prompt: victors, sorrow found me when I was young; sorrow waited, sorrow won


Chapter 1: Districts 1 & 2

Cashmere

Little sister, first Victor. That's the way it is in District One. The girls go in at sixteen, young enough to tempt the sponsors, and that means Cashmere graduates from the Academy while her older brother still has a year to go.

She doesn't think anything of it until they pull her from the Arena, scrub the blood and filth and charcoal from her skin. They have to trim her nails down to the quick to remove the last of the Four Boy's guts. She stinks of death and sweat and rotting wounds. It sticks in her nose even after she's been rubbed pink and clean, rinsed with perfume and wrapped in a robe of soft, soft wool. "Like your name, sweetie," whispers one of the prep team, and strokes a hand over Cashmere's hair as she stares at the wall and imagines it splashed with red.

Everyone wants to touch her, and she's a Victor now and that means they can. They all want a taste of the merchandise before they commit to buying. Cashmere staved in the skull of another boy with her mace, but now she has to smile and wink when one of the sponsors slides his hand up her skirt at a party. She pats his wrist and thinks about snapping the bones in two. Later that night she grips the headboard and imagines smashing his head against it until the skull fractures and the pillows lie heavy with blood.

In the time between her win and the day her brother stands on the reaping stage, Cashmere learns truths no one should ever have to see. She peels back the ugly surface of the world and peers into its decaying soul. There are secrets in this world that no little sister should ever have to tell her big brother, assuming he ever makes it out to hear them.

One year later, Gloss staggers from the Arena, soaked in blood and grinning like a madman. Cashmere weeps and hurls a lamp against the wall because he made it out alive.


Gloss

When Cash was six, she skinned her knee. They were running, racing up a hill, and Cash was faster than him even then but he was bigger and he used to cheat. He took a rocky path up that her little pink sandals couldn't handle, and her shoe snapped against a stone and down she went. She wailed and wailed and Gloss ran back, and when he scoffed and said it wasn't anything she threw a rock at his head. "I know that!" She scowled at him, cheeks puffed out. "I'm not a baby. You're supposed to kiss it better anyway. You're the worst big brother ever!"

Well, that taught him quick. Gloss kissed her knee, then her forehead, then he carried her piggyback down the mountain with her drumming on his head and giving him commands like a horse.

Gloss loves the Academy for giving him a purpose, for showing him what he always used to think, that he and Cash are special. He loves the Capitol for giving them the opportunity to serve, to be a hero. He's not a little jealous that he has to wait until after Cash wins to get his turn, but the Academy knows best and he trusts them to do the right thing.

Nothing prepares him for the Arena, for the pain and the screams and the horror, but it's worth it when he makes it out, when he stands on that stage in front of thousands of people screaming his name, and his sister waits for him on stage, resplendent and glorious. Until she takes him in her arms that night, holds his face, and tells him that the worst horrors are yet to come. He looks at her - really looks - and sees the wild darkness in her eyes. Somewhere in the year since he wished her well and the train took her away they've taken the little girl with the pink plastic shoes and replaced her with something twisted and hard.

He asks what happened. She says, "You'll see."

Cash isn't his little sister anymore. He hates them for taking that away, even before he finds out how.


Brutus

Brutus is five years old when one of the girls at school calls his dad a dirty quarry rat. Brutus pushes her down and grinds her face into the dirt until she takes it back. The school calls home, and Dad actually leaves the mines early - that means he doesn't get paid for the afternoon, that means he'll have to work longer tomorrow - to come pick Brutus up and take him home. He takes Brutus out back behind the house and makes him move a pile of rocks from one side of the yard to the other.

"Real men don't hit girls," Dad says, and his eyes are dark with disappointment and that's worse than trembling arm muscles and sore shoulders. He cuts off Brutus' protest with a look. "I don't care what she said, little man, that's not how we behave."

Brutus tries. He really does. He loves his parents and he knows they're best, but the other kids don't get it. The other kids are stuck-up or stupid or mean, and sometimes the anger gets so strong that the only thing Brutus can do is lash out. He tries to keep it to the older boys who like to fight, but sometimes the girls laugh at him and he can't help it. It's the worst thing in the world to be laughed at by a girl.

