6+6 = /eden

He goes back for the book first.

It's a little silly. The first thing he does after running from jail is to sneak back to the house of the family that put him there in the first place. But he's left his only possession under the mattress of the second room on the third floor, and the thought of leaving without it makes him want to throw up.

He can already hear the way Echo will yell at him once she hears about out how easily he backtracks.

It's a decision though. He's getting better at those.

It's late already, he's got maybe twenty minutes before someone notices the body. The manor's quiet and the security's significantly shittier when Eden isn't the one patrolling, he's had two years worth of memorizing the layout, finding blindspots, testing which stairs creak.

It takes him seven minutes to find a bag to keep his book dry and then another two minutes to grab the book itself. Going out the front door is quicker bur riskier. Going out the back means climbing down the trellis, but there's more cover.

Eden's halfway to the back patio door when he passes Eurydice's study and suddenly stops.

It's that decision again. He knows what Eurydice has in there.

The door's locked but Eden just uses a statuette of Malachi Le Roux to bust the handle off and push in the jamb. He can smell the varnish on the wood and the lilies on the desk and the faint traces of Eurydice's perfume when he steps into the room. It's such a different space without it's matriarch in it. Eden remembers standing in this same spot two years ago, a little piece of clay that Eurydice had bought at a discount.

He chose his name here.

Decision number one.

But he's here for the filing cabinet - not the big obvious one, but the smaller one that's tucked under the desk. He knows the key is in the bottom of one of the false drawers the same way he knows that there's a safe behind the fourth painting in the dining room. People do things they normally wouldn't around people who aren't actually people. Eden was more like a particular bland houseplant, standing at Eurydice's elbow as a shadow and nothing more.

The file drawer pops open and Eden has eight minutes left. He holds his wrist to all the lined up folders and compares the numbers until he finds the one that matches. There's lines of text across the manilla that he doesn't recognize, it's in a slanting handwriting that's too different from the printed letters that Isaac tried to show him.

Eden leafs through the papers inside, there's a whole page of numbers at the front, then it goes into the words with the little boxes and a bunch loose sheets where the handwriting's different. It seems surprisingly unorganized for Eurydice, there's a little slip so water damaged that it doesn't even look like there's any writing left on it. Eden wonders if that one's the receipt. He knows there'd been a monetary value attached to him. He knows he was worth less than his sisters.

Maybe Shadowcat knew what was going to happen - maybe she saw the change in Eden before it even happened.

Maybe she wanted to get rid of him before he fell and dragged her down with him. Better Eurydice than her.

There's two little pictures of him inside the file, one from the beginning, when he was barely eight, and it's weird to see a picture of a kid look so much like a mugshot. The other picture is from later, sometime during the year where he'd grown three inches and they'd started putting more ink in his skin.

Harder to run away with all that. The marks made the bodies easier to identify.

Eden can still remember 15. She'd been to young to understand what was happening and had tried to run. She hid out for a week before someone found her, so disfigured that they'd only been able to identify her by the three black lines around her ankle.

Eden tucks the pictures back into the folder labeled 12 and shoves the whole thing into the bag with his paperback.

He doesn't know what he's doing when he flips through the little book beside the phone. He's got three minutes left and he needs at least two of those to get off the property. But the books got numbers, and Eden knows numbers. Some of them are crossed out and there's ones with little letters beside them. Eden stops on the page with all the 9s and stares at it. There's a C on one of the lines. An H on another one.

He knows Avriel is from 9, but he doesn't know which letter would be his.

There's only four options.

Two minutes.

Eden should be leaving. He should already be gone, someone's bound to find him out soon. His grip tightens on the bag but his feet don't move. He just keeps staring at those numbers in the book.

He hasn't heard from Avriel since the tournament in Four. He doesn't know when he's going to be this close to a phone again.

He picks the second number and punches it into the phone before he can change his mind. What would he even do? Just stand there in silence again? It was pure luck that Avriel could even tell it was him on the other end last time. He probably thinks Eden's dead, half the district probably does, Eden needs to tell Avriel that he's okay.

He needs to tell him that he might be about to not be okay. Echo's lighter sits heavy in his pocket.

The phone rings four times and then it stops. Eden's only got one minute left and he's holding the receiver to his ear so tightly that the plastic groans. The other end clicks and Eden takes a breath, the words are right there, he can feel them, he's got Avriel's name stacked up in syllables all neat and formed and then the floor outside in the hallway creaks.

Eden drops the phone before he can fully process it. The receiver hits the desk but he's already across the room and throwing the latch of the office window open.

Ten seconds.

He jumps.

He finds 7.

He's not sure how. His feet hit the ground of the Le Roux gardens and then he blinks and the light changes, he's standing stiff and breathless in front of an old brownstone with a sharp pain in his chest. His jaw is clenched so tight that his teeth squeal.

He doesn't have to knock, the blinds over the window had shifted as soon as his shoe hit the first step of the stoop. Eden just waits until the sound of three deadbolts sliding out of their locks comes muffled through the door. A chain rattles and then the door finally cracks open; the person behind it glares out at him.

"12." 7 says, short but not all that sweet.

She doesn't sound very surprised.

Eden knows that she knows he doesn't use his number anymore, the whole district's heard his new name now, he can't hide it, but he doesn't correct her. He doesn't offend her like that. They stare at each other long enough that one of the streetlights down the lane flickers on and washes the buildings in warm yellow.

There’s a long scar across the right side of 7’s face, Eden thinks she got it when she left, on her way out, but he doesn't know for sure. The way the light catches on the tissue makes it turn gold. Her hair is short and brassy now and there's a slim bar of metal through her left eyebrow. Eden can't read her face, not because it's blank, but because he's never been able to, even back when he'd bothered to try.

