Offcuts
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We know we are doomed,
done for, damned, and still
the light reaches us, falls
on our shoulders even now
'Evening', Dorianne Laux
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The 76th Hunger Games
Victor: Finish Ardell, District 1
He had always possessed a better-than-usual sense of the rules. Not necessarily in the way that makes a follower or a lapdog, though not inherently out of those bounds, either. Merely in the sense that he had a gift for divining exactly where the boundaries were and exactly how far he could push them without incurring consequences. A value-neutral quality until put into use.
That, plus confidence, got him to the final two. For the first Games since the fateful Quarter Quell that ushered in the Mockingjay Rebellion, the Head Gamemaker has been playing it safe. He picked up on that from the start, based at first on the arena, which seemed to be some kind of abandoned airfield. Having seen them on television, as had most of the other tributes, in the context of bombers and hovercrafts laden with soldiers, he had some idea where they were, and some additional idea of the militaristically-themed challenges they might face. The sort that he and the other trainees were prepared for; that the children of the outer districts, still reeling from the traumas of the rebellion, were far less apt to handle gracefully.
Many things exploded, but he was careful where he put his feet. Food was scarce, but District 1 had sponsors. His father had been killed when rebels took his home, brief though the occupation was. He made a point of bringing that up a few times, staring out thoughtfully over the airfield, knowing the heartstrings it would pull. It worked, too, to his credit. He knew his character, and he played to type.
His father had been kind of a dick - his mother certainly thought so, it'd been one hell of a relief, more than anything, when the man got his face blown in - but he didn't bring that up. It didn't serve him, and he was long past caring much.
The flashy girl from District 4 who had taken charge of their alliance died when mutts swarmed out of a menacing sewer grate. She would have been able to kill him in a fair fight, and likely would have, but between a well-placed kick to her knees and the horde of mutated rats, she died fairly easily. His district partner died when a little band of outer-district tributes tried their luck with the trainees. That was just bad fortune for her. Moissa was good company.
It felt justified, killing one, barricading the rest in the aging shell of a plane where they'd made camp and setting the thing on fire. It exploded spectacularly. Jet fuel. Nice.
Not as dumb as the blond hair would suggest, huh?
He was no pushover. Never had been, never would be. Just aware of the limits. No excessive violence he couldn't justify or deny away, nothing to make him a potential risk when he was brought home. All of what he did in the service of that goal: he would go home. He would have the life he deserved, that had been made so much more unreachably difficult to achieve in the tight years following the Mockingjay Rebellion.
The only other person left alive by the end could barely have been called that. She was tall and broad, probably a former rebel, frankly, based on her answers in the interviews. Killing her felt justified, and he was beginning to find that he enjoyed that, far more than the killing itself, which was as neutral as any tool in his hand - feeling justified. Pecora Ramnath, the District 10 girl, put up a good fight.
He just happened to be a little stronger, in the end. Any of his allies could have killed her had they made it as far as he did, but they… well, they didn't. And there he was. Finish Ardell, the first post-Rebellion victor. Bound for a glorious future, never again to be mired in the blood and smoke and confusion of the past.
The Ten girl whispered something about carrying on the revolution as she died. He stabbed her a few extra times, even as the cannon rang out overhead.
In the post-coronation interview, he was asked why he did what he did. He'd never mutilated any other corpses, after all, and it must have raised some concerns.
"A rebel like her killed my father," he said, quite truthfully, averting his eyes.
It was more than enough to assuage the curiosities of the audience, to sate their concerns. But that wasn't why he did it. Watching the life fading from her expression, he realized it was probably the last time for a good long time that he could stab someone and get away with it scot-free.
So why not enjoy it while he could?
He'd always had a knack, after all, for pushing boundaries just far enough.
The 77th Hunger Games
Victor: Neveah Laurence, District 4
In Panem-that-was, he likely would not have volunteered. District 4 was beginning to take disproportionate pride in their ability to select future victors fastidiously and to the highest standard. He'd never liked to sell himself short, but at the same time, that probably wouldn't have been him. Never took it seriously enough. Wasn't inclined to suffer in the pursuit of goodness, let alone perfection.
The people who created the system that in turn created him, however, and in whose estimations he fell short as a volunteer, were all long dead by the time he reached the reaping stage in the town square. No one questioned him when he stood and called out his intentions and bit back an incredulous laugh of delight. The old ways died with them, the old trajectory of District 4 buried in scorched rubble and slowly being subsumed by the sea and the rot of intense, constant humidity.
