nation of heat // { lex + temple }
Jan 21, 2019 21:59:38 GMT -5
Post by aya on Jan 21, 2019 21:59:38 GMT -5
outside the train station
there's a bold painted sign
it says try to be patient
don't forget to choose sides
The train is empty all of a sudden. It's like looking up from her workbench only to find the world outside in greyscale, the sunrise catching the dew on the barren trees. The scenery changes around Lex are lost to her fixated focus. A squat stone city blends into the brutal mountainside until everything out the window is a taupe smear. Look down. Look back up. Long factories zoom past, ducts wrapping the roof like silver vines. Look down. Look back up. Wave goodbye to Wander and Annie out on the platform. Look down. Denali, I —
Look back up.
Outside the window of the dining car, there is nothing but dried grass in every direction. Inside doesn't have any better distractions to offer, at least not since she buffed all of the scratches out of the oak table in front of her using the walnuts she'd picked out of the pumpkin bread that came with her breakfast. On track to lose her mind before the train rolls up to District Six, Lex glances around for anything stimulating and finds... nothing. A handful of other tributes, sitting around quietly. Boys, mostly, and no one she knows well enough to want to talk to, even out of desperation. Apart from maybe Temple Jones, seated at a short booth on the opposite side of the car, staring at a teacup.
"Cool if I join you?" Flashing a quick half-grin, she sits down across from Temple. "I'm bound to start practicing my knife throwing if I don't get out of my own head for a few minutes," she explains, tugging at the hair on the back of her head, "and I think that'll probably get me tased." And restrained, and stuck riding the train all the way to the detention center. "By my escort, actually, not the peacekeepers. Something about decorum and neither harming nor dismantling the furniture. Which is bullshit because —" she drops her voice to a dramatic whisper, as if sharing some light treason "— all of it is ugly as sin."
Shaking her head, she leans back into her booth and glances back out the window. A single large boulder breaks up the sea of grass; otherwise, the prairie is every bit as boring as it was before. Wherever they were, it was still a long way from District Seven. Lex doesn't envy Temple for how much further she'll still need to go — especially as the company dwindles until it's more mentors than tributes. Particularly considering which old victors. "Hey Temple. I've been trying to figure this out — what's Mace Emberstatt's deal, anyway?"
On broadcasts, he'd always seemed amiable, well-liked: mayor of his district, father and family man, one of those rare victors who'd held the spotlight for decades without much in the way of public breakdowns. But here in person she could feel his flinty eyes on the back of her neck every time they were in the same room. And then earlier, he'd given her that jacket... it was as if he was trying to be nice and couldn't figure out how — but Lex can't figure out why.