Hey everyone, Paradigm of Writing here with a brand-new chapter of Declaration of Death, Chapter #11: Composers of Culpability. I understand that it has been another two months since my last update of this story, but there's a good reason for it this time, haha. I've got a new job! I ended up leaving my fast food position as I have been hired to be an 8th grade English teacher at my old middle school (which is crazy enough, mind you). I have been, well, busy to say the least, but I am slipping away time each night to write, which is how we've landed here. Last chapter, you were all introduced to Conrad Culler from District 11, Veryn Alenti from District 5, Tauren Anatole from District 3, and Ness Turner from District 8.
This chapter is the third and last train rides chapter concerning tribute intros, where we are meeting our final four kids who will most likely perish: Harquinne Villoria (D1F by Apple1230), Ridley Lifeson (D6M by Dr. Redneck), Anais Denali (D10F by darthnell), and Narcissus Wylder (D7M by LordShiro).
As always, thank you for your patience and your support. I hope you enjoy!
"Guilt is rooted in the actions of the past, perpetuated in the lack of action in the present, and delivered in the future as pain and suffering." ~ David Roppo
Harquinne Villoria: District 1 Female P.O.V (18)
The library on the train is full of everything but books on politics and such, eighteen-year-old Harquinne Villoria rolling her eyes as her fingers toil over the selection laid out in front of her. If she has to pick up another droll novel concerning a knight in shining armor that saves a wailing maiden who cannot tell her left foot from her right, she very well may just fling herself from the cliffs… err, train tracks in this case.
She should be asleep, but there's hardly a reason why Harquinne wishes to retire her quarters, despite it nearing 2 A.M. Harquinne tightens the shawl resting lightly around her shoulders, the warm fur snuggly fitting against her exposed skin, she raising a hand to bite away at the cuticles on her fingers. Flayed bits of skin that miss her teeth snag free and slip forward some onto the carpet, where she has yet to take her heels off. She cannot stand on the floor in her bare feet, and socks do not do the trick.
Harquinne closes her eyes, resting back some in the heel, a crystal wedge the color of diamonds, an indention starting to form in the carpet. The library has been the only space on the train where she can catch some peace and quiet, from an entire evening withstanding Adriane Latham's prattling about how District 1 will not fall this year, or how she knows that Dorian and her will become the pride of District 1 for ages to come.
Hopefully not Dorian. He… he terrifies her, to be blunt.
She's used to being sized up, especially across dinner tables where people who fancied themselves as lords and ladies came by the Villoria Estate to marvel at the gemstones presented before them for whichever adornments they wanted. She's shared glimpses with Catalus Drachma before, at those gatherings, his body now buried somewhere in the Drachma family grave, the Conglomerate all but forgotten.
"That will not be our legacy," her father, Vel Villoria, begged of her, clutching her hands as tight as he can in the holding cell of the Justice Building. Decimus was holding back tears unsuccessfully, unable to rise out of the wheelchair to hug his sister, so Harquinne fell before her instead. "We will not be snuffed out, Harquinne. You must return."
That cannot be her fate.
She hears the voice before she can register it.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Harquinne leaps out of her heels, nearly falling into the bookshelf. She turns around, her breath caught in her throat, to see Dorian Argenti swathed in frame of the door, darkness clouding the left side of his face. His right-side flickers in a dull glow from the lamp over on the table to the right of the entrance, and she catches a sight of his glooming stare.
A cold chill seizes her spine.
"What's beautiful?" she quirks an eyebrow.
The gemstones her family sold were never anything special – a ruby placed between saccharine lips, bearing the likening to a bitten cherry tart, juices spilling down porcelain skin, Octavia, Octavia, was special unlike the gems – but it did not mean Harquinne's life is without glamour and charm.
Her splendor led to many roads, boredom the primary one. She senses that any moment spent with that of Dorian Argenti will be everything but boring.
He fully steps into the light, and it is as if the room shrank in size, and despite him being ten feet away from her, it is as if he were three inches from her face. Dorian's dressed in gray pants, silk by the looks of them, and his pale shirt is unbuttoned down to the center of his chest, Harquinne's neck flushing scarlet.
"The bookshelf," he says, gliding across the room like a viper, his steps measured, but slithering. Harquinne winces at the harsh sound of his left foot trailing behind him, catching up to speed like the tail of the snake coming to kill her. He's by her side, Harquinne moving away before he can even think of gripping her arm. He's tried twice before, at dinner, when the Avoxes were serving the seared scallops, and Harquinne nearly screams assault.
"What about it?" To Harquinne, it's just another bookshelf. The ones at the Estate that were hand chiseled were far superior, with her siblings despoiling it by scratching their names above the family crest.
Dorian runs his middle and pointer finger together over the top of the bookshelf, slowly at first, before quickening its pace towards the end. "The wood itself. The finery," he states, as he then slowly turns to Harquinne, placing his fingers in his mouth, sucking on the digit lightly. "Mmm…" the boy hums contently, a smile replacing his rather expressionless face. "It's like sawdust and bone."
She's about to flee for the hills, Harquinne about to kick her stilettos off and jab them into his eyes… he's without shoes, without socks, and Harquinne nearly throws up at the display of his feet. They look like they've been unwashed for weeks!
"Is there a reason you're up invading my space?" she opines to ask instead, biting back the decision to insult him.
Dorian cuts his gaze at her, transfixed briefly by his fingers glistening in the light of the library car. "You're avoiding me," he crosses his arms. "Don't act like I didn't notice you doing it."
"No… I haven't," she stutters over her words. "Yes, yes I am. You're creepy. Evil. I can sense it." Harquinne Villoria has had fair practice avoiding those in her life, when her families would meet others in the district, before war separated families by loyalists and patriots, sneered at with the rebels and lesser who believed their crown of thorns was one of gossamer gold. Octavia was the only one she never wanted to avoid, stalking her behind columns and under the guise of the servants ensuring the chaos she dealt with had been minimal. "What would give you that idea?"
"I tend to know when someone doesn't want to be near me," Dorian says, keeping his gaze on her the entire time. "It gives off an odor, like wet, soppy clothes," he advances on her somewhat from the bookshelf, Harquinne matching him step for step. "I've been meaning to speak to you privately, and you did mention liking books, so…"
Dinner drags on and on until the three of them – Harquinne, Dorian, and Adriane Latham, their supposed savior (she didn't save Catalus from his head being turned into mashed potatoes) – retire to the parlor car, Adriane allowing a few supple glasses of wine to be placed into her tributes' hands.
When it neared one in the morning, Harquinne's yawn made her ears pop, her decision swift… the conversation ran boring for far too long, as now her district partner and the escort were into the third run-around about silverware. Harquinne needed a boom to fall asleep with, and by asking an avox who gave her directions, it is how she ended up here in what she believed to be a sanctuary.
She must've thought wrong.
"What did you want to talk about?"
"Being allies, for a start," Dorian says, without much of a preamble into his proposal. Harquinne raises her brow, frowning, before stopping the expression… frowning is unbecoming of a lady, even when her family can no longer see her. "We're alike, Harquinne, you and I."
She's hard-pressed to argue. "I doubt it."
