(She's not even six, not even six years old and she learned to slide a body's eyes shut before she learned to count. She's put flowers on graves more days than she's gone without hearing gunfire, and they use her kindergarten classmates' blobby self-portraits in their memorials, and she's already so damn tired of everything. Everything around her is in flames. She's hiding under a crate as firebombs rain down around the miners' homes, digging her white-knuckled hands into her ears tight tight tight like Mama told her to but it doesn't work, she can't even hear herself screaming, and she'll never hear things as good as she used to again. A bomb hits a gem refinery, and thousands of sparkling flecks fly up, rain down, coating the ashes like snowfall. Inhaling it almost kills her. They don't find her for two days.)
She's not even seventeen. Not even seventeen years old! She should be laughing with her friends, passing notes about boys during Panem's History class, sharing homemade salves smelling like honey and winter leaves for the callouses after a day in the mines, dreaming, smiling, holding hands. She's beating Three boy's head in with a mace, over and over and over until she physically can't lift it anymore and the red fades from her vision. She couldn't make it clean and right the first time so he kept twitching, nervous system shot to hell. It happens if you get the wrong spot, she's learned. The more you know! He doesn't even have eyes to close now. She pecked him on the cheek last night in the Capitol holding room because she'd never kissed a boy before. It didn't feel like she'd thought it would. It didn't really feel like anything. Maybe it wasn't him, it could've been a different lamb for the slaughter she didn't let herself distinguish from the rest. He must've told his mama he was gonna come home for her too. Pity she couldn't let him. He smelled like roses from the showers. Now everything smells like copper.
(She's not even nine years old and the Peacekeepers have found the district's small rebel shelter. It was dug out of the mines, hammered into a home, nothing as good as Two's loyalist bases, but at least they had it. Sapphire, they called it, for what glittered in the walls. Sapphire kept them safe. People lived there, got married, had birthdays, hoped their daddies would come back when they went out with their guns to shoot the bad people. She was lucky she didn't have a daddy and didn't have to worry. Now nobody's going to have a daddy. Now the Capitol's taking Sapphire apart like it was never there, and every bullet, every crowbar, every flamethrower they use on Sapphire stabs her in the gut and twists. Fours, Sevens, Nines, Fives, her own Ones, all are slaughtered. Everything is in flames again. She has seen far too many homes burn in only eight years.
She sees both nice daddies from the cubby next to hers gunned down as she crouches behind an outcropping and does nothing like Mama told her to. They both used to make jewelry before the Rebellion. Neither of them ever hurt a mite. Their blood dots the ground like the tiny rubies they placed into lockets and rings. She sees Trinity who's small for her age and doesn't know any words yet, dragged from her family, and she does nothing, because she's never yet disobeyed Mama. Trinity's mama drank too much when she was pregnant because she didn't want her daughter to be pretty and get taken away, but it doesn't look like it worked. She fights to reach her baby, shrieks until the capillaries around her eyes burst like cuprites under the skin. Then the little girl sees her own mama, feet away from her, dragged out from under a cart, staring down a shocker barrel and a Peacekeeper who shouldn't be allowed to look at her like she's a side of meat for his dinner, and her vision tunnels, and all she sees is red.
She dives out from behind the outcropping, tackles the back of the man's knees, drops him. His shocker falls. She bashes him in the temple with the grip, twice, three times. The shock setting was past midway, meant to hurt Mama till she might want to die, but not kill her. The red claims her further. She clicks it as high as it can go, jams it in his mouth, and then there's nothing at all but red.
When it washes away, she resurfaces. The cavern of sapphires glints bright with the fire all around. Smoke is covering the ceiling. There's so much yelling, pain echoing everywhere, even her messed-up ears ring. Mama's looking at her like she's never seen her before, because she hasn't, not this red thing, and she can't let go of the shocker. Her hands won't unclench. They're sticky, shaking. The man is charred and very still.
"Baby, what did you do?" Mama's voice quavers.
"I had to save you." Her own voice comes from somewhere far away. It's not a little girl's voice, but it's not a monster's either. It's the voice of someone a lot older and a lot colder than an eight year old. "He was going to kill you. I had to stop him." I didn't mean to kill him, she could say, but Mama told her to never tell lies. The Sapphire shimmers orange and echoes in the burning night.)
She's not even seventeen years old and the district partner they sent in with her is younger. She knew Mica when they played Jabberjay in the schoolyard, making a message at the beginning of the circle, falling over laughing when it got to the end and didn't sound like the first message at all. Mica used to come up with the funniest things to say. He always had nice clean fingernails. He's crying, clutching at his chest where Nine girl freaked out and shoved a spear in him. She saw red. Got Nine. Not soon enough. She holds his cold, slippery hands tight and tells him about things that don't matter and matter more than anything else now, the color of the pansies that grew outside his townhouse, the taste of the bitter chocolate schoolkids used to each get half a square of on special occasions, the beautiful songs of mockingjays in the trees, the sunrise-pink dress his little sister liked to wear, hey now, don't you cry, remember that, Mica, do you remember, until he stops coughing and shivering and breathing, and then she lets go.
There are still more children alive on the plain of dead. She doesn't know how many. It doesn't matter. The sun and the cameras and the nation shine overhead, and nobody said she wasn't a sucker for appreciation. She lets the red consume her.
