Walking down the corridor, Leon could hear the massive fight Marcellus was having with Mom. He stopped at the door, braced himself, and opened it.
"Oh, hey, Leon," Marcellus said, immediately falling silent. "Queue not too bad?"
"Might as well make the best of waking up at ass-o-clock out of habit," Leon said with a nod, taking off his shoes. He had been among the first to arrive. The pensioners hadn't wanted to stand in the cold drizzle, but Leon had pulled up the hood of his thin windbreaker and put up with it until the sun came back out. He walked into the kitchen and slung his backpack onto the table. "Potatoes, powdered eggs, sugar, desiccated vegetables, cheese, soy, meat," he listed off his packages as he handed them off to Mom. She had just gotten her license, but with the situation being what it was, the celebration had been muted. The money she earned became scraps of paper the next day. At least she could now work from home while watching soccer at the same time, and the family could fairly convincingly claim to be middle-class - at least, if Mom managed to convince Dad to stop working. They had had a pretty nasty fight over it, but they had reached a compromise the next day that Dad would stop working as soon as the inflation ended and Mom had a stable salary.
"I can't wait for Sunday," Mom sighed. "We're out of matches." Things like clothes and lightbulbs were given out infrequently. This Sunday, there would be matches and cooking utensils - the entire building was speculating about what would be given. The neighbours-
Hold on a second.
"Mom?" Leon asked, looking at the floor. "Er, I don't think I've ever asked you - how did we get this apartment?" Leon had always known that people of their class, even those with a teacher for a child, lived either in multi-generational or communal apartments. Asking questions about why things were not how they should have been, however, was something he had been raised to not do.
Mom shrugged. "Your great-uncle - Dad's uncle on his dad's side, he died before you were born - got it as a reward for something, and gifted it to us as a wedding present."
So Dad's uncle had been a NCIA operative. Odd, that Mom and Dad hadn't mentioned it before - but then again, it took a certain sort of parents to raise a Marcellus.
"Bloody miracle that Dad didn't turn out like him," Marcellus grumbled, still clearly irritated. "In any case, why do we even need matches? Electricity's on, thanks to your beloved government. We don't need those candles anymore."
"Marcellus. Calm down."
Leon took his bag and went to his room. As he hung up his bag and windbreaker, he could hear the debate perfectly.
"Calm down? I just said I don't like the land reform!"
"It doesn't even affect us!" Mom said incredulously.
"Still," Marcellus insisted, "I don't like that 'the land - to the workers, the factories - to the peasants' stuff."
"It's the other way around," Mom laughed. Leon, too, chuckled. "What's wrong with farmers owning their own land for a change? And if you ask me, the latifundia owners deserve to be expropriated." Everyone in the country had an opinion on that, thanks to the debates over compensation for landless tenants that had started to rage a few days back with the proposition of a land reform act in Congress.
Leon had never thought that politics could be exciting. Congress had always been a bunch of irrelevant people rubber-stamping everything Snow put in front of them. Now, though, it was fascinating. Leon had found that he liked the debates and the compromises. It was actually a little bit fun, to watch the nitty-gritty details of real policymaking. Of course, it stopped being fun when the Districts fell out with each other, but they hadn't fallen out completely yet, so Leon had hope that they never would.
Congress existed in parallel with the IDC, which was officially supposed to focus on mopping up while Congress looked towards the future. Decisions had to be signed off on by the IDC, which they always were. Leon had voted for the political party he liked the most, but he never shared which one it had been with his family, to avoid arguments.
"They're punishing landowners for being successful!" Marcellus insisted. "How is that a crime?"
The way the tenants on those plantations had been treated had been a crime. Leon had been horrified when he had read about the brutal discipline and the hunger. How could rural regions go hungry when they were the ones growing the food? It was unnatural.
"Didn't you read that article about that famine in Nine back then?" Mom asked bitterly. "You weren't even born yet. I remember-"
"Mom, what you remember is queueing for turnips. Like ten years ago."
This was too much. His one day off, and they were arguing. Marcellus had to go to work in half an hour, but Leon wasn't willing to put up with this for half a second more. He put his windbreaker back on - it wasn't drizzling anymore, but the forecast said it might rain - grabbed his bag, and went to put his shoes back on. "Nice weather today," he said. "I think I'll take a walk."
