Two / Born To Die

❦

          The lights are dimmed, and the tablecloth, splitting at the seams, still smells of freshly cleaned laundry.

Her father is sitting across from her; teeth locked together, he says nothing to the nine-year-old girl with the terrible dark eyes and choppy hair cut with the clumsy hands of a child— another reminder that his wife is gone, and that he had never learnt to hold something sharp in a way that wasn't to kill.

In his hands he holds a silver coin, turning it over and over in his fingers as if the value will change if it's reflected off the ceiling light enough times. The metal has long since corroded, so much so that Elliot can no longer make out the insignia on the surface, only the words 13 CENTS.

Elliot wants to ask him why someone would make a thirteen cent coin, but those are the things you ask your father, not a man you see every day who shares the same tired eyes and broken bones as you. So instead, she sits with him in silence and peels the orange in the fruit basket, waiting for him to ask if he might have some.

This is the closest they have come to love in two years.

Out of nowhere, he asks, "What's the worst thing you would forgive me for?"

Elliot pauses in the midst of eating the orange, a slice held up at the gates of her teeth— surprised by both his question and the fact that he is choosing to speak to her. Most days, they co-exist: he says nothing to her and she, in turn, has learnt to stop begging for his affection.

"I don't know," she says. The little girl in her (really, she's still a little girl, but she hasn't been a child since her mother died) shakes her fist and begs to be mean, but Elliot reminds herself that she isn't seven anymore. "I don't think I'd forgive you for a lot of things."

He lets out a half-hearted laugh at that; it dies in the cold night air.

"I wasn't trying to be funny," she tells him petulantly. "Why are you asking?"

"Just because," he answers, and then adds, "Does it matter?"

Yes. Yes, of course it does. He has been leaving so much lately, always disappearing for days on end. Every time he leaves Elliot will tell herself that it doesn't matter, that she's fine without him regardless, and then she will wait for him by the door like a dog that misses its owner, like a lonely house whose inhabitants have become nothing but shadows.

"I guess not."

Her father purses his lips, turns the thirteen cent coin over in his hand again. "Elliot."

"What?"

"You are turning ten next year."

"I'm surprised you've noticed."

He flinches. Good, she thinks. Elliot digs her nails into the orange, opening crescent-shaped wounds in the flesh. It bleeds and weeps and cries, but it is dead, and it was born to die anyway. This is something she can hurt without consequence.

"I'm not stupid, you know."

"Could've fooled me." Maybe she's being mean again. She doesn't know, doesn't care. Sometimes she feels like he deserves it.

"Elliot, please." He shifts over. She won't meet his gaze. Tentatively her father reaches out, with the hand that isn't holding the coin, and tilts her chin up to face him. "Please, look at me. You must listen."

What kind of begging is there to be done? Why is he the one begging? How is it that he can ask her to please, look at me, listen to me, when it's all she's ever done? When she's waited at the door for him to come home every day since he started leaving? When she's begged him, please, Rain needs you, and he's told her, you have a sister, as if that would alleviate his absence?

"I don't want to." The orange drops to the plate and becomes long forgotten.

"Please," he stresses, and she relents, fine. With his hands he grabs hers; the silver coin presses into her skin and marks her with the number 13. "You turn ten in the summer."

"Yes, you've said that already."

"No," he shakes his head, as if he'd asked a question, and she'd offered him the wrong answer. "Ten years old. Do you know what it means?"

The TV blinks at her from the corner. Oh. "I become. . . eligible for the Games."

He flinches again. This time, she doesn't feel good about upsetting him. The thought of being sent to die offsets the thrill of hitting him where it hurts, of wounding him the same way he's wounded her.

"Yes," he bites out. "I don't think the Games will stop by then."

"I don't think they'll stop any time soon."

"You don't know that," he says, sharp and swift and immediately cutting off at the end, as if he knows something she doesn't, something she shouldn't. The coin presses further into her palm. "If. . . if you are chosen, you need to know how to survive."

He removes his hands from hers, and then gestures to the hollow at his throat, "This is where you want to throw your knives, should you come into possession of them. A spear will also suffice, but most of them are heavy to wield, and are much, much taller than you."

He moves his hand to his ribs, then sideways, to his heart, "This is where you aim first: right between the ribs, where the lungs will be, and then if you can, drive the blade up towards the heart."

Finally his hand settles on his head, right at the side of his skull, "Most of your opponents will be taller than you, so this I don't recommend, but if you somehow end up on top of them, here is where you should aim— it'll take them out fast."

"Dad—" (The word tastes bitter on her tongue.)

"Do you understand, Elliot?" he presses. This is the most he's cared about her wellbeing since her mother left them, and Elliot finds herself grabbing onto the scraps in spite of herself. "Do you know what you have to do?"

Upset, Elliot tries to rub away the branded 13 on her skin. Something about it feels illicit. The air smells of citrus, the torn-up orange sits complacent on its plate and waits to die.

"Yes," she responds, "I understand."

In the half-light, she swears she sees him smile. Then his mouth sews itself shut again. The silence, permanently a guest at their dinner table, grows limbs and stretches outwards towards the window, away, away, away, until it has reached across the vast expanse of Panem and beyond.

