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mysticstormflyete · 1 month

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Donnie gets a fun little makeover in preparation for the pre-game festivities! :)

tag list time! if you’d like to be added or removed just let me know.

@boots-with-the-fur-club

@theonlybrightowl

@dandywonderous

@dandylovesturtles

@elijah-doodle

@fredquinn

@sady-is-secretly-an-alchemist

@heckitall

@beannary

@brightandfullofglory

@purplepixel

@pomelined

@imagionationstation

@daughterofskylark

@eb177

In the morning, as he suspected would happen, Kendra complains of a headache and refuses to get out of bed. The yelling match between her and Atomo probably isn’t helping her hangover any. Donnie hides his darkly amused smile behind his drink and pretends not to notice the suspicious look his papa gives him. By the time Atomo manages to force them out the door and into the car that will take them to the Remake Center, the District Nine tributes have already arrived in the Capitol and beaten them there. She seems especially upset by that fact, lamenting how little time they have to get her tributes “looking presentable.” Donnie resents the implications.

As the car deposits them in front of a massive pair of glass doors, there’s a flurry of activity from inside. A whirlwind of color and patterns and textures descend upon them, a number of voices all chattering over one another, hands grabbing at him, poking and prodding and pulling, faces too close to his own. He snarls, teeth bared, and it’s only papa’s hand on his shoulder that holds him back from biting when fingers or faces get too close to his. The warm, solid, familiar grip is as comforting as it is infuriating.

“Oohhh, he looks just like those old videos of you!” one of the women says, her brown eyes bright as she looks between Donnie and Yoshi. She takes a step back, clapping and bouncing on her toes. Kendra is gone, already whisked away by her team.

“So I’ve heard,” Donnie and his papa say at the same time, and the woman squeals and laughs like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

“Oh, this is just perfect!” she says, smiling brightly as she turns to lead them into the building. Her team of lackeys follows, herding Donnie and Yoshi along with them. Donnie frowns, and his papa gives his shoulder another little squeeze. When Donnie turns to face him, he sees the wide smile that has been painted in place. Ah, of course. Time to put on a show.

He takes a breath, then lets his own smile grow across his features. It’s not practiced like Yoshi’s is, or sweet and shy like Raph’s had been. He doesn’t have the natural ease of Leo or Mikey. Instead, when he forces his lips to curl, he knows it will look manic. That’s fine, too. It’s the smile he wore during the Reaping, so it’s what people will be expecting. It all works out one way or another.

Papa huffs out a laugh, quickly covering the sound with a soft cough. He gives Donnie’s shoulder a companionable little jostle, nodding his head ever so slightly to let him know he’s doing good. That little nod makes something warm unfurl itself in Donnie’s chest, though he does his best to ignore it. He’s already ruining the stoic persona he’s been fostering at home with this stupid manic grin; he doesn’t need to ruin it further by letting his smile become real just because his father approves of his choice of Capitol masking.

“Here!” the head stylist announces, throwing back a curtain to reveal what looks like a medical cot. Donnie eyes it dubiously, then looks back towards the stylist. She is grinning expectantly, hands clasped together as her eyes dart between Donnie, Yoshi, and the cot.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope! Put on your robe and hop on up!”

Donnie grumbles but strides forward without further argument and lays a hand on the crisp white cover. It crinkles like paper. He shoots a dark look back towards the stylist and her hovering team, mouth already opening to protest, but his papa shakes his head. Donnie’s mouth snaps shut, though his glower only darkens.

“Fine,” he snaps, and sullenly waits for the curtain to be shut before he changes into the blue robe. It’s silky, which is nice, but it does nothing to keep away the chill of the room. Goosebumps prickle across his skin as he sits slumped on the edge of the cot, arms and legs crossed crossed. As annoyed as he is, though, he still lets himself admire the robe as he waits for the style team to reappear. It feels pleasant against his sensitive skin, whisper soft against his back and the quickly fading bruises Casandra had left the night before. The blue is too soft to remind him of Leo, but it does make him think of the ocean, which is probably the point. District Four. Seafood. Ha-ha.

For all the insanity of their makeup, clothes, and body modifications, the Capitol isn’t very creative when it comes to dressing the tributes. It’s going to be yet another year of District Four tributes being dressed as fishermen or draped in nets before being paraded around. He’s confident he could pull it off, but he’s not so sure about Kendra. He doesn’t need to be embarrassed by her not looking good in rubber wader boots and slops.

“I’m coming in, so I hope you’re decent!” his stylist calls cheerily from just outside of eyesight. Donnie rolls his eyes but doesn’t protest as she tosses the curtains open, taking a moment to look him up and down curiously before she calls for her team and orders them to get to work.

