Chapter 2: The Girl From Twelve
He paces his steps as he passes through the threshold of the mansion. Traces along the wood grains of the banister that lines the curving, carpeted stairwell, in search of patience. Once he faces down the long corridor of the residential suites, he tries then, to measure each stride with such purpose in his endeavor to curb the anticipation that draws him like an invocation. Because he knows what awaits at its end. There is a foreboding that shadows his every footfall, like advancing on the morbid pageantry of an exhumation. He loses count before finding himself standing before the doorway that separates him from what he has waited so long to unearth.
Before his fingertips make contact with the bronze handle, he draws to a pause. His eyes blink, and in an instant, the four walls transform. The lighting turns. There is a hum of urban cacophony in the air and a chill carried along the breezeway draft that sweeps by. He looks down, and the perfect finish of his cordovan shoes turns into collective layers of scuff and wear. The leather dull and folded, despite the countless hours he's taken to polish and refine them, knowing the money earned between his odd jobs and what Tigris can manage to scrape up can't afford a new pair even after four years. He can only be grateful he'd grown into himself quicker than most other boys.
He stands alone in the Capitol Central Station for her with but a single gift in hand. Gift? No, there is nothing in his hand right now. That's right…he'd nearly forgotten if not for his last second detour to his greenhouse upon his return, having been so distracted by the matters of the state dinner.
—No, he did not need to renegotiate the weapons contract for the upcoming fiscal year.
—No, they were not going to divert a portion of the budget for next year's games to invest in transportation. (Just where in Panem were these parasites looking to vacation off to?)
—No, he didn't need another damn refill on their 'finest' D1 Estates Vintage Red.
It is his cousin's old words from so long ago that resound above all this, conjured back along with the high, hollowed out archways of that terminal. When he's just graced an entire banquet bearing offerings of promised bonds and dealings to the table, the thought of coming to this meeting empty-handed almost shames him. Waiting the worse part of five years with nothing to offer? Nothing to show? At best, it was a blemish to his pride as a master of the long game played. But his thoughts bring him back into the shoes of that boy again—some kid who was told he'd be mentor to this raggedy, half-deranged girl from Twelve. Standing there in the empty train station, haplessly out of place, clean cut and with nothing but a stolen rose in his hand.
That boy's thoughts come to mind then as well—how would he come off? Too formal? Too contrived? Who was this dumb kid trying to impress among a stock of dirty urchins from the districts? All sacrificial lambs destined for the slaughter.
His gaze drops to his feet again, blinks, and he is back in his finery. He looks up and around, and he is surrounded by the white and gold resplendence of his gains. His home. His world. Everything within these walls, beneath this ceiling is his.
Coriolanus finds himself in a distant stare at the molded alabaster woodwork of the door before him. A grand thing for a chamber meant only for a guest. What of this one then? The one who'd eluded him? It is the man's thoughts that consider this now. With nothing other than the cool, metal scrollwork of the door handle in his grasp.
Unlike that boy, he will not linger and wait this time. He proceeds to see for himself. He needs to see with his own eyes.
Against his sweltering touch, the handle feels like hard stone. Though it gives with surprisingly little impediment as the door loosens almost soundlessly on its hinges before he pushes through.
Perhaps he should have knocked first, the thought occurs.
It comes a bit too late when he peers in, catching the barest breath escaping his guest as she turns her head in a start toward the open door. This seems enough to halt her to a sudden standstill once their gazes coincide. With the stagnant motions, so, too, do the sound waves and their penetrating silence deafen the confines of this room. The space begins to feel too narrow, the air too thin, all while the still perpetuating seconds traverse it all, unchanged between two sentinels awaiting the other's opening step.
It's strange. It's neither apprehension nor unease, as he expected to feel. A bit of ambivalence, perhaps. Turned curiosity. At least until he's finally laid his eyes on her in this postbellum waiting game. Five years, and she still possessed that uncanny ability to embody such candor beneath that inscrutable guise. That simplicity that veiled an entire bastion of incongruous dissymmetry. Her mere presence left dissonant ripples in her wake. As ever, in complete odds with the order of his pristinely constructed walls.
A provocation.
Some things are never meant to change, it appears.
Her name would have filled the barren expanse between them, but it never quite escapes his breath. Instead, he merely stands there, his listless hands moving to push the door shut behind him with the leisure of an unconscious thought.
For the moment, they are poised like mirrors in infinite reflection into one another—words, thoughts, sentiments unsaid and unexpressed over the crawling seconds of a meeting so unlikely. So improbable. So fated.
