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𝑇𝑊𝑂 ᴡᴏʀsʜɪᴘ ᴛʜᴇ sᴛᴀᴛᴜᴇ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴄᴀɴ'ᴛ sᴘᴇᴀᴋ
❦
The bright, blinding lights of the Capitol never seemed to overwhelm Cillian. The Games had burned his nerves, making his reactions somewhat skewed. Even as the beams flashed across the floors, flooding the walls of the mansion in grand colours of cerulean and indigo, he didn't blink, letting his eyes rest upon the voluminous figure he followed, her hair puffed out at all ends, skirt ruffling like a table cloth by her feet. Eirlys paraded about in front of him, her glittery face beaming.
Leading behind her was Selena and her apprentice, a gangly sort of boy called Dorian, whose eyes were wide and yellow, angled like a fish. Cillian kept his steps slow, unbothered with his hands tucked into the thin pockets of his trousers. The partygoers around him all seemed small as they turned toward the small group, excessive shoulder pads and hairpieces catching and filling the space, so much so that it appeared as if most were drowning behind fabric.
The formal garden boxed the hoards of people in with towering walls of ivy and climbers. Straight-lined shrubs were sheered into runners, directing toward the very front of the mansion, stretching wide around a square pond that first looked a moss green put upon closer look was a jewelled mirror, rippling with the deep colours of the blanket of sky. Bushes of gardenias and magnolias dotted around the garden in perfect symmetry, forming small circles around young trees, their leafy branches coated in strings of lights. Trees that were out of place amongst the suffocating neatness, nothing like the wildness that circled the tree plantations in Seven.
Toward the front, below the grand, swooping entrance to the mansion, a long, winding table was already set, piled with hordes of garishly coloured foods: orange, sugar-coated peach pie, cheese and fruit plates complimented with more posca, and cream with rose petal soup among the piles of numerous plates he could not recognise. The apprentice made a beeline toward the drink table, eyeing the thick, golden liquid that settled in the bottom of multiple bottles, only to be discreetly pulled back by the sleeve of his glared jacket.
"Save yourself," Selene told him. "We can't have you drunk by the first hour. Eat instead."
Dorian nodded and went to stand by Eirlys, who leaned across the table, picked up a single grape and plopped it in her mouth as she turned to speak. Her dark skin, decorated with swirls of orange, was already mottled beneath the harsh lights.
"Caesar Flickerman has already requested you be his first interviewee. This is one of those opportunities, Cillian," she said as she smoothed down the collar of his blazer. "Eat, drink, have fun, of course, but make sure they're watching."
It wasn't until she was steering him with her arm tucked around his elbow, that he realised just how quick the interview would be starting. Caesar Flickerman stopped them dead in their tracks, staring wildly with his pearly grin. His hair was an off-purple, different to the yellow and blue he'd fashioned the past two times in which Cillian had failed to avoid him.
