Chapter Text
“Good evening.”
Killian knew it was coming. Pretty much inevitable at this point, when Q’s been stuck in the Gamemaker suites for the past few days without leaving - they’ve even had him in overnight, along with half the Gamemakers, making sure nothing can possibly leak about the Arena-from-hell.
Mostly, anyway.
Silva’s hand loops around his wrist, same as always. Killian’s blood freezes, even though he tells it not to. “Hi,” he returns bluntly, telling himself it’s for show, it’s all for show. “What d’you want?”
“We are alone,” Silva tells him, a hand stroking along Killian’s side, all the familiar motions - they aren’t alone, not even a bloody little bit, of course they’re not. Middle of the Hall, Silva pressing him back against the wall, a room full of people who are a bit too sodding used to seeing exactly this.
Killian’s mind hums a strangled, strange reminder that they are on the same fucking side; that Silva wants out just as much as the rest of them. “Are we?” he returns, a little snarkily. “Sure as fuck doesn’t look it to me.”
“Muddled, sweet thing,” Silva murmurs, mouth by Killian’s ear, a soft string of murmurings, “they will emerge in water. The Cornucopia is surrounded - they will need to swim, from the beginning.”
Bloody brilliant - an Arena made for District Four’s Victors, with neither of him or Finnick there to make the most of it. “I’ll sort it,” Killian agrees: have to be through Ruby, she’ll find a way. They’ll figure it out, somehow. “Anything else?”
“Nothing that he believes will make a difference, nothing they do not already know,” Silva murmurs, swallowing Killian with his body while he tries to keep thoughts in his head: they know what they know. Enough to survive, not enough to risk Snow clocking that they already know. “It is as it is - be careful, sweet thing. You and yours are being watched.”
“Shocking,” Killian grinds out, Silva’s lips pressing into the hollow beneath his ear, all the shit he usually does that Killian really wishes he believes was just for the benefit of whoever the fuck is watching. “Look, d’you have to do all this shit? Let’s just, not. Keep things civil, all that, yes? Enough going on as it is.”
Silva pulls back, his smile shadowed, examining Killian’s face. “You have grown,” he breathes, so fond. “My little Killian, all grown up - I am so… proud. I never dreamed you could be this.”
“M’not doing this,” Killian returns, sharp and short. “The rest, whatever, but m’not… no, we’re not doing the rest. We’ve been through this, right?”
Silva traces his cheek with his fingertips, half-smiling at Killian’s beard - something he grew the second he was off-Contract, allowed to decide for himself. “We have,” he agrees, “but allow me to ask you something - are you happy?”
“You know what? I’ve had better days,” Killian returns instantly, breath shuddering sharply at the bleak flash of annoyance in Silva’s expression. “Fuck, I - yes? I don’t know what you want me to say, mate, you know this is a fuck of a time. All this.”
“I am truly sorry,” Silva agrees, almost a sigh. “Killian - I know it is not as you would wish. But, I am grateful - so grateful - that you were spared this.”
Killian blinks at him stupidly; Silva runs fingers along his scalp, nails grazing the crown of his head. “Do you really reckon now’s the time?” he asks, throat clotting at the press of him, the heat and constancy and endless, endless insistence, pinned against a wall by a man who still thinks, still, that he owns some part of him. “I’m not yours any more. You’ve said your bits, now fuck off, right? All… all this, you don’t need to do this bit, we’re not friends. You know that. You want to fuck me, you buy my time like any other bastard in this place. I’ve got enough to think about without you fucking with my head.”
Silva’s expression sharpens, eyes narrowing slightly, smile fixed with way too many teeth. “I simply wished to speak with you.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t,” Killian returns shortly, holding onto every single fragment of the person he’s learned how to be. “I don’t owe you anything.”
The perfectly silent rush of livid anger briefly - very briefly - chokes him.
