Rivalry
a Hunger Games fanfic
by Technomad
What if Katniss and Primrose were more of an age…and had a very different sort of relationship?
As always, I stood in serried ranks with the rest of my female age mates, watching the same old movie about the Rebellion, the Dark Days, and the start of the Hunger Games. A few feet away, my sister, Primrose, stood. We'd been born eleven months apart, and we were in the same age-cohort, so we were together. This was not an arrangement that pleased many people; our age-mates were doing their best to keep us separated. I could see that they were uneasy about the situation, and I smiled to myself.
Finally, that overdressed bitch from the Capitol began her usual rigmarole. "Ladies first!" she carolled, as though being Reaped was some sort of a special favor, and she plunged her hand down into the big glass bowl filled with slips of paper with names on them. The tension grew, and I swear that sadistic cow was enjoying it. Finally, she pulled out a name, unfolded it, and read: "Primrose Everdeen!"
The crowd parted before her as Prim walked up to the stand. Before she could go far, I jumped forward. "I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!"
The crowd murmured; this was unexpected. In a few of the richer Districts, they were known to have sub-rosa programs that trained promising young people to step up and volunteer, but District 12 was poor. We'd last had a Victor twenty-four years ago, and he was now sitting on the stage, in the rumpled remains of what had been a nice suit, drunk as a hooty owl. He goggled at me as though I was some sort of hallucination.
Prim whirled, giving me a glare that should have had me lying on the ground with a big smoking hole where my chest had been. "Oh, no you don't! You hog everything I get, and I'm sick and tired of it! You go sit down and let me have a chance to shine for once!"
"Listen, you stupid little shit," I snarled, stepping forward as my hands clenched and unclenched, "do you need your earholes syringed out, just like your empty brainpan? I said 'I volunteer!' So I'll go to the Capitol! In any case, unlike certain little sisters, I, at least, am a credit to my District!"
Prim bridled, her mouth going tight and then twisting into what nobody sane would think was a smile. "You, a credit to our district? You?" She laughed theatrically. "Unlike some older sisters, I am young, and beautiful, and graceful! I'll get sponsors out the wazoo, and come home a Victor! And then I'll live in Victors' Village, and never have to share a bed with you again, Miss Snores-and-Hogs-The-Covers!"
I sneered at her. "You don't have the sex appeal to lure a hermit off a rock ledge! And that's without counting your personality, which I'd call poisonous, if that wasn't an insult to perfectly innocent poisons!"
"I don't have sex appeal? Who is it that practically does a striptease to distract any guy that I get interested in? Maybe someone like you, someone who's the District's bicycle…everybody gets to ride?"
"Any guy that got interested in you obviously had a few too many rocks fall on his head in the mines! You couldn't seduce your way out of a paper bag with directions on the side in six-inch-tall letters! Not to mention, as clumsy and stupid as you are, you'd last about five seconds into the Hunger Games!"
"Me, clumsy and stupid? Says the girl who knows!" Prim snorted. "If you were any stupider, they'd load you onto a train car and haul you off to the Capitol…as a lump of coal! And as for clumsy, Miss Butterfingers, you could break an iron anvil with a sponge-rubber hammer! They've got your picture in the dictionary, under 'inept loser!'"
"Inept loser, am I? You're the loser! If they put you into the Games, everybody will think you're the comedy relief! All you need is some baggy clothes, to hide that underdeveloped body, and you could go be a clown! At least nobody'd need to put makeup on you…your own natural face will work just fine!"
"You, on the other hand," Prim hissed, standing a few inches away from me, "are about as funny as a broken leg…except for your face, but looks aren't everything! Lucky for you, Miss Pimple-Face Saggy-Tits, you aren't going to the Capitol, and that's that! So go shit in your hat!"
And with that, it was on in earnest. Screaming with rage, we launched ourselves at each other, punching, biting, kicking, kneeing, clawing, grappling, and rolling over the ground. I caught a glimpse of our mother, who was standing at the back watching with a woebegone expression on her face. Just like she had the last time this had happened…last week. And two days before that. And four days before that. And…you get the picture.
The rest of the crowd was chanting: "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!" They'd seen it all before, many times. Prim's and my rivalry was District Twelve legend; we'd fought at school, after school, and all over the place.