The third time it happens Dad moves rocks with him, and that's after fifteen hours in the quarries. Dad's exhausted and hungry and just wants to go inside to eat supper and go to bed, but he stays outside and hauls the rocks across the yard with Brutus, and that sticks in Brutus' throat like a chicken bone. Dad doesn't hit girls. Dad's a good man. Brutus is - he doesn't know what he is. He knows what he wants to be, but then the next day one of the girls sneers at his patched clothes and the rage boils up again.

School says he needs to join the Program or be expelled, and that means Mom would have to stay home with him all day and that means less money and that means less food. They tell Mom and Dad there's a stipend, that they'll get money every year he's in the Program. Brutus sits up straight in the hard wooden chair and tries to look grown up.

"I want to do it," he tells them. "I want to go. I can contribute." Contribute is a word he knows. It's a word that chafes him because his parents do and he can't, not yet, but now he can.

"He doesn't have to go all the way," Mom says to Dad. She lays a hand on his shoulder. "It might help him to channel his anger."

"They ain't gonna channel it, they're gonna encourage it," Dad says in a low, furious voice. "They're gonna fan it and use it and make it worse." But Brutus is in the room and they don't fight in front of Brutus. That means there will be hushed, sharp whispers from behind the bedroom door tonight.

"In the early stages it's more of an extracurricular athletics program," says the principal, but he looks at Brutus, at his strong arms - Brutus has to move a lot of rocks - with something strange curling under his expression. "There's no obligation to continue."

"I want to," Brutus says again.

Dad sighs and looks at his hands. "Will they make him fight?"

"Oh, no, not until much later," the principal says. "No one's forcing you to make a decision right now, of course. Take the brochures with you. Recruitment doesn't begin until he's seven, so you have plenty of time."

They take Brutus to the Centre just to see it. There's lots of kids from all over the district - that makes him nervous, lots of people to laugh at him and call his parents names - but they all wear the same thing, bright white uniforms provided by the Program, and that means no one can look at his clothes and laugh at him or say his parents shouldn't have had a kid. There's food, too, and Brutus and his family don't need charity but at the same time he ain't ever seen strawberries like that before.

Dad and Mom have a lot of closed-door conversations and Brutus does his best to be good and finally Dad says yes.

The first day of training, Dad takes Brutus there himself. They get to the big white building with the big big doors, and Dad kneels down and holds Brutus by the shoulders like he's a man. "Remember," Dad says, and this is important, it's the face he makes when Brutus ain't allowed to forget. "Remember, whatever they tell you, you don't have to hurt anyone. Okay? Remember what real men do."

"Real men don't hit girls," Brutus echoes, and an older girl breezing through the door overhears and winks at him. Her grin is wide and sharp and he thinks she probably wouldn't mind if he did.

They don't make him fight at first. It's just games, lots of running fast and climbing things and throwing things, and they play at running around in the woods and throwing balls at each other and that's not so bad. Nothing to be scared about. Until the afternoon that one of the bigger girls knocks Brutus away from the rope he was climbing, and when he says it's his she tells him to make her give it back if he wants it so bad. He's about to when he remembers Dad's warning, and so Brutus lets her and she laughs and one of the trainers makes a disappointed 'tch' sound and tells him maybe he shouldn't be here after all if he can't be the least bit competitive.

It burns under his skin all day, and when Dad comes home, for the first time in his whole life Brutus doesn't run to the door to greet him. "Uh oh," Dad says, and he sits next to Brutus on the couch. "What'd your old man do?"

Brutus tells him, and Dad's face goes pinched around the nose. "What was I supposed to do?" Brutus demands. "She's bigger than me. Asking nicely don't work in the Centre. You get in trouble if you say 'please'. If I can't then they'll cut me and then there's no more money and I won't be able to contribute anymore." He'll have to go back to school, full of kids who don't understand what it's like to feel like he's holding a whole rushing river underneath his skin.