The silent parting of his lips to the microscopic withering of her brows.
The tiniest stirring of her fingers at her sides to the shrinking of his habitually proud frame.
They continue to undo by the stitches at the seams, and it is like a pursuit to see who it is who unravels first.
He begins to form his lips with words he doesn't even know yet, but it is her who moves first, tearing her eyes away as she turns from the lone square table for two in the middle of the room. Her hastened steps lead her toward the opposite end, away from where he stands.
There is something he notes in her hurried gait that is unfamiliar. And she might have disguised it well enough if she hadn't dropped her composure so swiftly in that moment—the merest limp he spots in the right side of her strides. His thoughts linger with a trace of lament for what casualty could have befallen her in all this time to cause this, but before he can infer more, she comes to a stop at the vanity against the far wall. From the back of its seat, she snatches the light satin robe draped there and tosses it over herself.
Of the selection of garments his attendants had arranged for his privileged guest, she'd chosen the sensible one for that evening—the simpler cotton nightgown. It doesn't escape him that she appears to have already prepared herself for bed before his arrival. (Was she really not expecting him to pay this visit?)
No…she probably doesn't even care.
The thought of her indifference needles him even more than her indignation. Surely, there is something entirely her own that she means to bring to this meeting. Though perhaps not. The shameless little snake. Slither back and sleep sound in all his offered comforts. She'd always been this way, though, hadn't she? It should come as no surprise. And he is the one, after all, who offers it all willingly even still.
Which is the fool, then?
With the fresh garments provided to her, he cannot imagine it is the cold she means to protect herself from. But she goes on to tuck the laps of the robe tightly over herself like her armor, arms crossed like a safeguard shielding herself ever further away. Even the position she takes, standing perpendicular to his line of sight, is as though she means to do anything and everything possible to keep her distance. To retreat. To hide when there is nothing, no place that offers any such refuge. Not here. Not within his walls.
Coriolanus presses his lips thin at this. She has always been good at that. Hiding. But he has found her all the same, in full spite of her talent and will. It would seem the odds had been ever in his favor this time. It is his turn to make his steps then, crossing the room in measured strides to match her own as he loosens the tie around his collar. He stops at the table she'd left and tosses his dinner jacket over the nearest chair. Makes himself comfortable, more relaxed. An overture that is perhaps inoffensive enough to calm the nerves amplifying the emptiness of the space between them.
"Have a seat, Lucy Gray," he says calmly to her. It isn't an order, but his intent completely eludes his tones.
She doesn't move from where she hugs the far wall, shifting without any seeming regard to her own discomfort from one foot to the next (that she favors the left hardly escapes his notice).
"I'm fine standing. Thank you," she answers with the same, precarious courtesy born in her poise.
Her first words after all this time, and it's a damned lie if he ever heard one.
The man lets his gaze scrutinize her for anything her gestures might reveal, but finds nothing more. He adjusts himself then, sitting backward over the edge of the small table with little effort for his height as he draws the chair she'd refused closer to rest a leg on. With an elbow propped over his bent knee, he settles into casual repose, hands loosely folded in front of him, personifying little of the genteel president known to all of Panem, and more of the self-assured, audacious boy who mentored that storied girl from Twelve.
But she has long grown from that girl. Hard years in her self-exile taught her the caution she once held too little of. Learning just too little, too late to be wary of that Capitol boy. (Or any boy, really.) And yet, old habits die hard. Seems all it takes is talking to another human again to remember how it feels to be reckless.
No…it's not that. Not quite. Maybe it's something else she's thinking of. Some other feeling she can't quite place.
In either case, Lucy Gray seems to observe whatever that is in the man before her. Her restless stirring begins to settle a bit, no longer searching for focus everywhere else in the room other than the one she ought to pay attention to. She swallows her nerves back down her throat then, now that they've begun talking. Somewhat. Though the ice hardly feels broken here.
"I was told to bathe and given a change of clothes. Said I was in no right state to be greeting the President of Panem," she informs with some air of pretense. Almost coquettish, even. But mostly sarcastic. And yet the lyrical charm of her cadence is all too pleasantly familiar to the ears. The same way a fond, but forgotten tune resurfaces to tickle at one's nostalgia. "Well, here you are. Damned for keeping a girl waiting," she tries to jest, if only to salvage some small shred of her own composure.
This is but another stage, she tries to remind herself. Though it's been long enough to feel its obscurity trickle between her fingers, she invokes enough from those years. The guise is her refuge when there is no other. Her mask is her shelter. The camouflage she crafts with her own small hands, that offers her some safe place to hide.
