Chapter 6: It messed me up, need a second to breathe
Claudius falls to his knees, screaming, his hands drenched with blood. Seven's guts lie stinking on the ground next to him, steaming in the cold air. A thousand voices whisper monster in his ear and laugh, the sound like the silver rasp of knives when the blades scrape against each other. Seven's still alive, eyes wide, and his mouth works and the blood bubbles out and there's no sound but Claudius can hear it just as well as if he spoke: why, why, why, I thought we were friends -
"He doesn't have friends," whispers the wind and the thousand voices, sweeping round and caressing Claudius' cheek with red-tipped razor nails. He sees himself reflected in the shards of a thousand broken mirrors, twisted and unloved and alone. "He's a monster. No friends for little monsters when they're children, no friends for big monsters when they're grown. No friends at all. Just death, and blood, and darkness."
Claudius shakes his head no no no and this isn't right, this isn't right at all, he didn't slice Seven open and let him bleed to death like this, he made it quick, like he promised, because Claudius is a monster but he still keeps his promises and if he keeps his promises then maybe he won't be a monster until the day he dies - and the wind twists itself like fingers in his hair and yanks, and the sky opens like a scab splitting when the muscles pull and the skin stretches and he's flying flying through -
Claudius jerks awake because there are fingers in his hair, real ones, but they're not pulling, they're sifting, combing, and fingertips press at his temples and push away the nightmares and there's a pillow under his head and soft, soft blankets over top of him and someone is speaking in a quiet, firm voice - it's okay, come back, it's okay D, it's okay - and then he remembers. He's not in the Arena. He's safe in bed in his new house with someone who loves him, and he never has to go back in the Arena ever again.
There are drugs in his system and hands in his hair, and Claudius turns toward the voice and nuzzles the hand near his face. "Mom?" he asks, drugged and delirious, and that's not right, there's something wrong with that, but the voice just says 'Right here' and that's enough that he can breathe.
"Am I a monster?" Claudius asks, and his hands grope at nothing in the darkness.
She finds his hand and links their fingers. "We're all monsters here," she tells him, and the relief is sharp, like a wave of water slapping at his chest.
He sleeps.
The Arena is a sliver under his fingernail, a jagged pebble in his shoe, a speck of dust in his eye and a tickle in his throat. It's everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's there, dancing in the corner of his vision, and gone when he turns. It stalks his dreams, though the medicine Lyme gives him robs him of his memory of them and leaves him gasping awake in the morning, sweating and twisted in the sheets with no recollection of why. It turns food to the ash that floated from the river of fire that killed the Four girl, turns everything he drinks into the Four boy's blood as it soaked through Claudius' shirt and stuck the fabric to his chest.
Claudius never wanted to kill anyone. He always knew that he would, and he got through his kill tests with some of the highest scores in his year, but he did it professionally, dispassionately, with just the right amount of emotional distress. He didn't relish it, didn't seek it out; even in the depths of his Arena-madness he never crossed that line. Now he's safe, safe in his cozy house that's more like a cottage, complete with warm-coloured walls and comfortable couches and a giant fireplace in the main room, and Lyme is there to give him his medicine and sit with him whenever he needs and tell him that he's perfect.
It makes no sense that the urge crawls through his fingers now, itching and twitching and twisting and churning until Claudius feels like it's the night before his Centre Exam all over again. He'd stayed up studying the death list and the protocols and the propaganda and the history for the millionth time, and he'd even picked the lock on one of the supply cabinets to get at a bottle of stimulants. He popped one every half-hour until his mind buzzed and he swore his blood vessels were trying to crawl out of his body like snakes.
Now the Arena sits on his shoulder, talons digging into his skin, and Claudius curls in on himself because he doesn't want Lyme to see it. He takes the pills that she gives him, sleeps when she tells him, curls against her side on the couch and dozes while she runs her fingers through his hair and reads her book. He asks her if she's bored. She tells him not to be such a dumbass.
