Warning: Bad language. Also, major The Bride and The Widow spoilers. I know I'm probably beating a dead horse but this chapter spoils the major plot twist at the end.
Coco Montclaire, District 1
"What a tomb we're building here."
Big Thief, The Toy
Ten Important Lessons that Coco Montclaire Learned
1. Get a head start.
There were classes in the academy about getting sponsors. They mostly focused on how to behave during the parade and the interview. There were no rules on how to behave during the reaping. Just volunteer if you were the chosen volunteer and wait patiently if you weren't.
Coco Montclaire planned on doing something extra. She just wasn't sure what to do. She volunteered when the escort called for volunteers, a smile pasted on her face.
The boy picked to volunteer, Argent LeMaster, didn't turn up.
The boy who was reaped, Polish Albert, panicked. He tried to run away.
Before the peacekeepers could react, Coco tackled Polish to the stage. She was careful not to apply too much pressure as she hauled him up in a headlock. Fighting between the tributes before the games was against the rules but running away from the games was even worse. Coco handed the struggling boy over to the peacekeepers - unharmed - and curtsied to the cheering crowd.
Later, people talk about how she'd done such an excellent job, saving her district partner from the embarrassment of being chased down by peacekeepers during the reaping. Coco had succeeded in doing something extra.
2. Everyone is beautiful. They just show it in different ways.
The only aspect of being in the games Coco had worried about was the parade.
She wasn't pretty. All the other girls in her school looked like glamorous princesses and she was the wicked witch - dark-haired, pasty-faced and hook-nosed. She'd nervously told her mentor about her worries and Amber had responded with six words that had been completely useless to Coco at the time. It was only after the games that she realised the dark, desperate place they'd come from.
"Fuck the parade. You can fight."
Coco's stylist, Ptolemy, was a lot more helpful.
"You'd look great in jewel tones," He said. "They'll suit you a lot better than they'd suit all the blondes I've been getting recently. It's a good thing that gemstones are one of your district's major exports."
He showed her the costume he'd designed for her, one he'd been working on for years, searching for the right girl to wear it. Coco had been full of doubt, at first. Did Ptolemy really think that she was the perfect girl for his costume? But when she stood in front of the mirror wrapped in a robe of rich sapphire-blue as her prep team dusted her skin with silver glitter, she realised she was more than just a princess.
She was a queen. The moment she landed in the arena, she would rule.
3. Make the most of your time with your opponents.
The Elite alliance spent most of training bullying the cannon-fodder. Polish had been replaced by Kuzi Heise, a fifteen-year-old bodybuilder from Eight. The six of them had already started picking out targets. The boy from Ten - a muscular ranch-hand - was an obvious choice. Nobody wanted another Palomino Burton. The boy from Five and the girl from Eleven looked pretty tough. The girl from Twelve also stood out.
Coco had first noticed her at the reaping. Her escort had commented on how beautiful the girl's name - Porphyria Elva - was, and Coco had decided not to tell him that porphyria was a type of liver disease. That was one of the great lessons of life that he'd need to learn for himself.
In training, Porphyria ignored all the other tributes and went straight for the knife station. Her blonde hair hung in a wavy curtain, all the way down to her waist, as she sparred with a trainer. It all looked very pretty.
Coco imagined how Porphyria would react if someone set fire to her hair. It would probably be very funny. Maybe she'd try it in the arena.
The other tributes who had caught Coco's eye were Polish and the tiny girl from Ten he'd allied with. She spent all of training throwing rocks at targets. She never missed. As a knife-thrower, Coco knew good aim when she saw it.
She'd have to watch out for that girl.
4. Know your strengths and your weaknesses.
Coco had carefully planned what she'd do in her private session. She knew she'd have to show a variety of weapons skills, in both ranged an melee combat. She eventually narrowed it down to three weapons.
For the first third of her session, she shot arrows at targets. It was her second best weapon. She hit four bull's eyes. Every other shot was just slightly off. But Coco knew that just slightly off a bull's eye could still seriously wound in the arena. The gamemakers would know as well.
Then she sparred with a trainer. She chose a katana as her weapon. She preferred precision over brute-strength. She came a hair's breadth from losing a fight but she recovered.
