Chapter 55: Mitt Compton
The Fifty-Fifth Annual Hunger Games were an absolute disaster.
Illythia Bitter argued voraciously that it wasn't her fault and she shouldn't be blamed. It was only her fifth year as Gamemaker and her third in the top spot. After the combined fiascos of the Quarter Quell and the Fifty-Second, Gamemaker positions opened like spring flowers and Illythia quickly rose to Head. She had presided over two moderately successful Games already and was looking to make her mark with the most brutal arena yet. On the morning of the reapings she wore a fine plum suit her parents had bought her when she was named Head Gamemaker as she eagerly watched the footage around the nation come in.
Things pretty much went downhill from there.
The boy from 9 was a field hand, strong and hale and not bad to look at. Illythia was just thinking that they'd have a lot of entertainment potential with him when he panicked. He dashed off the stage, pushed past a startled escort and leapt back into the crowd, shoving his way through. The Head Peacekeeper shouted to his men to restrain the tribute without damaging him, but by then it was too late. A trigger-happy officer had already brought him down with one clean shot through the back of the head.
The escort was left to clasp her hands and say "Ah well, we apologize for this inconvenience. Let's try this again, shall we?" The replacement tribute was a sickly, emaciated thirteen-year-old. Illythia's nose went white like it always did when she was furious. Her employees scurried for cover. The Head Gamemaker pinched the bridge of her nose. Not her fault, nothing she could have done. She had to move forward.
The parade was usually the place where the Games fervor hit a new height, with all the tributes assembled for the first time dressed in stunning ensembles from the city's best fashion houses. Unfortunately, this year the stylists decided that 'appallingly literalist' was the new theme. The tributes from 6 were dressed as locomotives, 4 as fish, and no one could even see the tributes from 7 from behind their birch leaves, giving the impression that two saplings from the park had been uprooted and stuck in a chariot. The few decent costumes appeared garish by comparison, and the Opening Ceremonies were a laughingstock. Illythia screamed into her personal communicator for thirty-five minutes straight and then had a couple very strong drinks.
Perhaps the Games could have been redeemed from the lackluster beginnings if the tributes had been dynamic and personable. Or at least fairly interesting. But fate had decided to take a big steaming shit on Illythia Bitter and it wasn't about to end soon. The Career tributes openly loathed one another, constantly bickering during training and lunch, leaving the cannon fodder to ignore their petty squabbles instead of quaking in their training shoes. The girl from 5 kept vomiting. The boy from 12 sat in a corner throughout the entire three days, crying for his mother.
Only the boy from 6 showed any initiative, cracking jokes and painting mustaches on the dummies. Illythia sent reporters out to 6 to find out anything that could be used to build a decent narrative. All they found was that the boy from 6 was a class clown, forever disrupting classes at school and not generally liked by his peers. Useless.
She gave him a score of '8' anyway, mostly to generate speculation and because the Careers hadn't demonstrated anything worth more than a '9.' Wasn't her fault though. She had nothing to do with how the tributes behaved. She muttered it to herself as she snorted some dream powder and lost herself in a cloudtrip for a few hours.
Caesar could always be relied on to help the tributes shine, and he was able to salvage the interviews into something approaching a civil affair. Barely. The Careers made their hatred of each other extremely evident. The boy from 6 acted as if he was in a comedy club, the boy from 9 kept protesting that he wasn't actually supposed to be there, and the interviews rounded up with the little boy from 12 asking if he could just go home in a thin, piteous whine.
The new arena had been one of Illythia's pet projects. A gigantic open air space surrounded by force fields in the wastes of the southernmost continent. Illythia imagined that it would be quite a popular spot for cross-country skiing and other winter sports after the Games. But when she told her employees to warm the area up for the start of the Games, she realized just how badly they had miscalculated. Weather drones were outdated in the best of circumstances and they had little power against the winter wrath of an entire planet. The tributes were launched onto the coastal tundra and they immediately clutched their arms to their chests, shivering violently.
Four died in the opening bloodbath, a three-decade low. Two more deaths immediately followed when the Ones tried to keep the only solar-powered heater provided for themselves. Their allies from 2 and 4 murdered them eagerly and Illythia was down two of her best tributes ninety minutes into the Games.
While the citizens of the Capitol were enjoying a bright and beautiful summer, it was winter in what was left of Antarctica. The sun set only a few hours into the Games, beginning the eighteen hour night the Antarctic coastline was subject to. Hypothermia set in quickly as the tributes scattered through the arena, trying to find something resembling shelter. Illythia waited for the sponsors to act, it was after all only the first night and supplies were still relatively cheap. But no parachutes fell from the night sky. Illythia checked her list to make sure there hadn't been a clerical error and discovered that one of her employees had jacked up the prices of blankets and firewood right away. She screamed at her scurrying underlings to drop the prices, drop them now, but in many cases it was too late as the tributes drifted off into frozen slumber. Twenty-four hours into the Games six more had died of hypothermia, including the boy from 12, his tears frozen like perfect gems. Cold, silent deaths that left the viewers moaning in frustration and the advertisers demanding action.
