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FORBIDDEN COLOURS | PART 1

Coriolanus Snow is nineteen when the Games end—and this time, he doesn’t win. There’s no scholarship. No ascent. Just a quiet fall from grace, sealed with official silence. Stripped of status, future, and name, he’s left to navigate the Capitol from its forgotten corners where heat is rationed, water runs brown, and no one remembers how to say “Snow” with respect. He’s a cautionary tale now. A boy who bet on the wrong tribute. Who learned too late that charm doesn't count without power to back it. Then he meets her.

POV Coriolanus Snow x Original Female Character | Rating: M | AU: CS loses the 10th HG

🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶🔶

"In Heaven and on Earth / There will be no winners / As we all are saints / And we are all sad sinners” Brainstorm - Thunder Without Rain

"Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird

"I don’t want much —/just you, and green/And for my heart to feel at peace" Władysław Broniewski - Zielony wiersz

"I'll go walking in circles / While doubting the very ground beneath me / Trying to show unquestioning faith in everything / Here am I, a lifetime away from you / The blood of Christ, or a change of heart / My love wears forbidden colours / My life believes" David Sylvian - Forbidden Colours

The water won’t boil.

I sit, stiff-backed and cold, in the brittle, unwelcoming silence of what might—charitably—be called a kitchen. Though even that feels too generous. Kitchen implies some measure of utility, some sliver of intention or design, some whisper of warmth or comfort. This room has none of those things. It is a carcass of a space, windowless, joyless, discolored by time and abandonment. The stovetop before me is rusted along the edges, the once-glossy black enamel chipped and blistered away to reveal a jaundiced layer of metal beneath, sickly and orange, like necrotic flesh exposed under a rotting scab. The single coil that still clings to life glows red for a moment—an embarrassed flicker, a blush of effort—before dimming again, as though ashamed of its own insufficiency.

It has gone out twice already. I twist the dial harder than I should, knowing full well it’s a gesture rooted in desperation and futility, but unable to help myself. As if brute force or sheer willpower might conjure heat from wires long corroded and circuits worn thin by a decade of neglect. The coil emits a faint hum, petulant, almost mocking, and then nothing.

The pot I’ve balanced atop it is a battered tin relic, thin and lopsided, scavenged three weeks ago from a street market that smelled of rot and burnt oil. I’d traded a garment for it, one I hadn’t intended to part with, though I refuse to admit which. The pot trembles faintly with the suggestion of steam, a cruel sort of near-success, but it will not boil. It merely shudders. Like me.

I stare at it until my vision blurs, as if prolonged scrutiny might compel it to confess. As if I could shame it into performance. But the water, like the city, like the world, remains obstinately unchanged by the force of my gaze.

The apartment is cold.

Not Capitol-cold, that delicate, artificial chill cultivated for effect, where the word “cold” describes the pleasing bite of marble underfoot or the whisper of air-conditioned luxury piped in through walls upholstered in velvet and soundproofing and entitlement. That kind of cold is expensive. It has been designed. This is not that. This cold is feral. It sinks its teeth into your skin and holds. It lives in the spaces between your fingers, coils around your spine, nests in your clothes. It turns your breath brittle and makes the silverware clatter in the drawers like teeth chattering in a skull. It’s the kind of cold that humbles. That insults. That makes you wonder, not for the first time, if you’ve miscalculated something important.

I flex my hands. The knuckles ache. The joints are stiff. I tell myself it’s the temperature and not what it represents.

I haven’t spoken aloud in hours.

The realization arrives quietly, like most things do these days, somewhere between one half-thought and the next, distant, but not unimportant. It occurs to me, with a flicker of clinical detachment, that my voice might be changing without my consent: fraying at the edges, acquiring the raw, unpracticed husk of disuse. There are moments when I catch myself mouthing phrases in the mirror—commonplace pleasantries, lines from speeches I once delivered without hesitation—just to assure myself that the architecture of my vowels remains intact, that my cadence still belongs to a Capitol son, even if my surroundings now suggest otherwise. I do not live as I once did. But I must still sound like I do. That distinction feels vital. It may be all that remains.

