rufus et viridis | { hugo / maxen } blitz

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

Neon dreaming and the broken cement would always lead him back home. He stepped without regard of what might be waiting for him, cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth, dime of purple punch slid into his coat pocket. The parking lot was all shadow and blinking lights from the open sign of the store behind him and he had to admit, this was probably exactly where he wanted to be. At this specific time, in this specific place. No people, no noise, and still such a strange feel for frenzy and a taste of madness on his tongue. He stretched his arms out, kicking over an almost-empty bottle of beer, rounded a chain-link fence, wound up squatting on top of an old dumpster and staring up at the stars.

When he was little, when questions of death had first begun to plague him, his father had brought him to the balcony and pointed up at the north sky and said "We join the stars, son." Truth be told, he was likely high on something, acid and power one and the same as far as he was concerned.

Maxen held up a spindly hand, bending his fingers into a fist one by one until only the one in the middle remained standing up.

"Fuck you," he said, just in case.

Fuck him. For making a bad call. For dying. For leaving. Most importantly, for not telling Maxen where the fucking money was hidden.

He recognized the figure from the moment he saw it: steam rolling off the top of his head in orange tendrils of hair, walking like either the chip on his shoulder or the pole up his ass was starting to get too uncomfortable. Maxen groaned, eyes rolling back in his head as he sat up from his makeshift camp.

"Hugo fuckin' Belgrave," he said.

Fuck you, too, he thought.

Max polished off the rest of his bottle of vodka and tossed it into the trash can between his legs.

"Past your bedtime, innit?" It was about the politest way he could manage telling him to go away, but he'd spent enough time with firecrotch there in the Detention Center to know there was no such thing as simply walking away. Damn, he wished Harls was here. Or, at least, that he was sober.

He hopped down to face him fully. Max had a solid couple inches on him in height, but Hugo easily outweighed him; the giant ham hocks he called arms hung tensely by his side, hands permanently clenched into fists. He wore his anger, and every vein in his body, on his sleeve, it would seem.

"Don't suppose you came to have a chat with yours truly?"

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

I stirred awake with the want to cave something in.

That meant I woke up normally, on a bed that was a few feet and inches smaller than the span of my form, my breaths coming out in wisps of white and my bones rattling from the cold. Snow drifted in from an ajar window, carrying with it the sounds of revelry and celebrations that the end of seasons demanded. But, the Belgraves had nothing to celebrate anymore. The presents had yellowed, the fire dead in the hearth. There was only the cold, which I endured.

The old clock on the wall told me that it was past midnight, a time I’d been anticipating. A time when nocturnal creatures crawled out from a thick dark to a sheerer one—and there was one creature I was eager to ensnare.

After scoffing at how neat Serena’s bed was in comparison to my own, I impatiently put on a leather jacket that had begun to show cracks in the varnish. Even in her sleep, Serena Belgrave was closed up and meticulous. Even in her sleep, she kept chaos and disorder at bay. “Wonder how fuckin’ exhausting it is to be you,” I scoffed out loud before slamming the door behind me, not caring whether the furious slam of the door would wake her.

It wasn’t too much of an effort to ask for Maxen Royce, not when they held some notoriety in the district: the children of rebels, the dirty rascals spewed out from the depths of the detention center.

I’d learnt to disregard some of the sour looks, learnt not to bare my teeth at any pedestrian that thought they could stare at me so openly. But, sometimes, I just want to wring their necks and wrestle them down. And, sometimes meant most times, I mused and made a glower at a gawking person ahead of me.

“Junkies are easy to find,” another junkie told me when politely asked, with my hands splayed tight around his slender throat. “They’re like rats – keeps to rot and trash.”

Maxen was the scummiest, nastiest rat out of them all.

I eyed him, my hot contempt towards him unhidden.

“Thought you died but death is something y’all are hoping for, right?” The edges of my mouth rose in a grin, all teeth but no kindness. Not even a shred of it. The pink crescents of my fingernails dug savagely into the flesh of my palm and the sting they caused was swift to hone my thoughts.