"When will you be back?"
"No idea! Bye!"
"Bye!"
Leon walked down the corridor to the sound of the argument picking up again. Another new thing - now that information was easily available, everyone thought they knew everything there was to stopping the inflation, dealing with child homelessness, and coaching soccer. Marcellus was willing to argue with everyone about everything. Good thing Dad came home so late. When he was tired or in a bad mood, being poked made him absolutely explode, which was the last thing Leon wanted.
Outside, it was still chilly, but not to the point of being unpleasant. Hands in his pockets, he walked between the piles of rubble being cleaned up by work gangs. Good thing he wasn't working there anymore. Working outside in the winter was bad enough, but working outside in the rain was a particular kind of hell Leon didn't want to experience ever again.
Now, where to? Leon had a monthly pass thanks to his job, so he could take the public transit as much as he wanted. On a whim, he decided to go to Lodgepole, to see the Justice Building. Its proximity to the university would probably just irritate him, but it would be worth it if he could sneak a peek at whatever was going on there.
The way there was quite simple. Leon caught a bus, hopped out after a few stops when it reached a major street, and switched over to the streetcar. His neighbourhood and the university were practically on the same street. Commuting would have been so convenient in the parallel universe in which people like him went to university. Instead, he had dropped out after grade six, and that was the end of it. There was only room for one exceptional child in a family.
Leon was overcome with a sudden feeling of bitterness as he sat in the drafty streetcar, empty bag crushed between his back and the seat. He was twenty-four, but he felt like he had missed out on something. He liked his job, but he couldn't help wondering if maybe he'd have enjoyed something else more.
It took an hour to get to the Lodgepole Justice Building. The neighbourhood was terrifying to look at. Most of the buildings had been completely destroyed, and entire families lived in craters or basements, cooking on open fires or just sitting. The Justice Building stood a good deal apart from the other buildings, which was probably the reason why it was so markedly undestroyed. The university campus, the little he could see from his vantage point, was completely empty. Those buildings, too, were mostly ruined. Leon had heard that the university would partially re-open during the summer semester, so starting in May.
Looking around the rubble made Leon feel a little bit sick. He didn't want to be reminded of the fighting. He just wanted everything to get back to normal - but was the default state he had lived in really normal? And if not, then what did he want? A miraculous transformation of Panem into a rich democracy? But that would have nothing in common with what he had grown up with and now missed.
Trying not to dwell on complicated things, he looked around. There was some activity around the Justice Building. MPs were lounging around the place and flirting with locals. Civilians darted inside and outside, holding briefcases, laptops, and folders. So this was where his documents went. They were working at a fast pace, scanning and photocopying endless reams of paper. Leon suspected that if not for the humanitarian aid, they'd have run out of paper long ago. Only a small percentage of factories of any kind were up and running.
Leon's musings were interrupted when he noticed a slight figure sitting slumped over on a concrete block. He rushed up to them. It was an old man looking curiously at the surroundings. "Are you alright, grandfather?" Leon asked anxiously. He didn't have a phone, so he couldn't call for an ambulance if he had to.
"Yes, yes, it's all fine." The old man spoke in a firm voice with a strange accent. "A sad sight, isn't it?"
"Uh, where are you from?" Leon asked. "I don't recognize your accent."
The man smiled. "I'm sure you don't! I'm from England originally, moved to Quebec as a child. It's nice to finally speak my native language to someone who isn't related to me."
Leon sat down on the concrete block, curious. "Are you a journalist?"
"Oh, no!" He laughed and shook his head. "Merely a curious party."
"Do you have relatives here?" Leon had gotten to watch television a few times, and had once seen a heartrending scene of siblings reuniting after being separated for seventy-five years.
The old man tucked a few locks of thin wavy hair under his cap. He wore a pair of thick glasses and a massive coat that went down to his ankles. "No. I came here because I've been waiting for this moment for ninety years." He motioned at the Justice Building as Leon nearly fell over.
"What moment?" Ninety years ago, Panem had been a run-of-the-mill isolationist dictatorship.
