Mags (born Margaret, but always called Mags) Gaudet is surrounded by prominent Capitol citizens of her day. Natural and plain in the middle of ones so manicured and coiffed and coutured. None of these people are still alive. She was only a young girl at the time (this picture's origins lie in the Capitol ending of the Victory Tour). Even with all their money and privilege and access to the latest medical advances, no one can completely still the march of time. She has outlasted them all.
But where one falls, another springs up to take his place, and only the faces change. Of the foes who rise up in her wake, President Snow is deadliest of all.
Everyone in the picture is smiling, but still she is swimming with sharks. Crammed into one image it's all too many teeth. Rows upon rows, for sharks to smile and eat you with. The large shark-mutt from her Games was stuffed and hung in a commentator's mansion. The one that's replaced it looms larger. Just like the one in her Games, this shark lies behind all the events, in thought if not in action.
There is a careful dance going on as the shark circles round and Mags Gaudet plays with various notions of what she might (what she can; what she should) do. Bait the shark? Attack it? Avoid it? Ignore it? Since her Games she has been teaching others to swim, but has she done enough for them?
The land is shrinking and soon there will be nowhere to stand. The shark is on no one's side but his own.
She was willing to put her life on the line for others when rebellion seemed an absolute impossibility, so who would wonder at her doing this when there really was a chance?
Tyde Barrow is grilling fish on a barbecue. This is a family photograph (though whether it hails from his family of fellow victors or the wife and children he tried his best at anyway is unclear and probably unnecessary to determine- the boundaries between these groups were often blurred). The steam curls up around his rough, masculine face. He is proud of his mustache and sideburns and stubbly beard, the greatest scruff of facial hair managed by any victor of the Games. He is a big man, just like he was when he won when he was nearly nineteen- a tribute even if he was barely a boy, although his face here is lightly lined with the press of age and on his arm is the elaborate hammerhead tattoo he acquired as part of the celebration surrounding his first successful mentorship.
Red-hot charcoal is visible through the grates of the grill. Tyde was burned in his arena. He was lost several times from Mags' sight in the swirl of smoke and steam and she despaired at the prospects of saving this magnificently strong volunteer who vanished into the depths of the geyser-filled arena.
How long did it take to break himself of the fear of that searing sound? To savor the scent of the cooking fish without the pleasure offset by memories of bodies boiled and burned and fried by the dangers built into that arena?
Did he do it for his wife? She left the house at times, but never left the marriage. Did he do it for his children? There were three, and only one lost to the arena. Did he do it for his grandchildren? There were two before the rebellion and a third after. Did he do it for the tribute trainees? Mags was the district's most successful mentor, but before the arena, Tyde was their most dedicated trainer.
He was wreathed in smoke again later as Capitol bombs exploded and roiled the sea. That wife and those children and grandchildren and a handful of would-be tribute volunteers survived him. It was in the company of the one winner he had mentored that Tyde Barrow went up, one final time, in flames.
Shad Atwater is pictured in an extreme close-up. He looks somber, but there is no indication of tears recent or forthcoming. His eyes are two different colors- one gray and one green. Lots of people in the Capitol bought contacts to achieve this look after his victory. Some changed their irises more or less permanently (in that way that lots of fashionable Capitol citizens do semi-permanent things that they later regret and try to alter or undo).
His crooked nose features prominently. Had he won his Games perhaps five years later, it would almost certainly have been fixed, but even prior to the arena it had not been a particularly neat shape and this off-ness, this imperfect quality he wore quite openly, suited his stylist just fine (Whether any noses were broken and offset in imitation of his look is more of a question for the fashion historians of the Capitol to answer). In the darkness of his Games, it made him easier to recognize, where in a better-lit arena it would have made more an "ugliness" impression.
The general response to his appearance was that he looked funny, but wasn't a victor always beautiful? People said he wasn't and Tyde Barrow argued that he was. He was the only victor Tyde ever mentored (no one in 4 could pick- or was it make?- a victor like Mags) and at all times Tyde rushed to defend him. Shad was not funny-looking, but uniquely attractive. He was not weak; he was sensitive. And his winning, Tyde told him over many, many times, was not bad luck, but a blessing.
But onstage, in training, and then underground, he had cried and cried and cried. There had been no clear sign warning Mags and Tyde of it before he was reaped and in front of the reaping crowd it was hardly unexpected. Then the crying didn't end there. Shad's sorrow, like the ocean, never came near to drying up.
"You can stop crying now," Caesar Flickerman had tried to comfort him at his recap, "There's nothing you need to cry about anymore."
"Sorry," said Shad, "I'm so sorry."
