Thirteen Things about Brutus Barsetti that Katniss Everdeen never bothered to find out.


He was from a huge family.

As the sixth of eleven kids, Brutus was the long suffering middle child in a small, cramped house of craziness. Being in the middle meant toeing the line around the babies because he was older than they were and he should know better but also serving as the punching bag for his older brothers and sisters. (Aren't girls supposed to be delicate and coo over tea parties and make-up like on television? Tell that to the Barsetti girls). Brutus's father Marius was the head of the Barsetti clan in name, with a voice like thunder and muscles like rocks and a bellow like an ox and a laugh even louder. But his wife Allenia was the undisputed matriarch, screaming at her implings underfoot while waving a rolling pin. She was red-faced and plump cheeked and always had a blueberry hidden in her apron that she would slip Brutus if he was good and didn't make her take a shot of whiskey because he broke something else.

It was a house filled with love and laughter and scraped knees and frogs hidden in bedsheets and Brutus knew he was lucky. He shared a tiny room with four of his brothers, his clothes were hand-me-down hand-me-downs and sometimes his mother called him 'You, boy!' because she couldn't pick out his name amongst her seven sons, but Brutus was raised with a strong understanding of his blessings. The Capitol gave Marius a good job as a foreman in one of the iron mines and they were never destitute even if they had to stretch to make ends meet once in a while. Brutus never once in his life went hungry because he could take as many tesserae slips as he wanted and know that the beautiful, brave, strong, boys and girls from the Institute would always step up if his name was called at the reaping. Marius and Allenia made sure their children knew just how lucky they were, and that's why all eleven kids volunteered at the Community Home or the retirement facility every Wintermas so they could see firsthand the privileges they were afforded by being loyal to the Capitol.

Still, there were times when Brutus lay on his mat in the corner of his room, his pillow lumpy from the Capitol magazines stuffed under it. He'd stare at a beetle crawling up the wall and just wish that once, someone would notice him. Remember him. Not as the little brother of Hero, the under eighteen wrestling champion of District 2. Not as the kid who tagged along behind his sister Nazara as she gave a speech on the five aspects of duty and had a shiny medal of patriotism pinned on her school uniform.

All Brutus wanted was for someone to look him straight in the eye, remember his name, and say 'You did good, Brutus, you did good.'

Just…notice.

And then puberty hit him like a coal train and grew six inches in two months and started filling out and there was no not noticing him because he couldn't fit at the dining room table any more.


He was a Games fanatic since he was six.

It wasn't that he liked the killing part. Marius had 'the talk' with him at five, explained what the Games were and why they were, and that it was an honor for any tribute to participate. But District 2 only gave up the best, because they were most loyal district and the Capitol deserved only the best from them. Even so, Brutus sometimes had to look away when the massive Career wrenched the little 12 boy's head half off, or the time the girl from 2 carved up one of her allies with a glaive, or when pale, blind worms as thick as his leg slithered out of the ground and devoured a pair of tributes alive.

No, what Brutus loved was the spectacle of it all, the pageantry, the competition, and the unpredictability. And most of all he loved the Victors. So strong, so brave, living manifestations of honor and duty and sacrifice. He knew all their names, their stats, their kill list, their Talents. He went to every Victory Tour speech instead of watching it on the screens so he could see them stand and talk with his own eyes and listen to them honor the tributes of District 2 and sometimes it was so beautiful he got tears in his eyes.

Brutus was six when he was chosen to carry in the district flag at the banquet for the Victor because he was a handsome boy with his deep cobalt eyes, and he had such strong shoulders already. He did very, very well. Afterwards, he approached Beetee Latier with a hopeful look and a scrap of paper and Beetee gave him a tired smile and signed it and Brutus didn't give a damn what people said. He would punch anyone who said the 3 Victor was a dirty cheater, because he was wonderful and smart and nice and everything Brutus ever, ever wanted to be, and no one could ever be luckier than him.

Beetee was his favorite Victor for exactly one year until Cerulea signed his paper and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and oh eternal hills she was the best Victor ever.


He was press ganged into the Institute.

Brutus wasn't stupid, despite what his classmates and brothers and occasionally his teachers said. He just…didn't always process things like other people did. He didn't always know when a joke was a joke and not a serious statement, he could read his schoolbooks but the words just sat there in his brain not making sense, and word problems. Don't even get him started on word problems.

Unfortunately there was a mental assessment given as part of the testing process for the Institute. Ten year old Brutus passed the physical tests and health check with flying colors, and then the middle-aged woman looked down at the scores for the mental puzzles they had him try, and her lips pursed and she muttered, 'hmmmm, what a shame.' They sent him home with a lollipop and all his dreams crushed.

