making yourself up as you go along

The scruffy television in the corner of Dy's living room gives up the ghost sometime during the long off season, offering not so much as a courteous flicker of static in preparation for the 80th Hunger Games. When Dy complains to Lin the next morning—softly, idly, nothing that a manager or a Peacekeeper could mistake for hostility, only filling the monotonous silence as they both tacitly agree is her role—he asks, voice steady as ever, whether she wants to join his family.

"The Games Square gets overwhelming," he says in response to Dy's open stare, as though that's the kind of thing people admit to one another without rehearsing it in a panic for days.

Maybe it is. How would Dy know?

In the end, as he must have known, it's hardly a choice. Swallowed in the miasma of the day, the awkwardness of meeting Lin's extended family barely registers, and like so much else the Games are best endured with as few people as possible. So that's where Dy is, curled up as small as he can make himself on the floor at the edge of Lin's couch, when the announcers start arguing about pronouns and someone asks "This is about Four?" with their head tilted curiously at the television and Dy—

Dy stands up.

Something comes out of her mouth, noise that the others must register as a coherent excuse. Her feet take her to the kitchen without being asked—so strange, suddenly, that even in tiny fits and starts, borrowing and loaning this and that, he's been here often enough to know where that is. So strange to know which cupboard door to open to choose a chipped cup for a glass of water that she watches herself pour from a distance, thinking he might be afraid if he remembered how. So strange, after all this time, to know someone like that.

He tries to drink the water, only to slosh it across the front of his shirt. She puts it on the counter.

That child is going to die. He would go back to the dark in a heartbeat to change that, would trade nearly every precious thing he can imagine. (Nearly.) But—Ripred, he wants to reach across wires and waves to hold vis shoulders and say did you know you weren't alone? I didn't. He wants to say I'm so proud of you and thank you and, absurdly, never let them tell you who you are, as though bright-eyed, self-assured Wander Sibley needs that advice from a stranger who barely knows her own heart and certainly, in all her days, never trusted it. She wants to say, like he sometimes dreams of saying to Aezril, I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry for this world we made for you.

Stupid. Even before the Reaping, Wander might as well have lived on another planet. But some things, Dy has learned—at his father's deathbed, at his mother's grave, in Lamia's sharp voice, in the fading memory of Aezril's tiny grip—some things can't not hurt.

A knock against the doorframe shoves her back into her body as abruptly as she vacated it. It's only Lin, though, sliding to the other side of the room so quickly that even Dy can't miss that he's clearing the exit. In the time it takes him to get to stop and turn, arms folded casually, Dy thinks of every time he's let her lead the way through a door and wonders hysterically how long it took him to realize that she needs that, and how long it would have taken her to figure it out for herself.

They should go back. They are literally required to go back. But Dy's feet sit like dead weights, and Lin makes no move to rush him, only watching him with the same quiet patience as always until he says, "Is it the Games, or something else?"

She doesn't have the words yet—still—but she doesn't have the energy to pretend he's wrong, either. What comes out at last, after she's exhausted every option but the one that claws at her throat more often than the one she was born with, is, "I have a child."

To his credit, Lin doesn't ask why Dy never brought this up before. Dismay washes across his face, pauses, and slides into outright confusion. He points to her, then vaguely over his shoulder and out of the kitchen, brow furrowed. "You... not—"

Dy realizes abruptly the arithmetic he's trying to wrap his mind around and laughs softly between gasps. (When did she start gasping?) "No, just—just one. And I wasn't that young." Ripred, she can't imagine having twins, let alone watching them walk to that stage together. She hopes their parents are... not alone, at least. "I was—she's nine. I—" Absently he holds his shoulders, elbows pulled so tightly against his chest that it hurts. "I kept her for two weeks." He's shaking, suddenly, maybe has been, and it's selfish to be so worked up when Aezril is another two years safe and Auto Grand and Larceny Theft and Wander Sibley and twenty-one other children are not and their families have jagged, widening wounds that will never heal but some things can't not hurt. "We—it wasn't—safe." Days get long and nights get cold, and there was no one to watch her when Dy needed to work. Of course the money ran out.

Of course she tried.

Out of the initial panic, Lin's expression settles into something soft that Dy doesn't quite know how to name. "Did you name her?"

"Aezril," he whispers, and after nine years it still fits in her breath exactly the way it fits in his heart.

Lin steps closer slowly, hands unfolded but low, as though toward a cornered bird who might fly away at any moment. It surprises Dy, too, when he's wrong. "Do you want a hug?"

Dy opens her mouth to say no, thank you, but nothing comes out. Of their own volition, like her feet knowing where to go, his hands move to press over his mouth; shaking harder, she nods, and keeps nodding until Lin wraps her up, one hand smoothing down an errant lock of hair like a child's. Like a friend's. Like he still doesn't understand, but cares anyway, and like Dy might be able to tell him the rest, someday.

They drop their head onto his shoulder, and they sob.


when I get stuck on writing I try to break the ice by writing other things and this is how I keep producing oneshots when I owe posts and I'm mostly sorry.

this here is deeply self-indulgent writing but listen Dy has been twenty-seven and Sad for eight years and it's time for them to be twenty-eight and A Little Less Sad.

title song is "True Trans Soul Rebel" by Against Me!, and if you don't know Against Me! please listen to that but also please listen to my favorite which hands-down-every-time-even-though-I-suck-at-picking-favorites is "The Ocean."