District 1

"… the male and female tributes are to be Reaped from their existing pool of Victors."

Seated in his wheelchair, plugged into the snazzy Capitol recliner technology, Gleam Cobble fiddled with the hearing aid Cashmere had gotten him as a present…. oh, at least six Winter Festivals ago. Maybe it wasn't working. Maybe he had completely forgotten to turn it on. Because he could not have possibly heard what he thought he just heard. What he thought the President said….

Reaching up an arthritic hand, Gleam toggled the switch in the hearing aid. No, it was in the ON position, for he could clearly hear Caesar Flickerman cutting away from CGN's on-the-ground reporting to begin talking heads coverage with Claudius Templesmith and former Head Gamemaker Illythia Bitter (she was going against the Capitol's cultural grain by letting the grey settle into her hair, and looked much changed from twenty years ago, when she pooched her whole career). The three of them were now breathlessly discussing the Quell, and it's meaning.

Gleam Cobble knew all too well what it meant, and he didn't need Caesar or anyone else's vapid talking-heads, opinionated theories to inform him: this meant the President had betrayed them. Betrayed the Victors whom he had lavished and entertained for seventy-five years.

Gleam knew what some of his fellow Victors would say. That the President had no choice, that he had to do it, on account of that fiery young woman from Twelve who won last year. Luster Lancaster would proclaim this loudest of all, though his anger would still fester like all the others, and he would pin his blame squarely on Katniss Everdeen with the most resentment. That a little slut from 12 would dare to call the Capitol's bluff and, by holding out a clump of berries, tell them to go fuck right off.

As the Victor from District 1 with the most experience and seniority, Gleam knew better. The Games had been going for three-quarters of a century… and he had been a personal witness to much of that history for two-thirds of that same century.

Reaching for the remote with arthritic fingers, Gleam attempted to navigate the dizzying array of buttons controlling his Capitol flatscreen television. He pressed a button, only for Caesar's voice to grow exponentially louder.

"….. SOURCES TELL ME POLLING OF ALL THE LIVING VICTORS' CHANCES WILL GO OUT IN THE MORNING….!"

The hearing aid let out a whiny screech of static, and Gleam frantically slammed his finger down on another button. The image of Caesar and his fellow talking-heads mercifully winked out, replaced by a prompt: SELECT SOURCE.

The hearing aid screeched again, and Gleam half-tapped, half-whacked it with his free palm. "Darn thing!" He turned back to the remote, squinting at the button arrays: Down arrow…. SELECT…. He checked the screen, and tabbed over a few more clicks. MAKE VIDEO CALL.

Various faces popped up on his TV screen, and Gleam scrolled through them until he found who he was looking for. The TVs of everyone in the Village were connected through a closed-circuit system. Jade had been sweet enough to come over one Saturday several years ago and set it up for him. The app was all the rage, she had said – something called…. Zip? Was that the name? No, Zoom!

The TV was now displaying an image of a young man with coiffed golden hair and a pretty boy smile – somewhere between sappy and genuine. The dial tone music that played was a little stupid, but Gleam waited patiently until Gloss Delacroix's face, backdropped by his kitchen, filled the screen. A bottle of wine – open but apparently still full – perched on his kitchen island.

"Hey there, Gleam," Gloss sounded tired, even as he gave his eldest colleague his best grin.

"Can I come over, boy? I want to talk to you."

"I'd appreciate the company," Gloss expressed honestly. "Do you want me to come on by and pick you up?"

"No, thanks, I can wheel myself."

"Are you sure? I'm right across the street…"

"… and two doors down, I know," Gleam dismissed, trying not to make his voice sound too irritable. "There have to be some things I can still do on my own!" That was the trouble with getting old: once you get past a certain age, people younger than you presume you can't do anything. Oh, most of the time, they're well-meaning, but Gleam believed that part of growing old with dignity was retaining the dignity to know both your limitations and your abilities. He was chair-bound, that was true. Sure, he still sometimes needed Luster to lift him into bed, but that didn't mean he was an invalid. "See you in a minute."

He had to press three different buttons before the TV itself turned off. The first button was unfortunately his sound, though he could still hear Gloss fine on the other end ("Gleam, your audio's off! Your audio is off! You're on mute!"). The second button took him directly to online shopping for Madame Lucia's boutique products – Ermine must have been web surfing when she said she was going to the bathroom during last week's Village dinner. Finally, with the third, the screen went black.

Pressing another button, a whirring indicated how Gleam's recliner was now easing into an upright position. Another click, and his motorized wheelchair disconnected from the technology, puttering forward out of the den and down the foyer. The Capitol's motion-activated sensors were useful in cuing the door to open automatically, allowing the elderly Victor to glide forward into the nippy, springtime air.

