Combo Divergence Part 5: Claudius & Selene, Post-War
Obviously there is a loooot with them. There could be a whole recovery novel just fixing their relationship. I didn't actually get around to writing that. Instead we have two things: one fight, and one happy scene. Neither directly follow each other but they help give the shape of how they rebuild their friendship, I think.
Claudius doesn’t mean to slam the door behind him, but it’s winter and the wind is a bitch in the Village this time of year, and the door tears itself from his hand and hits the frame hard enough to rattle the window. Claudius winces but it’s too late, and he’s not going to troop back in there and try a ridiculous-sounding excuse about the wind and air pressure and who knows what, and so he leaves it. He hadn’t bothered to bring his coat when crossing the Village to Selene’s house but who cares, maybe the cold will help freeze away some of the anger. He hunches his shoulders up towards his ears, tucks his chin into his chest and shoves his hands in his pockets and makes a headway into the snow.
They were going to fight eventually. No matter how well people get along there’s no way to avoid it forever, they’re human and Victors and killers besides, tempers will fray and there will be clashes, it’s reality. Doesn’t mean Claudius has to like it, or go looking for it - he’s never been the argue for fun type, never understood the people who are - but he can’t hide from it. Except that it was different before, when they were safe in the Village and nothing could touch them and no argument really mattered because they had each other and nothing would change that.
Nothing except Claudius running off with Lyme and leaving her behind. Nothing like Selene calling him a traitor on live television in front of the whole country. Nothing like Claudius taking her words and twisting them into the Rebellion’s most effective propo. Nothing like Selene cold-shouldering him and Lyme the entire time they were in hiding together at the resistance base, nothing like Claudius trying to explain himself and ending up snarling in her face that he’d do it all over again.
The wind whips ice crystals into his face, and Claudius grunts and squints to clear his vision. They’d fixed it, after months of awkwardness and silence and what he’s pretty sure was active, almost-subtle interference from Dash and Petra. They’d fixed it enough to sit by the lake and watch the dragonflies skim over the water together, for Selene to lean against his side, careful like an indrawn breath and ready to scatter at any moment until Claudius put his arm around her. They’d fixed it, if ‘fixed’ meant no more screaming and flinging each other’s worst nightmares back in their faces and finding an uneasy sort of truce where they pretended nothing ever happened.
If the rebellion was the Arena that tore their friendship and everything about the two of them to ragged, bleeding shreds, then this had been that stage after the early recovery when the young Victor no longer jumps at the weirdest triggers or tries to sneak a knife with them into the shower, when the weather cools down for fall and the nightmares lie quiet for a few weeks in a row and you think maybe, maybe it will be all right. Maybe the worst is over.
The rebellion was the Arena and this fight was the Tour.
As a new Victor Claudius had focused on walking the trails in a soft grey sweater with the sleeves pulled down over his hands, slipping on the bright yellow aspen leaves that covered the ground, and coming back inside to sip hot chocolate by the window with a quilt draped over his lap. He’d pretended fall meant nothing more than the end of the ugly, smothering August heat and the upcoming Harvest Festival, and not a whole new round of costumes and parties and smiling and the cold, unforgiving eyes of district after district after district before the Capitol with their wolf’s claws and teeth hidden behind fluffy, sequinned sheep’s wool.
He’d pretended as long as he could, just like over the last few months he’d ignored the way their tentative return to friendship stretched long and brittle, the way they chose their conversation topics carefully and tiptoed around only the safe subjects. How they lived in an odd collective nostalgia, sharing good memories as peace offerings as though they erased what they’d done to each other in the middle. How Selene carried the hurt on her shoulders like a war wound, how she never fully relaxed beside him like she expected him to strike her out of nowhere. How Claudius held himself with equal readiness, half afraid he’d do it too; how he censored every word he said to her in case she took it the wrong way and decided she really had been better off without him.
But wishing won’t delay the winter, and they couldn’t avoid this forever either. And just like the Tour was so much worse after those calm, relaxing months safe in the Village, so this fight was worse because he honestly had started to believe it wouldn’t happen. It turned out that repressing hurt and resentment and all those lingering fears and flashes of guilt didn’t actually go away because two people agreed to be adults and make it so.
He’d thought maybe he could handle it, but Selene’s first shout slapped him hard across the face and knocked him right back to the war. His own anger bubbled up inside him, defences flared, and he’d scrabbled for a mental weapon as Selene balled her fists and glared at him. He’d almost shouted back, half by reflex and half to show her he could take it and wasn’t going to run crying home to Lyme because he’d managed to displease her, except the anger stuck in his throat and shattered itself into pieces before he could let it loose.
Claudius remembered the war, all right. He remembered the silences and the screaming matches and Selene’s shocked, pale face when he snapped I’d do it again, how she’d curled in on herself like he’d thrown his full weight into a blow to her gut. He remembered the sick twist of guilt that followed, the wave of regret that hit a second later like the videos of the 70th Arena when the dam burst and a whole line of trees cracked in half and disappeared under the weight of that wall of water.
He remembered and so he’d stopped, the words a painful, half-swallowed lump in his chest, and he’d turned his back on Selene and marched to the door instead.
“Where are you going?” she’d called after him, her voice sharp.
“I’m leaving,” Claudius said without looking back. “I’m not going to stand here and say something stupid. I’m going for a walk.”
Claudius’ face burns from the wind and stings from the ice and he should have turned right instead of left so the wind was behind him but it’s too late now. Turning around would feel like a defeat, and apparently that matters when there’s no one to see him but the trees and the quiet, shuttered houses and an extremely judgemental chickadee crammed into a notch in the Village wall.
Claudius trudges through the snow even as his nostrils freeze and his breaths turn to sharp daggers in his lungs. He jams his fingers under his armpits, kicks his toes against the ground to try to restore circulation to his feet, and finally skids on a patch of ice and slides face-first into a low-hanging apple branch. It’s laden with ice and sharp with lack of moisture, and the branch whips hard across his face with a pain that startles him for how entirely stupid this is. A warm wetness trickles down the side of his face, and Claudius touches his cheek and stares dully at the red smear on his fingertips.
“This,” Claudius says out loud as the wind snatches his words and carries them away toward the woods, “is ridiculous. You are ridiculous. Go home.”
He turns around, the wind gusting at his back and almost toppling him forward from the force of it, and it feels so insistent that Claudius wishes he could snap at it and tell it to fuck off, he’s going, all right? But his toes have gone numb inside his boots and there’s a tingling in his fingers that feels almost like heat, and he’s pretty sure the blood has frozen to his face. If he tried smiling he’s not sure his skin wouldn’t crack and split like rubber.
He stops at the fork between his house and Selene’s, and for a second Claudius almost heads for home just so he can fling himself into bed and thaw until he stops feeling like an idiot popsicle. But he told Selene he was going for a walk, and going for a walk implies coming back at the end of it, and she’ll be expecting him. It wouldn’t be fair to leave her waiting, even if the last thing he wants to do now is talk about what happened.