So began the short days and endless nights of cat-and-mouse chases, lackluster hunts, and quiet freezing. Illythia and her employees tried everything to inject some excitement into the Games. Pack of roving carnivorous foxes that were frozen in their tracks as the tributes huddled in shallow caves and under snowbanks. Artificial avalanches meant to inspire fear and awe at nature's majesty completely overshadowed by the Southern Lights. A flock of birds that pecked bits of frozen flesh from the girl from 10 who didn't even have the strength to brush them away.
Finally, a week into the Games the remains of the Career pack cornered the boy from 6. They chased him over the open tundra, gasping and stumbling. It was a grotesque parody of human movement, like puppets at the mercy of a drunken puppeteer. Still, it was action, and Illythia stared at the screen eagerly. She could already hear the screams and pleas for mercy, see the blood splattered across the pure white snow in artistic patterns. She hoped they had the sense to not make it quick. So caught up was the crowd at Games Control that no one noticed the fragility of the ice shelf they were stumbling across until it broke. The tributes from 2 and the boy from 4 tumbled down into the ravine, swallowed up by the black abyss. The boy from 6 looked at the last surviving Career from beyond the chasm. They shrugged at each other and went their separate ways.
Illythia started pulling out chunks of her hair. She ordered the Gamemakers to put the three deaths on the boy from 6's kill list and started making desperate calls to Caesar, begging him to spin the fiasco into a clever trap.
The Head Gamemaker was never entirely sober after that, not even on the job. She would stand on the balcony in Games Control, totally silent, her white nose quivering in suppressed rage. Or she would burst into long tirades of screaming and berating that could last hours and sent two of her aides into nervous breakdowns of their own.
Still, Illythia was determined to get her bloody climax no matter what it cost her. She called a feast near a frozen pool to lure the tributes together. There were stacks of blankets, bags of beef jerky, enough portable heaters to warm an entire district, and a row of very shiny, very sharp swords.
They sat there until the night came again and the wind buried it all in drifts. No one came to the feast. Only the girl from 4 made a cursory attempt before she tumbled down a hillside and sprained her ankle. She lay there to complete the long, slow process of freezing to death.
The trumpets blared a couple days later when the tiny girl from 3 finally succumbed to the cold. The Victor of the Fifty-Fifth Hunger Games was pulled out from under a twenty meter snow drift where he had burrowed down to escape the worst of the winds. Mitt Compton was declared District 6's third Victor. The arena was immediately closed and shut down and never opened to the public.
Illythia stormed over to the Training Center after Mitt was brought in, determined to turn the half-frozen boy into a worthy Victor. Frostbite had claimed two of his fingers and three of his toes and the doctors and nurses were desperately trying to save his ears and the tip of his nose. Illythia waited until he was conscious then bullied her way past the medical team. She pulled up short at the bedside. The once wisecracking clown was now a yellowed skeleton, his lips pulled back from his teeth, his eyes wide and tormented. He begged for morphling, begged her, begged the absent doctors, begged his bedside lamp. He was cold, he said, and the morphling made him warm. It helped. He was so cold.
"It wasn't my fault," she stormed to her hapless parents on the phone.
"It wasn't my fault," she confided to Caesar Flickerman over dinner before he generously picked up the tab.
"It wasn't my fault," she protested to the angry investors and advertisers and public.
"Sir, please, it wasn't my fault," she began to say when she entered President Snow's office. He silenced her with a raised eyebrow.
The Opening Ceremonies for the Fifty-Sixth Annual Hunger Games were a triumph of fashion and art. The tributes were strong and alluring, from the amateur gymnast from 1, the beautiful girl from 3, the eager girl from 11, and the powerfully-built lumberjack from 7. In a week, they would all go into an arena of Illythia's design, a stunning vista of rocky peaks, majestic forests, and crystalline waterfalls.
Illythia watched the footage with narrowed, resenting eyes as the commenters simpered about the odds being ever in their favor.
"Two more ready for you, Bitter," said the head hostler as he brought in another pair of chariot horses fresh from the parade.
Illythia Bitter, former Head Gamemaker, stabled and groomed the stallions without a word, then went back to shoving manure as the parade replays began.
A/N: Credit for this chapter, and the next chapter, go to Oisinn and The Victors' Project. Mitt and Connor Murphy are my favorites in that universe, and seeing as I couldn't do a unique take better, I've decided to borrow them.