7th Annual Hunger Games

Victor: Athenodorus

District: 2

Gender: male

Age: 18

Slate's only seven when he decides he's had enough.

It's not that he hates his parents. He just has a liking issue with them.

In that he doesn't.

So one evening, when his Ma's crying and his Daddy's shouting and Slate can't even work out why, everything gets too much and too loud and he packs it all in and does what Ma should have done years ago. He gets out.

He hates leaving Malc, but his brother is nearly eighteen and already working day in day out at the quarry just to bring in enough to pay for new clothes, because Slate's growing and he's growing fast. If anything he's doing him a favour. Or at least that's what he tells himself.

District Two is a dangerous place, especially during the Dark Days. There are Peacekeepers on every corner, and at night there's screaming and gunshots and too many people turning the other way as if that will make it all disappear. Strict food rationing and ever lengthening work hours with ever decreasing pay hit the rich hard and the poor harder.

You can sense the anger and tiredness in the air and the violent fights that outbreak on the streets end, more often than not, with a bullet from a Peacekeeper's gun.

The first time he's involved in one of these fights, it's terrifying and he's eleven and shaking, but his fists are hard and fast and he gets in a few good punches before he forgets to dodge a right hook and passes out, cracking his head on the graveled floor.

When wakes up, he's lying in an alleyway and there's a boy sitting and leaning over him, a tall, scrawny street urchin with the most ridiculous hair cut and his eyes screwed together as he shakes Slate's shoulders just a little bit too roughly.

"I'm Wolf," he says cheerfully, after reasurring Slate that the damage is 'nothing permanent' as he helps him to his feet and brushes down his tattered shirt awkwardly.

In the seven years that follow, he gets into more close scrapes with the lanky, cheerfully destructive boy who pulled him out of the gutter than he could've ever imagined. They become strangley comfortable with the inside of the cell, but at the end of the day a bed behind bars is better than no bed at all. They're never put away for very long either. They have no registered address and no legal guardians so, short of shooting them on the spot, there's not really much the Peacekeepers can do.

(It probably also has something to do with the fact that the Head Peacekeeper's daughter has a massively transparent crush on Wolf, but they figure that if they ignore it, it might go away).

(It doesn't. They're fifteen when Slate finds them, half naked, sucking each other's faces off in the corner of the old shed. He doesn't say anything just immediately turns, his hands slammed over his eyes as he blindly searches for the door.)

There are rules in District 2, it's just that, with the right attitude, none of them have to apply to Slate and Wolf. That is, apart from the Reaping, Slate isn't even sure if he's still on the list. Maybe his parents took him for dead and he was written off. Maybe he's been added to it again from the Peacekeeper records. He could even be on there twice.

Not that it matters anyway. Every year, the Games pass them over. It's not like Slate's really afraid, the panic seems pointless as he stands, just one in a crowd of thousands, with nothing to fight for and nothing to lose. Sure, if they go into the Games, they'll die, but even if they don't they'll probably die anyway, so it doesn't make much of a difference. It's not that they like that Games. They don't. They just don't care.

Until everything changes. (When Wolf visits him in the Justice Building afterward, he forces a smile and says "That was the stupidest, bravest thing you've ever done.")

He doesn't know why (maybe it's compassion or maybe he's just suicidal), but the boy is only fourteen and crying like he's about to shit himself so Slate does the only logical thing and calls out I volunteer before his common sense can come back and tell him to shut up.

Being the centre of attention is unnerving. Every face is suddenly turned towards him, shocked, confused and disbelieving. Even the escort in her fancy heels and beehive hair can't seem to decide if she should ignore him or succumb to excitement- is this even allowed?

And then she decides that yes, this must be allowed because the next moment Slate is pushing past Wolf and stepping up on stage and when they ask him his name he hesitates only for a second.

"Athenodorus."

And then Slate isn't Slate anymore, but someone new, the name from the old story Malc used to tell him before bed, the one about the Roman King, and deep in the crowd of adults his brother's eyes burn with recognition and then horror and then pride, and he's the first to start clapping but he certainly isn't alone because the whole crowd is hollering and for the first time in seven years, the cheers are real.

His Games are a blur. Tiberius is alright, slightly insane but he figures it could be worse. He could be stuck with Adonis for a mentor, or, god forbid, one of those poncy Capitol escorts. He does begin to wonder if he would have been better off with no mentor at all because Tiberius isn't exactly helpful. He spent most of their first meeting standing in the corner of the train carriage, looking immensely bored and uninterested with the whole ordeal, all whilst maintaining his unnerving grimace.