The Peacekeepers were their usual efficient selves. "I've got five credits on Prim," I heard one say.
"I'll take that action!" their sergeant replied. "I think Katniss has been in training!"
Up on the stage, that grotesquely-dressed lunatic they sent us from the Capitol was completely upstaged. All she could seem to think to do was to grip her microphone and shriek: "Girls! Girls! This is no way to behave!" The Mayor was shaking his head sadly, and Haymitch Abernathy was rolling on the stage, laughing so hard I thought he might have an aneuryism.
Finally, they got some people brave or stupid enough to separate us. They hauled us off each other, snarling, swearing and spitting, and bundled us both up on to the stage. That Capitol mannequin was clearly in what would have been, in a person, a fury. "I hope you're both satisfied!" she hissed. "In all my years, I have never seen such a disgraceful exhibition! You should both be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves!" Both Prim and I were bruised and battered and bleeding, and our clothes were in sad shape.
Prim and I pointed to each other, and chorussed: "She started it, Miss Trinket! Make her stop!"
"Oh, I will," Effie snapped. "And I'm going to be on the phone to the Capitol about this…this outrageous display!" She narrowed her eyes; she probably thought she was menacing, but I was thinking that in any kind of a fair fight, I'd be bouncing her off the walls. I enjoyed that thought.
True to her word, Effie went over and picked up a phone, speaking in a low voice. Whatever she heard pleased her; she smiled, which had an effect about like what you might see on a corpse two weeks dead. Absently, I wondered if she really thought all that makeup and those awful clothes were attractive. I knew what "attractive" was, and if I were a guy myself, the only way I'd be willing to bed her would be if I were drunker than Haymitch. Maybe that was why he drank so much? He had crawled into bed with her once, and was trying to forget?
Speaking of Haymitch, he was standing close by, shaking his head. "I've never seen anybody do that on a Reaping Day," he muttered, his face close to ours. His breath stank of white liquor, and I could tell he hadn't bathed in a good many days.
Effie bustled over, a nasty satisfied smirk on her face, which suited her better than the big artificial cheery grin she usually wore. "Well, I had to talk to President Snow himself!" she announced, as though the name was something that would make us shiver in our shoes and cry and promise to be good little girls. "He says that girls who act like you have no place in the Capitol, and, therefore, you're to be excluded from this, and all future, Reapings!"
"But…but…you picked my name!" Prim wailed.
"And I volunteered! Doesn't that count for anything?" I gasped.
"Not another word from either of you! I'm ashamed for you! You're sisters, and you act like this? I hope you now know that District Twelve will be the laughingstock of the Capitol!" Again, Effie apparently thought that this was something that mattered to me. My own take on those grotesque parasites in the Capitol, from President Snow on down, was that they could all go hang themselves with my blessing. For that matter, I'd cheerfully knot the nooses.
Effie turned to our Mayor, who had come in to see what he could do. "Mr. Mayor? You have some sort of place to put people who need to be punished, don't you?"
"Yes, ma'am. These two are notorious troublemakers, and can't get along at all. I think a spell in the cooler's just the thing they need to teach them how to behave better," our Mayor said. He was all but wagging his tail; even the most powerful District official is nothing next to someone from the Capitol, and we all knew it.
"Right, then! Off to the 'cooler' they shall go! In the meantime, I shall get back to my Reaping, and hopefully whoever I Reap will manage to comport themselves in a halfway-civilized manner!" Effie stalked on out, reminding me of nothing so much as an offended cat.
The Mayor looked at us and shook his head. "I've ignored your brawling for too long, it seems. Thirty days in the cooler should teach you a lesson." The Peacekeepers dragged us out, and once we weren't being closely watched, Prim and I exchanged triumphant winks.
Our ploy had worked absolutely perfectly. For years, we'd pretended to be bitter, fierce rivals, quarreling over everything and anything, just so that if one of us got Reaped, the other could jump in and make just the sort of fuss that I had. It was an iffy plan at best, but better than one of us having to wave goodbye to the other, and then welcome her back home in a box.
Besides, the cooler wasn't so bad. Thirty days of no work, no school, nothing to do? Paradise!
END