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“Coryo.”
The voice reached out to Coriolanus through the haze of his intoxicated state–a consequence of a long evening celebrating the latest Capitol reconstruction project with some of the top names in the political sphere, and an even longer night after he had returned home, contemplating the isolating consequences of the last decade of his life with a bottle of his most expensive whiskey–as strong and familiar as their days together in the Peacekeepers, all the way back in District Twelve.
Coriolanus blinked wary eyes open, and there he was. Sejanus Plinth. As perfectly young and vibrant and handsome as he had been in the months preceding that one fateful summer day at the Hanging Tree.
But there was something off.
Sejanus didn’t belong here. He didn’t fit with the lavish luxury of the presidential mansion, his ornate private bedroom with soft satin sheets and imported furniture.
Coriolanus Snow–the youngest president in Panem’s history.
He never would have gotten here without the financial backing of Sejanus’s parents. Their way of repaying him. Repaying him for his friendship…
Coriolanus couldn’t take in any air. His lungs were filled with water, drowning him. Starving his brain of oxygen. Was this how Sejanus had felt? The noose cutting off his life little by little, squeezing every last drop out of him until he was completely empty?
Sejanus, empty. Merely a shell. A corpse, swinging in the summer breeze for voyeuristic onlookers to devour.
Despite the panic clawing at Coriolanus’s chest, he was vaguely aware that he wasn’t dying.
Perhaps death was too kind of a fate, after what he had done.
He didn’t think about it often.
He very purposefully didn’t think about it. If he didn’t think about it, he could convince himself that he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. That it was Sejanus’s own mistakes, not his, that led to the death of the only friend who ever cared to dig past his icy surface.
Sejanus stood at the foot of his bed and blinked at him now, his eyes much darker and more unsettling than they had been in life. Completely black, rather than the warm brown that had thawed through Coriolanus’s hard exterior on the most hopeless days of his young life.
“Sejanus,” he whispered into the chill of the night air, voice hoarse with both sleep and terror. “I’m so sorry, Sejanus.”
The Sejanus he knew would have consoled him after such an admission. Would have heard the tremor in his voice, seen the fear in his eyes, and wrapped strong, warm arms around him in a reassuring embrace.
But that Sejanus was dead, and so was the version of Coriolanus that knew him all those years ago.
Those dark, horrible eyes pinned him in place. “Are you?” Coriolanus couldn’t move a muscle. Couldn’t even blink. “So is this your apology, Coryo?” he asked, his voice never rising, but even more dangerous for it. When Sejanus was angry in life, when he screamed and threw things, completely at his breaking point as everything inside of him bubbled over, Coriolanus had never been afraid of him. But he was afraid of him now. “You apologize for ending my life by taking the lives of countless children? Slaughtering them like hogs? Systemically breaking down an entire nation under your blood-soaked hands? This is how you atone?”
Sejanus didn’t touch him, didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even blink, but suddenly all the air in the room was gone, every source of light extinguished, the entire world blacked out around him, and Coriolanus was sure this was the end.
Fitting, to die by Sejanus’s metaphorical hand.
No audience, no fanfare, no bread and circuses. Just another lifeless body with no explanation. One of many in Coriolanus Snow’s Panem.
He closed his eyes, though it changed nothing about his sensory-devoid surroundings, and surrendered to the inevitable.
But a moment later, Coriolanus wasn’t dead. He gasped for air, jerked upright against his pillows, the soft glow of the city lights outside his window casting shadows across his bedroom.
There was no Sejanus at the foot of his bed.
There was no one at all in the room with him.
Coriolanus Snow was completely, utterly alone.
And he always would be.