Signatures [Aya/Clover Blitz]

In recent months, Arbor Halt had made a legitimate effort to improve the state of his head, with considerably more success than his previous attempts to get his life back on track. Something about the realization that he'd somehow managed to live a decade longer (and counting) than anyone had expected him to — coupled with the realization that his friends, his peers, his fellow victors had all managed to adapt to life after the arena substantially better than he had — had given him something that resembled motivation to sort his priorities. So he refused to allow himself to slip into his old headspace, did not allow himself to drink while he was already down, and pushed back against the darkness every time it crept up on him.

This was definitely a positive note for his tributes — the nineteenth and twentieth that he'd be shipping off to death in the next few days — as the last time he'd attempted to give much mentoring, he had told… who was it? Alsomething? Whatever the boy had been called, Arbor had advised him point blank not to make any strides toward victory. Not that the advice "die in there" was particularly hard to follow, of course. Not in the arena, it wasn't.

He strode into the room where his two young charges were already waiting for him, finding a pair of unusual expressions in front of him. The boy, Erik, seemed to be ready to burst with excitement, while the girl — the volunteer, last year's tribute's sister — was behaved more appropriately for a tribute. Neither seemed to be particularly frightened by the prospect of going off to their deaths. Well that's helpful. Isn't as if I can do much for them, anyhow. Better that they're not desperately begging me to 'tell them everything' — whatever that means. The tributes who had already accepted their fates, of course, were far easier to deal with than those who were trying to do everything in their power to undo everything that had happened since their names were drawn from the glass bowls that sat upon the stage with the victor.

He eyed them, not entirely sure what to make of the pair that did not have any apparent fears of death. Certainly, the pair of them — the boy, too reckless; the girl, too delicate — wouldn't make it beyond a day or two, like the majority of District 12's tributes before them. There just wasn't a high life expectancy for the lowest district's representatives. He'd been wrong about tributes in the past, of course: There was the clumsy boy from the year before, who'd managed to outlive Arbor's expectations for him by triple, there had been that redhead with the legs that would make a giraffe envious who'd raised hell up until her inevitable slaughter, and the volunteer from two years before, and, of course, there was the tribute he'd expected to lose after her legs had been seared clean off, and there was the little wisp of a girl who'd spent her hell week astounding everyone.

But, for the most part, the tributes did exactly as Arbor anticipated that they would: poorly. So he wouldn't dwell on that. "It's nice to meet you both," he started, trying desperately to remember how pleasant conversation was supposed to go. The truth was, he hadn't tried to be a decent mentor in so many years that he'd forgotten how it was supposed to work. He furrowed his brow, and defaulted to the one sober, not-entirely-depressing conversational tool he'd upheld in the past decade: humor in questionable taste. "First piece of advice: try the veal stew if you get a chance — with the apricots. It's top-notch." What else was he supposed to say? "Unless you have any questions for me, of course." He disregarded the fact that his attempt at salvaging the interaction didn't even make sense and desperately hoped that the teenagers under his command would take control of the conversation so that he didn't have to.