Claudius sighs, absently rubs his face with his sleeve and winces when he feels the scrape of ice instead of soft wool. “Fine,” he says to the air, and heads for Selene’s house. If nothing else the walk did what he intended it to: the anger is gone, leached away into the air, but instead of the clarity he’d hoped for there’s nothing but slow, dragging exhaustion. By the time he reaches Selene’s nothing sounds more amazing than a nap and possibly hibernating until spring, but Claudius pulls open the door and slips inside before the wind can grab it and repeat the dramatic exit on the reverse.
“Hey,” he calls out, dispirited and drained as he wrestles his feet out of his boots and hops awkwardly to avoid soaking his socks in the quickly-melting slush puddle on the mat. The ice on his sweater has already started to turn to water, and Claudius grunts and pulls it over his head.
When he emerges, the sweater tangled around his arms and his hair pulled in odd directions across his scalp, Selene is standing in the entrance to the living room, staring at him wide-eyed. “You left,” she says.
Claudius sighs. “I know, look, I just needed to take a walk and cool off before I did something idiotic -“
“You left,” Selene says again, forceful this time. She has her arms wrapped around herself, and she’s wearing a large blue sweater that belongs to Misha that she wasn’t wearing when he left - her comfort sweater, the one she doesn’t like to admit she nicked, the one she hides in the back of her closet and pulls out when she’s upset but doesn’t want to call her mentor - and oh, shit, shit, it’s not just the lighting making her face blotchy and her eyes glisten.
Claudius drops the sweater to the ground in a sodden lump, and he crosses the room and pulls her into a hug before he even registers what he’s doing. “No, no, I didn’t leave, I went for a walk that’s all, I’d never leave, I promised -“
“You said ‘I’m leaving’,” Selene spits out, and she doesn’t push him away but she doesn’t fold into the embrace either. She just stands there, stiff and frozen with Claudius’ arms around her, and her breath ghosts hot and accusing against his collarbone and oh, Claudius, you’re a fucking moron. “What was I supposed to think? You said you wouldn’t leave and then you did, and you promised!”
Claudius steps back, and he holds her face in his hands before she flinches and jerks away, from the cold or from his touch he can’t tell. “I did, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I was always going to come back, Lene, I just didn’t want to hurt you again.”
Selene laughs, harsh and bitter, and she digs the heel of her hand into her eye. “Yeah, well. Good job.”
Shit, shit, shit. Claudius searches for words but nothing comes up but an increasingly panicked litany of swearing, and that’s the problem isn’t it. He’s good with words when there’s a camera in front of him, he’s great when there’s a script and a setting and an audience, but when it matters, when it comes to friends and feelings and all that important stuff, Claudius may as well be vomiting bullshit.
Words got them into this - words and overthinking - and Claudius is pretty sure that words will not get them out of it. And so, before he can second-guess himself again and make an even bigger mistake, maybe even one too big to fix, Claudius tackles her to the floor instead.
They hit the ground together, and pain shoots up through the knee Claudius used to break most of their fall as Selene curses and pushes him off her. “The fuck was that?” she demands, and at least that’s anger now, so that’s something.
“Talking is terrible,” Claudius says, and he falls back into a low combat crouch. “Fighting is better.”
Selene stares at him for a few long seconds, breaths coming short and fast, then determination clicks across her expression and she tackles him back.
It’s less a fight than it is a brawl, less sparring with any sort of discernible technique and more slamming each other into the ground and striking with whatever limb is closest to something soft. Claudius takes a few good blows to the head but he doesn’t hold back either, and the first time his elbow strike knocks Selene sideways and she comes right back for a return, something unloosens inside him.
At the end Claudius spits out blood onto the floor and Selene swipes at her nose, leaving a smear of red up the side of her cheek all the way to her ear, and they’re out of breath and sloppy and both call a mutual halt. Selene doesn’t flop on him like she used to do after one of their friendly matches, but she’s lost some of the wariness in her posture. They both collapse against the back of the sofa, heads tipped up to stare at the ceiling, breathing hard together as their hearts hammer in sync.
“I can’t do this,” Selene says quietly, and Claudius’ heart clenches but he owes her this and so he waits. “I can’t just keep waiting for you to leave.”
Claudius closes his eyes. “And I can’t keep being terrified I’m going to say or do the wrong thing and make you decide you don’t want me back after all.”
Selene exhales, long and slow. She shifts, the floor creaking at her movement, and when Claudius glances at her she’s pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “So what, then? What do we do?”
“This?” Claudius gestures between them, the blood on Selene’s face and the growing bruise on his cheek. “I mean, what else is there? We’re both great at hurting each other and not so great at the fixing part, at least not when we try to talk about it, so. Maybe no talking about it, not for a while, but instead of pretending like it’s not happening we fight it out instead.”
Selene is quiet for a long while, then unexpectedly, she laughs. “Dash would hate this plan, and Petra would approve. I’m pretty sure that makes it a terrible idea.”
“I want to promise I’ll never hurt you again, but I can’t,” Claudius says. Selene’s face tightens and she looks away, but she doesn’t argue. “And you’re going to hurt me, too. It’s going to happen. But - maybe, if we can beat the shit out of each other and still be friends after, then we can figure the rest out.”
“Okay,” Selene says after a pause. “I mean, it can’t be worse than before, right?”
She’s still not looking at him, and Claudius swallows a dozen more promises he can’t keep that would destroy them both to break. He reaches over, brushes her cheek with his knuckle, and finally Selene turns. Her eyes punch him in the chest, and Claudius uncurls his hand and flattens his palm against her the side of her face. Selene freezes but Claudius carefully doesn’t move, and at last she leans into his hand a little, only a fraction but enough to ease the flurry of panic in his stomach.
“I want this,” Claudius says, and he runs his thumb over the streak of blood across her cheekbone. “You’re my best friend, Lene, I won’t give up. I can’t. Life sucks without you, I don’t want to live like that again.”
“I want this too,” Selene says, her voice small and almost faint, the way it gets when there’s no way to bluster her way around it or breeze past pretending it’s unimportant. “I’m sorry I yelled.”
“I’m sorry I left.” Claudius pulls back and holds out his arm instead, and after a flicker of hesitation Selene curls in against his side. He wraps his arms around her and holds on tight, and Selene turns her face into his chest and takes long, unsteady breaths.
“Why was your face all scratched up when you got home?” she asks without looking up.
Claudius sighs. “I ran into a tree. I’m not proud.”
Selene laughs, a wet, startled snort, and it turns into a fit that leaves her shaking in his arms as Claudius holds on, staring at the ceiling with grim determination. “You’re an idiot,” she tells him finally, and wipes her eyes on his shirt.
“I’m aware,” Claudius says dryly, but when she looks up at him with a hint of her old smile his entire insides do a strange leap into his throat. “Hey, let’s go clean up. I want to make sure I didn’t break your nose.”
