Combo Divergence Part 2: Claudius in D13

[lorata]

Continuing from the last, here is Claudius' POV while he's in D13.

Warning: disturbing imagery, child death, blood, the usual Hunger Games stuff but with intent.


The screen in the cafeteria flickers, the sound turning on with a hiss and a pop. Claudius ducks his head to hide the rolling of his eyes before remembering he doesn’t have to do that here, and so he shoves his spoon into the unappetizing glop on his plate and sits back to watch. It’s nice, in a weird way, being able to watch Capitol broadcasts without having to play nice to avoid Lyme’s half-hearted glares. And all he had to do was turn traitor and leave almost everyone behind.

The clinking of cutlery stops as the others turn to face the screens, and the hum of dinner conversation cuts out at the spinning Capitol seal.

It’s been almost two weeks of the usual propaganda nonsense as the Capitol scrambled to get its act together, nothing but the usual claptrap from the presidential office and prerecorded messages about staying in their homes and assisting Peacekeepers with anything they need. It’s about time for an official presidential address, and Claudius is gearing himself up for the usual spike of fear and hatred at the sight of President Snow’s face.

President Snow appears onscreen at an oblique angle, the cameras picking up one shoulder, the curve of his jaw, an ear, before slowly spinning around toward the front, and Claudius sits up in spite of himself. He’d expected the usual address at the dais, not swooping camera angles and slow reveals. It’s almost artistic, and Claudius might make movies as a joke but the actual cinematography of it all interests him.

The speech itself is the usual fluff about peace and unity, a smokescreen for the threat of war like silk wrapped around a clenched fist, but the tight angles and the way the camera moves without revealing where the president is sitting or anything more than hints of the ornate seat behind him make Claudius’s heart rate kick up. They’re preparing for a reveal, though he can’t imagine what kind of thing they’d be playing at.

When the cameras finally pan out to reveal the entire stage, Claudius claps both hands over his mouth to stifle a yell. The others around him give him a glance, and then another, and now his heart is pounding and panic squeezes his throat because that’s Selene onscreen, dressed in a pure white gown with creases that could slice fruit, head high and eyes blazing and staring straight into the camera. Claudius has known her for three years and he’s never seen her this angry; he’s seen her raging and furious, screaming and throwing things until her voice scraped her throat and he ran for Misha, but not like this, cool and calm and terrifying. Nero stands on the president’s other side, a giant, hulking presence in a clean white suit, expression blank except for the taut lines around his eyes and the hard set of his mouth.

The walls press in and Claudius wants to run, needs to run, but there’s nowhere to go. The president keeps babbling on, and now the imagery has gotten disturbing - he’s talking about lizards, how a lizard’s tail can be cut off but the creature keeps living and grows a new one. “But what happens to the tail that was removed?” President Snow asks in a silky voice, the one that always trails fingernails up Claudius’ spine.

He turns to his right, and Selene lifts her chin. “It dies,” she says, her words like ice and venom, and now everyone at the table is staring at him because Claudius’ breaths are coming hard and fast. “And the lizard moves on.”

The rest of the propo could involve choreographed dances and pyrotechnics for all Claudius sees. He scrambles back away from the table, barking his knee and nearly tripping when his feet catch on the edge of the bench, but he can’t stay here. Can’t stay and watch Selene standing next to President Snow with her eyes like knives and listen to them talk around the idea of traitors, not when he knows exactly who she’s talking to.

The president might be addressing the nation, but Selene isn’t. For Selene, everything has always been personal.

Lyme finds him locked in their room, hunched in the corner of his bed with his knees pressed to his forehead and hands fisted in his hair. “Hey, D,” Lyme says, sitting next to him, and she unclenches his fingers and slides her arms around his shoulders. Claudius bites off a keening noise and this is ridiculous, he’s not eighteen and traumatized, he should not be rocking back and forth and hoping that squeezing his eyes tight will keep them dry, but there’s a lot of things he shouldn’t have done and too late to fix them now. “Hey, it’s okay.”

