Chapter Text
They made Coriolanus stay in the infirmary after Lucy Gray was stepped down to outpatient- not only monitoring him for organ damage and internal bleeding, but also managing the sores that were a side effect of his poisoning. It felt like having a hangnail in his mouth. Strips of skin on the inside of his cheeks peeled off like old wallpaper, and sometimes he had nightmares that a bird had crawled into his mouth to die and he was choking on his feathers. Anything saltier than oatmeal with honey stung.
There was only so much oatmeal with honey that a man could choke down.
Sejanus brought him fresh bread every night, with forehead kisses and promises that he wouldn’t starve, and Lucy Gray had promised to organize a surprise for him. Nevertheless, he was utterly miserable.
But that was no excuse for slacking on his responsibilities and neglecting to establish his future career, especially since he’d coaxed one of the nurses to bring him stationery. He still owed Dr. Gaul an answer on the importance of the Games. In all the chaos of putting his plan into action, it had completely slipped his mind. Well, if nearly being murdered wouldn’t get him an extension on the assignment, nothing would. He took out a few precious sheets of snow-white paper and the most consistent pen. The five-paragraph essay format was where he shone.
Outline, he wrote, ready to dazzle her. He drew a box around the word so it stood out.
Introduction.
Point One:
His pen stopped. It hovered over the paper as he realized that, for the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to say.
Was societal control truly the only reason that people helped one another?
Sejanus had risked his life to protect him without expecting anything in return, and Lucy Gray had gone along with the plan knowing its failure would endanger her as well. She could have played dead while Billy Taupe was smothering him. Made a clean escape. Instead, she’d fought back.
And, now that he was actively trying, he could think of more examples of selflessness- even in the arena, even among the Tributes. Putting Marcus out of his misery. Covering the bodies of the others. Asking if everyone could go home. Then there was Tigris, who’d risked her life again and again to look after him and keep him safe. Who’d go pale with horror and relief when she found out what had happened tonight. Who would have been utterly willing to die in his place.
Coriolanus put down his pen and paper and rested his head in his hands.
I can’t give Dr. Gaul what she wants.
Because I’m not the apprentice she wants. Not anymore.
Maybe the world was an arena. But without forming alliances, how could you win?
Something inside his chest cracked open, and he started to laugh. He doubled over, laughing until it turned into a fit of coughing and his mouth filled with blood.
The metallic taste brought him to his senses, the infirmary machines beeping like a warning. He couldn’t openly defy Dr. Gaul- not if he ever wanted to leave Twelve.
But a five-paragraph essay had never defeated him. If he could stand up in front of his class and give a report on a book he’d only skimmed, he could tell Dr. Gaul what she wanted to hear. He swallowed the blood and uncapped his pen.
Point One, he wrote. The human struggle for survival.
Point Two, how societal control is necessary for trust…
It turned out that Lucy Gray’s surprise was to smuggle him out of the infirmary. Out of District 12. What he needed, she’d explained, was a nice peaceful day where the two of them could look after him. No essay proofreading, no studying for the officers’ exam, just watching the rain fall and eating food cooked over a fire.
“He can’t stay in the infirmary, hooked up to all those machines. How’s he supposed to get better with all that beeping and getting his blood pressure taken every five minutes? Feels like a cage,” Lucy Gray had explained to Sejanus.
Sejanus kept mock-shushing them both whenever they passed near a building, and Lucy Gray had to fight back giggles until they reached the woods. Perhaps he’d exaggerated by claiming he was well enough to go to the cabin without the wheelchair. The walk seemed infinite.
“Here.” Sejanus handed him a fallen branch nearly as tall as Lucy Gray.
“I didn’t say I needed a walking stick.” Was it that obvious he was struggling?
“You didn’t need to,” Lucy Gray told him without turning around.
Still, when they reached the cabin, he collapsed onto the bed with a groan of relief.
