believe me when I say [ nan v cas ] day 7

The news about Syren seems to break him all over again. Part of Cas doesn't want to believe Nanette, part of him knows he has to.

So he blinks his tears back, and he takes a deep breathe and he tries to make the most of this tentative peace. They probably sit for longer than they should, and Castor probably talks longer than he should, but having a conversation partner makes his chest feel a little lighter. Sin is something special to him, and Cas knows he wouldn't change his silence even if he could, but sometimes there's something lonely in his quiet comfort.

It's nice to welcome the other girl to their fire and spend the lesser part an hour with her. It's nice to tap a rhythm out on Sin's knee and hear a story about the ocean. Maybe he's always just been naive at heart, or just too stubborn to turn off his rose-tinted filter, but here, in the wasteland of the arena, he's found something he's never had before.

And he'd quite like to visit the ocean, he thinks. He wants to sit on the bottom of the sea floor and feel a salt breeze through his hair. But he wants to stand there with Sin's hand clasped in his, and he wants to stand there with Nanette's voice beside him so she can describe the waves to him in the way that only she knows how.

The more he thinks about it, the more it hurts.

When the shadows finally seem to get longer and Nanette leaves to find her friend, Cas turns into Sin, resting his forehead against the other boy's chest.

“I’m glad that’s not us.” He says, and the way he whispers it into Sin's collarbone makes it feels like an admission in the dark, “I don’t want to lose you.”

Sin presses his fingers to Cas's wrist, and not for the first time, Cas understands him.

"I don't know what I'd do."

But then the smog seeps deeper into his lungs and he has to pull away to cough. He grips Sin's hand as his shoulders shake and it reminds him of the vendetta this place seems to have against him. Everywhere he goes, whether it be the arena or back home in Five, the world seems to have it out for him.

The two of them lie beside each other that night, just like every other night, and just like every other night Cas is the one that sleeps faster and deeper. He's sure that it's because of his shitty immune system. He wears himself out each day, then each night his body makes him pay for it and drags him down into exhaustion.

But it's the noise that wakes him up first, an incessant chirping from above his face, and before he even squints at the sound, he can feel a warmth against his face. It's like a light bulb left on for an hour too long and his sleepy mind clocks it as the strange little light from the previous nights. He can barely make it out in the day, and the higher the sun rises, the more it fades into the bright fog of the landscape.

Cas had forgotten to ask Nanette about the lights the previous night, and he curses himself for it.

He sits up and listens to its beeping, feels the change in temperature as it zips around his head and presses against his hand in a way that's probably supposed to be comforting, but in reality just makes him uneasy.

Sin is usually the first one up, if he even sleeps at all, so Cas gets to his feet gingerly, poking at the light and snorting at the trill it makes in response.

Then there's the slightest bit of shadow that shifts in the corner of his vision, focusing for a split second before it slinks back into the darkness.

"We should get going," He calls out to it, waiting for Sin to come over and lead the way. But his hand stays empty, and the shadow stays hidden, so he frowns, "Sin?"

It flickers in and out again as it passes in front of the seelie and approaches. Castor reaches out for it, expecting skin or cloth or rubber but the second his fingers make contact, the thing crumbles against his hand and Cas chokes at the sensation, spluttering and scrambling back from the cloud of ash that wells up in the air.

"Sin?"

He stumbles a step, the seelie chirping even louder above him and he calls again, throat closing at the lack of response and his heart starts pounding faster and faster, the powder stuck under his nails feeling molten and he cradles that hand to his chest. He panics in the darkness and suddenly feels unsteady. He feels like a ship without an anchor and a kite without a string,

So when a voice cracks through the air, he flinches violently.

"Nanette?" He repeats, and his heart almost soars.

Almost.

But he's disoriented and shaking and terribly, terribly, disillusioned.

In another instance maybe, if Sin was here and holding him steady, he wouldn't be opposed to Nanette's sudden appearance. But Sin is gone, even though he was just there, and the only conclusion that Castor's mind can come to in the flurry of this is that Nanette was just there too.

Sin would never leave him, not ever, Cas knows that. And Nanette was the last person that saw them both. They've been in this hellhole for a week already. There can't be that many people left.

Nanette is a career and Sin is not. Silk was a career

and Syren was not.

Castor suddenly feels like he can't breathe at that realization. His seelie nudges against his hand again but he can't move.

"Where’s Sin?" She asks, like Cas would know. Like she doesn’t know.

The rush of his head takes her words and twists them, makes them sound taunting and cruel. It turns them into a mockery and it isn't the radiation that makes Castor feel like throwing up.

There's a lingering sting of betrayal in his chest, because Cas trusted Nanette enough to open up the other night. He had been so eager for a conversation partner that he'd told her about his illness and his struggle and the way he had wasted away in a four poster bed for years, just to lose his vision. He told her how he survived his youth just to stand in the smog of the arena and be held gently by a boy who was anything but.

And he wants that boy back so badly that it aches.

He fumbles for his gun and points it in the direction of her voice, finger shaking against the trigger because it's a rash decision that he has to fight with himself to keep.

