I have a lot of feelings about District Two and the Rebellion. I have no qualms in saying that fandom gets them wrong most of the time, because so do the characters in canon. This fic was a long time in the making. It's also very, very angry. Watch your step.


Preface: Why?

The people aren't interested in the whys, not yet.

Maybe later. It's too fresh, too raw, the wounds too gaping. It's too much in the chaos of reconstruction, the months and months and months of anarchy and counterrevolution and infighting, to sit down and analyze. There are no academics, remote in their offices with years of peace behind them - a peace hard won, surely, but no one can yet say whether it's deserved or even truly lasting - to sit and watch the propos, to scour the papers and personal effects of those lost in the rubble, confiscated in attacks, burned in the riots, and breathe voices back into the dead.

Not yet.

This is not the old Panem. The President Emeritus is dead, trampled to death in the square by a frenzied mob that was more than animal but less than human, his body tossed unmarked and unmourned. Some poor soul was paid too little to gather the shattered, bloody fragments of Alma Coin's skull and placed them in a box with her corpse. Coin's name suited her, some say afterward, for she was but the other side of the same.

This is not the old Panem, and questions are not punished here. People are welcome to question, and they do, but not the right ones. The questions all look forward, never back.

What do we do now?

Who will lead us?

How will the districts be represented?

Who's going to pay?

Who's going to pay?

Who's going to pay?

The blood of the Capitol children in the final Hunger Games that never was would not have been enough, and after the Mockingjay put an arrow in Coin's head and the collective consciousness of the people, they know it too. But it does not slake their lust for revenge, and soon they realize that the silly Capitol citizens with their painted faces and jewels embedded in their fingernails are not to blame.

The Victors certainly think so, but they are few, and fewer still are sane. No one sees the Mockingjay and her boy with the bread anymore.

The people decide that revenge is pointless, but restitution is just. The master is dead, but the dogs who sat by his table and gobbled the meat, leaving nothing but crumbs for the mice cowering in the walls - ah, they are still here. And so, in the absence of their tyrant, the anger turns - like a shoal of fish, like a murmur of starlings, like a brushfire, a sandstorm, a tornado, a mob - to those who supported the President through the end, who enjoyed his favour and never once thought to question what was laid in front of them.

For years the people of Panem watched their children die, their young blood splattered on the camera lens and soaking into the ground. While their children withered to nothing in the streets, or worked in the factories until their fingers shredded to pieces under the threads in the looms, or lost an arm to a boiler explosion, or perished in the heat with a twisting rain of lashes upon their backs after sneaking one sweet crunch of a grape on their tongue - while they suffered, while they died, while they took extra rations in the death game so they and their families would not starve this month, other children did not.

Other children played in the shelter of the mountains. Other children grew up sleek and strong and healthy, with good teeth and powerful limbs and fists that itched for blood and fingers that grasped knives from the cradle. While most children in Panem struggled to learn their letters and basic arithmetic when they weren't in the mines, the factories, the quarries, the mills, the fields - other children learned one hundred ways to kill another child with nothing but a shard of glass and a piece of string.

Other children murdered their children.

There are Career districts and meat districts. The meat districts, their children fought because they had to, they fought to defend themselves against the monsters, and their Victors aren't to blame, oh no. Even Tobias, from District Ten, who dug out the final tribute's eyeball, who skewered it on the end of his knife and held it up to the sky and laughed and laughed and laughed as the trumpets blared, no one blames him, because he was driven to it. The Games turned him, twisted him, and the Capitol left him alone in his Village with a house full of servants and not a single therapist, no medication but plenty of moonshine. It's not his fault.

He didn't choose this. He didn't decide to major in child-murder at the child-murder academy, didn't sit down with his advisor and discuss whether to choose knife or sword or spear or mace or bare knuckles as his specialization while children in the other districts learned to count past ten by using their ribs.

No one remembered Tobias when he lived. No one mourned him when he drowned in his bathtub. But they remember him now. They mourn him now. Now he is a symbol. It's unclear whether it's any consolation to his pickled corpse.

The Careers wanted this. No one forced them to Volunteer - the people of Panem might not be mass-educated but they know what that word means, and no one stood in the square and put guns to the heads of those beautiful, smiling monsters and told them they had to. They went into it for the glory and the honour and the thrill of sacrifice; they were born to serve while the rest of Panem was born to suffer.

For those children, death was but another way to serve, a way to bring pride to their district. For Cato, the big, beautiful boy in the 74th Hunger Games who who stabbed a girl in the stomach and licked the spray off another beautiful girl's neck and grinned with the blood shining on his teeth and said it tasted like victory - for Cato, nothing could be greater than knowing he had given his all for the Capitol. The children he murdered died alone, purposeless, pointless.

Cato had eight long, glory-filled hours to appreciate exactly how much his sacrifice meant as the mutts gnawed him to pieces. It's a comfort not awarded to the boy whose head he tore from his shoulders, who died before he knew what happened.

Eight years out of ten, the victory went to Careers. Those districts, already fat with the blood they sucked from the Capitol's feet, took the prize money, the food, the public holidays, paid for by the blood of children who choked to death on coal dust and exhaust fumes and chemical dyes.

Who's going to pay?

The other districts demand retribution - restitution. They demand that the Career districts pay back their Victors' stipends, distribute them all out to the rest of the country in payment for the murder of their precious children. Only the Career districts, of course, because the other districts are not monsters; they have no price to pay, no guilt to assuage.

So no, they are not interested in the whys.

They are not interested in whys because -

1) they are irrelevant:

Why did District Two's children offer themselves up, year after year, with smiles and arms held high? Why did they give stirring speeches about duty while the others cried into their soft, gauzy dresses and vomited onto their shiny new shoes? Why did the conviction curl inside them so deep that until the end, down to their last gurgling, blood-filled breaths and staccato heartbeats, they did not denounce the nation that sent them there, that ate popcorn and watched them die?

2) they already know the answer:

Why did District Two not join the Rebellion? Because privilege, because wealth, because corruption and evil and stupidity, close your eyes and spin spin spin in a circle and pick one, any one, it doesn't matter. This one is easy, even the smallest, most stunted child born in the coal mines of District Twelve could answer.

and finally, one last why, one very important why, one crucial, linchpin, beating heart of a why, that they don't ask because

3) it doesn't occur to them:

It's a question that the other districts cannot even begin to fathom - a question that simmered in the hearts of the citizens of Two as the fire crept across the nation, and boils even now as a new country struggles to rise from the ashes and bones of the fallen - a question they don't consider because they're too busy not-asking why District Two never took a stand with the rebels -

The question is:

Why should they have?