Work Text:
Casca doesn't know how it started.
He doesn't even care to think about it, because it doesn't matter.
It started.
(And even after everything he never dared to wish it didn't.)
And by heavens it was glorious while it lasted.
Crassus is different under the lowlights of the nightclub, with drinks flowing freely and the music feeling like a living, breathing thing. His hair is messy, the top bottoms of his shirt are open, his face flushed red with alcohol and his lips twitch into a smile, gone is the perfect student, the perfect heir, the perfect fiancee.
A version of him that belongs to those meetings and to them alone.
In those moments he belongs to Casca and to him alone.
I hate her and her class . Casca slurs after one too many drinks, glaring at nothing and there is a heavy hand on his shoulders, grounding him. Stupid assignment, stupid class, I’m not writing that shit I don’t fucking care if she destroys my career.
Humor me. He says and smiles, that one indulgent smile that has him weak on the knees. If you were to write it, what would it be?
And Casca is a weak man, he always was when it comes to Crassus. And he is drunk, drunker than perhaps he should be when he has classes to attend on the next day, certainly drunker than Crassus would ever be, all those outings always ended with Casca drunk out of his mind, being guided home by a steady arm around his middle, this is familiar, almost comforting, the safety of knowing he will be looked after.
Maybe this is why he finishes his drink as he thinks for a few moments.
Maybe that is why he speaks, freely, openly, digs into the darkest parts of himself and bares it to the man beside him, detailing things that came straight from his nightmares.
What would hurt more than striking where it hurts the most? Children, Crassus! The worst place you can hit is on the children and what they represent, the innocence of course, but the future as well. When you hold power over the children you can control their whole future, you can mold generations. He hums, gestures wildly, smiles when Crassus looks at him with pride in his eyes. If you aim at the adults, at the parents, they will fight back, you can’t control them, not really, so you have to beat them down until they can’t get up again, you have to prove you control their everything, that you will be ruthless so that they never forget your power, so that every time they think about rebelling they will think twice because they fear you and what you are willing to do.
Tell me more . He says and offers him another drink, something strong that burns his eyes. How would you hit the children? What would you do to them?
Everything after this is a blur of drinks and hushed words, the only solid feeling is the hand that remains on his shoulder, the heat of the usually cold blue eyes as they stare at him hungrily the more he speaks which just makes him continue, is the sensation of those lips crashing into his when they make their way around the dark hallways.
He falls asleep in a cold bed but his insides are burning and there is a smile on his lips.
When Dr Gaul smiles at him in her class, sickening sweetly, and praises his assignment in front of the whole class, boasting about it’s merits and destaching her favorite parts with the glee of a child talking about a beloved bedtime story he can only feel dread setting on his stomach like lead, a foreboding feeling make him wish to erase any evidence of this travesty he came up with.
He feels sick as her words wash over him, as his classmates look at him in both wonder and disgust, as he hears his darkest fantasies exposed to the world. Crassus looks at him, unflinching and unapologetic.
He hated Crassus at that moment, by heavens, he hated him deeply, more than he ever hated anyone on this world, a burning feeling that consumed his everything, that made him snarl and bare his teeth, made him want to hit and hit, to see blood coming from that perfectly composed face.
But here is a secret about Crassus Snow: He was a black hole.
Casca would never be stupid as to compare him to a star or to the sun, he was a fool of course, he recognized himself as one, but not a stupid one. He knew Crassus Snow was meant to take , to devour everything that came close to him, to lure people to his orbit only to make them prisoners inside of him, to never let go of them, to make them never want to leave.
He was a black hole and Casca had long since been consumed by him. Did he even exist outside of his orbit? Of course not, everything Casca Highbottom was, was intrinsically connected to the man with the crystal eyes.
The objects that fall into the orbit of a black hole become isolated from the rest of space-time, incapable of ever leaving, what hope he, a simple mortal, had against that?
He hated him, deeply.
But he loved him, just as much.
Casca cursed and he screamed and he raged, threw things at the walls and demanded an explanation, demanded an apology.
But black holes do not apologize for their nature and neither would Crassus Snow.
Instead he bared his teeth back, contempt shining in his pale eyes and his voice was as cold as a wasteland as he hissed the words, ice to the fire burning inside his own chest.