Back home, on tour, while mentoring- the waterworks were never fully stopped. For no apparent reason at all the tears would start. It was tolerated increasingly poorly (aside from the sorts who were specifically attracted to this type of thing), but Tyde never failed to stand up for him. "He just cares so much," Tyde argued, "And the Games were hard on him."
It had been an entire Games played underground, in pitch darkness at times and with miner's lamps or improvised torches at others. When the tributes couldn't see, the audience across Panem watched their stumblings in the strange greenish glow of night vision. When the beam of a mining lamp fell across his face, Shad's wet eyes wobbled and streams of tears glinted down his cheeks. The color seemed drained from him. He had a certain similarity to some blind cave fish.
And he sobbed when he killed. The echoes of his cries came to frighten the less formidable tributes who remained. His open weakness had kept him from the career pack, but he won without them.
In this picture, it's not so clear from the extremity of the close-up, but he is looking out at the open sea. Dangerous enough, but with no boundaries he cannot break through. Few things frighten him after his Games more than to be shut in, to be caged.
What is he looking at? The only way out? Unknown, but open- so very open- the sea, the sea, the sea. He stays because he's too afraid to go alone. He stays because how could he even consider going without the only ones (and one in particular) who've ever had his back?
People swear they saw Shad and Tyde in one another's arms in the final flare of light before the ocean was lit with fire. No one still alive knows whether or not he cried.
Odysseus Armain is pictured on the front page of the Fishermen's Union's quarterly newsletter. The reproduction is a bit poor because the union's printing equipment is both illegal and outdated, housed in the basement of the home of a the very brave and daring union president, but even without the caption beneath it, Odysseus would be easy to recognize. He is a strong man and darker skinned than the majority of District 4's population, with a deeper innate coloration to begin with than the usual fisherman's tan.
There is a fishing basket beside his boots, like the basket he was found in as a baby, bobbing in the water. He came from the sea, as far as everyone knows, and that is good enough for District 4. He was laughing when they found him. With circumstances like that, how could anyone doubt the boy they named Odysseus was blessed?
The basket is good, of course, and his sturdy boots, and the damp deck of his boat beneath his feet, but the stern look he gives the camera points to the thing that this article is about. Something that is not good. As a matter of fact, a very serious problem for the entire district.
The exact condition of the fish in his hands is hard to determine from the picture, but anyone can see that it isn't good. As a matter of fact, this fish suffers from some kind of sickness or parasite. The Capitol asks for too much. They are forced to overfish. There are problems beyond that. Is there something seeping down through the earth from the other districts? Something washed in along the rivers?
This fish is all but rotting away in his gloved hands, but seeing it sickens his heart and not his stomach.
There was rot enough around him in his Games. There was mutt-mold in the swampy (that was what he'd decided to call it, but it was still hard to believe there could be such a thing) that would eat away at a body still living if you lay still too long and allowed it to congregate. Shad Atwater had not been lying- he had hardly been exaggerating- when he had told Odysseus that, "the things in the arena will exceed your wildest nightmares." Shad had been there as the mentor of his partner, Tinsa Rios. Odysseus had been in the hands of Mags. The way Tinsa had screamed when she fell into the acid that burned her hands to the bone was something he would never forget.
His "wildest" nightmares were wilder now. The mythic box full of evils had been opened. He had passed through the land of the dead. He had swum through their river, surrounded by bones. He had eaten their food (and food, in that arena, had spoiled faster than people). He was theirs now.
He had come home, and found home was merely a satellite of the netherworld all along. But he was strong, like they thought. He bought his own boat. He went back to sea.
Odysseus Armain survived the longest ever Hunger Games. He is the last of District 4's victors to fall before the forces of District 13 fully connect with those in District 4. He has fought to cut them off from the Capitol's spreading rot. In the end, he is, probably, think the remaining people who know him best, content.
Jules Surfjan is asleep low on the sand. The tide is rolling around his feet and legs, tangling them with seaweed. He is happy to soak up the sunshine he was denied in his Games. After the buckets of rain that drenched him in the arena, wetting his blond locks to his face and his unimpressively thin shirt to his tiny, muscled body it is only natural to Capitol eyes to see him at least partially wet. This much, up to his knees, would do.
This is a picture that looks like it could be part of a fashion spread, but the longer you look at it, the more you become convinced that it isn't. If some Capitol stylist had set the thing up, Jules' hair would be more perfectly tousled; the scrapes on his arms hidden with makeup; the clothes he was wearing more cutting edge.
Who took this picture then? And why was Jules laying like this?
