around her girl’s shoulders. “Why did you want to know?”
Artemisia shrugs, staring down at her cocoa. “I dunno, just curious I guess. What do you think they do with them in the other districts?”
“Give them back to the families, probably,” Lyme says, warning bells ringing in her mind, but they can’t hide from death forever and it’s better Artemisia talk about it than have it bubble to the surface on its own later. “I’ve never really thought much about the traditions elsewhere.”
“They probably burned what’s his name, from Six,” Artemisia says. “I saw that shitty district, nowhere to bury anybody. I bet they burn people and just let the ashes go wherever and people are always breathing in the dead but they can’t tell because the air is full of shitty, shitty smog.” Her voice goes tight, and Lyme stays very still and says nothing. “They didn’t even have snow, did you see? Just grey slush mixed in with all that city dirt. What a shithole.”
Artemisia sniffles loudly, wetly, and turns her face into Lyme’s shoulder. “I hate Six. Nobody cares when you’re born and nobody cares when you die and you just get mixed up in the same shit you breathe your whole life. What’s the point of that?”
She hasn’t talked about Six since her Tour when she refused to apologize, and Lyme hasn’t touched it. Guilt and grief hits in its own way, and now Artemisia sucks in a hard breath and scrubs a hand over her face. “I’m not sorry,” she says, her voice thick, and Lyme doesn’t argue. “I’m just sad for that shitpile of a district. It’s just so stupid and pointless and terrible, I don’t know why anyone gets out of bed. I’m glad I live here.”
“Me too,” Lyme says, and she holds her girl as she cries. Finally she peels off her gloves to wipe away the moisture from Artemisia’s cheeks without scraping her with the frozen fabric. Artemisia lets out a long breath, then pulls away.
“Okay, let’s give Nero a face,” she says, and Lyme claps her on the back.
Artemisia doesn't complain about the food, the temperature of the house, or anything else for upward of two weeks. When the weather isn't blowing icy pellets in their faces from the wind Lyme takes her out for walks, and they go the perimeter of the fence and up a short way through the trails out to the frozen lake. Artemisia scoots forward on her stomach to stare at the frozen plants suspended below the surface, and Lyme curls her hands into fists in her pockets to stop herself from darting forward to make sure her girl doesn't go through the ice and into the water.
(It's stupid. They've all been flung into a frozen lake before, and it's not like the pond behind the Village has a current that would drag her under. Afterward Artemisia runs back to the bank with pink cheeks and a wide grin, and see, it's fine. Mentorship does something very, very strange to the brain.)
Then, one afternoon, Lyme suggests they take the trail a little further up to the first level of cliffs. "It's pretty in the winter," she says. "The sky's clear, and you can see the frozen river going out through the centre of the district."
"No," Artemisia says.
Lyme blinks. It's the same mulish tone from the early stages but mixed with deliberation, and Artemisia darts her eyes toward Lyme as though to make sure she caught the insubordination. "All right," Lyme says instead. No sense picking a fight over something that small. "We could go into town and look at the shops instead."
"No," she says again, curling her fingers and examining the chipped polish on her nails.
This time Lyme lets her eyebrows creep up. "No? Do you want to stay in and embroider me something?” The 'no' this time comes as predicted, and Lyme taps Artemisia's shoulder. "Up, let's go, we're sparring."
It's a quick fight; Artemisia puts up a bit of an effort, but soon enough Lyme shoves her up against the wall and gets her hands pinned above her head. There's no wildness in Artemisia's eyes this time, and the stubborn light dies and her shoulders drop. "You good?" Lyme asks, and Artemisia nods. "Tell me what you want to do."
"It's cold," Artemisia says, flexing her hands but not struggling to break free. "Can we stay in?"
"Sure," Lyme says, stepping back, and she's pretty sure she offered that option but she isn't going to point that out. Sometimes things go squirrelly in a kid's head and they need a match to set things straight, that's all. "You pick the channel, I'll make popcorn."
It happens again the next day, and again two days after that. The time after that it's twice in one day, and each time Artemisia picks a fight for no reason Lyme can figure out, only to agree with a spurned suggestion or eat the food she'd refused earlier once the sparring bout finishes. It's newbie behaviour, like the boundary testing all over again, and when Artemisia has gone to bed for the night Lyme sits with her notes from the training sessions trying to figure out what has gone wrong. Victors don't push unless they feel unsafe and need reassurance, but as far as Lyme can track down, nothing changed between last week and this one.
