Lyme Time Travel Fix-it AU
Anonymous on Tumblr asked:
If Lyme in 74 could go back to when she was thirteen and do everything again, would she make any different choices?
Claudius’ body lies heavy across her lap. His blood coats her hands, hot and wet and slippery and that’s his blood, his blood, she promised to protect him and now he’s dead. Alma Coin smiles down at her, mouth a mocking gash across her face, and asks for last words. Lyme spits into the dirt. She’d give anything for the Arena so she could take this woman down with her "Go fuck yourself."
"Personally I think that's lacking that special something, but for a first draft I'll take it," Coin says. Then, almost lazily: "Fire."
Pain, sharp and hot and burning and then -
She jolts upright in bed, sweat-slicked and gasping, air slicing through her lungs like a fresh blade, both hands over her mouth to muffle a scream. A dream. Just a dream. No boots in the dark, no rifles glinting in the torchlight, no bodies of miners crushed beneath fallen rock. No ears ringing from explosions. No Claudius, falling stiff and silent to the ground with eyes wide and a mouth full of blood. He’s here, safe across the room and -
No.
No Claudius. No second bunk. No steel walls and dull, orange recessed lighting. A desk with books and papers stacked in the corner. Shoes - absurdly small - on the chair. Heavy oak dresser with a bedsheet tossed over the large vanity mirror. An open window casting tree shadows on the floor.
And numbers, thousands of numbers, scrawled across the walls in permanent marker: 33 - 16th, 10F, mutt attack. 10 - 3rd, 4M, exsanguination. 27 - 24th, 12M, blunt force trauma.
Twenty-five years of buried memories gush out like fallen intestines. “No,” Lyme says aloud. It comes out rough, the voice of a girl who’s spent years trying to make it sound lower, tougher, less like someone a few inches of hair away from pigtails and ribbons.
She scrambles out of bed, nearly falls on her face when her feet hit the ground too soon. Kid’s bed, barely a foot off the ground. Her legs are gangly, strong calves from walking but not filled out yet. Lyme swallows back bile. Still a dream, still a dream, it has to be a dream -
Rest of the house is dark, quiet. Nothing but the refrigerator humming in the corner of the kitchen; the door cuts a swath in the line of empties on the floor when Lyme yanks it open. No food inside but there wouldn’t be, would it, she kept all her food in her bedroom. In a box in the back of her closet, hidden so he wouldn’t find it. Bread, apples, beans, milk and eggs in a wire basket in the stream out back. The rest of the vouchers will be under her bed, slipped in between the slats. Her stomach knots.
More memories, like water seeping in through boots with a crack in the sealant. The Centre used to give out calendars, shiny, glossy paper with pictures of pretty children grinning at the camera as they climbed the ropes course or tossed dodgeballs, posing with their arms around each other like they won’t be pulling hidden knives as soon as the photo shoot is over. Lyme (she will not think the other name) had one on the back of her door - and yes, once she returns, walking fast like the dark will nip her heels, there it is. This month the kids are racing on the grass, a brown-skinned girl in shorts with bandaids on her knees pumping her fist in triumph as she dashes across the finish line.
May. And one date five days away, circled in thick red marker with giant exclamation marks, the point jammed in hard enough to dent the paper.
Her birthday. Her thirteenth birthday.
“Fuck,” Lyme says, in her Games-damned preteen voice.
She snatches up a school notebook and flips rapidly past math notes interspersed with death list calculations to the first blank page. In five days Lyme - this Lyme, the body she’s found herself back in like an awful nightmare - will turn thirteen. At the time she cared about one thing, and one thing only, but Lyme has watched children and friends live nad die, has seen the country fall in flames, and there is context now, context bigger than a young girl’s escape to freedom. Lyme has long forgotten her age but she knows how long she’s been out, does the math and works it backwards: thirteen in May means the tail end of the 49th -
Brutus. Brutus has just won his Games. He’s there in the Village being the perfect little Victor, while his mentor promises him he’ll never have to go into the Arena ever again. Misha - 11 years old, still in Transition, bright-eyed and feral and burning with life.
And Claudius … Claudius isn’t even a year old.
Lyme’s fingers press in against the pen’s side until her knuckles cramp. Spring of 49 means the world is ramping up for the - fucking hell - Quarter Quell. Four of Two’s tributes will die this year, bloody and ignominious, and Haymitch Abernathy’s family sleeps safe in their house, a two-month countdown ticking down on their lives, unknowing. As do the five hundred-some-odd kids who will have died in brutal, bloody ways before Lyme’s life catches up with itself again.
“Okay,” Lyme says out loud. The sour taste in her mouth thickens. So she’s dead, and living this all again to - what, make the same mistakes? See it happen all over again? Or is this some fucked-up karmic chance to do things differently?
The walls press in, thick and close, and now she’s across the room, shoving up the heavy sash and scrambling up over the sill, twisting around and pulling herself up onto the roof. The lights of town spill over up into the sky, blotting out the lower rim of stars in an orange glow, but the constellations dance above her head as she stares straight up. She saw the Milky Way for the first time in her Field Exam, a spatter of light and colour like a bucket of paint splashed above the jagged tree line so beautiful she’d stopped and stared, camera-face forgotten.
She could do it again. Go back, live the next five years of her life in Residential. Redo all the kills, the isolation tests, the physical demands, the psychological scarring. Live the Arena again: kill all those children - and they would be children now, half her age or less - feel that guilt all over again. Remember every trick, every surprise, every Gamemaker’s changeup or mentor’s wildcard from every Arena over the last twenty years and try to save the ones she’d lost. Find Misha, find Claudius and try to save them again, sit through those awful, agonizing weeks knowing she’d done it once, knowing how close she’d been to losing everything - and how much it mattered that these ones, these ones made it.
Save Cato. Save Brutus. Save her country from splitting into pieces.
All she has to do is live it all again. And in the meantime, hundreds of children will be hacked to pieces on live television, thousands more will starve slowly in the districts, the sex trade brutalizes boys and girls and makes them blame themselves for their own victimization, all while the Capitol parties, the military power hidden in the mountains watches and waits for its time to strike and President Fucking Snow sips tea and gardens in his palatial mansion.
A scream tears its way out of her throat, scaring the crickets into stunned silence. Lyme drags her hands over her face and curls up on her side, fighting a sob. She jams it back into herself with violent force, tracking down every atom of helpless despair and transforming it into rage, because the old mentor’s maxim still holds true: once you start it’s very hard to stop, so don’t open that door unless you’ve got your kid in a place where it’s safe for them to come down.
Unfortunately for Lyme, her mentor’s dead in a pile of rubble. Or, alternately, he’s off in the Village prepping for the Quarter Quell with no fucking clue about the thirty-eight-thirteen-year-old having a fucking breakdown on her roof half a district away. Either way, he can’t help her now.
“Can’t do it,” Lyme says to the empty air. A cricket beeps in solidarity and falls silent. “Can’t do that again.”
She barely made it out the first time with ten deaths on her conscience. If Lyme has to do it all again and bear the weight of thousands she will burn the whole fucking place to the ground.
You know, boss, says a voice in her head that sounds a lot like Claudius, that’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had.
Lyme sits up. Wipes her face. Stares down at hands that have never murdered anything worse than a stick with fresh green still in the wood.
“Okay,” she says again. This time it settles in her stomach, heavy like iron. Or - like a sword, its weight balanced in her grip. “Fuck. Okay.”
She’s gone by the time the man who thinks he’s still her father stumbles home.
She hitches a ride on the district train. Adult Lyme in teenage-Lyme’s body spends a good hour plotting how to sneak in, where to hide, how to avoid the train staff - before one of the men spots her and gives a friendly wave. “Hey Maddy,” he calls (the name shoves a dagger into the base of her spine but she stays still even as her lungs close). “Going in early today. Big city?”
And oh. Right. She’d been taking the train back and forth for years, for that last summer’s Reaping, for big-city clothes shopping, sometimes just to get away, and the train men never made her pay for it. Sometimes they pulled up a stool in the engine with them and let her watch over the controls. She used to love watching the train devour the track, the dust of her hometown disappearing in the distance behind her. “Just remember us when you win, eh, kiddo?” the conductor used to grin.
She’d forgotten, of course. Before she even stood on stage at the Reaping square. But today he’s there, and he waves, and Lyme swallows the bag of crushed glass in her throat and forces out a grin. “Got some paperwork at the main office,” she says, then, because she feels like she has to, “Five more days.”
“Attagirl.” He flashes her a thumb’s up. They’re the same age, Lyme thinks, this man now and the person she is inside her head. He might even be younger. “We got some sandwiches in the cooler up front, if you want to swing by and grab a couple. Paperwork can take a lot out of you.”
She laughs in spite of herself - the adult Lyme, not the adult-masquerading-as-kid - because boy does it ever, but the good thing is, he can’t tell the difference between a real one and a twelve-almost-thirteen-year-old faking it, half to stay on their good side and half because underneath it all she liked that they’d treated her like a grownup. (They hadn’t, of course, she can see that now. They’d treated her exactly like they should - with respect, but still a kid. But at the time it felt like they did, and that made all the difference.)
Did they recognize her when she strode onto the stage five years from now, new clothes, new name, a good head taller? Where are they now, in the version of Lyme’s life where she’s lying dead under the mountain? What is their place in Alma Coin’s future?
Lyme grits her teeth and grips her rucksack straps as she follows him down the narrow aisle.
Misha told her once, how she broke into the Peacekeeping office after hours on a dare, to steal her own arrest record and bring it back to impress one of the girls in Residential. Lyme isn’t stupid enough to try that, but one thing Misha told her is that the beat-keepers are pattern-finders. Here in Two - here in the city in Two especially - they’re busy people, but they aren’t pushed to the limits of their cruelty policing the country’s poor and desperate. It’s mostly the little things, and they aren’t always on alert.
In the early morning the station is open, staffed with a skeleton crew. If Lyme had her own body back she could march in and ask, but no one’s going to tell her anything looking like this, and Lyme is quick on her feet with the sponsors but spinning a story to get her into the records room of the central Peacekeeping station is a bit over her head.
Good thing Lyme just finished fighting a war.
