Interviews
Dior Marini. District One.
Dior faces the stage and the Capitol and the people. There is one thing she knows. She is prepared for this.
(Not prepared, as if she had practised her lines upon the stage. Nor prepared, as if she knows what she will say. But she is prepared: she is a Career. She is prepared: she has better odds than anyone. Ones do not need to shine themselves; not quite. They have the coruscating stars of their District behind them. Dior merely has to flash her eyes, mirror her District's ardour back at the crowd, and she'll ignite the embers which had long stewed in many a Capitolian's hearts.)
That thirst for murder: One and Two and Four are the vessels. And she can deliver.
They introduce her. Dior Marini, they say, and her name is sugared powder on their lips. It's the same, as the year before (Madison Saros), and the year before that; it is like that which they showcase the predators.
(Sweet, guileless, predators. They love the same archetype; that District One pomp and poise; their fanciful faces and their quixotic pride. That is what she will let them ascribe. There is no reason to let them think otherwise.)
She is seated upon the grandiose stage. Dior squares her back and lets her gaze rest upon the audience. Cool and unyielding: that is what she knows she projects. Their eyes are riveted upon her. As if she is an enigma, and they want to pry her alive.
(But Dior is made of obsidian. She had not broken to her family. She will not break to a crowd.)
Beside her, Caesar continues to crow. "We're so glad to have District One with us today," he says, as if the Games were not annual, as if he had not said the same: year-after-year, to the same girls that marched with knives into slaughterhouses.
"You in particular, Dior Marini." He licks his lips. "Marini. I think that last name is familiar." He turns to the Capitol, then: and it is just like that: their eyes snap, and that sea of attention that Dior commands is gone. As if stirred by magnets, the crowd draws to him.
"Do our audience members need a reminder?"
An explosion of sound cracks, like thunder, through the Capitol crowd. Dior looks on: and keeps that aloofness strewn over her face. But there is flecks of snow that creeps in her veins. It snakes over her bones and wraps them in a grasp.
"Presenting: the District One tribute of our 53rd Games. Mattie Marini: you may remember her!"
He is loud, and his hands throw up, and there is indelible glee that seats in his features. Flickerman turns onto the screen; and gestures a casual hand, an easy command to the blank screen, the emblem of Panem emblazoned upon the darkness.
"And this, my friends, is the moment that we all remember her by."
It flashes into colour; viridescent, sick-green, spots of black-red spattering the screen. Slowly, it phrases in: shaky, but steadying. The 53rd Games comes into focus; with its lush forestry and shrieking birds and freshwater wilderness. But there is always the quiver of the screen; as the Arena itself is drunken. Vertiginous forest glades: that house of the Erl-King can never be stable.
But it is not any of that which takes Dior. She rewound those Games too many times to count; she is too familiar with the Arena. Dior knows every nook and cranny; the gleaming spiles that mill upon the tree trunks; the satyr's treasures hidden amid the leaves; the jabberjays with their eyes gouged out and the robins with their hearts vivisected and the cuckoos that rest upon trees; oh, Dior knows the home of the Erl-King, levelled upon stumps of wood, the only place where the Arena is steady. She knows how he comes out and stalks and steals the children into his night.
Those Games that she should have been in. She had broken all of it, down and apart. Wracked every scenario in her head: would I have lived this, I'll have survived that, I would've kill him, those slabs of meat would be dead, there'd be no chance they could retaliate—
(And every conclusion she comes to is the same.)
No: the Arena does not bother her, anymore. She knows it too well for it to. What seizes a beat in Dior's throat is the scene. A boy and a girl; leaping through the trees, their hands rustling the leaves, their weapons in their hands. A javelin and a garrotte.
Groans; whoops; cheers through the audience. Flickerman makes a show of waving his hands; he gets up, points towards the screen, extravagant. "If we remember— our District Eights had made a formidable hunting team together. They had felled the boy from Seven; that girl from Eleven—picking them off, one after another. And now: they've turned their eyes upon a new target."
And the screen goes to Mattie. Mattie. Black locks fraying all over the place and her eyes so damned frantic (and her face, so small, button nose and small eyes, a child's, not quite fully grown), and she's running, clatters of steps down the glades, but immortalised upon the camera, she's alive.
It's a little harder to breathe, then.
Sharp hoots and laughs pierce through the glades. "There's no running!" and it's like a monkey's, so heinous and so frantic in their laughter, their power, they know. Mattie runs, as the screeches of glee echo behind her: "You think you're gonna last, kid? You're not even a Career! You're the last one left!"
