a too early grave — reggie & ten. ( blitz )

She flicks her eyes back at Reggie another time when he speaks. Eat, he says forcefully, and Taylor just rolls her eyes before taking whatever it is that he's shoved in her direction. Her mouth parts though when she sees exactly what it is that he's put in her hands. "This is bread," she says. "Actual baked bread." A tinkle of laughter peels from her throat as she lifts it to her nose, uncaring when the charred edge leaves a thin bit of soot on the tip of her nose. "Where'd you get this?"

She just smiles instead of watching him to wait for a real reply, turns her eyes back to the screen.

It's strange, watching someone else have that same kind of closeness with Nico that she had only ever seen Reggie have—and even then, it's still different, like Nico is all blade around the body from Five, like he is all weapon and doesn't know how to turn it off. It's not a look on him that she's familiar with.

There's a flash of anger across her chosen brother's face when he sees that it was the boy from Five who tackled him to the ground, then an almost reluctant, heartbroken softening when the blonde whispers something against Nico's jaw.

Like he can't believe it's real.
Like he doesn't want it to be.
Like he's glad that it is.

"Did you love him?" she asks, unable to help herself, wanting answers to every question that she's ever had. She knows the answer is yes, almost certainly, but she had never heard the two boys say it, had never been privy to the heart hiding in Nico Thorne's chest—had never been sure it beat in want of anything other than blood and vengeance.

She's curious.
Maybe morbidly so.
Maybe terribly so.

But still, she's curious, and Taylor had never been taught the art of tact, had never been taught what it was to not cross lines that don't want crossing, never learned that sometimes it was better to live without answers she wanted rather than asking the questions that would hurt.

She crinkles her nose at his joke.

"I took a page from your book," Reggie says, and she knows that it hurts him. It's like he thinks she can't see, like he thinks that she isn't as observant as she is. She has always been able to read people, has always known exactly what someone was thinking from all the way across a room just by the way they flex their wrist. She's never been any good at responding to emotions, never been any good at soothing them, but understanding—that she has in spades.

She doesn't reply, not really, just shakes her head and half-smiles at him, looks at him from the corner of her eyes and says "Idiot."

Not because she is cruel.
Not as a joke.
Just as a truth.

Ten has always understood those well, sometimes a little too well, Nico always loved to tell her.

When Reggie reaches out to wipe the soot off the tip of her nose, she does her best not to react, never having been able to handle unexpected human contact particularly well. She's always done better when it's her controlling the touch, her reaching out to cross a line that warrants crossing. Still though, she knows that Reggie knows this, and so she knows that he knows she can handle this small breach.

She furrows her eyebrows together though when he loops his fingers around her slender wrist, his palm large enough and her wrist skinny enough that his fingers more than meet in the middle. She knows that will probably worry him, and knows that she shouldn't add to that worry, so she doesn't fight it when he puts the rest of the bread in her palm and tells her to eat. There's a thrumming in her spine from the unexpectedness of it, but she thinks maybe that's her own fault, that she should have read him better and known he would do just that.

She watches his fingers unfurl from her wrist, then holds the bread between both her palms, looks down at it for a moment in wonder before turning her eyes back to the screen that wasn't allowed to shut off.

She doesn't expect his answer when it comes.

But then, she thinks maybe does.

"I don't know," she says, though she's loathe to say it. It's a colloquiality that she's never quite gotten used to, but learned to use anyways because she knows that it makes her friends more comfortable, because it lets them know and prepare for the fact that she might not agree. "I think the Nico we know loved you, at least in the way he knew, in the way he could." She purses her lips before leaning forwards on her elbows, putting the bread on the counter after tearing another small piece off and toying with it in her fingers. "He never really had room in his heart for us, but he made it anyways, because that's what he wanted to do." She puts the bread to her nose once more, watches as Nico takes another blow across his cheek from the boy from District 3. "But that?" she goes on, her palm facing up as she points towards the screen, thumb flicked out to the side like a finger gun. "I don't think that's the Nico who loved us anymore."

She thinks about sitting in front of a similar screen the night before, remembers watching her chosen brother as he cried out in his sleep, cried out his father's name like it pained him rather than motivated him—it's a sight she wishes she hadn't seen.

It's a sight she can never forget.

"I think the games change people."

She shrugs a little, wondering if maybe some uncertainty will make Reggie feel better, if maybe the truth cut with hesitance will be better than a truth cut with iron.

Ten can feel the tension rolling off him in waves.

