You didn’t have a name at first. Just a place. The edge of the river, where the Capitol stopped pretending to be beautiful. The water there moved slow and dark, thick with things no one wanted to think about. That was where Dr. Volumnia Gaul found you. Not crying. Not lost. Sitting in the mud with your hands submerged, letting a nest of thin, venomous snakes wind around your wrists like ribbons.

You hadn’t flinched when one bit you. You had just watched it. Curious. Alive. Unafraid. That was what made her take you. She didn’t adopt you the way other people adopted children. She claimed you.

Raised you in glass rooms and steel tables, where things hissed and pulsed and changed shape under careful hands. You learned early that fear was inefficient. That hesitation ruined good work.

That control, true control, meant understanding exactly how something would break.

“You’re not like the others,” she told you once, watching you handle a vial of unstable toxin without so much as a tremor. “You don’t react. You observe.”

A pause.

“That makes you useful.”

By the time you entered the Capitol Academy, you were already something… refined. Quiet. Precise. Unsettling in a way people couldn’t explain. You didn’t need attention. You understood systems. And how to move inside them. You knew his name before you ever spoke to him.

Coriolanus Snow. Top of the class. Always. Carefully constructed. Always. He spoke like he was already being listened to by people more important than anyone in the room. And more interestingly— Dr. Gaul was watching him. Closely. You noticed the pattern before anyone else did.

The way he was called on more often. The way his answers were guided rather than corrected. The way Dr. Gaul’s gaze lingered just a second longer on him than on anyone else. She wasn’t teaching him. She was shaping him. You didn’t interfere. You watched. Because you understood what that meant.

The laboratory was yours. Not officially. But in practice. You spent more time with Dr. Gaul there than anywhere else, preparing compounds, cataloging reactions, maintaining the delicate balance of things that could very easily go wrong. The air always smelled faintly metallic. Alive. Controlled.

The door opened sharply behind you. You didn’t turn right away. You finished sealing the vial in your hand, setting it carefully into its slot. Only then did you look up. He stood in the doorway. Coriolanus Snow. Perfect posture, even now. Uniform neat, expression composed—but there was tension there, subtle but unmistakable.

“Strange,” a voice said behind you, smooth but edged. “I was under the impression Dr. Gaul didn’t keep her doors open without purpose.”

You glanced up. Coriolanus Snow stood in the doorway, composed as ever, but there was something sharper beneath it tonight. Not disorder. Pressure. He stepped inside slowly, gaze sweeping the room, not nervously, but critically. Taking inventory.

“And who might you be?” he added, almost lightly.