Chapter Text
He got to keep her. And he wanted to keep her. Safe and close at hand. Admired and admiring. Devoted. And entirely, unequivocally his.
When I was little, they used to bathe me in buttermilk and rose petals.
She was a performer, she knew how to put on a smile, knew how to charm, how to appear so pleasant and pleasing.
She knew how to survive too, survive the deaths of those around her, the brutality of the Peacekeepers, hopelessness, starvation, the cruel hands of the law.
But the Games, the Games...To kill or be killed, to dance for your life, to huddle in those tunnels and know the world was waiting to see you emerge like a scuttling beetle from a ruin, that millions were waiting to watch you die, your pretty young body tumble and fall, your face so beautiful and broken on a screen—
To kill or be killed.
And her reward for killing, for living, would be to return home to the Seam and to The Covey and pretend that this never happened. That nothing about her had been changed, that she could easily slip back into her old life of singing for her supper there where a jealous girl had condemned her to certain death.
Lucy Gray was a consummate performer but, shivering in the tunnels however many nights into this televised hell, she thinks that if she survives, that might just be one performance too far.
She has food, courtesy of her mentor, she has water. But it isn't enough, her body is still starved from the journey and her time in the monkey pens. And with hunger, and fear, and death all around her, come feverish dreams. Snatches of them in between running, in between her hours of watch, as Jessup gets sicker himself; wedging herself under rubble, jamming herself into dark corners of dark tunnels.
It isn't home she dreams of though — the fields and the woods and the lake, the Hob, a warm fire, the melodies of the mockingbirds — it's a pillowy bed, it's buttermilk and rose petals, richness and softness beyond any she has known. Greedy with hunger, with the desire to live, to survive this game that is anything but, in her dreams she grows greedier still. Starving for more than a crumb or a thimbleful of water. Starving for it all. A feast, a banquet, a mansion. Dresses, jewels, cushions, velvet slippers.
She laughs once when she wakes from one of her dreams, a startled hysterical laugh before she claps a shaking hand over her mouth. Look at you, beggargirl, she thinks, look at you starving and this close to death imagining that you might be given a feast, riches, boxes of gifts.
Yet it is with an abundance of gifts that she kills Jessup, with precious water bottles dropped from the sky like so much manna, like bombs to his brain ravaged by sickness. She and her mentor work as one; he lavishes his care upon her from the sky, a shower of water come to kill a boy, a friend, who will kill her if she doesn't do it first.
She's popular, that's what the number of drones mean. Popular means more sponsors means more presents.
If only they could drop a few knives, a few guns down too, she had thought spitefully the first time she saw a drone. And yet, she and Snow had found a way to make these harmless gifts into weapons. Clever them.
Her secret, she thinks, is this. Something in her knows she will survive, something in her will make herself survive. Her mentor is wily, ruthless, hungry himself (did he not think she could see that? his flesh drawn over bones, his big hungry eyes that wanted more, that wanted the world he believed he was owed?). He was besotted with her, she could tell that too.
And so, the two of them, their two hungers, they would see this through. She would win.
The morning after Jessup dies, she wakes in her hiding spot close enough to the arena that there is still some light. She takes the compact, Snow's mothers compact, from one of her secret pockets and opens it carefully, keeping her breath shallow so she doesn't disturb the rat poison, doesn't breathe it in. There is still the scent of powder, still the scent of roses too. If she thinks hard, she can remember the taste of him, of the tall blond boy who she had been given to, a weapon of his own, a prize. It was a nice kiss, a hungry one. He hasn't kissed a lot, she could tell. Take it from someone who had spread kisses like honey at home.
Her mentor, Coriolanus Snow, he came into the arena the other night and beat a boy dead with his hands. A horrible thing and a fearful story to hear about from the other tributes crowing that they almost finished him off, but it was good to know, perhaps, that he was as ruthless as she is, as she must be. The both of them barely hiding their bloody claws behind their pretty exteriors. (He's pretty too, her mentor. He'll be handsome one day, square-jawed, strong, but at eighteen he's still pretty, she thinks. Shiny, new, mouldable).
Lucy looks at her face now. Beaten, starved. She pinches her cheeks with her fingers, drawing a blush. She likes wearing makeup on stage, too much makeup, it hides her real face so well. She's pretty, she always has been. The apple of her mother's eye, people called her, the prettiest little songbird in the District.
Her little tame viper is drawn by the shine of the mirror too, she snaps the compact shut but lets the snake wind up around her forearm.
The games, people said, they showed the worst of humanity, they cut children down to who they were inside, beasts.
But what she really wants right now is to be a pet, she thinks hazily. She wants to be petted and lavished and kept safe.
