Snow Dove

by spoomed

It is a simple thing for a man to keep his memories and regret unspoken and chained within his depths. Until one link breaks, and what resurfaces reveals the remnants of him once thought lost and beyond reach. How will the chains reform and reconnect the pieces? Will they liberate him, or will they only become his anchor, pulling him back under to drown within those depths?

8. Firedance (Part II)

Notes: This is a long and slow-paced one, sorry. But there are yummies near the end. :)

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Chapter 8: Firedance
(Part II)

Lucy Gray isn't used to any of this. The valet opening doors for her. The plush interior she sits so awkwardly into. It's one of the softest things her behind has ever parked itself in, yet she can't help but shrink herself smaller, almost afraid of letting too much of herself touch it, like the seats are going to get soiled just from doing what they're meant to do.

The president who basks in all of this as a norm watches his guest's careful fidgeting from the seat across from her with an amused smile on his lips. Not that she notices, eyes glued anywhere else but in front of her. He can allow her these distractions. It's some strange kind of engagement to watch how she soaks in the senses. The cabin of his private transport is made to be rather spacious, something that must have surprised her once she'd shuffled inside, finding difficulty figuring out where she should sit herself on a seat expansive enough for her to lay out on if she so wanted. She seems to settle on compacting herself against the window, face nearly pressing into the glass as her eyes follow the manor gates receding behind them once they've passed them.

The vehicle coasts smoothly away from the presidential estate down the wide Central Boulevard. Lucy Gray marvels at the sights of the open plaza at the end of it, where the avenue crosses with another, still bustling with the community in their evening repose even at this hour. Groups, couples, merchants, and pedestrians alike, along with the few Peacekeepers stationed around, all mingling beneath the turning sky.

Maybe the paved roads are little cleaner. The buildings a bit less shabby. But that sky is the same. The people are too, as far as she can tell, looking on from the outside in. It feels almost like any other night going down to the Hob in Twelve.

She smiles to herself at the thought. If there were no Capitol and Districts, if all were just one Panem, she'd have thought this city and its people no different from the rest in all the places she's ever seen.

"What's on your mind?" Coriolanus asks, breaking the silence when he spots that small light on her lips.

"Oh...I was just thinking," she muses distractedly. "Just...never been inside a proper car like this before." It's not a lie, but she isn't sure how long this ride is supposed to be. Seems like a conversation for a quieter time with nothing else ahead to have to pause it for. She looks across from her and smiles. "Other than the one that took us between the train station and that zoo...I've only ever ridden in the backs of trucks."

A fond little laugh surfaces then with the memories that come with it. "I remember when I was a kid, early in the war. Maybe even a little before. When someone had a truck that could take us around, move some supplies when needed. Me and the other Covey kids got to hitch some joyrides on the back of it running errands with the grown-ups sometimes. It was fun. Now that I think about it, I almost forgot how it felt to have the wind whipping past you like that."

Part of him is tempted to roll down the windows to humor her thoughts, but he stays those itching fingers at the console and listens to her reminisce about a childhood so far removed from any a Capitol child could ever know.

"I don't remember whatever happened to it. Maybe the person left. Or died. I think at some point, no one could find any gasoline for anything anymore, anyway," she shrugs, lowering her eyes. "Maybe that was how we ended up stuck in Twelve at all."

He'd almost forgotten that about the Covey. They were never citizens of District 12. And as far as she'd claimed, they were never citizens of any place within any border. Just people who lived where their music took them.

What kind of life was that, anyway? Without stability. Without any actual walls to even return to.

"Funny how memories just forget some things."

The car makes a familiar turn onto another boulevard, and the dazzling city lights begin to illuminate the skyline. Coriolanus seizes the opportunity when it arises to shift the mood a bit. All it takes is a bit of color to brighten even the merest creeping touch of melancholia trying to sink in.

"Look there," he points down a street aglow with neon lights, blinking signage, and a moving billboards. He hovers closer towards the window beside her. "We're coming into the Entertainment District."

"'District'? You've got them here in the Capitol, too?" Lucy Gray hums playfully.

"Not in the same way," he laughs. "They're just names we call the different quarters of the city. There's business and commerce. Residential neighborhoods. Even suburbs. And where we came from—the Central District, where all the governing houses and legislature are."

None of that sounded all too different from the roles of the twelve districts. Not from what she remembers learning in those early days in school. Before she'd stopped going, when they needed to work more for enough earnings to eat. Each district with its own purpose. Its own industry and important place in the workings of the whole.

Well, that's what all those speeches and addresses whatever important bigwig she never knew the names of would remind all the people. It was hard to feel that way, when all everyone ever works for goes unappreciated. Thankless and unacknowledged. It's only when things went wrong when any fuss was ever made. When mine accidents happened, it wasn't a tragedy that lives had been lost. It was profits and quotas left unmet. When a bad storm took out their power or flooded or froze their towns, it wasn't a scramble to get everyone together to help make repairs to make it through the season. It was counting the days it took until the rest of Panem could start getting their supply of coal streaming back again.

She wonders if the city districts here in the Capitol ever felt the same. It's one thing to see people living their lives out in the open. There are plenty of things under the surface that stay there. And for how long until the bubbling starts to boil? It's hard not to ponder how vast the underbelly must be for such great heights and grandeur this lone city has built. So much at the surface meant just as much beneath it all that goes unseen.

She thinks maybe she'd rather not know.

Her and bitter things and all.

The car passes a building lined with many posters on its façade depicting different faces and scenes. A great vertical sign at its entrance reads 'Capitol Cinema House.' There's nothing even remotely like this anywhere in District 12 that she's ever seen, but she does know what a cinema is.

"Does that whole place show nothing but movies?" she asks aloud, trying to study the posters that have flown by too quickly for her to register any details on them.

"There wasn't one in Twelve?" Coriolanus asks, remembering full well that something so commonplace here was practically nonexistent in a district where most of the population hardly even had working television sets.

"Not like that."

"But you've seen movies." They certainly sounded like something she was familiar with.

"We used to do public square screenings. Maybe once a month or so? When the weather was good for it." Lucy Gray beams to herself thinking back on this. "There was this old gentleman who had the projector and some reels. If someone could hang up a tarp big enough, he'd run them at night for everyone to watch. It was always a whole event, even bigger and more fun than our concerts at the Hob. The Peacekeepers loved it too. Even the meaner ones in charge." She laughs, remembering, too, just the ones. "Sometimes, the turnout was so packed, the other Covey kids and me had to climb up some trees or sit out on some roof just to get a decent view."

"I don't remember any movie nights that summer," he muses, trying to recall if he'd simply forgotten any such event that might have passed by.

"Oh, no. That was years ago. I forget his name, but that sweet old man got too old for it eventually. Passed not too long after. He was the only one who knew how to work that projector. I remember him telling us kids he used to run a cinema of his own, and it could play several movies all at once for different crowds. But that was all before the war. I don't think those places exist anymore." Her eyes continue to stare out the car window, fixed on that row of movie posters before they're lost behind another turn. "Not in Twelve, anyway."

"If you ever want to watch any of those..."

Lucy Gray turns at the sound of his voice.

"...I can have them arranged to be viewed at the manor."

"Oh, there's plenty already on the television," she smiles.

It becomes apparent to him that she knows nothing about how films and their releases work. They are a purely Capitol form of media after all. As with anything, all that the districts ever inherit are only the most antiquated forms of what comes out of this city.

"And besides...wouldn't it just be more fun coming out here like we're going now to see things?" she muses, racking up all the reasons to go anywhere beyond the manor together again.

"Nothing beats an exclusive home viewing."

It's so harmless and automatic, what he says.

'Home.'

The exclusivity he suggests doesn't feel like it quite reaches her, no matter what he intends. 'Home' shouldn't make someone feel such ambivalence. But it's not like she even feels back in her own skin yet either. Maybe a bit of time is all it takes. A bit of effort. A haircut, some nice make-up, and a clean dress went a long way. Maybe all the place needs is a bit of her own touch, too, to feel a little closer to it.

She misses 'home.'

She misses herself.

Maybe it's about time she stops being that fish out of water and sprouts some legs already.

"Where are we going, anyway?" Lucy Gray asks for the first time that entire week, realizing he's never even once said since proposing the outing at all.

Coriolanus peers out the window, already spotting the sculpted column exteriors of the many stage and concert halls ahead down the street. He smiles like he's holding onto a secret.

"We're almost there."

The vehicle passes several venues with that 'old-fashioned' look Lucy Gray can vaguely remember spotting only several times in her life. Back when the Covey were still free-roaming. These bear high roofs and majestic façades straight out of one of those history books she often liked to borrow from the library to flip through. Not so much for the reading, but more so for the old pictures of all the places little Lucy girl might visit in her imagination. And here, the Capitol can build as many of them as it wants. She isn't sure how good a substitute these urban imitations are, but they look more magnificent than anything that's ever existed in Twelve.

Finally, the car begins to slow as it comes upon the sidewalk where the bustling steps beyond it lead to several grand double doors ahead. Lucy Gray's eyes follow the fluted alabaster pillars upward to the gothic engravings emblazoned across the stonework of the high entablature above, designating the place as the 'Capitol Performing Arts Hall.'

Flanking each of the tall glass windows lining the building's exterior, there are massive hanging banners bearing captured images of dancers in their dynamic stances, all donned in colorful costumes across such a spectrum only the Covey could fully appreciate.

"'Rhythms of Panem'..." she slowly reads across their boldly flourished headings.

When the car seems to have pulled off to the curb, she wonders if they're to be getting off where they've stopped here. Coriolanus remains patiently seated across from her, so she waits along with him. Surely, there is some apparent procedure here that she doesn't know, so she continues to stare out the window at the stream of pedestrians passing by.

There are ones mingling around the front entrance who must be other patrons there for this show. Seeing all the formal finery the crowds have donned themselves in, part of her begins to think if she's come a bit underdressed by comparison. All those other ladies in their sculpted updos, their eclectic coats of wool and fur and all the trimmings, their long evening gowns, looking every bit the patricians that they are.

Her gaze drifts back down on herself. Her loose hair at her shoulders, to the diaphanous weight of her skirts, all the way down to the one pair of only a handful of flat-heeled shoes she could find for herself to wear that night. Nothing so conservative could be all that fancy, but they'd been the softest of them, lined in a sort of comfort that felt almost perfectly shaped for a pair of feet that had only ever known hand-me-downs with well-worn mileage on them. Natural beige in color with simple little jeweled clasps and satin bows adorned at the ankles, they'd caught her eye without fighting the soft hues of her chosen dress.

"You do look very nice tonight, Lucy Gray," Coriolanus says, bringing her attention back before it wanders too far down that hole, dragging down all the delight she started this evening with.

It's hard enough when you're already so out of place and far from everything you know. But the smile he offers convinces her that he means it, and that's enough to make her feel okay in her own skin here. And really, that's all that actually matters. She knows it's strange, even irrational feeling this way at all, but she hasn't been surrounded by so many eyes and whatever thoughts hiding behind them like this in so long.