Everything is about sight-lines. Get in. Duck. Around a corner. Against the wall. Into a side room. Down, over, across. And she doesn’t even have to pop in to fire off a shot that will alert the whole place to her location. After the past few months it’s actually anti-climactic: in and out with a piece of paper stuffed into her rucksack, all in under ten minutes.
(She looked for another name, too, but there’s nothing there - and won’t be for at least another decade, she realizes as she runs more mental math. Well. At least that gives her time.)
“Ferdinand Jacobs,” Lyme says aloud, and snorts out a laugh into her hand. Ferdinand? “Oh, girl. You didn’t tell me your whole fucking family was like this.”
She tracks down Artemisia Jacobs leaving her apartment for school. And Lyme prepared herself, she did, but all the mental pep talks in the world can’t cope to seeing her girl again, scowling in braids and overalls as she leaps the narrow stairs three at a time and takes a vicious swipe at the flower boxes lining the neighbour’s fence.
She’s alive. Her girl is alive, and safe, even with the remains of an old bruise at the far edge of her cheekbone. Lyme exhales and flattens out her fists.
“Hey,” Lyme calls out.
The girl stops. Narrows her eyes, gives Lyme a quick once-over. “You’re tall,” she says. She hooks her thumbs into her belt loops and rocks back on her heels, chin jutted out in defiance. “No fashion sense though.”
Snow on a Games-damned shitheap, but Lyme has missed her. She shoves down the volcanic rush of affection and keeps her voice casual. “I heard you’re good at stealing things. And setting things on fire.”
Artemisia’s eyes flicker but stay narrowed. Her finger taps an uneven staccato against her leg. “Squeaky rats around here.”
“No rats, just a good reputation.” And oh, hell, Lyme knows her girl but this is her girl as a girl, she’s not her Victor yet, she’s not even a killer, she’s practically an infant, and Lyme has historically reacted with blind panic to anything below Reaping age. How the hell are you supposed to talk to kids? How is she supposed to convince the world’s most skeptical and suspicious kid of something that makes no sense?
Except - it’s Misha, isn’t it, and one thing has always been true.
Lyme squares her shoulders. “I’m going to blow up the Capitol and kill the president. Want to come?”
Artemisia lets out a bark of startled laughter. “What? You’re crazy.”
Lyme doesn’t flinch. She does pull out a knife, from the collection of stolen Centre weapons she’d been keeping under her mattress. She tosses it across the sidewalk; Artemisia catches it without blinking. “Also, I need to steal a baby.”
A full five seconds, then Artemisia laughs again, this time the best kind of wild. “You’re definitely crazy. But sure, why not. Sounds fun.”
They pick their way through the city centre, ripping off bits of a cheese loaf that Artemisia stole from outside a bakery and passing it back and forth. “Do you know the Beaumonts?” Lyme asks her. Claudius told her his full name once, after his mother showed up at the Village, and she’d nearly accused him of pulling one over on her. What the fuck kind of name was that?
Artemisia shoots her a sideways look. “Are Twelves dead meat? Obviously. Which ones?”
The sidewalk ends and Lyme stops, rocking her toes back and forth over the edge. “Gloria and Jeremy.” She’d put a restraining order out on them after Gloria’s unexpected visit. The father never tried, but the mother had made a fuss a few times after that. Legal handled it and Claudius never even had to know.
“Who? Oh, them. No, he’s disowned or whatever. If you want the good stuff you should try -“ She stops, studies Lyme’s expression as she flicks the knife from her sleeve and rolls it over her fingers. “That’s the baby? You’re stealing a Beaumont baby? Ew, why? It’s going to have inbreeding diseases. There’s, like, so many group homes.”
Only Misha would immediately start comparing children to puppies and debate the merits of mutts over purebreds, but Lyme doesn’t have time to get into the analogy. “He’s mine,” she says instead. “I’m taking him.”
Not her best cover story - not even a cover story, really - and she can see Artemisia give her a long once-over and do some rapid math calculations, but Lyme’s mother had been fourteen, a fact that had been scary to Lyme at ten and now as an adult actively horrified her. Nero’s sister wasn’t that much older either. Finally Artemisia shrugs. “Okay,” she says. “No judging. But also, gross. We should probably set the house on fire on the way out.”
Lyme laughs, sharp and nasty, the sound dredging something thick and ugly up from deep within her insides. She closes her eyes on images of silent hovercrafts bombing the Victors’ Village into rubble and snarls her throat closed around a reflexive I’ve missed you. “Save that for the Capitol.”
“Holy shit.” Lyme tips back on her heels, leans back to shade her eyes. Beside her, Artemisia’s low whistle echoes agreement. “That is one ugly house.”
“Social climbers, I told you. But it’s only impressive on the outside, there’s nothing good in it.” She makes a speculative face, like she’s chewing on her tongue. “Except for a baby, I guess. This is so weird. So have you ever been inside? Can you give me anything?”
Lyme hesitates. For half a second she digs around in her memories, tries to find anything Claudius told her that might help, but it’s all fragments: she used to lock me in the closet, she’d drag me to the bathroom and hold my head under the sink, one time I crawled into her bed with a knife. “No,” she admits finally.
Artemisia’s eyes cut to her again, and this time her nose crinkles like a cat smelling something unpleasant. But all she says is, “Okay,” and continues on. “I’ll look. Don’t hang around, you’ll get me caught. Nothing worse than taking a newbie on a job.”
“Thanks,” Lyme says, because she has to, and speaking chokes off the wave of real gratitude, messy and complicated and absolutely unable to express. Artemisia doesn’t know her - will never know her, will never sit with her on a roof at three in the morning, brain meds stuffed into her sock. They’ll never ugly-spar with knives until the blood runs red and the wildness leaves Misha’s eyes, will never patch each other up with Misha propped up on the bathroom counter, sleepy and finally content, head tipped forward onto Lyme’s shoulder as she dabs iodine on a surface cut.
But this Artemisia is alive. And maybe they’ll paint each other’s nails.
Lyme doesn’t turn back to watch Misha at work. She ducks the side street, skirts around until she finds the library Claudius said he used to sleep in sometimes, during the Games when no one asked him why he didn’t have school. It’s not hard to tuck herself into a back corner with a book (“The Cost of Peace: The History of Panem’s Peacekeepers”) and flip listlessly through the pages.
(Once her fingers snag on a page etched with a lithographic print of a familiar mountain fortress. The yawning mouth draws her in, heart beating faster and faster until she slams the book shut. She pulls her knees to her chest, grips the back of her neck with both hands and forces in breath after breath until Claudius’ wide-open eyes and blood-smeared mouth leave her vision.)
“Yo.” A nudge at her shoe. “Found us an in. Also got us some food. Let’s find somewhere to chill until dark.”
Breaking in: easy. Finding the baby: easy. Leaving the house with Gloria and her husband happily asleep in their beds: a whole lot harder.
“You know it’s harder to kill people than it looks,” says Artemisia over her shoulder.
Lyme jumps. “What?” She does manage to keep her voice to a whisper, even as she peers through the crack in the door at the two adults asleep in their beds, oblivious.
“You know, in the Games. They make it look easy. All that stabbing, the blood, the cannon, boom like that.” Artemisia cocks her head thoughtfully. “It’s not, really. People have a lot more blood than you think, and they make way more noise. We can set the house on fire if you want, but I wouldn’t do it now.” She taps the back of Lyme’s hand to punctuate her point, and … oh. Well, shit. Lyme didn’t even notice the knife she’d flipped around to lie flat in her hand, angled precisely for throat-slitting.
She wouldn’t have done it. It’s been years since Lyme set foot in the Arena. But at the same time … memories of artillery thundering overhead, the press of her soldiers at her shoulder as they fought their way up the mountain in charge after useless charge. Lyme’s barometer for ‘senseless death’ has shifted over this past year.
Would anyone care if Jeremy and Gloria Beaumont bled to death in their beds? Would anyone even notice? Does it matter if they haven’t hurt Claudius yet, from their perspective - when they have hurt him already, for years, enough that the shadows of it chased him all the way through to adulthood? No, it fucking doesn’t. Time is clearly not a straight line, a-fucking-parently. They hurt him then. They will hurt him, soon.
They will never hurt him again.
Artemisia watches her still, careful and studying. She has - and hasn’t - killed more people as she has fingers. Lyme exhales and pockets the knife. “Let’s get the kid.”
Babies are - well, they’re terrifying, and gross: needy, leaking flesh-bags that explode out of every orifice and grow heavier with every second. Lyme has spent her entire career successfully cultivating an image that means no one will ever ask her to hold one without ever coming out to say she hates larval humans on camera. But this one will grow up to be Claudius, and it’s not his fault he’s not a person yet. What is Lyme supposed to do, wait for him to grow old enough that Gloria starts slapping him in the face or locking him in cabinets? From what Claudius told her, his memories a mix of fuzzy and strangely sharp, like stepping on glass while feeling around barefoot in a dark room, his very earliest memories hadn’t been that bad. Lonely, maybe, but not aggressive. Things only went wrong once he learned to talk.
It’s very likely Lyme will fuck him up even more than his parents did, but at least she won’t hold his head under the fucking sink.
“Geez, even their diapers are bougie,” Artemisia scoffs from across the room, rifling through a bin. “I’ll make a bag of stuff, I guess. I don’t see a carrier thing so you’ll have to use a blanket if you don’t want to hold him the whole time. Hope you’ve got biceps.”
Lyme swallows hard. “It’s fine, I’ve got him.” She crosses over to the crib and looks down, stomach twisting. The baby watches her, not crying out, grey eyes wide and serious. (He lies in her lap, eyes sightless, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth.) “Hey, D.” Her voice is all wrong, rough even at twelve and not tender or maternal at all, but he only stares at her as she reaches down and lifts him to her shoulder. “Let’s blow this fuck-ass joint.”
Turns out they have one more stop on the way, which was not in the plan but in retrospect, really probably should have been. Because, turns out, when faced with a baby and a ten-year-old and the whole span of the mountains between her and the Capitol and nothing but a brace of knives between them, Lyme doesn’t feel like a war commander with an Arena and two victors and a handful of dead kids and countless dead soldiers behind her. She feels horribly, undeniably, terrifyingly thirteen, and the longer she stays here, the more she wonders if that’s going to stick.