Lucy Gray stroked his shoulders, the sort of comforting touch he was embarrassed to enjoy as much as he did. She gave affection like that so freely. “I know. It’s a long walk. Do you think you’ll be all right here if Sejanus and I go forage for something good to eat?”
Sejanus, who’d been poking at the fireplace, stood. “You should stay with him – I think I can manage. I’ve been reading about local plants, and there’s a surprising amount ready to harvest.”
Outside, a summer cloudburst drenched the world. Rain poured down in thick sheets.
Lucy Gray let out a sigh as their bodies connected, limbs winding comfortably around each other. “I feel like this is the first quiet moment we’ve had in ages. No one trying to kill us or spy on us. If we ever do anything like that again, we need to be so much more careful. I mean, you almost died.”
His mouth, raw and bloody, still ached. So did the ring of bruises that surrounded his throat like a noose. “I did die,” he replied without thinking.
Worried confusion filled her big brown eyes.
He struggled to explain: was it something that made any sense put in words, or would he just sound awkward? “My old self, I mean.”
“And here I thought you didn’t understand poetry,” Lucy Gray murmured with a smile. She kissed his forehead before disentangling herself from him. “I should make sure Sejanus didn’t fall into the lake.”
“The whole forest is a lake in this weather.” Being soggy was barely a step up from being cold.
She looked especially pretty in his mother’s shawl. Orange, like the sky at sunset. He’d given it to her to replace the one she’d used as an impromptu bandage. On her way out the door, she paused, frowning.
“What?”
“I’m not made of sugar, but this is too nice to get wet.” She unwound the shawl and threw it to him. “Think you can have the fire going by the time I get back?”
Building fires didn’t come naturally to him, and he wondered if the chill in his bones leeched the heat from the wood. Even conjuring a thread of smoke made his hands ache.
But he wasn’t about to let roasting a few measly swamp potatoes defeat him after all he’d been through.
By the time they returned, he’d built up a decent blaze in the old hearth. He’d also taken off his shirt, put it back on, unbuttoned and rebuttoned it, and settled for leaving the top three buttons undone. This was a seduction, after all. He decided to go with two buttons just as the door opened.
“Oh, good, it’s warm,” Sejanus groaned, hoisting a bundle of some wet root vegetable that looked like a cross between onions and a wild bird’s eggs.
“I think we ought to get out of these wet things- don’t you, Sejanus? Otherwise we’ll catch our death of cold. Good thing our Coryo has made such a nice fire.”
He didn’t know what to say, but Sejanus looked at him. “Would that be all right?”
“Fine with me.” He tried to sound casual, but his heart pounded, his voice uneven.
Rain-soaked and half-dressed, they were both so beautiful it dried his bloody mouth. Sejanus in his boxers, his stocky body softer hairier than Coriolanus had guessed; Lucy Gray in her slip, looking like a wild thing of the woods, with delicate little flowers twined into her hair.
They peeled the swamp potatoes sitting in front of the fire. It radiated warmth even into him, or maybe that was the warmth radiating like evaporating rainwater from bare golden skin. Lucy Gray set them to chopping herbs.
“Parsley!” He stroked the ruffled leaves. “I used to grow this during the war.”
“Tastier than roses,” Lucy Gray teased. When she stretched, it highlighted how short her slip was, how smooth her thighs. “Think you can manage it?”
Even though he wore more clothing than either of them, the way they kept watching him made him feel naked. When he filleted a twig of rosemary their gaze clasped his fingers. The knowledge that they were watching him stroked his shoulders when he leaned over the chopped swamp potatoes to dump them into the pan that hung over the fire.
What had they talked about when they went to gather swamp potatoes in the lake-wet rain? It felt like Ythey were conspiring against them. A pair of predators with mischief in the gorgeous, unreadable depths of their eyes. He craved the moment when they’d strike.
Sejanus draped an arm over his shoulders and regaled him with a story of how he’d fallen into the lake and Lucy Gray had helped him climb out. He didn’t mention- though Coriolanus could see- how the cold water had pebbled his nipples. Lucy Gray stirred the roasting swamp potatoes. The rain’s rhythm drummed on.