"We both come from wealth," Dorian lifts his head up, as he heads over to the fireplace by the back wall. The trains on District 1, as Adriane claims, are all fitted with fireplaces in every car, and Harquinne wonders at the impracticality of a fireplace in a car entirely made of paper. There is a box of matches resting on the counter, her district partner seizing the box. "We had silver spoons and golden plates, and servants watching our every need. Both Capitol supporters," he turns to face her. "Both of us can get quite… bored."
Harquinne's heartbeat skips once, then twice. How does he know that just by looking at her? How would he know how easily she's distracted, how her thirst for knowledge knows no bounds, but has little depth?
"We all get indulgences from time to time," Dorian continues, as he lights a match. She catches him stare at it, tilting his head to the right, lips parting for a moment, Harquinne horrified at the thought that he'll eat the match, but she's proven wrong, thankfully. Dorian, with a lack of grace, flings it into the fireplace. It takes immediately, sunburst flames streaking in the air, a sizzle flaring between the golden grate separating the pit from the carpet under Harquinne's heels. "Catalus Drachma's was gambling… you heard how he'd spend the Drachma fortune in some gambling den and then on booze come morning. Cecelia Blackstone's was fantasy, where she couldn't understand when she wasn't wanted…" Dorian's lips turn into a fierce sneer, Harquinne blanching at the thought.
A soldier lunged for her, knife at the ready, Harquinne screaming, as he was close, close, closer, and then she was dead, dying, bleeding out, wailing-
"You have an indulgence?" Dorian asks her.
Harquinne balls her tongue on the side of her cheek. She could very well just lie, and he won't be all the wiser towards it. His game is chess, she can see it in his eyes, how he maneuvers his pieces. "Fascination," she says, her throat all of sudden dry, she cursing herself for forgetting to grab a water pitcher from the parlor with her. "Everything in this world fascinates me, but it doesn't hold me for long."
She could leave the conversation now, bustle past him and not turn back, for he gives her the feeling that he'd let her go without as much a hesitation of calling out her name in the dark of the train.
Yet Harquinne stays pitched where she is, as if she were bolted to the floor.
Dorian's lower lip twitches slightly. "That's a new one, darling," then, a frown. "Never heard that one before. You'll have to tell me more later." He sighs heavily, his shoulders rising and falling. "Mine is art." There's a pause, he looking expectantly at Harquinne to say something, but her face remains neutral. "I can look at something and think of a thousand and one ways to dismantle it, to then rebuild it into another thing no one would've ever dreamed possible. A blessing, and a curse."
She understands that sentiment enough, Harquinne supposes. Her gift to the world is her indecisiveness, waiting forever on the edge of something more, but that thing never reaches out to grab her by the arm and tug her along.
"That sounds difficult," she manages for the words. People… she's never really liked people, and this may be the longest conversation she's ever had with someone in years besides her father.
"Mmm," Dorian murmurs into his sleeve. "It can be…" his voice trails off, before he looks at her again, the sudden gaze of creepiness she's felt on the small of her back all evening replaced by that of one of her own fascination. "Would you like to dance with me, Harquinne?" His question is accentuated by the crackle of the fire, a wisp sailing lazily into the vent above.
She chokes on her swallow. "What?"
"A dance, Harquinne, darling," his words drip with manticore poison. "Movement of the body, so we're not so stuffy and austere."
"My heels-"
"You can take them off."
"What would we even-"
"The Accords," Dorian says, and he chuckles lightly, for Harquinne cannot help it, her brow rising at the proposition. All of the elite in One know this dance, one President Emrick announces when the rebellion is over, and all of the loyal socialites from all the districts gather in One for a celebration, as the Capitol had been too war-torn to show off again. A dance dedicated to new beginnings, to happiness. "I know you know that one."
"I- I suppose."
Dorian smiles. Predatorily, a tiger about to close its jaw across her throat. "Perfect."
Without a second moment to prepare, Dorian is leaping towards her across the library. She's undoing the strap of her heel when she slips back some, out of the shoe, at his sudden movement. Harquinne is about to embarrass herself in the fall when Dorian grabs her hand at the last moment, tugging her towards him.
Her body crashes into him, and as she's pressed against him, the scent of amber fragrance hitting her square on. He's humming the music, which she also hears in her ears as well, the grandiose violins and the one triumphant cello rising above it all. Underneath the hint of amber, Harquinne smells something foul, like dirt stuck under one's fingernails, and the musk of a corpse.
She's smelled corpses, burning ones and fresh ones when-
Dorian spins her twice on his own accord, Harquinne tripping over her discarded heels. "Can you just give me a moment to- gah!" Harquinne bites off, before petering off into a squeal as he dips her lowly, a hand resting on the small of her back.
When he rises her up, her long dark hair dangling against the carpet, it is the woman, or secondary partner's turn. Harquinne slips her hand into his, his skin chaffed, his fingers thick at the fingertips, his wrists rubbed raw and red, when she gazes past the silk. Harquinne leads him back towards the fireplace, she glancing up ever so often at his face, but he has his eyes closed, while hers are open wide.
As the two reach the fireplace, Harquinne debates whether it'd be unladylike to push him into the flames, but he's already demon-esque with his haunting stares that he may rise out of the flames like a true spirit of evil all the same. Harquinne spins him away this time, she starting to hum the swell of the music where the secondary partner leaps into the leading's arms, hoisted into the ceiling, in which there is enough room in the car to do so.
Dorian opens his eyes this time, looking pleasant enough, and she races forward, all of her inhibitions screeching at her to take heed. Harquinne does not get that far off of the floor, for her district partner seizes her by the waist instead, spinning her around again.
"Ah!" she cries out in fright, and the music cuts off completely at the sensation of pressure.
Dorian balances her on his knee, she hanging precariously by the small of her back by the delicate precipice. His gaze is on hers, his breathing silent to her erratic and rapid paces. It is his hands she notices immediately, both pressing hard enough to feel his thumbs against her pulse, that are wedged into her throat, lifting her jaw up.
"D- Dorian…" Harquinne gasps, tears prickling at the corner of her eyes. "What- what are you doing?"
Her district partner's stare is a smoldering thunderstorm, magmatic flow hot enough to melt her skin from her bones. When he speaks, his voice is deathly quiet, so, so quiet. "I could choke the life out of you right now," Dorian whispers. "And you'd be so powerless to escape my grasp, as all I had to do was lure you into a false sense of security, darling."
Several tears streak free down her face. "Don't…" Harquinne's heart beats like a snare drum against her ribcage. Her mortality hasn't felt this close since-
"We're district partners, Harquinne, and I can tell you're afraid of me," Dorian continues. "If I am thinking about it right now, when we're both from home, just think what the others who do not know you must be feeling when they see you." He tilts his head to the side, letting her fall to the floor as he removes his knee from her back. "I could tell you were rich in two conversations, yet those from the other districts, those who wanted the rebellion to win, all they'll see is a pampered little girl, like Poem."
"She was idyllic and unprepared, and she won!" Harquinne retorts, unable to rise herself from the ground as Dorian loomed over her, his shadow flickering against the background of the fire.
