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As a child, his eyes glow.
Tigris loves Coryo so much. He is the only person in the world who could ever try to understand her, and they have been alone together for so long. She has known him and his resolve since they were so young and she has tried to hold him against the temptations of the world. She is old enough to remember his father, better than he himself can, she is barely old enough to have thought of what the name Snow could stand for.
Crassus Snow was a cold man with eyes given of ice. If he felt affection, it was conditional at best, and when he came around he was a harsh father. Coryo loved him, because what else did Coryo know, and that became what love was to him, something harsh, wavering.
Tigris knows she is beautiful and she knows the value of their last name, but she is not like Coryo. He learns the importance of power when he’s nine, and he crawls his way up in the academy without wavering. His love for her is expressed in this staunch hard work, the nights studying and the careful conversations to hide their struggles. Tigris decides when she is young that he is the only salvation they have left. Her careful fashion cannot be rewarded like his charm, and she is far too soft-spoken to achieve any ends. Still, she dreams, especially between the men who take her to these ends.
She is not one to care so much of power, but she wishes for steady food and for the Grandma’am’s health, if not her sanity. She wishes Coryo will have what he desires and that he does not become his father and that they are happy, steady at the end of all things. She wants family and nothing beyond that.
Tigris finds him laying on his bed, a week before the Plinth Prize is to be announced, shirtless for lack of an outfit and eyes hazy. There is something about the lines of his body, the staunch resolve in his bones she has never been able to replicate, always hiding tearstains in the clothes she makes.
“Tigris,” he says when she is in the door.
“Coryo,” she says, sitting next to him on the bed, brushing curls back from his forehead. He’s so warm. “You feel feverish.”
“I’m fine,” he says. “It’s the excitement, how close this existence is to being over.”
“It’s been hard, hasn’t it,” she laments. “Still, maybe the experience isn’t for nothing.”
He shifts, his eyes boring into her. “Snow always lands on top,” he repeats their adage. “We should never have been buried so deep. We’re meant for so much greater.”
“I would settle for happiness, a stressless existence.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, “that you’ve had to do so much. It’s going to be better so soon. You’ll have whatever your heart desires.”
“We may lack material possessions,” she admits. “We have each other.”
He holds her hand tight for a moment, falls back with his face peaceful and relaxed like a child with those glowing eyes. “Material possessions are about more than instant gratification. It’s about the world out there, the society, the rest of it all.”
Tigris could say something then but she doesn’t, scared of the words more than she could ever be of the silence. She lets time eclipse before she steps up. She needs to work on his outfit for the prize, she needs to cook something of the potatoes she’s been able to salvage. Coryo is still a growing boy, and she will always feel guilt for how often he has gone without to feed her and their grandmother when he is their real hope. All they do is sacrifice, sacrifice, but having something to love in this world can keep her sane.
He’s feverish about this Lucy Gray. She can see it in his eyes, the way they have no indifference, the way this fire within him doesn’t leak into his actions, how every word remains measured.
Her accident is mistaking any of it for love. Of course, she thinks Coryo could love, what else have they done for each other? Maybe she has been wrong and this is just a give and take, not family. But is there not gentleness in the outfits she tailors, in the roses on his lapel?
The girl is beautiful, she sings so well, but there’s something different in the way he looks at her, animalistic but not carnal. And Tigris doesn’t trust the girl. She would do anything, they all would to survive. To her world, they have just been the Snows. She has never thought to jeopardize her family name for anyone, but for a reason Coryo would.
“What do you see in her?” they hold a brief conversation when he changes his outfit at home before he rushes off somewhere to do something about these games and his mentorship, something in him that has fundamentally changed in the past few days. Or maybe, and she is terrified, or maybe it has always been there and it is just alive now, in these games, in this murder spree and with this manipulative girl. Of course, she knows they are not saints.
“She’s like me,” he says, that spark again in his eyes, the fire rather than the glow. He kisses her on the cheek when he leaves, his face measured calm certain that Snow will come out victorious of this mess. I know people, I know how they work, the expression says.
Am I people? Is what Tigris thinks, her world off-kilter. She remembers the little boy eating paste, remembers seeing cannibalism on the sidewalk. Who has she saved, in this mess?
And then, he is gone. Lucy Gray Baird has won the Hunger Games and Tigris could never have been so happy. She takes extra red cloth from work and strings it around the dilapidated Snow residence. Grandma’am cuts another rose.
Coriolanus never comes home and she feels the loss profoundly in her chest. Their grandmother says the rebels have killed him, babbles off with her nonsense and delusions. Tigris learns the news eventually and writes a letter to him with a hopeful tone, responsibility closing on her chest. She gets back to the few families who have toured their residences, even though they haven’t offered much. At least Coryo should be able to send back some pay. She tries to worry about the bills and breaks her heart over the Grandma’am and her roses, tries not to think of the daunting fact of Coryo’s twenty-year exile. She has only been with him so long, they have been each others’ rocks for so long. Who will be he in those years?
She cries and cries, even on Pluribus, but after time she pulls herself back together. She will take care of him in letters while she can, and she will spend her life like this and she will wait and it cannot be so bad. She has lived through war and such horrors, this cannot be worse than that.
