the ways of beasts — eurydice. & emmett. [jb]

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

Every year, there’s a small and covert ritual Eurydice does to prepare for the reaping.

First, jewelry, because a woman needs to embellish her natural beauty: four rings on her left hand and one on her right, the golden heirloom necklace wrapped around her pale throat. In her vanity, the pearl earrings hanging from her lobes look like droplets of molten gold. Second, clothes—because damn, if she’s going to walk one of her children to their victory, or early funeral, she’d very much rather look majestic, thank you very much. Today, it’s a silken gold dress, because it’s always gold. This, in a way, is what it’s meant to be a Le Roux: encased by gold and bronze, grand like a handcrafted statue deemed untouchable in a museum. It does get tiring sometimes, the splashes of grandeur, but Eurydice would never confess to that. She could not.

And third.

Third, shutting her feelings off. It’s less concrete than all the two things from earlier; it doesn’t have much of a method, doesn’t have much of a blueprint to follow. It’s Eurydice resting the gilt family photo album on her lap and scrolling through it, tracing the faces of her all children there, engraving their features into her skull. It’s Eurydice reminding herself that they are a pride, made for grandeur that’s only achievable through blood.

She glances at herself in the mirror and she looks like she’s dripping gold, rivulets of it down her form.

She’s ready.

The parent section of the reaping reeks. It’s sweaty wanna-be aristocrats and the real aristocrats, wrestling to get a view of their children in the field. Eurydice doesn’t need to worry that; her children shine, and as do John’s and Isaiah’s. Beside her, her two brothers’ features are cold stone, hewn to an expression of indifference. Eurydice rolls her eyes and crosses her arms.

Then, as the escort’s hand dips into the bowl, they all collectively hold their breaths.

The name isn’t Silk’s. It isn’t Emerson. It isn’t Aurora, and thank heavens, it isn’t Cathy. She resists the urge to exhale; she should be furious about not having a child in the contest, about not having a chance to wear the crown vicariously through them, but Eurydice finds no anger in her, only a cold relief.

Then, it’s the boys’ turn. She risks a glance at Harper, Emmett, and Tattot, her golden boys, and when the escort calls out the name, it isn’t theirs, it isn't them, it isn’t them—

“I volunteer!”

Emmett, you little fuck.

She catches herself on the railing at the last minute when her legs threaten to betray her. The world reels; she tries to blink stars away from her eyes. John puts a hand out to steady her, but she’s already clawing it away. “Do not touch me,” Eurydice snarls.

It should be an honor. John’s probably about to congratulate her. She’s won, hasn’t she? One of her children was in the games now, a quell even. Eurydice Le Roux would reign.

But, at the moment, she didn’t want a crown –
she only wanted her son back.

The walk to the justice building takes forever, but at the same time, it takes only a moment.

Inside, Eurydice tries her best to train her eyes on the trashy furniture, on the curtains, on anything that wasn’t Emmett, her little Emmett, always fractured from the rest. I am supposed to be strong, she chides herself, holding her chin up high. He needs me to look strong. Eurydice sets herself down on the lavishly-embroidered couch with what she hopes is a modicum of grace, patting away the creases on her dress. She flings an arm on the couch’s shoulder, and finally, fucking finally, she looks at him.

Her heart twists. God, she forgets how young he truly is, not having lived yet. She should’ve spent more time with him – she regrets that, now. Eurydice plays favorites and Emmett has never been hers. It’s always been Harper with his charm. It’s always been Silk, a mirror of her own self. Never quiet Emmett, never reticent Emmett.

“It should’ve been Harper,” she speaks her first words, angry all of a sudden. “You should’ve given him his goddamn chance. It's the quell, for fuck's sake!” Who does Emmett think he fucking is? He would answer Le Roux, probably, because that’s what she’s taught him and because that’s the right answer. That makes her furious. Perhaps he would have had a good life if he hasn’t been born to her, to this family pieced solely together by values and fame. 

Perhaps his life would’ve never been at stake.

“Leave this building with your chin up high and your shoulders squared.” She makes a wave of her hand, rings flashing from the movement. ”Act like I’ve told you to act your entire fucking life: proud, but not too proud. Kind, but also ruthless if the situation calls for it. Make them love you, make them fear you, make them see you.”