The flat—if it can be called that with any sincerity—is a two-room shell, skeletal and sunken, tucked inside a worker’s block that once served as housing for technicians, custodians, and other low-level laborers whose unremarked sweat sustained the illusion of Capitol perfection while the rest of us stood on stages and congratulated ourselves. The building is older than my mother would’ve tolerated, a relic of some bygone phase of functionality, left to rust in the shadow of its own irrelevance. It squats at the base of the mountain, precisely halfway between the foot of power and the gutter of defeat, close enough that I can still see the better streets from the corner of my single window, but far enough that I will never walk them again. Not without invitation. Not without spectacle.

The walls are the color of rot, flesh-like, uncertain, tinged with a dampness that never fully dries. In places, the wallpaper has surrendered entirely, curling back in long, yellowed strips like old tongues caught mid-sentence. The window—there is only one—is cracked at the corner, the glass veined like a sickle moon, and its frame has bowed inward from years of unchecked water damage. Tigris, practical as ever, stuffed the gaps with fabric rolls months ago, hand-sewn tubes of salvaged wool and discarded linings, remnants of coats deemed too damaged to repurpose. Still, the wind comes through. Always. It insinuates itself like a thief. Like a memory. Like a voice I once trusted.

There is a stain on the far wall. Someone, at some point, made a half-hearted attempt to paint over what I can only assume was blood. The effort was poor. The color beneath bleeds through the thin coat of beige like regret beneath a powdered face. I didn’t ask who it belonged to. I’ve learned not to ask questions I’m not prepared to answer myself.

The kitchen—such as it is—shares a wall with the bedroom, though both terms have long since lost their meaning. The mattress is older than I am, its center hollowed from decades of anonymous weight, its springs curled tight as snares. The frame creaks with exaggerated effort each time I shift my position, as if performing for an audience long since gone. I used to find the noise vaguely theatrical. Now it simply irritates. The pipes wheeze at night, long, strangled exhalations that echo through the walls like a dying man gurgling on his own breath. Some nights I lie awake and imagine it’s the building itself, trying to confess its sins to me.

The pot finally begins to hiss with a thin, reluctant sound, more exhalation than boil, like the water is sighing at the indignity of being summoned in such a place. I move slowly, as though any sudden motion might startle the fragile balance and cause the heat to withdraw again. I reach for the tin of powdered broth. It’s a coarse, chalky mixture styled to resemble cheese, though it smells faintly of salt and metal and resignation. I scrape the last of it into the pot. It dissolves slowly, forming pale swirls like smoke in a dirty sky. I stir with the lone surviving spoon from what was once, presumably, a set. Now it lives alone. As so many things do.

There are two slices of bread on the counter, hard as roof tiles, their edges crumbling inward, fissures etched along the surface like the cracked heels of a poorly maintained servant. They sit there, mute and resentful, daring me to pretend they still resemble food.

Not a meal, of course. Never a meal.

But sufficient, at least, to dull the sharper edges of the ache carving a slow, cruel trench into the walls of my stomach. Hunger here is not dramatic. It is not cinematic. It is chronic, low and persistent, like a background noise I can’t shut off. Something structural. Foundational.

I pour the weak broth into a chipped enamel bowl whose original color is now a matter of speculation, and take my seat at the table, which wobbles immediately to the left as if unwilling to shoulder even this minimal obligation. The chair beneath me groans with the indignity of use, its joints complaining like an old bureaucrat forced to file papers long after retirement.

There is no holoscreen. No radio. No Grandma’am’s anthem. No string quartet humming softly beneath a polished dinner party. Just the hiss of pipes behind the walls and the faint, omnipresent hum of Capitol traffic far above. It’s the sound vehicles I will never ride again, streets I will not walk without eyes trailing after me like scavengers behind a wounded rat. They do not stop me. They do not speak. They merely glance. Then look again. Then whisper.

That’s Snow, they say. The one who lost.

They don’t say failed. That would suggest a process. A system. A scale upon which the weight of merit was measured and found lacking. No—lost is the word they use. And they are not incorrect. I lost. Everything that mattered. Though I might argue the rules shifted halfway through the game.

