Chapter Text
The first time Yasha Nydoorin truly meets Beauregard Lionett is when Beau has stolen her favourite spot in the Tribute Tower the night before the launch of the 62nd Annual Hunger Games.
The extent to which you can steal a rooftop is debatable, Yasha thinks, but it feels like theft when the place she wants to spread out her dark blue blanket and get away from everything currently has a tribute with an undercut and the remnants of her interview makeup under her eyes sprawled there, one arm lazily dangling off of the rooftop. The city reflects in her eyes, silhouetted buildings over steel blue.
“You’re from One, right?” Yasha asks softly, unsure how to approach. It’s rare that Yasha talks to anyone outside of her own tributes and the small circle of mentors that have wormed their way into her heart. And she knows things about Beau, has seen her over the past few days. She volunteered from One, lean muscles flexing as her hand shot into the air. She’s eighteen to Yasha’s twenty, still in that space of awkwardness where the tributes feel like her peers rather than her charges. She knows her way around a quarterstaff from the glimpses Yasha saw in training and the 9 Beau scored in her private session.
Beau rolls over onto her back, arm still dangling off of the rooftop’s edge. She meets Yasha with a wary eye, a furrowed brow. “Uh, yeah. And you mentor for Two. Did you come here to push me off the roof to give your District the one-up? ‘Cause it’s not gonna work. I’m fast .”
Yasha snorts. “No. Not that I couldn’t pick you up and drop you, but it wouldn’t even work. There’s a force field.” She approaches Beau, taking one of the strawberries in her little picnic basket and throwing it down over the side of the rooftop. Beau sits up, curious, and when the strawberry hits the field and bounces back up, she opens her mouth wide and catches it out of the air.
The scene is so strange that Yasha laughs, a sound that nearly startles her. Doesn’t happen often. There’s very few times where Victors laugh anymore. Molly does, but he’s never been quite like anyone else she knew. So hearing her own laugh away from the safety of Molly’s bold colour, is surprising and foreign, tasting sweet on her tongue.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t go back down to the second floor.
“I’ll share my rooftop with you,” Yasha says after a moment, spreading out the blanket and settling into her space with her basket. Beau watches each item as Yasha removes it: a bottle of Lionett wine, a little container of strawberries, some dark chocolate in jagged, chopped pieces. A look crosses Beau’s face at the familiar wine label that Yasha can’t quite place between the dim evening light and the unfamiliarity of the girl.
“Thought this was my rooftop.” Beau leans over a little, shifting back to her position laying on the ledge of the building. “And isn’t this fraternizing with the enemy?”
“One and Two work together enough,” Yasha shrugs. “We’re the least enemies of everyone. And besides, Caduceus made me this blanket and the cupcakes are from Jester. I spend plenty of time fraternizing already.”
Beau’s face softens at that slightly, and she rolls back over with interest. “You hang around Caleb a bit too, yeah? I saw you two talking downstairs before the interviews.”
“Molly does, more than I do.” Yasha pops the wine open and takes a sip from the bottle, before handing it over to Beau. She wrinkles her nose, but takes a drink. “Molly does a lot of things more or better than I do. But Caleb is good company.”
“I think Garnet- the other guy from my District, my partner or whatever- underestimates how smart Caleb is.” Beau reaches over to the picnic basket for a piece of dark chocolate. “Hard to explain to him that there’s more to life than just brute-forcing your way through with an axe, so I’m not even trying to. Works better for me, anyways.”
Yasha sighs. “Sometimes you have to just let people do what they’re going to do, even if you know it’s a bad idea. I haven’t been mentoring for long, not compared to some of the others here, but there’s some people you see go in that you know are going to fuck it up. Whether it’s because they’re too confident or skip survival training or have a specific story they want to play out. And I just have to let them mess up, because they don’t want the advice.” It was odd, those first few years of mentoring, when the tributes were the same age as you or just slightly younger. Even though Yasha’s victory was years before, she felt no older than Beau, really. Not much.
“That doesn’t sound easy.” Beau looks out over the evening skyline, thinks for a moment. “But I get it. People are going to do messed up shit and all you can do is just look out for you.”
Yasha frowns at that, just slightly. It’s not worth going into it, not worth the ache on her heart it’d cause to find out more about Beau than Taryon got out of her on the stage during her interview earlier that night. The one rule as a Hunger Games mentor is that you can never get attached to your tributes. The rule has to be tenfold for tributes from other Districts. And she’s barely seen much of Beau, not until tonight. Maybe it’s by design, the Capitol working to keep the Districts apart, push the competitive nature and animosity.
But there’s just something . It’s hard to place. Like a thread, delicate and fleeting, tying the two together. That perhaps Beau isn’t just going to be that girl from One who dies heroically but is forgotten years later after more Games come and go.
Maybe it’s worth not cutting the thread, but seeing where it leads.
