Chapter 1: Maximus Decimus Meridius
He lashed out the second his name was called.
He lashed out at the Peacekeepers who hauled him up to the stage. He lashed out at the engineers who loaded him like livestock onto the cattle car bound for the Capitol. He lashed out at his district partner, Raya, for starting to cry when they were barely past the new and shiny district gates sealing Two in like a tomb, and he told her to shut the hell up. There had only been a single pair of other souls waiting for them to board, Aryan kids with eyes of blue and hair of homespun gold, and he lashed out at them when they joined in Raya's mad orchestra of bellyaching by banging on the cattle car doors. District 1, the boy paused to mention where they were from just long enough between shouts and rams of his fist on the metal. He told them to shut the ever-loving hell up, too.
He lashed out at every stop they made along the way, barking and peppering anyone who even so much as looked at him funny, his jaws opening and clamping like a snapping turtle for breath just enough to get his point across and no more.
He lashed out at the onlookers who came to gawk and poke and prod at them while they were imprisoned like beasts with the chamois and the elephants and the ostriches in the Capitol Zoo. "Coo!" The children would ogle, shrieking and dancing away when he tried to paw at them through the bars and drag them by the clothes on their backs into the enclosure with him and his fellow condemned. "Check out the size of this one!" As if he was nothing more than a bear, and not a full-grown, proud District 2 man.
He wasn't supposed to be here. It wasn't supposed to be him! Not him! He had fought for them! He had bled for them! Bled for the Capitol! He was a patriot – always had been! The Treaty of Treason had been ratified as a punishment for the districts – that had been the stipulation. A righteous punishment, he had thought, when the district crier had stood in the Square and read out the document in a loud, clear voice: every year, the 12 surviving districts of Panem would send in one boy and one girl of teenage years (in this country, that now meant children between the ages of 12 and 18 – having the age range start at 13 had been perceived to be bad luck), where they would be forced into an arena to fight to the death.
The Treaty had said 'an arena,' but Maximus knew what that meant: the Capitol Arena. It had been a place of recreation before these Dark Days, where plays were performed and circus acts used to pass through, at least until President Ravinstill had decreed that all intra-district travel be heavily regulated. That's where he was going, what was now several feet above their heads, as the white-plated officers led him from the individual cage he had been locked in this previous night, following a night they'd all spent crammed together in the zoo's monkey enclosure. The others had been transferred here the previous day as well, but Maximus couldn't see them.
A Peacekeeper directed him to the pedestal where he was to stand. Maximus had lashed out at him as well, throwing a punch that managed to knock the visor off the soldier's helmet. Though the bastard's skull got served quite a decent helping of whiplash, the officer's facial expression moved not a tick.
In the several seconds it took for the hydraulics to activate, pushing Maximus up, up, up into the Capitol Arena, he thought about how he had lashed out at his father even, as Marcus Aurelius had pleaded with his son to go with the officers. The elder Meridius had been embarrassed, and angry at the petulant, childish display his son was gracing their homeland with for all to see.
"They want at least one patriot to give them a show and cut down all the rebel scum! So, give them that show, boy! Don't dare disappoint me further!" The shame in his father's tone had cut Maximus like a knife, and from that moment to this, his dad was the only person to whom he had lashed out and felt regret afterwards.
The heavens themselves seemed to open up, into sunlight so bright, it bounced off of Maximus's alabaster skin like blows. The cheers, jeers and roars of the crowd were like a never-ending roll of thunder, and when the glare faded, Maximus could see he was in a ring with the 23 others who had also been condemned to this cage match. A true village of the damned, in every sense of the phrase.
The stands, the spectators themselves, were no more than 10 yards from where he stood, as the mockingjay flew – not close enough to touch, mind, but if he really sucked in and let 'er rip, he might have been able to hit one of them with his spittle.
Not that he would spit at them, of course. His father was right – the Capitol needed a patriot to give them a show, one to emulate into time immemorial, and Maximus was that patriot.
