The Fog // [Wolf Tears]

[Sunrise Rainier D2 // [Thundy]]

Colgate O'Leary, Victor, District Nine

There was still an ache in his right hand, just beyond the knuckle of his pointer finger. It was paired with a heaviness in his chest, a faint tension behind his eyelids, and the realization that a harsh word or a slight breeze could probably send his mind and body spinning.

It wasn’t real. It was all in his head.

He didn’t know what was worse: the persistence of this imaginary ache, or knowing that it could objectively be much, much worse. So he moved onward, stepping through rooms and down stairs and into the careful hands of his stylist entourage. They clothed him and shaved him and powdered the shiny spots on his face, and he emerged through it all, somehow entering a gala he didn’t remember being invited to.

It was easy to ignore some things, while others brought him back to reality.

Snide reporters with ugly prying eyes pulled Colgate unceremoniously to the side when he entered the large room.

Where’s Cordelia tonight, Colgate?

How do you feel about losing your thirteenth set of tributes?

Though his mind was foggy, the questions stung, and his breath hitched in his throat.

“I, uh… well…”

He was saved by the presenter, whose words blended together. Colgate sidled away from the reporters, finding an inconspicuous spot in the corner to ignore the world.

He missed most of the presentation like that, but he didn’t miss the murder. He almost didn’t see it, except he happened to glance up at the wrong second as a mallet collided with bone.

The sight of blood finally shook him back to reality, and his fingernails dug into the skin of his palms.

He lowered his head and prayed to fall back into the fog.

[WT]

Aranica deliberately avoids drinking; it makes her too maudlin, too open, to be safe. It figures that the one time she desperately wants to is also the first event she's ever been to in this Ripred-forsaken city with no fucking refreshment tables.

That's low on the list of things she hates right now. It's a long one: Whoever required her attendance (along with the familiar faces she's managed to trade waves with around the reporters and socialites). Everyone who built this monstrosity. Whoever called it a museum, as if it preserves anything, when no one will ever know Dru or Anani at thirty-nine—or Zanita at twenty-two or, hell, Gabriel and Cassia with a few more days—and that's these people's fault. Herself, a little, for half-longing to hold her siblings' hands again when it would only twist the knife. Wearing shoes. Not being allowed to open her pretty little gem-studded umbrella in anyone's face.

She ignores the presentation as much as possible, in favor of scanning the crowd. She means to see whether Mace is here—or Lethe, shit, they better not have sprung this on Lethe out of the blue—but she lands on Colgate first, tucked in a corner looking even more miserable than she feels. Slowly, smiling warmly at strangers she passes, she scoots toward him, making a proper break for it once Atlas falls and the floor opens back up.

She lifts a hand to touch his shoulder as she reaches him, thinks better of surprising him, and lowers it. "Colgate," she murmurs instead, then pauses, trying to figure out how to make this an offer instead of a demand. She settles on, "They're less likely to talk to us if we look busy talking to each other."

[Sunrise Rainier D2 // [Thundy]]

Colgate O'Leary, Victor, District Nine

”Colgate,” a voice said, and his heart started panicking at the idea of more reporters confronting him about his life. Colgate turned, but the face was a (relatively) friendly one - a fellow victor, Aranica Petros.

For as much time as he spent in the Capitol, Colgate knew only a few of the other victors, and they made him only marginally more comfortable than the other strangers in the vast city. There was something a little morbid, knowing they’d all ended up alive because they had killed. It was akin to solidarity and fear, like looking into a distorted mirror and finding one’s own face, recognizable and frightening at the same time.

It was best not to dwell on the fact that they were all murderers.

Though they were mostly strangers, Colgate took relative comfort in seeing a familiar face. He flashed a halfway smile and nodded when she suggested they make conversation so as to avoid… well, everyone else.

Problem was, it was difficult to say anything at all. He couldn’t get the flash of Zanita’s death out of his head.

Words failed him. But then, they always did.

“I can’t believe they… I mean, this is...” he whispered under his breath.

He shook his head, looking for the right word.

“Cruel,” he said a second later.

Then again, his brain reminded him unhelpfully:

So was he.

[WT]

An extra bit of tension Aranica didn't know she was carrying bleeds from her shoulders as Colgate gives her a nod and as close to a smile as the situation warrants. She returns it and leans her back faux-casually against the wall next to him. That leaves her stuck facing the rest of the room, but it avoids both boxing Colgate in and getting snuck up on, and if she tilts her head down and lets her eyes unfocus she can kind of tune everything out the way she did the presentation. Kind of.

She nods as Colgate speaks. "Cruel" is a tidy word for the whole debacle. Somewhere a pile of coders and historians are sitting on pretty money from this bullshit, and the only real surprise is that they're not touring the program so they can shove it in the tributes' families' faces.

"Like they haven't gauged enough out of them already, right?" Aranica mutters, no louder than Colgate. She keeps her face steady, but her right hand hurts from the pressure she's putting on her acorn, and the left bounces her umbrella restlessly: ferrule against her knee, handle against her hip, back and forth in tiny motions that dispel none of the soft buzz of anxious fury. "I haven't seen Lethe, I'm hoping that means no one made her come. She shouldn't have to face this without warning." No one should, and frankly Aranica isn't ready to see Eden herself, but here she and Colgate already are, and at least she doesn't have to look at a phantom of Kieran.