If his parents were secretly relieved, they didn't say anything as they patted his shoulder and let him cry himself out on Allenia's apron and assured him that working in the quarries wasn't so bad, it was good work and he should be proud to serve the district at its heart. But training for the Peacekeepers alongside the best and brightest of the district, not to mention the Victors, had been Brutus's obsession ever since he was old enough to understand what that meant.

He got over the disappointment, eventually. He never did well at school, but he made a couple friends and finally found something he was good at. Boulder-tossing. When he was twelve, Brutus's picture was on the front of a local newspaper. A black and white photograph of a boy who was already massive for his age, heaving a chunk of granite over his head with a caption proclaiming him the new record holder for under-thirteens.

Two trainers from the Institute showed up at the Barsettis' doorstep the next day, and despite Marius's protestations that Brutus was over the age of acceptance, they shoved some very official paperwork into his hands and left with Brutus twenty minutes later.


He was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome his first week.

One of the mental health specialists at the Institute ran test after test before coming back with the diagnosis. It was a mild case, she told him. Barely inhibitive at all, and it certainly didn't mean that he wouldn't make a wonderful Peacekeeper one day. But it did explain why he didn't always pick up on things like metaphors and sarcasm or social cues, why written words sat in his head like rocks, and why he easily developed obsessions with things like the Hunger Games. It was just something that made him different. Then she gave him a strawberry.

But for Brutus, the confirmation that he wasn't stupid, that he wasn't broken, that he was never a failure meant more than all the strawberries in the world. He just had a special brain, that was it, and that's what he boasted to the other cadets when they would turn up their noses and sneer at how his words weren't always in the right order.

For a while afterwards, Beetee was his favorite Victor again because they both had special brains.


His nickname was 'Teddy Bear.'

At first, it was meant to cut him down. 'You're soft, Barsetti,' the trainers would say. 'I don't care that he didn't do anything, when I say hit him, you hit him.' The other cadets would laugh behind their hands, and then to his face. Soft Brutus, sweet Brutus, such a nice little lady, can't even punch a kid two years up because he's bigger and he might hurt him. Weak and stupid. A teddy bear, soft as pudding and with fluff in his head.

Brutus didn't care much. He was constantly reprimanded for his lack of aggression, but it wasn't like he was going into the Games. He wasn't even planning to apply for the Trials. It was enough for him to just be there, and he'd been called far worse, so he let it roll off him and did a couple hundred pushups to let off some steam.

Then, when he was thirteen, Ahenobarbus came to give a lecture and all the cadets stood at rapt attention, listening attentively. Except for the cadet standing behind Brutus, who cut through his belt with a knife he stole from the training room. In a matter of seconds, Brutus was standing with his trousers around his ankles, trying to remain impassive and focused even as the first ever Victor glanced his way and let his mouth twist.

Brutus found the cadet in the Pit the next day and forgot that he had fifty pounds on him, forgot that unsanctioned fights were forbidden (in the open), forgot everything except that Ahenobarbus had noticed him and felt nothing but contempt, and the cadet spent two weeks in the infirmary after Brutus shattered half his ribs.

Brutus was locked into the brig for a full day, not for fighting but for getting caught, and the trainer who escorted him down said nothing until she locked him inside the cell. Brutus settled himself down into the dark and then the trainer whispered, 'You did good, Brutus,' and rolled him an orange.

It changed everything.

She knew his name. She told him he did good.

Brutus wanted more. He wanted to do more good. He wanted everyone to know his name.

And in the following weeks, months, years, every weapons test and physical trial and sparring match and broken bone or fractured skull ensured that no one would ever call Brutus anything but his name again.

Except Teddy Bear.

The Institute trained Brutus, shaped him, but they could never take away that fundamental core, the protectiveness of those smaller than him, and once every so often a homesick ten year old would sneak into the older boys' dorms and slip into bed with a massive mountain of a young man, and feel a strong, warm arm wrap around them and pull them close, and when morning came they all knew that he would never say anything.

After he won, the privilege of calling him 'Teddy Bear' was afforded to only a select few, but they kept it until he died.


He almost failed his Trials.

The Trial of Strength was almost easy. Brutus set a record that was never beaten.

The Trial of Spirit, harder. But even as sweat poured down his face and his body trembled and seized up, as the fear synapses in his brain fired and sent adrenaline surging through his body, he refused to give up. The Institute made him live every nightmare he could ever imagine. But nightmares weren't real and Brutus wasn't about to let a dark room beat him, even if the walls were slowly moving in.

And then, the Trial of Blood.

