Cashmere told an Avox once.
She thought — fuck, she thought — well, they can't talk, so who are they going to tell, right? There are no secrets in the Capitol, of course, there are microphones under the dinner table and a pinhole camera in Cashmere's shower, high up so the spray won't reach it, she knows that.
(that's why she's never clean here because she can't clean herself properly with an audience, no one peeping on a gorgeous girl wants to see her balance one foot on the rim of the tub, they don't want to see her reach behind to scrub in the crack of her ass or lift her breasts out of the way to get the dead skin on the underside, they want titillating and sexy, all secret smiles and languorous strokes of the washcloth and suds that slide down her body like caresses)
(at home Cashmere's showers last five minutes, and it's near-scalding water that leaves her pink and raw, it's cloths so rough they leave scratches on her skin, it's soap that scours and burns the fingernail scratches and strips away the scabs)
But Avoxes, they're meant for secrets, aren't they, and so one night, one night when she can't anymore, when Cashmere sits at the mahogany table and stares at half a pear sitting on her plate — half a fucking pear, that's 50 calories (five minutes running up and down the stairs to burn that off, are you sure you want to eat that sweetheart) — and unable to choke it down, when tonight there will be another client and another pill to chase away the rope burn and the rug burn and the hands at her throat, a syringe in her arm to help her sleep and another pill in the morning to get her out of bed —
— Cashmere tells the Avox she wants to die.
"I could do it," she says. Her throat rasps, and not in the sultry, husky way her clients like, no this is screaming and acid from vomiting up her attempt at eating lunch, and fuck, she'll have to grab some of that spray from Remake before she goes. It'll help loosen her throat muscles and lessen the gag reflex, too, which always comes in handy. The laugh sputters out of her like blood coughed up by a startled tribute with a spear in their stomach, only wouldn't that be nice. "I know so many ways to do it. And then it would be over and I wouldn't have to deal with this, this shit anymore."
(The outliers, they say no one told them. Nobody ever said that freedom isn't free, that victory comes with a cost greater than the blood shed on the way out. Nobody told me, they whine, as if they really thought that if they killed a few people and made it look good for the cameras they'd really own their lives. As if it were that fucking easy. Idiots, all of them, poor saps with their poor dead families and their poor dead tributes, they think that somehow if they'd known they'd — what? They'd've done it anyway, is the truth, because survival is not a choice, it's an ugly, bitter instinct that kicks in and claws and scratches and drags you out of the hole and slams your fist into another girl's nose until the bones give and plunges the sword into a boy's gut again, again, again, and there's no choice and there's no freedom and nobody tells them that it's not any easier when you know.)
The Avox looks at her, expression blank and eyes wide, and Cashmere laughs. She stabs the pear with her knife, picks it up and stares at it, and it's a fucking pear but all she can think about are calories and grams of sugar and how many minutes on the treadmill and her client's hand on her ass, squeezing as he says ooh you're filling out there sweetheart, maybe we should skip dessert and make our own, as though this were about her weight (the scale hasn't changed a pound since her victory, thank you very Games-damned much) and not him being too thirsty to make it through the rest of the meal.
Cashmere laughs and drops the knife, and it clatters against the plate and she leans back, staring up at the ceiling until the light burns her eyes and the tears retreat. The Avox says nothing, miming stupidity, which is funny because they have their tongues cut out, not their brains, and Cashmere has cut out a girl's tongue on camera and she knows full well how much fear and pain and panic stays behind.
She pushes the chair away from the table, plants both hands on the tabletop and levers herself to her feet. "Don't worry," Cashmere says, sing-song, and flicks her fingers at the Avox in a flirtatious wave. "I wouldn't do it on your shift. They'd probably take something more valuable than your tongue for that, wouldn't they, honey."
The doors don't lock, of course, not here. Cashmere has an apartment in the Capitol with doors that lock but she never goes there first, that's for after when she doesn't have to think about clients for at least another day. And so she saunters into her room and flings herself on the bed, which is soft and moulds itself to her weight like a giant embrace and she hates it, so much, for being so fucking accommodating that she almost takes a knife to the mattress.