(She's not even eleven years old. The neverending mercy of the Capitol lets her take a ragdoll from her home when they catch her for killing a Peacekeeper in a brothel and toss her in a juvenile cell. There are a bunch of other snuffly, boring girls there and she'd bet on escaping even without their help. Mama and the rebels and everyone except her thinks she'll never come back. She starts unraveling old Ann into a long, coarse rope.)
She's not even seventeen years old. The neverending mercy of the Capitol lets her say goodbye to her mama in the war-scarred and justiceless Justice Building, for a few minutes, goodbye, I'll come home to you, Mama, I promise, I've never left you before, I love you, I'll come back, don't you cry now, can't stand that, and then they pull her away to the train, and nobody except her thinks she'll come back. She starts the Reapings on the television and jots down how best to kill each cretin in the confines of her wee misfired brain.
(She's not even fourteen years old. The Peacekeepers don't care. She blossomed early into a lithe, powerful confection of pink pearl and spun gold and cold, rusted steel. They take her in the street as she huddles in a corrugated pipe behind a warehouse, they take her rough and use their hard hands, they take her tears to know they're doing it right, they take her in every possible way and leave her spread across the ground, bruises in places you need tiny cameras to see, dirty inside and out and all of thirteen. They take her because she's a random rebel brat in the war and nobody who matters will care or stop them. They think they took everything.
Until she lets the red bubble up in her sight like it does from her lips, her nose. Until she controls her hands, wrists circled with ugly gray-purple, enough to close them around chunks of forgotten warehouse metal. Until she stands up in her tatters that hide nothing of her body but everything of the rest of her. There are three of them, facing away from her as they return to their quarters, high on their thrill, drunk enough that it's impressive they could do what they did. She goes on graceful tiptoe to drive jagged steel into the back of a neck, ducks, and sinks the other into another's thigh. The latter is screaming the way she did. He's not acting, though, like she did. Mostly. She's had worse. It's not like it was her first. Mama said not to lie, but you get loads more in pleasure houses if you pretend you're losing your cherry, she's good at it, everyone does that. The one with the thigh wound gets put out of his pain with metal in the throat. She's wanted a string of pearls at her throat for a while. Maybe she'll take one from a jeweler's soon. Mama's wanted a new watch, too. Then maybe some earrings. She can find someone who used to pierce ears. Most One rebels used to be things like perfumers and costumers before their lives got ripped out, trampled like weeds in a rose garden.
The third Peacekeeper stares and stares. He apparently decides it's time to be cliche and snarls at her. Snarls. She'd throw popcorn through the holovid at that point. "You little bitch," he hisses. "I should've used my shocker with you. If I didn't tear you up bef-"
She doesn't waste time spouting late night B-movie threats. Both crude blades whip out of flesh with an almandite spray by 'shocker,' and before 'before' she's shoulder rolled into his knees and shoves the girls vertically into his legs down behind the kneecaps, yanks as he falls. It doesn't make a crunching sound. She's surprised, a bit disappointed. She expected a crunch. Of what she can hear, it's more like breaking wet green wood, when you twist and twist but can't part the last fibers.
He's screaming too. Obviously. She wipes her lovelies on his trousers before pressing them into his rapidly pulsing throat, and straddles him to mirror what he did to her, because even she can't resist some theatricality. He laughs incredulously through the sobs. "What the...what the fuck, what in fucking Panem…?"
"I was waiting for my hit to come by when you interrupted me and scared off everyone with the noise. You're lucky, honestly. He's a big position guy. I was going to use a Curiatius point two-oh-oh shocker. It's back where you and your buddies grabbed me before I could grab it. Sloppy me, huh, like your sloppy seconds? Great thing you missed it. Yeah, I see you've heard of the Curiatius. Maybe you shouldn't be lucky, you know?" What the hell, call her a Capitol drama villain and dress her in black, she's been waiting to give this line forever. "Want to find out why they call it oh-oh?")
She's not even seventeen years old. The frilly pink and lime Capitol envoy Pompey, slim with surgeries to remove more food than Twelve kids ever see all at once, just called her name in the district square. She has a hunch this day is going to suck.
The place is as silent as the surrounding crumbled buildings that haven't been fixed yet because all the workers were pulled off to the poor weepy Capitol first. They're silent not only because, you know, they're sending off two kids to die in the name of penance and reality TV, but because they know her name. Everyone recognizes it except this daft camera kisser. Hands up who didn't think it would be her. Look, only the toppled bronze statue who used to hold a sword aloft in the center of the tree-lined square has his hand up. There's so much ruined here in a district that used to be beautiful as its citizens, it affects her. Some. The paved brick roads devastated by pods. The townhouses, miners' barracks, and slums alike in ashes, ashes, all fallen down. Not manors, but the sorts in manors were the loyal sorts. What would they need to rebel for? Even they're aching, though. Sometimes she wonders if she'd worked even harder, carried out more hits, saved more of the people who deserved it, children and rebels and loyalists in the wrong place at the wrong time bombed blindly, the Capitol wouldn't have come through and Panem wouldn't be in this many pieces. If the district that imports Peacekeepers allowed to do anything they want and exports genetically perfect beauties to hang on important businessmen's shoulders at parties and tangle with them under silken sheets because it makes everything okay if they look legal, if One could've cut off its golden hair and finally stopped sneaking thalidomide to its desperate, smoking, drinking pregnant women. If they could've been free. Then she thinks that's more ridiculous than poodles crossbred with spiders and she's being more egotistical than usual. Then she can't help but wonder again.