Dior's throat stays in her heart. The Eights, they're gaining upon her, they're so close. Minutes draw onto seconds, and even though Dior knows how it ends, she still stares (as if, if she concentrated hard enough, her gaze would change what happened, as if, if she tried hard enough, thought hard enough, closed her eyes and willed hard enough, she'll be the one on the cameras, and not—)
That shake of the Arena makes Mattie fall. And the Eights shriek in joy. They pounce like wolves; and they drag her sister apart.
It is a drawn-out struggle. Mattie fights: thrashes, screams, yells, but it isn't enough. It's never enough.
Minutes drag into hours. Drags until the Eight boy's tired of playing with her sister and wrings the circle of silver round her neck.
Dior makes herself look.
(It is longer than she had remembered. And the gags of her sister, as the ruby pieces of blood leak from her skin, echo throughout the stage.)
"Mattie Marini, everybody!" Flickerman says, finally, after the display turns off; and it is no less jovial than it was before - as if he were announcing a celebration, or a feast, or the leave of a guest. And the Capitol scream for Mattie: as if they were screaming for a Victor.
But all Dior stares at is Mattie's resting ground. Her throat hurts, and there's something sick inside her mouth, and her stomach's twisting like she's been knifed. Her shoulders are cast back, like they're framed so by iron.
(She is made of obsidian, still, to the crowd. But she is glass inside; she is broken; she is in no more than shards.)
Dior Marini is not an enigma. She is pieces and shards; she had long broken apart. She has her shoulders thrown back, her head tilted up, her eyes gazing down, and that is because how she had been devastated by Mattie's death. She is tired. She is a shell.
But she hears their relentless laughs. their heckles, their roars. Get the Eights, they chant. Get the Eights. Revenge; justice; death. Bring it to us upon a silver chalice.
(It's a classic: the quest for revenge.)
It is what Dior needs. She listens to the cries of the Capitol; to the chants. She hears Mattie's gags, choking on her own blood. And that glass heart melts; and fortifies, into something else.
They will go. They will die. Eight and Seven and Eleven and Six and Five and all of them. She will kill them.
(And the Eights; oh, the Eights especially. Eight girl—that slab of meat that she refuses to call by name—rests in her head. That spark of darkness in her eyes, hyenalike, just like the girl that stabbed at her sister with a pike— a hyena, a flesh-slab that rose too far, that fucking freak of a thing, relishing in her win—)
It is then, when Dior decides: she must triumph.
And all else will die to meet her cause for it. Nothing less; nothing more.
(And it is, as it always is, for Mattie.)
Althea Ivory. District Four.
She is here for the sponsors. That is all. That is what Althea reminds herself as she steps upon the stage, her sapphire-wrought dress swishing by her legs, making a sea out of their waves; from their sonorous songs.
The Capitol is saturnine in their glory. In their ceremonies. In their bedazzlement and their pompous peacocking. Their ruffed up collars had always made them look like glorified birds. And of course—their colours and their palettes are different. But it's still so boring to her: it's the same old monotone that she'd seen back at home. They're just a bombastic District Four victory party, and she'd know. She'd been to a few of those.
(For a while. Till Talon died and there were no more streak victories to show.)
Althea lets a smile wrangle her lips. That is what she'll use to dazzle the Capitol; and as the floodlight ploughs unto her, as the audience's rioting screams steal her ears, as Caesar Flickerman extends his arms wide in a welcome—Althea knows she's done it right.
She strolls towards the sofa that they have out for her; she sits in the middle. Althea turns her gaze onto Flickerman, clasps her fingers together, pretends to look attentive.
He gasps, reels, for a moment. It's positively theatrical. The audience goes quiet with him; and it's only after long that he exudes a sigh, a breath. "Well, would you look at that."
Althea obliges. She stands, and twirls in her dress, and she knows how she looks upon the cameras: a nymph, a sea's child, a succubi. The cheers drown her.
(It sickens her, how they sample her. Names they inscribe; creatures, minnows, mice, none of them violent. But Althea is the goddess of the sea; there is no god by her. She is not a nymph nor succubi; she is murderous, she has a knife. They will see that soon: she will make them. But not now. Not for now.)
Flickerman waves her over after the cheers reach their peak. Althea reseats herself again.
"I think I can speak for the audience when I say that that was positively delightful," he tells her, scoots forward in his chair like he wants to get closer to her. "What do you all say?"
They yell again; a cheer, a scream, a roar, all of it crescendos. Their voices roll over her skin like the crest of a wave. If it were a wave, she would submerge herself in it; she'd let herself go.
But she has necklaces of pearls and all of them fake and hollow—it is not the sea's blessing that wreathes her. She is acting for the artificial.
"The audience has spoken!" Flickerman says. More rapture; more cheers; more fawning; more applause. "And taking the stage: Althea Ivory, everyone!"