It's not all bad, especially at first, though it's all more of a daze than anything. Lyme makes good on her promise of brownies the second day back - Claudius spends the first day dead to the world, bundled in blankets on the floor in front of the fire, his hand curled around Lyme's ankle - and she gives Claudius the bowl of ingredients to stir and they watch TV while they bake. Turns out brownies are just chocolate goo cooked vaguely until it holds together, and it's so rich after a decade of Centre-controlled diet that Claudius can only eat one before his stomach protests, but it's the most delicious thing he's eaten in his entire life.
It's not all bad, really it isn't. Lyme brings him flowers from the backyard of one of the Victors who chose gardening as her Talent, and she leaves the windows open so the warm summer breeze filters through the house. Summer in Two, up in the mountains, is the nicest in all of Panem, Claudius thinks, and he'll fight anyone who thinks otherwise. Screw District Four with its humidity; what good is having an ocean if you can't actually get out of it without melting. The agricultural districts aren't any better off, all mugginess and mosquitos, and in Twelve he's heard that in summer the whole Seam reeks of corpses and the putrefaction of the nearly-dead. But in the Victors' Village in Two it's warm without being stifling, and at night the air cools off just enough that Claudius can roll up in the soft sheets and sit close to Lyme on the sofa without feeling sticky and overheated.
It's not all bad, until a couple of weeks in when the Arena takes up every inch of Claudius' concentration. He spars with Lyme, just like she promised, and at first it was amazing and settled his mind into place but now it doesn't; now there's something missing, and he takes that part of himself and shoves it down deep. He's the spider hidden at the centre of the head of lettuce just like the time in the cafeteria at the Centre, when a whole bunch of kids got rounded up and shouted at because how the hell could they have gotten their orange beads yet scream like little babies because of a damn bug.
Lyme said everything he does in the Arena is forgiven, and maybe it is - it didn't look forgiven when he had to shake Nero's hand at the closing ceremony, even if Nero said good job - but this is after, isn't it, and that's different. He's supposed to leave the Arena behind and start to heal, but Claudius can't leave it - or maybe it can't leave him - or maybe they're like lovers, twined and tangled after a long night together, and the hunters are coming but they can't disentangle fast enough and they get an arrow through their skulls.
That doesn't make sense, but nothing makes sense with the Arena pressing out behind his eyeballs.
Finally, three weeks in, Claudius slips away. He wakes up late at night, pulls on his clothes and shoes and sneaks out the front door, quiet quiet quiet like a mouse, like a snake, like a blade against a sleeper's throat right before the blood. He walks on the grass to avoid his sneakers crunching in the gravel, and he wanders through the darkened Village until he finds the house he wants.
The rumours are that Enobaria can't sleep a full night, that she takes her rest in twenty-minute shifts and that's one reason why she's so crazy. Claudius thinks that's a load of crap, but she opens the door after only a minute or so of Claudius' super-quiet knocking, so who knows.
"Oh hey, it's the baby," she says, and the moonlight glints off her teeth. "Your mentor know you're here, baby?"
Claudius shifts from foot to foot. "I want you to fight me," he says, and his voice sounds high and young and Enobaria raises a dark eyebrow and juts her hip. "I need - I need it. I can't spar like this with Lyme. Please."
Enobaria shakes her head. "Not interested. Find somebody else to hit on."
"I'm not hitting on you!" Claudius hisses, though in Two that is usually what the offer to spar together means, and he fists his hand in her shirt before he realizes what he's doing. Enobaria doesn't stop him, doesn't reach out and grab his wrist and snap the bones in two like Claudius knows she could - like he learned himself when he was nine and watched some bigger kids do it in training. She just gives him a long look that says he better think twice about what he's doing. "I just - it won't go away. It's inside me and I need to get it out and maybe if I can get it out of my system then it'll be gone for good and I can sleep. Please. Please fight me."
Enobaria narrows her eyes, studying him, and Claudius can't even imagine what he looks like, hollowed eyes and gaunt cheeks and hair all over the place. She sucks on her teeth, thoughtful, and licks away the blood when the action slices her lip. "All right," she says, and that's that.