Her final weapon was throwing knives - her greatest weapon. She hit every bull's eye. Her last knife even split one of her arrows down the shaft.
Coco scored a ten. It looked especially good next to Polish's three. She noticed that Porphyria managed an eight. Clearly she'd be the one to kill.
As for the girl from Ten, she'd scored a two. Coco knew that she was hiding something.
She'd be a threat as well.
5. Be a tough act to follow.
Coco felt confident about her interview. She looked regal in a sheer, black dress, studded with rubies like drops of blood. After the first few questions - small talk about clothes and the Capitol - Caesar did what Coco had been waiting for him to do and mentioned the reaping.
"That was quite a first impression you made at the reaping," he said. "You made it look easy."
"It was easy," Coco replied. "I'll win easily as well."
"I admire your confidence, Coco," Caesar said, brightly. "Do you have a particular motive behind volunteering?"
The obvious answer was "I want to bring pride to my district," but that had been done so many times before.
And it wasn't what Coco really wanted.
"I first got the idea to volunteer when I started going to school," Coco said, "It was the same school that Amber LeClerc and Mink Ultramarine went to before they volunteered. I'd always been curious about what it would be like, going to school with the next victor, maybe even being friends with them. Maybe even inspiring them. It's not just the idea of winning that fascinates me. It's the idea of being an influence behind other victors. That way, I can feel like I've won the Hunger Games more than once. So I want to win this games. I want to mentor victors afterwards. But most of all, I want to blaze a trail. I want to lay down a path that only the greatest can follow."
The buzzer rang. As Coco glided back to her seat and prepared herself for the fun of watching Polish flounder through his interview, she realised that it was perfect timing.
6. Anything can be a weapon.
The arena - or the space in the arena where the tributes launched - was a wide concrete yard surrounded by buildings. Coco noticed that she was right next to Porphyria. As she ran for the nearest set of throwing knives, she realised that the other girl was ahead of her. Porphyria would reach the weapons first.
Coco would be defenceless.
Out of options, Coco threw her entire body at Porphyria and pinned her to the ground. She had no weapons. There were no convenient rocks lying around. She'd have to sit and wait for one of her allies to help her, hoping that none of the tough outliers saw her as an easy target.
Unless...
Porphyria's hair was in one long, golden braid. Coco imagined that she'd never cut it in her life.
It definitely looked like something that a trained volunteer could strangle someone with.
Ten minutes later, the bloodbath was over. Coco Montclaire only had one kill but it was a historic one.
In almost four decades of Hunger Games, this was the only occasion where a tribute was strangled to death with their own hair.
At the time, all Coco could think about was the girl from Ten, who she'd watched run away from the bloodbath with nothing but her ally.
7. An ally is just an enemy who's yet to switch sides.
Coco knew, the moment her alliance started searching the arena, that she was at a disadvantage. It wasn't because she had no weapons, since she'd collected all the throwing knives in the Cornucopia after Porphyria's body had fallen still. It wasn't because the arena put her at a disadvantage. In fact, she felt quite at ease in an abandoned school, even if all the sinks and water fountains were disconnected.
It was because she had no district partner.
The Twos and the Fours had trained alongside each other for years. They were sure to target either her or Kuzi during the split. If they were smart, they'd kill the fully-trained volunteer who'd scored a ten before they killed the untrained bodybuilder.
Out of the Elites' intended targets, only the boy from Ten and Porphyria had died in the bloodbath. They'd made a pact not to start fighting each other until the boy from Five and the girl from Eleven were dead. Coco wasn't sure about it. She had a gut feeling that she wouldn't be able to fight the girl from Ten alone. She'd need at least one ally with her.
On the second night, the girl from Five's face was in the sky. On the third, there were a handful of faces - most of the outliers who'd survived the bloodbath. The girl from Ten and Polish were both still alive.
That night, the Elites left Kuzi on watch. Seeing an opportunity to convince him who the most dangerous opponent was, Coco pretended to be asleep until she was sure that all her other allies were unconscious. Then she got up and started talking to Kuzi.
"Do you think the girl from Ten might be a threat?" She asked, innocently.
Kuzi laughed. "She's tiny and she scored a two. What did she leave the bloodbath with? A nuke?"
