PRESENT DAY
9am
"-So, conclusion: the Games are continuing nevertheless, and Velarius has decided to be Caesar's little lap dog or something."
Rufus sighed, tapping one finger absently against the wooden table the ancient laptop rested on.
"We'll work with Velarius when the time comes; we're in this for the long game, and you're close enough to undermine him. The Games-"
Rufus looked down at his hands, inspecting an old but still raised scar on his left palm. He never had gotten back the majority of movement in his left hand. He sighed.
"-We'll figure them out too. Besides, I have some assets lined up. Got any dates for the victory tour?"
"Flickerman and Snow have a little secretive cabal going on; I don't know anything other than it's happening and it's already in the latter stages of planning. I'd guess sooner than usual, maybe a month shy of the usual midwinter launch." Plutarch paused. "What do you mean, 'assets'?"
"It's a long game we're playing, and we need some players. Beetee has his eyes on a Calotte, Quint has- someone he thinks is incendiary, I don't know who, and I personally have a Blackthorn on my books."
Plutarch was silent for a time.
"Rufus, that's brutal."
"We live in a time of brutality," Rufus countered gruffly. "Not all of us have spent our lives with more."
Plutarch shifted uncomfortably; Rufus' hard truths were something he apparently wasn't used to facing up to in Capitol society. "Point taken."
"I'm sending out missives about recruitment; I'm getting our victors to start driving people to join the Rebel Alliance."
"We're actually calling it that?" Plutarch said with a slight wrinkle to his nose. "I told you, Rufus' Army will galvanise the people, give them a name to chant-"
"The same as you guys chant 'Snow'?"
Plutarch shifted. His eyes were lost in shadow.
"You know I don't."
"Sorry," Rufus said, knowing he had gone too far with his sponsor. "But you understand my reasons. I can't create some kind of army under my name. We remember too well here the kind of person who makes that sort of-"
"-Culture of personality. I understand." Plutarch said, conceding the point with a magnanimous gesture of his hands. "The Rebel Alliance it is. Do you think you can rally them even without the name?"
"Sure I can. The riots are a sign of that."
Plutarch frowned. "Really? The riots? That's just undirected anger, looting, pyromania-"
"-From where you are, I guess that's what it looks like, but I've been seeing it every night. These people aren't arsonists and burglars, they're just looking for a direction to move in that isn't a dead end. They see one guy beating up a Peacekeeper, they join in."
"It's more violent and unpredictable than I'd consider wise for a revolutionary force."
"Look, you're a great politician," Rufus said, deciding to just charm his way through this call, "And you're an expert in politics, and for that I'm grateful. But I know what I'm doing here. These are my people. Let me do this; I guarantee that it'll work."
Plutarch considered this a moment, static crackling over the line.
"Fine," he said with a sigh, hands up in defeat. "Take your rioters and make what you will of them. Just don't blame me when they're too volatile to work with."
"Fine," Rufus grated with a forced smile, before cutting the connection. The ancient laptop was shut off by an aide nearby, and Rufus collapsed back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his face in frustration.
Plutarch was a necessary help; but a damn infuriating one.
10am
"I really don't see why this is necessary." Seneca shifted uncomfortably as Elizabeth neatly tied his hands behind his back.
"We may need you to lead us back, but it's not exactly like we trust our captors."
"I can get a lack of trust, but what if we fall over?"
"You'll probably break something."
"Don't you care that-" Seneca cut himself off with a frustrated sigh. "You know what, ignore me, dumb question."
Elizabeth finished tying the knot on the cord around his wrists.
"We're not without compassion," she said calmly, but with the stumbling tone of someone unused to using words as weaponry. "That's why we waited a week for Emil to get well enough to walk."
"Barely."
"But you're a Capitolian and you're the /Head Gamemaker. Credit us with a little self-preservation, because the second you have an opportunity to fuck us over, you'll take it."
"And if we didn't know the way back better than you, you'd have stabbed us in the back by now."
Glace walked by suspiciously casually, checking and re-checking her newly restocked knife belt.
"Actually she's right, Mr Crane; we're not without compassion. We only need one of you to lead the way."
Her cool blue eyes caught his gaze and held it. She never expressed a true warning; only an analogue of it, a hint of her ever-turning analytical mind working its Machiavellian cogs.
Seneca searched for words to say, but Glace didn't seem interested in them; she exhaled brusquely and turned away, one knife a blur of silver in her hand as she swirled it deceptively casually.
Seneca looked up at the forests that for the last week had been his shelter.
God, but he hated them.
Elizabeth, who had that strange and unnameable quality of de facto leadership in the group, moved through the forests like a sylph, the trees an extension of her senses. Seneca, on the other hand, would have had a tough time of moving over natural and uneven terrain even with a full range of movement; he had spent his life in the city. As it was, his bound wrists and still-injured side reduced him to little more than stumbling over unfamiliar ground.
Lexus walked up slowly to Seneca from the side, Theon in tow. His wrists were bound as well, but he looked a little chirpier.