The cicadas were chirping insistently, District 1's Victors' Village quiet and at peace. A full moon bathed the Village in an ethereal glow, most of its beams highlighting the fountain and its accompanying statue in the center, of two lovers wrapped in a close embrace. Brilliance had sculpted it himself – stonework was his talent, which had led many in the Capitol to joke and wonder half-seriously if Brilliance had really been reared in the quarries of Two. The statue really was a miraculous piece of work, all the more so considering Brilliance had never quite gotten used to his regenerated eyes (his original pair had been clawed out, blinding him, in the dark devil woods of his arena, three years before the previous Quell).

Manipulating the joystick, Gleam maneuvered his wheelchair down the ramp connecting his front porch a little at a time. The Mayor hadn't wanted to incur the cost of installing it, after Gleam fell in his home about ten years ago; Gloss had gone to bat for his friend, taking it up with the President. The young Delacroix's relationship with Coriolanus certainly had its uses; Snow had threatened the District 1 Mayor into complying with Capitol building codes, even citing ancient legal precedent from something called ADA guidelines. The political pressure did its work – the ramp went up, and the second floor of Gleam's mansion was even outfitted with a stairs chair and an express elevator. Though these days, Gleam preferred to sleep in the master bedroom on the ground floor.

Though the lights were on in all but a handful of the mansions, most of the houses were still. Crossing the street, Gleam paused briefly in front of one of the darkened palaces before turning left. At one time, every single house of the dozen in the Village had been filled. But as the years had passed, District 1 had taken a few losses in the tight-knit Village community: Luxe. Platinum – they'd both been in the ground for some time. Poor Wonder – slit his wrists and drowned himself in the bathtub following the Victory Tour twenty years ago. Though, with how disastrously Illythia Bitter had handled the 55th Games, Gleam had been tempted to slit his own wrists too (as had no doubt many others) out of sheer embarrassment. And finally, there was Crystal Flute – found dead in her home six months ago under mysterious circumstances. That one had also been officially ruled a suicide. Though unlike Wonder's tragic but eloquent note, no one could make any sense of the two cryptic words Crystal had left behind: It's you.

The real problem for the Village had come close to a decade ago, when they became only the second district – after Two – to clinch their 13th Victor… and thus run out of Village housing. The Capitol had insisted on turning Luxe's, Platinum's and Wonder's old homes into museums by that point, so none of them could be reused. That had been only one of the problems associated with Song Nuo. She was not a classically trained Career, had never set foot in the DAEYD (District 1's Games training academy) and had even beaten out Luster's handpicked tributes in rushing for the stage to volunteer. Ermine, her mentor, had responded by not giving Song the time of day, but that hadn't stopped the Asian beauty. Song had proven her worth, actually spurning the traditional Career alliance and getting all the way to the end before turning on her ally, the girl from 9, and forcing her to jump into a ravine to her death at spear-point. When Song had come home, she solved the problem of where the hell her new colleagues were going to put her by marrying and shacking up with Quintus, her Peacekeeper lover, and living in his cottage just in the shadow of the Peacekeeper barracks, on the Street of Jewels. They had a little boy together, Tybalt – he was five. That was about all Gleam knew about it; Cashmere was the only one in the Village who ever acknowledged Song.

An amber glow cast out into the street as the door to the house he was approaching opened. Gloss stepped out onto his porch, smiling apologetically for there being no ramp which his old friend could ascend. The younger man bounded down the steps.

"Ready?"

"Are you?" Gleam's eyes twinkled. Still, it never ceased to amaze him how Gloss could get under a motorized wheelchair with him – a full grown man – still in it and carry both up the steps and into the house without looking like he was breaking a sweat.

Setting Gleam down by the kitchen island, Gloss turned his attention to the bottle of champagne and poured two liberal glasses.

"Chardonnay?"

What the hell? It wasn't like he was going to have many more chances to knock one back. But Gleam still warned himself to be careful as he took the flute with an aged smile of thanks.

"I've been running the numbers," Gloss stated, taking a conservative sip from the rim of his glass. "We've got four guys, and five girls, so plenty of the others are worse off. We draw about even with the options they'll have down in Four, and only the Twos are sitting prettier. We have to put our best foot forward."

Gleam didn't have to read too deeply between the lines: by best foot forward, Gloss was making it clear that he should be the one Reaped. And if he wasn't Reaped, he would volunteer; Gleam knew the boy would.