"Nothing," Coco admitted. "She had nothing. But isn't that a worry in itself? There's no safe water in this arena. Since she's managed to survive this long, one must assume that she's managed to earn sponsors. And how could a fourteen-year-old with a score of two do that?"
"She killed someone, didn't she?" Kuzi asked.
"I reckon it was Five." Coco said.
"I suppose it couldn't have been a mutt," Kuzi mused. "They usually get the boring ones. Or the rebels. Five wasn't a rebel. I know. I'm from Eight. There are rebels everywhere."
He sounded bitter. It occurred to Coco that Eight hadn't had a tribute as tough as Kuzi since the Quell. She wondered if any of the reapings had been rigged and, if so, why Kuzi was the first tough tribute from Eight in over a decade. She remembered him joking in his interview about hitting his growth spurt a month before the reaping. Had he been shorter and weaker when the Capitol had taken their last census?
Coco decided that it served District 8 right. If they couldn't treat their victors with respect, they didn't deserve victors.
"If you team up with me during the split," Coco said, finally making her full intentions clear. "We can work together to kill Ten."
"I like that plan," Kuzi said. "But why wait?"
Coco realised what he was trying to say and mulled it over. They could probably kill Eleven, two against one. The other four Elites were just extra muscle.
None of the four sleeping Elites ever woke up again.
8. Making a bet in the Hunger Games means betting with lives.
Two days later, there were two cannons in quick succession. Polish's face was in the sky. So was the girl from Eleven's. There were just two outliers left - the boy from Six and the girl from Ten. The games were flying by.
"Do you think Eleven killed your district partner?" Kuzi asked, after the faces.
"I bet Ten killed her in revenge." Coco said.
They found the boy from Six, weak with hunger, the next day. They killed him quickly.
After four more days of cat-and-mouse searching, the gamemakers sent a swarm of giant flies to force the tributes closer together. When Coco spotted the girl from Ten around a corner, she thought of a plan.
"You attack her," she whispered to Kuzi. "I'll cover you."
She'd made a decision. She wanted to see this girl attack - possibly injuring or killing Kuzi - before she leapt into the fight. She wanted to know exactly what she was up against.
If it took out her other opponent in the process, Coco wouldn't mind.
Kuzi charged. The girl reached into her pocket and threw a glass bottle into his face, then dodged as he stumbled past her. As he passed, she sliced a knife across his throat with brutal efficiency.
A cannon fired as Coco started throwing knives at the girl. She knew that her plan had caused her ally's death. It didn't matter at all. As a knife lodged itself in the girl from Ten's chest a bottle flew from her hand. Coco tried to dodge the bottle but it hit her right in the forehead. Some liquid dripped into her eyes.
It burned.
Another cannon fired. Trumpets blared. Someone declared Coco victor. But she couldn't see a thing. She sobbed with pain and fear as the hovercraft took her. Then someone emptied a syringe into her neck and the pain was gone.
9. The Hunger Games evolves. True victors evolve with it.
The first thing Coco Montclaire saw when she woke up was her mentor's face. Amber looked absolutely disgusted. For a second, Coco was terrified that she'd become hideous.
Then she realised that it was lucky she could see at all.
The doctors showed her her reflection in the mirror. Instead of the burned, disfigured face she'd expected to see, she saw someone so perfect she couldn't be real. Coco's reflection had chestnut-brown hair, luminous eyes, ivory skin - without a single freckle - and high cheekbones.
They'd even made her nose shorter.
"They call it the full body polish," Amber said. "It's brand new."
Coco winced at the mention of her district partner's name.
"I know," Amber said. "I tried to talk the doctors out of it - maybe just stick to curing your blindness - but Emerald and Mink were insistent. Bastards..."
"Why would you want me to be ugly?" Coco asked. "Are you jealous?"
Amber laughed, bitterly. "Jealous? I feel sorry for you. One year earlier and you'd have made it out."
"Made it out of what?" Coco asked.
Amber explained everything. It made Coco want to cry or scream or vomit.
Over the next few years, she learned exactly what kind of trail she'd blazed. Victors became lucky to escape prostitution now that the full body polish had been invented and its pioneering patient was so lovely. Even the outliers had their clients. Even the ugliest of them had a year in the spotlight, the year after they won.
The best that Coco could hope for were two female victors to follow in her footsteps. Then she could retire.
