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Rico isn’t standing there when Lennox steps off of the train. Of course she isn’t. Lennox lets himself smile at the notion that one of his siblings would pony his beloved horse all the way to the train station just to be the first to see him coming back a Victor. He doubts Rico would like that, either. There are no horses to greet him when they finally let him step off the of the train platform. The image makes him smile, though. His family’s horses all standing patiently in the crowd as if they have even the slightest clue why they’re there. It’s a silly idea.
He touches the solid, arid ground of Ten and lets out a breath he’d been holding. Upon his inhale, he smells everything he’s missed for this past month and then some.
He’s home.
It’s a place he never thought he’d see again. A place that Kerry Moreno can only return to in a pine box. His eyes draw upwards, towards the puffy clouds that signal it might actually rain for the first time in weeks. Making a note to ask his family if they didn’t get any rain while he was away, Lennox raises a hand to the crowds and ignores the cameras entirely. His focus is on his people; on this home he never thought he’d return to.
Ana runs to him first. He knows the Capitol will be eating this up. His persona during the Games was always family-oriented. He made it very clear he was always fighting to get back to them. Lennox Clearlee is nothing without the family he came from. Pulling the girl into his arms, he spins her and kisses her blonde head of hair. “I missed you,” she whispers like some dark secret. He can only kiss her hair again. When she pulls away, they both hear the crinkling of candy wrappers in his pocket. Putting a finger to his lips, he tells her only with his eyes that she’ll get whichever candies the horses don’t want. He imagines it might be most of them. “Rico didn’t,” his little sister tells him through a giggling fit that almost seems to startle the camera crew.
“Now, don’t say that,” he tuts, though he can’t help but laugh. He sets her down but she doesn’t move a muscle away from him. When she looks at him, he can tell she’s still shocked to see him back. Alive. “I guess she don’t care ‘less you stopped feedin’ her but I came back for her. Don’t go breakin’ my heart like that.” The camera feels like it’s inches away from his face as he speaks, always too close. He makes the obvious move away from it but lets them see him turning to his older brother.
“And who is this Rico we keep hearing about, Mr Clearlee?” The Capitol has a way of always saying his name like an insult.
He doesn’t answer immediately. Clyde goes to simply clap him on the back but he doesn’t want just that. He didn’t survive two weeks of the Capitol and nearly three weeks in the arena for so little. He goes in for the hug and, over his brother’s shoulder, tells the cameraman that Rico is his horse.
“Will we get to see this noble steed? I’m sure so many of us want to know what kind of mounts you’ve got.” He has to control the way his face wants to contort at that. Of course the Capitol wants to sexualize him and his horse. They’ve sexualized everything else about him. He’s an object for their enjoyment.
Ignoring the way his stomach turns as he remembers the hands on him, he decides these cameras aren’t worth his time. “I got a secret to tell you once we’re home.” He makes sure his volume is loud enough that the cameras and crew will pick up on it. Even when they all but beg to be in on it, he continues to ignore them. “You seen Abi today?”
“Off at the Barn for the next few days. They doubled the quotas out the blue so she’s goin’ out for the week to get North Lot Seventeen back.”
“Didn’t they just loose the bull there?”
His brother nods. Lennox has to enjoy how easily Clyde can ignore the cameras, too. “Yeah. My guess is as good as yours but I’m thinkin’ they’ll just process the cows that ain’t caught yet. Think it was an older bull, might not have a good run, you know?” He laughs when the man, his brother older than him by four years, does. “An’ don’t ask about Beni. Got caught up on the last drive. Won’t be seein’ him till the cows come home.” He can’t help but laugh again.
All too suddenly, he feels like crying. The disbelief that he gets to hear Clyde’s voice again sends a wave of nausea through him. He’s grateful, of course, but the shock still hasn’t worn off. “You train-sick or somethin’?” He looks away from the cameras and holds a hand to his lips to be sure he won’t spill his guts on live broadcast. Even if it might benefit him in the long run, he knows the President well enough from stories other Victors have shared. It’s one thing to feign ignorance when being asked inane questions, it’s another to embarrass himself.
His Ma is standing with Ana now clutching her dirty red dress, smiling so sadly. He goes to her to keep his stomach from spilling. The cameras follow but Clyde doesn’t. Not when he’s accosted by a second camera team with questions all about Kerry. “Never thought you’d see me again, huh? Be honest, now.” He embraces her. For being hardly forty, she’s already so small. He’s always been big, tall, and impressive; it only makes her stature seem more of something he refuses to call frail. He can’t think of her as frail but there’s something about her that begs to be protected. Now knowing what life awaits him as a Victor, that feeling only gets stronger.
