from one compulsive liar to another {sue/murdoch}

Deep down, he knows everything is broken.

He breathes in

Deeply

Letting the icy air that hung in the training center turn his lungs into the arctic, turn his spine into ice before reaching out and cracking it in half, ice shards made of his past sins. They reflect the face he sees when he looks into the mirror, with eyes too big, with ears dropping to the ground with their lips stretched like bubblegum. 

Toss, turn, the bedsheets he sleeps in plugs his airways, over and over until he's choking on his own false assurances. The clock next to his bed ticked on slowly, screaming at him every hour, a silent taunt into the abyss of his room. And finally, just before the hand pushing on his chest went straight through him, shattering every bone in his chest, he spun his body off the bed, cringing at the sound of the floorboards beneath his feet. 

His body heat leaves warm remembrances in the spots that he sits, pacing back and forth across the room, and the shadows that beckon from the corner are quick to absorb him as he sits down, one giant's leg outstretched while the other tucks itself into his own lies. 

And he's rationalizing with himself, bargaining with his own mind as to whether or not it was time to break, to fall like the trees from Seven. Ha! he'd once cut down thirty in a single day, watched them fall one by one. 

Timber. At some point in the night hanging his head when he paced by the mirror became too much of a burden for even his lumberjack shoulders. But when his eyes went from floorboard to stand to mirror he swears, for a split second his own reflection lunges at him like Orville in the Justice Building, and before he can react the nearest object had propelled itself into the mirror.

Glass showers and reflective hell, the fall with cracks and pings against the desk.

He breathes out

Slowly. 

One breath, two breath, the third claws at his throat, scratching the lining as it comes out.

The sunlight is ripping his eyelids to shreds by the time he crawls back into bed, and one hour later his escort is pounding down his door and his eardrums. 

"Dearest Sue! The bags under your eyes look horrible!" 

And he squints, because her cheeks are tinted the color of the forests of seven in the summer. 

There's parties for them, the death holders. Alcohol and bad decisions, metaphoric masks and lavish dresses. Every Capitolite that kisses his cheeks leaves a lipstick stain, color plucked from the rainbows after a sun shower. 

He eventually escapes, dragging lies down the hallways until he finds a bathroom. Eyes down, head hung low, the entire left wall is nearly a giant mirror. Eyes up, head up, during the midst of his piss he hears another man enter the bathroom.

He doesn't look, but he speaks at him anyways.

"It'll be harder to pee in that arena, kid." 

Hair the color of A Capitolite cheek.

"Especially when you've got Muttations tracking you down, they can smell your pee, like." 

This is Murdoch Fenn. He doesn't know him, and from the looks of last Games, he doesn't want to. 

"Pro tip, pee in a bottle, then throw it in your enemy's eyes, or just outright piss on them." 

Not a bad tip, he guesses. 

He runs one hand under the water before bringing it to his eyes, rubbing off the makeup that his stylist had caked on in order to hide the black holes underneath black holes. 

And then to his cheek, feverishly trying to rub off whatever stain their lips had left on him.

It doesn't work. But he keeps trying.

He avoids his own gaze form the mirror, looking over at the man to his right. He's harmless, he thinks.

"...thanks. And you are?" 

He breathes in

quickly.