Between her returning smile and the thoughts she's got for something nice to say back, they're interrupted by the face suddenly looming into view only inches away from pressing into the car window. Lucy Gray nearly recoils at how close the woman is, all glitz and gaudiness with her neon rimmed sunglasses, her frilly, many-hued hair, and the long, sparkled nails running along her own face as she stares into the window without seeming to be seeing anything or anyone on the other side of it. And that, perhaps, makes all this even more bizarre to her. More so than the fact that the woman's got shades on in the middle of the evening. Or the funny faces she's making, tilting her face, shaping her brightly colored lips this way and that...

A grin forms on Lucy Gray's lips as she shifts her eyes awkwardly from the window to the man across from her, as if he might have an explanation for what they're seeing, but all he offers is the same exact perplexed look of amusement she's got.

Coriolanus shakes his head, trying to contain his laughter once he realizes. "They're...tinted windows," he whispers to answer her confusion.

With a self-absorbed pucker of her lips, the woman pulls out her lipstick and begins to retrace them.

...Oh.

Goodness, what a show.

Right, now that she thinks back, she'd been taken by how pristine and shiny the polished glass surfaces of the vehicle looked when she'd been ushered inside. Lucy Gray begins to catch on to what is going on, biting back the rumbles threatening to burst through her own lips as she does her best to contain herself.

"I know the outsides were practically like mirrors...but she really can't see us in here?" she asks between giggles, baffled without the understanding of how that could possibly be when they had a clear, unobscured view of everything from inside.

Pressing his lips thin, Coriolanus shakes his head just as he spots one of his security agents approaching from one of the escort vehicles ahead. Right on cue.

"Step away from the vehicle, ma'am," the agent is heard instructing in his approach.

The near-perfect sound insulation within the cabin muffles the voices quite a bit, especially by the time the agent has the woman hauled off by the arm.

"—I'm fixing my face here! Can't you give a girl a minute?!"

The woman's voice picks up suddenly in a shrill even as she's pulled away. Lucy Gray starts to really crack in the middle of their exchanged glances. The confrontation is reduced to more muffled grumblings as they watch the flailing woman getting into the agent's face before she has a government badge flashed back into hers, silencing her just long enough to lift those shades, squinting between it and the car. Only by this point does she seem to stop her tantrum, but not without turning on her tall heels with a dramatic flip of her head and a bird on her finger as she stomps away down the sidewalk.

"...Yeah, well fuck you, too!" the obscenity rings unhampered in the least even through all that insulation.

Even the young president can't hide the morbid amusement he finds out of such a scene. "...At least you don't look like that."

His wry remark seems to be the last thing to finally bust through that dam holding back her laughter, and he can't help but join in with her.

"Don't be mean, now. Eclectic people are what makes the world a little more colorful," she sings.

"If that's what you want to call it."

"Who would have thought...?" she begins musing as she works the giggles out of her system. "Folks like that seem to exist anywhere, don't they?"

Bemused by what she means, Coriolanus' gaze turns.

"What, you don't remember? Had plenty like her down at the Hob most nights."

There is a fleeting fondness in how she recalls these scenes to mind. It'd always been such a show, seeing them from the vantage point of their stage. People never think that they notice, that they're not watching their audience back because they're busy performing. But from that stage, she gets to see everything. Every one of those eyes staring back. All the ears listening in time with their playing. Which of those hearts are open or not.

She remembers each of the nights she spotted her boy there in the crowds with the rest. Flashing him a smile between lyrics, watching to see if he'd caught it.

'This one's for you, Coryo.'

She'd think sometimes while singing a word, a line somewhere.

Most times, he'd wear that hazy looking expression on his face, somewhere on the spectrum between bored and amused. Watching more than listening, probably. And it'd take so much in her not to laugh at that poor stiff, barely getting himself bobbing along in his seat in the back, with the rest of the hall rowdy and riled up all around him. He probably thinks she's never noticed. When a boy is trying like that, how could she not? But she knows at least his heart was always there.

She knows because he was always looking at her the way he is now from that seat just a hand's reach across from her.

The door opens for them, with one of their escorts standing by to usher them out. "Apologies for that, sir. And for the wait. But they're ready for you now," the agent says.

"Not a problem at all," the President answers with leisure, stepping out from the car.

Lucy Gray moves to follow behind him, pausing at the agent's gloved hand being offered to her. Having been tossed in and out of trucks and trains her entire life, this gesture is something she's still getting used to.

"Thank you, kindly," she tells the man. Years between her and the last stranger she's spoken to won't ever make her forget her manners.

Staring up those stone steps to the grand entrance, she's hardly begun up the first one before Coriolanus' voice beckons her attention from afar.

"Lucy Gray—" he calls. Heading down another direction elsewhere, he nods for her to follow. "This way."

There is a curiosity she sees across the passing gazes watching this well-dressed young man and his retinue pass by. Coriolanus Snow hasn't held his seat long enough to yet earn the immediate recognition of the populace that the late President Ravinstill commanded, it would seem. Plastered on every screen and poster, she'd been conditioned since childhood to remember the face of that man without ever really knowing him. To remember that within his voice and image embodied absolute authority, that the only thing that mattered was to know that he alone ruled over all their lives.

She supposes that's what the young President Snow will become to all those back home. To everyone else in the other districts. Even the ones roaming the Capitol streets freely here will be made to know this once he has become immortalized as his predecessors were. For now, there is some small comfort she takes in knowing that none of those gazes present seem all that concerned with the scrawny girl following along in this man's shadow.

'Who?' they'd probably be asking.

The frail looking one with the messy hair and the homely dress, with the poorly veiled, funny walk.

'Oh. Must be some Avox or something,' they'd probably be thinking. Hardly anything that resembles a companion to him, surely.

Behind the venue where no public wanderer lingers in sight, Lucy Gray is about to ask where they're heading until she spots a discreet door opening up for them right past the loading dock. The panel beside it reads 'STAGE DOOR,' and beyond it is a brightly lit foyer that looks far too utilitarian to be a place where any guests are ordinarily received.

A posh looking gentleman in a pewter silk suit stands waiting inside. "Welcome, Mr. President..." he greets, palms pressed with a bow of the head. "We are so honored to have you here for our opening show and gala."

"Thank you for the invitation. I apologize for my late response," Coriolanus graciously smiles. He doesn't need to know that his decision to come had only been an afterthought. That his letter had been ignored until he'd needed to figure out where to take Lucy Gray on such short notice.

The man offers a gratuitous laugh. "Not a worry at all, sir. You're a busy man. I'm only glad you've found time to step away from your duties to enjoy yourself, even if for a bit."

His assurances echo the overwrought flourishes of showmen in the likes of Lucky Flickerman, that grate Coriolanus just enough to dissuade him out of engaging more than he needs to with the man.

"In any case, I have your badges here for the patron tour before the top of show tonight," he beams, gesturing for an assistant to distribute them.

Lucy Gray reads the little card suspended on the lanyard before putting it on, designating them as 'VIP Guests.' Coriolanus, on the other hand, merely tucks his away into some breast pocket. His casual disregard about it reserves some expectation of their hosts to know, without needing to be told, exactly who he is.

The pewter-suited man's prattling becomes a muffle to her ears as she shuffles along in whatever direction they're drifting in her peripheral. There's some small group of other, even more extravagantly dressed guests they join up with, none of whom hold her attention over the movements that beckon her sights farther down another hall. By the time they've all flocked around the actual guest of honor among them, there's hardly anything stopping the wanderlust in her feet taking her off where her eyes and ears lead. Like a little theater ghost, she simply slips away unseen. It isn't like she isn't already used to that, having haunted her quiet woods for five years.

A theater ghost.

She smiles to herself at the little musing. There's some spooky story there somewhere that she just can't quite recall.

In the winding halls, it feels like passing through the insides of a machine made up of smaller, moving parts. She sees all those singleminded technicians clad in full black, coming and going, all stuck on their tracks. Eyes either down on their notes or forward where they're going. Even a blip of color like her seems to go unnoticed among them, all simply passing around her like the flow of water drops in a stream parting for the rocks and brambles that fall into it, all completely undisturbed. They all seem as uniform as the President and his entourage, and she's just odd enough out to be marked as an other, but without all the grandeur to be drawing any eyes. Funny how easy it is to just slip through the cracks floating through.

Perks of being a ghost, she supposes.

Somewhere to the right, there's a huge door opening out to pitch black, where the static scratches of radios and the voices calling over them funnel to her ears. Ghost girls can't help but steal peeks of the darkest nooks around, so she pokes her head through. The dark only extends a few steps in before the line of bright overhead lights cuts across it through the rows of curtains hanging there. She realizes then that this cavern she's staring out into is the entire stage.

Tiptoeing between the towering set pieces and the crew making their checks, Lucy Gray slips past what looks like a projection screen at the back, spanning twice as big as what she remembers they had for those old movie nights back in Twelve. Following it up to where it's suspended from the maze of riggings and lines above, she brings her hand over her eyes to shield them against those blinding spotlights even higher up, shifting colors in cue with those buzzing radio voices calling them.

Her eyes trace their trails beaming down onto the stage. Follows them with her steps, bringing her out to the front and center. It's so much more than the Hob. Even more than that inflated soundstage they all got corralled onto for those televised interviews for the Games. The sheer magnitude of this stage, the hall it stands before—it humbles all of it.

And there, she stands with the star's-eye view that she almost even forgets when she hasn't had anything to play, not even a soul to sing for in so long. But how easily she can call it all back with just the close of the eyes in this space. She remembers that day she went out there. When Coryo had urged her to sing her heart out to those people. All those faces who filled those seats only for wanting to know which horse to bet on. She'd been the longshot that won over all those wagers that day. What wonders, too. Even managed to make good on it all, earning them their winnings with all she was worth.

And how much was that, anyway?

It'd never felt like much.

Not to them.

The smile pales on Lucy Gray's lips. Before it starts tasting too bitter, she swallows it all back down again and wills those eyes back open when she can't bear those memories in her head anymore. Those projections start to dissipate from her retinas until those colorful lights in front of her do the rest. She isn't on that soundstage. There are no cameras around. There is no audience.

Just this grand, empty hall. Its suspended crystal lattice chandeliers and sculpted glass hanging from the high rotunda ceiling. The pale, painted scenery that covers that dome above, all of something vaguely pastoral that everyone knows doesn't exist anywhere in the urban realm of the Capitol.

Her ears start picking out some new sounds close by. Plucking strings, whistling winds, and tooting horns. In front of her—or rather, below—in the pit before the stage, she spots the sparse few musicians among the mostly empty music stands. Some of the instruments they've got are sorts even the Covey have never seen, all getting tuned and warmed-up on while they're talking over their notes. Doesn't matter how fanciful or humble; what the Covey do with theirs is all the same as here, it looks. She's glad to know that a musician's a musician no matter where they're from.