The next several hours are a whirlwind of commotion and discomfort. The team plucks and shaves and waxes and dyes and laminates and curls and scrubs and moisturizes, and by the end of it all Donnie wants to bury himself beneath the ground and never come up again. It feels like every part of him is aching or stinging, and to add insult to injury, his papa had disappeared just a few minutes into the process to go “check on Kendra” and never came back. Donnie wonders if he got caught by one of the stylists and is being forced to wax his legs, too. It would serve him right.

Worst of all, though, he hates how much he loves the way he feels after all the pampering. His skin has never been softer, his nails never more neatly painted, and the purple balayage looks fabulous. Liking something that the Capitol’s done to him without his input feels like a betrayal of some sort, though, so when the stylists ask him how he likes it he just gives a noncommittal hum and shrugs off their lingering touches.

“Well, maybe this next bit will win you over,” the head stylist says, looking a little crestfallen despite her optimistic words. She leads him to a private room, away from the bustle of the many tributes being made over. It is blessedly quiet within the small room, with no one but the head stylist and him. She’d told the rest of her team to hang back while she showed him her design for the Chariot Ride. It’s still a few hours away, but she seems excited to share her creation. That, at least, Donnie can relate to.

“Go ahead and strip again,” she commands without looking at him, pulling a large garment bag from a hook on the back of the door. She doesn’t leave the room.

“That’s very forward of you,” Donnie drawls after a few seconds pass in her company, leveling a flat stare at her. “I don’t even know your name.”

At that, the woman actually blushes, cheeks going dark beneath the dusting of neon green blush across her cheeks. She has sweated off a fair bit of her makeup throughout the day, and the green of her highlighter and eyeshadow drip down her face like algae down a pier leg. She coughs, but doesn’t make any move to leave him in peace.

“Oh. Things have been so busy today, I didn’t realize—! This is my first time being the head stylist for a team, so I got a bit swept up in all the excitement! I mean, I already feel like I know you, so I just! Forgot you didn’t know me back! Sorry. I’m Sunita.”

“Right,” Donnie says, trying to ignore the little twinge of discomfort he feels at the thought of Capitol Citizens feeling so close to him after having only seen his tv appearance a grand total of one single time. Technically two, if you counted Raph’s Reaping. Which he doesn’t. “Are you going to leave so I can get undressed?”

“Nope! Once you’re released from hair and skin, it’s my responsibility to stay with you every moment until the Chariot Ride so I can properly direct makeup and wardrobe!”

Sunita is still smiling when she shakes her head, feet planted firmly as she clutches the garment bag to her chest. Donnie forces down the groan that is building inside his throat, not wanting to let her know how much he hates this already. Whatever. Raph and papa both got through this indignity, so Donnie is determined that he will, too.

With a tremble in his fingers that is so slight he’s fairly confident the stylist won’t notice, he unties the robe and lets it fall from his shoulders with the whisper of silk against skin. To her credit, Sunita has no reaction at all. She merely strides forward, bag held before her. Donnie frowns, trying to get a peek inside so he can prepare himself if this year’s costume is going to be comprised of anything scratchy or painful, but his stylist doesn't give him the chance.

“I’ve been working on this design for months,” she tells him as she slaps the bag on top of the little cot set up in the center of the room. It sounds heavy. “There’s going to be a lot of glitter and glue involved, so I hope you’re ready for that!”

She unzips the bag, and Donnie leans over her shoulder to get a look at the contents.

The fabric inside is golden, but as he shifts to get a look from a different angle, the color seems to ripple and change, shifting to a deep blood red, then a rich midnight blue. He tilts his head the other way and finds glistening patches of twilight purple and sunrise orange, interspersed with summer grass green. Then, as he straightens, it all shifts back to gold. It reminds him vaguely of the iridescence of june beetles, or the way that schools of fish seem to glisten and change as they swim beneath the water.

“How did you make this?” he asks, fascinated. His brain is already churning with the stimuli and the excitement of something new, wanting to pick it apart and examine every facet of the fabric.

“It’s my own design,” Sunita tells him, practically glowing with pride. “Thousands of different colored threads woven together in such a way that the light reflects differently off of each one at different angles. The basic premise has been done before, of course, but never with this many colors or with such care to the pattern of the transition. It was a pain to figure out the logistics of it, but I got it eventually!”

“Huh. It’s actually…very impressive.” He picks it up carefully, running the material through his hands, squinting and tilting it this way and that to examine every inch of it and admire the changing colors. He can practically feel Sunita’s gaze burning into his skin, but he ignores it in favor of sating his curiosity.

Upon closer inspection, he notes that the swath of fabric is made up of hundreds of individual pieces, each one shaped like a scale. He feels his lips twitch into a sardonic little smile. So the fishing district tributes will be dressed like fish this year after all. Funny. Leo would love it.

