two sides, one coin — francisco. & nico.

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

The sky spreads out above him, littered with stars, and echoes the window lights. It wraps its ethereal arms around the skyscrapers that precede the clouds, all rising to dizzy heights. 

But, the stars do not warm Francisco’s fingertips as he discreetly reaches out for them.

Even in the Capitol, the winter is merciless and brutal. He adjusts the woolen cape along his worn shoulder-blades, letting the faux fur embrace him until the cold dissipates and his bones slacken. He clings onto the luxury and the comfort they shower in him, like a moth drawn to a flare, indulgently.

He’ll memorize the corners of this serene, blue sky before a blood-soaked red one greets him.

Nico Thorne’s mouth is drawn to a thin, solemn line behind him. His face, its sharp edges jagged even more by the Capitol lights, flickers between Francis and an enigmatic world of his own. He wonders what Nico Thorne’s world would be. Brimmed with kaleidoscopic lights and star-glow as Francis’s is, or is it the dark of space, an ever-spreading mass that never ceases?

Francis’s bet is the latter, considering how the boy’s gaze never rests on anything: a relentless and restless creature. He quietly takes a seat beside him on the low stone border that circles an old tree, its leaves emerald and rustling despite the cold. There’s a sense of magic and mirth on the rooftop to Francisco, but he is not certain that Nico feels it in his heart – tastes it on the wind – hears its distant susurrus.

“Myrcella’s taking a pretty long time, right?” Clothed arms wrap around his own physique, a nervous tic, an involuntary need to guard himself from whatever menace and hazard the other could hurl at Francisco.

“This alliance is an interesting one.” It was interesting; a girl of the moon overhead, a war machine whose veins are all blood and mortar oil – one less than the other, a sharp and lethal blade that screams untouchable, 

and Francisco Bloom –

   feeble hands,
   feeble heart,
   feeble soul.

“I am much aware of my role in this alliance,” His eyes rise, hopeful to meet the other boy’s. “But, I cannot – no matter how much I try – figure out what yours is.” Two predators and one lamb make sense but Nico, a mysterious outline sitting there with downcast eyes, is neither to Francis.

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

The air is cold on his cheeks.

Nico remembers with a foreign pang of emotion the last time that he sat under the stars, remembers the smile of his cheeks replaced with a confession on his lips, remembers the feeling of a fist once again meeting his cheekbone when the truth of his future got revealed. I'm going to volunteer, he'd said, and watched as all of the starts above him turned into nothing more than dying light, remembers thinking them beautiful one moment and a collection of broken things the next.

But here—
by god—
he's never seen so much light.

It echoes all around him, deafens his ability to see in the darkness, throws his head into chaos trying to adjust to it all. For years, he has lived on hunger and candlelight, and even with the hunger pangs still heavy in his stomach in preparation for his new blood-soaked home, this is not something that he can control.

Not something that he can run away from.

Myrcella’s taking a pretty long time, right? the kid of District Five says, the one who he can't stop looking at every time he lets himself. Nico pretends not to notice when he pulls the blanket tighter around his slender shoulders, pretends not to see all the little weaknesses this boy seems riddled with.

It's not until he goes on that Nico finally lets himself really look at him again. This alliance is an interesting one, he says, and Nico inhales deeply and turns to let his eyes take in the other boy. He'd been avoiding looking at him, taking in every little detail of the space they now share--the way the leaves hang from the tree above him, the grooves on the bench below him, the way a city of lights can look so unlike the stars.

But now he's looking, and his chest feels heavy.

I am much aware of my role in this alliance.

That makes one of them.

He can't admit that though, cannot bring himself to show weakness the way that Francisco has. Instead he leans back on his hands, the picture of ease despite the cold nipping at his cheeks and hands, a lazy smile decorating his cheeks.

"That's good," he says, not letting his smile drop. "It's always better when the pretty one's know that they are."

It's a mask.

He doesn't know how to take it off.

"Care to share what you want my role to be, 'cisco?"

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

He was braced for impact, but all that cuts through the silence between them are words –

   no –

   queries.

Francis exhales a breath and the tension in his shoulders dissipates to the fluorescents ahead. Not knowing what to expect is like making a leap of faith, but it’s always a heart-thrilling pang to question the odds about whether your feet touch a low platform or descend into a ravening abyss.

This, Francisco muses with bright smiling ivories, is the former – a comfortably low dais that kisses the callouses upon his bare soles.

He expected shards, retorts, knives masqueraded as words, but he is greeted with an open-mic, an empty space in which conversation could grow.

Nico Thorne is an enigma but a comfortable one, not unlike the stars overhead. Constellations can be mapped out, memorized, even photographed but no one could seize them inside a fist. Untouchable, he recalls the thought from before and decides that this metaphor fits Nico like a glove. Francis reveres the other boy’s starlight.

“You see me as pretty?” His tone is curious and genuine, eyes gleaming at Nico.

Francis never sees beauty splattered across a mirror when he stares into it – only a boy, a common boy with lackadaisical features, all unkempt hair and easy smiles, all veined hands and veined neck. The sensible truth is, he is not bothered by his own appearance. Bodies are simply shells in which homeless faeries decide to live in, his mother used to tease.

But, she’d later add glacially as her rose-watered hand combed through Francis’s brown wreath, you’re one of the loveliest shells, France.

Francis rises to his two feet and, with a strange litheness that he rarely shows, hops onto the low stone border around the ancient tree. Its bark, clean of jagged timber lines and rotten sap, beckons at Francis’s palm to caress it. He does, gently, smoothing the warm stem out. Then, he stumbles onward, channeling a threadbare balance in his toes upon the small width of the stone border, hands outstretched like a circus performer’s.

“I don’t see myself as pretty.” The admittance holds no reluctance, each word cascading out with ease like poetry, like water through a bamboo shoot.

“You’re the type of person who answers questions with even more questions.” Francis observes in a small voice; it does not have the cadence of a query – but a statement he’s pondered extensively on.

This is the capricious scholar underneath Francisco Bloom’s skin, a sunken part of him that jots down the number of petals a marigold has or describes a petunia’s scent seamlessly. But, it never surfaces when he needs it to.

“– So maybe I should ask you more and make us stuck on a dreadful loop of questions, until one of us grows tedious. Are you quick to boredom, Nico? And, you didn’t answer my previous question so let me echo it,” He is keen to conquer this battle of echoes and queries. With back leaned against the tree, moon-glow threaded to his brown wreath of hair, Francis asks,

   “What is your role,

Mr. Thorne-in-my-side?”