How she wishes the others could all see this, too. The space, the scale of it all. What it'd sound like to fill a house like this with their music. She loved the Hob, but that hall might as well be a shack compared to this. There must be more than a thousand seats in front of her, filling the floor aisles and two more balcony levels overhead. How do the ones so far away even hear anything?

'Curtains coming down. House opening,' she hears a voice calling out to the stage.

Like automatons, all the bodies floating nearby clear away behind a marked line at their feet, so she does as they do. The sound of smooth rails moving overhead draws her eyes, and she follows it, watching as the heavy wall of velvet drops, sending a breeze from its perfect stop whispering right past her skirts.

The distant sounds of doors opening follow as the humming sea of voices streaming in gradually fills the air. She leaves her daydreams here on this stage before moving on. Crosses over to the opposite end from where she'd come and on through the door beyond it.

Wherever she finds herself next seems to honeycomb out into even more doors and alcoves in a way that makes her lose her sense of direction. The geometry here is mystifying—how a building so perfectly symmetrical on the outside manages to hide what looks like nonsensical catacombs within, hardly at all like the other half of this place she's just walked through.

For all its peculiarities, this does look like the more populated half, where Lucy Gray starts to see what must be the performers roaming these halls right beside the production crew. The ones who aren't bustling about line the corridor walls in their warm-ups, stretching in all manners of amazing contortions, limbs articulated to the very digits. With listening devices buried in their ears, they look lost in their own bubble worlds, reminding her of the way she'd always sat alone, playing and humming her tunes to herself between the Covey's shows.

Somewhere along the way, there's a couple that catches her eye, getting her to crane her head while rubber-necking it around a corner. The way their arms are holding each other's reminds her of the casuals on the Hob's dance floor during some of their concerts. Except there's more of a polish to them. A precision. Something that's a lot more refined, fit for presenting to some kind of audience. They move with it even then, without any around to be watching. It's something in the way they're swaying around and into each other that makes her think she's seeing a pair of mirrors there. Responding to and from, somehow even overlapping in places. They're not even moving in their feet where they're standing, but they're clearly dancing to something in their heads.

Part of her wishes she had the chance to do that. Even just once back in Twelve. Just once with her boy. But with her gimp walking the way it is now...

That's a lot of work just to embarrass himself.

But maybe it'll be enough to get to watch, then. She's always been the one playing, the one making the music for the rest to dance to. It feels nice to be on this side of it for once. Being the audience. Being the one who gets to feel what the ones giving their hearts out are sharing. See the kinds of stories they're offering.

Lucy Gray really starts to wonder about the ones behind what she sees after the next turn. Sashes adorned with bells, sequined tunics, skirts of heavy accordion pleats that almost seem to unfurl like an entire tapestry piece. There are racks in the halls teeming with multitudes of garments in an array of colors, composed in styles that she thinks only exist in the worlds of the old storybooks she's flipped through as a child.

At the very end of these rows are ones that tell of something familiar. Something about the brightly contrasted hues of the vests and skirts hanging on that last rack. Lucy Gray smiles.

They're harvest festival colors.

The same kinds all the girls back in Twelve wore every season. She knows that embroidery work on those trims that decorate the hems and panels of the skirts. The kinds of patterns they fill out on the fronts of those laced-up bodices, each bearing a unique floral motif that's got her thinking back on all their mamas and aunties, all at work stitching away those hot summer afternoons before the harvest season hit.

She remembers the little dress she'd long outgrown that her own mama worked on one summer. One she realizes she hasn't seen again ever since she'd been gone. And all those same wasted summer afternoons that stubborn little Lucy girl decided to spend in the meadows playing and singing, never paying close enough attention all those times Mama tried to show her how she'd made those stitches.

They'd all lost their mamas so young. She'd missed out on all of it, and neither she nor Barb Azure ever learned enough to know their way around a needle beyond a simple mending job. Lucy Gray couldn't remember any of those sewing lessons, but she remembered things like how it felt to be in her warm embrace. How it felt for her voice to help ease any hurt she ever felt, inside and out. She'd wear her mama's own dress like her arms and sing her songs like she was right there to hear her.

When she looks closer at these dresses, she starts to see some differences between them and the ones in her memory. The textiles are something heavier. Finer, too, like silk or velvet, when theirs were made from the repurposed linen and cotton scraps they had on hand. Even the needlework looks rich and dense. In a way that looks too heavy and clean to have been done by hand like what their mamas and aunties made. Her fingers reach for the embroidery, curious to know how that satiny sheen on those threads might feel like, too.

"—You're welcome to look, but please don't touch the costumes, miss," a firm but disinterested voice stops her.

She's startled enough to snatch her hand back like she's been scolded around open fire, whispering a quick apology as she steps back, "Sorry." Offers an innocent little smile along with it. The woman looks to be part of the crew from the same, full blacks she's got on. A quick glimpse of the badge pinned to her apron tells her that she's one of the dressers for the show. With a modest nod to excuse herself, Lucy Gray discreetly slips out of sight around the corner just behind the rack.

"Hate these patron tours. Don't get paid enough to babysit..." the dresser utters to herself. After finishing with her checks, she briskly wheels the entire rack of costumes away with her, none the wiser to the insidious little hand sneaking from around that corner, defiling those forbidden garments in her care.

Lucy Gray giggles to herself with the satisfaction of an accomplished heist. She remembers something else Mama had taught her about those threads. The motifs they make up on their harvest dresses all tell the story of where they come from. She wonders, then, from where in Panem ones as finely sewn as those might hail.

As she treads on, something soft beneath her sole halts her pace. She lifts her good foot away to reveal a bright, red ornament fixed to a clip of some kind. Taking it into her palm, its crumpled petals unfurling back into its natural shape remind her of the rose Coriolanus had given her earlier that evening. There is nothing in sight, no costumes or the bodies that wear them, that this little flower accessory could possibly belong to. But peering further down the hall, there is a single room by a stairwell she spots. It seems too remotely tucked away to be one of the many dressing rooms, but the door is just open enough to reveal someone inside.

Upon closer approach, another figure comes into view, stationed at the stairwell, standing at attention, back turned. The unmistakable heavy vestments and drab field colors of a Peacekeeper's uniform are enough to make Lucy Gray's blood run cold in her veins. The sight of a loaded rifle at the soldier's ready stops her breaths along with her steps before she even reaches the end of the corridor. The steps there only descend down to a lower level. What could possibly be important enough to be guarding down there?

Or dangerous enough?

Here? At a theater full of artists getting ready to put on a show?

But then she remembers that shootout at the Hob, too. The one that ended with Mayfair and Billy Taupe dead at their feet.

No...not tonight. We're not there anymore, Lucy girl. That's not what this is.

She shakes the memory from her thoughts and turns her sights back to the halfway open door across the hall in front of her. Beside it is a panel that reads 'PRINCIPAL — A. Vasina,' which she presumes is who is sitting inside, getting prepped. The woman is visible enough through the mirror in front of her to tell that she's got dark, perfectly outlined eyes and even darker, raven-black hair, cleanly parted down the center and pulled tightly into a coif low at her neck. One of the artists busies with fixing a tall, fan-shaped comb into it, while the other is painting a deep rouge to her lips and cheeks.

There is something unspeakably solemn about her beauty. How she keeps her eyes low, and her expression worn like a decorated porcelain mask. It bears a semblance of something that Lucy Gray feels so closely. So innately. Like it's an entirely different world from the rest here that resonates from that room, from this little hidden corner. The presence of the Peacekeeper so close by only rouses that sense of obscurity. Of surveillance. Of oppression.

Lucy Gray can't take her eyes away. They stare in search of what about her is so compelling. The thing that tells without being said. The wordless wave of the hand she gives when dismissing the two artists. The melancholy in her, even when she is granted her solitude. The weariness, even beneath the brilliance they've painted onto her. The kind that makes her feel so far away and someplace cold. Like she doesn't belong, but she's here because there is nowhere else for her to be.

What Lucy Gray glimpses in her reaches her heart and takes hold. Its touch just as cold as that woman's façade, and yet it burns so deep into her, simply because she knows.

She knows exactly how she feels.

She sees herself there in that room in front of that mirror.

Who is this woman? Her name?

'A. Vasina,' Lucy Gray reminds herself, committing the letters of that panel to memory. Her eyes blink away from it before turning back through the door to that mirror again, only to catch the woman's sight in that briefest moment their gazes coincide. And for that marginal second, she thinks she sees her dark gaze shift then. Like the ice has completely melted away into the fire that swallows it the moment she catches her eyes stealing that glance into her private world. Like she's seen something that was never permitted for an outsider's eyes to glimpse.

"—Excuse me. Are you with the tour group, miss?"

Lucy Gray whirls around. Makes sure to shape that smile back to those lips with all the pleasantries she can craft for the voice calling from behind her. "Yes, ma'am. I sure am," she chirps, brandishing her VIP badge with a playful flourish.

It's one of the production assistants come to fetch her, she supposes. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

"Ah, wonderful. Everyone is heading to the lounge now that the house is open for seating, if you would follow me back to the group."

"Sure thing," she beams gratuitously almost by instinct. She's learned to play up the innocence whenever she's caught in the middle of something she shouldn't be doing. Usually helps to smooth things over a little, even if it doesn't always work. Not that it appears to matter too much here. She doesn't seem to be in any sort of trouble from the looks of it.

Though part of her amuses at how priceless it would be to know that Coriolanus Snow might be having a complete shit fit right now with her wandering off to god-knows-where.

"Just curious..." Lucy gray muses, following in the woman's steps. "What's the story behind that Peacekeeper all by his lonesome there?" she asks unassumingly, nodding back down towards the stairwell at the end of the hall.

"Oh..." The production assistant pauses at the unexpected question. "Well, the dressing rooms for the district cast are down on the lower level there, you see."

She halts mid-stride at the mention of this.

"...District cast?" she asks, turning her gaze. Something in her jaw clenches, but she keeps on cradling that smile. "We can't go meet them?"

And it's this that leaves the assistant completely baffled at a loss. For a moment, the woman has to search her thoughts for how to even answer before she decides the young lady here must simply have a strange sense of humor about her. That weird accent of hers doesn't help either, having her second-guessing for a moment if she'd just been one of the quirkier performers trying to pull one over her or something.

"Security is always a precaution with them, of course," she laughs off for the offhanded joke it's got to be. "You've seen the Games...how their kind can be like..." The woman says this in the sort of hesitant whisper reserved for things too abhorrent to be heard aloud.

"...That's a funny thought," Lucy Gray hums, her smile starting to feel as heavy and hard as stone. "They're performing out there along with everyone else, aren't they?"

To this, the woman only shrugs at the sound point being made. "Well, our production has its protocols. There haven't been any incidents so far."

"'Don't fix what ain't broke'…right?"

The woman finds herself needing to think about this lady's peculiar vernacular, but she smiles once she finds the sensibility in what's being said. "Yes, exactly that."

