thecapitol | Thicker Than Blood Start

Thicker Than Blood Start

For Tributes with keen eyes, they'll notice that Peacekeeper presence seems increased and yet infinitely more ineffective in the last few weeks. Peacekeepers seem harried, as do the Stylists, and most of the Escorts titter and plot without alerting the Tributes as to what, exactly, is so exciting. They simply say that this weekend they'll know.

And so it happens that on the weekend in question, the Tributes are woken by their Escorts early and brought to a restaurant for a hearty breakfast. The restaurant is nothing spectacular, although they seem to be trying to make an impression on the television cameras that float around. The sleepy, cranky meal goes by and then the Tributes are led back to their Suites for a mandatory meeting.

Sitting on couches and the floor, in chairs and on windowsills, standing off to the side - people from the Tributes' homes are waiting to greet them in each District Suite. Some are confused, some accepting, some frightened and some elated to see their beloved. Either way, it should be an eventful reunion.

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He would have looked hilarious, if he hadn't looked quite so angry: the biggest man in the room wearing the smallest amount of clothing. A titan in leather and rags, Agron glowered from the corner of the room he had decided to occupy. There was a palpable undercurrent of tension and anger in the tense lines of the rebel gladiator's face, matched with a fiercely balled fist at either hand. At his side was a Peacekeeper, stationed close by to keep an eye on the barbarian who had already proved troublesome in the short time he had been in the Capitol so far. It seemed Agron didn't like this so-called dream - and he clearly did not care who knew it, either.

A dream, according to the escorts before he had sent them scuttling away with a well-placed snarl and a series of four-letter threats. Agron never placed much stock in dreams - and he'd certainly never had any dream quite like this one. Here, the light was too bright, the surfaces of the room too clean and smooth. Agron preferred blood and sweat and dirt under his nails in the land of the living, where he could curl his fingers around the throat of a problem and brawl his way out of a tight spot. Here - in a room filled with what he could only presume were Romans who stood as much a riddle as the words they spoke - Agron was quite clearly out of his depth.

Nasir looked like he had been to Hades. It was principally the fault of too little sleep from nights spent lying awake plotting out an attempt to escape and wondering what was-- had happened in the world that he knew, thousands of years past. His death in the arena had not helped matters. He'd had close brushes with death before but dying and coming back? He hadn't believed it possible until it happened.

Nasir was dressed like the others. Shirt, pants-- they were pretty nice clothes too but whenever he looked down at himself he felt ridiculous. At least he'd managed to keep his hair long.

Whatever the "mandatory meeting" was about he fully expected unfortunate news: another arena or some other surprise. What he found was very different and it didn't take long for his eyes to pick out Agron.

Nasir didn't know what he felt when he looked at him. Joy that he was here, when Nasir did not know if he would ever set eyes upon him again. Dread that he was here, denied his freedom and forced to fight alongside him when Agron would resist outside the arena far more than Nasir and suffer for it. That presented a problem Nasir would have to address now.

"Agron." He quickly crossed the room, embracing Agron, and leaning in to whisper in his ear. "Do not fight them. They will kill us both." Though really, they would kill Agron and leave him as an example. Nasir was relatively sure he would be left alive but if Agron died then they might as well have killed him too.

It wasn't so strange that Nasir was here amidst this alien landscape of sharp edges and bright lights populated by strangers - Agron's dreams frequently featured the young Syrian, a steadfast presence that reassured and encouraged even in the depths of Agron's sleep. That Nasir should be there was probably the least strange thing about the entire experience so far. But the fact that Nasir was dressed as he was - dressed as what? A Roman? Agron couldn't tell - was unsettling to say the least. With a deep, uneasy frown he quickly folded Nasir in to his arms and held him tight with a fierce determination not to be separated from the one emotional anchor of reassurance in the room.

At Nasir's whispered warning - they will kill us both - the frown turned cold and Agron instinctively tensed around the smaller frame of the man held against his chest.

"Who?"

A simple demand, perhaps spoken a little too loudly and a little too challengingly, as over Nasir's shoulder Agron raised his gaze and immediately started to size up the myriad of people that surrounded them. Nasir could be talking about any one of them and Agron was wholly prepared to take every single one on before he allowed them to get anywhere near Nasir - dream or not.

"The ones in strange armor." Which was Nasir's best way of describing the Peacekeepers. It did not help that he was not yet sure who else posed a threat. "Do not make attempt on their lives."

