"You're gonna catch your death out here like that."
"Eh. Had worse."
Brutus doesn't bother to look up from the silent contemplation of his beer bottle as he peels off the label in long, straight lines with his thumbnail. Lyme's footsteps crunch through the snow, her boots breaking through the top crust and sinking right down to the ground underneath. Behind her, the trail from her house to his will be scored with hollows from her feet, dark smudges against an otherwise unbroken blanket of white.
Clove probably could've run across the top of the drifts without any trouble, and for a second Brutus sees her, a wicked little girl with the evil little eyes and a killer's aim, scampering over the snowbanks while Cato, enormous and hulking as his district partner (friend) was tiny, flounders through by force. Maybe Clove laughs at him. Maybe Cato balls up a handful of snow and pitches it at her head, missing by a mile because Cato was strong but couldn't aim for shit. Maybe Clove packs a nasty ice ball and nails him right between the eyes. Maybe he yelps, crashes through the last of the snowbank between them and knocks her down, where they roll in the snow like puppies and try to shove handfuls down each other's shirts. Maybe Clove complains that he's made her cold, ass-fucker, and Cato laughs and wraps her up in his jacket and half-carries her home.
They're in the ground now, what's left of them, buried next to each other in a neat row along with every other tribute who didn't make it out, in the memorial field maintained by the Centre. The families are allowed to visit and pay their respects if they want. Most don't bother. Maybe Clove's daddy did before he hanged himself. Who's to say. Cato's parents didn't even bother to make it into town for the Reaping, so unless they hired some poor sucker to lay a wreath or something, his stone is likely as bare as hers is. The mentors don't go back after the interment. They accompany the body back, sit silent on the train with the coffin on the next seat over, and that's more than any sane person could take, year after year.
Used to be, Brutus could deal with the loss of a tribute over the summer and be back on his feet by fall. Used to be he knew his job and his duty and took comfort that the kids did too, and he hurt when they died but he could pull himself back. Brutus can't tell if it's the world that's changed or if it's him - maybe twenty years of mentoring is too much, maybe he's lost his edge, maybe he's an old man before his time - but here he is, months later and still unable to shake the ghost of the little girl with a spider's smile.
Lyme drops down into the chair next to Brutus on the porch, the one that might as well be hers because she's the one who uses it most. It creaks under the sudden weight, and she's one to talk, jibing about him freezing to death, when she's just in a sweater the same as Brutus is. When both of them got flung through the ice with the rest of the trainees at the age of thirteen, when both their Arenas had weather that fluctuated from blistering to freezing in a matter of hours.
"Thought I'd join you," Lyme says, tipping her bottle of expensive asshole brandy, or whatever it is she's drinking today. If ever Brutus orders for her and they're not at their usual place, he just asks them to give him whatever it is rich douchebags pour to impress their potential business clients. Brutus likes his drinks simple, local beer brewed right here in District 2, and he doesn't allow himself a lot of indulgences but this is one that's hard to give up. Even harder recently.
Lyme's been quiet the past while. She was never one of Two's flashier Victors - right from the Games she won through stealth and cunning as much as she did with swords, through to her plays for the sponsors, persuading instead of bullying - and she stays out of the cameras after that business with one of her own back in the 67th. This, though, this is different. She went two days without food or sleep during her Games and didn't look like this, exhausted and resigned, if not outright defeated.
She looks like the reason Brutus took down the mirror in his bedroom, wrenched off the reflective door of his medicine cabinet and threw it through a window like he was eighteen and fresh out again instead of almost forty-five. Every day that passes Brutus gropes for the conviction that's kept him going these past twenty-some years, the absolute knowledge that what he does is good. Every day that rebellion whispers its way down through the mountains from the outer districts while Cato and Clove lie cold in their coffins is another day where the rocks shift beneath his feet.
Not that rebellion is the answer. Brutus has not mentored since he was twenty-one for him to lose sight of being practical. He doesn't allow himself to think about whether the Capitol is good because there's no point in that, but they are clear, and consistent. Follow their rules and you'll be rewarded. Play their games and they'll provide you with ample protection. The Capitol has resources and power and reach that took more than a girl and a handful of berries to accumulate.