In less than five minutes, the production assistant covers what felt like almost half an hour of Lucy Gray's wandering through those labyrinthine halls. The last of the doors opens out to the bustling, brightly decorated lobby, where she sees Coriolanus standing in wait alone, presumably for her.

"Hey there, beautiful."

He turns at the sound of her greeting and smiles. A good sign. He isn't crabby or annoyed, at least. "Where have you been off to?" he asks, even seeming to be more amused than at all concerned by her sudden return.

"Just a bit of exploring. Never been in a proper performance hall like this before. The Hob, even that television stage where we did all those interviews had nothing on this place," she beams, turning her eyes upward to the high ceilings above, sparkling with the lit chandeliers. "It's like a whole hive here. With all the busy working bees on the move, doing what they do." Her musings recall the odd little bit of trivia she remembers between their wine and pastels. She wonders who the 'queen' in the middle of it all is intended to be here.

"Did you see everything you wanted to see?"

The question tempers her smile again, however earnest it may be. "Saw plenty of new things I never knew."

"I'm glad," Coriolanus says, pleased.

While being ushered along to their seats, she glimpses the tacit nod he directs elsewhere across the room. A simple peripheral glance brings to her attention one of his suited escort guards, clandestine presence kept while standing recessed against the walls. It only dawns on her now—she's probably been in his sights the entire time. And either this one's far better at his job than the ones always shadowing her at the estate, or she's been too absorbed with these innerworkings around her to notice.

You're slipping, Lucy girl. Hardly some weeks back at feeling comfortable, and already getting soft in the senses.

If these had been the woods, those wild critters would have had her snatched up unawares.

But it also explains Coriolanus' easy mood. Should she be all that surprised? Those walls around her won't disappear just because they're someplace else. This is all still his world. The walls are there everywhere he goes.

Passing all the auditorium doors, she wonders where they're to be watching the show if it's not where everyone else is. A small stairwell in another hidden alcove takes them up a level, where a uniformed usher silently greets the President before opening the last set of doors at the top. Beyond them is a posh looking waiting room bearing an opulence that echoes that of the Presidential Manor's many chambers. Lucy Gray hardly has a moment to appreciate any of it, catching up to Coriolanus's strides toward the drawn curtains at the opposite end that takes them out into a private box overlooking the entire house.

"Kind of wished we were down there on the floor," she remarks quietly, a bit disappointed by the view, being so high up. "Nothing beats the sound of the music hitting you in the face front and center," she laughs halfheartedly. Those were always the best spots in the Hob for anyone coming to their shows, after all.

"These are the most coveted seats in the whole hall, Lucy Gray," he says, leaving no question of the consummate luxury in their accommodations. "It's not just the privacy it offers. You have the entire waiting room to yourself," he nods back through the curtains. "Rest if you want. The screens inside will offer coverage of the show. You won't miss a thing even if you leave your seat."

A novel thought and a convenience, surely. But she'd prefer being as close to the show as possible. Along with everything he's pointed out, she spots the suited escorts, too, stationed at the doors. Their stealth continues to surprise her at every corner she suddenly catches sight of them, nearly invisible in the backdrop of everywhere they've gone through.

"Guess it's nice that those fellas can enjoy the show, too," she remarks, offering them a polite smile. The most she gets out of the men are sparse nods of acknowledgement before returning to stoic, unmoving sculptures.

That she even bothers at all to spare such a thought so offhanded for his guards brings an amused curl to his lips. Beside him, she's still settling into her seat, bearing a child's gaze still roaming all across the hall with the inaugural novelty of any first experience.

"There's really nothing like the energy from the crowd, you know...?" she murmurs, staring down at the people filing into their seats in the closest rows. Theirs might be the most coveted in the house, but it's those that she wishes she could swap with at that moment. "Performers love seeing and feeling it. And whatever they get, they give it all back extra."

"Do you miss it? Being down there?"

She knows just how close he's whispering this to her ear when that lingering rosy scent of his is wafting past her senses like that.

"With the people...?"

"On the stage."

He's got his blue eyes fixed on her, and she can see in them that he's asking this in earnest. But she needs to give it some thought. She hasn't sung for anyone, hasn't played a single note of anything in more than five years now.

The music? Sure. She misses all of it.

But she looks down at that stage again, thinks back on that brief moment she'd stood at its center. Closing her eyes and reliving everything that came with it. Something about it just feels so far away. Feels cold. All it leaves her is the melancholy that sits heavy in the pit of her insides.

Why did this feel so familiar so suddenly?

Her thoughts then find their way back to the raven-haired woman seated in front of her mirror in that room.

She parts her lips without an answer behind them, and Coriolanus can see this. He nearly frowns at the hesitation that is so unlike her, so apparent there in her drifting gaze.

He'd glimpsed it then, too. When she accepted his rose earlier that evening.

Before any thought forms on their breaths, the lights overhead begin to dim, extinguishing them along with the rest of the residual murmurs in the hall. From the silence, the orchestra's tuning swells to fill that air, furnishing every bit of the void with its harmony as it collects all the room's great anticipation across its sound.

The suspended note of each interweaving instrument lulls Lucy Gray's eyes shut, reminding her ears of their own Covey voices. Of the mockingjay flocks that kept her company out in the wilds. She's glad, at least, for how far-reaching the sound is, making it all the way up to their little box so removed from the rest below. The impeccable acoustics of this hall might just be enough to make up for their poor vantage point.

The swell of applause following as the maestro takes to his podium coaxes her eyes open again, bringing her back to the hall, back to her seat right beside Coriolanus, where she finds herself smiling for the simple joy of hearing live music for the first time again in far too long. She watches as he directs his musicians with the flourish of his baton, drawing a quiet and somber sounding melody on the strings.

The show begins its opening set with a pair of performers emerging on the stage, opposite to each other. Lucy Gray recognizes them as the couple she'd seen practicing in the halls before. The man, now in a perfectly tailored suit, and the woman, in a beautifully shimmering gown to her ankles. Within the opening bars, they come to meet at the center, taking each other's arms in the familiar hold she'd seen earlier. This time, they take flight across that stage together, gliding in unison to what she thinks is a waltz from the sound of it, but much slower, and more romantic and melancholic than ones she's usually heard. She has never seen partners dance like this, effortless in their steps, floating and falling like feathers on a current in their spins and turns.

She can't help but wonder how Coriolanus must be feeling seeing this when she has to remind herself to blink every so often. She wonders if she'll see the same look that boy had, sitting far in the back, watching his girl's performances. A quick glance shows a man with a more focused attention than she recognizes in her memory from the stage. Maybe he's just got keener eyes for observing what he's watching than he ever did in his ears for listening. She spots him smiling to himself in approval, with something specific on his mind. When the set finishes, he simply joins the hall with his reserved applause and that quiet sort of appreciation she remembers of him, watching the couple elegantly turn out for their bows.

Arms outstretched. A deep bend of the legs. A lowered head and a smile.

Lucy Gray remembers doing the same on that stage, on the day of the Reaping. She had no applause then. Except for those watching who'd been eager to be entertained by the slaughter of just some other district waif. It takes her a moment to remember her courtesies and clap for the ones who'd just given their hearts to them. Every honest artist deserves that much at the very least.

It's a stream of them that follows for the rest of the show. Duets to full ensembles. The aesthetics shifting in movement, sound and color with each number. Different tones, different stories being told from all the different places not a single person in that hall can claim to have ever been.

The ones she gets really into are when the dancers are making the music along with the orchestra. From the bells worn on their ankles to the tiny cymbals on their fingers. There's one where they've even got swords and shields, clashing in sparks with each strike while spinning in tandem to the frenzied tempo of the orchestra. And the ones that really have the whole hall set off in a storm of cheers are the dancers with the lightning steps in their clicking shoes. A whole line of them in formations, adding a whole percussive layer to the accompaniment, just between that stage floor and their feet that altogether make sounds like rushing water against the rocks.

Getting the entire house in an uproar, clapping and cheering at the end of their number, Lucy Gray does what they do at the Hob and lets out a wailing whistle that pierces above the noise even higher than the piccolos in that orchestra. She even manages to draw a few surprised looks from below, along with the one right next to her.

"I take it this was your favorite so far?" he asks, grinning in amusement that such a loud sound had come out of the lungs of some slip of a girl.

"We've still got the rest of the show left, don't we?" she laughs. "Let's see if anything tops it."

Part of her also wonders about the district folk who are supposed to be in this. It's not like they've made a point of saying a thing about it. Everyone on that stage commands it the same as the next. So what difference was there? That entire ensemble taking their bows? The ones who've got everyone hooting like this—what a wonder it would be if they were all district.

Well...they cheered for you, too, Lucy girl. Once.

It goes black before a spotlight illuminates a darkened end of the stage where a lone guitarist sits, appearing as if he'd simply fazed in from the shadows. Lucy Gray straightens in her chair, watching his fingers for the sounds they're about to make.

His strumming begins gradually and muted—a controlled style, clean and precise in a way she's never heard before. The orchestra stays silent, leaving the space of the entire hall reserved for just his instrument alone. His prelude goes on for nearly a minute before the sound of hard heels begin to tap back in response, unseen. The heads below turn in a wave toward the opposite end of the stage where it reverberates from, but no one emerges.

Both guitar and taps continue to exchange lines, building in their dialogue until it grows quiet again, leaving the whole room in anticipation in the interval. It is then that a new rhythm picks up, slow and steady as it gains in volume, signaling the dancer's approach. The heavy curtains in the wings reveal a beautiful, raven-haired woman in a long dress of deep, flaming red in rows of gathered, ruffled lace down the train trailing behind her every step. Draped over her arms is a black fringed shawl, swishing with her every flourish. In a dramatic sweep, she kicks her skirt by the heel without missing a single note in her step, catching it in her grasp mid-spin as she gathers it at her hip, stopping her phrase with a challenge in her pose, staring down the player opposite of her.

So precise her movements are, even the smallest of her gestures project across the full distance, filled with feeling, enough for all eyes to glimpse the shifting lights twinkling against the thousands of faceted stones shimmering across the body of her gown. She looks like moving fire itself, even within the cadences of her stillness.

Unlike the other performances, Lucy Gray watches the woman more than she listens to the music that plays with her. Watches all the emotion she bears in her hands, her feet, her lines and her expression. And as the tempo picks up, so too does the intensity of her heels against that stage. That porcelain mask she remembers seeing before is all but splintered beneath the flames she summons with her vocalization, like a roar from the bowels of her very spirit, filling every corner of that entire hall. What her eyes glimpse shocks her then, chills her as deeply as the woman's burning heart scorches. She sees when the woman parts her lips to let out her voice that she is missing her tongue.

She's an Avox...

And in that moment, Lucy Gray realizes what she's seeing. There is rage and resentment channeled into her movements. Her cry, a call to arms. Her lines, like a challenge, brandishing a sword and shield crueler than those wielded by the dancing soldiers from before. Where the entire hall thinks of her as little more than a spectacle, Lucy Gray sees the huntress in the room, ready to slaughter her enthralled prey with eyes boring into each and every one of their faces she stares out into.