Flickerman's eyes sweep across the audience, and then, quietude swamps them all. He turns to her, then.
"Would you start us off with a fun fact about home?"
It's kind of ridiculous, she thinks: this is the Hunger Games, not some trivia party. But the eyes of the audience prick her; not just the audience, but the sponsors, the people with riches, the dozens in the masses that can help her win.
"Well… District Four is delightful," Althea says, easily, and curls her lips on that same word that Flickerman's utilised. "You should see our sky. It's bluer than the most aquatic textiles you have in the Capitol. Our sea, obviously, most often gets the spotlight: but I'd like to highlight our forests. You don't see much mention of the forests—but it's one of the most beautiful parts of Four."
(She keeps it vague; keeps it down; keeps it cliche. Boasting about Four won't rouse anything new in the Capitol citizen's minds; particularly not if they've only known platinum palaces and liquid gold. They've heard the same old.)
A sheet of cheers come forth, anyway.
"And I'm sure there's more reason as to why you love it so much," Flickerman continues, above the murmurs of the audience. "The forests, I mean. There's been… rumours, I've heard, from several of our reputable sources."
A pause. Flickerman turns to the audience with an endearing smile: one that would seem so for the cameras; that would be seen so nationally. But to Althea, he glints, teeth first, in a tusk's white, and the words gnash out, in a predator's breath— "Kani Fairchild."
No.
Not Kani. Not now. Her teeth grit; her fists clench. She wants to strangle Flickerman right there and then. They didn't have to—fuck, they didn't have to…
Questions. They're trying to dig into her heart; they're trying to pry her open; they're trying to lay her bare for the Capitol to devour. They want to rip apart her armour; they want to dress her down. Althea Ivory, self in self, they want her raw.
(These vultures; they want to take it all.)
"None of your business, Caesar," she says, keeps her smile intact, but it's twitching with frothiness that she can't keep down. An ember's erupting in her chest, and she just wants to—
Althea gazes into the crowd. She reminds herself of the audience, no, the sponsors.
All a show.
(It doesn't mean anything, back at home.)
All a farce.
(She'll be ready, when she returns, she'll do it with Kani, the Capitol doesn't matter to them.)
All to win.
(All to get back to home.)
And she strains a smile up. And the plastic explosion of sound douses her ears; they swallow her fully. Althea raises her head and lets herself act like the doll the Capitol want her to act.
But the burning pit in her chest doesn't stop moulding.
Kiernan Alcraiz. District Two.
Blinding. It's so blinding.
Starlight mangles his vision. Then: rapturous roars, clucks of kites, caws of ravens, screeches of sirens. He is overwhelmed. He is—
(So much like Scott, that District 5 boy, last Games. His District had snickered when they'd seen him on-camera: stick-frozen like he had a pick in him already. Panem was there to witness that humiliation; he'd watched him go through the Capitol's denigration; all of Two had harassed that boy's corpse and laughed when he passed.)
(And it'll be the same, for him, because he's made the entirety of Two aghast when he'd crashed the Reapings. By volunteering. And when he dies they'll heckle and they'll chorus and they'll laugh and he will be that boy from Five, jostling in a rickety hearse, ghost-eyed and broken inside, he will be a shame and he'll be blamed, he will be six feet under next to his shell-dead mother, and that phantom of her will decorate her world with his sister's imagination, living in the best of her brain's amalgamations.)
He closes his eyes; he steadies himself. But his feet feel like they're upon the wreckage of planks, hiking with the sea's waves, and he's nauseous, he's uneven. He's Scott, so close to falling, to dying, petrified, gouged by the gaggle of gorgons that glug at any District rat's panicked dance.
But Kiernan's not District. Kiernan is a Career. He is a Career and he is not some slaughterhouse kid, he is not some boy that would die in the Bloodbath, he is not a child, he is old, he knows how the world works, he isn't, he's not, he's not—
"Our preteen volunteer!" Flickerman crows. "Let's make him feel welcome, everybody. Round of applause, all!"
Raucous; rowdy; rancid. That is the Capitol.
Needles prod against his skin. Frostbite swallows his toes. Panic races up his heart. Kiernan Alcraiz, twelve years old, stares at the rest of the world that wants to devour him completely and experiences fucking stage-fright.
"Kiernan. Kiernan. Come here, won't you?"
A tut. A note of sympathy. A wretched expectation. It's so much like he's beckoning a child.
It presses down, squashes his heart like a hydraulic metal press. But Kiernan goes anyway.
(Because anything—anything is better than looking at those gargoyles.)
Flickerman eyes him immediately once Kiernan gets onto his seat. "Alcraiz," he says, gestures at the gargoyles at the seats, "We're familiar with the name."