The rebellion, if that's what this is, will fail, and just like the Dark Days, the Capitol will remember who stood by them through it all. When the children of the rebellion are slaughtered once more, those of Two will be safe.
Except. Except. Except.
Brutus doesn't think about except, but he sees it on Lyme's face all the same. It's the reason they sit and drink together but don't talk about it. The rules are changing again - the double Victors from Twelve, even if never repeated, are still unprecedented - and this close to the Quarter Quell that can't be a good thing. The only thing Brutus can do is cling to tradition, to the rules, in the hopes that his loyalty will be remembered and passed on to the people whose children he's tried to save nearly every other year.
"Mandatory broadcast tonight," Lyme says, and Brutus glances at her. "Think it's the reading of the card."
Brutus barely remembers the last one. He'd been fresh from the hell of his Victory Tour, exhausted and half-crazed, nearly delirious from the medication his mentor put him on to keep him sane. He remembers the box, absurdly enough, the rich mahogany with the inlaid carvings along the side. He recalls admiring the craftsmanship.
Lyme draws one knee up onto the chair, looking out over the yard. A pair of tiny bird tracks dot the snow, until a large dent marks where a hawk landed and made off with it. "It was my first year in Residential," Lyme says, and they try not to talk about feelings with each other but Brutus does understand the need to talk to someone who gets it. "The fiftieth, I mean. I still remember the volcano, watching three of ours just -" She snaps her fingers. "They'd been stopping the footage every time a tribute died, asking us what they should've done, but I remember, they didn't ask us this time. They didn't say anything. The whole room just went quiet. One of the girls in my year started crying. I hit her to make her stop, but she didn't. They took her out and she wasn't there the next day."
Brutus gnaws the inside of his cheek. "Odin said 'What a shame'," he says. He doesn't look at her. "Started to say something else but changed his mind."
What a waste, his mentor's body language had said instead, the tight lines of his shoulders, the clenched fists, the taut jaw. Three Twos, two Fours and a One, wiped out by environmental catastrophe on the Gamemakers' whim, and worse because a move that wiped out nearly the entire Pack could only stand to benefit the outer districts.
"Yeah." Lyme swirls her drink. She didn't even bother with a glass this time, which Brutus thought defied some kind of dickbag alcohol law, something about letting it breathe, and now she takes a long pull straight from the bottle. "D's been having nightmares. He's convinced they're gonna send him back in. I told him that's ridiculous."
Brutus winces. It's no use trying to imagine what new rules sit in that box, though a few late nights have given his brain the occasion to try. "Nah," he said. "Kid's old news. They've got plenty of new threats to deal with." Actual threats, ones the Capitol might have to worry about, if the rumours of what went on during the Twelves' Victor Tour are anything to go by. Lyme's boy bent the accepted protocol a little his year, but he didn't stand there with a handful of poison berries daring the Capitol to break their own rules to save him or kill him and let him win anyway.
It doesn't make sense to send the Victors back in, not when making that last kill is what turns tributes into people for the Capitol. Standing on the stage and receiving the crown is license for the Capitol audiences to think of the new Victor as someone with relationships and tastes and talents. The citizens of the Capitol might cheer and eat popcorn while twenty-three children die every year, but even they would have trouble pulling back after years - decades, for many - of getting to know their favourites.
A Victor Game might be one of the most popular rumours, but it's only one of several. One theory is that the tributes will be chosen only from those children who have not taken tesserae, to remind the citizens that it is not just the poor who must sacrifice to the Capitol; another that only the Victors' relatives would be chosen, or that each tribute will go in with a parent. The Capitol is abuzz with speculation, and while Brutus has avoided it as much as he can, every time he sets foot in the city someone is asking him if, as one of Two's most illustrious mentors, he has any ideas. Brutus always says no. It's never good to try to second-guess the Capitol.
"Let's just hope that's what the broadcast is about," Lyme says. "It's not just D. I asked around, all the younger ones are getting antsy. They don't know what to expect."
"Mine too," Brutus says with a nod. Two's latest Victor is one of his; Petra turned twenty-one this past December. Enobaria is the last of their Victors to remember the second Quarter Quell at all, and even she was only six, not even in the Program yet. In interviews she says she mostly remembers how pretty the bright red blood looked, splashed against the candy pinks and greens of the Arena.
