So Homesick I Can't Feel // [Owen/Mace]

for what it's worth, I have a slow disease that sucked me dry... I always aim to please
but I nearly died

He figured it was probably a good idea to stop hoping, praying, suggesting "ifs" and "maybes" when it came to the Games. Because for those three weeks to a month every year, Mace got fucked over

and

over

again. He was slowly becoming mature to enough to realize that, in fact, it really wasn't him that was getting screwed, but the poor tributes whose lives depended on him. Tributes like his brother, like Lydie and Damion. Like Essence the Healer and Axel the Beloved. What the shit was he supposed to do with a hand like that? He would've passed, quit, gotten up and walked away from the table. But that wasn't an option in Ten where he was the only mentor available. He just had to gut it out, try to say the right things to bring one - oh yes, just one - of them back home to the fields and cattle of their forgotten district.

He'd gone down to breakfast to meet Essence and Axel, who had the dubious honor of rising earlier than he to meet with the stylists for fittings and the like. They'd long ago given up on him. Well, about three years ago, when Mace had locked the District Ten escort, Olive, in a closet for the entire train ride to the Capitol, just for mouthing off. After that, they pretty much ignored him. He thought about trying to scare them off from his tributes, but instead he decided to seize the rare bit of good luck and keep his own flesh out of their hands.

Which gave him the dubious distinction of the being the most crude looking victor in recent memory. Mace embraced it. He wore his worn jeans (the ones Julian had tried to throw out multiple times), crisp white button downs, and a belt with a buckle the size of his fist. His boots clacked when he came down hard on the spurs, but otherwise were as quiet as the ghosts that haunted him. Zynna. Alliance. Dysis. Aesop.

Elon.

Alexander.

It had been a long time, more than a year, since he'd last carried her name so close. Now it was in his throat all the time, stuck there, waiting for someone to ask. But because Mace never got close to the press, no one had. It would take a master of Games history to make the connection, and though a few pundits had, it hadn't really landed. He'd been so cool, so collected, other than that breakdown in Seven.

But that had been expected, after all. It was Dysis' district beforehand, the rare beauty who had told him to harden his heart. And he had been allied with Alexander for many days. They had passed hours in a dark cave, and he had carried her frozen body out of the water so that she could take her name back. That was friendship, that was how brothers in war were supposed to act. But she hadn't quite been his brother. Perhaps it would actually be easier for the public to understand, given his relationship with Julian. Except that those two relationships were worlds, eons, apart. Mace would never feel for Alexander the way he felt for Julian, and he couldn't quite bring himself to give the piece of his heart that was still frozen to his beloved.

So he carried her name in his throat, waiting for someone to ask. When no one did, it became a cancer, stealing his emotions and his voice, making it more difficult and even torturous to talk. He avoided his tributes, Ara, Kieran, even Julian. How could he even start to explain? Where was the beginning? But he knew. It had all started with a name in district seven, a reaping twist of fate like a knife in his gut. It was only too easy to blame him, to blame whatever tesserae he had taken out. After all, hadn't Mace tried to help him with the gift of the tokens?

Hadn't that been enough?

The guilt made him itch, made him shiver as he stalked towards the dining hall. The only good part of his day any more was training. He couldn't even find solace in the delicious, sultry food of the Capitol, not after he'd gorged himself on the train ride. He still had promises to keep. So breakfast promised to be another round of torture he could bear when he looked up to find a boy walking just a few paces ahead of him. He was taller than Alexander, his hips thinner as they ought to be (and as he ought to have noticed much sooner), but the gait was the same.

Hell, the color of their hair was the same. Just before the District Seven tribute reached the doors to the dining hall, Mace reached forward and grabbed his elbow, wrenching it sideways so that they sidestepped the doors into one of the service corridors. "Shit, shit, shit," Mace breathed, the same eloquent phrase on discovery of Alexander's secret. "You should go home, Owen Hood. Don't you have kids that need lookin' to?" Mace thinned his mouth, relaxed his grip. But only because he could feel the cold spreading, threatening to disable him entirely.