Dad swallows. "All right, new rule, then. When you're in the Centre, you can hit a girl as long as she's bigger and stronger than you. Okay?"

The next day Brutus finds her - she's with her friends, laughing as they throw hard, bouncy balls against the wall and try to hit each other on the rebound - and shoves her down. She leaps up, face red, and they fight and she pulls his hair and he kicks her in the stomach and in the end he's not sure who wins because the trainers pull them apart. They tell him to go back to his age group, but they give him a cookie first. Brutus usually doesn't care much for the Centre food but the cookie tastes good today, though it leaves a weird, guilty taste in his mouth.

He's eight when one of the girls in his age group - she's from the quarries too but her family ain't as good as his, she has sharp elbows and hungry eyes and she nicks food from the kitchens - tries to take his apple. Brutus doesn't even care about the apple really but it's his, and there are lots more, and when she takes a swing at him he hits her back without thinking. She snuffles with her nose full of blood and slinks off to steal from one of the others instead. The trainers let him have a muffin.

He tells Dad, and Dad goes quiet again. "Okay," Dad says, and his voice is tired and strained. "I guess you can if she starts it, but pick your battles, little man. A real man doesn't need to go around pushing people. Who cares if she took your apple? It's just a snack."

Brutus hangs his head and says he'll remember.

He's ten when one of the new girls, a seven-year-old, challenges him to a fight. He says no - she's so much smaller than him, and she has the look of rich people, soft curls and soft hands, which means she ain't got in fights before - but she just keeps on bugging him until finally he knocks her down. She gets up, giggling, and runs away the way the girls back in school used to do after they cornered a boy and kissed him.

Dad says it's fine if the girl asks him to, and if it's all in fun. They don't talk much for the rest of supper.

Brutus is almost eleven when he and that same girl get into a fight. They're friends, kind of, he thinks they are, and that should mean they can get mad at each other and it's okay, except that she's madder and meaner than him and she just - she pushes his buttons, that's all, she knows how to get under his fingernails until he snaps back. They fight and he gets her arm up behind her back and that should be it, she should fall and he'll let go except she doesn't, and he doesn't, and something burns inside him and makes him do the thing he never should, makes him take it that one step further. Instead of letting go he twists harder, and that's the first time Brutus learns that a bone snapping sounds like stepping on a tree branch, or maybe breaking a giant stick of celery in half.

He breaks her arm, and the trainers give him strawberries. Once the girl's out of the infirmary, she gets some too because she didn't cry.

Dad is furious, but he doesn't make Brutus move rocks. He tells him to stay inside with Mom and help her clean the house, then Dad goes outside - even after a long day, even before dinner - and moves the rocks himself even though there's a storm coming down from the mountains. For the most part Brutus hears nothing but footsteps and the clack of stone against stone and the occasional grunt of effort, but sometimes, when the wind howls strong, there's something else, like a shout or scream, but when the wind dies down it's always gone. Dad stays outside until Brutus falls asleep waiting for him.

Brutus is thirteen when his parents sign the papers that mean they won't see him anymore, that the Centre owns him until they see fit to let him go. It's hard, but it's okay. The longer Brutus stays, the more money his parents get. It's better for everyone this way. "I'll come back," Brutus says. Most kids who wash out of the Program go to the dorms, they tell him, but he won't. "You'll see. It'll be fine. And then I'll never hit girls again, Dad, I promise."

"Just promise me one thing," Dad says, and he doesn't have to kneel this time, just crouch a little, and his hands are just as firm and strong on Brutus' shoulders. "You stay good, you hear me little man? Whatever they tell you, you're good inside. Keep hold of that."

Brutus doesn't know about that. In a way it's almost a relief to get away from Dad, from the silence and the disappointment and the sense that Dad wants to shy away from him but can't. There's something ugly inside him that's not inside his parents, and maybe if they're not always right there, making him feel bad with their goodness, the ugly part of him won't feel so strong by comparison.

