Christmas 2017: "A Complicated Time of Year"
Lyme hates the holidays. Misha decides she wants to celebrate. A mentor's duty is clear, but that doesn't make it easy.
The holidays, Lyme thinks as the train glides into District 2’s Central Station, are fucking exhausting.
December has always been a bit of a muddle in District 2. Caught between its old-fashioned quarry customs and the siren song of the capitol, never mind the Program and the Peacekeeping Academy and all the rituals that spring up around the military-industrial complex, trying to pinpoint one definitive set of “District 2 winter traditions” would be pretty much futile. As far as Lyme can tell, the quarries pretty much ignore everything but the Winter Solstice, while in town it’s mostly the Solstice with a bit of the Harvest thrown in for flavour, while the Village takes whatever they want and mixes it together to create a mad mess of “we won the Games, we do what we want.”
As a girl, Lyme hated the whole mess. Hated the “This Harvest I am grateful for…” letters she had to write every single year, hated the teacher who pulled her aside the time she wrote “the Program”, “swords”, “my trainers” and “punching people who annoy me” and asked why she hadn’t written nice things like “my mom” or “my dad” and told her to do it over. Hated being forced to decorate solstice cards and make presents for her parents at school for the last week before the holiday, hated that there was a winter break where for two whole weeks she didn’t have school as a respite and had to stay home and work the ashlar with her father with nothing but a few hours at the Centre each afternoon as a brief escape.
She hated that even though her old man didn’t give two shits about the winter solstice or the harvest or any actual meaning behind the holidays, he cared just enough to insist that the house be spotless for them, and would take it out on both Lyme and her mother if anything was out of place. And so Lyme’s clearest memories of the holidays weren’t decorations, or presents, or watching the snow dust the streets, or anything that might have been kind of nice, but of leaving the workshop and hurrying home to frantically clean the house while her mother yelled the whole time before her dad finished his drinks with the boys.
Now Lyme would like nothing more than to pretend the holidays didn’t exist, but she knows better. Now she’s a Victor and a mentor, which means she has to pay attention to the seasonal sponsor trends, and everyone knows that sponsors are more generous during the Harvest season. That means days on end of Capitol holiday parties, meals consisting of nothing but unsatisfying appetizers, endless flirting from hopeful men - and women - waiting under sprigs of mistletoe, and fucking pretty boys in their garishly decorated apartments after getting them pleasantly tipsy on deceptively strong red-and-green cocktails.
The holidays are ghastly, but as Lyme steps off the train and slips through the crowd to the car lot, her one comfort is that at least she won’t have to deal with it any longer. Some of the Village celebrates, yes, Brutus brought his whole quaint quarry ethos with him and only doubled down after pulling Emory, and Callista enjoys any celebration so long as it lets her wear scandalous clothing and drink a lot of booze, but Lyme isn’t the only one who’d rather not. The one good thing about living here is that they’ve all killed their share of people to get here, and that means they’ve earned their right to celebrate - or not - in their own way.
For Lyme, that means no wreaths, no sprigs of holly, no candles in the windowsill on December 21st, and definitely no fucking songs or going around the table talking about what she’s grateful for. She does save a bit of the log she burns on the night of the solstice for the first day of the new year, but that’s only because she thought Brutus was going to choke on his own tongue when he found out she wasn’t going to bother. Messing with him is one thing, but superstitions are a serious thing to some people, and Lyme enjoys being an asshole but only to a point.
So whatever, she burns the stupid log, and that’s her one concession while at home. And Lyme is twenty-one years old, not a sulky ten-year-old, she isn’t going to pitch a fit if she walks past someone’s house and sees a wreath on the door, but after the week she’s had, she is definitely looking forward to shutting the door on her plain, undecorated home and pretending there’s absolutely nothing special happening in the next few days.
Not to mention, this is Artemisia’s first winter without the shadow of her upcoming Victory Tour hanging over them. Last year Misha hadn’t wanted to do anything for the holidays either, and as Lyme slides into the cab of her truck and turns the engine over - waits a second, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel for it to catch, after sitting for days in subzero weather - she thinks about spending the next few days with her Victor, hanging out and doing absolutely nothing and ignoring societal convention altogether.
By the time the high whine of the truck’s engine lowers into an acceptable growl, Lyme’s grinning. Yeah, this will be good, she tells herself. Plus Emory will bring over baked goods, which are the only acceptable part of the whole holiday bullshit mess.