Silva replaces it with a smile. A perfect impression of himself. “I am not your enemy, Killian,” he says, playfully lethal. “If this is what you wish…”
“It doesn’t go away just ‘cos you want it to,” Killian points out, a tiny flicker of pleading underneath it, because fuck knows he does not want Silva getting weird ideas of being enemies when they’re about to break out of the sodding Capitol. “I get it - I know you want that to be how this goes, but it can’t. It’s different than it was anyway, right? You and me. S’been alright, you’ve been decent - let’s, let’s keep that, right? Being decent. The rest is, I don’t know. One day, maybe, but I can’t hack this right now and you know I can’t, and the more you try the worse it’s gonna get so - decent? Yes?”
Maybe not the height of articulate, has to be said, but he reckons the important bits got through all the same - enough to placate without promising anything.
Inch by inch, Silva’s smile bleeds into something more relaxed. “Decent,” he echoes, looking over Killian’s face, something behind his eyes that’s hard to read properly. “You need me, Killian; do not forget that.”
Killian looks him in the eye, holding bravery he didn’t know how to find when he was younger. “Thing is, though - you need me too,” he points out, knowing it’s true: Silva might be taking out the cannons, but they’re all involved in the evac, moving pieces shifting all over the board. “So - compromise, right? I don’t want to talk like we’re mates, I can’t do that, not with everything else. It’s gonna have to wait.”
There’s a funny, distanced look in Silva’s eyes. “For a world elsewhere,” he murmurs, tracing fingers along Killian’s jaw. “I wonder.”
Killian doesn’t get to know what he wonders: Silva steps back neatly, giving Killian space - and as always, the suddenness leaves him off-balance, swallowing oxygen as best he can.
“I will see you soon, Killian,” Silva tells him, dipping his head in something like a bow - then, buggers off without another word.
Killian takes a second to reboot his breathing, before he’s swallowed back into the party.
-
Regina sits by Bond’s side.
“You lasted a whole day,” Bond smirks; it was a matter of time before Regina cornered him properly, away from the training stations. “Go on.”
As always, when called out, Regina pretends it was her plan all along: “I missed you,” she tells him shortly. “Are you alright? I know you’re not talking - I’m gonna ask, all the same. For old time’s sake.”
Bond looks at her levelly, smile curving up in the corners, fingers playing through knots upon knots - ones Killian can whip up without thinking, that Finnick will excitedly teach to anybody who’ll sit still long enough, that Annie’s hands mimic the motions of even when there’s no rope to be found.
“Hell of a fucking year,” he says, instead of the rest.
Regina half-laughs, sighing. “True,” she agrees, eyes falling on Emma and Mycroft, both of them at the plant identification station.
It’s for Emma’s sake, not Mycroft’s. Bond knows Mycroft will have spent the past few years reading every book, every study, on plants in different environments; his expertise probably outstrips the trainer’s, as is intermittently true for others - nobody can whittle like Mags, nobody knows axes like Johanna.
Mycroft stays, all the same - teaching Emma. It’s the best option. Much though Mycroft would love to think he’s at his most likeable when giving monologues about grand plans, he’s actually best when he teaches: tentatively enthusiastic, shyly delighted as he relaxes into himself.
In the light of it, Emma’s visibly starting to grow used to him. To all of them.
“So,” he smirks, “you called her?”
Regina flushes slightly, almost invisibly. She’s always had a weakness for being needed. “I didn’t want her to feel alone,” she huffs, elbowing him in the ribs when he snorts. “I wanted to call you. You… are you okay? Really, I mean. Not the answer you’ll give Mycroft to keep him off your back.”
There’s no dissuading Regina when she gets like this. “Mostly,” Bond replies, tiredly aware - as he has been all year - of their resident audience. A building riddled with cameras. “The second Woof was Reaped, I knew it… Q didn’t tell me about the Quell. I never said goodbye to him.”
Or rather: he and Q said the only goodbyes they were allowed to have was the night they spent at Silva’s, months ago - a single night, in over a year, where they were able to be honest.
It’s still more than he’s had with Killian or Finnick - or, even more than that, Alec.
Awful though it is, Bond had half-hoped for Alec to be Reaped. Alec has done his job well back in Two, almost too well - because now, if Bond dies in the Arena, that’s it. He’s spoken his last to Alec Trevelyan.
