Story written in response to scorpiod1's prompt: Elena gets reaped (or volunteers?) and goes to The Hunger Games (you pick who her mentor is – Damon? Alaric? someone else entirely?).
My beta-readers (who are better than your favs) are Kelsey and Sarah. I owe them a lot of first-borns.
Alaric has no idea why he bothers to remain sober.
It probably has something to do with watching Haymitch Abernathy vomit into a plant pot on Alaric's very first day mentoring, but today, this doesn't feel like a sufficient motivation. He would probably need five vomiting Haymitches with three Chaffs on top to keep him away from booze on Reaping Day if he had any – which he doesn't. Alcohol is hard to come by in District Seven, and Alaric made sure to get rid of his stash weeks ago. Technically, he has enough money to resupply at any moment, but he's fairly certain that Blight told everyone not to sell to him just in case.
The Victors' Village is eerily quiet, and the silence makes Alaric's skin crawl. Blight has two kids, and his younger turned twelve just last week, so the lack of usual bustle next door is as understandable as it is unsettling. Alaric almost hopes that their escort will arrive early, and give Johanna a chance to fill the Village with loud contempt.
But no distractions are coming to save him, so Alaric crawls out of bed with a deep sigh, and attempts to shave. The preps won't lay their hands on him until after the Reaping, so if he doesn't want Blight to rip him a new one, he needs to get his shit together.
District Seven is a funny one; poor and shabby enough to never stand a real chance in the Games, but with victors happening often enough to give people some false hope. Liz Sommers winning back in the day was a small damn miracle, but then she brought Blight and Alaric home almost back to back, just two years between them, and all hell broke loose: an army of dead tributes (five of them volunteers), and parents looking at Alaric with a mixture of courage and terror as he took their children away year after year.
Blight brought Johanna home when Alaric was busy being drunk like a skunk, and she never forgave either of them.
Alaric dresses smartly, a picture of how the Capitol imagines somber District modesty, but with a splash of color he hopes can revert part of the crowd's attention from Blight's bloodless face and Johanna's furious eyes. None of them really likes the others, but they make a decent team regardless – not that it matters much. Alaric is long past the megalomaniac stage in which he believed that his actions have impact on what happens during the Games, regardless of what the Career mentors like to tell themselves every year.
They do, however, matter to Blight, so Alaric makes sure to be at the train station on time. Capitol insists it's good manners to welcome their escort as he arrives every year, so the three of them have no choice but show up. Formal wear makes Johanna look ridiculously young, and Alaric makes a mental note to never ever mention it to her.
The train is fashionably late, the way it often is. By the time it rolls onto the platform, Blight is white like a sheet, his right hand desperately clutching his wrist watch. It's almost eleven o'clock, and if he had any hopes of seeing his kids before the Reaping, he'd better give them up. If they know anything about their escort, it's that this bastard loves to play with his food.
Finally Damon Salvatore jumps onto the platform with predatory grace, and Alaric is immediately reminded of a large cat stretching lazily before it strikes and kills. His flamboyant clothes probably cost more than the Justice Building, but Ric doesn't find them funny, not anymore. His black shirt is open all the way to his waist, showing more chest than anyone in Seven has ever shown while sober, and he's wearing dramatic eyeliner that contrasts freakishly with his pale skin.
"Happy Hunger Games," he throws with a charming smile. Damon Salvatore is probably the only person in Panem who manages to make the Capitol accent sound scary instead of ridiculous – or maybe it's just Alaric who can't shake the sense of dread at the words that suddenly make this day real.
"And may the odds be ever in your favour," recites Johanna loudly, her last vowel curled up like a whiplash. She's looking directly at Damon, and the amount of hatred in her voice makes Alaric wonder if she realized that Blight just lost a chance to check up on his kids before the Reaping.
Maybe not. Maybe this is just regular Johanna. Hard to tell with her.