"I just want to get this over with." Lyme's mouth thins, and her fingers tighten around the bottle neck. "Maybe after the Quell things can go back to normal."
Wouldn't that be nice. A normal year where normal teenagers murder each other normally, no star-crossed lovers and dual Victors and a new Gamemaker after the old one wound up dead because a sixteen-year-old girl made him look the fool. No standing behind Lyme in Mentor Central for eight hours with Brutus' hands on her shoulders as Cato got chewed to pieces, pretending he didn't notice when her breathing turned ragged. Nothing but good, clean deaths for the Twos, not a swift, violent descent into madness ending in the most blatant execution since the avalanche took out Titus from Six.
Cato was the first Two tribute eliminated deliberately by the Gamemakers that Brutus can remember, regardless of whether their mutts or Twelve's arrow actually killed him. Clove died in the dirt like the rest of them, but at least she died true. If any justice exists in the world, after the Quarter Quell there will be no more Catos.
Hopefully, whatever card the President pulls out of his box will douse the fires of rebellion all over the country and things can return the way they were, safe and predictable. If Brutus has to choose between an uncertain future where anyone might die at any given time, and one where two are guaranteed to die but they get to choose those two and prepare them for it, he'll take the future whose rules he understands.
The part where the figurehead of the rebellion-that-isn't-no-really let Lyme's tribute take an entire night to die while she cuddled her boyfriend and complained about the cold doesn't help, either.
Every tribute who dies is another chain around their mentor's leg, but Cato and Clove hit hard for both of them, and Lyme even worse. Brutus never let himself believe for a second that the rule change would hold, regardless of which district managed to make it to the end. That was too much of a departure from the norm - not how the Games are played - and their kids, if they'd been the ones at the finale, would not have thought to defy the Gamemakers and threaten to deny them their Victor. Clove would have stuck a knife in Cato and come back broken and bitter and dead inside, or Cato would have snapped Clove's little neck and returned to them a monster. Either way, there'd be no winner left by the Victory Tour.
But Lyme allowed herself to hope, and Brutus saw it. It wasn't his business and so he said nothing, but then the ending had been worse than anything he'd imagined. Now the whole country holds its breath waiting for the axe to fall. Meanwhile every day Brutus watches Lyme lock a little more of herself away.
"Hey," Brutus says, and Lyme flicks her eyes toward him but doesn't move. "Bring your boy over, you can watch from here if you want. Petra's with the trio -" his Emory and Devon, her Artemisia - "so I'm guessing she'll just stay and watch there. What time's the broadcast?"
"Seven," Lyme says, and her breath fogs in the winter air. "Thanks, I think I will."
That evening the three of them sit in Brutus' living room, watching the television that he only uses for mandatory viewing because Capitol programming insipid and sets his jaw on edge, like the tiny sugary cakes that make his teeth ache and leave him feeling unsatisfied and vaguely queasy.
The feeling doesn't go away when the mandatory broadcast turns out to be the Katniss Everdeen wedding dress special. Brutus very carefully holds his breath, hiding any reaction when there's a younger Victor in the room, and beside him Lyme freezes. Brutus shifts slightly, pressing his arm against her shoulder.
"You gotta be kidding me," Lyme's Victor spits, and he's twenty-six, old enough to get bitter but not enough to be resigned and jaded. "This crap is mandatory? Are they punishing us by trying to make us vomit?"
"Claudius," Lyme warns, and it sounds like she's grateful for the minor insubordination because it gives her something else to think about. Brutus knows how that feels.
"Sorry, boss," Claudius mutters, crossing his arms. "Thank you to President Snow and the Capitol for providing me with this wonderful opportunity to get reacquainted with my lunch. It was a good lunch. I relish the chance to meet it again." Lyme smacks him on the back of the head, and he subsides, slinking down into the sofa.
"Still, this can't be it," Lyme says, frowning. "What are they playing at?"