"Lightning will not strike twice, Harquinne," he steps away from her, digging into the lapel of the unbuttoned night shirt, pulling out a handkerchief. He wipes at his fingers, dabbing it atop his brow line. "They won't think twice of bashing your brains in…" A pause, a look at the flames, then back at Harquinne.
She rises to sitting up. "They-"
"There's nothing greater than that feeling in this world, darling," he says, kneeling back towards her, a manic glint in his eyes. "It's far better than gambling, far better than fantasy and fascination, and it is so much better than art…" Dorian catches his breath. "I am a bit of an expert on the subject."
Harquinne is at a complete loss for words, only able to fit the space with babbles. "He's insane. Wherever he came from, it's turned his mind to mush!"
"Whenever you take your first life, you'll revel in. The squelching. The copper taste in your teeth," his eyes aglow with the ferocity of the fire, popping and crackling in the occupied silence between their breaths, between her terror and his reverence. "And when that thirst takes hold of you, nothing will satisfy you ever again."
Harquinne rushes to her feet, gasping, a frigid fear seizing her chest tightly. "How- how can you possibly think and say such horrible things?"
"You're thinking it," Dorian nods his head. "Even when you don't want to, you are, darling."
"Stop!" Harquinne hisses, but she dares not advance on him. "I am not your darling, Dorian!" she points a finger in his direction. "You're a monster!"
He throws his hands up in the air haplessly. "Not the first time that's been levied at me. You'll need something original…" a wicked pause, bereft of anything but the thump of the train thundering down the tracks. "Darling," he winks.
"Stay away from me," Harquinne commands, her voice trembling, but she stays resolute. "Do not come near me. Do not ally with me. Do not even think of speaking to me again."
"I think curiosity will get the better of you. Theron Drachma couldn't stay away, after the death of his dearly departing boy, and if he couldn't, the new mayor of District 1, neither can you," Dorian smiles. A vampiric bite, fangs that could sever Harquinne from the world of the living.
She does not remain a moment longer in the library, her desire to find a politicking book to sleep with abandoned into the night.
As Harquinne flees, barefoot, leaving her heels behind on the carpeted floor, Dorian's rising laugh echoes along the cars, following her as she quickens away.
There'll never be enough gemstones in all the districts and the Capitol to ever entertain the devil in his domain again.
Ridley Lifeson: District 6 Male P.O.V (17)
There will always be people who believe, just because seventeen-year-old Ridley Lifeson is blind, that he has lost all of his other senses. When the vision went away, so did his hearing, so he falls deaf. Or it is his speech that is rendered useless, and he turns into a mute. It simply makes Ridley chuckle, shaking his head, occasionally full on laughing as the questions are levied at him.
Rather, it is something else entirely that gets Ridley to simmer in a seething pool of rage. It is pure arrogance. He is to be counted out of the Games, simply for the lack of vision. That is the principle mistake, double-so when Astra Enoshima, for the richness in her voice just bleeds the hints of bitchiness, raises her concerns at breakfast.
"You know he'll just be a liability," Astra's voice is heard loud and clear over the table, over the clinking of the utensils, over the soft murmurs between Ayanna and the non-Avox wait staff, and even over the thundering rumble of the train. "And if someone does ally with him, it'll be out of pity."
A firm hand places itself on Ridley's left shoulder, he stirring and violently shaking the grip off of him. It is in the Capitol's infinite wisdom to make him seen, that he is given a translator in the moments he is not training, whether that be walks from the apartment to the training center, getting from the bed to the bathroom… and it has been less than twenty-four hours of this coddling.
He is sick of it.
"Astra was just-"
"I heard her," Ridley snaps, turning his head in the direction of the translator. He had been born blind, or to the point of near complete blindness, as that was what the doctors tell his parents. Blindness is a spectrum, where only 2% of all of those born blind in Panem were with a complete lack of sight. That had never been Ridley's case.
The translator's strong whiff of cologne, a mix of cedar trees and water lilies, is overpowering given the hearty pancake breakfast placed in front of Ridley's seat smells delightful. Ridley can make out a very light hint of fuchsia colored hair dangling down like a crooked tree branch and can sense blips of darkness every time the translator blinks. From the soft gasp that comes from the gentleman, Ridley wagers the reaction to be an open mouth, gaping, horrified that they have been talked back to.
"I'm sorry, I-"
"I have my hearing, you know," Ridley hoists the walking stick up from the floor, having settled the device between his legs when he sat down. He tilts his head in Astra's generalized direction, not having been too close to her to ascertain her general profile. All he can pick out, from her head, is how much they are not going to get along. "What did you say about me, Astra?" His district partner scoffs. "If you have the guts to whisper it to Ayanna, surely you can say it aloud to me."
Astra's chair squeaks as she sits back, her hands trifling with the napkin and the utensils, more clinking going on as she adjusts her seat. "I don't see how you'll survive in this arena, let alone win." Ridley pictures her with long dark hair that goes to about mid-back. Every insufferable, rich sounding woman he has ever come across, when their profiles are described to him later, share the same trait.
In the end, no matter what they look like, there's always a commonality settling among them.
They all count Ridley Lifeson out of the game.
"That's funny," Ridley ghosts the slight formation of a smile, upturning the corners of his mouth into a smirk. "I thought I could say the same about you. I don't know what you look like yet, but I imagine you aren't all that pretty."
That… that may have been taking things too far.
Ridley winces the moment the words leave his lips. Calculations go off in his head that if Astra were to throw the knife sitting on her left side, as his is sitting on his left side, it would come at him from a thirty-three degree angle, slicing over the lapel of his night shirt if he takes a second too long to slant his head out of the way.
He braces for impact, opting to sit where he has been.
"On the contrary," Astra says, pursing her lips, voice cool – too cool for Ridley's liking, his hands bracing around the edges of the table – like a sparkling clear stream on a summer day. "Men fawn over me, the darling of the industrial quarter."
"So, you're telling me you're a high-class whore?" Ridley snipes back, and he immediately ducks his head, for at that moment Astra flings not only her knife, but the small platter underneath her coffee mug. That was… unkind. "Sorry, sorry," he amends, holding his hands out peacefully. "That was wrong of me."
"Yeah, well, you're right about that!" Astra barks at him, voice squeaking imperceptibly like the rubber rings of a bed that has been landed on one too many times, the tone petering off into a whine. "I am not ugly!"
"That's good!" Ayanna chirps, nodding her head. "Stand up for yourself."
"I can't tell if you're talking to me or Astra at this point," Ridley points to himself, sighing. He reaches for the bagel resting on his plate, it smothered in strawberry cream cheese, lifting it off of the plate. The sensation of the translator's hand clamps onto his wrist, pushing the bagel towards his mouth, Ridley dodging out of the way last minute. The food slides past his hair, slicking up a few of the black strands in pink goop. "For shit's sake, man!" he cries out at the Capitolite. "I am not incompetent! I can eat on my own, dumbass," Ridley scowls. He sets the bagel down with a thud. "Do you ask any of the other Avoxes here if they need help with anything just because they've lost the ability to speak?"
By the creaking of the leather, the translator must've slumped down in the chair.
"My, my, you're a testy one," Astra laughs from her seat. "Never would have figured that out when you were reaped yesterday."