Damon takes her hostility in a stride. He looks vaguely amused and entirely pleased with himself. Alaric heard in the Capitol that he's considered lucky; apparently Reaping a victor in your first year as an escort is a good luck charm, a great omen for your future career in the Games. He's glad Johanna didn't know about this superstition when she was a tribute, or she might've gotten herself killed just to screw things up for Damon.
Two sealed boxes are carried out of the train, and Blight makes a sound that immediately distracts Alaric from Damon and Johanna. Reaping balls, straight from the Capitol, each name entered the required number of times, all fair and square – or so they're told. Actually, Alaric thinks that they're assured of this a bit too often, but he'll be damned if he breathes a word of his suspicions for another six years at the least. He doesn't need Blight stressed enough to vomit on Salvatore's shoes, tempting as the idea may sound.
Of course Blight isn't stupid, and he knows that victors' kids get Reaped more often than they theoretically should. You don't have to have the history of the Games as your talent to notice some things in the Victors' Lounge, things not even Johanna talks about, ever. Old Mags never looks Beetee directly in the eye; the year Beetee won, the girl from Four could make terrific fishhooks, and it meant absolutely nothing when she stepped on a carefully disguised mine. Alaric always thought she'd been a volunteer, but the footage the Capitol so kindly provided for him to work on his talent registered nothing but deafening silence as she mounted the stairs to a huge stage, her face fixed with an expression of slight disbelief.
Even if the Reaping balls are never tampered with, who would dare to call Salvatore to show that the name he read out really is the name written on the slip of paper in his hand?
Johanna's sharp voice snaps Alaric out of his overflowing mess of thoughts. It only takes him a second to reassess the situation: Salvatore has moved to follow the boxes, and Johanna followed suit, not so accidentally putting herself between him and Blight. Meanwhile, all Alaric has achieved was drawing attention to Blight's stalling by staying behind with him. Brilliant.
"We have about half an hour before the ceremony starts," says Johanna loudly. "The mayor will be in the square to greet you."
The mayor has a seventeen-year-old son, remembers Alaric grimly, and as much as he's a hateful asshole rubbing shoulders with the Capitol whenever he can, there is no way in hell he'll leave his house today until he absolutely has to. Having grown up in a tiny lumberjack settlement deep in the woods, Alaric didn't even meet Richard Lockwood until he came home as a victor, and he can't say that he ever got to know him very well, but this, he's sure of.
"Yes, yes," replies Salvatore impatiently. "And in the meantime, you three are supposed to entertain me. Wonderful."
Alaric steps in before Johanna can say whatever it is that's on her mind right now.
"What's Nero's strategy for the opening ceremony?" he asks stupidly, as if Nero ever had a costume strategy going beyond "needs more branches".
Salvatore raises his eyebrows.
"He's bringing tree bark back in style. Or was this his strategy two years ago? No matter," he replies emphatically. "He won't make final decisions until he sees the tributes. I suggested he stick an axe in his moronic skull as an accessory, but for some reason he thought it an overkill. Can't imagine why."
His accent gets slightly less Capitol, showing just how annoyed he is at the memory of their failure of a stylist. Alaric simply nods.
They drag their feet to the square, and Alaric does all he can to keep focusing on Blight, on talking to Salvatore to shield Blight, on listening to Johanna – because the moment he lets himself think about what's really happening around him, he might start screaming. In some ways, Reapings were easier when he was a boy – at least then, he could tell himself they didn't touch him; close the door of his house in the evening, and pretend nothing happened.
Of course he could only do it until he couldn't, but that's neither here, nor there.
The Capitol people from the train are securing Reaping balls on stage, and Alaric's eyes automatically drift to kids who are already starting to fill the square. They're forming their usual tiny groups at the entrance, but each group gets broken up quickly as Peacekeepers briskly divide them up according to age. Seven might be big, but people are spread thin around the forests, so unless your parents work in one of the paper mills in the center, all school you'll ever see is a single room with a teacher trying to sing songs with six-year-olds while grading eighteen-year-olds' calculus. Alaric usually mentors kids he's never met before the Reaping, and he'd never had a pair of tributes who knew each other. Perhaps it's easier this way.
