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Reaper’s mentor is a strange one.
Granted, Reaper hadn’t really noticed her at first.
His main priority after getting Reaped was looking after Dill, who he was truly concerned wouldn’t even make it to the Arena at all. Which, all things considered, might have been a kinder scenario, but he wasn’t about to let it happen so easily. Then, once they had been forcibly deboarded from the train, he’d immediately focused on the pompous blond boy that boarded the truck that he and the rest of the tributes had been shuffled onto.
He’d been looking so arrogant, only to stumble the moment the truck had begun to move. His demeanor changes in an instant, suddenly unable to mask his discomfort as all eyes turn to him—them, really, considering the girl beside him, dressed in a similar red, holding his hand. But none of them are paying her much attention when her presence was so inoffensive in comparison to her companion.
With wide eyes and a ram-rod stiff posture, the Capitol boy looked like a rabbit ready to bolt. It was such an irony considering where the rest of them were being shipped off to. Reaper couldn’t help himself. “What’s the matter, pretty boy? You in the wrong cage?”
Like a switch, the Capitol boy’s demeanor changes yet again. He lifts his chin and wipes his expression of its prior unease, replaced with a superior look that makes Reaper bristle even before the boy opens his mouth. “No, this is exactly the cage I meant to be in.”
Ensuring Dill was safely behind him, Reaper stalked forward and slammed the entitled boy into the wall of the tribute truck. He’d see how quickly that attitude lasted when the Capitol boy was unable to hide behind his superiority.
“Still think you’re in the right cage?”
Reaper pauses. He expects another haughty response.
Instead, he gets kneed between the legs.
He’s forced to release the Capitol boy and step back.
“He might kill you for that,” he hears Dill mumble from behind him. “Reaper killed a peacekeeper back in Eleven.”
Ah, crap. “Quiet, Dill,” he reprimands quickly.
Even if Reaper was going to die in the Arena, confessing to anything in front of these Capitolites was never going to bode well. He didn’t want this blond boy to have a single thing he could hold over Reaper’s head.
Tension is still thick in the air.
It is broken by the girl in the rainbow dress, warning them all off with the potential consequences of Peacekeepers finding one of their own injured or dead upon their arrival to wherever they were being taken. “Besides,” says the rainbow dress girl, “I might need him. He’s my mentor.”
“Why do only you get a mender?” asks Dill.
“Mentor,” comes the immediate correction, from both the arrogant Capitol boy and the girl who had accompanied him. Giving her a proper look now that he is paying attention, she’s rather pretty, with long dark hair and holding herself with a grace that looks far more natural than the blond boy.
Another tribute points out that if the Capitol boy is off limits, she might be fair game to kill. Reaper isn’t particularly inclined to attack her the way he had the Capitol boy considering she hadn’t done much except stay silent and stand to the side. But it’s her response that seals his decision.
“Actually,” she says, and gestures at Reaper. “I’m not sure he’d appreciate you killing his mentor,”—so she was Reaper’s mentor?—“I mean, he’d probably want to do the honors himself.”
Reaper stifles his amusement quickly.
There’s evident panic on the blond boy’s face, shaking his head in a vain attempt to silence his companion, who, for her part, looks entirely unconcerned, meeting his gaze with surety.
Quite the difference between the pair of Capitol citizens in their company.
She’s offering herself up to be killed? What a strange mentor.
He’s opening his mouth to tell her so when the truck lurches to a sudden stop, and he’s too busy trying to keep steady to say anything at all. He’s not very successful as the truck bed tilts at an angle too steep to maintain balance and he’s tumbling down and out with the rest of them.
Thankfully, he’s able to regain his bearings without too much difficulty, having fallen to the wayside rather than trapped under the pile of bodies spilling out of the truck after him. He helps Dill to her feet before finding his mentor looking rather disoriented, still on the ground; the perfect time for an introduction, really.
“Hello, mentor of mine.”
She lifts her head at that. Her eyes go very wide when her gaze lands on him. Reaper tries to hide his amusement at the stark difference between the grace she’d held herself with in the truck and now. Privately, he thinks she’s still holding up rather well, even now, all things considered.
When she doesn’t speak, Reaper decides to continue with their line of conversation from before they had been so abruptly interrupted. He keeps his tone conversational as he says, “You’re right, I would enjoy killing my mentor more than having someone do it,” then turns to Dill before continuing, “I guess you’ll have to sit this one out.”
Dill meets his eyes and takes a step back with a shrug. He’s pretty sure Dill can tell he’s not being serious, but his mentor is a potentially different story. He glances back to her, where she had yet to stand from where she’d fallen despite most of the rest of them already getting up and spreading out around their newest cage. There’s a commotion beyond the bars that Reaper is ignoring.
“You won’t mind, do you?” he adds, just to gauge his mentor’s reaction.
“Not at all,” she replies easily. “But might I know the name of my to-be killer beforehand?”
Her response feels more like a distraction than a real question.
Reaper can’t help the grin that overtakes his face then.
Far more interesting than her blond companion.
“Why do I feel like you already know mine?”
“It’s only polite to introduce oneself—oh! I can go first,” she tells him, like that is what he was curious about. He’s sure she knows and is doing this on purpose. “My name is Clemensia.”
She extends her hand and smiles at him.
Smiles at him. In the face of a death threat.
Capitolites are strange.
Reaper looks back at the other Capitol boy that had accompanied his mentor on the truck. He hadn’t been nearly as odd. But, then again, he’d been far more aggravating, so Reaper preferred his strange mentor to the blond boy’s irritating arrogance.
