the laments of beasts — eurydice. & emerson. [jb]

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

She should have predicted it.
Hell, a wiser part of her did.

Whenever reaping day stumbled along, Eurydice made her children get together for one final gathering because a part of her knew that it would be the last gathering for one of them. Perhaps it was her blood that marked them for the reaper’s grasp, this hot and fiery rebel blood coursing through her veins, but she wasn’t surprised when Emerson’s name rippled across the reaping stage. Instead, she held her chin up and smiled as a career mother should, because this was a cause for celebration. But in her chest though, the emptiness that Emmett and Silk has left behind tear looser, tears wider. Her skin is golden, but not much lays underneath it now. She is a hollow woman.

The path to the justice building is memorized in the balls of her feet as she strides towards it in a click-click-click of stilettos. She wonders absently if Emmett followed her here when she visited Silk, and she wonders absently if Silk is following her now. She doesn’t know, though. That’s the thing – the dead dies once, but the living goes on living.

“Move,” Eurydice snarls at the peacekeeper in front of the door, and the man is quick to comply. She pushes through the mahogany doors, fire in her steps as she crosses the distance to where the curtains are. She draws them open, and the sunlight is searing.

And only then, in this new light, does she slowly turn to look at Emerson.

Her girls have her looks, and she has always been proud of that. Drawn in by the sunlight, Emerson is still burnished gold, an extension of her that she has polished and polished until it hurt. She wonders if that was a mistake, if pushing them wasn’t doing them any good. It hadn’t for Emmett. It hadn’t for Silk. She wonders if her tenacity and strictness is wrong. She wonders if … if she has failed at being what a mother should be.

Quietly and with her shoulders braced, as if marching towards a battle, Eurydice draws her daughter in for an embrace. She smells of cigarettes and leather. Wretched girl. Her little girl. “I’m going to destroy whoever is ripping you all away from me,” she whispers, low enough for the other to hear, but not the world. This is an angry woman’s promise, muttered only to herself and her daughter.

Moments pass before Eurydice’s arms loosen and she is left nearly spent from that single tender gesture. She doesn’t do tenderness. She doesn’t have enough of it, never had. Her children were tempered in flames and heat, not doting words. She offered an embrace, but she wasn’t going to start spewing sweet words. They wouldn’t help. Instead, her eyes burn as they lock with her daughter’s.

“Kill him,” she mutters sharply.

“Kill Julian. Smother him in his sleep. Give him a friendly nudge down a flight of steps. Let him be a martyr. Do not let him live, Emerson, you hear me?” The word breaks at the last syllable as it leaves her.

She takes a step back to look at her daughter, her beautiful daughter. “Wretched girl,” she whispers, and it's affectionate. Why does it have to be you? Why does it have to be any of you?

Eurydice’s loss is already a bottomless well that if one were to toss a stone into it, no splash would follow. Her dress is red and it feels stained hotly with the blood of her two children. If Silk and Emmett are here, she wishes to apologize to them because she should have been predicted their fates, should have pushed them more, should have loved them harder. And those are all things she should have done for Emerson, too. But the Fates are tricksters as they have always been, refusing to be predicted, and so all Eurydice has to rely on is the hope that she has made Emerson enough of a soldier, that she has trained her well.

And looking at the fire that burned in her daughter’s wake as she walked up to the stage and hearing those twisted, angry words spat at her, she knows she has.

Eurydice yanks free the necklace around her neck, a pin of a lion roaring, and presses it into Emerson’s palm.

“Kill him and then everyone else in that arena. Don’t do it for One. Don’t do it for me. Do it for yourself. Go and get that goddamn crown.”

Wretched girl. Her little girl.

“Give ‘em hell.”

[alex 🐺]

She shouldn’t be surprised that Mom—sorry, Eurydice Le Roux, Madam Mayor—sweeps into the room in the Justice Building with long strides, looking every inch the lioness, wrath dripping from her lips as she tears open the curtains that Emie had just fucking closed.