Lyme passes through the Village gates and makes the trudge down the snowy path to her house in high spirits - then stops dead at the sight of her house, which looks as though an evergreen forest and a lighting store threw up all over it. There are spruce boughs all over the door, along the roof and above every window, and strings of coloured lights festoon the entire facade. Someone has even wrapped branches around the posts of Lyme’s porch and tied them with ribbons, or at least started to, since the attempt looks a little half-hearted, like they got bored halfway through something more elaborate and did their best to make it look like this was what they meant to do all along.
Only one person could manage something so half-assed yet utterly committed at the same time. “Oh no,” Lyme says under her breath and dropping her overnight bag, where it sinks onto the snow with a soft, underwhelming thunk.
A moment later Misha bursts out through her front door and caught Lyme in a flying tackle, driving her backward and nearly knocking her flat on her ass. “Happy Sols-vest-ice!” she exclaims, pulling back and giving Lyme an utterly disarming grin. “I know we didn’t do anything last year because we were getting ready for my Tour this year and I was in a mood, so I made up for it. Do you like it?”
“Oh boy,” Lyme says, unable to stop herself. “That’s - you don’t do anything halfway, do you, girl.”
“Nero wouldn’t give me the keys to your house so I could decorate the inside!” Misha says, sticking out her lip in an exaggerated pout, as though she hadn’t sprawled by a campfire and watched her district partner torture a twelve-year-old for hours. “So I had to make it count!”
Well, thank Snow for small mercies, anyway. Lyme doesn’t spend a lot of time standing on her front porch staring at her house and contemplating its architecture, so if Misha wants to decorate it, well, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Lyme picks up her bag and shakes off the snow, pulls Misha in for a headlock, and drags her up the porch stairs. “I can’t imagine why Nero wouldn’t let you into my house unattended,” she says, knuckling the top of Misha’s head before letting to go to unlock the door.
She opens the door and a shower of glitter falls from a bucket balanced on the top of the frame. Lyme stares into her living room, which has been transformed into a visual cacophony of various plants and herbs, lights, garlands, and who only knows what else. Various spices and scents hang in the air until Lyme’s nose nearly throws a fit and gives over to sneezing, but she manages to hold it together.
Lyme turns to Artemisia and can’t help giving her a hard stare. “I thought you said Nero didn’t give you the keys.”
Misha’s gaze goes shifty. “You don’t lock your windows.” At Lyme’s sigh she flings up her hands. “What? What was I supposed to do, not decorate your house? Leave the inside looking all boring when the outside was ready to party? I don’t think so!”
Lyme’s throat tightens as she glances around the house and sees nothing but the aftermath of the holiday vomiting all over her private domain. “What did Nero say when you said you wanted to decorate?”
“He said you don’t celebrate,” Misha said, and the knot between Lyme’s shoulders unwinds, just a little. At least he tried; it’s not his fault that nobody can account for the full force of Misha on a mission. “And, look, your parents sucked, and so did mine, but they’re not here, right? Now it’s just us, and I thought the whole point was to start over and do whatever the fuck we want. What I want is to make a new holiday and new memories and new traditions with my mentor.”
Lyme swallows down the residual wash of anger and panic, the urge to rip it all down, strip every last sprig of holly and ivy and carry it out back behind her house and set it all on fire. She’s not just her own person now, she’s a mentor, and that means she has a responsibility to her girl. It means not making her issues Misha’s problem, no matter how much she wants to scream.
Lyme exhales, slowly, making sure not to let out any appreciable sound that would tip Misha off to her discomfort. She counts backwards through the forty-seventh, and after making it through the deaths she has enough of a hold on herself not to give anything away. “Come on,” Lyme says. “Get your coat on, let’s go see if Emory has any cookies we can bring home.”
Misha beams at her, and Lyme kisses the top of her head, and it’s fine, really it is. It’s just memories, it doesn’t matter. She can put up with a bit of bullshit for the sake of her girl. By the end she won’t even remember why she even worried.
Yeah. So much for that, apparently.
It shouldn’t matter - it shouldn’t. She’s home, it’s the Village, there’s nobody here but people Lyme cares about, and most days it’s not even anyone but Misha, the girl Lyme would give absolutely everything in the entire world for and would give even more if it would keep her safe. So what’s a little decorations and holiday music, especially when paired with good company and Misha’s ever-present blanket nests that enveloped the entire couch.