I chew the bread slowly, with mechanical deliberation, as though each bite is an act of defiance against my current station. There is no flavor to speak of, just texture, a dry crumble followed by the coarse grind of yesterday’s crust across my teeth. The broth, insultingly thin and vaguely yellow, is hot enough to punish haste, so I sip it with restraint, letting the heat settle in my chest like a memory of warmth rather than warmth itself.

I’ve begun washing my clothing by hand, though the word “begun” implies a kind of agency that feels misplaced. No valet arrives in the morning. No laundry token left in a silver tray. The laundries charge coin now, not loyalty or legacy, and I possess little of either. So I kneel at the basin like a character from a provincial novel, with my sleeves rolled, jaw clenched, scrubbing collars in soap so diluted it might as well be rainwater. The cracked ceramic bowl beside the stove serves as my washing station. My shirts soak there overnight, then I wring them out over the bathtub with a care that feels almost devotional. The water runs gray for several minutes.

Sometimes it’s rust. Sometimes it’s blood. I’ve stopped investigating.

The skin of my hands has changed; lines etched deeper now, the creases of my knuckles darkened from repetition. A laborer’s hands. A laundress’s hands. Survival has etched itself into me in ways the mirror does not always reflect. And yet I persist. It is, after all, the one occupation I’ve never been formally dismissed from, though I’ve come close. Perilously close.

There are mornings—too early for logic, still damp with dreaming—when I wake with the brief and idiotic conviction that I am elsewhere. Back within the polished walls of the Academy, perhaps. Back beneath the scent of waxed marble and ink and ambition. I expect the distant click of leather soles against stone, the gentle creak of leather-bound books, the knowledge that my name still meant something. But then I open my eyes, and the ceiling above me swims into view, stained, sagging, quietly decaying like everything else in this flat, and the truth settles in like a weight across my chest.

I am no longer a capital letter in anyone’s sentence.

I am a footnote in a city that has already turned the page.

And the water—damn it, the water—still refuses to boil properly. Even now.

I sit back in the chair not because there is anywhere better to go, and certainly not because the act holds any intrinsic comfort, but because I require the sensation of something beneath me. Something real. Something inert but dependable, even if its stability is only partial. Even if its presence mocks me with its impermanence. The wood presses unkindly into my spine through the thin, pilled cushion, now more threadbare than padded, the material flattened by years of indifferent use. One leg wobbles, faintly, rhythmically, like a metronome keeping time with my descent. I make no effort to correct it. I remain perfectly still.

To my right, the bowl rests in silence. The broth—what passed for it—has cooled into a grayish film, clinging to the rim with the tenacity of something that knows it will be neither cleaned nor consumed. It taunts me. As though it, too, understands what I’ve lost. The heat has long since abandoned it, just as it has fled my fingers, withdrawn from my chest, escaped through the fissures in this flat’s rotting architecture and vanished into air too stale to hold anything as fragile as warmth. It is a pattern I know too well. Nothing stays. Not heat. Not comfort. Not legacy. Privilege, certainty, power, praise; they all possess the same infuriating tendency to slip through one's grip the moment one believes them secure. They do not linger. They leave.

Across from me, the envelope is gone. Not gone in the sense of vanished or misplaced, no, nothing in this apartment disappears without my full consent, but tucked instead beneath a shallow crust of trash: the waxy peel of something once optimistically referred to as fruit, a crushed foil wrapper bearing the anonymous scent of nutrient paste, and the brittle remains of dignity I once called correspondence. The letter lies on the table, not torn or burned, but unopened, disregarded with a cold, meticulous finality reserved only for those things that dare to provoke sentiment. I discarded it not in anger, but with deliberate disdain, the precise and practiced revulsion of a man too proud to admit he is wounded. I do not permit feelings to dictate action. But I am no longer immune to them.

Its weight still sits in my stomach, a cold, smooth stone I cannot pass.

My hand, long since emptied of purpose, falls to the table with quiet defeat; palm open, fingers curled just slightly inward, as though resting between intention and collapse. They look wrong, thinner than they ought to be, as if some part of me has been quietly receding and I’ve only just noticed the absence. More bone than flesh, more memory than instrument. I flex them slowly, with theatrical deliberation, as though I might still convince myself they belong to someone with control. As though I haven’t already lost the thread of the narrative in which I was the central figure.