It's different in Residential. Everyone's meaner, tougher, harder, and the fights are faster and more violent. Brutus breaks all of Dad's rules in the first three days. In Dad's absence, he makes new ones, sure that Dad would agree.

Real men don't hit girls, unless they're bigger, unless they start it, unless it's just for fun - those are Dad's rules. To those, Brutus adds a few more: unless she has a weapon; unless she's going to hurt him; unless the trainers are watching; unless it's a competition.

He's fourteen when they send him out into the woods with nothing but his fists and make him wait for the target. The others in his year don't talk about it - maybe just a sentence, a small detail like what their eyes looked like, or how they smelled, or how one of them couldn't stop thinking about what he had for breakfast - and Brutus doesn't know what to expect until the target bursts out of the trees. It's a woman, wiry and insane, and later he'll find out she broke into an old couple's home looking for something to steal and killed them when they woke up, but for now all he knows is that she's there, and so is he, and only one of them is leaving the woods alive.

Training takes over, and soon enough Brutus stands over her body with his fingers wrapped around her throat. There's no blood, at least, and Brutus staggers back, staring at his hands with wide eyes, and they pull him out and tell him his score and he doesn't have to show up to training for the next three days so get some rest.

It's not until he's back in his room that he remembers Dad at all, and when he does Brutus grips his hair with his fingers and lets out a high, keening sound he's never made in his life. Be good, Dad said. Stay good. Brutus wants to. He does. But the Centre is his life and the Centre serves the Capitol and Brutus wants to serve the Capitol, and he can't make it all fit together. Brutus stays awake for two days before he makes one last rule, the rule that settles it in his chest and lets him breathe again, and from then on he doesn't question anymore.

It's the rule that propels him straight through the rest of training. It holds him through his field test, the endurance tests, the four other kill tests until he stands up on the stage and promises his every breath and heartbeat to his district, the Capitol, and Panem. That morning two people come to see him in the Justice Building, and they match the faces in his memory except that they're older, and smaller, and they look at Brutus like they're afraid of him and that settles it, doesn't it, they've all made the right choice. Brutus was never a good little boy and he's found the path that will use him as he's meant to be.

The next week, Brutus springs from the platform toward the Cornucopia, snatches up the sword he knows is for him because it's twice as heavy as the others. The first target in front of him is a girl, maybe fourteen years old, wearing the red piping that marks her from District Five. Brutus looks into her wet, terrified eyes and doesn't need to rationalize because that final unless has long drilled itself into his brain and suffused him with cold, beautiful clarity:

Unless the Capitol tells him to.

Brutus swings - the girl falls in a spray of blood - and one way or another, his father will never see his little man again.


Enobaria

She's popular in the Capitol in a way that most Twos aren't. The others from her district tend to be serious, very career-oriented (har har), and when they come in to the city it's for work, networking and sponsorship agreements and parties where they stand around talking to powerful people in the hopes that one of them will have the heart to send a tinderbox or bottle of salve to one of their kids down the line. Brutus methodically fucks his way through the reams of Capitol socialites who want to get with a Victor, focusing less on the giggling heiresses who touch his biceps and tell him he's so strong and more on the older, harder women with money and power and the urge to use it. In the Village they all pretend not to know that he'd really hoped for a wife and a kid or two to make his life not such a time-suck of work work work but them's the breaks, shoulda thought of that when he was thirteen and got that last chance to back out.

(This is why another reason why the Capitol doesn't sell Twos; it doesn't need to. Brutus knows his duty, knows what he has to do to get recognition and cachet, and nobody had to put a gun to his head to do it. Sometimes people pay money to be put on a Two's radar, but that's just like a compass. It's not the same thing, and they know it. They know it, and the Victors who aren't so enterprising know it, too.)