Claudius shakes his head. “She thinks I’m a traitor,” he says. “I mean, I am a traitor, and I was before I met her, so fine, I just. I can’t imagine what she’s thinking about me right now.”

Lyme lets out a long breath and shifts to rest her cheek against his hair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to come with me, I should’ve -“

Anger and fear flares in Claudius’ chest, and he uncurls enough to grab Lyme’s arms and grip hard. “Should’ve what, run off without me and left me there alone? No way. You’re my mentor and I promised and if you left me I’d -“ He can’t even think about it, everything in that direction is a terrifying grey wall that threatens to swallow him, and so he doesn’t. “No, you’re here and I’m here and I wouldn’t ever leave you. I just wish I’d been able to explain it to her.”

Lyme says nothing, only combs her fingers through his hair, and Claudius gives himself five minutes to turn his face into her shoulder and cry.

It’s not the only one. Over the next week and a half Selene delivers four propos and two full interviews with Caesar, and in each one she’s fierce and uncompromising and her words reach deep into Claudius’ chest and tear his insides out. No mercy for traitors, is the message, and he’s known her since she was eighteen years old and wild-eyed and playing the part of a girl too proud to care that the Village resisted her, and this isn’t that. Selene has the best acting scores the Centre had seen since Devon, but Claudius was no slouch either and he’s always been able to see the cracks. No matter how perfect Selene’s performance, Claudius has spent his entire life looking for the strings.

He sees the strings in the moments when Selene burns with patriotic fervour. The Capitol loves Selene the Victor but she’s never fooled herself into thinking they loved her as a person - she told him so once, when they sat on the couch and watched one of her interviews, her voice resigned and a few shades from sad as she leaned against his arm - and her own district turned its back on her when she betrayed her district partner to win. Misha rarely scolds Selene for real, but most of the times Claudius had seen came after she scoffed openly at Emory’s blind love of district and country.

Selene’s delivery is perfect, and she plays the patriot with a fire that will kindle the hearts of everyone in Two for certain - funny how they’ll love her now, that this would be the thing to change their minds on their youngest, wildest Victor - but it’s still a part. The patriotism is a way to channel what’s underneath, and maybe Claudius would buy it except then she stops talking about honour and loyalty and shifts to the traitors who have betrayed friends, loved ones, family, and there, that is seamless because it’s real.

No mercy, Selene says, eyes hard. Not for those who did this to themselves.

Claudius sits through the propo meetings at the back of the room in silence, letting the others argue about their next move. The propos coming out of Thirteen are a disgrace, all cheap effects and shoddy acting, and their Mockingjay can’t deliver a line for shit. It makes Claudius embarrassed, and meanwhile he’s spent the past eight years of his life filming waterfalls and rain and moss growing on rocks and pretending it means something, so that’s saying a lot.

But the stupid thing is, this is important. Every time they try to film Katniss Everdeen in smokey eyeshadow with flags waving behind her, every single canned line that falls flat on the ground like a meat tribute at the Cornucopia, the Capitol gains another step. The propaganda machine has been in full swing for nearly a hundred years, and it shows; the president doesn’t just have the budget, he has a limitless number of people willing to be passionate and honest about their love and loyalty, no lines required.

Claudius has his head in his hands as Plutarch Heavensbee lays out his next plan, and it’s stupid and fatuous and fake just like all the others and finally Claudius can’t take it anymore. “You’re all wrong,” he says, and they stop to look at him, judgement weighing heavy. He’s Lyme’s hanger-on, he’s the one they got and didn’t need and shoved away to do tech-grunt work so he’d get out of their hair, but Claudius’ temper is up now. He betrayed his people, betrayed Selene - has to listen to her call him a filthy traitor every time she’s on the television whether she says his name or no - and this is what he did it for?

“You’re all wrong,” Claudius says again. “We have everything we need already. They gave it to us.”