She pokes experimentally at her cheek, the bridge of her nose, and shakes her head. “It’s fine,” Selene says, but she follows Claudius to her feet anyway. He stumbles on the way to the bathroom, one knee still weak from a hard kick to the back on the same leg he’d used to break their fall. Selene catches him, hands warm and steady at his waist, and for a second their fingers brush and Claudius has the stupidest, most suicidal impulse to tangle them together.
He doesn’t, because what the hell, and instead they take turns sitting on the counter while the other daubs antiseptic on the cuts on their faces. Afterward Selene takes her time putting away the med kit, and Claudius watches her twist a length of gauze around her fingers, around and around and around.
“Do you - can I stay tonight?” he asks, blurting out the words before common sense draws them back. “You know, like when we had that week of awful storms and we made the blanket forts in the living room with Misha and everything. I’ll leave if you want me to, I just - I don’t want to. Leave, I mean. Not yet.”
Selene studies him, her gaze at once searching and unreadable, but at last she nods. “Okay,” she says. “Let me call Misha.”
There’s a stab of something that might be relief or disappointment or something else, but Claudius doesn’t chase it to find out. She said yes, and having Misha as a buffer is a good thing. It’s a step, and that’s something.
“I’ll get the blankets,” Claudius says, and Selene nods. He feels her eyes on him as he leaves the bathroom and heads for the hall closet, but he doesn’t turn around to look because he’s not sure what it is he wants to see.
It’s not normal - whatever that is - and it’s not like nothing ever happened, but Selene chucks a pillow at his head and pushes him into the pile of blankets when she comes back in from the kitchen with a bowl of popcorn, and when Misha shows up they’re scrapping in the middle of the deconstructed fort.
“All right, kids, don’t hurt yourselves again,” Misha says with hypocritical maturity, and this time when Selene flashes Claudius a grin, he’s pretty sure it’s real.
The night of Selene’s reunion, Claudius can’t sleep. It’s not her fault, and honestly he’s glad she changed her mind about going, glad that Petra managed to convince her that everyone wouldn’t sit there thinking about how they wished she hadn’t stabbed her district partner to bring home the crown. If there’s one good thing about the war it’s that Selene being the poster child undid any negative feelings the district might have had about her; she’s no longer the kinslayer, she’s the girl who stood up in front of the entire nation and defended her district and its principles to the world.
He’s glad, really he is, it’s just that Selene going to her reunion makes Claudius think about how he never went to his, and that stirs up a whole vat of complicated sludge he would rather not step in. Claudius had avoided his reunion because he’d never been chummy with his year-mates, only the boys a few levels above him, and because he’d had an awkward Arena and no one knew quite what to do with him after. He’d figured it wasn’t worth ruining everyone else’s night to show up and be a killjoy, and so he’d stayed home with Lyme and spent half the night sparring and the other half sprawled across her lap.
It’s almost cute, how that back then had been the height of his awkwardness. Now Claudius is District 2’s second-most notorious traitor, and the only thing that saved him from a public lynching, he’s pretty sure, is the part where Coin’s propo team preferred to hog the success of their most effective campaigns and didn’t broadcast who helped them write it. Selene figured it out because she read his fingerprints and because no one else knew her enough to hurt her that badly, but as far as Claudius knew, no one else had connected the dots.
Five years ago Claudius had been an afterthought, an embarrassment most everyone was happy to forget. Now, ten years after his victory, Selene is a war hero and Claudius is an even worse pariah than when he won.
He wouldn’t trade places with her, though. Selene earned her place in the district’s hearts with loyalty and fire, and she deserves a night to hang out with her classmates and find out exactly how much they love her. Petra wouldn’t have convinced her to go if she hadn’t tested the waters first, and Claudius wouldn’t take that away from her for all the money in Panem. He hates people anyway, and Selene might pretend she does but she’s always been more outgoing. She’ll appreciate it much more than Claudius ever would.
Still, when the hour creeps past midnight Claudius gives up staring at his ceiling and writes the night off as lost. He heads down to the music room and plays for a while, his favourite dissonant concertos on the piano and a frenetic sonata that screeches high up onto the A string and sets his teeth on edge. It’s a gamble - sometimes it works to expel the restless energy and sometimes it makes it worse - and tonight, unfortunately, Claudius finishes more jittery than when he started. He’s too keyed up to try anything soothing, and so he abandons the music in favour of the chin-up bar instead.
He stops when his arms give out, the muscles trembling and twitching in odd clusters, and after a long round of stretching Claudius actually does feel a little better. Nothing like muscle burn to occupy the brain, and he pulls his arm over behind his head and feels the last kink in his shoulder unlock. Better than nothing, and Claudius wipes his hand across his forehead, pushing his hair back out of his eyes.
There’s sweat droplets on the floor underneath the bar, and Claudius stares at them for a minute before grabbing a towel. May as well do some cleaning while he’s at it; it’s never given him the laser-focus clarity it does for Lyme, but at this point he’s almost ready to ask Callista for some of her special mints. At least cleaning doesn’t require leaving the house.
He’s finished the floor and is contemplating going after the back of the fridge when a series of knocks at the door stop him. It’s not the standard knock pattern - short short short long long, O Horn of Plen-ty - but a patter of soft blows almost like a rainstorm. Claudius blinks, tosses the towel over the back of the chair, and opens the door.
Selene leans against the frame, cheeks flushed in the porch light, and smiles up at him with half-lidded eyes. “Hey,” she says, and she’s only ever this loose and relaxed when she’s had a really good lay or something to drink. Claudius hopes it’s the latter, and decides not to chase that thought too far. “Can I come in?”
“If you need to throw up it’s probably better to go home,” Claudius says dubiously, though she doesn’t look trashed, just pleasantly buzzed.
Selene rolls her eyes, and she pokes him in the chest with two fingers. “No, silly, I had a good time and you were right, you said I should go and I went and it was fun, and I’m in a good mood and I wanted to see you.” She straightens up and affects a pretty good imitation of Lyme’s offended face. “If that’s okay with you.”
Claudius moves out of the way to let her in. “I’m touched,” he says dryly, adding an extra layer of sarcasm so she won’t know it’s actually true. “Good night, then?”
“Mm-hmm.” Selene wanders in through the front room in a lazy zigzag, picking up knickknacks and putting them down a few feet away in an absent manner. Claudius gives up trying to set everything right after the first few times and instead follows her, bemused. At the entrance to the kitchen Selene stops and whirls around so suddenly Claudius almost runs into her. “We should make cookies,” she announces.
Claudius sneaks a glance at the microwave - 3:20 am - and looks back at her. “Cookies? Now?”
“Yes!” Selene pokes him in the side, and when Claudius yelps and slaps her hand away she grins and does it with the other finger, alternating back and forth as though playing his ribs like a xylophone. “You have things to make cookies, because you’re a sensible boring grownup person who keeps that kind of stuff.”
“Excuse me?” Claudius bursts out, and Selene lets out a peal of triumphant laughter. He should ignore it, but - no, no, he won’t. “Sensible? Grownup? Boring? Selene, what the fuck?”
