Chapter 41: Androcles Lupton

He was a disgrace to the Institute, the instructors said, the first time he actually, openly refused to pick up a weapon and hit another cadet with it. He was punished with thirty full demerits and an afternoon of doing laps in one of the nearby quarry pits.

The second time it happened, Gunner Trillium had resorted to beating him, resulting in a black eye and a split lip. He was also sent to his bunk without supper. Maximus Meridius at least tried to take a more proactive approach, visiting him while the others were at the Choosing Feast before the 35th Reaping and asking him what was going on.

It probably would have been better if Androcles had lied or made something up instead of telling the very first Victor the truth. The look of disgust on his face stung sharper than any knife blade to the gut.

"Who do you think you are?" Maximus had breathed, gasped in revulsion. "Vulcan Bronzedrop?"

Upon a closer, more open-minded scrutiny, it wasn't exactly an apt comparison. Vulcan Bronzedrop might have been a coward, but Androcles Lupton wasn't a coward. He was a conscientious objector. A pacifist. There was a difference.

While Laurel Flamsteed had had someone else's religious will imposed on her until it dehumanized her, Androcles had come to his religious beliefs on his own. His parents kept a dusty old Bible hidden in the floorboards under their beds, and Androcles had read it several times, cover to cover, from the time he was a small boy. One particular passage had stuck out to him: The Seventh Commandment.

Thou shalt not kill.

He had taken the message to heart, and had watched enough Hunger Games in the Square and then in the mess hall at the Institute to know that the Games were most definitely not what the propaganda said they were: a safeguard against violence and war, like in the Dark Days. The Games themselves were an act of violence and war, just a more contained version.

With a worldview like his, people would have been tempted and well within their rights to ask: if you feel this way, then what the Snow are you doing in a Training Academy for the Hunger Games?

Androcles' place in the Institute hadn't been by choice. His father had enlisted him, despite knowing full well his son's religious beliefs. The elder Lupton had figured a tribute-in-training's lifestyle would stamp all this nonsense out of him.

Except it didn't, and it wasn't, and it hadn't. Androcles simply refused to fight. Many classmates tried to reason with him: "We fight. We all have to fight," they would say. When the boy stood firm, as his twelfth year became his thirteenth and then his fourteenth and then his fifteenth, the bigger, more rabid cadets began trying new ways to break him. When he was sixteen, and the Thirty-Ninth Games were still going on, a kid from the Eighteens named Smitty (a not-at-all common District name) and several of his buddies cornered Androcles in the barracks while he was saying his evening prayers during their free hour before bed.

"I don't think this is a question of religion. I think this is cowardice," Smitty declared, after trying and failing to get Androcles just to hit him.

Smitty and his crew hit back though. Androcles was subjected to the most brutal hazing the Institute had ever seen, and to the day he died, Androcles knew that Gunner and Maximus had put his classmates up to it. It was an implication that was all but confirmed the next day, when Gunner yelled for the whole class of Sixteens to hear:

"Cadet Androcles Lupton does not believe in violence! Do not look to him to go against you on the battlefield!" The grade was then taken through a punishing regimen of compulsory training exercises; on account of his injuries, Androcles couldn't even make it through half of them.

In his final year at the Institute, when Androcles defied the Headmistress herself by refusing to submit to the Trials for even basic examination of readiness, he was court-martialed. The Peacekeeper Commandant who oversaw his case had the look of someone who was constantly stopped up as he demanded of Androcles:

"You don't kill?"

"No, sir."

"You do know quite a bit of killing does occur in the arena? Will you at least injure to maim?" Androcles's telling silence spoke volumes. Even after the teenager was threatened with the possibility of going to prison, the Commandant finally ruled that under the district law, Androcles could not technically be forced to take the Trials. All he left the boy with was this grave warning: "Androcles Lupton, if you are selected as tribute at the Choosing Feast, you are free to run into the hellfire of battle without a single weapon to protect yourself." Hipployta Anderson was apparently furious.

At the Choosing Feast, everyone but the Institute Staff was shocked when Androcles Lupton, despite having not taken the Trials or even swung a weapon, was tapped to volunteer as tribute for the 41st Annual Hunger Games. The kids whispered that Maximus and the other Victors were only doing it to get him out of the way. Androcles would go down at the Bloodbath – the first District 2 Career to meet such an end in decades. Maybe it was going to serve both as a laugh and a life lesson: you don't refuse to fight, especially if you're a Two.

The night before the Reaping, Gunner came to Androcles and told him just what would happen if he tried to avoid volunteering tomorrow, while also making it clear that, though he was to be his mentor, he should expect no help from him.

Come the dawn, Androcles volunteered for the Games. He had no choice. After all, they had threatened Dorothea.

