TEAM 13: TRIBUTE 12

Fred : Sean

The Train

After the Reaping came hugs and kisses from loved ones, sparingly few minutes spent saying goodbye, saying good luck, saying I love you.

He and George had done that the morning before the Reaping, woke up at two AM and spent hours talking and talking and planning for what comes next.

And they certainly had plans.

Unfortunately, those plans were on a bit of a time crunch, so when it came time for official goodbyes Conor Kint was mysteriously absent.

He could tell his parents wanted to ask why, knew he knew why, but also knew better than to actually voice the question burning the tips of their tongues with the Peacekeepers looming not three meters away.

Instead Fred spent the last few minutes trying to say everything that needed to be said for both him and George, because right now George was a bit unavailable.

After the fifteen minutes had passed and everyone who had a right to was given at least a few moments each—Fred was well liked, but neither he nor his brother had become particularly close to many—it was time for the train.

The train was long, sleek, and elegant—black and neon was clearly in fashion in the Capitol, so it was that aesthetic which covered the train from engine to caboose.

It had ten compartments in total: four compartments of two bedrooms each, an additional bedroom for their escort and another for their single victor, a car for the avox, a car for the Peacekeepers, a dining car, and a seating car.

Fifteen minutes into the trip nearly the entirety of the train's occupants were gathered in the latter.

Lenny, their Victor, was a stocky somewhat ill-looking adult of 26. He had also refused to buck typical Victor trends and developed a morph addiction despite the relative scarcity of drugs in District 12, so there was that.

Fred remembered Lenny's Games, actually. It was a little hard not to—whenever they weren't replaying the latest Hunger Games or it wasn't another Victor's birthday (at which point their own Games would be played for the week), then they played the Games from that district's winners.

Which, here, meant Lenny, Lenny, Lenny.

That wasn't to say Lenny's Games weren't nearly indistinguishable from the others—the 89th only had two unique factors, the first being that outside of the Careers the oldest tribute was Lenny himself at 15, and the second being that following the District 2 male career killing the District 1 female career in her sleep after fucking her everything went to hell in their already tenuous group (none had any interest in working with fourteen year-olds, which meant their pack advantage was much smaller than usual) and by the end of the first week all but the District 4 girl—the 'barely a Career'—was dead.

Lenny had killed her himself by engineering a rockslide, which was, Fred supposed, unique too, but then Lenny's also bashed a twelve year-old's head in with a rock just the day before, so...

Anyway.

Unlike most Districts, who had multiple Victors fighting for the honor to survive, Lenny would live no matter what—victory (and therefore survival) was determined whether or not the team, not the individual, won, and Lenny had all twelve teams.

To say he was unmotivated would be an understatement, because that wouldn't take into account how he'd (despite being cognizant of the Peacekeepers lurking around and in front of every corner) loaded up on morph before boarding and now seemed unable to understand a single thing Fuzzy Glow (their green-skinned escort) was trying to say to him.

"Lenny! Get up now!" Fuzzy snapped, straight-up slapping him in exasperation.

Lenny mumbled something, then went back to staring at the ceiling.

"All right, all right." Fuzzy said, apparently giving the effort up as a lost cause and trying to think of what to do next. "All right, all right.

Well, I suppose we should get started."

"With what?" Team 17's tribute, Adeen, asked. She was poking and prodding behind the small bar at the end of the carriage; it was clearly meant to be run by an avox, but the avox wasn't there so Adeen had taken it upon herself to find the hidden goods.

"Well, getting ready, of course!" Fuzzy said. "You're stars now, you know, and in a few short hours you'll be riding in carriages in front of the entirety of the Capitol!"

"There's supposed to be food, isn't there?" Team 16, Malloy, asked. "Can we eat the food now?"

"The—the—this is the 100th Hunger Games, the Centennial Censure, and all you care about is food?!"

"Look, lady," Malloy said. "At the very least seven of us will be dead by the end of the month, and given that we're District 12 we might as well round up to the full eight. So I'm not going to spend my last few comfortable minutes on earth thinking about how I'm probably going to be strangled with my own spine after some Career rips it out my back. Instead, I'm going to enjoy all the pleasures the Capitol usually hoards for itself.

And that includes food.

So, where is it?"

Fuzzy looked nearly infuriated.

"Bet you can just go to the dining car and ask for some." Fred said. "Actually, let's do that now." Malloy had a point—even if Fred wasn't personally planning on dying, they may as well take advantage of the good things in life while they still had hold of them.

"Found the booze, too." Adeen said. "Anyone want some?"

She tossed booze at all seven raised hands, ignoring Fuzzy's indignant mutterings about how eleven year-olds shouldn't drink and why couldn't she have been given a better district and this was even worse than last year's tributes and—

Fred chose to ignore her too.

Later, much later, after every tribute had gorged themselves on food and alcohol and smoking (none, as it turned out, particularly enjoyed that last one) and tried the showers and changed their clothes and watched outside the windows for a while and slept and slept and slept and woke up and did it all over again (besides the alcohol part, given that the bar had been mysteriously dismantled at some point in the night), Fred and the rest of them finally got around to what Fuzzy wanted them to.

This was largely because of Lenny.

"I'm twenty six, you know? Twenty six!" Lenny repeated. "Twenty six and I already feel like I'm dead."

"Any tips on how to keep us from becoming that way?" Team 18, Inis, asked. Fuzzy, who had been idly watching the bubbles in her non-alcoholic fruit drink rise, leaned forward eagerly.

"Nope!" Lenny said. "Got tips for the opposite, though."

"What are those?" Team 14, Nevan, sat up, looking vaguely interested from his pile of meats in the corner.

"Go into the bloodbath. Quickest way to die and not generally drawn out, neither."

"Got it." Fred said, sardonically. "Don't go into the bloodbath, but ask sponsors for cyanide pills to be used at a later date."

"Don't even joke about that!" Fuzzy said, aghast. "You know suicide during the Games is strictly prohibited!"

"And running into the bloodbath isn't considered suicide?" Team 11, Taber, asked.

"People survive that!"

"Careerssurvive that, and those stupid enough to team up with them." Adeen corrected. "And anyway, suicide's kinda survivable too. I mean, if you do it wrong."

"None of you are committing suicide!" Fuzzy shrieked.

"Wow." Nevan muttered under his breath.

"Psycho." Fred agreed.

"Twenty six and already dead!" Lenny said, and Fred idly wondered if anyone had bothered to tell him that he was going to live.