Pompey clears his feathered throat, squints at the paper again, and repeats the contents. Must be no stranger to that from the vomitoriums. Ha, she cracks herself up. "Isn't she here? Come on out, little miss, no need to be shy! You're the first tribute chosen for the Hunger Games in history, we don't want to disappoint your fans, do we?"
She lets out a long, long sigh, and waves away the kids clustered around her before the Peacekeepers start shooting someone. They part reluctantly, and only after her continued urging. It's uplifting to see how they're willing to protect their resident more-rebel-than-thou loose cannon even in the face of danger, or something. It'll make great television at the very least. She stalks up toward the stage, eyes mapping the location of every gun and weaponizable object on the way by instinct, stepping one-two, one-two. Mama isn't making any noise back there in the crowd out of the age range. Without looking, she knows the old woman's collapsed. Not her baby, oh no, no. Not the sociopath a life of flowers on graves and fat, sweaty, broken bodies and too many homes in flames created. Not always her daughter, though. Sometimes she's the red thing. Her boots percuss on the wooden steps. She's already made it to the stage. Strange how many years passed behind her hard, pale blue eyes by then.
Pompey shakes her hand vigorously and holds it up to the hordes of hovering cameras. "Our first tribute in history, ladies and gentlemen! Isn't she a beauty, too! Wow, a knockout, I mean, she'll be setting the fashion trends for a season in all the best brands, Marcella, Divinity Dinar, Lumiere- but I get ahead of myself. I'm sure we're all dying to see her perform. Could you just say your name and age again for the audience, sweetheart? And let me tell you thank you so much for being a part of the show. We all thank you for your brave sacrifice."
She gives the ladies and gentlemen behind the curtain a dry smile and pushes back her classically One golden hair, the better for them to see their Red Riding Hood. "Well, hi. I'm Arcadia Collens." The district shivers. It really is her. There's not a soul who didn't expect it, but it took this, her devil-may-care assurance, for it to sink in that their tarnished gold savior has finally had her wings clipped. "Sixteen years old and you're booting me into the slaughter, no, thank you, President Vanis!"
"Oh, don't write yourself off yet, Miss Collens, no, that won't do." He pats her shoulder, and hang her if it doesn't seem, somehow, like it's meant to be comforting and not to invite a Six gang necktie upon his fat tongue. "You'll have as good a chance as anyone else."
"I don't think I ever said I was the one getting slaughtered. Hurry up with the boy's ball, these fine people need to get back to work. Worrr- k. Woooooork, double-you oh arr kay. You wouldn't know anything about that, though, huh, Mr. Pompey?"
Pompey meets her eyes and realizes something. She's not looking at him like she hates him, or like he's nothing, or with frigid cold, or like she's figuring out a way to kill him. She's looking at him like she already figured it out, no matter how quick the Peacekeepers are, no matter what they'd do, because the President wants her dead in his dollhouse, not here, and she's confident enough to let him know that, and it's in her eyes, her half smile, and it wouldn't necessarily be slow, but it wouldn't necessarily be quick either. He shudders and nods smartly, moving onto the boys' names, getting an inkling why every single girl's paper said 'Arcadia Collens.' She smiles into the cameras again like a shark dragging you under the water, and with all the contempt she has, enough to fill an ocean, enough to drown a nation, flips off the entirety of Panem.
She's not even seventeen years old and she has to face a bloodbath in the morning. The boy they brought with her is Mica, Mica with the rarity of brown hair in One, Mica who may be the only other surviving alumnus of their first grade class, Mica who made a poultice for her broken nose after she fought three big loyalist second graders at once, Mica who loved milk with a splash of coffee and had a worshipful crush on the rebel hero Zirconium Wu and killed spiders for his little sister and who's already given up. After the train ride to the Capitol, they hurriedly pop her and the other twenty-three kids into showers, nightclothes worth more than their houses, then a large cream and mahogany meeting room with used camp beds more than likely pulled from a hospital. They have no idea what to do for the tributes the night before their biggest day. They wheel in tables of decadent steaming food and coolers of lemonade with silver goblets that shine under the crystal chandeliers. Capitolites who seem sorry for them bring extra blankets and stoke up the giant fireplace. Capitolites who, and it's only a vague hunch, might feel less sorry for those gosh darn murderin' rebels, hurl rocks and mud and shrieked insults and crap from outside at the tall world-proof windows until Peacekeepers chase them away. One of the avoxes, bless those tongueless wonders, brings them 'Our Proud Districts of Panem' coloring books before they're locked in for the night with five silent guards to make sure nobody tries to get a head start.
