``another sip of them } // shrimp.trainblitz

He'd been a mentor in title for thirteen years, but truth be told, Arbor Halt could really only claim five of them. Sure, he'd pick up a half-year every once in awhile, when his tributes did particularly well — Ailis, Asunder — and he'd done his duty in the beginning (with Aranica and Heron to show for it.) But with the exception of his nephew's year, Arbor hadn't tried very hard to engage with his tributes in the recent decade.

In fact, he was actively avoiding them. He inevitably ran into them on the small train, but for the enclosed space they were all confined to, Arbor did a pretty damn good job of minimizing time spent in the same compartment. He was leading the three-year-old Cedar back to their room for the night and had planned to coop himself up in there with him (after all, who would disturb a sleeping toddler?) when a familiar face caught the corner of his eye.

He stopped, spun his son around by the hand, and knelt to face him. "Hey, bud, why don't you go back there without me? Dad will be right there to tuck you in, just give him five minutes. Okay?" Ever obedient, Cedar nodded and teetered down the hallway. It was inconceivable that the growing boy had been a squirming, fussing lump in a liquor box on his stoop less than three years ago.

The victor watched his found son all the way to the end of the hallway before rising, then turned to face the white peacekeeper uniform standing in front of some door. "How's your jaw doing?" He grinned as he asked, despite himself — he hadn't meant to assault a peacekeeper, and likely if the man had been uniformed, no amount of alcohol would've made Arbor believe it was okay to throw a left hook just then. That incident was more than a year past, though, and Xanti himself had seemed in good spirits about it when they had last spoken.

Besides, Arbor had reigned in his drinking — and, by consequence, his drunken transgressions — since his large mistake of the 66th games, and so had cut down on the number of injuries he'd doled out in bar fights. He wasn't interested in rehashing that story, but for some reason felt compelled to converse with him. "You know, I've always wondered, how do they decide which poor bastards get to make sure this year's dead kids don't hurl themselves from the train before their time. How did you get stuck with it?"