Author's Note: A very different story here and one of the longest chapters I've written for this. Whilst none of the previous victors are entirely harmless, not many of them are completely objectionable. This one on the other hand….This is what happens when Career training and volunteer selection happens to the wrong person...
Just a note out of caution, this is a much darker chapter, and it contains non-arena deaths and violence.
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The Twenty-Second Annual Hunger Games: Slate Obsidian, District Two
Slate Obsidian did not know when to stop. He always enjoyed playfights and running around with pretend swords and shields, and there was nothing wrong with that. But he took it too far. He never wanted to stop playing when the other children did, and he hit and fought back harder than any of the others, leaving him alienated when the other children became fed up with his behaviour.
His mother tried her best, but it was difficult in a house with four energetic boys running around and no father to offer support. Not that she would have wanted his support anyway, not after she picked up the courage to take the children and leave after living with his abuse for too long.
But the more Slate grew, the more he reminded his mother of the man she had escaped. He enjoyed being aggressive towards his brothers, particularly Quarrier, his youngest sibling. He was always getting into fights at school, each worse than the last, resulting in constant injuries. Because of all the fights, Slate could never keep friends for very long so spent a lot of his time when he was not picking fights, alone.
He had started to scare his mother. It did not take much for Slate to resort to violence, an odd look in his direction that he did not like, a joke he did not find funny or a fellow pupil deciding they did not want to spend time with him anymore. The fights were so frequent, Slate eventually got himself expelled from school. He was now left to roam the streets freely. The other nearby school did not want the trouble and his mother could not take him into work.
A couple of weeks later, Quarrier came running into the house crying. Slate had killed their pet cat, made fun of him for being upset and then told him how he had done the same to the stray dogs he had found in the street when he was bored. Their mother was horrified and confused. She tried talking to Slate, but he just shrugged. She thought she saw her son smiling to himself as he walked away.
She hoped things would improve when he had finally been admitted to another school. But it was only a couple of weeks later that she was called away from work to pick Slate up and not bring him back. There had been several fights since he started, but he had since attacked and injured another pupil, completely at random and when asked to explain why, he said it was for fun.
His mother did not know what to do. The final straw came when she found Slate beating Quarrier for telling one of his friends about the cat. She hauled her son towards the Institute and demanded they take him in.
Slate thrived at the Institute. He was able to build his strength, challenge himself, and improve his fighting now that he could use more than his hands. Nobody spread stories about him, and nobody was angry when he fought other boys and won. He was top of his class every year and had earned the attention of Vita, which he loved. Every week, she would offer him private coaching, with the promise that if he maintained his performance, she would pick him as her candidate.
His weaponry and combat skills were unrivalled, and he was able to challenge the older boys. Slate easily made the cut with each selection and found himself moved into advanced classes.
When at the end of his year with the sixteen-year-olds, they were asked to kill stray dogs, fifteen-year-old Slate found the task easy given his previous experience. When the candidates were coming to the end of their seventeenth year (Slate's sixteenth), they were asked to carry out the death penalty on convicted criminals. Slate did the job and came out smiling.
By this point, he was Vita's confirmed choice, and she would take over his tutoring with the aim of sending him into the Twenty-Second Hunger Games, aged seventeen. But it was also at this point that Tiber and Cleo raised their concerns. They found something about him unsettling and felt that he enjoyed violence a bit too much, even for a volunteer tribute. Since passing the kill test, he had severely wounded one of their potential volunteers and almost killed another. But the two newest victors were outvoted, and Slate entered the Twenty-Second Games.
Vita believed in her boy. She thought that his attitudes were proof that their training regime was working as intended. Killing without guilt and grief had to be advantageous for a volunteer tribute surely? But what she did not know was that on two occasions, Slate left the Institute at night and returned to wash the blood of his victims off his hands and clothes. One of the supervisors had seen him returning in the night but Slate insisted that he had just been for a run, and when a belt of knives went missing, it was Slate who claimed to find it the next day.
He thrived on knowing that he had been chosen. That Vita and his district had given him the power to go where few others had and that he would not have to stop until only he was left alive.
In the arena, Slate set the record for the most kills, one that was never beaten. During the bloodbath, the other five volunteers killed one tribute each, whilst Slate alone was responsible for the deaths of five more, something for which he felt immense pride. Immediately after the remaining tributes scattered, he was eager to go hunting through the gardens of the arena and he and his district partner each killed another tribute before the day was out.
Over the next two days, the volunteer tributes sought out the remaining six before turning on each other. Slate enjoyed killing five more children before the boy from Four took down the final reaped tribute only to end up Slate's first kill of their alliance, for taking what the boy from District Two believed to be his prize.