Somehow, it would be this guise that manages to draw a fondness across the lips of the man before her. It's like as if he simply knew. Like he'd seen this before.
She feels like an idiot for forgetting.
Somehow, his smile, too, unravels her shroud just a bit. Right. Infinite mirrors and all.
"Are you going to tell me why I'm here…?" she dares to ask at last, voice down to a near whisper.
"Speaking of waiting… How long has it been now?" he muses with a breath of ease in his tones. Familiar. Like the voice of a friend. It comes with such ease that he doesn't even seem aware of his deflection here.
"Which games is it this year?" she quips back. There's an edge to her response. No, he doesn't get to make this easy.
A bitter stillness overtakes his expression at this. The 15th Hunger Games had only passed just prior to his inauguration. Surely, she knows. But the longer he trains his eyes on her countenance, the more he realizes she doesn't actually appear to.
Lucy Gray only offers a dismissive shrug to answer his bewildered gaze, arms still tightly cradling herself as she lowers her own away again. "Not like I had a radio where I was living. Let alone television."
The thought hollows Coriolanus out a bit. Yes, it was reported that she was found well beyond the northern borders of District 12, completely alone. It was a wonder she hadn't wandered any further. More like a stroke of luck, really. He thinks he'd have lost her entirely had she trekked beyond that. Maybe, he thinks, she might have even made it to the grounds of District 13. Surely, she hadn't made contact…no, he is certain she hadn't. He knows next to nothing about the insurgent district, other than the fact that it survives is Panem's greatest kept secret. If she had made it, she would never have left. They would never have let her leave. That is the accord by which the two nations exist—one does not infringe upon the domains of the other.
The distance shows in his hanging gaze as the memory of that day returns to mind. His fingers begin to weave across themselves. "It must have been hell," he speaks softly, "being out there all on your own like that."
The condolence in his voice almost gives her pause. Almost fools her into thinking he might actually be sorry. All the lightness and amusement washes from her then. How dare he? Her lips tighten as something cold begins to well within her. "And who's fault was that, Coryo?" she asks with a tremble in her breath.
He's spent longer than she knows dwelling on that very question. He'd even expected it of her, thinking of this meeting. And yet, his mind stalls at hearing it aloud, no matter how much he's reasoned, ruminated, and tried so damned hard to resolve. Replaying all the possible pathways at each corner, frame by frame. No matter how many versions of it he's conceived of, it all led to the same conclusion. Not that any of the thoughts even mattered. The consequences still remain.
It stares him in the face at that very moment.
How many times have such untempered thoughts sought to overrun him? The incessant call of those shadows to join them in the deep? His first instinct is to cull them. Those thoughts. Those phantoms. He has no need of their voices when none even offer the vindication he seeks. It's a funny thing; he's never had a hard time justifying any of his means to any end. Somehow, it's different when it all stands bare before him. When he's made to look her in the face and quantify all that he's done.
"You look like you want to say something," she speaks for him. "But you still haven't answered my question. Why am I here?"
And it all falls short. All of it.
But he understands it's not excuses she's looking for. To his memory, she had never been one to dwell. Though neither is he, and look at where they are now.
Damned ghosts.
The honest truth is that he doesn't even quite know himself. He had no expectations, no plans. Not when it came to Lucy Gray Baird. He knew better than to hold expectations around her. He embarked on this search out of a need. To have his questions answered. To have his doubts silenced. To have his ghosts buried. And yet it would be this one's refusal to stay at rest that would upend the order he had forged for himself. Order was the only refuge that stood against the past. And as ever, it would be Lucy Gray Baird who would topple it all to the earth left scorched in the trail of her steps.
No, she never was among the ghosts to begin with. She had been alive this entire time. Despite all that had been unforeseeable even to his far-reaching sights, what relief he'd felt at simply knowing this. Something released its hold inside him the moment that report came, as he sat in his greenhouse among Grandma'am's roses.
He parts his lips on a thought. Finds his words. He needs to decide then and there.
"…I'd like for you to stay, Lucy Gray."
Her silence lingers. What else had she expected from this 'invitation'? Back to the Capitol. Back to the heart of Panem where she'd been made into a spectacle—his winner, the victor, the girl from Twelve. All the things that ran her life off all the courses possible, that brought her into the wilderness and the void and back.
"If I declined?" Her voice is brittle glass. Something inside her knows it's a futile thought, but she presents it anyway like a precious offering. One she knows is unwanted.
