Chapter Text
Worst of all is the realisation that the Victors' Tower has changed him beyond all hope of return. Colour floods Wilbur's skin now, a Capitol-healthy ruddy pink he himself can only associate with fever and death. Pockets of flesh fill the troughs in his skeleton where they did not before. His stubble, forbidden and eradicated for the Pre-Games, returns with a vengeance. In his hubris, his refusal to prepare a token for something that would surely never happen, it is the only thing that bears even a slight similarity to the boy in his precious few photographs. It itches. The Soots probably wouldn't even recognise him now.
Some days it's worse than that. He floats around as if enshrouded in thick grey fog, the others indistinguishable but for the different shades of sadness behind their eyes. This is not something they can judge him for; if they do, he certainly doesn't notice.
The days before Rebecca's birthday are still in part spent this way, pottering sightlessly around in a daze that tastes like what he imagines of morphling. But beyond his meagre control and shrinking awareness some balance has changed. Techno's subjugation, Rebecca's painful reminder - even the outsider he still considers himself to be knows these are wrong and dangerous deviations from some invisible routine.
This threat keeps him awake. It pulls him from his daze and throws his floormates into high relief. He can no longer think of them as blurred lines in a vaguely antagonistic whole. They exist as eight, as each, as other, as they. It is an undesirable lens through which to view a person. Wilbur has no choice.
Pyro is crushed. What has happened has affected him more than it should have. He must resent Wilbur for seeing it, the open, angry, weeping sore behind his eyes, behind those lips that shout at his mother and smile at the politicians and pucker at the cameras with a sick and inflexible verve. His anger for Rebecca is less familial than that of a slighted officer. It is a wound that has festered for seven years, and Wilbur only adds to it when he pushes against any one of a thousand invisible boundaries. They do not like each other.
Josh is, in his own cool way, as enraged as Wilbur. Again, they do not like each other, but at least with Josh that was never part of the equation. Often they eat together, but he still has to wrestle - with that cool Career-born terror and with the great divide of age between them. There is a stalwart comfort to be drawn from the precious few cracks in his apathy. Whenever he streams, Wilbur likes to wander in and extract an exaggerated rise out of him. It implies personhood.
Angel is the object of his pity. He never voices it and she never brings it up, but they both know. Every adult Victor is to a certain extent exoticised, romanticised, made desirable. Yet she suffers the brunt of it, just in front of Pyro, and that is sad. Haunting, in a way beyond the last vestiges of propaganda in his head that keep surprising him at odd moments. She only ever interacts with him through others, and vice versa, but she laughs when Rebecca lets fly obscenities at him for the crime of "starin' at ev'ryone like you're at th'zoo, bug-eyed cunt!" A zoo, for reference, is a historical facility that housed rare livestock for entertainment. Or so Angel says when he asks about her videogame, haltingly, searching his face for deeper meaning. He feels like he is in a zoo when he is with her. Which side of the glass, he could not say.
Michael is an enigma. Unexpectedly cheerful under the aura of gloom, he readily accepts help with his projects and offers a constant stream of banal chatter. Apart from in the pool room, on the balcony, haunting a handful of closely-guarded blind spots, he is the perfect Victor. Of all the adults Wilbur regards him as the nearest one to a friend. He approaches him with a question about Rebecca's birthday present and Michael's face splits into a grin like the sun rising.
Vikk is changeable, a lightning storm playing over the sea. There is a modicum of respect between them now, a spark flailing under the weight of damp deference. It is a flimsy and unspoken bond. Single-mindedly sprinting to Rebecca's aid together, hopeless and equal in that hopelessness, sharing the gall to believe that they could help in any way; this has mirrored them in each other. Sometimes Wilbur stands with him on the balcony in taciturn acknowledgment and it is almost companionable.
Rebecca is unpredictable. She likes to boast "privately" that she is so very separate from Minx. Wilbur isn't so sure. When the smoke from one of Tommy's kitchen escapades sends him into a blind hyperventilating fear, she's there to curse him out affectionately until everything calms down. When she laughs, it is true, when she screams, it is true, when she snarls and snaps and startles it is true. As far as he knows she has never told him a lie, and yet. It comes to mind more than once that Minx and Rebecca are simply two sides of the same coin. He grows, guiltily and covertly, to revere them both.
