Thank you Sen, for the silly conversation that gave me this idea. Thank you, coursework, for avoiding you gave me the motivation to write this. All characters from Angelic Sword's forum The 17th Annual Hunger Games, but this is AU as hell, probably.
(Go District 7.)
1.
Jolene makes it to the safety of the mountain in the early hours of the second day. She's walked through the night, driven by fear and powered by two years of night shifts at the factory, and she is so tired. Dark and cool on the mountainside, the cave networks beckon her in. Here she is safe. Here she can hide.
Her bag contains several things, but unfortunately a flashlight is not one of them. Jolene is about to resign herself to learning to navigate the caves by touch alone when there is, of all things, a chime at the cave entrance behind her.
Someone has sent her a parachute.
She's seen the Games before, of course. Quite often the sponsors send the tributes nothing useful at all – doubtless Rose and Satin, pretty girls both, will receive their fair share of jewellery from admirers before the Games are out – so she isn't expecting much. Still, the fact that she has sponsors who are ready to commit to spending on her this early on is a good sign.
When she prises open the silver container, there is a torch inside. It's small, but powerful; the beam stretches far away into the darkness. Her sponsors are extremely generous, Jolene realises with a start, and her mentor is clever. She's in with a chance.
"Thank you," she says shyly, and because she hasn't spoken all day her voice is low and husky.
(Back at the training centre, the phones start ringing.)
The days go by one at a time, not that Jolene has any real concept of time in the caves. She explores the tunnels with dogged determination, experimentally turns her torch off to see how far she can go without losing her bearings, fingers reading the texture of the rock walls and the temperature of the air currents that idle past her. She marks the location of every pitfall, every narrow crevice, every oddly placed stalagmite, even discovers the sulphurous hot springs bubbling deep in the depths. Soon she doesn't really need the torch. When she's hungry, she makes her way back to the cave entrance she came in by. Sometimes it is day when she comes out. Sometimes it is night. But there is always something waiting there for her: candied fruit peels, beef sandwiches, once a whole steaming flask of hot vegetable soup with bread.
She doesn't know why. She's not doing anything – certainly not killing anyone.
(Mentor Robert Furniss, victor of the 16th Hunger Games and already a world expert in jadedness, turns on the night-vision cameras every time she visits the hot springs and grits his teeth).
Day five, and the golden haired girl from Five comes staggering into the caves. Gasping with sobs and bleeding profusely from the hip, she only wants somewhere to hide. Jolene hasn't spoken to anyone in five days. She isn't sure she remembers how. When Macey starts to limp into the dark, oblivious to Jolene's watchful presence, Jolene knows that without a torch she will be hopelessly lost within the hour.
"Let me help you," she whispers hopefully, and although at first Macey screams and threatens to stab her with a spear, the Five girl calms down enough to let Jolene look at her wound. It's deep, but a clean cut – she's seen far worse as a trainee medic in on the factory lines in Eight. She couldn't save poor little Geraldo. Saving Macey is perhaps the next best thing. She helps Macey to the hot springs, washes her off, bandages her up, absently plants a kiss on the smaller girl's angelic blonde head. Macey is so frail looking, after all.
(Back in the Capitol, Robert can barely take people's sponsorship bids fast enough. He knows he didn't have this much money when he won last year.)
They are friends for all of one day. Macey tries to poison her over breakfast the next morning. Jolene can smell the herbs in her hot tea, and fixes a sweet smile on her face as she pretends to drink. I feel sick, she comments carefully. The pain Jolene feels at the subtle way Macey's eyes light up is deep, but not as deep as the yawning pit Jolene pushes her down when they go for a walk to "settle her stomach". Macey's scream goes on for a long time, echoing around the tunnels.
Andrew from Twelve is next to venture into the labyrinth, desperate to get out of the freezing snow. Jolene has learned her lesson this time. No one here is her friend. She lures him deeper, turns him around until he is totally disorientated, and impales him on a stalagmite.
She spends that night reciting her Healer's Oath brokenly, crying and choking down the box of chocolates they send her.
(Robert can't bring himself to watch.)
Day eight, and Jolene can feel the temperature rising in the caves. She can't determine the source, no matter what tunnels she follows. For the first time since she took up residence in the cool, dark network, she sweats when she walks. It trickles down her neck, pooling in the small of her back.
On day ten, the mountain explodes in a burst of searing hot lava. Jolene's precious tunnels are flooded with magma and toxic gases, and she barely manages to crawl out of the closest exit, hacking and gasping for air. The lava chases behind her; she can hear it rocketing through the tunnels at high speed, high pressure. She climbs out onto the ledge, swings herself sideways onto the mountain face – and the lava bursts out of the tunnel beside her as she does. Her left forearm is deluged in a spatter of intense boiling pain, burnt almost clean off. The chip reading her vital signs is fried instantly.
The cannon goes off, falsely announcing her death, and Jolene wonders if this is what Hell is like.
(The Gamemakers are yelling and shouting, the giant 3D map of the Arena rotating this way and that as each of them try to keep a handle on containing and controlling the flow of lava down the mountain. Someone has fucked up badly, Robert thinks – one of the tendrils of lava has gone awry, pooling against the outer shield of the Arena. A panel of the shield is flashing, indicating the infrastructure there is no longer sound.
And no one is paying the slightest scrap of attention to the camera fixed on Jolene, because her vital signs stopped coming through twenty seconds ago. The red and blue lines next to her name have ceased in their erratic tango – she is, to all intents and purposes, dead.
Robert turns the camera away from her and blows the rest of her sponsor money. It is a mark of how much concentration is needed to stop the final set-piece of this Games becoming a disaster that no one questions why he's trying to send gifts to a dead tribute.)
She cauterizes the stump of her forearm and smothers the injury in every single paste and salve that tumbles from the sky. Silver parachute cartridges litter the ground in shimmering piles. She is not dead. She is not dead. Dizzy and lightheaded and high on hallucinogenic Capitol painkillers, but not dead.
The lava is belching down the mountainside at an unnatural pace. If Jolene counted the cannons correctly, the volcanic eruption has left only two other tributes alive. They'll be running for their lives through the ashy understory of the conifer forest. The Cornucopia is the only heatproof structure in here, she can see that now, and that will be where the fight to the death takes place: a single island in a sea of lava.
What will become of her then? No one will come to rescue a girl who is supposed to be dead.
One last parachute spirals down from the sky. At first Jolene can't tell what her final gift is – it looks like a sheet of fine golden metal, folded a dozen times over, but as she slides each layer out and locks it into place, it starts to appear more like a Peacekeeper's riot shield in shape. Bowed in the middle, like a shallow half barrel.
Only… only it's the same colour as the Cornucopia. And it's easily big enough for a fifteen year old girl to sit on.
Below her, a spiral of lava curls away from the rest, oozing towards the edge of the Arena. Jolene might be mistaken, but she thinks she can see sparks spitting there. The riot shield floats.
Obsidian wins the 17th Annual Hunger Games.
Jolene survives it.