“This is not the Capitol,” says Artemisia, dry as the desert.
Lyme hefts the makeshift carrier-knot over her shoulder. “Pit stop.”
“Now I know you’re nuts,” Artemisia says, that half-mix of admiration and let’s-wait-I-want-to-watch-the-explosion in her tone that Lyme misses so hard her chest aches. “You can’t sneak into the Village. It’s the first thing we learn in school. Even I don’t climb barbed wire, and you’ve got a baby.”
“You don’t need to climb the fence,” Lyme tells her. It doesn’t count as betraying trade secrets, not when Misha would have been here anyway. Not when they don’t plan to stay. “You can get in from above if you climb the mountain trails. No one ever does, that’s all.”
It takes them a day and a half.
“Ho-ly shit,” Artemisia whistles, as they stand on the rear mountain path that leads down to the Village orchard. “How did you find this shit out?”
“I know things,” Lyme says. “Wait here with him. I’ll be back.”
She makes a face, and for a minute Lyme thinks she’s going to make a fight about it, but then Artemisia nods and holds out her arms for - the baby. (It’s still too hard to think of him as Claudius, just yet.) “Okay, yeah. Congrats on finding a place that freaks me out too much to want to steal from. I’m pretty sure if they catch you in here you get used as target practice for the Seniors.”
They don’t use kids, Lyme almost tells her, but the words curl up in the back of her throat and crumble into dust.
Nero answers the door in the ugliest chunky-knit sweater Lyme has ever seen (the bare garment was a sensible Adessa knit, she can recognize the weave, but the front has an embroidered tomcat in lurid purple and gold). He’s younger than Lyme has ever seen him except his original Games tapes, though even young his eyes are hollow. He blinks down at Lyme, and for a dizzying second she sees herself through his eyes: an angry teenager with ropy Centre muscles and an atypical crew cut, too old for telltale bruises on her face but all the hallmarks in the set of her shoulders and the curl of her fists.
“Okay,” Nero says, blase as ever. It’s so painfully Nero - so very much her mentor, who took in Lyme standing over the kitchen sink with a shard of broken glass stuck deep into her wrist and simply said No - that Lyme desperately wants to fling herself at him and bury her face in his chest.
The worst is knowing that she could, a strange girl he’s never seen but who’s bleeding hurt and fear all over his floor, and he’d probably let her.
She hadn’t rehearsed this part. She probably should have. But Lyme always did her best sponsor-work unscripted. “Five years from now, you’re going to meet a tribute,” Lyme says. “She’s going to win, and you’re going to kick off the wildest, most batshit mentor dynasty this Village has ever seen. And twenty years after that, we all die. Every single one of us, in a war we can never hope to win.”
Nero folds his arms. Curls his fingers over his bicep, looks her over as one foot taps a steady rhythm against the floor. “Okay,” he says again, without judgement. Brutus never managed that skill, or either very deliberately cultivated his the other direction; he could make the most neutral statement of fact sound like a virulent condemnation. “And that girl’s you?”
“You killed your old man when you were twelve,” Lyme says. Nero stiffens, but doesn’t try to interrupt. “He was going to hurt your sister. You told me this because I didn’t kill mine, but I wished I could have. I didn’t want a male mentor and you needed me to understand why Adessa or Calli wouldn’t have understood the way you did.” She swallows. “I still think Calli would have let me hunt him down and kill him, but you’re right that it probably wouldn’t have been … you know, better. For me. In the long run, anyway.”
Nero’s breathing has gone suspiciously even, nice and slow but shallow. Lyme would recognize that from across the sponsor ring. “Okay,” he says again. Doesn’t prove anything, she hears at the edges of his words, except what does it prove? What else is there?
“The 75th is the Quarter Quell.” Lyme’s voice cracks. She’s so tired of holding it all in, pretending like she doesn’t know, like none of it all matters. Like she hasn’t been torn apart, like starting over isn’t just as bad as losing everything. All these people, her loved ones, looking at her with a stranger’s eyes. “They Reap us again. There’s a Rebellion - all of us are killed - the details don’t matter. That’s not the point, I don’t care. I want to make it stop. I’m going to make it stop. I’m going to kill the president before it ever happens.”
His eyes are white around the edges, nostrils flared, but he hasn’t moved, his voice still level. “Just you?”
She shakes her head. “I found my kids. Misha’s ten, I think? Maybe eleven, you know birthdays. She wins 57. Claudius is - fuck, he’s just a baby. I thought I could do this, but I can’t - I can’t do it alone.” Lyme, the one she is now, this age, would scream to hear the quiver beneath in her voice, the desperate need underlying it all. “I need my mentor.”
This time his exhale is long and steady. “Kill the president,” Nero repeats, and lets out a slow fuuuuuck that’s more breath than sound. “With a baby. For fuck’s sake. Okay, wait here.”
For once, Artemisia has nothing sarcastic or witty to say. The inter-district train slides smoothly down the rails, humming with the quiet efficiency that had become second nature to Lyme over the years, but since the war had fallen by the wayside of her memory in favour of silent District 13 hovercrafts or clinging to the roof of freight cars. It feels like years since Lyme has enjoyed the kind of sleek, modern comfort the Capitol throws at everyday convenience, but now it sits sour in her mouth. Hard to forget the riots, the images of bread lines in the outer districts, white-uniformed Peacekeepers firing into crowds as the mayor announced rations had been restricted due to seditious activity among the general populace.
Artemisia, at least, knows nothing of this. She can’t stop staring, even though the usual passenger rail has nothing on the twice-yearly tribute train with its cascading chandeliers and overwhelming frippery. Then again, it’s hard to tell whether it’s the wood panelling and plush carpet she’s staring at, or the others in the car with them.
Which - fair. When Nero told her to wait, Lyme expected him to grab his sword, maybe an overnight bag if he’d decided to be extremely proactive. She had not expected him to return with both Ronan and Adessa at his side, both of them studying her with the kind of expression she would rather have redirected to Games footage or her very distant memories of school science class, staring at leaves or bugs or thin slices of potatoes through thick magnifying glass lenses. Adessa in particular very much looks like she’d enjoy taking Lyme apart, with putting her back together firmly listed under ‘optional’.
But apparently while Nero, Mr. ‘country before self, duty before life’ himself is fine to drop everything and take a nonsense-spouting teenager on a treason joyride at the drop of a dagger, he won’t do it without backup, So. Here they are. Adessa, primly knitting by the window and acting like she can’t sense Artemisia’s worshipful eyes on her, and Ronan, who insisted on giving Lyme’s aching back a break, cradling the baby in his arms with years of practice in the ease of his posture.
“How many infants do you suppose I have kissed,” he says to Lyme when he catches her staring. “Not everyone has a reputation for enjoying fingerling baby sandwiches.”
“He’s joking,” Lyme says to Artemisia automatically. “She doesn’t eat meat.”
“Please.” Adessa does not even look up from her stitches, did not bother to question Lyme’s assertion despite her reputation. “As though I would bother with postnatal. All the scientific potential is in the foetal predevelopment stage.”
Artemisia glances at Lyme, eyes questioning, but there she can only shrug. Adessa leveraging her influence in the Capitol to gain access to underground stem cell research for absolutely no reason other than boredom and scientific curiosity - sure, why not.
Adessa smiles to herself and adds another skein.
Years ago - years from now, in the never-was - Claudius asked Lyme what she would have been, if she hadn’t been a Victor. She told him she never could have been anything else. The whole line of his spine had relaxed and he’d said he was the same. Now, the baby who would be Claudius, a tiny, solemn-eyed thing who latches onto her finger with surprising strength, will be anything but that.
“What’s left for us, huh?” Lyme asks him, softly. Artemisia, not one to let herself be awestruck for long, has challenged Nero to a game of five-finger fillet. Lyme took Claudius over to the window, though she’s not really sure how much babies can see or understand. For all she knows the whole thing is a big, flashing blob of light to him. “What do we do, in a world where I stop us from existing?”
It sounds like the plot of a terrible movie the two of them watch at three in the morning when the nightmares get too bad to sleep. The question sounds like something Brutus would snort and punch her for worrying about, the kind of philosophical bullshit that’s above their pay grade, you don’t get to stress about existential shit when you spend half your life trying to keep very real kids very much alive. But here she is, curled up on the ornate wooden passenger bench, watching an Artemisia she only ever knew from photographs cackle in triumph as Nero pretends to suck an imaginary cut on his finger, and wondering if, at the end of all of this, she’ll simply disappear.
As soon as she thought hits, a cool weight spreads across her shoulders. That’s the answer, isn’t it. All of this, this is Lyme’s borrowed time. She died in the mines with Coin’s gun to her forehead, died with a curse on her lips and a snarl on her face and ice-gray eyes boring into her soul. And now she has to change the rules, to twist the game and stop the war and those empty, stupid deaths, but - she was never meant to be here. She’s dead. This is not redemption, it’s not a do-over, not for her. It’s a chance to do a little good before what’s left of her vanishes from the universe for good.
“Nero will look after you,” Lyme tells Claudius. “It wouldn’t be fair if you disappeared, you or Misha or the rest of them. I’m the one who did all this. I’m the only one who remembers. You’ll get a good life and you’ll learn who you can be without all this killing. I’ll tell Nero to get you a cello. They have to make kid-sized ones somewhere.”
“Holy shit,” Artemisia bursts out, the knife clattering to the serving tray she’d filched for the game. Nero sits back, grinning. “You can see the whole mountains from here. I never knew they were so big!”
“Mountains and earth,” Lyme says without thinking. If only Brutus could hear her now.
“You,” Artemisia shoots back without tearing her eyes away from the windows, “are corny as shit, mystery terrorist.”
Lyme never thought too hard about Ronan’s weird Presidential privileges very much, until he walks right in to the mansion unannounced with two Victors, two kids and a baby and nobody tries to stop him. “Oh, he can see us,” Ronan says in a flat voice. “It’s impossible to get the drop on him, the man puts cameras in the showers-”
(“Perv,” says Artemisia, dismissively)
“-but the thing to remember with Coriolanus is, this is a man at the top of his game. He’s killed everyone who opposed him and has leverage on anyone who might think to try. He is both extremely intelligent and understimulated. It makes him dangerous, but in this case it may work in our favour.”