“I had faith in you every step of the way.” Her hands are on his chest, feeling his heart beneath his bones. She smiles. “Mama’s got an intuition for his sort of thing, you know? My herbs never led me ‘stray before, they ain’t lead me astray this time, neither.”
“Wonder if any of their parents thought the same thing.” His eyes flit back to the train. He’s just soured the mood but Ma was never afraid of sadness. She nods and lets him sit in it. The recurring reminder that he had to outlive twenty-three children, two of which he considered his friends, to see District Ten again. “You think my paw saw me winnin’?”
He watches her purse her lips. What was supposed to be a bitter joke at his father’s expense has truly angered her. He wants to take it back but he knows he can’t, especially not with the cameras watching over his shoulder. “Don’t bring that man up, you hear?”
“What man?” She nods. Approaching her again, he settles his arm over her shoulder and points to the camera crew. “This here’s my Ma. Best cook this side of the Capitol. We only get scraps here in Ten but you best believe she can make food better ‘an I ever had in the Tribute Center with ‘em. Ma, say howdy to the Capitol.” She tries her best to smile and wave but he can tell making faces at a glass lens being propped up by a squat, colorful man isn’t the easiest thing.
“This here’s my littlest sister, Ana. Got a little brother, too, but he’s out workin’. Beni an’ I ain’t no slackers.” Not that we got a choice, he wants to add. Y’all never once cared if you worked us to the bone, that it? “Fine fellow hoggin’ up that other camera’s my older brother, Clyde. Best rider I ever saw. Learned everythin’ but my manners from that man.” He waves dramatically and can’t hold in a laugh when Clyde gives him a confused wave back.
“And one more question before we leave,” the camera man beside him prompts, “during your Reaping, there was a girl of note who saw you off. Where is she now?” They push a microphone towards his face but it’s the expectant way their beady eyes bore into him that’s most annoying.
“Workin’,” he says simply. He lets himself be hopeful that they’ll let him stop there but their expressions don’t change. “We ain’t like you Capitol folks. We have to work for our keep. Girls and boys both. Abi’s out doin’ what Ten knows best, ranchin’.” He sits back on his heels, arms crossed over his obnoxiously patterned suit, and dares the man to ask another stupid question. It’s a risky thing but Lennox wants an excuse to be openly bitter. To point out the unfairness of his life in Ten compared to his new life as a Victor, let alone what he saw in the Capitol.
The camera crews are quick to disperse after the director with his stupid tuft of dyed-green hair calls cut. Lennox lets himself sigh, unafraid to let them see him so relaxed now that they’re leaving, and beckons Clyde back over.
“How fast you think we can get the horses out?”
“Time enough before supper.” Before he can stop his older brother, the man is running full force away from him. Lennox kisses Ana’s hair one last time and chases after him.
Unlike in the arena, this running is fun. His lungs may burn and the Capitol’s awful choice of shoes may dig heedlessly into his ankles but he’s happy to feel so free. He imagines sitting back on Rico’s back and it gives him a burst of energy. By the time they’re running down the massive hill that leads to their little pocket of land borrowed for the Barn’s staff, he’s ahead of his brother by a nose. By the time he reaches the shack he calls home, his brother is still at the corral.
He touches the worn-down panel that used to be fencing but may as well be decorative. The once-blue paint is barely gray now, chipping so badly it flakes off even before he’s touched it. Still. He finds that it’s perfect.
“That arena did you some good. Never seen you run so fast,” he hears Clyde joke. He knows it’s a joke but Lennox can’t help but tighten his hand over the wood until it rasps against his skin. “Len?”
“The arena ain’t nothing but hurt.” His voice is quiet, laced with a pain he’ll never forget. “You don’t win the Games, Clyde, you survive.” An’ if I don’t behave, Ani or Beni could be next. He knows it happened to Rodeo Grazer’s little sister two years after his win. He’s sure the only reason Snow couldn’t get at Brierre is because she had no siblings to start with. Only a pair of depressed parents who couldn’t keep their jobs long enough to hold over her head.
His brother apologizes for the joke. Like that, Lennox forces himself to forget that pain. He got really good at ignoring anything but survival in the arena. There was a switch in his mind that he found. He could turn from tribute to kid and back again like Rico could cut a cow. He flips it now, intent only on seeing his little red horse after almost a month of expecting never to see her again.
She’s out grazing on the dry grasses with Raquel, Clyde’s little gelding. Something about seeing them again, this pair of horses who’d been in his life so little but have affected him so greatly, makes him pause.
