Reaping Day.
Etan is too tall for the shower, and he doesn't like baths, generally. He doesn't like the submerging part. Right now he's crouched in the tub, facing a trickle from the faucet that digs into his scarred, fish-pale shin. He wets a washcloth and finds areas to scrub. His stubbled chin is prickly between his knees. Eyes bleared shut, he goes by touch, guiding his elbows through the narrow quarters. The prep team is going to lay an egg when they see what they have to work with, and the Reaping only hours away.
The running water blends into rolling waves. He opens one eye to an aquatic shimmer on the ceiling, floating in the humid, slippery warmth, salt stinging in his nose and mouth. His lungs are about to split. If he doesn't breathe now, he never will.
He shuts his eye again until he drains the tub, towels off, and pokes his head out the door. His house is quiet and dark, and the air is dry. He chews on his scabbed lip. Nobody's out here. He's by himself.
Yeah, all right. He turns around to retrieve his glasses, smearing the moisture off them with his waistband.
Etan shuffles down the hall in an old pair of boxers and a hideous pair of orange socks. His shoulders bunch forward; his gait is an older man's. He's only twenty years out. In the plain kitchen, he dips into the icebox for some soya noodles, digging them out of the paper box with his fingers. He paces while he eats. Straightens a chair or two. Turns on a light. He rolls down the window shades, then reconsiders. Noodles dangle down his chin as he hunts through the upper cabinets. He pulls out a squat blue bottle, rattles it. Four left. There'll be a stock for him on the train. He tips back two that melt bitter on his tongue. For his nerves, mostly. For the prep team.
He wonders if he will make it back to this house. There isn't much to miss about it, but the thought is not comfortable.
He drops the rest of the noodles into the bin, slides down to sit by it, and lowers his forehead into his legs.
A warm, crushing squeeze by some baby-pink form of cotton candy wakes him up. There is even more of it in the frontal region than he remembered.
"Polly," he grunts, a pained half-grin cracking the corners of his lips. "Hi. I- uhf- good to see you. Is this-" He awkwardly indicates with his shoulder. "Are those safe to be- pressurized?"
"They're durable, honey, I paid enough for them." Polyhymnia Parsh is more than durable herself. She ruffles his hair and lifts him up under the arms, dusting him off with a strong lilac-gloved hand. There are not a lot of women who match Etan's height. In kitten heels, she beats him by three inches.
They regard each other, Polly's eyes full of a deep, stable affection. Officially retired, the stylist returns exclusively for Etan's public appearances. She'd taken a shine since the beginning. She hardly looks different from the day of his first chariot rides, and has indeed been celebrating her forty-fifth birthday for about a decade. She goes for another hug, swooping to kiss both cheeks.
"I am appalled with your upkeep, but unsurprised. I knew you'd look like a raccoon made a mistake with an orangutan. The team is waiting outside. Shall I let them in yet?"
"That's fine. Yeah." He rubs the bags under his eyes. "No beauty base 0. Please. Not the plucking."
"Of course not. I'm going to stick you in slacks like a civilized man. Your speedo days are long over, my dear." She winks and straightens his glasses, and heads for the front door. "And stop nibbling on those lips, or I'll coat them in something rancid."
He smirks wearily and salutes with two fingers before the team descends on him like butterflies for blood.
Hands are on his neck under the water and his face grinds into the sand. He's gagging on it. And he's reaching back above him with his eyes pulsing red light, and the girl's hair is hanging. He-
Etan blinks at the ring of vanity lights. Bedenia is combing something volumizing through his widow's peak, shaping it into something a little less orangutan. Lucillus and Fiera tag-team the state of his complexion. Polly has the slacks draped over her arm while she takes in a gray jacket around his waist, clucking over his weight loss.
Yeah. All right.
He can't keep doing this. He can't do this every year. Nobody comes back with him. Maybe that would've made it different. Maybe, maybe, but it's only a symptom of the disease.
If he doesn't breathe now he never will.
"Polly," he mumbles into her hair. "It's this year."
"I'm sorry, honey?"
