"Hey listen, I wanna ask you something," Brutus slurs. He rolls over and jabs one finger at her, the others loosely curled around his bottle. His hand wavers as though he never won a sword fight against a pack of mutts or caved in a boy's head with his fist after days with minimal food and water. Magic stuff, alcohol.

Lyme narrows her eyes at him. "I'm not gonna fuck you," she warns. "No way. Not all the corn whiskey in Nine could make me say yes."

That's obviously not Brutus' real question, if nothing else Lyme is as acutely aware of Brutus' sexual preferences as he is of hers, with equal enthusiasm of that fact, but it's worth it to see the bug-eyed face he pulls like he wants to punch himself in the head until the memories fly out his ear. "Fuck you," Brutus shoots back. "No, shit, see, this, this is what I'm talkin' about. What is it with you and men? You hate them or what?"

A chill runs down Lyme's spine that has nothing to do with the whiskey sitting warm and a little shifty in her stomach, but she shoves it back. She's paid the ultimate price for safety and no one can touch her here. "I don't hate men," she says, giving Brutus an exaggerated leer. "I love them. All night long, a real deep love. Because I fuck them, see." She nods sagely. "With my dick collection."

Brutus rolls his eyes so hard he loses his balance. "Okay, fine, my fault for asking a — wait, collection?"

Lyme bares her teeth at him. The funniest part is he has a Victor, he has a boring, responsible Victor and in a few months maybe Lyme will too, why not, she's twenty years old and immortal and fuck yeah. "Yeah, a collection. Not everybody likes it the same. Not everybody can take it the same, either. You, if you were gonna do it, not that you would because you keep your fragile masculinity hidden up your ass, you'd have to go with the smallest one —"

Brutus yelps, shoves his beer aside and tackles her, slamming her head against the floor. Everything sparks white for a second before the booze chases away the pain, and it's all funny, everything is funny, and Lyme's laughter fills the room and Brutus huffs and flops back onto the rug, fishing for his drink. "Fuckin' crazy, that's what you are," he mutters.

"Hell yes," Lyme says. She finishes her drink and eyes the bottle before deciding to give herself a breather instead of pouring the next one right away. The ceiling light is not only too bright, now there are five of them, and Lyme flings an arm over her eyes to block it all out. "I don't hate men," she says. The humour slides away for a moment, like a cloud passing over the sun, and she exhales. "I mean — well, I do, sorry, it's not you. I mean, it is, but it's not you, it's all of you. Together. Men are shits."

Brutus, funny enough, doesn't argue. Lyme expected some sort of sputtering explosion about the manly code or some shit, but instead Brutus blows out a breath through pressed lips. "Yeah, kinda," he says. "Shoulda heard the way the One in my year talked about his district partner. Wasn't sad to see him go. I mean —" Fabric shifts, marking some sort of gesture, likely an expansive hand wave. Brutus gets more expressive the more he drinks. "Wasn't sad to see none of 'em go, quake just made it easier for me, but you know. Sometimes you're more not-sad than others."

Lyme chews on that for a second. The amount of drinks in her system still can't decide whether it wants to rebel or not, and a minute ago everything was hilarious but now it feels unsteady. "Yeah, men — men are shits. And, okay, so are women, they're shits too, but it's not — I dunno."

"'s power, right," Brutus says. "Whoever's got more power, that makes whatever shitty things they do more shitty. 'Cause the other person can't stop them."

"Maybe." The odd feeling in her stomach has turned shivery, and the longer Lyme keeps her eyes closed the more a shadow creeps up behind her, dragging with it the memories of hard-fingered hands digging into her shoulders and the sting of a belt buckle across the backs of her legs. She sits up, swallows a dry heave and shoves her hand into her hair, gripping tight. "I didn't want to like it. Boys, I mean. Tried for girls. More than once, actually."

She waits for Brutus' inevitable rejoinder, the grin and the wink and the that's hot, all the jokes that Lyme's Arena partners made on the sly when no one but the Gamemakers could hear them, and the back of her neck heats up in warning. Except Brutus doesn't joke, no grin, no leer, just pours the last of his beer into his mouth and pushes the empty bottle away. "Sure, well, why wouldn't you," he says finally. "Have you seen guys? We're ugly as shit, and we smell. Wouldn't blame you."

Lyme barks out a laugh, startled and — not grateful, all right, she is nowhere near drunk enough for that thank you kindly, but something — and she punches Brutus in the shoulder. "Yeah, see, who wants that, except apparently me, because my brain's a dick." She laughs again, a little looser this time. "Maybe I do hate men. Hate that I don't hate them, not all the way anyway."

