A Reunion of Lips

XX

Cleo was still glaring at him.

Mitch was doing his best to avoid eye contact with her, but she looked like she was just waiting for the chance to give him a piece of her mind. He tucked his head farther into Scott's shoulder and tried to close his eyes and listen to whatever Scott and Avi were talking about while they waited.

It was peaceful. Mitch couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so at ease. The anxiety that had been crawling under his skin, sitting tense in his gut for weeks was just... gone. He had to actually think about relaxing his shoulders from how they tightened habitually when he tried to relax.

The damn scar on his neck didn't even bother him, despite the weird position he had assumed to wrap around Scott. Small miracles, right?

Scott shifted underneath him and he had to lift his head for a second as the arm he was leaning on came up and around his shoulders, pulling him closer into Scott's chest. His mouth crooked up as he thought about what Cleo's expression must look like. Whatever. He literally couldn't care less right now while he was tucked up against Scott, breathing in the painfully familiar scent of home.

He jolted hard at the scream.

He sat up so fast he almost launched himself off the couch as he looked around sharply for the source of the horrible sound. When his eyes landed on the woman in the doorway, he did launch himself off the couch at her. This time, Mitch was the one to tackle someone in a hug.

"I knew it I knew it I knew it I knew it—"

Mitch decided he was going to need a lot more of Kirstie's hugs. "I missed you so much—"

She pulled back quickly and Mitch received a sharp slap to his arm. "Don't you ever go scaring me like that again! You're at two strikes already, mister!"

Mitch laughed and dragged her over to Scott's couch. "I'm really sorry, Kirstie."

The room watched in amusement as the three tried to squeeze themselves onto the small couch together. Eventually, they made it work with Mitch tucked up under Scott's arm, and Kirstie tucked up under Mitch's, all leaning into each other enough that some serious thought would need to go into getting up without knocking them all down to the ground.

Once Nicole and Leigh had gotten seated like the others, Scott turned to Hannah, Cleo, and Darien. "Can you start from the beginning and explain... literally everything?"

Cleo sat forward in her seat and started to talk.

"The first year or so after you first took office, things in Alluvia—which is where the three of us live and have been working against the rebels—were really nice. A lot of lower-city citizens, me included, were starting to apply to colleges, crime rates were going down, unemployment started going down, people were excited about all of the changes that were happening. At least, they were in the lower-city."

Mitch watched the reactions of everyone in the room curiously. He knew most of this story, or at least vague versions of it after all of their shared time in the Manor, so he was curious to see how all of the Capital citizens were reacting to this information.

"Those of us—and by us, I mean the group of loyalists Hannah started to put together—" Cleo gestured to Hannah sitting next to her, "—who worked or went to college in the upper-city started to notice little things. The city council started voting on changes. Budgets started to be readjusted. People lost scholarships. People were losing their jobs, they were evicted from their homes, taxes started going up, more and more people ended up getting fines and tickets for things they had never even known were punishable activities. It started so slowly, no one thought anything of it. Most people in Alluvia still prefer to think it's just a fluctuation in the economy, or things got too lax for a while, so people started trying to bring things back to 'normal'."