Enobaria doesn't do that because she's not a mentor - not sane enough for that, too broken, too angry, not her mentor's fault but there you go - and she admires the others for their dedication but it's not for her. She made a name for herself in those final frenzied days of the Arena, when the blood and the dirt and the slow creeping ache of starvation drove her past that final edge. She'd looked at the boy from District Seven who'd magically managed to survive this far and thought no, no no no, no he did not get to be here, he did not get to wear that crown. Did he make his first kill under the camera's watchful eye at fourteen, no. Did he say goodbye to his family and move to a dormitory filled with other tiny killers in training, did he fight for every scrap of validation, every piece of dessert, every moment of free time, no he didn't. Did he spend thousands of hours learning how to find cameras, how to angle himself to them without making it obvious, how to smile and sneer and snarl, how to slash so the blood flew up in an aesthetically pleasing manner without smearing the primary lens - no, and no, and no.

She'd looked at him, at those wide brown eyes, red and wet and rimmed with fear - he stank of it, or maybe that was just the sweat and the piss and the filth - and she wouldn't let him have it. Not just that, but the desire stuck in her to make him realize just how badly he'd fucked up by thinking he could do this, to remind everyone watching that this victory belonged to her, not some snivelling snotrag smart enough to hide and wait for the others to finish themselves off.

Enobaria tore his throat out with her teeth, and by the time she finished throwing up the hunks of flesh and strings of muscle, by the time she'd smeared the blood across her face because her sleeve was too dirty to wipe it all away, her fans in the Capitol had already made animated images from the footage and were sharing them with their friends.

They all assume she sharpened her teeth herself - she guesses the doctors who did it while she was out were paid to keep quiet, or maybe someone told them it was her request, who knows. It doesn't matter now. It takes Enobaria months to stop slicing up the inside of her cheek or biting off chunks of her tongue when eating or talking. Her mentor gives her a mouthguard to wear while sleeping, and it's rubber and uncomfortable and fills with spit by the end of the morning, but it means she can sleep without waking up choking on her own blood. She laughs in the morning as she drains the saliva into the sink and puts it back in the drawer by her bed, laughs and laughs and laughs and leans forward while pink smears drip from her mouth onto the porcelain.

Girls in the Capitol have inlays done to make their teeth look like hers - they open their mouths to her, and she laughs and looks at their soft, pale throats and very carefully doesn't imagine ripping the jewels they've sewn into their collarbones. Men flirt with her for the privileged position of being shot down, and she delights in cackling in their faces and asking if they really want these teeth near their most important assets. No one ever says yes; they enjoy the danger, but Enobaria is like a live wire. Stand close enough to feel the charge, but don't touch unless you want to stop your heart.

Enobaria is only speechless once, when a young Capitolian with purple hair like cotton candy lifts her baby, a little pudgy thing that Enobaria could kill one-handed if she wanted to. The mother holds him up, juggles him in one arm and says, "Okay, sweetie, now show me, what's Enobaria do?"

The baby giggles, then snaps his toothless mouth at Enobaria's neck.

(There's an entry in the Capitol Dictionary of Games-Related Colloquialisms as follows:

Bari'd (v., past participle; origin, 62nd Hunger Games; originator, Enobaria, District 2)

1. to be beaten; to be put on notice; to be called out; to be defeated in an argument to the extent that any recovery is impossible - Damn, son, you just got Bari'd!

2. to be so viciously turned down for a date that everyone in the room feels your pain - I thought I had a chance with her, but she totally Bari'd me. Well that's what you get for going for a Cashmere!

There could be worse legacies. There definitely could be better ones, but there could be worse.)


Lyme

All tributes from District Two go into the Arena with the same token. It's a thick bracelet worn on the right wrist, eleven black strands of leather braided together and strung with different-coloured beads. The number of beads differs from tribute to tribute, but the colours are the same: orange, red, silver, gold. Orange for animals. Red for humans. Silver for the mock-Arena field test. Gold for Volunteers. It's both a secret and a promise, the Centre that trained them, raised them, moulded them, made them who they are. It's a reminder of where they've come, what they've sacrificed to be here.