His little Ricochet. He remembers her as a filly. Scraggly little red thing with the faintest star and a single white sock in the back How he’d taken a risk on that fiery little orphan because he couldn’t stand the idea of the Capitol cooking her up and lying that she was beef. He recalls her first saddling, the day she got her name.
He’d taken his time with her. He hadn’t and still didn’t just want functional, he wanted her to want to work with him. He’d only graced her with the name ‘red’ before then, so torn between so many names but never finding one that stuck. He’d laid the saddle pad over her back and watched her flick an ear, otherwise almost bored of his antics. Even trying to get her to move around, she’d given him no negative reaction. Next had come the saddle. Again, nothing. She’d taken the cinch, too, with ease. He’d wanted to credit her love for belly scratches but maybe it was a silly thought.
Still, he’d sent her off, begging her to show him any interest in this new chapter of their training, but she refused to put a foot out of place. She’d just gone along like a dream. Walked calmly, jogged evenly, loped with the balance of a finished horse. Had even got her leads both directions. It was only at the end, standing still in the round-pen he’d made from spare fencing panels and the wall of their run-down shack, that she’d given him the tiniest hint of something,
She’d kicked once with a back foot, her only white leg. It sent a clot of rocks and dirt ricocheting off the house loud enough to drive Ma from the kitchen. But when she’d come out, the yearling was still standing, quiet as ever, foot cocked, saddled like any other finished horse in the herd.
“You’ve always been Ma’s girl, haven’t you?” His mare stops her grazing, ears pricked. For a little while, the two of them stare at once another a good twenty feet apart. Lennox, a child turned killer. Rico, the mare he swears saved his life.
He feels a swell in his chest when she whinnies. It’s the softest noise. It sounds almost like disbelief from her mouth.
“Nah, man,” he hears Clyde call out as he fetches a halter for each of them. “That one’s yours. Ain’t see a horse so attached like her. You know she ain’t let a single one of us catch her since you left?”
“You didn’t?” He’s talking to his horse now. She takes a tentative step in his direction and then stops. Lennox is ready to feel heartbroken and betrayed. He’s felt that pain before; he knows it well. But she starts up at a lively trot towards him, all of her attention on him, and he knows she won’t ever let him go again. “What? You think you a wild horse without me?”
The mare puts her head over his, pulling him towards her with a forceful movement and a nicker. It’s the smell of her, though he supposes she smells like every other horse he’s worked, that sends him into a fit. Before he can stop himself, Lennox is crying. Holding tightly to her neck, he buries himself into her mane and tries to hide the shame of breaking down so easily. In all fairness, it’s the first time he’s let himself cry since those half-lucid tears in the Capitol hospital. Then, he’d had Brierre, Rodeo, and Palomina watching over him. Comforting him with soft lies that he was finally safe. Now, if Clyde is watching, he doesn’t say a word. His mare lets him cry, not moving even an inch. When he finally pulls away, a blubbering mess of snot and tears, he sees the wet on her hair.
“Suppose I should pay you for that.” So we’ll both be the same, he almost says. He digs into his pocket and tries to pretend the Capitol hasn’t put a price on his body. He fishes out a few of the candies and unwraps the first. They pay me for my affections, suppose I should pay you, too. He hates that idea. “Nah, this just for being you, sweetheart.”
Rico doesn’t hesitate to take the crunchy, red candy from his outstretched hand. Though Lennox had tried all of them at least once to be sure they’d be good enough for his little mare, he doesn’t recall most of the flavors. He can smell something sweet, maybe a mix of berries, on her breath as she chews loudly beside him.
“Tack’s out by the shed,” Clyde announces. He pauses to look at Lennox unwrapping a second candy and smiles. “The Capitol crews came by for an interview when you made it to the last eight. Wanted it all on display. Made us clean it for them, too.”
“Sounds about right.” Lennox can’t imagine parting from his beloved Rico for even the few minutes it would take to gather his tack. She’s chewing on a second candy, this one a caramel color but smelling more like spices and vanilla, when Clyde brings him a weathered halter small enough for her dainty face. He feels the coarse lead-rope attached to it in his palms. It reminds him of the debris in his arena. Of the killing. “Where’re we ridin’ to?”
His brother shrugs and goes to catch his horse. Lennox does the same, throwing on the halter likely older than his mother and offer Rico a kiss on her face as thanks. The mare makes no noise but her slow blinking and gentle push into his body makes it clear enough. “Haven’t been to the Range since last winter,” he offers.
“We got time for that?”