Cadets were given one hour to complete the Trial of Blood, and Brutus walked out of the Pit at fifty-nine minutes and forty-seven seconds. Virtus was waiting for him at the top of the staircase. His sponsored cadet, soon to be his tribute, was shaking as tears streamed down his eyes. His hands were dark red, the streaks of someone else's blood giving the impression of gloves worn by Capitol ladies to the opera.

"Is it always like that?" he whispered as Virtus threw a blanket around his shoulders and pressed a mug of coffee into his hands.

"No," said Virtus. "It only gets worse. But not harder. You'll see."

He would.


He was afraid of spiders.

Not the little ones. Brutus liked those. He liked to watch them spin their webs in the corners of his room in the house back down by the mines. It was the big ones he didn't like. The tarantulas that lingered under rocks or climbed into boots to escape the heat of the day. One of his elderly neighbors didn't check his boots before he pulled them on one summer. The screams echoed through the valley all day and all night, and some of the boys who had been nearby said his leg swelled up to three times its size, purple and pasty and leaking green pus.

Brutus wasn't sure what it was about the monster arachnids that unnerved him so much. Maybe it was the way they moved, maybe the coarse, unnatural hair, or the tiny eyes that never flickered. Or maybe it was the fact that one bite could lay him out for days of misery and pain, a tiny enemy that could bring down even a boy as big as Brutus and there was nothing, nothing he could do about it. Except always check his boots.

There were spiders in his arena. Of course there were.

As big as a dog, and some of them larger. They scuttled down the trees towards the Pack and Brutus, armed with only a knife and knee-deep in murky water, panicked. He threw himself away, ignoring the shouts of his allies, only to be caught in a gleaming green web the size of a mattress. Then they were on him, their hairy legs touching him, prying at him, big black eyes staring in hunger. Brutus screamed and bellowed and slashed out with his knife. He cut through one, two, four of the monsters until one of them bit his wrist and he dropped his knife.

He screamed in agony as the poison coursed through him, and his vision grew hazy and his limbs turned to warm butter. Images flickered through his mind, memories long forgotten, until the smoky face of Ahenobarbus, sneering at the young boy with the trousers around his ankles came to the front, and Brutus was not going to let them laugh as he lost to a bunch of fucking spiders and a final blast of adrenaline burned the effects of the poison away.

Within ten minutes, Virtus had enough money to send an anti-venom kit. Pictures of Brutus covered in the web he pulled himself out of from sheer strength of will and the pieces of the three spiders he tore apart with his bare hands were already being printed out as commemorative postcards.


He almost beat the kill record.

At fifteen kills Ahenobarbus dominated the kill record for half a century. Nearly everyone agreed it would never be beaten. Ahenobarbus had the advantage of the first arena, a small enclosed space filled with sand and weapons. The arenas of the new era, not to mention the larger amount of prepared tributes, were no longer conducive to a kill list larger than eight.

Brutus decided to prove them all wrong.

The Forty-Eighth Games were held in a marsh, stinking and wet and brimming with quicksand and biting insects and mutts. The bloodbath was messy and slow, but Brutus managed to take down four with his bare hands before making it to the nearly empty Cornucopia and joining up with the rest of the pack.

They stalked through the arena for the next week, tracking down the rest of the tributes. Brutus claimed each kill, and in an unusual move the rest of the pack let him take them. The Ones and the Fours were content to let Brutus turn himself into the monster, the villain of the story who would be brought down by the heroes at the end. So they stood aside and let Brutus take down the crying, desperate children from 12 and 9 and 8 and 5. Brutus's kill count rose rapidly, as did his support in the Capitol, and after a week his allies were ready to make their move.

The Gamemakers, however, weren't quite finished with such a popular tribute, and they sent the spiders. In the chaos, Brutus was separated from the rest and left alone to wander the arena in aimless circles. His popularity quickly plummeted and the number of sponsor gifts dwindled.

Brutus knew he had to do something to keep the audience's attention, and in the end he dropped the ruthless killer face and let the audience see a little bit of the teddy bear. The rich, old Capitol ladies adored the rustic charms and quaint manners of the big handsome boy who whistled old work songs as he tended the cooking fire and made friends with the frogs down by the water's edge. The money began pouring in again and after Brutus wrestled an alligator mutt and tore its upper jaw off with his bare hands, Virtus finally had enough to play the last card and sent Brutus a war hammer.

He found the rest of his old alliance on the seventeenth day. Five against one and they didn't stand a chance. The hammer snapped the pretty blades of the pretty Ones before smashing their ribs through their lungs. It blocked the harpoons and spears of the Fours and shattered their legs, sending both tributes down to drown in three feet of water. It twirled towards his pretty district partner who was in way over her head but determined to fight to the end and at least she never felt the hammer make contact with her skull.