She sees them all.

A vantage point that Lucy Gray herself remembers all too well. The woman in red commands the stage like a lioness who gives no heed to the cage around her, who stalks without regard to the collar bound around her neck, who looks to kill as soon as she finds her opening.

But Lucy Gray sees her. Sees all of that color in her.

Defiance red.

Pain red.

Anger red.

And the audience roars in their ovation for it all. Not a single one knowing what it is they're applauding. The woman in red rises from her final pose. Shawl impeccably hung about her arms, hardly disturbed from all her motions. Even the manner in which she kicks her skirts from her heels is done with indomitable elegance. Her painted porcelain mask reforms as she gives her steely bow, a shallow curtsy and lowering of her head. She bears an aloof hauteur in how she regards her audience that they all seem to believe is simply part of a character the dancer plays, no different from the rest.

Lucy Gray sits still in her awe.

Coriolanus only notices her quietness after finishing with his own respectful claps. He watches her steady breaths. Her focused, lowered gaze. The pensiveness that lingers in her even after the performers have left the stage. It leaves him curious about what sentiments might dwell with her in that moment. It is then when a vibrant voice that is all too familiar rings out, interrupting his thoughts as it reels his attention back to the show.

"Greetings, everybody—ladies and gents alike. My, what a full house we've got tonight!"

The man in the pewter suit stands center stage with a microphone and a spotlight shining down on him.

"I am Lysander Dalis," he introduces himself with the exuberance natural to all showmen, "folks call me Mr. Sander for short, your producer of this whole production you've all been watching here...that I hope you've all been enjoying?"

The house responds in a whirlwind of applause and calls of appreciation.

"Well...sure sounds like it," the man quips, earning a few laughs. "Before our last sets on to the finale, I wanted to step out just for tonight for a quick word to all our patrons out there. Thank you all for bringing yourselves and all your energy and enthusiasm to this opening night—trust me, those dancers needed it," he jests to some more amused chuckles. "But truly, thank you all for your continuous support of the arts. Without you, we wouldn't be running these shows for fifty-something years and counting to this day!" he pauses as their cheers and hollers pick up again. "Thank you, from the bottom of all our hearts. Thank you all."

With a press of his palms, the man offers a bow of the head in humble gratitude to the audience before him. He waits patiently until their clapping subsides once more before continuing.

"And...I would also like to thank a special guest who is here with us tonight. An honored one, who has graciously chosen our house here, of all places, to spend his special day—" the producer announces, directing his gaze up at one of the private boxes above. With a gesture of his hand, a second light beams down on the man seated there.

Lucy Gray nearly gasps at the thousand eyes suddenly turning up toward them. Sinking backwards into her seat, she turns to Coriolanus as he rises from his chair, bearing all his natural-born charisma in that public smile of his, giving his people a silent nod and a wave of the hand in greeting.

"—President Coriolanus Snow...on behalf of the Rhythms of Panem family—the greatest of birthday wishes to you! Thank you for joining us tonight."

Shifting like a wave with its crest and undertow, the astonished murmurs in the room graduate into gratuitous applause for the young, golden man in question. Lucy Gray listens to it all, watches from her place in the shadows just to the side of him. Even as he's settled back into his seat and that spotlight leaves their little box, that wave hardly slows. Hardly wanes. And then it makes sense why they're seated here. A whole realm above the masses. Someplace so high up that ivory tower that the ones down there can only marvel from a world away.

He's right at home up here.

She isn't so sure that she belongs.

"Your birthday...?" Lucy Gray softly utters to him. "Coryo...why didn't you say anything?"

The entire course of that week starts to make more sense to her. Those extra free nights visiting. All the cakes he's been getting when she knows he doesn't even care all that much for sweets.

"I wanted today to be for you to enjoy what you wanted to do," he answers simply. Like nothing else was of any consequence next to that.

There's that feeling she hates, welling up inside again. The same one that ate away at her, knowing how much that boy all those years ago gave up of what little he had for himself, just for her.

"You could've chosen any other day of the year. This is your special day."

She's never felt comfortable being the reason for others getting deprived of what's theirs.

Coriolanus turns to her, looking as though it were beyond obvious why. "When else would I have found the time?"

The crowds begin stirring in excitement again with the producer's closing words.

"...All right, I think I've held the show up long enough. You all just want to see the rest of this and go on home already, don't you?"

Lucy Gray takes his unadorned smile for what it is. Watching as he turns his attention back to the show, she quietly follows.

"Let's go, then, maestro—make 'em play faster. They're getting bored," the pewter-suited man jokes to the conductor, waving out to the audience before taking his exit from the stage. "Enjoy the rest of the show, everybody!"

---

After finishing his rounds among the few noteworthy patricians present at the gala, the young President Snow makes his way back to his table, where his awaiting companion sits.

"What's that you've got there?" Coriolanus asks, eyeing the little thing Lucy Gray is fiddling with in her hands.

She pauses in thought before a smile lights her face. He's in the middle of polishing off the drink he's got when she turns to him, fingering around the lapels of his jacket.

"Felt like you were missing something all night..." she muses to herself. "There. Happy birthday, beautiful."

He looks down to see a little red flower pin clipped to the welt of his breast pocket before turning to her with a raised brow.

"Sorry. I've got nothing else on such short notice," she laughs softly. Seeing his confusion still lingering in that look he's giving her, another one follows. "It's just a souvenir from the show. Got it while I was wandering around backstage earlier."

"...You took this?"

Her eyes turn dirty at the insinuation dripping from his tone. "I found it."

"You can't just go swiping things—"

"—Picked it off from the floor. No harm done," she cuts him off before his smart mouth lectures her any further on the ethics of 'finders, keepers.' "Not like anything was burning down because of it. Don't be such a stiff, Mr. President," she scoffs in a tease.

There's a playbill set out on all their tables that Lucy Gray starts flipping through. Full page spreads are given to each set from the show, followed by lists of the cast members featured. There's fewer named there than she recalls actually seeing on that stage. Her careful perusal finds that those uncredited are only given a passing 'additional district ensemble' in small text at the bottom of the pages. Nothing else in it is particularly interesting until she reaches the spreads depicting the woman in red.

'The Firedancer.'

That's all she's given in her heading. Not even dignified with the simple acknowledgement of a name.

"...Annia Vasina. She's got the makings of a star if I'd ever seen one."

Lucy Gray lifts her gaze to see the producer hovering by their table. It's a bit off-putting how he directs his remark almost exclusively to his 'guest of honor' there, when it's her eyeballs staring through that playbill. It's clear the man is someone used to singling out who the important ones in the room are. So much for all his sweeping egalitarian words of gratitude from before.

"Is that her name? I didn't see it anywhere in the program," she makes a point of asking.

"Well, that's because she's technically an Avox," the man says rather plainly. Like that's supposed to be the obvious explanation.

Coriolanus is the one who questions further on the thought, hiding his curiosity behind his wine glass. "How did an Avox end up landing a solo in your show?"

"Ah, that's a story. She's a Capitol girl, actually. Like a lot of the principals on our production, she received much of her training out in the districts from the original schools out there."

To think that there was anything a true-blooded Capitolite would ever admit the districts could do better. Lucy Gray almost can't believe what he's sharing here. And she's almost certain that it's only because it's the President who'd asked.

"Funny thing about those folks. They're simple people with simple lives, so it's no surprise how easy it is to source this kind of talent among them. It's why we have to fill our cast with some of their likes. God, what a nightmare it was trying to get their visas sorted out for this," the man continues, giving the bridge of his nose an exaggerated pinch. "No matter how much training our dancers get, sometimes there's just no comparing to the natives, you know? I mean, when they've got nothing else going on in their lives but the one thing they're good at..."

Coriolanus turns a tacit corner-gaze toward Lucy Gray as he takes another sip from his drink. It's been some time since he's last glimpsed that half smile of hers.

"And Miss Vasina? It's a damned shame. How a girl as beautiful and talented as that from such a good family got herself mixed up with some district rat. It's one thing to share the stage with them...but that's as far as the art goes," the man shrugs, telling all this like it's supposed to be some sad story, when he can hardly even hold in his own morbid delight at how delectable the very scandal of it all is. Little more than a novelty. A pitch. A gimmick.

And this Annia Vasina a mere commodity to sell it all.

"What happened to make her lose her tongue...?" Lucy gray asks, her voice dropping just beneath her breath as all her feigned levity runs dry. Seeing how the man's brow raises at her hollowed out gaze, she remembers to paint that smile pretty back onto her lips.

"...Mr. Sander?"

Throws all that condescension back into how she sings his name.

"Well, she..." He pauses, blinking with the sudden urge to curb his usual propensity for words. "...After illegally fleeing the Capitol, she was caught with that boy attempting to run south beyond the borders of District 10," he tells simply. "All for some guitar strumming farm boy who knew how to charm a girl who didn't know any better."

Coriolanus's fingers still around the stem of the glass between them. How familiar that story rings to his ears. To his very memory.

"What ended up happening to that boy?" he finds himself uttering before he even realizes, the rim of his glass pressed against his lip.

"Don't know," the man shrugs. "They probably shot him."

Just as easily as Lucy Gray.

"Dragged her back home. And after everything, she's still one of the lucky ones, really."

Just as he had been.

"She can thank her own talent and her family's influence for the basic privileges she still gets. Still gets to dance...even teach the craft. And there's plenty looking to learn. The woman isn't a master at it for nothing, after all."

Coriolanus wears his cordial charm loudly, as though to veil those thoughts within. Offers the pewter-suited man a nod of gratitude for humoring his curiosities. "The world has its way of weaving its threads and ends." His serene, unaffected smile suggests that it's a matter of little consequence in every angle observed. "Doesn't it?

"...Well put, Mr. President."

Yes. So better to dwell no more on it.

The man then sighs, chuckling to himself as though to wash away of all the distaste a disgraced woman's tragedy leaves on his tongue. "In any case, I am honored that you'd accepted my invitation to our opening, sir. I'm glad to hear of your reception of the show. Please enjoy the rest of the gala."

He is quicker to excuse himself than he'd been in his self-invitation to all his pandering. Lucy Gray is glad for it and for her unimportance in his eyes. This is one of the few rare times in her life that she is grateful for her invisibility.

---

The ride back to the manor is far quieter. Lucy Gray has almost no words this time as she stares out the window, watching the city fly past the entire drive.

Coriolanus wants to believe it's simply because she must be tired. The gala had still been ongoing by the time they'd left, only shortly after finishing their meals once he'd sensed enough her desire to leave. Not that there'd been much enticing him to stay any longer either.

"I had fun," he hears her small voice speaking across from him. He lifts his gaze to see her smiling back, realizing just how solemn he must be looking, lost in thought there, staring down at his folded hands. His expression softens itself out again at her gentle assurance, and he's made to wonder if she only says it because of what she sees.