It didn't matter that her two replacements would definitely be forced into victor prostitution. Coco planned to get her district as many victors as possible. That way it would be over quickly for every victor form District 1 who had to suffer at the Capitol's hands.
The moment she returned home, she took up a teaching post at District 1's training academy. Mentoring just wasn't enough for Coco. She wanted District 1's next victor to learn under her from the very beginning.
10. The Hunger Games never ends. Never stop fighting.
Coco Montclaire sipped at a cup of coffee, like she usually did after a long day of teaching. She was stressed. She and Mink were being kept under heavy guard in a glitzy Capitol hotel until President Snow made sure that neither of them had any connection to the rebellion that had ruined the Quell and cost Cashmere and Gloss their lives. Since both Amber and Caramel LeClerc had been exposed as secret rebels, Coco feared that she'd be found guilty by association.
The feeling that she was being watched made the hairs on the back of her neck stick up. But there was no-one in the room with her, nobody except an avox.
An avox with glossy, black hair and dark, empty eyes...
She'd seen those eyes before. Those were the eyes of a girl who had haunted her for the last twelve years. Ramona Hirose, the daughter of the two inventors who had created the full body polish. The machine that had ruined Coco's life. Ever since the girl had been reaped at the age of twelve only to be saved by a surprise volunteer, Coco felt like she'd been playing a twisted sort of game against her.
Coco had made the first move, training up all the potential volunteers for the Sixty-Ninth Hunger Games for a battle against a genius inventor. She'd caught the look in Ramona's eyes, that burning curiosity. She'd seen the same look in the mirror since she was a little girl. She'd known that Ramona would volunteer when she turned eighteen.
But, even then, Ramona Hirose had been one step ahead. She'd volunteered for the Sixty-Eighth Hunger Games, a year early. And she hadn't been an inventor.
She'd been a poisoner, an Elite's worst nightmare.
With a shaking hand, Coco set down her cup of coffee. The cup of coffee that Ramona must've served her.
"Hello, Ramona," Coco said. "How long do I have left to live?"
The avox - or rather, the victor pretending to be an avox - didn't answer. She slipped out of the door. That was unexpected, even by Ramona's standards. Coco assumed that Ramona had heard all the rumours about her. Why else would she be risking her safety to poison her?
Ramona Hirose knew that Coco Montclaire had killed her parents.
It had been three years ago. Ramona Hirose had taken poison. She should've known better, even if she hadn't been alive for Palomino Burton's death and the aftermath. Coco had always found the circumstances extremely suspicious. Why would Ramona Hirose, the master poisoner, survive an attempt to kill herself with poison? And why would she even do it when her father - one of District 3's most renowned doctors - had been in the house?
It was almost like she hadn't even wanted to kill herself.
Any victor who'd watched Juanita Burton's execution knew what would happen next. Sure enough, there'd been a house fire that claimed the lives of Yoji and Lupa Hirose. Coco had been preparing herself to dance on their graves when she'd got a call from President Snow. The fire had just been a cover-up. Snow had wanted to make sure that Ramona Hirose would never step out of line again. He'd wanted to film someone torturing Ramona's parents as a punishment. And since Coco had suffered so much due to their most successful invention, she'd seemed like the perfect candidate.
She'd agreed to it. She'd wanted some form of revenge and, even if she hadn't, she knew better than to refuse an offer from the president. It had actually been disturbingly fun. Snow had promised Coco that he'd edit the footage so Ramona wouldn't be able to tell who was torturing her parents. She should've known that her enemy was smart enough to realise it was her. Either that or Ramona had enlisted the help of her hacker friend, Binah Katayanagi, to search through Snow's files.
Even then, Coco would've expected Ramona to be more curious about her parents' killer. Maybe to stick around, ask some uncomfortable questions, gloat a little.
That was another mistake that Coco had made. She'd assumed that Ramona Hirose wasn't smart enough to avoid sticking around at the scene of the crime.
It occurred to Coco that the only way she was going to survive this encounter was if the peacekeepers caught Ramona and forced her to give up the antidote.
"Guards!" Coco cried. "Help!"
"What is it?" A peacekeeper appeared at the door.
"That avox was Ramona Hirose in disguise. She poisoned my coffee. You have to find her."