Athenodorus gets into a fight with the boy from Four on the second day of training, when he's leaving the room and hears the snide mutter of "gutter rat". He's not going to fight back but then he remembers where he is and that for the first time in his life he has something to lose, and he breaks Four's nose before the Gamemakers can intervene, and if Tiberius scolds him, it's only for a second and no one else sees the twitch of a smile he receives when he tells his mentor what happened and why he has blood all down his front. (In his defence, most of it wasn't actually his.)

His Games are the first time they use a desert (and it won't be the last) but there's almost nowhere to hide and the heat is sweltering and overpowering and it's not an easy game to survive, but once you do it's an easy one to win. (He doesn't let himself think about what would have happened if he had Ronan's arena or Edison's or any of the other four that came before them, mainly because he knows the only way he would've come back to two would have been in a coffin.)

Most of the other tributes fall into a trance and Athenodorus is met with a feverish, delirious mess when it comes down to the last two. The absent, terrified girl from Seven is no match for his brutal and desperate attack in the light of his realisation that he might actually have a shot of getting back for Wolf.

He kills three people in the Games. There was the sobbing boy from nine, the girl from seven right at the end and his district partner. He was never meant to kill her, she was from home, she was real but then she cracked under the pressure and the scorching heat and everything else just disappeared.

(There are still those in Two who look at him with burning eyes and haunted faces. They never forgave him. They never let him forget.)

He doesn't remember being pulled out of the arena. One second he's just another tribute, dead where he stands. And the next Seven's guts are spilling down his sword and onto his hands and there are trumpets playing a fanfare and a blast of gold light across the sky and then he's in front of a crowd at the Victory Ceremony and he's being asked a dozen questions a minute and he can hardly remember anything other than the look on Seven's face as she notices her insides spilling out.

But then Tiberius drags him aside and slaps him across the face (in the friendly, fatherly kind of way) and reminds him that if he doesn't want to end up like Adonis, so drugged up for official occasions that he can hardly walk straight, he has to get his shit together.

And somehow, that helps. So he smiles at the cameras, he preens at all the rich old women and thanks the Capitol in his speeches and does his best to do what a good Victor would do. And that works in the Capitol, they lap it up and he may not be the most charming or handsome Victor but they like him.

It's different in Two, it's always different in Two. The smiles are there when he comes back, loud and wide with too much teeth but they're there for the cameras and to them he's just a ticket to the free food that comes with the victory.

He doesn't belong in Two anymore, he's too tame, like a dancing pony made up to prance about in from of the Capitol, and at the same time he's a monster. Even before, he belonged with the people on the streets, the poorest of the poor. But after the games, even they look at him with a mix of fear and pity and disgust. There's not much of a social group for child murderers (not for another few decades at least).

So when he walks through the streets he ignores the spitting and insults that fly his way from the upper part of town, under the cover of a cough or a vicious glare, and he wants to yell at them that if he could bring their

preppy little princess back for them, he would. But he can't so they should just fucking get over themselves.

Wolf is waiting for him just beyond the cameras and then he's letting go for the first time since the reaping and bursting into tears and flinging himself at his best friend. They just hold each other and Wolf doesn't say anything because he doesn't need to- he understands- and Athenodorus is eleven again and safe. And then he gets a sharp tap on the shoulder and an overly cheerful smile from the escort to tell him that he's expected in the Justice Building for tea and scones (pronounced sc-oh-nes) with the Mayor.

(Malc shows up, smashing on his door just a few days later, drunk off his face and sobbing his eyes out. Athenodorus is still fucked from the Games, hardly having slept for the past week and all he sees is loud, drunk man on his doorstep, a threat, before Malc's on the ground with his lights punched out.)

(If anything that makes their reunion even easier, after all it's hard for Malc to apologise and try to take the blame when he can hardly see through his right eye.)

In the Eighth Hunger Games, he mentors the girl. She's young and brutal and long after she's gone he's haunted by her empty eyes and sardonic, bitter smile. He hates her but when she's slaughtered by the eventual Victor, he trashes four fancy rooms, gets drunk three nights in a row and almost kills Caiden, the shy Victor of the Fourth Games, in a fiery haze of fury.

Caiden (impressively, considering the bruised rib and possibly broken arm and the long scar across his cheek from his rings that he can hardly bear to look at) brushes it off casually and sits him down with Edison and Lysander. He rages a lot and cries a bit, but they don't speak, let alone scold him, which his own mentor would have done, and then, for all it's worth, they tell him it will get better. That it does get better. He knows even then that it doesn't. Not really.