Because he'd glimpsed that despondence in her, even if only a whisper of it, all simply at the poorly-timed mention of some Avox's tragedy. He understood it, though. And he needed her to know that tragedy was not her own. How his fingers stirred in their search for hers, obscured beneath the table they shared.

And as ever, he would stay them in favor of a mere, wordless cue in his passing gaze given. A tacit dismissal of that vexing producer and all his ungraciousness, however inadvertent.

"I'm glad," Coriolanus tells her. All he can do is mirror that smile back.

They arrive at the entrance to the manor, and he walks her all the way back to her room before retiring to his own. It isn't that garden walk she's been asking for, but it's as any good gentleman does.

Even though he doesn't expect anything more from the night, the simple 'happy birthday, Mr. President' she leaves him with at her door feels thin. Perhaps it would have meant more if given to 'Coriolanus' instead. Or better yet, just 'Coryo.'

Her Coryo.

Always the presumptuous little shit, aren't you?

Does she even think so anymore?

As he passes those doors to his room, his solitude leaves him to dwell on every word she's said that night. To dissect each and every tone and turn of her gaze. She says she had fun. Yet there is a reticence about her that's lingered from the moment he'd come to her door with that rose in hand. One that's gone as deep as the greatest height of the exuberance he's seen of her all evening. For all his observance and vigilance given to her that night...

Coriolanus goes for the fresh bottle of wine waiting for him on his bar cabinet.

...It still feels as though he's missing something.

He takes his corkscrew to it.

The illuminated numbers on his clock tell him that there is still little more than an hour left before midnight. He gathers two glasses from his stock in one hand with the open bottle in the other before retracing his steps back out through his door.

The path to the most luxurious guest room in all of the manor comes to him almost automatically now. When he finds himself standing in front of that white door for the third time that evening, he shifts in his feet a little before bringing his knuckles to its wood face.

One...two knocks.

The third comes half a beat later, something he likely barely even notices as a habit, and well before he realizes, too, that he hasn't even formulated a thought to say yet.

And yet, here he is.

The approaching steps inside are nearly indiscernible when they are dampened by the soft carpet beneath bare feet. The door opens sooner than he expects, but he collects his wits enough to smile then. To not look too hapless. Too hopeful. Too idiotic.

Just play the part of the president who knows what the fuck he's doing.

"Forgot I had this."

Lucy Gray is somewhat surprised to see him back at her door all of a sudden after they've said their goodnights. But she glances at the bottle of red he's come bearing like it's something he's just found casually lying around. She smiles at the amusement of how bored he must have been to make some excuse not to end the night yet.

"Were you about to get ready for bed?" he asks, noting how she's already changed out of her dress and into one of her robes, cosmetics already partly cleaned from her face.

"Well, that was the idea."

"Sorry."

"I'm sure you're not."

He smirks at how confident she is of this. Rightfully so.

"Having the President hovering outside your door with a bottle of wine and glasses for two..." she muses with a curl of the lips, "...it's mighty tempting to tell him to beat it 'cause a girl's tired and slam the door in his face to make a point."

This one earns him a good laugh.

"But I guess it wouldn't be a proper day's end without our usual midnight meals to top it off."

"Well...drink this time." If they're to be technical about it. "Didn't bring snacks. Sorry."

"It's all right," she smiles. It's the effort that counts. "Still working on those lavender cookies, anyhow."

"You haven't finished those yet?" This rather surprises him, as she seemed rather fond of them.

"Always taught to save up the good stuff when you have them."

For her to have found something to cherish in this world of instant gratification and excess, this rather pleases him to hear. Even for something so inconsequential. He's seen her appreciation for these small things enough times. He'll remember this for the next.

"And stop apologizing when you don't mean a lick of it, Coriolanus Snow."

He stifles down another laugh behind his thinned lips.

"Wouldn't want to be a doormat, would you?"

He raises his brows, feigning astonishment. "Me?"

"You."

Flashing her slip of a smile, she steps away from the door, pacing across the room back to her seat at the vanity. She picks up her hair brush and returns to straightening out her locks at the mirror.

"Didn't you drink enough of that stuff at the gala?" she hums.

"D1 swill," he almost scoffs as he sets everything down on her table. "I dumped most of it in the plants when no one was looking."

She glances at him through the mirror with a funny look, unsure if he's actually joking. Maybe not, by how concentrated he looks pouring their glasses at the table.

"You know, what most people don't seem to know is..." he muses, bringing his own glass to his nose, sampling his drink the same way he's seen her take in his roses. Good wine can carry just as many notes as a well-bred bloom does.

She glimpses him idly pacing about the room in the corner of her mirror as she listens. It isn't his usual habit to stand or wander around a room he enters, normally settling himself into whatever he decides to make a seat out of once he finds it.

"...District 1 wine is garbage," he says with candid distaste. "People fall for the prestige of the label because they're idiots. Thing is, One has the means and money to synthesize the process, so that's what they do."

"So where's the real stuff come from, then?" Lucy Gray asks, separating out a lock of her hair to work out the tangles.

He meets her gaze through the mirror and smiles. Someone who doesn't even drink wine couldn't care less, but he can appreciate her humoring him a little here.

"There's a small region inland from the coast of District 4. A valley. The climate there has just the right conditions for the vineyards. They still do it the same way it's been traditionally done in its history. But the wineries there are smaller. Too artisanal and not enough prominence to be selling at the prices they should."

Coriolanus takes that inaugural sip of the one he's picked out. It goes down the way he's used to. The way he expects all wines should. Like silk and velvet.

"Most people overlook its authenticity and the fact that it's far superior." He gives his glass a swirl. "All because of the presumptions that come with the labels they see." His smile is almost satirical as he stares intently into the dark liquid in his glass. "Uncanny, what the power of optics can do."

She knows this better than most probably ever will. After all, he'd been the one who made everyone believe the underdog of the 10th Hunger Games had any chance at becoming the victor. And by his own will in believing it himself, he'd made it so.

"It is kind of funny, isn't it?" Lucy Gray utters, her brush slowing as she pulls it through her locks. "You'd think people learn after getting burned once. Even twice for some."

Coriolanus raises his eyes from the deep red of his glass and steers it across the room. He searches for her again in the mirror she sits at, glimpsing in it the strange distance in her lowered gaze, brush in hand halted at the ends of her hair. There are more to her words than what is simply said. He furrows his brows with a tilt of his head, as though trying to decipher what it might be. Stirring behind his lips are his own that he doesn't quite know yet, but just as he parts them, it is her voice, as ever, that beats his thoughts to it.

"I don't know that I could tell either way, though. It all tastes the same to me," she muses on, her humor seemingly returning as she laughs to herself. "I think I liked the sweeter white stuff from earlier today, anyhow. Hope that doesn't ruffle you to hear."

When she lifts her gaze back to the framed glass in front of her, she looks as though she's searching for more than just the figure of the man floating somewhere in the backdrop of that room reflected there. Like as though the slanted angle of the mirror might just reveal something, some other side that her two eyes on their own can't discern. Like maybe seeing everything in reverse is enough to deconstruct and reengineer what's hidden underneath. Just looking for some answer he's not really giving either.

But she feels like they're still just too far away. Even the closed space of the room does nothing to bridge that distance. She remembers feeling this way across those zoo enclosure bars. Worlds away from him even when he was right within reach.

So she does what she did then, too. She smiles back from where she sits behind those bars. Behind that invisible wall.

And this time, he's unsure if it is that mask or not he's looking at. Just like an entire hall of mirrors, there are too many facets there for him to trust.

"But you know me. Always love to learn anything interesting. You're always sweet for sharing."

The words come easier than that smile she gives. Probably, it's because she really means this. When all her life, most people would write this Covey girl off as being too stupid to waste any time explaining or teaching things to. Why bother? When all she's good for is strumming that guitar and tossing those sweet words around for a good time. Charming boys who don't know any better.

Even Billy Taupe said as much.

Sure. What good was school to their music? An education, when you're only worth what your hands can do? Go out there and play. Sing. Make those coins toss your way. Don't come home 'til you've got enough of it.

Sure.

All while he gets to cozy up at the mayor's. Doing what his hands are good at. Playing whatever tickled his fancy. And all those coins he ever did manage to scrape up never did make it home either. No, he'd brought along the bottles they bought him instead. And only when he hadn't already finished them all along the way.

Twice burned.

Sometimes, she hates how long it takes her to figure it out. To finally fucking learn.

Coriolanus watches Lucy Gray return to tending her hair. The focus she gives those tresses, almost like when she's plucking at her guitar strings. Finding that feeling, that thought, that sound with something that's got her lost in her own mind. And it draws him along, too. Beckons him to lose himself somewhere away from there as well.

When she shifts in her seat to pull all of her locks over one shoulder to continue working through them, he catches the brief moment when her silken robe loosens and falls from it. She misses catching it before it's slipped away, so she quickly fumbles to pull it back over herself, only to spot his gaze through the mirror.

He blinks and immediately averts his eyes.

Something about that bitter cold he'd glimpsed in her. So exacting, so utterly abject in just the mere interval. As though accusing him. As though ashamed. Layers of all things he is certain in that single errant glance were not meant for his eyes to see. And now it has branded itself into his sights.

It is not the glimpse of her flesh that stops his breath in that moment, but the terrible, badly healed scar that leaves it disfigured. One he is certain had never existed in any memory he keeps of her. Surely, then, a trace of some injury she'd suffered in these past years?

Could it have been...?

No. Five years is a long time. It could have been any number of things.

But none of that stops him from feeling responsible. Anything and everything that has been done to her. He condemned her to those woods. Abandoned her to the mercy of whatever fate awaited her in those trees.

No...Lucy Gray was the one who fled.

She was the one who abandoned him.

The one who—

—You were the one who fired.

Coriolanus downs a long, generous gulp from his glass. Turns his attentions elsewhere. Anywhere. His eyes quietly trace the room's perimeter in desperate search for any focal point to push out and occupy his thoughts.

And why did everything need to be so damned sterile white in here? Clear, spotless, and clean for all that noise to come flooding back to his head of all fucking times.

Until something steals all that attention back. Something loud and bright like a siren driving away that cacophony. It draws his feet to drag his body across the carpet towards it. The lone red rose that stands tall among the rest.

His rose.

Tucked away with the cuttings she'd taken from his garden earlier that week. Among the unassuming yellows, creams, and purples she's gathered, the red of his rose defiantly stands out. Something about it is at odds with the rest of the blooms. The pain of being so out of place, of unbelonging. Its angry hue fighting with the rest just by being there, just sharing the water that sustains them all the same.

And yet...it's as though his perfect rose somehow has paled in its radiance here. It's strange, and he thinks it's just a trick of the eyes. The lighting. The hour. The environment. He reaches to pluck it from the vase, hardly even noticing the other body crossing the room, drawing closer to his own in its silent paces. Its presence almost like a specter looming over him, if not for its unabating warmth nestling against his skin, staying his hand.