Except that every time Lyme looks around her house, instead of feeling her shoulders settle and her jaw unclench the way she was supposed to when she came home, she finds herself having to consciously work through relaxation rituals the same as if she was at a Capitol event being pawed at by hundreds of sharp-toothed sponsors. Whenever she steps into her kitchen, she feels the ghost of fingers at the back of her neck, a washcloth slapped into her hands, a frantic voice in her ear hissing the house is a mess it can’t look like this not before the solstice.
But Misha - Misha loves it, the ridiculous decadence and the absolute ridiculousness of the decorations she’s set up, the horrifying mishmash of the two holidays that makes Brutus choke the one time he comes in. (He catches Lyme’s eye when Misha’s distracted, but Lyme presses her mouth thin and shakes her head and he doesn’t push it.) And making her girl happy is important, even if Lyme wakes in the morning chasing the forgotten wisps of dreams that leave her shoulders tense and the muscles in her jaw shooting pain up through her temples.
One day Misha decides she wants to decorate cookies, and so they spend a day baking from a set of instructions painstakingly written in Emory’s large, careful hand and ignoring about half of them. “I know it says chilling the dough is the absolute most important thing,” Misha says, cheerfully scooping spoonfuls onto a baking tin borrowed from Nero, “but who wants to wait four hours before putting them in the oven? I bet that’s just a quarry trick to teach kids patience.”
Lyme very prudently says nothing when the cookies spread out into a giant, amorphous blob that takes up the entire baking tin and they have to cut them into squares and chisel them out. “Okay, well,” Misha says dubiously. “Maybe I’ll listen to Emory next time. But don’t think I’m going to learn any major lessons from this.”
“I wouldn’t dare suggest it,” Lyme reassures her, and hands her a tube of icing. Misha’s attempt at cheerful holly berries ends up looking like drops of blood and so she goes with it, smearing and splashing long lines of red across the cookies until it looks like a murder scene.
“I actually liked the holidays really,” Misha says, not looking up from her work. Lyme glances at her but says nothing, recognizing one of Misha’s rare sharing moods and not wanting to spook her. “People would throw parties around the solstice, and they wouldn’t always be too careful about leaving things locked because they had friends and family coming and going, you know? So my old man, he used to take me out robbing houses. We’d go at night, when people were out visiting, or sometimes he’d pull me out of school if he knew people were going shopping or whatever. We’d always come back with a good haul, and he’d be in a good mood and he always let me keep some of it, and he usually wouldn’t belt me until after the new year. It was good.”
Lyme flattens her hands over her knees, digging her fingers down hard to stop herself from making a fist. “Sounds fun.”
“Yeah, it was.” Misha pushes a loose strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “Of course Mom hated it, she was convinced he’d get caught and thrown in jail again, so she used to try to make us feel bad but we never cared.” She pauses, examines a particularly gory cookie, then adds another splash of blood and sits back with a satisfied nod. “She was right, is the funny thing, one year we did get caught, only it wasn’t him. He got away and left me there, on the roof, and the Peacekeepers nabbed me and brought me home. He chewed me out good in front of them, even gave me a smack, said he’d make sure I didn’t do it again. Then once they were gone he asked if I’d ratted him out, and when I said ‘what am I, a fucking snitch’ he let me eat nothing but dessert for a whole week. I was sick to my stomach, obviously, it was a terrible idea, but it was worth it.”
Lyme’s jaw spasms, and she forces her tongue between her teeth so they’ll unclench. “Misha…”
Misha’s fingers tighten on the icing tube. “I know, I know. What’s the thing my therapist says? ‘There’s a lot to unpack there’?”
She swallows the wild bark of laughter before it can escape. “Yeah, that’s - one way to look at it, girl.”
Misha sighs. “It really did seem fine at the time. It seemed fine when I started telling the story! It was supposed to be funny! But then it … wasn’t. And now I just feel gross and kind of pissed off.”
“Well,” Lyme says, carefully. Misha startled into feelings could be as dangerous as a muttation suddenly backed into a sharp corner. “Why don’t we spar for a while, and see if hitting things helps with being pissed off?”
