"I hope you know my finger is actually still sore," Cain announced, as he stepped out onto Six's floor. He'd taped it against the adjacent finger after his spar with Cat and managed to snag a little ibuprofen, so it wasn't really a justified complaint, but he needed to make a point. He didn't wait for Cat to appear or even answer him before he pressed on, flopping down onto the nearest couch. "And since you so owe me now, we're going out tonight," he called to her— wherever she was. "Put your shoes on, Miller, we've got plans."
"I said I was sorry!" Cat protested from down the hall at the sound of Cain complaining. It was an immediate defense and – maybe the partial realization that she did treat Cain more like a sibling than like a friend. She pushed off her bed from where she had laid lazily since Slate had left and made her way to greet Cain properly. She idled in the entry to the hall, glancing down at Cain who was flopped over the couch. "Do I need t' get fancy or are we just goin' out to go out?" Cat asked head cocked to the side in inquiry.
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Slate felt that he and Cat had reached a tentative agreement, a truce of understanding. They both felt stuck, like their hands were tied, but neither was the enemy. He wanted to continue to repair the friendship, though, as it was important to him -- she was important to him. So he made his way to the sixth floor, balancing a pizza box in his hand, and when the elevator doors opened, he called out, "Cat, you around?"
She'd spent the day fiddling with tech, avoiding sponsors and mentors and – much of anyone. Cat felt more in the way than helpful to the people from Six. District loyalty had certainly died with her when she found herself favoring Juno more than her own Tributes but then the bloodbath happened and they were gone within the first blow. She prayed there wouldn't be a next time where she'd have to leave Six disappointed again.
The elevator opened with a ding and her ears perked up. She was the only one meant to be here but then – Slate. Cat groaned for second, burying her head in her hands, because that was another thing she had so wholly fucked up. She pushed up from her bed, where she had been rotting, and out the door. "Coming!" Cat called down the hall as she approached. Her arms crossed over her chest and she gave a raise of her brows as he finally came into view, "What's up?"
“Hey, it’s Delphi,” Cat drawled into the microphone, voice in half a slur.
She could feel every nerve ending in her body ache, mainly in her fingertips, some in her skull, head pounding with each beat from her heart. It echoed in her head, coiling into the beginnings of a headache. Why the fuck had she picked up these pills again when it felt like this on the comedown?
It had taken months, patient, patient months to repair the damage she’d wrought against the radio. Cat wallowed in loss, curled it around herself like a blanket even though her life was built upon one thing – a determined escape from loneliness. Loneliness could be abated if she fixed it all. Maybe, it would be like Nano had never left, if she piece by piece took care of the damage of the mics, taped back together the drawings Enna had shown her of the graffiti she’d wrought across the Capitol, pulled her copies of the zine out from the drawer she’d shoved them inside and smoothed out the wrinkles in the paper. It was better, she supposed, to remember them as they were.
Wallowing in her regret, her fear of a change of her stasis made her explode, she knew that, hell she’d cried clutching pieces of a shattered laptop in her lap for hours until Cress had scooped her up off the ground. Cat regretted erasing the last earnest memories she had of how good things had been when the team of freedom fighters – the rebels, the T0MMY team, had worked together to try to save Panem.
It was real fuckin’ stupid, she thought. Cat had thrown so much away for the sake of living in comfort under a regime she had tried to erase with a fucking alias and a line of code but it brought her back here, in the tower, the present, legs curled under her body, a new computer, nothing as nice as her old one had been – she’d traded more than she should’ve to get her hands on it – but it was a comfort, something familiar to hide behind.
“Hello,” she repeated, testing it again, this time the mic pinged in the recording program, picking up sound.
It wasn’t live. Cat doubted she’d ever go live again, not when Vox Populi propaganda crammed the airwaves. Besides, that was one bit of tech she was certain she’d never get her hands on again if she tried. Transponders were likely something more than she could rustle up enough to trade, not if she wanted to eat, not if she didn’t want to trade herself for it.
Talking through radio was better than talking to Eugene though, who had been notably silent the moment a pill passed through her lips. She worried what other ghosts would try to flood her head if she didn’t take anything. Eugene was dead. He wasn’t supposed to respond, but he did more often than not. With the radio, talking to herself was appropriate, wasn’t insane, she could talk and know that on the other end was silence.
“We got ourselves into some shit, huh?” Cat gave the rhetorical. There was no audience, she doubted there ever would be again, not that she so desired a captive thing like that. Cat had spent so much time screaming and crying and pleading for someone to notice how she ached, but the more she did, the more she felt like she pushed everyone away in some form or another. She supposed the radio would do – or the fantasy of it – because she didn’t want to ask for someone to help her. The one time the words of needing someone there had crossed her lips, she was told – reminded – of how easily strung along she was, how obsessive she was, how she was ‘Delicious to toy with. So insecure, so broken’.