♰

Standing at the very doors she'd boarded the train through, Elliot entertains the prospect of running away. It is getting darker, now; night sinks its claws into the sky as the half light on the horizon dies out.

It would be so easy, she thinks, just to take a bar stool or a Peacekeeper's rifle gun and break the glass and run away, but a tribute a few years back had done something similar with the windows, so it's likely that the Capitol has upgraded their facilities to prevent another occurrence from happening. Still, she finds the idea enthralling to dwell on, like if you were starving and suddenly stumbled upon your first chance at fruit.

She's far more lost in her thoughts than she'd like to admit, and consequently does not notice when the compartment doors slide open, and Lennon makes his way into the foyer to find her hovering right at the doors, a butter knife in hand as if it'll be enough to wrench them open.

"Don't even think about it."

Elliot's stomach twists uncomfortably. She doesn't have to look at him to know he's watching her, with those terrible green eyes and sharp, crooked smile. (She wonders if it's sideways because he was punched in the face at some point.)

"You don't know what I was going to do," she argues, trying to step past him and exit.

He blocks her swiftly, and Elliot feels dread settling in the pit of her stomach when she realizes that they will likely find themselves in the same position again during the Games, one trapped and the other smiling, knives for teeth.

"Yes, I do," he says; his voice would've been sympathetic if it weren't also so cutting, "You were going to run away."

"What? With a butter knife?"

Elliot tries to play it off, looking up at him as she hopes that he'll just laugh it off and let the subject drop, but no. Lennon Lourdes is the kind of person to play with his food before he eats it, to corner the prey and watch it writhe and beg before he deals the killing blow.

"I don't know," he tells her. "But for what it's worth, Elliot—" there it is again, the unnecessary strain on her name— "if you run away, it won't be you that's punished. Well, you might get taken away and hung in the town square of whichever district you end up in, but that's all there is for you. Your sister, on the other hand. . . the Peacekeepers won't be as kind to her."

"You don't know that," Elliot counters, but even she knows it's futile— he's right, and she hates it, and she hates that he's still standing there with that wide uncomfortable smile on his face; as if this delights him, as if there's something funny he finds about all this. Something rises in her gut, sharp and angry; an open wound begging to be avenged.

"If you don't look away," she seethes, turning the butter knife to face him, "I'll fucking kill you."

"Oh, but that's against the rules," Lennon mocks, his smile turned leering. "No murder of the tributes before we enter the Arena, remember? But then again, maybe that doesn't matter to you. You can do whatever you want, and then you'll get sent into the Games, and then you'll die. What does it feel like to know that you won't be hurt ever again?"

The wound rips apart at the seams, blood flooding the pit of her stomach as she lunges at him, driving the knife straight towards his ribs. He reacts quickly, dodging out of the way and scrambling towards the compartment doors, but not before the flat of the blade collides against the side of his jaw, leaving a visceral red mark.

Elliot wants to charge right at him again just as the Peacekeepers begin to flood the room, but then she sees that he's laughing— laughing, chin tilted up and glasses reflecting off the afternoon light.

"I don't blame you," he calls to her. A Peacekeeper grabs his hand roughly and attaches it to a handcuff; another one does the same to Elliot as they're unceremoniously dragged to the dining area. "It happens, you know. Lower class people are vicious things, and girls even more so."

Instead of responding, Elliot counts the amount of sharp objects in the dining room that she can possibly use to smash his skull.

The Peacekeepers cuff them to the table at opposite ends. Niamh scowls as she's being shoved out of her seat, but the indignance disappears off her face the second she sees the blooming bruise on Lennon's jaw and the butter knife in Elliot's hand, glinting as the sunlight catches off of it (though it's confiscated seconds later).

Kennedy blinks at the two from her spot at the table, mouth hanging slightly open in a mixture of surprise and amusement. Seated next to her, Elliot notices, is a man that she assumes to be their other mentor— Pietro Lleras: victor of the 52nd Hunger Games, who falls on the opposite side of the spectrum from Kennedy. 

Time has not been kind to him. His eyes, bruised and sunken, stare at Elliot, gaze blank and quizzical and nothing like the rugged, fetching man she sees smiling at the world through a television screen every year. Tangled, chopped up pieces of hair fall in his face, obscuring his vision and casting his face in shadow. He might've been— no, could be handsome if he weren't so bedraggled.

"God," he groans, shutting his eyes as if unable to bear the sight of them, "we've got a pair of delinquents this year. Why the fuss? Can't you all just sit still and die quietly?"

Elliot clenches her jaw. While Niamh has never openly addressed her and Lennon as such, she knows that the Capitol finds District citizens as backwards and somewhat subhuman. It doesn't bother her— it's long since been established that they're out of touch, after all.

But for someone like Pietro to say this, for someone who has lived through the Games and had their innocence be slaughtered under the gaze of the world to ask her to sit still and die quietly, who knows how Elliot must be feeling in this exact moment and just doesn't care—

The sharp end of anger finds its way to her throat, pressing into her skin.