One of them scowls and starts to argue, but Heavensbee holds up one hand. His fingers are soft and his face round with Capitol decadence but his eyes are sharp, thoughtful. “Tell me what you mean.”

Claudius swallows. Selene thinks he’s a traitor, well, he’ll show her one. “We use her.”

The screen starts out black, just a hint of whistling wind over low strings, the first notes of the Panem anthem that plays during the parade of the fallen. A flash of white: a twelve-year-old girl, eyes wide and face pale, blood smearing her scalp and clotting at the side of her head, the grass around her a mess of red and grey.

“No mercy,” says Selene’s voice. It’s her slogan, her rallying cry, cold and unforgiving, and it plays as the camera pans away from the girl’s broken body before the screen goes black.

The next time it’s a boy, floating facedown in the water, jacket billowing at his sides as his arms float, listless, and the water clouds dark around him. Again: “No mercy.”

Shot after shot of dead children, twisted and bleeding, ribs and collarbones protruding, eyes hollow from starvation or mouths flecked with foam from poison. Children torn apart by mutts; children beating each other senseless with rocks, with broken pipes, clumsily tearing at each other with knives.

No mercy. No mercy. No mercy. The Capitol will show no mercy.

The more violent the scene, the cooler Selene’s tone, and at the final shot - the little girl from Eleven the year before, her corpse ringed with yellow flowers, expression angelic and hands folded to hide the gaping wound in her stomach - they overlay the one time Selene allowed her temper to snap and the anger to burn hot instead of cold.

“No mercy!” Selene shouts, as Katniss Everdeen bends and presses a kiss to the dead girl’s forehead.

The screen goes black, and the room explodes into applause.

Claudius swallows bile, turns away and heads out into the hall alone.

Claudius didn’t expect to get called into President Coin’s office, but in hindsight, he isn’t exactly surprised.

“Plutarch tells me you’re the one behind this latest propo,” she says, tilting her head. Claudius stands just inside the door, hands at his side, because Alma Coin might not be Coriolanus Snow but they both enjoy listening to themselves talk. Sometimes he’s surprised her walls aren’t made of mirrors, except no, that’s more Plutarch’s style. “It’s impressive. We have reports of riots all over the country, far more than any of our previous attempts. It appears you know how to inspire people, and I admit I wasn’t expecting that.”

More riots. More deaths. More Peackeepers gunning down civilians in the streets; more sidewalks washed red with blood. Exactly what he wanted. Claudius accepts the backward compliment with a nod. “I just hope something comes of it,” he says. The words taste like his victory, like the water here in Thirteen, stale and metallic and lukewarm and not at all refreshing.

“As do I,” Coin says. “You know, I didn’t expect much from you when you got here. Lyme, we can use. She’s a strategist and a warrior and she knows how to lead. But you, I thought, all you are is a killer, loyal to nobody but her. You turned because she left, not because you felt any allegiance to our cause, and you left because you had none to your people.” Claudius says nothing. “You wouldn’t let go of that murder trophy around your arm, you wouldn’t take an official position. And yet here you are.” She narrows her eyes, grey and cold just like his. “I’m not foolish enough to believe you had a change of heart, so tell me. What happened?”

Claudius swallows, counting his heartbeats as he breathes. He will not deliver Selene to this woman; he’ll betray her trust and fling her words in her face over a hundred littered corpses but he won’t take what was theirs and turn it over to someone else. “You convinced me.”

The president raises one eyebrow, but she could interrogate him all day and Claudius will never budge. “Did you ever see my Games, Madam President?” he asks instead. She would have, maybe not at the time, but likely she’d have checked at least some of the key footage after he arrived, trying to get some sort of handle on him. It’s easy to talk now, to loosen his stance just a little and use the years of image training and charisma that he all but abandoned after his win. “The Capitol wanted me to be their executioner and I made myself a mercy-killer. The districts wanted to hate me and I made them hate themselves. I know hate, Madam President, and I know how to use it, where to turn it. Does it really matter why I want to help? You don’t question when someone hands you a weapon, you just use it.”