Salvatore is in his element now, bossing people around and casually flirting with everyone as if he didn't come here to read out a death sentence. Theoretically, Alaric knows that the Reaping is a celebration in the Capitol, but every year the very idea hits him like a hammer once he sees Salvatore's festive clothes and his genuine excitement.
"Who's mentoring this year?" he asks routinely, his eyes fixed on the stage where his people are adjusting the microphones.
"Us," responds Johanna before Alaric can make a sound, and then she makes a mistake of pointing at herself, then at him. This brings Salvatore's attention back to them; he turns to follow the movement of her hand, and ends up looking straight at Blight, who's been taking care not to fall too far behind.
"And you're just enjoying a family trip?"
His voice isn't exactly menacing, and the remark is innocent enough, given Alaric and Blight's reputation in the Capitol, but Blight still turns green, his jaw clenched so tight he couldn't speak even if he wanted.
Then Salvatore loses interest as if nothing happened, and Alaric finds himself climbing the stage behind him like a coward, because he can't bear looking at Blight's face anymore.
The Reaping Day is the only time he ever considers the possibility of Blight's kids getting Reaped. For most of the year, knowing how slim their chances are is enough to calm him down. Today, however, none of them is placated by anything so frail as numbers, and as Alaric takes his seat on the stage, he scans the crowd for any kids he might know. Anne, the only kid his age he went to school with, has a thirteen-year-old son, and her brother, Tom, has two daughters who can climb trees like squirrels. Close to the entrance, Liz Sommers' younger daughter Jenna is hugging two kids way too old to be hers, and Alaric looks at them for a moment, because a group from the settlement closest to the Victors' Village is walking in just now, and while he feels like wallowing and maybe seeking out parents of his potential tributes, looking at kids he actually knows is a bit too much.
"Feeling sorry for yourself?" asks Johanna casually as she falls to a seat to his left. Alaric shoots her a dirty look.
"Seeing anyone you know?" he replies, knowing full well that he's being vile.
For a second, he thinks she'll slap him, but Johanna just clenches her fist so hard her nails must be digging into her skin. She must've noticed a camera fixed just on them, ready to catch a juicy scene even though the official ceremony hasn't started yet. They'd be all over tomorrow's breakfast television.
Salvatore's traditional speech is a blur that still manages to send chills down Alaric's spine. The camera's glass eye is gleaming in midday sunlight, and it makes him think of a bug in a jar. He feels familiar terror creep up on him the way it does every year, and the world shrinks until this day is all about him, his pain and his tragedies, and a very melodramatic memory of blood on his hands.
He barely registers Salvatore calling out Elena Gilbert, then Tyler Lockwood. The crowd's stunned disbelief as this unlikely pair mounts the stage goes completely over his head, and the first thing to shake him out of his stupor is deafening silence as Richard Lockwood chokes on Treaty of Treason.
Alaric has no idea how long he sits there without a word, his eyes dancing from the mayor's shaking throat to Salvatore's lazy smile. It's like watching a tragedy on TV, mute and motionless, and blissfully free of any responsibility until Blight gets up from his chair, takes the cards from Lockwood's hands, and finishes the Treaty as if he's been doing nothing else for his entire life.
The burning feeling Alaric is experiencing right now probably has something to do with shame, and it has nowhere to go but up.
Once the Treaty is over, the Peacekeepers pull the three of the off the stage and usher them towards the train a bit more brutally than usual, not even allowing Blight to wave his wife and kids goodbye. It's a short walk, and they have time until the tributes finish saying their goodbyes in the Justice Building, but Salvatore is obviously pissed that someone interrupted his precious ceremony, and it's not like him to let petty revenge go.
Once they leave cameras behind and close the train door shut behind them, Johanna Mason turns on her heel and slaps Alaric so hard he staggers.