"How can you just say that?" Elliot blurts out, flinching when Pietro turns to look at her.

In the corner of her eye, she sees Lennon grin, a hand still held over his bruised jaw, and realizes with a sinking feeling that she needs her mentors to actually like her in order to get any sponsors— something she may or may not have just botched.

"I'm sorry," she mutters quietly, wilting in her seat.

"No, she's right," Niamh says, turning to Pietro. She lowers her voice, though Elliot can still make out what she's saying, "The Games are an honor. You're already dressed like a morphling addict from District Six, you could at least behave yourself."

"They're only an honor to the likes of you." He raises an eyebrow at the woman, blinking blearily at her. "What are you going to do? Shoot my parents?"

Niamh blanches. "That has nothing to do with this—"

He opens his eyes wide, the discoloration under them stark against his sharpened stare. "Doesn't it? You know, Niamh, if you don't like what I'm saying, why not just kill me now? You have Peacekeepers on the train, might as well get the job done before we get to the Capitol."

Oh, he's lost it, Elliot thinks to herself.

"Pietro," Kennedy scolds, "stop it."

He turns his gaze to her, jaw clenching with the weight of all the unsaid words locked in between his tongue and teeth. "I didn't know we were back on speaking terms."

Kennedy calls his name again. "Please."

Elliot's eyes dart back and forth between the mentors. Lennon, too, looks intrigued.

"Not this again," Niamh sighs. "If you're done being rude to everyone, Pietro, I'm going to put on today's Reapings."

"Oh, of course," Pietro flashes her a sardonic grin, tilting his head to face Elliot when Niamh walks away from the table and Kennedy lowers her head. He offers her an easy smile, as if the girl hadn't just raised her voice at him. "Don't you just love watching children get picked to die?"

"Not really," Elliot answers, averting her eyes from his. "I prefer sitcoms."

Truth to be told, she's never seen a single one of those in her life; entertainment is only for the wealthy. But Pietro nods, as if she's said something particularly interesting that he agrees with. The screen on the other end of the room comes to life, static splintering into the Capitol anthem as the crest of Panem rises from the nothingness and bares its golden glory at them. Another reminder of who is in power.

"War," President Snow declares. He is younger in this than Elliot remembers. "Terrible war."

Elliot has seen this film so many times that she could recite every detail of it with her eyes closed. Before them, the tribute bows, kissing its teeth— immortalized at the height of its suffering, boy-turned-animal forever inhabiting the television screen like a ghost that has never existed anywhere else. The blood stands to attention against the terrain.

What changes about it, this time, is that the tribute is put to rest, and the story continues on without him. The rest of the world moves on to Caesar Flickerman, whose hair and eyebrows this year is the shade of rusting copper, and then on to the districts.

Elliot tries to pay attention to the names and faces of the people that might be the ones to take her life, but they all blur together into discolored figures with lives that will not intersect with hers again after the Games— one way or another.

Still, she makes note of them in her head— the volunteers from Districts One and Two. The pair from District Four that had looked horrified at finding each other on stage. (The camera, Elliot notices, lingers on Finnick Odair longer than it does on both tributes combined. He smiles and waves; Niamh giggles even though he's only on screen. They've turned his hair dark this year.) The girl from Seven with the flowers in her hair . . .

And then the one from District Eleven makes his way onto stage. It starts out just as Elliot's reaping had— a child is called onto stage, no older than ten, and the wind sings through the silence of the onlookers. Someone cries out; next thing Elliot knows there's a boy rushing on stage, pushing his brother away from the arms of the Peacekeepers as he offers himself up to the slaughter.

One of the commentators makes an offhand observation on how similar this is to District Eight's situation. Through the reflection in the window, Elliot sees Lennon peering at her. He has that same animalistic smile on his face, a creature flashing its gums.

She makes a point to not look at him.

"Well, then—" says Eleven's escort, leaning forwards for the boy to tell him his name— "we have our tribute! Jess Bonteri, ladies and gentlemen!"

Jess hangs on display at the stage, eyes staring vacantly into the distance even as the escort clasps his hand and raises it to the sky. The commentator says he is eighteen, and Elliot thinks to herself, eighteen, so close to freedom.

The escort tugs on his hand and then he raises his head and smiles at the camera, eyes hollow and unblinking. There is a scar at the corner of his eye, pallor sharp against the rest of his skin. It is his final year at the Reaping and his brother's first. Unwittingly, Elliot thinks of Rain again.

"He's just like you," Lennon says, breaking the silence that follows as District Twelve's reaping begins to play out on the screen.

Elliot ignores him. The Peacekeeper standing by the door eyes both of them warily, as if afraid that they will leap out of their restraints like wild animals and finish what they started. The cuff on her wrist begins to burn with a dull ache; she wants it gone.

He's not wrong, though. For better or worse, Jess Bonteri is just like her. But only one of them will make it out, if at all, so Elliot tells herself it doesn't matter and closes her eyes against the memory of the crying boy reaching for his brother.

But it finds her again in the dead of night when she's lying in bed and staring at the ceiling: the boy, weeping, clutches onto his brother's arm as if he can save him from something greater than both of them. As if he could dig his heels deep into the dirt and hold him there, forever, away from the waiting gates of the slaughterhouse.