The first time it's nothing much. Claudius is exhausted and skirting the edges of his sanity, and it doesn't take long for Enobaria to beat him, to get her teeth inches away from his throat and her nails into his forearms. He fights her anyway, biting and clawing and kicking, and he doesn't hold back at all, not one dark, twisted bit of it. He gouges at her eyes with his fingers, tears at her shoulder with his teeth, but when Enobaria finally kicks him hard enough that he can't get up and she has to drag him to his feet and brace him against the wall, Claudius feels like he's just had a whole bottle of wine to himself. "Don't get lost, now," Enobaria says as she shuts the door behind him, and it takes Claudius almost half an hour to stagger back to his house and collapse into bed.
The next night he fights longer, harder, and he has to push his shoulder back into place when they're done. Enobaria tosses him a glove to bite down on when he does it. He switches to the other side of the couch when sitting with Lyme to lessen the pressure.
The third night they use knives. Enobaria slices him deep across the ribs, and Claudius goes down right there on her floor, clutching his side and bleeding out onto the hardwood. Enobaria steps over him and goes back to bed, leaving him there, and finally Claudius hauls himself up and helps himself to every bandage in her medicine cabinet, cussing her out the whole way.
"So," Lyme says at breakfast.
"So," Claudius says back a few seconds later, when it's clear she's not going to say anything else. "Jam?"
Lyme ignores him. "Anything you want to tell me?"
Claudius swallows. "I don't think so," he says, and the lie stings all over him like rolling through a patch of nettles. It feels wrong but he doesn't know what else he can do. Lyme wouldn't understand. She's his mentor and she promised to be his family but that was before, and Claudius knows now that she was wrong, he was wrong, everyone was wrong, and sometimes little boys who set fire to their mother's clothes grow up and don't get any better.
"Really." Lyme crosses her arms, and Claudius is shocked to realize that she's pissed, she's actually, seriously angry at him, and he's never seen that before. He's seen her serious, disapproving, seen her full-out Games face meant to scare away the interviewers and the other mentors and any questions, but he's never seen her this mad, not at him. "Because I might have something to say about that."
And it's not fair, that she's getting on him after Claudius spent half an hour bleeding out onto Enobaria's floor and no one cared or noticed. It's not fair that she's angry with him after Claudius has done nothing but what she's told him to, day after day, night after night, and he killed for her and he bled for her and he hasn't slept for real in weeks and it's all for her, every day of his life since he was ten and learned her name has all been for her and she doesn't care just because he broke a rule.
"Say whatever you want, I've got nothing to add." Claudius snaps, and there's the Arena back again, buzzing in his ears, and if Enobaria slashing him open doesn't keep it away then what will. He fights back a hysterical screech of laughter by pushing a whole piece of toast in his mouth and choking it down. The crusts stab his throat and he winces.
"Oh really." Lyme stands up fast enough to send her chair scraping back along the kitchen floor tiles, and she drags Claudius up by his shoulder and hauls him into the room he plans to use as a gym once Lyme okays it. Which she probably never will because he'll never be worthy of it, and that's something Claudius realizes more and more with every passing minute as the need to grind someone's bones into pieces beneath his boot digs itself deeper into his brain.
He's about to say something snarky when Lyme's foot lashes out and catches him right across the ribs. "Ow!" Claudius yelps, and the next thing that tears itself out of him is a torrent of profanity right from the dregs of training.
Claudius has barely enough time to think that he's being stupid before Lyme is on him again, knocking his legs out from under him so that he has to twist to avoid slamming into the floor like a trainee on his first day of big kid sparring. It really is stupid. How he can fight his entire life for something, have it be the thing driving air through his lungs, pumping the blood through his heart, since before he could count to a thousand, only to screw it up now after everything's been handed to him, well. That's just proof that Claudius is a screw-up, isn't it, because he has the house and the mentor and the brownies and he's managed to piss all over that and throw it in the garbage.