"What did you do to him?" He tries to demand, but the ash on his skin itches and the muzzle of the revolver wavers, "Where is he?"

Nanette tells him to put his gun down, but he just ends up squeezing it tighter. If he thinks hard enough, he can imagine it's Sin's hand. She says that she cares for Sin, and Cas wishes that it didn't sting but it does. He's selfish, and her voice sounds so apathetic that it chills him.

It's his mother's voice chiding him for having his window open. It's his mother's voice telling him that the air isn't good for his lungs. It's his mother's voice saying that time away from his brother would be good for him.

The seelie chimes in his ear and the gun is hot against his palm, everything conflicting under the weight of the air. Nanette keeps saying his name, over and over again, and it's too much. He just wants Sin. Selfish little boy - he wants he want he wants.

There's a scuffle against the ground, the wet sound of the muck shifting and Cas screams when Nanette steps closer.

"STOP!" And his finger twitches against the trigger a heartbeat later, the sound cracking through the air and the kickback shooting through his shoulder. The warning shot buries itself into the soil and he wipes the sweat from his brow. "Don't come any closer, don't-"

The spear shoves through his stomach in a way that punches the breath out of him. It tears through the stitches that Sin had painstakingly done, makes Castor gasp into the pain and he pushes his hand against it, futilely trying to get the thing out because it burns.

"You're lying." He spits out, the pain making it short and he almost spins from the deja vu. He thinks of Nanette and Silk and the boy from Two, "You're all the same, you just pretend to care."

The spear is wrenched out of him and the momentum makes him trip, barely catching himself at the last moment.

Maybe this was her plan the whole time. Maybe she'd sat with him and Sin and talked long enough to gain some sort of trust, then bided her time until they were vulnerable. Maybe her little missing friend didn't even exist. Or maybe Flynn had already died and Nanette was going around, cleaning up the rest of them.

He doesn't like to think about it, but he didn't like to think about Syren either, and look where that's gotten him - there's a brand new hole in his stomach and a tremor in his hand.

"I trusted you." Castor tries to imagine an ocean so blue that it'd shine through his blindness, but then he's shaking his head, two hands gripping his gun for dear life, because it doesn't exist it's not real. He's a selfish little boy that's been playing house with a murderer and now he's trying to push the consequences onto someone else. "Last night I trusted you, and I shouldn't have."

"But I'm not afraid of you." And the break in his voice brings out the lie.

I want to be brave, he had told Pollux, but it's so hard to be something you're not

"I'm finding Sin and-" He shakes the gun a little, looking for the right words and bundling up every bit of courage he has, "and we're getting out of here!"

If he says it more , and if he says it loud enough, then maybe he'll finally believe it. Say it enough times and it'll come true. "You can't stop me."

"We're not the same." And it's denial, red hot and molten and it flows backwards like a nose bleed, settles against the back of his throat and makes him cough.

Nanette's spear bites into his arm hard enough that he drops his gun and cries out. He hears the dull clatter of the revolver hitting the ground and he uses his free hand to clutch at the blood seeping from the gash. But Nanette keeps talking, and his ears keeping wringing so Cas grits his teeth against all the noise, risking precious seconds to fan his fingers across the ground and slipping his fingers around the grip of his gun, fingers slick and red against the metal.

It was a lovely dream to imagine a little house on the lakefront. A place with a dock and a frog den and a porch swing. Castor's never been much of a realist - it's the consequence of growing up on stories of knights and princesses and dragons. He learnt a language of bird calls and piano keys and counted out the star stickers that glowed on his bedroom ceiling.

"I don't want to go without him." He says quieter, not knowing if that means leaving the arena or leaving all together, but it might be a bit of both. "I don't want to be alone."

Because it is a lonely life. He's had the darkness as company for four years and every day it threatens to suffocate him. He was never really living back in Five, he was just existing. He was alive because the doctors had kept him that way, but he didn't know anything past the sound of his own heartbeat and the tinny sound of their old radio.

"Did you volunteer, Nanette?" He asks suddenly, because it seems important all of a sudden. "I did."

He adjusts his grip on the gun and wipes his palm against his thigh, wincing as the blood there starts to dry tacky.

"And I know that sounds crazy, I know it does. Why would the blind kind want to go play the death games? They didn't have to say anything I knew what they were thinking."

"I left my family to come here and I thought I'd be dead on the first day. But I wasn't. I'm still here." He's still here, bleeding out into the smoke and clutching a revolver so tight that it makes his hand shake.

It's far cry from the boy who was barely even allowed to leave the house, the boy who clutched his brothers hand and tried not to feel like a case of medically-expensive luggage being dragged around.

"Sin saved me and now I have to go save him." He digs his heels into the mud, can't make himself shut up because regardless of everything that's happened, he's still Castor. He's still just a kid who's in over his head and floundering at a sudden and unwanted independence.

"So just tell me where he is." He says, squinting against the shadows and the burn behind his eyes, "Or get out of my way."