they all run together and never make sense { lex+willow | jb

When she enters the justice building for the fourth year in a row — well, fifth, she supposes — Lex Lionel has to work to remind herself that this isn't about her. Visiting this year's tribute who's following her into the arena — that's just something that she does now. For the first few minutes this entire morning, it's a chance to focus on something peripheral rather than try to untangle the weird snarl of feelings that she's successfully been burying beneath her bark for the last days, weeks, months.

These visits, on the other hand, have grown so standard that Lex ought to just make cards or something. It would save a lot of time and exasperation, the way she finds herself repeating the same things over and over and over again, year after year, reaping after reaping. Idiot after idiot. She could get them printed on some nice stock, "That was the dumbest thing you ever did." printed on the front, and on the back: "Make better choices in the future." Turn them over and over and over so maybe the ideas stick somewhere before it's too late, even though both parties already know that it is.

In the hallway outside the holding room, she pauses for a moment, trying to relax the glower off of her face. She's spent the whole morning frowning and fixated already, old wounds — on her arms, on her leg, on her ego — twinging and twisted up with the newer, knottier hurts that are hard enough to name, much less process. Feelings are harder on reaping day, when everything becomes unburied all at once, when she has little choice but to stand still and relive all the things she swears don't bother her. She can repress the aggravation and guilt and anger and confusion on their own, but add on the other aches of reaping day and it's impossible to ignore any of it. Not the indignation. Not the shame. Not that lingering hurt that reopens every time someone spies a stranger on the stage and decides she's worth sparing from the knock-down, drag-out deathfest. Not that creeping worthlessness that resurfaces each year when she's reminded that the life of Jennifer Rose! or Jenny Sycamore! or Lenox La Chance! has more value than Lexandriy Lionel's.

She inhales; she exhales. It's less meditative than sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Games Museum, trying to teach herself how to apologize, saying nothing instead of saying sorry. It's better than nothing.

When Lex enters the holding room, she is tired — not indignant, not incredulous — when she opens with the frank query that she supposes she'll be asking someone every year for the rest of her life: "So, what — did you think you were being brave?" The question is rhetorical and the answer doesn't matter anyway. Intention doesn't change anything. "That was a stupid thing you just did. Remember that. And before you get defensive —" Lex pinches the bridge of her nose, as though both of them have had this talk over and over. Lex has. It still feels fair, this exasperation. Whether or not Willow Oak was the girl in this room, don't sign up to get brutally hacked to pieces ought to go without saying. "— I don't have any stake in sugarcoating it for you, and when I leave this room it doesn't matter if I still think you're a dumbass."

If leaves space for an uncertainty that doesn't exist — Lex will absolutely still think this girl is an idiot for the rest of her life. She's stubborn that way. (— Why do you have to be so bullheaded?!) For better or for worse.

"You might get Capitolites fawning over you for it but you're a story to them, not a person. So don't let their adoration convince you that you're doing the right thing — they don't care. And Mom's too nice to call you stupid to your face, but I'm not." Lex grins, not unkindly, as though coming here to tell Willow Oak that she's an idiot is nothing more than a shared joke between them. As though they're not strangers.

And maybe they're not. Lex has sat where Willow sits, and though it might've been a decade ago, once upon a reaping Willow must've stood where Lex now leans into the doorframe. They know each other at least in that way, which means that the noble dumbass in front of her knows Lex Lionel better than most. Manufactured tragedy makes acquaintances of all its victims, willing or unwilling. "So just... take it from me: leave that self-sacrificing hero shit out of the arena. It won't get you anywhere except dead."