Coriolanus doesn't need to look to feel how close she is. She's near enough for him to feel the silk of her sleeve brush over his arm. Near enough to feel the touch of her steady breaths beneath his ear. She comes near to him enough to halt him completely, inside and out. Stilling his thoughts and sensations to a crawl. He becomes like the rest of the empty furnishings here that occupy her little space.

"You don't think I noticed all the times you steal those glances from across the room...?" Lucy Gray breathes to his ear.

Her words alone are enough to send that warmth she brings burrowing deeper into his flesh.

"...From your windows, when I'm out in the garden...?"

Where his hands have stopped, she reaches her own across that distance. Walls be damned. She reaches until it finds its counterpart. Takes hold of it along with the glass half empty of its wine within his grasp. She directs their joined hands then, tilting the glass until the faint, distorted image on it warps with the shifting light from her eyes to his own against the bowed, crystalline surface.

"...In all the reflections on all the mirror surfaces throughout your shiny mansion?"

It feels like she's been seeing red all over lately. She stares at the polished liquid sloshing in that glass cup. Maybe it's a sign. Some good omen. The universe trying to tell her something.

Because good fortune has always had a soft spot for ol' Lucy girl.

That's a good one. Might've been enough to get a laugh out of her if the irony didn't sting so damned much.

There's hardly any hindrance on his part when she ushers that cup in his hand to her lips. Tilts it 'til she downs the last of its red ruby drops. He was right. Stuff goes down smoother than anything else. Like silk and velvet. Maybe it's the finery. Or the mood. Or maybe she's just feeling the color red herself then. Something dulls those inhibitions a bit, and the words that she's kept swallowing down and down again find their way back out of that pit, back up and breaking through the rubble of that veneer to the light of the surface.

"Why is it that you always look...but never touch?"

The question burns on her tongue more than any bitter drink. All those missed moments. All those times that gold dust ticked away like plain sand in the hourglass. She raises her eyes beneath her lashes. Searches for his gaze, for some sign that he knows what he needs to answer for. But the man seems intent on daring not to. She sees it in how his throat bobs just so when he swallows to still his next breath.

Lucy Gray draws nearer then, as though to chase what he's trying to quell within. Brings her face close enough to steal it all back.

No. He doesn't get to make it easy.

"How long do you mean to keep waiting, Coriolanus?"

Why are you here? This night. In this room.

It's a need to know that has begged at her conscience from the moment he'd opened her door that night, five long years after the last. She still doesn't know what he wants.

And her?

Home is all she has ever yearned for her entire life. Home is what matters most to the Covey. Home is wherever the Covey heart makes it.

Lucy Gray has asked for nothing more. Asked time and again. And all he keeps insisting is it isn't possible, like as though he isn't the lone person in all of the world who can make it possible. Like he forgets who exactly he is. What damned else is the President of Panem good for if he can't do anything he fucking wants?

He says all this like he doesn't even know it himself.

Coriolanus Snow. Without a vision. Without aspiration. Without hunger.

Imagine that.

Find out what he wants, then. Give it to him. Maybe then, we get to find Home again, Lucy girl.

He feels the words more than hears them. Her question a mere brush of the air between her lips and his skin. And that breath demands an answer out of him. Compels him.

What is it that you want, Coriolanus Snow?

The burning question that silently resonates between them. Both unequivocal yet unrealized and left unspoken.

He slowly turns to her. There's hardly even any distance to close before the glass slips from their fingers. In a single, swift motion, he's drawn her into himself as he answers with his lips in every way she beckons. He tastes the wine on her tongue, somehow more potent than what he's sampled purely from the glass itself. He drinks all of her full. Drinks her dry. Until she needs to swallow a great, surfacing breath, and—sweetness—she takes in a whole sea of that cologne that soaks every particle of him. Even with an entire bouquet of his roses right there, it holds nothing to how intoxicating his scent is.

Smelling like the color red.

How it overwhelms.

They stumble half a step, and she feels the tap of the discarded wine glass against her heel before he snakes one hand around her waist and tangles the other into her hair for purchase. She hardly even minds that he's tousled them back into the nest she's spent the last fifteen minutes brushing out exactly the way the stylist had instructed. Not while her own fingers twist into the cloth of his loosened shirt, raking trails up his chest, his neck, that clean-shaven skin of his face. Like gluttons fully submerged in their own undertow, they drink in everything that craving thirst necessitates.

And his kisses are nothing like the way she remembers. They are not the kisses of a boy with a yearning heart. His lips want.

His touch. His hands. All his fire.

Everything that has wanted her, wanted to do this. All the things only his dreams could ever permit.

Is this what you want, Coriolanus Snow?

The echoing voices go unheeded when he kisses her with such fervor that she is left breathless, parting her lips just to catch it again against the need of his own, refusing her that single drink of the air. His hands are just as starved, roaming and tracing where they embrace her like an ungentle cradle. His demand disturbs the sparse, thin layer of satin barely clinging to her slight frame beneath it, until it spills like liquid from her shoulders completely to relieve that scorching skin.

He almost forgets it then. The contortions of her maimed flesh now made bare beneath his fingertips. Its merest touch sears his own, and yet everything wills him to chase after the cleansing burn even more. Seeking the absolution in its cremation. The resurrection from its ashes. To feel as though he were made whole again by the flames. To feel the immaculate completion of his being when he holds his burning muse there in his arms to smolder away with him.

May he be forgiven by his passion.

What withering regard he can spare barely even registers any of the obstacles he bumps into between them and the bed, stumbling across the room with her in those arms. He can already feel his legs failing beneath him by the time he reaches the foot of its cushions, never so grateful as now for the wealth that bought him the comforts of its luxury when he's lain her down onto it. What is left of her garments is discarded before he rids himself of what remains of his own, and he doesn't even spare a breath as he draws her legs around his sides to settle himself between them.

How lovely her lashes look when he watches with such intent while they flutter shut. Her raking gasp that escapes her lips when he grazes his thickening cock against her sensitive flesh.

And...fuck.

He has to slow down here. Catch his breath. Settle those firing nerves. He pulls back to stroke himself a bit to take some of the edge off. By painstaking degrees of this agonizing pace, he drags his body back over her own, tracing every contour of her flesh with those slow, searing lips. Until her breath gives again the moment he catches the peak of her breast between his teeth and tongue. The breath carries along the barest whisper of her voice when his hand kneads at the other, full in his greedy palm.

Another shift of his muscle and bones and he is nearly flush against her, catching her lips once more to drink what notes they have left to utter. He is even less gentle this time in his pursuit, pushing past those lips until his tongue can taste hers. And she meets every bit of his avarice when her own dances along with it.

No...this is hardly the kiss of a mere boy.

And yet, there remains some vestige of him in his touch. That innocent way he presses his brow to hers. Lips hovering only the brush of a breath away. And for a moment, she remembers those nights passed beneath the stars. Perhaps it's the memory that brings that smile back to her lips too. That draws her hands to his face like that girl had done then. When it was only simple love and nothing else.

What she would give to go back home to that time. Hang onto it all for dear life.

It's the indelicateness of his lips against hers again that reminds her where and when she is. That they are not a boy and a girl any longer. She feels him push himself inside her. At last. Feels that stitch in his brows against her own at the labor of his effort.

Sweet hells—how wet, how tight she feels.

His breath grows ragged between his teeth when he feels her small fingers leave his face and burrow into the flesh of his chest and shoulders. He's more sinew than skin there than he once was, hardly yet grown into a man then, so they leave scores imprinted to his hewn body.

And he takes it all. He intends to do the same to her. Leave his mark. Leave her branded all over with traces of him as well.

He guides her arms to drape around his back for purchase. With a touch harsh enough to bruise, he lifts her from the bedding by the hips to meet his as he gives them that first, exacting buck, burying himself deep and full into her. And how gratifying it is for him to see her head fall back into the pillow beneath her, locks cascading over the eiderdown plush as her lips part to that ambrosial carnal sound that escapes her throat. He can already feel her legs seizing up around him, hiding the curl of his lips between more kisses to her flesh while he sets this pulse. One that demands—again, again, again, and again.

It takes but few measures more of this pace before he finds her, that deep part in her at the core, that leaves her trembling still in his arms with a soundless cry on her breath and those small, desperate fingers clenching tangled into the ends of those white-golden curls at his nape.

And god, how perfect she feels in that moment. How profanely beautiful Lucy Gray is in all his debauchery. He could love her body like this until she lies desecrated to her bones. No single doubt lingering as to whom this flesh belongs.

Is this what you wanted?

Yes.

This is everything he has wanted to do to her from the moment he'd seen her again. Living and real. With his own two eyes. Everything he held back within himself for all his touch has ever done. No good deed goes unpunished. Everything he felt and wanted for and from her was goodness. What, then, would the price have been for this?

He can't even think so far when his hands roam her skin, when he tastes her lips and drinks the last of her breaths before he drowns. And everything he gives, she takes and returns tenfold. Those small, delicate fingers that claim his skin. That impossibly small frame of hers that takes him all in, swallows him whole until he's nothing but nerves and the singleminded desire that drives them. And what breaths he thinks to steal from her unmerciful lips, she consumes all back and leaves him without anything left for that thirst in his throat other than to chase after what she's claimed. He's as good as her very own hostage there in her arms, beneath her kiss, joined at the flesh they both take so selfishly.

This is what he wanted.

Her breath at his ears stirs him on, so he drives deeper. Draws it out, drags it from her lungs. He wants to hear her voice, so he presses a kiss by her throat to beckon it, hiding a hiss behind those lips when he feels her fingers dig deeper into his skin wherever they're clinging to. He snakes an arm around her waist to draw her closer, snapping his hips harder. He wants her to feel this. Sing for it. And when the cries come, he only presses on. He needs her to come again now. Come with him. Be his and entirely his.

One more time, Lucy Gray.

He isn't even sure if that was his mind pleading or if it'd passed as a whisper across her ear, but she follows his beckoning either way. He can tell by how she coils around him like he were salvation itself. By the gods of the earth, he's taking her away with him wherever he's about to go, or dying in the fire there with her where she lies.

She doesn't let go. And he knows she never will. He can feel her there, tightening her grasp, and—fuck, how much tighter she's getting.

So...fucking close...

He drives on until he can feel it from her at last. That dying cry on her hanging breath. Her body writhing to stillness, tightening in its coils inside and out until he feels his own air escape his lungs. His own voice intermingling with hers with that final thrust he can muster before all of him surrenders. He makes his last deep and deliberate. Enough to make her feel, to make her know through and through. To leave his mark where it has always belonged.

She is his.

All his.

He leaves lingering kisses to her lips to quell those gentle whimpers, to sate his own embers before they flicker out in their dying light.

Brows still pressed, his eyes are slow to open back to the world dawning back on them, bringing everything that they've just done into his conscience. And everything starts feeling raw again. The touch of the physical realm back from the liminal space of pure feeling. He feels wet between their legs. The sweat against their skin sticky and growing unpleasant by the passing seconds. The spent exhaustion creeping into his bones. So he releases himself from her, slides out from between her legs before rolling off to lie in the space beside her.