Brutus swore as the hovercraft pulled him up and into the safety of the medical bay. He swore loud and long and cursed until his face was blue. Fifteen. He had tied Ahenobarbus. If only he could have gotten one more…


He was a damn good mentor.

The Institute took his strength, his competitiveness, his need for recognition and his eagerness to please and forged him into a wide-eyed, aw-shucks killer. He was made for the arena, shaped for the three weeks he spent hunting and killing other children, but it was only after he walked out that Brutus discovered that his true place wasn't in the arena. More than any other Victor alive, Brutus was made for Control Center.

In a quarter century he managed to save two. Not the record holder, even in 2, but both of his Victors were pulled out of brutal arenas after Brutus brought them back from near death. His tributes always made the final six, without exception. Brutus's competitiveness drove him to fight for their lives with such vigor, such vehemence, that even some of his fellow Twos worried about him killing himself of a heart attack from overstress one day. But it was his 'special brain' that made him the ideal mentor. He talked straight to his tributes, didn't coddle them but encouraged them to open up to him, and never, ever lied to them about the odds or anything else. His tributes grew to trust him implicitly almost without exception, and when they trusted him they listened, and when they listened they lived longer. And his two boys, the dewy-eyed idealist and the angry survivor gave Brutus a gift that he never even thought possible – complete adoration just for being there with them. Just for living.

Even the outer districts afforded Brutus something like grudging respect. There were always the couple of hold-outs like Chaff and Nolan who hated the Careers from the moment they stepped forward and shouted 'I volunteer' in cocky, confident tones. But unless the prejudice was set in stone, it was almost impossible not to like Brutus. He in turn never gave any Victor anything other than absolute respect. Even Victors like Matty and Mitt, who won by default and were typically sneered at by the inner districts. Whoever was plucked out of the arena was the one who earned it, in Brutus's eyes, because they were the ones who made no mistakes.

That's why Connor would play wingman when they went out to town to pick up girls, and why Cora never told him to shove off when he asked her to dinner again and again, why Seeder sent him orchids for his birthday and Johanna let him bench press her just to prove he could do it.

And if the camaraderie and companionship he cultivated made the other Victors underestimate him in the Control Center, well, he wasn't going to complain about that either.


He developed a roaring crush on Blight Gavin.

Brutus liked girls. He liked them a lot. Tall girls and short, big, muscled girls who could wrestle for top, small, delicate girls who floated around like a wisp of silk, girls with jeweled eyelashes and dyed skin and girls with calloused hands and dirt under their fingernails. He wasn't picky. He considered himself a connoisseur, which was a fancy word he had to look up the first time he heard it, but once he figured out it wasn't an insult he rather liked using it.

As for boys, well, they weren't Brutus's first choice, but a man is allowed to be curious and adventurous, and the men who ended up in Brutus's bed were the type who went all night and then left in the morning without ever telling him their name, and Brutus was perfectly fine with that.

And then Blight walked out of the Fifty-Second Games and Brutus felt like a hook made of powdered sugar and granite was digging into his stomach.

He couldn't explain what it was about Blight Gavin that made him act like a total fool whenever the short, rather scrawny Victor was within fifty feet. The way he held himself with supreme assurance, his acrobatic skill, the way a quarterstaff was an extension of his hand, the casual 'fuck you' he gave the world. Even his cruel wit was like a dip in a cold spring, even though Brutus was often the brunt of it. For a couple of years Brutus could hardly speak in his presence, and when he did it was loud and inappropriate and succeeded in nothing but confirming the 'dumb cocky Career' trope in Bight's mind.

Unfortunately, Blight already had a lover, and a best friend in Connor Murphy, and his hatred of Careers was legendary (and after the sorry lot who tortured him in the Fifty-Second, no one could really blame him). Brutus contented himself with nursing his crush from a distance, and eventually he resigned himself to eternal, unrequited infatuation.

Then, during the Fifty-Sixth, Blight brought his lover to the Capitol at the sponsors' insistence, and it was a bad, bad idea. Brutus was there in Samson's when Jason, blind-drunk and raving, tried to hit Blight and it was Brutus who held his arms back and Brutus who knocked him out with one punch and Brutus who dragged Jason back up to the District 7 apartments and even though Blight was sitting at the bedside, mopping the blood off Jason's face with a wet cloth, Brutus heard the whispered 'thank you.' The next day, he dropped by to see if Jason had recovered and the two men had a short chat that neither of them told anyone about.