“Oh, I’d love to um, have tea and tell you all ‘bout my day!” My grin broadened and sharpened, mouth like a knife unsheathed under the moonlight. Inching nearer to him, I smoothed the creases on the collar of his shirt and plucked the cigarette out of his mouth, perching it between my own two lips.

“But unfortunately, that’s not why I am here tonight, princess.” The scent of smoke and burning permeated the air in between us; fire was catching. “The money’s ours, fucker— all of it. Your daddy and the other one owed my father for the arms he loaded them with. Did he not tell ya'? Fuck, coke does mess with a person's head a lot, huh.”

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

A hyena's worth of laughter escaped him: shoulders rolling, chest rising and falling, sly smile stretched far enough that every tooth in Maxen's mouth was on full display. Even still, there wasn't an ounce of humor in it. The tightness in his back, his chin tucked in, neck craned down to make eye contact with the shorter boy.

Maxen Royce didn't owe Hugo Belgrave a fucking thing, and he was lucky it was Maxen he was speaking to and not Harley. Though, he had to admit, the mental picture of the furious perfection standing before him lying in the ruins of Harley's punishing left hook was something he would have paid a lot of money to see. She was every bit as quick to bite, and even better, venom was laced in her fangs. She didn't strike to hurt; she struck to kill.

In the absence of the cigarette Hugo had stolen- those Belgrave's loved taking what was not theirs, didn't they?- Maxen pulled out a toothpick to rest in the corner of his mouth.

"Guess we'll see who finds it first, won't we?"

The fact that they had to search for it in the first place was ridiculous. The Royce family had been pulled into a war they had no interest in fighting. They'd been brought to a territory of which they'd never asked to go. Hugo's father was the man who led them there. Hugo's father was, thereby, directly responsible for what came next: the entire district watching as Max and Harley's father was injected with an overdose of drugs and trackerjacker venom.

He glowed pink and green in the neon lights; the stars reflected against the wet pavement. He felt a little bit like a god, numbness in his fingers and the tip of his nose, invincibility concocted of youth and euphoria. He puckered his lips as if to kiss the other boy.

"Don't you have a wall to be banging your head against?"

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

The burn in my lungs from the nicotine was no match to the anger that burned in my veins.

It was incandescent rage, an ever-burning pyre, a matchstick struck to life in a powder keg. It was the sort of anger that said it had been in ma' body for a long, long time—the sort of anger that had created my many reputations: the red Belgrave bull, firecracker, ticking time bomb, anger issues.

I’ll fucking show them anger issues.

For a moment, I thought about what Serena would do here right now: stand down and think, maybe. The bitch was always thinking. Sometimes, it felt as if she was mocking me with it. Thinking because she was the one with the brains and I was the one struck with fuckin’ bull strength. Thinking because she was the smartest, had always been, perfect Serena with her golden trophies earned from essay-writing competitions.

Fuck her, too.

Fuck everything.

I just wanted to drive my fist through a wall.

But instead, with a huff, I made my chin rise and spine straighten, trying to level with Maxen Royce’s tall skeleton height. Why were junkies so goddamn tall? I plucked the cigarette away from my mouth, tossed it to the rain-splattered ground. “We aren’t fuckin’ guessing anything here.” The ember tip of the cigarette disappeared under the crush of my boot. “I need your rat ass to back the hell out of this shit. I won't ask twice.”

Because the money had always been the Belgraves. We started the empire—it was only fair that we got it back in the end. I wanted—needed—it back because money was power, and wasn’t power what kept you at the top of the mountain? Wasn’t power what emblazoned you as a fucking threat? Power instilled fear and I wanted to be frightening. I wanted to be terrible. I wanted to be dreadful. I wanted to be the worst person in the entirety of district three because I knew it in my guts that no one would see me as anything if I weren’t.

Hugo dumb Belgrave.

Fuck that.

Hugo stupid Belgrave.

Fuck that. 

Hugo nothing Belgrave. 

Fuck. That.

I could feel it again, that rage: incandescent. explosive.

Maxen’s words poured in.

"Don't you have a wall—”

I clenched my fists. The rage pulsed there “—to be banging your head against?" and then everything burned as I gritted my teeth and swung a punch at Maxen Royce’s perfect fuckin' teeth.