Soldier

“That’s my job.”

Ares twisted the cap off of the bottle and took a drink before leaning back in his seat and holding it in his mouth for a moment. He swallowed before placing the bottle back down on the table and looked up at his sister with his hazel-blue eyes. Something that he would imagine he had gotten from his sperm donor.

Ares gave her a look before he flipped the lid open to the wrap that he had and picked up one half of the wrap. “Don’t worry, that comes later,” Ares told her before he took a bite out of it. He wasn’t going to lie about it. He was going to get drunk later, because that was the only way that he could possibly sleep without nightmares.

He put the food down, chewed and swallowed before he looked to his baby sister’s face, really seeing her expression, and frowned. The walls he put up around himself were sturdy, but once in a while, he’d peek over them for the sake of someone else. Serenity had been his most recent person he was doing that with, but Fell, Enobaria, Nolie, his sisters… he wasn’t sure if he was ready to do that quite yet with them. However, Leta, in this moment, deserved a little crack in the foundation.

He reached his hand across the table, palm up, offering it to her.

“You’re really not talking to Mom, are you?” Ares asked her. After a short pause, he swallowed the lump in his throat. “You don’t have to do that for me.”

She looked to him, face guarded as she ran her hand through her hair. At that moment, she didn’t exactly trust him not to pull the rug out from under her feet. “Commendable job effort, really,” she muttered. There was no use in pretending they were a typical big brother and little sister duo. They’d grown up with their bedrooms only feet apart but they might as well have grown up on different ends of the continent. You could be a stranger to the person who’d been there to see you grow and so they were. 

So she paused before reaching out to take his hand. Her peacekeeper gloves were resting on the table so she felt his callouses against hers. Weapon training from childhood hadn’t left space for softness, at least not on the outside. 

“I’m not doing it for you,” she told Ares. “We’ve been heading for a break for years Ares, this was just -” she paused. “I’d had enough of her bullshit, enough of her hatred. I’m nothing but a project to her, useful only if I fit in the space she’s carved out for me.”

She squeezed Ares’s hand. “Don’t believe what she said for an instant okay?”

TASK 003 // PAINT ME LIKE ONE OF YOUR CAPITOL GIRLS

That was the least Echo could wish for.  After all, she no longer had a family to have business with.  They were gone and she’d do anything for the chance to argue with her parents one more time, or tell her brothers they were idiots.  But those chances were gone.

“Unlikely but thanks.” She brushed pieces of her hair away from her face as she spoke, recognizing the victor instantly. Some wounds were too deep or too cruel to mend. She didn’t consider it selfish or naive to be withholding from her family. Really all she was thinking about was preservation. Her own and Ares’s. “How’s the training going? I’m stuck at the elevators staring at the rope tying station. Not too much action there.”

Ares had left the Training Center around noon to find something to eat. His body was starting to tell him that he wouldn’t last much longer if he didn’t have some sort of protein in his system immediately. So he decided to go and find somewhere to eat, having gotten a bigger bottle of water and a wrap loaded with different meat and vegetables.

He was about to go and sit down when he heard a familiar voice with her voice raised. He glanced over, finding Leta sitting at a table not that far away from him. His heart plummeted to his stomach when he heard the name ‘Persephone’. To think that his oldest sister was one phone line away in that very moment made him nauseous. He hadn’t spoken to her or Mikala since Seraphina died. He had been keeping his entire family and the people he cared about at arm’s length, trying to spare them from whatever curse was following him around.

It didn’t stop the longing to have someone there for him.

So he made the split second decision to walk over just as Leta hung up the phone, her irritation flared, but as she apologized, he shook his head, put the to-go box down in front of her and sat across from her, hoping it would register exactly who had heard the entire thing.

“Clearly,” Ares told her. He was stone-cold sober now, but he did remember the dinner they had the other night. It helped, but it didn’t stop him from wanting to keep his baby sister at arm’s length like everybody else. Still, with his mind not as cloudy and his judgement there, he knew he needed to say something before he was too inebriated to do it again. “I’m sorry for the other night.”

Throughout her phone conversation, she’d pulled herself into a tight ball. Her shoulders were hunched inward, face turned downward and legs drawn together. It was her go to whenever something horrible happened. Pull yourself inward and protect yourself from the outside world. Her conversations with her older two sisters now were stunted and irregular. She couldn’t say much of anything, but at least they could share bits of that same loss. Standing next to Ares it was like he sucked all the air from the room. He made her feel sometimes like she had no claim to the sadness surrounding her. 

She looked at his plate of food and water bottle before his face. “Yeah, well we all know I’m winning no best sister of the year awards here, but you were a dick, so thanks.” Mean drunk, she thought, but didn’t say. She’d left half a protein bar on the table that she picked at nervously. “Good to see you’re putting something that isn’t 40 percent proof inside you.”