Techno is an unexpected anchor. He has a way of saying diplomatic words like sly pejoratives, a sarcastic ambiguity of tone that makes Wilbur question his otherwise steadfast loyalism. They play videogames and lament puberty and complain about small things, play-acting as Capitol childen and dealing only in the superficial. Best behaviour. By November, Wilbur begins to wonder if the nihilistic rage of their first meeting is ever going to be set free like that again. Selfishly, he hopes it might. Pyro is dispirited, and Josh is intimidating, and Angel is gruff, and Michael is confusing, and Vikk is downright threatening, and he doesn't even know how to describe his friendship with Rebecca. But Technoblade can set the fear of Solstices in him with a look, and he damn well knows it.
Which only leaves Tommy. Tommy is...too painful to be around for long. He reminds Wilbur of a younger Charlie, so fully determined to spin joy where there is none. Everyone has the nightmares, but his are the loudest and the bloodiest. Even Wilbur, who still smells like smoke when he sweats and still sees it all happen again every time he blinks, feels a twisted gratitude that it's not him. Not even two years separate them. And yet, when Wilbur sees Angel dote on him and Pyro crack a private smile at his antics, there's the unshakeable feeling that Tommy has chosen childhood. This regression is an impassable gulf between them.
It's on Rebecca's birthday that everything comes to a head. How laughably appropriate.
In District Four, sunrise was like a switch. The night shift, desirable, became the sweltering discomfort of day on the red-hot ocean. For the Soots, whose parents usually took the day shift with grace, it meant shuffling from their own bedrooms to the dormitories. A revolving catalogue of matrons shepherded them there, and the night shift kids would nod tiredly as they passed in the street. Back then none of them were old enough to even forage properly, and they tottered around the dormitory all day without a care in the world past food and warmth.
(It wasn't poverty, on a good year. Was it? No, for Wilbur that must have been around when JC won. Nobody went hungry that year. Or this year. At least the toddlers will eat well as his friends and family mourn him.)
Already he thinks of such constants in the past tense. This detachment does not escape him.
It's all getting to be too much.
Even though Wilbur is familiar with the feeling of stumbling half-dressed through the dark in the embrace of a groggy crowd, he does not miss it. So when someone bodily hoists him out of his hammock with a finger pressed to their lips, his first instinct is to lash out as hard as he can and run. This does not go well. His second, as Angel fusses over the tear in Josh's pyjamas, is to follow the seven of them to wherever they're going with his mouth clamped firmly shut.
"We don't have long," says Vikk tiredly, interrupting the stark rhythm of of feet on marble with an impatient clicking sound. "Dawn's on the way." This is incomprehensible to Wilbur, but everyone else just nods.
"I asked 'em to push it back to 10:00," Pyro grunts as they make it to the main corridor. Nobody answers. The double doors to the common room are ajar, the space beyond yawning and pitch black. They keep on past it without a word. "Anyway, setup 'n' crew are gonna be here by 8:00. Heads up for that." Someone groans, and Wilbur almost trips over his own foot, but they're here.
For all its splendour, awash with the dim grey light of Capitol daybreak over the mountains, the balcony still gives him the creeps. Wilbur stands awkwardly behind the others in a shrugged-on jumper and catches a glimpse over Tommy's bedhead of the two figures outside. One of them is instantly recognisable, but the other is...unfamiliar. Clearly a Victor. Her mentor?
"Wilbur!" Rebecca says with genuine joy, and when she jumps off the railing to drag him over he is relieved to see that her hair and face are still her own. "Bee, this is Wilbur. Wilbur, Bee." This is comfortable territory. Being introduced by a friend at a party, gathering acquaintance like a precious substance. Without thinking, he twists a lock of hair around one finger in polite greeting before remembering that they don't do that here. Vikk blinks at him like he's grown two heads.
The woman doesn't miss a beat, however, and curls the end of her dark ponytail around her thumb in clunky imitation. Odd; she doesn't look like any of the District 4 Victors he can recall. And....she can't be from District 4.
