10. Years
Year In and Year Out, Same Story...Different Ending?
The Capitol and Districts of Panem had witnessed seventy-three years of Hunger Games. Seventy-three years of mindless slaughter to entertain the Capitol masses. Seventy-three Victors for the Capitol to adore and admire. Seventy-three years of successfully maintaining division between the Districts.
Twenty-four tributes reaped and in the case of the Second Quarter Quell, forty-eight tributes were reaped. Tributes were killed in the arena in countless and imaginative ways. The Gamesmakers were always devising new thrilling techniques to pit the tributes against each other. Seventy-three years of bloodbaths and feasts at the Cornucopia. Beaten, beheaded, bludgeoned, choked, electrocuted, strangled, stabbed, or drowned by fellow tributes. Devoured by mutts. Scorched by unbearable heat. Frozen to death by subzero temperatures. Poisoned by innocent looking nightlock and other plants in the arena.
Every year, the same morbid tournament held over and over again. Innocent blood spilled. Families torn apart. Traumatized Victors forced to train new tributes to help them survive or prepare them for their imminent deaths with the entire nation watching. Very few people in the Districts believed the Hunger Games would stop. It would never change. It would always be this way…
President Snow recalled watching the Hunger Games when he was sixteen years old, around the time of the 13th Hunger Games. In all the decades he had been watching, he had never seen anyone like Katniss Everdeen. He knew immediately that she posed a threat to the control the Capitol exercised over the Districts. Tributes that showed any resistance during their Games or after their victory in the arena—such as Johanna Mason and Haymitch Abernathy—were quickly squashed. They had to be kept in line before the Districts got the notion that rebellion was at best, acceptable, and at worst, a real possibility…
The same had to be done to Katniss Everdeen, especially since President Coriolanus Snow intended for the Hunger Games to be a Panem tradition continued for generations to come, even after his reign is over. He wanted to instill terror in the Districts for the next twenty-five years, fifty years, seventy-five years, one hundred years…and even though he knew he would never live to see it, if Panem still held the Hunger Games for a millennia, then all the better for the Capitol.