Isn't a pet a sort of performer anyway? Wasn't she good at singing for her supper, at being what her audience wanted her to be? Wasn't she kept there on stage and encouraged to be good, to be so good she would be thrown a few coins?
Now, feverish and half-mad with fear, when she thinks of the Hob, she thinks of the monkey pens. The walls of the homely bar became bars.
All those tributes lined up in a row in the field, all those bodies, all those children. Are they putting on a good enough show to appease the Capitol? Are the lawmakers entertained? Do they applaud each death out there? she thinks, mouth wobbling, cries caught silent in her throat.
When she steals the flags, the gruesome shrouds, from the bodies of the tributes and runs with them, taunting Reaper, tiring him, hiding her poisoning of his puddle, she imagines she's on a grander stage than she's ever set foot on (you are, Lucy Gray, she thinks desperately, you are on that stage right now) and that the fabric is ribbons and gossamer gauzy silks, that her ankles are circled by bells, that she is only dancing. Dancing away from death, twirling from it.
Watch me, Mama, she thinks, watch me, Papa, watch me Covey, watch me world, look how I shine, look how I live.
**
He's drunk when she's presented to him afterwards, his tribute, his prize. The winner of the 10th Hunger Games. She hasn't been cleaned or given new clothes; she hasn't, he thinks, even been given a sip of water.
'Here,' he says, fumbling over his glass of posca.
'Thank you,' she says, face blank, and downs the whole thing. Then sways on her feet, smiles sweetly, strangely, and falls right into his arms as she collapses.
It causes a commotion. She, and he, are supposed to be on camera right now, being interviewed about their win. But here she is, warm and small in his arms as he lifts her onto the goddamn dining hall table.
'Is there a medic who can help?' he asks tightly. 'Or is the idea to kill all the tributes and have no winner at all?'
The thought of his win, of his chance at a new life, a future he deserves, being snatched from him at the finish line; the thought of Lucy Gray, sweet Lucy Gray, sickening and dying; were both insupportable. He had won fair and square (won with tricks and lies and subterfuge, he thought, but what was the games but a game of trickery, a gruesome play-acted war for the cameras to appease the Capitol, to quell the rebellions in the Districts) and so had she.
'She's a dramatic thing, your girl,' Dr Gaul tells him later when he is brought to her labs, 'we think it best that she not be returned to her District. She'll only stir up trouble, I know the type.'
'She's to stay here in the Capitol?' he asks, dry-mouthed. Isn't that what he wanted? To keep her close, to have her?
'Yes, and under your charge. You'll be given a small stipend for her keep, on top of the very generous University scholarship the Plinth's have gifted you. But if she causes trouble here in the Capitol, it'll be on your head, dear boy.' Dr Gaul picks up a small wriggly furry creature and drops it into the tank of whirling vipers. 'And her head, of course. Naturally.' She laughs that awful laugh of hers. 'The Capitol won't tolerate traitors. Nor lapses in control of its best and brightest.'
He squeezes his hands behind his back.
'Don't look so solemn, boy. I seem to recall seeing footage of a kiss between you two?' He didn't think they had been on the cameras at the monkey pens when he had kissed her. But of course, Dr Gaul saw all. He hated her, hated her unnatural beasts and her power. 'Ah, he blushes, a modest type. Now,' she peers into her tank and smiles, 'you have your fun this summer, by all means, but get your head clear for University, you hear me? A lot of people have staked a lot of things on your shoulders. On your future.' Her voice rolls that word around her tongue.
He has his own ideas about his future. He wonders if they align with hers.
Admittedly, what he hadn't imagined in his future was being given a District girl as his ward, of co-habiting with a sweet girl who looked like the sweetest temptation.
She's waiting for him outside the labs, sitting on a bench like a doll with its strings collapsed, watched over nervously by a young guard. When she sees Coriolanus, she beams, her eyes watery.
Poor thing, he thinks. She must be so very tired after the arena.
'You're to stay in the Capitol. With me,' he says, watching her closely to see how she feels about the news.
'In the Capitol?' she repeats. 'They aren't letting me go home?'
'You said you were an orphan,' he says.
'I still have friends, family.'
'Your name wasn't picked at random. Are you really safe back there? Don't you—don't you want to experience life in the Capitol? I know you've seen the worst of it with the games, but you can have a fine life here,' he says. 'A good life.' He's desperate to convince her, he thinks. But she's a clever girl, he's sure she can see how much better her life can be here. With him.
She swallows, licks her lips. 'Well, I've always wanted to see how the other half live,' she says.
How they live. His cheeks flush hot thinking of the condition of the mansion, of his family's hunger and poverty. But that stipend is coming, those funds that will restore glory, dignity, to the Snow family.