Jess, he is saying, over and over again. Jess, don't go. Run, Jess, run away!

And Jess, both the prayer and the sacrifice, holds him by the shoulders, dropping to his knees like a broken God, and tells him, It will pass, Kit, it will pass.

It'll pass. What, the ache of his absence? Or him? The grief that never seems to go dormant in her heart opens its jaw again, poised as it waits for its next victim. It counts the figures in the lineup: Elliot, Rain, Jess and his brother. It decides it will be one or all of them.

♰

They rip her into pieces the second she reaches the Capitol.

The crowd is screaming and waving when their train pulls into the station, a sea of brightly painted piranhas that will never be satiated with all the sacrifices lined up at the television screen every year. Savage little things despite the wealth and privilege rotting in their veins, they claw over each other in their attempt to witness this year's offerings. The entire city holds its breath as it waits for the first draw of blood— this is their annual celebration, a ritual slaughter.

More, more, more, the citizens are shouting.

Elliot supposes to those looking on the outside that there is nothing strange about any of this. She is nothing more than a mere character to them, a girl trapped behind a television screen, who is born and will die before the cameras. To them, her existence will span for fourteen days or less, and then it will be on to the Victor and next year's tributes.

Fresh blood. Isn't it funny? The death of innocents only matters when it's entertaining.

"Oh, look at them," says Niamh cheerfully. "They love you!"

Beside her, Pietro grumbles, arms crossed as he gives the people an unimpressed stare. He's cleaned up overnight, and has gone from looking like a District Six morphling addict to a Capitol one. 

"They do that every year with the new tributes. It's nothing special. You'll all die soon and then the Capitol will forget all about you."

"Pi—"

"I'm just being honest," the words sever Kennedy's protest in the midst of its escape, tearing up his name into empty air. "Better this, than to build up false hope that they'll both go home to their parents and then having them die before the entire nation still wanting to live."

Pietro turns to Niamh, refusing to meet the eyes of either of his tributes. "Get them off the train," he says shortly. "We'll catch up later."

That's the end of it. Perhaps it is routine every year for Pietro to tell his tributes they will die and then send them off to the Capitol, because Niamh says nothing and simply complies in silence.

Everything blurs as she takes Elliot away— one moment the Capitol people are screaming for her and Lennon to look in their direction, the two tributes false gods raised on pedestals by the same people that will soon cheer for their beheading. 

The next moment she is lying on a cold metal table, stripped to the bone. Three foreign faces loom over her figure; the overhead light blurs their faces and highlights the edges of the razors sitting in their hand.

"Well," one says, "this one's a real piece of work."

Another pulls her by the hair to get her in a sitting position; Elliot flinches but obliges. Now that she's not directly staring into the light, she can see the faces of the three people in front of her— unfortunately so.

It is an understatement to say that they are the epitome of decadence— one wears a wig constructed entirely of flowers, and the sickly, saccharine stench from what Elliot assumes to be preservatives brings tears to her eyes. Another one has patches of his skin covered in what looks like cement; half of him looks like a marble statue and the other half a human— Elliot can't tell if it's an experiment gone wrong, or an artistic statement.

The third one's waist is a terrifying sight to behold. Elliot has heard rumors that the people in the Capitol willingly get bones shaved down and even removed to look more appealing (to whom, she doesn't know— everyone in the Capitol has either exaggerated or diminished their features so much that such degenerate beauty has become commonplace). But she'd never expected to end up amongst them, much less to see one in person— the woman's waist is so slim it's practically pinched inwards, like if her flesh just caved in at that point.

"Do you like it?" She blinks at Elliot with her too-wide eyes; it's without a doubt that she's had work done there, too. "I wanted to get that done for you too when I heard we were getting assigned to a female tribute, but Teddy says removing your ribs will lower your chances of survival."

Truly, it scares her, and she finds it disgustingly ostentatious of her— are the people in the Capitol blind to the suffering of the districts? How can you sit here, while the rest of your people starve, and worry about whether your waist is beautiful enough for the eyes of strangers? But the woman is looking at her pleadingly, as if her survival hinges on Elliot's approval, as if she'd take the razor in her hands to her throat if Elliot said something disparaging to her.

Elliot swallows and looks away. "You're very pretty."

She smiles and holds the words to her like a lifeline. Elliot learns their names later on as they continue to cut away at her: Blanche, Valen and Cyra, in order of appearance, each of them equally detached from reality. To them, she is a vessel in the shape of someone better, in the shape of someone they can call beautiful, something they must carve into existence.

It goes on for hours, the treatments and alterations, a never-ending metamorphosis. Elliot thinks of how she is almost just like the Capitolites now, rotten and beautiful by their standards but inhumane to the rest of Panem.

Is it better to die, or to live long enough to surrender your humanity? The difference between Elliot and the Capitolite they are trying to make of her lies in the fact that her change will end, that she will be buried under the sun by the end of this month. Unlike the people of the Capitol, Elliot Kalomiri will not live to evolve with the trends, will not be around to forever chase a standard of beauty that changes with the sky, their own false god that will never be satiated.

