Work Text:
The act was outrageous
The bride was contagious
She burned like a bride.
("Hearts and Bones" – Paul Simon)
Here is a list of things that Cinna knows to be true. He doesn't know where he is. The Capitol hasn't killed him yet. The Capitol is, nonetheless, very angry. Cinna's made them angry, and so has Katniss. He meant to. Katniss didn't. But he's also certain that intent is irrelevant anyhow. All the same, he is alive and so is Katniss but the Seventy-Sixth Hunger Games has begun, and that means that neither of these positions is very stable. He also knows that he has a terrible headache.
He tries to ignore this by focusing on his surroundings, by attempting to figure out where he's being kept. He examines it, this anonymous room, bare and sterile with its painfully bright lighting, when the last thing he can remember is Katniss, and then the attack, falling, his knees hitting the floor with such force that he can't quite remember what happens next – and he winces and stops. Cinna's always prided himself on his restraint – his ability to harness his emotions and direct them accordingly – and he knows he needs this now. It's a quality that has served him well professionally, too, distinguished his work from the thoughtless excesses particular to the designs favored in the Capitol.
He's not a popular stylist by any means, at least not yet, though he's learned a hell of a lot in the last few years. He no longer raises his eyebrows at the candy-colored skin, the surgically widened eyes lashed with colors whose names he hadn't known, and he's learned to be careful with his words, because even if it's not implied the Capitol crowds are all too eager to assume they're looking a bit old these days. That's all in the past, though, and he has a small, but faithful, contingent of customers who swear by him, frequent him, and incidentally, encouraged him to apply for the position of stylist in the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games. He hadn't expected to have his designs selected for the Games - it had been a gamble, more than he'd hoped for. Not the outfits he and Portia designed together for Katniss and Peeta, of course, he hadn't entered into the competition in the hopes of setting a sixteen year-old girl on fire.
Though with Haymitch as a sponsor, Cinna supposes there wouldn't have been much room for criticism even if he had.
About Haymitch. Cinna knows he couldn't have been more than eight years-old the first time he saw him, and that's, well, precisely twenty-five years ago but it seems much longer. It was a memorable occasion for a few reasons - his first Quarter Quell, for one, and there was no guarantee he'd live to see a second. He was just old enough to be vaguely conscious of his own impending eligibility for the Games, but young enough that he was still delighted by the undeniable loveliness of the arena that year. The fragrance of the flowers (toxic), the pastoral calm of the landscape (totally deadly), and the adorable, doe-eyed animals (less adorable when descending in hordes). He wasn't yet a Capitol stylist, so it's only in retrospect that he appreciates the cleanly perfect design of it all – how clever, how unexpected the ties between violence and beauty. The disruption of the familiar, the reminder that the Capitol's control extends even over one's own senses. It's the height of artifice, of being made artificial – at least this is how it seems to Cinna now.
Of course, Cinna was eight then. And it's possible that at the time his attention was on the fluffy golden squirrels. Or something like that.
(And then there are those other reasons this Quarter Quell was memorable, though Cinna tells himself he can't think of them right now, because he's focused on the chill of the floor against his calf, and the slight coppery smell his blood seems to give off, and the pulsing throb occurring somewhere in the immediate vicinity of his left eye. He wants to focus on these realities. And besides, Cinna's not a romantic. Fate hasn't brought him to Haymitch simply because Cinna watched him win that particular Hunger Games. Thousands did. Simply because Cinna's never been able to quite forget that Haymitch, handsome and abrasive, tense like a coiled spring, even though he's watched his retreat ever since).
Cinna won't be distracted, but he lets himself remember how much he admired the simplicity of it, of Haymitch's victory, even if he didn't appreciate it at the time. How Haymitch adopted the perverse logic of the games and directed it towards his own survival. The startling violence of that ax, soaring through that pastel sky and past those clouds of spun-sugar, splitting open the skull of the tribute from District One. The design of the Games turned upon itself. And Cinna's been interested in design for quite a long while. Almost as long as he's been interested in Haymitch.
Twenty-four years later, and Cinna's worked in the Capitol for at least five of them. And he wonders when it happened, when his desire, maybe not to rebel, but to say something simple, something direct to the Capitol snaked out from under his skin, making him grow impatient with the increasingly outlandish body-mods and the glittering gowns and the winking lights of the Capitol. He doesn't know when, but he thinks it started with Haymitch.
Twenty-four years later, and Cinna sets Katniss and Peeta on fire. It was a dangerous move in the Hunger Games, not unlike Haymitch's, when Cinna considers it. As a pageant actualizing the violence latent but ever-present in the mechanisms of the Capitol, the familiarity of the Games and its regular players reassures the Capitol and its audiences. The success of the Districts closer to the Capitol's political and economic interests, the favoritism within the Games, the convention of sponsorship, even characters like Haymitch, though Cinna is not sure he believes this, or wants to, become part of this annual reiteration of the Capitol's power.
When it's time for Cinna to place Katniss in her wedding gown, he's not sure whether it's entirely ethical or not to turn a seventeen year-old girl into a highly charged political symbol without her knowledge. But once again, he suspects there's probably not too much room for criticism. So he rigs Katniss's wedding dress, watches steadily as the flames leap and lick at the stiff, heavy fabric of the dress, as it falls softy away to reveal his design, as the ugliness of President Snow's request becomes transformed, by Cinna, into something both unexpected and demanding in its beauty.
And he thinks back to the second Quarter Quell, to Haymitch and to that ax, clean and crisp, against that impossibly blue sky.