He's almost glad she found out. Better for him to face reality now than fool himself for weeks.
"So let's talk," Lyme says, and Claudius snarls and none of this makes sense and he doesn't even know why he's mad. "I'm going to give you a list of things that aren't okay, stop me if you think I've got this wrong. You've been holding back and not telling me things. You've been sneaking out. You've been coming back looking like somebody ran you over. You've been lying to me. You wanna argue any of this?"
Claudius tries to fight her, but it's even worse than with Enobaria because Lyme is bigger and she knows him, she knows every move he makes before it even crosses his mind. The only reason it isn't over in two seconds is because Lyme allows it, and she makes it very clear by the deliberate way she allows it to keep going when Claudius knows she could have finished him.
She slams him against the floor and pins him. "Why did you sneak out to fight with Enobaria?"
And of course she knows. This is the part where she gives up because it was cute when Claudius was probably going to die but she can't handle him now, not the part where he's hers twenty-four hours a day. This is the part Claudius didn't think about for all the years when this was just a floating goal ahead of him.
He doesn't answer, and Lyme presses his shoulders against the floor. "Why Enobaria?"
"Because she understands!" Claudius bursts out, and it's betrayal and bile and he turns his head to the side and grits his teeth.
"And I don't." Lyme's voice is low and dangerous, and her foot settles more firmly against his shin.
"Enobaria is fucked up," Claudius says, and that's not an over-the-line thing to say because it's true. "Just like I'm fucked up. I couldn't fight like that with you. I didn't want you to see it. If you saw it you'd know why."
"Tell me," Lyme says, and she's in his face and Claudius can't shake her off, and why is she doing this? Why won't she just leave?
"Because!" Claudius struggles, and he pushes at her arm holding him down but he can't budge her, he's too skinny and too fresh and she's too perfect, like always, he's unworthy and weak and she ruined her career for this. "Because I'm fucked up and ugly and there's nothing left of me. It's all the Arena and that's all there ever was."
"Wrong," Lyme says, and she lets Claudius up just long enough to knock him down and pin him again when he charges her. "Dead wrong." Claudius just shakes his head, and Lyme narrows her eyes. "Okay," she says. "Show me."
Claudius does.
He fights her like he never allowed himself to fight in the Arena because he couldn't, because he had to play the one the audience would like instead of the ugly little boy who nearly killed a classmate when he was nine, sending him to Medical with a snapped vertibrae. He fights like every inch the villain now, low and sneaking and nasty and dirty, and any minute now Lyme will throw him off, tell him he's right, he's too crazy for her and for the Village and she's going to call someone to lock him away where he belongs.
She doesn't.
Instead Lyme gets him pinned again, holds one hand at his side with her foot placed firmly on his wrist, the other arm at the level of his shoulder held in her iron grip. She braces her free arm across his throat, pressing down until the blood rushes to his head. "No," she says, calm, like they're sitting in a cafe drinking tea instead of scrapping on the floor like savages.
"What 'no'?" Claudius asks, his voice shrilling up into the hysterics range.
"No everything running through your mind right now," Lyme says, and she tightens her grip on his wrist and digs her arm harder against his throat. "I don't care how ugly you get, how deep you think you are. I'm coming in after you every single time."
Claudius gasps, and he tries to shift to throw her off but just like the last time he can't. "You shouldn't. You should send me away where they know how to deal with people like me."
"Spoilers, kid, that's exactly where you are and that's exactly where I am." Lyme lets up on his throat enough that Claudius can get himself a good lungful of air before she's back again. "I didn't watch you fall into quicksand and crawl through fire and everything else they threw at you just to toss you aside because that came out with you. You can be broken as hell and it doesn't matter because I'm going to put you back together. Because that's my job and you're my kid and there is nothing, nothing in the world more important than this, right now."
Claudius shakes his head, but at the same time he feels a little like when the One girl's cannon fired and he knew he only had to do this one more time. "You can't fix me," he says, challenging.