It feels incomplete. Bond’s entire life feels unendingly incomplete. Too many things he never had the chance to get closure on, facing what may be the last days of his life.
Regina leans a head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, holding so much comprehension, so much grief. Her gaze lingers on the knots he’s made, a memory of people he knows he may never see again.
“Happens,” he shrugs, eventually. “Better than them being here.”
Regina’s breathing shivers incrementally, stories she can’t tell, that one night of calling couldn’t capture - a softer lull to her, accessing tenderness more quickly than Bond remembers. Mycroft and Sherlock, who have never in Bond’s memory interacted so easily; Johanna’s transparent attachment to the others, though she and Sherlock orientate around Finnick’s absence.
Emma Swan, meanwhile, keeps shooting furtive glances at Regina when she thinks the woman isn’t looking. It’s sweet, especially given that she thinks she’s being subtle.
Regina leans against him like she could fall straight into him. “I hate that you’re here, but I’m… so glad you are,” Regina murmurs, almost inaudibly.
They are so young. Sherlock, Johanna and Emma are teenagers, early twenties; even Mycroft. Intellectually mature, without question, but younger in a set of ways that matter when it comes to fighting in a Hunger Game of other adults.
“I missed his thirtieth,” Bond comments absentmindedly.
Regina lets out a quiet, fragile sigh. “Not like we were celebrating much,” she explains sadly, watching her husband; a man unfortunate enough to be born only a few weeks before the annual Reapings. “Still - Annie made cake.”
Briefly, Regina’s breathing hiccups completely; she is too practised to let it show too visibly, just the rhythm of her chest stalling.
Bond puts an arm around her waist, holding her close.
-
They’re really pulling out all the stops, where ‘they’ refers to practically everybody involved in this whole nightmare of a scenario, it just never stops.
Q doesn’t have time to watch the Tributes in training, which frankly, he doesn’t have time to be upset about: he’s working flat-out, running full-team full-day dress rehearsals of a highly engineered Arena that needs to be running seamlessly by the time the klaxon actually sounds.
On the bright side, the ten o’clock wave looks amazing in practice. It’ll absolutely definitely kill anybody anywhere near it, but it’s very cool, and everybody’s impressed with the drain-time and corollary environment reset, which is nice of them.
In a bid to keep some vague handle on his dwindling levels of sanity, Q is trying his best to join the Gamemakers in the usual Tribute-depersonalisation; something that is a lot harder for everybody to obey than the last couple of years. Even the most experienced Gamemakers keep referring to ‘1M’ as Mycroft or ‘3M’ as Beetee or ‘7F’ as Johanna, blurring them back and back into being actual real-life people.
It both helps, and really doesn’t help, that the Gamemakers are a bit stuck on what to do about Sherlock Holmes - Reaped for 12F, but is neither ‘12’ nor ‘F’. Eventually, they decided it was more confusing to go with anything atypical, so Sherlock Holmes is going into the Quell Arena as 12F which is doing strange things to Q’s sense of humour, he can’t stop giggling about it.
“You are more composed than I had expected,” Snow comments, lurking around Q’s desk because of course he is, that’s what life is made of these days. “A word, if you would be so kind.”
‘Composed’ is not the word Q would have gone for. “Of course,” he agrees instead, his voice completely steady as he leaves his desk, following Snow into the observation room, a place he is growing uncomfortably familiar with.
Snow gestures for him to take a seat. “As you are aware, the Tributes are likely to be obstructive in their interviews,” Snow states, straight to business without preamble. “I would appreciate your thoughts on what we may expect; we will need to correct for any behaviour that may disrupt Panem’s stability.”
It takes a reasonable degree of effort to not immediately retort ‘what stability?!’ but, Q isn’t quite that stupid.
“Well - judging by the Parade, at least, they won’t be discreet,” he replies carefully. “I mean, I wouldn’t be, in their situation. It… I mean, anything I could predict, you could predict. I doubt I have much to offer on that front.”
“Humour me,” Snow orders - asks - quietly.