It makes her already alight nerves catch on fire, and she has to start tapping the tip of her fingers to her thumb. First her pointer, then her middle, then her ring, then her pinky, and back again in descending order. Back and forth, over and over, she lets her left hand hang down at her side and touches her fingers against each other—it calms her down, gives her an outlet for the tension that she can feel on Reggie's skin like lightning bolts. It doesn't matter when he says Maybe you're right, not when the shrug that follows is so obviously fake. He shrugs like it's nothing, but she can read the pressure in his forearms out of the corner of her eye, see the vein rising in his wrist as his heart picks up before he says But I don't think you are.

As if she didn't already know that.

He never really had any room in his heart for us, she'd said, and she knows that it's the truth, knows it better than she knows the patterns the ridges on all the pads of her fingers make.

I gave him mine, you know, and it still wasn't enough.

It makes Taylor's bones quiver, makes every single one of her thoughts hesitate and go into overdrive in a single moment. She doesn't know what to say, doesn't know what to do—knows that what he needs is sympathy, that he needs someone who will be a shoulder to lean on, but all Ten can see are the infinite pieces to the puzzle that make up the relationship between Reginald Blume and Nico Thorne. She searches her head for everything that the two boys have ever taught her about life, about how to be there for the one's that you love. She thinks about Reggie and his brothers, about the aching grief she'd watched him endure and how Nico had helped to pull him from it. She thinks about the day her own father died, and remembers Nico and Reggie both sitting with her, never judging her for the tears that never fell, never judging her for not feeling grief the way that was familiar to them, just loving her—not in spite of this, but perhaps because of it.

She thinks about Reggie bringing a plate of food to a woman he so clearly hates, just because a boy he loved, —no loves, she mentally corrects—had asked it of him before giving his heart to someone else. She doesn't know what to say, and she knows that every moment she is silent causes Reggie more pain, knows him well enough to know that every time he opens his mouth to spit anger at someone else, there are twenty voices inside of his own head saying that it's his fault, that he isn't good enough, that he never had been.

Taylor doesn't know what to say because what if one of them is right this time? 

He was always capable of it, Taylor. Of letting it all go. Moving on. I knew that. I could see it every time I looked at him, but she—she poisoned him.

Ten can see the tension in him rising, can feel where he hit that table like she hit it herself, and there's a knots between her shoulder blades, under her ribs, right at the base of her throat—little pieces of the emotions that Reggie is feeling that Ten has no real idea how to alleviate, no real idea how to help.

The only way through is logic;
the only way through is truth.

She knows Reggie would tell her that's not true.
Sometimes the way through is heart.

"He was always going to die," she says automatically after his last words. Just to die, he'd said, and the part of her that needs to give him answers latches onto the thing that she can address, the thing that she knows what to do with. "The minute his name was called, he was going to die anyways." She puts the bread that was in her right hand down on the counter, stepping away from the broken sink to take a small step towards Reggie. She knows that touch is something other people crave, something that other people want in times of tension, even if that's never really been the case for Ten—there are times she likes it, like when Nico would pat the top of her head, or when Reggie holds the top of her shoulder and smiles after she snags something particularly impressive, those are moments of touch she likes.

This one scares her.

"The odds of him winning the games are so low, even if with him in the arena they're higher than they would be for other Twelve tributes." She lets her mind focus on the numbers, lets herself sit in the logic and the math of it all, the probabilities that makes her feel safe because she knows what will more than likely happen. She thinks about Nico, thinks about what he had said to her when her mother died and she got so angry with her she hadn't been able to contain it.

Is it better to live in pain or find peace in death?

She doesn't think he'd had an answer to that question, and she knows that she still doesn't have one, but something about answering anger with a question had calmed her, and she wonders if that might help Reggie here.

"He was always going to die, even before the boy from Five." She steps towards Reggie again, and lifts her eyes to look into his. He'd always had sharper features than Nico; where Nico's face was full of soft lines, threats made from brute force of will, Reggie to her had always looked like the edge of a knife, with delicate features unkind enough to kill. It was ironic, really, that their personalities were somewhat opposite in that way. She has never much liked looking into people's eyes, not when they were looking back at her; it was too intimate, too much emotion all at once, but she knows that it's a comfort Reggie needs. "Would it be better if he died alone with his anger?"

She doesn't know if it's a cruel question, can't be sure that its what he needs to hear, but it's the thing she'd want to be asked if she felt the way she thinks Reggie feels. She knows it would be easier if he did, maybe, but she thinks about the silent thanks that she'd whispered to the boy from Five when he saved Nico's life yet again and isn't so sure.