With thanks to AbbyCoraby123, Glassgift, and Regster for your reviews of the last chapter.

Y 184-09-01 T 06:23:05

Day 2

"Hey, kid. Wake up. Wake up."

Emil was surrounded by dark warmth, and the voice was far above him, far away from him. He moaned and shifted away from the voice.

"You're kidding." The voice groaned. "Emil. Wake up."

Emil wasn't so easily swayed. He was the son of a merchant family, but he was also a child of District 12, and he had spent his life on hard-mattressed beds that were never quite free of fleas. He had never experienced in his lifetime an overwhelming sense of comfort, of security. He hummed out an incomprehensible response and buried his head further into the pillow under his head.

"That's it. I was done being civil half an hour ago."

And then Emil's world flipped and suddenly the ground had come to meet him. He yelped, flailing out of the duvet he was tangled in and getting to his knees. When he had regained enough of his mind from the fog of sleep, he found himself on the carpeted floor, facing a tipped-up bed. An odd coincidence that a bed with a sturdy wooden base would tip up, he thought, especially when Cesal's standing right there.

"Morning, kid," Cesal deadpanned, letting go of the wooden bed and allowing it to flip back down to the floor. "Looking for something down there?"

"Yeah," Emil managed after a moment. "I used to have a bed, and I'm wondering where it went."

"That's funny," Cesal said with a tone that blatantly said it was not, "Because I was looking for an ally who actually woke up in the mornings."

"It's- what-" Emil glanced at the drawn curtains, squinting at the sunlight filtering through. "-Early, I guess? You don't need to get violent, it's not like there's any wake up call."

"Okay, newsflash, kid? There was a wake up call. It was to the tune of 'Horn of Plenty', it was five minutes ago, and it gave a heart attack to any sane person in the arena. You seriously telling me you didn't hear that?"

Emil knew he was a heavy sleeper, but he had seen no reason to share this with an ally who was tentatively connected at best. He shrugged non-commitally, disentangling himself from the duvet and standing up to face Cesal head-on. "Okay, so there was a wake-up call. Why are you so desperate to get me up?"

"Because our advantage was with moving before anyone was up, even the sun. And now everyone's awake and the Gamemakers have-" Cesal threw open the curtains to the bedroom, letting in a burst of sunlight- "-Messed up the sun. So now we've lost both advantages. So get up and move."

"Won't everyone be having the same idea?" Emil called over as Cesal hurried into the living room.

"Shut up and pack things!"

Emil, feeling he was pushing his luck, threw on his jacket and sneakers and got to work packing everything else. There wasn't much to pack- he bundled the spools of wire from the Cornucopia into his backpack, where they took up less than a quarter of the space and almost none of the weight. Emil had spotted a few things of interest, and had set them out before going to sleep last night- a sheet that could be used for bandages or tourniquets was stuffed in the pack, along with a silk sheet he had found that could prove useful if they found water. Emil hadn't purified water with the seven-fold fabric method for years, but there was little to the concept, and while it wasn't as effective as silver filters it would probably protect him from most major pathogens. He had discovered a small bathroom, too, and while it held almost nothing beyond fake or unplumbed amenities, it had still proved useful.

As quietly as he could, he had loosened and removed the heavy metal showerhead and placed it in his backpack. While it was unwieldy, at short notice it could serve as a club. Emil stuffed it to the bottom of the bag, out of sight if Cesal decided to pry into the pack's contents.

He didn't trust Cesal. The deal had been made in the Training Center (he had memorised and filed the exchange exactly) that between them, they covered a lot of potential arenas- Emil for the rural, Cesal for the urban. But Emil had been in little doubt that Cesal would turn on him if the arena was in his favour instead of Emil's. The fact that Cesal hadn't killed him at the bloodbath, or even last night, was exceptional. Emil had pretended to sleep for hours before exhaustion had finally overtaken his will, and not once had Cesal so much as entered his room. For some reason, Emil was alive.

But now came the question why Emil was still alive, and it wasn't a question he had an answer to. He intended to find out, and he wasn't going to be unarmed around Cesal until he did.

Emil walked out into the large, luxuriant living area, decorated in red and black. Cesal was reclined on the red couch, busy throwing a glass paperweight up into the air and down again, up and down, catching it one-handed and rolling his wrist to send it aloft again. Finally, he fumbled the catch, and the heavy glass ball dropped onto the couch- Emil noticed for the first time that Cesal was using the hand with a missing finger. Cesal looked over and stood up, flexing the fingers of his hand.

"We ready to move out?"

"Yea- hang on." Emil's eyes alighted upon the stylised, pointless mantlepiece, with the small picture frame on top. He grabbed it up and stuffed it into the backpack.