Arcadia surveys the room of sniffling, snotty, blotchy kids, noting the ones who are sniffsnotblotching for real, and the ones who are acting. She considers that some might be skilled enough at acting that she can't tell they're faking it. She remembers who she flippin' is, and stops worrying. There's got to be one, though. Sneaky, pretty young Weathervanis's plant. His chosen Victor. There'll be that one who's hidden it so far. Almost certainly a deathly loyal Two, the aggressively cheery ride-of-the-valkyries Viking bombshell or the quiet, serene muscleman who probably hunts mammoths to eat on slow days, but she can't tell which one.
The kids cry and huddle all around her. She can't stand sniveling. This must be remedied. Then, because she is not and cannot be anyone other than Arcadia Collens, she starts throwing paper airplanes. She begins an all-out battle. Soon they're laughing hysterically, hormonally, through their tears and apprehensions, getting to forget their deaths waiting on the morrow, at least for a little bit. None of them are even nineteen. Some of them have barely begun puberty, with hips not yet wide enough to give birth but designated old enough to be shattered by maces, voices that'll crack as small boys bleed out and sob for their daddies, confused sparks of children, if war children, that fluttered into the world like mayflies and will flutter out before they really get to live in it. Arcadia's going to raise the lantern to many of the mayflies herself. She doesn't learn their names. It'll be easier that way. The room is filled with flying lemonade cups, incredible food they've never seen the likes of before except on television, paper hovercrafts, and a seething air of petrified chaos. She kisses one of the boys on the cheek, because he's slender, soft, ash-skinned, because she's never done that for real before. She gorges on rich desserts, trading and tossing honey-roasted apricots to the others, thin crisped slices of pumpkin, cups of sharp mint pudding, cupcakes with hot chocolate in their middles that make her eyes bug out and her tastebuds do a rustic jig. The boy from Eleven sings like a mockingjay and they dance in the sparkling light, recklessly, slowly, hesitantly, boys with girls and girls with girls and boys with boys and they're not going to be alive the day after tomorrow and everything they've ever been will end.
A round pellet of message gum shoots into a window from a blowgun, making Eleven choke on a note, making twenty-four kids slip in their socks. It smacks the reinforced glass and flattens out wide to show the kids its message. Gums usually have words. This has a printed, iconic picture that everyone knows, the most iconic of Panem. The bombed ruins of Thirteen. A district of thousands utterly destroyed. It would be difficult for the meaning of 'Vanis hates rebels!' to be clearer. Twenty-three kids gasp in uncontained horror. Arcadia finally sees the one who's faking it. You can fake sorrow, you can fake wild abandon, you can fake it to make it and kill every kid who believed you tomorrow, but nobody can fake the confused, appalled tragedy of so, so many dead in an instant. There'd have to be schools to teach that. Ridiculous. He couldn't hide it right. Mr. Two, I found you. Here, boy, here you are.
Their eyes meet, and they each realize something about each other. They've found equal fanatics. They've found their enemies for the Games. They've found their antitheses, and that sounds like a fancy test word they never did enough school to learn because they were busy making a killing, and they know they're going to be the last ones, because that's the show, that's the plot, it was all planned, it's reality TV and there's no way out. It's funny the kinds of things they can see in each other's eyes. With other people they just note the particularly vulnerable flesh, and maybe a telltale One blue color, or an Eleven amber, or no eyes at all, for any citizen who pissed off a Peacekeeper bad enough.
The message breaks the spell. The tentative camaraderie and acceptance of the coming end falls into a million million pottery pieces. Everything rushes back. The Seven girl throws up. She could easily have had friends in Thirteen, family. Nobody does now. Peacekeepers outside fire at the perpetrator, but that does worse than nothing. If anyone's going to fire guns near shell-shocked war kids, it's got to be the Capitol. Twenty-two tributes duck and cover under tables, under beds, under anything they can find. There's a crunch, and everyone is staring at her, and Arcadia finds herself fading out of the red as quickly as it came, clutching a table leg she broke off a snack table. The antithesis had to go and heft a whole bed.
"Well, aren't my chances looking peachy?" she says to nobody in particular. She walks down the center of a row of ducked-and-covered kids who now flinch as she passes, and drops the leg into the fireplace. Then she picks a bed a Ten already claimed, slides into it with great ceremony, and hides under the covers to hyperventilate and contemplate the inevitability of death for the first time in years.
The others follow her lead after they manage to unlock their muscles. The Peacekeepers switch off the lights and start to take their watch shifts. Twenty-four tributes lie together and alone in the middle of a city that adores the show they'll give and hates their guts. Nobody sleeps. Outside, faintly, they hear shouting, rioting. There's no peace even here. The Hunger Games would be just like more of the war they said was over. Hours buzz by like seconds and nobody sleeps.
"Anyone want to tell scary stories?" says a girl timidly from somewhere in the dark.
"Remember how this isn't a giant slumber party?" comes a muffled voice from under the pile of sheets Arcadia jacked from most of the other beds. "We're in a scary story right now, fucknut. You're going to die tomorrow. The end. Go to sleep."
There's another silence punctuated by distant commotions. Trucks patrol outside the building, their headlights flashing across the rows of people who couldn't possibly be less asleep. The normal lights of the Capitol, glowsticks, party houses, roving adbots, are conspicuous in their absence. It's hard to acknowledge that they've been hurting here too. Most don't. It's quiet in the scary story they're living. Then, muffled:
"Guys, did anyone brush their teeth?"