"Well, I was saving it for today," Ridley picks the bagel up again, taking a bite. "Which reminds me, Astra, also something to save for, one of the servants on the train told me that you said I'd be easy competition," He hurries his speech, as Astra rises out of the chair again. "Again, I am just curious as to why you'd judge me so quickly."
"Really?" Astra scoffs. "Do I need to show you a mirror?"
"You know that isn't-" Ridley cuts her off.
"I know!" She's getting flustered again, he can tell, another smirk hinting on his face. It is all too easy with her, someone who crows and crows about how successful she is. All of this success, and she's transformed into someone just like him, a meat bag to puncture, another tally to the board.
"Just double checking in case you knew how blindness worked," Ridley holds his hands up, surrendering to her storm.
"Everyone has their preconceptions," Astra says, voice quieting, Ridley's brow perking up at her tone. Much softer, much sweeter, a hint of regret perhaps?
His parents had their preconceptions, Joseph, and Leila Lifeson, when they are first handed their child in a swaddling bundle of cloths and paper towels – Ridley is told years later that he was born during a hurricane, and a majority of the towels were taken to stop as much of the leaking that the staff could muster – and it is his father with the worst words of them all.
"He won't be able to live normally, Leila. I don't know why you keep fighting me on this," Joseph Lifeson barks at his wife, his hands wringing together constantly whenever he believes Ridley's presence is directed elsewhere. "It just makes sense."
"The sensible thing to do is not cast our son out on the street when he turns eighteen, Joseph," Leila snaps back.
Ridley tended to agree with them when the house would fall silent, his parents unassuming that he hears every word of theirs even when he's pressed his entire body into the pillows of his bed so the fabric could smother his screams.
It seemed to be where he had been heading, a street of disappointment, a life of misery where no one got too close, until…
"Does anyone have any Essence Fruit?" Ridley speaks up, finished with his bagel, wiping the crumbs off of his shirt. The table falls silent, he feeling all of their stares directed at them. One of the waiters mutters a sound of confusion, and Ayanna squeaks a pitiful noise in her seat. "Y'know, those cubes from District Seven that taste like kiwi and bananas?"
"Ridley, I have no idea what you are talking about," Ayanna says. "I've checked the manifests list three times before embarking to Six… there's no mention of any… Essence Fruit on there."
Ah. That's… disappointing.
It's been two full years where every day he ingests what his procurers call Essence Fruit, squares that he's told he must eat, every day, or else. The 'or else' is never specified, never expanded upon, no matter how many times Ridley begs.
All he knows is that it is essential for his survival, to keep up what has been injected into his body so long ago. Without it, he is neutralized, left to become the person his parents fear that he would end up as.
It is a fascinating thing, Ridley contemplates, whenever he holds one of the pieces in his hand. It is more science than food at this point, nutrition lost to what it can do, he bringing it as close as possible to his eyes to scan its surface, to feel its texture.
"Oh, well, I'll manage to do without," he says, throwing his used napkin on his plate. "I'll see about asking in the Capitol for some, then." Ridley goes to stand, tugging the walking stick out from underneath the table. "Do you mind?" he asks the translator, who proceeds to help hoist him up.
"Wait," Astra says, her voice grating against his ears, Ridley minding the need to hold back another wince. "I want to test something first."
"And what would that be?" Ridley rolls his eyes. "How many fingers are you holding up? As if I haven't heard that a thousand times…"
"In my family, reputation is everything," Astra scoots her chair back, absentmindedly picking at her nails. As she walks, which is going around the table, there's a clinking sound accompanying her steps, like a metal object hitting a chain, which thumps against her skin. Ridley furrows his brow with a frown. He can't make it out, from where he's standing. "My father, and my mother, and I built the Enoshima name from nothing. When we get to the Capitol, everyone is going to count you out, and I am not going to let my reputation be thrown through the mud cause of you…" she cracks her knuckles. "See if you can fend me off."
"What?" Ridley squawks, and Ayanna snickers at the ridiculous noise.
"You heard me," Astra's voice rises steadily, her breathing accelerated, Ridley picturing that her shoulders lift up until they are at her ears. "Let's see if you really shouldn't be counted out."
"Astra..." Ayanna chides. "This is not necessary."
"It is," Astra reaffirms. "If not for me, against the others!"
Zoe would make mincemeat out of this spoiled, entitled brat, but she's nowhere to be found, Ridley all alone on a speeding minecart headed to disaster.
He settles a thin smile on his face, painfully making the gesture. "Very well," he says at length. "Have it your way," he turns to the translator once more, extending his arm. "Take me to the couch, please. In front of it is fine," as he latches onto the helper. "The crow she's about to taste is going to be like vinegar and whip cream…" The serum combined with a helping of Essence Fruit... Astra won't know what hit her.
Once he's in place, teetering slightly, Ridley straightens his back, extending his walking stick to the farthest it can go.
"This'll be easy," Astra mutters under her breath. To anyone that isn't Ridley, to anyone who has never ingested Essence Fruit, or those who haven't met his procurers, perhaps they'd be incapable of hearing her, but not Ridley. With the Essence and the serum, he feels all, he hears all, down to the point where sounds are what guides him.
"If you say so," Ridley shrugs, assuming a non-threatening stance. He extends his hand, beckoning her forward with the bending of his fingers. Come at me.
Astra moves without a word, but it is not her voice that'd give her away. Her breathing, slightly accelerated by the exercise, the exertion that causes panting, it is what he hears first. Secondly, amidst the train hitting each new thump in the track, the echo is familiar, the vibration like an old friend. Astra's footsteps disrupt the pattern, an aberration, a flaw that must be corrected.
She's a little less than two feet away from him, the hair on the side of his neck prickling up at the light breeze that flutters around him. Ridley raises his walking stick, clutching the thinnest part of the rod in his hand.
Now.
Astra takes another leap for him, Ridley lashing out with the walking stick. The rounder end smacks bluntly into Astra's face, sending the girl from Six sprawling. She sputters in exclamation, a protest of rage tearing from her lips as she swings a punch in Ridley's direction. He ducks underneath it, swiping at Astra's feet with the cane, snagging the hook under the left side of her pants.
With her snagged onto him like a fishing line, Ridley tugs her downwards, Astra crying out in fright as she falls down, but not until Ridley reaches out to catch her.
He smirks at her, knowing they're directly pressed against one another, her breath that of lavender and jasmine, thyme, and juniper… money and oil. He rights her to her feet, waiting for the apology, but Ridley keeps his smirk on his face, pledging for the total embarrassment route.
Hooking his hand under Astra's left arm, he hoists her up, before flinging her directly to the floor, before she can as much protest or cry out.
Victory.
"As easy as you thought it'd be?" Ridley taunts her.
"What the fuck?" Astra screams, a glob of spit landing directly on the boy's face. "What the hell was that Ridley?"
"You getting your ass handed to you, that's what it looks like," he rights himself up, away from her body; he'll let her get her own bearings. "Not the only one who can make jokes, you know," he winks at her.
Let the others count him out, let Astra Enoshima count him out, hell, he'll extend it to the Capitol.
For Ridley Lifeson, there is always more than what meets the eye.