Misha’s frown is growing, slowly threatening to take over her whole face until it collapses in the middle, but finally she drops the icing and pushes herself to her feet, slapping both hands on the counter. “Yeah, sure,” she says. “Why not.”
Lyme grabs a pair swords first, and they head out into the snow in their boots and sweaters to swing them around until the first round of Misha’s furious energy burns off. Once the initial wildness wears out Lyme tackles her, and they scrap and grapple while Misha aims for Lyme’s knees and her bad leg and all her known weak spots, just like Lyme expected. Lyme doesn’t fall for it, and she gets Misha on her back in the snow just like Misha expected, based on the light of relief that sparks in her eyes.
“You’re my girl now,” Lyme tells her. The snow stings her hands where they press into the drifts behind Misha’s shoulders, and Misha’s cheeks glow bright red and her hair is strung through with ice crystals as it fans out behind her. “Not theirs. Mine. And yeah, girl, you’re gonna go see your therapist so she can pull apart all the ways that was fucked up, but for right now, I’m here and I’m not gonna leave you. Ever.”
“Okay,” Misha says, and lets go of Lyme’s wrists. “But maybe now let’s go inside before I can’t remember what my fingers feel like.”
Back inside Misha makes a big show out of blowing on her hands and demanding blankets and cocoa and cuddles, and Lyme obliges her because of fucking course she does. The rest of the holidays are still excruciating, Lyme’s house is still a walking trigger and she can’t turn her head without getting slapped in the face with the spirit of Solst-vest-ice grinning at her, but Misha’s happy, and sometimes you take a hit so someone else can keep going.
The next year, Lyme braces herself when December rolls around. Artemisia has a habit of never doing the same thing twice with the previous level of intensity - why repeat when you can improve, she likes to say, whether it’s a recipe or an embroidery project or an ever-escalating prank war - and Lyme cannot even begin to imagine what will be waiting for her. When she comes back from her annual sponsor circuit blitz, Lyme grits her teeth and prepares for an all-out lights show complete with dancing animatronic snowmen on the roof of her house or some shit.
Instead her house looks the same as it always does, plain brick and stone and wood, the roof bare except for the usual covering of snow from a recent fall. Lyme frowns, kicks the snow from her boots as she climbs the front steps, and pushes open the door - gingerly, in case Misha has saved it all for an absolute holiday horror-scape inside. What could possibly await her, a festive minefield? All her furniture gift-wrapped and attached to the ceiling in mirror-image?
Nothing. There’s a fire crackling in the hearth, and the faint trace of her favourite sandalwood incense, but other than that, there’s no hint that either the Harvest or the Solstice have come anywhere near District 2. Lyme sets down her bag and peels off her jacket and boots, still suspicious, and only after she’s hung everything up does she notice the second coat and pair of boots.
“Hey,” Misha says from the armchair. “Did you have a good trip?”
“Capitol’s Capitol,” Lyme says, and Misha laughs. “What’s all this?”
“What’s what?” Misha says innocently, but then she gives it up and stands up, hands jammed in her pockets and shoulders hunched, just slightly. “Well, I was going to decorate your house again but then I asked around. Nero and Brutus said you don’t do anything for the holidays, and don’t make that face, they didn’t say anything about why, they were very careful, but … you know, they were careful. Nobody around here is careful unless they’re protecting somebody. And then I thought about last year, how I came and I made your house into The House that Vomited Holiday Cheer and you didn’t say anything, you let me because I wanted to, and it was awesome, I needed it, but I didn’t stop to think about whether you wanted to.”
Lyme frowns again. “You weren’t supposed -”
“I know, I know, you’re the mentor, I’m not supposed to think about it.” Misha’s mouth twitches a little. “Good job on that, that’s all I’m saying. Anyway, Brutus and Emory are doing the Solstice together again this year and they said I could join them, so if I want decorations and cookies and songs and all that, I’ll just go over there. When I’m here, it’s because I want to be with you.”
Lyme swallows through the rock that’s lodged in her throat, blinks around the traitorous stinging. “Careful, girl, that sounded like sincerity.”
“Yeah, well.” Misha slides up against her side, resting her head on Lyme’s shoulder. “Throw me into the snow a few times, I’m sure I’ll get over it.”
Lyme laughs, feeling the last band of tension in her chest snap and break free. She swings Misha over her shoulder and throws her onto the couch, where she lands with a squawk and a wide, cheeky grin. “Maybe later,” Lyme says, and tosses Misha her favourite blanket.