“We were thinking,” Sejanus started. He glanced at Lucy Gray, who gave a “go on” encouraging nod. “Could we feed you?”
His mouth watered, and it wasn’t just from the savory smell of the golden-brown potatoes. “Sure,” and, because he couldn’t leave a good thing well enough alone, “Is that something you thought about? I mean, before?”
Sejanus ducked his head with an awkward half-smile. “An embarrassing amount. I’d pass cookies to you at lunch and pretend Ma had baked too many just so I could watch your mouth and think of you eating from my hands.”
Lucy Gray ambushed him, kissing his neck. “Like a pretty baby bird…”
If he had to make the first move, he’d freeze, his shameful inexperience exposed. Lucy Gray made it so easy. Just like in the tribute cage, she gave him a role to play. That role seemed to be “do absolutely nothing” and it made him burn with a full-body blush. He had to remind himself to breathe when Sejanus made a nest of pillows and blankets for him and hand-fed him perfectly crisp bites, Lucy Gray stroking his sensitive bare scalp. By the time the emptiness in his stomach had faded he was desperate for them.
“Do you want something?” Lucy Gray asked, playing at innocence like she didn’t know exactly what he wanted.
He tasted blood. The act of eating had re-opened his sores. “Can you touch me? Both of you?”
“Anything you ask for, sweetheart.” Lucy Gray drew close enough for him to wind his fingers in her now dry, gleaming hair. “And your clothes- do you want those off?”
“I can undress myself,” he attempted, though on some level he didn’t want to preserve even that dignity.
“I know, darling. But it isn’t a hardship. You’re exquisite.” She kissed his shoulder as
What would Sejanus think of him? He was more pretty than handsome, delicate even with the muscle his Peacekeeper training had let him put on.
“You’re… fuck,” Sejanus managed. “Coryo. Even better than I fantasized.” Coriolanus had never seen his breath come out in broken gasps like this, his eyes so dark. “Let me kiss you.”
Coriolanus ran his tongue over his teeth, though he knew attempting to clean them was futile. “I taste like blood.”
“I don’t care how you taste. Can I kiss you?”
He’d barely nodded before Sejanus was upon him, gentle even in his ravenous desperation to touch every part of his body. Murmuring “is this all right” and “do you like this” until he had no choice but to choke out a red-faced “yes.”
Sejanus and Lucy Gray traded off kissing him, snatching his breath away, the sweetest form of suffocation he could ever imagine. He was part of them. Their softness blending into his skin, blending into the driving rain, the hungry fire. Loving them was the only uncomplicated thing he’d ever done.
He needed them. Agony. The helplessness of craving them, the loss of control as if they were roasting him alive instead of stroking his chest and thighs. Lucy Gray clung to him and called him beautiful with a hand buried underneath her petticoats. Her words unraveled into something like a song as Sejanus rutted shamelessly against him, gasping as if he was fighting to breathe.
The old him would never have survived the fatal alliance of Sejanus Plinth and Lucy Gray Baird. When they flayed off the last layer of his clothing, when Sejanus’s large rough hand closed around his cock, it felt as soothing as pressure on a wound. He clung to them both as release spilled out of him, blood-hot, blood-wet, in deep convulsive spasms.
He might have cried.
But Sejanus didn’t say anything about it when he was washing his boneless body clean and calling him exquisite, and Lucy Gray didn’t say anything about it when she offered him a honey stick and he listened to her and Sejanus comparing lullabies. Maybe he hadn’t after all.
Or maybe it was all right if he had.
Billy Taupe’s hanging was the next evening. Arriving in an old-fashioned wheelchair, the uniform making him look even paler, Coriolanus thought he projected the perfect combination of stoic, modest, and deathly ill.