There is a pair of bare feet visible in the top left corner of the photo- someone is sitting near and above him. According to the note on the back, that's his mother, Faline Surfjan (nee Beaumont), the very girl who was saved at the reaping years ago by Mags' volunteering. They were hardly willing to let her get away so easily (but they could wait, yes, better to wait and make her believe herself safe than merely drawing her name again), and, yet, if the Capitol had cared to force the point, Jules Surfjan could've been forced to lose. Perhaps it was a sign they knew that this (living) was harder than dying.
He doesn't look safe, sleeping as the water comes in, but the feeling of safety might be relative. He was coddled every day of his life before his name was called. He is an only child. His mother and father are living and responsible and kind. Mags is like an aunt to him. He had the best sort of childhood a boy in 4 could have- this did not exclude training, of course. He had been the next best thing to the child of a victor. He had all the best training that love could bestow- all the training that could be taught without damaging a gentle young soul.
Is he really sleeping, or is it just pretend? He pretended to sleep before. He played at unconsciousness. It looked like tears ran down his face when he killed, but he never loosed a sob (he was no Shad). Steady and silent.
It rained straight through every day of his Games, so how could anyone tell?
His face was likewise wet when he turned up dead.
There's a story there that has never been fully explained.
Song Wen-Goff (nee Wen) is standing up on her seat at the District 4 mandated Victory Tour celebration for District 12's joint victors, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. There are so many hands visible in this photo, taken by a member of the official Victory Tour camera crew and intended as celebrity propaganda, but ending up on President Snow's desk as more of a sign of District 4's latent rebelliousness than anything else, that they threaten to overwhelm her. Peacekeepers are grabbing her right arm and one reaches to wrap his arm around her waist. Her left arm is raised in a half-wave, half-salute of support, her palm turned out and up toward the two young people on the stage. The sun glints off a silver ring on her hand. Her husband(fellow victor Theo Goff)'s hand clutches nervously at the hem of her soft green, fish-scaled dress.
Behind Song, behind the Peacekeepers, people of the district attending the festivities push against the Peacekeepers and the decorative ribbon holding them back, waving and shouting and mimicking Song's gesture. Will all those arm hold her up, or do they intend to pull her back and send her tumbling down?
The career boys from 1 and 2 held her down along with a supposed ally from 9, whose touch was as timid as Theo's is here. She was the only girl remaining in the career pack by the end of the fourth day. By the afternoon of the fifth, brambles were cutting her cheek as her head pushed down into the sharp grasses of the arena. Her left hand was twisted above her arm just like this- pleading? calling? signaling?- when Russet Dram of District 9 picked up his sledgehammer and smashed in the head of the District 2 boy.
Her mouth is open. What is she saying? "Katniss and Peeta, bring down the hammer?"
The machete is recalled as her weapon of choice. With her clothes torn and her face scraped and bloody, she takes the chance given to her by Russet's attack and grabs the 2 boy's machete and hews away furiously (terrified) at the boy from 1, adding a heavy smattering of his backlashed blood across her own. This is generally considered one of the three main highlights of her Games.
So she raises her hand and perhaps she's saying: "You swing down the hammer and I'll slash up with the machete!"
She hates to be touched by strangers. She gave a Peacekeeper a black eye that day and he would have punched her back, but she is a victor and this is on camera, and a good fourth of District 4 is packed into the square ready to fight for the honor of Song Wen-Goff- not to mention her husband, who has gutted two people with nothing but a utility knife even if he is only 5'7" (and all this, to say nothing of the other six victors at the table).
For the rest of her life, they continued to ask Song about Russet Dram, though sometimes, after she was no longer so new and popular, there would be dry spells that lasted for years. Her wedding stirred up a reprisal (she thought that might be the end). Katniss and Peeta's joint victory brought another wave.
"Would you have kept him, if you could've?"
Would she have?
Would she?
Would she?
Theo Goff is on a soundstage, looking over his shoulder at the expensive set rising up behind him. Tall and elaborate columns of fake rock teeter pseudo-precariously in front of a huge green screen. Little tufts of dry grass and scraggly berry vines are the only vegetation present in the setup. The endless sky and the distant nests and swooping wings of golden eagles and condor hybrids will be added in in post-production.
Theo is wearing a blue jacket, left loose and open over his costume until the actual filming begins. You can see that it's a replica of his Games gear- black and green and shoes with lots of traction for climbing and clinging to the rocks. A coil of rope is looped around his waist.
In the studio, under the setup for reenacting this portion of his Games, it's obvious that this is fake- only a replica of frightening things that have come before. If Theo fell from these platforms he would probably suffer no more than a sprain. A fall from most of the drop-offs in the arena that had been nicknamed "the Aerie" was all but a guaranteed death sentence.