The holidays, Lyme thinks as the train glides into District 2’s Central Station, are fucking exhausting.
December has always been a bit of a muddle in District 2. Caught between its old-fashioned quarry customs and the siren song of the capitol, never mind the Program and the Peacekeeping Academy and all the rituals that spring up around the military-industrial complex, trying to pinpoint one definitive set of “District 2 winter traditions” would be pretty much futile. As far as Lyme can tell, the quarries pretty much ignore everything but the Winter Solstice, while in town it’s mostly the Solstice with a bit of the Harvest thrown in for flavour, while the Village takes whatever they want and mixes it together to create a mad mess of “we won the Games, we do what we want.”
As a girl, Lyme hated the whole mess. Hated the “This Harvest I am grateful for…” letters she had to write every single year, hated the teacher who pulled her aside the time she wrote “the Program”, “swords”, “my trainers” and “punching people who annoy me” and asked why she hadn’t written nice things like “my mom” or “my dad” and told her to do it over. Hated being forced to decorate solstice cards and make presents for her parents at school for the last week before the holiday, hated that there was a winter break where for two whole weeks she didn’t have school as a respite and had to stay home and work the ashlar with her father with nothing but a few hours at the Centre each afternoon as a brief escape.
She hated that even though her old man didn’t give two shits about the winter solstice or the harvest or any actual meaning behind the holidays, he cared just enough to insist that the house be spotless for them, and would take it out on both Lyme and her mother if anything was out of place. And so Lyme’s clearest memories of the holidays weren’t decorations, or presents, or watching the snow dust the streets, or anything that might have been kind of nice, but of leaving the workshop and hurrying home to frantically clean the house while her mother yelled the whole time before her dad finished his drinks with the boys.
Now Lyme would like nothing more than to pretend the holidays didn’t exist, but she knows better. Now she’s a Victor and a mentor, which means she has to pay attention to the seasonal sponsor trends, and everyone knows that sponsors are more generous during the Harvest season. That means days on end of Capitol holiday parties, meals consisting of nothing but unsatisfying appetizers, endless flirting from hopeful men - and women - waiting under sprigs of mistletoe, and fucking pretty boys in their garishly decorated apartments after getting them pleasantly tipsy on deceptively strong red-and-green cocktails.
The holidays are ghastly, but as Lyme steps off the train and slips through the crowd to the car lot, her one comfort is that at least she won’t have to deal with it any longer. Some of the Village celebrates, yes, Brutus brought his whole quaint quarry ethos with him and only doubled down after pulling Emory, and Callista enjoys any celebration so long as it lets her wear scandalous clothing and drink a lot of booze, but Lyme isn’t the only one who’d rather not. The one good thing about living here is that they’ve all killed their share of people to get here, and that means they’ve earned their right to celebrate - or not - in their own way.
For Lyme, that means no wreaths, no sprigs of holly, no candles in the windowsill on December 21st, and definitely no fucking songs or going around the table talking about what she’s grateful for. She does save a bit of the log she burns on the night of the solstice for the first day of the new year, but that’s only because she thought Brutus was going to choke on his own tongue when he found out she wasn’t going to bother. Messing with him is one thing, but superstitions are a serious thing to some people, and Lyme enjoys being an asshole but only to a point.
So whatever, she burns the stupid log, and that’s her one concession while at home. And Lyme is twenty-one years old, not a sulky ten-year-old, she isn’t going to pitch a fit if she walks past someone’s house and sees a wreath on the door, but after the week she’s had, she is definitely looking forward to shutting the door on her plain, undecorated home and pretending there’s absolutely nothing special happening in the next few days.
Not to mention, this is Artemisia’s first winter without the shadow of her upcoming Victory Tour hanging over them. Last year Misha hadn’t wanted to do anything for the holidays either, and as Lyme slides into the cab of her truck and turns the engine over - waits a second, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel for it to catch, after sitting for days in subzero weather - she thinks about spending the next few days with her Victor, hanging out and doing absolutely nothing and ignoring societal convention altogether.
By the time the high whine of the truck’s engine lowers into an acceptable growl, Lyme’s grinning. Yeah, this will be good, she tells herself. Plus Emory will bring over baked goods, which are the only acceptable part of the whole holiday bullshit mess.