Brutus thinks he knows, but he doesn't like it. A suspicion starts working its way beneath his skin like a sliver, that if they're starting with the wedding show then whatever follows will be in direct contrast to that. The Capitol purports not to know what's in the Quell box ahead of time - Brutus refuses to think about whether that's true, not his business not his problem - but whether they do or not, it will only serve as a sharp reminder that everything, including Twelve's fairytale wedding, can be taken away.
Sure enough, when the broadcast ends, Flickerman comes back and tells them not to leave their seats. Then President Snow stands up and asks for the box, and Brutus' breath squeezes in his chest he reaches inside and pulls out a faded envelope.
Claudius hisses a breath. "They're trying too hard," he says, and he tenses himself like he knows Lyme's going to whack him again but he doesn't care. "If those things are kept in a sealed box and only opened four times a century, they wouldn't be yellowed like that. It's just theatrics."
"Stop it," Lyme says sharply. Brutus tried to tell her that letting the kid do movie-making as a public Talent was a bad idea, too much thought into appearance and craft and showmanship, but she'd said she could curb him and he was her kid, not Brutus', and so he'd kept his mouth shut after that.
Then the President opens the envelope, takes out the card - tells all of Panem that next summer, the only tributes in the Arena will be the ones who've been there before - and the floor falls out from under them.
An hour later, Brutus stands with the rest of the Victors in the Village gym, all of them crowded into the open sparring court, their feet sinking into the mats. They're all clumped into groups without really meaning to, mentors in the middle with their Victors spiralling out in ever-widening circles, and in the centre stands Ronan, their first Career Victor, where it all began. He's in his seventies now but stands as strong as ever, his back unbowed and hands steady.
Brutus and Lyme keep near each other, five young Victors between them, their reactions a mix of steely determination and wide-eyed panic. Brutus' first girl, Emory, stands with her arms at her sides, fingers clenched into fists; she's hardly a child, only three years younger than Brutus himself, but that's the way things go. She might be forty but she'll still be his girl until the day she dies - something that made her smile when she was twenty, but now means something different when it could be less than a year.
Brutus swallows his fear; Emory can handle herself. It's Petra, his latest, that he's worried about, barely three years out and fresh from her Games with a hip injury - took a mace to the side, shattering her pelvis to bits - that doesn't want to heal no matter how many surgeries she goes through. She walks with a cane and a limp; the others joke that she and Claudius are the Village's youngest weather forecasters, since both her hip and his shoulder twinge when rain is coming.
"First things first," Ronan calls, his voice still clear and strong despite his age, a Career to the end. "I think we can agree. The youngest ones stay out."
Petra narrows her eyes and drums her fingers against the handle of her cane. No one turns to look at her but the attention of the room shifts to her anyway just because they're trying so hard not to. She's always despised pity, his girl, and it will stick her in the gut to take the exception, but she understands protocol and waits for the proper time to oppose instead of bursting out with it now.
Brutus can't second, not when the youngest is his, and his gaze flickers over to Odin without thinking. Odin doesn't look at him, but he straightens his shoulders. "I second," Odin says in his powerful baritone. "They're under our protection."
Technically everyone except the oldest are under someone's protection, but that's not what he means. Two takes care of its own, and that means not sending in the ones whose trauma has yet to fade. It's been over two years for Petra but she still hasn't healed, and even now when she tries to do something her body can no longer handle it's a tossup between whether she'll scream and smash something or burst into furious tears and a stream of curses that turn the air blue.
"Third," echoes Nero, and that brings it up for the vote. "Anyone opposed?"
Petra growls under her breath, and Brutus shakes his head to cut her off. "Don't," he says in a low voice. "It's not personal, we'd make the rule for anyone."
"Then it's done," says Ronan, striking the mat with his cane, which he carries more like a sceptre of office than a walking aid. It makes a muffled thump against the exercise mats, but the effect is the same. "I move to set the cutoff at those born after the last Quarter Quell."
Beside him, Lyme sucks in a breath, and it takes Brutus a second to realize why. On her other side, Claudius stands up straight and lets out a long exhale, and that's when Brutus does the math and realizes Claudius was born in the summer of 48, well before Ronan's cutoff.
Back in the 55th, Brutus watched Lyme navigate a minefield to get to her Cornucopia without breaking a sweat, but now the colour drains from her face and he learns what she looks like when she's afraid.
