DAY 9

Harry : Hugo/Harry

Funerals

The sudden spout of deaths had drastically changed the mood inside the Alliance.

They'd known, of course, that many would die—hell, if it had been a normal year, most would have, and those that would have had the best chance were in that forest right now, planning out how to cope with the numbers disadvantage.

But the Alliance had made them think that maybe, just maybe, they could live.

That was still true.

It didn't make it any easier to come to terms with the flip side of the coin: they could still die.

They were still in danger.

And when the day came (and there was, really, only two more days to go) they would be in even more danger.

The somber mood…

It wasn't entertaining.

And, with the future so close, the eyes of the citizens had to be off Team 13 as much as possible.

It was Harry who decided to keep their eyes on him.

Harry… Harry was good at fighting, at making the best decision in the very, very short term and reacting with his body before even his mind had time to grasp onto the new situation. He'd also been relatively good at teaching during the few times he'd been called upon for said skill.

But long term plans…

Yeah.

Not his forte.

Leave it up to the rest, then, he thought. He could use his status—non-volunteer, one of the weakest members of the team, and so on—to his advantage.

"Hey." He sat, cross-legged, next to Alice, who was only a year older than him but still the oldest of their district to join the Alliance—only Districts 1 and 2 had less members in the Alliance.

Alice, who had been rather close with Matilda from their same district, nodded at his greeting but didn't look up from where she was drawing randomly in the dirt.

The rest of his Team, Harry knew, were busy looking like they were getting nowhere fast. At around dusk they'd actually 'finish' coming up with the plan they'd use tomorrow, but they'd supposedly been at it for over an hour already and Harry—who already had a reputation of not speaking up during Team meetings—had slipped away on cue.

"We couldn't bury her." Harry said, jumping headfirst into what would both be a conversation Alice needed and one the Capitol would find more interesting than the hours of failed arguments.

"I—I buried this, this doll thing I made this morning. Iva called it stupid."

Iva, his brain supplied, was the daughter of one of the District 4 victor's and Alice's age.

"Why'd she think that?" He made his face curl in a mixture of confusion and disagreement—it was easy enough.

"She—she said there was no point in doing any kind of funeral, if you didn't have the body."

"I was talking with Sean," Harry started (and this was true, which was good; any provable lie would be suspicious) "and he said that the actual body wasn't so important in 12."

Alice looked up.

"They—well, they do a lot of mining, you know, really deep into the earth, and so I guess they often don't have a body to bury. So instead—instead they focus on, um, talking about the dead and stuff."

Alice nodded. "I wonder what the funeral rites of other districts are like."

That… wasn't a bad idea. And, as callous as it sounded, probably more than a little entertaining to their watchers, too.

"We could—we could try to mimic them. Today, I mean. In honor of the dead. And not just in the Alliance either."

"That would be nice."

"You ask around Team 14 and the older kids, okay? I'll get the ones younger than me on board. My Team… well, they're still arg—planning. But I bet they'll stop once we get everything ready."

Alice grinned. Her face was still streaked, her eyes still teary, but she was looking at him. "Funerals during the Games."

Harry hoped his team could adapt on the fly, because this seemed really necessary.

They started at around midday with District 12's attempt at honoring the dead. While it was mainly based around speeches, it turned out that the District would also cover the body (if there was one) in green things and (if not available) create a sort of green pyre which would remain unlit.

As the speeches continued—they'd last throughout the day, because that was apparently a common part of every District—the customs from the other Districts were introduced.

District 11 had a similar rite of covering the body, but theirs specified color, so flowers (some of which seemed suspiciously recently additions to the arena—probably a good thing) were added, and they also emphasized musical performances so those who could sing sang and those who couldn't tried.

District 10 (like all districts, really) had a funeral that conventionally had a body, but they mimicked what they could: tents that would traditionally contain the body were erected and a fire lit in each entrance to be maintained for the rest of the day—usually it was maintained until burial, so they had to improvise.

District 9 didn't have a set funeral, really, or at least none that any of the children could remember, but one—the seventeen-year-old Oda—remembered that when her uncle died before she left for school no one ate, so they decided to do the same.

(That hadn't been a hard decision; they'd been running out of food for several days even with sponsor gifts.)

District 8 would typically have something woven in the dead's honor so—after a timely sponsor gift of wool and needles—those who could set to work knitting ten quilts.

District 7 went back and forth a bit—apparently there was a lot of variation—but in the end decided to plant what they called 'a useless tree' in the dead's honor. It was important, they said, that the point of the tree was only to honor the dead, not to meet quota several decades later.

No one mentioned the Capitol explicitly that day, though their presence was a constant weight.

District 6's funeral rites overlapped with many of the others, except that all their dead were burned.

They had the fires from District 10's ritual, though, and so claimed they felt their two dead were properly respected.

District 5, Harry's district, also had a surprising amount of variation, especially given that they only had three in the Alliance left.

After some back and forth, Conrad—the youngest—pointed out that his family's ritual (they lived near the dam) was to wail, and that was the only one they hadn't really done anything similar to yet.

So they wailed.

They didn't have any water for District 4's standard funeral, so instead Herve, their eighteen-year-old, points out that drinking is another common funeral practice.

They are not gifted alcohol.

District 9, furious that their own mourning practice might be usurped, were more than a little pleased, but the District 4 members held that it wasn't fair that their practice was the least followed.

After some arguing and no solutions, the Alliance moved onto District 3. They were on a schedule, after all: everything had to be done today, because a two-day funeral was just begging for Capitol interference.

Unfortunately this left District 3 in the lurch too: traditionally they had a multi-day period of prayer and meditation, something which just wasn't possible. Instead everyone sat in silence for half an hour, praying, contemplating the lost, and crossing their fingers that the insane gamble they were taking would pay off.

Harry—who wasn't quite sure what he believed, what with the revelation of Death being an actual entity—prayed that Death had actually given them a mission they could succeed in.

He received no response.

Death had disappeared two days ago, off to check on some other world or hero or something.

It was with Districts 1 and 2 that there was the most trouble.

Their only members of the Alliance, after all, were in Team 13.

Additionally, their two dead—District 2's Marcia and District 1's Organza—were killed while trying to kill the Alliance.

Both Roman and Tourmaline dealt with the increased tension by proclaiming that their practices were, more or less, encompassed by what was already being done, and that was that.

By the time the practices of each District are addressed as best as possible and every story that can be remembered is told it is dark.

The citizens seem appeased; there are no additional struggles.

And Harry feels, far more than he had that morning, that Pascaline, Matilda, Dirk, Marcia, Betje, Renny, Borden, Organza, Jago, and Tahki all got closer to the amount of honor they deserved as children being forced to kill and be killed by this cruel world.

Tomorrow, however, was only hours away, and would bring a whole new set of struggles and, in all likelihood, deaths.

It was, after all, the day the Rebellion would begin.