The nonsensical giggling turns into quiet sobbing turns into, eventually, sleep.
She's not even seventeen years old and the nation is watching as a hovercraft drops her onto the edge of a big hill piled with weapons. The hill's round, white with sand, and has a cluster of spears in its center. It looks like absolutely nothing more than a boob.
The tributes on either side are staring at her with red, puffy eyes. "Did I say that out loud?"
There are tall forcefield walls surrounding the bottom of Mt. Boob. The eager, cheering crowd outside on coliseum rows piled high like colorful ice cream scoops can watch the fight from above. The prices to get close-up seating instead of watching on TV could have bought outer district businesses with everything and everyone inside. There are shielded hovercrafts in the cloudless sky above, too, for government officials, celebrities who don't want to sit among the snack-munching, the beer can-crumbling, because eating popcorn you spilled down your augmented bosom while you watch people die is just distasteful. President Vanis is probably right up there. Arcadia flips him off again. They're counting down from sixty before any tributes are allowed to move. She's going to keep up the finger that long because why the hell not.
She can't see Two around the hill. They must be meant to meet for the finale, probably on the top up there for the best angles, after they've slaughtered the others. This goes against everything she's ever done, killing rebel kids, or war kids at the least, ones she danced with last night in crystal luxury, but there's nothing farther from crystal luxury here and if she doesn't the loyal mastiff will get them all, set a record to never be beaten among all these unprepared, and the Capitol will love him for it and that is not going to happen. She wants to go home. She told Mama she would. She doesn't lie, how distasteful. She just murders. They never showed her how to do anything else. Oops, that's 'dies at the end' thinking. Let's cut some throats!
The loudspeaker blares the wartime bomb siren to tell them to move their asses, and Arcadia puffs out a breath. Cracks her neck. Stretches her fingers. She lets her old friend red take the reins, and its joyride brings her careening, clawing to the weapons, brings her to tribute after tribute, and Three dies, and Nine dies, and Mica dies, and they die and die and die and die and-
She's not even seventeen years old and together with Two she slaughtered almost two dozen children. They meet on the top of the hill.
"I'm king of the mountain," she informs him. His simple shirt and trousers are bloodier than, than, they're so bloody she can't even manage a joke about them. Her hair is soaked with the stuff. His hands are pruny. She tastes copper and sweat. He's got a sword in one massive fist. She has a spear garnished with guts. It's your classic boy meets girl story. They're panting, wounded in dozens of minor places, and so damn tired of everything. The crowd bays for more.
Arcadia glances past him at his recent decapitated kill. Summons up her last. "If you wanted some head, you probably could've asked politely and gotten it."
Tall, dark and pokey doesn't say a word, moves in. She releases the spear. It's not her chosen weapon to throw, as in she sorta sucks, as in it better be a big broad side of the barn for her to hit, but he's exhausted and misjudges where he needs to dodge and the point goes into his...heart? He falls on his back. No, this can't be right.
She whips around, looking for the trick. "Hey! Hey, what's the deal? Are you gonna lift me out now? You should give me an alert when somebody dies, the suspense will be the death of me! Don't boo me, you painted fucks, I thought there was going to be a showdown too! Oh, now you're cheering?"
The terrible last words warn her. She flattens out backwards by instinct and sees a sword swoosh overhead as she falls on its wielder, squishes and slips in the clotted sand. He pulled out the spear which didn't quite get his heart because the universe loves her, and yeah, she should've practiced more long-range back home. She kicks it out of his hand down the hill before he can use it. He doesn't need it, though, when he grabs her and slams her down on her back, cracks a rib and pins her, and no noise escapes from her clenched teeth, but this is the showdown, and there'll be more than enough noise for both of them soon enough. The crowd is going wild. They echo around the arena like the night she wants to forget.
"I liked you better when you were dead," she hisses, and earns another cracked rib. Something high-pitched gets out between her teeth that she will never acknowledge.
"Shut up! You don't know what I had to do for this! You don't see how Two's suffered! You think we had it nice there, serving our master and asking 'how high' and killing you rebels like sheep! But you wormed into our homes, our families, and we died too, and I'm doing this for President Vanis and they never showed me how to do anything else! I'm Domitius Payne and children hide when they hear my name, I could've…"
Those two exclamation points she heard around the time she stopped listening were a sure sign of off-the-deep-end-into-the-Mariana. Dom goes on and on for a few pages. Even the Capitol probably wants a commercial break by now. The dipping sun sets the forcefield glimmering orange. Her chest hurts. Eventually Two pauses for a breath. And sets back in. She can't deny the man has stamina.
"They never let me-"
"Oh, Zirconium Wu, you've got more? If you get a monologue, I do too, ever heard of equal rights? Yeah, your daddy made you into the perfect soldier, your brother was a durn traitor, you can't let the rebel who scares all the other rebels win the first Games, I get it! The Capitol's counting on you, the president's going to shake your hand after it's over, you just wanna go back to the way it used to be and eat Mama's spicy apple pies, I don't care! This is a reality show, and the reality is everyone here has a tragic backstory because we were all war kids. You are not the only one who deserves this, and you are not paying attention!" She goes limp to loosen his grip and jerks her head up. The crown of her head crushes his nose. She feels the cartilage snap, arches back, bites down on the swelling nose, and yanks away. His scream isn't very manly. She spits flesh onto the sand, wondering why anyone would want to be a cannibal. That crap's nasty. "You thought I was gonna do the three pattern again, huh?"