"It's this year."
She pauses with the jacket, reorienting the flash of shock on her face. Her voice is barely a tickle in his ear. "But without the Gamemaker- are we all in?"
"Enough of us. Couldn't talk to you earlier. They listen to my phone."
"It can't be the 65th? And you were supposed to be working with Gill-"
"No more time. They're trying to push all the youngest mentors in, cut us off- they've been suspecting. They're too close to us."
"Are we close enough to get through them?"
She's aged in a couple of seconds. The slacks unfold and hit the floor like a sledgehammer. Nobody hears anything.
Bedenia and Fiera are in agreement over the slick, unpleasant sensation of Chanay body glitter, although Lucillus's defense is so apoplectic he nearly stuffs lip balm into Etan's nose.
He and Polly gaze in silence.
His pores and scalp are stinging. And he feels queasy, and very tired. The pills, of course. They should've kept him down for longer. He softly see-saws one hand.
"Close enough," he says. "Nearly close enough."
If they aren't, they won't have much longer to worry about it.
Killian kneels down to button the back of Diona's dress, a spine of pearl beads that concludes under the sheet of her shiny hair. He's been buttoning the same dress for her these past four years. They're well off enough to change it every month, if they wanted- more than enough- but it's not the same thing with Reaping clothes. You push those to the back of the closet. Separate them in the drawer. Reaping clothes have a contaminant, a death smell.
He tugs on the back of her collar when he gets to it. "Still fits?"
She twists around, sticks her tongue out, and clatters out of the room like a goat in her buckled shoes. That's something else that hasn't changed, the little asshole. Sometimes he appreciates that. Sometimes he's not sure. Gill had told him everything was going to be different when he got out.
His clothes were sent in advance by the stylists. Slimming vertical stripes on the jacket, blue and white. That's...thoughtful of them. He slowly fixes his tie, stalling the minutes before he has to join the bustling atmosphere downstairs, and hoping at the same time that somebody will come to find him.
He waits ten more minutes before he goes.
In the kitchen, his father has camped out at the new coffee machine. His mother is circling Rossel with a lint roller, which picks the crumbs off his suit as quickly as the man can scarf down his toast. Ross spots Killian first and waves him closer, gifting him a lopsided, messy pat on the back. Their mother aggrievedly switches targets.
"This is a lovely jacket, Killian. They sent it specially for you from the Capitol. You've got to learn to take care of these things."
"What? What did I do?"
"You heard her." Ross grins and flicks his ear. His brother is like a mirror into what Killian should have been. Dark hair that actually forms a shape, and doesn't stick flat to his head. The propensity to tan rather than blister. A jawline. Proportions. And there's...the rest of it. "It is weird to me knowing you're po-faced back there on the stage while I'm jawing on the Treaty of Treason. I remember when we used to make fun of that bull on the way home."
"Ross," their mother squawks. "Not today, for Snow's sake. Don't let Diona start saying those things."
"She's dressed, by the way." Killian points out her billy-goat tread in the foyer as he maneuvers out of reach of the lint roller. "Helped her finish up. Remember when she would tear off her shoes and socks and hide them so we'd be late?"
His mother has resumed the scouring of Ross, who accepts it like a martyr, and retaliates with a brief yet mildly scandalous anecdote. Killian waits a minute, then smiles, and passes through to the living room. His father bumps him on the shoulder with hard, knobbed knuckles. For an instant his brain flashes through the moment when he peeled desperate fingers from the edge of a roof.
"Jacket's good on you." The old man fiddles with Killian's tie. There can't possibly be anything wrong with it, but he grunts and allows him to buzz off after a set of minimal adjustments. "You'll do us proud out there this year."
"This year, huh?" Killian cracks a bigger smile. Sure. Maybe his second tribute won't get herself paralyzed by snakebite and drowned in three inches of water. Maybe the Capitol kids have stopped circulating the animated images of his stomach bouncing in slo-mo as he runs for his life. Maybe this year he won't be the joke. Maybe they requested him back to the mentors' ring this year because they're fond of him. "Thanks, Dad. Doing my best."