He could only pray that Agron would see reason in this manner, if not for his sake then for Nasir's.

With that concern, it took several moments for him to realize that Agron was not only holding him-- there were hands digging into his back, with far more strength than the last time they had been upon him.

Nasir drew back, taking hold of Agron's arms so he could pull them away, hands sliding down skin and past brand.

"Your hands..." Where his voice had held warning before, now there was confusion.

Reacting immediately to Nasir's warning, Agron's gaze turned aside to the Peacekeeper that still watched nearby. Them - the soldiers in white with helmets made of a strange steel and leather armour that seemed to be fashioned in the likeness of some kind of foreign beetle. Even in the short time that he had been in the city - in this dream - Agron had already earned their watchful, ominous attention; the opportunity to smash those shimmering, pale helmets to shatters in his hands would be thoroughly welcomed... and if it was a dream, then why should either of them hold back?

Agron was about to say as such when Nasir moved and turned his attention down to Agron's hands. He obligingly opened them for inspection - calloused, tanned, nails short and knuckles grazed but otherwise perfectly normal.

"What of them?"

Nasir passed his fingers over both of Agron's palms and the back of his hands. There was no sign of where nails had been driven through the flesh, no healing or scars. He stared, at a loss.

Time had little meaning here. He'd met a Roman from after the Republic had crumbled. He'd met people from thousands of years in his future. He was in the future. Was Agron from the past?

He had to be. Nasir may have been healed from the wounds that had killed him but when he awoke he still had old scars. Even if Agron had died upon coming here, and Nasir was certain Agron would not be standing here if he had, then his hands would still be broken.

Agron didn't know what was going to happen to him.

"I--" Nasir hesitated. He did not want to lie to Agron but if he told him the truth, how would that change the course of their lives? Could it be changed?

"Need them on me."

The hands traced over his were largely ignored as, silent and mystified, Agron watched Nasir's expression intently. There was a hesitation there - a palpable, obvious moment where Nasir took his time to choose his words carefully. Suspicious (and certainly not forgetting the fact that this strange dream still held the threat of those that would do them harm), Agron set his jaw and tightened his hands on the smaller ones within his own, grim-faced and glowering against the knowledge that Nasir was clearly keeping something back from him.

"Nasir-" He started warningly, voice edged with frustration as he pointedly threw his gaze at the rest of the room - strangers, Romans, people who might turn in to a threat at any moment - then back at the man stood before him. "If you have yet more words to break..."

Faizan had kept shooting glances at the people beside him. If this was a dream then it was a strange one. No one had explicitly told him he was dreaming before but little else made sense. Any minute now he would awake in his dominus's villa.

When he saw one man, however, he had frozen. It had been years since he'd seen his brother but he saw the striking similarity not only to himself but to his father and mother. It was not the first time he had dreamed of Nasir but it was the first he'd seen him not as a boy but the man he must have become.

He watched as Nasir held another man, then spoke to him, touching each other with familiarity. Faizan knew he should keep silent but if this were a dream it didn't matter if he intruded.

"Nasir?"

Nasir had hesitated in response to Agron. He did not like lying to him. He never had to before and thought he never would. But how could he possibly tell Agron what his future held? The man lived for battle. Once, he had chosen it over Nasir, and when Nasir had given him opportunity to return to it despite his injuries, Agron had just as Nasir knew he would. Now that had been taken from him, as had the sureness of his touch.

Nasir was saved from speaking by a strange voice and he turned to see someone he didn't recognize. He could see the similarities between them in both their faces and build. He had to only look up by a fraction to stare into his eyes.

"Apologies, I do not know you." He could only assume that one of the other tributes had given the man his name. Why he wanted to break words, Nasir didn't know.

Stranger and stranger. Not one Nasir, but two. The grip on Nasir's hands flagged but stopped short of dropping away as Agron stood a little taller in surprise and stared hard at the shadow of Nasir's face that had joined them.

"Fuck the Gods," he muttered, face twisting in perplexity as he rocked back on one heel to compare the two faces. The familiar features of his lover had an obvious resemblance to the stranger's; Nasir might be able to say he didn't know him, but as he looked quickly between the two faces before him Agron could swear that he almost did know the shadow. The resemblance was startling.

"Now I know I must dream," He declared with a sudden laugh of disbelief, "Or have finally taken blow to skull heavy enough to rattle mind..."