The girl from Four and both tributes from One worked together in attempt to take down Slate and his district partner. But they only managed to kill the girl before Slate got the better of the three of them.
Slate emerged from the arena with a record-breaking fifteen kills and Vita was delighted. Her third victor, a record-breaking victor in a record-breaking Games, the only time every fallen tribute was killed by a member of the volunteer pack.
Meanwhile District One's victors were unnerved that their volunteers could be overpowered so easily, and Mags and Shai were saddened at the loss of the boy they had primed for victory. They shared their concerns with each other about their newest victor and they soon found that Junius agreed, as Slate's behaviour in the arena had unnerved him too. He was by now realising that Tiber and Cleo were right.
In District Two, the youngest two victors were outwardly celebrating their latest victory for the candidates at the Institute, but inwardly, they were nervous about their new neighbour. When they knew their fellow victors would be busy, they secretly called Pluto to ask about obtaining discrete intruder alert systems for their homes.
On Slate's return they tried to settle into a routine, but it was uneasy. Distrust and suspicion set in between Cleo, Tiber, and Slate whilst Vita was irritated at their reluctance to accept her boy. Only Enobarbus was seeming to take her side but even he was growing concerned.
Slate was disappearing two or three nights per week and Enobarbus had caught him burying unknown objects in his garden on his return so took to following him, at a distance. What he soon realised was that Cleo had been doing the same. On nights where Slate would disappear, Junius would go to Tiber's house, and Cleo would sneak out, leaving them to keep a watch in the village. Cleo and Enobarbus figured out what the other was doing and set about going together.
What they found horrified them. Slate was lying in wait in a dark side street next to the main bar in Two's centre ready for whichever unfortunate lone, drunken reveller stumbled his way. He would attack them with whichever knife or sword he had stolen from the Institute and haul their body into the nearby river.
The pair informed Junius and Tiber but knew that Vita would never believe them. It did not take long before people in District Two realised that something was amiss either. Within the first month of Slate's return, six people had vanished after leaving the same bar. Unsure of what else to do, Cleo made an anonymous tip off to the peacekeepers about seeing a body in the river and Junius and Enobarbus were able to use their peacekeeper roles to increase security in the district's centre.
But Slate was only deterred for a week and had picked a new location by the following Saturday in anticipation of finding his next victim. His disappearances from the village at night had decreased now that the peacekeepers were aware that there was a killer on the loose. But still, the victors were alarmed.
They knew it would be catastrophic for them, the Institute, and their district if Slate's identity was uncovered. The victors' reputation would be tarnished by what appeared to be the development of a serial killer by their hands. They knew they would face repercussions from President Ravinstill and that their candidates would never stand a chance in subsequent Games. So, they tried to keep Slate constantly occupied with a heavy schedule at the Institute. Tiber was also secretly slipping sedatives into the meals he begrudgingly prepared for their young victor so he would not have the same opportunities to leave the village at night.
It was Slate's disproportionate anger at his new workload and the lack of freedom at the Institute which finally aroused Vita's suspicions. She thought Slate had wanted further involvement at the Institute, so keenly agreed to Enobarbus' scheduling suggestion. But Slate argued that he was being spied on and controlled. The arguments continued when Enobarbus refused to relent on the schedule and was backed up by Junius, Cleo and Tiber.
Vita demanded to know what was happening and they told her what they knew. Vita refused to believe that those disappearances were related to her boy but ultimately, in a rage Slate shouted that it was the power that he loved, not the desire to train or inspire, but the power that he felt when he held dominance over his victims in their last moments. He loved the arena, loved those days where he did not have to stop, where he was in control of the other tributes and if he could, he would go back again.
Vita was shaken, angry that she had not noticed this when her fellow victors did and was disgusted with Slate who now, with his secret revealed, saw no reason to stick to his role at the Institute. He disappeared for days on end, venturing out further into the district but always returning accompanied by the news that several people had been killed by an unknown assailant.
Slate's mother came to Victor's Village when she knew her son was away and demanded answers. Slate had threatened Quarrier when they met outside her youngest boy's workplace. She told them that she knew he was responsible for the killings, that as his mother, she could feel it. The victors had to move Slate's family into their protection, placing them with contacts of their own.
Two's victors knew they must act, but the Victory Tour was imminent, and preparations were in full flow. The Capitol would be angry if they did not get their Victory Tour and as District Two victors, it was their duty to serve the Capitol. They would have to wait until they returned home. Enobarbus insisted on accompanying Vita and the two travelled armed, unnerved to be in such proximity to Slate for over two weeks.