He had just finished sparring with a trainer that tried to talk smart with him, but Fell had knocked him flat on his back in the middle of a snide remark. At least it shut him up until Fell had knocked him down to the mat a few more times. The Capitol trainers always got in over their heads fighting against most of the Victors. He had leaned his back against the wall and took a drink of water from his water bottle when he heard the rather loud conversation next to him. He recognized the young woman as one of Ares’ sisters, Leta.

“Then it’s none of my business,” he murmured. Though that was a bold face lie, as he had been making an effort to look out for Ares since they had arrived at The Capitol again, perhaps even before then too. “But while we’re on the subject, you seen your brother at all yet today?”

“He wasn’t in his room when I got in at dawn, or down training.” She’d woken extra early in the hopes of catching him before her official duties began. Sleep these days was often snatched in small batches of no more than three hours. She woke at every little sound certain that was the moment she’d hear her fellow soldiers banging at the door. Or worse even, that she would get the news something had happened to Ares. 

She knew Fell, of course. Having grown up in the victor’s village she’d known all her neighbors, but she’d been sequestered away for much of her childhood. If she was visiting one of them it was only in companionship to their mother, or tagging behind Seraphina. “I wouldn’t put it past him to be avoiding me though. He thinks I’m my mother’s pawn.”

“Is everything okay?” She found herself asking more out of politeness than anything.

Okay. Leta didn’t know if she had an appropriate baseline on that. She was functional. She got up every morning, worked out, and reported to duty. Her friendships with other peacekeepers were based mostly on lies, and her grief was reserved for moments when isolation was assured. 

“Just my sister,” she said, trying to wave off any interest or concern. “Born to create drama.”

With training begun her days were spent mostly guarding the entrances to the training center and checking the tributes when they left for stashed weapons. Dull work, but also work that was being meticulously looked over by her superiors. Any toe out of line, any slip up and she knew that she would be facing a write-up and then another day of questioning. 

She was out of uniform now though and dealing with another not-so-little annoyance. “No Persephone, I won’t talk to her. I don’t care what she told you. Stop asking me. You weren’t there. You didn’t hear what I did.”

When she hung up she took a deep breath and ran her fingers through her long hair, noticing the person sitting just a few feet. “Sorry,” she said, realizing her voice had been pitched a little high. “Just family business.”

“Yeah, actually, I do,” Ares said like a veiled threat. “So don’t test me right now. Or ever, for that matter.”

Ares wanted to care about his baby sister. He did, a long time ago. When Leta was born, he had wanted so badly to hold her when she was first born. He was two at the time. His Mom wouldn’t let him. When he was caught trying to curl up at night with her when he heard her get a nightmare in her bedroom, their Mom caught him and disciplined him and sent him back to bed crying. Back then, when they were little, he tried his best to be the big brother she wanted. The only thing that stopped him was their Mom.

It was always their Mom.

Ares didn’t say anything else as he moved ahead of her, stumbling a little when the room got to shift too fast in his drunken vision. His mouth was dry even though he had been drinking. He exhaled a heavy breath before combing his fingers through his black hair and rubbing his palm down his slightly paled face and across his beard that he had grown over the last several months.

“Why do you want dinner?” Ares asked. “Do you want something or is it some sort of courtesy I don’t know about?”

Her eyebrows rose at those words, but she hid the pain they caused, only allowing her expression to tighten slightly. “I’m not your enemy here, Ares.” 

I’m just your sister. 

He could hate her all he wanted, despise her for the attention she’d garnered, but she’d never asked for it. It’d taken her a long time to understand the circumstances behind their mother’s actions, and even more to come to terms with the fact that she only existed because Ares did. She’d been meant for something, failed, and was now useless to Eladora. She was only beginning to get her real feet under her. 

“But I am an officer and that means I can through you in a cell until you sober up and aren’t a threat to the people around you. Let’s avoid that, get some food in you, and talk.” Privately. She had to be careful with her words, she knew the capitol was keeping an eye on her. “I don’t need anything but your attention.”

It was a bit of a shock to hear that come from Leta. That she hated their mother. It didn’t occur to him that any of them would have the same hatred he felt for her. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe Leta really didn’t, but to hear it from her, it was startling. She was the baby. Ares watched her get doted upon every single day and their mother showered her in affection. To know that Leta resented it, that was a little jarring. It wasn’t a secret that she was the band-aid baby to fix the mistake (him) that their mother had made.

So he nodded, deciding that he’d make her elaborate more later.

He caught himself before he could eat the floor, but as soon as Leta started to gripe on him he immediately spun his head and glared at her.

