Hey all, I'm sorry it has literally taken my almost a year to update this. I've been super busy with school and other real life dramas but I should be able to start posting more frequently now. I hope you enjoy.
For future reference, this story may contain swearing at times as well as drug and non-con sex references. I should've included this in the first chapter but, oh well.
Katniss watched the trees and mountains zip past the windows of the train carriage while she daydreamed about Gale hunting in the wilderness near District 12 for her family. This was fuelled by the aggravating ambience that was Peeta and Effie's lively conversation about cakes and other pastries which Katniss not only didn't know of, but also didn't care about. Katniss looked over at the boy who she recognised as the humble, charitable prince, peacefully daydreaming while holding a cup of herbal tea which went cold hours ago.
"So where's our mentor?" Katniss asked to no one in particular, aggravated that she was on a train taking her to her grave and there was no one there to help her.
"I'll go and get him, Haymitch should be in the liquor car," Effie said with an expression of grimace as she smiled politely at Peeta, put her cup of tea down on the coffee table and left the train carriage to find their mentor.
"Have either of you ever met Haymitch?" Katniss asked, anxious about who their "life-saving mentor" actually was in person.
"I don't think I've ever even seen him," Peeta said, thinking deeply as if trying to find a memory of Haymitch buried underneath all the thoughts running through his mind.
"Sora?" Katniss asked inquisitively.
"Hmm?" he asked, startled, as he was brought away from his thoughts. He couldn't help but mentally thank Katniss for that. Remembering she had asked something of him which he had missed, he politely said, "Pardon?"
Sora leant over and put his teacup on a coaster on the coffee table, making Katniss smirk at the formality. She was more or less used to people leaving mugs on any kind of surface that wasn't the floor.
"Have you ever met Haymitch?" Katniss repeated her question with a kinder voice than before, not wanting to upset the poor, innocent prince.
He chuckled quietly before he replied, "Sadly," with a snark tone of voice, eliciting a small laugh from Peeta and Katniss at the unrefined response which blindsided them.
"Why do you say it like that?" Peeta asked, enjoying the company of the prince when he was out of his shell.
The trio suddenly heard the door open from behind Sora and Peeta, attracting their attention. Haymitch strolled into the cart and headed straight for the alcoholic refreshments across the room from the tributes while Effie made her way back to her seat across from Peeta, preparing herself for the imminent, and most likely uncomfortably awkward, conversation.
"Are you Haymitch?" Katniss asked somewhat eagerly while he continued to pour a glass of whiskey before swirling it around and putting the bottle back on the tray.
Haymitch responded by chuckling softly, not once taking his eyes off of his drink, raising his eyebrows in surprise and saying, "Someone's eager to die," shooting the mood down faster than Katniss can shoot a bird traversing a maze of tree branches. The tributes looked at him with both surprise and annoyance. He was the man who was supposed to help them?
"I just want to know what to do in the Games. How to survive, how to find shelter, water-," Katniss said before she was cut off by Haymitch who said, "I'm not going to waste my breath right now, we have time to go over this. Besides, with the Blond Baker, Prince Posture and you, Little Miss Death Wish, I'm gonna need a few more drinks to be able to sit in this room for more than five minutes."
Peeta and Sora flinched at the nicknames before recomposing themselves, with Peeta meekly grabbing and looking at a lock of his hair and Sora checking his posture and that of those of the room, trying to figure out what he did wrong.
"Can't say you're great company, and I've once spent six hours in a cramped room with a cat that hates me," Katniss said as she grimaced at the man who slumped into a chair next to her whilst gulping down his drink. Haymitch rolled his eyes at the attitude in the room and walked back over to the alcohol table, grabbed an entire bottle, and brought it back with him to his seat.
"Feel free to put the drink down and actually do your job," Sora mumbled, unhappy with how Haymitch was treating them when all they had done was be unlucky enough to have their names selected at The Reaping. He crossed his arms in annoyance while staring Haymitch down, daring him to open his mouth again. Peeta, Katniss and Effie looked on in surprise that Sora replied in such an unroyal way, as well as in fear as they were worried about what Haymitch's response would be.
As Haymitch poured himself another drink, he looked over at Sora and said, "Speaking of jobs, wasn't yours not to mess around in your daddy's business?" Haymitch swirled the remainder of his drink in his hand and swiftly poured it down his throat before he returned his ever-annoying gaze to the boy across the room from him.