“If we’re quick.” He lets himself mirror his brother’s smirk and follows the other pair to the shed. Clyde is quick with his brushing. Not rushed enough startle his gelding but certainly not taking his time. Lennox can’t imagine it. He passes his brushes slowly over the length of Rico’s body, talking to her in a soothing voice she doesn’t really need. The voice is for him, the touch is for her. He’s hardly gotten one side clean by the time his brother is throwing a pad onto his horse. The saddle comes next. “I said if we’re quick, boy. Now ain’t the time for all this, what Ma call it, lollygaggin’?”
I survived the Hunger Games and the Capitol all in one sitting, Lennox thinks to himself as he unwraps yet another candy, passes it to Rico, and goes for the shed while she devours it. I’ll lollygag all I want. He looks at their collection of bridles and then at the saddle that used to be his grandfather’s. When he returns from the shed, he’s only carrying the bridle.
“An’ before you say a damn thing, look at my pants and this jewelin’ all on my backside an’ tell me with a straight face it wouldn’t cut up gramps’ saddle.” He bridles his mare as Clyde tightens the cinch on his gelding. Rico never much liked the bit. Didn’t matter what kind, not that they had too many options, she never quite liked the metal. He knows it’s all in his head but he’s sure she takes it easier than she ever has before. Even when he used to rub molasses across the bars of it to make it more palatable, she never took it so eagerly. Today, she does. Must be the candy, he thinks to himself, certainly can’t be her missin’ me. Horses ain’t like a human. But as she pushes against him, needy but not searching for more candies, he’s almost convinced she missed him.
“You survived that arena just to get thrown off that little firecracker in the desert? Really, Len? Nothin’ on her back?”
“I trust her an’ she trusts me,” he defends, though softly. As if to make his point, his mare lips at the bridle in his hands. Taking hold of one of the reins with the care he imagines she’d use in raising a foal. “This my girl right here. Never given me a reason to doubt her, you know?”
Clyde only rolls his eyes. While the man bridles his gelding, Lennox brings Rico to an old pile of wood and crates that was once meant to be a chicken coop project and steps up. Rico circles as best she can before stopping. “Come to papa,” he says through laughter. Like he’d trained her years ago, she side-steps towards him with careful steps. Swishing her tail once at the incessant flies, she stands as patiently as ever for him to mount. The words aren’t necessary as long as he’s holding up a hand for her but he’d started to say it each time he hopped on. Now, a few years later, it’s stuck for the both of them. “Atta girl.”
The pants he was made to wear for his return to Ten are tight in all the wrong places. One pocket is empty and the other is still filled to the brim with stolen Capitol candies. He’s half-tempted to pull them off, to ride out in just his underwear and hope his brother won’t tease him too hard. Adjusting himself to no end, he finds no reprieve but in the comfort of riding his horse again.
The tears are threatening to well up again. This time, he doesn’t let them. He squeezes on his thigh with force enough to bruise, ignores the way it reminds him of his banquet and those pervy old women, and asks Rico to walk on.
The Range is a good three miles from home. He heads in that direction but finds himself doubting they’d make it there and back in time for supper. “Say we get halfway to the Range today and all the way tomorrow?” He’s yelling over his shoulder for his brother who’s doing his best to direct his ornery gelding over to where Rico’s lined up by the gate out to their south pasture. Pasture being a generous word for the seventeen acres of shrubs, brush, and sand. They open it with ease. It’s a freeing thing to realize how easily his mare listens to him. When he’s on her back, or even on the ground, he feels like they’re one being. He does the thinking and she does the moving. And when they really need it, she saves him by taking over the thinking, too.
“What? You scared to ride her out bareback now?”
“You told me y’all couldn’t catch her since I left. That’s, what, almost five weeks? She ain’t worked hard since I left, ain’t fair of me to expect so much out of her today.” His brother rolls his eyes. “Tomorrow, now. That’s when we can race for it and I’ll show you how a Victor does this sort of thing.”
“Or maybe tomorrow’ll be the day I make you eat them words.” His brother kicks into a jog. The moment he’s thought of the idea, Rico’s already acting on it. The rhythm comes to him like second nature. His body is one with her back, moving in time. Never in her way, never too early or too late, never uncomfortable. He feels free on her back but he knows it’ll only get better as they gain speed.
“Now, ‘bout that secret.”
He genuinely has to recall what he’d meant to tell the man. It feels somehow like it’s been days since he arrived at the train station even if the sun still high in the sky makes it clear it’s been an hour at most. “Oh, yeah. You remember how you were crushin’ hard for that Cashmere girl? From One?”
“Cute lil’ thing with the blonde hair? The twin, right?” He nods. “Tell me you ain’t steal her from me.”
Lennox lets his brother see him smirking. As far as Clyde knows, he’s being honest in his teasing. He can’t help but enjoy the way his brother seems so ready to fight for this Victor he’s never met. “Slept with her.” Just slept, he’s sure to remind himself. “The night of my final interview. Had my share. There was her-”
“You slept with the Cashmere Diives?”
