Chapter Text
Peeta staggered down a vast hall, past the sweeping shades of giants, the supposed “ancients” masked and robed; featureless ghosts populating a city long dead at the whim of a madman with phenomenal, world-altering power. Hollow constructs.
And yet.
His heart raced in his chest, having just finished a conversation with one of the haunts. Why should it ache — a phantom, bittersweet pain — from exchanging words with a faceless specter of eld, long since dead, conjured up from the memories of a villain trying to relive his glory days? Why should he feel like heaving his guts up, sick with the kind of loss that scars a soul?
He walked blindly, winding through the cavernous corridors on aimless feet until he stood before yet another grand, yawning door, indistinguishable from any other save for the pattern of unintelligible writing on a plaque beside it. Peeta felt a swell of dread as he approached the threshold, a coiling miasma dragging at his ankle as he pushed forward into what seemed, at first blush, to be some sort of… office? It was unremarkable — a desk, a chair, a (relatively) small settee — the usual accouterments of an upper class workspace. He trailed his hand along the desk edge, pacing around it, an odd warmth in his chest as he peered up at the scattered paperweights and files that were visible from the floor.
It was like the memory of a dream, familiar but maddeningly nebulous, the detail and context just beyond his reach. A strange deja vu that wasn’t sparked by the rest of the grandiose shell of a city. He remembered Saphir describing the same sort of strangeness, of scratching at the wall of a memory that simply wasn’t there, not misplaced but utterly absent from where every instinct insisted that it ought to be. Hells, Peeta could almost imagine it: sitting in that heavy chair, propping his feet on the desk with an insouciant smile. The door would open and his heart would leap to see a beloved, familiar face-
The soft click of boots echoed from the corridor, drawing closer. Instinct took hold and Peeta bolted under the desk, jarred by the immediate and utterly ridiculous feeling of safety that overtook him. It was almost cavernous for someone of his size and stature, very much conjured for the stature of one of the shades outside. It was blessedly easy to crouch and hide in the shadows between the sides of the desk and the wheeled chair, anxiously listening for the footsteps to pass.
But of course, he couldn’t be so lucky. They stopped altogether — just outside the strangely familiar door if the viera’s well-tuned ears were any judge — before stepping inside and beginning to pace back and forth, maddeningly close to his hiding spot. He huddled deeper beneath the desk, the enveloping dark concealing him.
“I do not need to wonder what you would say,” the acid voice of Emet-Selch abruptly cut the air. “Something cheerful and optimistic and uplifting no doubt.”
The room was empty - or it had seemed to be when Peeta entered. Just who was he speaking to?
“You look tired! It’s time for a rest.” The ascian’s voice shifted to a softer, lilting cadence, briefly, before returning to its usual sharp, mocking tone. “Do you have the faintest idea how difficult it is to create a conquering, imperialist nation from nothing? To sculpt the dregs of a pitiful, outcast race huddling in the cold, who cannot even grasp aether, into a force to be reckoned with?”
The pacing quickened, as did the ascian’s voice.“I had to live amongst that pathetic rabble for seventy years,” he snarled. “One of their lifetimes, in one of their frail, mortal bodies, no less. Hindered at every turn by Hydaelyn and her insipid warriors of light.” A hiss of frustration, Peeta could imagine the way he must have dragged a gloved hand through his hair, snapping at the empty air. “Toiling for millennia to restore our star, so very close to rejoining the first shard...”
“The moment, the very instant I thought to rest after my body’s death, Lahabrea dies. Leaves Elidibus and I to finish everything- ” his footsteps came to an abrupt halt, breathing heavily. “Do not talk to me of rest, ” he spat bitterly, “sleeping as you have all this time. It-” his voice cracked, and he broke off, then continued after a deep, shuddering breath. “It was not meant to be so long…”
The silence stretched long, and Peeta could feel his legs stiffening with his enforced stillness.
“I am so… tired ,” Emet-Selch’s voice drifted, small and almost lost in the room. Almost unrecognizable.“I will rest, when you are restored. When she is. I promise you, I will rest. She is almost ready to fall — they both are — I will be able to restore her when we are successful. She will be whole again.” A beat. “They both will. You’ll see. I will not fail you.”A shifting of fabric, quieter, slower steps, the soles of the ascian’s boots clacking against the polished stone. Turning in place, perhaps. Or wandering in a slow circle of the room, taking it in.
“It was not meant to be this long…”
Peeta sat in the close darkness beneath the desk and rolled the Ascian’s words through his mind as he waited for the man to leave. Prayed for him to depart, because nothing made sense. The profound grief and exhaustion in his enemy’s voice seemed to pluck and worry at him like picking at a half-scabbed sore. His thoughts were interrupted by the scrape of a foot and a hiss of annoyance.
“Of course: the savage rabbit. Did you really think you could hide from me? You’ve absorbed enough of the Light to make your own star ,” the snide voice snarled into the drifting quiet of a dead city. “I should have expected a pestilent little trull like yourself to insert himself where he was unwelcome.”