Anyway, he thinks, offering his elbow to her as they make their way through the halls of the school, feeling the way she clutches tightly to him with every noise, every laugh and shout from the Games afterparty, even a faded mansion is bound to seem like a luxury to a girl who grew up amongst coaldust and grime.
**
Her mentor, and his family, are poor, she realises almost instantly on arriving back at his mansion. Her stomach sinks as she takes note of empty rooms and the cold air, of shabby fabrics and the drawn cheeks of his cousin and grandmother (his grandmother who takes one look at her and wails, horrified to be hosting a District girl, shutting herself up in her room in protest).
He'll get his scholarship, his stipend, within a few days, he tells her, even though she does her best not to show her disappointment. He's sore about it, she thinks, his poverty.
She, and her win, was his prize, she sees that even more clearly now. She is his ticket back to wealth and prestige.
And Snow? Is he her prize? Or her jailor?
One thing's sure though, she can't rest on her laurels, this—living with him—is a game of its own and one she needs to win if she's to survive and thrive.
She's not sure yet if she wants him to help her leave the Capitol soon and return back to District 12 or if she'll stay here longer and see what coins she can gather, what sort of life she could have (you're a Covey, her mind says as she thinks this, of course you want to leave, leave the Capitol, leave District 12, leave all the Districts and vanish north where you will be free to wander. And to that voice she says, maybe so, but I'm tired and I almost died and I killed to live and I'm scared and alone and worried what the Capitol would do to everyone back home if I fled, so shut up for now, will you.)
Whatever her plans might be, she needs Snow on her side, she needs him bewitched, enraptured, smitten. And the best way of doing that is by bedding him.
He's a virgin, she's quite sure. Solemn, private, lonely, thinking he's better than everyone else while fearing he isn't at all.
'And here's where you'll sleep. Your room,' he says to her on that first tour, eyes flicking around the shabby room, mouth tight on silent apologies that might belie his embarrassment about its condition, about his family's condition.
'My own room?' she says, trying to sound both impressed and disappointed. She isn't planning on staying here much, not so close to the mad grandmother who might come and smother her in her sleep. Besides, he needs her in his bed if he's to fall in love with her.
'I'm sorry I don't have many things for you right now, clothes and things,' he repeats. 'But they're coming, I promise. You'll have everything you need, everything you want,' he says, squeezing her hands. So solemn in his promise, so earnest.
'You're too kind,' she says, tipping right onto her toes to kiss his cheek. Her lips land more on his jaw, he's tall, her mentor.
'I think you probably need your rest now, but if you need anything—'
'I should come and find you?' she finishes.
'Well, I was going to say you can ask Tigris, my cousin, but yes, you can ask me too,' he says.
He leaves her awkwardly, closing the door softly behind him. But not locking it, she notes.
The dress that Tigris leant her while her rainbow dress was being cleaned is lying on the bed. A bundle of underwear too. But no silky robe, no velvet slippers, she notes with a laugh at herself.
She puts Snow's mother's compact in the drawer of the nightstand. It still has its poison inside, he hasn't asked about that. He hasn't asked her about any of the games in fact. But it's fine, she doesn't want to talk about it. Doesn't want to remember.
She takes the new dress to the bathroom and bathes in the cold water of the rusted bath, making herself squeaky clean, trying to wash away everything about the last two weeks too. Then she returns to her room, and slides into the heavy blankets and sits and waits.
She counts down the minutes until the rest of the house goes to sleep, singing songs silently in her mind to keep herself company. When the mansion is quiet, she tiptoes down the corridor towards his room. The largest room, for the man of the house, the head of the family.
It squeaks a little as it opens, jolting him up from sleep.
In the sudden lamplight, the both of them look at each other alarmed. Sudden movements, frights, they remind both of them of the Games, she thinks.
'What's wrong?' he asks. His voice is thick with sleep.
He's sitting up now. She can see that his chest is bare. Pale and well-formed.
He sees her look. Good.
'I couldn't sleep.'
'Your nerves must be frayed,' he offers.
'And I was lonely,' she says quickly before he can offer her some tea or another blanket.
She doesn't make the most inviting picture in her tunic dress, she thinks, but she's going for forlorn orphan. And once he's offered said forlorn orphan a place in his bed, she'll turn on her other charms.
'I don't want to be alone right now,' she says, crossing her arms around herself, shivering (it's not hard to make herself shiver. She is cold and she doesn't want to be alone).
'Of course you don't, come here,' he says, lifting the covers next to him.
She takes him up on his offer, sliding far enough that her body meets his.
'Your beds are a marvel,' she says. 'Here in the Capitol.'
'Are they?' he replies, swallowing.
She wriggles as if testing the bed, letting her bare leg touch his.
