A/N: Sorry for the late update. Been ill. Hopefully this chapter will make up for it!
I'll do the chariot rides themselves next chapter. Also, I decided to reverse the order of the Districts, since I suspect the tributes who are last end up being given a raw deal, since I'm tired of writing by then and you may be tired of reading. So, reverse-order for the sake of fairness.
I hope you like the chapter! Remember to vote!

10 - So Easily Gilt With Romance

Ash went into the Remake Center happy enough to be there, but five minutes after meeting his prep team, he's given his hairdresser a black eye and is arguing loudly with Cilla, an unnaturally thin Capitolite with dazzlingly white hair who, despite her frail appearance, gives as good as she gets, her voice rising shrilly. "I'm telling you, you need to lie down and let Julius do your nails!"

"Make me!" Ash retorts, sticking his tongue out at her. "I don't need stupid make-up and stupid scrubs and stupid... whatever that is! I'm a guy!"

"You're a tribute!" Cilla snaps back, wagging her finger chidingly at him. "Now lie back down and let us do our jobs!"

In the next room, Piper chats cheerfully to her own prep team, the three Capitol women fussing around her like brightly-coloured birds. Their names, Piper found out the second she bounded into the room, are Sia, Tulla, and Varys, and while Sia and Tulla are busy discussing the long job ahead of them, Varys – the youngest – seems more than happy to talk to Piper.

"Oh, it'll be wonderful," she enthuses, clapping her green-tinted hands together and smiling even wider than Piper. "You're going to look amazing, just beautiful! We just need to clean you down a bit... a lot... and fix your teeth, and get rid of all that ugly body hair, and then I get to style your hair, and then Nella, that's your stylist, Nella's going to make you look so beautiful, you won't even recognise yourself!"

"Teeth?" Piper's hands, which were holding the thin robe closed around her, go up automatically to her mouth, with its crooked yellow teeth, and she frowns. "Is it going to hurt?"

It does.

Husk's prep team are wary of him, to say the least. They treat him like a wild animal, whispering to each other behind their hands, staying well back, dealing with him at arm's length. His response is part irritation, but mostly satisfaction. He hates them on principle, these gaudy, twittering dolls, and the further they stay away from him, the less damage he'll have to do to them.

That isn't to say they're gentle with him. In fact, because they're nervous of him, they're harsher than they might be to another tribute. They approach all at once, when they approach, and they don't make conversation, except with each other. When they bathe him, he splashes and claws out; when they wax the budding hair off his legs and chest, they have to hold him down; and eventually, when he's bitten Thaddeus, the man trying to shape his eyebrows, they give up the fight and sedate him for the rest of the process. It isn't ideal – he'll be groggy for hours – but at least they can apply themselves properly to the task in hand.

In contrast to her District partner, Sift is remarkably easy for her prep team to deal with. She undresses without argument, although she covers herself automatically with her hands, and she doesn't murmur a word of protest when the Capitolites wax her skin, massage her with rough ointments, buff her raw until she feels like she might bleed. She sets her jaw, lowers her eyes, and lets them undo the twists her mother put in her hair a lifetime ago, listens to them bicker about how to deal with the hunk of scar tissue over her eyebrow and the polio-swollen joints of her wrists.

She's used to taking orders. The fact that the prep team's orders are mostly implied doesn't change that. Throughout the whole process, the skin-chafing and the close shaping of her nails and the tugging on her thick black hair, she doesn't utter a single sound. She's taken herself somewhere far away.

The District Ten prep team have a similar experience with Lysander, although for different reasons. He's been told what to expect – not just on the train ride, but in stories Jareth told on the ranch sometimes – at every stage of the Games, and the Remake Center is no exception. He's also one of the easier tributes to deal with, simply because he's already fairly well looked-after. He needs a few hours' worth of cleaning and shaving and cleaning again, of manicures and pedicures and skin-softening, but there's a lot to work with.

The only thing the prep team can't do much about is the burn scars on his face and arm. They withdraw for a moment, in conflab, and seem to come to a consensus. The scars, Callie Highsilver explains to him, are actually going to count in his favour. Scars look good on guys, she assures him, with a glance back at the men she works with. They look tough.

Lysander, who after two hours in their care is bored and fed up, couldn't care less.

