Sending out \\ smoke signals // {Aramir}

Don’t put my name in more than I have to? She knew what Gage meant, but at the same time wondered if he did. Having to take tesserae was not something common in the District, usually an option for the obsessed rather than the desperate… but when one is hungry enough… "I can't promise that..."

Her parents had never expected or asked it of her; in fact, they never discussed it, as though not acknowledging the increased risk placed on their one remaining child might also erase it from the minds and records of the Capitol officials. It was during the previous winter, work was scarce for a carpenter, and many were watching their purses closely, preferring to do their own laundering rather than part with the coin for its outsourcing. Margot would send home what food she could part with, but her own family represented hungry mouths to feed as well. Sam didn’t ask, didn’t mention it, she just lined up with the one or two careers, and a few similar unfortunates, and signed the papers. A small splotch of blood from a lancet stab to the thumb sealed their documents, and then a measure of grain was place in a sack, and she was headed back into the biting wind and homeward with food for the first time that day.

Who gets to define what she ‘had’ to do? Gage with his big home and smooth sheets on the bed? With a legacy passed down from his father that involved more than booze? She wasn’t certain how well they might understand one another on this point, and tonight was not a night for arguing. So, Sam shut her lips tight, and stretched out on the sheets, rubbing a palm over their silky texture and nuzzling her cheek into a fluffy pillow. Had she only started to purr, it would have completed the image of a kitten going belly up in a patch of sun.

“Mmmm, your bed’s nice, Gage. How do you convince yourself to get out of it in the mornin’?” Saamina chuckled sleepily, trying not to let the icy soles of her feet bump up against his, but unable to help it. Like two heat seeking missiles that had latched onto the greatest source, they inched closer to Gage’s legs, basking in the comparative sunstroke comfort.

She was in his bed, the sag in mattress created by their combined weight, cradled her up against him in the space originally intended for a single person. It was a pocket of warmth and sweetness, an experience she battled to stay awake and revel in the newness of. Brooke…it had been safe and secure with him…their little ritual providing reprieve from the fears that plagued every child’s mind before a reaping, forcing them to confront concepts such as death well before nature would otherwise educate. But with Gage…it wasn’t perfectly safe, there was a sensation pressing at the barriers of Saamina’s chest, pounding against her heart and fluttering its wings over her lungs in a manner that had her breath hitching a little faster and her mind scrambling to fasten onto the nature of it. Nervousness and a hunger for something that she couldn’t verbalize even in the privacy of her mind. It wasn’t unpleasant, of that she was positive. Its uncertainty didn’t threaten to send her scurrying for the bed that waited at home, it drove her to inch a little closer to the inviting expanse of Gage’s chest, rising in a rhythmic pattern of quiet breaths.

Her head found a cushion on one of his outstretched arms, and there she stopped. This…alien concept struggling to rare its head deserved further consideration, but not tonight. Tonight, Sam desperately needed to just be here, to lose all the overwhelming…everything that plagued her. Tonight she was curled up in bed with the most important person in her world, and tomorrow could bring an ugly tide of change in so many various shades of disaster. Tonight wasn’t a time to delve into the whys of everything that was creeping closer as undeniably and unescapably as adulthood. No. For a span of eight hours, she was Saamina and he was Gage, and this was perfect.