Still, now that he'd had time to turn it over in his head, the thought of going back into the arena was actually quite…. tempting to Gleam. If his 18-year-old self had ever thought such a thing, so soon after the horrors of the 9th Games, he might have ended up at the bottom of his bathtub a long time ago, same as poor Wonder. But Gleam was 84 years old; only Jules Elmer of District 7 was older (by a month) and still living. Gleam had been mentoring for decades by the time the First, then the Second Quell, had rolled around. Frankly, he was tired. Maybe there was some dignity into greeting the arena like an old friend. Again, his teenage self would have recoiled at this – he recalled his very first party in Samson's when good old Seward Docker from 4 had given him his first hit of morphling, to numb the pain.

"Maybe… you should let me go, boy. I'm old, I've lived my life."

Setting his flute down very deliberately, anger flashed in Gloss's eyes, but also something else: pain, born of deep caring. "No way. You're too old."

"There'll be people in there just as old as I am who will have no choice in the matter." Woof Barton from Eight immediately came to mind. Hell, Mags or even Jules might be picked, though like him, that wasn't a guarantee.

"There's no sense in you turning The Run into a kamikaze mission. We still don't know who Two and Four are going to tap to go in, and we'll need a strong pack to go after the sure things: Johanna. Roan Tully. And the Everdeen girl." Gloss didn't say it, but Gleam was sure he was imagining the sight: an octogenarian, put-putting his way to the Cornucopia, slow as molasses. Even he now had to admit, the thought was laughable.

"But you're valuable in the Capitol! Who else could go in? Luster?" Gleam's first tribute was no spring chicken himself; Silk was already making plans for his 65th birthday party that was still two whole years away. Though Luster was probably arrogant enough to think he could make a go of it.

As for Brilliance…. Brilliance was pushing 50 and still suffering from night terrors. Every Victor's arena was a nightmare they never truly left, but his more than most. No, Brilliance wouldn't have the stomach to go in a second time. The Capitol shrinks would probably even declare him pshycologically unfit.

That only left….

Gloss was now reaching across the kitchen island, his sparkling eyes almost pleading. "Please, Gleam…. Let me do this. I… I have to go back."

Gleam pursed his chapped lips, deep in thought. He had some idea of the struggles Gloss had gone through these past twelve years. Had heard and absorbed the confidings his sister Cashmere had placed in him over weekly dates of tea and scones. And followed the dark rumors…

If this was something that Gloss really wanted, who was he to stop him? Gleam might have believed that it was foolish for the boy to be throwing his life away at only just 30, but Gloss was right: they didn't know the cards Two and Four would be dealt. They could be dealing with a Pack alliance half-full of middle-aged Careers, or worse, geriatrics. It wouldn't do for Gleam's participation to render the Pack down a man, leaving five strong fighters instead of six and possibly lower.

And so, swirling a gnarled finger around the rim of his glass, a crystalline note singing out into the kitchen, Gleam gave a tired, little nod.

"All right."

Gloss beamed. "Thank you."

The Reaping that summer was fairly predictable: the Capitol and District 1 finally got the wish it had been denied just over a decade ago, and saw siblings Gloss and Cashmere enter the Games together: only the second sibling pair to ship out for the arena after Elena Perez from 10's twins had done so in the 2nd Quell. When Gloss's name was called, Luster had looked like he wanted to volunteer, and the younger man had needed to physically intimidate his old mentor to get him to back down. Positioned behind Gleam's wheelchair, Brilliance had watched the proceedings silently and with visible relief.

Luster would have to make do training his former protégé once again. Gleam had wanted to come along, but all agreed it was best for everyone if their senior ranking member stayed behind; night terrors or no, Brilliance was more than competent to look after him. Song Nuo was tapped to coach Cashmere, a move that pleased the whole community, but Cashmere most of all.

Saying goodbye to their friends in the Justice Building, the blonde bombshell had tearfully pressed a wet kiss to Gleam's cheek. The old man smiled.

"With such a pretty lady making eyes at me, I can die a happy man!" She had laughed.

As the tributes and mentors were sent off by a cheering throng to the train, Gleam overheard Luster advising Gloss:

"We know Everdeen's a shoo-in. And her man-whore is practically a guaranteed as well."

Gloss nodded grimly. "Your orders, sir?"

Luster's eyes sparkled with bloodthirst. "Take them out: both of them. At the earliest opportunity."

Despite how Gleam knew that that was how the Games were played - identify threatening outlier tributes early, and neutralize them unless otherwise directed, he still felt his heart squirm in disquiet.

He was District 1 through and through, but setting your scope sights on a 17-year-old girl…. well, that didn't sound good.