“Don’t you dare start on me too,” Ares spat, his words coming out a little thick from the alcohol. He managed to stand to his full 6′4″ height before making his way around the chair without another incident, but his walking was a little off and stumbling. “Just… start walking. Just don’t go too fast.”

She had to look upward when Ares stood straight. All of her siblings were different, colored by their respective and varying fathers, and yet there was a tinge of familiarity in their faces. She’d glimpse little bits of herself in Persephone or Seraphina, despite what their blood said she didn’t think less of them for not being full siblings. 

“Do you think that’s going to scare me off it?” she asked. She’d fought bigger and meaner than Ares in her day. They didn’t train peacekeepers to fight malnourished children, they trained them to take on mobs. She took a step to the side, motioning him to go forward. “Go ahead. I’m not having you pass out behind me.”

“I don’t know, Leta,” Ares’s voice cut in with a sharpness that signaled his irritation.

He didn’t know who would be next to come and get him, to wreck another piece of his life. He hadn’t spoken to Persephone or Mikala in the same amount of time he hadn’t for Leta. Now that clock has reset on Leta and he wasn’t sure what to say to her anymore. All of them had been there when the fallout happened and yet he had received nothing from any of them other than blank stares. He could remember knocks on his front door a couple of times over the last couple of months, but he wasn’t sure who that could have been.

He was, however, surprised when she told him that she hadn’t spoken to their Mom in several months. He lifted his head and looked at his baby sister, his brow rose until his hazel-blues dropped to the bar top.

“Weird,” he said. “Why?”

He wasn’t sure why he asked the question. He didn’t know what kind of answer would come with it and more than likely it would hurt him. Ares had been a glutton for punishment on himself for months and he knew Fell and Serenity were starting to get more and more concerned for him. Hell, they both said so.

Ares sighed and rubbed a hand across his eyes again, trying to figure out what to do. If Leta would keep pestering him, he at least owed her a single yes. Ares didn’t have to keep doing it if he didn’t want to. His family obviously didn’t care about him outside of Seraphina, so he could put a stop to all of it if he wanted.

“Fine,” he said as he downed the rest of the whiskey and tried getting up out of the chair, but his coordination was garbage and he stumbled a little before nearly falling against the armrest.

Her hands balled themselves into fists at those words. She'd been guilty of her fair share of silences and bitten off words, but she'd never loved Ares less than any of her other siblings. If anything, she'd found herself admiring him more than anything. He was neglected but he was free to move without someone breathing down his neck. "Because I hate her. Because I couldn't even look at her without feeling physically ill after what she said."

She'd wanted to stay in district two after the confrontation but the corp's had only released her for the funeral and she was to report back to her station promptly. There was little wiggle room after the pair of district citizens she'd lost in eight. There was even less room to mourn. To her superior, Seraphina wasn't worth the tears and so she'd had to put a stopper on her emotions and focus instead on her daily tasks. Only when she was sure she was alone would she put her head in her hands and let herself cry.

She'd think of Seraphina braiding her hair before Academy lessons began. She'd think of how in the training yard she'd find a corner to watch her sister work her magic. Grief didn't let you forget those details.

When Ares stumbled she stood and would have gone to catch him should he have fallen. "Fuck," she muttered, noticing just how drunk he was at that moment. "Really Ares?"

Ares didn’t answer her. There wasn’t a true need to do so. What happened back home had been horrible to him. While he knew that Leta had a closeness to Seraphina, he had ownership toward her in a way that he was sure that Leta wouldn’t understand. She was like the mother he was supposed to have. While the girls had all gotten the mother they needed, he never did. The hatred that burned through his mother’s eyes when she told him that all of this was his fault, he felt it more than ever.

Her question brought pause, but he still looked at her with a furrowed brow with the glass of whiskey poised to his lips. “At this point?” he paused. “I can’t trust anybody so… maybe. Maybe not.”

It was weird to see Leta here. He hadn’t been told until recently that she would be in the Capitol, or that she was already there. He wasn’t entirely sure. No one kept him in the loop about anybody in their family. They were all damaged goods and it was no thanks to the spiteful woman that birthed them all. Leta wasn’t even looking at him anymore, but that was better than anything. He wasn’t sure what to make of all of this but he knew that he wasn’t happy that she was here. To see her in that white uniform would inevitably make him tense.

“I didn’t either,” Ares told her. “just in a different way than you.”

It made sense that she just went where she was taken, but Ares wasn’t going to put it passed their mother that she didn’t have a hand to play in Leta’s assignment. He sighed through his nose and rubbed a hand across his tired face when she asked about dinner. He looked ahead, not bothering to look at her either now.