Dorothea Peak was a pretty belle of the Fatherland whose father ran one of the largest, most productive and profitable stone quarries in the entire district. She and Androcles had been childhood friends from the time they were babies, then sweethearts; they'd married in secret against her father's wishes the moment both were sixteen, which was the Panemian age of consent.

Doroethea, his wife of two years, was now the only person who visited him in the Justice Building. "I fell in love with you because you weren't like anyone else," she told him. "I know you have your reasons for not wanting to fight, and I respect you for that…." she took a deep breath. "But if you won't fight for them, at least fight for me! So you can come home."

Androcles had remained firm. "I don't know how I'm gonna live with myself if I don't stay true to what I believe…"

It warmed him that Dorothea at least seemed to accept that. But when their fifteen minutes were up and she kissed him goodbye, she still whispered against his mouth, "You'd better come home to me…"

Androcles shone at the parade. Despite a lack of combat experience, he still looked healthy and strong. It was to be the last time he was shown such deference. When scores of sponsors went to Gunner expressing interest in giving Two financial backing, only for the Victor of what was sometimes called the Suicide Games to turn them away, alarm bells began going off.

Some of Androcles' private session, which had consisted of the boy just standing there for fifteen minutes, was intentionally leaked by one of the Gamemakers. The Dow Jones industrial average went into free fall and there was an entire economic contraction caused by a Career tribute receiving a Training Score of…. 1.

Androcles had expected for them to give him a zero, just so they could prove the number existed. His interview with Caesar went little better, as when Androcles used his three minutes to extol against the values of war itself – speak out against the Games, Caesar had looked nervous enough to at least attempt to try and cut to commercial break early. He didn't, of course, looking as though he was partaking in a hostage video, and for the rest of that final night, a frazzled Gunner was left fielding panicked calls from high Capitol financiers. The crisis escalated to the point where people were all but begging President Snow to comment, though he did not.

The arena that year consisted of plains dotted by lakes containing freshwater. Never in the Career pack to begin with, Androcles ran without even trying to take a backpack.

The audience groaned in sheer agony. The kid's mentor may have gone through an arena perhaps best remembered for more tributes offing themselves than each other, but if there ever was a suicide mission, this was it.

Fifteen went down at the horn, the paltry three-man team of the Careers having to overcompensate a little now that they were down a man. The kids from One and the girl from Two then scouted out across the plains to track Androcles and the five others who remained.

Out by the lakes, Androcles kept himself not only well hydrated, but well-hidden as well. It just so happened that his young wife had taught him how to swim, and he was rather accomplished in the art of holding his breath. Concealed just beneath the still waters, he treaded close to the shoreline grasses, using reeds to breathe while still under the surface.

With so few survivors and all of them spread out, it took an entire week-and-a-half just for the Careers to find their first victim (the boy from 12) and set the Final Eight. Over the following days, the Pack would pick off the others one by one, though Androcles's district partner and the boy from One were eventually lost on the way when a fight with the fierce boy from 10 was almost too much for them to handle. The girl from One finished him off, though it was a close thing.

By now it was down to the girl from 1, Androcles, and the girl from 3. The seventeenth day dawned on a technically all-Career Top Two, with Chanel finally finding Androcles in his shoreline-hiding place.

"Ready to die, coward?"

"I prefer the term conscientious objector."

The valley girl had just shrugged and attacked.

In accordance with his beliefs, Androcles couldn't even defend, for that fell under his definition of fighting. He could only evade, not attack, so that's what he did when he sidestepped the girl from One's knife thrust.

Her inertia from the stab carried her past him, and her legs got tangled with his. She tripped.

Androcles couldn't quite believe it, watching the sprawled form of the District 1 girl lie still in the grasses, not moving, not getting up. Only when the cannon fired and the trumpets sounded did he allow himself to believe it. He had done it. He had won the Hunger Games without killing anybody and going against his beliefs. Androcles was the first tribute since Acacia Ivy, not quite forty years earlier, to accomplish the feat.

Or, he would have been, if the Capitol hadn't decided to go and rewrite the truth. As the girl from 1 tangling in Androcles's legs had been what caused her to trip and fall on her own knife, the Gamemakers gave Androcles credit for the kill. Caesar mailed it in at the Victory Ceremony, President Snow was apparently raging at his aides to find a way to tail Androcles and "get rid of him!", and Gunner wouldn't even so much as speak to his tribute on the entire train ride back.

Androcles didn't care. He was reunited with Dorothea, who followed him to Victors' Village, where they quickly started a family.

Androcles and Dorothea were young grandparents roughly thirty years later when his resoluteness that defied the Capitol, defied a President, finally caught up with him. The death was ruled an accident while poor Mrs. Lupton had been out grocery shopping and playing with their grandchild in the park. But deep in her bones, Dorothea knew the truth.

Which is why, when the rebels later infiltrated Two looking for information, it was the widow of the 41st Victor who smuggled them the plans for how to bring down the Nut.