“So he’s letting us in because he’s bored,” Artemisia says. “You know what, I get it.”
Coriolanus is waiting for them in his study, plush carpets and oak-panelled walls, a heavy table with a tray of baked goods. “Ronan,” he says, spreading his hands. “What an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?”
This is the part Lyme didn’t think through. What it would feel like to face him now, remembering years of dead children, the cold, casual malice when Artemisia finally won and the President insinuated she wasn’t grateful enough, Claudius returning from his one-on-one pale and shaking, the chill of a death threat wrapped around his throat.
Lyme holds herself still and blank-faced, even as her heart skips in her cheat - but if she’s filled with the murder-fury she can’t imagine Ronan, decades upon decades of resentment and rage coiled up into that quiet, unassuming man and his cane - and she braces herself for the blistering speech she most definitely would have spent the last fifty years perfecting if she were Ronan.
Ronan tilts his head with the predatory anticipation of a hawk spotting a field mouse. His fingers flex at his sides - a knife flies across the room - and President Snow falls, soundless on the ankle-deep carpet, dagger buried to the hilt in the hollow of his eye socket.
“Holy shit!” Artemisia bursts out. “Holy fuck, you nailed him! I would have gone with a cool line, though. Something like, ‘You can die!’ Okay no that’s stupid, but you know what I mean. You should have had a kill phrase”
“Monologuing drops the odds of a confirmed kill to an average of ten percent,” Adessa says evenly. “Fourth-most common late-game cause of death for over-confident Careers.”
Ronan examines the head of his cane. “Besides, ‘eat my poisoned petit four-flavoured shit, you smug fuck’ didn’t have a snappy ring to it.”
The President is dead. Long live the President.
“You have a choice,” Ronan says, glacial calm, facing down the Peacekeepers who crashed down the door and stare at them, bug-eyed shock behind the clear faceplates. “One: Kill us all right here, report this to your superiors, work to keep order in the streets during the chaos of a power vacuum. Two: Back me now, take control. No one else has to die.”
It can’t possibly work, Lyme thinks. She survived months and months of the worst, most awful, gruelling guerilla bullshit before the end, run after run after run up that Games-damned mountain, soldier after soldier splattered against the bedrock of her homeland and it never felt like they got anywhere. And Ronan’s going to ask nicely?
The Peacekeepers glance at each other. And then - holy shit - they nod, raise their rifles and move to flank the door.
Claudius squirms against Lyme’s back and lets out a fussy grumble.
“And a bottle, please,” Ronan says, still without moving. “We have a little one to feed.”
Claudius fusses in a cradle one of the Peacekeepers conjured up from somewhere on Ronan’s orders, a bemused expression behind the clear faceplate. Misha sprawls on her side on the bed beside him, arms wrapped around herself, one leg jutted awkwardly to the side with the other tucked under her, a confused tangle of limbs that’s at once possessive of her space and self-protective. Lyme sits on the floor, back braced against the wall, like she’s done a hundred times after nightmares or unexpected triggers or escape attempts kept her kids awake. Exhaustion presses to her forehead like a heavy cloth but she can’t sleep, not yet.
She can feel it, the pull of time at the back of her neck. She had one job to do and she did it, and you don’t fulfill a cosmic mission endowed by what-the-fuck ever and get to overstay your welcome. Brutus, Misha, Nero, Claudius, they’re all alive, and now it’s time for Lyme to go. It’s justice, anyway; she caused this, doomed Claudius by bringing him with her, doomed Misha by leaving her behind. Doomed them all by rebelling in the first place. Doomed Brutus by not rebelling sooner. Whatever her choices, she killed them. Now she can finally rest, knowing that she saved them and can vanish from their lives forever.
The starfish, safe and happy in the ocean, don’t need to worry about the kid who tossed them in.
Fuck, that’s maudlin. She’d ask for a drink except there’s an age-lock on the machines in the Games Complex, nothing harder than hot chocolate for minors. Lyme laughs under her breath and lets her eyes fall shut.
She wakes to wailing and a foot kicking her shin in a frenetic rhythm. “Hey, wake up, lazy!” Artemisia grins down at her. She has … banana …? in her hair? “Did you know these machine things make anything you want? I got us a whole pancake bar, it took me like an hour to order all the fixings. Grab your larva and let’s eat.”
Nero shoulders his way into the room, ruffling Lyme’s hair on his way past. “I got him,” he rumbles, reaching down to prop a red-faced and furious Claudius against his shoulder. “Finally crying, huh? Good for you, buddy. Let it out.”
Lyme stares at the sight - her future mentor, cradling her future victor, tickling his baby-soft cheek with one massive finger - and out of reflex digs fingernails into the skin of her wrist until blood beads up beneath the scratches. Nero catches sight and frowns. “Hey, no, don’t do that. C’mon up, I’ll grab a bandage.”
“I’m older than you,” Lyme says reflexively. Snow on a fucking shitpile, right now she’s Adessa’s age. She’d never had time to do the math before.
Nero blinks at her. Claudius, still squalling, jams a tear-stained face into Nero’s neck and subsides into sniffles. He’s probably thinking something about how, if she’s older than he is, why did she bother saying something so stupid and petty, which is a question Lyme asks herself every Games-damned time Nero makes a reasonable point about self-care and she regresses to a stubborn teenager. “We won’t use one with hovercrafts on it, then,” he says, deadpan. “Don’t wait too long, though. The girl is experimenting with the pancakes and some of them are pretty good. She’s got a peanut butter-pineapple and a maple-wasabi that are real good. Can’t really recommend the ‘Salt Bomb’ though.”
He saunters out - through the door filters the clink of cutlery, Artemisia’s laughter, Ronan asking for the savoury options please and thank you, Adessa’s liquid what is that monstrosity - and Lyme stares at the line of pink across her smooth (smooth!) wrist. “What the fuck,” she says aloud. Then, again, an edge of panic squeezing her throat: “What the fuck?”
Claudius and Misha both asked her, years ago, what she would have done if she hadn’t won the Games. Both times Lyme gave the same answer: she could never have been born to do anything but this.
So what is she supposed to do now?
18 YEARS LATER
“Got another one for you.”
Lyme glances up as Pryor drops a file on her desk. “Bad?”
“Not like some of the others, might be nothing. Still, take a look.”
Shouts echo down the corridors, the squeak of shoes and sharp ping of dodgeballs hitting the floor. A few voices rise in evident squabble; a trainer overrides them and the din subsides into the regular chaos of the game. Lyme stares at the wall for a long moment, snorts a low laugh, and flips open the cover of the file.
The face that stares up at her knocks her hard in the gut. Tousled blond hair, blue eyes, square white teeth. He grins through the first few years of photos, but then -
Abrupt mood swings, says his most recent assessment. Short temper, violent outbursts, uncommunicative. Home visit recommended.
Lyme slumps back in her chair, chest aching. “Cato.” The word comes out hardly more than breath. He’d never talked about his home life - never talked about anything, really, hadn’t been interested in his mentor at all, too wrapped up in Clove. No bruises in his file, not like Claudius or Misha or Sloane or Slate or half the kids she took on with warning bells that rang so loud she could barely sleep at night. If he had a shitty family they were the quiet kind, not the kind with heavy fists.
And yet - reactive attachment and codependent and responds to positive reinforcement and he clung to Clove like a lifeline and here he is now, that happy, smiling kid curled in on himself and there’s no kill tests this time to turn him hard.
Breath still caught in her chest, Lyme scrawls home visit approved across the top of the file.
“I know that look.”
She startles. Claudius flops against the door jamb, one eyebrow cocked. “You’re supposed to be flagging kids for the system, not taking them all home.”
Lyme tries for a look halfway between haughty and nonchalant, but the grin her kid gives her says she didn’t pull it off. “Who says I’m taking anyone home? You’re here early.”
Sloane ducks around under Claudius’ arm. He tweaks the end of her braid and she shoots a glare at him, all five foot nothing of her. “No, you didn’t come pick us up.”
“Is it home time already? The kids were just playing -“
She stops as the silence envelops her office. No shrieks. No trainer whistles. No thump of over-excited kids crashing into walls. How long had she been staring at Cato’s file?
Claudius rolls his eyes. “C’mon, Ma, it’s Misha’s night to cook so we have to get secret takeout on the way home.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Lyme drops the file in her outbox and holds out her arm to Sloane, who curls in against her side. Claudius flanks her other side and together they head out from the District 2 Athletics and Personal Growth Centre - not-so-secret headquarters for District 2 Family Services - into the glow of the mid-afternoon sun. “Tell me about your day,” she says.
“I tried the crossbow today,” Sloane says. “Just for fun. I don’t think I’m going to stick with it but it was fun to try.”
“I got asked if I want to stay on when I graduate,” Claudius says, so casual it takes Lyme a second.
Her head snaps around so fast a muscle in her neck twinges. “What? What did you say?”
He shrugs. “I told them I’d think about it.”
“Dillweed!” Sloane jogs sideways, reaching around behind Lyme to sock Claudius in the kidneys. “You couldn’t go first so I wouldn’t sound dumb?”
“You’re not dumb, you’re twelve.” He aims a kick back at her that misses by a clearly-purposeful margin. “And you’re doing smart things like trying out lots of stuff to see if you like it. You’re working hard and you’ll get a great recommendation when you’re older, that’s why we have the Centre.”
Twenty years of losing tributes, war, failure, death, a whole new lifetime to try again and this is where she landed: two not-dead kids balancing bickering and stunning sincerity while the third (two years her junior, forever her kid) prepares the worst casserole known to humankind back at home. Cato is not the first file to cross her desk; across the district a handful of kids live out happier lives with new families who are proud to have them, and she will find more. No more looking for bruises and channeling repressed anger into murder - not now, not ever.
Sloane harrumphs like an old man, but then she stops and glances up at Lyme with a slow smile. “Uh oh, Mom’s having feelings.”
Lyme rears back and glares at both of them, but before she can retort, both Claudius and Sloane say “Yeah, yeah” in the exact same tone.