The sight of her new face in the mirror makes her instantly sick. Valen is quick to react, shoving a wastepaper basket in her face as she empties the contents of this morning's breakfast.

It's not like they have made her ugly. Rather, they have made her alien to herself— filed her teeth down to perfect, twin rows of white bone stacked upon each other, cleansed her skin of any scars and blemishes save for the one running up her arm. Tore her flesh open and stitched it back together, fixed and packaged her up for public consumption.

Who is she, now? Will Rain even recognize her from home? Her reflection stares back at her with its bright dead eyes, lashes lifted and eyebrows sculpted. This is not Elliot Kalomiri— this is a girl who does not exist outside of the television screen, a girl who does not exist unless she is perceived.

"Poor girl," Blanche mutters. "She must never have seen herself cleaned up before. Do you think they have mirrors back in the districts?"

"She can hear you, you know," Valen says, grimacing as he dabs at Elliot's mouth with a napkin and hands her something to rinse her throat with. "Did last year's tribute react like this too? I must ask the next time I see him."

"He's dead, Valen."

"Oh, right, I forgot," the man sighs. "Shame, that— I was hoping he'd become the next Finnick Odair."

There it is, again: the mention of Finnick Odair. Broken boy turned half-God, District 4's golden Victor, the Capitol's darling. Another child carved into a commodity, a museum exhibit for the Capitol to fawn over on his visits. Ever since his win three years ago, he has become the only thing brought up in television interviews or reruns (thing, not person, because there will always be a distinction between District and Capitol no matter how many of your bones they break). He, with the laurels draped around his neck like nooses, is what makes beauty a thing to be pitied.

Cyra giggles. "There'll only ever be one of him," she says. "They don't make a lot of pretty boys like him in the Districts, you know."

The doors swing open to mark the end of her sentence and another person walks in— this one Elliot recognizes from previous interviews of the Games: Theodore James, or Teddy, as Caesar Flickerman and the rest of the Capitol refers to him, District 8's stylist and one of the contestants on a family game show after hours.

"Oh, Teddy's here!" Cyra declares to no one in particular. She smooths Elliot's hair down like you would a doll's, and presses a kiss to her cheek. "Just sit tight and do what he says, okay?"

Elliot flinches at the contact. "Of course."

Valen smiles, teeth bared. The razor glints in his hands, aching to lacerate skin; Elliot, a blank canvas laid bare, curls in on herself. There is a hunger in his eyes; not to devour her whole but rather to cut her open and rearrange her to his liking, to make her something he can call beautiful.

In that moment, Teddy speaks up: "You can go now."

Elliot's prep team ushers themselves out, Cyra makes an offhand comment about removing another one of her ribs before the door slams shut and it's just Elliot and a man who has not existed to her outside of the television screen until now.

"I'm Teddy," he offers her a lopsided smile, "though I'm sure you know that already."

Elliot can only blink at him. She thinks of making an attempt to cover herself from him but then decides that it's futile— is it possible that the humiliation of this moment is greater than that of dying in front of the entire nation?

Teddy scratches the nape of his neck awkwardly at her silence. From the briefcase in his hand he procures a robe and passes it to her, turning his head in the other direction despite the pointlessness of the action— he's already seen everything and they both know that.

"I forgot that they usually strip the tributes down," he says, making a point not to look at her. "Sorry, I know it's uncomfortable— I promise I won't, uh, try anything, I have a wife and I love her very much."

He stumbles over his words as he speaks, hand over his eyes even though his head is turned. He means well, Elliot decides; she allows herself to laugh politely at his statement.

"I'm decent," she announces, and adds in a quieter voice: "Thank you."

He purses his lips and nods, seemingly at a loss for words. "Good. Come along, we ought to get you ready for the parade."

Elliot pulls her robe tighter around herself and follows him through a door into a sitting room, picking up the necklace Rain had given her on her way out. It had been sitting on a small table, dull and washed out against the bright colors of the Capitol.

The hyacinth charm presses against her skin. She hopes her sister's doing alright.

Elliot should know not to be surprised by the decadence of the Capitol any longer. But the sitting room, with its marble pillars and ceiling-to-floor glass window, serves as a huge contrast to the dimly lit factory she spends most of her time in. (Correction: spent. Another reminder that she will either return to never have to work there again or she will not return at all.)

Teddy takes a seat by a couch near the window, gesturing for her to take the one across from it. The table sits between them like an enemy line. He presses a button off the side; the tabletop splits open and a second one rises with what Elliot assumes to be lunch. Or afternoon tea— the sun is way past its peak in the sky now.

She counts the food laid out before her— it would have made for at least two days' worth of meals with her and Rain. Teddy has his head lowered; she wonders if he feels ashamed by such a display of depravity, or if this overindulgence is so common in life in the Capitol that he no longer flinches at the thought of wasting food.

It must be the latter. Here, starvation is a choice. What is it like, to never have to count your food or the days left that you can live without it? Scarcity does not exist to you when your resources are infinite, when you have an entire country built around sustaining your luxury.