She could call Nero. She probably should, that would be the quick and responsible thing to do, but the idea of calling her mentor and asking for advice instead of figuring it out herself --
The next time Artemisia announces that all her clothes are ugly and she refuses to wear any of them. After a long round of sparring that ends with her on the floor, Lyme's elbow at her throat and one foot pinning her hand to the ground, Artemisia consents to borrow one of Lyme's sweaters.
The sight of Artemisia swimming in her mentor's sweater triggers a memory in the back of Lyme's mind. She'd had a bad time of it when Nero started going to the Capitol to fuck his horde of cougar sponsors, and once to cheer her up he'd left her a shirt to wear. Lyme told him she didn't need it, but once his truck left the Village gates she'd hauled it on over her clothes and curled up in the corner of the couch, knees tucked up under the bottom edge.
Lyme drops down next to Artemisia, and sure enough her girl tips sideways against her side. "Hey," Lyme says slowly, because if she's wrong then this could blow the whole thing to the Arena and back. "You know if you want to spar you could just ask. You don't have to act out like that."
Artemisia stops humming, and the line of her arm goes tense. "I don't --"
"I like sparring," Lyme says, cutting off the flustered denial before it takes root. "It's fun. There's no reason why we can't just spar for the hell of it. If you want to, just say something."
Artemisia tugs one of the sleeves down over her hands, plucking a loose thread at the end. "It -- I don't want to," she says, and Lyme waits because she trails off instead of ending it. "I mean, I don't want to ask. It feels stupid, or babyish or something. You and Nero don’t.”
Lyme could go the Adessa route, find out statistics of how many Victors continue sparring with their mentors. She and Nero don't, true, but it's more because his size makes it awkward for them to have fun with it and she doesn't want to whale on him full out the way she does Brutus. Brutus and Odin still have matches at least once a week, and Emory talks about sparring with Brutus with such open honesty that she likely wouldn’t understand why anyone else might be embarrassed. The numbers are there, but Lyme looks down at the top of her girl's head and she thinks, no. No, logic and statistics wouldn't have worked with her, and she's betting it won't for Artemisia either.
"What about a code?" Lyme says.
Artemisia tilts her head back and squints up at her. "What kind of code?"
"A way to tell me you want to spar, but we don't have to say it. And if anyone else is around they won't know what it means."
Artemisia lets out a breath and stretches, pushing her feet against the side of the coffee table. "That... could be good," she says, and Lyme gives herself a mental high-five. "I'm not -- I didn't think, I don't know. I hated it when my mom tried to cuddle me, and she did it all the time. She'd try to pull me into her lap and I started hiding pencils in my pockets so I could stab her and make her let me go. My old man belted me for it but I'd rather get hit in the face than hugged when I didn't feel like it.” She reaches over and takes Lyme's hand, lacing their fingers and twisting them this way and that to examine the last of the matching polish on their nails. “But I feel like it more with you. Is that weird?"
Careful, careful. Lyme taps her foot against the floor, but in the end she takes the jump. "I used to sit in Nero's lap."
"You did not!"
"I did, when I was upset." The day Lyme found out what Nero did to earn her sponsor money, she'd crawled on top of him and refused to move until he had to carry her to the kitchen for dinner. "Sometimes I'd fall asleep on him while he was working and I watched TV, or whatever. Last spring when I was getting ready for you I passed out on him going over your files." Artemisia laughs, but it's light and incredulous, not mocking, and Lyme tugs the ends of her hair. "My point is, there's no magic age when you're suddenly too old for sparring or whatever else. If you want to keep going then we can keep going. I don't mind."
Artemisia ducks her head. "Really? I mean, I like it when my head's screwed on funny, too, you were right. It's much better than getting smacked. But I think I'd like it when I don't need it, either."
"Yeah," Lyme says, a warm glow in the centre of her chest threatening to spread out through her body and make her say stupid, soppy things. "It's nice."
"I'll think of a code," Artemisia says, sounding pleased. "I like that. In the Centre a few of the girls and I had one for sex." Lyme chokes, and Artemisia grins at her. “Don’t worry, that’s weird. I just wanted to see your face."
