both feet, deep end { lex + aspen | jb }

Her head's on her shoulders this year. Striding through the halls of District Seven's justice building, there's no need for Lex Lionel to fold her arms across her chest to keep the disquiet caged within her ribs, because this year there's no seed of guilt putting its unsettling roots around her heart.

Last year's reaping — when the name Lenox LaChance was drawn again and no one took the girl's place — had been a referendum on everything Lex thought she knew about how the world worked. Reckoning with it took months.

Demolition is fun, except when Lex is the one who put everything together wrong in the first place. Then it's humbling work. And since being wrong about even the smallest things is viscerally uncomfortable, dismantling and reconstructing a core belief was always going to be a painful process. But each time she sent her ego through the thickness planer, it came out the other side a little more consistent. Working towards square and true, one sixteenth of an inch at a time. It feels better now. She knows what she's working with. She knows what she's doing.

Even the throng of peacekeepers doesn't set her on edge the way it used to. She looks each of the whitecoats in the eyes as she passes, rather than willing her high-vis vest to let her fade into the background.

If indignation has always been her armor, conviction is her sword. Worn at her hip or held out en garde, it's returned some of that teenage bravado that fell away when it seemed like she was out of things to fight — when it seemed like the stakes would never be higher than when they were life and death. It's clear to her now that they always are. It's just a matter of whose. And now that she's done feeling stupid for not seeing that sooner, she can wield it again with both hands.

She enters the holding room deliberately, unconcerned about intruding. Tucking her thumbs into her belt loops and leaning casually into her favorite spot near the door, she studies this year's tribute for a moment, the quizzical expression on Lex's face not unsympathetic, but not kindly either.

She's not here to bear witness to suffering, like it's some kind of pious duty — no point. Who could kid themselves that it's enough to simply know that awful things keep happening, so long as they look the victims in the eye while they're fed into the woodchipper? She doesn't come back here year after year to pay penance for living when the girl she's visiting will not. She doesn't need a reminder that the Hunger Games are bad. She's got the permanent one on her face. Symbolism doesn't get more ham-fisted than that — if it were someone's idea of fucked-up fiction instead of her life she'd roll her eyes at it.

One glance at Lex Lionel is usually enough to dispel the notion that she'd be a good shoulder to cry on, but from the look of this year's tribute, she gets the sense that Aspen Peake would find that sort of feelings-fest as unpleasant as Lex would.

Maybe she's projecting again, but there's just something so recognizable about her... posture? expression? movement? beat-up combat boots? It's almost uncanny, the way it makes Lex wonder about what it would be like to step through a time machine and pay herself a visit eight years ago, and before she can stop herself, she cracks a messy grin and chuckles at the thought of it.

Laughing in a future murder victim's face might not be considered a socially acceptable introduction to most, but honestly this ranks in the politer half of Lex's justice building visits. It's certainly more civil than insinuating the girl is heartless, or point-blank calling her stupid while taking measurements for her casket. And it's not like she means it badly, anyway.

"Let me guess," she starts, grin still reaching toward her right eye. "People find you intimidating because you've never cared enough about strangers to bother trying to impress them. You hate small talk, but once you get going it's impossible to shut you up." She counts on her fingers, rattling off conjecture after conjecture like reading from a list. "You spend half your time thinking through every conceivable consequence and the other half rushing into trouble without any kind of plan. You're too impatient to wait for things to cool before you touch them and too stubborn to drop something that's burning you. You've spent multiple consecutive days without sleep doing something just because it was that interesting."

Her smirk takes on its classic shithead character as she gets more specific: "In third grade someone once tried to tell you that if you jumped down from the top of this one elm you'd die on impact, and you immediately broke your arm proving him wrong. You've had at least one serious relationship that started out as a fistfight — which you won, of course. Your dad just got done shaking your hand and telling you to come back in one piece, and it was quiet after you told him you'd try while you both thought about how there wasn't anything to say last-minute that would be more heartfelt than seventeen years of demonstrated caring. Even now you're too headstrong to consider the possibility that you could die. And somehow, no matter how much you work on it, your handwriting still sucks."

After reaching ten, she shrugs, then drops her hands and tucks her thumbs back into her beltloops. Grin unwavering, she locks her eyes on Aspen Peake, waiting for a score on the assessment. "How'd I do?"