Chapter 67: Augustus Braun

If Vulcan Bronzedrop was the 'Cowardly Career,' then Augustus Braun was his exact opposite, executing a dazzling and daring performance in the arena that would behoove Capitolties to call him 'The Cavalier Career.' In the case of both men, their reputations were well earned. But only one would steal the hearts and minds of the most rabid Career fans and backers.

The fascination had all started with his Reaping, and for a time into that evening, the television stations went so far as to be convinced that something was wrong with the reception. The signals had gotten mixed up, they postulated, but they soon found out this was not the case. Still, it was unusual for a Career to come out of One with a name more befitting of a Two.

A deeper dive into Augustus's family history would have explained away this discrepancy. His great-grandmother, Aphrodite, had emigrated from District 2 just before the start of the Dark Days, became acquainted with and married a respected guild master before starting a family. Generations of Brauns had thus been sired in District 1, eventually buying into the practice of creating mail-order test-tube babies, in order to ensure that One's youth would remain the fairest of them all.

Augustus was born in the immediate aftermath of the Second Quarter Quell, when a wild young buck from 12 defied the ultimate odds and alone came home alive. When he was Reaped at the age of 17 for the Sixty-Seventh Hunger Games, Augustus was met on the train with a rather unflattering choice:

District 1 had more female Victors to mentor than it knew what to do with, but in terms of male Victors… there had only ever been three: Vulcan Bronzedrop, Hero Banz and now, most recently, Gloss St. Cloud. Unfortunately, Gloss fell ill in the lead-up to the Reaping and was unable to go to the Capitol. Like District 2, District 1 followed the practice of assigning both a primary and secondary mentor to their tributes, but seeing as their male tributes had only ever had two options for close to the last forty years until Gloss came along, Vulcan and Hero were back to having little choice but to essentially trade seats with… each other, in a weird arrangement reminiscent of the final round in musical chairs. One man would serve as primary mentor for one summer, and for the next summer, they would shuffle. By Augustus's year, however, Vulcan Bronzedrop, at 81, was in failing health. Hooked up to a ventilator, the 4th Victor seemed at peace with his circumstance, as he had never bought into the proceedings that had come to define his life. Hero thus quietly took over acting as primary mentor, and would continue doing this, along with Gloss, until Vulcan would ultimately die just after the Seventy-Fourth Games at the age of 88 (the Capitol didn't bother with a 70th anniversary of his Victory, not even in memoriam, fearing how it would look to the grumblings of rebellion in the districts).

But back to Augustus. For one mentor, he had a man who was still reviled in respectable Career circles as a coward, and for the other, he had a Victor who was fine enough, just not as well known beyond Jeopardy! questions for die-hard fanboys. He really wish he had Gloss to talk with, but Village illnesses were never to be taken lightly, and besides, Cashmere – a self-trained Healer and nurse – was back home caring for her brother. In this Catch-22 he was left with, Augustus chose to stick close to Hero, his primary coach.

The arrangement worked fine, though Hero would later maintain that it wasn't anything to do with him. It was all Augustus. The bulky kid scored an 11 in Training – a score that wouldn't be seen again until a beauty from the coalfields came along. They chanted his name during his interview with Caesar so frequently that most of the Q & A session was missed. A few disgruntled mentors tried to hijack all the attention the boy from One was getting. They discovered an old movie featuring a kid named Augustus, except the kid was fat and really addicted to chocolate – so much so that he fell into a river of the stuff and got stuck up a tube. Before long, memes and MeTV videos began cropping up on the Internet featuring Braun's face photoshopped on the fat kid and with phrases like 'Real Test Tube Baby.' Some of it went viral amidst those who really like Internet-snarky jokes, but the influential media just ignored it.

And Augustus quickly shut all the teasing down once he was launched into a space appropriately called The Hellish Hills.

Hellish Hills are called that mostly in cycling circles to describe the most challenging inclines to ascend while on a bicycle. In Augustus and his competition's case, however, there were no bicycles. A tribute in the Hunger Games is there to kill, not pedal. Still, it might have been nice not to have to walk or run up these hills.

Augustus did get up those hills though, easily. He shocked everyone when he turned on his entire Career pack, which he had already assumed command of, and simply ran them all through with his longsword, along with three outliers. The rest scattered quickly.

The Games soon turned into a test of endurance. Under the hot summer sun, smaller and weaker tributes quickly succumbed to the inclines of the Hellish Hills, dying bloodless deaths of thirst and heat exhaustion. Augustus was one of the few who knew, from advanced training, how endurance is supposed to work: when appropriately applied, you can get over the hump of a challenging hill. As every cross country runner knows, it's all in the timing: you start off easy at the base, and then attack the incline once you hit the steepest part. This way, you don't expend all your energy at the beginning.

This is what Augustus did to professional perfection. Meanwhile, the Gamemakers sent in robots dressed like runners and passing cyclists to confuse and frighten the tributes. The robots were dressed eerily similar to humans, so you had to be sharp-eyed to recognize that something about them wasn't right. Augustus saw through it, and would attack any passing motorist or athlete until the robot collapsed in a shower of sparks.