Brutus hums like Lyme just said something profound instead of the usual drunken shit-babble. She waits for him to ask — who hurt you, what did he do to you, did you ever get him back for it — but again he manages to surprise her by saying nothing. "I tried it once," he says after a long silence, and it takes Lyme's sluggish brain a second to catch up. When she does she gapes at him, and Brutus glares and points his wobbly finger at her again. "Not for keeps! But five years is a long time, and the other guys, they said it weren't bad, as a substitute. Fuckin' liars, it was not the same. Not the same at all. Never tried that again, never will."

This time the laugh that tears itself out of Lyme is wild and raucous, high and screeching and absolutely out of her control. "You ever think the problem is you, caveman?" Lyme asks, and Brutus' look of wounded pride only makes her squawk louder. "No, no, of course not, you were amazing, I'm sure, the best he ever had. I bet he still falls asleep crying over lost opportunities."

"Fuck you," Brutus says, enunciating carefully with an extra click on the 'k', only it makes him sound Capitol-proper like when they train the quarries out of the tributes, and Lyme snorts. "You're the worst."

"You're the worst," Lyme says, pleased. She flops back down, a little more carefully than she'd like to for the sake of her image, but oh well, nobody's watching except Brutus and he lost his dignity ages ago. "You wanna see who can climb up to the roof fastest?"

"Yeah, but not your roof, 'cause I know you've climbed it before and can do it sleepwalking." Brutus glares. "No cheating."

He's not wrong, and Lyme acknowledges the point with a nod. The shadows still hover a little, and do you hate men will be swirling around her head for a few days before she chases it away, but that's life. That's life and there's a girl in a file with bruises across her face and Lyme will know exactly how to deal with her because of the long-healed ones she used to bear. That doesn't make it worth it, doesn't make it right or even less shitty, but — something. Give her another half a bottle and she'll find the meaning and write a fucking poem about it, just watch.

"Fine." Lyme sits up, and she holds out her hand. "Adessa's roof. Challenge is to get up and get down in the fastest time, without waking her up."

Brutus hesitates. "Adessa? Are you sure —"

Two years and change ago Adessa sat calmly while Lyme threatened to open a vein, turned a page in her book and told her to do it over the sink because blood would stain the floor. She's stone cold and terrifying, and Lyme would not go anywhere near her house, let alone scale her roof in the middle of the night, except for the chance to outdo Brutus. "What's the matter?" she asks, voice syrup-sweet. "Scared?"

Brutus glares, then growls and pushes himself up to his feet. "Fine, you're on," he says, smacking Lyme's hand. "But you go first."

It's about power. Brutus' words rattle around in Lyme's head that night after she collapses in bed, her shoulder aching from losing her grip on the drainpipe and hanging one-handed, half a quarry crew hammering away between her ears, and she closes her eyes and flings an arm across her face to block out the world. There's something there, something deeper and dangerous, like lowering her foot into a placid-looking lake and feeling the tug of an undertow against her heel.

Whoever's got more power, it makes whatever shitty things they do more shitty. 'Cause the other person can't stop them.

It's not just men, is it, it's not just fathers with hands that fly too freely or mothers who sit back and let it happen. It's something else, it's lines of white soldiers in the Reaping Square in every district, how in Two the children run up to them for high fives and in the districts they shy away and hide in their parents' sides, it's memorizing hundreds and hundreds of dead children and the way they died but not their names. It's something Brutus would never have said sober, something that digs into Lyme's skull and wriggles like a finger in a wound —

Lyme rolls over and the rest of the thought scatters as booze and exhaustion drag her down.

In the morning there's a note on her door announcing that Adessa is awaiting an apology for the destruction of her rose bushes, and that she and Brutus can begin their penance after lunch. Lyme groans, squinting at Adessa's precise, spidery handwriting, and gropes at her memories in a piss-poor attempt to reconstruct the night, but no, it's gone. Brutus' laugh and the burn of alcohol at the back of her throat and, okay, maybe the prickle of thorns scraping her calves as she dropped from the roof and took off running.

They'd talked about something, Lyme's pretty sure, but the memory swims away like a reflection on the surface of the water, and Lyme doesn't bother. Instead she picks up her phone, dials Brutus' number, and grins when a muffled litany of curses blisters her ear. "Morning, caveman," Lyme says cheerfully, letting her amusement at Brutus' pain help reduce her own a little. "We've got some gardening to do."