A month before Reaping Day.
The floor and walls are transparent glass, filled with brilliantly-colored swimming fish. Adrian keeps thinking he's going to fall through. Twelve stories up, the sight roils motion sickness and a spinning ache behind his eyes. He can't lean against the wall, because there's just koi and open city behind it. He doesn't know how the women in heels are doing this. Some of them even have fish inside the heels. Partygoers clasp his tanned arms and coo over him while he tries not to squeeze his eyes shut and hyperventilate. The music thumps and echoes like the inside of a tunnel, out of sync with his hammering heartbeat. He would've tried to make an exit hours ago, but, well. He's the guest of honor. Victor of the Sixtieth. Their newest shining star, for another month or two.
It's almost sweet, he supposes, that somebody thought the Four would appreciate fish. He wonders if they think anyone from the district can actually afford an aquarium.
People touch him, offer him bits of food on cocktail sticks and bubbly drinks in glasses shaped like cerith shells. They all smell like spices and citrus and sweet, metallic musk. They say things to him while the light bounces off their glittering skin, and he laughs with them. Sometimes they're actually funny. It gets harder to tell. He feels the room slipping out from under him in slick, warm waves. An older woman, some Governor, or Gamemaker, he can't remember, feeds him a pineapple cube, and Adrian smiles and says something he hopes is coherent, gripping the grand piano behind him like the ladder out of the arena. He takes a deep breath and then somebody else is pressing another shotglass into his hand, a sticky crimson-pink. Tastes like cherries. The pressure in his head builds to dizzying levels, and then releases. He feels as though he has unlatched and floated outside of himself. His heart slows to the rhythm of the beat. He loses sense of time.
"Adrian," someone's saying in his ear down there, loud. Clicking their fingers. They pull him toward a corner. He struggles to stay on his feet. They're too far away, and there are possibly four of them, making trails of light as they move. But he tries not to resist. They told him he can't resist. His mentor told him to laugh and smile and never tell anyone no, because if the Capitol doesn't like him the President will find out, and something could happen to his dad, and Adrian's trying so hard to follow and smile at the same time that his legs tangle up. Someone catches him before he skids. The man guides him the rest of the way to the couch with a broad arm under his shoulder. He doesn't smell like a Capitol person.
He asks for water, mumbling around his tongue. The man pulls one from a passing Avox's tray, but doesn't give it to him. He cracks open a plastic case of pills, dissolving two in the glass. "No, I don't want more of those," Adrian slurs. He can't help it. He tries to push himself away with taffy for muscles. "I don't want to take any more."
"This is the last one you're taking," the man says, calm but edged with anger, and that isn't the same either- Capitol people don't get angry. Cross, or sullen, or pouty, but nothing as hard and resilient as anger. And he's scarred. They don't keep their scars here. "You're going to feel better. Knock it back, Waller."
They don't call him Waller in the Capitol. They like to call him Adri. Come over and sit with us, Adri! Oh, my goodness, just look at him- turn your head, Adri- look at his poor ear! That's where Rapture got you with that knife, isn't it? My brother was betting on Rapture. But I was always, always betting on you, Adri-
He chokes down the water. It tastes like battery acid. He clamps his fingers over his mouth when he nearly gags it up. Slowly, sensations start to sting as the blood rushes back to his head. His skin feels pinched and inflamed. His throat and eyes are burning dry. When he shifts his arms, tingling under their sheer layer of mesh, he realizes he's drenched in sweat.
Adrian pants quietly, hands splayed on his knees. The man is leaning over him. The slashed face and single arm of his co-mentor are finally coming recognizable, like a charcoal rubbing of a grave.
"Did Luther send you?" Adrian croaks, working his tongue through the pasty film on his teeth.
"Sent myself. I'm not so much a fan of the 'sink or swim' method. At least not for your first year." Kaito Ebihara snags another drink from a platter, takes a cautionary sip, and passes it to him. "Just soda. Rinse your mouth out, and we'll head to the balcony."
Adrian obediently swishes and swallows. He's not sure the sugar is going to help the migraine squatting in his frontal lobe like a grunting, territorial boar.
"Good man. Let's get you up. The balcony isn't see-through, thank Snow for little wonders. I'll scare off anyone who wants to follow us out for a bit."
"I'm going to throw up," Adrian says indistinctly, gripping the front of his shirt.
"Run that by me again?"
"I'm going to throw up." He staggers toward the sliding doors, trying not to lock eyes with a partygoer, a governor, or a fish. "Everywhere."
Over the delicate silver railing, filigreed with seaweed and merpeople, he does. Four times in a row.
While Kaito cleans him up, the kid talks. Most of it doesn't make sense- he's still coming off the trip. Spasms go through his shoulders. The clammy sweat stands out on his upper lip. It's clear that it isn't comfortable for him to swallow, but he obeys whenever Kaito makes him rinse. His heart hurts. The boy is too young.
Adrian talks about mentoring. He says he's made a horrible mistake.