'You know,' she says softly, so softly he has to move closer. 'I thought there'd be more kisses once I got out of there.'
His hand shifts her curls from her face to see her clearer.
'Your kisses, I mean,' she says.
His frown smooths. 'Do you want to know a secret?' he says. 'So did I.'
She smiles and tilts her chin.
His kiss is hesitant, his breath sleep-warm. She makes a noise in her throat, encouraging, just a little startled, and touches his bare chest.
He kisses her more deeply, his tongue exploring her mouth.
She turns on her back, carefully encouraging him up over her. He grows confident, hungry. His body pushing her into the bed, his body responding.
She curls her arms around his neck and kisses back, hungry herself.
His hips are rocking into her, her thighs are splayed wide, when he pulls back, panting.
'You haven't done this before, have you?' he asks, brow furrowed.
She shakes her head, bites her lip. 'No.'
He's pleased by her lie. She sees him become more confident, sure.
'We don't have to, not now, not yet.' How noble he seems, this boy who is shaking for want of her, whose grip on her hips only tightens as he offers her an escape.
'I want to. I want you,' she whispers. She does want to. She wants to feel something good. To forget for a moment about blood and death and pain and fear.
'I'll be gentle,' he says, both solemn and teasing somehow.
And just how none of his classmates have made their move on him she'll never know, but maybe they're prissy rich girl types who think themselves above the desires of their own bodies.
Luckily for her, and for him, she's certainly not that.
She helps him pull her dress over her head, but he doesn't need her help to reach for her breasts, her waist, her hips; his hands mapping her, stroking her, learning her.
She slides her own hand down into his shorts and he stops, out of breath.
He's big, almost intimidatingly so. But if she struggles a little to take him that will only make her virgin act seem even more real.
She can't wait until he's more comfortable, confident, and she can joke with him in bed. She likes teasing and laughing in bed. Right now, she wants to joke about his big hands and his big feet and his big—
But one of those big hands has just slid to her cunt and the catch of his thumb on her clit makes her gasp.
'There?' he asks, intent, triumphant, a gorgeous smirk on his face.
'There,' she nods breathlessly.
Sex, good sex, she's found, is one of those places where her performance becomes no performance at all, the lines blurred between the real her and the performer. She's not pretending to feel, she is feeling. She's wet, wanting, as he touches her. She's moaning without thinking, kissing out of instinct.
'I think you're ready,' he says.
She nods, although if this was the first time, he should have prepared her with his fingers inside. She'll help him learn that though, next time, another time. There'll be many times, she thinks determinedly. Even if this time isn't good enough for her, the others will be.
When he enters her she lets out a high gasp in the back of her throat, snaps her eyes shut.
It's good, so good. His size almost more than she can take.
When she opens her eyes again, he's watching her closely, drinking in her expression.
'You can move,' she whispers and he does.
A slow, punishing roll of his hips. A fumble of his hand right there to where she needs it. And the combination of the two—
He's going to make her come in no time at all, she can feel it. She meets his hips with hers, lets her head fall back on the pillow as he mouths at her neck.
His hips keep driving into hers. He's determined for this to be good for her, to show his prowess, and that is its own pleasure. She's chosen a winner, she thinks hysterically, thighs trembling, nerves sparking.
He clenches her hair in his fist, keeps her in his hold. He's intent, focused, even as his breath hitches; she is, his manner seems to say, his prey and he the predator, even though when she entered the room, when she made her first move, she swore it had seemed to her the opposite.
'Come for me,' he says, his voice a low gravel, his kisses so sweet. 'Come for me,' he orders, a boy, a man, built to order, to rule.
Oh god, she thinks as she falls apart, as she climaxes and he kisses her through it, groaning as he finally lets himself come. Oh god.
'That was...was that good? For you?' he whispers, a nervous boy again in the dark when he turns the lamp off.
'It was overwhelming, but good,' she says, without lying at all.
'You'll be safe here, with me, I want you to know that,' he says, stroking her side.
He's gone solemn now in the afterglow, serious. He cares for his own, Snow, she sees that with his family, and now she is one of them. Not his family, but something he owns. His prize, his ward, his girl.
Is she to be his mistress then? she thinks hazily as she slips towards sleep. Is that the future for her? To escape from the viper's den into the viper's mansion?
She shivers and he drags her closer, one large hand tucked around her hip.
Well, she can't escape now even if she wants to, she thinks, sinking into the softness of the plush mattress, burrowing back into the heat and warmth of her jailor.
**
He has her again in the morning, just as the sky is lightening. He didn't mean to, he wanted to let her rest after such a hurried first time, but she is so warm in his arms. Warm and sleepy-eyed and moaning so prettily when he brushes a clumsy good-morning kiss to her neck.