“Oh well now it’s war,” she declares, and knocks them both into the grass.
If Lyme in 74 could go back to when she was thirteen and do everything again, would she make any different choices?
Claudius’ body lies heavy across her lap. His blood coats her hands, hot and wet and slippery and that’s his blood, his blood, she promised to protect him and now he’s dead. Alma Coin smiles down at her, mouth a mocking gash across her face, and asks for last words. Lyme spits into the dirt. She’d give anything for the Arena so she could take this woman down with her "Go fuck yourself."
"Personally I think that's lacking that special something, but for a first draft I'll take it," Coin says. Then, almost lazily: "Fire."
Pain, sharp and hot and burning and then -
She jolts upright in bed, sweat-slicked and gasping, air slicing through her lungs like a fresh blade, both hands over her mouth to muffle a scream. A dream. Just a dream. No boots in the dark, no rifles glinting in the torchlight, no bodies of miners crushed beneath fallen rock. No ears ringing from explosions. No Claudius, falling stiff and silent to the ground with eyes wide and a mouth full of blood. He’s here, safe across the room and -
No.
No Claudius. No second bunk. No steel walls and dull, orange recessed lighting. A desk with books and papers stacked in the corner. Shoes - absurdly small - on the chair. Heavy oak dresser with a bedsheet tossed over the large vanity mirror. An open window casting tree shadows on the floor.
And numbers, thousands of numbers, scrawled across the walls in permanent marker: 33 - 16th, 10F, mutt attack. 10 - 3rd, 4M, exsanguination. 27 - 24th, 12M, blunt force trauma.
Twenty-five years of buried memories gush out like fallen intestines. “No,” Lyme says aloud. It comes out rough, the voice of a girl who’s spent years trying to make it sound lower, tougher, less like someone a few inches of hair away from pigtails and ribbons.
She scrambles out of bed, nearly falls on her face when her feet hit the ground too soon. Kid’s bed, barely a foot off the ground. Her legs are gangly, strong calves from walking but not filled out yet. Lyme swallows back bile. Still a dream, still a dream, it has to be a dream -
Rest of the house is dark, quiet. Nothing but the refrigerator humming in the corner of the kitchen; the door cuts a swath in the line of empties on the floor when Lyme yanks it open. No food inside but there wouldn’t be, would it, she kept all her food in her bedroom. In a box in the back of her closet, hidden so he wouldn’t find it. Bread, apples, beans, milk and eggs in a wire basket in the stream out back. The rest of the vouchers will be under her bed, slipped in between the slats. Her stomach knots.
More memories, like water seeping in through boots with a crack in the sealant. The Centre used to give out calendars, shiny, glossy paper with pictures of pretty children grinning at the camera as they climbed the ropes course or tossed dodgeballs, posing with their arms around each other like they won’t be pulling hidden knives as soon as the photo shoot is over. Lyme (she will not think the other name) had one on the back of her door - and yes, once she returns, walking fast like the dark will nip her heels, there it is. This month the kids are racing on the grass, a brown-skinned girl in shorts with bandaids on her knees pumping her fist in triumph as she dashes across the finish line.
May. And one date five days away, circled in thick red marker with giant exclamation marks, the point jammed in hard enough to dent the paper.
Her birthday. Her thirteenth birthday.
“Fuck,” Lyme says, in her Games-damned preteen voice.
She snatches up a school notebook and flips rapidly past math notes interspersed with death list calculations to the first blank page. In five days Lyme - this Lyme, the body she’s found herself back in like an awful nightmare - will turn thirteen. At the time she cared about one thing, and one thing only, but Lyme has watched children and friends live nad die, has seen the country fall in flames, and there is context now, context bigger than a young girl’s escape to freedom. Lyme has long forgotten her age but she knows how long she’s been out, does the math and works it backwards: thirteen in May means the tail end of the 49th -
Brutus. Brutus has just won his Games. He’s there in the Village being the perfect little Victor, while his mentor promises him he’ll never have to go into the Arena ever again. Misha - 11 years old, still in Transition, bright-eyed and feral and burning with life.
And Claudius … Claudius isn’t even a year old.
Lyme’s fingers press in against the pen’s side until her knuckles cramp. Spring of 49 means the world is ramping up for the - fucking hell - Quarter Quell. Four of Two’s tributes will die this year, bloody and ignominious, and Haymitch Abernathy’s family sleeps safe in their house, a two-month countdown ticking down on their lives, unknowing. As do the five hundred-some-odd kids who will have died in brutal, bloody ways before Lyme’s life catches up with itself again.
“Okay,” Lyme says out loud. The sour taste in her mouth thickens. So she’s dead, and living this all again to - what, make the same mistakes? See it happen all over again? Or is this some fucked-up karmic chance to do things differently?
The walls press in, thick and close, and now she’s across the room, shoving up the heavy sash and scrambling up over the sill, twisting around and pulling herself up onto the roof. The lights of town spill over up into the sky, blotting out the lower rim of stars in an orange glow, but the constellations dance above her head as she stares straight up. She saw the Milky Way for the first time in her Field Exam, a spatter of light and colour like a bucket of paint splashed above the jagged tree line so beautiful she’d stopped and stared, camera-face forgotten.
She could do it again. Go back, live the next five years of her life in Residential. Redo all the kills, the isolation tests, the physical demands, the psychological scarring. Live the Arena again: kill all those children - and they would be children now, half her age or less - feel that guilt all over again. Remember every trick, every surprise, every Gamemaker’s changeup or mentor’s wildcard from every Arena over the last twenty years and try to save the ones she’d lost. Find Misha, find Claudius and try to save them again, sit through those awful, agonizing weeks knowing she’d done it once, knowing how close she’d been to losing everything - and how much it mattered that these ones, these ones made it.
Save Cato. Save Brutus. Save her country from splitting into pieces.
All she has to do is live it all again. And in the meantime, hundreds of children will be hacked to pieces on live television, thousands more will starve slowly in the districts, the sex trade brutalizes boys and girls and makes them blame themselves for their own victimization, all while the Capitol parties, the military power hidden in the mountains watches and waits for its time to strike and President Fucking Snow sips tea and gardens in his palatial mansion.
A scream tears its way out of her throat, scaring the crickets into stunned silence. Lyme drags her hands over her face and curls up on her side, fighting a sob. She jams it back into herself with violent force, tracking down every atom of helpless despair and transforming it into rage, because the old mentor’s maxim still holds true: once you start it’s very hard to stop, so don’t open that door unless you’ve got your kid in a place where it’s safe for them to come down.
Unfortunately for Lyme, her mentor’s dead in a pile of rubble. Or, alternately, he’s off in the Village prepping for the Quarter Quell with no fucking clue about the thirty-eight-thirteen-year-old having a fucking breakdown on her roof half a district away. Either way, he can’t help her now.
“Can’t do it,” Lyme says to the empty air. A cricket beeps in solidarity and falls silent. “Can’t do that again.”
She barely made it out the first time with ten deaths on her conscience. If Lyme has to do it all again and bear the weight of thousands she will burn the whole fucking place to the ground.
You know, boss, says a voice in her head that sounds a lot like Claudius, that’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had.
Lyme sits up. Wipes her face. Stares down at hands that have never murdered anything worse than a stick with fresh green still in the wood.
“Okay,” she says again. This time it settles in her stomach, heavy like iron. Or - like a sword, its weight balanced in her grip. “Fuck. Okay.”
She’s gone by the time the man who thinks he’s still her father stumbles home.
She hitches a ride on the district train. Adult Lyme in teenage-Lyme’s body spends a good hour plotting how to sneak in, where to hide, how to avoid the train staff - before one of the men spots her and gives a friendly wave. “Hey Maddy,” he calls (the name shoves a dagger into the base of her spine but she stays still even as her lungs close). “Going in early today. Big city?”
And oh. Right. She’d been taking the train back and forth for years, for that last summer’s Reaping, for big-city clothes shopping, sometimes just to get away, and the train men never made her pay for it. Sometimes they pulled up a stool in the engine with them and let her watch over the controls. She used to love watching the train devour the track, the dust of her hometown disappearing in the distance behind her. “Just remember us when you win, eh, kiddo?” the conductor used to grin.
She’d forgotten, of course. Before she even stood on stage at the Reaping square. But today he’s there, and he waves, and Lyme swallows the bag of crushed glass in her throat and forces out a grin. “Got some paperwork at the main office,” she says, then, because she feels like she has to, “Five more days.”
“Attagirl.” He flashes her a thumb’s up. They’re the same age, Lyme thinks, this man now and the person she is inside her head. He might even be younger. “We got some sandwiches in the cooler up front, if you want to swing by and grab a couple. Paperwork can take a lot out of you.”
She laughs in spite of herself - the adult Lyme, not the adult-masquerading-as-kid - because boy does it ever, but the good thing is, he can’t tell the difference between a real one and a twelve-almost-thirteen-year-old faking it, half to stay on their good side and half because underneath it all she liked that they’d treated her like a grownup. (They hadn’t, of course, she can see that now. They’d treated her exactly like they should - with respect, but still a kid. But at the time it felt like they did, and that made all the difference.)
Did they recognize her when she strode onto the stage five years from now, new clothes, new name, a good head taller? Where are they now, in the version of Lyme’s life where she’s lying dead under the mountain? What is their place in Alma Coin’s future?
Lyme grits her teeth and grips her rucksack straps as she follows him down the narrow aisle.
Misha told her once, how she broke into the Peacekeeping office after hours on a dare, to steal her own arrest record and bring it back to impress one of the girls in Residential. Lyme isn’t stupid enough to try that, but one thing Misha told her is that the beat-keepers are pattern-finders. Here in Two - here in the city in Two especially - they’re busy people, but they aren’t pushed to the limits of their cruelty policing the country’s poor and desperate. It’s mostly the little things, and they aren’t always on alert.
In the early morning the station is open, staffed with a skeleton crew. If Lyme had her own body back she could march in and ask, but no one’s going to tell her anything looking like this, and Lyme is quick on her feet with the sponsors but spinning a story to get her into the records room of the central Peacekeeping station is a bit over her head.
Good thing Lyme just finished fighting a war.
