Chapter 1.2

Reaping Day in District 10

I stay out with the goats until the last possible minute. I'm in a suit and nice shoes but I don't care. All shoes are always covered in some kind of livestock crap in District 10. We take them off at the door when we go inside. Snowball nuzzles my hand – he thinks he's a dog. I pick him up and scratch his ears like a dog, and kiss him on the snout. If I get Reaped, Duke had better not sell him while I'm gone.

"Do you want to get charged with treason?" Duke snaps from across the fence.

"No," I say flatly.

"I'm not gonna sell your stupid favorite goat," he says with a smile. He knows me so well. I can see a little bit of the old Duke in his smile some days.

Snowball was my pet from before he got Reaped – we got him when I was seven. He could eat the grass and live on it, so he didn't cost us anything, and he was trained to do a couple of tricks to help us get money. He's old and arthritic now, so I don't think he can do any of those tricks anymore. Duke wanted to get a nanny goat so we could get the milk but I saw Snowball as a little tiny kid, all white and looking lonely and I insisted on taking him even though he was the runt. We saw humans who starved to death with a belly full of grass all the time, and one time I asked Duke if Snowball was really okay eating it, and he explained about how some animals could break down grass but humans couldn't. It would be nice if we could … the fields are full of grass.

I brood over what's happened. I guess all the word Duke spread about three tesserae worth of money to the family of anyone who volunteered to take my place if I was drawn was a waste of time. As soon as I was drawn, I immediately realized that I need to get to a bow, even if I have to run into the bloodbath to do it. I can shoot coyotes and foxes through the eye from three hundred feet away at twilight – pretty sure the Careers will be no problem.

If it's an open field … which it probably won't be. If it's something like in the sixty-third games – my formative games, the first ones I remember – where it's a ruined city, I'll be fine. I get a bow, I jump from roof to roof, and I pick everyone off. If it's a jungle or a forest, I might be able to do something similar with trees, but it'll be harder. If it's a desert, I've lucked out – I'll be vulnerable but only if I'm caught unawares, and I can live in a desert. If it's an ocean or a beach … I'm very, very dead. I can't swim very well, and I don't know how to fish. I sure don't know anything about boats.

My thoughts are interrupted by a knock on the door. "It's not locked," I call. I don't want to leave this bed – it's the softest I've ever been in, and if I'm going to die I want to spend every minute I can sleeping in a soft bed first. The door opens and Brandy comes in. "I can't sleep," she tells me pitifully. "Can I sleep with you?" She's the youngest of eight – her only sisters are too old to volunteer for her, and all the rest are brothers. I know she's never slept alone in her life – I never did either, until Duke won his Games. For as long as I can remember, I slept next to Duke – whether in a bed, a sleeping bag, on a floor, or on the ground. I remember the first night I slept alone – I didn't like it. "Come on," I say with a sigh, and throw the sheets back. She climbs in the bed with me. She has a little rag doll she apparently sleeps with. She's so, so very young … and I know I can't kill her. Even if it were my life or hers I can't. I'm going to put myself on the opposite end of the arena and hope someone else kills her before I'm forced to. "Just stay on your side," I order coldly. I don't want her to like me, I don't want her to come looking for me in the Arena.

"Okay," she promises.

Within thirty minutes, she's asleep, and I can barely breathe because there's a little girl choking me with her arms around my neck, breathing on my ear, and putting her knee in my stomach. I can just imagine Duke chuckling at the sight – justice at last for all the nights he slept with me draped over him or tangled around him when I was little and he was … slightly less little.

The fear almost gets me then … if I don't win, I'll never see him again. I don't let that thought take hold.

Author's Note

I was inspired for the stuff with Snowball by an interview with Jeremy Renner on David Letterman. His mom and stepfather apparently had a ranch and his favorite goat was a white miniature goat called Snowball.

When I was first plotting out this story, for a while it was just the Avengers characters in a Hunger Games setting. Clint was basically Katniss – he was from District 12, and I switched the birth order on him and "Duke" (Barney in the comics, I forget what his name was at that point in development) and he volunteered because his little brother got Reaped. I was going to have a character based on Mockingbird (Hawkeye's *grumble screw you Marvel editorial grumble* ex-wife from the comics and one of my favorite Marvel characters) in basically the same role as Peeta, but I decided that I wanted to see the Avengers interacting with the Hunger Games characters and changed the story around to be a more genuine crossover.

It used to be much more common for siblings to share beds. My grandmother and her eight brothers and sisters used to sleep in one big bed (with the two youngest laying at the foot) so I imagine that's common in a world like Panem where the Districts have sort of backslid into the eighteenth century in a lot of ways. The books mention that Katniss and Prim share a bed (except when Prim gets scared and goes to their mother), Rue and Katniss sleep next to each other in the arena, and Katniss and Peeta sharing a bed platonically between the 74th and 75th Games. So even though Brandy's not his sister, considering she's twelve, and a twelve-year-old from an outlying district would probably look more like a nine-year-old since I doubt very seriously they eat well enough to enter puberty, I don't think this would be too weird for him (all though someone from the Capitol would probably judge him for it since they'd have the more industrialized "bed sharing = sexual" mindset).