Weeks ago—perhaps longer—I began folding the collar of my shirt lower. Not enough to appear slovenly, never that, but just enough to obscure the Academy crest once so carefully embroidered into the lining. I told myself it was practical, a concession to camouflage among the soot-stained uniforms and coarse fabrics of the laboring class. But that was a lie. The truth is duller, more humiliating: I can no longer bear to be seen as him. That boy with the certainty in his step and marble under his boots. That boy who believed proximity to power was the same as possessing it.

I’ve grown accustomed to the way people speak my name now. Not with awe. Not even with hatred, which would at least confirm relevance. No, they speak it like a question. A hesitant, embarrassed whisper. Snow? they murmur. That Snow? And always the same trailing silence, the same shift of the eyes. I didn’t think he was still around.

I am. Still around.

Barely. But enough to notice. Enough to remember what it was like to be above all this.

I shift in the chair with the practiced delicacy of someone accustomed to performing grace under strain, careful not to disturb the fragile equilibrium of the uneven leg beneath me, and fix my gaze on the empty sliver of tabletop where the envelope once lay. My eyes sting, not with tears, which are vulgar in their display and serve no meaningful purpose, but with the steady, hollowing burn of fatigue, of sustained hunger, of a quiet but unyielding ache lodged somewhere beneath my ribcage, wedged precisely between pride and need. It is not grief. I refuse that. It is something more disciplined. Something quieter. A state of erosion.

I am nineteen years old—an age that once promised promise itself—and I am no longer a student, no longer a mentor, no longer a name called at ceremonies or printed in programs or murmured in corners with admiration or fear. I am not an heir, though I still carry the name as if it retains weight. I am not a leader, though I was trained to become one. I am not even a curiosity. I am a boy sitting alone in a crumbling tenement, surrounded by decay that offends every aesthetic instinct I was raised to worship, staring at a wall whose paper peels like old skin, beside a bowl of broth that has long since ceased to steam, its heat—like everything else—evaporated beyond retrieval.

My thumb hovers, then presses. Peels.

The sound is louder than it should be, sharp, fibrous and final. The whisper of paper splitting open like a throat too dry to scream. I unfold the letter with clinical precision, the movements slow, almost worshipful in their restraint. My eyes scan the document, trained as they are to sift through language for meaning, intent, loophole. The header is printed in that stifling bureaucratic serif; designed to imply authority without elegance. The body of the text unfurls beneath it in dense, officious language, each line written to imply procedure, but none written to admit cruelty.

To Mr. Coriolanus Snow,

In light of your conduct and outcome during the 10th Annual Hunger Games, and following internal review by the University Placement Board, your application for the Capitol Leadership Initiative has been formally revoked. All previous credits earned through non-traditional field study at the Academy are hereby expunged.

Your application to re-enroll may be reconsidered after a waiting period of no less than three years, and only upon submission of a revised personal ethics statement and a letter of recommendation from a standing Academy official in good trust.

Please note that reinstatement is also contingent upon full financial sponsorship or proof of independent funds sufficient to cover tuition and housing for the duration of the program.

The Capitol expects more.

– Placement Board Office, University of Panem

I read it once, then again, the words imprinting themselves into the marrow of my mind, each repetition more surgical than the last. Then I fold the letter back along its creases—neatly, of course—and place it where I can’t see it.

The Capitol expects more.

More of what, precisely? More obedience? More brilliance? More charm dressed as conviction, more cruelty trimmed in silk? More carefully rationed ethics, decanted and served like ideology at a Chancellor’s dinner table?

I gave them everything.

I gave them Lucy Gray.

The name slithers unbidden into my consciousness, unwelcome and familiar, dragging behind it the scent of pine needles and rebellion, and the sound of her voice threading through the bars, echoing in the pit, in the dark, in my head. “You're not free until the Capitol says you're free.” She had said that to me once, or perhaps I dreamed it, in that sickening liminal space between strategy and sentiment, where I could no longer tell whether I was leading her or being led.

Lucy Gray Baird.

Not just a tribute. Not just an assignment. Something else. Danger. A mirror I didn’t know was a mirror until I saw the cracks.