Arcadia and Domitius entangle, clash, break and shake the world apart in their finality.
Ears, eyes, groins, biting, scratching, four hands and four feet and no mercy. Nothing is sacred. They lost both their weapons but what were they made into? Nothing else. Never anything else. The bright-blazing, glittering lit powder keg versus the soldier hound raised to treat her kind like dirt under his feet. A match made in the Capitol. They tear off what pieces of each other the war didn't already take. He has his red way in too, she can tell, she can see it when he glazes over, then she joins the blur and they fight and cry and perform and die and-
She's not even seventeen, and soft-spoken, gently smiling President Vanis is nestling a platinum victory crown in her golden locks. She's on the balcony of his repaired mansion, and every television in the nation is showing them, every Capitolite who could afford it is in the crowd, the crowd that cheered when she lost an eye as she scrabbled in the muck and cheers as she tries to smile in a teal velvet gown worth more than a Twelve's family.
"Miss Collens, I can't tell you how proud you've made the nation of your victory," he says as the crown weighs her down like the mastiff boy on her neck. Her head sinks, her lids droop. They drugged her so she wouldn't try to push Vanis off the balcony or rant and rave or something. She just wants to sleep in a warm bed, sleep until this goes away.
"I know all of Panem must be indebted to you for your thrilling show," he says as his fingers bite into her pale wrist like mastiff teeth in her cheek, tearing and tearing.
"I hope to see many further Games as pleasant as yours," he says as his hand brushes against the synthetic hair to replace what the mastiff tore out in clumps, as he meets the staring glass eye where a dying boy's scratches wrought the real one into milky goo, as he grips skin rebuilt out of a raw, open mess.
"I'm sure you've realized you were not intended to win, Miss Collens," he says in his study, out of the public view. He's sat her down in a plush wine leather seat in front of his desk. She isn't short, but her slippered feet barely touch the floor. It's not a subtle technique. That's not to say it doesn't work. She feels small and worthless and sticky with blood- no, sweat, right, sweat now instead?- under his softly admonishing gaze. His hands are steepled before him. Mama used to play 'here is the church, here is the steeple' with her. There aren't any churches or steeples for real in Panem anymore. There isn't anything whole.
"Yeah, I gathered that." She tries to give him her bitter half smile. It just comes out bitter. "Your cheat wasn't good enough, I guess."
"You might recall that he demolished your poor face before you...do remind me? I haven't remembered, you see, considering the hundreds of times it's been replayed. I can't stand to turn on the television anymore."
"I'm sure I, with the nation of Panem as a whole, would be pleasantly happy to remind you of the thrilling event, smartass. I kicked him in the knees when I couldn't even see because he broke my eye. I'm frankly incredible."
He lets that pass with a delicate raise of the brow. "That's the word I was looking for. Incredible. My slavering, disgustingly loyal lapdog dragged you backward down the hill, you landed on him with his sword, and now he's dead, and my flawless first Victor has been replaced by a whining, ragged, ungrateful brat. Your physical assets will sell better, but I would have had a vociferous spokesman for the Games, a model to hold the others up to as they come, not the poster child for antiestablishmentarianism and mental issues. What am I going to do with you, Arcadia? No matter how much you hate it, you have to act like my perfect princess, is that understood? Say the Games changed you, that you see the truth now, that the Capitol is your savior. Act it up, you're decent at that. You have to set a shining example." Vanis sighs and runs long nails through his longer pale lilac hair. He pulls open a desk drawer, and she flinches for a moment, calculating how much time she has to roll away before he shoots her, which window she could reach first, what breakable objects within two feet would make the most durable weapons. Instead of getting out a gun, he expertly conceals his amusement, and retrieves a lacquered black tin of candied fruits and nuts. "Would you like an apricot?"
She's not going to eat that crap, or pretend like she knows what antiestabanishmentalbinism means. "I'll pass, thanks. How can you think I'm gonna be your dressup doll? You can't make me somersault through your hoops like Captain Payne would've. I want to go home. You said I get a fancy Victor home, right? Without leaks in the roof? Without Peacekeepers setting it on fire? Notice how I emphasized the peace? Hey, you can't- you can't kill me, can you? I'm the first Victor. I'm special now. People like me, even if it's for killing a bunch of teenagers. I have fans. I've been signing autographs on their diaries and spangly boobs and hats for a straight week since I got out of the hospital, I know I have fans. They get tattoos of my handsome face how it looked the moment I 'won' on their asses. Everyone knows I piss you off, and even Capitolites will be suspicious if I end up dropping dead." Arcadia leans back in her chair, and the grin is real this time. She props her feet up on the gold-inlaid desk. "So...okay, I'm the poster child for antideoxyribonucleasic acid and mental issues, sue me. Yeah, if we weren't playing bondage and you didn't have me cuffed to the chair-" She clinks the seamless plastic circles around her wrists to demonstrate. "-I'd go red and kill you. You can't cut my balls off and torture me into this, probably, I've gotten hurt real bad before, you'd have to go until I couldn't recover enough for the patriotic speeches. You can't kill me. You sure as hell can't convince me. I'm not your toy, I'm not a Two, and I'm not going to play any more of your games."