Mentors don't play favourites, but Claudius is her youngest, and not only does Brutus know how that feels, his own girl is safe from this rule already, no question. Almost before he knows what's happening, Brutus finds himself speaking up. "That's a lot of math," Brutus says, and despite the situation a low ripple of laughter spreads through the tense silence. "Let's just make it the past decade and save us all the trouble."
Claudius stiffens, but he knows better than to move or say anything, not yet. Lyme doesn't either, but her fingers slowly uncurl, Brutus counts two long breaths as she closes her eyes and gets a handle on herself.
"I second," Nero says immediately.
"Third," says Enobaria, crossing her arms. "You kids just had your fun, save it for the rest of us." The ones who've recovered enough that they don't reach for a knife when they go around a dark corner, she means; the youngest ones would never be able to go in again and walk out sane. Brutus feels a twinge of guilt that he couldn't push the age range up to keep her out - of all of them, she's the one with the most of her left behind in the Arena - but she's over thirty, and they can't start picking and choosing now.
The vote goes up, and again no one stands opposed except one.
"I can do it," Claudius protests, and Lyme tenses again. "I've been out more than enough time to detox, and I'm strong. It doesn't make sense to cut me out." He swallows and raises his chin. He's the least pretty tribute Two has ever sent and definitely the plainest Career Victor in all of Panem, and the Capitol forgot he existed within three years of his victory, almost unheard of. "Plus I don't mentor. I'm dead weight. You may as well designate me the tribute right now."
"Nobody's designating anybody," Brutus snaps, because Lyme can't, not with that much vested interest. "This isn't the fucking twenty-fifth, we're not starting that shit now. But you don't mentor because you ain't ready, and if you can't handle that then you're not going back into the Arena, do you hear? We've got consensus. You may as well just shove it."
Brutus does understand the drive. The kid won an unconventional Games that left a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and he's never been quite right for it since - never outgrew his mentor properly, never managed to start training to be one himself, never made any real friends. If someone's going to go back in, it might as well be the one who hasn't earned it as much as the others. Maybe this time he could win it for good and get himself a second chance.
Brutus gets it. He also knows it's bullshit. Anyone who walked through the gates of the Victors' Village has earned it, period. If they start scorekeeping behind the fence, there's no way it will ever stop, and that's no way for anyone to live.
"Nobody's gonna like you better because you killed Victors instead of twelve-year-olds," Enobaria points out - in Claudius' year every tribute Reaped had been as young as they could go - and he grits his teeth. He looks like he's about to point out that it won't do Enobaria any favours, either, and this is another reason why the babies should stay out, in Brutus' opinion; too easily riled. With everyone in the Arena knowing the other's weaknesses, their hot buttons, it makes sense for those who can keep their cool to be the ones who go.
"Enough," says Ronan, and that settles it. Claudius snaps his mouth shut, hands spasming at his sides, but he doesn't argue. "We're agreed. Any other suggestions?"
Claudius narrows his eyes, and Brutus has just enough time to think 'uh oh' before he speaks. "I propose an upper limit," he says. "No one of eligible Centre age or over by the first Quarter Quell."
That safely knocks out anyone fifty-eight or over, leaving Callista and Nero, in their mid-fifties, as the oldest possible tributes. It's a good, solid range, encompassing their best Victors that still have the physical strength to pull this off, even against the younger Victors from the outlying districts. Not a bad suggestion, all in all.
Ronan slits his eyes right back at Claudius, but before he can say anything, Emory says, "Seconded."
"Third," says Petra, her voice like layered steel. "You've done enough. You'll be the most help on the ground anyway."
They put it to a vote, and while Ronan's opposed, as are two of the others past the cutoff, the motion passes. Ronan's eyes snap with displeasure, but he knows better than to fight precedent when he's just used it to hit Claudius across the face. "Then it's decided," he says, somewhat sourly, but then he reverts back to professional coolness. "Anything else?"
One more. Artemisia, Lyme's first Victor, puts it forward. "No mentor should go in with their Victor," she says. A long silence follows, and she folds her arms. It's a safe proposal for her; while she's mentored for years, she's never managed to bring one out with her and that means this can't be called self-serving. "It's not right," she says, a note of desperation in her voice, the only hint anyone in the room is willing to make at what Brutus knows they're all thinking.