It also takes him three years before he can even talk to that kid from 11. Even if he kind of reminds him of Malc in a weird, twisted way.

When he moves into the Victors' Village with Wolf, rumours start to fly, of course they do. And he supposes there is some truth to them, and perhaps he does love Wolf a bit, but not like that because Athenodorus is into girls and he isn't in love with his best friend quite in that sense.

The rumours only get worse when the meek little girl from Seven comes out bravely on the stage at her interview, and, then after she wins, when the Capitol bends to popular demand and brings in her girlfriend to broadcast their reunion to the whole of Panem.

In the end, Athenodorus has had enough and one day, on stage in front of Capitol escorts and his entire district, he grabs the front of Wolf's jacket and plants one hard on the mouth. When he pulls away, he turns to the cameras and grins.

"That what you fucking wanted?"

Wolf laughs hysterically the whole way home.

The novels and magazine articles and weird fiction practically write themselves, books flying off the shelves at a frankly quite alarming rate.

(Nobody seems to care that Wolf is actually engaged to a sweet girl from the poor end of Two, and Athenodorus has been disappearing off with the Mayor's niece for months now. Apparently shit like that doesn't sell quite as well as the forbidden love story between two guys from the gutters brought together by the glory of the Games.)

(Nobody seems to care that any love between them was definitely not brought about by the fucking Games, either.)

(And he definitely doesn't tell anyone, except perhaps Wolf, about the time he got drunk off his arse and and woke up in Edison Gates' bed the next morning. Not that it matters much to him anyway, it was just a drunken night and God knows he still likes women)

(Besides him and Eddie stayed friends for a long time after that. He was a good guy and he knew how to listen to him. And, as far Athenodorus knew, he'd never told anyone either.)

He supposes it could be worse. It's not like when he's growing up, and he since the Rebellion, people have better things to do than care who their neighbour goes to bed with. (He breathes a sigh of relief when Seven's admission on stage is met, not by horror but by raucous cheers and hysterical crowds. The first time he speaks to her, on her Victory Tour, he simply smiles and pats her shoulder in the least patronising way he can, which, in all fairness, is probably still pretty patronising.)

He gets his very own Victor when he's twenty-six. Lupus is stunning and charismatic and Athenodorus doesn't even have to try that hard for the sponsor donations to keep rolling in for all thirteen days of the Games and it's the best year he's had in forever because for the first time, he brings one home. It doesn't matter that Lupus is kind of an ass, and deep down, he's even more of an ass, and it doesn't matter that, after six months, something snaps inside Lupus' head and he seems to realise everything he's done, because Athenodorus tried his best and did a damn good job with that kid, and fuck if he's going to stop trying now.

He's the one who signs the official alliance agreement with One, just before the 18th Hunger Games, and he starts to train the kids in abandoned barns and back alleys he grew up in. They don't tell anyone and neither does he. Wolf doesn't speak to him for three weeks, but it's the best fucking decision he's ever made because being a Career is about saving some twelve year old kid from certain death and giving whoever does go in the best damn chance they've got of making it out alive, and that's pretty special.

(Wolf comes around when Athenodorus' volunteer steps up for a snivelling thirteen year old. She dies a painful and gruesome death on the end of a spear but then the girl she saved shows up at one of Athenodorus' training centres a few days later and he knows he's done the right thing. The young tribute she saved goes on to be one of Athenodorus' strongest students and, after flying through the 24th Games, one of the strongest Victors the district has ever produced.)

There's a few rocky years of uncertain alliances with Seven, but the tension is clear and when it ends one year with a swing of an axe and a head rolling almost comically down the mountain side, Athenodorus pulls the plug on any hope of a full Career Pack with the lumber district, and tries to get his tributes the fuck out. (Tiberius ignores him and makes the official offer anyway. He's met by a very resolute blank.)

Lupus is the one to first suggests Four. It's not the most obvious choice; Sevens are beasts with an axe in their hands and if you can bear training them up a bit, and even the Tens and Elevens are stronger and bigger and more powerful, but after twenty years and three Victors, even Athenodorus has to admit that the Fours must be doing something right.

He offers an alliance to Mags and Lysander and it's never as sure as the alliance with One but it's something and for decades, it holds.

Eventually, even those in Two who hate him begin to see the merit in his ideas. But as support for him grows in Two, the Outer Districts begin to hate him more and more. He knows it's fair. They don't have the resources to do the same with their tributes and so they lose so many of their own. But at the same time, he knows and they must know that they would do exactly the same if they could. So he would really appreciate it if they would stop the death threats.