"That's dumb," Cesal said, flopping back onto the couch as Emil sat back on the other. "What do we need the Snow picture for? Dead weight?"

"A morale booster? I don't know, it was at the Cornucopia for a reason-" Emil, in stuffing the picture into the backpack, lost his grip on it, and the pack slammed with a metallic crack onto the floor. Emil caught his breath. Cesal was suddenly sitting alert on the couch.

"What was that in there?" Cesal said, his generally relaxed tone snapping to a rough bark.

Emil stood up sharply, pulling up the backpack desperately after him. "I packed the wire as well," he said smoothly. He had hoped his ability to lie would have worked on Cesal, but to no avail; the Eight tribute was already on his feet, hand reaching for his jacket pocket. Emil backed up half a step, then hit the edge of the couch and fell backwards, scrambling for purchase on the plush lining. Cesal, hand still in his pocket, pulled the backpack from Emil's hands and tipped it, dumping the contents on the floor. The picture of President Snow cracked on the ground, the coils of wire tumbling on top- the sheets fell silently to cover them, and then, with finality, the heavy showerhead dropped on top of the pile with a damning heavy thud. Cesal looked at Emil heavily, before picking up the showerhead and hefting it in his hand.

"I was a Black Band back in Eight, and a senior one, so don't try to con me, kid." His tone was dangerous, and now his hand emerged from his jacket pocket, palm wrapped around the hilt of a blade.

"I don't know- I don't know what that means," Emil muttered, trying to scoot to the side on the couch, away from Cesal directly looming over him. Cesal matched the slide with a single sideways step, cadence untroubled by Emil's attempts to escape.

"It's-" Cesal's eyes flicked around, as if looking around for people for the first time. Emil realised, then, that his admittance to being a 'Black Band' was likely far more dangerous here than Cesal had realised- gang, Emil decided a second later. Cesal tried a different tack.

"-Don't play games with me," Cesal said, following this up by holding the showerhead a little higher. "I'm not your mom, and I'm not going to buy your dumb excuses on why you packed this. What, you trying to kill me? You think I'm a pushover, kid?"

"No, I just-"

"Then what? What? Come on!"

"I didn't want you to kill me," Emil said with a gasp, springing up and behind the couch. Cesal moved like a whip, but now Emil had a couch between them, and he matched every sidestep Cesal made around the couch. His only chance now was honesty, much as he despised the concept. "We're in a city, you brought us together on the basis of how useful we were to one another, but how useful am I to you here? Huh?" The outpouring of his worries became a flood, and Emil shook as Cesal's eyes darkened. "I've not got the advantage, I've not got the weaponry, I mean, come on, you thought I'd just lie down and take it as you slit my throat?"

Cesal looked, all of a sudden, painfully awkward. "It would've made my life easier," he tried vaguely. Emil sidestepped as Cesal did, and now his months of lying to his parents gave him a sudden taste for the truth.

"Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint, but I'm not going to take it just because I'm 'the Twelve kid'. I'm not useless, not even now." Emil's mind was alight with possible ways to continue this conversation, to continue his life, and now an avenue presented itself to him. "You don't sleep."

And now Cesal's knife twirled in his hand and they were almost constantly moving around the couch, a quick circle of movement, chasing one another in short steps just below a run. "What the hell is that to you?!"

"Back in Twelve, I-" And while it seemed petty, now, it had been a lie he had proliferated at home for so long, and it was painful to say when he knew there were cameras everywhere. "-I made drugs."

"Yeah, you're the apothecary guy, you mentioned in training."

"Not- I- not just that." Emil's hand clenched into a fist, unclenched and clenched, over and over. "I met people. People I shouldn't have talked to, but they knew me and- things I didn't want them to know about me." He couldn't say he had gone outside the District, not here with so many cameras on and his parents still at home. "They knew my mother's experience with medicine, and they-"

"-Blackmailed you?" Cesal said. "Sure, I've seen it done plenty, though I imagine in Twelve it's not exactly a big operation so much as a few kids that want to get high. Your sob story's not convincing me of anything, kid."

"You're not understanding me." Emil turned and turned as Cesal matched his every movement, only a couch between them both. He had to make his case. He had to survive. "I made alcohol for them, mostly, but I know how to make other things. Things that could help you with your insomnia. They're not Capitol-grade, but if I can get hold of just a few ingredients-"

"-You'll kill me with some poison shit." Cesal finished, holding his knife up dangerously. "I'm not dumb, and I know you know that shit better than I do."

Damn. Emil could do that, and probably would if he had the opportunity to do so. He needed another tack. He raced from memorised information to memorised information in a desperate bid to find something that would save his life from the knife in Cesal's hand.