Because it isn't. Any mentor in with their tribute makes for an automatic choice of winner, because no mentor would ever, ever make it home in their Victor's place, but none of them know how to play a defensive game, and none of them have ever walked in determined to die. It would throw things even further into chaos than they already are. The problem is, if Emory goes in then Brutus would want to know her district partner would do his best to bring her back.
"Second," says Devon, Brutus' boy, and he's safe to make the suggestion because he's in the same boat as Artemisia, same-sex mentor and no Victors of his own to worry about.
At last Ronan nods. "Third," he says, and calls for the vote. This one takes longer - more of the mentors are affected, and while everyone agrees that the others shouldn't have to go through it, no one wants to give up the chance to protect their own tributes should the case arise. In the end, not enough hands are raised in favour to carry the motion through; Brutus gives a silent apology to Emory, whose own hand is in the air for the same reason that his stays firmly at his side, and he looks away to avoid her accusing, desperate stare. The same divide makes its way across the room, and Ronan announces the suggestion declined.
"All right." Ronan stands even straighter, his fingers tight around his walking staff. "Then it's decided. We don't choose our Volunteers ahead of time this year." They could, of course. They could spend the next month running trials and choose the best candidates, but there's no guarantee that they would fall within the accepted groups, and with those limitations in place the rest of the selection process would be invalid. Nobody argues. "We let the Reaping determine the initial candidate, and we call for Volunteers as necessary based on the agreed-upon criteria."
No one calls for any amendments after that, but even so, the atmosphere in the room lightens. It's not much, making these rules that have no legal binding, nothing but the verbal promise of the Victors together, but it's still something. It gives them back a sense of the control they lost when the announcement went live; it means that not everything will be taken from them. Two has never had much power, in the grand scheme of things, but they use what they have to its fullest to save the ones they can.
If they have to lose one of their own, at least they can limit which of them the Arena will take.
"Everyone, take tomorrow off, get things in order," Ronan says. "Day after we'll meet back here and work out a training schedule for those in the running. Those who aren't, we'll cover everything so the rest of you have nothing to worry about. Tonight we're adjourned."
Nobody speaks, but the groups splinter off, the youngest generation of Victors with their mentors in clumps. Odin holds Brutus' gaze over the crowd and nods at him, expression hard and determined, and Brutus matches the gesture before turning back to his kids. Two girls, one boy, one per decade, and something tears itself free inside Brutus' chest and tries to batter its way out of his ribcage at the thought of not being able to keep them from this.
"C'mon," Brutus says to his Victors. "Let's head back, I've got some beer needs drinking."
Of all the women Brutus makes a point of seeing in the Capitol in the hopes of gaining sponsor gifts or inside information, he minds Lucretia the least. Around twenty Brutus realized that he could get a much more satisfying time and greater dividends by ignoring the fluttering young heiresses and socialites, instead choosing the older, wealthier women with influence and the desire to use it. Most of them preferred their men young and eager to please, and that combined with District 2's image as savage and primal made it easy for Brutus to make himself a regular. The other bonus of older women being that they were much less likely to request Arena games, which Brutus didn't object to so much on principle as he thought them ridiculous.
The older he got the more difficult to maintain their favour as younger, prettier men kept winning every few years, but some, like Lucretia Bell, an Arena designer, never lost interest in Brutus. It's for that reason that a week after the announcement of the Quell rules, Brutus takes the train into the Capitol and asks to see her. She clears her schedule, orders dinner to her rooms, and they spend the rest of the evening together until Brutus gets her purring underneath him.
"Mm, you are my favourite, dear boy," Lucretia hums, running a hand over Brutus' shoulders. "You're like fine wine, you know that, you just get better with age. They don't make them like you anymore."
Brutus grins at her, sharp and predatory. "Well, you're the connoisseur." His job isn't pretty poetry; that isn't why she likes him.
"It's true, you know, all these boys today, they're so ..." she waves a sparkle-nailed hand. "Insubstantial. Ephemeral. You, on the other hand, you Twos are built to last."