She doesn't. Instead Cashmere reaches into the bedside table and pulls out the bottle of sedatives. The cap twists off with a savage motion, nothing like breaking a tribute's neck but the image floats behind her eyes anyway, and she didn't do that in the Arena but Gloss did, big hands and muscled arms, he was allowed the fast, brutal kills while Cashmere's dragged out for hours if she let them. She shakes the bottle and a single pill falls onto her palm; another jiggle and a second pill joins the first, again and again and again.
She's done the math, knows exactly how many it takes to put her under for an hour, a night, a weekend, how many for her to close her eyes and never wake up. It's a neat trick; Finnick Odair can do it with half a dozen pharmacological substances, he rattled it off once one night after a double booking, when they collapsed in her bathtub together with a bottle of something green and vile and thankfully obliterating, their backs pressed against opposite sides of the tub and their knees knocking.
(Finnick fell asleep in the tub, slipping down until his head rested on the rim, eyes closed and copper hair damp and clinging to his neck in curls. Cashmere watched him, waited to see if he'd slide under, wondering what to do if he did, if he disappeared under the water without waking. Whether she should drag him up by his hair, coughing and spluttering, or leave him there until the bubbles stopped and the suds floated over him, undisturbed. What he'd do if it was her.)
(Of course he didn't, the tub wasn't big enough for that, and so Cashmere let him sleep while she dangled her arm over the edge and rolled the bottom of the bottle in slow circles on the floor.)
Cashmere knows how many pills, and time and time again she's counted them — pushing them around her palm with her finger to make sure she got them all, lining them up on the bedside table like little Peacekeepers all in a row (like the nursery rhyme, ten little Peacekeepers white and fair, one goes to town to the Reaping Square), arranging them in patterns, the house she never lives in or a hangman's noose she'll never get to wear.
Today that all feels too precious, too melodramatic, and instead Cashmere upends the whole bottle into her hand and stares. They're terrible pills, really, the Capitol has force fields to stop people jumping from roofs and climate control so none of the terrace parties get rained out and food replicators that can make lamb stew and ganache cake in under a minute, so why can't they make sedatives that don't coat her tongue with an acrid aftertaste?
Funny enough, tonight that's what saves her. She forgot to bring a glass of water and the bathroom is too far, too much effort to walk out and pick up a glass and fill it up and bring it back, too much with the Avox's eyes on her — and she can't bear the thought of crunching all those pills with the awful sour taste, gagging on the white powder and trying to choke it all down before she threw it up again.
(Cashmere hates vomiting, ironic given how many times she's stuck a finger down her throat, but give her a choice between throwing up, waking up with her face stuck to the bathroom tiles and hair crusted and plastered to her face, and walking back into the Arena with a brace of knives at her waist and a machete on her back and she'd pick the Arena every single time)
(for other reasons too, but never mind that)
Finnick said once — blitzed out of his mind, pupils wide and dilated as he sprawled on the sofa and Cashmere kept his head up and tipped water into his mouth — that he tries to think of little things, like the glint of the sunset on the ocean, the way the fish leap and the sun catches the scales, the feeling of sand under his skin. Mags' fingers as she twists a fishing lure out of feathers and wire. Annie's laugh. "There's always something," he said, looking past her. "No matter how stupid. No matter how much I wish there wasn't, sometimes."
Nothing like that for Cashmere. No romance, no sweetness, no beautiful little moment acting as her thread to tie her to life. There's always some annoyance, something she forgot, some little detail that makes killing herself inconvenient. Tonight it's the taste of the stupid pills, so Cashmere swallows one and tips the rest back in the bottle, and lies down to sleep.
She wakes to her handler in the room, wrenching the pill bottle from her hand. "What is this?" Dexter demands, shaking it so it rattles. "Is this what you call getting ready for tonight?"
