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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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."

At any other time and in any other place, Nasir would have smiled upon hearing that promise. Now he wished that Agron was not here to speak them.

Nasir glanced to his side, at the Peacekeeper, then withdrew his hand and moved to embrace Agron again. He did not trust them to not be overheard.

"I will seize opportunity at appropriate time. Do not sacrifice life for mine or my own breath would cease."

He did not pull away this time. It had been too many nights without Agron by his side or in his arms. And, if as a result, Nasir's closeness kept Agron from shouting his intentions to all the world, that could only benefit them both.

Faizan had stood back and watched the growing tension that threatened to overtake all. He did not know this Agron. He did not know the man that Nasir had grown into. Intruding now would only make matters worse but he could not hold himself back for longer.

"You speak as though you were no longer tethered to slavery." It was not easy to imagine how this came to pass. All slaves had heard whispers of the rebellion. "You were with Spartacus?"

His brother, young and so often needing protection, had stood among them? Dream this must be.

As Nasir moved to embrace him so Agron's arms found their way around his smaller form, wrapping tightly and pulling him close with a hot surge of fierce protectiveness flaring somewhere deep in his chest. One hand strayed up along the lines of Nasir's back - familiar and loved, even through the strange fabric of the shirt - to press through the curtain of fine black hair and softly grip the nape of his neck. A kiss pressed against Nasir's temple was his response - a different promise of it's own - while over Nasir's shoulder his eyes burned black looks on all the strangers that surrounded them in the room.

At Faizan's question he straightened a little, pulling away slightly but reluctant to draw his arms away from the comfortable hold he had on Nasir.

"Spartacus is as a brother - to us both," Agron replied with a proud jut of his chin. Still flush with the fierce threats of violence, he added with relish: "And together we hack Roman flesh from bone with blades fashioned from the same shackles that bound neck and limb."

Nasir had not forgotten his brother, but it was more important to keep Agron, if not calm, then from going into a rage. That was still of concern and why Nasir kept his arm around him as he turned to face his brother. Small as he was, he would be of little use if he had to restrain Agron but if he could remind him that there were reasons not to fight for once...

"He speaks truth. Spartacus ripped collar from neck himself. I--" He paused, aware of the fact that Agron had not yet witnessed the death of their leader. "Am in his debt."

Nasir hoped that, in the end, he had repaid it.

Seeing Spartacus draw his last breath had affected Nasir more than he let show but it was still noticeable, his loss and others' partly to blame for his lack of sleep and it was certainly the reason for the way he kept his face too still.

Faizan stared at his brother, smaller, as ever, than himself. The thought of him raising sword was foreign to his mind. The other one, Agron, he could see wielding a weapon all too well. He was built for it, perhaps born for it.

"Do I break words with the same Nasir?" Faizan smiled. "Now I know I dream yet even thought that Spartacus did what I could not lifts heart."

It was not impossible that it could have happened. And, now that he thought, Nasir had always been spirited. Perhaps he could raise arms against the Romans. Faizan knew he would given the chance but he was far from Spartacus and would never survive the escape let alone the journey.

"Spartacus fights for all who yet bear chain of slavery," Agron replied confidently. But the words were not his own. He might not have agreed with every painfully (or in Agron's mind, ridiculously) idealistic strand of Spartacus's dogma, but the lines were etched in to the walls of Agron's heart as if they were his own beliefs. Never mind that he hadn't always believed house slaves worth recruiting to their cause, and never mind that he himself fought purely for vengeance rather than lofty ideals: the words came easily, because he had always loved the man who said them most. And if Spartacus was not there to say them, then Agron would voice the words in his stead - ever the faithful, loyal lieutenant, even in his absence.

The arm around Nasir's waist squeezed momentarily and Agron dropped his gaze to the little man pressed against his side as he added darkly: "And he would share similar thought to my own, to hear you so enslaved."

The idea of their surroundings being a dream seems preferable to that, at least.

"He would not have me lose life in vain attempt, not without taking the lives of many with me." Nasir replied evenly.

He didn't want to say any more on the subject. He wasn't going to tell Agron that he had tried and been incapacitated before he could get his hands around one of the Peacekeeper's throats. That was not a moment he was proud of. All that would help him now was too take his time and see if he could form an alliance between tributes, as Spartacus had with his gladiators. That way he would stand a chance. The difficulty was learning who he could trust when all were pitted against each other in the Arena. To make matters worse, he had not reacted favorably immediately after being brought here.

He looked back at his brother.

"You take this for dream. Is thought of my taking up arms so far removed from mind that you hold it impossible?"

This seemed a safer route to direct the flow of conversation. When Agron proved himself calmer, when they were not surrounded by people, then they could discuss Nasir's plans.

Yes, Spartacus fought for all, but he could not save them all. Faizan's smile turned bitter.

"I recall a boy who fought birds and lost, even when he at last caught them." It was a fond memory, one he had tried to cast aside for many years to be conjured again in dark moments.

"Yet you stand no boy."

He looked at the way Agron and Nasir held each other so comfortably with envy. If this took place only in his mind he wanted Nasir's attention solely on him. He wanted an arm around him in embrace, for however short a time. It had been denied him all these years.

"No," Agron agreed proudly, oblivious to Faizan's envy as he turned a satisfied smile on Nasir and held him tightly against his side. There could be no doubting Agron's overwhelming love for him as he declared appreciatively: "Not a boy. He stands a warrior."

No slave, either. Not any more, Agron thought to himself. The hand at the back of Nasir's neck strayed ever so slightly as he faintly traced the pads of his fingers against the ghost of where Nasir's collar had sat against his neck so long ago. His expression turned grim and resolute.

Never again.

Thicker Than Blood Start

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cw: offensive slur

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