He lets his breaths catch up before he turns back to her again. Sees that she still keeps her eyes tightly shut where she lies, unmoving. The goodness of the feeling starts to fade as the room begins to grow cold. He really doesn't know, but perhaps she feels it too. Maybe she's still stuck in that liminal world between the dream and the waking one. Maybe she doesn't want to leave it. He continues to watch her until she stirs. Until he sees any signs. Until she comes back down to the earth with him. She exhales gently, pulls her covers back over herself, and curls away from him.

Lucy Gray's eyes haven't opened to him even once.

It's too cold here to stay unclothed. The covers do nothing to help either, so he quietly rises from the bed. She doesn't stir even as he collects his garments, strewn across the floor along with hers. He puts on whatever layers he needs and grabs the rest. Before he can bring himself any further from where she lies, he looks to her still form once more. Thinks to at least say something—what? 'Thank you'? 'Goodnight'? Everything feels tactless, so he says nothing. She looks like she simply wants to sleep, so he leaves her to do so.

Crossing the room soundlessly, his fingers find the neck of the open wine bottle forgotten on the table without an afterthought. The door is just as silent on its polished hinges when he opens it. He looks back a final time to the motionless body folded away beneath the bed covers, lingers to watch for any sign at all keeping him from going.

She remains still as those voices that have already left.

Coriolanus resigns himself to a breath before bringing his hand to the switches to extinguish the lights with all the traces of his lingering presence. His departure is so quiet and swift, it's as though he were never even there.

Like nothing at all has changed.

---

The walk back to the presidential chambers isn't a long one, but the weight of his thoughts and the drink in his hand make the simple crossing of a corridor feel like a long and lost journey. The halls are left dimly lit at this hour, but he yearns for the natural night, finding it once he throws his own doors open to the barren and solitary space within.

Just as he's left it.

There's something in the company of the darkness that feels like a comfort right now. He doesn't even bother to kick off his shoes as the doors slam shut across the threshold behind him. He tosses the garments in his arms to pile where they land and lingers where he stands with his straggling mind still wandering its way back with him. Another heavy swig from the wine bottle does nothing to lead it along, but it helps fill the fractures a bit. Like a red lifeline running down the empty, parched channels. He can only wait to see what trails emerge from them. Where they lead. Where he'll end up at the end of it all.

The empty room here somehow doesn't feel as cold as the one he's just left. Maybe it's the drink warming his insides, but he wants that cold again. Wants it to fill the space and envelop him. Maybe if it gets numb enough, everything stops feeling so heavy. Everything stops eroding away. If the cold sinks deep enough, maybe he can feel the rot finally stop.

Coriolanus's legs drag him out to his balcony. The chill night air kisses away at the warmth still clinging to his skin the moment he slides open those glass doors. He basks in its embrace. The night's touch feels like solace to him. Like a salve to the burned flesh.

He shuts his eyes as he lets his head hang back to blindly face the heavens above. He knows what's up there. Those lying cosmic lights and all their treacherous prophecies and destinies.

Fuck all creation.

Could they have predicted he'd be standing where is now? Lain out his path to this very crossing from those billions of miles away? So fucking stupid.

All of it.

They take him back to the year prior. Ravinstill on his deathbed. His inner circle lined up all around him. Young Coriolanus Snow seated in the chair closest to the withered man. A mere aide of but several years, who'd risen to more than just an apprentice in his brief time. A prodigy of promise to some. An unequivocal threat in the eyes of others.

While the whole of the room looked on awaiting the man's will, Coriolanus sat quietly in his seat, idle hands folded and busy fingers shifting, head bowed and poised in patience.

"...Coriolanus Snow..."

With that labored breath, half the eyes in the room turned to the pensive young man seated in his chair.

"...I am appointing him to be my successor."

The dying man coughed at the exertion on his decayed lungs, making certain those words rang clear. There would be no question as to what his will commanded.

His fingers quelled in their stirrings. The remaining eyes that had yet to regard the young man now joined with the rest, with half the cabinet present bearing nothing short of contempt for what was taken as a slight, their seniority and the decades of loyalty that earned it, snubbed for some usurping, inexperienced pretender.

"President Ravinstill has spoken. The Peacekeeper Corps will stand behind Mr. Snow's succession of the presidency."

The words of the High Commander had been deliberate in extinguishing the flaring tension among them. It had been no secret where the man's loyalties lied, once serving at the head of District 12's Peacekeepers. Young Snow's brief service and lasting impression on the now High Commander Hoff ensured the support of the entire Corps, and his words were the unveiled declaration to these witnesses that the legitimacy of his succession would be upheld by the full power of Panem's military authority.

Coriolanus slowly raised his eyes, peering across the faces before him in the room. He noted each of them—each gesture, each turning gaze, each shifting microexpression—committing them all to memory. The borderlines between ally and enemy would be drawn that day in that very room.

Among the whispers, one voice boldly spoke then, choosing his side then and there.

"I believe our president has voiced his distinction of merit over precedence."

A scoff in the room clipped across the man's words, prompting the riposte of another.

"We are not a democracy, gentlemen. There is no 'choice.' Only that of our exalted leader's—"

"—There is always a choice."

Ravinstill's vice president never made any secret of his disdain for the young aide. More than thirty years of service as the weathered old man's second, stolen away by Crassus Snow's upstart of a boy, hardly graduated from school. None of the younger Snow's brilliance mattered to a man who had fully believed in his own entitlement to the line of succession. As far as he was concerned, this golden child had stolen what had been rightfully his from the day he'd been sworn into his office.

Coriolanus remembers the arrogance that drove his greatest rival out of that room that day. A declaration of war in his wake. The young Snow had been nothing to their likes in his father's great shadow, still lingering after he'd been bones in the ground for the better part of two decades by then. He'd have burned them to ashes if it'd done anything to vanquish that shadow, always a fucking pall over all his own hard-earned gains. Men like that now dead fool never missed any chance at reminding the younger Snow of that. And how swiftly he'd made him pay for both his petulance and the conceit of his own miscalculations. Even swifter still, how the rest had fallen in line after he and his ilk had been done away with.

He's learned to wear his youth like a cloak to mask his discerning prudence over the years. Where others yield to their presumptions for whatever shallow sense of authority, he knows to never underestimate any obstacle, no matter how slight or small. Of all lessons his time under Gaul's tutelage had instilled in him, this stands among the most enduring of them.

There are snakes everywhere.

All it requires is to cut the head off one as a warning to the rest.

And like the deranged woman's tank of those vicious fiends, he has them all under his thrall now. Their threats never cease, but they know his scent. They will stay their fangs so long as he gives them a reason to.

He commands.

He rules.

This is what he has inherited. A legacy entrusted to him to remake and reform. This is what he was chosen for. With his stubborn eyes still squeezed shut, he raises his wine bottle to his lips for another drink.

Old man had a lot of faith Crassus' kid was the one for the job.

He'd proven himself to be, hadn't he?

Right. Can't even manage to find your way with some Covey girl from Twelve.

Mountains to move. Skies to touch. A whole fucking sea to cross.

Before the red liquid makes it to his tongue, he stops. Even knowing that he's got all of Panem in his hands hardly feels enough for any of these labors. Like the matters of the world are nothing next to this.

...Nothing at all next to Lucy Gray.

His grip tightens around the neck of the bottle before he reels it back, heaving it over the rails with all his might, breaths carrying a raking howl of all his resentment and the lament that seems to forever follow. The faint splintering of glass to pavement hardly registers even with the dead sound of the hour. He doesn't even need to look down through the night's pale shroud to imagine its remains, a mere stain spilled on the cobbled pathway below.

Red.

Like blood.

And all that's missing is a body for it to belong to.

How asinine. He laughs in spite of himself, remembering the time he despaired enough to contemplate such a thing once. What a feckless imbecile that boy was. What the hell had Lucy Gray ever seen in him?

It's even a little perturbing the more he dwells, really, that a lone woman can do all this. Leave him shaken by all this doubt with so little effort. Just by existing. Without malice or enmity like those snakes all around him. All she is guilty of is bearing the heart he had given her those years ago. For the sake of his own existence, he needs hers in return. It's self-preservation. Survival. His very fate on the line.

Ah...so it comes back to this, now.

He should have known. All those channels and trails always inevitably lead his thoughts back to her, the only thing that ushers him to open his eyes at last. The faint stars overhead come into focus. So few and far in between. But their words, their voices, all their collective will rings clear as ever all the way through the cosmos to this lone man standing wide awake here beneath them.

Like some child's fairytale, it's so unfathomably stupid, and yet he wants to believe this more than anything he's ever been certain of. Because unlike the known, unlike the tangible, unlike the bottle of wine held tight in his hand, this gives him comfort.

Hope.

The night sky fills his entire field of view. Misty dapplings of pale cirrus clouds. Behind the gauzy trails, a gibbous moon near the zenith above. He doesn't remember his constellations enough to know what he sees, but he can number the few twinkling dots that the horizon of city lights can't outshine. The still image revives something buried deep in his memory, something he realizes the shadows have schemed to play keep-away with all this time. He's almost forgotten this view. The last time he's even looked at it.

Back in Twelve. With his girl in his arms beside him.

Coriolanus smiles.

Sweet and bitter, just like the voice of a songbird that comes echoing back to his ears from across the universe from another time completely.

.

.

.

'You're mine and I'm yours. It's written in the stars.'

---

Notes: To all my fellow horndogs. I hope you have been fed well. :) And happy movie drop! (I'll be getting to see it literally in a few hours, WHOO!)

I really, really do hope this chapter was worth the wait. ;A; I have been DYING to get to their first snu here, BUT I COULDN'T RUSH IT! I didn't want it come off too sudden and forced, and I think I needed that time for the build-up. That said, I hope the pacing up to this felt okay. It's one of the things that always has me worried and hung up over posting. Ahh... .-. Also, apologies for any stupid typos or weirdness in this chapter. I tried to be thorough in the revisions, but since it's so long, I might have missed some things.

I also hope the theatrical setting wasn't too self-indulgent either, haha. I always wanted a chance to incorporate this thing I love and work so closely with (theater and dance) into something I'm writing, and something about this sort of setting felt like it could work as an interesting backdrop to Lucy Gray's own reflections on things?

I also wanted to mention a source of huge inspiration for this chapter—the title, along with the character of Annia Vasina came from 'Firedance', a flamenco number from the show Riverdance, which I got to see earlier this year. The dancer who performed at our show was just amazing and left SUCH an impression, and to this day, I still think about it. I only hope I did her some justice, channeling a bit of what I could remember for this!

As always, thank you everyone SO much for continuing to read along and for the wonderful and encouraging comments left so far! I'm swamped with a lot of work projects coming up at the end of the year, but I'll try my best to get the next chapter out without too long a delay!

11-18-23