"Do we have to?" Lailani's lower jaw juts out, a little cynically and a little childishly. It's not normally like her to be petulant, but she's been in here for over an hour, being buffed and brushed and waxed and massaged to within an inch of her life. For someone whose usual beauty regime is dragging a brush through her hair before a day on the ranch, this is torture.

"Shh." Timea, who seems to be the head of the prep team, puts her finger sharply to her pursed blue lips and then goes back to brushing Lailani's hair. Every stroke of the brush feels like it pulls a handful out, but she's unrelenting. "Of course we have to. Don't you want to be pretty for the parade?"

"Not really, no," Lailani mutters, but nobody's listening. Ignoring her complaints, Hella and Polly are moving in with waxing strips at the ready. The pain is, at least, a distraction from Timea tsking about how coarse her hair is.

Bernard has decided he enjoys the Remake Centre least of all the horrible things that have filled the last couple of days. The prep team are excruciatingly friendly, chatting and crowding around him as if he wasn't stark naked, when they aren't talking completely over his head. He hates how they scrutinise him, and chide him for putting his hands in his lap to cover himself up, and giggle when he blushes. Right now, he just wants this whole thing to be over.

But he's been here three hours, and they don't seem to be anything like done. His face is bleeding in several places where they scrubbed away his acne, and his body feels raw from whatever the grease was they put all over him, and he's had an injection without being told what it was for, and they're still discussing how to get rid of the pockmarks. He has a sinking feeling he might well be here three hours more.

Sitting on the table with her stinging legs swinging as if she didn't have a care in the world, Daisy seems completely unaffected by the hubbub around her. Now they're done with her skin, she's chatting cheerfully with Dolores, a tiny, fine-boned woman with a fur stole apparently grafted to her shoulders, who wields the hairbrush with dangerous skill as she shares stories about tributes past.

"...she was a long job, of course, but so worth it, maybe you remember seeing her on the screens, well, I did her hair for that, and for months I was hearing how much people liked it, and I heard some people are still wearing it like that, can you believe it!"

Daisy smiles genuinely, expresses her amazement, and wonders idly whether her stylist will be this nice.

Clark is quiet, watching the stylists out of the corner of his eye. Marcus, the young man whose hair is coincidentally the same blue-green as Clark's eyes, is talking to the others, his long-nailed hands moving expressively. Occasionally, he glances back at Clark with something like pity, and Clark drops his eyes, smiling shyly.

He feels like a different person, and his scrubbed skin itches, as does his scalp. He's very relieved indeed when, with a smile and a little clap from Marcus, all three Capitolites totter away to call in the stylist.

Lacey's hair seems to be the biggest obstacle to her prep team. Her skin took a long time, of course, but they knew how to do it. Now, though, every hair has been removed from her artificially softened skin, her nails have been trimmed, she's been thoroughly cleaned and greased down, and they still can't work out what to do with her hair.

"It's just so... short!" Annette complains, picking at one ear-length curl. "And it won't lie flat, no matter what we do! How do you deal with this, Lacey?"

"Oh, I just don't, really!" Lacey says, cheerily and truthfully, and all three of her prep team groan.

"Well, that's it, then," Silas says, rolling his eyes. "Let's just call Pirro already. He can work out how to deal with it."

Hair is apparently Teddy's problem, too. He's taking it with good grace, although he fidgets and winces until his prep team's nerves are all but shattered. The issue is that he's been cutting his own hair, with a knife, for years. His split ends, as an aghast Julia exclaims, have split ends.

They cut his hair, then washed it again, dried it, cut it, washed it, dried it, slathered it in creams and something that smelled strongly of lemon, cut it, washed it, cut it again. They've been working at his hair for over an hour when Julia finally steps back, with a loud, overwrought sigh of relief, and declares him ready.

Then he's left in the empty room of the Remake Centre, naked and stinging, with a cold wind on the newly-bared back of his neck.

Yaraminda is losing patience. She might be able to keep her temper if her prep team were at least polite, even in their banal Capitol way, but instead, all she's heard for four and a half hours is all three women bemoaning what a hopeless cause she is. She feels more naked than ever with the thick hair stripped off her body, along with what feels like half her skin, with her frizz of dark blonde hair dripping with various salves and conditioners, and with all three of them appraising her and finding her wanting. She wants to snap at them that she's a lumberjack, not some Capitol model, and can't they take her to the damn stylist yet?