"Yeah, well, now I think you need a bit of a reminder who your mentor is," Lyme says, standing up and tugging her girl up after her. Artemisia gives her an impish smile, and Lyme snorts and shoves her into the wall.
A few days later, Artemisia hands Lyme a small square of fabric, sort of like a handkerchief but made of something thicker and heavier than the classy white things Adessa keeps on her. “What’s this?” Lyme asks.
“Look,” Artemisia says, bouncing a bit on her heels, and she clasps her hands behind her back. “Seriously, it’s right there.”
It’s a mess of knots and sticking-out ends and long stitches stretching across blank spaces, and Lyme blinks at it for a long moment before looking up. Artemisia rolls her eyes. “That’s the back side. I haven’t learned how to make the underside look nice yet, it’s hard. Turn it over.”
Lyme does, and this time she laughs. It’s a house with two little stitched people in front of it, one with long hair and one with short, and underneath Artemisia has picked out the phrase ‘Kick my ass, why don’t you’ in red thread. “I like that,” she says. “It’s subtle.”
Artemisia taps the side of her nose with a knowing expression, then laughs. “So what do you think?”
“I think I feel like sparring,” Lyme says, handing it back, and Artemisia grins and pockets it.
After that, Lyme finds that or other pieces of embroidery stuffed behind couch cushions, into her pockets, or waiting on the table under her plate. Whenever it happens Lyme finishes what they’re doing, then drags Artemisia up to the nearest clear space for a play-match. Afterward Artemisia takes back the fabric square to pull out the stitches and try a different design without having a hundred of scraps lying around the room, and Lyme ruffles her hair and gives her a hug.
Once Artemisia hides a pocket square in the toe of Lyme’s boot, and when she pulls it out and unwrinkles it Lyme nearly has a coronary to see ‘BEST MENTOR’ stitched in navy across the front without any ironic embellishments. It’s a nice fabric, plain blue linen, and Artemisia has learned to sew so that the back no longer makes a mess. It would go well with the charcoal suits Lyme wears out on business, and so this one Lyme doesn’t give back, just squirrels away in her drawer. Much later she wonders whether that wasn’t the point after all.
It’s spring when Artemisia tells Lyme she wants to have a campfire.
By now, at least, Lyme is used to her Victor’s more esoteric requests. “It’s a bit chilly out there today,” she says, pushing the curtain aside and checking the thermometer outside the window. “Not near freezing, and we’re past the snow, but you’re still going to get cold pretty quickly.”
“That’s what the campfire is for,” Artemisia says in an exaggeratedly patient tone. “Fire, hot. Heat, good. And like you said, it’s not freezing outside and we’ve both been in worse. I feel like a campfire, and sticking a marshmallow on a cooking skewer and holding it over the gas range isn’t going to cut it.”
“No, let’s not with the fire in the house,” Lyme says dryly. One of the notes in Artemisia’s early files mentioned a tendency toward pyromania, and while the Centre had given her weapons to play with instead and the interest waned, Lyme would rather not risk reactivating an old love. “You really want a campfire now?”
Artemisia shrugs. “Yeah. I don’t want to wait until summer, and anyway it would just feel like the Arena if it was warm out.” She’s stitching again, a pretty garden scene with the words ‘Fuck you and your face’ sewn in looping pink cursive, but when she pulls the thread tight the fabric puckers unevenly under the pressure and she scowls.
Lyme reaches over and takes it away, setting the needle and cloth on the table. “Get your coat,” she says. “Nobody’s going to die, but if either of us catch cold we’ll get made fun of until we wish we had.”
And so they end up outside in front of a small but crackling fire, clumps of chilly dirt and grass digging into their legs. Artemisia holds her hands out close to the flames to warm them, watching with an expression of quiet satisfaction that was miles away from her twisted Arena glee. It’s not that cold, really, and Lyme tosses in another branch to see the fire turn the bark black.
“So, mentor,” Artemisia says, pushing her hair back out of her face. “Was this one of the perks to having a Victor they mentioned to you in training?”
Lyme snorts, leans over and wraps her arms around Artemisia’s shoulders. “You be quiet, you’re perfect.” She actually kisses her girl’s hair, and Lyme did not give herself permission to do that but too late now. Artemisia doesn’t pull away, at any rate, so Lyme opts to let it go. “And no, I consider it a bonus.”
Artemisia knocks her head against Lyme’s. After a minute of quiet she says, “What were you going to be if you didn’t make Volunteer?”