After that, Brutus let his infatuation spiral away like dandelion seeds in a high wind. He met new people, nursed a few more crushes, and finally was able to laugh the whole Blight affair off over a beer with Connor and Phoebus.

Still, he never quite stopped dropping ribald jokes or self-deprecating comments within Blight's hearing, then sneaking a glance to see if he could catch a smile or a startled laugh.

In twenty-five years he earned three smiles, one laugh.


He liked to wear thick woolen socks in bright, clashing colors.

He loved jasmine tea, but he only ever drank it alone because he thought the sight of a nearly three hundred pound man holding a teacup and saucer was supremely stupid.

He had a powerful, deep bass voice and performed with a couple of indie bands in District 2.

He loved reading trashy novels about Peacekeepers in District 10 who wrangled cattle, always got the girl, and left the bad guy in a shallow grave.

He once watched Beetee struggle over a particularly difficult invention and asked 'Well, is the power on?' and Beetee, red-faced, flipped the switch.

He didn't understand why people said orchids were hard to keep alive. Sure, if you treat them like a tomato plant they're going to curl up and die in a week, but anyone with fucking common sense should know that a delicate plant needs to be wooed.


He volunteered because he was the only District 2 Victor alive who could get away with it.

Honorius shook his head. "Out of the question."

Brutus glared at him. "If it's because I'm too old, or too unstable, or because you think I'm needed in the Control Center rather than out on the field-"

"It's none of those things, and you damn well know it, so cut the tone with me, Barsetti." Honorius sighed. "Brutus, the Quell is…" He pinched the bridge of his nose. "This whole affair, these…problems, they all started when Everdeen volunteered to save her sister. That's the heart of it. Without that, they'd have nothing. The president, the Gamemakers, they will NOT look kindly on anyone who volunteers to save someone else. They will not want a reminder of Twelve's sacrifice from anyone, particularly not someone who is supposed to be doggedly loyal. Except for Mellark, because they expect it from him and they want him in the arena as much as his girlfriend. That's why it's out of the question."

Brutus crossed his arms. "Who said anything about saving one of you sorry lot? I just want to beat Ahenobarbus's record once and for all."

Honorius looked up at the younger man, shock etched on his face. Brutus shrugged.

"That's what they'll say anyway, isn't it? Big dumb Brutus, can't wait to get back into the Games, finally has a chance to beat the record and of course that's why he did it, can't expect anything else from the big dumb monkey."

Honorius collapsed into a chair. "Boy, if anyone calls you a dumb monkey, I'll kill them myself with my bare hands."

They called Lupus at the reaping. Brutus's youngest Victor, and 2's most recent. The muscled, young man stepped towards the stage, the ugliness of his dozens of tattoos and piercings matched in the expression on his face and Brutus rushed forward, shoving his boy out of the way and calling out the sacred words.

One look at Lupus, shell-shocked and gagging on his own relief, was enough to confirm that he made the right decision.


He had a son.

"What's it like in Two?" asked Peeta Mellark as he practiced spear throwing with a couple of the other Victors. "I didn't see much of it on the Tour."

Brutus shrugged. "Warm this time of year, but not too hot since we're higher in elevation. The lakes are warm enough for swimming, the beer is cheap, the girls are pretty and the gardens are full. Not much, I guess, but it's home. Spread your legs more."

Peeta nodded and made the correction. "More than we have in Twelve. Well, Twelve has Katniss, so no contest, really." He gave Brutus a small smile that the older man returned with a grunt. "What about you, Brutus? Any family?"

"No. Live alone. The Victors Village is all I need."

The boy nodded and he didn't push because at least he had some sense of tact. Brutus sighed. Why not? Not like Mellark was going to live long enough to give him much grief and why shouldn't someone know?

"I have a son," he said.

Peeta looked at him curiously. "I'm sure he's proud of his dad."

Brutus hefted a spear and put it halfway through the target dummy. "Probably doesn't even know my name. Only saw him once myself, a few years ago, and his mother wouldn't let me talk to him."

He sighed. "He has my eyes though. Saw that at least. Strong too."

Peeta sent his own spear flying. Not bad for a rookie. "What's his name?"

Brutus lifted another spear and threw it. He didn't even follow its flight, his eyes drawn ever so briefly to the edible insects station.

"Aaron," he said. "My boy's name is Aaron."

Peeta didn't push it.


AN: And that, my friends, is Brutus. Hope you enjoyed a look at District 2's most well-known canon Victor. Next week is a Victor who's made a few appearances already, most of them rather nasty. Thanks again for all the support! And Happy Holidays in case there's no update before the start of break.