“Are you going to keep bothering me about it until I say yes?” he asked as he took another drink.

“So I’m just as much of a monster to you as mom then?” she asked, her voice low and thin. She couldn’t blame him for the mistrust. She’d never stepped in before and put in a word on Ares’s behalf, not like Seraphina did. She’d lived under a microscope her whole life, concerned that what love was given would be taken away if she stepped out of line. Now she didn’t want to spend another minute in her mother’s presence. And yet, the woman’s influence was felt even here. “I think she had a word about my posting, but it wasn’t something that I asked for. I haven’t spoken or seen her in over six months actually.”

She left voicemails on her phone every couple of days, wrote letters, and even once showed up in the capitol. She’d gone to great lengths to make sure their paths didn’t cross.

Her gaze switched to the cameras in the room, to the sound of footsteps in the hallway. They weren’t alone here, and there were ears in every corner. There was a lot that could happen to a peacekeeper that expressed even an inkling of disparate ideals toward Panem. “Yes, I will actually keep asking. I know a quiet place. I can treat us.”

Ares finally made his way to District Two’s floor after a while. He didn’t want to go to the Parade this time around. It wasn’t his gig. It was something that Lael could figure out and deal with on her own and the mentors would probably have no problem dealing with that either. It wasn’t the thing he was best at. Maybe when he was a tribute he could wow a crowd, but now, he was just a bystander who wanted a drink.

He managed to get to the open bar without incident. Ares poured himself a glass of whiskey and brought the bottle over for an easy refill, sitting down in one of the chairs as he drank on it. Ares started to withdraw into himself as the liquor started to hit him a little heavier, but it was nowhere near where he needed to be in order to numb the pain that was coursing through him.

He poised the glass to his lips when he heard a knock somewhere off to his left. Ares flinched and glanced over, more alert than he wanted to be, and saw his sister. His little sister. Everything in him seemed to slow at that point when he saw her. He remembered her being there, off duty, when their mother blamed the entire incident on him. He remembered her standing there, blank, and did nothing and said nothing. Ares ran into the mountains that day and stayed missing for eight days, only to come back, point his finger in their mother’s face when she tried to scold him for being gone for so long, and told her that he hated her.

It was the last time he saw Leta, Mikala, or Persephone.

“So was it an unwilling transfer or did you do it just to spite me?” Ares asked her in a tight tone as he took another drink from his glass. He didn’t like that Leta was there. It meant that he had to deal with his family more, and he wasn’t sure which side she had taken in the fight. She shouldn’t have had to, but their mother was a quizzical beast. For all he knew, their mother pulled some strings to get Leta into the Tribute Tower to keep an eye out for him.

She felt her heart constrict at her brother’s gaze. There was mistrust there and the space that time had built between them. "I missed you too, Ares." She stepped forward and perched on a seat at the other end of the bar. He looked thinner to her and older than he really was but grief could do horrible things to a person, she'd seen it on the faces of the citizens in district eight. Parents who'd lost children, wives who'd buried their husbands, and siblings that had been left behind.

"Do you really think that I'd do something just to spite you?" She sat with her back straight and her gaze forward, attempting not to appear confrontational. She regretted not instantly running out of that house after Ares, but their mother's cruelty had glued her in place. There'd beena trench built between them by that woman, one they were still trying to navigate. "Or that I have any control over my own life?"

She'd given that up when she took the Peacekeeper Oath at eighteen. Now she'd be beholden to the force that murdered her sister for over another decade. "I go where the corp stations me." She paused, looking to the glass and then to Ares. "Now about that dinner?"

In theory, there was no such thing as an off duty peacekeeper. You were allowed to carry your weapon when not in uniform and expected to take action should a situation arise. In practice, most of those stationed in the capitol worked four eighteen hour shifts a week and then spent the rest helping themselves to luxuries. They were glorified bodyguards and traffic enforcers here. The only time real work occurred was when the mentors rolled in with fresh tributes for the games. Now they were prison guards, ensuring each child lived to see an arena platform.

The kick-off had been hectic with barriers being placed around the tribute tower, access cards being double-checked, and shifts being added on. She'd meant to meet Ares and the rest of district two when they arrived, but she'd been pulled into setting up extra security in the lobby and could only glance at him from behind her visor. He looked thinner, older, and meaner than she recalled and the thought had sent a twist through her heart.

Finally released from duty, showered, and in civilian clothes she went to find him. She doubted she'd be accepted kindly. She answered to the same authority that had put Serphina down, but there was no other option at this point. She passed through district two's common areas and was headed to the private quarters when she noticed Ares to the side, alone and too close to the open bar. She stepped lightly to him, knocking her knuckles against the wall to announce her presence. "Hey big brother. You want some dinner?"