(He always feels unwelcome in Nine. He thought they would've forgotten how he suffocated their boy with his bare hands when there wasn't enough sponsor money for a knife and food, but then when he's there for Lupus' Victory Tour a man leaps out of the crowd to try to gets his hands around his neck and squeeze and Athenodorus just knows.)

When Wolf finds out about the threats, his friend completely ignores Athenodorus' pleas and throws the mother of all hissy fits, storms straight to the Justice Buiding and demands an audience with the Mayor. Unsurprisingly he's told to piss off and to stop wasting their time.

(The Peacekeepers are not big fans of either of them and the old guard at the door definitely remembers them as the little boys who were constantly in and out of the cells fifteen odd years ago.)

He's thirty-five when his older brother dies in a freak accident late at night in the masonry. With Athenodorus' Victor's salary Malc didn't need the money but he always insisted the routine brought him comfort. He was always the first one there in the morning and the last to leave at night and, when the under-trained exhausted girl checking the scaffolding had overlooked the loose ties, he was the one who had come crashing to the ground under a pile of rocks and beams.

It wasn't her fault. Not really, and Athenodorus knows that if it had happened three months, even a month earlier, people would have forgotten. But it happens two days before the announcement of the First Quarter Quell and when she's called forward, Athenodorus fights tooth and nail to bring her home but he's still mourning and the rest is just psychology.

He loses her despite his best efforts (and some things he'd done with various Capitol patrons just to pull together enough funds for sponsorships that he'd rather not remember) but Athenodorus does everything he can to make sure her mother and little brother live the best life they can.

After Malc's death, Wolf is the only one who still calls him Slate. When they're with others it's always Athenodorus, and Wolf keeps his distance and they sit properly and refrain from childish games of footsie under the table. But when they're alone it's uninhibited water fights in the fancy kitchen, and food fights in the dining room, and games in the garden, because even with the weight of twenty-three kids' lives on his shoulders, he refuses to let himself forget how to have fun.

(They try wrestling, once. Athenodorus just feels the adrenaline and the hand on his neck and suddenly he's lying in the master bedroom and it's nighttime and Wolf has a half bandaged cut on his cheek. They don't try wrestling again)

Wolf's girlfriend Amelia moves in with them when they're thirty-seven. Wolf takes her last name when they marry because he can't remember his own and the wedding is on a bright, summer day in September and Athenodorus gets drunk and cries as he watches his best friend take his new bride by the hand and lead her into their first dance.

She's cheerful and knows when to give him space and no one can ever be as close to him as Wolf but she comes pretty damn close. And she makes the house with its posh decorations and fancy wallpaper and furniture that could pay for food for his entire village for a year feel warm and comforting in a new way. And it's never perfect but they're never alone so they're always okay.

He doesn't think it was planned but it happened anyway and two years after they get married there's a tiny baby crying in a cot in the spare room. And Athenodorus' sleep terrors are now filled with images of the child he knows he can't save from the horrors of the games if they decide to take him. But maybe it's his victories with the tributes at the Training Centre or the smiles he puts on at the Capitol each year, he doesn't know, but they take it as a miracle when he's spared.

When Adonis' little brother was reaped for the 11th Hunger Games, not even the Capitol escort pretended like it wasn't a fix, and they all knew he was a walking target in the arena. Amasis had his older brother in the control room, calling in all his favours, he couldn't be trusted as an ally and would eat up all the sponsor money.

Everyone had their eyes on him as he put on his best show on stage, gushing about how he admired his brother, how glad he was to be given the honour of fighting in the games and how eager he was to share Adonis' glory. Everyone had their eyes on him as he was hunted down in the hours following the bloodbath and hacked into tiny pieces.

(In all the years Athenodorus had half-known Adonis, those were the Games he seemed most present in. The year he tried the hardest, cared the most. Having his brother in the arena to fight for brought a part of him back no one had seen in years. But when Amasis died, well, if Adonis' mind had been damaged before, it snapped clean in half that night and it was a testament to the Capitol doctors that they managed to salvage any part of him at all.)

Levis calls him Uncle Atheno and when he's seven and Athenodorus teaches him how to use a sword in the back garden until Wolf catches them and the following screaming match continues until Amelia comes out and tells them to stop yelling. Neither will have their son grow up in the shadow of the Games and Levis is seventeen before he's allowed to watch Uncle Atheno's year.