The sincerity is jarring, a flicker of something Q might almost term ‘uncertainty’; it flares and falls, while Q considers his options.
There isn’t much he can do, in all honesty, bar play along: “I’d expect Swan to be egregiously difficult, absent intervention,” he fills in, the obvious problem-candidate. “Even then, I’m not sure there’s any intervention that would work, at this point - she’s a bit past that.”
“We shall see,” Snow murmurs. “Of the rest?”
“Erm - most of them, I think, are probably sensible enough not to do anything too blatantly stupid,” Q continues, “given they have other friends outside the Tributes, families at home. I’d expect emotional plays and plausible deniability across the board. I assume we can’t pull the interviews outright without causing… problems?”
Snow nods incrementally. “Naturally, we will have a brief delay between Capitol and District airing,” he muses, “though I doubt - at least in some cases - that it will do a tremendous amount to dissuade them. That will be managed separately.”
Q does not feel particularly optimistic about that statement. “I understand that the Holmeses have solicited Swan as an ally?”
“Yes,” Snow confirms. “Thoughts?”
“She’s the emotional centre of this,” Q shrugs. “I… well. It’s the most sensible call they can make, but it’s interesting vis a vis the interviews - there isn’t much left to lose, for them. I’d expect they’ll all do whatever they think will cause the greatest degree of distemper, in the hopes of having the Games cancelled.”
Snow sighs slightly, faintly. “It is troubling,” he murmurs, before seeming to correct himself: “The strategy is to our benefit; the alliance will fall apart, as it must. As you can likely imagine, we will have the ability to tell whatever stories we wish.”
“And allow them to prove themselves Victors,” Q agrees, though it aches. “I assume that’s what you’re relying on?”
Snow doesn't answer for a moment; instead, he coughs. Q notices blood, speckling his handkerchief. “Victors have ever been a troublesome breed; I suppose it was inevitable that they grew too great in number to remain manageable.”
The phrasing sends a nasty, cold feeling along the back of Q’s neck.
District Three remembers the purges. Nearly thirty years have passed since the last, but it still affects every atom of life in Three: last time, the Capitol used productivity metrics. The lowest-performing percentage of the District, sliced off. Targeted raids that left dozens dead, adults and children alike, the ‘unpromising’ or ‘useless’ clinically removed in less than a day.
Beetee had only just won his Games when the last purge took place. Belle was fourteen. Both lost friends; both became educators. It scarred the District in ways Q can’t even put words to.
“This isn’t just about the Quell, is it?” Q asks, pulse throbbing in his throat.
Snow doesn’t answer for a horribly long moment. “I am very glad you have chosen to be a useful resource,” he says instead, quiet and still, while Q feels every single drop of blood drain from his face. “I have always abhorred waste.”
It takes everything in him not to pass out. “Then…”
“I cannot dispatch the Victors in their entirety, not without cause,” Snow explains, crisp and detached. “All the same; this Game must take place. Victors hold a unique position within Panem, one they believe affords them power; it does not. They are not immortal. If they cannot be controlled, they will be removed.”
Gold has never, not once, allowed Snow to control him. Punish him, yes; never control him.
Blood whistles in Q’s ears; he’s reasonably sure they continue talking, but Snow gets a phone call, leaving Q to return to the Control Room, to stare blankly at an Arena that is going to kill twenty-three other people because if it doesn’t, there’s a reasonable chance Snow kills everybody else.
It isn’t that Q hadn’t thought about it in those terms. Gold is evacuating along with them, because he’s always been a problem, Snow would relish any chance to remove him, but there’s something about Snow blithely confirming that if this doesn’t work, if the Quell doesn’t work, then that’s it, they’re dead, they are all dead.
Every single childhood terror breaks over his head. The work he did as a child, proving himself again and again, proving he was productive and useful and worthwhile, knowing he could make things work, knowing that if he didn’t, he’d be culled the moment it became necessary.
Q excuses himself to the bathroom. Aloysius looks mildly concerned, which is probably reasonable; Q can’t feel his own fingers, curls himself up against the cubicle door and stares blankly at the toilet cistern, unable to cry or scream because he’ll be seen or heard, there are too many eyes, everywhere he goes.