The new apartment is easier to maintain, has fewer memories. She misses walking into his room and creating masterpieces of the too-small garments in his closet. He must be eating well in the troops, she lets herself think. For once, he will be healthy. And he will charm all of them, like he charmed the entire capital. Coriolanus is the only boy in the Capitol who could have put together such a webbed story of the Snow family, who has maintained their reputation. Even in his absence, he protects her.
In this absence, she forgets the fiery eyes. He’s in twelve, with the singing bird. Maybe it was love and she was wrong. She thinks it must have been love and she chastises herself for thinking so terribly of her cousin and brother. Of course Coryo could care so much, like he cares for her. She lets herself think so much of this is for her.
When he comes back, his curls are gone, the curve of his mouth is harsh. His best friend is dead. He speaks nothing of Lucy Gray. His eyes do not glow, there is no fire, there is ice.
He is a new man, not a boy, and her heart loses all faith.
In a few days, he has it all. But of course Tigris cannot fathom that he is now the praised toy of Dr. Gaul, the mad scientist that she is. What have you done, she wants to ask but she cannot ask, to be the champion of the monster.
The eyes are like frostbite. The clean cuffed shirts he has bought, maybe taken from the Plinths. He tells her that he will never wear a shirt she has stitched together like it is something to be proud of. He hugs her and he cares like she is a pet and he has made a commitment to it.
He is the monster. Clemencia Dovecote comes by one day, the life sucked out of her. Tigris has met her before. Even she looks at her Coryo so differently.
“What happened to Lucy Gray?” she asks him, finally. The Grandma’am’s health is failing but she is taking care of her roses. At least she did not die in her delusions, the family name has been recalled.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But she can’t harm us anymore.”
“Did she ever,” is what Tigris says carefully.
For the first time in a long time, he reaches for her hand. His grip is freezing. “Dr. Gaul and I have planned a new department in the games. There’s to be a costuming department. You’ll work there now.”
“What!” she exclaims all of a sudden, taking her hand out of his grasp. “I like my job. And I don’t like those games, I won’t work for them. It’s immoral, Coriolanus.”
“It’s life,” he says tensely. A statue like always, immovable, words measured. So charming, is this the monster? “Snow lands on top. Be a victor with me, Tigris.”
“I don’t want to work with Dr. Gaul.”
His mouth opens like he wants to contest this, but then closes in tight-lipped thought. So he can still falter. “I know you wouldn’t. She wouldn’t be involved with you, or your work. But I’m so important to the Hunger Games, it would mean so much if you came to work with me.” He links their fingers together like he is eight years old again. “It would mean so much.”
His eyes sing in the ice. He has lost Sejanus and he lost that girl, of course, she can’t fight with him. “Of course, Coryo.”
Tigris is too soft-hearted for this. In his worst moments, Coryo can still see that. After the thirteenth Hunger Games, when she sobs for days when the tributes she has costumed herself die, and she hangs off his arms and begs for him to end this slaughter, he drags her away from him and sets her up in a fashion studio. She only talks to the Capitol elite who wish to smother themselves in fabric and excess, and it is far easier than those ragged children destined for death.
Coryo doesn’t come home anymore to talk to her. They hold a funeral for The Grandma’am and hold hands at the fire, and it has been so long since they have. Tigris thinks of when she imagined they would spend two decades apart, and thinks she would have liked that because in those dreams his hands would still be warm. He would not be this broken brother.
“I think I’ll have children,” he says to her after. “Our name must continue, after all.” It’s a clinical thought.
“Don’t speak like that, Coryo. You can wait for love, then have children.”
“I’m up for that seat in the cabinet, you know. In the next few years, I will have that. I should do it now, while I have time. I don’t care for love. It’s not for me.”
But what about, she could almost say. But what about Lucy Gray? Then Tigris remembers the fire that even then she doubted was love.
“Do you have anyone in mind?” she manages to say.
“Livia Cardew would make a fine first lady,” he says.
“Of course,” Tigris thinks of the woman who is all bite, so cruel. She hasn’t really thought of marriage or children herself, chooses to forget the part of her meant for romance. She hides it in a part of her not worth thought and she is not that girl, she would never have told him. She thinks she would love for there to be children in her life. Maybe it would have to be this way.
Coryo puts an arm around her and they watch the old woman’s body, carried up the stairs in a grandiose coffin. It’s engraved with roses, Coryo’s decision. A red rose is in Tigris’ hair, a white one on Coriolanus’ lapel.
“She was insane,” he says quietly. “The life we once lived feels so long ago.” The octave of his voice has changed and it is less careful, more free, more like the boy. Tigris thinks of that day he had been assigned to be a mentor, so long ago. He has been so different since that girl sang that song, so much a monster.
She regrets it, regrets him in this vision. “I miss it, I do.”
His voice catches like he could almost agree when the old woman is dropped into the earth.
“Snow lands on top,” he repeats like always. “I’ll be President, Tigris. We will have everything we could desire.”
“You preside the Hunger Games,” she finds courage, “and you will marry Livia Cardew and have children, and these children will not know any of what you know. And you will have the responsibility of the whole country.”
“And we do not starve, and we are victors. Remember that,” he says carefully, though he wouldn’t chastise her.
Innocent Tigris, the sentiment behind his words. And maybe she is this, naive and innocent.
When she looks up, she hopes to see his eyes glow. But there is only a faint halo, the reflection of the sun on ice.