Read this first, please!
First off: This is a companion to Fields of Battle. It's designed to go along with the story so if you haven't read that, almost none of this will make sense. You're still welcome to read it, if you want, but this was designed as both a thank you and also a sorry to the creators of the babies below.
Second: This is a (mildly) confusing piece. There are twenty-four blurbs, one for each tribute, about if they won, their victory, what they did, their homecoming, whatever I spit out of my brain at the time I wrote it. Yes, Kiero's in here, but you'll see what I did with his when you get there. You also may notice that even though I numbered each one according to their placement in FoB; I didn't use that specific tribute's name, mostly because I am an aesthetically-annoying asshole. For reference, Gera's 24th (the first one), Eitta's 23rd (the second one) and so on. It's all on the blog if that's too confusing for you.
TW: Brief mentions of alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, general bad stuff, and me being an ass.
24th. The Crazy.
Somewhere along the way she stops blaming herself.
Her siblings died. That's a fact. But she didn't kill them. She got a voice in her head that blamed her more than she blamed herself.
If she steps off her plate she's another casualty for District Twelve. They don't need any more of those, but she doesn't know how to be something other than that. Herself and the voice in her head is all she has to cling to.
She wins the Games as the first victor in over a hundred and twenty five years to not kill anyone. Not that it makes her feel any better, really, when they make her watch the recap, but she knows that victory comes in a lot of forms. Hers is when the voice doesn't come back.
She thinks it got chased out when they announced she won.
23rd. The Mouse.
He's got some of the lowest odds in Games history.
He knew his chances. Obviously, everyone did. By some form of a miracle he escapes the bloodbath with nothing but the clothes on his back - his tiny frame hunched over in the rain, shivering and shaking. He finds refuge in a bunker, forcing himself down to the tunnels.
He's still down there when Terron Calvert blows up half the arena with sponsor-gifted dynamite. He doesn't move. Not once.
His eyes, sunken and shallow in his face, only open when he hears the voice floating dimly through the tunnels, announcing that he's won.
22nd. The Pacifist.
She wishes Lumin had never said District Five wouldn't lose anything this year. That means that she's whole, that she really won.
And she don't think she did.
Winning implies that she came out alright, that the blood that's on her hands is a figment of her imagination, that Abbie dying for her and Falco choking on his own blood was a terrible dream she had one night. She doesn't want to look her parents in the eye, doesn't think she deserves all the friends that still want to be there, by her side. She doesn't deserve it. There's no way she can.
She's not alright. She couldn't be farther than that.
21st. The Cheerful.
He doesn't want to win, so of course he does. It's funny, the way the world works, that it doesn't care what people want or what they fight for (or not). He fights for someone else's survival, because he knows Elora and Quill have things to back to, so why shouldn't everyone else?
Maybe he does deserve victory, just like everyone else does, but he doesn't want to fight for it. Not when he's got no life to go back to.
It's ironic, he guesses, but he stopped believing in fate a long time ago.
If fate had favored him, he wouldn't be alive.
20th. The Manipulator.
Her compassion is her downfall.
Theoretically, of course. Before the Games she shoved every ounce of emotion, every sliver of mercy so far inside of her that she shouldn't have been able to find it. She convinced herself of it, too, that she'd never be able to piece together her emotions if she won.
Two things: she finds it, finds it all, quicker than she ever imagined, and she still wins.
And it's only because Hariwin smiles, eyes closed, when they're the only two left. He shakes his head. And she takes the opportunity to step forward and stab him in the heart. He doesn't even look surprised.
She might as well have stabbed herself.
19th. The Overlooked.
She's nothing but a number in a binary code, a faceless nothing in the wasteland. She's the only one that goes in for her District and the only one that comes out.
Ironic, she supposes. She's been alone, or at least felt like it, most of her life. A Mother that tries too much but doesn't get far and a dog that replaces her dead best friend isn't much to go back to, anyway. She's supposed to be a victor. She's supposed to have more than what she gets, more than what she can even imagine wanting.
Things were supposed to change, but maybe it took longer than she thought. She's a victor. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows what she's done, what she has the capacity to do. The things she can do are endless. It's not something she's used to. Hiding behind a computer screen is what she's good at, not changing the world.