"Oh, just like JC!" she says delightedly, and her voice is much brighter than it should be at such an early hour. That solves that mystery. "I'm glad I bothered asking him now. Forgive my clumsiness. It's heyimbee, but Bianca will serve."
heyimbee. District 10. He makes a note to research her later and nods with what he hopes is an appropriately respectful frown. Wilbur too has a strange new language to learn, and smiles are no longer the watermark of authenticity; quite the opposite. "He's been asking after you, you know," she adds, beaming so widely herself that it throws him off his game, and her proclamation guts him.
Bianca meets his gaze steadily, unblinking. Does she know how distant JC has been? Does she somehow know too how many times Wilbur has been kept awake by the thought that his spite towards his mentor has been fabricated, encouraged, honed into a weapon?
He does not ask; today is not his. Instead he shrugs and shifts the conversation onto Tommy's shoulders, a surefire diversion that the kid only briefly furrows his brows over. They watch the dawn in silence.
From watching Mi-Rebecca's birthday last year, Wilbur knows vaguely that this is a District 10 tradition. Exactly the significance it holds he isn't sure. When the sun pulls away from the horizon, a reddened eye glaring down, he steals a furtive glance at the two Victors for whom it is so much more than a switch. One is a girl, muscles bunched tensely like a ship's cat readying itself to pounce. One is a woman, every muscle so forcibly relaxed that it has the opposite effect - she looks terrified. Both of them are weeping into the sunlight without movement or sound. He looks away from them with immediate self-disgust and catches the camera set behind the glass door in its whirring movement, straining just short of the corner. Good. Fucking voyeurs.
The injustice of it is electric. It thrums through him, an unnatural spark. Orange light washes over the identical empty balconies above them, prompts murmurs from at least one below. The anger is back and he is scared, like a smoking branch, like a box of matches, like rocks in the water, of himself.
Voices raise themselves from inside, past the camera. They are late, and this is unacceptable. They are reluctant, and this is unforgivable.
His door opens and closes. Not many people do that unannounced. Wilbur takes a gamble without turning from the bathroom mirror.
"Hullo, Austin," he says, and he hopes there's enough venom in it to hurt.
"I think you need to start shaving." It's said cheerfully, but Wilbur bristles. Literally.
"I think you need to get out of my room, Austin."
Maybe it isn't fair to be so angry at him for things so far out of his control. Wilbur doesn't care. It cannot be accidental that his foundation, now yellow-tinted instead of ashen grey, still reeks of a withering campfire. He wheels around to Austin with fire licking at his heels.
"You know," and he looks truly sad to say it, "we're not on camera. You don't gotta...address me." It echoes Rebecca's plea, but with none of the weight behind it. In Wilbur's eyes, to separate the suave persona from this living ghost would do both a disservice.
To this end, he does not draw things out by replying. Stomach churning, he instead directs Austin to the crew in the common room with a tight smile and invites his own prep team inside. The illusion of this choice is satisfying.
When he trots into the common room himself at the head of a cluster of camerawomen, beautifully made up in garish primary colours, something is off. One wall has vanished completely to expose the kitchen in a state of manufactured disarray. The only people inside already are Pyro and Austin, heads bowed in quick and tumbling conversation. There's an urgency behind it that prompts Wilbur to stumble loudly over the threshold, and by the time the crew have righted him they're both sitting on different stools and fiddling with their little computers. Apparently they also work as telephones, but he flat-out refuses to ask for one and find out.
Luckily none of the Capitol folk seem to notice anything wrong. Perhaps it is not in their nature to notice anything at all.
Without makeup, Austin is handsome. With it, he is unattainable, supernatural. Perhaps this would impress Wilbur more if he hadn't lived and breathed it all month.
A reprieve arrives only seconds into his interview - Tommy and Pyro are pretending to brawl again, flitting around the kitchen island with exaggerated bluster. He is reminded again of Pyro's strange grace, and laughs so hard it hurts. Again trickles down the feeling of a pantomime. The clip will be watched millions of times before the week is out. Today, he only knows it as a nervous giggle of pent up horror, expelled.