But she's on her best behaviour, and so she settles for sarcastic comments that fly right over their heads, sitting stolidly on the table and glowering from under her newly shaped brows.

There's palpable relief on all the prep team's faces when they finally leave Joshua to go and fetch his stylist Orien. Joshua's talked non-stop throughout the whole process, laughing at his own jokes and making awful puns, and the three Capitolites are clearly unimpressed.

So is Orien himself. He sweeps into the room, running a hand back through his spiked, multi-coloured hair, and introduces himself with consummate politeness, but when Joshua's made ten terrible jokes in about as many seconds, the stylist's peaceable demeanour vanishes as if someone's pushed a switch.

"Shut up, will you?" he snaps, and there it might have ended, except that Joshua, whose sense of humour always overrides his sense of self-preservation, answers cheekily "Shut what up?"

Despite the pain and boredom of the preparation, Wren feels quite good about it. Looking at herself in one of the mirrored walls of the room, she sees someone looking back at her who's the kind of person she's always dreamed of being. She finally has eyelashes, long and curled and dark – she bats them at her reflection and smiles, delighted – and her frizz of hair has been smoothed and brushed and trimmed into something that's actually a style. She still isn't beautiful, but compared to where she started... She's going to be on TV, and she's going to be pretty.

As long as she keeps her mind off what all this is for, she's happy.

Jayden almost faints with relief when he meets his stylist. He'd been expecting somebody frightening, someone stiff and sharp and unsympathetic like Auralio. Instead, the woman who comes to meet him, her elaborately twisted gold-woven hair moving oddly as she walks, gives him an apparently genuine smile and introduces herself as Alba.

"Alba means white," Jayden remembers out loud. It helps him not to be too embarrassed when she walks around him, evaluating his naked body with a calculating eye. "Is that why your hair's white?"

She laughs, clearly delighted. "You know," she says with a wink, "I don't think anyone's actually got that joke before."

Taraysha, Robyn's stylist, doesn't give anything like as good a first impression. In fact, when Robyn first sees the tall, grinning, blood-red woman gliding towards her, she's already panicking. Taraysha's teeth are the only thing about her that isn't red; her hair, her clothes, her skin, even her eyes are a bright crimson. She looks, with her strange cone of hair, like a blood drop suspended in human form. The overall impression is enough to make Robyn's skin crawl.

Dispassionately, she tells Robyn to take off the thin robe she put on after the prep team left, and to stand in the middle of the room while she examines her. Slowly, under the unending scrutiny, Robyn turns almost as red as her stylist.

There's been no embarrassment in James' prep – at least, there hasn't been embarrassment on his end. One of the girls on his prep team, a young blonde with dramatic sweeps of neon tattoo over both cheekbones, spent most of it pink at his constant flirting, and there was a lot of giggling on her end. James doesn't mind that. He's actually pretty happy with the day. He's comfortable naked, and it's always nice to be the centre of attention.

He's also relieved to find that his stylist, Una, is not only female, but the attractive one he's noticed in the last few Games. She must be at least thirty, but that's no barrier, particularly not when the Capitol technology makes her look so much younger. He may pose a little for her as she examines him. "You don't have to worry," he tells her, with a flirty raise of one eyebrow. "You can touch as well as look."

"Stop that." She swats his shoulder, but the corners of her plump lips are twitching. "I'm here to do a job. Now, put on your robe, and let's go."

"Una and I discussed your costumes," Fenviel says, running his finger along the sculptured ridge of his cheekbone. Storm can't take her eyes off it, that grotesque display of Capitol surgery. He undoubtedly thinks it looks good, but it's given her the heebie-jeebies since the first time she'd seen him in the Games, back when the Games were nothing to do with her. She and Selene had laughed at his ridiculous augmentations, and...

She hangs her head a little, a sudden lump in her throat, and tries to focus on what he's saying, although she finds it hard to care. She's tired from the hours in the Remake Center, and so close to where her brother and sister spent their last few days, she can't get away from the memories. Fenviel is still talking, something about fish and nets, but she can't focus. She has the horrible feeling that she's about to cry.