People came up to him and said things like “I’m so glad you’re still alive,” or “a hanging is too good for someone like that.” He kept a straight face as he nodded solemnly.
Sejanus told him he needed to keep his strength up and pressed a packet of nutritional crackers into his hands. He kept glancing towards the gallows. Waiting for the main event.
At last it began. Peacekeepers emerged with a handcuffed Billy Taupe. Everyone parted for them.
“No!” A pale-faced figure in gingham darted from the crowd to stand before the gallows. Mayfair had fought free of her father’s gasp. “Billy wouldn’t have done something like this! He wanted to free us all, he wanted to save us! He was framed- that horrible boy cheated- he rigged the games for Lucy Gray, I know it- it’s all a lie!” she screeched, pointing to Coriolanus.
Coriolanus wanted to shriek with laughter and roll in the grass. Instead, he filled his mouth with a nutritional cracker. He didn’t dare search for Lucy Gray in the crowd in case meeting her eyes made him laugh.
The mayor shrunk in discomfort. He motioned frantically to a few Peacekeepers. They hauled the still-screaming Mayfair away. When she fought back, one of them gave her a tranquilizer shot, and she fell limp.
The Peacekeepers led Billy Taupe onto the gallows.
Sejanus shifted, uncomfortable.
Even though movement made his weak body protest, Coriolanus fought to his feet to take his arm. “Don’t look, Sejanus.”
He shook his head, lost in misery. “I never thought this would happen.”
Coriolanus captured Sejanus’s face and stroked his cheek. “You did the right thing,” he whispered. “Just keep your eyes on me. You saved me. You saved us. Remember that.”
Sejanus rested their foreheads together. His nod was a movement of skin against skin.
The executioner pulled the lever, and the platform dropped.
Ordinarily, the person’s neck would break instantly. A hangman’s fracture. But he’d had bribed the executioner. Billy Taupe had wanted Coriolanus to die slowly, in agony. It satisfied Coriolanus to grant the same fate.
The conspirators’ last breaths turned into strangled gasps before fading away. Through it all, Sejanus held his gaze.
Victory.
The snare pulled taut.
**
Coriolanus went to visit Dean Highbottom on his return to the Capitol.
He didn’t need the wheelchair anymore; instead, he was steady enough on his feet to graduate to a smart-looking walking cane. The dark polished wood complemented the deep red of his jacket, and it was topped with cold silver bearing his . Even his hair had grown out enough to look nearly presentable.
The Dean’s eyes narrowed when he walked in. “Don’t you look well, Mr. Snow.”
At least the Dean could no longer make snide comments about his family’s financial state. Not when he had the Plinth fortune. “How kind of you to say so. The jacket’s new.” Coriolanus draped his hand over his cane in a way that highlighted the twenty-carat mine-cut diamond that that flashed in a setting of white gold on his ring finger. If he tilted his hand just right, he could flash an irritating beam of light into someone’s eyes.
Highbottom turned towards his desk, thwarting Coriolanus’s efforts to blind him. “How fortunate that you received a non-fatal dose of a rare derivative of nightlock, one of the most fatal poisons our scientists have ever developed. And right when there was a medic in the building, too. Yes, how fortunate that you were medically discharged- and that your medic friend and your little songbird were granted clearance to accompany you for your safekeeping on the journey back.”
“How fortunate indeed,” Coriolanus agreed. And, with a placid little smile that he knew would infuriate the Dean to no end: “We plan on having a spring wedding in the rose garden.”
“Your father had that sort of luck, you know. Why, the games were his idea in the first place…”
A vial of morphling was a cold weight in his jacket pocket as the Dean monologued. He’d fantasized about knocking off his old enemy. Making it look like an overdose.
But in the end, he’d decided against it. He’d need a well-positioned ally to take out Dr. Gaul.
Even more than being unable to resist how powerful his command over poison made him feel, he couldn’t resist two pairs of perfect big brown eyes. And when the loves of his life wanted someone dead, killing tasted even better than a home-cooked meal.