“What are you doing? What is that?”
Lux reaches for the bottle in Posh’s hand but he’s not fast enough.
“Nothing,” the blonde says lightly, swallowing three pills at once – and those are just the ones Lux can see, just the ones Posh is taking in front of him. The bottle rattles like there are only a few left. Posh hesitates, his expression softening when he looks back.
“It helps,” he says.
Lux lashes out again. He’s not any faster, but Posh is getting slower. The taller man sinks, muscles relaxing, practically melts into the chair at his kitchen table. His grip tightens around the bottle, but not enough to keep Lux from taking it.
He knows what it is and he still reads the label three times to be sure.
“Where did you get this?” he asks, his voice hushed even with no one around to hear them. Morphling was kept in tightly secured boxes in the Capitol hospitals – but Dahlia had her own private stash, didn’t she? If she could get it, Posh could. For all Lux knew, this bottle had come from her.
Posh moves to take it back and Lux dances out of his reach, comparing the numbers on the outside to the pile of pills remaining.
“Nowhere.” There’s a strain in Posh’s voice. It’s his ‘don’t worry, things will be fine,’ voice. His ‘keep your head down and you might have a chance in the arena,’ voice. Lux pours the pills out onto his palm to count them – six, six left in a bottle that started with 20 – and Posh sighs.
“Stop, you stop,” he says, voice louder now, but with a slur around the s’s. One of his hands – Lux had thought he was far enough away but Christ, the man’s got long arms – grips Lux’s wrist, pulling him back to the table. The grip is painfully tight for a few seconds before it loosens, relaxes, releases. Lux breathes for a moment, just a second, just long enough to collect every combative thought in his head and breathe it out in an exhale instead of an insult. Fighting won’t help.
“You gotta be careful with this, man,” he says, matching Posh’s light tone from earlier and pouring the pills back with steady hands. He sticks the bottle in his pocket. Posh is too far gone to notice.
“Dahlia’s hooked on the stuff,” Lux continues. “Don’t let it get you, too.”
“It’s already got me.”
He hadn’t been expecting a response – experience with Dahlia taught him that two pills are enough to knock you practically comatose, and Posh just downed three like breath mints. But he’s talking, and he keeps on talking, his words both distant and desperate.
“It’s got me, they’ve got me,” he says. “Forever. They’ve got all of us.”
“What are you talking about? Stop being melodramatic. That’s my thing.”
“We can’t win. We won, but we never win.”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
Posh laughs and it’s icy and harsh and empty and it pulls Lux up short. He’s never heard anyone laugh like that.
“Go home, Lux. I’ll be fine.”
Someone – not Lux – finds Posh dead in his bathroom a week later, an empty pill bottle on the counter and – Lux imagines – apologies hanging from his lips.
Someone – Lux – raids Dahlia’s house the next day, taking every bottle and box and needle he can find and throwing them out.
It doesn’t change anything and it doesn't stop anything, but it's easier to think he's still got a chance.