Everything is about sight-lines. Get in. Duck. Around a corner. Against the wall. Into a side room. Down, over, across. And she doesn’t even have to pop in to fire off a shot that will alert the whole place to her location. After the past few months it’s actually anti-climactic: in and out with a piece of paper stuffed into her rucksack, all in under ten minutes.
(She looked for another name, too, but there’s nothing there - and won’t be for at least another decade, she realizes as she runs more mental math. Well. At least that gives her time.)
“Ferdinand Jacobs,” Lyme says aloud, and snorts out a laugh into her hand. Ferdinand? “Oh, girl. You didn’t tell me your whole fucking family was like this.”
She tracks down Artemisia Jacobs leaving her apartment for school. And Lyme prepared herself, she did, but all the mental pep talks in the world can’t cope to seeing her girl again, scowling in braids and overalls as she leaps the narrow stairs three at a time and takes a vicious swipe at the flower boxes lining the neighbour’s fence.
She’s alive. Her girl is alive, and safe, even with the remains of an old bruise at the far edge of her cheekbone. Lyme exhales and flattens out her fists.
“Hey,” Lyme calls out.
The girl stops. Narrows her eyes, gives Lyme a quick once-over. “You’re tall,” she says. She hooks her thumbs into her belt loops and rocks back on her heels, chin jutted out in defiance. “No fashion sense though.”
Snow on a Games-damned shitheap, but Lyme has missed her. She shoves down the volcanic rush of affection and keeps her voice casual. “I heard you’re good at stealing things. And setting things on fire.”
Artemisia’s eyes flicker but stay narrowed. Her finger taps an uneven staccato against her leg. “Squeaky rats around here.”
“No rats, just a good reputation.” And oh, hell, Lyme knows her girl but this is her girl as a girl, she’s not her Victor yet, she’s not even a killer, she’s practically an infant, and Lyme has historically reacted with blind panic to anything below Reaping age. How the hell are you supposed to talk to kids? How is she supposed to convince the world’s most skeptical and suspicious kid of something that makes no sense?
Except - it’s Misha, isn’t it, and one thing has always been true.
Lyme squares her shoulders. “I’m going to blow up the Capitol and kill the president. Want to come?”
Artemisia lets out a bark of startled laughter. “What? You’re crazy.”
Lyme doesn’t flinch. She does pull out a knife, from the collection of stolen Centre weapons she’d been keeping under her mattress. She tosses it across the sidewalk; Artemisia catches it without blinking. “Also, I need to steal a baby.”
A full five seconds, then Artemisia laughs again, this time the best kind of wild. “You’re definitely crazy. But sure, why not. Sounds fun.”
They pick their way through the city centre, ripping off bits of a cheese loaf that Artemisia stole from outside a bakery and passing it back and forth. “Do you know the Beaumonts?” Lyme asks her. Claudius told her his full name once, after his mother showed up at the Village, and she’d nearly accused him of pulling one over on her. What the fuck kind of name was that?
Artemisia shoots her a sideways look. “Are Twelves dead meat? Obviously. Which ones?”
The sidewalk ends and Lyme stops, rocking her toes back and forth over the edge. “Gloria and Jeremy.” She’d put a restraining order out on them after Gloria’s unexpected visit. The father never tried, but the mother had made a fuss a few times after that. Legal handled it and Claudius never even had to know.
“Who? Oh, them. No, he’s disowned or whatever. If you want the good stuff you should try -“ She stops, studies Lyme’s expression as she flicks the knife from her sleeve and rolls it over her fingers. “That’s the baby? You’re stealing a Beaumont baby? Ew, why? It’s going to have inbreeding diseases. There’s, like, so many group homes.”
Only Misha would immediately start comparing children to puppies and debate the merits of mutts over purebreds, but Lyme doesn’t have time to get into the analogy. “He’s mine,” she says instead. “I’m taking him.”
Not her best cover story - not even a cover story, really - and she can see Artemisia give her a long once-over and do some rapid math calculations, but Lyme’s mother had been fourteen, a fact that had been scary to Lyme at ten and now as an adult actively horrified her. Nero’s sister wasn’t that much older either. Finally Artemisia shrugs. “Okay,” she says. “No judging. But also, gross. We should probably set the house on fire on the way out.”
Lyme laughs, sharp and nasty, the sound dredging something thick and ugly up from deep within her insides. She closes her eyes on images of silent hovercrafts bombing the Victors’ Village into rubble and snarls her throat closed around a reflexive I’ve missed you. “Save that for the Capitol.”
“Holy shit.” Lyme tips back on her heels, leans back to shade her eyes. Beside her, Artemisia’s low whistle echoes agreement. “That is one ugly house.”
“Social climbers, I told you. But it’s only impressive on the outside, there’s nothing good in it.” She makes a speculative face, like she’s chewing on her tongue. “Except for a baby, I guess. This is so weird. So have you ever been inside? Can you give me anything?”
Lyme hesitates. For half a second she digs around in her memories, tries to find anything Claudius told her that might help, but it’s all fragments: she used to lock me in the closet, she’d drag me to the bathroom and hold my head under the sink, one time I crawled into her bed with a knife. “No,” she admits finally.
Artemisia’s eyes cut to her again, and this time her nose crinkles like a cat smelling something unpleasant. But all she says is, “Okay,” and continues on. “I’ll look. Don’t hang around, you’ll get me caught. Nothing worse than taking a newbie on a job.”
“Thanks,” Lyme says, because she has to, and speaking chokes off the wave of real gratitude, messy and complicated and absolutely unable to express. Artemisia doesn’t know her - will never know her, will never sit with her on a roof at three in the morning, brain meds stuffed into her sock. They’ll never ugly-spar with knives until the blood runs red and the wildness leaves Misha’s eyes, will never patch each other up with Misha propped up on the bathroom counter, sleepy and finally content, head tipped forward onto Lyme’s shoulder as she dabs iodine on a surface cut.
But this Artemisia is alive. And maybe they’ll paint each other’s nails.
Lyme doesn’t turn back to watch Misha at work. She ducks the side street, skirts around until she finds the library Claudius said he used to sleep in sometimes, during the Games when no one asked him why he didn’t have school. It’s not hard to tuck herself into a back corner with a book (“The Cost of Peace: The History of Panem’s Peacekeepers”) and flip listlessly through the pages.
(Once her fingers snag on a page etched with a lithographic print of a familiar mountain fortress. The yawning mouth draws her in, heart beating faster and faster until she slams the book shut. She pulls her knees to her chest, grips the back of her neck with both hands and forces in breath after breath until Claudius’ wide-open eyes and blood-smeared mouth leave her vision.)
“Yo.” A nudge at her shoe. “Found us an in. Also got us some food. Let’s find somewhere to chill until dark.”
Breaking in: easy. Finding the baby: easy. Leaving the house with Gloria and her husband happily asleep in their beds: a whole lot harder.
“You know it’s harder to kill people than it looks,” says Artemisia over her shoulder.
Lyme jumps. “What?” She does manage to keep her voice to a whisper, even as she peers through the crack in the door at the two adults asleep in their beds, oblivious.
“You know, in the Games. They make it look easy. All that stabbing, the blood, the cannon, boom like that.” Artemisia cocks her head thoughtfully. “It’s not, really. People have a lot more blood than you think, and they make way more noise. We can set the house on fire if you want, but I wouldn’t do it now.” She taps the back of Lyme’s hand to punctuate her point, and … oh. Well, shit. Lyme didn’t even notice the knife she’d flipped around to lie flat in her hand, angled precisely for throat-slitting.
She wouldn’t have done it. It’s been years since Lyme set foot in the Arena. But at the same time … memories of artillery thundering overhead, the press of her soldiers at her shoulder as they fought their way up the mountain in charge after useless charge. Lyme’s barometer for ‘senseless death’ has shifted over this past year.
Would anyone care if Jeremy and Gloria Beaumont bled to death in their beds? Would anyone even notice? Does it matter if they haven’t hurt Claudius yet, from their perspective - when they have hurt him already, for years, enough that the shadows of it chased him all the way through to adulthood? No, it fucking doesn’t. Time is clearly not a straight line, a-fucking-parently. They hurt him then. They will hurt him, soon.
They will never hurt him again.
Artemisia watches her still, careful and studying. She has - and hasn’t - killed more people as she has fingers. Lyme exhales and pockets the knife. “Let’s get the kid.”
Babies are - well, they’re terrifying, and gross: needy, leaking flesh-bags that explode out of every orifice and grow heavier with every second. Lyme has spent her entire career successfully cultivating an image that means no one will ever ask her to hold one without ever coming out to say she hates larval humans on camera. But this one will grow up to be Claudius, and it’s not his fault he’s not a person yet. What is Lyme supposed to do, wait for him to grow old enough that Gloria starts slapping him in the face or locking him in cabinets? From what Claudius told her, his memories a mix of fuzzy and strangely sharp, like stepping on glass while feeling around barefoot in a dark room, his very earliest memories hadn’t been that bad. Lonely, maybe, but not aggressive. Things only went wrong once he learned to talk.
It’s very likely Lyme will fuck him up even more than his parents did, but at least she won’t hold his head under the fucking sink.
“Geez, even their diapers are bougie,” Artemisia scoffs from across the room, rifling through a bin. “I’ll make a bag of stuff, I guess. I don’t see a carrier thing so you’ll have to use a blanket if you don’t want to hold him the whole time. Hope you’ve got biceps.”
Lyme swallows hard. “It’s fine, I’ve got him.” She crosses over to the crib and looks down, stomach twisting. The baby watches her, not crying out, grey eyes wide and serious. (He lies in her lap, eyes sightless, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth.) “Hey, D.” Her voice is all wrong, rough even at twelve and not tender or maternal at all, but he only stares at her as she reaches down and lifts him to her shoulder. “Let’s blow this fuck-ass joint.”
Turns out they have one more stop on the way, which was not in the plan but in retrospect, really probably should have been. Because, turns out, when faced with a baby and a ten-year-old and the whole span of the mountains between her and the Capitol and nothing but a brace of knives between them, Lyme doesn’t feel like a war commander with an Arena and two victors and a handful of dead kids and countless dead soldiers behind her. She feels horribly, undeniably, terrifyingly thirteen, and the longer she stays here, the more she wonders if that’s going to stick.