"This must be a lot for you," says Teddy. He has that look on his face again, like he doesn't know what to do with himself. It must be interesting to sit with a product of the suffering wrought by your own debauchery.

She studies him in lieu of a response. Teddy looks young compared to the rest of the stylists, even with the modifications done to their bodies in their desperation to stay young— perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two at most; he could not be over five years older than her. His hair is short and tousled, flyaways highlighted by the fluorescent light. His features are angular in that uncanny Capitol way, the flesh too hollow and the skin stretched too tight over the bone; a Frankenstein born of an endless pursuit of beauty.

It remains a fact that he is the most human out of everyone she's seen here, though she supposes it won't matter when she's six feet underground— chances are that Teddy will forget all about her by the next Games, just like Valen with past tributes.

"So," starts Teddy, unpacking the contents of his briefcase onto the low table between them, "about your costumes. The other stylist, Alaia, is in charge of your district partner— Lennon, correct?"

"Unfortunately."

His eyebrows disappear into his hair, though he says nothing to this. Some small jars clatter from his hands onto the table carelessly. "For parade outfits, it's customary to reflect the indus— flavor, of your district. I'm sure you know this."

Being in charge of textiles, District Eight is a relatively easy district to work with. It's nowhere nearly as tricky as Three or Twelve, though with the already ridiculous fashion of the Capitol, it's difficult to make clothes any more of a statement than they already would be in everyday life. (There's always the option of wearing nothing for the shock factor, but Elliot hopes it'll never come to that.)

"Of course, regular fabric is boring, so we figured we'd try something different."

Elliot takes in the sight before her— a large roll of what she recognizes to be organza, several tubs of a clear gel marked RESIN, and a miscellaneous assortment of what looks like Niamh's face paint, safety pins and silver jewelry gleaming in the afternoon light.

"Technically," Teddy says, blanching, "you won't be naked."

It is sundown by the time they finish. The version of Elliot Kalomiri meant for public consumption has been carved into perfection, both figuratively and literally. For the past few hours, Teddy had got to work draping the thin, transparent fabric around her figure, and then sculpting it with the clear resin to hold its shape. There are crystal embellishments placed strategically around her figure so it can still be considered decent, but Elliot is about as close to those bare statues of goddesses in the Capitol streets as she could get.

When she voices this to Teddy, he simply tells her, "Beauty is pain, Elliot. They have to remember you if you want to win."

To win, not to live.  She remembers again that to him, this is all just a game. He will only know her in passing.

It's unfair, she wants to say, but it means nothing and it will not save her. It's unfair that I only get to live if I'm interesting to them.

Teddy places the scalpel in his hand onto the table, stepping back to observe his work. It's beautiful, Elliot will give him that— the carefully sculpted fabric hangs off her figure like water arrested in motion, making her look like a glass statue. The resin catches the light of the setting sun like the edge of a knife, bright and frightening and wonderful.

Her hair has been arranged in waves down her shoulders, makeup done in a doll-like way that reminds Elliot of Kennedy, with wide eyes, meticulously curled lashes and blush dusting her cheeks.

"Perfect," Teddy exhales. "It'll last you through the entire night."

Elliot thinks of throwing herself out the window at the thought of having to wear this dress for the next six hours and more. Years ago, the Tribute Parade was the only event during the opening night of the Games. But the birthday of the President's granddaughter falls on the opening of the Hunger Games, and since her birth another event has been added to the usual theatrics— a gala after the Tribute Parade, the only night in the entire two weeks that celebrates something other than slaughter.

"It's okay," Teddy says, seeing her expression. "It'll be over before you know it."

I'll be dead before you know it. "You're right."

"Don't worry, all you have to do is smile and wave." He cracks a smile, glancing at her apprehensively as he starts packing his things up. "I'll be at the gala, so you can come find me in case there are any. . . malfunctions."

"How reassuring."

He nods, smile sinking into weariness, and takes her down to the bottom of the Remake Center, where pairs of tributes in order of district are being loaded into chariots pulled by teams of four horses. They're already rolling out District One's tributes; in the distance Elliot can see the deepening twilight marking the end of her first day in the Capitol.

The other stylist— Alaia— and her team are missing when they get there, so Teddy positions her right by Eight's chariot and goes off in search of his partner. (Elliot secretly hopes that something terrible happened to Lennon and killed him.)

She's standing awkwardly at the chariot when she hears a small voice calling, "Excuse me?"

Looking down, Elliot finds one of Eleven's tributes looking up at her, hand reached towards her dress as if she'd tried to tug on the fabric to get Elliot's attention but decided against it midway.

She's a pitiful little thing, dressed in a full-denim outfit and a pile of fruits sitting above her head to represent her district's industry— agriculture. Her hair is tied off with ribbons in twin ponytails, and she blinks up at Elliot with a mixture of fear and awe.

"Can I help you?" asks Elliot.

The girl points at one of the straps of her pinafore; the button on it has come loose.

"I'm sorry," Elliot says, "I can't fix that for you— I can't really bend down in this dress."