By the sixteenth day of the Games, it was down to a Top Two between Augustus Braun and a fourteen-year-old girl from District 5. The Final Eight had been set three days before that, until the Gamemakers sent rolling boulders down the hills that crushed most of those who remained.

The finale was almost boring as everyone pretty much knew the outcome, and soon the Crown was in Augustus's hands.

Everyone in the Capitol wanted a piece of him. He was so handsome, kind and polite, a true patriot. Mothers started asking if they could adopt him, which some say is what started Augustus's second nickname: "Panem's Favorite Son." Some Victors are fortunate if they receive even one nickname: the Girl on Fire (Katniss), the Youngest Ever (Finnick). Augustus had two. He returned home to One ready to mentor alongside Hero the next year; a grateful Vulcan was able to stay home and enjoy his last days, holding on longer than anyone would have expected.

Augustus was a popular mentor and Victor. In following Games, he worked well with Hero and Gloss, becoming close friends with the latter. He would develop a crush on Gloss's sister Cashmere, but for a time, the poor guy was too bashful to confess his feelings. He was devastated when the twins were Reaped for the 3rd Quarter Quell at only 29.

In the run-up to the Third Quell, discontentment stalked the land, and even found its way to District 1. In the winter before Katniss and Peeta's Victory Tour, the graphite miners went on strike. The guild masters declared an embargo on Capitol gains liens and many of the district's ordinary citizens joined in, refusing to pay. There was even an attempt to storm the Justice Building, find the district tax collector, and string him up from a tree. The assault almost worked too, thanks to freedom fighters getting their hands on footage from the Insurrection.

The insurrection had led to the fall of what until that time had been the United States, and would start the ball rolling of turning the nation into Panem. Unfortunately for the District 1 freedom fighters, there had been two of them, spaced only a couple of years apart, and when they had studied the easily available footage on MeTV, the freedom fighters misidentified the footage and chose to follow the tactics of the wrong one. The wrong Insurrection. The one that had failed.

The January 6th, 2021 Insurrection featured the storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-outgoing President Donald Trump, whose descendant would eventually go on to win the Hunger Games in the late-40s. Part of the reason it failed was because it was led by retarded mental defectives who possessed wits duller than Guernsey Hyde. When you watch the hundreds of hours of footage streamed and uploaded and now preserved in the National Archives from that day, it's actually quite bonkers to the point of surrealism. It's as though the traitors were hoping to build up to the Act I Finale of Les Mis, but forgot which show they were doing halfway through, and instead ended up performing a poor man's version of the Mob Song from Beauty and the Beast. Some dare say it would have been reviewed as an entirely atrocious staging in either case.

Just as it did then, so too did the storming of the District 1 Justice Building fail. But you know what they say about failed insurrections: they're not failures so much as they are training exercises, especially when they go unpunished. And the unpunished first insurrection had eventually led to a second, a catalyst among several that started the Dark Days.

Only the Capitol had no intention of letting this go unpunished. When he received intelligence that the anti-taxxers and freedom fighters who had shut down the graphite mines were regrouping in the District 1 countryside, President Snow quietly dispatched the district's Peacekeeper Commandant and two Victors at the head of a small battalion, to put down the rebellion.

Gloss St. Cloud and Augustus Braun readily agreed to serve, the latter with great enthusiasm. When they and the Peacekeeper commandant arrived at the edge of the shanty town the rebels had established, the Commandant simply had his battalion surround the perimeter, guns cocked. He and the two male Victors then entered the compound on horseback, strutting like they owned the place. The Commandant made it clear how pointless it was to resist, Augustus brimming like a live wire at his side.

"You are outgunned…"

"What?!" Augustus punkily provoked, sounding like a rapper given a fresh beat.

"Out-manned…"

"What?!"

"Out-numbered, out-planned…"

"PAY YOUR FUCKING TAXES!" Augustus roared, shoving an old woman down into the dusty street. Behind him, Gloss looked a little embarrassed for his friend.

"Ok, I'mma need you to walk it back a little," the Commandant finally reigned the free-wheeling Victor in.

In the end, however, the people seemed more willing to listen to the Victors, and not the Commandant, when laying down their arms. It was a moment that did not go unnoticed in the city, and, coupled with an attempted whipping fucked up by the Victors in Twelve, led Snow to believe that all the Victors posed a threat. That Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark were a clear and present danger to Panem, and a threat to the stability of the Republic.

When the Quarter Quell was announced, Augustus was the only one who could mentor Gloss when they went to the Capitol. He finally worked up the balls to confess his feelings to Cashmere after her interview. She seemed taken aback, flattered and sad too when he told her, but after her brother had gone to sleep, Cashmere slowly stole into Augustus's rooms and his bed and quietly made love to him. When she left his room in the morning, they shared a kiss goodbye and Cashmere promised to give him a chance if she came back the Victor.

Except she had no intention of coming back.

Augustus screamed when Katniss Everdeen and Johanna Mason took the twins out at a skirmish on the Cornucopia Island. At the anti-climactic end, he chose to stand and fight the Peacekeepers who were forcing their way into Control Central, buying time for Haymitch and the others to escape.

Augustus would die on the floor of the mentors' room, fighting to the last.