“This is not the Capitol,” says Artemisia, dry as the desert.
Lyme hefts the makeshift carrier-knot over her shoulder. “Pit stop.”
“Now I know you’re nuts,” Artemisia says, that half-mix of admiration and let’s-wait-I-want-to-watch-the-explosion in her tone that Lyme misses so hard her chest aches. “You can’t sneak into the Village. It’s the first thing we learn in school. Even I don’t climb barbed wire, and you’ve got a baby.”
“You don’t need to climb the fence,” Lyme tells her. It doesn’t count as betraying trade secrets, not when Misha would have been here anyway. Not when they don’t plan to stay. “You can get in from above if you climb the mountain trails. No one ever does, that’s all.”
It takes them a day and a half.
“Ho-ly shit,” Artemisia whistles, as they stand on the rear mountain path that leads down to the Village orchard. “How did you find this shit out?”
“I know things,” Lyme says. “Wait here with him. I’ll be back.”
She makes a face, and for a minute Lyme thinks she’s going to make a fight about it, but then Artemisia nods and holds out her arms for - the baby. (It’s still too hard to think of him as Claudius, just yet.) “Okay, yeah. Congrats on finding a place that freaks me out too much to want to steal from. I’m pretty sure if they catch you in here you get used as target practice for the Seniors.”
They don’t use kids, Lyme almost tells her, but the words curl up in the back of her throat and crumble into dust.
Nero answers the door in the ugliest chunky-knit sweater Lyme has ever seen (the bare garment was a sensible Adessa knit, she can recognize the weave, but the front has an embroidered tomcat in lurid purple and gold). He’s younger than Lyme has ever seen him except his original Games tapes, though even young his eyes are hollow. He blinks down at Lyme, and for a dizzying second she sees herself through his eyes: an angry teenager with ropy Centre muscles and an atypical crew cut, too old for telltale bruises on her face but all the hallmarks in the set of her shoulders and the curl of her fists.
“Okay,” Nero says, blase as ever. It’s so painfully Nero - so very much her mentor, who took in Lyme standing over the kitchen sink with a shard of broken glass stuck deep into her wrist and simply said No - that Lyme desperately wants to fling herself at him and bury her face in his chest.
The worst is knowing that she could, a strange girl he’s never seen but who’s bleeding hurt and fear all over his floor, and he’d probably let her.
She hadn’t rehearsed this part. She probably should have. But Lyme always did her best sponsor-work unscripted. “Five years from now, you’re going to meet a tribute,” Lyme says. “She’s going to win, and you’re going to kick off the wildest, most batshit mentor dynasty this Village has ever seen. And twenty years after that, we all die. Every single one of us, in a war we can never hope to win.”
Nero folds his arms. Curls his fingers over his bicep, looks her over as one foot taps a steady rhythm against the floor. “Okay,” he says again, without judgement. Brutus never managed that skill, or either very deliberately cultivated his the other direction; he could make the most neutral statement of fact sound like a virulent condemnation. “And that girl’s you?”
“You killed your old man when you were twelve,” Lyme says. Nero stiffens, but doesn’t try to interrupt. “He was going to hurt your sister. You told me this because I didn’t kill mine, but I wished I could have. I didn’t want a male mentor and you needed me to understand why Adessa or Calli wouldn’t have understood the way you did.” She swallows. “I still think Calli would have let me hunt him down and kill him, but you’re right that it probably wouldn’t have been … you know, better. For me. In the long run, anyway.”
Nero’s breathing has gone suspiciously even, nice and slow but shallow. Lyme would recognize that from across the sponsor ring. “Okay,” he says again. Doesn’t prove anything, she hears at the edges of his words, except what does it prove? What else is there?
“The 75th is the Quarter Quell.” Lyme’s voice cracks. She’s so tired of holding it all in, pretending like she doesn’t know, like none of it all matters. Like she hasn’t been torn apart, like starting over isn’t just as bad as losing everything. All these people, her loved ones, looking at her with a stranger’s eyes. “They Reap us again. There’s a Rebellion - all of us are killed - the details don’t matter. That’s not the point, I don’t care. I want to make it stop. I’m going to make it stop. I’m going to kill the president before it ever happens.”
His eyes are white around the edges, nostrils flared, but he hasn’t moved, his voice still level. “Just you?”
She shakes her head. “I found my kids. Misha’s ten, I think? Maybe eleven, you know birthdays. She wins 57. Claudius is - fuck, he’s just a baby. I thought I could do this, but I can’t - I can’t do it alone.” Lyme, the one she is now, this age, would scream to hear the quiver beneath in her voice, the desperate need underlying it all. “I need my mentor.”
This time his exhale is long and steady. “Kill the president,” Nero repeats, and lets out a slow fuuuuuck that’s more breath than sound. “With a baby. For fuck’s sake. Okay, wait here.”
For once, Artemisia has nothing sarcastic or witty to say. The inter-district train slides smoothly down the rails, humming with the quiet efficiency that had become second nature to Lyme over the years, but since the war had fallen by the wayside of her memory in favour of silent District 13 hovercrafts or clinging to the roof of freight cars. It feels like years since Lyme has enjoyed the kind of sleek, modern comfort the Capitol throws at everyday convenience, but now it sits sour in her mouth. Hard to forget the riots, the images of bread lines in the outer districts, white-uniformed Peacekeepers firing into crowds as the mayor announced rations had been restricted due to seditious activity among the general populace.
Artemisia, at least, knows nothing of this. She can’t stop staring, even though the usual passenger rail has nothing on the twice-yearly tribute train with its cascading chandeliers and overwhelming frippery. Then again, it’s hard to tell whether it’s the wood panelling and plush carpet she’s staring at, or the others in the car with them.
Which - fair. When Nero told her to wait, Lyme expected him to grab his sword, maybe an overnight bag if he’d decided to be extremely proactive. She had not expected him to return with both Ronan and Adessa at his side, both of them studying her with the kind of expression she would rather have redirected to Games footage or her very distant memories of school science class, staring at leaves or bugs or thin slices of potatoes through thick magnifying glass lenses. Adessa in particular very much looks like she’d enjoy taking Lyme apart, with putting her back together firmly listed under ‘optional’.
But apparently while Nero, Mr. ‘country before self, duty before life’ himself is fine to drop everything and take a nonsense-spouting teenager on a treason joyride at the drop of a dagger, he won’t do it without backup, So. Here they are. Adessa, primly knitting by the window and acting like she can’t sense Artemisia’s worshipful eyes on her, and Ronan, who insisted on giving Lyme’s aching back a break, cradling the baby in his arms with years of practice in the ease of his posture.
“How many infants do you suppose I have kissed,” he says to Lyme when he catches her staring. “Not everyone has a reputation for enjoying fingerling baby sandwiches.”
“He’s joking,” Lyme says to Artemisia automatically. “She doesn’t eat meat.”
“Please.” Adessa does not even look up from her stitches, did not bother to question Lyme’s assertion despite her reputation. “As though I would bother with postnatal. All the scientific potential is in the foetal predevelopment stage.”
Artemisia glances at Lyme, eyes questioning, but there she can only shrug. Adessa leveraging her influence in the Capitol to gain access to underground stem cell research for absolutely no reason other than boredom and scientific curiosity - sure, why not.
Adessa smiles to herself and adds another skein.
Years ago - years from now, in the never-was - Claudius asked Lyme what she would have been, if she hadn’t been a Victor. She told him she never could have been anything else. The whole line of his spine had relaxed and he’d said he was the same. Now, the baby who would be Claudius, a tiny, solemn-eyed thing who latches onto her finger with surprising strength, will be anything but that.
“What’s left for us, huh?” Lyme asks him, softly. Artemisia, not one to let herself be awestruck for long, has challenged Nero to a game of five-finger fillet. Lyme took Claudius over to the window, though she’s not really sure how much babies can see or understand. For all she knows the whole thing is a big, flashing blob of light to him. “What do we do, in a world where I stop us from existing?”
It sounds like the plot of a terrible movie the two of them watch at three in the morning when the nightmares get too bad to sleep. The question sounds like something Brutus would snort and punch her for worrying about, the kind of philosophical bullshit that’s above their pay grade, you don’t get to stress about existential shit when you spend half your life trying to keep very real kids very much alive. But here she is, curled up on the ornate wooden passenger bench, watching an Artemisia she only ever knew from photographs cackle in triumph as Nero pretends to suck an imaginary cut on his finger, and wondering if, at the end of all of this, she’ll simply disappear.
As soon as she thought hits, a cool weight spreads across her shoulders. That’s the answer, isn’t it. All of this, this is Lyme’s borrowed time. She died in the mines with Coin’s gun to her forehead, died with a curse on her lips and a snarl on her face and ice-gray eyes boring into her soul. And now she has to change the rules, to twist the game and stop the war and those empty, stupid deaths, but - she was never meant to be here. She’s dead. This is not redemption, it’s not a do-over, not for her. It’s a chance to do a little good before what’s left of her vanishes from the universe for good.
“Nero will look after you,” Lyme tells Claudius. “It wouldn’t be fair if you disappeared, you or Misha or the rest of them. I’m the one who did all this. I’m the only one who remembers. You’ll get a good life and you’ll learn who you can be without all this killing. I’ll tell Nero to get you a cello. They have to make kid-sized ones somewhere.”
“Holy shit,” Artemisia bursts out, the knife clattering to the serving tray she’d filched for the game. Nero sits back, grinning. “You can see the whole mountains from here. I never knew they were so big!”
“Mountains and earth,” Lyme says without thinking. If only Brutus could hear her now.
“You,” Artemisia shoots back without tearing her eyes away from the windows, “are corny as shit, mystery terrorist.”
Lyme never thought too hard about Ronan’s weird Presidential privileges very much, until he walks right in to the mansion unannounced with two Victors, two kids and a baby and nobody tries to stop him. “Oh, he can see us,” Ronan says in a flat voice. “It’s impossible to get the drop on him, the man puts cameras in the showers-”
(“Perv,” says Artemisia, dismissively)
“-but the thing to remember with Coriolanus is, this is a man at the top of his game. He’s killed everyone who opposed him and has leverage on anyone who might think to try. He is both extremely intelligent and understimulated. It makes him dangerous, but in this case it may work in our favour.”