This time, he pulls her legs around his hips, gets even closer, deeper. He's thrilled when she squirms, when her moans become breathless little gasps, when her eyes grow wild and wide.
He makes her come twice before he lets himself come and the thrill of that is sweeter than any other achievement he has ever made—besides, perhaps, his win at the Games that brings with it a delivery that very morning of food and gifts and a stuffed envelope from the Plinths with an obscene amount of money (it turns out that he didn't even need to blackmail the father, that he's worried enough that Snow will tattle and tell the tale of how Sejanus almost ruined their family by running into the arena to make some nonsense prayer for a dead boy).
And to return to his bedroom once the delivery men have left and Tigris and Grandma'am are busy in the kitchen cooing over the hampers of food, smiling at his change in fortune, to find sweet Lucy Gray and her tangled curls, her rosebud mouth, waiting for him dozing in his own bed, why that is the cherry on top of a very fine morning indeed.
'Are you just going to stand over there and look?' she murmurs.
'It's a good view,' he says, smirking from the doorway, crossing his arms and feeling like he is exactly where, and who, he is supposed to be, finally.
'Here's a better one,' she says, as she flips the covers down and bares her pretty breasts.
He swears under his breath and shuts the door behind him, locking it.
'You're trouble, you know,' he says as he strips and slides back into bed, pulling her, laughing, towards him.
'The best kind, I hope,' she says and kisses him.
**
On her second morning in her new home, his home, she wakes with him watching her, and not entirely lasciviously, she thinks, mustering a dozy smile for him.
'What is it?' she asks, stroking a thumb on his cheek.
'You were humming in your sleep.'
'I was?'
'I didn't know the tune, I didn't recognise it.'
'Well, I know lots and lots of songs. District songs.'
'Hmm,' he says. But his eyes are watchful, he's thinking.
She hopes then that it's only songs she shares in her sleep, not names, not memories and hazy future plans.
He doesn't want her just for her body, he wants to know her, he's selfish and possessive, she can tell that already. He wants to know each and every thought in her mind.
'If you hum it back to me, I can sing it for you, if you like,' she says. 'I like your voice.'
But maybe he's shy being put on the spot because he hides his face in her neck when he hums the notes, so she can't see his face.
She swallows as she recognises the tune.
'It's a love song,' she says. 'An old one.'
He lays his head on her chest as she begins to sing. Of a maiden lost and a covetous man who finds her, of a tower and a locked door.
'I never understand your songs,' he says and shakes his head. His hair tickles her skin. She shifts her body so that his mouth catches her nipple. Hoping to distract him. To distract herself.
He stills and then reaches out with his tongue. 'Sometimes they're just stories,' she says, gasping as he sucks harder. 'Pretty songs without any meaning at all.'
'Pretty songs and a pretty girl,' he murmurs, sliding lower under the blankets without her guidance.
When his mouth reaches her cunt, when his tongue begins its cruel ravishment upon her, she sings a new song, or a very very old one, of moans and gasps and the name of a lover called out in ecstasy.
'Who taught you that?' she asks as he gets dressed, hiding his lovely limbs in strict tailoring, a new suit bought with his new money.
'No one, I'm a natural,' he says with a cocksure smile on his lips.
Then, as he neatens his tie in the mirror, his face becomes more serious, focused. 'I'll be gone most of the day but Tigris will be here. And if Grandma'am is rude to you, I'm sorry for that, but she's had a difficult time of things. She lost so much, we all did, in the rebellion with the Districts.' His eyes flick to hers in the reflection.
Real life crashes down upon her, and just when she was enjoying herself.
'Her bark is worse than her bite though,' he continues. 'And if you make sure not to ever disturb her in her rose garden, I'm sure things will be just fine.'
'I'll be good,' she says, lifting her chin. Perhaps a little resentfully. Hasn't she been good thus far?
'I know you will be,' he says striding to the bed to chuck her under the chin. To press a brief kiss to her forehead.
He stands back again and looks at her carefully.
'What?' she asks finally, bunching the covers up around her bare shoulders.
'I just want to make sure I have something pleasant to think of today during tedious meetings with tedious people,' he says with a boyish smile.
It's sweet, he's sweet. An odd, deadly mixture of sweet and cruel (he doesn't think he's cruel, but men in power are always cruel in one way or another, she thinks).
'You can think of what you want to do to me tonight, if you like, if that will see you through the hours.'
He shakes his head, smiling. 'You're something, Lucy Gray.'
'I'm trouble,' she repeats, sing-song.
She hopes she's more gift than trouble, more pleasure than obligation. He may not be thinking of the future but, now that she's had two solid nights sleep away from the arena, in warmth and softness, she is. This is a whole new world, a whole new stage for her. And something in her fears her rehearsals haven't been good enough.