District Three is still the same, monotonous background that she left. Only now, the edges look the slightest bit more rebellious.
18th. The Light-Hearted.
Being funny is hard when every ounce of fun gets sucked out of you in favor of murder.
It still makes Kellen laugh, when he gets back to Ten, but he has a hard time reciprocating.
The thing is, despite everything he feels - the sadness, the emptiness, the utter despair that feels something like claustrophobia, no one else feels the same. It's like they're trying to make up for what he can't do anymore. His sisters try to make jokes, Avis smiles at him in the sole hope of getting one back. It's becoming harder to fake it.
He thinks about killing himself, sometimes, and that's what scares him the most. No matter how bad things got before the games the thought would have never crossed his mind. Now that it's there it's like it tries to eat away at him until all that's left is the desire to be dead like everyone else is.
He can't do it. He can't do it to his family, or Kellen, or Avis.
But God, does he want to.
17th. The Defiant.
Rage is a thing he's been feeling a lot of lately.
There's so much blood dried under his nails by the time he gets to his finale that it's practically a part of him. He stopped paying attention to it the day they made him kill Acacia, Finnea screaming in the background.
Somehow he ends up with other allies. The Nine guy and the Ten girl. The Nine girl joins them when both of her allies end up dead. He makes his first mistake when he kills the Four guy in front of them, in front of the screaming Ten girl. He's been hearing a lot of screaming lately, too. He ends up killing all of them, because apparently the Capitol isn't done with making his life as much of a ruin as possible.
He tries to imagine his little siblings, all four of them, clamoring around him and hanging off his back when he gets back.
When he finally does, they won't even come close.
16th. The Mold-Breaker.
No one expected her to come back.
Ivory looks her over, after she wakes up, narrows her eyes. She's left alone soon after that. Not even her own mentor looks at her like a victor. She's nothing more than long tanned legs and a perfect manicure and hair that drapes over her shoulder like she never has to touch it. She's done with being their poster girl, with being the girl that accidentally came back, the Career that killed one person almost by accident and then won.
Her interview is filled with silence. Question after question. She blanks them all out. The audience grows tense.
They let her go when they realize she isn't going to talk.
Royal smirks at her, when she walks backstage, nothing short of proud. It's not until that moment that she feels like a victor.
15th. The Unstable.
He leaves the arena laughing, dripping with blood. Nine kills. More than anyone in the last half a century.
The worst thing is, he's proud of it. When they tranquilize him, just after, he goes down smiling. He doesn't reconcile with his Father, gives his Mother a grin full of teeth and slams the door in her face when they try to make amends. So much for making things better.
Half of the District is terrified of him. The other half won't even look him in the eye in passing.
He doesn't mind, not really. He always knew what he was. It was the rest of the world that had to open their eyes.
14th. The Honorable.
That's what they call her - a blessing of a Career, a warrior that refused to lay her swords down for anyone yet still showed compassion when it counted most. She's not like most Careers but she's not like most tributes, either.
It's what District Four used to be, before they shoved their children into a world of bloodshed and early deaths - before they started telling themselves the glory would be worth it no matter the outcome. She never believed it, not like most of them. She only wanted to do better for the world.
She's going to change it.
And she's going to make sure, no matter how many years it takes, that she never watches another person die like that again.
13th. The Unusual.
She was always the weird one.
In this case, though, it wasn't bad to be one of the ones that stood out. Maybe being fascinated with death was what got her through it - she wasn't afraid to look at the bodies or of the blood that pressed into the cracks of her calloused hands like dried-up rivers.
Victors in Twelve are a rarity, so it's only fitting that they get the youngest victor of all time to go with the minuscule amount they already have. She's no rebel leader or star-crossed lover. She's barely a teenager.
She's too young for people to be scared of her, worried about her well-being, and yet they are. She should be having fun and playing with her friends and worried about her grades in school. Those types of things were trivial to her - always were, still are.
She found a body in an alleyway before she was of reaping age.
Why is anyone surprised?
12th. The Unwanted.
To say the arena changes her is an understatement.
No one really wanted her to win. The anger at her being reaped was nothing but a facade - more of a shock than a true act of rebellion. But she comes back, anyway, to a train station full of people that are there only because they have to be, to two families who wonder why she's standing there instead of their daughters, and one family that starts looking at her differently.
