Who Will Rule After Me?

Chapter 4 Seneca Crane

About a month later Snow felt faint during a banquet. He slipped out while Plutarch loyally covered his absence. The doctors said the specific problem was loss of too much blood through his mouth ulcers. They gave him new medicines to restore the balance and warned him to take them regularly. They also expressed a general opinion that he was getting old and should cut back on activities. Snow did so, making less public appearances and staying in the palace much more. Meanwhile he ordered the doctors to keep the advice strictly confidential. He didn't want others to get the notion that he was getting too old to rule. When Plutarch casually asked how the succession search was going, Snow told him never to bring up the subject again.

Fortunately people's attention was on the Hunger Games. In Year 68 had a particularly sexy winner, Aphrodite from District 2. Seneca Crane, the Gamesmaster in charge of the managing the Victors, stage-managed numerous parties for her, and her events helped cover the lack of public appearances by Snow. The President was grateful for that, even if it wasn't Seneca's intention.

Later that year Seneca requested another audience with Snow. Finnick Odair had come of age and Seneca said several society ladies had offered him (Seneca, not Finnick) bribes for a night with the Victor. Snow took the ladies' names and promised to take care of the abuse. Then he contacted the ladies himself and collected the bribes. News got around, and men started asking for Cashmere and Aphrodite. Seneca, still ostensibly in charge of protecting the Victors, either didn't know what was going on or was careful to look the other way.

In Year 69, however, there was a public relations disaster regarding the Games. There was a fashion that year in the Capitol for nudism, with body paints and enhancements standing in for clothes. Chief Gamesmistress Turkeymother decided to do the same with the tributes, staring with the parade. That was when the disaster happened. For the first time, the audience saw the tributes without the usual gaudy apparel and saw how scrawny and malnourished they were. (The tributes themselves, who did not share the Capitol culture, were visibly humiliated at being seen naked, though nobody cared about that.)

Snow ordered that the tributes be clothed for the Games themselves, but Turkeymother said there wasn't time to create uniforms. Snow turned to Seneca, who had the bright idea of reusing arena uniforms from prior years (most of whose original wearers, of course, were dead). They wouldn't match, but that could be played up as an interesting feature of the Games. Snow authorized it and Seneca came up with the uniforms, with the help of a brilliant young tailor-apprentice named Cinna.

The Games went well (if 22 deaths in a few days could be considered well) until it got down to the last two tributes. They were from the same district, were good friends, and refused to fight each other. Finally Turkeymother created an acid rainstorm, forcing the pair to war over shelter, and the girl killed the boy, becoming the latest Victor. A few days later, while being treated in the hospital, the girl stole a hypodermic needle and stabbed herself to death, She was quoted as saying that she had betrayed her best friend and didn't deserve to live.

Now, with no Victor, Snow had to cancel the Victor Tour with all of its propaganda importance. He was fed up with Chief Gamesmistress Turkeymother, so he had her executed and promoted Seneca in her place.

After that fiasco things seemed to go swimmingly. Seneca teamed up with Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith and made sure that the following Games were exciting. The rich decadents of Capitol were paying lots of money for the privilege of sleeping with Victors, while the rest of the Capitol admired the Victors from afar and made the winners their heroes. Snow, still beset by poor health which he kept secret, began to delegate many of his duties, keeping to his palace and aloof even from the Capitol, Plutarch never argued with him anymore, Snow began to live in a fantasy world with the Games at its center. He even speculated that Seneca, who managed the Games so well, might be the person he needed to manage the Empire as his successor. Weren't the Games the center of Imperial culture?

Then came the 74th Games.

In the parade Cinna, who had helped solve the fiasco five years ago and was now assigned to District 12, came up with a dazzling publicity stunt, wreathing the girl and boy from 12 in flames. The audience loved it, but the silly people gave the credit to the tributes, not Cinna. Instead of realizing that the boy and girl were puppets, they talked excitedly about the Girl on Fire.

A few days later, Snow watched the Individual Evaluations via a closed-circuit camera. They were mostly quite dull. One girl, trying to demonstrate archery, badly missed her first attempt and everybody lost interested, including Snow.

Then, for her last attempt, she shot an arrow directly at the Gamesmakers' banquet table. The arrow skewered an apple at the top of the fruit bowl and pinned it to the opposite wall. The girl was actually the best archer Snow had ever seen and, he suddenly realized, this was the one everybody was calling the Girl on Fire.

The scene had its comic aspects - Plutarch had panicked and landed in a punch bowl – but Snow was worried. He started to read up on neglected reports from his spy in District 12. Law enforcement was lax there. The head Peacekeeper was mainly concerned with bedding girls. The mayor was married to a woman whose sister had been killed in the Second Quarter Quell, and might secretly hate the Games. Floggings and use of the stocks were rare, executions almost non-existent. No explicit signs of rebellion, but that might be due to poverty, not to loyalty to the Empire. Rebellious sentiments could grow there, undetected.

Distracted by a bleeding episode in his mouth, Snow took no action, expecting an announcement that Seneca had requested for the girl to be arrested and given a thorough whipping. But the next thing he heard, Caesar announced that the girl had been given an 11 for her Individual Evaluation – the highest score in this year's games!

Snow summoned Seneca to his rose garden.

"An ELEVEN?"

"She earned it," said Seneca.