Cat didn’t like to ask anymore.
Even if Cress had apologized the damage took because, even if Cress had said all of that to shove her away, the words were still accurate, weren’t they? They still had to come from a place of truth, right?
“Maybe I got you guys into some shit, I dunno,” Cat hissed, tucking herself smaller and smaller, because maybe she could just disappear that way. “I’m sorry,” she voiced quietly, as if the other side could offer her some absolution, “I know I said all this would be better without Snow and the Capitol, but now look, 'nother launch day, huh?”
Cat’s eyes watched the waveform rise as she spoke, die off into a straight line when she fell silent. She swallowed, this wasn’t as good as asking for help. It wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. Nothing was satisfying when her words weren’t met with a reply – maybe in another world she’d hear something snarky from Nano in her ear about how the Vox would shut them down if she kept her tongue that loose.
Her fingertips crammed down on the spacebar. It halted the line. Her cursor moved to hover over the recording button. End recording. Her fingertips found the keyboard – ctrl, a, backspace. The recording was deleted, she needed to try again. She clicked to record and the waveform began to move again.
He shrugged. Nothing good was ever coming their way. He doubted it would be that different, going forward, and he didn't really want to be disappointed again. So he tried to keep his expectations low.
"We could," he agreed. They'd never do it, not as long as there was a war. People, normal people, that needed to be protected from... fuck, everything, it felt like these days. "Lots of great spots up in Seven, once everything's... you know. Safe again. You don't even have to go far to feel like you're really getting away."
The shrug was enough of an answer as anything else, she didn't like it perse, but it made it feel like she wasn't the only one going insane or doubting their newest and dearest leader's intentions.
"You know," Cat drawled in a low and slow breath, trying to gather a thought, get lost back in another very nice and organized fantasy that did not involve the war or Terra Cacus or the Vox or the T0MMY or the fucking radio. "I ain't really remember the last time I was back in Seven and it was all normal," Cat said, failing to find something that wasn't her least favorite topic of her lifetime, "How – how close is that shit t' home for you?"
"I don't have a lot of time to find it." She'd thought she'd had her whole life to figure things out, figure out who she was, what this new Panem meant for her, for her family. Instead, now... now this journey was accelerated and in the name of life or death.
She looked around them, as though the answer might present itself. "Unless being a boring, stupid rule follower is a skill." A pause, then, more hopefully, "Will you help me figure it out?"
Cat wanted to chastise the other woman; if she kept thinking down on herself she'd die, that was what happened with nearly every Tribute who didn't see more in themselves, wasn't it? That was how they found their downfall, believing in the lie that Panem, The Capitol, Snow, society – hell even the Vox now sold people. If they weren't of value, if their families couldn't serve whatever the new "greater good" was, they were useless.
She studied Juno for a moment, really taking her in, watching the ripple of emotions over her face that she couldn't fully read and then nodded, gentle, perhaps more gentle than she'd felt with people in months and spoke, "Yeah, yeah of course." Cat's lips tugged up into something that was vaguely a smile and offered, "How's this – step one, we're gonna break some rules, yeah?"
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Cain could feel it from the jump— he was a little off his game. His time spent with the Vox had reestablished habits he'd let fall by the wayside. They were strict about an exercise regimen, so it wasn't strength that Cain lacked, but the routine was different from the Academy one he'd grown up with. It had been a long time since he'd sparred like this, instead having focused on a strength that allowed him to walk far distances with a gun in his hands. Plus, celebratory midday shots with Cade didn't exactly aid him in any way.
So, when Cat leapt, Cain moved but with a dangerous delay. Cat managed to clip his side, snagging one arm. Cain stumbled back with a grunt before regaining his control. He bent forward over Cat, his chest over her back as he tried to wrap his other arm around her middle and force her to the ground.
The way Cat fought was much like her namesake, a feral thing on defense, it was never anything calculated or done with poise (despite how often she had sparred with Cress and received instructions on how to do exactly not that). She stumbled past Cain, surprise cropping up on her face as she found herself caught around the midsection.
"Shit."
Cat found herself stumbling the rest of the way to the ground, forced flat onto her stomach. Quickly, she tried to wriggle out of Cain's hold, to claw herself free – or at the very least turn herself over. Her one free hand dug underneath her body, working to find the grip Cain had at her midsection and dislodge it, peeling away at his fingers while she tested the grip on her other arm with a few tugs.
Slate snorted a humorless laugh at that. "I don't know if I have the energy for that," he admitted, though awhile back, before his Games, before his imprisonment, he'd have said he'd have energy for as long as it took. Whatever it took. Now, he just wanted to set up at home with Cress, Kya, and their friends. He wanted them to be safe but effortlessly so. He didn't want to fight to make it happen. "We've already done so much, been through so much."