She watches him for another moment, then lets out a quiet laugh. “I suppose you’re right. Either way, you’ve made yourself useful, and I’d like it if you stayed that way. Here.” President Coin holds out a wrist cuff communicator, the kind they hand out to proper officers here in Thirteen, the kind they denied him when he refused to let them burn his tattoo away.

Claudius takes it, and now it’s his turn to laugh because they’ve made it for the left wrist. He can wear this and keep his tattoo at the same time, even if it means he has to use it wrong-handed. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, and the concession from Coin and her outfit is clear. Claudius straps it on, then steps back and bows. The cuff hangs heavy on his wrist, dragging down his arm the way his bracelet did the days before the Reaping.

He catches sight of himself in a pane of glass as he rounds a corner, and the man who stares back - cropped hair, military uniform, shadowed eyes and an officer’s mark around his wrist - is not the one who left. The Victor who held Selene during a thunderstorm and offered to play her music until it passed, the one who grinned at her and ruffled her hair and dabbed her nose with frosting the time they made cookies in the middle of the afternoon just because they felt like it, he’s long gone. The one who’s left looks like the traitor Selene talks about on the propos, the one who left his friends and family behind for a cause that would see them dead and their names spat on the ground.

Claudius the rebel squares his shoulders, checks the schedule on his arm, and heads down the corridor toward his next meeting.

Claudius hits the shooting range after his scheduled hour in the gym, trying not to think about how much he misses swords. It’s not the same, standing in the booth with the instructor watching over his shoulder, lining himself up with the target and aiming without being able to move. The moment when a bullet makes contact with a target is nothing compared to the satisfaction of the blow resonating up through the sword and into his shoulder; the only thing good about firing guns is the kickback, and Claudius ignores the pistols and heads for the rifles every time because otherwise he’d be bored to death.

No swords here in Thirteen, oh no. He could ask Beetee to make him one, maybe, he’s down in his lab puttering away making special weapons for the Mockingjay and her Star Squad, but they’re the rebels’ golden bunch. Beetee and Claudius aren’t friends for all the time Lyme spends down in the lab avoiding food or interaction with other people, and Claudius can’t be sure that Beetee wouldn’t just go tell him to fuck himself if he asked for a favour. Or, well, whatever the ten-syllable version of that would be.

Besides, Beetee probably has to run everything he makes by Coin’s outfit anyway, something something limited supplies something totally reasonable and not that Coin is a complete control freak. There’s no way anyone is going to requisition Claudius a sword, not when he’s not cleared for combat duty, and they’re not practical for this scale of war anyway. Like it or not Claudius is good as a civilian out here, and if there’s anything worse than being trapped underground and betraying his people every single day, it’s being helpless while doing so.

And so Claudius hits the range, and he listens to the usual safety lecture and puts on the ridiculous goggles and hunkers down in his booth, the one all the way at the end so hopefully no one will see him and he’ll get left alone.

It works for a while; Claudius goes through a few rounds without anyone taking the booth next to him, and eventually he takes a break to give his shoulder a bit of a rest. He sets the rifle down and pulls himself up onto the ledge, feet up and back against the side of the partition. He drops the protective headphones down around his neck and wishes Thirteen weren’t so stingy with water so he could wet his throat a little. It’s dry this far down, and after all this time he’s gotten used to the way the walls close in for the most part but it’s still a little creepy.

He tips his head back and closes his eyes, and that’s when the voices carry over the room. It’s a pair of Thirteen soldiers, casually chatty in the way that most of the refugees aren’t, and they both squeeze into the booth on Claudius’ left. They’re talking about the war and what they’re going to do when they win it, which, points for optimism but they’ve obviously never seen the world outside this bunker.

Perfect. Claudius rolls his eyes behind his lids and grabs the noise-cancelling headphones to put them back on when the conversation shifts, and he freezes with the headset halfway to his ears.