It’s not a surprise now—the facade. But Emerson can see past it. She can see the deep-set wrinkles that the cream won’t buff away, the bags under her eyes that definitely weren’t designer. No Capitolite would be caught dead looking as if they aged and Eurydice was wearing her age on her like a death shroud. Well, scratch that. She was wearing Emmett’s and Silk’s deaths on her like a shroud. And the shroud today happened to be blood fucking red.

“Mom, just—”Emerson barely gets out before Mom sweeps her into a hug. Which—no. Mom didn’t hug and she definitely wasn’t going to start now. Her grip hurts and Emerson has half a mind to sink into it because they never fucking hugged and this could only mean that she was sure that Emie would come home in a fucking bodybag. She wasn’t Silk but then again, she’d never wanted to be. She wasn’t Emmett and she wasn’t Harper and she definitely wasn’t Tatton or Aurora or Cathy.

She was Emerson and she was—scared. Scared shitless, but the last thing she was going to do was admit it to the one woman who had taught her from a very young age that no matter what you feel, you never let it show on your face. And if you did, you better be ready to wear something else on your face. Like the imprint of a hand or a gash on the lip.

Always smile wide, wide enough that it shows in your eyes, even as you stab them in the heart. Mother’s mantra rings in her ears as Eurydice draws back to gaze at Emerson. It burns, Mom's gaze. 

“Kill him,” she says, as if they were talking about the fucking weather and not murdering her cousin. Homicide or some other stupid fucked up Latin term that Emerson didn’t know because she’d rather be in the gambling halls or going down on a guy in an alley than actually learning something when all they had ever known was the Games.

“Kill Julian. Smother him in his sleep. Give him a friendly nudge down a flight of steps. Let him be a martyr. Do not let him live, Emerson, you hear me?”

“Really, Mom?” Emerson asks, a sigh in her voice when Eurydice gives her the necklace. The one thing that she always wore because it went with every outfit. She wasn’t like Silk or Harper who could keep up the facade and not cave under the weight of a tarnished crown. She wasn’t Emmett who shed his feelings like a second skin. She wore them all, every feeling and every scar like a tribute to a false god.

And now she holds a piece of metal in her hands, a cherished relic, clenched in her fist tight enough to leave the imprint of a lion on her palm, an etching on a girl made of clay, eyes downcast before her mother whispers her next words. They sound like a plea thrown to the air from a woman who had buried two children already with four more left to be sacrificed to gods who played roulette with lives.

“Kill him and then everyone else in that arena. Don’t do it for One. Don’t do it for me. Do it for yourself. Go and get that goddamn crown. Give ‘em hell.”

Well, she’s gotta hand it to Mom. It’s one hell of a pep talk. Emmett would be rolling his eyes if he was here.

But all Emerson can do is mutter, “You’re asking me to murder the one person who might have my back there. Do you know how fucking insane that sounds?! Is this the bullshit that you spewed to Silk and Emmett? They died, Mom! They—they didn’t come home. We let them go, telling them to keep their heads held high because that’s what lions do, but—”

Emerson gasps for air, her chest tight and her eyes burning with unshed tears but if she’s learned one thing from Mom, it’s that you don’t cry. You never, ever fucking cry. You let emotion ebb and flow like the tides, you harvest your pain in the darkness of the night and by morning, you act as if nothing had ever bothered you.

“They didn’t come back. They didn’t come back and I’m—” I’m not strong enough, she thinks. She isn’t.

She’s skin and bones and a beating heart and flesh and blood when Eurydice demands steel and iron and gold, gold above all else. She feels her rib cage crack and break from holding back tears, lips stained red. She’s nothing more than a girl. A silly fucking girl building castles out of her grief, hiding away in ruins.

Emerson lets the sentence fall, hanging from her lips.

To say more would be weakness and Eurydice Le Roux had no time for weakness. Not from anyone. And especially not her children.