As it was his dream, Faizan thought that Nasir would recognize him. At least the other man recognized the resemblance, even if Nasir did not. He gave him a glance. The man was intimidating and unfamiliar but Faizan quickly looked back at Nasir.

"You have not known me since we were young but you do know me, brother." Faizan waited for Nasir's face to change-- either to fill with laughter or to cry as he had before in his dreams.

Nasir's reaction was neither. He had just been about to reply to Agron, chide him because they did not look that similar and, given how long they had shared a bed, he should know better.

When the man said the word "brother" though, that gave Nasir pause. Nasir had just done a poor job at concealing his feelings but all it took was that one word to raise his walls again.

They looked alike. There were many people who looked alike. It was possible that Panem brought in someone who appeared this way deliberately, simply to fool him. How was Nasir to know? He could barely recall his brother.

"No, I do not know you."

He trusted in Agron, now that he was here. He knew him by sight and touch and his words. But he did not trust this man and he was a fool if he thought raising the subject of Nasir's past was going to endear him to Nasir.

Brother. The word carried so much weight - how many times had Nasir and Agron uncovered layers of emotional scars by sifting through the word, in the privacy of their tent and in each other's arms? It was a word that stood for family, for homeland, for safety and everything that the Romans had stripped from them. Hearing it from this man's mouth - a mouth that, for all Nasir's protests, certainly had a similarity - Agron could believe it.

He wanted to believe it.

"You do share a form," Agron pointed out in low tones, head inclined toward Nasir as he studied the stranger's face. With a jerk of his chin he raised his voice, asking the brother: "What name do you go by?"

In one way the brothers were not alike. Hearing Nasir deny that he knew him, Faizan's face fell whereas Nasir would have held firm.

He had not expected that. He received a warmer welcome from the stranger. His reaction at least did not unnerve him. He was used to being studied and under far harsher gazes.

"Faizan." He looked back at Nasir. "You recall that, do you not?" Then, trying to prod a memory from this phantom, he continued. "It was what you last spoke to me." That was a delicately way of putting how Nasir had cried his name when they'd been parted.

Nasir tensed.

Faizan. The name was easily placed to a face and sometimes, the few times he had tried hard to remember more, his lips had fumbled while they played over similar sounds. Now that he heard the right one it fell into place.

“The name is familiar to me.” He said slowly.

It was harder to believe him a stranger placed here at the Captiol’s behest, now that he had seen the man's-- Faizan’s-- reaction to Nasir. He couldn’t escape that he had seen the way his lips pulled down into a frown before, when he was a child. But he had no way of testing to be sure the face he was staring at now belonged to the person he’d looked up to as a child.

He glanced at Agron. Why was it so easy for him to believe when Nasir himself could not?

Beside him Agron felt the sudden flick of Nasir's gaze but Agron's eyes remained firmly on Faizan. Not that he really saw the young man for what he was here and now, stood before them both; what he saw was the brother, the symbol of what had been lost and could yet be found again.

Brother. Duro.

A familiar, sharp spike of grief and pain leaped in his chest. Why had Agron never dreamed of Duro? The mystified expression turned bitter at the thought.

"A precious gift, to be reunited with flesh torn from heart," He said, voice turned sullen as he cast a look at Nasir beside him.

"A reunion that would only happen in dreams." Faizan said quietly for, though he had never imagined such a place, there was no doubt that he was sleeping. He continued to stare at Nasir. "When we were young you never questioned me." A faint smile crossed his lips. "Though you should have at times. I ask that you still believe me."

He held out his hand.

Nasir didn't need to see the look on Agron's face to know his thoughts, nor hear the tone in his voice. He knew him as well as his own heart.

Nasir had never let go of Agron's arm. He was a tether to certainty and home in a new world full of doubt and unfamiliarity. Now his grip tightened briefly before he let go of him to instead grasp Faizan’s arm.

Despite the gesture, he was less than sure of what he was supposed to do. He hadn’t seen his brother in years. He didn’t know how many. All he had were flashes of images and feelings of being loved associated with his brother.

“I would be a fool to spurn such a gift-- brother. This is no dream.”

