champagne topped with trauma [nico/josiah] blitz vt

To say the past months have been a whirlwind would be an understatement, but nothing in the districts could have prepared him for his return trip to the Capitol. Even his first time here, those months ago when he had first been reaped and taken away to the Capitol to be trained in the best ways to prolong his death, Nico had been angry then.

He doesn't know what he is now.

He's standing not exactly on the edge of the party, but as near to them as he would dare to go. Jenas had allowed him some degree of comfort, hadn't put him into anything terrible flashy or extravagant. One look at it and Nico had wondered how long it would take his mother to stitch something like this, if it would take her months and months what it had probably taken the Capitol stylist only some hours. Jenas had also rimmed the top of Nico's eyes in bright gold liquid. But now I'm king, he remembered.

Looking in the mirror, Nico had seen just how much that rang true now.

The thought made him sick.

But he doesn't have time to sit on it, doesn't have time to punch the mirror with his new hand and break the skin across the knuckles, feel the pain and know that it wasn't even his pain to feel. The Capitol fitted him with prosthetics that felt pain, a technology that Nico still can't believe he walks around on every single day. His body is fitted with technology more advanced than anything in the entirety of Twelve.

Nico doesn't deserve that.

But he's here, surrounded by people who cheered on while he put a pitchfork through Jayne's face and felt her brain around his blade, people who probably got mad at him for not killing Raven even faster. He's here, having a glass of champagne he doesn't particularly want thrust in his direction. Josiah Layton, he recognizes almost immediately.

It is great to have you back, he says, and Nico wants to slit his throat.

After all, he is the killer Josiah's games made him.

"Actually," he begins, plucking the glass from Josiah's hand without thanks. "I rather preferred Four." It's not even true, he thinks, though the memory of the sea is something he thinks he'll take with him for the rest of his life. "Perhaps here is filled with too many memories, already," he says finally. Memories of my friends that are dead because of your games hovers right on the tip of his tongue, but he bites it back.