If a Two wins, there's often not much left of the bracelet. The strands will be soaked with blood, the finish on the beads scratched, and sometimes the leather frays or snaps right through. That's why, if a Two wins, their mentor gives a drawing of the bracelet to a special artist down in Career-town at the base of the mountain beneath the Victors' Village, and he inks the swirl of black and dots of colour right onto their wrists. It marks them, sets them apart and binds them together all at the same time, this community of killers that no one else could possibly hope to understand.

Lyme can't stop looking at hers. At first the skin is red and puffy and irritated from the dye, the slide of the needle beneath her skin, and it itches and burns and never leaves her alone. She scratches at it until her mentor tells her to let it be, but how can she let it be when it never leaves her alone? Lyme's convinced that the tattoo artist put capsaicin in with the dye because even when she closes her eyes she feels the tattoo winding round her wrist like a snake.

Her mentor catches her one morning in the kitchen, standing over the sink and scrubbing her arm with salt while the wound oozes raw and red but the ink stays clear. "No, little girl," he says, sharp and firm, never mind that she's almost as tall as he is. He drags her into the bathroom and washes the salt away, bandages it up with gauze, and at least the smooth stretch of white against her skin is better than the band of black.

But it's not enough, and fourteen people are dead because of Lyme - more than half of them under the legal age - and soon after he finds her with a paring knife and has to stop her from sticking it beneath her skin and slicing the tattoo away like she would an orange peel. "No," he says again, and he fights her, holds her down with her shoulders flat against the floor and tells her he's not going anywhere until she listens.

"Why do I have to have this?" Lyme struggles, but he's bigger and stronger and knows her better than she knows herself and she can't budge him. "I hate it! I don't want to look at it anymore!"

"You have it because it's a reminder," he says, and Lyme snorts and turns her head away. He turns her back with a finger against her cheek. "Don't snort at me, little girl, this is important. It's a reminder of who made you and who can unmake you."

Lyme closes her eyes, and he lets her. "What do I do?" she asks, her voice sticking in her throat. "I can't wash it away."

"No, you can't," he says. He's not talking about the ink and neither is she. "But what you do is become a mentor. Each kid that goes in and doesn't come out, that's your penance. Each one that does, that's one brick in the road to redemption."

That's cold comfort, but Lyme swallows. "How far does the road go?"

"Forever," he says, and he kisses her on the forehead. "Until your last heartbeat, darlin', that's what we swore and that's what we do. But we claw back a little of what we can each time we bring one back."

Lyme sags, and he lets her up and wraps a broad arm around her shoulders. "Can I wear long sleeves?" she asks finally, leaning her head against his shoulder.

"Yeah, that, that's fine. You can wear whatever you want. Nobody said you gotta flaunt it." He works his fingers into her hair. "Get dressed, I'll take you clothes shopping."

Lyme doesn't move. Fourteen corpses feeding the soil because of her; knock off the criminals the Centre used for her kill tests, that's still ten kids. Even if Lyme mentors every year she can for as long as her body can take it, even if she pulls a miracle once out of every three kids who go in - more than any mentor in history - she'll still never repay that debt. And even if she did, for every kid she saves that's twenty-three others gone, including one of their own. It's hopeless. It's hopeless, yet certainty builds in Lyme's chest until she all but burns with it, that it might mean nothing but she's going to mentor until the day she dies anyway.

"Listen," her mentor says, and he squeezes her shoulder. "Lemme tell you a story about a kid from Four who threw a starfish back into the sea."

It's a silly story, but as the years pass she thinks of it every time a tribute's blood splashes the camera lens and the cannon fires, every time she stays awake in the Control Room for weeks on end while her brain buzzes with stimulants and the backs of her eyelids itch. For the times when she sits next to the broken remnants of what was once a beautiful, laughing child and dips her hands in their blood, untangles their twisted psyches around her fingers and begins to weave them back together into something resembling human.

It matters to this one, said the boy in the story as he tossed a starfish back into the ocean. In the end, Lyme saves only a handful - still more than almost any other mentor but not enough, never enough - but she clings to them anyway, her Victors, and each one keeps the darkness at bay a little longer. You matter, she thinks as she holds them, fights them, pins them down and weathers the worst they know to throw at her. You matter to me.