Ever since you were born you've been dying
Every day a little more you've been dying
Dying to reach the setting sun
As a child, with your mind on the horizon
Over corpses, to the prize you kept your eyes on
Trying to be the chosen one
All those things that you desire
You will find here in the fire
Put your hands up and reach for the sky
Cry for absolution
'Absolution', Ghost
Prologue 1
Milo Zimmermann, The Capitol, 2 months before the 13th Games
"Stop clowning around, you two!"
"Hah, good one." Milo muttered under his breath, even though his eyes did not leave his bright screen where messages of varying degrees of emergency popped up on the holopad. As if they'd ever stop messing around, when the deadline to finish the project was so close. Too close for his liking. Cyrellia still somehow managed to hear his input and dutifully smacked him across the back of his cleanly-shaved head.
All in all, the workplace wasn't bad. By anyone else's standards, it would even be qualified as absolutely enthralling, considering the pay, the allocated vacation and the sheer honor of the job. The expectations though…they wore out the most rough and rugged Gamemakers and ground them to a dust before they hit 45 years of age. Spit them out like food that has gone bad. Rotten they were, the whole lot of them. Not Cyrellia though, who was once again heavily pregnant and positively beaming at Quill from across the room. No indication of a burnout there, then. To come to think of it, Milo isn't sure if he's ever seen Cyrellia not in the process of carrying a baby to term. The woman was a baby-incubator and proud of it, really.
Despite his annoyance at her sometimes-over-the-top demeanor, he had to admit she wasn't half-bad. She was strong. Not unlike most of the Capitol people who had survived the Dark Days. He remembered the war as a young soldier in the Capitol army, barely able to lift the cutting-edge-technology weapons they were provided with, to crush any resistance. She remembered it as a mother of two, cowering in a basement cellar as explosive devices rained upon the houses nearby. Her youngest died in that war, after all, and she was still here smiling and planning the murder of twenty-three more children, year after year. That's what strength was all about, getting back up and being able to stomach doing what was right by you, even if it was horrifying and regretful and wrong. Milo wasn't delusional enough to think that what they were doing here was anything short of abhorrent, but it was necessary for maintaining the order throughout the districts.
Sometimes it was almost easy to forget the moral implications of what he was doing, what Quill and Cyrellia were doing. They were just putting on a show for the country. An unforgettable show that would make the districts tremble, elevate one odds-defying tribute to god-like status and entertain the Capitol crowds that were able to forget disaster a lot quicker than he ever could. If anything, this career permitted him to get up at 9AM on most days and loiter around the parking lot while eating his President-sponsored balanced breakfast (which really was glorified oatmeal with little bits of fruits). He couldn't for the life of him comprehend why the President, of all people, would promote this garbage but, it was free and oddly filling and Milo wasn't Cyrellia, so he didn't complain about it. If he squinted at it from the wrong angle, the control exerted over his team as well as the other Games-related jobs was almost-suffocating. Everything was monitored, from the portions of fruit they allowed themselves to take, to the private discussions they held during their breaks. That was his life for the past while, he made peace with it. Everything was monitored but nothing was forbidden, strictly speaking, until it was, and you got a bullet in your skull for your troubles. That was an extreme, he had to remind himself. It rarely came to extremes in this job where food, shelter and sleep was all but guaranteed. Sleeping a lot was part of his whole get-up, excluding the many weeks prior and during the Games, of course. During those months, he just had to subsist on caffeine and stress alone, but delegating his job to lesser employees for the rest of the year was a pretty sweet trade-off, wasn't it? Besides, he had minimal contact with the actually-human aspect of things: he was the designer, the one who assured that the show onscreen would be as aesthetic as possible. Maybe that's why in the past few years, Milo started appreciating the District 1 and 2 tributes more and more. They were able to compliment the hard work he had put in and truly make it shine. With blood, more often than not, but as he has completely and utterly convinced himself by now, death and gore was its own kind of beautiful.
"…Milo? Have you approved the mutt designs yet?...Milo?"
Cyrellia's expectant high voice shook him out of his thoughts and he sheepishly blinked twice at the young-looking woman in front of him with her hands on her hips, comically tapping her foot on the ground in front of him.
"Stop looking at me like an owl and please just ans-"
Milo tuned her out as he put on the extra-large headphones and elected to open up the files that the guys at Games Organization, Design and Analysis (GODA, for short) sent him. These were …interesting designs. He wouldn't call them strictly original, but a little bit of tweaking would turn this arena into something worth watching.
