Chapter 11

Cost of Victory

Katniss

I gasp when I see Stephen – he looks at least three years older than the kid I knew. All I knew was he's been out of training for a couple of days and there was some kind of incident with the power.

"Stephen?" I ask.

"It's still me," he says sheepishly. Even his voice is different – deeper, older. Shale embarrasses him by squealing and hugging him. Thresh is more reserved – he stands back with arms folded and nods approvingly.

Shale and I practice stealth training in real city conditions – they have a fake city set up for us somewhere in the wilds. Before we begin, Pym comes up and proudly shows us his new invention – stealth suits, incorporated into our armor. We try them on, and at first I don't really believe they're as good as he says, but Phillip shows us the footage he's taking to show Fury later – and we're by no means invisible but we blend nicely into the shadows. Meanwhile, the boys practice almost the exact opposite – making as much noise and smoke as possible. They give Stephen a fancy shield with a simple star design on it – I try to work out the symbolism but I have other things on my mind.

"Do you think you're ready to make your propo yet?" Phillip asks me when training is dismissed for the day. I shrug. "Fury wants them by the end of the week."
"The mission isn't for another month!"
"Cressida needs time to edit them – we want them as polished as possible."
"I guess … I guess I'll go see her tomorrow."
"Today," Phillip says, and I know I have no choice in it. He walks with me to the little studio where everyone else on the tribute team – now called the Avengers – has made their propo.

"I tried to give them one – they said they wanted more. They said my speech fell flat."

"That's not actually true. What they meant was it was too narrow," Phillip says. "Fighting for your sister is noble … but it should lead into broader goals, the way that Tony's and Thresh's …"
"I know that," I interrupt. "That's the hard part – I know I want to make things better for all the little brothers and sisters, not just mine, but I don't know how to say that without sounding corny."

"You'll think of something. Who knows – maybe we need corny. Maybe it would help if you also …"

"I'm not using Clint," I say, cutting him off. "I'm not playing the heartbroken star-crossed lover."
"I thought you wanted to go with honesty," he says, and I almost punch him in the arm and then remember he's my superior officer and not my buddy.

"It's not like that … I don't know how I feel about him. I miss him, and I wish he was here … And maybe that's the worst part. I don't know if I would have loved him if we had the chance or we were meant to be just friends." He nods, understanding, and I think he's the first person who believes me about that.

We walk mostly in silence the rest of the way to the studio. "Hey Cressida," he says, sticking his head in. "If you've got a minute, Katniss is trying to figure out what she wants to say …" I had to fight not to roll my eyes – he's the one who dragged me here. "I think you should show her what else you're working on."

"Sure," she calls out, and Phillip turns to leave.

"Good luck, Katniss."

I'm summoned into the studio. They're in the process of editing – they're cutting down huge, long testimonies from previous victors into bite-sized propo pieces. "We'll air the whole versions too – but these will get people's attention and get them interested in watching the whole thing, and we can play them as reminders."
"Why victors?" I ask, looking up at Duke Barton's face in some paused footage. "And isn't it dangerous to show these?"

"This is only for after … well after we see how the Games turn out, obviously," Cressida says. "But – we want to remind the nation that even the kids who survived the Hunger Games didn't survive unscathed." She hits play, and I watch – curious about the hardships of a victor. By the end, I understand why Haymitch drinks.

I listen to Finnick Odair – the dashing playboy from several years back – describe the way his childhood was stolen by the Career process and being blackmailed into sex with various power players at the Capitol, mostly women but not exclusively. He describes how the Careers in training in 4 play with spears instead of balls and drill for hours on end from the time they're old enough to speak – and from what he understands 4 isn't as bad as 1 and 1 isn't as bad as 2 in those regards. I think of Drusa and for the first time, I feel something for her, if all that's true. Finnick explains he volunteered at the tender age of fourteen because there didn't happen to be any eighteen-year-old Career Boys that year and he figured he had a better shot than any of the poor fishermen's sons who might get Reaped otherwise, and when he says it that way I'm more sympathetic. He doesn't spare the details about the forced prostitution and I feel dirty listening to it – especially when he describes having sex with Duke Barton for some woman who liked to watch. It sounds miserable for both of them – he manages to joke and say it might have been fun if they could have forgotten they were being watched and if either of them liked men but since they didn't it was just unappealing and awful … and the joke he tried to make falls incredibly flat.

I listen to Duke describe how most of the circus Clint mentioned to me in the Arena was murdered for performing without a license they didn't even know they had to have, and how he went to the Arena with a girl he knew and loved and had to kill her to make sure Clint didn't starve without him, since their parents had died years and years ago in an influenza epidemic, and they'd nearly starved until they joined the circus. He tells how he had a complete meltdown after he won – something they cut completely from the footage. How he was such a shell of himself that Clint had to take care of him for years – I think of the boy I knew and how his smile didn't reveal any of that and bite my lip at the thought of the pain he hid from me and everyone else. He was forced to be a prostitute too – not just with Finnick for the aforementioned pervert, but with a handful of powerful women before they got bored with him, since he was never as much of a heartthrob as Finnick, and he was allowed to go back to his ranch in peace. Worst of all, they wanted him to pretend to rape Johanna Mason for yet another pervert – but he told her a code phrase to use if she got too frightened to go through with it, and she used it at the last minute. "What would your brother think?" he had told her to ask. Duke breaks down at that point and says the only way he did any of it was thinking about how Clint would be killed if he didn't cooperate, and now that he's gone he doesn't think his life is worth anything unless he can sacrifice it to the cause.