Cashmere drags herself up to a seated position, head pounding, and Dexter is glaring and the Avox is standing in the fucking doorway and Snow on a muttfucking shitheap, of course she told. "I'm just taking a nap," Cashmere mutters. Her mouth tastes like a rug, and she runs her tongue over her teeth, hating the fuzz. "Count the fucking pills if you want, they're all there."
"This isn't a joke," Dexter snaps. "You don't tell the Avox you want to kill yourself and then not answer your phone! What do you think would happen if you'd done it?"
"I think I wouldn't have to care about it," Cashmere says, flat. Dexter bares his teeth, and she pushes past him and pulls her shirt over her head, letting it pool in a heap on the ground. She fishes in the closet for a gown, but Dexter grunts in irritation and reaches past her. grabbing one by the hanger.
"This one," Dexter says, shoving it at her. "You're with Applethwaite, he likes blue, remember?"
Cashmere hisses but she's a Victor and she knows her duty, oh yes she does, no matter how much the coddled babies from Two think they have a monopoly on the word, and she steps into the gown and tugs it up over her shoulders. "No wonder you want to keep me alive," she drawls, combing her hair over her shoulder and tilting her head so Dexter can zip up the back for her. "You might have to come out of retirement to make up the shortfall."
"Your clients and mine do not overlap, honey," Dexter says. His voice is smooth and honeyed and that's how Cashmere knows he's pissed, but trying to make herself care about that is like trying to cuddle with a wall. "You know who would, though, your brother. I know you don't give a shit about yourself, or me, but he's the one who'd be punished if you died."
Cashmere stills, and she squeezes her eyes shut as Dexter grabs a brush and drags it through her hair, the bristles snagging on the sleep tangles. "I didn't ask for this," Cashmere says finally. Her voice sounds hollow and smile and childish — fucking infantile, really — but Dexter doesn't comment. "They weren't supposed to take him, too."
Now that is a s comment worthy of an outlier, and Cashmere waits for Dexter to catch hold of her weakness and rip it from her, dangle it in front of her face like a gutted intestine. She waits, and waits, but finally Dexter only sighs and rests his hands on her shoulders. "I know," he says. "They told us to choose. One of you for Victor, the other for leverage. I picked you because I thought you could handle it better. Then, the next year —" His fingers tighten, and normally the pressure would kick Cashmere's heart into adrenaline mode but today she clings to it, the anger in Dexter's voice, thick and ugly and selfish, that travels down through his hands to her skin. "I should've known they'd want you both. I should've warned you."
Cashmere laughs, quiet and disbelieving, and she spins around to face him. Dexter schools his expression before she gets there but his eyes are dark and she sees the murder in them and lets it ground her. District 1 is pretty and vacuous on camera, it's twirling hair and swirling skirts and giggling, it's Victors who could crush a man's windpipe with their hands letting fat, sweaty businessmen hold them down, but it's also the mountains and icy glacier lakes and machines that make diamonds that can cut through glass.
"How do I look?" Cashmere asks, tilting her head and lowering her eyelashes. "Presentable enough to meet the stylists without causing them conniptions?"
"Pretty as a picture," Dexter drawls, and he chucks her under the chin. "Go get 'em, tiger."
Cashmere paints a smile on her face with her fingers, remembering the days when she dipped her hands in another boy's blood and striped it across her cheeks like war paint, and raises her head high. The Avox stares at her, eyes big and wide and solemn, as she sweeps past.
The Avox turns up dead in the streets a few nights later, found between a pair of garbage cans, eyeballs gouged out until there's nothing left but dark, bloody holes. Gloss, sprawled with Cashmere on the couch as they scroll through the evening news, makes an off-colour joke and knocks his head against Cashmere's shoulder until she laughs.
Dexter gives her a long, silent stare from the table where he's tabulating their client revenue, then deliberately turns back to his paperwork. Cashmere bares her teeth at the ceiling and it looks like Finnick's right, sometimes it's the little things in life that keep a person going for one more day.
(The day the card for the 75th Hunger Games is read, Cashmere sets down her drink on the table unfinished, and never picks up another. She doesn't need it anymore.)