"We try," Brutus says, and scrapes his teeth across her collarbone. Still later, once he has her flushed and breathless for the third time, Brutus presses an open-mouthed kiss against the inside of her thigh. "Any vacation tips for me?" he asks, trailing his fingers behind her knee.
Lucretia chuckles airily. "After a performance like that, I should think so." She beckons, and Brutus heaves himself back up, his heart rate picking up as she looks at him through lowered lashes. The expression is vapid but her eyes are intent under her violet-dyed lids. "What do you think about the ocean, my dear? Are you a fan?"
Brutus takes her fingertips into his mouth. "Can't say I've been much."
"Mm, well, you might want to consider it," Lucretia says, letting her head fall back against the pillows. "I've heard it's going to be a very popular destination this summer."
The next morning, Brutus takes the first train back to Two and heads straight for the Centre. "Find the biggest pool you can and rent it out," he says. "We've all gotta re-learn how to swim."
Over the next few weeks, Brutus isn't the only one who makes trips into the Capitol, and gradually the information trickles in. Two of the others confirm Brutus' intel on the ocean, and three come back with sketches of watch faces, though no one can understand what that's supposed to mean. It's not Brutus' job to figure it out, though, nor any of the ones in the eligible group; they pass their info on to those who won't be going in and let them and the strategy trainers in the Centre work it out.
They also get word on which districts are phoning it in and which are using the time given to their best advantage. Mostly it goes as expected, the usual mix of washouts, but the surprises this year are Eleven and Twelve. Sources say that both districts have been laying off the booze and making at least a perfunctory attempt at getting back into condition. It won't help them in the long run, but Brutus can respect anyone not willing to lie down and take it. At least the ones with only one male or female tribute on either side have the certainty of knowing it's them, may it give them peace.
Brutus and the others train every day they can, turning the Village gym into an impromptu adult education Career Centre while supplementing it with real-world conditions. The harsh spring - still winter, up in the mountains - makes endurance tests easy, and for the first time since he was a teenager, Brutus finds himself hiking barefoot in the snow with a heavy pack on his back. It brings back memories, both of training and the conditions of his Arena, and afterward Brutus stands in the scalding shower for nearly an hour, his hands shaking. It's fine. All of them have unpleasant things they don't want to unearth again and no choice but to do it, and it makes sense to dig them out now while they still have the resources to deal with them.
The main difference between now and their pre-Arena training is the lack of kill tests. Someone brings it up at a checkpoint meeting a few weeks in, uncertain and wincing, but the rest of them vote it down. They've all done enough killing for several lifetimes, and the two that go in will be murdering friends and colleagues, not strangers. They can practice the necessary physical skills, but no amount of facing down condemned criminals will prepare them for shoving a sword through the chest of someone they used to grab drinks with. Sometimes hands get saturated with enough blood that they can't hold any more.
Instead they focus on weight and diet, bulking everyone up as much as they can. Turns out Centre protein shakes taste just as bad as Brutus remembered as a teenager, but he chokes down four a day anyhow, watching with grim satisfaction as the numbers on the scale climb week by week.
As late spring comes to the mountain, bringing the annual floods as melting snow bolsters the swollen rivers, Brutus isn't the only one having trouble sleeping. The rest of them, despite the training, the preparation that keeps them sharp and on edge, can only stave off reality so much. The Capitol will expect a good show for their Quarter Quell - another reason, callous as it is, why it's a bad idea to send the elderly Ronan or the injured Petra - and that means Two's tributes must exemplify the district. All of them do, but only a few are so famous that the Capitol still remembers their names years later.
Brutus is one of them. Lyme is another.
It's that thought that keeps Brutus awake at night; the reason, he suspects, that both of them shy away from sparring with each other during training despite being constant platonic fighting partners since Lyme came out of the Arena. Their actual combat skills are about even - Brutus is bigger but Lyme is faster, and they're both about equal with the sword - but they're also stylistically similar, and Brutus can't decide if that would be the sort of parallel that made the game interesting or too predictable. Then again, their years of working together and the constant rumours of whether or not they're sleeping together might make up for the lack of diversity in their fighting styles, and already Brutus can hear the commentators remarking on the years of mentorship rivalry finally carried out in the Arena.