"She shot an arrow at your head." He felt a vague déjà vu over that sentence.

"At an apple—"

"Near your head."

Seneca was convinced that shooting the arrow was nothing more than a dramatic stunt, and he loved drama. If she pulled stunts like that in the arena, the audience would love it. She might be this year's Finnick Odair, the hoped-for hero.

Snow tried to bring him back from the clouds, with a lecture on Realpolitik. He concluded, "A little hope is good, as long as it's contained. SO CONTAIN IT."

He talked about his worries with Plutarch, who had cleaned himself up after the punch bowl accident. Plutarch seemed calm. "It'll work out. The Careers will be furious over seeing that girl get the top score, and they'll target her in the Games. She won't last long. If you arrested her while everybody's attention is on her, the story about the security flaw will get out. Much better keep quiet and have her die a "normal" death during the Games."

Plutarch's advice seemed right, as usual.

The next day there was more foolishness from the populance. The boy from 12 announced to Caesar that he was in love with his district partner, but their love was doomed because at least one of them would obviously die in the Games. The people gobbled it up. Even Caesar seemed moved. Then Snow realized that the foolishness had a dangerous side. For once, people were starting to talk about whether it was really necessary for 23 people to die each year. But once one of the "lovers" died, they would probably get over it. The Girl on Fire simply had to be killed.

Seneca and her enemies certainly tried. When she tried to take refuge in an unoccupied part of the arena, Seneca set it on fire, but she succeeded in returning to the central section. Later the Careers managed to trap her up a tree, but she found a hive of mutation-bees and dropped it on her enemies, killing one and scattering the others so that she could escape. She was apparently expert in manoeuvring through forests, but to the audience it added to her heroic aura.

Seneca came up with a new plan. The girl's most formidable enemies were the two surviving Careers, Cato and Clove from District 2. But as other tributes continued to be killed, they were likely to turn on each other eventually. Seneca proposed a new rule, that two people from the same district could become joint victors. Ostensibly this would humor the Capitolians who wanted the "lovers" from 12 to both survive, but it would also induce Cato and Clove to stick together. Next, Seneca proposed a "feast", an offer of extra supplies to the surviving tributes. This would lure Cato, Clove, and the Girl on Fire to the same spot, and the Careers would kill the girl. There were 3 other tributes still alive: the boy from 11, the girl from 5, and the boy from 12, but they weren't likely to interfere. The first two were loners who avoided battle, and the last was badly wounded. Indeed, medicine for the boy from 12 was probably the best bait for the girl. Snow hated to add a new rule to the Games, but the chance of getting the Girl on Fire killed was worth it.

Unfortunately, the tributes did not follow the script. For reasons known only to themselves, Cato and Clove decided to split up at the crucial moment. Clove found and overpowered the Girl on Fire, but decided to indulge in a little torture before finishing her off. The boy from 11, appearing to claim his own new supplies, killed Clove and spared her victim – it seems that he owed her a favor from earlier in the Games. Cato eventually killed the boy from 11, but the Girl on Fire was still alive and looked more heroic than ever, having risked her life to save her lover and succeeded at it. As an additional irony, the girl from 5 accidentally poisoned herself with something called nightlock berries. This set off an unexpected backlash in the Capitol. Here was a girl who had hurt nobody and shown great resourcefulness in the Games, only to be brought down to a choice between starvation and unfamiliar food that could be poisonous. One man boldly stated in a street interview that "I think the Gamemakers should be locked in a cell with nothing to eat but those berries, for what they did to that girl." He was arrested, but Snow remembered that quote.

Seneca's last try was to release some mutation-wolves into the arena. He calculated, and Snow agreed, that Cato would have the most powerful will to survive, and that the two from 12 would be killed. But once more Cato failed to follow the script. It suddenly seemed to occur to the boy that everybody was using him as a tool – the Capitol to entertain the populance, his District to win the awards for producing a Victor. He lost his nerve, and fell among the wolves. The Girl on Fire put him out of his misery with an arrow, and an idiot technician, believing that the Games were over with two official victors, turned off the wolves.

All this had brought back Snow's ulcers. Desperately he ordered Seneca to suspend the double-victor rule and order the lovers to fight. If the boy won, Snow was rid of the Girl on Fire. If she won, Snow could spin her as a murderess who had killed her lover to save her skin. Then he rushed off to take his medication.

When he got back to the Games Center he found a disaster. The lovers from 12 had threatened to kill themselves rather than fight each other. Seneca, doubtlessly remembering his predecessor's fate, talked them out of it by restoring the promise of twin-victor awards. The result was that the girl looked more heroic than ever, and the Games managers looked like buffoons who couldn't make up their minds about the rules.

Snow considered what to do with Seneca's failure, and remembered a street interview. I think the Gamemakers should be locked in a cell with nothing to eat but those berries…

TO BE CONTINUED

(Author's NOTE: Snow's déjà vu over the line "She shot an arrow at your ahead" is an in-joke. Donald "Snow" Sutherland appeared in the 1990s movie BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and was onscreen when another character spoke that same line)

(Author's NOTE: This chapter overlaps some other Hunger Games fanfics that I have written. The victor that committed suicide was in AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. Cato and Clove were featured in HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO. Plutarch's real agenda was portrayed in THE RULES OF THE GAME)