Eurydice feels a suspicious prickling at the back of her throat, so instead she looks at the horrendous throw pillows on the settee with a one etched upon it, scowling. “I guess taste isn’t something everyone in this godforsaken district has,” she mutters, then makes herself hold her son’s gaze. Eurydice draws closer all of a sudden, embracing him like she used to do whenever there were thunderstorms. Her fingers rake through the pale gold of his hair, one of the many things that mark them as Le Rouxes, as lions. “And don’t you cry,” she says it with a small quaver like its a warning for Emmett but the words are entirely meant for herself. “This is my most expensive dress.”

Eurydice suddenly aches for a camera, to click a picture of Emmett in a way she remembers him: red-cheeked, beautiful, regal—her golden boy. He’s always been difficult. He’s always been the one she has nearly given up on a many times because Eurydice Le Roux only knows about feral, proud creatures and Emmett is none of that. A trimmed finger brushes away a strand of blonde hair away from his forehead.

“Win, my little cub.” She whispers. “You chose to this, so now you have to go and get that goddamn crown.”

[calla]

I shouldn't be surprised when Mom is the first to visit me.

Hell, if I was in charge, I'd do the same. Because there's a certain strength to her, something chilling and magnetizing and otherworldly, something I don't think Uncle Isaiah or Uncle John has. Maybe it just came with being a mother. Maybe she had it all along.

I fiddle with the hem of my shirt and pull at a loose thread while she makes her away around the room, every second that ticks by worsening the dread building in the pit of my stomach.

She doesn't say anything about my fidgeting.

I think I'm in trouble.

Maybe she'll scream at me, a hurricane through the trees, and tell me that I had no right to embarrass her like that. Because I didn't.

I know I didn't.

That's the thing about living in that house, living with that family, I know that I don't belong. But that doesn't make it any easier. It just sort of solidifies the cement in my lungs and the water around my ankles, makes the emptiness in the air something constant.

"It should've been Harper," Is the first thing she says, and I recoil immediately, tense, ready for her to keep going until she runs out of breath or I shut down. Whichever comes first.

And maybe it's worse, because I know Harper would've been the Capitol's favourite, in the same way that he's her favourite. He would have taken the games in stride, made everyone love him, and then he would've come home with his chin still held high.

I don't say anything. Because what am I supposed to say? Sorry? Sorry for ruining your plans the way you ruined my life?

I wait for the damnation, the face of exile, a slap. Something.

Except when I look at her, my mother, the woman who raised me into something she decided she didn't want, I don't see the rejection I expected.

The breath is punched out of my lungs, from words that sound like a challenge, act like I’ve told you to act your entire fucking life, she says and my brain takes two seconds too long to catch up. Because this is Mom, and this is how she speaks to Silk and to Harper and to Emie. She challenges them, because she knows they'll challenge her right back, they'll rise to it and surpass it and make her proud. She knows what they're capable of and she lets them show her. She sees them.

If this is all it would've taken, maybe I would've volunteered sooner.

Because I think she's seeing me now, against a backdrop of lacquered wood and silver bells. She's seeing me now with blood on my hands and a knife in my stomach and maybe it's just not what she had hoped for.

She's standing suddenly, and I'm too shocked to flinch at the movement, because it feels a little like I'm standing on a precipice, and what she does next might send me over or it might pull me back. Except she takes me into her arms and I can feel my spine stiffen, iron laced through my back, until everything is crumbling down all at once and I suddenly feel eight years old again.

It feels like a flash fire, the way my arms move on their own and I'm hugging her, I'm hugging my mother.

"Don't you cry," She says, soft like I've never heard her, and I try to hold back the catch in my breathing, try to bury my face in her shoulder like I've never been able to do before.

I think I'd spend the rest of my life in this moment if I could. Because this is all I've ever wanted - to be Emmett Le Roux and not just Emmett, to be a son instead of just a boy. Maybe she'll never love me like I want to be loved, but this makes it easier to pretend. This gives me something to hold on to and play make believe with.

But it ends, like all things do. Like I might.

My hands shake behind her back. As quickly as I'm getting my family back, I'm losing them. I don't want to go anymore, I want to tell her, this is all I wanted, don't make me go, not now. But she's pulling back and my eyes are wet because it's not fair that this is being ripped away from me so soon it's not fucking fair.

Then comes “Win, my little cub.” and that's it. I can taste the saltwater trailing down my face and feel the burn behind my eyes. I can feel sixteen years worth of not being good enough grind to a halt and everything freezes.

“I will.” I tell her, and there's a tightness to my throat that I haven't felt in a long time, an opening in my chest that twists and turns and starts to mock me. Because I want to come back to this. I want to win.

“I will.”