“I’m considering putting my name in for the assault just so I can be there to see it,” the man says, in the kind of voice that means he wouldn’t ever actually have the guts. “I mean, she set it up with that speech, right? You know they’re going to do it, it would be such a waste if they didn’t. Get her on her knees, ‘no mercy’, and bam, shot through the head. Let the loyalist bleed to death from her own irony. I’d do it myself if they’d let me.”

The woman snorts. “They won’t,” she says. “It’ll be Coin or Everdeen or no one. They’re not going to waste that good a moment on some mook who hasn’t even cleared for field duty yet.”

“Hey!” He protests. “I’m working on it! I’m rated for firearms, it’s just the physical I’m having trouble with. It’s my flat feet.”

“Sure it is.”

The banter continues, but Claudius’ brain starts roaring and he misses the rest. The world around him turns white, then red, and the pressure in his chest builds and builds and his fists itch to feel the crack of bone and the sticky spray of blood because how dare they. There’s only one person they could be talking about, and Claudius might have betrayed her - might have left her behind, might have taken her words and her voice and her image and turned her into the poster child for the Capitol’s murder and cruelty - but he still cares.

He still cares, whether Selene would spit in his face or shoot him in the chest the next time she saw him or no, and he’s not going to let some mutt-fucking soldier asshole talk shit about her and get away with it. Claudius leaps down and rounds the partition, rage burning up inside him like he hasn’t felt in years.

The soldiers turn around and give him an unimpressed once-over, and of course they do, they haven’t seen Claudius the Victor. They’ve seen Claudius the good little soldier, behaving because there’s nothing else for him to do and these idiots aren’t a challenge anyway, but they’ll see soon enough. They’ll see for a few seconds and then they’ll never see anything ever again after he rips out their eyes -

“You got a problem, buddy?” the man asks, and that’s hilarious, they don’t recognize him. The woman folds her arms, leaning back against the ledge, and Claudius growls. “If you have a problem, we can take care of it right now.”

Claudius gives himself a glorious moment to imagine what it will look like, blood splashed bright red over the dull metal floor, their faces bruised and terrified as they beg for mercy. Months of living down here in the tunnels like a rat, months of making movies that will win the war and destroy whatever had and Selene had at the same time, months of I’m a killer as he takes his food tray, of Lyme trying to duck her meals and nights spent staring at her back as she curls against the walls, and these idiots think Claudius will be afraid of a little fistfight -

(The soldier on his first day in Thirteen, giving Lyme a hard-eyed stare. “You’ll take full responsibility for him, then. Anything he says or does is on you.”)

It would be so easy to snap and let them have it, snap their bones and smash their faces so they never say a bad word about a Two ever again. All Claudius would have to do is let go, let go like he’s done a hundred times, a thousand times, since he was five years old --

Anything he says or does is on you.

- and then they’ll take it out on Lyme.

Claudius staggers back as though punched in the chest, and he forces himself to breathe. “No,” he says, the words sour in his mouth. “But maybe keep it down. Some of us are trying to shoot.”

Not that he can now, not anymore. Claudius doesn’t bother to put his gun away even though he’ll cop it from the quartermaster later, and he stalks off to the sounds of the soldiers wondering what crawled up his ass and died.

According to the schedule Claudius scrawled on his opposite forearm, Lyme is in a strategy meeting for another hour, and he can’t keep pacing the halls or he really will haul off and punch someone. Claudius heads for their room instead, and everything is terrible because resources are scarce and there is absolutely nothing disposable anywhere that he can smash or tear or stomp on.

He settles for punching the mattress, which is basically as hard as a punching bag anyway and hurts his knuckles just as much. What a complete asshole, talking about Selene like he’d get within ten feet of her without Misha putting a bullet in his brain. In order to get to Selene they’d have to take out Misha, and in order to take out Misha that means defeating the strongest single-combat Victor that Two has. That would mean snipers, far away enough to shoot her before she gets wind they’re there, and Nero too because he’ll shield both of them before he lets anyone take them, so they’d have to kill him, too. No way a small platoon could sneak up on them without one of them noticing, either, and not with Capitol security all over the whole place. It would take far more than this idiot and his buddies; in order to take out three of Two’s strongest Victors they’d need -

- a full-on assault.