His father nods, as though he has imparted state secrets, and resumes a deep meditation over his coffee. Killian buzzes off.
The escort's here too, making his presence known with whatever passes for music pouring out of his earphones- Dorian, who appears to be foaming over with white bubbles from the neckline and platinum hairpiece. With his tiny, wretched blue poodle under his arm, he stalks fragrantly from one side of the house to the other, strewing incense and fine glitter and dishes of candy aphrodisiacs in his wake like a haute natural disaster, somehow molding the chaos into something that could belong on camera. They're planning to shoot some background footage for his Talent. He squeezes Killian's shoulder tightly as he goes by.
"You're on for a reading while you're in the city, big boy. Apparently your book's been a hit!"
"Oh, nice. That's...great. Which one? I've done a few this year."
Dorian snorts and pinches his cheek. "You've done others? I refer to your pièce de résistance on Stonebrook's Games. We do love a Two, don't we? I've got the hardback right on my coffee table. I treasure it deeply."
Killian suspects Dorian's preference in literature extends no further than Reaping slips and erotica, but he gives a thumbs up. "Appreciate it. I'm sure I'll see you in line for that reading."
"Never doubt it," he cooes, already on his way to the kitchen. The poodle bounces miserably in the crook of his elbow. "Love the jacket, by the way."
Killian rubs the welt on his cheek. "Thanks. Apparently it's been a hit."
He goes out onto the front porch for air.
The summer is pleasant, even through the pervasive gray smog that pollutes so many young children's lungs with pneumonia and curses them with allergies. He wrote a paper on that once. Killian sits on the stairs, glancing up the line of Village houses to Etan's, darkened and lonely; to Gill's, fading and peeling. Her automobile's in the driveway. Maybe he should go in and see how she's holding up.
She told him everything would be different.
He picks at grit in the seam of the porch, and carefully, deliberately smudges it up and down the collar of his jacket.
He pushed his ex-girlfriend off the roof of a schoolhouse arena, and a sketch show called him the Custard Cream Killer when he dropped so much weight that his skin drooped in bunches around his waist. The least these people could do is act like it fucking happened at all.
Gill doesn't show up to the stage. It's just the kid, Killian, making big eyes at Etan that he can't give an answer to. He stands stolidly, posture sagging lower the longer Dorian keeps them out here. Fields of sweating children cough into their sleeves and face down the Reaping balls with the gravitas of those already without hope. Look at their mentors. A broken-down matchstick and a green boy. You can't blame any of them.
Etan is thinking about Thirteen, and about the Gamemaker they don't have, and the co-mentor he didn't get. How many of the other districts have had their newest pressured to the front? He fears the conference in the Capitol will be far emptier than he had planned for. There's been word that even Lorne won't be coming out of Nine. They can fill in with Zachary, but already, the losses are a major blow...
He actually misses the first name that Dorian gets around to, and blinks himself back to awareness. They'll be having a hoot with this on the commentators' channels. Whatever Dacker's having, I'll have two!
It's the girl, Killian's assignment. Sixteen and sturdy-boned and flat-faced as a Persian cat. Dorian announces her again, probably for the benefit of her stunned parents. Her name turns out to be Tacita. Etan hopes that she will not die in pain. He can't afford her more than that.
His own tribute is called Marcel. Thin, lanky, with photogenic cheekbones and some curl to his hair. He's eighteen, and he's almost crying, but he composes himself, staring far up into space with his fingers knotting behind his back.
Etan can't tell him anything to make him feel better. He's not going to lie to him. Tributes are smarter than that.
He is thinking of Thirteen. The plan. The Gamemaker. The young mentors. Polyhymnia, who would have been safe if she hadn't kept coming back for him. Gill, and Lorne, and he isn't sure who else yet. He's thinking, already, of the letter he will write to Marcel's family in place of their son.
He wonders if his house will be razed this year, sending the ashes of all the unsent letters spiraling up into a gray sky from which they will not return.
(Your feedback is highly appreciated!)