His expression here is wide-eyed but fairly neutral. Whatever he is thinking, he'd prefer not to share- this from a boy who was known for wearing his heart on his sleeve- who caused several years of career alliance troubles for his district by refusing to join up with his counterparts from 1 and 2 saying that he hated "their lousy way of doing things," citing the way they had turned so quickly and brutally on Song Wen four years before. "I swore when I saw that," he informed Caesar Flickerman, "That I would never team up with 1 and 2 if I were in the Games. They play way too dirty. What those guys did to Song wasn't to help them survive. You kill in the Games so that you can live another day. You don't torture people. And it's not supposed to be fun."
The 55th Games were marked by a high number of accidental/Gamemaker-induced deaths. The tributes from the flat plains of 9 and 10 had been paralyzed with fear when they saw the terrain and they were hardly the only ones. It would be hard to prove, because that interpretation of the facts is always officially discouraged, but there were a high count of suspect suicides as well. Fourteen tributes died on the first day. There was plenty of drama, but not as much blood on view as on average. Six more tributes went on by one over the following week. The high-stakes game of cat and mouse between the final four tributes (male 1, female 2, Theo, female 5) lasted nine more grueling days. Food and water were hard to come by.
When Theo looks back at the studio set, what does he think, reflecting on those things? In the advertisement being filmed, he will climb, clamber, and reach, stretching, stretching, stretching to grasp a new sort of designer orange-grape-blackberry hybrid as purple as an amethyst instead of the ordinary blackberries he struggled to find to survive.
He had many close calls in regard to the cliffs and the heights. "Too many," Mags gently rebuked him upon his return.
"He's making me lose my hair," his father declared during the final four family interviews.
Some of those close calls were real ("And terrifying"), but some were just acting. Theo is a natural at playing for the cameras. The sponsorships he gathered this way made up for the allies he refused. This is why many of his return trips to the Capitol are to play himself in advertisements or on cheap celebrity game show programming. He has a flair for the dramatic.
When the District 5 girl slipped and found herself wedged in a crevice but still refused his offer of help (leaving everyone who cared to ask forever: would he have helped her?), he returned to watch her struggle several times and each time tossed her down a flower (she must have hoped, on what ended up the second to last day of those 55th Games, to outlast the careers at this remove, but the boy from 1's throwing arm reached her).
The bit actors sitting in folding chairs on the sidelines of this picture have been picked to resemble those last three tributes from Theo's Games. The also-rans are quickly forgotten by the Capitol, but someone researched/re-watched enough to make these casting choices nearly spot-on. They take Theo back, in their echoes of his old opponents.
All of this has groomed him as an actor. He is so skilled that the Capitol all but believes him when the Third Quarter Quell is interrupted and he says he and Song, present as mentors, don't know anything about it. All but.
Then the torture comes.
Finnick Odair is wearing a golden net. He's artfully tangled up. This is a fashion photo from the 75th Hunger Games (the Third Quarter Quell) clipped by some aspiring artist or designer to provide a burst of inspiration. The owner would hardly have been the first to have wished for Finnick Odair as a muse.
He wears the net and the net also wears him. The fisherman has been fished up in the same sort of maneuver he used in the arena on both fish to feed his body and tributes to feed his victory. No matter how big a fish, there's always a bigger fish to eat it, or so it seems.
In his Games he fought and defeated a strange, octopus-like creature that tried to drag him down, but afterward the tentacles that tried to grasp him were multiplied a thousand-fold. He was graceful in the water and danced across the slippery rocks. It almost appeared as if he could breath underwater he stayed down so long, the sunlight glittering down and lighting up his lithe young body and his golden trident.
He smiles in this picture and it's a beautiful thing, but it's not the same as the innocent joy that filled his eyes when he first laid his eyes on the arena's waters (that he could be- could look, at least- genuinely delighted within the arena undoubtedly worked in his favor). There are only echoes here- ripples spreading out from the Games that had come before. The easy Games, not the tricky, subtle things they played in the Capitol- the ones that had come instinctually, not the ones he had had to learn.
He is as lovely in this picture as he is in most others. What lies behind that loveliness is the part that is open to interpretation.
He is loveliest to the Capitol when he kills. The odds are zero, when the reaping comes around, that they will not summon him to kill again.
Annie Odair (nee Cresta) is holding her baby. She's holding him properly, but from the tension apparent in her body and her eyes, it's as if she lets go she might drown. If there's something keeping you afloat, you should be thankful for it. Annie knows plenty about the forces that will conspire to let you drown.
Things have been bad for her. Bad and then worse and then better and then almost as bad as she imagines they can possibly be.
But Annie is alive. She's back in District 4 when all the other victors are gone. No one is better than she is at treading water.