Forced Perspective [Nico & Saturn Day 4]

[Deleted]

Saturn Rhodon

*

[Writer's Note: This thread takes place prior to "We Are Like Light Filaments"]

He knows nothing of the boy from twelve.

He doesn’t want to, doesn’t feel the need to care about any of the bodies casting shadows in the light of the bonfire. They are like the embers searching for the sky, temporary, ephemeral. Tomorrow would make this but a dream. Not that Saturn wasn’t used to momentary distractions, or rather, choosing to live out non-sequiturs that gave him a sense of belonging. They were all just bodies, that much was true. Boys that were handsome enough, and weary from fighting against the weight of what they were facing.

“Twelve,” He starts. The light of the fire reflects off the black of Saturn’s armor and he angles himself forward from the hay bale to get a closer look at Nico. He noticed the missing limbs and imagined it was a miracle that the boy had lived four days. Then again, who’s back had carried him here, and saw him valuable enough to keep breathing? Damaris would have done the same for him, wouldn’t she have? But then - he thinks about her fears, and how he’s left her quite alone. He takes another drink. It wouldn’t be wrong of her to think Saturn was more trouble than he was worth, too dense, and heavy on her back.

What was it that Damaris had said? She didn’t want to be a burden? Saturn closed his eyes and listened to the flames sift ash across the logs. What if she’d gotten the whole thing flipped on its head?

“You know your district partner killed her ally?” Saturn sips from his canteen and lets the alcohol burn the back of his throat. His face is already flushed from finishing the first container of swill, but he won’t stop now. He can’t stop. A part of him longed for the dizzying euphoria of the moments before he was too drunk, and there was a long way to go before then. He remembers how enough of it made him step forward and out of himself. Whatever heaviness lived inside him was drowned out, washed far enough away so he could press his body against another boy and dance, or beg for touch, to fill his yearning. The world was a little brighter, cheerier after a few swallows, and a few swallows more.

“Alja tried to kill her, in her sleep,” Saturn moves his head up slowly, eyes focusing in on the boy’s features. Full lips, soft skin. Full eyebrows, a rectangular chin. A sadness Saturn can place in his eyes - because he has seen that look too many times not to feel it in his own heart (or perhaps he wanted this, too, projecting on Nico as though they were kindred in more than just an evil game). He wipes away the spittle on his chin and raises his eyebrows, the grin broad across his face.

“We helped kill her. Traitors like that deserve to die, don’t you think?”

Honor is not for survivors.

Words from behind his eyelids, etched somewhere across a corner of his mind. The man who’d gone and lifted him up, made him better, whole, and broke him - he had said them. Win by any means, no matter who he needed to hurt to get there (because if they were weak enough to care, they weren’t worth his time). He had said a lot of things that Saturn couldn’t run from.
Soon there would be no such thing as honor, if there had ever been. Tomorrow someone’s sword could come for Saturn’s heart; he’d have to make a choice of who deserved to die, and who deserved to get just a little bit further.


“Do you think any of your little friends will do that to you?”

[word catch roll]
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1-2

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

The boy from One does not start out well.

Twelve, he calls him, and Nico's bones are already on edge. He doesn't like being associated with that place, with that town that took his life from him, that district that had never been anything but a hell for him, so far from the home he's slowly learning that he deserved. Twelve had never been kind to Nico Thorne, had shown him cruelty after cruelty until there was nothing left in his bones but ash and coal dust, the embers f a burning fire that would set his whole world on fire. Nico looks up at the sight of Saturn Rhodes carefully, like every part of him is sharp and just looking at him the wrong way will be a call for blood, like all of the jagged edges of the boy are just begging to be caught and Nico knows better than to play with things like that. But there's something in that Twelve that sets Nico's blood on fire, and he can't help it when he grits his teeth, his mouth turning into an automatic scowl.

He'd never been any good at hiding his emotions.

Tonight is no different.

He looks away from Saturn as the other boy sits down—too close, like a live wire threatening to set him on fire. Nico looks around for Francis and Jessica, sees both of them off and away but not far, allows himself a moment of comfort in the memory of his hands tracing Francis's jaw. It's not enough to save him, will never be enough, but for now the memory calms.

“You know your district partner killed her ally?” Saturn says, and that almost makes Nico snap his eyes back in the other boy's direction. A part of him is shocked, on edge and confused as to why Saturn is speaking to him in the first place. He's not someone that Nico has any real interest in, a heightened version of the boys in Twelve who used to think they were better than Nico just because their father's were still around to bring home food to put on the table, just because their mothers were able to get out of bed every day and show them what it felt like to be loved, as if the sum of Nico's whole was made up by a dead father and a lost mother, as if he was nothing more than his broken parts. "Alja tried to kill her in her sleep," the other boy goes on, and Nico narrows his eyes slightly as he watches Saturn take swig after swig of the canteen in his hand, drowning himself in demons Nico has too many of already. Good, a part of him thinks. She needed to learn that lesson.

He can't help it, the instinct towards cruelty; it had been beat into his blood for so long he doesn't think he'll ever be rid of it.

“We helped kill her. Traitors like that deserve to die, don’t you think?”

Nico considers for only a second, lets his eyes adjust to the sight of Saturn's face as the flames shine on it in the darkness.

"Sure," he says, radical honesty, unsure why he's giving it but giving it all the same. "It's easy to say a traitor deserves death." He pauses, keeps his eyes hard on the other boy. "Not everyone here is going to be a traitor though, and twenty-three die anyways." He bites the tip of his tongue, remembers the taste of dirt in his mouth as a Peacekeeper shoved his face into the earth, remembers every scrape and bruise from an older boy that looked just like the one sat near him, remembers how it feels to have their hands curved around his neck and lets his anger keep him talking. "What's that say about their killers?"

“Do you think any of your little friends will do that to you?” Saturn asks, and Nico lets his eyes wander back over to where he'd seen Francis, considers.

He feels like Dante at the edge of his death, staring into the abyss of his future with a metal collar around his throat and his salvation chained to a rock at the top of an impossible mountain.

"No," he settles on. "But who could blame them if they did?"

[Deleted]

Saturn Rhodon

*

Filler because Kaitlin's posts are glorious and I am in a bit of a time jam at the moment and want her to be able to move about/come back to this to give her the reply that this deserves.

Saturn leaves this thread in this post.