Lyme passes through the Village gates and makes the trudge down the snowy path to her house in high spirits - then stops dead at the sight of her house, which looks as though an evergreen forest and a lighting store threw up all over it. There are spruce boughs all over the door, along the roof and above every window, and strings of coloured lights festoon the entire facade. Someone has even wrapped branches around the posts of Lyme’s porch and tied them with ribbons, or at least started to, since the attempt looks a little half-hearted, like they got bored halfway through something more elaborate and did their best to make it look like this was what they meant to do all along.
Only one person could manage something so half-assed yet utterly committed at the same time. “Oh no,” Lyme says under her breath and dropping her overnight bag, where it sinks onto the snow with a soft, underwhelming thunk.
A moment later Misha bursts out through her front door and caught Lyme in a flying tackle, driving her backward and nearly knocking her flat on her ass. “Happy Sols-vest-ice!” she exclaims, pulling back and giving Lyme an utterly disarming grin. “I know we didn’t do anything last year because we were getting ready for my Tour this year and I was in a mood, so I made up for it. Do you like it?”
“Oh boy,” Lyme says, unable to stop herself. “That’s - you don’t do anything halfway, do you, girl.”
“Nero wouldn’t give me the keys to your house so I could decorate the inside!” Misha says, sticking out her lip in an exaggerated pout, as though she hadn’t sprawled by a campfire and watched her district partner torture a twelve-year-old for hours. “So I had to make it count!”
Well, thank Snow for small mercies, anyway. Lyme doesn’t spend a lot of time standing on her front porch staring at her house and contemplating its architecture, so if Misha wants to decorate it, well, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Lyme picks up her bag and shakes off the snow, pulls Misha in for a headlock, and drags her up the porch stairs. “I can’t imagine why Nero wouldn’t let you into my house unattended,” she says, knuckling the top of Misha’s head before letting to go to unlock the door.
She opens the door and a shower of glitter falls from a bucket balanced on the top of the frame. Lyme stares into her living room, which has been transformed into a visual cacophony of various plants and herbs, lights, garlands, and who only knows what else. Various spices and scents hang in the air until Lyme’s nose nearly throws a fit and gives over to sneezing, but she manages to hold it together.
Lyme turns to Artemisia and can’t help giving her a hard stare. “I thought you said Nero didn’t give you the keys.”
Misha’s gaze goes shifty. “You don’t lock your windows.” At Lyme’s sigh she flings up her hands. “What? What was I supposed to do, not decorate your house? Leave the inside looking all boring when the outside was ready to party? I don’t think so!”
Lyme’s throat tightens as she glances around the house and sees nothing but the aftermath of the holiday vomiting all over her private domain. “What did Nero say when you said you wanted to decorate?”
“He said you don’t celebrate,” Misha said, and the knot between Lyme’s shoulders unwinds, just a little. At least he tried; it’s not his fault that nobody can account for the full force of Misha on a mission. “And, look, your parents sucked, and so did mine, but they’re not here, right? Now it’s just us, and I thought the whole point was to start over and do whatever the fuck we want. What I want is to make a new holiday and new memories and new traditions with my mentor.”
Lyme swallows down the residual wash of anger and panic, the urge to rip it all down, strip every last sprig of holly and ivy and carry it out back behind her house and set it all on fire. She’s not just her own person now, she’s a mentor, and that means she has a responsibility to her girl. It means not making her issues Misha’s problem, no matter how much she wants to scream.
Lyme exhales, slowly, making sure not to let out any appreciable sound that would tip Misha off to her discomfort. She counts backwards through the forty-seventh, and after making it through the deaths she has enough of a hold on herself not to give anything away. “Come on,” Lyme says. “Get your coat on, let’s go see if Emory has any cookies we can bring home.”
Misha beams at her, and Lyme kisses the top of her head, and it’s fine, really it is. It’s just memories, it doesn’t matter. She can put up with a bit of bullshit for the sake of her girl. By the end she won’t even remember why she even worried.
Yeah. So much for that, apparently.
It shouldn’t matter - it shouldn’t. She’s home, it’s the Village, there’s nobody here but people Lyme cares about, and most days it’s not even anyone but Misha, the girl Lyme would give absolutely everything in the entire world for and would give even more if it would keep her safe. So what’s a little decorations and holiday music, especially when paired with good company and Misha’s ever-present blanket nests that enveloped the entire couch.