Vanis chews on his lip. He seems more disappointed than furious. "And I thought we could settle this like reasonable human beings. Miss Collens, I'm afraid I'll have to be blunt. You could withstand torture for a time, I don't doubt that. Do you believe your mother could do the same?"
And. And oh no, no, no. No, he did not say that. He did not just threaten Arcadia Collens' mama because bad things happen to you when you do that and the last one never found his teeth. She snarls and yanks at her cuffs and thrashes, kicks the desk to make it fall on him, and it's bolted down, of course, of course. He moves the tin of treats before she can knock it down. He's not grinning. He doesn't need to grin.
When she's finally spent from her flailing, she slumps back into the chair, despising herself for her powerlessness. Her polyester hair is still perfectly curled, her glass eye still cold, slimy and vacant like a slug crawled into her head and died. Her fancy new skin's hardly brought up a sweat. She can't even work herself into a disarray. Completely helpless. "You are one sorry bastard, you know that?"
"Perhaps so, but if a threat to one person has more effect on you than the murder of twenty-three, maybe I'm not the only one in the room. If you would calm yourself down and not act like a savage little animal, you could realize the sense in my terms."
"The sense? Okay, no, no, I don't-" She takes a shuddering breath, throws her head back, and bites her lip until blood wells up. He can't kill Mama. There's nobody else who exists that she personally cares about besides herself. Call her sense of morality skewed, go ahead. It really is. One over twenty-three. That's how it goes. That's the way it'll always go. Nobody else loves Arcadia instead of her image, not One, the Capitol, the districts. Mama never left her. Mama found her new homes when the old burned down, she hugged her, she said it would be okay and stroked Arcadia's hair when she vomited after the red washed away at first, bringing cold bodies with it. Mama manages to care for her monster. If she loses Mama, there'll be nobody. Nobody ever to stroke her hair and not expect anything back. "Yeah, okay. Okay. Fine. You're not an idiot. I know you have her location and everything. Professional snipers, audio, cameras. Sniper on the second floor, third window to the left in the Lamarr Perfumers, right? And one in the Garners' flat's window. No, they're real traditional, they'd have it taped over black for the Games. Their roof, behind the chimney, then. And you like thinking you're subtle, you won't have one to jump out from pretending to be a patron in Diana's place, but it doesn't have windows. You could pay Diana to taint her drink, though, that's it. Heartless hag. Wish her son went in with me instead of Mica. At Mama's work, her house, and the bar. Am I right?"
"I can't say you're wrong." Vanis pops a sugared walnut into his mouth and damn she wants to punch that smug elegant face so much. "We're in agreement, then? You'll return to your district soon, live with your mother in your non-leaking Victor's house once it's built, and work for me when I need you. Nothing distasteful. You will give minor speeches, promote the Games, and behave like a lovable, feisty, freewheeling scamp whose wacky hijinks will involve photobombs over actual bombs, crazy public stunts like hoverboarding down stairways, cracking naughty jokes in your show interviews. Saccharinely spicy. An endearingly bad role model. In return, Mama will live a long, happy remainder of her life, with any comforts she could ever want. Have an avox to take care of the house. Have two. The tasks I'm giving you aren't objectionable. I don't see any problems in the deal." She wants to run a chainsaw through that smug elegant face. Gradually.
"Not objec- fine, we're in agreement. You're going to make me into a lovable public killer. I'll make scary faces in pictures with people's chubby babies, I'll swear in front of the cameras, I won't tell them what it's like after a bombing to inhale people you knew. Got it. Mmlp. Sorry, tasted bile for a moment there."
"You've got it in one. Now, if that's settled, I have documents to sign, and you have spangly mammaries waiting for the same. I'll-"
"Wait!" She kicks the table before he can call in her Peacekeeper escort. "Wait, I'm not done, I want something else! I want something else for doing this, I'm not going to roll over like your trained bitch. I'll be that, but I get to have something else. Come on, hear me out."
He raises a sculpted eyebrow again and rests his chin on the back of his hand. "You're lucky I find your delusions of importance more amusing than not. Go on."
"I want to take care of the District One tributes in the Games. Help them, give them advice, teach them stuff. Mentor, or something. I'll be the whole patriotic thing for them too, promise. It's just, they aren't like me. They won't be killers. Soon the ones chosen'll all be civilians. No more war kids. And they're- they're my district. I wanna help them." She tries to cross her arms, forgetting she's cuffed. She settles with sticking out her lip. "Am I different now than I was two weeks ago? I'm not. I was already fucked up. They'll be a mess. They'll need help from someone who did a lot more of what they had to. I'll be in the Capitol more, I'll promote the Games, I'll do anything."
He appraises her, then gives a slow nod. "You have something here. Maybe you're not as heartless and unstable as you make yourself out to be. I couldn't give District One the only mentor, though. An unfair advantage, I'm sure you'll agree. Military officers should do quite nicely for the rest, until other districts collect their own success stories." He holds up a hand before she can interject. "Yes, Capitol officers. It should do nicely. Yearly mentoring will be added to your duties, then. I hope you understand what you've gotten into. What the effects may well end up being."
