¿ // family blitz.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

change .

Babe's gloved hands are in your hair, sticky and stained, and for a moment your smile falls in your reflection.

In these whisper-moments, you expect to hear sound. The crinkle of plastic gloves. The squelch of dye leaving a squeezed bottle. The rush of water in a sink. Babe's laughter.

But then you're disappointed for half a second, noise left to your imagination or memory or a strange mix of both. It's hard to tell what is real and what is fiction, if a song's lyrics match the tune plucked out on guitar strings years ago or if they're the wrong tempo.

You catch movement in the mirror and your eyes prick up, the corners of your mouth following suit as Mo peers around the bathroom door. "Come in," you beckon to your friend.

"Babe's changing my hair."

Your hands flow where your hair used to, now curled up in a brown mop atop your head, and grin like a child in the mirror.

table by elegant.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

b a b e .

When Terra had asked Babe to help her dye her hair he'd said of course. Except the last time he'd dyed his hair, he and Tera Seraphim had been drinking those shitty little 4% canned mimosas all afternoon and he'd ran his fingers through his own strands real fucking clumsy.

Now he's standing here, Terra sitting on an upside down bucket, bleach-covered gloves on his hands and a cigarette hanging off his lips with the bathroom window wide open for the fumes. Terra grins at him in the mirror and Babe grins back, making sure to speak slow, signing out District Nine ASL crudely as he goes, "If it looks like shit, just remember, you asked for this."

But it's not going to look like shit. Terra's too gorgeous for anything to look like shit on her.

Babe runs his fingers through long strands and pulls a clip off his shirt to twist it up with the rest of her hair. If you'd have asked Babe three years back if this is what he thought he'd be doing three years on from winning, he wouldn't have thought this.

But it's good, he's grateful for it.

"Mo, good fuckin' timing," he says as the District Five Victor pokes his head around the door, "I'll give you blonde spikes, it's all the rage right now."

[lance]

m o h a m e d .

"you are weak
but not foolish
you have learned
how to die."

Babe's place has long since been the home away from home for you, regardless as to what sort of circumstances might take place. There's a certain kinship born of shared trauma, and whenever you find yourself yearning for Five or of the many surrogates that took your family's place in the years following the war, there's never been a problem that a visit over couldn't fix.

Two years on, and you still have nightmares born of butchered animals and eviscerated comrades in arms. But two years on, you've gained much as well - an entire lifetime you thought you'd pass on to your younger brother, a sense of purpose worthy of your family's sacrifice, and a new family as well. Without Babe Adroxis and Terra Montague, well...

You don't like to think about what ifs, these days.

Today, when you enter, there seems to be a deal more commotion coming from the bathroom than usual, and the silent prayer you utter in hopes of avoiding walking in on an image that all the bleach in the world couldn't scrub from your brain goes, mercifully, answered, even if at first you're not quite sure what to make of the picture itself - Terra, her hair a different shade from normal, and Babe, hands gloved, cigarette alight, the source?

Confusion is replaced by curiosity, and cautiously you snake your body around the corner and into the room, gaze focused Terra's newly dyed locks. The old Mohamed would have recoiled at such a preposition, but, well, that version of you had died in the dirt along with twenty three other unfortunate kids.

And besides, if there were two people that you trusted wholeheartedly with your second chance at life, it'd be these two.

"Sounds fun," you grin, only wincing slightly at the voice crack that these days accompanies every other sentence you speak, hands moving along in practiced tandem with your voice for Terra's sake. "I've always wanted to cosplay a Capitolite."

But teasing aside, you can't help but find your heart beating faster at the prospect of something so new and foreign.

elegant

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

unease .

It's in these unsure moments that you feel the most fragile.

Fun, the word catches in the mirror. Always, Capitolite. And it might be a crime, you think, for the world not to allow you to hear the voices of those you hold closest to her heart. But you're already forgetting what Lachlan's voice sounded like, and it is enough punishment to last a lifetime. Perhaps it's also a blessing that you will not have to forget the sounds of Mo and Babe.

Perhaps, but the silence is still frustrating.

"Sorry," your voice feels soft in your throat. Guilty, almost. "You've always wanted to what a Capitolite?"

You tilt your head in the mirror regardless, picturing him with streaks of yellow atop his head and the dark in yours once it's dry. "We'll trade!" you offer up a grin, pointing from your own head to his.

Relief, looking in the mirror and knowing you'll look less like her. Cordelia Blake is, according to officials, still chained up to an endless drip of anesthesia, but the thought of her and all her wild still makes you a little nervous. Not that you'd ever admit it, but you know your match when you see one. Now you want to put as much resemblance between yourself and that girl as possible - even if it means changing your hair on a whim.

And then a twitch, index finger prodding the sticky mop of hair that sits atop your scalp.

"Babe? Is it supposed to sting?"

table by elegant.