"Penny!" someone calls in a chastising voice. "You shouldn't be running around like that, we're supposed to be on the chariot."

Enter Jess Bonteri: Eleven's other tribute, eighteen and so, so close to making it out. He's roughly Elliot's height, if not slightly taller, and he flashes her an apologetic smile as he nears them.

It's obvious that the stylists prefer him— he's modeled after one of the agriculture gods in myths, a laurel wreath woven into his curls and a chiton draped over his figure. His body is painted with a pale, luminous dust, which isn't obvious up close, but far away the light hits his figure and it almost seems like he's glowing.

"Where's your partner?" he asks Elliot, reaching down to fasten Penny's strap button for her.

"Gone," Elliot says. "Hopefully forever."

He laughs at that, short and sweet. His eyes are a light silver, like moonlight. Elliot smiles until she remembers what they are here for, until it occurs to her that silver is also the color of knives, and that the same hands fixing the little girl's hair will soon be bloodstained and aching with the weight of death.

Jess opens his mouth to say something, but then his gaze drifts behind her shoulder; his face closes up, lips pressing into a thin, polite smile.

"It was nice meeting you," he tells Elliot, steering Penny away. "We should get going now."

"You really should," another person says.

From behind Lennon approaches, spiteful as ever. He returns Jess' smile, but his is sharp and blinding, a knife in the eyes.

He's dressed in a similar outfit to Elliot's, but there's less emphasis on the overall figure— the fabric is instead shaped like a billowing dress shirt, caught in motion in the wind. It unravels at the seams, the scraps extending to cover his waist and thighs. She expected him to wear glass shoes similar to hers, but it appears Alaia has decided for him to go barefoot, opting to instead place gold jewelry around his ankles.

He might've been beautiful if the sight of him didn't make her skin crawl.

Alaia (and Teddy, rushing up to her) helps them onto the chariot as District Seven's chariots roll out, carefully arranging their body positions— "Shoulders back, chins up, smile for the cameras!"

The city unfolds before them, a sea of high voices and too-wide smiles blurred out by the harsh spotlights, bright and frightening. There is something terrible about knowing you were made for the slaughter, and this was it— Panem opens its jaw, gnashing its teeth as the hunger descends. Here, the tributes are lined up like a meal for the appetite of the decadent; the Capitol shall eat well tonight (as it always does) while the Districts starve.

Smile for the cameras. It is sickening, Elliot thinks, how in the Games you are not worthy of living unless you make yourself entertaining. Survival hinges on the attention of the Capitol and is punctuated by the moment you become something boring, the moment the pedestal cracks and you become yesterday's news thrown out the back door.

"Chin up," says Lennon. His voice is rough and parched, like the crunching of dead leaves on the pavement. Elliot isn't sure what to make of his statement until he follows it up with, "I bet your sister's watching."

Another reminder that her slaughter will be broadcast to the whole nation. The thought of it lodges in her throat, a persistent ache that never goes away: How will she die? A knife to the back? The heart? The skull? Perhaps it will be nature and not man that kills her. Starvation, maybe? Drowning?

"I know your mother's watching," Elliot retorts. The memory of her mortality sits tight in her chest; she can't quite breathe. "Maybe she's putting money on your downfall as we speak."

He cracks a smile, a ghastly thing in which his skin splits open to accommodate for the curve of his lips.

"She had best be prepared to lose it all, then."

The spotlight slants across the planes of his face, darkening the hollows of his cheeks. He seems to remember that the eyes of the world are upon him, because he turns his smile from Elliot to the crowd, waving to the cameras.

Everyone is screaming for them, now; Elliot blows kisses to the masses and wonders how long it will be before they are cheering for her death. A flower lands at her feet and she thinks of the necklace Rain had given her, sitting somewhere in the hands of the Gamemakers as they check it for anything lethal. Her dress feels suffocating, like a glass cage she cannot break out of.

She reminds herself that this, too, will pass. (Like her.)

The Snow family stands at the balcony of the President's mansion, a collection of perfectly polished porcelain dolls smiling at the cameras. Elliot remembers them from the commentaries of previous Games: the President, his son Aeolus, and his grandchildren— Talya, Judith and Atlas. Uncanny little things, all of them.

The chariots pull up to the gates of a mansion with a halt; the music ends with a flourish and the national anthem picks up in its wake. The President gives the welcoming speech of the Games, and then the mansion gates unhinge to let the tributes in.

It sinks in again to Elliot that there is no walking away from this.

Teddy is standing by when the chariot slows to a stop, Alaia at his side. He's beaming as he helps Elliot down from her spot, the brightly colored makeup around his eyes crinkling. He makes a big show of fussing, re-curling her hair and patting down the flyaways, readjusting her necklace so it's right where he wants it to be.

"You were beautiful," he tells her. "They loved you."

Because I was interesting. Because I was entertaining. They'll love it when I die, too.

"It was all your work," answers Elliot. "They wouldn't have cared about me otherwise."

The light in Teddy's eyes falters. Perhaps he remembers the reason she's being dressed up by him, the reason she's here in the Capitol at all. Does he pity her, or is he simply upset that she has reminded him of the cruelty he is complacent to? Elliot supposes she can't blame him either way; he has never known suffering nor what it means to be subjected to it.