"When I was just a child," the man began to explain, "there was a civil war. One of many, over the past centuries. I lived on a farm back then. Enemy soldiers arrived, stole everything there was to steal, set the fields on fire, and shot some people when they tried to resist." He wiped at his eyes with a voluminous sleeve and adjusted his glasses. "That is the very first memory I have. People I had known lying on the ground like broken dolls in puddles of blood and gore. And the stench."
He still remembered it, so many decades later. Ninety years ago was practically ancient history to Leon, but to this man, it was memory. The man was crying softly, and Leon wondered if the children of today would still be crying ninety years later when they remembered the Rebellion. "We had the same happen," he said, unsure how to console someone so much older than him. "It happens too much." Even right now, wars were raging in ten different places in the world.
The man looked at him curiously. "It does," he said. "I remember asking my parents as we were leaving what would happen to these soldiers. They said that nothing would. It made no sense to me. I had been taught that hurting others was bad, but here were soldiers, who were supposed to be brave and heroic, hurting people. I asked again, asking how they would be punished." He took off his glasses, cleaned them with a little cloth, and put them back on. "They explained that soldiers can do what they want. That made no sense to me." He smiled ruefully. "It still doesn't. When I found out about the legal system, I asked my parents if the soldiers who had destroyed our village would go on trial. They just laughed. It was only when I was a teen that I found out that all of the progress made before the Cataclysm had been wiped out, and since then, we've been running on the spot, unable to advance." He waved at the Justice Building. "It never made sense to me why countries go to war with each other instead of talking their issues out, or why a dictator would massacre peaceful protesters instead of de-escalating the situation. For decades, I've been trying to convince the world - make law, not war. But nobody ever listens."
Throughout that monologue, Leon had sat open-mouthed. "Uh, yeah," he said weakly, trying to figure out a way to respond.
"For decades, I've been waiting for something like this. For someone to show the world that burning a village to the ground is the way not to military glory, but to the defendant's dock."
He raised his eyes, and Leon realized just how old the man really was. His face was deeply lined, and he looked like a shrunken doll in that overcoat of his. But his gaze was clear as he looked away and focused on the blocky building in front of them.
"It's terrible," Leon said. "I couldn't believe it when I first heard of such things."
The man nodded contemplatively. "You didn't know?"
"I heard rumours. I didn't know what to believe. I knew that what the television said was nonsense, but my neighbours were hardly better informed." The sole exception had been 'Unveiled Secrets', a bizarre TV channel where bits of truth like the continued existence of Thirteen had been snuck in between rants about unexplained foreign influences, ex-civil servants blaming everything from colleagues to mesmeric forces for their involuntary retirements, and scammers charging water through the television. That had only added to the total confusion. Leon would have considered it a masterstroke of propaganda had he believed anyone in the government savvy enough to pull such a trick off.
"The media lied. Always lied, and so brazenly, too, like they didn't care if you knew it was all lies. So you knew that everything that was being said publicly was nonsense. They could say that two plus two made four and you'd assume it actually made five, because your instinct was that nothing they ever said was truth. You needed another authority to rely on, someone you could trust. Any charlatan was more trustworthy than a politician, a teacher, or a scientist. Perhaps you believed your great-aunt's stories no matter how fantastic, perhaps you thought 'Unveiled Secrets' was a beacon of truth, perhaps you simply assumed that everything was a lie and there is no truth anywhere and all you can do is drift along, work, raise your children, and not think."
Leon felt like he had been punched in the stomach. This man understood him perfectly. How did he understand Panem so well when he hadn't even lived here? "Yes," he said quietly. "My parents, my extended family - they complained when something affected them, but that's it. My brother was more critical, but he's critical of what's happening now, too. He always sees the worst in any political initiative."
"And you?" The man's dark eyes seemed to see into Leon's soul.
Leon shrugged, acutely aware that this man was four times older than him. "I just drift and make the best of things. Before, I went to work and spent my free time in the library. It was alright. Even when the potato crop failed when I was a teen and we had to eat turnips, I found that turnips were actually pretty tasty for me." The man chuckled. "Now, I work for the government. I didn't even notice how my opinions changed. The line from above changed, so did my mind. Just like that. And I'm living better than most of my peers again."