Duke always loved her. So did her Father, and her Mother. It's a shame she took so long to realize it.
Queenie perches herself on her shoulders. She feels taller than she's ever felt.
It's a dangerously daring height, she knows, but there's no chance in hell she's going to fall.
11th. The Gentle.
Her family is known for a lot of things - avoiding death when their last name screams it, producing a victor over 80 years ago that died not long after in a Game that shouldn't have happened, caring for everybody else above themselves, even when it doesn't make sense. She doesn't regret the way she was raised, quiet and unassuming, because it makes her who she is.
Somehow, Porter dies, and Acacia dies, and against all the world's odds, she's the one that's left. It doesn't make any feasible sense. They were the strong ones.
It takes her a while to realize that maybe she fits the last name better than anyone. So she vows not to change. To honor who she is by going home and living a life for the friends she lost, for everyone that's died, to prove that she's alright and one day, she'll be able to say it out-loud.
She's the second Mason to win the Games.
But she's the first of her kind.
10th. The Firecracker.
When people expect things of you it's even harder to keep the mask on.
Maybe it's the hair, she thinks bitterly. Maybe it's such a contrast to everything around her that her emotions are supposed to follow. It's Finnea that dies first, and then Porter a few hours later, and she decides she wasn't wrong in telling herself that alone usually equals better. But it doesn't matter. Not after that. She is alone. So what the hell if she blanks it all out for her own sake, everyone else would probably do the same.
She kills five people and convinces herself that she doesn't care. Theoretically, she probably should. They all had families and lives, just like she did. Like she does.
Porter's oldest sibling, tiny little Selby Crankshaw at only thirteen, looks up at her when she gets back. She should look sad, and she does. But it's the fire in Selby's eyes that makes her question everything she thought she knew. Ainsley Mason almost looks the same, tainted with a rage that no ten year old should be capable of possessing. That fire will be enough. They'll burn the Capitol to the ground.
Fuck the rest of the world.
9th. The Steadfast.
She's so much stronger than everyone thought.
Normal, innocent girls from District Ten never make it far. They definitely don't win, either, but maybe she was never that girl.
Maybe she was always just waiting for a moment to arise. The Games definitely aren't the ideal place to do it, and not necessarily the one she ever imagined, but she'll be damned if she's going to change who she is to win. She doesn't, though. Because it was always in her.
Maybe she tells Ross everything, this time around. Maybe she never leaves Falco, doesn't run and leave Dess to die. Maybe she lets Quill stop her from dying. Maybe it's entirely different, and she barely remembers any of their names when she gets out. She's strong, and she's going to survive, and maybe she cries more than she used to but so be it. If it happens, it happens.
She's a victor. And maybe she's not the one everyone expected, but she'll make sure they remember her and the names of everyone she loved in there.
8th. The World-Weary.
Youngest victor ever wouldn't sound so bad if he wasn't so damn bitter about the whole situation.
He's twelve, why should he have had to kill people? He would have settled for the suffering Eleven brought, for a life dedicated to just barely scraping by. Sure, he complained about that too, but it's better than getting hunted down in the dark and chased and hurt ten times worse than he ever had been before. He wasn't afraid to kill, so he did. But it's still wrong in a way that he hoped he would never have to experience.
Putting on a show has never been his thing.
He knows damn well, though, that him stabbing Terron Calvert straight through the neck is going to be in highlights for the next hundred years.
Good, he thinks. Better him than that asshole.
7th. The Free-Spirit.
What's the point of calling them her boys if all she does is watch them die around her?
It's probably supposed to be ironic. She was supposed to be the leader, yet she couldn't even hold herself together enough to do it. She's weaker than she thought. So of course, it's probably funny when she wins, because what else is she supposed to think?
Blaming herself isn't the right option, because it's the Capitol's fault, not hers. Or at least that's what she tells herself. But she can't be happy, either, because she failed everything she had hoped to save. Being alive doesn't feel right. Her being here instead of Spens, or Kiero, or Quill doesn't feel right. So she doesn't feel anything. She falls to everything that some of the victors warn about - to the liquor, to the drugs, to the numbness that makes her feel better than anything else. Being numb is better than hating yourself.
