Happy Ratmas, WT <3

[shrimp]

Happy Ratmas, Wootee!

I hope that this holiday season has treated you kindly (especially because you got to see all that holiday snow!!). You are so kind and thoughtful and excitable, and the work and care that you put into your writing and your friendships are inspiring. It's been an absolute pleasure to be your friend, and I hope that this year is the best one yet!

And now: gifts! I made a couple of tables, aiming to help add more visuals while not taking away from how you enjoy coding your posts. I hope you enjoy!

"Wander, honey, it's been too long."

"Hey, Ms. Sibande." Wander leans into the hug, exchanging an awkward glance with Madalitso over her shoulder. "Missed you too, it's just been, uh. Been busy, I guess."

She probably sees through that; she must know how Madalitso feels better than Wander does, these days. Things between them haven't been bad in any way that ve's figured out how to do anything about—no screaming fights or petty maneuvers, almost nothing tangible at all. Every time ve asks whether they're okay, Madalitso says yes, only to blatantly avoid ver at every possible turn. Wander alternates between pretending that doesn't sting, which Flo always calls out sooner or later, and complaining at length, until Iovita gets an uncomfortable crinkled look around their eyes.

Plenty of Wander's friendships have drifted apart. Ve knows it happens. But ve also knows that Madalitso still hangs out with Flo and Vita when ve's not around, and after the Games' crash course in weird friendship dynamics, ve's less annoyed at the two of them for allowing it than at Madalitso for not owning up to it. If he resents Wander for being the one to get to come home when they all know his name is in that ball as many times as it can be—never mind the Careers, or that if Wander had used vis brain for two seconds then it just would have been someone else—then Wander wishes he would say so. They could have a proper fight and get on with things, instead of whatever this is.

"Still busy, yeah?" Madalitso says, shifting his weight uncomfortably. "We got school stuff, Mom."

[div align="center"][div align="left" style="width:330px;padding:35px;background-image:url(https://i.imgur.com/CC66fmd.png);background-repeat:no-repeat;"][div style="height:150px;"][/div][font size="1"]

words here

[/font][/div][/div]

They're in a different cemetery, of course.

Even freshly dead, no longer a promise and not yet a legend—even murdered by a scraggly twelve-year-old minutes away from the crown that by any reasonable measure should have been hers—Dru had status and support here. Your sister's headstone carries a little more dust these days than it did last time you saw it, longer than Kieran's lifetime ago, but it still sits well-lit and clearly marked in a gated plot, with visitors or more likely a groundskeeper to care for a spray of flowers beside every grave. The scattering of tokens around it remains as well, thinner than you remember but still enough to make you smile at the thought of her reaction: a private scoff, you suspect, even as she accepted them as her rightful due.

(You idly rearranged those as you sat curled against her headstone, long enough for heartfelt rambling to give way to peaceful silence, and eventually tucked a palm-sized plastic falchion—a gentle thing, nothing like Dru's, that apologized to you when you couldn't smother the smallest of old flinches—into the center of the groundskeeper's bouquet. You thanked the others before you left, and wished you could thank the people who brought them here, for remembering Dru after almost twice her own lifetime. For loving something about her, even if most of them would never love her.)

But it took you nearly an hour breathing dust to track down the name Tamura, and another twenty minutes to feel certain about Bonnali and Kenta; your mother's documents vanished in the shuffle of excited Capitol reporters after Anani surfaced, and her parents were no stranger's treasured memory. (No one's treasured memory at all, anymore. You used to know a lullaby they liked, but you never felt sure about the melody after Anani died; you sang it to Kieran only a few times, stumbling over the unfamiliar words—nennen korori yo, okorori yo—until you lost hold of it, in the end, like so much else.) With a surname to start from, Arieh and Marietta Petros were easier to find—or at least, you had to apologetically send the harried Justice Building clerk on fewer trips between the records and your reading room—but they were a cook and a sculptor: jobs that would signal wealth in District Twelve as surely as the softness in your face or the sturdy make of your jacket, but offer no place among the gilded elite of District One.

You don't have time to find them. Every minute spent with your feet in prickly unkempt grass, squinting at faded names and politely extracting yourself from conversation with headstones, is a minute you should spend preparing for the business meeting that brought you to One; setting up new contacts always involves a measure of risk, and you mean to honor the trust the Sublinos have extended to you. (You suspect, too, that any prayer of getting a permit to visit Ten approved someday hinges on making good on your noise about antiques. You pushed for that trip less subtly than you should have; it wouldn't help, now, to give the Permit Office an excuse for more red tape.) At the very least, you should be making yourself useful in the home Bette's family opened to you, or paying Topaz a visit while you have the chance. The Justice Building took enough time already.

[div align="center"][div align="left" style="width:330px;padding:35px;background-image:url(https://i.imgur.com/2YKZKA6.png);background-repeat:no-repeat;"][div style="height:250px;"][/div][font size="1"]

words here

[/font][/div][/div]


I also wrote some posts (and some gifts) for your characters. I hope they help spark new ideas or flesh out old ones. Thank you for everything you do WT, love you a lot <33

---

BETTE SUBLINO

She (with Eon and his curious eyes, Temple and her sturdy hands, effervescent Wander) came to barter with a rucksack of animals, carved at the break of daylight and in twilight's muddy pitch. Round humps illustrated fluffy wool. Sturdy limbs twined up to support a giraffe. Four, five, types of whales swam among their brethren. The bag itself was a gift: light, practical, minimal—one a Capitolite would overlook.

