Change of Heart
The thing was, Peter Delmont noticed, that once you kept winning the amount of people that didn’t know you decreased rapidly. You started to get used to the fact that every restaurant could arrange a table for you despite the place being packed with people. There would always be bottles of the finest champagne on the house. Hotels always had the suite with the best view for you – once people knew that it was Peter Delmont who was asking for it, suddenly everything was possible.
And he got used to that. So when he met someone who didn’t treat him like a mixture between a war hero and a rock star, someone who saw the real Peter – the person who he was before he started winning – someone who didn’t want anything from him but himself, then he suddenly began to know the shallowness of his current life as a League winner. Everyone around him wanted something from him. They wanted money, they wanted to be noticed with him by the tabloids, they wanted his tips on Deathmatching, they wanted to paste his ass all over the Arena. And the beautiful girls that were always there for him… they most of all. What had seemed like intoxicating love and gold and honey, suddenly was exposed as shallowness. They didn’t love /him/, they loved a /winner/. Once he’d slip up, he’d be dead, sure… but he’d be forgotten. Unloved.
Who still remembered the faces of the people who lost? He sure as hell didn’t, and he didn’t doubt that it would be different for his groupies and his sponsors and his managers.
And once he realized this, the fabulous life began it lose its splendor for him. Sure he got his kick out of deathmatching, but he did begin to feel the toll that the matches took on his body. His dependency on stims. The long tedious hours in the gym. Loneliness and repetition, and nobody asking how he was doing. /Really/ doing.
What was he still doing this for? Surely now he’d earned enough money to live the rest of his days in luxury. He hadn’t even taken the time to spend any of it yet… he was too busy training for the next game, the next League match.
And he never would have noticed if not for Sasha.
Sasha Tiselle. He met her in a restaurant in Eclat, where he’d been for some press-riddled gala event that his agent had wanted him to go to. He had a bite to eat in the restaurant and was offered a bottle of red wine that must have cost a fortune; but that night he’d been alone and he wasn’t in the mood to drink on his lonesome. His handheld device was full of phone numbers he could call – people who would love to join him in those two hours before the gala would start, but he just happened to look at the table next to him, and the girl that was sitting there was just so gorgeous that he couldn’t help but invite her to join him.
Dark hair, hazel eyes. A dusting of freckles on her pretty face. A body that curved in all exactly the right places. And when she smiled at him, Peter felt his knees go weak. “Hi,” he said. “I couldn’t help but notice your lack of table partner and I just got this bottle of fine red wine and I had no one to share it with. So I thought you might be interested.”
“What, do I look like a drunk?” she asked, amusement sparkling in those gorgeous eyes.
That took him aback – he realized that she thought he was just a common flirt. She didn’t know him! It had been ages since that happened for the last time. He forced himself to smile and rose to the challenge. “You look like someone who could appreciate a fine wine. I’m not sure about the amounts of it, I’ll leave that up to you.”
Still, she allowed him (allowed him! Ha!) to sit down next to her and they chatted away the two hours that he had to kill. They talked about all kinds of things, but never once did her eyes light up in recognition, not even when she learnt his name. He enjoyed getting to know her better; she had a rich laugh and commented wittily on whatever he had to say. She was a damn enjoyable conversation partner; better than most escort girls he’d spent time with in the past few years. And this girl worked in social services, with juvenile teens. It was a rather lost cause and she was aware of the irony of trying to help kids in a lost cause, but it was just the way she ticked. “It’s what I do,” she explained with a shrug. “I can sit and bitch about the situation, or I can try and do something about it.”
His buzzer went off about an hour after the gala had already started with a reminder to get his ass over there if he still wanted to get noticed by the press. “Ah sorry,” he said to the gorgeous girl at his table, “I have to go, there’s this event where I have to be.”
She smiled, but he could see the disappointment in her eyes. “Duty calls,” she murmured. “It was nice to meet you, Peter.”
“I could just call my agent and tell him to go fuck himself, of course,” he offered. The thought was suddenly very appealing. “Or, I could ask you to join me.”
“It depends,” Sasha answered, her expression suddenly guarded. Her slender fingers let go of her crystal wine goblet. “What is the event?”
“Just some gala event from one of my sponsors, I’m not even quite sure. They wanted me to be there, and I go where they tell me to go.”
Sasha blinked. “What is it that you do anyway?”
He smiled faintly. There it was. “You’re not much of a League fan, are you?”
There was some confusion in her eyes. “No, my parents are anti-League activists. I never watched the games much. I’m not a nut as they can be sometimes, if people want to kill themselves in the Arena then that’s their stupid choice but-…” she trailed off. “Why are you asking?”
He bit on the inside of his cheek. Anti-League Activists. Great, just great. His agent would bite his head off if anyone had spotted him with this girl. It might be on the internet already, gossip could already be running rampant. Who the hell would have thought such a thing? Anti League Activists in the middle of Eclat, less than twenty miles from the biggest Arena in old Europe? He had to tell her, though. And if she freaked, he could handle himself. “I’m the current reigning European League champion, Sasha. Two years in a row.”