She's dead, a needle stuck in her veins, before she hits twenty.
6th. The Courageous.
It's a girl.
At first, it's all that matters. She doesn't break, not once, survives the Games and come back more whole than most do. She has the knowledge that instead of just taking lives she saved one too. There are four kills to her name and two survivals - herself and her child. It doesn't seem like it's worth it, at first.
Perseus wraps his arms around her when she gets off the train and threatens to never let go, his voice thick. She decides then that maybe surviving was worth it.
Over half of the Careers make it to the Final 8. Terron tries to kill her in her sleep. Hariwin dies saving her, and she'll never know if he did it on purpose or not. Sheridan takes her hand on the second-to-last day and says that she doesn't regret it, just before she dies. There are too many things she doesn't want to forget, too many things that she credits to her survival.
Kaira Sheridan Harthgrove will know them all, one day.
5th. The Monster.
He doesn't have to make the decision in this world: monster or not, compassion or killing.
Everyone makes it for him.
All his life he's been exploited, taught to be a killing machine until that's all he ever knew. For a while, there in the beginning, he's convinced that's all that makes him up - that the blood pumping through his veins and the air in his lungs is dedicated to one thing and one thing only, and that's victory.
So he spends the rest of his time proving differently. When he kills there's the slightest bit of mercy in his eyes, the swing of his weapon more careful than he'd been taught. He's been taught torture, and murder, and he's done all of those, he can't deny that.
But when he kills Terron in the Final Two, the predictions are all wrong.
4th. The Soldier.
People sign up for war all the time. He's watched them do it, more often than he can count. Dedicated to fight for a rebellion that doesn't exist and a Capitol who doesn't care for the casualties it causes. There's so many of them. He hates war more than he can imagine hating anything, and he's still a part of it. Still volunteered for it. Killing is a necessary part of it. He knew that.
The guilt he feels has nothing on the blood on his hands.
It's not for the deaths. It's for Elora, because he's still not quick enough. It's for Kiero, who dies two inches from his outstretched hands because he can't do anything, he's never been able to do anything. He's useless to stop everything but his own death and by then he doesn't care, not even about himself.
The war doesn't end, not even when he gets out.
3rd. The Understated.
It's almost the same.
He does hate himself, when he comes out. Instead of it destroying him he realizes soon after that if consuming him whole is the next step, then he's probably already there. So he stops it, before it smashes him entirely, makes sure to kiss his Mother on the cheek every morning in their huge new house, watch the waves from the back porch.
Cas still falls over at inappropriate times. Genivieve still sighs and looks physically pained to put up with them.
He puts his life back together, piece by piece.
And no matter how long it takes, he finally decides it's worth it.
2nd. The Cynical.
When he wakes up, there are no scars on his face.
It's not like he had a mirror in the arena, but he knew they were there. Could feel them any time he did anything other than sit there and stare at a wall. Suffice to say, it's weird not having them. Like they were the last step in erasing what he did in there and he didn't even get a choice in the matter.
He didn't get a choice in what he did, either, so it's probably fitting.
It changed him. Everything felt like it was for the worst. But Willow latches herself onto his back and doesn't let go, his parents are happier than he's ever seen them, his friends don't treat him any differently. They're all trying to tell him, in little words or less, that it doesn't matter. That it's okay, that he's home, that as long as he's here nothing else matters.
It does matter, though. But not in the way he expected.
He's a killer, maybe even a horrible person, and the world still looks off-sometimes, but he learns to hate it a little less.
It's not worth fighting. Life, that is. He might as well let it happen.
1st. The Victor.
Except in this universe, he's not.
There are a million different ways he can die; blood spilling out of his mouth with a sword through his back, his skull split in half by an axe that he doesn't even see coming, throat ripped out by a mutt the leaps out of the shadows before anyone has the frame of mind to move. It really doesn't matter. Fact is, they're all not that great. Fact is, he can only win if everyone else doesn't.
What if everyone fought harder? Made a different move? Said one thing different, stepped one foot back instead of one foot forward? When you think about it, there's so many things to contemplate that it's a miracle he survived at all, in one universe or another.
He knows one thing: victory is something that comes at a cost.
In every other universe where he dies, he wasn't willing to pay it.
I know I haven't posted the epilogue yet. Eventually, though.