I did it for you . He said and his hands are like snakes holding his arms, stopping him from moving, a prey under the gaze of a predator. You would fail her class and for what? You would throw away your future, so many possibilities, so much potential! For fear, for some misguided pity? I did it for you.
The fight leaves his body and he can only weep, bitter tears that are both sadness and unfiltered hatred.
When their lips collided it tasted like blood.
His death changes nothing. Crassus was never his to love, his to care, his to mourn.
Casca lost him the moment he realized he loved him. Because he knew, he knew deep inside his very bones, that they aren’t meant to be.
Yet he mourns. Hidden from the prying eyes of course, a strange sort of mourning that is not defined by social expectations, but he mourns like only an object lost in space, forcibly ripped from it’s orbit can mourn.
Who is he without Crassus Snow?
Who is he if not one of the objects he took for himself, something that was consumed by his everything to the point he could never leave no matter how every piece of himself screamed that he should?
He attends the funeral, hidden in the back, watching as a little boy cries into the arms of an old woman and a little girl conducts the niceties expected. His eyes are dry, his face lacking any sort of expression but when the cemetery grows empty, when the night falls he too falls to his knees and he weeps.
He weeps for what they had and what they could never have as well.
Casca weeps for Crassus, but he also weeps for himself.
The first thing he feels when the news of the games reaches him is anger. But not anger at any of the living, at the situation. Oh no, Casca's anger was directed at a ghost.
How dare him.
Crassus Snow died and Casca Highbottom stayed, alone, to bear the weight of their sins.
How fucking dare him.
Do you hate him? Dr Gaul asks one day when she is in his office, sitting on his desk as if she owns it, her gaze is piercing, cold, analytical, he is nothing but one of her little experiments. Or do you love him more than that?
He doesn’t answer and her laughter rings loud and yet empty around them, his silence telling her what she wants to know.
What is hate without love? What is love without hate?
He never stopped hating him. He never stopped loving him.
Men like them don’t love softly. Their love is harsh and consuming and bloody, it tears at them and it drags things from deep inside, things they would rather be left buried, it poisons as much as it heals.
Casca always knew their love would never be soft, would never be gentle, would never be kind, would perhaps never exist beyond his own heart and those drink filled nights. But he wasn’t prepared for the hate, for the grief.
He wasn’t prepared for a world where Crassus Snow wasn’t there for him to hate. For him to love.
Perhaps what Casca hates more about Crassus is the absence of him, the empty spot at his side, is the bitter taste of “what if” that haunts him.
At first Casca tries to drown himself in posca, in hidden bottles of days that seem so far away, he drinks and drinks until he can’t feel the burning in his throat, until he can’t hear the people discussing ideas that should have been never spoken aloud.
But it doesn’t work. The drinks are an invitation for ghosts.
For the ghosts of his classmates as they celebrated the end of the exams, laughing and joking, faces he cannot recall with details anymore, many of them who he will never see again, some lost in the Districts, few buried in the cemetery.
But mostly he drinks and he tastes forbidden kisses, stolen under the darkness of the night never to be spoken about when the sun was shining and the eyes were sober. He drinks and there is a ghost sitting at his side with messy hair and flushed cheeks, smiling at him.
Casca wanted to run from the ghosts, not make a home for them.
Then came the blades and the blood.
It was fitting wasn't it? The children of the Districts would bleed, why shouldn't he? The pain surely would be a fitting punishment for all the pain he helped bring into the world.
And it was, for a while it was.
But then came the day the pain was too great, too consuming and he couldn't stop, couldn't make his hands halt their movements until they physically couldn't hold the blade anymore.
For a blessed moment Casca saw sky blue eyes and red tinged cheeks. For a moment there was no pain.
But men like him, men like him weren't meant for paradise.
Dr Gaul was sitting at his bedside when he woke up, still eyeing him like one of her experiments because maybe that is all that he is, maybe that is all that he is worth. She smiled as bitter tears swallowed him whole.
He wasn't allowed to die. They needed someone to praise for the Games, someone to haul as a mastermind and a hero.
But it was in that hospital room that he found the vice that would keep him company.
They offer the morphling to him freely, despite how hard it is to find, how just one dose may cost more than many families will have to keep themselves fed for the month, and he takes it, of course he takes it. Dr Gaul smiles at him, there is a twinkle in her eyes as she tells him he deserves it.