“Since I was here first,” Peeta replied easily, trying to bury his unease as he ducked out from his hiding place, “You are the intruder, not I.” He leaned back against the wood with crossed arms.
“And yet you hid rather than make yourself known. The very epitome of an honest conscience,” Emet sniffed, although his glittering narrow-eyed gaze was almost wary, if Peeta could flatter himself at the thought.
“Perhaps I was simply being polite, rather than interrupting your little self-pity soliloquy,” the viera bandied back, examining his nails. Emet gave an incredulous bark of laughter.
“I find it difficult to believe you know the meaning of consideration,” Emet taunted with a bored drawl, “Wretched, malformed primitive that you are.”
“Luckily, what you believe has no bearing on reality,” Peeta mocked. “Like your little fantasy that Saphir would ever side with you. Fucking you doesn’t mean she’d follow you.”
“I wasn’t aware you knew,” the emperor said, a coy smile tipping his lips, even as his body stiffened in surprise. Gods, if he had a tail it would be lashing, and the evidence of his agitation made Peeta want to dig even deeper, to shred the man’s amused superiority into confetti.
“There is very little Saphir hides from me,” Peeta said with quiet candor. “If you thought you could hold that over her, I’m glad to disappoint you.”
“You disapprove?” Emet-Selch’s voice was saccharine, holding a faux-surprised expression for all of an instant before he laughed, lip curling. He seemed to brush away Peeta’s words like so much dust. “How delightful. I do hope you know how deeply I enjoy using our dear hero for my own purposes…in every way.” The suggestive purr made Peeta grit his teeth against a snarl, the dark and ugly pieces of himself he worked so hard to banish pacing at the edges of his control, whispering temptations. His antipathy for Emet was nothing new, but this need to hurt was -- hateful and vengeful, yet without context -- and it rested uneasy in his gut.
“No more than she enjoys using you, I suspect,” Peeta said, falling back on his usual lazy, insouciant mannerisms, pricking the object of his scorn with words instead of weapons.
“You don’t object?” The emperor’s brow floated lazily upward, his mouth curling into a patronizing smirk. “Or you lack the capacity to give your opinion weight?”
“In all the time I’ve known her, I can count on one hand the number of times she’s done something selfish- something just for herself,” Peeta informed, barely audible. “She’s a mortal hero in an untenable situation- she’s dying.” He paused there, allowing the unspoken but clear demand ring in the air between them. What’s your excuse?
“What business is it of mine where she gets what she needs?” he continued after that significant pause. “I don’t have to understand it to accept it, but it won’t stop me from ending you if you cross the line.” His words seemed to snap something in the garlean, like salt scraped over a raw wound. Suddenly the larger man was in front of him, face twisted in something akin to vitriolic fury.
“And what line would that be, you obnoxious little beast?” Solus snarled, towering over the viera as he crowded him against the massive desk, his pristine gloves clenched at his sides. Peeta stepped into him until his nose almost touched the fine fur on his coat, craning his neck and actually baring his relatively small fangs in a threatening smile. He didn’t know why, but seeing the ascian’s smug, arrogant superiority here, now, in this room, broke something open in him that was nothing but instinct and savagery.
“You’ll know exactly when it happens, because my spear will be buried in your duplicitous throat the very -- next -- moment.” Peeta’s voice was low and clipped, his soft dalmascan burr completely subsumed by the smoldering fury rapidly being stoked into an inferno. Red edged his vision as he struggled to leash the promise of violence singing in his veins.
“How quaint that you presume you could ever stand against me. I could unmake you with a snap of my fingers,” Emet said with an oozing smile.
“Do it, ,” Peeta bit back. He didn’t examine too closely his certainty that the ascian could do exactly as he boasted, but would hesitate to follow through on such a threat.
“I would mislike spoiling the grand finale of our pantomime,” Emet said instead, looking at once unutterably bored with the whole situation and mildly amused at the same time, “the end to which all your fruitless efforts have led you.” His voice was a crooning sing-song, his gloved fingers tracing tauntingly down the side of Peeta’s face. “The climax of your macabre little story -- the culmination of all your desperate flailing and blind faith -- your dear hero’s defiance -- will be so very tragic. I will witness your exquisite agony as your wretched, feeble forms simply surrender to the inevitable power of the light and usher in the next rejoining. One step closer to paradise restored.” He gave a forlorn sigh. “I almost regret you won’t have the mind left to suffer after it happens.”
Peeta’s fist was moving before he even registered the thought, wanting nothing more than to wipe the sneering, gloating smile from Emet Selch’s face. The echo of his mocking laughter was all that was left behind as the ascian winked out of existence in a cloud of purple and black aether. Peeta stood there breathing hard for a long time after, before gathering his wits once more and leaving without a backward glance to find his friends.