His gaze doesn't even waver at this. Of course it was to be expected after all the shit he's pulled. He doesn't mean to coerce her into anything, but he reminds her of her real choices here. "You have nowhere else to go, Lucy Gray. Unless you forgot why you left Twelve to begin with. You know there's no home for you to go back to."
"I got along just fine in my little cabin in the woods." She means for those words to spite him and his Capitol.
"You know you can't go back there. Deserters lose their tongues. Condemned to lifelong servitude as penance." Somehow, he doesn't think that deters her as much as it should.
"Not if you turn a blind eye." she suggests, her voice just a trace too feeble to be swearing anybody to her secrets. Not that there's even any incentive a ghost girl with nothing to her name could offer for it. She feels her eyes dampening as the door she'd come back through begins to shut right in front of her. "You owe me that much, Coriolanus." It comes out more a plea than an appeal. She doesn't intend for it to, but it's also her last means of convincing him.
The sight of her tears bends him, but he has resolved not to yield to them here. This is in her best interest. He can't let her go now. Not ever again.
"That's out of the question, Lucy Gray."
Had he even been willing, what would that say of Panem's allowances? Its borders are an iron curtain. He will not part them for one thousand, let alone a lone one. Not even (and especially not) for Lucy Gray Baird.
"Make yourself comfortable as you see fit." Settling on this, he rises from his makeshift seat on the table's edge, descending in a mere half-step to his feet as he clinically proceeds to straighten out his shirt. "Whatever you need, I'll see provided within reason."
Lucy Gray eyes him while he gathers his garments piled over the nearby chair. That was it, then? His word, decided. She throws her arms down at her sides once that welling cold spills past its walls, a full deluge from a place as small as it is deep. "So I really don't have any choice here, do I?" she protests, voice rising and shaken. "Why? Why do you want me here now?"
He remains with his back half turned to her as he folds his jacket back up. It is when he pats it down neatly over his arm when he feels the form of the soft clump tucked away in the left breast pocket. Right, he'd very nearly forgotten the gift he'd brought along with him.
There is recompense that is owed. Perhaps he might start with this.
Coriolanus reaches into the fine, silken lining between the folds for the delicate thing inside. He doesn't need to be too careful with his probing fingers, reminded by the fine wounds that are still tender on his hand from the prior day. Their traces are like a tapestry on his skin, woven and telling. He'd taken care to cut away the thorns this time.
"What I said to you all those years ago still stands. I'll do my best to take care of you." A reminder—perhaps to himself as well—as he twists the gentle token between his fingers, inspecting the little treasured thing for any flaws overlooked. Detail rarely escapes his scrutiny, but he would be remiss to bestow anything less than immaculate.
The abhorrent, angry tears begin to wet her vision. She scrapes them from her face with the sleeves of her robe so harshly that even the exquisite satin leaves her eyes raw. She can't bring herself to believe his words. It isn't the first time she's been given false promises. And it would not be the first time she received one from him. She remembers just as well as the rest of his ghosts do.
Between the final meeting of their parting gazes, he discerns the retreat in her fortitude. There is something wretched about seeing the radiance of that wild girl, who once deigned to pluck apart his gift right from his hands, now dulled over the bygone years. He treads no further then, reaching only as far as the table beside him, resigning first with but his simple peace offering lain there for her.
Sometimes, the dead are easier to face than those that still cling to the living world.
For all his convictions and intuition, it is Coriolanus Snow's doubt which guides his steps this time. The doubt which ushers him to spare not even a single glance as it steers him back around towards the door. The doubt which moves him to take his leave and withdraw. That sees him relinquish too soon to take notice of the subdued gaze she leaves in his wake. The pause in her breath when it glimpses what he'd left behind.
The door shuts soundlessly in his departure, and Lucy Gray is alone again. He leaves her as swiftly as he'd come.
Nothing has changed.
The only trace of him that lingers is the pure white rose lain at the center of that lone square table for two.
Notes: Thank you to everyone taking the time to read this! I really hope those who stick around will continue to enjoy the read. I'm rather slow with updates once work/life stuff picks up, which I apologize for in advance. But there's so much I have in store for this dump, haha.
And a huuuge thank you to Rachele, for all the time and effort and love you've put in to help with revisions and just being a second pair of eyes for all the proofreading (and just generally listening to all my ramblings, LOL.) I enlist your aid in keeping me accountable for staying on top of this story, too, LOLLL... Please set me on fire as needed to make this happen. (MAKE KATNISS PROOOOUUD!) XD
Much love to all!
6/5/23