"So, buddy. Enough about me, how are you feeling?" Wilbur reaches up to pull down his hat, feigning deep contemplation, and steeples his fingers under his chin. Anger has made him sloppy before. He can't afford that now. Rich as rich can be, and yet his new currency is this...this dopey grin, draped over the blade of an immutable cutting cruelty. It will be years before he truly has it down to a science. Today, he tries his hand blind.
They lock eyes across the room. Her hair is a violaceous mess this time, her eyes tired and her makeup dark. Approvingly, she bobs her head. The depth of the gesture reminds him of Rhianna.
"I'm a little bit grumpy today, actually!" Austin's face falls so subtly that the cameras must only see an encouraging nod. A neat trick, Wilbur supposes. "I'm a grumpy boy. But that makes it better, because it means I can completely destroy Minx." He lets his mouth curve into what is quickly becoming his trademark malicious grin, motioning to the impromptu wrestling match behind them. "That's all I want. I just want Minx to be completely wrecked." Austin laughs again, incredulous, and this one is real enough that Wilbur says it again. "It's all I want, dude!"
In all the hassle of filming, Vikk is the closest Victor, and as they pass each other over the boundary of Austin's domain he gives Wilbur the commiserating cousin of a smile. It's a start.
Taking Vikk's place, he watches from behind the camera as Bianca and Rebecca weave their familiar tapestry. It's the oddly compelling story of Bee and Minx, the long-suffering mother plagued by her errant daughter. Now he knows where he has seen her before. It makes Wilbur fucking sick, and he shudders with unfurling spite when they push him to fuck around in the background of the next shot. Not for the first time, Josh catches his eyes before he snaps. That slow shake of the head grounds him like only fear can.
"Stage fright?" witters a nearby grip, who looks less than threatened when Tommy hisses at her and immediately claps a hand over his mouth. Like Minx's teeth, his tongue really does look forked, and he hasn't said a single word since his snappy one-liner about wrangling snakes.
From then on it's a normal day. Or it masquerades as one, filmed and followed at every turn. Of course he has watched this show before, and been serenely, safely jealous of the Victors' excess. Now he sits ramrod straight next to Minx as they play a simple videogame in-character. If this is what it's like, then he never wants to stream games in his life.
They break for lunch, and Wilbur does his best to pull Bianca away for a moment. She avoids his gaze religiously, and holds onto Minx like she'll otherwise disappear. The message is clear. Not today. But then, when?
By late afternoon everyone is getting antsy. Vikk flashes his glowing cufflinks to a complex rhythm, whilst Angel and Josh sullenly keep up their dichotomy of smirk and sulk. All of them line up to be filmed from three angles, holding bags; Minx is implicitly expected to gush over her presents no matter what they are.
First, a gift from the President himself. It's the most beautiful plaything Wilbur has ever seen. A snarling wolf, rendered in meticulous detail, soft and huge and furred. Tommy's hands itch towards it, but for everyone else - Minx included - there is an affronted second of rage before their expressions settle. It's something to see.
"Bigger than the real fuckin' wolves were," she jokes crassly, breathlessly, and to Wilbur's immense relief does not start crying. The Peacekeepers are appeased, at any rate.
From Pyro she hefts a flask of soup, whilst the camera team snicker unapologetically. Wilbur has tried it - it's the kind of simple-by-necessity District recipe that tastes of warmth and meat and salt and little else. She sips from it, despite the cameras, and a look passes between them as she draws an exorbitant cashmere sleeve across her top lip. He doesn't understand what, but it means something. That's District 9 for you, though.
The watch Josh gives her is a simple, functional gesture. It's sleek and digital and there is probably more to it than Wilbur can see. For the camera's benefit, they swear at each other companiably for a good two minutes.
Angel, mask long abandoned, smiles genuinely and presents her with a necklace. The string is simple, but the pendant - a varnished wooden R - has been carved with tiny details that he can't make out. They hug as the director ushers things along, but Michael shakes his head.
"Wilbur and I have collaborated," he shifts his weight back, winks directly into the camera, rubs his hands together. "You'll have to wait."
Minx shoots him a glance and he shrugs, before ogling along with everyone else at Vikk's gift; a brand new pair of glasses.
"They're smart glasses," he explains into the general confusion. "You can do everything on them." And it might just be Wilbur's imagination, but maybe he lingers for a second on that everything. Minx slips them on wordlessly and studiously does not look at Michael.