"Could you please explain something to me?" the man asked earnestly. Leon nodded. "How were these so-called Hunger Games normalized for you?"
Leon was hardly the person to answer that question. "It depends on generation," Leon said, thinking about the newspaper articles and radio broadcasts where the phenomenon was endlessly debated. "Everyone who grew up with it - I mean, if you are born in a world where something happens all the time, you're unlikely to question it. As for the people of your generation, I guess they were beaten down eventually. Did you read about the Marches of the Disapproving?" The man nodded. The first few Hunger Games had been protested by first hundreds of thousands, then thousands, and then only by a couple. "That was all destroyed. So people eventually only dared complain in the kitchen, if that."
The man nodded, as if that all made perfect sense. "Typical," he said. "Shame on the so-called free world for letting this go on for so long. Though I suppose we should be grateful for the humanitarian aid!" He chuckled, and Leon joined in. "I flatter myself by thinking that I helped that happen, but I suppose even in our atomized world, cooperation is not dead."
On a patch of empty land not too far from them, a group of people was carting away rubble. Since so much had been destroyed in rural Panem, every available scrap of land would be used for growing food this year. Heiko Laur, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, spent all his time travelling the world begging for more help, but there was a limit to everything.
"What's your name?" Leon asked, realizing that he didn't even know that much.
"John Hope," he said offering his hand to shake.
"An appropriate name," Leon said, taking his hand. The skin felt papery, but Hope's grip was strong. "I'm Leon Shim."
"Very nice to meet you, Leon. And I wouldn't go that far," Hope said with a slight smile. "I've been reading that one of your most brutal generals was named Hope."
"She's the destroyer of hope. And you give us all hope." Leon said the first thing that came into his mind, but he realized that he meant it. 'Make law, not war' - what would have happened if Snow, or McCollum, or whoever had been before that, had been willing to listen to the people instead of crushing them further and further? If Snow had offered terms instead of firebombing Twelve? The mental image made no sense at all, but Hope clearly believed in it, and being at least ninety-four or so, it was hard to call him naive.
"I'm very flattered," Hope said. "Now, what is it that brings you here?" Leon quickly explained his job. "It is I who should be saying that you bring us all hope!" the old man exclaimed. "I wish you all smooth sailing with these trials."
Leon wanted to explain that he was only doing the job for the money, but the words stuck in his throat, so he simply smiled and nodded. All of a sudden, doing the job for the donut holes seemed pathetic compared to someone who had spent who knew how many decades trying to make the world a better place. "I hope justice will be done," he said instead. It sounded clunky, but Leon realized that he actually believed in what he was saying. It was an unfamiliar feeling, but a nice one.
"You - come along. Time for your shower," Janie said, focused on the wall and not on Cotillion. Finally, the last part of the shift was almost over.
"Long overdue," Cotillion muttered, going to her shelf and grabbing some clean clothes. The dumpy researcher was a head taller than Janie. Her grey hair buzz-cut and in a military jacket rescued from the recycling heap, she looked like a homeless person frantically trying to stay presentable.
Janie cuffed Cotillion to herself, wincing when their arms touched. In the corridor, four others were also being cuffed to guards under the watch of Second Lieutenant Tiller. They had worried that only another Vance could stand to be his deputy, but Tiller was way nicer. Right now, the radio was talking about the glass industry, and a few of the guards were whispering to their charges. Janie already had a few autographs, but Tiller seemed to be intent on getting the autograph of absolutely everyone. Vance knew, but he treated Tiller like a favoured child, letting her get away with it all.
Completely unfair. Janie and Cotillion set off, following the lead of Tiller. Janie had already been on pretty much every kind of duty there was, and the key criminals wing was a solid last, except for being outside when it was raining. Vance would drop in at any moment and glare at whoever was currently not fitting his standards, and the glare promised a massive chewing-out within the day. In the other wings, he was barely ever seen. Even he couldn't be in ten places at once.
At least she'd be able to go see Tav today. Thinking of that made Janie smile. She had helped his family get a television, so they'd cuddle on the couch while watching the news.