And besides, if there's anyone that's good to spill your heart out to, it's someone who has a 23/24 chance of being dead in two weeks. The dead are the best secret keepers.
“I wasn’t good at it at first,” she says finally. “I hated that I couldn’t fix them. That I was so much more malleable as a tribute than the people I was trying to mentor. I felt like I was trying to do everything right when it was my Games, but the other people weren't listening to me. It felt like they just wanted their journey without realizing what it took to get there. It wasn’t until Molly won, a couple years ago, that it really sunk in. He was the one who put it into something I could understand: it’s like a garden. You can use the shears and put up fences all you want, but if a plant is going to grow out of where you try to place it, you just have to let it.”
Beau nods. “You were fifteen when you won, right?”
“Sixteen,” Yasha corrects. “Still young, for Two. It was… it was a complicated situation.” Obann was a complicated situation, truly. One she couldn’t get into, both for lack of desire and lack of ability to do so. There were still so many areas that were hazy, blank, fuzzy. Glimpses of the training period before the Games, echoing, faded memories of his voice, a few blinks and pauses to remember the wasteland her Arena looked like. And blood. There was blood. “A lot to get into. But being a Victor primes you for oversharing. Everyone knows everyone’s deal here. I’ve talked to people who I’ve seen nearly bleed out on television before I even knew their last names.”
“Well, if it’s a lot to get into, then I suppose I’ll be hearing it in a couple weeks.” Beau smiles, the cocky demeanour settling back into her bones. “Because, you know, I’ll be out of the Arena and in the thick of it with you.”
That almost hurts. The 23/24 chance echoes in her ears again, but having a good attitude does help. “It’s a deal,” Yasha says, and the rhythm of her heart echoes don’t, don’t, don’t . “I hope this isn’t weird, but you’re very different than a lot of the tributes I’ve met from One over the years. In a good way,” she adds hurriedly. “I don’t see a lot of personality in them, much. And usually they’re named Sparkle or Rhinestone.”
“I had three kids in my class one year who were named Shimmer. They had to use their last initials.”
“Holy shit.” Yasha’s face breaks into a smile that feels less foreign each time it creeps onto her face. “District One is more of a lawless place than I imagined.”
“What are kids named in your District, then? Brick?”
“Actually, yes,” Yasha says, and Beau laughs so hard she snorts and nearly falls off the ledge. But Yasha can barely twitch her hand toward Beau to help before she catches herself. She’s right. Capable. Dextrous. Quick.
Maybe if anyone has a chance, she does.
After a couple of hours, mixed silence and occasional questions and small talk, trying to process the events that are coming tomorrow, it’s Yasha who leaves the roof first. She pauses before she steps onto the elevator back down to the second floor, taking in the scene. Beau's still sprawled on the roof's ledge, the remaining chocolate on a napkin next to her. Below, the crowds are partying in a colourful expression of the Capitol's finest, and the noise is growing enough that Yasha has to raise her voice when she bids farewell. “Good luck, Beauregard.”
As the elevator doors close in front of her, Yasha smiles at the wave of Beau’s hand and the flash of her grin, illuminated by the glow of the Capitol.
Molly is still up when she steps back into Two’s suite minutes later, sitting with his legs folded under him on the kitchen countertop, a flute of something blue and bubbly in one hand and his tablet in the other, slightly swaying to his own joyful rhythm as he caught up with some of the Capitol news. “Dearest, did you know that the tribute from Eight apparently was caught calling Head Gamemaker Ikithon a narcissistic scumbag? Veth must be so proud.” When Yasha meets Molly’s eye, he winks mischievously and mouths a chip off the old block.
“Not here she won’t be,” Yasha adds, playing along for the sake of the recording devices she knew were scattered throughout the Tribute Tower. Veth had gotten into her own shares of trouble over the years, but it only took one threat to Luc’s life to get her to simmer down. You can tell a lot about a person, though, by the disapproving looks and hints of sarcasm in otherwise innocent sentences. It was only to the Capitol that Veth appeared to be in line. Her friends knew better, knew how she truly felt.
“Remus and Beatrix went to bed.” Molly slides off of the countertop to rest on the floor with a faint thud and echoing jingle of his jewellery. “And everything seems good. Sponsors are happy, so we’re happy.”
Happy. It’s an odd emotion in the Capitol, with its cold gray buildings and false, colourful facades. The city that wanted her to belong, but a place that always felt so empty. Nothing was real. The parties, the trends, the faces of the citizens altered and adjusted to all look the same. It brings her back to laughing on the roof with Beau, the smallest spark of genuine colour she’d seen in a while, outside of Mollymauk’s garish aesthetic. Molly had brought colour and life streaming into this place two years ago, and since then Yasha has tried her best to find the pieces when she can. But the spark didn’t matter. It’d be gone in the next couple weeks like every other tribute she’d seen a little bit of brightness in.