"Looks like we're finally getting out of this hellhole, huh?" He said, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet.
"Glad to see you're enjoying yourself," Seneca said in a deadpan tone. He didn't think this was funny at all, not after listening to Glace threaten Lexus' or his life.
"I just wanna get out of here, go south, and get home," Lexus said.
"Where's home anymore?" Seneca replied softly. "You know we're not going to be greeted with anything else but a bullet if we went back."
Lexus' mouth hardened to a thin line.
"It's all we have left," he intoned eventually.
A rustle behind them and the group completed itself around them; Cesal closely shadowed Emil, who had a hastily fashioned stick-crutch and a grim look of determination on his face. The others, in various states of disrepair and exhaustion, huddled around them, and a strange circle emerged.
"Alright," Emma said, shifting her backpack on her back. "We're going to see how walking goes, right?"
"Right." Theon said. "If anyone needs to stop, just say; Emil, I'm looking at you here."
"I'm fine," said Emil, which had becoe such a constant refrain over the last week that even Cesal looked mildly annoyed by it.
"Call me when you can move your leg, kid," he muttered, loud enough for the group to hear. Emil shifted slightly off his crutch and then smacked it against Cesal.
"Hey! You asshole, what's that for? I've been carrying you around all week!"
Emil smirked slightly despite his pale complexion and the dark rings under his eyes. "Carrying makes it sound like you had either the strength or the height to actually carry me."
Cesal rounded on Emil with an anger that was only partway serious, and Glace intervened.
"Let's start walking before we kill each other, okay?"
Seneca muttered mutinously, only loud enough for Lexus to hear.
"Yeah, how unlikely's that?"
Lexus snorted, and Glace turned and shot daggers at him until he made an involuntary whining noise.
"Okay," Elizabeth said. "This can only go well. Let's get out of this dump."
11am
He walked across District 6, a concealed can of spray paint in his jacket.
The night before had been a riot; one of the largest yet. A Peacekeeper had killed some tiny child the day before, on a charge that he had been playing with a stick-gun and pretending to shoot Peacekeepers. News travelled fast in the transport district, and when a vigil was held peacefully and privately, and then violently broken up; well, the public only had so much patience for peace, and they wanted the Peacekeepers dead as much as the chid had.
But they didn't even have a stick-gun.
Nico bit his lip as he weaved past the uncleaned carnage of the night before. He believed in rebellion, he really did; he painted pro-revo murals all over District 6, recruited like a maniac for the cause. But there was a real difference between the ideals of a revolution and the reality.
He couldn't avoid every puddle of blood, and his boots were covered now in a mix of watered-down blood and the odd bit of unavoided viscera.
There was one or two bodies still left unclaimed in the streets, and the flies were swarming them with a cloud of death. Nico held his breath and avoided his gaze but he couldn't ignore that it was there, that it was only a child, perhaps half his age, and he wasn't very old to begin with. It was pooled in blood, and he couldn't avoid stepping in it.
Typically he wouldn't come out this soon after a riot, but he had a purpose today, and he had to make his way to district boundaries to manage it.
Nico Marquette, in his scant time as part of the revo forces, had mostly spent the time four ways, between painting pro-revo murals, aiding in recruitment, trying to downplay his pretty much blatant crush on Quint, and trying to obscure what he was doing from his family.
His parents, lifelong factory workers with the health issues to prove it, wouldn't likely complain if he was to join in on the riots and revos, and- well, he never saw them enough for them to complain about most anything he did.
And besides, he had seen the morphling needles they used to get through each day.
But his grandfather- he worked with him. His grandfather had taught him to paint, had given him free reign of the supplies when they weren't using them to paint some Capitolian's new colour scheme. That was a hugely expensive promise, but his grandfather had always kept to it- with the caveat that he kept out of trouble, always kept himself safe.
Nico felt that if his grandfather was to ever see his murals, it would be the end of him. That was a heartbreak he couldn't afford to bear.
He sighed, kicked at some trash on the ground, and walked on.
The District boundaries for Six were heavily guarded; while all of Six' inhabitants travelled outside of the boundaries frequently, this only meant the Capitol were more concerned about them escaping. Fences were high and electrified in all places, inpenetrable.
But he didn't need to get out.
Today, someone only had to get in.
And he was to help them.
The supply train from 6 pulled into the station, and the Peacekeepers, yawning and tired from the riots the previous night, customarily checked the carriages.
But they didn't check whether someone had slipped out the other side.
Checkpoints were set up between the train and the main District, but Nico had lived in Six a lifetime, and as a child had played around a collection of discarded shipping containers nearby. The Peacekeepers were too exhausted to see someone slipping behind the checkpoint into a maze of discarded containers at Nico's signed direction, and Nico moving to meet them.
They met in the middle, among the rusting metal. As they walked to meet, Nico realised for the first time how small his messenger was, how young; she was at least four years his junior, but wore an adult's leather jacket and a proud expression. She was smeared in mud, but Nico could see long russet hair beneath the grime, braided neatly and tucked beneath her coat.