I listen to Johanna Mason describe her three little brothers, David, Wes, and Spruce (not mine, but I think about how hard it must have been for her to mentor a boy with the same name as her little brother) and little sister Pine. Her mother died from complications in childbirth just after having Spruce, when Johanna was eight, and her father died in a logging accident when she was fourteen, and they were raised by their widowed grandfather from then on. She was Reaped two years later, and won for her little siblings and grandfather. On her Victory Tour, the woman Snow hired as pimp so he didn't have to get his hands dirty (is a woman pimp still a pimp?) had Johanna's virginity auctioned to the man with the best political favor to offer, and the monster who wanted to see her get raped won. When she panicked and used Duke's code phrase, this horrible woman beat her and told her she better play along if she didn't want her family to suffer. She tried, but panicked again when she was next auctioned to a man she described as incredibly old and with especially frightening facial augmentations and who was very rough with her, and she broke his nose when he tried to take off her clothes. At that point in the video, she rolls up her sleeves to show her parents', siblings', and grandfather's names tattooed on her arms. I remember how my Spruce had his mother's name on his arm in almost the same place she has her mother's, and how Cinna explained to that other stylist that the people of District 7 get their dead loved ones' names tattooed, and I know before Johanna says anything else what happened to them. She explains coming home to District 7 to find her cabin in 7's victor's village empty. When she went (hurriedly) to her childhood cabin to check there, she found it on fire with all her little siblings and grandfather inside it, burned to death, probably after being drugged so they couldn't escape. However the fire was set, it wasn't easily put out – the other residents of the village were desperately trying to put out the flames, and in the end two other cabins (thankfully empty by then) caught fire and burned to the ground before they finally got it contained. I'm sickened to think what Snow had done to her in punishment for being a sixteen-year-old girl who didn't want to have sex with strange older men or be sexually assaulted for entertainment. "If he'd been smart, he would have had them killed one at a time – he didn't have anything to hold against me anymore then. My life I guess … whatever that's worth," she says flippantly. She hasn't cried this whole time, and I think that's the worst part, even worse than seeing Finnick, trained since he was a toddler to be tough, try (and fail horribly) to laugh it off and Duke, who seems very much like the macho type, break down in tears.

"Oh – Peeta …" I start to say, having a horrifying realization.

"Our inside sources say he hasn't been subjected to any sexual extortion at this time," Cressida says quickly, and I breathe a little easier, but I'm not any less angry.

I want to kill Snow now more than ever. My fists are tight little balls as I watch Johanna finish talking, and I'm sure they have more but Cressida can tell I've seen enough. "You should have shown me this when I got here," I say flatly.

"We didn't have it then – we only talked to Johanna yesterday," she says.

"I know what I want to say," I say. "I mean – I think you'll like it better this way."

"Okay," she says evenly, and leads me to the middle of the room. She adds just a little make-up herself – she apparently disagrees that I need the layers and layers of make-up most of the others seem to think I need. "Whenever you're ready," she says.

I take a deep breath. "If you had asked me what I was fighting for just a few days ago – I would have said I was fighting for my sister, to give her a better future. That's still true. But it's not all of the truth. I want a better future for my sister … for all the little sisters. And little brothers. For the orphaned older siblings struggling to feed their families. For all the kids who will be Reaped if we don't change anything, and the victors whose survival came at a terrible, terrible cost. For all the Avoxes, whose voices were stolen. For all the little girls like Rue, so they can grow up to chase their dreams. For the village healers like Spruce," and Prim, I add to myself. "Who should be able to go to school and be real doctors instead of being forced to go to the Arena to kill. For all the children that deserve to be children – not have their childhood ripped away by hunger or murder or training for murder. That's why I fight – not just to avenge the wrongs, but to set things right. I do it in honor of the fallen and the suffering." Cressida smiles.

"I think that will work," she says.

Author's Note

I have Duke's story written and posted on deviantart. I probably won't post it here because it goes into the sexual abuse of the victors and at a district orphanage and it's very, very rough. I'm providing the link but reader discretion is advised, especially for sexual abuse survivors. art/The-Cost-of-Victory-Part-I-387429726

So I had this thought about the canon story while I was writing this – would Snow or whoever he hires to run his victor prostitution ring have filmed or sold tickets to Peeta and Katniss's honeymoon or something? Because obviously the Capitol was rooting for them as a couple so they wouldn't want to come between them, but as beautiful as Katniss is described, it's hard to believe that they wouldn't have been subjected to some kind of prostitution, and they made a big deal about having the wedding in the Capitol …