Anais Denali: District 10 Female P.O.V (18)
Staring at the squares have done little to assuage the churning nausea on the sides of her stomach, where each time the train thunders over another jointed piece of metal along the track, eighteen-year-old Anais Denali grips the side of the table a little harder to prevent vomit from appearing all over it. It would be unbecoming of her to make such a mess, especially at such a delicate hour.
It's half past seven, with the faintest peeks of sunlight streaming through the curtains, billowing up in plumes of stardust at her feet. She's the only one awake, as far as Anais can tell, for the Avoxes wouldn't need to be awake until seven, as per protocol. It's- it's just a fact she's learned from eavesdropping, for her and Phillip's escort doesn't exactly have the quietest voice known to man.
Philip will wake up soon too, she knows, as he tells her as much during dinner the night before over roasted potatoes and seared pork loin, Anais smiling gently at his easing words and polite smile. He prefers to be early to rise, when the world is the most silent, before the bustle and hustle of humanity disturbs the quiet. Anais wakes up early for a different reason, however, but what he doesn't know, the better.
He's been a constant for the last twenty-four hours. That and the chessboard sitting in front of her, Anais's eyes grazing the pieces gathered before her calculating gaze. There is nothing in the world more rewarding than the game of chess, nothing more fleeting like a lover's kiss than the triumph of taking an opponent's pieces and adding them to your victory pile. Her playground is a chessboard, where an endless world of possibilities lie, amidst the tan and mahogany colored squares.
Anais stretches her hand out over the board, picking up a smooth, glassy piece, the symbolic crown of the Queen nestled softly in her fingers. The piece is cool to the touch, her skin prickling at the sensation. Her token rests similarly in her pocket, a rook piece that her father lays in her hands just before his departure from her holding room, Anais sinking her to knees in despair with the remembrance of home tethering her to the floor.
The feeling has yet to ebb away, the disbelief, the disquiet that she is here on a train heading to the Capitol. It is not the homecoming she envisions, the one she's secretly yearned for over the last year and a half… people will not be waving banners from their decorated balconies singing her praises but rooting for her demise. Anais frowns, supple lines forming around the corners of her mouth.
This is… distracting.
"But you need distractions," her father's voice, the ever-clear voice of Jann Denali breaking through the frayed nerves and anxiety like heated iron, reminds her, "Distractions keep you focused, they help you from making mistakes." An irreplaceable sigh, her father's trademark, as he ran a hand over his face and down his mouth, hanging slightly off of his lip. "As if that has helped me, but…"
"Wow," comes a male voice off to Anais's right, the sound jostling her out of her reverie. "You weren't kidding when you said you'd be up early."
Anais blushes, sitting upright in her chair, clearing her throat. Her district partner, Philip Woodacre, eyes from the dining car counter, an amicable look in his eyes and on his face. He's dressed lightly for the morning, a semi-see-through white shirt, half tucked-in and half sticking out from his pair of charcoal gray pants. He's… Anais has yet to see him in the bask of a morning light, and he's something to say the least.
"Good morning to you too," Anais says, words stuttering over each other harshly. Her upbringing prepared her for decorum and how to utilize it, easy enough to curtsy and bow and smile when prompted, but the truth has always been that it is in the interpersonal relationships that Anais has struggled with. Her words aren't sweet enough to ears, her facial expressions are a tad too late for those who care, and her general demeanor is colder than the harshest winters one could recount from memory.
"You didn't mention you liked chess at dinner," Philip comments, going around the counter to grab the jug of water, Anais having already helped herself to a glass.
She asked for wine last night at dinner, which caused Roxanne, their escort, to burst out into uncontrollable laughter, but the response only elicited Anais to blush the color of the tablecloth. Her father let her drink during social occasions back before the war, when she's on the cusp of fifteen and a little more cheerful, but as the skies darkened over Panem, so did her father's mood, and the glasses of wine stopped.
"I didn't?" Anais absentmindedly comments aloud. "Strange, I swore I would've…" she says, not really paying him attention, placing the pieces back on their correct sides. Her side is the lightly colored pieces, the glass set, while the opposition are darker, painted a greasy shade of black.
Black, the color of detonated bombs, black, the color of Anais's soul at the moment.
"How can one play themselves in chess?" Philip asks, crossing his arms over his chest. Anais looks up at him then, for his voice has risen slightly, if not to be heard over the rolling thunder of the train car. "I feel like you'd have to rig it for yourself one way or another."
"It's actually quite therapeutic."
"Is it now?" Philip quirks an eyebrow.
"Well, why don't you find out yourself?" Anais sits back, gesturing for him to sit down, the ever-faintest semblance of a smile titling her lips upward. Her father always told her she didn't have the warmth of a socialite, nor did he expect her to ever fall into it like he did. Her father never needed to learn how to become a member of the upper echelon, for his brain did all of the talking, and when he managed to get his act together, people died.
If Anais is going to want to get away from her doom, she must finalize her act, and once she does, bodies will drop like flies.
While she can tell that Philip has always been from District 10, with the faint smell of cedar and oak and that stink that only comes with being around livestock one's whole life – a whiff of his scent hits her in the face as Philip sits down across from her at the table where the chessboard is laid out – Anais's is perfumed, practical, perfected. She's rosemary and liquid gold, sunshine, sunbeam, and sunflowers.
Tainted by cow shit, and by oxen droppings.
Anais Denali is not from District 10, a migrant in her own sense, but from the Capitol. Not the homecoming she expected.
Jann Denali was once the shining star of the Capitol, a general fighting during the rebellion, being the reason District 2 has quarries on fire with flames that have yet to flicker out, or why so many orphans exist in District 11. She's bred in the lap of luxury, tucked into bed every night by her father, seeing as his hands leave behind bloodied handprints on the bedsheets.
All of the galas, all of the balls and concerts and award shows and grand openings… she attends each and every one to drown in the splendor and grandeur of the Capitol, as it is expected of her. It was expected of her father to be merciless, to destroy and burn and bring about the ruin of every brigand who believed they could raise arms against the gilded city and get to walk away with their lives.
"Are you going to make a move or are you going to admire the craftsmanship of the woodwork?" Philip quips at her, an amused smirk on his face, he resting his hands underneath his chin. Anais licks her lips in a quick motion, blushing once more.
"S- sorry," she stutters, tucking a lock of hair over her ears. By all means, she shouldn't even be apologizing to Philip, let alone speaking. He's from the districts, and the words have been ingrained in her head, even as she lives among them, that they're the waste of the earth, scum to be crushed under her bootheel. Like her father did before her, and his father before him, they knew where they stood, and yet Anais is entertaining one over her domain.
Men can claim the battlefield all they like as their playground, but put a chess piece in her hand, and Anais Denali has everyone in checkmate.
Anais goes to make her first move, moving a pawn up two spaces, but Philip cuts her off. "Don't wipe me out in four moves, please."
"No promises."
Her fingers grace the pawn, inching it forward, but she stops. Anais stares at the piece, bulking her tongue against the left side of her mouth. "I'm sorry," she apologizes once more, against her better instincts. "I just can't stop thinking about…" she gestures around her, around the beauty of it all, the beauty she's grown up with her entire life. "All of this…"
"All of what?" Philip asks innocently, leaning away from the table in his seat, doing so hard enough that he lifts the far legs of the chair off of the ground, teetering between falling down and staying upright.