She left with a fire ignited and a small pouch of stones: rare as clouds on an overcast day.

After the mania of reentering One, where a foolhardy Keeper set about examining every single pebble—and to his detriment, neglecting to check the other crates quite as thoroughly—the bag sits, slumped in a corner of her room for months: a reminder of the work ahead. And yet she doesn't quite know what to do with them; there is ingenuity everywhere in One: they take the scraps that the Capitol leaves behind and twist it into something new. And yet, ego fails them; the market for goods sourced from twelve is… Lacking. So the stones stay until six months later, when a letter arrives with a District 12 seal.

The first gift she considers is smooth and polished, as she rummages in the studio for a dremel. She sands out the edges of a practice stone, one she finds on the edge of a neighbor's lawn. When she holds up the finished piece it is beautiful, pristine, but not right. Off, somehow.

The second that she tries is doused in resin, molded in a cracked ramekin that was dropped off last week by a haggard man looking for a pawn shop. With a chisel and a hammer she breaks the glass apart and holds up the sculpture, examining it in the light. Not right either: the stones are warmer and deeper, but it reminds her too much of an aquarium—more fitting for Wander than their upcoming guest.

She wonders why it was those stones that were sold, placed delicately in a wicker basket. Most of them are deformed, imperfect shapes with shards chipped off, ruddy and dirty and somehow—precious. A potential, that breaks down under refinement. Or...

With a resigned sigh, then a soft grin, Bette heads back to step one.

When Aranica arrives, the Victor is presented with a simple spare room: there is a slight draft from where the window meets the wall, the wooden floor creaks just over the threshold. But the home smells of warming spice and crisp apple, and the quilt over the bedspread is warm, and thick, and handmade—clustered with jewel tones.

Three days into Aranica's stay, Bette sits with her in the kitchen. Around them is a disarray: Reshma helps Aja scoop cookies onto a baking tray as Yara and AK sneak in to sample globs of dough. There are many things that the games took away from Bette, this isn't one of them.

"For you," she says, and hands over a wooden box carved with elegant flowers and intricate spirals. The inside is upholstered velvet taken from a ripped-up dress, indigo with gold trim. And nestled between the fabric is a brass necklace and a brass brooch, with thin wires wrapped around ordinary rock.

"It's not much," Bette says, but shows the victor how to swap out one rock for another by pushing the twines down, "but it seemed right."

Sometimes, she concludes, all a rock wants to be is itself.



---

ABDIEL IZAR

When the clouds break up, Abdiel rings his bisabuela's doorbell and invites her on a walk. A third of the time, the bags under his eyes are like suitcases; a third of the time, the sun has already yawned and turned to dusk; a third of the time, he still smells faintly of formaldehyde. She always accepts.

There isn't much to say. His comprehension of the old language is fine, but he misses the details when he speaks his mind. And there is always the overwhelming sense of being watched: they are not beloved by the Capitol. The keepers will find any reason to send them all to the slaughterhouse—to raze the barrio to piles of wood and echoes of song.

Instead he wraps his arm around her elbow and they look at the riverbank, wine-dark but clean. They walk up the dirt road towards where he and Alfer smoke to escape the world. They take a right at the mayor's office as Tío Vasco locks up his office. They stroll through the graveyard, resting their hand on tombstones of children long-forgotten, of relatives long-lost. Often they bring flowers, and return fronds of roses to the earth.

On a good day she tells him stories, short ones, sentences long: of Uxue and Xuxa, of baby Gabriel and Raquel, of glimpses of a kinder Iago. He worries that when she is gone, their memories will be lost. He tries to jot down the placement of their plots.

"Come over for dinner," he says, knowing that his parents will be angry after she leaves: at how their house isn't clean enough for guests, at how they didn't make something elaborate. (There is never a question on portions; it has been years since Gabriel died, but they still make enough for seven).

No one minds though, not really. Their smiles are brighter.

One foot is placed in front of the other.

After a small coffee, he walks her back up the road, tucks a parcel of cookies into her hands, tries his best to refuse anything she offers. He fails, always.

They look forward to it.



---



BETTE SUBLINO

It's unlucky that Bette chose today to mend a porcelain doll, because her hands refuse to stop shaking. Instead, they keep flexing and unflexing, her breath claws out of her chest. And its not that Wander is going to die--ve is safe tonight, as a pair of siblings race to their deaths instead. Ve will turn nineteen, and twenty, and stay in saltwaters that remind her of cannon-fire.

It's the simple fact that they can, like they did to Larceny. And there's not a damn thing she can do to stop it.

Aja takes the doll away, and Bette is left sitting in the dark. Silence reigns. An hour later, she takes a walk through the district when all she wants to do is run, as fast as she can, like the frigid wind at her back. The Capitol took that away too.

She will watch as Ridley progresses, and loves, and loses, and finds herself in the thick of the war. She will want to care, and she does: she does not give out advice, or even sentiment, without feeling.

But she has seen Two.
She has seen Ten.
She has not seen Four and sea foam, has not heard the sound of vis laughter, a chuckle turned into a roar. Her dreams are filled with a tidal wave, rising above a cliff.

So she packs her bag,
and writes down Anatalia's name on her travel form.