"I wish I had the energy for it," Cat laughed because he was right, they'd done too much, maybe more than any one individual should've contributed to an entire revolution, but – Panem seemed to always be the same even with a change of regime. Cat didn't know how to say she wasn't sure she had fight in her for anything else, herself, others – Panem at large. "I feel like it's just gonna be more shit though, dude," she insisted, "Like, we don't know what kind of shit is gonna happen with this arena, don't know how they're gonna start treatin' us tomorrow."
Slate nodded. "It's okay, I mean... shit felt a lot more simple back then. It was straightforward. Now I feel like we're the bad guys, when I was so sure... I was so sure we were the good ones." He peered around the training center in defeat. "And we just routed everyone back here."
It resonated, something deep in her gut – mainly because she hadn't heard anyone else actually voice what she feared. That they were evil, the same as Snow and that regime. "Feels like we're the bad guys," Cat agreed, voice hushed. She tracked his gaze over the training center; different kids who were as unlucky as they had been to fall under the thumb of a dictator trying to scrounge up skills so they might live. "Think we were like, dunno, workin' from the right place but –" Cat cut herself off and gave a laugh, "Makes me wanna torch the whole thing again 'til we get it right."
It pained him to have to come back down to earth, but he supposed it was probably the kinder thing to do before either of them got too carried away with it. The deeper they let themselves get pulled into the fantasy, the worse reality would sting when they returned.
"Don't know," he sighed. "I mean...at this point, I don't know if I believe in a 'all's said and done' anymore. It just keeps fucking coming." He shook his head. Of course, he was glad to see people still trying to chase their happy ending. Alder, though, had started to resign himself to the idea he'd never get to rest. There was always, always work to be done, even when he thought they'd won the war.
"Yeah, what're you thinkin' is comin' next?" Cat asked, because – she'd be a liar if she said there wasn't something scratching at the back of her mind like an emergency signal, that either things with the war weren't going as planned for Panem or the Vox were about to do something worse than just a singular Game. "We should like, do a vacation – you think people still do that shit?" Cat wondered aloud, "Like we jus' go off grid for a weekend or somethin', change of scenery."
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"Old habits die hard or whatever," he shrugged, figuring his need for outlined rules were still drilled into him from academy days— ridiculous considering there were no outlined rules within the Games. That was war and all was fair. "Why limit it, though? You wanna kick the shit out of me, go for it? You'd rather swing, that's cool too. Do what's right for the moment," he laughed, taking his stance across from Cat on the mat. He nodded at the final set of rules, satisfied that he probably wouldn't be leaving the training center infertile. "All good," he confirmed, waiting for her to make a move.
"Nah, nah, gotta be limits," Cat said waving her hands in front of her body for a second because...well...if she really hit Cain, she was certain it would unleash a rage she would not be able to bottle back up and he did not deserve that. She let her body take its position back, one leg in front of the other, hands squared up. He was likely more practiced than her, stronger too, on a battlefield in the off-season when she was playing pretend as a journalist. So, she did what made sense – get him to the ground and leapt for his midsection.
Slate nodded his agreement as she spoke, glad she seemed to be cooling off a bit, though he knew there was still shit between them. "Yeah, doesn't feel like the same. It's not you, me, and Nano squeezed into a closet." He remembered frantically writing up reports for them to read on the radio; one particular incident where Alder had run into the house they were in to let them know that he'd seen Peacekeepers gathering and they'd pulled together the equipment and put on a broadcast as quickly as they could, at once point with Slate holding the microphone up to Cat's mouth as she paged through a map, reading off town names in the vicinity.
"I miss that," Cat confessed, offering something like a grimace. She could envision it, all of them trapped together – or out in Free Eleven all together. It was a unity she missed because it felt like in the aftermath they were all so divided, that it was all so divisive where they'd landed on the other side of the revolution, no one was happy, everyone was alone. "I'm just..." She trailed off and let her head hang as if to find the words, "Look I'm sorry for bein' a dick I just – wanna go back t' last year when we all, like had each other."
Juno wasn't sure that was something she could count on, her Arena simply... failing at the right time. Her luck so far hadn't exactly been stellar. She frowned at her own lap, wondering if she would be capable of any of this. Betraying someone, hurting someone. Being smart enough to figure out a puzzle. "I have this... this feeling. I don't think I'm special enough to get out of there. Every Victor has their thing that set them apart, but I don't think I'm cut out for the Games like that."