That, at least, is an easy answer just because there isn’t one. “I didn’t have a backup plan,” Lyme says. “It was the Arena or nothing. I guess if I’d washed out I would’ve figure something out, but I didn’t want to think about it.”
“Me neither.” Artemisia leans forward and picks up a stick, poking it at the edge of the fire. “I was just thinking. Emory, I could see her as a Peacekeeper, one of the ones who stays in Two and takes care of the quarry towns. I bet if she’d come second that’s what she would’ve done. Brutus too, or maybe they’d both go back home and take up mining. Adessa could’ve gotten a job working with the district mayor or something. Me, though.” The end of the stick snaps against the ground, and she tosses it into the middle of the blaze. “It was this or the other side.”
Lyme frowns. “What do you mean, the other side?”
Artemisia stares into the fire, the light dancing across her face. “I used to steal things and break into houses and set shit on fire. One time the Peacekeeper who dragged me home told me I’d better do well at the Centre because if I didn’t, she bet I’d be staring at a kill test from from the opposite end of the sword.”
Nero said a similar thing once, that after he killed his stepfather they’d told him his choices were Residential or breaking rocks at one of the youth penitentiary mines. Lyme herself had wondered, once or twice, what she’d have done with all her seething, roiling anger if she hadn’t had the kill tests and the vicious, violent sparring matches in training to expel it. Maybe she would’ve stuck a knife in her old man’s jugular one night; maybe she would’ve mixed the rat poison he used to leave around his shop into his beer and wait for him to drink it. She’d thought about that and a dozen other ways to make it end, and only knowing that Residential waited for her if she sat on her hands and took his shit for another year had kept her from doing it.
“You’re not the only one,” Lyme says finally, and Artemisia’s glance flickers back at her before a tiny smile twitches at the corner of her mouth. “Look, it’s not like the Centre picks sweet kids and turns us into monsters, all of us had a killer underneath somewhere.”
“Except maybe Emory,” Artemisia says wryly.
Lyme stifles a laugh in an attempt to be mature. “Except maybe Emory,” she agrees. She’s never asked the older Victor what her life was like before the Centre, but Lyme can’t see her running around bashing heads. “Some of us might’ve been trained into it more than others, but there’s no shame in being born for this.”
“I blame my mother,” Artemisia drawls, and she usually brings up her father but this is twice now for her mother, and neither time happy. Lyme stills. “Not like that, I meant my name. The only people called Artemisia are Victors and socialites, and I sure as the Reaping wasn’t going to be a socialite.”
“Did they call you that when you were a kid, even?” Lyme asks. It’s dangerous territory, wading into the pool of childhood memories, but she’s here and the fire is warm and grounds them in the present. Once she’d asked Callista if her parents had ever called her ‘Calli’ like Nero does and the woman skewered her right through with a horrified gaze. Her parents, apparently, believed children had dignity. “I can’t imagine calling a little girl a name longer than she is.”
“Oh, sure.” Artemisia laughs, flat and fatalistic and dusted in bitterness, and Lyme still catches herself sounding like that when she lets herself remember the people who raised her. “My mother sighed it all disappointed, like, Arte-mi-sia, any time I broke something or came home bloody or set the neighbour’s garden on fire. She wanted a perfect little princess and she got a perfect little muttation in hair ribbons. Meanwhile my old man would shout it through the house until it shook the walls. I swear when he said it he gave it six syllables, still can’t figure out how.”
“Well it is a good Victor’s name,” Lyme tells her, and Artemisia smiles at her, sharp and bright. The beginning of a thought starts working its way into her head. “But not much for after. ‘Artemisia’ doesn’t sound like the girl who paints my nails and demands cuddles.”
Artemisia snickers. “Well, if you come up with anything better let me know, because I get the feeling you’re good at that.”
Lyme tilts her head. “How so?”
“You really want me to believe some parents went and named their baby girl Lyme?” Artemisia raises her eyebrows in a fair imitation of Emory’s polite but incredulous expression. “You changed it when you signed the papers, I know you did. What was it before?”
Her birth name, soft and feminine and giving birth to a dozen cutesy nicknames, starts a treacherous whisper in Lyme’s ear before she stomps it down. “Never mind,” Lyme says, sharper than she intended. “That girl is dead.”