Except that every time Lyme looks around her house, instead of feeling her shoulders settle and her jaw unclench the way she was supposed to when she came home, she finds herself having to consciously work through relaxation rituals the same as if she was at a Capitol event being pawed at by hundreds of sharp-toothed sponsors. Whenever she steps into her kitchen, she feels the ghost of fingers at the back of her neck, a washcloth slapped into her hands, a frantic voice in her ear hissing the house is a mess it can’t look like this not before the solstice.
But Misha - Misha loves it, the ridiculous decadence and the absolute ridiculousness of the decorations she’s set up, the horrifying mishmash of the two holidays that makes Brutus choke the one time he comes in. (He catches Lyme’s eye when Misha’s distracted, but Lyme presses her mouth thin and shakes her head and he doesn’t push it.) And making her girl happy is important, even if Lyme wakes in the morning chasing the forgotten wisps of dreams that leave her shoulders tense and the muscles in her jaw shooting pain up through her temples.
One day Misha decides she wants to decorate cookies, and so they spend a day baking from a set of instructions painstakingly written in Emory’s large, careful hand and ignoring about half of them. “I know it says chilling the dough is the absolute most important thing,” Misha says, cheerfully scooping spoonfuls onto a baking tin borrowed from Nero, “but who wants to wait four hours before putting them in the oven? I bet that’s just a quarry trick to teach kids patience.”
Lyme very prudently says nothing when the cookies spread out into a giant, amorphous blob that takes up the entire baking tin and they have to cut them into squares and chisel them out. “Okay, well,” Misha says dubiously. “Maybe I’ll listen to Emory next time. But don’t think I’m going to learn any major lessons from this.”
“I wouldn’t dare suggest it,” Lyme reassures her, and hands her a tube of icing. Misha’s attempt at cheerful holly berries ends up looking like drops of blood and so she goes with it, smearing and splashing long lines of red across the cookies until it looks like a murder scene.
“I actually liked the holidays really,” Misha says, not looking up from her work. Lyme glances at her but says nothing, recognizing one of Misha’s rare sharing moods and not wanting to spook her. “People would throw parties around the solstice, and they wouldn’t always be too careful about leaving things locked because they had friends and family coming and going, you know? So my old man, he used to take me out robbing houses. We’d go at night, when people were out visiting, or sometimes he’d pull me out of school if he knew people were going shopping or whatever. We’d always come back with a good haul, and he’d be in a good mood and he always let me keep some of it, and he usually wouldn’t belt me until after the new year. It was good.”
Lyme flattens her hands over her knees, digging her fingers down hard to stop herself from making a fist. “Sounds fun.”
“Yeah, it was.” Misha pushes a loose strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “Of course Mom hated it, she was convinced he’d get caught and thrown in jail again, so she used to try to make us feel bad but we never cared.” She pauses, examines a particularly gory cookie, then adds another splash of blood and sits back with a satisfied nod. “She was right, is the funny thing, one year we did get caught, only it wasn’t him. He got away and left me there, on the roof, and the Peacekeepers nabbed me and brought me home. He chewed me out good in front of them, even gave me a smack, said he’d make sure I didn’t do it again. Then once they were gone he asked if I’d ratted him out, and when I said ‘what am I, a fucking snitch’ he let me eat nothing but dessert for a whole week. I was sick to my stomach, obviously, it was a terrible idea, but it was worth it.”
Lyme’s jaw spasms, and she forces her tongue between her teeth so they’ll unclench. “Misha…”
Misha’s fingers tighten on the icing tube. “I know, I know. What’s the thing my therapist says? ‘There’s a lot to unpack there’?”
She swallows the wild bark of laughter before it can escape. “Yeah, that’s - one way to look at it, girl.”
Misha sighs. “It really did seem fine at the time. It seemed fine when I started telling the story! It was supposed to be funny! But then it … wasn’t. And now I just feel gross and kind of pissed off.”
“Well,” Lyme says, carefully. Misha startled into feelings could be as dangerous as a muttation suddenly backed into a sharp corner. “Why don’t we spar for a while, and see if hitting things helps with being pissed off?”
Misha’s frown is growing, slowly threatening to take over her whole face until it collapses in the middle, but finally she drops the icing and pushes herself to her feet, slapping both hands on the counter. “Yeah, sure,” she says. “Why not.”
