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Just a few more feet and Taffeta could make her move.
She watched the other girl…What was her name? From District ten…sit in front of the fire.
“They were stupid,” the girl said, looking up at Taffeta, who stood now in the shadow of the treeline. The other woman gestured to the fire with a pale brown hand, then to a stain of red on the snow a few feet away. “The Careers killed ‘em, but they didn’t douse their fire… Now, all night they’ll see the smoke, and assume it’s just not gone out yet. If they doused it, and they saw smoke, they know someone lit a new one.”
The girl shifted over slightly on the log, making room for Taffeta to sit.
Taffeta stayed where she stood, her hands still on her knife, though the fire looked tempting and warm, and, in any other place, the girl would have looked friendly. The type of person Taffeta would like to spend time with.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” the girl reassured Taffeta. “Know what my skills are?”
Taffeta shook her head slow, and brought her knife towards her belt, though she did not yet return it to the sheath.
“Nothing,” the girl shook her head and sighed. “I got no skills. ’M not a career. I’ve not been trained since I was barely able to walk and talk to kill. I don’t know how to make a fire. I didn’t know how to find food in the wild til I did training here. I don’t know what water’s safe to drink and what isn’t, and I certainly don’t know how to kill nobody. My skill is /pity/. If I get a sponsor, it’ll be because they pity me. Or they’ll pity my little girl growing up without a momma. Not cuz I’m talented or pretty or smart. It’ll be pity. Know how I keep pity? Keep sympathy? It’s not by killing unless I’m gonna be killed. And I’m not sure you’re gonna kill me.”
She patted the log next to her. Taffeta sheathed her knife, and walked towards the fire to join her.
“Did you see me coming?” Taffeta asked, pushing her curls out of her face, and adjusting her white knit cap.
“Heard,” the other girl said. “My momma’s friend Ella, I live with her, she says I got ears like a cat.” She smiled, but it was a sad smile. Taffeta studied her. In the firelight, she could see the sign of creased brow already forming on the other girl’s face. Stress made one get old young, her mother always told her.
Despite that, the other girl was pretty, though you could see poverty in most everything about her. She had curly dark hair, and one could see places where some had fallen out and was replaced with synthetic hair by her stylists. She had low, prominent cheekbones, but they showed even more than they probably should have, lack of food.
But her eyes. There was no trace of suffering in her eyes. They were dark and they shone with life and vibrance in the firelight. She had thick, full, dark lashes, and the snow kept catching on them, til she blinked them away.
“What’s your name?” Taffeta asked, before she could stop herself.
Immediately afterwards, she mentally kicked herself, and took a soothing breath to stop it. If the girl had a name-
“Ashby. But I like Ash better,” the girl, Ash, said with a smile.
-she was a person. She was /real/. And Taffeta wasn’t sure she could kill her if she was real.
“I’m Taffeta.”
“Charmed.”
Ash smiled again, and showed all her teeth. She had an overbite, and all her bottom teeth in the front crowded together closely, like they too were huddling for warmth in this storm. That would be the first thing the Capital would fix if Ash were made victor. Fix her teeth so they all stood straight and tall, so they rested on top of one another like a stack of papers, rather than like a lid and a box.
And Taffeta didn’t know why she thought it, but the first thing she thought was how much of a pity that would be.
They both fell silent, both trying to think of something to say, but neither finding it.
Their eyes kept darting up at each other, stealing glimpses at each other, glimpses neither probably wanted to take, knowing in a few days one, or maybe both, of them would be dead, and the other would be a memory they tried hard to forget.
“It could be a trap,” Taffeta said after nearly five minutes of silence.
“Hmm?”
“The fire,” she pointed a hand towards it. “They could be watching it. Checking it every few hours. Laying in wait.”
“They’d have to come up that hill,” Ash pointed to a hill on one side, “Or from the way you came. The lake is too deep and too cold for them to come the other way. We’ll hear them first, and we can run…or fight.”
She tapped a spear that rested next to her, it’s tip resting near the hearth of the fire getting hot, with her foot. Then she paused, and reached for her pack.
“Are you hungry? My bag had, uh, some,” she pulled out what looked like jerky, wrapped in a piece of white cloth and bound with string. Inside her pack, there seemed to be at least four or five other similarly wrapped packages. She gestured to the meat.
Taffeta nodded, and took the smallest of the pieces on offer. She slipped it into her pocket for later.
“Why are you being nice to me? I was going to kill you.”
“You didn’t kill me,” Ash said. “And cuz I need an ally.”
“I…” Taffeta took in a breath, held it for a moment, and then sighed, the steam from her breath standing in stark contrast to the cold air. “I can’t ally with anyone. I’m sorry.” Taffeta started to rise, but Ash stopped her with a gentle hand on Taffeta’s knee.
“I don’t mean in the arena.”
She swallowed, and dropped the, metaphoric mask she’d been wearing since the two began to speak. The happy, kind, loving mask, and instead let her face show what she truly felt. Fear. Sadness. Loss. A hint of anger.
“I got a little girl at home. She’s not even a year yet. She’s…a little baby. She’s…” She sighed too now. “I’ve had nothing but bad luck since I was born. Clairette. She’s the one good thing I ever had happen to me, and even she came from bad. I ain’t coming home to her. I’ve… made my peace about that. But I don’t want her to suffer because I die. Ella, the lady I live with? She can’t care for Clairette. She’s got her own kids and can barely keep them fed and clothed. She can’t take care of my girl. But… A victor could. They could make sure she…That she’s safe and happy and…” Tears began to fall now from Ash’s eyes, and she stopped speaking.
She reached a hand out to put it on the other girl’s shoulder, to offer her sympathy, and before her brain could stop her, before her brain could remind her not to get attached, she began to rub at it softly.
Ash sobbed silently, her shoulders occasionally 'jumping’ the way one’s shoulders might if one had the hiccups.
Taffeta was not good at soothing. She wasn’t good at comfort. From the time she was a little girl, she knew what would help her and what would hurt her if she was ever lucky, how could she have thought it was lucky?; enough to be chosen to fight here. And compassion hurt you. Help others if it helps you, but sharpen your blade all the same had been her coach’s motto when training her. But now, here…
She knew saying yes would gain her love in the Capital.
Some part of her brain knew that.
But it wasn’t the part that spoke the loudest as she considered Ash’s question. Instead, all she heard, all she saw, was her with a baby in her arms that looked like this woman, cooing and happy and warm. Standing in the window of a home in Victor’s Village, looking out at the snow falling outside instead of freezing in it like she was now. And that was all she needed to see. To hear.
“I’ll be your ally, Ash,” she said softly.
The girl swallowed, and looked up at her. Her eyes were red, her nose running, but she was still pretty, even like that. “Thank you,” she mouthed, still sobbing too much to speak.
“You’re welcome,” Taffeta said. She pulled the other girl to her chest, and hugged her.
Ash stopped crying after awhile, and the two fell into comfortable silence again.
“Is…The baby’s father-?”
“He’s dead,” Ash said.
“Did you love him?”
Ash shook her head. “No,” she said simply. “But I needed someone. And he was someone.”
“I’m someone, if you need someone now,” Taffeta said, intending it as a joke, to lighten the mood.
Ash laughed, wiping away at her eyes. “Wouldn’t be the worst thing I could do with the last few days of my life.”