She steps back and folds her hands behind her back, head up in a tipsy mockery of the Peacekeeper at ease. “Well?” she asks innocently. “Do you or don’t you?”
Claudius stares at her for a minute, and he contemplates lying and saying he doesn’t but that would be petty. “Fine, cookies it is,” he says, and Selene grins and does a triumphant twirl on the linoleum in her sock feet. Claudius gets his revenge by flicking on the kitchen light and laughing as she flings her hands in front of her eyes, but a moment later Selene chooses to block her vision by standing behind him and mashing her face between his shoulder blades, so that backfired.
“Selene,” Claudius says patiently. “I need you to let go if we’re going to make cookies.”
In response Selene buries her face in closer - Claudius’ breath catches for an unknown stupid reason, what the hell lungs - and sticks out her hands in front of him, arms braced against his sides. “My hands are your hands,” she says. “Use my gift wisely.”
“Snow on a mutt-fucking mountain,” Claudius mutters, but when he tests her by placing the container of butter in her outstretched hands, Selene cradles it gently against his chest like a baby and doesn’t let it drop. “Well, this isn’t weird at all, but okay,” he says, and Selene giggles into his shirt and shuffles after him as he turns to grab the dry ingredients from the cupboard.
Claudius lines up the ingredients and supplies along the counter in the order of the recipe, and once everything is ready he drags a stool over to the counter. “There, that’s where you sit,” he says, peeling Selene away from his back and guiding her to the seat. “I’ll add the ingredients to the bowl and you stir, how’s that?”
Selene salutes with the wooden spoon, and Claudius snorts and measures out the flour.
It’s a wonder he actually gets the cookies in the oven, given that Selene keeps wandering over to poke at things, or rest her chin on his shoulder and poke her fingers between his ribs in a deliberate up-and-down walk across his side, but all that Centre focus training had to go somewhere. Claudius spoons the mixture onto a pair of baking trays, laughs when Selene decides to add chocolate-chip faces to all the cookies before boring of the fiddly task and wandering off halfway through, and finally sets the timer and steers Selene away while they wait.
“How long will it take?” Selene asks him. She’s blinking a bit more, and each time seems to take a few microseconds longer than the one before, but Claudius suspects he’ll have a fight on his hands if he tries to convince her to sleep before the cookie are ready.
“I’m supposed to check them after eight minutes,” Claudius says. He leads her to the living room, where Selene flops onto the couch and sprawls across it as though he’d poured her there. “And then we’re supposed to let them cool, but I don’t think anyone actually listens to that step. Well, Emory probably does.” Claudius has no problem with Emory or anything, but sometimes she makes him feel like he’s still seven years old and not really supposed to be in Residential.
Selene rolls her eyes, but there’s no edge to it, not tonight. “Play for me?”
Claudius freezes, but Selene doesn’t appear to notice. She’s too busy tracing her fingers over the stitching on one of his Misha-embroidered pillows - this one says “Do No Harm But Take No Shit” in bright blue thread with yellow sunflowers - and Claudius swallows and shakes the urge to twist his fingers in an obvious tell. He’s played for Selene since they came back to the Village and patched up the ruin of their shattered friendship, but it had always been more that Selene would stop by while he was practicing and stick around to listen.
He can’t remember the last time Selene asked, but it must have been before the war. Still, Selene’s humming softly to herself and giggling as she follows the swirl of the S in ‘shit’, and Claudius isn’t going to take it for granted - even if it did require a whole lot of alcohol to get it to happen. “Sure,” he says. “Be right back.”
It’s too much to get the cello; the cello is what Claudius plays when he bares his soul, and while the thought of letting Selene listen to that again makes his chest ache, he’s not ready. Not when she’s tipsy and smiling at him like that, all lazy and relaxed for the first time in forever. He fetches his violin instead, settles himself on the arm of the couch at Selene’s feet so he can keep an eye on the clock, raises his violin to his chin, and plays.
He watches her at first, quick glances when he swoops his bow in the reverse direction, but turns out Claudius can’t actually keep that up for long. He almost fumbles the first time he catches her eye, sees her expression soft and fond and not at all self-conscious, and Claudius finishes the concerto with his gaze fixed firmly on the clock behind her head.
The house smells of chocolate and cinnamon by the time Claudius finishes the piece and sets the violin down on the coffee table, and it might be three in the morning but cookies are actually starting to sound pretty good. Claudius slides the cookies - still gooey - from the tray onto a plate and brings them out into the living room, along with a glass of milk for Selene and water for him.
Selene, for her part, has pulled the cushions and blankets off the couch and built a nest on the floor. “Cookies need nests,” she tells him, pointing one finger imperiously, and Claudius doesn’t try to argue. He sets the glasses and the plate on the coffee table at the edge of the blanket pile, and sits down next to Selene after only a little hesitation.
They make it through half the batch or so before Claudius’ stomach starts protesting that much sugar without anything to combat it, and Selene gives up soon after. Claudius starts to get up to clear away the plate and put the empty glasses in the sink, but Selene makes a low noise of protest and loops both her arms around his. “Dishes are for mornings,” she says, pronouncing the statement with the confidence of a lawmaker enacting a new piece of legislation. “Nests are for Claudius.”
“Oh are they,” Claudius says, amused. Selene’s flopped against his side, halfway into his lap, and he can’t help but hold his breath, half afraid this will shatter and they’ll go back to the way they were after the war, brittle and careful and awkward. Claudius curls his arm around her shoulders, which is at least somewhat familiar territory, and slowly works his hand into her hair, combing his fingers across her scalp.
“This was a good day,” Selene mumbles into his chest. “I’m glad I went. I’m sad you didn’t go to yours, I bet it would’ve been good.”
“Ah, well.” He’s not going to point out that as far as regrets go, not attending his five-year reunion is pretty much at the bottom of the list. “I’m okay, I’ve got all the people I like right here.”
He meant - the Village, or in his life, maybe, since here doesn’t include Dash or Petra - but then Selene rolls over to look up at him with a surprised-sleepy smile, and Claudius decides maybe he said the right words after all.
The combination of alcohol, late hour, cookies and milk and hair stroking means Selene doesn’t last much longer. She falls asleep still curled against him, but when Claudius tries to extricate himself, once again she murmurs and tightens her arms around his waist. He considers arguing with her about it - sober Selene doesn’t cuddle in her sleep, she hates being touched unless it’s Misha and wakes up too easily at any movement - but Selene’s forehead puckers in a deep frown and he doesn’t want to end the day on an argument.
Instead he manages to pull away long enough to turn off the lights and get her to lie down, then joins her in the mess of blankets before she has time to complain about the loss of contact. Selene doesn’t wrap herself around him again but she does tuck herself in against his chest, and Claudius rests one arm across her back as light and non-trapping as he can manage in case she wakes up in a panic.
“Night, Lene,” Claudius says, tugging at the ends of her hair.
“Mmrph,” Selene mumbles. “No talking. Sleeeeep.”