"Course I do," she says, unfazed. "I don't want them to be alone. They won't be psychos already, they deserve better. It's my, uh, noble and patriotic duty to help them, right?"
Vanis laughs like breaking glass. Arcadia jolts in her seat. The president's laughed on television before in his speeches, but politely, gracefully. This isn't a social laugh. It's one that makes her want to run out of the room. It says he's holding all the cards, and if she thinks she's out-gambitted him, he'll pull out another deck and another rulebook and show her he won before they started playing. "Of course it is, Miss Collens. I was referring to the effects this will have on you, but don't mind my rambling, I'm positive you'll make a splendid job of it. Then, it really was a splendid idea of yours. Do have a lovely day. Go to Xanthe's cafe for lunch, they serve brandy cupcakes, did you know? I have a feeling you'll need them. The bill is on me." He presses the alert to summon the Peacekeepers in, slips a check for an exorbitant sum of denarii into her black skirt pocket, and begins to scrawl notes with indecent haste, as if she's already gone. He must have loved that mentor idea. Arcadia puts it out of her mind for the moment in favor of brandy cupcakes.
She had no idea the level of attachment you get to kids desperately trusting you to save their lives. Go figure.
She's seventeen years old, and two bright, pretty, determined teenagers she coached through the basics of killing and hiding and patriotism for popularity are lying dead in the grass. She sits back from the screen and shakes her head. Idiots. Chypre wasn't a fast runner, he shouldn't have gone straight for the weapons, and she'd told Coco not to hesitate before the kill for even one second, even if it was a little kid. Look where that got them. She knocks back her sleeping pills with a shot of whiskey that night and falls into her silken hotel sheets without kicking her shoes off. She signed way too many autographs that day. One fan earnestly told her it was a shame Coco got her head nearly pulled off, he and his buddies would've liked to sleep with her. She had to smile wickedly, purse her lips, and say he wasn't alone. She is so damn tired of everything.
She's eighteen years old, Erinite was twelve with no hope, and all she could do was promise the tiny tear-stained wreck that she'd probably go out quick. She didn't. Ten this year is...but Solaris is strong, he's cunning and eager and half the girls in the Capitol wet their panties when he flashes his trademark smile their way. Arcadia hardly moves from the television, glued to the spectacle with clenched fists and dry eyes, believing in her boy, and then Ten gets to him. The former Peacekeeper Commander Lucius is mentoring the Tens, and even he can hardly watch. Again, it's not quick. Arcadia slams her coffee mug down and storms away for a lot more brandy than what comes in cupcakes, not caring who stares.
She's nineteen years old, the Capitol loves the Glam and Gilt alliance, and she's tangling her fingers in a Games official's sweaty viridian hair in his sweaty viridian bed to buy her kids some jerky when they die on his viridian-cased television. He clucks 'what a shame, you poor dear' and expects her to keep going.
They die, and die, and die. She tries to forget them. She never forgets one. She fakes it, like she fakes everything, and gets uncontrollable twitches around her mouth from the smiling, smiling, smiling.
The pills she takes are supposed to help with the dreams, but apparently they weren't made with Arcadia Collens' dreams in mind.
(She's sixteen and unrecognizable when the hovercraft lifts her away from the arena, from Domitius, from Mica and a horde of children she murdered and waltzed with. Mica's little sister never speaks to Arcadia again. Not even when she's Reaped.)
(She's thirteen and they're holding her down and she's mostly acting, but not all. Mama can't speak when she hobbles home covered in blood and little else. She aches inside for days. She guzzles pine needle guck, just in case. If it had been a different time and a different place and a different everything, she would've named it Red. Somehow, maybe, she hoped if she did, her red would pass on. That she could get angry and come out of the haze without another guy lying on the ground with his head beaten in. The different time, the different place, the different everything never comes.)
(She's ten and a girl kills herself in the juvenile cell while she's working out her escape plan. Back then she couldn't comprehend how someone could be driven that far.)
(She's eight and when the red emerges for the first time like a rose blooming into nothing but thorns, like a monster coming out from under the bed, like a stranger she only ever saw in passing taking control of her body and hands and brain, her own Mama can hardly tell who she is.)
(She's five, and all around her, the world is burning.)
Arcadia used to be the name of a better place, wild and untamable and free, one that nobody can find and ruin, that nobody can burn. Arcadia wonders how different she would have been if she'd lived there. Arcadia never finds herself.
VICTOR TRADING CARD! COLLECT THEM ALL!
The First Victor
Arcadia Collens
District One
16 at victory
Kill count: 11
Weapon(s) used: Mace, spear
Games length: 29 minutes and 32 seconds
Arena: Sandy hill
Mentored by: None
Quote: "I'm the first fucking Victor of the first fucking Hunger Games. I've slept with three times as many people as you and killed three times that many and hurt- a lot more. Am I done now? Is that it?"
Well, hi. It's me, Allie, back to fanfiction at last, with Basil (love takes thyme). We're beginning a chronicle of the Games and Victors. Not all of them will be nearly this long or in this format. We would greatly appreciate constructive criticism, cause this draft's rough, and iffy on some parts. Thanks for reading!