“In the very same room.” He prompts Rico into a lope just to annoy his brother. “Only slept, you hear me? The others...well, there was more than just sleepin’ then.”
“What about Abi?”
So distracted by this sudden realization, Lennox almost loses his balance. Rico manages to catch him, slowing enough to twist over an especially rough patch of found and right herself again. “Shit-”
“What the hell you mean, ‘shit?’ You cheated on her-”
“We ain’t a couple,” he defends. But then he falls silent because he knows how horrible he must sound. “I just...alright, I gotta ‘fess up. Can we...can we stop?” Rico’s already slowing herself down. She glides easily from lope to jog, always seeming careful enough to keep a rhythm that won’t unseat him. He slows all the way to a walk and dismounts in a smooth motion.
Clyde is beyond confused when he circles on Raquel. He can see in his brother’s eyes that he wants to argue. They’d made a deal to try to get halfway to the Range before sundown and now they’re stopping? Lennox feels guilty about it but he feels more guilty letting anyone think he had sex in the Capitol on his own free will. “Man, what’s goin’ on with you? All emotional, fuckin’ around in the Capitol-”
“I’m a Victor now, Clyde.” His voice is incredibly cold. It isn’t cruel but there’s an edge to it that scares him. “I killed. I lied. And I let them do whatever they wanted to me ‘cause I knew it’d keep you safe.”
“To you? What are you on about-”
He interrupts his brother again. This time, while taking hold of the gelding’s reins so they can lock eyes without the distraction of movement. “I need you to listen closely ‘cause I don’t know what they can hear. Y’all all in danger now. Just ‘cause you’re my family. When I go to the Capitol, I go see folks who paid to do whatever they damn well please to me. I ain’t sleepin’ with a single one of them ‘cause I want to.” He shudders at the notion that he’d ever let those ugly, cruel, or ignorant perverts take him to bed if it wasn’t by force. “Maybe you don’t believe me. Shit, I wish I didn’t either. But it’s true.”
He looks away because meeting his brother’s eyes feels impossible all of the sudden. “And what I said about Cashmere...that was a lie. We slept together...in the same room. That’s it. I didn’t sleep with her sleep with her.”
“You’re a damn liar,” Clyde spits. “You sayin’ I still got a chance?”
He has to appreciate how easily the man takes the news. It almost feels cruel to know Clyde doesn’t dwell on the confession that people can buy his brother like meat scraps at the Slab. But when Lennox sees the way his brother looks at him, he knows the casual way he’s joking is only a disguise. He’s just as afraid, and maybe even angry, about the fact. “You can’t tell a soul. Whatever I told you here don’t get back to no one, you hear me? Not even Ma or Beni or Ana. And certainly not Abi, you hear me?”
“I wish I could tell someone who could stop it,” his brother confesses. “Man...I’m so sorry.”
I am, too, he almost admits. He just shakes his head. Letting go of the horse’s reins, he turns back to Rico standing quietly at his back. “They’ll move me into the Village before long. I know it ain’t got space for her so...I gotta enjoy this time while I got it.” Just like how he used to do it when he was smaller, he vaults onto her back in a single motion. He can’t deny being proud of himself. Maybe in shock, too. “But you ain’t ever allowed to sell her, you hear? I’ll kill you if you do.” He passes her an unwrapped candy as if that, too, can keep the promise. The mare, ignorant or maybe entirely trusting, takes it with a huff.
“I think she’d kill me first.” Clyde laughs, loud and free, and spurs Raquel into a lope. The gelding is light on his feet, sending up puffs of dust and pebbles behind each stride. Never one to be left behind, Rico is quick to follow. Letting up on his reins, Lennox lets her go as fast as her legs will carry them, ignoring the way his heart is aching.
I won’t let them take this away from me, he decides as he pushes her faster and faster. She’s a nimble little horse made for this terrain. In smooth motions that hardly feel different to her flat gaits, she navigates the terrain of dips, hills, rocks, and brush with ease. They can have my body, they won’t take this. This is the freedom he can only find on horseback. There might be fence lines miles and miles away. They might still be trapped in Ten even if it feels like an endless wasteland of deserts and canyons, but at least he can pretend he’s free. The Capitol will never take this freedom from him. If they have, it’s because he’s dead. That’s the only way, he decides, he’ll part from this feeling and this horse ever again.
He’s crying by the end of the ride but he lies through his teeth when he tells Clyde he got dust in his eye. If his brother believes him or not, Lennox doesn’t know. Nor does he care.