Athenodorus stays friends with his fellow Victors even after he stops training tribute and mentoring every year and his visits to the Capitol become fewer and further between. He still enjoys getting drunk with Edison Gates (though that night really was a one time thing), and he and Mags spend way too much time in that ridiculous restaurant (read bar) in the Capitol centre, carefully making their way down the overpriced menu and list of liqueurs.

(Their friendship gets more distant around the games. The worst time is the year her tributes turn on his most promising student in years, shattering the alliance within hours of the Bloodbath and drawing out his death for nearly half a day. It's not until he sees the piece of work that her Victor is face to face that he finally accepts that it wasn't her idea. He never quite gets over the sense of unease that Victor gives him.)

The decades following his games are full of days when he wakes up in layers of fluffy duvet and mounds of pillows and eats burnt toast in his pyjamas with Wolf and Amelia and Levis in the kitchen. Days when they go on walks through the streets of Two where he and Wolf grew up and buy sweets for Levis from the stores and feed the geese with Amelia's homebaked bread (which never tastes quite right).

Of course, there are always the bad days. The days when he doesn't leave his bed for hating himself and attacks the furniture and can hardly breathe because he knows that death is coming and he is terrified of what he'll find waiting for him. The nights when he can't sleep because all he can see is blood spurting from the neck of a small boy from District 9 or Malc tumbling like a rag doll into a bottomless pit of granite or a girl he trained for years being cut down in an instant by the swing of an axe.

But he lives on, in his grand house with the warm glow of family and tulips in the front yard. And the bakery down the road and the ditzy brunette across the street who has to be reminded almost daily that, even though he always manages to show up at official events, Wolf never entered, let alone won, the Games. (And if Athenodorus wakes up screaming in the night, he got his room soundproofed years ago so no one is any the wiser).

It's a sad day for Athenodorus when Levis moves out of the house to attend college but no one cries harder than him when he graduates and takes on the role as head Peacekeeper in Two.

It comes as a shock when Amelia dies. Athenodorus is on his way to the Capitol when it happens, the first time he's mentored in almost a decade, and he hears it from a garishly dressed reporter shoving a microphone in his face before Wolf even has a chance to call. He blames himself, of course he does, says that he should have noticed the signs sooner and he gets a desperate phone call two days into the Games at three in the morning and he can hear Wolf breaking down.

The desperation in Wolf's voice combined with his own heartbreak becomes too much so he leaves his tribute in Victoria's hands, barks at Tiberius to watch her, and gets the first train back to Two so he can bring his friend to one of the quiet alleyways they used used to sleep in, decades ago, where he can break things in peace. They get drunk that night, ridiculously, black-out drunk and Athenodorus can't remember anything except the pounding in his head and the taste of gravel.

(Leaving the Capitol turned out to be a terrible, terrible mistake. Brutus was a strong, well-trained tribute and an even better Victor, but it was only his second year mentoring and when Athenodorus stumbles into the Control Room the next morning, after the gruelling train journey back, he Brutus is staring blankly at the vital screens, surrounded by smashed bottles and the alliance is broken and his tribute is bleeding out on the forest floor. Tiberius is nowhere to be seen, the bastard, and Brutus doesn't mentor for a few years after that.)

(Even though Athenodorus couldn't have let Wolf deal with losing Amelia alone, he spends many sleepless nights wondering if leaving that day really was the right decision)

He hasn't mentored for years by the time he falls sick just before the Reaping for the 62nd Games. It's a nasty, rasping throat infection that the antibiotics the Capitol doctors give him don't even seem to touch. He's gone days after the Victory Tour.

There are crowds outside, not for him, but for the new, pretty Victor, who ripped out her allies' throats with her teeth and who took three different pills for PTSD before going to see her district. He couldn't help thinking it was almost a shame. She could have been sweet if she was born in Twelve. (She'd also probably be dead. That's the only part that makes this whole thing okay.)

"What difference would it have made if I hadn't volunteered?" he rasps out, clutching at Wolf's hand as he sobs quietly, finally voicing the question he's been too afraid to ask for decades.

"You know," whispers Wolf, clutching his clammy palms tightly, "Panem would be a far darker place, Slate. And I think you must be the only Victor I could say that about."

AN: We're so sorry this update has been so long (I don't even want to look at when the last chapter was posted) but basically we got writers block on this one Victor and lost motivation so we've left him (hopefully we'll come back to him later) and so here's Athenodorus instead. We hope you enjoy and fingers crossed the next update isn't as long as this one. Xx