Claudius laughs a little to himself while trying not to jostle her, but the house is dark and quiet and the cookies sit comfortable in his stomach, and Selene is warm and close at his side. He waits long enough for her breaths to even out into sleep, then follows her soon after.
Claudius doesn’t mean to slam the door behind him, but it’s winter and the wind is a bitch in the Village this time of year, and the door tears itself from his hand and hits the frame hard enough to rattle the window. Claudius winces but it’s too late, and he’s not going to troop back in there and try a ridiculous-sounding excuse about the wind and air pressure and who knows what, and so he leaves it. He hadn’t bothered to bring his coat when crossing the Village to Selene’s house but who cares, maybe the cold will help freeze away some of the anger. He hunches his shoulders up towards his ears, tucks his chin into his chest and shoves his hands in his pockets and makes a headway into the snow.
They were going to fight eventually. No matter how well people get along there’s no way to avoid it forever, they’re human and Victors and killers besides, tempers will fray and there will be clashes, it’s reality. Doesn’t mean Claudius has to like it, or go looking for it - he’s never been the argue for fun type, never understood the people who are - but he can’t hide from it. Except that it was different before, when they were safe in the Village and nothing could touch them and no argument really mattered because they had each other and nothing would change that.
Nothing except Claudius running off with Lyme and leaving her behind. Nothing like Selene calling him a traitor on live television in front of the whole country. Nothing like Claudius taking her words and twisting them into the Rebellion’s most effective propo. Nothing like Selene cold-shouldering him and Lyme the entire time they were in hiding together at the resistance base, nothing like Claudius trying to explain himself and ending up snarling in her face that he’d do it all over again.
The wind whips ice crystals into his face, and Claudius grunts and squints to clear his vision. They’d fixed it, after months of awkwardness and silence and what he’s pretty sure was active, almost-subtle interference from Dash and Petra. They’d fixed it enough to sit by the lake and watch the dragonflies skim over the water together, for Selene to lean against his side, careful like an indrawn breath and ready to scatter at any moment until Claudius put his arm around her. They’d fixed it, if ‘fixed’ meant no more screaming and flinging each other’s worst nightmares back in their faces and finding an uneasy sort of truce where they pretended nothing ever happened.
If the rebellion was the Arena that tore their friendship and everything about the two of them to ragged, bleeding shreds, then this had been that stage after the early recovery when the young Victor no longer jumps at the weirdest triggers or tries to sneak a knife with them into the shower, when the weather cools down for fall and the nightmares lie quiet for a few weeks in a row and you think maybe, maybe it will be all right. Maybe the worst is over.
The rebellion was the Arena and this fight was the Tour.
As a new Victor Claudius had focused on walking the trails in a soft grey sweater with the sleeves pulled down over his hands, slipping on the bright yellow aspen leaves that covered the ground, and coming back inside to sip hot chocolate by the window with a quilt draped over his lap. He’d pretended fall meant nothing more than the end of the ugly, smothering August heat and the upcoming Harvest Festival, and not a whole new round of costumes and parties and smiling and the cold, unforgiving eyes of district after district after district before the Capitol with their wolf’s claws and teeth hidden behind fluffy, sequinned sheep’s wool.
He’d pretended as long as he could, just like over the last few months he’d ignored the way their tentative return to friendship stretched long and brittle, the way they chose their conversation topics carefully and tiptoed around only the safe subjects. How they lived in an odd collective nostalgia, sharing good memories as peace offerings as though they erased what they’d done to each other in the middle. How Selene carried the hurt on her shoulders like a war wound, how she never fully relaxed beside him like she expected him to strike her out of nowhere. How Claudius held himself with equal readiness, half afraid he’d do it too; how he censored every word he said to her in case she took it the wrong way and decided she really had been better off without him.
But wishing won’t delay the winter, and they couldn’t avoid this forever either. And just like the Tour was so much worse after those calm, relaxing months safe in the Village, so this fight was worse because he honestly had started to believe it wouldn’t happen. It turned out that repressing hurt and resentment and all those lingering fears and flashes of guilt didn’t actually go away because two people agreed to be adults and make it so.
He’d thought maybe he could handle it, but Selene’s first shout slapped him hard across the face and knocked him right back to the war. His own anger bubbled up inside him, defences flared, and he’d scrabbled for a mental weapon as Selene balled her fists and glared at him. He’d almost shouted back, half by reflex and half to show her he could take it and wasn’t going to run crying home to Lyme because he’d managed to displease her, except the anger stuck in his throat and shattered itself into pieces before he could let it loose.
Claudius remembered the war, all right. He remembered the silences and the screaming matches and Selene’s shocked, pale face when he snapped I’d do it again, how she’d curled in on herself like he’d thrown his full weight into a blow to her gut. He remembered the sick twist of guilt that followed, the wave of regret that hit a second later like the videos of the 70th Arena when the dam burst and a whole line of trees cracked in half and disappeared under the weight of that wall of water.
He remembered and so he’d stopped, the words a painful, half-swallowed lump in his chest, and he’d turned his back on Selene and marched to the door instead.
“Where are you going?” she’d called after him, her voice sharp.
“I’m leaving,” Claudius said without looking back. “I’m not going to stand here and say something stupid. I’m going for a walk.”
Claudius’ face burns from the wind and stings from the ice and he should have turned right instead of left so the wind was behind him but it’s too late now. Turning around would feel like a defeat, and apparently that matters when there’s no one to see him but the trees and the quiet, shuttered houses and an extremely judgemental chickadee crammed into a notch in the Village wall.
Claudius trudges through the snow even as his nostrils freeze and his breaths turn to sharp daggers in his lungs. He jams his fingers under his armpits, kicks his toes against the ground to try to restore circulation to his feet, and finally skids on a patch of ice and slides face-first into a low-hanging apple branch. It’s laden with ice and sharp with lack of moisture, and the branch whips hard across his face with a pain that startles him for how entirely stupid this is. A warm wetness trickles down the side of his face, and Claudius touches his cheek and stares dully at the red smear on his fingertips.
“This,” Claudius says out loud as the wind snatches his words and carries them away toward the woods, “is ridiculous. You are ridiculous. Go home.”
He turns around, the wind gusting at his back and almost toppling him forward from the force of it, and it feels so insistent that Claudius wishes he could snap at it and tell it to fuck off, he’s going, all right? But his toes have gone numb inside his boots and there’s a tingling in his fingers that feels almost like heat, and he’s pretty sure the blood has frozen to his face. If he tried smiling he’s not sure his skin wouldn’t crack and split like rubber.
He stops at the fork between his house and Selene’s, and for a second Claudius almost heads for home just so he can fling himself into bed and thaw until he stops feeling like an idiot popsicle. But he told Selene he was going for a walk, and going for a walk implies coming back at the end of it, and she’ll be expecting him. It wouldn’t be fair to leave her waiting, even if the last thing he wants to do now is talk about what happened.