"Well," he declares, steering away from the connotations of her response, "the canvas has to be of good quality for the art to look nice."

Elliot cracks a smile at that. Teddy pats her shoulders, careful not to touch the resin gown, and gestures to the open doors of a hall with a sweeping motion.

"This way," he says, and Elliot follows him into the clutches of the crowd.

The cameras are gone now, but the principle of existing in the Capitol as a tribute remains the same: You are loved until you are no longer interesting. So Elliot smiles and shakes hands with people she does not know, holds the drinks they give her until another person comes along and snatches it from her hands.

On and on and on it goes; Elliot sees people she recognizes (Pietro, who is on what she assumes to be his twentieth glass of the night, and Jess, stuck in a conversation with two overly drunk Capitolites, who mouths the words Help Me when their eyes meet), but she is passed on from one sponsor to another like a commodity to be stared at, and finds that there really is nothing she can do about it if she wants to live.

Somewhere in between the second or third time she is coerced to down a drink, the Capitol boy hanging off her arm collapses, and Elliot ends up crashing into some stranger in her mad dash to disappear into the crowd.

An apology is rushed out; the second one dies midair when she stares up at him. Her first thought: they've lightened his hair. It was darker when she knew him. When did she know him?

The boy blinks slowly back at her. If there is any semblance of recognition that dawns upon his face, he doesn't show it.

"Can I help you?" he asks.

It occurs to Elliot that she has seen Atlas Snow before.

A memory, from another life: It is midsummer. Elliot is sitting on the porch steps after her first Reaping, a needle digging into her skin over and over again as she attempts to patch up one of her old shirts for Rain to wear.

She thinks she might be doing the fabric more harm than she's fixing it, not that she can be bothered to care at the moment. Her father had disappeared out the side door the moment they got back from the Reaping, with no more than a quiet acknowledgement of her survival. It's a sharp contrast to when he'd begged her to remember four ways to kill a person, should she ever be chosen for the Games; Elliot wonders if he's only always leaving because he knows she'll always be there when he comes back.

A voice severs her from her thoughts, cutting the image of her father in half as she looks up to identify the source.

"Excuse me?"

The neighbor's son is standing at the foot of the stairs, smiling awkwardly as he holds a rake in one hand and shears in the other. He's maybe two or three years older than Elliot, with watercolor eyes and dark brown hair that falls into his eyes, casting half his face in shadow.

Elliot scowls at him as her hand slips and the needle buries itself into her finger again. The knife tucked up her sleeve sits heavy, the metal pressing a cool kiss to her feverish skin.

"What do you want?"

He gestures to her lawn, to the rotten grass at his feet, "I was wondering if you wanted help with that. I— I notice your father hasn't been around a lot."

He's trying to be nice, she knows. But that strikes a chord with her, and the resentment in the pit of her stomach raises its head, peering through broken bones at the boy before her.

If he has noticed, who else has? Her anger sharpens itself at the thought that this boy, who has been nothing more than a stranger in passing for the entirety of her life, is showing more care for her than her own father is.

It begs for her to take the knife out and point it at him; right now, her father is too far away for her to hurt, and she knows she'd never be able to bring the knife down on him if it ever came to it. But the boy is here, standing at the foot of her home waiting for a response, and he is within reach. He is here. She can hurt him. It will be enough, it will have to be enough—

Elliot tucks her cruelty away into a fist. He doesn't deserve her rage and she doesn't deserve his kindness.

"We don't have the money."

"It's okay," he answers, shoulders untensing at her response. "I don't need it."

She thinks of the empty fridge in the kitchen and the signature she'd faked on her sign up form for tesserae. Her answer comes out a lot more bitter than she'd intend it to be, "Good for you."

The neighbor's son shifts in his spot, unsure of what to do. Her answer had neither been a confirmation or a denial.

"You should go," Elliot mutters quietly. "Sorry."

He blinks, as if he doesn't understand what she's apologizing for. "Okay. Take care, Elliot."

They never speak to each other again. He disappears two years down the line.

But he's here now, and he stands before her reborn as a boy from the Capitol, named after the god who failed to hold up the sky. Is it fear she sees in his eyes or familiarity? Elliot opens her mouth to call his name, but he shakes his head at her— an infinitesimal movement that hangs low and heavy in the space between them, aching with the gravity of it; the word Raphael rots away in the tomb between her tongue and teeth.

He smiles; his eyes remain blank, unmoved.

"Atlas Snow," he introduces himself. "President's grandson. Pleasure to meet you, Elliot Kalomiri."

He kisses the back of her hand as a courtesy. Elliot notices that he pronounces her name long and solemn, like one does when reading a eulogy.

Author's Note . . .

EVERYONE MEET TEDDY!!! he is awkward but he's my bb and he means well ok!!!!

atlas snow oh how i adore you... he is my very own tortured poet and i am so so excited to explore his character!! i love him lots

also look what kins made!! lennon is a Very Interesting character to say the least!! i think i made him too fucked up but we'll see in later chapters..