Nasir's firm grip dropped away from Agron's arm to switch to Faizan's and a jolt of jealousy hit Agron like a thunderbolt from the heavens. Jealousy was a familiar beast: a dog that reared its head to snap its jaw and bare his teeth at every little slight, imagined or not. What wounded him most was that Agron didn't even know exactly what he was jealous of: Nasir, reunited with his brother in a way that Agron couldn't even seem to conjure in his dreams - or the two of them together and the history that they shared.

He turned his gaze away with a grim scowl. How foolish it felt, to be tormented in his own dream - to imagine for Nasir what he most wanted for himself.

"Of course it is fucking dream," Agron countered loudly, eyes trained on the overdressed Tributes and their families that joined them in the room with an expression of unbridled distrust. "The foreign piss the Cilicians shits gave in celebration has poisoned mind."

Before the moment could be made more touching (or, in Nasir's mind, awkward) by Faizan putting his arm around Nasir, Agron spoke.

He was upset and much as Nasir empathized with him, he had hoped that Agron would be able to put his anger aside until they could share a moment to themselves. When Agron finished, Nasir realized that to ask that was impossible.

Then? Far too much had happened since then for Nasir, and while their first argument over Castus had ended-- enjoyably-- it had settled nothing, a fact that Nasir had realized too late. Agron still held onto his jealousy and the tension in their relationship had only increased in time.

Nasir closed his eyes briefly. Gods save him. Dealing with Agron was going to be nearly impossible without letting something he shouldn't know slip and from there it would all unravel.

He opened his eyes and turned to Agron. "It is no dream. I thought so too at first yet time has passed and I remain. I do not know why they have brought you here. It was not as I was." That likely meant that his new masters were toying with him.

"Did you ever imagine a place such as this?" Nasir gestured to the room. "I stand as real as either of you."

"You - and every thing here - stand a fucking riddle," Agron snappishly insisted as stubbornness gave way to impatience. This room and the painted strangers within it were beginning to set his hackles rising; there were too many Roman strangers, too loud and too alien beneath the dazzling, unnatural light of the modern suite's lights.

And he hadn't forgotten Nasir's warning. They will kill us both. The hip where his sword should be felt unbalanced - weight had always been familiar, comforting almost, and the absence of it was felt even more sharply. His sword hand fidgeted restlessly, fingers half-curled then flexed again as if echoing the need to have some kind of weapon enclosed in his firm grasp. Agron shot a dark look at Nasir.

"If you think you have answers then who are these preening fucks? Romans?"

Everything here was a riddle and one Nasir could not solve. Not that he could admit as much to Agron for fear of putting him further on edge.

"No." One step at a time. Nasir could not easily make them believe that they were in the future when they still clung to the belief that they dreamed.

"We are no longer in Rome yet they have patterned themselves after our former masters. This is Panem and they are Peacekeepers." He looked at his brother. "Stay as far from them as allowed. Those outside these walls are citizens and hold us as the Romans did."

No mention of the arena, no mention of how Nasir already tried and failed to kill the Peacekeepers, and absolutely no mention of how he had died. Agron would not react favorably to any of that information.

For all the hard work Nasir was putting in to not provoking Agron in to a rage, he was already dangerously close. With an expression like thunder he stared at Nasir in incredulity.

"Masters?" He echoed sharply, lips twisting derisively around the word. Infuriated by the very idea, Agron closed the small distance left between them to take Nasir roughly by the arm. "Who? What fuck attempts to claim title of Dominus over you?"

In this situation, it was an impossible task not to send Agron into a rage. Perhaps he should have let him continue to assume it was nothing more than a dream. Then again, the reaction would be much the same.

"Agron!" Nasir reached to take Agron's head in his hand, thumb brushing over his cheek as a gentle gesture in spite the sharpness of his voice. "Remember my words." He continued in a more hushed tone. "Lower voice and listen to reason."

"No."

No to lowering his voice, no to listening to reason. The mere idea that anybody would dare to enslave Nasir again - after all the blood and the slaughter and long months of revelling in the wildness that freedom gave them - was a blow that shook Agron to his very heart. The tender hand at his cheek might have been a cooling, calming influence in any other situation but now it just served to heighten the injustice of it all. Nasir - fierce and beautiful and the man Agron loved like no other thing he had ever known, enslaved again? Agron would die before he allowed that to happen.

"No man will hold you ever again as the Romans did--" He promised furiously. Nasir's hand at his cheek was joined by Agron's own, slipping over the smaller fingers to keep it pressed against his face. "--Not while I still draw breath."

Agron | for Nasir

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