The morphling was exactly what he needed at that moment, it numbed everything , it even made him forget sometimes- About the blood coating his hands, about her eyes staring at him, about the taste of drunk lips, about the black hole that now existed within his chest consuming everything else.
It made the emotions feel shallow, the world distant, it gave him the numbness needed to stand there like a statue to have his picture taken, to sit there as people discussed the logistics of turning children into killers, of making their deaths a spectacle.
Casca was tired of his own self, of the broken, self destructive, murderer. He was tired of everything, of this world who praised him for the worst part of himself, tired of every feeling that still lived in his black hole of a chest.
So he took the morphling and he let it take away everything he still had.
The moment the first child dies, the first living, breathing child with terror filled eyes, who begs and begs to go home, who dies crying for their mother ( the screams echo on his ears until he takes so much morphing he ends in the hospital, the broken voice, cracking around the word “ma” “ma” “ma” “ma” ).
The moment the first child with blood soaked hands screams, horrified and desperate, when they fall to their knees on the side of the body and sobs and sobs, begging to go home, begging for forgiveness, asking “ why” “why” “why” over and over again.
The moment the adults watching that display look at each other and grim satisfaction glints in their eyes, in the curve of their smiles, when Dr Gaul laughs and claps and others follow her example, when they clap him on the shoulder and congratulate him, when they look proud .
Those are the moments Casca Highbottom wishes it was him who had been hit by a rebel bullet.
But he wasn’t.
He wasn’t and now it’s him who stands under the bloody glory of being the genius mind behind the Hunger Games.
He clings to the futile hope that one day he will be known as the man who put a stop to that madness.
He downs more morphling until he can’t feel anything at all.
He looks at the children as they kill and as they die and he hates , he mourns, he wants to tear his own skin off and never feel anything again because this wasn’t supposed to be like this, that cursed idea should have never been anything but the ramblings of a drunk man.
And the worst part, the ugly one he tries so very hard to pretend doesn't exists at all, is that there is a part of him, dark and twisted and cold, that looks at that monstrosity and longs for the man who made it all exist on the first place, who took his ramblings and put them on paper, who made this all possible.
A part of him, who wonders, shamefully, if he would feel so strongly about the ‘Hunger Games’ if he was able to see those cold eyes glowing with pride when looking at his creation.
(Casca always craved his approval, lived for the moments he would look at him with pride, the moments where he would be proud for having Casca at his side.)
He feels and then he drinks the morphing until he can't feel anything anymore.
They took who he held closest to his own heart, was it so unfair that he takes who they love so dearly back?
He gags at the thought the moment it dares to form itself, disgusted with himself even more than he usually is.
He shivers because maybe Casca has not learned anything at all, maybe even after years and years of suffering, of watching the consequences of his actions affect the lives of those who are innocent he is still that selfish young man sitting in a bar stool talking about unfathomable cruelties just because a young man with the sky in his eyes looked at him like he was something special.
Maybe he was always a monster in his own right.
Maybe staring at the emptiness of a black hole took much more than he first imagined.
Maybe he willingly handed it over.
Maybe he would have handed even more if only for the opportunity to be fully consumed.
Casca looks at a boy with blonde curls and blue eyes and a ghost stares back at him.
He watches as the boy smiles and charms his way around the Academy, as people are drawn to him like moths to a flame, like objects to a black hole, and his laughter scratches his throat as it makes its way out, bitter and foul tasting, because he doesn’t remember that smile, it’s not familiar with the way it sits on that face, but those eyes? Oh Casca knows those eyes, they haunt him every single minute of his life.
He had years to memorize their color, their coldness, the way every single emotion could possibly shine on them.
He watches as that Ghost of a boy interacts with a boy who looks at him like he is something holy, something more than an endless pit that only knows how to take, something that can bring anything more than destruction and Casca laughs and laughs and then he numbs himself until he can’t feel anything because he knows this history.
Knows it as a part of himself, knows it as a young man drunk on alcohol, drunk on love.
Knows, more importantly, how it will end and that it will not be pretty, it will not be kind, it will not be soft.
It will be painful, it will be sorrowful. Perhaps even bloodly.
It will be cold, like snow.
Snow always lands on top.
No one ever needs to know what lies underneath it, the ugliness and the betrayals, the blood and the tears. The ones snow buried in order to remain on top.
Ask Casca Highbottom, he, better than anyone else, will know the price of loving a black hole taken human form.