In short, she looked like a child wearing adult's clothes, and far too young, even to Nico's adolescent eyes, to be risking execution to take him messages.
The girl frowned slightly.
"You're not Quint Barkwater."
"Nice deduction," Nico said with a little grin. The girl didn't seem to share the amusement.
"This message is for Quint Barkwater's eyes only."
"And it will be. I'm Nico Marquette, I'm his- uh-" The quote 'right-hand man' came to mind, unfortunately replaced itself in his head with 'right-leg man', and was entirely discarded. "-I'm with the revos."
The girl looked suspiciously at him, which given her youth and tiny size was almost hilarious, if she hadn't been entirely serious.
"Yeah? How can I trust you're not lying?"
Nico opened up his jacket and flipped an aerosol can of paint in his hand. The girl's eyes widened.
"You're the guy who's been painting the murals. I saw a picture on Rufus' dispatch table."
Nico couldn't help stroking his ego.
"Did you like them?" He asked with a little grin."
The girl considered the question.
"You made Quint's eyes too sparkly," she finally decided.
Nico's ego dropped to somewhere near the ground.
"His eyes are sparkly! You haven't seen them, not in reality, they're like stars trapped in a person!"
The girl wrinkled up her nose a little. "What, are you his boyfriend or something?"
Nico's ego dropped entirely to the ground as he realised that downplaying his blatant crush on Quint probably didn't involve complimenting his eyes. He self-consciously swiped at his hair, pushing it in place absently.
"How do I know I can trust you, huh? You could be- you could be a spy, or something, and-"
The girl produced a letter from her jacket pocket, both eyebrows raised.
Nico cut himself off. He coughed awkwardly.
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"So, uh." Nico snatched the letter up quickly, stuffing it in his pocket. "Who are you, anyway?"
"Oh, that's not important." The girl puffed up a little in pride. "I'm the messenger, that's all you need to know."
"And if I asked?"
The girl paused. She scraped her foot in the gravel a little.
"Robyn."
"Robyn.."
"...Blackthorn."
Nico's eyebrows raised practically to his hairline.
"Seriously? The Blackthorn Blackthorns?"
Robyn raised her hands in frustration to the sky.
"No, the Blunsthorpe Blackthorns, yes them!"
Nico laughed a little. "But you're ridiculously rich!"
Robyn pouted a little in turn. "Doesn't mean I don't believe in the cause. I'd do anything for it."
You'd do anything?" His voice wasn't so much incredulous as surprised, but Robyn seemed to take it as a challenge.
"Yeah, of course. You've gotta help the good guys, no matter the sacrifice."
He raised his eyebrows, crinkling the letter in his pocket.
"You believe in good guys?"
Robyn smiled, and spoke with a distinguished, collected pride; her voice carried just a tiny amount of the Capitolian inflection on the vowels, a glimpse of innate privilege hidden beneath her mud and leather.
"We're doing the right things for the right reasons, aren't we?"
"-Yeah, I guess."
"Then we're the good guys. And, obviously, Snow's the bad guy. You see- good guys and bad guys. The world isn't always shades of grey; sometimes we really are that polarised."
Nico, not wanting to admit he'd never heard the word 'polarised' and didn't catch the meaning from the context, crinkled the letter a little more pensively.
"I guess."
Robyn smiled, clapping him on the shoulder and then backing towards the train tracks as a whistle blew faintly in the air. "That's my ride. Stay safe; there's a war coming, and we'll need everyone we can get."
She ran away, small but determined, across to the tracks.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets, as much to warm his cold hands than to conceal the letter he held. He rubbed the thin fabric of his sweater pensively, thinking about the sturdy warmth of Robyn's leather riding jacket.
He wondered if she was right; if they were the good guys, he could certainly agree that Snow was the bad one.
But yet- but yet.
The flies were beginning to buzz around the child's corpse as he passed it by on his way home.
Could you imagine if someone didn't update something for months on end with no real explanation or warning, even though they had the chapter done for all that time? Wow, anyone who did that would be a dick.
...Okay, explanation time. I wanted to write Ivaylo. I really, really did. It was burning me inside not doing anything for this after so long consistently updating it (well, consistently is a relative term), but I was applying to university and wanted to devote everything I had to it, even if I had to take all year off.
Why only one term off, then? ..Well, I may or may not have just recieved an unconditional offer to study English Literature with Creative Writing at a pretty high-ranked university. So, uh, not really as stressed anymore. Consider this my celebratory chapter post.
(Yes, I'm being a bit proud. Yes, they made a massive mistake offering me an offer to study writing, of all things. What can I say? I'm as astounded as anyone else, but I'm not going to correct their mistake.)
It's nice to get back to Ivaylo. I'll try not to abandon it again (or talk about myself for five paragraphs, wow). If anyone's still reading this story after 3/4 months of abandonment (and 200 words of self-absorption), it's great to see you all again.