Once upon a time, he had had dreams of becoming an artist. Years ago, he had studied anatomy and movement so meticulously, in order to recreate the shapes in an accurate and hauntingly beautiful way. Back in the day, all he knew was how to make things beautiful. Then they handed him a gun, and he could name the anatomical region, the muscle, the tendon where each shot landed, which bone was fractured by the explosives, which artery had been punctured by the shrapnel. After a while, death came with its own kind of breathtaking awe. Somewhere along the line, he stopped being the Milo who strived so desperately to capture deceitful beauty and became a man who, for all intents and purposes, was the executioner of the district's offspring every year. He had to make it beautiful too, akin to a scalpel catching the light in an elegant manner before sinking into skin. Back in his youth, he could have been anything, and now he was a Gamemaker, a sealer of fate and a deliverer of doom. Kind of melodramatic when you think of it, but what were they if not a mismatched squad of overly-dramatic assholes trying to put together a spectacle the likes of which Panem has never seen before? After twelve games and counting, it was becoming increasingly difficult. After all, sandy arenas and roped-off forested planes could only go so far.
SNAP.
His headphones came off with a twinging sound. God, why did Cyrellia have to be so physical with everyone?
"Can you please focus on what I'm saying for a second before continuing to look like you ate a goddamn lemon?" Cyrellia exclaimed just as Milo, rolling his eyes hard enough to sprain an eyeball muscle (his medial and lateral recti muscles, to be exact, Milo thought without humor), gave up his attempts at ignoring her and sat up straight to listen.
"Sorry Cyra, what do you want me to do?"
"Does this dress make me look fat?" she asks deadpan and then flops down in the rolling plush chair next to him and kicks off, propelling herself at moderate speed towards the other end of the room, while laughing loudly.
God this place annoyed the shit out of him sometimes, and he had to deal with these idiots on a daily basis… but these were his idiots and most of the ones sitting here today got their job before him, so he had to demonstrate at least an ounce of respect towards them. He waited patiently for her to get to the point.
"Seriously though, how are the designs coming along?"
They were coming, that's all he could say for now. Milo simply nodded in response. He thought it conveyed the message quite nicely.
"Not in a talkative mood today, alriiiiiiight!" Cyrellia exclaimed with so much exuberant enthusiasm that Milo had to repress an active wince. She could be a total pain in the ass. She knew Milo would only tell her once everything was meticulously organized and written out in full, but she still enjoyed seeing the even-more-sour look that appeared on his face, any time she nagged him about it. That was their whole dynamic, for the past 4 years. Cyrellia leeching onto him and making his life miserable and at the end of the day, sharing a gigantic plate of homemade delicious food, stating that she was tired of seeing his miserable scrawny ass patrolling the halls of their establishment like the ghost of some District demon-child.
Although he'd never suggest it out loud, Milo suspected she preferred the guy that came before him and was playing the longest game of denial-and-systematic-replacement-of-poor-dead-asshole-with-Milo. And he was dead, of that Milo was assured, after the designs that were put up under his supervision drained Capitol-tax money and yielded the most abysmal goddamn reviews. That particular set of Gamemakers was deposed of fairly quickly after that.
Cyrellia and Quill and Jazz. Those were the only three that had survived that particular purging of Gamemakers and Milo intended to join their ranks in securing his position. After all, he'd get tenure by the end of these Games, whatever the hell that meant in this day and age. But first, before dreaming up a future that went beyond being executed out-back unceremoniously and dumped into an unnamed grave, he had to finish approving these sketches. Milo looked them over, took out his pen, and started writing corrections. They only had two more months, the arena was completed, and all the structures were being put into place. The big problem were the mutts, which Jazz had procrastinated on, and now Milo felt a twinge of pity for the team of biologists and engineers and whoever else was responsible for bringing their creations into existence. It wouldn't be easy, but he promised himself it would be worth it.
Cyrellia
After getting her third virgin daiquiri of the day (sue her for taking full advantage of the beverages package Gamemakers were provided with up until 55 days before the Games), Cyrellia was bored. Truly and utterly bored.
She looked over at Milo, deep in thought and doodling some last-minute improvements on the mutations that would patrol the arena this year. From the looks of it, they looked freaky enough. She smiled at the thought. She was a real horror-movie fan, when it came down to it, and always approved of a properly and utterly horrifying arena over a classic one. Forest arenas were alright, nothing wrong with forest arenas, she reminded herself. Still, there was something so innovative when you had to conceptualize buildings or trenches or underground facilities from scratch! She was lucky too, she was a glorified Head Gamemaker's assistant, which sounded kind-of lame on paper but really, she got the second-best seat in the house when it came down to it.