Lyme grabs a pair swords first, and they head out into the snow in their boots and sweaters to swing them around until the first round of Misha’s furious energy burns off. Once the initial wildness wears out Lyme tackles her, and they scrap and grapple while Misha aims for Lyme’s knees and her bad leg and all her known weak spots, just like Lyme expected. Lyme doesn’t fall for it, and she gets Misha on her back in the snow just like Misha expected, based on the light of relief that sparks in her eyes.
“You’re my girl now,” Lyme tells her. The snow stings her hands where they press into the drifts behind Misha’s shoulders, and Misha’s cheeks glow bright red and her hair is strung through with ice crystals as it fans out behind her. “Not theirs. Mine. And yeah, girl, you’re gonna go see your therapist so she can pull apart all the ways that was fucked up, but for right now, I’m here and I’m not gonna leave you. Ever.”
“Okay,” Misha says, and lets go of Lyme’s wrists. “But maybe now let’s go inside before I can’t remember what my fingers feel like.”
Back inside Misha makes a big show out of blowing on her hands and demanding blankets and cocoa and cuddles, and Lyme obliges her because of fucking course she does. The rest of the holidays are still excruciating, Lyme’s house is still a walking trigger and she can’t turn her head without getting slapped in the face with the spirit of Solst-vest-ice grinning at her, but Misha’s happy, and sometimes you take a hit so someone else can keep going.
The next year, Lyme braces herself when December rolls around. Artemisia has a habit of never doing the same thing twice with the previous level of intensity - why repeat when you can improve, she likes to say, whether it’s a recipe or an embroidery project or an ever-escalating prank war - and Lyme cannot even begin to imagine what will be waiting for her. When she comes back from her annual sponsor circuit blitz, Lyme grits her teeth and prepares for an all-out lights show complete with dancing animatronic snowmen on the roof of her house or some shit.
Instead her house looks the same as it always does, plain brick and stone and wood, the roof bare except for the usual covering of snow from a recent fall. Lyme frowns, kicks the snow from her boots as she climbs the front steps, and pushes open the door - gingerly, in case Misha has saved it all for an absolute holiday horror-scape inside. What could possibly await her, a festive minefield? All her furniture gift-wrapped and attached to the ceiling in mirror-image?
Nothing. There’s a fire crackling in the hearth, and the faint trace of her favourite sandalwood incense, but other than that, there’s no hint that either the Harvest or the Solstice have come anywhere near District 2. Lyme sets down her bag and peels off her jacket and boots, still suspicious, and only after she’s hung everything up does she notice the second coat and pair of boots.
“Hey,” Misha says from the armchair. “Did you have a good trip?”
“Capitol’s Capitol,” Lyme says, and Misha laughs. “What’s all this?”
“What’s what?” Misha says innocently, but then she gives it up and stands up, hands jammed in her pockets and shoulders hunched, just slightly. “Well, I was going to decorate your house again but then I asked around. Nero and Brutus said you don’t do anything for the holidays, and don’t make that face, they didn’t say anything about why, they were very careful, but … you know, they were careful. Nobody around here is careful unless they’re protecting somebody. And then I thought about last year, how I came and I made your house into The House that Vomited Holiday Cheer and you didn’t say anything, you let me because I wanted to, and it was awesome, I needed it, but I didn’t stop to think about whether you wanted to.”
Lyme frowns again. “You weren’t supposed -”
“I know, I know, you’re the mentor, I’m not supposed to think about it.” Misha’s mouth twitches a little. “Good job on that, that’s all I’m saying. Anyway, Brutus and Emory are doing the Solstice together again this year and they said I could join them, so if I want decorations and cookies and songs and all that, I’ll just go over there. When I’m here, it’s because I want to be with you.”
Lyme swallows through the rock that’s lodged in her throat, blinks around the traitorous stinging. “Careful, girl, that sounded like sincerity.”
“Yeah, well.” Misha slides up against her side, resting her head on Lyme’s shoulder. “Throw me into the snow a few times, I’m sure I’ll get over it.”
Lyme laughs, feeling the last band of tension in her chest snap and break free. She swings Misha over her shoulder and throws her onto the couch, where she lands with a squawk and a wide, cheeky grin. “Maybe later,” Lyme says, and tosses Misha her favourite blanket.