She has two days reprieve, before the cameras come, before her appearances start.
'I told them you needed to sleep it off, the Games,' he says as he presents her with a large box of clothes for her to wear and tells her that they are to report to the Academy for a televised interview, that there is a party they are expected to attend tonight hosted by a school donor, and a dinner tomorrow with the Plinths, and more after that.
'Two nights sleep to wash away all those horrors?' she says.
'No, I know,' he shakes head. 'It's ridiculous, isn't it. Bringing you out to be paraded in front of everyone. You did what was asked of you already.'
She's more pleased than she can tell him to hear him say that. But he's naive if he thought the Games would be it. She's a token, a figurehead of the whole thing.
'I suppose I should tell them that it was my choice to stay in the Capitol, that I accepted the gamemakers extremely kind offer to stay.'
'Yes.'
'Because if I said something different, if I made a fuss and a spectacle of myself, the wrong kind of spectacle, they'd punish me.'
'And me,' he says. 'Dr Gaul said it would be on my head if you caused trouble.'
'I'm just a singer,' she says ruefully. 'A performer.'
'You're a victor, a survivor,' he says. Then he cups her face in his hand. 'And you're so much more than that.'
Am I? she thinks. 'Well, at least I get some new clothes out of it, I suppose,' she says, giving in to the temptation to rummage in her new gifts.
He looks pleased to see her pleased. 'Tigris can help you with fittings, with makeup and your hair, if you need it.'
'How do you want me to look?' she asks, turning round to him before he leaves. 'Innocent? Deadly?'
He sighs, but he's thinking.
Should I look a child or a woman, she wants to ask. Should I look the coquette or a good-time girl? Do you want me demure, do you want to show me off?
'That dress,' he says with a lift of his chin. 'The blue one.'
She holds it up in front of her. A frothy skirt to her knees, a fuzzy woollen bodice with cap sleeves.
'Isn't a bit...much?'
'Says the girl with the rainbow dress,' he says.
'Well, that was for a special occasion. I wanted to put on a show.'
This is a show, she sees them both think.
'Alright,' she says, 'now scoot so I can change into it.' She winks. He sucks his teeth, smirking, and closes the door ever so slowly, peeking through the crack to the last second.
She doesn't look like a killer in it, at least, she thinks when she checks herself in the mirror, nor a seductress. It's girly but she doesn't look younger than she is.
It doesn't, she thinks, give much away about what he wants from her, but maybe the rest will.
Are you planning on letting him choose what you wear every time? she thinks crossly, her reflection frowning.
At the party that night she realises that she is, in fact, almost underdressed. She didn't know the evening fashions here, she didn't know how very extravagant and ridiculous they wear their clothes here where they have money to burn.
She gets through the interviews in a daze, answers the many crude questions in bright excited voices from the people she meets at the Academy and at the party.
What was it like in the arena? What was it like to be scared? What was it like to be hunted? How did she think up that clever trick with the water? Why didn't she use more weapons? How did she learn that trick with the snakes? Would she have used a knife or a spear if she had to?
None of them know that she used poison to kill, none of them see beneath the perfect mask of her performance there, in the arena, or here, in the snake pits of the Capitol.
It makes Coriolanus feel awkward to see her so animated, she thinks, but it makes him proud too.
But she isn't doing anything of this for him. She's doing this to save her own skin, to save her own life, thank you very much.
'I think you've done enough,' he murmurs to her late that night, when she's finally let herself gulp down three glasses of Posca after a truly horrid conversation with a beautiful woman with horrible questions about horrible things.
'I can hold my liquor actually,' she hisses back.
He shakes his head, eyes soft, worried. 'I mean you've done enough tonight. We can go home.'
'I'd like that,' she says. 'Can we?' she asks, and it comes out so pleading she thinks both of them are embarrassed.
He holds her hand tightly as he leads her out of the party and the block, tighter still in the car that drives them home. The cars, Tigris told her, are a new treat. They used to walk everywhere before.
'What do you need?' he asks her when they're back at his house, when she's standing in the dark of his room. He rubs her shoulders.
'Can you make me forget?' she replies, vulnerable from the drink, from the day, from it all.
'I can try,' he says.
It's not love-making that night, they would need to know each other better, love each other truly, for that, but it's something close, she thinks.
The next morning he seems uncertain which girl has woken up next to him, the consummate performer, the survivor, or the scared girl he glimpsed in the dark.
'We have more engagements today, I'm afraid,' he says.