"Being reaped for the Games," she admits. When the two of them watched the recap last night, after dinner, with pork loin resting in her stomach, settling the ever-present nausea, Anais saw it on all of the other tributes' faces, the same sort of disbelief. The few volunteers that stood out from the crowd do not have a similar disposition, but even then, in a few of them, the regret is palpable on Anais's tongue once those tributes are given a moment to themselves. It is what happens to her, when she's back in Ten, standing so still that a breeze could've knocked her over.
Pure shock, which manifests into pure sobs the moment Anais has a second to herself behind closed doors. She's lived a perfect, law-abiding life, by the Capitol's standards, and she's being repaid in this manner… the inhumanity.
The Denali family were stout and delightful, the envy of everyone in the Alpha Sector, where the majority of the Capitol's highest-brow families lived. Ashna Denali, her mother, always stepping into the role of a perfect hostess for any and all guests, and Jann, the stout commander leading District 10 to victory with each bloodied battle over the rebel host.
However, in time, even as Anais danced with distant cousins and potential bachelors once she's aged up enough, she can see her father's displeasure across the ballroom. He'd hide it as best he could, by drinking more than talking, and if he wasn't drinking, he was eating, but the haggardness started to show despite his best efforts.
The president and vice president, though Anais never got to meet Emrick Israel and Cain Passionia personally, were always making demands of Jann, and he rose to meet them, except the one time he didn't.
"And we've paid for that mistake, haven't we?" Anais thinks bitterly to herself. "Apparently not enough."
An ambush of a traveling platoon in the dark of District 4, going after a squadron led by the now dead Diana Kratovska's father, a host of great size, with warnings of a rising tide and a storm that if the Capitol ambush failed, would leave them trapped by the leviathan's bite of Four, and the uncompromising sea.
Her father protested, just the once, for he never spoke against his betters, but for that, they are cast out, double-so when Jann Denali is right – the one time she wishes for her family's failure, the one time the always correct patriarch needed to miss the mark – and the Capitol forces are all massacred, and President Israel responds by blowing the backwater section of District 4 to ask and rubble.
The Denali family, for her father's incompetence in strategy and in keeping the tattered raft alive by just tape and some sticks, are booted to District 10, to live among cow herders and ranchers and farmers, and no matter how much incense Anais smells on the daily, the odor of animal feces and chaffed skin from rope burns plug torment her.
Anais studies Philip's jaw, the light in his eyes, as he looks at the chess pieces, and imagines what it'd be like to smash the board into his face at this very moment, to see the blood of a rebel trickle down his pale skin.
She waits for him to make his move, which is matching her step for step. "I'm getting used to it too," Philip adds, resting his arms on the lip of the table. "And I bet the same goes for all of our competition."
Anais has been so worried about herself that she hasn't had much time to even think of the others. There's a few that are worrying, if Anais can pull out details in her head to remember, like the boy from District 1 who radiates savagery in an uppity way, or the look of defiance in the girl from Eleven's eyes, but Anais knows inwardly that she could – she can – outwit them all.
Especially the boy across from her.
"Well, you don't look too shaken up about it," she says, more rudely than she wants, but the words still slip free, nonetheless.
Philip scratches the back of his neck. "I sort of expected it, to be honest." Anais raises an eyebrow, frowning slightly. He deserves it, at the very least, for the Games were designed to be a punishment for district citizens, not Capitolite darlings.
"Why say that?"
Philip locks his jaw, looking away from the chessboard. A smoldering glimpse of darkness flickers in his eyes, Anais almost shifting her body to catch a peek, before he returns with a smile on his face. "Perhaps another time," he rolls his shoulders back. "I don't want to ruin the morning," Philip nods. "Your turn."
Anais moves another pawn, and back and forth do their steps go, beads of sweat breaking down Anais's forehead. She only perspires when memories trouble her, distracting her from the strategy ahead.
"Can't you do something?" Anais begs, her lip quivering, for she cannot stop crying, she cannot stop this weakness of hers. "You ruled their armies for fucks sake! Can't you save me?"
Jann Denali looks her in the eye, but the warmth one would have for their daughter is replaced by a cold starkness, iron truth. "They demoted me for speaking the truth. We are no longer Capitolites any longer, Anais. I don't have power any longer. Here, we're just as awful as the rebels," he rests a hand on her shoulder, Anais flinching at the contact.
"But I know we're not…" she bites back through the tears.
Her father leaves her with one last adage, one last piece of advice. "The only one who can save you from this is yourself, Anais."
She breaks away from the thought as Anais moves her queen into position, heading towards Philip's king, but he's too preoccupied drinking from his glass of water to notice.
"Aha," she proclaims triumphantly, making Philip choke on his sip, for she's won. "Checkmate," Anais winks.
This is going to be child's play, in her head, in her game.
Everyone else will be pawns, and Anais Denali will always remain, as she once was, what she used to be, a queen.
Narcissus Wylder: District 7 Male P.O.V (18)
"This…" the District 7 escort, Javier Nordem, says slowly, drawing his words out like molasses slowly coagulating on a spoon. "Is a definite first for me…" he sits down in the chair across from the brother and half-sister pairing, rubbing his hand down his face, tugging on the skin till it rebounds.
Narcissus Wylder squirms in his chair, the judging stare of the older man with his barely poking through stubble and a riveting emerald green gaze piercing him through the chest. It has been a good while since someone has scrutinized him with a real judging look, but that would be saying Narcissus Wylder has been out in public since, well…
Ilana is the best one to explain.
Speaking of his half-sister, she's been nonstop shooting daggers at him the entire time, all throughout dinner the night before, in the car ride over to the train, and at breakfast in the morning. She stirs her coffee with a freshly baked cookie sitting on the neatly folded napkin by her elbow, a thousand-yard stare directed straight for him.
He believes he had gotten used to it, especially from her, but not like this.
Not when she could very well kill him, and has already-
Narcissus bites down on his tongue, spilling scarlet over the organ as he harshly clamps his teeth forcibly.
"Not here," he tells himself, digging his nails into his arm. Dwelling in the past is going to do anything but grant him any favors, any way for Ilana to sniff out a weakness and pounce on him like a hound.
"Sorry we're not Sylvan and Nevaeh," Ilana comments, after a moment of silence that washes over the parlor car. The trio finishes the reaping recap, both Wylder siblings agreeing – rarer than a blue moon, that is, when the spawn of Heath Wylder agree on anything – and as District 7 is last on screen, his and her friendly dynamic is displayed for everyone to see. Ilana slams her spoon she used to stir the coffee once, then twice in rapid succession.
Narcissus flinches, the echo of Chester Breckinridge's screams dying in his ears once the sound has dissipated.
"Yeah," Narcissus speaks, his voice raspy, the first time he's talked all morning, actually. He reaches for his warmed herbal tea, taking a long, satisfying sip. "Sorry." He apologizes, but there's nothing to be sorry for, especially not with Javier.