She curses herself for losing her temper over something so stupid - so personal, so weak - but Artemisia, to her surprise, only nods. “My bad,” she says. “You told me we don’t ask other district Victors about their Games. I probably shouldn’t ask Twos about before the Arena unless they bring it up, right?”
Lyme unclenches her hands, slowly, and her fingers twitch to pull her sleeves down over the fading scars on her wrists but she keeps herself steady. “Probably better,” she agrees. “Everybody deserves a few secrets.”
“Fair enough,” Artemisia says, and she shifts in closer, warm against Lyme’s side.
The next morning Lyme wakes up early, and rather than stare at the ceiling she pulls on her jacket and boots and takes a walk down to the city centre. The temperature runs a few degrees warmer down at the base of the mountain, and by the time she gets there Lyme has shed her coat and tucked it under one arm.
The early vendors are setting up on the sides of main street, and the quiet bustle is soothing in a chaotic sort of way. Lyme wanders the road, picks up some fresh bread and a basket of muffins from the bakery, and she’s about to turn back and head up when the sharp, sweet scent of fresh produce hits her. Lyme stops by the seller’s stand and picks up a soft, yellow-pink fruit. “Is this a peach?” she asks, surprised. “I didn’t think they were in season.”
“No ma’am, that’s an apricot,” says the man pleasantly and without condescension, and his eyes flick to the Victor tattoo on her wrist and back up again without comment. “You see how the skin is smooth? Peaches are fuzzy. We can’t grow them so easy here in Two, they don’t take the cold so well. Apricots are much hardier.”
“Huh,” Lyme says, turning the fruit over in her hand. Nero used to bring her peaches all the time; she hadn’t realized he would have had to order them from out of district. Funny, the things mentors don’t tell their Victors. “Do they taste different?”
“Apricots are sweeter,” he says, warming up to his subject the way Emory does when anyone asks her whether you can make jam out of who knows what. “Dry ‘em and they taste just like candy.”
Artemisia needs to dump half a pound of sugar into one cup of coffee before she’ll screw up her face and knock it back like a shot, so that’s probably a good thing. “I’ll take some then,” Lyme says, and the man smiles and runs her up a tab that Victor Affairs will pay from her stipend at the end of the month.
She takes the long way back up to the Village, still thinking about the night before. Artemisia is the kind of name that drags down a baby with the weight of expectation, and now that her girl is a Victor that kind of pressure won’t ever back off. The Village, on the other hand, should be a place to calm down and relax, where some of that stress can slide off.
Lyme keeps musing all the way back to her girl’s house. The sun is coming up over the trees by the time she gets in, and she knocks on the door and waits for Artemisia’s mumbled “’s’open” before slipping inside. “It’s nice out if you want to go for a walk,” Lyme calls out.
“I had my nature yesterday,” Artemisia says in a half-muffled tone that means she’s likely face down at the kitchen table, angling herself to catch the morning sunlight against her back.
That’s exactly what she’s doing, and she’s dressed in one of Lyme’s oversized sweaters with her hair pulled back in a sloppy braid, blinking sleepily up at Lyme and stifling a yawn. It throws Lyme back to the night before the Arena, when the layers of showmanship and gleeful murder peeled away to reveal the teenager underneath. There’s nothing grand or wicked about her at all as she raises her head and props herself up on her hand, her eye half-closed as the skin of her cheek pushes it shut.
“I got some fruit down at the market,” Lyme says, setting the bread and muffins on the counter. “You should try some, they’re good.”
Artemisia sits up, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Cut it up and put it in my mouth for me,” she says, yawning again. “Too tired.”
Lyme snorts, and just then it clicks inside her head. “C’mon, Misha, catch,” she says, and lobs one of the fruits at her.
Her girl’s eyes go wide, but she snatches the apricot out of the air without looking. After a second she stares down at it. “It’s not fuzzy,” she says slowly.
“Peaches are fuzzy, this is an apricot,” Lyme says, and it’s probably stupid to feel as pleased as she does about having a new fact to share, but oh well. “What do you think?”
She takes a bite, teeth slicing through the skin and juicy flesh with a loud slurping sound. “It’s different,” she says, then ducks her head a little and grins. “I like it, though.”
“Good, me too,” says Lyme, tugging the end of her braid on the way past to put the rest of the apricots in the fridge.
Misha grins and takes another bite.