“So he’s letting us in because he’s bored,” Artemisia says. “You know what, I get it.”
Coriolanus is waiting for them in his study, plush carpets and oak-panelled walls, a heavy table with a tray of baked goods. “Ronan,” he says, spreading his hands. “What an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?”
This is the part Lyme didn’t think through. What it would feel like to face him now, remembering years of dead children, the cold, casual malice when Artemisia finally won and the President insinuated she wasn’t grateful enough, Claudius returning from his one-on-one pale and shaking, the chill of a death threat wrapped around his throat.
Lyme holds herself still and blank-faced, even as her heart skips in her cheat - but if she’s filled with the murder-fury she can’t imagine Ronan, decades upon decades of resentment and rage coiled up into that quiet, unassuming man and his cane - and she braces herself for the blistering speech she most definitely would have spent the last fifty years perfecting if she were Ronan.
Ronan tilts his head with the predatory anticipation of a hawk spotting a field mouse. His fingers flex at his sides - a knife flies across the room - and President Snow falls, soundless on the ankle-deep carpet, dagger buried to the hilt in the hollow of his eye socket.
“Holy shit!” Artemisia bursts out. “Holy fuck, you nailed him! I would have gone with a cool line, though. Something like, ‘You can die!’ Okay no that’s stupid, but you know what I mean. You should have had a kill phrase”
“Monologuing drops the odds of a confirmed kill to an average of ten percent,” Adessa says evenly. “Fourth-most common late-game cause of death for over-confident Careers.”
Ronan examines the head of his cane. “Besides, ‘eat my poisoned petit four-flavoured shit, you smug fuck’ didn’t have a snappy ring to it.”
The President is dead. Long live the President.
“You have a choice,” Ronan says, glacial calm, facing down the Peacekeepers who crashed down the door and stare at them, bug-eyed shock behind the clear faceplates. “One: Kill us all right here, report this to your superiors, work to keep order in the streets during the chaos of a power vacuum. Two: Back me now, take control. No one else has to die.”
It can’t possibly work, Lyme thinks. She survived months and months of the worst, most awful, gruelling guerilla bullshit before the end, run after run after run up that Games-damned mountain, soldier after soldier splattered against the bedrock of her homeland and it never felt like they got anywhere. And Ronan’s going to ask nicely?
The Peacekeepers glance at each other. And then - holy shit - they nod, raise their rifles and move to flank the door.
Claudius squirms against Lyme’s back and lets out a fussy grumble.
“And a bottle, please,” Ronan says, still without moving. “We have a little one to feed.”
Claudius fusses in a cradle one of the Peacekeepers conjured up from somewhere on Ronan’s orders, a bemused expression behind the clear faceplate. Misha sprawls on her side on the bed beside him, arms wrapped around herself, one leg jutted awkwardly to the side with the other tucked under her, a confused tangle of limbs that’s at once possessive of her space and self-protective. Lyme sits on the floor, back braced against the wall, like she’s done a hundred times after nightmares or unexpected triggers or escape attempts kept her kids awake. Exhaustion presses to her forehead like a heavy cloth but she can’t sleep, not yet.
She can feel it, the pull of time at the back of her neck. She had one job to do and she did it, and you don’t fulfill a cosmic mission endowed by what-the-fuck ever and get to overstay your welcome. Brutus, Misha, Nero, Claudius, they’re all alive, and now it’s time for Lyme to go. It’s justice, anyway; she caused this, doomed Claudius by bringing him with her, doomed Misha by leaving her behind. Doomed them all by rebelling in the first place. Doomed Brutus by not rebelling sooner. Whatever her choices, she killed them. Now she can finally rest, knowing that she saved them and can vanish from their lives forever.
The starfish, safe and happy in the ocean, don’t need to worry about the kid who tossed them in.
Fuck, that’s maudlin. She’d ask for a drink except there’s an age-lock on the machines in the Games Complex, nothing harder than hot chocolate for minors. Lyme laughs under her breath and lets her eyes fall shut.
She wakes to wailing and a foot kicking her shin in a frenetic rhythm. “Hey, wake up, lazy!” Artemisia grins down at her. She has … banana …? in her hair? “Did you know these machine things make anything you want? I got us a whole pancake bar, it took me like an hour to order all the fixings. Grab your larva and let’s eat.”
Nero shoulders his way into the room, ruffling Lyme’s hair on his way past. “I got him,” he rumbles, reaching down to prop a red-faced and furious Claudius against his shoulder. “Finally crying, huh? Good for you, buddy. Let it out.”
Lyme stares at the sight - her future mentor, cradling her future victor, tickling his baby-soft cheek with one massive finger - and out of reflex digs fingernails into the skin of her wrist until blood beads up beneath the scratches. Nero catches sight and frowns. “Hey, no, don’t do that. C’mon up, I’ll grab a bandage.”
“I’m older than you,” Lyme says reflexively. Snow on a fucking shitpile, right now she’s Adessa’s age. She’d never had time to do the math before.
Nero blinks at her. Claudius, still squalling, jams a tear-stained face into Nero’s neck and subsides into sniffles. He’s probably thinking something about how, if she’s older than he is, why did she bother saying something so stupid and petty, which is a question Lyme asks herself every Games-damned time Nero makes a reasonable point about self-care and she regresses to a stubborn teenager. “We won’t use one with hovercrafts on it, then,” he says, deadpan. “Don’t wait too long, though. The girl is experimenting with the pancakes and some of them are pretty good. She’s got a peanut butter-pineapple and a maple-wasabi that are real good. Can’t really recommend the ‘Salt Bomb’ though.”
He saunters out - through the door filters the clink of cutlery, Artemisia’s laughter, Ronan asking for the savoury options please and thank you, Adessa’s liquid what is that monstrosity - and Lyme stares at the line of pink across her smooth (smooth!) wrist. “What the fuck,” she says aloud. Then, again, an edge of panic squeezing her throat: “What the fuck?”
Claudius and Misha both asked her, years ago, what she would have done if she hadn’t won the Games. Both times Lyme gave the same answer: she could never have been born to do anything but this.
So what is she supposed to do now?
18 YEARS LATER
“Got another one for you.”
Lyme glances up as Pryor drops a file on her desk. “Bad?”
“Not like some of the others, might be nothing. Still, take a look.”
Shouts echo down the corridors, the squeak of shoes and sharp ping of dodgeballs hitting the floor. A few voices rise in evident squabble; a trainer overrides them and the din subsides into the regular chaos of the game. Lyme stares at the wall for a long moment, snorts a low laugh, and flips open the cover of the file.
The face that stares up at her knocks her hard in the gut. Tousled blond hair, blue eyes, square white teeth. He grins through the first few years of photos, but then -
Abrupt mood swings, says his most recent assessment. Short temper, violent outbursts, uncommunicative. Home visit recommended.
Lyme slumps back in her chair, chest aching. “Cato.” The word comes out hardly more than breath. He’d never talked about his home life - never talked about anything, really, hadn’t been interested in his mentor at all, too wrapped up in Clove. No bruises in his file, not like Claudius or Misha or Sloane or Slate or half the kids she took on with warning bells that rang so loud she could barely sleep at night. If he had a shitty family they were the quiet kind, not the kind with heavy fists.
And yet - reactive attachment and codependent and responds to positive reinforcement and he clung to Clove like a lifeline and here he is now, that happy, smiling kid curled in on himself and there’s no kill tests this time to turn him hard.
Breath still caught in her chest, Lyme scrawls home visit approved across the top of the file.
“I know that look.”
She startles. Claudius flops against the door jamb, one eyebrow cocked. “You’re supposed to be flagging kids for the system, not taking them all home.”
Lyme tries for a look halfway between haughty and nonchalant, but the grin her kid gives her says she didn’t pull it off. “Who says I’m taking anyone home? You’re here early.”
Sloane ducks around under Claudius’ arm. He tweaks the end of her braid and she shoots a glare at him, all five foot nothing of her. “No, you didn’t come pick us up.”
“Is it home time already? The kids were just playing -“
She stops as the silence envelops her office. No shrieks. No trainer whistles. No thump of over-excited kids crashing into walls. How long had she been staring at Cato’s file?
Claudius rolls his eyes. “C’mon, Ma, it’s Misha’s night to cook so we have to get secret takeout on the way home.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Lyme drops the file in her outbox and holds out her arm to Sloane, who curls in against her side. Claudius flanks her other side and together they head out from the District 2 Athletics and Personal Growth Centre - not-so-secret headquarters for District 2 Family Services - into the glow of the mid-afternoon sun. “Tell me about your day,” she says.
“I tried the crossbow today,” Sloane says. “Just for fun. I don’t think I’m going to stick with it but it was fun to try.”
“I got asked if I want to stay on when I graduate,” Claudius says, so casual it takes Lyme a second.
Her head snaps around so fast a muscle in her neck twinges. “What? What did you say?”
He shrugs. “I told them I’d think about it.”
“Dillweed!” Sloane jogs sideways, reaching around behind Lyme to sock Claudius in the kidneys. “You couldn’t go first so I wouldn’t sound dumb?”
“You’re not dumb, you’re twelve.” He aims a kick back at her that misses by a clearly-purposeful margin. “And you’re doing smart things like trying out lots of stuff to see if you like it. You’re working hard and you’ll get a great recommendation when you’re older, that’s why we have the Centre.”
Twenty years of losing tributes, war, failure, death, a whole new lifetime to try again and this is where she landed: two not-dead kids balancing bickering and stunning sincerity while the third (two years her junior, forever her kid) prepares the worst casserole known to humankind back at home. Cato is not the first file to cross her desk; across the district a handful of kids live out happier lives with new families who are proud to have them, and she will find more. No more looking for bruises and channeling repressed anger into murder - not now, not ever.
Sloane harrumphs like an old man, but then she stops and glances up at Lyme with a slow smile. “Uh oh, Mom’s having feelings.”
Lyme rears back and glares at both of them, but before she can retort, both Claudius and Sloane say “Yeah, yeah” in the exact same tone.
“Oh well now it’s war,” she declares, and knocks them both into the grass.