"I shouldn't be doing it my first year out. I thought I could do it but I'm not ready. I'm not...it isn't fair to him." Adrian rolls the base of his water glass in dreamlike circles. "I've already killed him. He'll know that. And he trained for this, and I didn't. He spent years just to get here and I've...killed him."
"You don't know that. You never know how the Games could play out before they're done." Kaito makes a list on his fingers, which, tragically, can only go to five. "The Ten who never made a kill. Big kid from Six, year before you. Fourteen year old in the 55th. Back-to-back district victories from Three, Five, Nine-"
"But those are trends from the 50's. They won't want that again for this decade." Adrian is curled up in the curve of the railing, hunched between his shoulders. "And they didn't have a first-time mentor. I'm not even ready to- to live on my own yet. I look down at the fish in there and I'm seeing the lake I drowned Rapture in, and people kept coming up behind me, and if I wasn't drugged I would've broken somebody's neck. And they're just touching, all the time, and that film star with emerald fingernails contracted me last night-" He hisses and scrubs at his eyes, lowering his voice even though the party behind the closed sliding doors is enough to drown out any recording feed. "He says I'm his favorite. I don't want- I can't handle any of this-"
"My first year out, I did break someone's neck," Kaito says, settling against the railing beside him. The multicolored lights refract through the aquarium walls, chasing strange reflections over their faces, outlining the deep crevice that crosses his nose and cheeks. He gives Adrian a moment to process.
"I was actually on my Victory Tour. End of the line, made it to the Capitol, made it through the President's ball. And my stylist wanted to take me out one more time before I went home. Dragged me to Cicero, over there." He points to the matte black spire near the center of the city. It absorbs the light pollution like a hole ripped in the sky. Adrian's eyes widen. He's picked up some things early. "Yeah. Ended up wishing I'd stayed at the ball. We got in, got our masks assigned. I had an eagle. My stylist was a fox. Turns out, there were a lot of foxes. And in a place like that- crammed full, with the strobes and fog- I lost her pretty quick. It was too warm. Felt like the side of that fucking volcano they dropped me on. I thought it'd be easier to breathe if I got to the next floor."
He takes a drink from Adrian's soda and wipes his mouth, then produces a sealed box of herbed biscuits from his bag. Still fresh. He breaks one open and holds it under his nose, shutting his eyes with contentment. "You want one? Arnav packed them for me. He says Capitol food's shit for nutrition and he'll send me straight to the couch if he sees me at the dessert table in a publicity photo."
He earns a watery smirk from Adrian, who takes the biscuit half and starts to nibble on the edge. Tiny progress, but it's progress. Kaito looks back across the skyline to the tall, opaque specter of Cicero.
"Each floor's more expensive as you go up, more specified tastes. I just swiped my Victor's ID and I could go anywhere. It starts out...fine. Typical drugs. Weird sex. Everyone's in the masks. You don't know if that's Caesar Flickerman or Rowella Dovell or the President. And at some point you're too fascinated- too shocked to stop. You have to know how much worse it can get. They get younger as you go up," he adds absently. That's a part he's spent a good eight years trying not to picture. "Not the clients."
He bites into rosemary and thyme, grounding himself in Four. At home.
"I didn't make it all the way to the top. Couldn't tell you what they're buying in the penthouse. I was most of the way up, keeping my distance from an interesting exhibit involving a bear. Not a bear mask, the real thing. And I was lost. I was in shock, seeing tributes at the corners of my eyes. Wasn't great. And...a woman in a sparrow mask took my shoulder and guided me back downstairs. I was still glassy. Turned around to thank her. There was a strobe light, or something, flashing off her glove, and I thought she was raising a knife. I-"
Kaito knocks his hand crookedly against the railing.
"I found out she was an Avox later. Would've been consequences, otherwise. Arnav does breathing exercises with me when I dream about her. You- I think you're doing all right, Waller. You can handle this. One day at a time. Like all the rest of us."
Adrian stares at him with trapped wild animal eyes. Kaito's seen the same ones in the mirror for eight years.
"It doesn't get better?" he whispers. "It just stays?"
"It gets worse. More kids every year. More arenas. More spectacle." Kaito hugs Adrian roughly, letting the boy's damp face sink into his shoulder. "But we get better. And sometimes we get them out."
"Is it worth it? Is this worth saving them for?" He looks so tired. The cool wind sticks his shirt to him, scatters his pale hair around his face. Seventeen years old. Kaito remembers being seventeen and thinking he was invincible.
He doesn't let go. "It's always worth it. Always."
Bruises like thunderclouds around Adrian's eyes. The dry sound of vertebrae snapping. Contracts with film stars. Cicero. Every night Kaito wakes up his husband because the faces come back. Unmarked child coffins. The brimstone smell of hell on Earth. The lava pools. One day he's going to bring back his own tribute, out of their own two weeks of nightmare into one that never ends. He's going to tell them the same thing.
It has to be worth it.
(District Six next- have had problems with the formatting. I hope you've enjoyed so far. I would love your feedback!)