There had been a moment in the arena, brief, veiled in shadow, when I believed myself not a mentor but a god. When she looked up at me from the dust and the dirt and the blood, and I believed she owed me survival. Believed she belonged to me, because I had bent the system, because I had played the game, because I had turned the rules to ash and to make her victory a monument to my own ingenuity. But the truth was simpler, more brutal.

She could’ve survived in spite of me.

And when she was gone, when the cannon fired and her body was left sprawled in the dirt like a broken lyric, blood darkening the same ground she could have danced across with theatrical grace and maddening unpredictability under different circumstances, I stood there, above it all, watching the screens flicker, and realized there would be no redemption. No clever pivot. No miraculous victory to salvage the narrative I had so carefully constructed from threads of desperation and pride. She died in the arena. On my watch. Under my guidance. In a system I thought I could outwit. And with her went the last of my illusions. Her death was not noble. It was not necessary. It was useless.

The Games ended, and I did not win. She did not win. And for that, the Capitol decided we had both failed.

I gave them myself. My name, my future, my supposed potential. I gave them every calculation, every quiet cruelty disguised as strategy, every compromise dressed in Capitol white.

And now, even that is insufficient.

I press the heel of my palm into the hollow of my eye socket until I see stars, those scattered, illogical bursts of color that pulse behind the darkness, sharp and temporary. I press harder, until the pain overtakes the other sensations clawing their way to the surface: the shame, the failure, the persistent hum of not-enough. Pain, at least, has edges. It can be circumscribed. Measured. Contained. It reminds me, in a blunt and primitive way, that I am still a body, still here, still capable of enduring, even if the days of succeeding have dissolved behind me like ink left too long in water.

By the sink, stained, slanted, perpetually damp, there is a bar of soap carved lengthwise into two smaller portions, a quiet economy I committed weeks ago in anticipation of lack. I wrapped the unused half in cloth and placed it in the cupboard like a relic, as though preservation might grant it sanctity. The water that trickles from the rust-bitten pipes runs brown for the first several seconds, metallic and lukewarm, and smells faintly of neglect. It must be boiled before drinking; if it boils, when it boils, which is never guaranteed. There is no certainty here, not even in the elements.

I’ve long since stopped counting the days since the Games ended. There was a time when I marked them on the inner flap of a discarded envelope, a faint hatch for each sunrise endured, but I misplaced the envelope, or discarded it in a moment of irritation, and now they bleed into each other, indistinct and interchangeable, grey and narrow and stretched thin by repetition. The calendar has lost its scaffolding. There are no holidays to distinguish time, no rehearsals, no Academy recitals, no official events to anchor the hours to meaning. Nothing to wear a new jacket for. Nothing to prepare an argument or a smile or a victory for.

There is no one to notice if I rise at noon or not at all. No one to comment on my absence, and more importantly, no one to expect my presence. I am neither missed nor summoned. I persist by default.

The air inside the flat has its own stale texture, a taste faintly metallic, as if rust hangs in the very molecules. The scent of old water mingles with something harder to name, it is wilted pride, or perhaps ambition that has curdled in the corners. There is dust in the seams between floorboards that no amount of sweeping can fully dislodge. The smell of it settles into the fabric of my clothes and the lining of my throat.

I lower my head and rest my cheek against the edge of the table, rough, unpolished wood that once aspired to varnish and never reached it, and stare sideways at the wall opposite. The wallpaper there was once patterned with pale blooms, forget-me-nots, perhaps, or some similarly delicate motif meant to conjure the idea of home. Now it has faded to a grayish smear, the flowers reduced to blurred stains that resemble blood rubbed into ash. The pattern no longer repeats. It just exists—mute, smudged, and slowly peeling.

I breathe in through my nose, deliberately, as though oxygen is something I can control, and hold it for a moment, let it stretch my ribs, let it remind me of the body I still occupy. Then I let it out, slow and quiet, like something being returned that was never mine to keep.

There is nothing else to do.

I told her to run.

Not as a lover speaks in desperation, but as a strategist does in the final, terminal move of a game already lost. I told her I’d get her out, that I had a plan, that it would work, that the system could still be bent one last time in her favor, as if intention alone had ever been enough to rewrite the rules. She ran. I watched. And now she’s gone, struck down not by rebellion or betrayal, but by the unflinching arithmetic of Capitol justice. One tribute left standing. One cannon blast to mark the end.