Another heartbeat passes and then 7 opens the door a little wider in a silent invitation and Eden slips inside.

The locks all get closed behind him.

He stands still next to a coat rack with one hand clenched in the other, trying not to look at one thing for too long. They're in a one-room flat, all exposed brick and peeling laminate with two shaded windows along one wall. There's a mattress tucked into the corner with a purple-red quilt laid out across it, the same colour as a crushed blackberry.

"Figured you weren't dead." 7 says when it becomes obvious that Eden isn't going to start the conversation.

That startles him a bit, he focuses on a point just over 7's shoulder and breathes through his nose. It's hard to tell how much time's passed since the reaping, he'd tried to count the guard rotation to keep track of the days but that early run-in with Icarus had made his head go foggy and then he'd lost count.

He's got the echo of a dial tone in his ear now, the sound of the phone ringing washes the fog away but leaves him feeling worn and wrung out.

He knows it can't be more than a week. There weren't any black banners up in the manor yet, which means Isaac isn't dead, but there weren't any gold ones either, which means he hasn't won. There's a split second where Eden feels himself panic, throat close up briefly, because what if- it's possible that the Games are entirely over already, the banners were up but are gone now and he'd just spent that long in the dark.

"Little cockroach." 7 calls him accusingly, pulling him out of a whirlwind, and there's a bite to the way she says it that almost makes the insult feel fond.

She doesn't ask how Eden found her, maybe she already knows, maybe in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter, she just crosses the flat in three strides to stand in the little galley kitchen. Eden sits down heavily at a scuffed up wooden table pushed against the wall.

7 is muttering something from the sink but Eden's left lung still stutters from getting that spear in the chest and both his ears still ring from hearing his name called out in the square. His fists always ache, sometimes enough that it feels like his knuckle bones are trying to split right out of his skin. He should be dead five times over now. Maybe even more. He feels defective, like some part of his programming's gone wrong and that's why his feet don't always do what he tells them anymore.

He doesn't know the date, he doesn't even know himself, he's still got so much to figure out, his head pounds with the effort of trying to bring back the memory of the past handful of hours but he comes up short.

7 comes back and sets a glass of water down in front of Eden but he doesn’t touch it. She doesn’t seem to mind.

"I could get in a lot of trouble for harbouring a criminal."

But she was the criminal first, and so even though her voice is toneless she makes a little half smirk at the inside joke. Eden keeps following the lines of the table and counts all the different ways that they vein out.

”Shame that cushy mayor’s pet gig didn’t work out.” 7 tries again, the same old song and dance except this time her fuse seems about three prompts longer than it was when they used to do this.

Eden has a sudden flash then, 9 is crying and 13 is snarling at her and 7 is trying to get all of them to shut up long enough to hear a whispered conversation through the office door. Eden was supposed to keep watch down the hallway but he had forgotten the whistle code, couldn't make the noise, and all 4 of them ended up getting caught.

7 ended up snapping Eden's clavicle the next day, but it's fine, he deserved it.

Maybe she's thinking about the same incident, the way she's looking at him so sharply.

”D’you get to keep the name at least?” God, he hopes so. ”You were so close to being a real boy.”

She pitches her voice up when she says real boy, draws the words out like it’s a reference to something he’s supposed to understand.

Eden frowns at the table, at his hands on the surface, at all the little scars and grooves there. His veins match the ones on the table.

He’s real, isn’t he?

He feels solid when he presses his fingers to his chest. He feels solid when he touches the little scar along his temple. He has his own thoughts now, sometimes his own words; he makes decisions and has memories and there's a file in the bag by his side that has half of who he used to be stuffed inside.

The other half is sitting down low in his ribcage, simmering and shifting. The little photograph in his pocket burns.

7 seems to take the face he’s making to mean something else.

"They would've gotten over it." She says quietly, prodding him, looking for all the soft bits he can't seem to get rid of, and Eden finally looks up at that, gives her a flat look.

He has a feeling that Eurydice would not have, in fact, ever gotten over the murder of her youngest child.

The sad little plant on the windowsill suddenly becomes the most interesting thing in the room.

7 exhales once through her nose, short and frustrated. "You can't stay here, if that's what you came to ask."

And Eden just shakes his head.

She swings her hand out and rolls her shoulders, a gesture of well then?

Then what did he come here for?

But he doesn't really know.

He doesn't say anything and 7's frustration is more palpable now. It hangs between them in the air like something heavy, familiar, and Eden leans into it without meaning to.

7 has both of her forearms on the table and Eden watches them. Her marker's gone now. The number on the inside of her wrist is tangled in the roots of a tree, so seamless that Eden can't pick out exactly where it used to be.

"Say something." She dares him, and both of her hands become fists on the tabletop.

Eden stares at the roots, at the veins, at the hands.

"12." She snaps.

He stands up so quick that his chair gets knocked behind him. 7 shoots up too, matching him on the other side of the table.

The glass is still sitting there, condensation dripping down the side, he could throw it and run, he could flip the table and vault over it, smash the glass and grab a piece and shove it-

"Eden." He says, so fast that it surprises them both.

It's only the third time he's said it and it still makes him nervous. Like someone is about to come around the corner and rip it from him. He's let himself become selfish over four letters, he tucks them in close and squeezes them in his fists and doesn't let anyone else touch them.

But it seems to be what 7 was waiting for.

"Eden." She repeats, cautious almost, poking at the syllables, and then she repeats it again when he doesn't flinch.

Neither of them sit back down again, but the line of 7's shoulders seems to relax minutely. Maybe she really did think that he was there to kill her, or to bring her in. Maybe she thought that he was there on someone else's orders and had really truly lost his will.

She searches his face for another moment and then nods.

"Good to meet you."

She doesn't hold her hand out. Eden wouldn't have shaken it anyways.

"I'm Clare."