'That's alright,' she says calmly. 'It was just...an adjustment yesterday, that's all. You forget, I'm used to people, to all sorts of people. Back home—' she hides the way her breath hitches in a yawn—'back home we used to play at this place called the Hob. Me and the Covey, our band. And the audience was a mixture of locals and Peacemakers. All sorts. Drunken and rowdy. I learned young how to control a room, how to shift the mood of a crowd.'
'You'll have to teach me that skill.'
'Well it starts with a guitar,' she teases.
'Would you like a guitar?' he says seriously. 'I should get you one. Do you play other instruments?'
She pictures her friends back home then, of the things they had to do, the cost of the precious worn instruments they had. And here he is offering them for nothing.
Well, not quite for nothing, she thinks, lifting up on her knees to kiss him.
Her owner is a generous man, she comes to learn. Once some of his family's wealth has been returned to him, as he puts it casually one evening after a long drunken dinner, he enjoys lavishing it upon her.
He enjoys her pleasure at the gifts, her greed and hunger. It delights him that she cannot seem to hide her delight with every package and box and gift unwrapped. Sweets and chocolates and bracelets and earrings and hairpins. Dresses and skirts and lingerie, shoes and slippers and stockings.
Guitars, a whole piano delivered to the mansion, a brand new book of songs (Capitol music that she deigns not to learn or to play, he seems happy enough with her old repertoire anyway).
Snow likes dressing her up, his own doll. Try that dress on, he says, lolling on his bed like a prince, no not that one, the purple one.
Let me see them, the new stockings, he murmurs to her one dinnertime and she hoists up her skirts where she sits, the table covering her legs from the prying eyes of the other diners. His hand is large and hot on her thighs. The silk so thin she can feel his calluses.
Wear these, he says, handing her shining earrings shaped like roseblooms before a stroll through the Capitol's pleasure gardens.
But he likes the necklace he gifts her most of all. Not the delicate glittering chokers and chains, but the one with the heavy pendant he has made for her after a memorable party they attend that first month together.
There's a different mood at the party, she feels it from the start. The guests are half-drunk already, the venue half blinding lights, half murky gloom with dark corners, and the entertainment on offer—dancers, Avox bar staff—barely dressed at all.
She sticks close to Coriolanus but he is distracted talking with two of the professors at the University where he will start in a few weeks time. He wants to get in their good graces early, and he preens under their attention. From what she can hear, they talk a lot about the Games, about his suggestions for the last ones, the sponsors and gifts.
She doesn't want to think about the Games. Hers, or the ones to come. She doesn't want to think about Coriolanus being involved with any others, being involved with any of this bloodthirsty sham of a government when he had told her that he thought the Games were cruel and useless, a pageantry of violence unfairly meted out on children.
And, as if her mood couldn't get any worse, the men who find her, who interrupt her tentative conversations with the guests she has judged most friendly and tame, aren't shy about implying just what they want, what they expect her to offer.
By the time she tugs on Snow's arm and asks him, in her politest way and with her most pleasing smile, whether they can leave already, she is boiling over with fury.
**
He thinks it went well, his conversation with the professors, with the others there tonight. Even if the party wasn't to his tastes, he still got what he needed out of it, he thinks. And Lucy Gray looked so pretty in her red dress, so charming whenever he glanced across the room to find her.
It's when they're in the car home that his mood shifts.
'I don't want to give private concerts to other men,' she says from beside him suddenly, her voice cracking.
'Why would you give private concerts—?' he says, voice fading as he understands her meaning, her hot cheeks and sullen mouth. 'Who said anything about that? Who talked to you about it?'
'Was it supposed to be a secret?' she spits out furiously.
'It's nonsense, is what it is. It's not going to happen. You're in my care, they gave you to me. You're mine.' He takes her hand tightly. His mind running over the conversations he saw her take part in, how charming she looked, how beautiful. 'Give me their names, the men,' he orders.
'Why? So you can put them on a list?'
So I can kill them, he thinks, quite seriously, frightening himself with the precision of his thoughts, the plans already springing to his mind. 'Dr Gaul said you were my charge, that you were in my care. You're mine,' he says again.
He'll be able to sort this out, he thinks. He'll demand it sorted. And if not, he has money, he has some modicum of power. And if not... he looks across at Lucy Gray, at his girl. He'll fix this one way or another.
**
You're mine.
She shivers at that phrase. It's nothing she doesn't know, nothing he hasn't said in so many words but.
'I'm yours,' she says. As if to hear what it sounds like out loud. Awful and final.
Being his will protect her from other men, from a life starving and fearful, she knows that (she prays that), but it goes against everything in her blood. Freedom is the song at the heart of every Covey. The freedom to roam, to live as they please.
The walls of Snow's mansion are just one more cage.
'I don't know where they get the impression that you're...that you're available for company like that,' he says after sitting in silence, so angry she felt she could taste it in the air.