There are nights when I see her clearly, even now—Lucy Gray Baird, walking backward into the dark, skirts dragging in the dust, hair catching the last of the arena light like it meant to stay. The song still lingers, just at the edge of memory, sweet and fatal. That voice was a weapon, though I didn’t understand it in time. A melody sharp enough to carve her name into the bones of anyone who heard it. Including me.

I should have been the victor.

The Snow-crowned prodigy. The boy genius who survived the scandal with unflinching charm and a portfolio of calibrated ambition. The one who outwitted his legacy, who walked back into the Academy, not disgraced but applauded, with blood still drying on his hands and a medal resting cold against his chest. A redemption arc perfectly cut for broadcast. They should have written my name in the program. They should have rebuilt the narrative around me. It would’ve been clean.

Instead, I am here.

Scraping mold from the crust of hard bread with the tip of a butter knife that has no partner. Folding my shirts beneath a pipe that leaks in slow, persistent droplets that stain the floorboards in a spreading constellation of damp. Pretending, quite literally, that the weak broth I mix from powdered rations is something that deserves the word meal. I am not a victor. I am not even a survivor in the way the Capitol demands. I am a cautionary tale with good diction. A discarded draft of something once promising, now revised out of relevance.

And none of it—not the song in her throat, not the fire in her eyes, not the kiss we shared behind the curtain of night when no cameras could catch us and the world felt, if not ours, then briefly paused—was enough to save her. I had her in my hands. I let go. Or perhaps she slipped through, impossible to hold, even when I believed I was the one doing the holding.

I press the flat of my palm against the edge of the table, hard, until the narrow ridge of wood carves a line into the base of my hand, until bone grinds into grain and the grain presses back. The pain is minor, but it gives the moment contour. It reminds me—briefly, bitterly—that I am still here. Still tethered to flesh. Still real, even if reality no longer bends in my direction.

I do not cry.

Not because the grief has faded. But because there is no one left to witness it. And if there is no audience, there is no performance. And if there is no performance, then what’s the use of tears?

Two knocks, soft but sure, tap against the door, a polite warning rather than a request, and then the handle turns without hesitation. She never waits for permission. She knows I no longer bolt it. She knows there is nothing left here that a thief would covet. She steps through the frame with the quiet certainty of someone returning not to a home, but to a mausoleum, and I feel, absurdly, as if I should have straightened the blanket or set the chair upright or tried to appear more like someone worth visiting.

“Tig?” I call, though I already know it’s her.

“I brought things,” comes her voice from the hallway, level and unhurried, touched with that soft-edged steadiness she used to adopt when we were children and Grandma’am had drifted into another of her wordless fogs. It is the voice of someone holding the world together by carefully not acknowledging how much of it has already collapsed. Measured. Calm. Nothing promised.

She crosses the threshold like she’s entering a tomb.

Tigris has always had a gift for softening the world around her, not through denial, but through arrangement. She tempers ruin by reordering it, making it tolerable, even elegant. She carries her dignity like it’s been basted into the seams of her coat. Today’s is long, dark wool, the hem dampened by snowmelt, the shoulders drawn slightly too broad from repeated alterations. I know she’s had it tailored twice this year, not to flatter her silhouette but to conceal what’s been lost, weight, warmth, the subtle assurance of health. Her boots are clean, always, but scuffed at the toes in a way that speaks of long walks and careful budgeting. Her hair is drawn back into its usual twist, silver strands discreetly powdered to blur the evidence of years that have not been kind. Her lipstick; once a statement, once sharp and red enough to cut, has dulled into nostalgia. A color remembered.

But her eyes—amber, unwavering, endlessly tired—find mine the moment she enters, and hold. They do not flick to the table. They do not scan the bowl or the chair or the envelope now resting, slightly curled, at the lip of the wastebin. She sees it all, I know she does, but she makes no inventory of my failures. She simply moves toward the counter and places the parcel down.

“Bread. Two eggs. And a little jam from Marcas’s cousin,” she says, unwrapping the contents with methodical care. “He owed me.”