They played on the small size and the poverty of Twelve to leave immediately after the dinner with the Mayor so the small population of the district would not be left at the mercy of Two's worst. In many other districts, they claimed security concerns, apparently victors from Two were so unpopular they could not go anywhere unattended, not even to the bathroom in the Mayor's house. In Eleven, they knew that such a stance would cause arguments with Orchard, so they told him that Slate was having issues adjusting to life beyond the arena. But Orchard realised that both Vita and Enobarbus were armed and uneasy around their victor and with the news of District Two's serial killer problem now reaching the most connected persons in other districts, he put two and two together and would use his knowledge against Two's victors for years to come.
With Districts One and Four now also training potential tributes, Vita told their victors outright what was happening. They did not want other volunteer districts finding themselves with the same predicament of highly unsuitable, dangerous victors and risking the whole training system. Mags and Shai also arrived at the dinner discretely armed whilst Gem in One showed up wearing a knife attached to her belt, clearly on display. Slate loved that he had got the victors so rattled.
But he underestimated Pluto, completely unaware that he knew there were problems from Cleo and Tiber's previous calls. He spiked Slate's drinks so he would spend the rest of the night vomiting and whilst they were leaving, he handed Enobarbus a small box of the drugs he had used, should they be needed in the future.
Vita and Enobarbus knew that Slate would never get away with anything in the Capitol. There were too many people watching him closely and they were correct in their assumption that he would be too cowardly to try anything when he would be in the President's grasp. On return to Two, all the other victors watched him closely during the final party, so when he did try to escape, he ran into Vita and then Junius.
Cleo had heard whispers whilst Slate was on his Victory Tour and realised that people were becoming suspicious. The victors all knew they had to act quickly; this could not continue if they wanted to preserve their reputation and the Institute. So, the following Saturday night after Slate's return, Vita and Enobarbus took him into the centre for drinks, saying that it was a tradition, a celebration of a successful Victory Tour and that the people will want to know more than they had seen on television. They stuck with Slate for a while, but then deliberately let him slip away, but not before they spiked his drink whilst his attention was elsewhere.
Vita and Enobarbus left to follow him and thankfully he did not get far before turning back in the direction of Victors' Village. They intercepted him running back through a side street on a short cut back to the village and then stopping to be sick in the side of the road, like they hoped he would be. They hid themselves at the corner, behind where Slate had stopped. Whilst he was still distracted, Vita leapt out from where she was hiding and threw the first knife from the vest she was wearing under her coat, quickly followed by the second. When he did not stand up, Vita and Enobarbus cautiously approached and Enobarbus threw one of his knives for good measure. Slate was dead.
Shortly after watching Vita and Enobarbus depart, Tiber, Cleo and Junius left the nearby bar they were waiting in. They followed at a distance and then arrived at the street where Vita and Enobarbus had been a few minutes previously. Sure enough, there was Slate lying face down with two knife wounds to his back and another in his neck, with the knives nowhere to be seen. They breathed a sigh of relief and Junius ran back to the village, in the name of 'alerting' their fellow victors and calling on the peacekeepers whilst Cleo and Tiber stayed at the scene.
With two victors in their ranks in influential positions, the peacekeeper investigation was brief, and Slate's death was attributed to the mysterious killer who was believed to be still on the loose. This conclusion satisfied the Capitol investigators who had been deployed to Two as the murder victim was high-profile and fresh off his Victory Tour.
Outwardly, the victors were in mourning, shocked that one of their own had been killed. But amongst themselves, they were relieved, and changes were afoot at the Institute. Vita's leadership had come to an end as more people realised what had happened. The killings stopped during Slate's Victory Tour and there were no further murders of that nature after his death, so it did not take a genius to realise who the killer was. Parents pulled their children out of the Institute and their tributes would be treated with a deep unease for several years.
Cleo and Tiber took over the Institute, supported by Junius and many of the instructors. Enobarbus did not feel that one disaster was enough to overhaul the entire leadership, but he was outvoted. At first Vita was angry, but then she saw that Cleo and Tiber's changes could make their tributes even stronger, realised that their safeguards were in place for good reason and gradually more parents felt they could trust the Institute, and the victors again.
District Two's older generation of victors was complete. There would be a significant gap before Tiber brought home his victor, after which, a golden age for District Two dawned and the Institute became the jewel in their crown. Slate Obsidian became a cautionary tale to the career districts and a quiet part of Two's history book.