He had always been rather ambivalent towards his name, Maximus. He'd been christened after a character in a movie. A movie, that had been over a century old by the time he was born. Gladiator, it was called. In the Capitol, it was considered a classic, and when Maximus was in the womb, his mother had apparently fawned over the star actor, a roguishly handsome leading man who made it clear in some of his other works that he couldn't sing, couldn't emote anything, unless it was anger. He couldn't even deliver his lines in any way outside of a blasé baritone that never once strayed in volume or pitch. But he could fight – Gladiator had attested to that. Crowe. Somebody Crowe. Russell Crowe, that was it!
By now, Maximus had tuned out half of President Commodus Ravinstill's address; the speech seemed to be nearing its conclusion. He didn't wait for the timbre that sounded like rockslides and foghorns thrown into a blender to halt before, smirking, he turned to face the audience and crossed his arms over his chest. A show, they wanted, did they? Then a show he would give! Co-opting a line from that infernal movie for which he had been named was a good place to start.
"We who are about to die…. SALUTE YOU!" Maximus bellowed it so loudly that he talked over Ravinstill and the President trailed off mid-sentence. He looked miffed at being so rudely interrupted, and his peevishness only grew as the swelling roar of the crowd indicated they were cheering not him, and instead the bulky boy from District 2 who knew his movie lines but apparently didn't know it was never polite to talk out-of-turn.
Still, the interjection was helpful, as it behooved the President to skip to the end. "Ladies and gentlemen, let the 1st Ever Hunger Games begin!" A handkerchief fluttered down to the dusty earth, like Maximus had sometimes seen on TV channels that broadcast the drag races in Six.
His body was tilting forward with the momentum he would need to spring off his pedestal and dash towards the pile of weapons left stacked in the center of the ring, when a voice spoke over an intercom: "60… 59…"
Maximus rocked back on the balls of his feet and frowned. Really? A minute wait period? What the devil for? Fuck that!
At 55 seconds remaining, he was off his pedestal and sprinting towards a broadsword, kicking it up into his hands and ignoring the surprised gasps and jeers of the crowd as, once again, the big boy from District 2 was doing something out of turn.
At 52 seconds, he was turning back and in half a dozen quick strides had arrived back at the pedestal just to the left of his, which held the simpering boy from 3. The kid made no attempts to move though as the intercom droned on, and at 48 seconds remaining, Maximus's sword had cut across his abdomen, the flower of red bursting into full bloom as the boy stumbled off his mount into the dust.
Maximus would have thought that at least some of the other teens would have made off like fugitives once they saw that nothing seemed to be truly holding them back from making a run for the weapons, other than the droning voice counting down. The remaining 22, however, stayed still as statues, some frozen with fear, while others were frozen with defiance. They didn't want to play the Capitol's Game? Fine. It was their lives anyway – and seeing as all of them, to a man and woman, had chosen to fight for the sodding rebels, those lives weren't worth much to begin with.
Maximus proceeded to go around, one pedestal at a time, and cut the opponent before him through a critical artery. He fell into a rhythm and timed it so that one slash to the next took about 3 seconds apiece.
45 seconds left – the girl from 5 sank to her knees, hands clawing at her throat and gurgling.
42 seconds – the boy from 12 had his skull cleaved, bisected down the middle.
37 seconds – the boy from 8 actually tried to resist, but Maximus just pulled him close and ran him through the heart.
Maximus darted, slashed, then repeated. He willed his body to move faster, but he was going at top speed as it was, and he could never get the space between kills at under anything less than three seconds. As the annoying numbers started to dwindle, both in tributes and seconds, he vaguely wondered what was supposed to happen when the clock ran out first. For it was going to run out first.
There was only one second left, Maximus was lunging to make his seventeenth blow, the body of the boy from Nine he'd left behind still falling when a gong sounded sharply, long and low.
The seven tributes who still breathed came to life as if by magic, not so much because they wanted to play the Game, per se, but because they wanted to get away from the grisly fate that awaited them if they remained still. The girl from 8 in his sights side-eyed him in terror as she made a desperate dive to get out ahead of him.