The difference between them is that Lyme left the Arena behind her the day she walked out, wearing sleeves to cover her Victor's tattoo and rarely talking shop unless she has to. She's popular in the Capitol not because of her Games themselves but because of how hard she works to get her kids out; they think it's admirable, laudable, selfless, a million other words that mean nothing, whether they're said sincerely by Capitol citizens or spat sarcastically by the outlying districts. They like her because she bucks the trend, because she's fierce and strong and absolutely refuses their best efforts to make her pretty, which in turn makes them giggle over her old-fashioned District 2 ways.
Brutus, on the other hand, never managed to scrub the Arena from his skin. As far as Brutus knows - not that they talk about this, all right, there are lines - no one Lyme brings home spends half the night cooing about the details of her Victory, shivering over how the iconic moments will never leave their minds. Few people born after the 55th have seen Lyme's Games at all, except maybe on clip shows, whereas Brutus gets the impression his are practically required viewing to have any sort of cred in Games circles.
They don't talk about it, because the best way for Brutus to stay on task is to avoid the things that would throw him off his game. Lyme compartmentalizes her life just as much as Brutus - maybe even more - and so now when they're not training they spend their time with their Victors, and keep away from each other.
Until the night before the Reaping, when Lyme shows up at Brutus' house again. Just like the night of the reading Brutus is on his porch, but this time instead of the crunching of snow it's the sudden silence of the screaming cicadas that lets him know she's coming. Tonight, neither of them are drinking. "Hey," Lyme says, sitting next to him, and Brutus nods. "I'm not going to stay long, I just. I have a request."
Brutus knows what it is. It's the same one he's been rolling around in his mind over the past few weeks, but hasn't given himself the time to think about. He looks out over the yard, at the garden he doesn't have because he never got a wife to help him plant it and it felt strange and stupid doing it by himself.
"If it's me -" Lyme leans back in the chair and stares up past the edge of the porch roof at the stars. "Don't, okay?"
Brutus sighs and rubs at his forehead with his thumb. "I can't promise that."
"You damn well can," Lyme snaps, blowing out a hard breath through her nose. "You're not the only one with a suicidal duty streak, let someone else. It's going to suck no matter who it is, but I really don't want it to be you and me, all right?" She grits her teeth. "If it's me and Devon I'll take care of him, same as you would. So don't, please."
Brutus drags his hand down his face. "I'll look out for Misha then, if it comes to it," he says, using Artemisia's nickname because she's not here to throw something at his head, and Lyme nods.
They sit in silence for a long time, long enough that the cicadas start up again like a dentist's drill or a surgeon's saw. Finally Lyme shakes her head and stands up. "Okay, I've got to go or I'll never -" she waves a hand, and she doesn't finish her sentence but she doesn't have to. Brutus gets the feeling there's a lot of never going around the Village tonight. "I'll see you down there, then."
"Yeah," Brutus says. He wants to say something else - it feels weird, leaving things like this - but he's not great with words and neither is she. They're more than friends but never lovers, and somewhere they've become a matched set in spite of it and what could he possibly say? And so he lets her go.
Petra turns up after Lyme leaves, limping from the humidity, and her face is swollen and blotchy in the darkness. "Can I stay?" she asks.
Brutus scoots over, and she sits next to him on the swing. "Sure thing, sweetheart," he says. He doesn't call her that in front of people but no one else is here, and the stars ain't tattling.
"I can't sleep," Petra tells him. "I don't think I can."
"Ain't your fault," Brutus says, and he was never the cuddly mentor and Petra rarely asked him to be, but to hell with this. He holds her around the shoulders and pretends he doesn't feel the damp patch on his shirt. She doesn't ask him not to volunteer, and Brutus appreciates it; she's within her right to do it, but Brutus can't keep that promise and he'd hate to lie to his girl. Petra falls asleep after a while, breathing smoothing out, and Brutus carries her inside, sets her up on the couch, and heads upstairs to bed.
Tomorrow's coming whether he sleeps or not; no point in putting it off any longer. He crunches a sleeping pill for the first time in a decade and lets it drag him under.