"Wylder, huh?" their escort sits back in his chair. "Your mother… Forsythia, she's a forestry associate, right? Providing lumber for the Capitol to build their extravagancies. And then she married some random nobody?" Narcissus squirms in his seat. Heath Wylder is not a random nobody. The best conman in Panem would not be- "Heath Wylder, right?" Javier finishes his questioning.
"That would be them," Ilana thrums, licking her spoon again, letting it clatter loudly on the plate. "What a great legacy we lead, don't you think?" His half-sister remains standing, her glare digging into Narcissus's chest. He sighs heavily, rubbing his fingers over the bridge of his nose. This is nothing new, especially since his father landed in prison - thought not of just Narcissus's necessity, Heath Wylder is to blame as well, as much as he'll deny it - and it is not the stare of Ilana Wylder that Narcissus preoccupies himself with. It is those of strangers, of the people he'll never meet, the people he'll never speak to, who look across a crowded ballroom and hate him for how he dines on shrimp cocktail.
"It's not going to work," Narcissus locks his jaw, tone flippant, but he does not give Ilana the satisfaction by looking over at her. He'll leave that for the strangers "But you already know that."
"What isn't?" Ilana settles herself comfortably against the front of her pushed-in chair. She can feign innocence as much as she likes, especially in front of Javier, but everyone, and that is everyone saw how she acted during the reaping, spittle flying from her mouth, a rageful, hating screech ripping free from her lips as Narcissus's hunch is proven correct about how the offspring of Heath Wylder will be thrown into the Games. Ilana lifts her brow, tilting her head to the side. "What isn't going to work?" she repeats the question.
"Provoking me." His voice is solid steel. It is weak. Narcissus Wylder is weak, weak, weak, weak. Weak! Weak! Weak! "As if you haven't said the same a hundred things fifty times over already."
Ilana rights herself as if someone stuck a thumbtack between her shoulders, prickling blood. Her nostrils flare, there's an audible creak of leather riding the air as her left hand tightens around the helm of the chair, and her mouth opens in protest. Narcissus's hands find themselves in his lap, his fingers digging away at each other, picking apart the cuticles of his thumbs. Here it goes.
His half-sister's shout could rival the shaking of the train car. "I am not the one who abandoned Father and tradition. And I am definitely not the one who betrayed him and sent him up the river." She rounds the dining room table, Javier's facial expression one for the picture books, with risen eyebrows. Narcissus bites down on his tongue, swallowing his scream. Truth be told, with Chester out of the picture, his screaming days are at an end. "This is your fault. Us being here." Ilana points at him, sneering, her finger this close to thumping him in the chest. "I've tried holding it in, but I can't. Not anymore." She sighs, shaking her hands through a tussle of dark hair. "It's impossible."
"I know," Narcissus signs resignedly.
"And you sit there and act like you don't care! Any idea how infuriating that is?" She begins pacing back and forth between the table and at Narcissus's feet, for he's lounging up against the window, and with every word spilling out of Ilana's mouth, he rises higher and higher off of the pillow positioned against the small of his back. "That you don't care?"
She just had to say it.
Caring has led to this point.
Heath Wylder is in prison because of his own son, spilling out family secrets that never should have been shared, to a Chester Beckingridge. Tall, pale, handsome, everything Narcissus could ever want in the world. A stranger, which made the desire that much stronger, to the point that Narcissus lay awake at night and could only think of the other boy's hips, and his porcelain lips, and the small locks of blonde hair that curled around his deep oceanic blue eyes. It was caring that leads Narcissus to befriend the most dangerous, most desirable man in the waking world. Because he cared, everyone has suffered.
The boy leaps to his feet off of the seat, tears beginning to burn at the corners of his eyes, his vision blurring. His first reaction is to wipe away at the droplets, but his hands are moving in a fury, knifing through the air decisively. "All I do is care!" He shouts, the breaths in his chest quickening, shortening. "All I have ever, EVER done in this family, is care!" Narcissus takes a step towards Ilana, but she does not cower back away from him. Forsythia Dianthus, the one who has made Heath's meager money scheme into a fortune, coddles all passionate expressions, the genuine and the ugly, but leave it to Ilana to break those chains too. "Too much, in fact," his voice softens, words hitching like a wagon hitting a speedbump.
"Then you have a shit way of showing it," Ilana sneers.
"You're the one who resumed operations," Narcissus matches her face, scowling. "Had you not done that, then maybe we wouldn't have been rigged in."
It was much more than that. Narcissus came first, when Forsythia moved her operations to District Seven, and she met his father. Ilana was second, but not from the original partnership, which according to her, the district has blithely reminded her of this every step of the way. When Narcissus would come to visit Heath, after the divorce, he was the golden child. If the two - Narcissus and Ilana - were side by side, who did the patriarch gravitate towards to immediately? Who received the pats on the back and the smiles? Who was left to scrap for the crumbs?
"Well, if you hadn't told your little boyfriend-" Ilana cuts in, thrusting a finger down towards the floor.
"Not my boyfriend!" Narcissus screams back at her. Chester Beckingridge was not Narcissus Wylder's boyfriend. He was- the boy was never given a label.
"About Essence, then we wouldn't even be here!" Ilana continues overriding him, now stepping up to him, her half-brother towering over her in height. "So, no Narcissus, I am not going to take credit for this screw-up."
The two Wylder siblings are touching chest to chest at this point, her breathing audible even over the roar of the train as it thunders down the tracks. His is more controlled, quietly seething, sucked dry out of him from months and months of in-fighting, where Forsythia cannot utter her half-daughter's name any longer, her visible rage viewed by how tightly she clenches her pens in her office.
The car falls into silence, until Javier clears his throat.
"I- I hate to disrupt what clearly looks like happy-go-lucky family time, but... what are you two talking about? What is Essence?" Both siblings turn to look at their escort, who has in the span of their argument, grabbed the morning paper, a pair of reading glasses perched a little too far forward on his nose. A look of utter confusion stares back at the smoldering anger from Narcissus and Ilana.
Narcissus locks his jaw. There's already been an expose given about Essence when Heath is arrested, doubly so from Chester's own mouth. They will undoubtedly be asked by Richmond Anvil about their father's illegal operations, even thought it had been perfectly legal in the Dark Days... what does one extra soul matter?
"Essence Fruit," Narcissus says, not turning his head. "A fruit that if ingested, can give you slightly heightened abilities, such as improving your senses. It can't cure any ailments, but it will improve what is already there. And..." He licks his lips, pausing. Most people would not know it was Essence Fruit if they were looking at it, more cube shaped than any apple Narcissus has seen, a pinkish cube with alternating bands of orange and red crisscrossing over the other. "And it's rather-"
"The process to make it is morbid," Ilana cuts over him, though she hasn't moved out of the way, nor has she looked at Javier either. "Bone marrow, blood, even mucus and sperm and-"
"You get it by exhausting cadavers," he proclaims. Ilana's breath hitches in her throat, she visibly swallowing her rage. "Our family business is killing people." Narcissus turns to their escort, Javier having closed the newspaper, and leaving it on his knee. "What we take is from dead bodies we have to kill ourselves."