“Happy, happy,” Yasha echoes, and Molly sighs in response, a hand carding through his purple hair, strands falling from the messy bun. Somehow, she can't make eye contact. She should know by now that there’s no hiding herself from him.
“I wish I remembered all of the dreadful parts of this so I could be in them with you.” He turns to refill his glass from a dispenser built into the kitchen cabinets, the blue liquid pouring from the spigot with a soft fizzing noise.
“You don’t, really. There’s a lot of days where I wish I didn’t remember, either.” Yasha goes to take her seat at the bar, but Molly shakes his head and motions for her to follow him. Yasha had forgotten large pieces of her Games, which had tried to fill themselves in over the years. There were, four years later, only a few foggy, hazy moments. But Molly remembered nothing. One moment he was in the tube, rising into an arena. The next, he was waking up in a hospital bed with Yasha sitting beside him and scars crossing his body. The in-between was just empty . Which was preferable in some ways. He hadn't asked her many questions beyond the essential things he needed to know onstage with Taryon at his Victory interview, but he didn't want to know most of what happened in the Arena itself. Forgetting what happened would be a blessing to most of the Victors, and if you asked half of them if they’d take the chance to lose their memories of it all, they would.
But she’d seen the darker side of what forgetting looked like. Even though Gustav had been the one to officially mentor Molly and bring him home, it was Yasha who had been his partner in mentoring ever since. And she’d seen it all. The empty, restless dreams, the instant panic of trying to piece together the small elements that he recalled, sudden and pounding. And the interviews: the endless line of press questions that were a mystery to answer. It didn’t seem to bother Molly as much as one might think. There was no alternative, nothing he felt he was missing out on. As he called it, just empty.
“If there’s one thing I can do for sure, it’s try and just keep you company. We’ll put on the best trash the Capitol can offer on television and I’ll play with your hair and we’ll see where the night takes us.” Molly swings open the door to his room, decorated in bright colours and mismatched patterns that make Yasha blink in confusion a couple of times and twitch her nose at the sudden sensory overload.
With a wave of his hand over the console, Molly turned the television to a reality show where a collection of Capitol women were currently arguing over pairs of designer shoes, and pulled Yasha by the hand to rest on the bed along with him. “You know what, I have those shoes, and they are not worth the fuss they’re making over them,” Molly adds, settling up against the headboard and guiding Yasha’s head to his lap to make work of her long, two-toned hair.
The high-pitched voices of the Capitol women on television fade almost as soon as Yasha can feel Molly’s manicured nails against her scalp. He works out a few of the small braids she’s twisted into her hair out of stress throughout the day, easily parting the strands and smoothing each into gentle waves. Often, her hair starts out in the morning in its usual unruly, wavy state, but by the end of the day dozens of tiny braids have decorated the waves, woven into her hair with dextrous, anxious hands. As Molly takes each one out, Yasha feels as though the tension of those moments leaves with it: the one she twisted into her hair as the press hounded her for details on her tributes; the few that occupied her mind during the interview of Eleven’s female tribute, a wide-eyed twelve year old girl; a few added in just at the sight of Head Gamemaker Ikithon walking down the hallways, steely-eyed and indifferent.
Molly’s hands twist the last braid out, and she feels the relief flood through her. Until tomorrow, the tension subsides.
“You weren’t up on the roof for as long as usual.” Task finished, Molly resumes his place leaned up against the headboard, fidgeting with the rings adorning his fingers.
“Oh.” Come to think of it, she wasn’t. She’d spent a couple hours on the roof, talking with Beau intermittently, enjoying the quiet otherwise. But Molly was used to her creeping back into the suite in the early hours of the morning, and the clock hadn’t even flipped to midnight yet. “The girl from One, she was there before me. We talked for a little while, but I felt a little bit like I was impeding on her space, and I figure I’ll get it back next year. She has one year to have the roof, I have plenty.
“As long as you’re not revealing all of our trade secrets,” Molly says. “And as long as you don’t get yourself hurt. It’s hard enough losing our own every year. Leave One’s mourning to Caleb, yeah?" Yasha sighs. Molly's right and she knows it. Maybe it's why they make such a good team: sensible when the other is floating, colourful when the other is bleak. Molly continues chattering, nails still scratching over her scalp. "And you know, Jester is so excited to have us tomorrow, and then launch will be over and sponsors will be shut down and we’ll be up on the roof with drinks before you know it. Now, anyways, I actually read on my tablet about that woman buying those absurd shoes, and honestly, she’s not going to need them with how few parties she’s been invited to, because apparently the Lightfoots…”
To the soft, familiar sound of Molly’s smooth, cheerful voice and the low hum of the party outside, Yasha drifts off, smoothed and unraveled and, for now, the tension eased.