As Sora was about to open his mouth to respond, Effie quickly clapped her hands to dispel any further comments before exclaiming, "Well! Let's change the topic, shall we? Katniss, who does your hair?"
After a brief pause, she flatly replied, "Me."
A silence fell over the room for a short moment before Peeta picked up a conversation with Effie, drawing Katniss in gradually. Sora picked up his cold cup of tea and sipped at it, finding solace in his beverage while Haymitch did the same with his whiskey.
The group of five soon found themselves in their luxury suite on the top floor of the tribute centre. As Haymitch made his way to the bar, Sora walked over to the lavish sofa and collapsed on it, lying on his stomach as he pulled a small plush cushion from under him and held it on top of his head.
Peeta approached him, sat down on the floor in front of the couch and asked, "Is everything ok?"
"Just my way of taking in everything that's happened," Sora replied as he moved the cushion underneath his head and turned to look at Peeta sitting beside him. Sora found himself lost in Peeta's dazzling brown-blue eyes that seemed to stare right into his soul, as if he understood everything about him.
After a brief moment of silence, Peeta asked, "Do you want food?"
As soon as the last word left Peeta's mouth, Sora had bolted from the room and gone around the corner into the kitchen, leaving the blond boy utterly shocked at how fast he was. As he stood up and walked to the kitchen, all the while rubbing the back of his neck, he watched the cupboard door opening and a pair of feet on their tippy-toes struggling to reach something. Peeta couldn't help but laugh, resulting in Sora closing the cupboard door and flashing Peeta an annoyed face. Sora opened the cupboard again and after another five seconds of struggling, he eventually closes the door and reveals a bag of large marshmallows.
Peeta looked behind Sora to find Katniss leaning against the counter peeling a mandarin, all the while slightly smirking at the short boy's predicament. As Sora opened the bag of marshmallows, Katniss asked, "Are we gonna make smores or something?"
"I don't know what that is but it sounds gross," Sora said as he glanced at Katniss with a confused expression plastered on his face.
"Lemme guess, Daddy Satoshi only let you eat high quality food, and probably health foods at that?" Katniss asked Sora, who stared at her surprised as he replied, "How do you know that?"
Katniss laughed softly to herself before saying, "Remember when he tried to impose a district-wide diet a few years back to, and I quote, 'preserve the district's low food supply' following the crappy harvest we had that year?"
Sora pursed his lips in familial embarrassment as he remembered the occasion and how the district went berserk, threatening to burn the remaining crops with the message 'A king can't rule without a kingdom!' Sora remembers the pleading his father had to do with The Capital and neighbouring districts to supply them with food in exchange for additional resources that the workers found in the mines.
"I'll take the moment of deep thought as a yes and show you how to make some smores, mainly so then you can bring me some when I don't want to get out of bed," Katniss said as she moved past Peeta to grab biscuits, chocolate and skewers from the pantry before she moved back next to Sora who was still standing at the bench, eager to learn.
"Katniss, I don't think we're even allowed to be near an open flame as tributes in case we try and burn ourselves to death before the Games. How are you going to make them?" Peeta asked as he moved to the other side of Sora and looked at the ingredients splayed out in front of him on the bench.
"Does the microwave work?" Katniss asked as she opened the packet of chocolate, broke off a square and popped it in her mouth while she looked at the boys as an indication to go check for her as they were closer to the microwave than her.
Peeta walked towards the microwave and began pushing at the buttons on the front panel before he called out, "It's not working, do you think they even turned off the electricity to our appliances so we can't purposely electrocute ourselves?"
Sora walked towards him, looked at him dead in the eyes for five seconds to catch Peeta's attention before he smirked and reached next to the back of the microwave towards the power point, flicking the switch into the on position. Peeta stared at the switch with a blank, dead face as he tried to comprehend his own stupidity, all the while Katniss was slow clapping him from the bench behind him and Sora was still staring at him, trying not to laugh.
Peeta sighed and laughed momentarily before he said, "I swear, I'm not actually this stupid. I'm just tired." Sora pursed his lips again while giggling and patted Peeta on the back before Katniss beckoned the boys back over. Once they were next to her, Katniss started to demonstrate the assembly of a smore.