The older man takes his glasses off, pinching his brow, sighing heavily. "Another first..."
"Well, actually, lately, she's the one doing the killing. Initially-" Narcissus nudges Ilana in the side, hard. Strong enough to push her off of her feet, an irresistible smirk rising on his face as he does so.
"Narcissus!" She shoves him back, he laughing as he falls back into the chair he had been sitting in. "Shut up, or I swear by the grace of-"
"You'll kill me?" he interrupts her again, raising his brow. "You've already told me that. Again, many times over." He saw what happened to his messenger, the teenager he found standing on a street corner looking one awful hangover away from turning into an urchin, and how Ilana returned him to the Dianthus household covered in blood, limping. How Ilana's veiled threats are exerted on the wrong ones, when he's still living and breathing.
He's tried that, he's tried too much of that. "And I am still standing here," he hums triumphantly.
"I am not going to die because of your mess."
"I am not expecting you to."
Javier claps his hands together, standing up, still holding onto the newspaper, it bunched up in his hands. Narcissus wonders, although it is only for a split second, what it would be like to feel the hands encircled around his throat, squeezing the life out of him, as his skin turns a perverse purple, mixed in with a ghastly blue as blood rises to the surface, pooling under his cheeks. "Which... leads to the best point, and why I wanted to talk to you two before we got to the Capitol," the escort grabs a glass of sparkling water from a platter over by the dining room table. "It sounds like we've got family history here... a name to keep alive. You can't do that going for each other's throats."
Ilana scoffs, shaking her head back and forth vigorously. Dark tandems of hair flurry in front of her face, shielding Narcissus from their fury. "Our name is not going to be just snuffed out."
"And how do you plan on doing that?" Narcissus asks her, crossing his legs, pointing them ever so slightly towards the floor.
"It's obvious, Narcissus," Javier nods, gesturing to the two siblings. "You do better in an alliance."
Fuck that.
Hell no.
"Not with-"
"Absolutely not! Did you not just hear-" Ilana protests hotly, using both of her hands to whirl gestures in both Narcissus's direction, and at Javier.
He's heard the insults before, when Heath is carted off to his eventual doom, when Ilana swears that she'll immolate herself and the entire Wylder name first before Narcissus is given a chance to sully them through the mud.
"If you want to keep your legacy alive, and have it not end with a dead dad in prison, and a lone mother, you need allies," Javier instructs. "If you spend the entire time in the arena aiming to kill one another, you'll give the other tributes a better opportunity to do so. You wait until the final two to kill each other."
"I don't think she can wait that long," Narcissus laughs. He begins picking at his nails again, teeth biting down at his lips, flayed bits of skin joining their already downed brethren on the immaculate carpet.
"I've been wanting to do it for a whole year. What's another two weeks?"
"Glad that's settled," Javier claps his hands together, ready to move on. The train will be arriving in the Capitol in just under an hour. Narcissus is ready for the pageantry, as if it were anything different back when he's a boy, putting on his first pair of ballet tights, spraying gold glitter to his eyes for the effect of sunshine underneath the stage lights. "Now, for-"
"I have a plan. I know who I want," Ilana interrupts, arms crossed over the other.
"You do?" Narcissus frowns. Looking at the reaping recap the night before, Narcissus sees plenty... plenty of people he'd never associate with, and judging from how they acted, they would never want to work with him. The boy from One catches his eye, with a smoldering glare, and a sensuality bubbling underneath the furrows of his brow. Cerberus, from Two, who commands stage presence as if he were born to it. Even Ness Turner, from District 8, her aggression palpable, her mind sharp.
"The girl from Six? She looks like someone who could really do with a great leader," Ilana says.
Astra Enoshima.
From afar, Narcissus thinks little of her, with her stunned expression - stunned from being reaped, no doubt - but whatever potential she has, Astra will not uncover with his half-sister leading the charge.
"Then she needs to keep looking, because she's not going to find it here."
"I-"
"You need to be likable, Ilana! You are the farthest thing from likable, sweet, and nice and everything anyone would ever want in an ally!" Narcissus throws her way, thundering back to his feet. The idea is preposterous. When Forsythia Dianthus and Heath Wylder split, Ilana is not the child their father goes to, but him. He's the one lauded with praise, the one given the keys to the kingdom. From the get-go, Ilana Wylder is cast out, unfit to rule.
"I am the one who ran the business. I am the one who is running the business, as we speak," Ilana shouts at him. She goes back to the dining table, grabbing her empty saucer. She holds it in her hands, prepped to throw it, Narcissus pausing in his effort to follow her. "Give me some credit."
"When I am dead, maybe," Narcissus snorts.
"That can be arranged," Ilana says coolly, blinking at him. She doesn't lower her arm, keeping her gaze posited on him.
"We'll see." Narcissus's voice is hollow, as he wrings his hands around his wrists. Chester always told him he worried too much, too preoccupied with what his sister thought of him, when he should've worried on matters of state, on matters of finances versus petty grievances. Chester is - was, Narcissus cuts himself blithely - not a Wylder. He'd never understand.
"I am cutting your throat in the arena if it is the last thing I do," Ilana hisses, still poised to attack, a tigress prepared to pounce. "Stay out of my way, Narcissus. Father will want to see his golden child return home, and when this is over, it'll be me."
"Eat my ass," Narcissus sneers at her, stalking out of the dining room, despite Javier's pleas to get him to return.
The two of them working together? Ilana plucking people out of the recap to use as her envoys?
Narcissus will go the grave and let himself be consumed as Essence Fruit before he ever, ever entertains the notion. Perhaps this is the price he shall pay, his penance for the sins he's committed. Perhaps there'll be no way for him to atone.
The composers of culpability charged on to the Capitol, the gilded city opening its gates to prepare for the tribute's arrivals.
Yay! There we are ladies and gentlemen, Chapter #11: Composers of Culpability, the last set of intros for these wonderful tributes. I am blessed to have such a wonderful cast, and I have really enjoyed getting to know them as we move on from intros to pre-games and talk about a great set for this last intro chapter. I initially had a Capitol pov in the end with Richmond, but that'll be moved to the first pov of next chapter as I figured it'd fit better. For this last go around, you have met Harquinne Villoria (D1F by Apple1230), Ridley Lifeson (D6M by Dr. Redneck), Anais Denali (D10F by darthnell), and Narcissus Wylder (D7M by LordShiro). Initially, when I was writing this chapter, I did not have Ridley and the D7 siblings with a conjoined storyline, but looking at how Ridley's backstory was structured, I figured it'd be the perfect tie-in... and there's a lot more to learn.
Pre-Games start next chapter with #12: Immortal Mortals, focused on the tribute-parade, with a whopping 7 povs... starting off with Richmond, like I wished to end this go around. Each tribute will have two povs in the pre-games, following near the exact same structure as Liberty's with pov-spread per chapter. Next go-around will be Anneke, Roark, Jasione, Philip, Ilana, and Sable, and there's lots of fun to be had!
On my profile there'll be a poll about your favorite six intros in the story... I'd greatly appreciate it, always a great way to gauge certain things. I am very happy with this chapter, and I am just so excited for what is to come. I love you all so much. Have a great day!
~ Paradigm