Thea doesn't realise Silas is there until his hand rests gently on her shoulder.

She turns her head to the side and blinks up at him in surprise. "Hey," she goes to say, but it comes out as a croak - she hasn't spoken all day, and her throat isn't ready for the sudden use. Silas is looking down at her sadly, concern lacing his gaze, and absently rubbing circles on her shoulder blades. "You ready for tomorrow, Windrow?"

Thea coughs to clear her throat, turns her gaze back to the scene outside her window. A young girl, the age where the end of Reaping days are on the horizon, laughs sweetly as two children, presumably her siblings, run circles around her. She wears a plain green dress, short-sleeved against the Spring warmth and greying in colour. Each child holds a woven basket, filled precariously with wheat stalks, and the girl stops occasionally to pick up the ones that fall out of the youngster's baskets when they don't notice. She doesn't seem to mind.

She could be dead in a week.

Thea wonders if she's taken out tesserae. She has a job it seems, but wheat picking in Nine didn't always yield the best pay and neither her nor her siblings can seemingly afford to go to school it seems, considering they're all out and about on a Thursday mid-afternoon. "Thea?" Silas prompts gently. Thea gives a jerky nod. "Yeah. Yeah," she sucks in a deep breath and lets her forehead fall onto the windowpane, "ready as I'll ever be."

Silas moves his hands down to loop around her wrists, and he pulls her carefully backward until they're both sat on her bed. Thea can't look up at him, can't bring herself to see the look on his face, as silent tears begin to spill down from her eyes. He reaches forward and brushes back a piece of her from her face, and tucks it behind her ear. "There was nothing you could do," he murmurs. Thea screws her eyes shut against the words but suddenly it's two weeks time last year and-

Thea has long since ran out of any nails to bite, and quickly found that tearing off the skin around her nails with her teeth wasn't enough. She bites down on the knuckles on her right hand and only stops when her mouth is flooded with the metallic taste of blood. "Thea," comes Silas's voice from behind her. She's sat on a chair, crowded as far forwards to the screen as she can go, and his hands are on the back of the chair. His knuckles are white. "Thea she might not-" Silas repeats, a warning, but Thea cuts him off.

"She will." She knows she will.

It's Thea's first time mentoring. She's thankful Silas won his Games only a few years back, thankful he's not yet a drunkard or an addict and she doesn't have to stumble through everything alone. She remembers the train ride to the Capitol the night she'd been Reaped, how everyone had gone to bed but she sat curled in on herself on the couch and had sobbed, and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. She remembers Silas padding out of his compartment and finding her like that, and how he'd stroked her hair and shushed her until she had settled down into a calmer, drowsy state, only giving the occasional hiccup. "You're gonna be fine." Silas had promised into the darkness, "you're gonna be fine."

Thea wasn't fine; she was lifted out the arena with three, broken prongs of a trident embedded in her stomach and her sanity snapped. They sated her, removed the metal embedded in her organs, but when she woke up from surgery she didn't stop screaming. She'd wake up on the train back to Nine to find she screamed herself awake in the middle of the night, Silas sat on her bed rocking her in his arms, crying as he shushed her just like he had done a week prior.

Thea likes this girl. She's strong, determined, had asked all the right questions. Her district partner was thirteen. He placed twenty-fourth. But Eve- Eve is currently running from a pack of mutts, and unbeknownst to her straight back to the cornucopia where the boy from Two is waiting for her. Eve has done well to get this far. Silas warned her to not get attached but how could Thea not? It's her first year mentoring, and she might have a Victor - that would be three for District Nine within five years. More than that, though, Thea just wants Eve to survive. She's so young, she's only sixteen, and her Reaping had seen at least a dozen or so people start crying and protesting. She's pretty, smart, fiercely determined - and she's got a life waiting for her back home. Thea sticks her knuckle back between her teeth.

Eve sprints into the clearing and the mutt behind her instantly disappears. She gulps down some air and scans the area until she sees him, the brute of a boy from Two stalking towards her with his mace in his hand. Thea holds her breath.

Eve doesn't get the chance to lift her knife. She's struck down almost instantly, her head dented and her blonde hair matted purple with blood. Her cannon doesn't go off for another three minutes. Thea stares at the scene in front of her, mouth open and face white, and her hands come up to scramble at the screen. A litany of "no"'s stumbles from her mouth, barely audible.

"Thea," Silas sighs deeply, standing up to leave and taking his weight off the chair, "c'mon. There was nothing you could do."

Althea Windrow, Victor of the 94th Hunger Games, slumps against Silas Seeder, Victor of the 90th. They're the only two alive Victors that District Nine has; a girl who's only just passed Reaping age and the young man who kept her alive. They stay like that, leaning against each other in the silence, until Thea's brother knocks on her door and asks if Silas is staying for dinner. He doesn't. Instead, he stands, squeezes Thea's hand in his and tells her to get some rest in a murmur. Then he's gone.

Tomorrow, it is Reaping day and a girl and a boy will be picked. Thea will guide them and give them advice to the best of her ability, and she will inevitably get too attached and then she will probably have to watch them die. She's done it once before, and she doesn't think she can do it again. She thinks of Silas, how he mentored alone for four years, how he practically didn't leave her side on her return to Nine, to Victors Village. She thinks about her own Games and how he had to watch her be beaten black and blue and betrayed and left to die in the midst of a snowstorm, and then how she curled around her body when a trident was slammed into her stomach. Sometimes she catches him looking at her and wonders how he coped.

Thea doesn't think she'll be able to cope, she can't see another one of her tributes die. She pulls the knuckle she didn't realise she was biting away from her mouth. She can taste blood.

She has to bring back a Victor.

A/N

hello! welcome to "Finem Omnia", my first SYOT. what did you make of it, and thea & silas? reviews will always be appreciated (: rules, district spaces and the tribute form is on my profile, i look forward to seeing your tributes!

silver x