Lyme digs her knee into his thigh and bears down harder. "Yeah, I can," she tells him. "And you can test me all you want, every damn day if it makes you feel better, but it won't make a bit of difference because I call the shots here, not you. I'm your mentor and you're my kid and that makes me the boss. That means you don't get to decide for me whether you're worth it, because I know best and you're a fresh victor who runs into walls when he tries to get up before nine."
"But-" The itch starts up in his brain again, and it's like scratching at his back and almost reaching it but not quite.
"Nope," Lyme says, nonchalant as hell, but her eyes are dead serious and she fixes Claudius with her gaze and it's like she's pinned him right through the centre of his forehead. "I can do this all day, D."
It takes him a second to get that 'D' is him, that Lyme is using a nickname on him that has nothing to do with his rages or his violence or obsession like any of the ones back in training. A second later he realizes that she means it, that if he wants to lie here and fight her all day she'll do it. She'll hold him down and pin him to the floor until he's tired of it, and if he starts up when she lets him up then she'll just hold him down all over again.
"There is nothing," Lyme says, eyes boring into him, "that I haven't seen. Nothing you can do short of killing me, and kiddo, I'd love to see you try." She narrows her eyes. "I said goodbye to you on that tarmac and I didn't take a full breath until you fought your way home to me. I'm not giving you back now. So tell me." She bears down on him and he can't move, can't move at all. "Who's in charge?"
Something breaks inside him with the sharp, stinging relief of a bone sliding back into place, a sword striking true. "You are," Claudius says, the words finding home like the snick of a knife into the bullseye.
"Damn right," Lyme says. "So you get feeling like you wanna fight mean, you tell me and we'll fight mean, but after I'm gonna pick you up, put you back on the couch, make you some soup and tell you that you're wonderful, you got that?"
Claudius tries not to cry because he's done enough of that, plus he's on his back and that just means he'll get a nose and throat full of phlegm and that's just gross, but no matter how much he tries to stop it, the sobs just rip themselves from him.
"I love you," Claudius gasps out, and he's trying so hard to stop crying that the words just slip out without him noticing. And there it is, that's the other end of the spectrum of things he's tried to hide from Lyme, because it's one thing to pretend they're a family when he's ten years old and his room is locked. He's an adult now, and a Victor, and there are things it's okay to think about your mentors and things that are just plain wrong.
"I know, and that's good," Lyme says, and she still hasn't backed off, still hasn't moved to let him up. Her arm lies flat across his throat. "'Cause I love you too, kid."
She lets him up this time, but it's just to pull him into her arms for a hug before dragging him up and over to the couch. She gets him bundled up in blankets before disappearing and coming back with bandages, salve and muscle relaxant cream, and Claudius protests for all of about two seconds before giving up. He falls asleep as Lyme bandages his ribs, and he wakes up with his head on her knees and her fingers combing through his hair.
Claudius groans as pain stabs him from every direction. "Feel like shit," he mumbles.
"I figured." Lyme ruffles his hair. "Stay there, I'll get you your meds."
She has to poke him awake again to take them, and Claudius slides under almost immediately after. When he crawls awake again it's after dark and Lyme is still there, going through a stack of paperwork on her lap.
By six weeks in, Claudius is feeling a little more human, or at least less like his head is stuffed with spiderwebs and nightmares. His drugs counsellor says he'll need to stay on his nightmare medication for at least three months before they start thinking about tapering him off, but the pain meds lessen and he starts being aware of more things while he's awake.
Like the day that Lyme's phone rings in the middle of the afternoon, and within ten seconds of answering it her face turns to stone. "Okay," she says in a low voice. "No. No, it's fine, I'll deal with it."
Claudius looks up from his book, glad for the distraction. He's been trying his hand at reading since he hasn't done any of that since school, but he's not surprised to find that he doesn't actually like it any better now. Being a Victor didn't magically fix the way the words swim around on the page and laugh at him when he thinks a word is "dog" but two seconds later it turns into "god". Though once he realizes it does make President Snow's autobiography make a lot more sense. "What's the matter?"