At least he won’t be draped in scratchy nets. Or have to wear a seashell bra and loin cloth. He still pities the tributes who’d ended up with that stylist almost ten years back. Even at seven, he’d thought it was the stupidest looking thing he’d ever seen. They’d gone on to die pretty early in the arena, and not even in a cool way, so any time they were mentioned from then on, the announcers always used the same stupid footage of the two of them trying to keep the seashells in place during their chariot ride. Even he’d felt sorry for their families, for having that be their children’s legacies.

Sunita is still chattering away, going on and on about how she became a stylist in the first place, but he’s too busy tuning her out to pay attention to her life story. As he bends forward again to take another look at the fabric that has spilled over the edge of the cot and is tumbling like a waterfall towards the white tiled floor, silence suddenly falls. It takes him a second to realize that Sunita has finally stopped talking. Judging by the gasp he heard around the same time that his ears stopped ringing, he can wager a guess that it’s not because she suddenly realized that her incessant chatter was annoying him.

He glances up at her, seeing her staring at him wide eyed. Not his face, though. Instead, her gaze is focused on his back, and on the intricate metal creation that spans the length of it. Donnie rolls his eyes and straightens up, meeting her shell shocked gaze with a bored expression of his own.

“Problem?” he drones, crossing his arms haughtily over his chest. Sunita’s mouth opens and closes a few times as she tries to find words to voice her thoughts. Finally, she blurts out, “You shouldn’t have that!”

“Oh yeah? Why is that?”

“You-you’re from the Districts! None of you should have technology like that! Not even District Three has access to the materials needed for something that advanced!”

Donnie huffs a sharp, bitter laugh. Then, he turns abruptly so she gets a better look at his back. He hears her choke on her gasp as she takes it in. The keloid scars. The mottled, patchy skin. The metal beast that was fused to his spine, back when he was still too young to remember. The accident that had left swathes of Mikey’s skin a mottled patchwork and left Leo’s face and limbs scarred had also nearly claimed Donnie’s life. His papa’s told him before in hushed whispers that the fire had burned through skin and muscle, straight down to the bone in some areas. They’d all had to have surgery to repair the damaged parts of them, but Donnie’s had been the most extensive.

Papa used to hold the four of them close, kiss each of their heads, and tell them that saving their lives is the only good thing the Capitol ever did. Ironic that it’s tried to take back that gift twice over now. Nothing but a devil coming for its pound of flesh.

“I’m going to have to report this,” Sunita frets, finger in her mouth as she gnaws nervously at a hang nail. Donnie levels her his coldest, most challenging look.

“Feel free to, but it won’t change anything. The Capitol is the reason I have this in the first place. Remove it and you’ll have a dead tribute before the Game even starts.”

Her brow furrows. Blood is welling up along her nail bed. He can almost smell it in the air around them, mixing with the bitter scent of her fear. His mouth waters.

“Why would they give something like that to someone like you?” she asks, wide eyed with disdain. She doesn’t even seem to realize the disrespect of what she’s said. It makes him want to laugh. Want to scream.

Want to slam her head against the wall until she’s just as damaged as he is, and maybe then she’ll see that she’s just as fragile and human as the people from the Districts.

He doesn’t. Instead, he smirks at her and says lowly, “You didn’t know? My brothers and I were all born right here in the Capitol.”

The horror on her face would be funny if it didn’t make him want to spit. Make him want to vomit. He hates her in this moment, and all the ways she sees him and his fellow tributes as nothing more than animals bred to be slaughtered for their entertainment.

“You’re a Capitol citizen?” she gasps, both hands flying to cover her mouth this time. Like the words are too shameful to be spoken into the open air.

“Technically speaking. Yes.”

“But…but how could you be eligible for The Hunger Games?”

“I live in District Four. Obviously.”

“But you were born here! You shouldn’t be—“

“I’ll die before I acknowledge anywhere but my District as my home,” Donnie cuts her off coldly. “And if I’m not deserving of death now, just because you’ve learned where I was born, then none of us deserve to die like this. So either start thinking of all of us as humans, or shut up and help me get dressed.”

She shuts up.

And she helps him get dressed.

Her trembling fingers avoid his back at all costs. He’s glad of it. He hopes she’s disgusted every time she thinks of him until the day she dies. He hopes he’ll haunt her like every tribute she’s worked with before should have already been. He hopes news of his origins spread until it’s all these monsters can think of when they turn their holoscreens on. Maybe then they’ll see that their own children could have just as easily taken the places of the children whose deaths they are gleefully cheering on. He wants to haunt them all.

#yipee !!#rise hunger games au #writing #myst reblogs

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