Oh, of course you are, he wants to scoff out. None of you would let me forget.
"So, it's obvious—your sister's infamous," Flickerman says, his arm sidling on the armrest, like he's trying to get closer to Kiernan, like he's trying to get more comfortable. The rest of the audience stare on, and Kiernan's stomach is queasy. They're hungry for what'll happen next, for Casear's words, for his answer, their tongues darting in their cheeks, like snakes waiting for the nibble of bait.
"I think you're best equipped to tell us, as the sole surviving Alcraiz," Flickerman says, gaze roaming the audience now, and Kiernan's heart grips. (Offhand. So offhand. They didn't even bother to give Maeve's name.)
"Would you tell us, then? Will we be seeing antics like that?"
Antics. A bubble inflates in Kiernan's throat, and he wants to choke it out, he wants to let the laugh resound. Because the Capitol was right on that. Antics were what Maeve had engaged in in the Games. They were antics.
Flickerman's eyes rest on Kiernan's for far too long. Then, he lets out a quick laugh. "An appropriate reaction! It seems like our volunteer here doesn't really remember, either! Do our audience need a reminder?"
There are roars and yells and stomps. A dozen cuckoos rip out their throats in song. A hundred bison stamp their screeches. A chorus of gargoyles cackle.
It's a debacle that they show. Course it starts with the girl from One. (He knows that her name is Madison, but he can't bring himself to give a shit, he can't, he doesn't, girl from One will always fit better— girl who corrupted his sister and girl that was too much a fucking idiot to live and girl who killed herself when she could've won).
And Maeve.
(It is always Maeve that they focus on. There is something mythical about his sister. A gravity that draws the cameras to her; perhaps it is her saint-like hair or her sea-made eyes. Perhaps it is the madness that drives through her expression: manic, unfettered, untenable, untameable. A spark spins through her body and stars frizz from all about her. Perhaps they focus on her because she is so wild; because it is only with the frame of the lens that they could contain her. They would not be able to, otherwise.)
And what flicks on is a scene that has replayed a dozen times before. That smash of two lips; matted in the red light of sirens. Kissing. Razing. Ravaging.
And the Capitol's ecstatic. Yells and cries and cheers. That scene flicks, but what's shown is just the same, just another angle and clearer. And he sits, and watches it all.
(It's uncomfortable. It's something so personal, so… private. Something that's between the two of them; even he can see that. It's like he's intruding. The Capitol's voyeuristic, he knows, and his sister's stupid for doing all that on camera, she'd consented to it being shown, really. But still it shouldn't be shown like that.)
So red. So red it's unreal. Bodies; limbs; for them to feed upon. Flesh; skin; breath—and all of it the Capitol harvests.
(Voyeurs. Voyeurs that leech off schadenfreude, they all are—)
The scene shifts. Kiernan recognises the round-tribute campfire, the smiles, the goodbyes. And at the end there's the flash of Maeve: her spine poking out of her back, a pearl, shining in the redolent moonlight, and his breath catches, it's beautiful, it's ugly, why is it so damn romanticised—
Kiernan wants to throw up. He wants to leave, he's done, he's finished with the interview. He needs to go.
He forces himself to breathe. Inhale, exhale, you're okay. They were antics, that was all— screaming, screaming, screaming as she died. They were antics—fighting to survive, all of them, for a way outside. They were antics—trying to live, they were trying to live, that's all there is, was, to it.
But none of them see him.
"So? What did you think of that?" Flickerman asks, and the audience is eager. They crow; they lurch forwards, like vultures, waiting, watching, needing—
"I think," he says, throat tight, "She deserved a better montage."
(And Kiernan goes, as the Capitol laughs because he can't stand it anymore, but they still don't understand, for they are gargoyles, and he is a child, and they prey upon him; in the darkness of the night.)
A/N: Is the chapter actually on time? Holy crap. That's a surprise!
I managed to proofread this chapter early — and so I got it out early. It went a lot more smoothly than the Training Chapter (which was totally wild when it came to editing, not gonna lie… I'm still not satisfied with it honestly), and I hope you guys liked it too! It was a lot of fun to write. I also am in a dire need to catch up with reviews and if you haven't gotten a response from me, just know that it's coming soon!
Next Chapter: Interlude. Should arrive at your doorstep on the 30th of August. Feel free to drag me to SYOT jail if I don't...
Faster updates? Yup! I honestly am super excited to get us into the Games—our Night Before/Launch chapter should be out on the 2nd of September. I want to be finished with this fic by the end of September/early October—hence the speedier schedule. I can't wait to dive straight in with all of you!
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you thought! What did we think about the ways Dior, Althea, and Kiernan reacted to their respective interviews?