Cat's face fell, because she knew those words from so many Tributes over the Games she had been a part of, bloodied her hands in. No one ever thought they were special, but there was the inherent nature of becoming immediately special by having their name plucked from a bowl to seal a fate. Twice a year certainly made it seem normal, but Cat never forgot who those people were, who the unfortunate children – peers – led like lambs to slaughter were.
"Everyone's special," Cat argued, "Not in that, like, way your parents tell you when you're a kid to stop you from feelin' bad about yourself, but – everyone has their own thing, you – you probably just ain't know it yet, s'okay, you will figure it out though, everybody does."
Slate could feel the ache of home in his bones as she asked him that -- why Twelve. Why he'd leave here. There was a tether, something that yanked him back home every time he left, and he didn't want to sever it; he loved Twelve, desperately and often without reciprocation. "Twelve is where I started it," he said, trying to parse it out, put it simply, feeling like he only had a moment to explain, to get her to understand before she wrote him off. "In my fucking bedroom at Hestia's. And I printed the first few off this ancient printer we stole. Me and my friends, we walked around sliding them under doors, we were such dumbasses. Twelve is -- it was about Twelve. The T0MMY is Twelve. That's what it was always supposed to be. The fucking noise in the mines leading you to ore. I thought... I thought I needed to be there to let it be about Twelve again." But it couldn't be about Twelve anymore. Twelve was in ruins, Twelve was distant.
"It's more than Twelve now, dude, you know that," Cat said, her brow creasing – though, to Cat, it didn't even really feel like the T0MMY any more, it felt like it was the Vox's. It wasn't about ending the Games or unveiling the evils of Snow and the government and how people hurt in the districts. Now they were their fucking PR team. She shifted, arms planted firmly across her body, fingertips digging into her ribs. She breathed, slow inhale through her nose, a huff out her mouth and she spoke slowly and carefully, "I wish it was about it, but they keep pullin' us around man – talk about Tarrenfree – talk about how they're rebuilding the Capitol, talk about anything that ain't what the whole thing is actually about – T0MMY's The Voice but for Cacus."
All of the color drained from Juno's face. "Oh," was all she could manage to squeak out, horrified by the thought of having to do that to her own district partner. She didn't know him, but she liked to think that he wouldn't want to sell her out like that either. "And they-- found you again anyway?"
"Yeah," Cat said, her voice feeling suddenly very rough, not quite comfortable enough to sit in her chest. She shifted how she sat, hand over her chest as if to alleviate the tightness inside of her. "Yeah," She spoke again after clearing her throat, "It gave me time, though, gave me time t' kinda figure it out – or – shit time for the Gamemakers' shitty programmin' to fritz out – but it's about givin' yourself time by any means and then you can get outta there."
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"Kicks only?" He asked, raising an eyebrow at Cat, because that was an insane rule. It was almost tempting just because it sounded so ridiculous— no hands, just kicking at each other on the mat. Cain fell into step beside Cat, moving toward the mat. They both needed to expel some of the energy that burned under the layers of their skin, and he trusted Cat to fight with him with that same shared goal. "I'm cool with an all out brawl as long as it's above the belt and no face," he offered in return. "Is that cool?"
"It's jus' an option," Cat defended, her hands flying up to her sides, palms facing out. "Don't you like, get sick a' the same ol' shit all the time, though?" She asked, but took stock of the rules in her head – it was fair enough that they both probably had some inner demons to work out and, oddly, she trusted Cain not to kill her. She couldn't say that for half of the people meandering around the training center. "All-out brawl, no faces, no balls, gotcha," Cat affirmed, getting into a stance, ready to attack, "You good?"
"There was no goddamn signal!" he snapped. He'd been devastated every time he couldn't connect through the phone; he'd wandered the town every day for a signal but more often than not he'd failed. Every night at Hestia's he'd felt less and less like this was the place he was supposed to be; he just wanted to be with Cress and Kya. His own family. "I couldn't fucking call her, I couldn't connect. Of course I told her she could come. Cress -- Cress didn't think she had a place in Twelve. That's fine, that's fair, but what was I supposed to do? Stay here and do nothing, not try to see the T0MMY through? I thought I needed to be in Twelve for it, and no, I was fucking wrong, I get that now. But that-- that was what I thought."
Cat sucked in a breath through her nose, a metered inhale. Because that sounded like an excuse but the way he bit back, the vitriol she felt just from Slate's words. "But you though Twelve because...?" Cat trailed off, maybe trying to understand, maybe to antagonize. It wasn't a clear path in her head – something stirred in her, though, an envy perhaps. "It's just like – look – you have so much goin' on for you here and I don't see why you left back that way in the first place," Cat stated – but they hadn't talked about it so – she'd only talked to Cress, heard vague sides of a story. She didn't talk to Slate about an ounce of it. Fuck, was she just being a jackass?