It's a little funny, she thinks, the both of them talking in code like they're polite well-mannered creatures and he wasn't feasting on her cunt half an hour before the party.
'I don't know how the Capitol works, what's expected of me. What the rules are,' she says.
'The rules are what I say they are,' he bites out.
What, all of them? she thinks mockingly. He imagines the Capitol runs to his rules, her boy. But he's not in government yet.
'We just have to let people know that I'm a one man kind of gal,' she says, taking his hand and kissing the back of it. 'Do you have a family crest or something? You could sew it into my clothes,' she says, half-joking.
But evidently, she is a poor girl with a poor imagination, for a week later, after telling her about several conversations he has had, firm assurances he has been given, Coriolanus presents her with a weighty necklace, a golden pendant, of his family crest.
He's not even bashful about it, she thinks, about branding her with a collar of gold.
His eyes glitter when she puts it on. She shivers at his possessive gaze but not at the gold because it's been warmed, by his pocket or the clutch of his fist on the walk here, she imagines.
'Do you think it's obvious enough?' she asks, half a joke again. 'Should I mention it in an interview?'
'You can if you like,' he says. 'But don't do it in a gauche way.'
'In a gauche way?' she repeats. Says the man who has branded his girl.
'Why are you acting strangely? Don't you like it?'
'I do, it's...Why, it's finer than anything I thought I might wear,' she says, making her eyes wide and innocent, thankful. She was about to say anything I might own, but she doesn't own it. He owns it like he owns her.
'Well, if it's not to your exact tastes or it clashes with your outfits or something, I'm sorry, but it'll do the job.' He's cross, uncertain at her response.
She's not doing a good enough job at acting thankful, pleased. Have her performance skills abandoned her after being given the largest, shiniest coin yet?
He runs a finger down the chain and rests his palm over the pendant, over her heart which races. He studies her. He's always studying her, and right now she hates it.
'I love it,' she says softly, placing her own hand on his chest, over his fine suit, over the muscle which waits beneath. He's stronger than he was when she first met him, broader, older, even though it's only been a few weeks. 'Truly. I'll be reminded of you when I wear it, I'll think of you whenever we're apart.'
'I hope so,' he says.
That night, when she's stripping off her clothes, she isn't surprised when he tells her to leave it on as he sits on his bed, watching her hungrily.
She takes a seat in his lap, rides him hard into the mattress. She holds his wrists and pushes them down too, or tries to, before he frees himself with an easy twist of both.
His eyes look knowing, his smile is cocksure.
She hates him and how good this is.
He knots the fingers of one hand in the chain and uses it to keep her close enough to kiss, to tug her down and down. 'It chafes sometimes, doesn't it?' he murmurs, 'knowing that you're mine.' She doesn't dignify him with an answer but bites his lip instead, making him laugh, making him call her a wild thing.
He keeps her close with the necklace while the thumb of his other hand works between her legs. Caught between the two hands, trapped in place, she comes and she comes.
'Will you get a ring with this crest, for your wife?' she asks him a few nights later.
They're lying in bed getting their breath back. She brought him off with her mouth earlier, something which he never asks for but, when she offers it, makes him go crazy and come quicker than just about anything. He rewarded her for her generosity by using his hands on her. Three of his strong fingers inside of her, the other hand holding her hips down so she couldn't buck him off.
'My wife?' he repeats, sounding lost.
He's tired from their sport, and tired from his first days at the University but he can't be so tired as to forget his future duty, surely. Every great family needs to spawn the next great generation. Every great man needs an heir.
She's curious though who he might have in mind, and how long she'll have of him being just hers.
'I'm far too young to think of wives,' he says after a long silence, and tugs her closer.
He strokes her hair distractedly, thinking.
**
She's a funny thing, his girl, talking of wives. He's so young yet, they both are.
He can't begin to imagine finding someone he'd like to spend the rest of his life with, someone he wants to have children with.
It would have to be someone special, someone perfect. He would probably need to help make them perfect, he thinks. Help them suit him better. Prepare them for the role.
Lucy Gray makes a sleepy sigh in his arms. He missed her today when he was at his classes. When he came home she played him a song she'd never played for him before, on the piano which she's been getting lessons for.
It was beautiful, one of those beautiful sad songs she loves to sing. He can't remember the words, but he can remember the feeling, he can remember the way her eyes shone when she looked at him, and the way she trembled when he came to her and kissed her neck.
Her body can't hide how she feels, his girl. Sometimes...sometimes he isn't sure what she's thinking, what's true or what's not, but he has time to learn. Time to learn her tricks and her tells.
He won't get married until he has power, true power, he thinks on the brink of sleep. Until no one can tell him who he can and who he cannot marry.