But two seconds in time and space isn't a lot. Maximus cut her off anyway, giving his sword a break in favor of a headlock and snapping her neck like a twig. Head jerking up, he watched as the six survivors were making a break for the weapons. No wonder the rebels had lost – if these warriors were smart, they would have tried to rush him all at once in the hopes of overwhelming him, bunched together as they were. Two of the survivors did try to rush him – the pair from 11 – with nothing but their bare hands. With a roar, Maximus ducked the vicious right hook from the boy and hacked off his arm at the shoulder. The boy teetered, gaping at his bleeding wound in a daze, then went over as his district partner tackled Maximus, trying to pin him down low to the ground for an easier kill. He simply flipped them both, sat on her, and bludgeoned her to death with the sword's hilt.
1 minute since the gong…. Maximus got to his feet, and surveyed his last four opponents, paired off in duels and stabbing at each other pathetically. Maximus decided to give his body a rest and let the duels play out – the winners of each would surely face each other, and then he would take the remainder. Staring up into the stands, at the totally inadequate lack of response, he splayed his arms wide.
"ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?! IS THAT NOT WHY YOU'RE HERE?!" It was schmaltzy, quoting Gladiator again, but at least it got an enthusiastic reaction.
4 minutes since the gong…. The boy from 1 who he had hollered at skidded his foot along some pebbles, which adjusted his rather pathetic aim into something slightly more competent. The kill was still messy, the head of the boy from 10 not quite rendered completely from his shoulders, though he nonetheless collapsed like a puppet.
5 minutes since the gong… the boy from One was vomiting into the dirt, horror-struck, ignoring both Maximus and the remaining duel going on around him. The girl from 3 and the boy from 7 were edging back and forth along an invisible line with an apparent length of only six feet, back and forth in a poor man's attempt at fencing. The rapiers both held glistened in the sunlight. Maximus fought the urge to roll his eyes. The audience was also clearly having none of it; the nosebleed sections had started to boo lustily.
7 minutes since the gong…. The boy from 7 made a riposte that caused the tip of his rapier to sink into the girl from 3's ribs, puncturing her lung. She screamed and sank to her knees, suffocating on her own bile as she internally bled out. Like the boy from One, Seven seemed equally shocked that he had actually managed to land a hit, and he danced away from his vanquished foe writhing at his feet. Maximus tightened his grip on his broadsword, bracing for whomever Seven would decide to target first.
It turned out to be the boy from One, directly in Seven's sightline and still doubled over on his knees. Staring for a moment, Seven dashed forward desperately and grabbed One by the hair. The fair boy hollered in shock and twisted, but it didn't stop Seven from slewing him with a blade across the throat.
Maximus had already been dashing forward as Seven was dispatching his own opponent, coming in from behind for the element of surprise. Despite being no longer winded, he still wasn't fast enough, and Seven brought up his rapier to block Maximus's overhead strike in the nick of time.
Back and forth the pair of boys went, clobbering at each other. Seven managed to kick up a shield into his free hand to parry against Maximus's blows because Panem knew he couldn't dodge the blade forever without getting cut.
13 minutes since the gong… Neither was giving an inch, but Seven was clearly tiring. Maximus pressed the advantage so viciously that the other boy finally tripped and stumbled flat on his back, the shield spinning away.
Maximus's sword was a blur as he brought it down on flesh again. And again. And again. After a handful of slices, the meaty lump before him no longer moved.
The trumpets sounded, and President Ravinstill was announcing Maximus Decimus Meridius as the inaugural Victor.
The 1st Hunger Games lasted a dazzling fourteen minutes – fifteen if Maximus's sixty-second free reign of terror was factored in (in future decades, a healthy debate remained over whether or not it should be factored in). The Victor himself made twenty of the twenty-three kills. It was a record that would never be broken on either count.
A/N: Hey, everyone! I held back from taking the plunge here because it's hard to top Oisin 55's The Victors' Project... but I'm going to try! There will be an update, a new Victor, every week. Favorite, follow, and REVIEW!