Claudius sighs, absently rubs his face with his sleeve and winces when he feels the scrape of ice instead of soft wool. “Fine,” he says to the air, and heads for Selene’s house. If nothing else the walk did what he intended it to: the anger is gone, leached away into the air, but instead of the clarity he’d hoped for there’s nothing but slow, dragging exhaustion. By the time he reaches Selene’s nothing sounds more amazing than a nap and possibly hibernating until spring, but Claudius pulls open the door and slips inside before the wind can grab it and repeat the dramatic exit on the reverse.
“Hey,” he calls out, dispirited and drained as he wrestles his feet out of his boots and hops awkwardly to avoid soaking his socks in the quickly-melting slush puddle on the mat. The ice on his sweater has already started to turn to water, and Claudius grunts and pulls it over his head.
When he emerges, the sweater tangled around his arms and his hair pulled in odd directions across his scalp, Selene is standing in the entrance to the living room, staring at him wide-eyed. “You left,” she says.
Claudius sighs. “I know, look, I just needed to take a walk and cool off before I did something idiotic -“
“You left,” Selene says again, forceful this time. She has her arms wrapped around herself, and she’s wearing a large blue sweater that belongs to Misha that she wasn’t wearing when he left - her comfort sweater, the one she doesn’t like to admit she nicked, the one she hides in the back of her closet and pulls out when she’s upset but doesn’t want to call her mentor - and oh, shit, shit, it’s not just the lighting making her face blotchy and her eyes glisten.
Claudius drops the sweater to the ground in a sodden lump, and he crosses the room and pulls her into a hug before he even registers what he’s doing. “No, no, I didn’t leave, I went for a walk that’s all, I’d never leave, I promised -“
“You said ‘I’m leaving’,” Selene spits out, and she doesn’t push him away but she doesn’t fold into the embrace either. She just stands there, stiff and frozen with Claudius’ arms around her, and her breath ghosts hot and accusing against his collarbone and oh, Claudius, you’re a fucking moron. “What was I supposed to think? You said you wouldn’t leave and then you did, and you promised!”
Claudius steps back, and he holds her face in his hands before she flinches and jerks away, from the cold or from his touch he can’t tell. “I did, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I was always going to come back, Lene, I just didn’t want to hurt you again.”
Selene laughs, harsh and bitter, and she digs the heel of her hand into her eye. “Yeah, well. Good job.”
Shit, shit, shit. Claudius searches for words but nothing comes up but an increasingly panicked litany of swearing, and that’s the problem isn’t it. He’s good with words when there’s a camera in front of him, he’s great when there’s a script and a setting and an audience, but when it matters, when it comes to friends and feelings and all that important stuff, Claudius may as well be vomiting bullshit.
Words got them into this - words and overthinking - and Claudius is pretty sure that words will not get them out of it. And so, before he can second-guess himself again and make an even bigger mistake, maybe even one too big to fix, Claudius tackles her to the floor instead.
They hit the ground together, and pain shoots up through the knee Claudius used to break most of their fall as Selene curses and pushes him off her. “The fuck was that?” she demands, and at least that’s anger now, so that’s something.
“Talking is terrible,” Claudius says, and he falls back into a low combat crouch. “Fighting is better.”
Selene stares at him for a few long seconds, breaths coming short and fast, then determination clicks across her expression and she tackles him back.
It’s less a fight than it is a brawl, less sparring with any sort of discernible technique and more slamming each other into the ground and striking with whatever limb is closest to something soft. Claudius takes a few good blows to the head but he doesn’t hold back either, and the first time his elbow strike knocks Selene sideways and she comes right back for a return, something unloosens inside him.
At the end Claudius spits out blood onto the floor and Selene swipes at her nose, leaving a smear of red up the side of her cheek all the way to her ear, and they’re out of breath and sloppy and both call a mutual halt. Selene doesn’t flop on him like she used to do after one of their friendly matches, but she’s lost some of the wariness in her posture. They both collapse against the back of the sofa, heads tipped up to stare at the ceiling, breathing hard together as their hearts hammer in sync.
“I can’t do this,” Selene says quietly, and Claudius’ heart clenches but he owes her this and so he waits. “I can’t just keep waiting for you to leave.”
Claudius closes his eyes. “And I can’t keep being terrified I’m going to say or do the wrong thing and make you decide you don’t want me back after all.”
Selene exhales, long and slow. She shifts, the floor creaking at her movement, and when Claudius glances at her she’s pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “So what, then? What do we do?”
“This?” Claudius gestures between them, the blood on Selene’s face and the growing bruise on his cheek. “I mean, what else is there? We’re both great at hurting each other and not so great at the fixing part, at least not when we try to talk about it, so. Maybe no talking about it, not for a while, but instead of pretending like it’s not happening we fight it out instead.”
Selene is quiet for a long while, then unexpectedly, she laughs. “Dash would hate this plan, and Petra would approve. I’m pretty sure that makes it a terrible idea.”
“I want to promise I’ll never hurt you again, but I can’t,” Claudius says. Selene’s face tightens and she looks away, but she doesn’t argue. “And you’re going to hurt me, too. It’s going to happen. But - maybe, if we can beat the shit out of each other and still be friends after, then we can figure the rest out.”
“Okay,” Selene says after a pause. “I mean, it can’t be worse than before, right?”
She’s still not looking at him, and Claudius swallows a dozen more promises he can’t keep that would destroy them both to break. He reaches over, brushes her cheek with his knuckle, and finally Selene turns. Her eyes punch him in the chest, and Claudius uncurls his hand and flattens his palm against her the side of her face. Selene freezes but Claudius carefully doesn’t move, and at last she leans into his hand a little, only a fraction but enough to ease the flurry of panic in his stomach.
“I want this,” Claudius says, and he runs his thumb over the streak of blood across her cheekbone. “You’re my best friend, Lene, I won’t give up. I can’t. Life sucks without you, I don’t want to live like that again.”
“I want this too,” Selene says, her voice small and almost faint, the way it gets when there’s no way to bluster her way around it or breeze past pretending it’s unimportant. “I’m sorry I yelled.”
“I’m sorry I left.” Claudius pulls back and holds out his arm instead, and after a flicker of hesitation Selene curls in against his side. He wraps his arms around her and holds on tight, and Selene turns her face into his chest and takes long, unsteady breaths.
“Why was your face all scratched up when you got home?” she asks without looking up.
Claudius sighs. “I ran into a tree. I’m not proud.”
Selene laughs, a wet, startled snort, and it turns into a fit that leaves her shaking in his arms as Claudius holds on, staring at the ceiling with grim determination. “You’re an idiot,” she tells him finally, and wipes her eyes on his shirt.
“I’m aware,” Claudius says dryly, but when she looks up at him with a hint of her old smile his entire insides do a strange leap into his throat. “Hey, let’s go clean up. I want to make sure I didn’t break your nose.”
She pokes experimentally at her cheek, the bridge of her nose, and shakes her head. “It’s fine,” Selene says, but she follows Claudius to her feet anyway. He stumbles on the way to the bathroom, one knee still weak from a hard kick to the back on the same leg he’d used to break their fall. Selene catches him, hands warm and steady at his waist, and for a second their fingers brush and Claudius has the stupidest, most suicidal impulse to tangle them together.
