devil don't sleep a wink — d12 train.

"Two volunteers then?" Nico asks by way of greeting, settling down across the sofa from you as you look up and offer a nod and a subdued smile in greeting. "You I guess I get, Jules," he offers Juliet, a near-aside familiar enough that you wonder whether they know each other, before looking to Angel with, "but what the fuck was that about?"

"Yeah..." the former puts in, looking about as dazed as Angel does. "What... what the fuck happened?"

Well.

If there is one thing you have learned in the Capitol that Twelve never would have taught you—and this is not a favor they have given you; it is a survival tactic you should never have had to teach yourself against every bit of your nature—it's the ability to school your face. Someone here needs to be collected, and it's easy enough to let yourself be that person; as much respect as you have for both Nico and Stella, Nico is not the world's calmest presence and you have either of their lifetime's worth of practice putting on the unruffled, open expression you reach for now.

But the moment you're next alone you will pinch the bridge of your nose through a mumbled conversation with your rock, because really, what the fuck.

It's not like you'd rather Lucas risk his life than Angel; if you're going to bother wishing, you'd rather nobody had to. And Angel wouldn't be the first person to follow a family member into the Arena voluntarily, for one reason or another—vengeance, jealousy, a misplaced sense of honor, grief. But you can't imagine, in some other version of your life, watching Anani die and come home and walking away from him like this. Even at your angriest, even when you screamed at him to leave you again for no reason except that you wanted him to hurt as much as you did, you never thought to leave him yourself.

You don't leave people behind. You can't.

Angel stammers his way to, "I don't... really know. Hellion, maybe?" Maybe, you think, no shit, kid, caught between heartache and faintly hysterical frustration. You wish you knew Hellion as well as you know Carter—wish you knew her at all. Well enough to feel sure that there was someone back in Twelve looking out for her right now. Well enough to know the first thing about Angel.

He laughs, or tries to, and the sound melts no small part of your frustration. However little he thought through volunteering, he's thinking about it now, and he's as nonplussed as anyone else—maybe even more so, unable or unwilling to meet anyone's eyes as he finishes, "I don't know what overcame me."

"Okay," you say as gently as you can without feeling like you're undermining the severity of the situation. It's not okay. None of this ever is. But it is what happened, and the rest of you staring Angel down isn't helping anyone deal with it, least of all him. "Other people are going to ask, but you have a couple hours to think about it. We can talk through that in a bit if you'd like to—" maybe he'll have an easier time discussing it with fewer eyes on him— "or you can take some time yourself, but even if you aren't sure for yourself, it's better if we don't let the Capitol write a narrative for you."

They already are, no doubt—they love a fucking legacy—but Angel has enough to worry about, and you have practice distracting seagulls. It will be, if not fine, manageable.

This is far from your least favorite part of the Games, but it's the one that makes your skin crawl the most—trying to look at these children the way the Capitol does, as objects to market, sound bites instead of people, all the while desperately aware that someone will use anything you say in support of one tribute to tear down another. But at the end of the day supplies are the first and best tools you have to help them once they hit the Arena, and securing those has been harder than ever, the last few years. You'd sell any part of yourself you could to give them a little longer alive, ease a little pain; swallowing revulsion for a few weeks, locking it away next to your expressions and your fury and your pain, is so much less than what you owe them it barely measures.

"I'd tell you similar," you add to Juliet—Jules? "But you made why you're here pretty clear." A Reaping is not a life story, and you know even less about the Monaghans than about the Mos, but it's hard to look at her without seeing echoes of another teenage girl whose gut reaction to her little sister crying out was to put her life on the line for her. It's harder still to smile at her without letting grief older than anyone else in this train car slip through, but you think you manage, if only just. "You and your siblings are lucky to have each other."