Silk's scowl is deeper than ever. He has no interest in what Harriette, his stylist, has to say about his costume for the chariot rides, any more than he had an interest in all the vacuous nonsense of the prep team. What concerns him – the only thing that concerns him, right now – is that they found his knives, and they took them away.

It's that, more than the thinness of his robe, more than how raw and vulnerable his skin feels, which makes him feel so exposed. Nobody has ever known about the knives before, and now they're gone. He's fairly sure, too, that he won't get them back. He hadn't really thought he would get away with taking them into the Arena – not with the rules about weapons – but having them taken away still hurts.

It's also a reminder, more unavoidable than any other, that his old life is over. He can't hide in the shadows any more.

The thought of the chariot rides makes Singe want to die. She isn't interested in the chariots, or the fashion for the parade, or any of the nonsense of today. She wants to get it all over with, to move on to the Training Center and find someone she can talk to about the Games themselves. She definitely doesn't want to have to be the centre of attention all over again. Her stylist, Tobias, is talking about circuitboards and hairstyles, all while whipping around her with his measuring tape. She wants to listen, but her attention's drifting. How long can it possibly take, she thinks, to make a dress? With all the technology at the Capitol's disposal, she's sure she could cut this whole thing by hours.

Avius is profoundly unimpressed by the whole prep team, stylist included. They're flighty, silly, weak. He might admire the fact that none of the prep team showed any qualms about causing him pain, except that it was causing him pain. He isn't good with pain when he's the one it's inflicted on, and by the time his stylist is sent in, he's feeling positively homocidal.

And then there's more to put up with. More fluttering and jabbering and meaningless talk about colours and themes and how tight to draw the waistband, while Rufinius sips his foul-smelling tea with one finger stuck out pretentiously. The urge to grab that finger and haul it back until it snaps is almost irresistable, but Avius grits his teeth against it.

In the Arena, he reminds himself. He can let all this out in the Arena.

Delphine isn't the type to encourage conversation, at least not when it comes to work. For the hour and a half she spend with Brooke before disappearing to adjust Brooke's outfit, she says nothing personal besides her introduction. The only questions she asks are short and to-the-point; how high a heel can you balance well in, what are your measurements, show me how you stand.

Then she's gone, leaving Brooke alone to pick at the provided food and try to rub feeling back into her legs, which are numb from some kind of grease the prep team used. Her ribs still ache, although the bruise is gone thanks to some expensive ointment she's hardly seen before.

Delphine comments on her ribs when she returns, her whole demeanour changed. Now she extrudes friendliness and concern, asking about Brooke's scars, wanting to know about her. Brooke isn't sure, but she thinks she might prefer the hostile Delphine who took her measurements. At least then she knew what she was up against.

Platinum is easily irritated, and even if he wasn't, the last few hours would have driven him to the edge. It's a very contained kind of irritation – he hasn't lashed out, and in fact, he's hardly spoken to his prep team – but it's in every tense line of muscle, in the glitter of his eyes, in the taut edge to his voice when he snaps at Julia that he doesn't care what she has planned, as he'll have to wear it anyway.

She takes his frustration with good grace and a friendly smile, and he's actually slightly impressed. She is, to be fair, quite impressive. This is only her second year in the Games, and already she's a stylist for District One, on top of which, he doesn't think she can be more than thirty. Even more impressive. She's quite normal-looking, compared to the other stylists, and relaxed, talking to him as if she actually cares what he thinks.

She starts to take the edge off his irritation, in fact. That's most impressive of all.

Quaius fits the final stitch to Giada's outfit himself, helping her down from the little stool where she's been standing while he finishes the outfit. "There's a necklace in the box over there," he tells her, indicating the nearby dresser. "The final piece for it, if you will. Put it on, then come back here and tell me what you think." For the first time, his professional attitude drops ever so slightly, and he smiles, teeth glittering silver.

Giada does as she's told, nodding to him but not returning the smile. She likes his no-nonsense professional calm better. It suits her own.

Lifting the slim strands of blonde hair which fall from her elaborate hairstyle, she carefully fastens the necklace and allows Quaius to adjust it before he turns her to the mirror. She regards herself closely for a moment, without vanity, but with a cool kind of respect for the work they've done.

In the mirror, meeting her reflection's eyes, she quirks a little, satisfied smile.