She was happy it was a scary arena this time around. The one problem with her is that she had a hard time applying herself if the arena was shit. As simple as that. If the arena scheme was boring, Quill would see the disapproval written all over her face, figuratively, for the next 290 days. Sometimes he'd see it written literally all over her shirt, when she came in, sporting a sequin shirt with "The Arena is Garbage!" sown in meticulously with sequins of another color, stretched tight across her growing belly.
Cyrellia was nothing if not dedicated and a little bit out of her mind, and at the end of the day, she knew Quill appreciated the frankness with which she stated her opinions. She also knew that her ditching the team and loafing around for the entire year could only work for so long, in the name of artistic integrity. Either way, she liked the arena this year, and she liked to think she put in the necessary effort, Milo's judgmental looks be damned. No sequin shirts this time around. Or at least, no sequin shirts that would risk her getting shot through the head by the helmet-and-armor-clad guards the President kept around their facility.
Speaking of Milo… Cyrellia wheeled herself back to his desks and parked herself right in front of him.
"Seriously, can you give me anything on the plotline Quill will be trying to push this year? He won't tell me shit, and I wanna finally be in on it."
Milo rubbed his forehead in annoyance. She smiled at that, taking it as a point in her favor, in their unspoken-about-but-totally-there game of who could piss the other one off more.
"If you tell me it's another loyalty-is-rewarded-rebels-are-punished arc, I swear to god I will hurl," she persisted, seeing Milo's mouth quirk up slightly. He knew how much she hated rebels, how traumatized the fighting that took place in the Capitol had left her, but again, aesthetics and hate were two different things. Demonizing rebels was a thing, certainly, but like, come on, something more original hadn't come along since the 5th Games.
Milo was keeping silent. Maybe he didn't know any more than she did, or maybe her delicious potato casserole hadn't convinced him to spill the beans, but Cyrellia decided that ultimately it wasn't worth her time. Fuck it, as she loved to say out loud. So be it, the clock was already showing quarter to 3, and she had already completed the paperwork Quill had assigned her. Contrarily to Milo's judgmental comments, when she actually came to doing her work, she did it well.
In this profession, you never know whether this move or the next will be a stepping stone to a promotion or your last hurrah in this world, and she didn't particularly mind. She knew she was well-liked, well-connected and well-impregnated, which put her fairly high on the list of people that it would simply be too impolite to execute. No one liked to execute moms, especially not ones that were 110% on board with the Capitol repopulation campaign the President had been pushing for the past while. Moms who, for all intents and purposes, were creating a legion of mini-Cyrellia's, who came running around the office once in a while, to Milo's horror.
She wasn't stupid enough to think that her top-notch quality never-late never-questionable work is what kept her alive. First, from the starvation and disease that claimed the lives of the most-fortunate alongside those born in poverty. Then, from the throngs of terrorists who patrolled the streets during the weeks prior to the Capitol forces regaining control of their city. And lately, from the President himself, who executed a large portion of her collegues because of a fluke. Life was fickle and no one knew that better than Cyrellia. She just knew how to create walls upon walls of protection and if someone was strong to break them down, well, that was fucked. Cyrellia was nothing if not willful, determined to have a great time and do things her own way. That's why she had gotten the job in the first place and why she had secured it for so long, when others failed repeatedly. She was good at what she did and she enjoyed it, and as far as she was concerned, that was enough. They still had a ton of time on their hands, and she'd get some propaganda-message-related information out of Quill soon enough.
Cyrellia gave one last look to Milo, sighed exasperatedly and flicked a piece of paper towards him. Of course, she missed him, but still elicited the huff of annoyance she had come to anticipate. She smiled cheekily, clocked out, and her heels were heard ticking across the sparkling-clean floor as she hummed a happy tune on her way out of the office.
NOTES: First chapter, Done! I am beyond excited to start this. After years upon years of lurking, reading and reviewing, I finally decided to launch myself into this head first. I tried to set the scene for the story, and some more details will unravel in the upcoming chapters of the prologue but essentially, we are roughly 2 months away from the 13
Send me your tributes, send me a PM or review this story! Either way, it'll make me incredibly happy to hear input from you. I will try to upload the next chapter on Sunday. Or I might wing it and do it before. Either way, it leaves you with plenty of time to decide whether you want to embark with me on this epic journey where laughs will be had, tears will be shed and blood will be spilled. The form is going to be on my profile shortly.
Peace and love.