I do not ask what she traded. I never ask anymore. I’ve learned that silence, in these matters, is a form of protection, for both of us.

“You shouldn’t be out in this cold,” I murmur, my voice attempting evenness and almost achieving it.

She shrugs off her coat with the practiced ease of someone trained to minimize concern. “And you shouldn’t have stopped eating properly. But here we are.”

I attempt a smile, brittle and bloodless. “Don’t worry. I’ve been savoring the Capitol’s finest protein slurry. Exquisite mouthfeel. Hints of iron and defeat.”

“Don’t joke,” she says, and she doesn’t raise her voice—Tigris never does—but something shifts beneath the words. A gravity. A stillness that lands heavier than reprimand.

I look away.

She steps closer and lifts a hand to my face, cupping my chin with fingers that are cool, steady, familiar. She tilts my head toward the light like she’s inspecting damage she already expects to find. Her thumb brushes along the edge of my jaw, pausing at the sharpness there, frowning as if it’s a personal affront.

“You’ve lost more weight,” she says.

“You sound like Grandma'am.”

“She was right more often than anyone gave her credit for,” she replies, and her voice is softer now. Not indulgent—never that—but threaded with memory.

I swallow, thickly. My throat aches, not with emotion, but from disuse.

“I opened the letter,” I say, and the admission feels metallic in my mouth. “They’ve struck me from the program. Everything. Even the field credits.”

She does not gasp. She does not flinch. She merely lets her hand fall back to her side and folds it over the other. The silence she offers is not empty; it is structured. Intentional. It gives me space without giving me pity.

“And what will you do now?” she asks, and the question is sincere, not rhetorical.

“Survive,” I answer, because it is the only word I have left that still sounds like a plan.

She nods once. Her eyes move to the walls, the ceiling, the corners. The flat does not improve under her gaze. Nothing here ever does.

“It’s not so bad,” she lies gently. “Better than some. At least you have a view.”

I follow her glance toward the grimy window and the scaffold beyond; rust-bitten steel, half-erected, wrapped in tarpaulin like a wound being sutured against the weather. Beyond it, the sky is the color of damp paper, folded once and left out in the rain.

“A view of what?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

“The fact that the Capitol still builds,” she says, her voice quiet. “Even after it’s torn something down.”

I blink. I study her. “That’s uncharacteristically poetic.”

“Don’t look so surprised.” Her mouth curves, just slightly. “You’re not the only one who can say things that sound like riddles.”

I reach for her arm—thin under the sleeve, but warm—and rest my hand there, lightly, as if anchoring both of us in place.

“Tigris… if things get worse, I want you to go. Stay with your friends or someone else. Someone outside the city center. You don’t need to keep carrying this with me.”

She turns to face me fully, and for a moment the room stills.

And I see it then. Not just the seams in her coat or the way her hands tremble when they think no one is watching, but the exhaustion in her eyes, worn into the very fabric of her gaze. Not the tiredness that a night’s rest might mend, but the deeper kind, the fatigue of someone who once believed in this world, and still pretends to, because pretending is all that’s left.

“Coryo,” she says, soft but steady, each syllable calibrated, each word stitched in calm that barely conceals the fracture beneath, “if I let go of you now, what do I have left?”

I do not answer her. I cannot. There is no reply that would not betray a thing; dignity, desperation, or worse, affection. So I say nothing. I simply reach for her and pull her into my arms, more fiercely than I intend, more urgently than I would ever allow myself to admit. She doesn’t resist. She lets me hold on, and I do. Longer than I mean to. Longer than I should.

She doesn’t cry.

But her hands press into my back with a steadiness that feels memorized, like she’s mapping the shape of me, committing it to some internal archive, in case one day there is no one left to remember. When she steps away, she doesn’t speak again. She only gathers her coat, smooths her collar, and exits without ceremony. The door clicks shut behind her like a sentence ending.

The air doesn’t change.

But the absence does.

The apartment feels colder, not from any shift in temperature, but from the vacuum she leaves behind, the sudden reappearance of echo and space. Her presence, ephemeral as it was, had filled the corners with warmth-by-proxy. Now that she’s gone, the silence returns in full.