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

As minutes trickle past them in the too-quiet room, Eurydice finds herself absently toying with the gold ring wound around her fourth finger.

She looks down at it and sees herself reflected in the aureate surface, lean and alive, two fierce eyes of a lioness staring back at her from the gold, but for a moment she’s looking beyond it, back to the moment she was first presented the worn marriage ring.

It was winter when he proposed her, with the spring thaw a few months away, and sometimes she can’t help but fathom if that winter’s ice seeped into her marriage by chance and made it the icy, stiff thing it is. On the shiny veneer, Lennon and Eurydice are the crowning glories – king and queen – his and hers. In every event they attend, they spin stories and play their role as a loving couple well, smiling when prompted by a covert joke, laughing into each other’s neck-crooks, but trust a woman when she says a marriage rivals even the most talented magician’s illusions. Trust a woman when she says ‘I married the wrong one.’

Lennon being a perfectly fine man makes it worse. It makes her feel as though she’s a woman in hysterics. Eurydice resents that fineness of him that appears as nothing but plain and dull. A woman surrounded by gold her entire life saying she’s done with the radiance, but sneering at the first dull, plain-looking man she sees — Eurydice is well aware of how two-faced that makes her. But she doesn’t make a show, because he takes well care of the children. She hides her ruthlessness and sheathes her claws, because Lennon is a good father and a husband who doesn’t stray, something every woman knows is a rarity.

But now, Eurydice knows he is both plain and a coward because here is his son on the cusp of glory or death and his father is nowhere to be found, probably crying in some corner. There is only Eurydice and as someone who’s taught her children strength, she doesn’t find any in her. There is only softness. There is a bottomless pain that she cannot articulate or show, because Eurydice Le Roux is the proud lioness, not a loving mother; because Eurydice Le Roux snarls when talked back to and slaps when provoked; because Eurydice Le Roux is never kind.

Still, there sits her beautiful cub, so golden and young-faced with fresh tears welling in his eyes it reminds her of all those stormy nights where she held him and Emmett to her chest as it thundered, and he is about to be taken away from her.

Every ring on Eurydice’s hands flash when she clasps them around Emmett’s fidgeting hands.

“I wasn’t kind to you,” she speaks, and is taken back by the rawness of her own tone, the rasp of tears it carries. Eurydice swallows everything down before reattempting it. “I wasn’t kind to anyone of you because kindness is not what the world offers – it only knows ruthlessness, it only knows hierarchies, it only know who reigns at the top and who rots at the bottom.” Her hold around his hands tauten; her eyes on him are lambent and fierce. “That’s what we do as Le Rouxes; we reign and we rule. That’s what you’re going to do in that godforsaken arena.”

Reign and rule.

If Eurydice pictures it hard enough, she could see how the golden crown would rest on his small head, wreathed by his equally golden hair. He is a prince from all these stories she’d begrudgingly read to them near their beds. He is her son, with all the expectations she’d handed to him surpassed. But all the grandeur of that pales when she muses about the blood his maw will be stained with now. She is a mother, gazing as her son become monstrous.

The hunger that gleams in Emmett’s eyes –
that is all hers. 

God, what have I done. 

Eurydice whirls away, her golden dress bursting into a thousand dots of bronze light when the sunlight catches it. She rests her hands on the windowsill in an effort to steady herself once more. “It was supposed to be Harper,” she says, and it’s unsure if it’s a thought spoken aloud or if it’s meant for Emmett. She’s unsure herself. “Do you why I named you and your sister Emmett and Emerson?” Eurydice lets out a laugh; there’s no kindness or humor in it, only a hurt. “‘E’ names, because of my own name. Because god, I had twins, the most beautiful twi—” Her shoulder-blades tense up then as she gnashes her teeth and holds back a sob. Don’t fucking cry, the lioness in her chides. Cry, the mother in her pleads.

She doesn’t let the tears fall.

“I’ll talk to Ridley, make sure there are adequate sponsorships. God knows that girl owes us.” There’s a bitterness to the way she says her name. Ridley Le Roux was never meant to get out alive, but here she is, beloved victor. Eurydice tears away from the window and makes for the door in a maelstrom of gold, all without sparing Emmett a glance. But she doesn’t have it in her to not give her beautiful boy a final, parting look.

“Aurora’s going to be overjoyed to have her own damn room, now,” the smile that graces her mouth is rueful, “when you come back, they’re going to build a castle for you.”

And only when she's out of the room,
does she let the tears fall.