Lyme hisses through her teeth. "Your mother is here."
Claudius' entire body goes taut. "What? Where?"
"Outside the Village, making a fuss at the gates." Lyme stands up and grabs her shoes from by the door. "She's been applying for an entry pass since you got back, but I've kept denying it. I guess she got tired of the runaround."
Claudius had not even considered that. "But I thought she signed away all rights to me when -" when she left him, he thinks, but he doesn't say it.
Lyme hesitates halfway through pulling on a sneaker. "Actually, once the Centre realized what happened they tried to contact her, but after she ignored their phone calls they didn't bother trying to track her down. They took custody of you in her absence and you signed yourself over when you entered Residential, which is fully legal, but she never officially gave you up on paper."
"Oh." Now Claudius feels the squeeze of panic in his chest, and the book falls to the floor, pages flattening beneath the cover's weight. "Could she actually make a case to live here?"
"No," Lyme says sharply, and she rolls her sleeves up to the elbow. She usually wears them long to cover the tattoo on her wrist - Claudius asked her why, and she said she isn't ashamed of it, but sometimes she doesn't want to look at it every day - but now she lets it show, the ink stark against the powerful muscles in her arms. "No, she can't. You're an adult; you can say whether she stays or goes, and I'm your proxy which means I'm authorized to speak for you. I'm going to tell her off."
"Wait," Claudius says, and Lyme frowns. "Let her in. I want to see her."
"You don't have to. I'm happy to handle it." She bares her teeth when she says happy and Claudius thinks, oddly, of vulture tearing at a corpse.
"No. I want to see her. I mean, I don't want to see her, but I - I want to look at her again. Last time I had to focus on being ready for the Games so I couldn't pay attention, but I want to now." Claudius swallows. "Just not alone. I want her to see that."
Lyme nods once, her mouth pressed thin. "Oh, it won't be alone, all right," she says, and takes out her phone again. When Claudius asks who she's calling, Lyme grins, mean and feral. "Brutus."
Claudius laughs outright, relief sharp in his chest, because if anyone has the trophy in being big and terrifying even to other Victors, never mind civilians, it's Brutus. Claudius is a little afraid of him himself. "Really? I didn't think he liked me all that much." Not that he thinks Brutus dislikes him, but Brutus' default is a sort of unimpressed neutral, and it takes a lot to elevate that.
"Just because he's not chummy doesn't mean he doesn't like you. He likes all the kids who walk through that gate by default of you managing to make it here," Lyme says, the phone against her ear. "What he doesn't like is outsiders. Especially not ones trying to take advantage of our system." She holds up one finger. "Yeah, Brutus, hey, you busy? - Well I know you're always busy, but can you give me say half an hour?" Claudius grins a little, and Lyme rolls her eyes theatrically at him and opens and shuts her hand in a yapping gesture. "No, the kid's mom's here. Yeah. No. Well, she sure thinks so. No. Okay. Thanks." Lyme flicks her fingers at him. "Okay, D, up. We're doing this at my place."
Claudius obeys, just glad he felt like getting dressed today, though his hair is a lost cause. He hasn't bothered getting it cut or anything since the stylists had their go at it at the closing ceremony, and Claudius scrubs his fingers through it before giving up. "Why yours?"
"Because this is your house," Lyme says, and she gives Claudius a look that nearly knocks him backwards from the force of her anger. "Your safe space. She doesn't get to invade that. If you choose to let her come here then that's up to you, but not before."
Claudius takes a second to bask in the knowledge that people actually give a damn about him and his comfort before Lyme beckons him out the door.
"Brutus is bringing her," Lyme says when they reach her house, and Claudius tries imagining what that must look like, getting greeted by a wall of muscle that has one thought and one facial expression and both of those are 'I really don't like you'. Lyme catches his expression and nods. "Yeah. Hopefully that knocks her down a peg before she gets here."