The peacekeeper laughed. "What is it with you Ones and Ramona Hirose?"
"I swear it was her." Coco said, struggling to keep her voice steady. Many victors from her district were absolutely terrified of Ramona. There was something about poison - something that killed from the inside and could be wielded by even the weakest of tributes - that scared the living daylights out of Elites.
Gloss had had a panic attack on the train, worried that Ramona had been reaped and they'd be going into the same arena. He'd told Coco, after he'd recovered, that she was so scary because he'd seen her as a weak and terrified outlier until his tribute in the Sixty-Eighth Hunger Games had started vomiting blood. Coco had learned from a bottle of acid in the face - courtesy of a fourteen-year-old science prodigy from District 10 - that outliers could be deadly but Gloss had won one of the easiest games of all time. None of the outliers had put up much of a fight.
They both knew that, if Ramona Hirose had gone into that games like she'd been meant to, she would've put up a fight.
As for Coco, what disturbed her so much about Ramona Hirose was the feeling that the girl had always been planning something evil. But she'd never known what. She'd never known how to prepare.
Now Coco knew what Ramona had been planning. She felt the poison begin to attack her internal organs. Just as the first wave of nausea crumpled her to the floor, the peacekeepers burst in.
"We're taking you to the hospital, Miss Montclaire," they said.
Coco didn't have the strength to say that she preferred to be called 'Madame'. She wasn't married but it was a lot more impressive than 'Miss'.
On the way to the door, she spotted two other peacekeepers escorting Mink. He looked even worse than she did. He was pale and shaking, red fluid dripping down his chin. Coco realised that Ramona must've poisoned him before coming for her. A smart move, given that Coco had been able to spot Ramona but Mink definitely hadn't. If she'd poisoned Coco and then slipped into Mink's room, maybe the peacekeeper's would've taken Coco's warnings to heart and caught her.
Coco wondered what Mink had done to deserve getting poisoned by Ramona and then realised that it was Mink...
She began to vomit blood as she was led into the elevator. Her vision clouded over with white. She began to panic. What if she went blind again? This was a scenario out of her worst nightmares.
The last thing that Coco Montclaire ever felt was the familiar sting of a syringe in her neck. She hoped, as she lost consciousness, that the doctors would be able to save her.
It was a foolish thing to hope.
I was originally hoping for Coco's chapter to be a bit more light-hearted (by my standards, at least) but then victor prostitution reared its ugly head and things only got darker from there. Coco definitely didn't have it easy. She had the worst of both worlds, getting injured and likely traumatised by her final battle and then being healed up and sold to Capitolites. Luckily, she's pretty good at coping. Coco's one of the smarter Careers and was able to hold herself together until Ramona showed up. Then she let her paranoia rule her.
As for Ramona, I thought this chapter would be a good one to introduce her parents' backstory. They got rich because they invented the full body polish. They probably intended for their invention to be used for victims of factory accidents, not for victors. Originally I wasn't quite sure how to kill Coco off, since she was a pro-Capitol Career but she was also in the Capitol (due to backup mentoring Cashmere) and likely to be protected during the rebellion. It was only as I was writing this that I realised that, while Coco's not as revenge driven as Amber or some of the other Careers, she definitely wouldn't pass up an opportunity to torture the Hiroses, which caused her to get caught up in Ramona's revenge plot. I've been including major characters from The Bride and The Widow a lot in recent chapters but there's one major victor who I haven't really focused on so far. Rest assured, I have plans for them.
Coco's victory brings the thirties to an end. Thank you all for sticking with it. It was a very dark decade (and all the flash-forwards associated with this decade). Highlights include the rise of victor prostitution, sociopathic Seeder, Luka having his happy ending taken away from him, Fawkes' loving (and doomed) family, the first child of a victor to die, everything to do with Palomino and Ramona's parents getting punished. I think the only comedic scene I wrote was the one where Emerald had a heart attack. That says a lot. I wish I could say that the forties will be better but they definitely won't. I will stick to my policy of ripping your heart out every four chapters for another decade or so.
However, just so this isn't a complete and utter tome of suffering, I thought I'd give you an advance warning that there will be a comedy chapter in the next decade. And it will be exactly when you don't need it...
