Chapter Text
Pyrena Tress has a childish, but very real, to her, beef with Catalina Cain.
Even though Celeste doesn’t like Catalina, she knows that Catalina has done nothing to stoke this. Pyrena doesn’t like Catalina because her ex-husband who’s not even alive was honest about how Pyrena would always be second-best to Catalina Cain. Celeste doesn’t have a f*cking clue what Tiberius saw in Catalina, not because she’s so stupid and full of hatred to not admit that Catalina is a beautiful woman, but because that Catalina would never have been the kind of wife Tiberius wanted out of the arrangement.
Catalina bought her own drinks and paid her own bills. And she was proud of it. And she never had any interest in letting a man buy her a neat whiskey or a new summer property. If she wanted it, she’d buy it for herself and she’d talked about it a lot with Celeste. Tiberius wanted a wife who’d spend his money on purses, sugary co*cktails and plastic surgery. Maybe he liked Catalina Cain because he thought he could be the one to break her.
Maybe he liked Catalina Cain because he never liked Seneca Crane, never got why Seneca Crane could work his way up to Head Gamemaker and when Tiberius asked his grandfather for the role, he didn’t just get it with the snap of his privileged fingers. It doesn’t matter, because Tiberius Snow is dead and from all of Celeste’s digging, it never seems like Catalina Cain ever returned his advances. It seems like every time he tried to touch her, she reminded him that he had a wife at home and he’d have a kid coming soon, if he was keeping up with high society traditions.
Pyrena doesn’t know that Celeste knows about the abortions.
Pyrena doesn’t know that without Catalina Cain, she wouldn’t have been able to get those abortions. Celeste might hate Catalina, but she doesn’t let her hatred twist her memories of the past. Because it’s much more interesting to say that Catalina Cain used to be good, and then she wasn’t and no one’s ready for that conversation, because she’s spending her eternity with a narcissistic piece of sh*t who she lets walk all over her.
Tiberius Snow was never going to be able to gag Catalina Cain, but she let Plutarch Heavensbee make her his attack dog. Celeste just wishes that Catalina could have left her sister out of it or would at least admit that it’d been her fault, because Aurelia wouldn’t have done that sh*t on her own.
Pyrena Tress smiles widely when she mentions that they both hate Catalina Cain, and that’s why she’s invited her to this ball. It’s the twenty-sixth one that she’s held in the six months since the rebels taking power. Pyrena leans in and whispers that she’s pretty sure Celeste’s going to agree that it’s the place to be, and that she hopes Celeste will see the old Capitol glimmering through.
Celeste’s been in prison next to Catalina Cain, on the traitor’s benches, because they didn’t know what her and Caesar had been doing.
Celeste had decided that if she was going to go down with the ship, she was going to go down screaming. And then she’d been pardoned and someone had bought her an apartment because her old one had been bombed into oblivion. Celeste doesn’t say to Pyrena that she’s not really interested in the “glimmers of the old Capitol” if it means that she’s risking going back to prison. It’d been damp there, and she’d heard what the guards did to Catalina, because they thought she’d done worse things than Celeste. And yes, she had. So, Celeste doesn’t want to do those things.
If Celeste didn’t hate Plutarch Heavensbee almost as much as she hates his ex-wife for what she’s done, she’d even have considered taking a legal job at his newly-formed Ministry of Communications. She thinks it sounds a lot like the Flickerman Network.
Pyrena flags down Rainier Blair, who’s probably in a weird spot in his life because of the recent revelation, on the live-broadcasted trial of Catalina Cain, that his wife Lucinda actually didn’t kill herself. Instead, Catalina decided she had to die because of some apparently violent sex that she’d had with Finnick Odair. Rainier Blair never remarried, even though it’d almost been a decade ago by now.
Rainier Blair grins and says: “First time?” as he offers Celeste his sweaty hand. Slowly, Celeste places hers in his.
“First time?” she questions, “You’re making this sound like it’s not just a ball?”
He grins.
“It’s the best one you’ll go to in this…” he spits out the last three words, “… new world order.”
