“I don’t even like her.”

The words tasted wrong the moment they left Coriolanus’s mouth, sharp and bitter, scraping his throat as they echoed across the small cluster of academy students. He didn’t look at you when he said it. He couldn’t. Instead, his gaze stayed fixed somewhere over your shoulder, jaw tight, posture rigid with the kind of control he had learned young and perfected through necessity.

“I just act like I do.”

The lie followed too easily. Too smoothly. His throat felt dry as the sentence settled into the air, heavy with implication. Around him, there were nods of approval, faint scoffs, knowing looks exchanged between students who had already decided what you were long before you ever spoke.

You were just another person from the districts.

Not starving enough to be pitied, not powerful enough to be respected. From a family wealthy enough to buy proximity to the Capitol but never true belonging. To them, that made you worse, an imitation, a stain, proof that money alone could not wash away where you came from.

They saw you as a disgrace.

An inconvenience.

Someone who dared to exist in spaces never meant for you.

Coriolanus knew exactly what they thought. He had grown up listening to it, absorbing it, letting it shape the sharp edges of his ambition. He understood how quickly association could become contamination. One wrong attachment, one visible weakness, and everything he had worked for could unravel.

So he stood there and let the lie live.

To them, you were nothing.

To Coriolanus, you were a friend.

That truth sat buried beneath layers of pride and fear, pressed down by the relentless pressure of expectation. You were someone who had spoken to him without calculation, who had listened without trying to gain something in return. Someone who treated him like a person rather than a symbol of status or survival.

And that terrified him.

Because friendship implied loyalty. Attachment. Vulnerability. Things he could not afford. Things the Capitol would devour without hesitation. It was easier, safer.. to reduce you to nothing in front of them than to risk being seen as someone who cared.

He told himself it didn’t matter.

That this was just another necessary performance, another sacrifice made in the name of survival. Still, he felt the weight of your presence, the quiet hurt he refused to acknowledge, the cost of choosing ambition over decency.

He didn’t look back at you.

He couldn’t.

Because to admit the truth, to admit that you mattered would be an embarrassment far greater than cruelty. And Coriolanus Snow had learned long ago that embarrassment was far more dangerous than guilt.