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The room was dark, save for the pale moonlight casting its silver glow over a stripe of the room as it came through the window. Sitting right within it, staring out over the skyline of the city, was Huaisang. He was curled in on himself, one hand clutched tight around the necklace his brother had given him before they had gotten on the train. There was an expression on his face that bordered on anxiety, but was otherwise ureadable. Wanyin watched him gnaw at his bottom lip for a moment before crossing the room slowly to sit across from him on the window sill. Huaisang glanced at him as he lowered himself down, his brow furrowing.
Wanyin pulled one knee to his chest, leaned against the window, and offered him a noncommittal shrug, "Couldn't sleep."
Huaisang's confusion eased then, bleeding out into more like understanding and he nodded twice, "Yeah. Me neither."
"Who could?" Wanyin replied, a long breath escaping him, "Considering..."
"Yeah…"
The looming cloud over both their heads. Namely, the fact that they would be going into the arena a tomorrow with twenty two other people who wanted them dead, and were very likely to die in the next couple weeks. Also the fact that Wanyin knew damn well he wasn't coming home. Huaisang didn't know that, of course he didn't, but the dread gnawed at Wanyin's gut, creating a hollow emptiness in his core. He had two weeks left at most. For all he knew it could have been a matter of days. Even worse was the thought that people were going to be watching all over the country. His parents, his brother…
He was so busy thinking about it that he jumped a bit when Huaisang suddenly asked, "Are you scared?"
Well, shit, he thought that was a given. He was going to fucking die. And before he died, they were going to watch a bunch of other people die too, possibly even by their hands. The arena was all well and good when you were outside the fish bowl looking in, but when you were in it? No amount of mandated training could prepare you for that.
"Yeah" he whispered, his voice breaking more than he wanted, "Yeah, I guess I am."
He thought it should have been harder to admit that. Hadn't he wanted to be strong for them? To seem unfazed and unshaken in the hopes that his friend would have a rock to ground himself with? But the admission fell surprisingly easy from his lips. It had always been easy to talk to Nie Huaisang.
He tilted his head away from the window to see Huaisang nod slowly again. He wrapped his arms around himself, gaze still fixed on the flashing lights and flickers of the Jinlintai citizens still lighting their party crackers outside. They were celebrating. As if they weren't sending twenty four very real people to their deaths. Wanyin was twenty one years old, and Huaisang twenty, so they weren't kids anymore, but it was still so supremely fucked.
Wanyin unfolded his legs just enough to nudge Huaisang's foot with his own, "Are you?"
A flicker of a million different things flickered across Huaisang's face then - fear, anguish, maybe a bit of anger - but it was all gone too fast for Wanyin to see clearly. It took him a long time to reply, but when he did, his voice was small, an admittance that barely filled the minimal space between them.
"Kind of," he murmured, "I just- Hell, maybe it's stupid but I don't…I don't want them to change me."
There it was. The one thing people never really thought of when they were able to sit at home and watch the games from the comfort of their own homes. The glaring, cruel reality that the Games weren't just some event where people killed each other and then it was over. Wanyin had been there when his brother had come home from his own games five years ago. He remembered the drinking, and the outbursts of rage seemingly from nowhere, and the way he would get this blank look in his eyes sometimes, as if he were somewhere farther away than anyone else. That wasn't the bright, happy, endearingly overbearing guy he had been before. The arena had done that to him.
Before the reaping this time around, he hadn't spoken to his brother in four years because of it. The thought of Huaisang becoming that - distant, angry, and scared - made him sick to his stomach. He couldn't let that happen. He would say he wouldn't he able to live with himself, but he wasn't really going to be living either way, was he?
The very idea of this witty, lively, gentle man having to become a husk of his former self like Wuxian just so the weight of it all didn't crush him filled Wanyin with a surge of fury and indignation that reared its head with teeth and jagged claws. It was rage blooming insistently in his chest, and he realised suddenly that he would do damn near anything to keep Huaisang from getting back on that train when he came home and bringing bits of the arena back with him. He'd do it. He'd kill for it, die for it, whatever he needed to do. That way, at the very least, he wasn't dying entirely for their entertainment and Huaisang would be okay.
He thought the realisation should have scared him, but instead it smouldered, cooled, and solidified into crystal clear determination. Wanyin reached out slowly for Huaisang's hand, a bit surprised when Huaisang let him take it and squeeze. He met his golden eyes in the dim light.
"They won't," he replied, "I won't let them."