And then he noticed the tremor.

They were moving quickly, but Cesal's hand was shaking. He'd put it down to muscle damage, but it wasn't the hand with the missing and reattached fingers- and it was shaking. He had seen that tremor only a few times before, and it was in the hands of Haymitch Abernathy, when he was semi-sober and paying for grain alcohol from his mother's apothecary, lost in the memories of killing, of trauma.

And like that, Cesal's life seemed all too easy to piece together. Emil stopped moving.

"You won't kill me," he said, and he knew it was true. Cesal shuddered to a halt opposite him on the couch.

"Wanna bet, kid? Because I'm the one with the knife and the showerhead, not you." But he had stopped moving, and the knife was trembling in his hands.

"You're shaking." Emil said, his mother's medical advice coming back to him, years of experience at her side coming to his aid. "It's not physiological, because that's your good hand and you don't shake all the time, so that leaves psychological. You don't sleep, and I thought you were just over-dependent on sleeping pills, but that's a symptom, not the reason. Something happened, something traumatic, something that makes you almost unable to hold that knife, something- that's the reason you volunteered for Cutch Hassan. You won't kill me because you can't."

Cesal's face twitched slightly, fury behind his eyes. But slowly, he lowered the knife to his side.

"Doesn't mean I won't beat the shit out of you, kid." He murmured, but it was grating and the knife was juddering in his shaking hands.

"You're not going to kill me." Emil said, because that was all that ultimately mattered. And, because he wanted to try and salvage his hopes at not being beaten up either- "-And I've got at least a foot of height on you, so I'll take my chances."

Cesal chuckled humourlessly, returning his knife to his pocket with a shaking hand. "Four inches, max. Don't get cocky, kid."

Emil smiled weakly, shaking his head. Something in this revelation, in Cesal's vulnerability, made him like the Eight tribute, just slightly. "Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure you've put lifts in those sneakers."

Cesal snorted, but his eyes were marked with hurt. He flicked his eyes up to Emil's face, his hand still in his jacket pocket. "You diagnosed me in less than a day?"

"I diagnosed you in less than a minute." Emil said. "When you volunteered for Cutch Hassan, and when you said you weren't related to him. People don't volunteer for friends. Not unless they owe them something big."

Cesal removed his hand from his jacket pocket, this time empty of a knife. He flipped the showerhead in his other hand, sighing. "Ah, Christ, are you looking for some big sob story now? I only just decided not to kill you, and I'm not all that sure where you stand either."

"You can't kill me, and I'm in it for your city knowledge." Emil said. Really, he was still unsure whether or not he'd ditch or even kill Cesal the first time he dropped his guard, but for now he just wanted to keep Cesal from killing him first. Cesal nodded, just slightly.

"Pick up that damn backpack. We're losing time here."

With that, the allies were clearly reconciled, if only for now. Emil didn't take his eyes off of Cesal, but he picked up the backpack and moved towards the door. Cesal approached him, tentatively, before holding out the showerhead.

"It's not a bad weapon, if you hold it correctly. Slam it into their solar plexus if you get the chance- or just slam them round the head if that doesn't work out."

Emil, surprised, took the showerhead with a nod. This was, even if it was tentative, a form of trust. Cesal and he had shared parts of their history with one another, moments that grated on their soul, and now they stood together again, even if with more tacit understanding of the lack of trust between them.

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it. And don't ask about the goddamn volunteering thing again."

"Sure." Emil was certain he'd get it out of Cesal one way or another, but for now he wouldn't pry. He might have the height advantage, but he was still fairly certain Cesal could beat him up without trying. "So where are we headed?"

"Search that spirit guide mind of yours and think what we need."

"Food, for one."

"And?"

Emil figured it out then, but he wanted to test the waters with Cesal. He smiled slightly. "-Girls?"

Cesal laughed- lightly, and only temporarily, but he still laughed. It seemed, then, that the truce had been agreed. "Close, but no cigar. Maybe if we meet that Two girl on the way."

"Water, then."

"And your spirit guide mind tells you-"

"We passed a reservoir when the trains came into the Capitol."

"Bingo. So, kid, you ready?"

Emil hefted his repacked backpack on his shoulder, felt the cool metal in his hands and the eyes of his temporary ally. "Ready."

"Let's head out while the sun's hot, then."

The two of them left the apartment. All they left behind was the smashed image of President Snow on the floor.

I really hate travel. No wifi, no chapter, unfortunately. Thankfully, during my stay here I should have wifi, so I'll be keeping up with chapters until my journey back around Friday.

As ever, thank you for reading this far.