Claudius grins when Lyme opens the door to her weapons cabinet, leaving the swords in plain view. She normally leaves it locked, both because it's a bit overkill to have weapons actually hanging on her walls no matter what the civilians think, and also because Claudius still gets a little twitchy at the sight of them. It's all right now, though, since he can code them in his head as nothing but a means of intimidating his mother instead of being used for their actual purpose. "Subtle," he says, and Lyme winks at him.
They wait, and Claudius picks at a loose thread at the bottom of his jeans, legs tucked up under him, to give himself something to do. Usually when he gets fidgety Lyme lets him have a knife to play with - she sits next to him and watches him to make sure he doesn't do anything he shouldn't - but he knows he can't do that now. It isn't as though he hates his mother enough to think he'll fling a knife at her, but the hole inside himself where she used to be is not a place he wants to enter with a weapon in his hand. It comforts him to know that even if he asked, Lyme would say no.
Claudius finds himself watching Lyme put on her scary-face. He hasn't seen it since the Games and it's even more startling now after weeks of seeing her smile, how her expression hardens and her eyes narrow and her body language shifts entirely. Normally Lyme stays on the unassuming side, which is impressive for a woman whose arms are the size of Claudius' calves, but now she squares her feet and shoulders, crosses her arms so her biceps stand out.
"You're really scary," Claudius says, impressed, and Lyme flashes him a grin that ruins the whole effect before putting her unimpressed face back on.
Lyme is fully in the zone by the time Brutus pounds, once, on the door with his fist, and she opens it but doesn't stand back. "That her?" she asks, biting off the words.
"Looks like," Brutus says in matching monosyllables. "Heard her all the way from my house, so I'm guessing."
Lyme looks up and down, and with her and Brutus the sizes of houses standing in the way Claudius can't actually see, but he hears Lyme's dismissive click of tongue against her teeth before she turns. "D, can she come in?"
"I guess," Claudius says, and it's absolutely stupid but his heart speeds up a little.
Lyme nods and steps back, and Brutus escorts the woman in. She looks the same as when Claudius saw her at the Reaping, tense and twitchy and like she can't decide on a facial expression, and this time Claudius has the time and mental energy to devote to studying her. He looks at her hands and wonders that he ever thought them terrifying - they're small, Brutus could wrap his entire hand around her fist - but then she clenches her fingers and Claudius' stomach tightens in response and oh yeah. Sometimes things don't make sense.
"Stop," Lyme says when she takes a step toward the couch. "You can stay there. That's as far as you're going."
"You mean you're not even going to let me sit with my son?" his mother demands, and there's that voice again, the one that feels like a fingernail scraping down Claudius' spine.
"Nope," Lyme says, slowly, deliberately, and she moves over to the sofa and sits next to Claudius in the same manner, draping her arm along the back of the couch. "Say what you have to say."
"I just think this is ridiculous. It's kidnapping, or fraud, or something," she says, and she wrings her hands in front of her. "It's bad enough you took my child from me for all those years -"
Brutus coughs, and if he were a different sort of person it would be the type that hides the word 'bullshit' in the middle. "Really. That's what you're goin' with."
She flushes, and Claudius thinks that if nothing else, he got his balls from her. Certainly not from Jeremy, and he doesn't think much of his mother at all and when he does it isn't nice, but he'll give her credit for that. It takes a special kind of suicidal insanity to waltz in and talk about the Centre stealing the kid she dumped on their doorstep and refused to acknowledge ever again.
"Fine," she snaps. "But you can't deny that I have the right to be here and the right to a house. The Capitol makes those rules, not you. Family has the right to move in with the victor, and since I'm the one who let you have him and I forfeited the stipend, I'm entitled to my share."
"The stipend is for taking care of the kids before the Centre takes them," Brutus growls. "You woulda lost that anyway even if you hadn't."
"He slandered me in front of everyone in the country!" she tries again. "I'm being shamed by my neighbours! It's affecting my husband's work! He owes me recompense!"