He crouches down to her level but doesn’t take her hand. She holds it up for several more seconds before realizing he had no intention of taking it. Despite this, her expression doesn’t change. She doesn’t seem to hold any upset that he hadn’t reacted the way she had clearly wanted him to or that he hadn’t accepted the gestures she was offering.
“Reaper,” he says finally. Reaper is sure already knows their names, which defeats the point of an introduction, but he can play along, if only to see where this is meant to go. “And she’s Dill,”—he waves a hand at his District partner behind him—“but you probably know that already.”
She hums in agreement, and Reaper is unsurprised to have this confirmed.
Reaper presses her on her reasons for having him introduce himself. It was hardly new information to her, and they both knew it. So, what was the point? Why?
“Because it’s easier to conduct negotiations this way,” she answers, like they are business partners discussing a mutually beneficial bargain. Reaper is very aware this is not an interaction of equals, but the casual, straightforward way his mentor is talking with him almost makes him forget as much. “Like for my continued survival.”
“And why should I let you live?” he questions.
Truly, he’s more interested in hearing how she would react than the content of her words.
Still, there is no fear on her face. It had melted away the moment she had offered a hand and a smile, and hadn’t seemed to return, despite her continuing to bargain for her safety. Reaper truly didn’t understand her thought process. He was trying his best to follow where her mind might be going, but it didn’t appear to make sense.
Before his mentor—Clemensia, as she had told him—can reply, Dill breaks into another fit of coughs. In the seconds it takes for Reaper to turn to Dill and ensure she’s alright, then turn back to his mentor on the ground, she’s already launched into a quick reply about Dill’s mentor and an offer to bring medicine. Then, she’s too preoccupied with her bag, moving with a slowness that must be deliberate, as she searches its contents. After a few moments, she pulls out a plastic water bottle, and two orange fruits.
“Here,” she says, and tries to hand off all three.
“I had another water,” says Clemensia, sounding apologetic, “but I gave it to the girl over there.”
True to her word, there was a girl with the red scarf in the direction she was pointing who did appear to be clutching a water bottle that looked similar to the one Clemensia had just tried to give to him. What purpose did she have to hand off supplies to the other girl?
Clemensia was speaking to him because she was his mentor. The blond boy was offering special attention to the girl in the rainbow dress because he was her mentor.
What reason could she have to give the supplies she brought to anyone else?
The obvious answer strikes him quickly and clearly. Hm.
So, Reaper finds himself accepting the water bottle.
He doesn’t hesitate to hand it off to Dill, given that she needed it far more than he did. The ruckus taking place beyond the enclosure’s bars is getting harder to ignore, especially with the cameras and the waving people. Clemensia doesn’t appear to have noticed them at all.
Her focus is entirely on Reaper.
She holds out the fruit. “Take the clementines too.”
It reminds him of the produce that Eleven works to gather, but is not allowed to touch. But this is not from a harvest. This is—Reaper isn’t quite sure. A gift, maybe?
Safe enough to accept, he decides.
He takes them both and passes one to Dill, who quickly makes to eat the portion shared with her. Reaper hesitates. He still can’t work out where his mentor stands in all of this. Everything about her is so contradictory to what Reaper knows of the Capitol, and even contrasts heavily to the boy she’d been accompanying.
Reaper gives her another examining look. She seems to have blocked out her entire surroundings except for their current conversation. He gestures to the crowd she’d been turned away from. “I think they’re waving at you.”
She hardly gives them a moment’s consideration—other than the slight lingering gaze at the blond Capitol boy, who was engaged in a conversation with some people with cameras, his rainbow-dress-wearing tribute beside him—before she was turning back to face him. Reaper doesn’t even have a moment to wonder if she expected him to do something similar before she brushes off their attempts to grab their attention entirely.
“I suppose they are,” she says blandly. “You can ignore them.”
Ignore them? Demands from the Capitol were not something that Reaper could easily ignore, as much as he wished it were that simple. But here his mentor was, simply dismissing the calls for her, and instead offering her attention to him. With every word and action, Clemensia made less and less sense. It made her, quite possibly, the most tolerable Capitol person he’d ever met.
After a moment of silence, her gaze drops to the fruit still in his hands.
“Are you allergic to clementines?”
Is he allergic…?
What?
Reaper studies her face to try and figure out if she’s genuinely asking.
It definitely seems like she is.
After a few moments, he replies, “...no.”
“Oh,” she says.
Reaper can’t do anything but stare. He tries to work through what her thoughts must be like to go from bantering about allowing him to have the sole right to kill her to offering food and water to rebuffing the people outside the enclosure’s attempts to catch her attention. He can’t seem to track how any of that connects to querying about his allergies.
Eventually, he peels the clementine she’d given him in the vain hope that anything about his mentor would make sense once he did. It doesn’t. Reaper is still confused.
At a loss, Reaper offers her a couple segments of the fruit. To his ever-increasing bafflement, now she looks bewildered as to why he was doing so. For the sake of his sanity, he chalks it up to them both being mysteries to each other.
He gives her another questioning look, a silent question if she wants to share, and she politely declines. “I already ate breakfast today,” she tells him.
Then, her stomach growls loudly.
Already ate earlier, she claims. Uh-huh.
“Of course,” Reaper says, but can’t quite contain his mirth. Where her priorities lie continues to elude him. “Still, it feels rude, making you watch me eat.”
“I suppose you’ve got a good point,” she concedes.
He offers a segment of the clementine that she graciously accepts. He eats a piece as she does the same. It is possibly the sweetest fruit he has ever tasted.
Reaper suddenly feels awkward that she’s still on the ground, unmoved from where she had fallen. He extends a hand to her, one that she accepts, unlike the one that he had refused from her earlier, and he helps her up.
Clemensia smiles at him. “Thank you.”
Reaper finds himself smiling back.