Chapter Text
The first time Lyme sees Beetee, the awkward, strange boy who won by hiding in a spot where the cameras couldn’t reach him (by accident or on purpose, no one’s really sure) she’s seventeen and her class– final six girls, final six boys– have been dragged out to his Victory Tour. And her first thought when she sees him standing up there is strikingly clear. She remembers her kill tests and she thinks: this is what dead people look like.
Two is an awkward district for him, and as he speaks, she’s expecting him to do that thing people who kill a Career always do– look out at the crowd, see the Academy kids, and realize with a start that all of them probably knew Roman and Julien. But he doesn’t react, not even to the eyes of thousands. It’s like he’s not even there, and it’s fucking creepy, and she wonders if he knows he’s only making the perceptions of him worse. People try and talk to him as he leaves the stage, but he doesn’t seem to hear them, and when he turns the wrong way Lyme sees that they’ve given him an earpiece.
She doesn’t know for sure that the non-Careers hate him, but she figures it’s a safe bet. Most non-Careers are scrappy, tough kids who used the survival skills they learned growing up to win. He’s in for a hell of a rude awakening in six months.
There’s a part of her that wants to tell him that her trainer says that sometimes you don’t feel guilt after your kill test because you can’t feel anything at all, but she doesn’t even think he would listen.
It's funny, in an awful way. For six years, people have been trying to get Lyme to be that detached and this kid seems to have been born with it.