"Ok so, first you take your biscuit, put a block of chocolate on top of it, and at this point you usually put the marshmallow on a stick and hold it over a fire till it's golden-brown but in this case, we're just going to put the marshmallow on top and put it in the microwave for a couple seconds so the marshmallow becomes softer and the chocolate melts a bit." As Katniss finished her lesson, she quickly made a second smore, walked over to the microwave with the half assembled smores on a plate and placed them in the microwave as she inputted ten seconds into the machine. The three of them watched through the transparent door as the marshmallows gradually began to blow up to three times their original size.
Peeta and Katniss looked at the expanding marshmallows in shock before Peeta quickly hit the stop button after only five seconds. He opened the door of the microwave and removed the plate from the appliance.
"Ok, I didn't know that could even happen, that was amazing," Katniss said with a smirk on her face as she grabbed a couple more biscuits and placed them on top of the marshmallows before squishing them down, taking one from the plate, and leaving the room abruptly.
"Hey!" Peeta shouted as she walked around the corner back to the living room, ignoring him. Peeta rolled his eyes before he looked down at the plate and noticed the other smore was missing. His eyes went wide in surprise before he looked across the counter at Sora and saw him staring right back at him with an equal look of shock. Peeta reckoned that Sora had figured that he'd chase after Katniss to get the other smore so they could split the two smores somewhat equally between three, when back in the kitchen he would actually be eating the remaining snack left on the plate. Sora's hand holding the smore was frozen only centimetres from his open mouth for a few seconds before he slowly closed the distance between the smore and his tongue. As he moved his hand at a snail's pace, Peeta's gaze altered from surprise to exasperation as he squinted his eyes to exaggerate his discontent.
Sora looked away from Peeta and took a small bite of the smore and savoured it before he returned his gaze to Peeta. Sora offered over half the snack to Peeta by holding his hand out towards Peeta, gesturing for him to take it off of him. Surprised, Peeta gingerly took the snack from his hands and began enjoying the sweet as Sora grabbed a sparkling drinking glass off of the counter and walked to the fridge behind Peeta to fill up the glass with water from the door compartment on the outside of the refrigerator.
Peeta couldn't help but chuckle as he asked, "You don't like smores?"
Sora laughed into his glass as he took another small sip before replying, "I don't even like marshmallows, I don't know why I grabbed them. I'm not great with sweet food."
A peaceful silence fell over the boys for a few moments before Peeta gingerly asked, "Why'd you do it? Give food to the people?"
Sora refused to meet his gaze as he put his glass down and stared into the water, swishing it around slightly as he tried to think of what to say. Sora eventually took a deep breath and said, "I'd look out my bedroom window every day and from the castle, I could see how everyone would live. So many people are just skin and bones, people are starving, begging for money, getting beaten up by peacekeepers. I felt guilty." A brief silence fell over the boys before Sora continued, saying, "Everyone in the castle would eat so much. They were the definition of gluttony. They would actually eat food, throw up on purpose, and then keep eating. Every couple of days, I would head to the servant's quarters where they helped disguise me so I could grab food from the kitchen and take it in baskets out to the district, undetected by the guards at the castle gates."
"I had heard about someone from the castle who'd give food out to the people of the district but I didn't realise it was you," Peeta mumbled as he listened attentively.
Sora continued with his story as he said, "Eventually I ended up leaving the castle every day, when I realised how much the townspeople were suffering. I went from sneaking out twenty loaves of bread every few days to about thirty every day. Eventually, my father found out and he was so angry with me. He told me that I could be sent to the Games for giving away valuable produce which was technically owned by Snow. I didn't care though. I resorted to extreme lengths but I kept sneaking out until one day, King Satoshi locked me in my room. I was in there for about two and a half months before the Reaping."
"He kept you prisoner in your own room for almost three months? That explains a lot, I had noticed that more people had resorted to begging again and more people were dying from hunger recently. We were getting more sales though so I didn't really notice it at the time," Peeta said as he recalled the not-so-distant past.
"Sales? Did you work in a bakery?" Sora asked.
"Yeah, it was a family business. You don't have to feel bad about taking our sales or anything. We sold cakes and other sweets to those that could afford them. It's good you were giving away loaves of bread though, I didn't really care whether we were making money or not, I just hated seeing people dying," Peeta said softly.
A solemn silence fell over the boys before Sora mumbled, "Let's go watch TV or something, no point being completely miserable in our final days," as he began walking out of the kitchen, only to stop near the exit to beckon Peeta with a flick of his head, before he left the room completely. Peeta sighed and eventually followed, hoping he could find something in the day to cheer him up.