I Know A Place [Absalom/Bill]

little bill cubs

There are hundreds of things to marvel at in the capitol, all shiny and new and unknown, but Little Bill is more concerned with sleep than any of the bells and whistles of a world he was never meant to comprehend. He holds two silk-cased pillows over his head, but the additional cover does nothing to drown out the laughter coming from the district eight main room where Eloise and their newfound friend sit squabbling like a bunch of crows on a fence post. It’s hard enough to adjust to this alien place, to rooms that rise and fall with the push of a button, with windows looking out to building after tall ass building with not a blade of grass in sight - but on his first night in this sparkling, glistening metropolis, all he wants to do is pass out.

Maybe it was dumb of him to assume he could maintain his sleep schedule, but the bedtime of a butcher is clearly several hours earlier than most any capitolite, and even most other tributes. He’s used to hunkering down before the sun falls, rising early to the welcoming stillness of morning; Eloise and their friend have other plans for him.

He rolls over, sits up, and stares out at the sun setting behind a collection of the tallest buildings he’s ever seen. Expletives rumble under his breath, and he grabs his eyepatch, pulls its band over his thick head, and marches out his bedroom with both pillows in tow. He walks louder than he means to on his way past his district partner, but he’s too bloody tired to do a thing about it; exhaustion propels him into the magical rising room, and he’s unsure where he’s going but it takes him down to whatever coinciding button he pressed.

When he gets off, he finds himself in a room unlike any he’s ever seen: cushioned seat after cushioned seat fills the expanse, with a great screen bigger than the one in eight’s own square facing the chairs. On the far end is a boy, wide eyes taking in all the man on the screen has to say - something about beer that Little Bill only half hears, because his eye is trained hard on the boy.

“So pretty,” he says out loud, before cheeks blush bright red, his grogginess turning his thoughts into words. He freezes, staring as wide-eyed as the other boy watched the screen, and pulls his pillows in tight to his chest. His brain screams to leave, to get back in the rising room and ride away till he’s flung from the rooftop and never seen again, but his body grounds him there, still watching the most attractive person his eye has ever seen.

Ma never let him out much. Little Bill grew up confined to their shoddy little house on the hill or the shed in the back where he cleaved his flock apart and hung their meat to drain their blood. His experience in communication was as limited as possible; once Ma was sick with fever and he was left to take the meat to market, and he’d returned with the majority of his cuts still in tow, unable to sell what he couldn’t describe, couldn’t advertise. He bit his tongue and stared with one wide eye at the crowds swelling around him, only speaking when approached and otherwise sinking back against the stone walls of a bakery whose loaves he’d never afford. There had been one boy, a friendly but rough-looking Klein who bartered away two shanks for barely the price of one, and a lady or two that frequented the Cubs family stand when manned by Ma. Otherwise, his day was spent silent amongst the cacophony, and when he dragged the meat home she’d slapped the back of his head with her boot.

Understandably, he didn’t quite grasp attraction either. He’d grown with the soft, wooly bodies of sheep; someone as statuesque as the boy watching the movie was entirely foreign, and he stood with his mouth agape for an unreasonable amount of time, silent as he was in the discord of the district square those years before. The boy pressed his body backwards, harder into the cushions than they’d been designed for, and the seat leaned further towards parallel to the floor. As he did, a bit of his shirt lifted, and Little Bill couldn’t stop himself from eyeing the patch of skin beneath his navel, smooth and hard and beckoning. His hair prickled down the back of his neck.

“Do you want to sit with me?”

He wanted more than that, but couldn’t pinpoint exactly what, had no way to identify the heat rising in his chest, in his pants, the sweat dripping down his forehead. He grasped the pillows tighter as he stared unblinking at the boy, turning his head and pressing it into his shoulder to look at Little Bill, almost bashfully, like a lamb. Lines along his arms rippled and roared; Little Bill didn’t know what he wanted, but he walked toward the boy then, cheeks still red and knuckles white around silk pillow cases. The boy said he wanted to watch something better, well, Little Bill had achieved that first. “Do you like movies?”

When he was three seats away from him, the butcher stopped. His heart beat faster and his head raced with endless thoughts of nothing. He shook his head yes, then decided not to lie. “I’ve never seen one.” Another step forward, and he took the biggest risk of his life thus far: he sat in the next seat over from a boy who clearly disrupted his being, and despite the static shooting through every inch of his body he tried to smile, instead of staring awkwardly and ruining whatever this was. “Pillow?” He offered one of the two he’d carted from his bedroom upstairs. Maybe he’d have better luck in this market.