"Ain't slander if you deserve it," Brutus says, and he hasn't moved. He's a rock between Claudius and his mother and Claudius is very, very glad he's on his side. "We got the medical bills that say you do."
"Besides," Lyme says, and her arm is around Claudius' shoulder and she lifts her hand as though she's examining her fingernails, leaving her tattoo in full view. "You're not entitled to a house. You'd be entitled to his house."
Claudius actually has to stifle a laugh as that sinks in, as the horror and memory twists her face. "I don't think any doors have locks, either," he says, looking at Lyme. "Do they?"
"Don't think they do," she says, thoughtful, and she's heard the story of five-year-old him with the knife by his mother's bed and she wasn't impressed. Claudius lets his smile turn nasty. "And, of course, the house is in the Village. I heard you couldn't even sleep in the same house as a five-year-old who wanted attention. How you expect to pay for all the sleeping pills so you can sleep in a whole village full of murderers?"
"It's true," Claudius says, as though the thought just occurred to him, and he echoes the words that he can't remember if Lyme said or not because he heard them in a dream. "You always said nobody but monsters would ever want me, and you were right. We're all monsters here."
Brutus doesn't say anything, and neither does Lyme, but they both stare, and the colour drains out of his mother's face. He can actually see it happen, until she's left pale and drawn in on herself.
"Yep," Brutus says finally. "Kid's an adult now, and there's a statute of limitations on your status as a family member." He says the legal term in a way that sounds like 'fuck you, yeah I know smart words too', and Claudius is nearly giddy. "So this is how it goes. You can live with the kid, or nothing. And it's his choice whether you do."
Lyme lets her hand fall to the nape of Claudius' neck, her fingers working through his hair. "What do you think, kid?"
Claudius stares at his mother and tries to dredge up the feeling of fear that her face gave him for years afterward, that dug its claws into him when he saw her now, but it's gone. All he feels is Lyme, and Brutus, and the entire Village and the wall and the guards and the barbed wire and everything keeping him safe from her.
"No," Claudius says, and it's like the victory trumpets and the soft red blanket on his hospital bed and his first taste of brownies all over again.
"And that's all he's gotta say," Brutus says. Lyme wraps her arm around Claudius and pulls him close against her side. "This is the part where you get out."
She looks, for a second, like she's going to fight it - her jaw clenches and her feet dig into the floor - but then Brutus unfolds his arms and lets his hands hang at his side, flexing his fingers, and she gasps and flinches back. "Fine!" she shouts. "I was right. You are monsters, all of you. I hope you take good care of him."
"That's my job," Lyme says, and she stands, tugging Claudius up with him and leaving her arm around him, but she's bared her teeth now. "Taking care of people."
That's all it takes. Claudius doesn't relax until the door shuts, and then all his breath escapes him in a rush. He's grateful for Lyme holding him up.
Brutus rolls his eyes. "I'll escort her out."
"Thank you," Claudius bursts out. "For helping."
Brutus just shakes his head. "You're one of us, kid. It's what we do." Then he opens the door and strides out into the yard.
"Damn right," Lyme says, and claps Claudius on the shoulder. "Okay. Home, sparring, food. How's that sound?"
Claudius swallows, both to clear his throat and to stop himself from saying any one of the torrent of embarrassing things pressing on his mind - that it sounds like heaven, like a storybook, like every promise he ever made himself while lying hunched on his bed in Residential, every fading dream he clung to for those few glorious seconds before the wake-up anthem drove it from his mind.
"Sounds good," Claudius says instead, and Lyme looks at him and smiles and yeah, she knows. She hip-checks him into the door on the way out, Claudius punches her in the arm, and Lyme drags him the entire way back to his house in a headlock.
"I love you," he tells her, shoving at her forearm and staring at her shoes because he can't twist around to see anything else.
"Yeah, I know," Lyme says, and instead of letting go she yanks him tighter, tugging her elbow into her ribs. Claudius grins at the grass because he knows, too.