They walked past Vance, whose facial expression promised nothing good for the fifteen-year-old guard being glared at. Vance seriously hated having underage guards sent to him. By now, Janie could do a pretty good imitation of him insisting that the army wasn't an orphanage. Not like he was wrong - Janie wanted to puke at the thought of her little siblings in uniform, and these kids were the same age as her eldest. The underage had had top priority when it came to demobbing, but lots had nothing to go back to, so they stayed.
At least for this, Tiller had grabbed only guards who were of age. Janie was already unenthusiastic enough about what was basically going to the bathhouse with your great-aunts, but if she had been fourteen, it would have been even more awkward.
They reached the room and walked inside. Janie noticed that it was a pretty normal shower. Taps at regular intervals at about head-height for Janie, and small canisters of liquid soap chained to the wall. Hopefully nobody would figure out a way to steal it. The key criminals were worse than street rats when it came to nabbing things.
"Get on with it," Tiller said, glancing anxiously at her watch. Janie doubted her newest bedwarmer would complain that she was a few minutes late. "Uncuff them." Janie took out her key and undid the cuffs, carefully placing them back on her belt. It felt really nice to walk around with a club on one hip and cuffs - on another. It made Janie feel like she was the boss here. "You five, get undressed." There were supposed to have been six, but Slice was still not recovered enough from whatever had happened in Thirteen to be sent here, so the women were being split into five and six.
There were two people in white coats standing against the wall with an expression of the purest boredom. Now, they began to half-heartedly pull on gloves. Everyone else got to shower like normal people in big groups, but Vance's paranoia when it came to the key criminals knew no bounds.
The five women finished taking off their clothes and stood against the wall. Bright didn't look too fussed, but then again, if Janie looked half as good when she was fifty, she'd be alright with being naked in front of everyone, too. The other four looked like any upper-class women of that age in her town. Janie was surprised to notice that they had stretch marks, and then wondered why she was surprised. How else were women who had given birth supposed to look like?
Blues looked like she wasn't sure where she was or what was going on. She looked like what Janie imagined an engineer in her late thirties would look like, but in her town, engineers usually wore their hair long. It was a status thing - nobody in the mill could afford to waste time on hair. Cotillion looked pretty similar, except that she was darker and more alert. Brack and Dijksterhuis were both simmering with rage and embarrassment. By the time the searches finished, they looked ready to implode.
Brack was very light, so Janie could see that she was bright-red. On the others, it was harder to see. Dijksterhuis had flushed cheeks and was shuffling from foot to foot. Cotillion was glaring at the ground, shoulders slumped. Blues still looked completely out of it, there was an expression of vague misery on her face. And Bright was standing at attention, eyes forward, back perfectly straight.
"Go wash," Tiller said. "Take them back to their cells in five and be as you were. I need to run." She marched out of the room, followed by the orderlies.
The five guards looked at each other. Feeling close to panic, Janie stared at the oldest one, hoping she'd do something.
"Uh, go wash," the scar-faced woman said. In the barracks, she claimed those were battle scars, but in reality, she had driven a jeep into a tree while drunk. "Didn't you hear?"
Obediently, the five women walked towards the taps and turned on the water. "It's freezing!" Cotillion complained.
"So what?" someone else spoke up. Janie was still torn between wanting and not wanting to get close to the others, so she didn't know any of the others by name. "Go wash." Bright was already washing. Janie thought a flicker of smugness passed over the former Peacekeeper's face. Blues, too, obediently stepped under the cold water, though she looked miserable.
"This can't be good for my health," Dijksterhuis tried a different tack.
"You're barely older than her," the scar-faced guard said, waving at Bright. "Move it. Five minutes. Lieutenant Vance will show up if we're late."
That got them to move. Reluctantly, the other three began to wash. They didn't complain, but their eyes blazed with fury. Janie ran her hands down her club, a tough casing full of heavy pellets. She was allowed to give out swats on the hands and arms if someone got uppity, like when a little sibling was reaching for something they were not supposed to touch. When on duty outside the cell blocks, they wore white sticks made from painted pieces of mop handles and random rods.
