A/N: For day four of Caesar's Palace shipping week.
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Bloodlust is a calling. It is fleeting, in most tributes: it flees like quicksilver through their veins, showing only in flashes of survival and fury and wild lashing out, then receding back to a haven of secluded desperation until it is called forth again. Enobaria prides herself on the way she can call it from her at will, bring it out harsh and sour and violent in its instability. For Brutus, it is a harnessed animal, merciless and hungry, railing against the shackles he keeps firmly locked down at all times.
The Quarter Quell calls of freedom, to them. Freedom, release, tinged with a dash of longing for what could have been, in another world without classes and districts and murder flaunting the jester's mask of a game. Enobaria dismisses this as she has always done, set firm in her resolution. As children they were infinitely more familiar with weapons than school books: this is how it has always been, and she accepts it as her reality. Brutus feels it, sometimes, when his guard drops, but after three decades post-Games he is used to compartmentalising his regrets seperate from his heart.
Everyone who stands in this Arena has survived one before, but some of the older Victors do not act like it: Woof is openly dazed, the woman from Eleven folds shaking hands into fists at her side, and several of the others swallow too often for it to be natural and worry their lips to bruising point with nervous teeth. Enobaria does not; she learned her lesson thirteen years ago, paid the price in blood each time she forgot it. Instead, she bares her teeth, locks them together in a predator's warning. Her smile is animalistic, an open challenge capped in gold, and the tips of her teeth, unnatural but not out of place in a mouth like hers, catch the sunlight. Three plates down, Brutus notices her. His blood burns with what feels like interminable waiting, but wait he does. He runs his tongue over the dry roof of his mouth, sets his face in determined resignation, returns Enobaria's nod when, inevitably, it comes.
They understand each other.
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