He doesn’t, because what the hell, and instead they take turns sitting on the counter while the other daubs antiseptic on the cuts on their faces. Afterward Selene takes her time putting away the med kit, and Claudius watches her twist a length of gauze around her fingers, around and around and around.
“Do you - can I stay tonight?” he asks, blurting out the words before common sense draws them back. “You know, like when we had that week of awful storms and we made the blanket forts in the living room with Misha and everything. I’ll leave if you want me to, I just - I don’t want to. Leave, I mean. Not yet.”
Selene studies him, her gaze at once searching and unreadable, but at last she nods. “Okay,” she says. “Let me call Misha.”
There’s a stab of something that might be relief or disappointment or something else, but Claudius doesn’t chase it to find out. She said yes, and having Misha as a buffer is a good thing. It’s a step, and that’s something.
“I’ll get the blankets,” Claudius says, and Selene nods. He feels her eyes on him as he leaves the bathroom and heads for the hall closet, but he doesn’t turn around to look because he’s not sure what it is he wants to see.
It’s not normal - whatever that is - and it’s not like nothing ever happened, but Selene chucks a pillow at his head and pushes him into the pile of blankets when she comes back in from the kitchen with a bowl of popcorn, and when Misha shows up they’re scrapping in the middle of the deconstructed fort.
“All right, kids, don’t hurt yourselves again,” Misha says with hypocritical maturity, and this time when Selene flashes Claudius a grin, he’s pretty sure it’s real.
The night of Selene’s reunion, Claudius can’t sleep. It’s not her fault, and honestly he’s glad she changed her mind about going, glad that Petra managed to convince her that everyone wouldn’t sit there thinking about how they wished she hadn’t stabbed her district partner to bring home the crown. If there’s one good thing about the war it’s that Selene being the poster child undid any negative feelings the district might have had about her; she’s no longer the kinslayer, she’s the girl who stood up in front of the entire nation and defended her district and its principles to the world.
He’s glad, really he is, it’s just that Selene going to her reunion makes Claudius think about how he never went to his, and that stirs up a whole vat of complicated sludge he would rather not step in. Claudius had avoided his reunion because he’d never been chummy with his year-mates, only the boys a few levels above him, and because he’d had an awkward Arena and no one knew quite what to do with him after. He’d figured it wasn’t worth ruining everyone else’s night to show up and be a killjoy, and so he’d stayed home with Lyme and spent half the night sparring and the other half sprawled across her lap.
It’s almost cute, how that back then had been the height of his awkwardness. Now Claudius is District 2’s second-most notorious traitor, and the only thing that saved him from a public lynching, he’s pretty sure, is the part where Coin’s propo team preferred to hog the success of their most effective campaigns and didn’t broadcast who helped them write it. Selene figured it out because she read his fingerprints and because no one else knew her enough to hurt her that badly, but as far as Claudius knew, no one else had connected the dots.
Five years ago Claudius had been an afterthought, an embarrassment most everyone was happy to forget. Now, ten years after his victory, Selene is a war hero and Claudius is an even worse pariah than when he won.
He wouldn’t trade places with her, though. Selene earned her place in the district’s hearts with loyalty and fire, and she deserves a night to hang out with her classmates and find out exactly how much they love her. Petra wouldn’t have convinced her to go if she hadn’t tested the waters first, and Claudius wouldn’t take that away from her for all the money in Panem. He hates people anyway, and Selene might pretend she does but she’s always been more outgoing. She’ll appreciate it much more than Claudius ever would.
Still, when the hour creeps past midnight Claudius gives up staring at his ceiling and writes the night off as lost. He heads down to the music room and plays for a while, his favourite dissonant concertos on the piano and a frenetic sonata that screeches high up onto the A string and sets his teeth on edge. It’s a gamble - sometimes it works to expel the restless energy and sometimes it makes it worse - and tonight, unfortunately, Claudius finishes more jittery than when he started. He’s too keyed up to try anything soothing, and so he abandons the music in favour of the chin-up bar instead.
He stops when his arms give out, the muscles trembling and twitching in odd clusters, and after a long round of stretching Claudius actually does feel a little better. Nothing like muscle burn to occupy the brain, and he pulls his arm over behind his head and feels the last kink in his shoulder unlock. Better than nothing, and Claudius wipes his hand across his forehead, pushing his hair back out of his eyes.
There’s sweat droplets on the floor underneath the bar, and Claudius stares at them for a minute before grabbing a towel. May as well do some cleaning while he’s at it; it’s never given him the laser-focus clarity it does for Lyme, but at this point he’s almost ready to ask Callista for some of her special mints. At least cleaning doesn’t require leaving the house.
He’s finished the floor and is contemplating going after the back of the fridge when a series of knocks at the door stop him. It’s not the standard knock pattern - short short short long long, O Horn of Plen-ty - but a patter of soft blows almost like a rainstorm. Claudius blinks, tosses the towel over the back of the chair, and opens the door.
Selene leans against the frame, cheeks flushed in the porch light, and smiles up at him with half-lidded eyes. “Hey,” she says, and she’s only ever this loose and relaxed when she’s had a really good lay or something to drink. Claudius hopes it’s the latter, and decides not to chase that thought too far. “Can I come in?”
“If you need to throw up it’s probably better to go home,” Claudius says dubiously, though she doesn’t look trashed, just pleasantly buzzed.
Selene rolls her eyes, and she pokes him in the chest with two fingers. “No, silly, I had a good time and you were right, you said I should go and I went and it was fun, and I’m in a good mood and I wanted to see you.” She straightens up and affects a pretty good imitation of Lyme’s offended face. “If that’s okay with you.”
Claudius moves out of the way to let her in. “I’m touched,” he says dryly, adding an extra layer of sarcasm so she won’t know it’s actually true. “Good night, then?”
“Mm-hmm.” Selene wanders in through the front room in a lazy zigzag, picking up knickknacks and putting them down a few feet away in an absent manner. Claudius gives up trying to set everything right after the first few times and instead follows her, bemused. At the entrance to the kitchen Selene stops and whirls around so suddenly Claudius almost runs into her. “We should make cookies,” she announces.
Claudius sneaks a glance at the microwave - 3:20 am - and looks back at her. “Cookies? Now?”
“Yes!” Selene pokes him in the side, and when Claudius yelps and slaps her hand away she grins and does it with the other finger, alternating back and forth as though playing his ribs like a xylophone. “You have things to make cookies, because you’re a sensible boring grownup person who keeps that kind of stuff.”
“Excuse me?” Claudius bursts out, and Selene lets out a peal of triumphant laughter. He should ignore it, but - no, no, he won’t. “Sensible? Grownup? Boring? Selene, what the fuck?”
She steps back and folds her hands behind her back, head up in a tipsy mockery of the Peacekeeper at ease. “Well?” she asks innocently. “Do you or don’t you?”