It was nice to literally hold the whip hand. When Brack met her eyes, Janie lightly grasped her club and stared her down. Before, she'd never have dared stare down someone who was at least fifty. But now, she wore a uniform and could smack people if they misbehaved. Brack looked away and focused on scrubbing her hair, which must have been black once. Out of the women, only Bright and Blues still had fully-dark hair, and Coll was the only man with that distinction, though Krechet only had a few strands of grey. And Verdant had never had dark hair at all, but the light-brown was mostly white by now. Janie wondered when her own hair would start to lighten. Dad had gotten his first grey hairs at her age, but Mom's hair was still fully dark-brown.
Janie's musings about hair were interrupted by one of the guards asking Cotillion how many children she had.
"Er, six," the former researcher replied, teeth chattering. "Three of them are a set of triplets. They're all grown by now." Janie knew of someone who had died giving birth to triplets. The babies had survived, but the father hadn't been able to take care of them alone, so they ended up raised by various relatives.
"I've got three," Brack said. "Can't believe how fast they've grown up - they all have families of their own."
"Three of mine are also long-grown," Dijksterhuis said. "But my youngest is sixteen." Only a bit older than Ricky.
"My oldest is eleven," Blues said quietly, as if to herself.
Just like Annie. "And your youngest?" Janie asked.
"Going to be two in June."
"Mine's the same age," the scar-faced woman said. "She's my only one - so far. How many do you have?"
"Five."
Janie wondered why anyone would want to give birth five times. But then again, these were Capitolites, pregnancy and childbirth wasn't dangerous for them. Janie studied Blues' face, wondering how someone so normal-looking could be so evil. This was the engineer of death, the master builder of the Hunger Games Arenas where Janie had feared ending up not that long ago. But she looked like a better-fed and older (and taller) version of Janie. Same tan skin, narrow eyes, and straight black hair.
It was already weird enough seeing them in their cells, but naked, it was even more obvious that these were just normal people. Cotillion was so unassuming, Janie could easily imagine her coming back from a long day at the office to a dinner freshly cooked by her husband and telling him about how they were behind on paperwork or whatever. But she had overseen a bunch of horrific experiments Janie couldn't wrap her mind around.
Janie stood against the wall and wondered what kind of family people they were. Had Bright's niblings all run to the door happily when she was home on leave? Did Dijksterhuis' youngest faithfully recite everything they had done that day in school when she got home? It was weird to think about. How had Blues been able to build the Arenas, where other people's children would soon die in agony, while coming home every day to five little faces of her own?
"Alright," the scar-faced guard said, "you're done." She half-heartedly poked through their clothing, finding nothing. "Get dressed."
The five prisoners toweled off and got dressed. They took their dirty laundry in one hand - a POW worker went by in the evenings to pick it up - and stood by, waiting to be cuffed. Janie took the cuffs from her belt and secured them to her wrist before shackling herself to Cotillion, whose hair was still damp.
Once Cotillion was safely back in her cell, Janie waited to be relieved and practically ran to the barracks to put on her off-duty uniform. The confusing shifts had wrecked her ability to tell what time it was, but she could still fall asleep on command, so at least there was that. It was early evening, and the sun was starting to set. Janie looked around the street, glad to be outside.
Two eye-catching figures walked out of the main entrance, whispering to each other. Dr. Michael Wreath looked completely different now than in that photo half the barracks had cooed over. Instead of a round-cheeked boy with a comically serious expression, Wreath was now a dashingly handsome middle-aged man whose uniform fit him perfectly. Even Janie's distaste for that uniform didn't stop her from ogling him. Next to him, Dr. Basalt Teck, who was working with him, was a total nonentity. If Wreath could have stepped out of a propaganda poster, Teck looked like she had stepped out of a caricature of a desk officer.
The two were holding briefcases. It seemed like Teck was explaining something to Wreath. Some sort of fancy lawyers' trick to explain away an incriminating document, or maybe where to get black-market pastries.
Janie put the lawyers out of her mind and went to Tav's place. When she opened the door to his apartment, her hopes were dashed as she saw that her boyfriend was lying on the couch under a blanket. "What's wrong?" she asked. On the television, Congress was debating about the nationalization of the railroads, but Tav was staring blankly at nothing.
"Not feeling well," he muttered and drew the blanket tighter around him. Janie noticed that he had stubble on his face. He must have not bothered to shave that morning.