Ever the pragmatist, Techno reaches behind the big sofa to retrieve a box. Inside are a set of bright red boxing gloves.
"Figured you'd want some new ones," he hums, light. To everyone watching, save a few Peacekeepers and President Charles himself, it's an innocuously violent offering. But he's playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse by even acknowledging the conflict. He smiles at the camera with bloodthirsty contentment and Wilbur is as scared as he ever was.
Tommy darts forward, drops something into her hand and refuses to elaborate on what or why. At first someone complains, but the room is distracted as one by trying to pick up the rare sheen of gratitude in Minx's eyes. And then it's Wilbur's turn.
From seemingly nowhere, Michael produces their project. It's a music box, designed and printed with one of Michael's strange machines. The plastic bull inside spins slowly on a dais, and when wound the box plays an old District 4 lullaby in Wilbur's voice. She looks at the animal for a moment, rubs her thumb over its horn and yanks the key around in a jagged circle until the melody spills out. A pale imitation of any such Capitol toy, but he wouldn't dare insult her so.
Minx mouths along to the words for a moment before remembering herself. Another mystery - shared music between Districts? His voice is thin and raspy with desuetude, but she leaps into his arms anyway and knocks both of them - plus an unsuspecting Techno - onto the biggest sofa. Leaping out of the way, Michael takes the cameras' attention for a single second with a scathing joke.
"Thank you," Minx murmurs into his ear before it can swing back, and for a moment he can pretend there are no spectators. That there is no guilt. Maybe he's just playfighting with Rhianna and Matt. Maybe it's Autumn Solstice. Maybe it's him, and her, and him, dancing.
This boorish girl, all angles and edges, cannot be Rhianna. This eerie boy, all sinew and strength, cannot be Matt. But he squeezes his eyes tightly shut and pretends, and then he looks into the camera with one arm slung around each of them and hopes the remaining Soots will understand.
It is many long hours until they are given their offensive semblance of privacy. Filming abandoned, they loll around the common room and fuck up what remains of their costumes with determination. It's distastefully enjoyable to see how the Capitol faces wrench at the sound of taffeta being ripped apart or the wet splash of costly makeup swirling down the drain. It is more horror than they have ever expressed over the Games.
"From now on," Techno mutters finally with the kind of insistent authority that Wilbur can barely tolerate from Pyro, never mind a teenager, "we're doing birthdays the day before."
His eyes, still red-rimmed under candy-pink contacts reminiscent of Charlie's favourite sweets (a Solstice contrivance, little wafer discs enameled with expensive sugar) land on Michael and Wilbur follows his gaze. The crew had cooed over his upcoming birthday like it was a Solstice in and of itself. Ah, yes, the national holiday of reeeves turning twenty-one in fucking prison. Perhaps Michael has among his many bizarre contraptions a machine to detect treason, because he turns from Techno to Wilbur just to treat him to a miserably knowing smirk.
But Minx's enthusiasm cannot be dampened. Her and Bianca are practically attached at the hip. He sees it, tangible, the moment the last lot of Capitol people leave and she becomes again Rebecca.
"I kinda like the hair," she says finally, as if it was a choice. Humming in agreement, Bianca arranges it into two bunches. Childlike. Tenable. It suits her more than it should. "I think I'll keep it purple, eh?"
Tommy doesn't reply even when she jostles him. Whatever they did to his tongue is gone again now, but he still looks ill and more than unwilling to open his mouth.
To Bianca's credit, when they come to take her back to Floor 4 she does not spit or scream. She offers her wrists to the Peacekeepers and Wilbur, already halfway out of his seat, chokes on his next breath. It is not a sign she should know. It is the final obscene insult of a beaten man. One who in the end offers victory to his enemy, before it can be snatched away by force.
But luckily her consignment are simple soldiers from District 2, and they joke in gratified tones that she doesn't need handcuffs anymore. Clearly they don't expect resistance and she offers none. But she does wink at Wilbur as the lift doors close.
It is a good thing, he thinks, that Rebecca has someone like Bianca in her corner. It is a sad thing, he observes with a coil of selfish guilt, that he does not.