I begin to pack.

It doesn’t take long. Two boxes. That’s all it takes now to account for me. The first contains my Academy notebooks; still immaculate, still meticulously labeled, filled with diagrams, political theory, moral calculus. Pages I once believed would open every door. They smell of starch and roses and soap, a ghost of order clinging to the edges. A single pressed shirt folded over top, its collar crisp but discolored. The second box holds what passes for sentiment: two photographs, both worn to the edge of clarity. One of my parents on their wedding day, silver-trimmed, frozen in time with expressions of such serene confidence it feels almost perverse. The other is older still. It’s of Tigris, barely more than a girl herself, holding me on the balcony one summer after the war. The sky was blue that day. We were smiling. I’ve kept the image for proof.

No furniture. No heirlooms. No tokens to pass down. Just me—reduced to paper, fabric, and memory.

I step carefully over the warped tiles of the stairwell, balancing the boxes with one arm. The plaster smells of mold and old smoke, as if the building is exhaling its own decay. On the third floor, I shoulder into the new flat; unit 3C, the door resisting in its swollen frame before groaning open with a reluctant wheeze.

Inside: four rectangle walls the shade of spoiling parchment, a sink no larger than a coffin lid, two chairs in various stages of collapse—one missing a leg entirely. A cot in the corner, bowed at the center. A single window, so layered with grime it gives the illusion of stone. It is, technically, an upgrade. The rent is marginally lower. The building marginally quieter. I suppose that counts as progress.

I don’t unpack.

I set the boxes down near the cot, unopened, undisturbed. Then I cross to the window and pull back the curtain with two fingers, careful not to snap the threadbare fabric. Outside, the Capitol sags into dusk—its once-proud rooftops now dulled by ash and weather, the monuments of Victory Heights gleaming gold in the distance, untouched by time or consequence. They rise against the horizon like relics from a dream I am no longer permitted to enter. Their windows catch the dying light. They do not look back.

A knock startles me.

I open the door.

A boy stands on the landing—thin, narrow-shouldered, twelve perhaps, though hunger and hardship have likely sanded a year or two off that estimate. His coat doesn’t fit. It hangs on him like he borrowed it from a version of himself that never grew. His face is smudged with soot or streetdust or both, and a rag is tied tightly around one hand like a makeshift bandage, proud and defiant. His hair is a mess of black curls. His eyes are sharp.

“You Snow?” he asks, tone neutral, but not unsure.

I stiffen. “Who’s asking?”

He shrugs with exaggerated indifference. “No one. Just… people said there was a new one. From the higher tiers. Said you used to live near the Circle.”

I say nothing. The pause speaks for me.

He lifts his chin. “You want the tip or not?”

“…What tip?”

He jerks a thumb behind him, toward the shadowed end of the corridor. “Back bathroom? Don’t drink from the tap. Pipes are rusted through. Mrs. Kave didn’t listen. Threw up three nights in a row.”

I nod once, slow. “Thanks.”

He starts to turn, then stops, glancing back over his shoulder.

“You ain’t gonna last long if you act like you’re still up there.”

“I’m not acting.”

He looks down, then gestures with his chin.

“So why you still wearin’ the shoes of someone who is?”

I follow his gaze.

The shoes. Polished black leather, once regulation Academy issue, now split at the seams, their shine incongruous against the scuffed linoleum. They do not belong here. They say too much. They reveal everything I still wish to pretend I’ve shed.

He smirks—this boy, half-grown and already wrapped in cynicism it takes years to learn, wearing survival like a badge that no one dares question.

“You’ll learn,” he says.

Then he disappears down the stairs without waiting for a response.

I close the door behind him, slowly. The latch clicks into place like a punctuation mark.

I stare at the shoes for a long time.

Then I kneel, and with hands steadier than expected, I unbuckle them. I set them beside the wall carefully, quietly, almost shyly. Not discarded, but placed. As though laying them to rest.

I reach for the mismatched boots buried beneath the shirts in the box. The leather is cracked. The soles worn uneven. The left one pinches at the arch. But they do not gleam. They do not speak.

They fit.

And more importantly—they belong here. With me.

#the ballad of songbirds and snakes #fic recs

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