Work Text:
The berries sat glistening in Jason’s palm, dark as the night sky above them. If Leo looked closely enough, there was almost a red tint to their color.
He thought of Foxface’s body in the forest, the foam spilling out of her mouth and her lifeless eyes staring up blankly at the sky. He looked up at Jason's face, pale and gaunt and stained with dirt and smeared with blood.
“Do you trust me?” Jason asked. His voice– Leo used to love the sound of his voice, deep and confident and soft– was marred with dehydration and exhaustion. It shook when he spoke.
Leo swallowed. His heart was still racing from that last fight, and he was pretty sure his ears were ringing from that last announcement, the one that shattered any hope he had of leaving alive with Jason.
Did he trust Jason?
The question brought him back to flashes of memories of simpler times, before he and Jason even made it to the arena, back when they were both just strangers hoping for the least painful death. Before Jason announced that they were in love during the interviews and suddenly they became something much, much more than a miner who was good with his hands and the mayor’s son.
“Do you trust me?” Jason had asked, sounding sincere as his eyes motioned towards the stairwell access door.
It had been their first night together in the Capitol. The glitz and glamor, the crowds, the noise, the knowledge of the bloodied past that supported these towering buildings– it was all so overwhelming, and Leo was grateful for the friendly smile and promise of fresh air. So he followed Jason up the stairs, swallowing down the tiny voice in his mind that warned him that Jason’s kindness would only last until Leo was no longer useful to him.
“Piper, my stylist, told me about this place,” Jason explained, holding the roof door open for Leo.
It really was nice to breathe in the fresh air, Leo thought, gazing around the roof.
The Training Center was a large building that loomed over the rest of the city around it, which seemed just as dazzling and distant as if Leo was still watching it from one of the coal-dust-covered TVs way back in District Twelve. Over the roaring wind, Leo could hear whispers of loud music and the electrical buzz of hundreds of Panem’s most efficient electronics coming from somewhere beneath them.
As if enchanted by the sea of lights and sounds below him, Leo moved closer to the edge, gripping the cold metal rail as he gazed down.
“It’s beautiful up here,” Leo said.
Out of the corner of his eye, Leo could see Jason copying his movements, leaning up against the rail and studying the dazzling city below.
Jason made a hum of agreement, then said, “I was surprised Piper let me up here.”
His voice was barely audible over the wind. Leo’s eyes scanned the roof around them– no sign of cameras, and even if there were, it was too dark and too loud for them to pick anything up, as long as they were careful.
So Jason didn’t just bring him up here as a superficial attempt at friendship. No, Jason wanted to talk to Leo, privately– so what was he going to say?
“Yeah, well, it’s not like we could jump off,” Leo said, motioning towards the edge of the roof. If you looked closely enough, or listened closely enough, you could see the blue-ish glimmer of the forcefield, and the persistent, quiet hum that emanated from it. “There’s a forcefield keeping us in.”
Jason let out a low whistle. “Well, at least you can’t say the Capitol isn’t concerned for our safety.”
Leo glanced down at the ground again. No one could survive a fall like that, even if you did get past the forcefield. But then again, his odds in the arena weren’t that much better.
Jason, though– Jason had a chance. The best chance of any District Twelve Tribute excluding Reyna, who’d won her game a few years ago. He was strong, and he had that attractive sort of charm that could easily win over sponsors.
Leo couldn’t help but resent Jason for that, just a little. He knew he should be angrier at the Capitol. No matter how good Jason looked, he was still just another scared kid from Panem’s poorest district, looking for any ray of hope or comfort– even if that meant standing on a freezing cold roof in the middle of the night.
“What are you thinking about?” Jason asked.
Leo shrugged, letting out a watery chuckle. “We’re never going to survive out there, are we?”
He let out an involuntary shudder, more nerves than cold, and he felt a gentle, warm pressure on his shoulders. Sure enough, Jason had given him his jacket. Leo sent him a grateful smile, and tried to ignore the way Jason’s jacket smelled exactly like he did.
Jason wasn’t looking at Leo when he finally spoke, his electric blue eyes trained on something in the distance, his words soft and tentative as if he was betraying the Capitol just by thinking them. “If it was me, I’d bet on you.”
Leo did a double take, staring at Jason, something fiercely warm blooming in his chest. “You’d lose.”
Jason shook his head, voice gaining something close to passion, as if Leo deserved that level of confidence. “You’re smart, Leo. I’ve heard of what you’ve done in the mines, how you can make machines out of nothing–”
“Not out of nothing.” Leo wasn’t sure why he was bothering to correct Jason. No one had been impressed by Leo, no one had cared about Leo, since his mother died in that mine explosion. Jason’s soft words felt like thorns on the stem of a rose, pricking at Leo’s heart, drawing blood Leo couldn’t afford to lose. After all, he’d be bleeding out soon enough. “I had spare parts in the mines, scrap metal and wires and old machines that I could fix into something new. I’m not going to have any of that in the arena, I’ll have nothing.”
“That doesn’t have to be true.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jason shrugged, but Leo could tell that his nonchalance was forced. This– whatever Jason was about to say, whatever confident, charming speech he’d created– was the real reason Jason had led him up here in the first place.
“The Careers do it, don’t they?”
“You want to, what? Form an alliance?” With me, of all people? Leo had to stop himself from adding.
“I trust you,” Jason said, so earnestly that Leo didn’t even think this was a trick. “We could both have each others’ backs in the arena, if you wanted to.”
“They’d still never let us both live.” Reyna had said it herself, on their first awkward dinner on the way to the Capitol. Don’t join an alliance, you’ll either get betrayed or have to betray them first, and if you don’t betray them right, you’ll lose sponsors.
“I know that. But we wouldn’t have to die alone. Better than the alternative, right?”
In that instant, meeting Jason’s steady blue gaze on that freezing roof, the gleeful cacophony of people who wanted to watch them die, Leo felt something else stirring in his stomach– not the dread or desperation that had been haunting him since the second he heard “Leo Valdez” being read out on Reaping Day, but determination. Stubbornness.
Leo could’ve given up the day they told him his mother wasn’t coming home. But he didn’t. He’d always been resourceful and stubborn and very, very adept at pissing the wrong people off. If the Capitol– if the Careers– thought he was going to be an easy target to pick off, then he’d prove them wrong. And maybe he could prove Jason right, too– that Leo Valdez was someone who could win instead of someone who just avoided losing for as long as possible.
“Yeah,” Leo said, fiddling with the fraying edges of Jason’s jacket, “Yeah, it would be.”
The answer was yes, Leo did trust Jason. After this, maybe Jason was the only person he could trust. And maybe that was a bad idea, maybe the warm feeling that curled deeply in his chest was some weird chemical byproduct of the horrid trauma they’d gone through together. But Leo went into the Games thinking he’d never make it out alive, and now, he knew he couldn’t live with himself if he left alive without Jason.
He felt himself nodding, eyes locked on the berries. “Let’s do this.”
Jason put the berries in his mouth before tugging Leo upwards and crashing their mouths together in a desperate kiss. Leo barely had time to register the delicate texture of the deadly berries, or the taste of iron on Jason's lips, or the way his warm, calloused hands came up to cup Leo's face before Jason was pulling away, and a booming familiar voice rang out around the desolate arena.
“Stop! Stop! Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present the victors of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games, Jason Grace and Leo Valdez! I give you– the tributes of District Twelve!”