Claudius stares at her for a minute, and he contemplates lying and saying he doesn’t but that would be petty. “Fine, cookies it is,” he says, and Selene grins and does a triumphant twirl on the linoleum in her sock feet. Claudius gets his revenge by flicking on the kitchen light and laughing as she flings her hands in front of her eyes, but a moment later Selene chooses to block her vision by standing behind him and mashing her face between his shoulder blades, so that backfired.
“Selene,” Claudius says patiently. “I need you to let go if we’re going to make cookies.”
In response Selene buries her face in closer - Claudius’ breath catches for an unknown stupid reason, what the hell lungs - and sticks out her hands in front of him, arms braced against his sides. “My hands are your hands,” she says. “Use my gift wisely.”
“Snow on a mutt-fucking mountain,” Claudius mutters, but when he tests her by placing the container of butter in her outstretched hands, Selene cradles it gently against his chest like a baby and doesn’t let it drop. “Well, this isn’t weird at all, but okay,” he says, and Selene giggles into his shirt and shuffles after him as he turns to grab the dry ingredients from the cupboard.
Claudius lines up the ingredients and supplies along the counter in the order of the recipe, and once everything is ready he drags a stool over to the counter. “There, that’s where you sit,” he says, peeling Selene away from his back and guiding her to the seat. “I’ll add the ingredients to the bowl and you stir, how’s that?”
Selene salutes with the wooden spoon, and Claudius snorts and measures out the flour.
It’s a wonder he actually gets the cookies in the oven, given that Selene keeps wandering over to poke at things, or rest her chin on his shoulder and poke her fingers between his ribs in a deliberate up-and-down walk across his side, but all that Centre focus training had to go somewhere. Claudius spoons the mixture onto a pair of baking trays, laughs when Selene decides to add chocolate-chip faces to all the cookies before boring of the fiddly task and wandering off halfway through, and finally sets the timer and steers Selene away while they wait.
“How long will it take?” Selene asks him. She’s blinking a bit more, and each time seems to take a few microseconds longer than the one before, but Claudius suspects he’ll have a fight on his hands if he tries to convince her to sleep before the cookie are ready.
“I’m supposed to check them after eight minutes,” Claudius says. He leads her to the living room, where Selene flops onto the couch and sprawls across it as though he’d poured her there. “And then we’re supposed to let them cool, but I don’t think anyone actually listens to that step. Well, Emory probably does.” Claudius has no problem with Emory or anything, but sometimes she makes him feel like he’s still seven years old and not really supposed to be in Residential.
Selene rolls her eyes, but there’s no edge to it, not tonight. “Play for me?”
Claudius freezes, but Selene doesn’t appear to notice. She’s too busy tracing her fingers over the stitching on one of his Misha-embroidered pillows - this one says “Do No Harm But Take No Shit” in bright blue thread with yellow sunflowers - and Claudius swallows and shakes the urge to twist his fingers in an obvious tell. He’s played for Selene since they came back to the Village and patched up the ruin of their shattered friendship, but it had always been more that Selene would stop by while he was practicing and stick around to listen.
He can’t remember the last time Selene asked, but it must have been before the war. Still, Selene’s humming softly to herself and giggling as she follows the swirl of the S in ‘shit’, and Claudius isn’t going to take it for granted - even if it did require a whole lot of alcohol to get it to happen. “Sure,” he says. “Be right back.”
It’s too much to get the cello; the cello is what Claudius plays when he bares his soul, and while the thought of letting Selene listen to that again makes his chest ache, he’s not ready. Not when she’s tipsy and smiling at him like that, all lazy and relaxed for the first time in forever. He fetches his violin instead, settles himself on the arm of the couch at Selene’s feet so he can keep an eye on the clock, raises his violin to his chin, and plays.
He watches her at first, quick glances when he swoops his bow in the reverse direction, but turns out Claudius can’t actually keep that up for long. He almost fumbles the first time he catches her eye, sees her expression soft and fond and not at all self-conscious, and Claudius finishes the concerto with his gaze fixed firmly on the clock behind her head.
The house smells of chocolate and cinnamon by the time Claudius finishes the piece and sets the violin down on the coffee table, and it might be three in the morning but cookies are actually starting to sound pretty good. Claudius slides the cookies - still gooey - from the tray onto a plate and brings them out into the living room, along with a glass of milk for Selene and water for him.
Selene, for her part, has pulled the cushions and blankets off the couch and built a nest on the floor. “Cookies need nests,” she tells him, pointing one finger imperiously, and Claudius doesn’t try to argue. He sets the glasses and the plate on the coffee table at the edge of the blanket pile, and sits down next to Selene after only a little hesitation.
They make it through half the batch or so before Claudius’ stomach starts protesting that much sugar without anything to combat it, and Selene gives up soon after. Claudius starts to get up to clear away the plate and put the empty glasses in the sink, but Selene makes a low noise of protest and loops both her arms around his. “Dishes are for mornings,” she says, pronouncing the statement with the confidence of a lawmaker enacting a new piece of legislation. “Nests are for Claudius.”
“Oh are they,” Claudius says, amused. Selene’s flopped against his side, halfway into his lap, and he can’t help but hold his breath, half afraid this will shatter and they’ll go back to the way they were after the war, brittle and careful and awkward. Claudius curls his arm around her shoulders, which is at least somewhat familiar territory, and slowly works his hand into her hair, combing his fingers across her scalp.
“This was a good day,” Selene mumbles into his chest. “I’m glad I went. I’m sad you didn’t go to yours, I bet it would’ve been good.”
“Ah, well.” He’s not going to point out that as far as regrets go, not attending his five-year reunion is pretty much at the bottom of the list. “I’m okay, I’ve got all the people I like right here.”
He meant - the Village, or in his life, maybe, since here doesn’t include Dash or Petra - but then Selene rolls over to look up at him with a surprised-sleepy smile, and Claudius decides maybe he said the right words after all.
The combination of alcohol, late hour, cookies and milk and hair stroking means Selene doesn’t last much longer. She falls asleep still curled against him, but when Claudius tries to extricate himself, once again she murmurs and tightens her arms around his waist. He considers arguing with her about it - sober Selene doesn’t cuddle in her sleep, she hates being touched unless it’s Misha and wakes up too easily at any movement - but Selene’s forehead puckers in a deep frown and he doesn’t want to end the day on an argument.
Instead he manages to pull away long enough to turn off the lights and get her to lie down, then joins her in the mess of blankets before she has time to complain about the loss of contact. Selene doesn’t wrap herself around him again but she does tuck herself in against his chest, and Claudius rests one arm across her back as light and non-trapping as he can manage in case she wakes up in a panic.
“Night, Lene,” Claudius says, tugging at the ends of her hair.
“Mmrph,” Selene mumbles. “No talking. Sleeeeep.”
Claudius laughs a little to himself while trying not to jostle her, but the house is dark and quiet and the cookies sit comfortable in his stomach, and Selene is warm and close at his side. He waits long enough for her breaths to even out into sleep, then follows her soon after.