"Is there anything I can do?" Janie asked worriedly. She had no idea what she was supposed to do. She kicked off her shoes and went over to sit down next to Tav. "You want some tea or something?"
"Nah. Can you change the channel to something less stressful?"
Janie picked up the remote and selected the number of the Culture Channel. Fortunately, it was showing an opera. She sat there next to Tav for a while, listening to the nice singing. She wasn't sure what the plot was, but the singing was really great.
"What exactly is wrong?" Janie asked after three songs, trying to find the right words.
Tav shrugged. "Just can't do anything. I should be better by tomorrow."
Was he having a depressive episode? He had never mentioned that before. "Want cuddles or should I stay away?"
He thought about that for several seconds. "Cuddles won't hurt," he eventually decided. Janie lay down under the blanket and wiggled over until her back was touching his front, feeling his warmth.
A few minutes of singing later, he spoke up again. "Are you really happy with me?" he asked out of nowhere.
"Of course," Janie said. Why was he even doubting that? "I've never felt for anyone what I feel for you."
"I've never felt anything for anyone." He draped an arm over her chest. "I'm worried I'm just going along with the first person who offers. Maybe if someone else had asked me out I'd have gone with them. I'd never have dared turn down a soldier."
Was he implying he felt like he was settling for her? Janie wasn't sure how to react. "Some people do get lucky on their first time," she pointed out, trying to hide her irritation. "Do you like me?"
"Yeah."
"Do you like that I'm here?"
"Yeah."
"You think that maybe you'd have been happier with someone else?" Janie was beginning to understand why the mental health team always looked so tired. She felt like her brain was leaking out of her ears from the effort of trying to understand Tav.
"I don't know."
Then what was his problem? "You're afraid you'll stop liking me eventually?"
"Yeah."
Janie sighed, running her hand over his. "Worry about that if it happens. Everything's alright now, isn't it?"
"I guess." Tav fell silent, but Janie could feel his heartbeat with her own body. It was reassuring, and made her feel safe and secure. Outside, they were a soldier and a bedwarmer, but when it was just the two of them, they were ordinary workers relaxing together. Had she gotten to this stage back home, every relative and their cat would have been dropping unsubtle hints about when the wedding was going to be. But there were no relatives here, so they could deal with things on their own. She'd need to ask Tav once he got better if he really felt like something was wrong. She had heard that one of the psychologists was an expert in helping people with relationship problems.
A/N: A Capitol multigenerational household takes different forms depending on social class. An unmarried office worker might live with their parents, adolescent sibling, sibling who just got married and had a baby and is trying to save up some money before the three get a place of their own, aunt who has a moderate disability, grandparents, and cat in a three-bedroom apartment (grandparents sleeping in one bedroom, parents and aunt in the second, sibling and family in third, our office drone and younger sibling in living room, and the cat sleeps where it damn well pleases). People like Leon might easily have more people crammed into a two-bedroom apartment. An alternative for working-class people is when a young couple rents a room - and then they and their kids, however many they have, all live in that room, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with the other families of the communal apartment. Renting one's own place is unaffordable for most working-class families. Young couples moving out often do so together with several other couples they know, starting a new communal apartment. The above-mentioned office workers' just-married sibling is either going to cough up the insane Capitol rent or take out a crippling mortgage loan at double-digit interest rates for an apartment of their own.
Bit late, but here is a picture of what I imagine the assault on the Capitol having looked like (of course, I am not comparing any sides of the Yugoslav wars to anything in the books): i dot reddit dot it/dp5lgs69u3861 dot jpg
The character of Heiko Laur was created by me right when Alexey Navalny was poisoned. The international bickering was all over the news for months, so I could not help but name a foreign minister after the respective foreign ministers of Germany and Russia at the time - Heiko Maas and Sergey Lavrov.
If you're curious about Michael Wreath and Basalt Teck, Wreath is the main character of my novella 'Minor Offender', though that will reveal the broad strokes of the plot of this story, if you're the kind of person who doesn't like knowing these sorts of things in advance. Wreath is the Otto Kranzbuehler of this trial, but with one key difference - in that story, I make clear that Wreath, unlike Kranzbuehler the loyal Nazi, is politically apathetic and wouldn't be able to name his political ideals if he tried.