Blankly, Q bites down on his knee and tells himself that Gold is sensible. Gold will get out in time; they all will, that’s the whole point, they’re all going to get out of this fucking city, they’ll get out of the Arena.
It occurs to him that a lot of the other Victors are not getting out of the city, because it never fucking occurred that Snow would have any particular interest in killing off morphlings or loyalists or whatever lingering survivors exist, why would he, it’s not like they are the ones who’ve set up a rebellion in Snow’s back garden.
Then again, Q thinks, there’s similarly no reason not to.
“... Q?” Aloysius asks, startling him. “You alright in here?”
Q sits up slightly, controlling his breathing as best he can; he grapples for whatever he can find, the shields that can fit neatly over the dissipating mess he’s turning into, enough to make this viable.
In the end, he settles his expression into an absent smile, one he learned from Gold; an implacable oddness, otherness. A way to ward off the unwanted, something he learned how to wield before he was old enough to talk.
Aloysius is waiting, when he steps out of the cubicle. “Can’t last five minutes?” Q asks, teases, as he washes his hands.
His knee hurts, where he bit into it. Aloysius looks quietly concerned. “You looked… off,” he explains, “and then you just, disappeared. Are you okay? I know it’s, they’re your… brothers…”
“Biology isn’t everything,” Q replies, detached, voice dancing eloquently. “I can’t think about that right now. I want to do my job, and it’s - well, insane - but it is what it is. There’s not much I can do about it.”
Aloysius nods slightly. He’s a kind man. Clever. He’d have fitted in well back home, in Three; just a quirk of birth meant he grew up in the Capitol, where the Games are something he never needed to fear. A place where ‘purge’ is something people do when they’ve eaten too much, in the neatly arranged vomitoriums. “It’s fucked-up, that they’re asking you to do this,” he says, looking at his shoes. “I’m sorry.”
Q’s smile tilts into place, smoothly angled. “It’s my choice,” he replies, after a moment. “I could ask to be reassigned - but I’ve worked on this Arena, now. It’s on me. I owe it to them to not be a coward about it. I hated that, in my Games - I didn’t see them. I killed other Tributes, but didn’t give them the dignity of acknowledging what I did… well. I’m sure it sounds ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t sound ridiculous,” Aloysius tells him quietly. “It’s… honourable.”
The mirror reflects them both. Q debates makeup, he has some in his bag; Regina taught him how, when he first won, something Silva encouraged. Making himself look flawless, for all the people looking for cracks.
For Snow’s many, endless eyes.
“It’s not,” Q replies, languid. “I don’t know what it is; but. It’s not honourable.”
Q watches Aloysius in the mirror, the pained edge to his expression. “How do you… how do you handle it?” he asks tentatively. “Knowing… knowing that you’ve killed people. In the Games.”
“I could ask you the same,” Q returns promptly, irritably unsurprised by Aloysius’s eyes widening slightly. “Well - last year’s Game. We organised the supplies for the Cornucopia, figured out who’d get what. Irie, starving to death. Thresh, with the mutts. We killed them, just as much as whoever or whatever finally finished the deed - every single person in this building is just like every Victor. Killers. It’s why it doesn't matter, it can’t matter, that it’s them - I won’t be a hypocrite. I’ve been a killer from the moment my first traps went off. Nothing’s changed.”
Aloysius stares at him in the mirror in abject horror. “But we’re…” he tries; Q gets the entertaining experience of watching a man collide head-on with every single piece of conditioning he’s ever received, in one concerted hit.
He’s too clever not to see it, to understand it. The dissonance has always existed; all Q is doing is pointing it out, dragging it into the light.
Q has no mercy left, not for him. Not for somebody who had a choice.
“So you tell me,” Q continues, his voice borrowing the lilting cruelty that lulls him to sleep on bleaker nights, ones where he can’t breathe for terror, “how do you handle it? Knowing you’ve killed people?”
Aloysius stares at him, eyes wide.
Q’s smile glints gold, twisting away without another word.