An assault like the one Coin and her people have been planning, the one that all this is leading up to once the last of the districts fall to rebel rule one way or another. An assault that will lay the Capitol to ruin, storm the mansion and shoot everyone inside who isn’t a secret rebel agent, an assault that will find Selene and drag her on camera and say the words that she made famous and Claudius turned into a weapon against her -

For the first time since his Victory, Claudius blanks out.

He comes back to Lyme kneeling on the floor in front of him, hands closed over his, talking low and soothing. The words don’t penetrate but the words aren’t the point, the point is she’s here, and Claudius pulls himself out of it with a gasp and twists to grip her wrists. Lyme has her mentor face, and she opens her mouth to ask him what he’s thinking except Claudius beats her to it.

“What happens if we win?” he blurts out. Lyme frowns, and she doesn’t get it but she has to, Claudius needs her to give him an answer that will settle the sick churning in his stomach and make the world all right again. “If - when - if the rebels win and we take down Snow and the Capitol and everything else, what happens? Selene and Misha and Nero, they’re all in the Capitol, and what about everyone back home?”

Especially now that Lyme ran, now that Claudius made Selene the spokesperson for the Capitol’s brutality.

Lyme doesn’t answer - why won’t she answer - and Claudius’ breath burns in his lungs. “They’re loyal,” he says, and it’s stupid but he’s proud, he’s proud of all his fellow Victors for their stubbornness, no matter how much he might have rolled his eyes at it before or thought himself so much more enlightened because he didn’t put his faith in a system that obviously gave no shits about him. “They’ll die before they turn.”

Lyme swallows hard, her throat working. “Yes,” she says quietly. “If that’s the choice they’re given.”

Claudius pushes his hands into his hair and pulls. “What can we do? How can we save them?”

This time Lyme’s expression turns hard instead of panicked, and she reaches up and pries Claudius’ hands loose, holding on tight. “I don’t know yet,” she says. “But give me time. They won’t make their move on the Capitol until all the districts fall, and we’re only halfway there. I’ll figure it out, I’m just not there yet.”

If Lyme says she’ll save them then she will, she has to, because if Claudius has to watch some soldier put a bullet through Selene’s brain, has to listen to them throw no mercy in her face right before the end, he will kill everyone in the room until they’re forced to put him down.

If Selene dies because of him it won’t matter how much Lyme says she loves him, because he won’t deserve it. All he’ll deserve is whatever death he forces them to give him.

“This isn’t what I wanted,” Claudius says. He said that after the Arena once, curled up on the couch with Lyme’s fingers combing through his hair. Now Lyme shifts to sit beside him, and she wraps her arm around him and pulls him in against her side. “I just - I only thought about them hating us for leaving. I didn’t think about the rest.”

“We’ll fix it,” Lyme says with conviction, and she strokes his hair just like she used to when he was babbling and incoherent and pumped full of mood stabilizers. “We’re building a new world, not just tearing down the old one, and we’re right in the middle of it. There’s room for us to change things.”

Claudius nods, and the one good thing about being a Victor and passing through the gates of insanity and back again is that it’s easier to trust his mentor than fall into despair. “Okay, boss,” he says, and Lyme kisses the top of his head. He’s not certain but he does trust her, and if anything is true, it’s that Lyme will die in flames before she lets anything happen to Misha or any of the others.

They stay there for a long time - Claudius doesn’t bother to count the seconds, for once - and finally Lyme drags him up. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go find an empty room somewhere and spar for a while.”

“Yes please,” Claudius says. Anything to chase away the creeping thoughts of red blood soaking through raven-dark hair.

“Follow me,” Lyme says, opening the door, and as always Claudius does.