He treated it like a joke from the beginning, because he'd never cared to learn to treat anything any other way. Hard work didn't pay off the way people had always promised it would, back in District 4. So many victors, so much hard-won progress, all of it blown to hell because a few too many people had tried to pit their lot against the Capitol's. Wasn't that the biggest fucking joke of all?
Now he was the punchline, walking away from the typical volunteer alliance on the first day of training because they were, he felt, a bunch of incurable tightasses, allying instead with a few later-district guys who seemed of a similar mindset. It felt more like summer camp than anything once the bloodbath was done. Some kind of water park arena, pretty stupid, in his view, all multicolored concrete and chlorinated pools he knew not to drink from by the smell alone.
They were a strong alliance, especially since the trainees, exactly as he'd predicted, made a fairly boring group themselves. Playing it safe had worked too well for One, he figured, in the previous Games. Now, both One and Two, trying to emulate that success, went ahead and shot themselves right in the foot with their choices of volunteers. White bread bullshit. Boring.
Neveah was anything but boring, and Hex from Three and Sabal from Eleven were good company until they weren't - one conveniently turned around and tried to stab him in the back, which was an idiot move, because Neveah could have snapped the boy's neck, frankly, if he didn't find killing with his bare hands distasteful. The other outlasted the terms of their alliance by a few minutes, loyal to the end. Both of them seemed to forget that, for all his laid-back approach and cavalier attitude towards the Games themselves, Neveah was a trainee, for fuck's sake.
To be fair, he was the only trainee to make it to the final four, let alone the final two. Maybe they had been right not to take the title seriously. Either way, it was him and some grim girl from District 9 named 'Babylon' of all things. Too stringy for a laborer. Smart, he figured, as he sized her up.
He hadn't taken her seriously in training. And he was happy to engage in equally non-serious and one-sided taunts as she tried to take advantage of an ally-related injury to gut him with a modified marine rescue hook, of all things. Ha!
They dragged the fight out longer than it should have gone. By the time the fight was more or less settled, they were both bleeding liberally and the massive wave-pool into which they'd been driven was clouded red with blood.
He drowned her in the end, which was oddly fitting, since one of his own older sisters had drowned when they were children. He'd been splashing in the shallows. She panicked in a riptide further out, gone before anyone realized. It was as awful as he'd always imagined it must have been. Took such a long time for the girl to stop frothing out crimson bubbles beneath the glassy surface of the water.
But he won, after all.
A few weeks later, he was back to laughing things off. The alternative was sincerity, and after so long in its absence, the shock of exposure to something real might have stopped his heart.
The 78th Hunger Games
Victor: Claudia Navarro, District 2
She was born with blood on her hands. At least, that's what she'd been told. Delivered by a dead woman who had tried to hide her pregnancy on a long Peacekeeping tour of District 11. Maybe it was District 11. She's not totally certain. The Center adopted her, and then it consumed her, and then it spat her out into a revolution. Thirteen years old, too many notches on the butt of her gun to count. Rebel scum.
Frankly, she could take or leave the scum. Didn't care much either way, until she was given the orders to pull the trigger, of course. There but for the grace of god went she, etcetera. Most of them weren't too much older than she was. Just people. Just meat.
But she learned, in the war, that she was fond of war, as a way of understanding the world. And that there was another person in training with her last name, a little younger, who she'd never met. So perhaps she hadn't killed her mother after all. Perhaps she wasn't entirely alone in a world that had become so much bigger upon leaving the underground Training Center for the first time in years, though, of course, for the sole purpose of burning the rest of that big, beautiful world into submission.
It worked. They won. She liked that part, the winning.
Once the Games were reinstated, she knew she'd have to get herself into them, somehow. It wasn't nearly as hard as she'd expected, still a very unregimented and confused process. The Center was left in disarray after half the leadership was wiped out - or, more optimistically, commissioned into political positions to suit the changing world. Not as though a trainee would be privy to staffing decisions.
She was the right choice for the Games.
In the final two, she found herself facing her former ally, a young man from District 4 on the heels of Neveah's triumph the previous year. He was aware that she'd killed many more people than he had. But of course, he didn't know the number any more than she did. She stopped keeping track half a decade prior. The butt of her gun more notch than butt at that point. It was never really a joy.
Tomini was a handsome young man, and he took joy in everything. Thought it would be clever to strike off and leave the trainee alliance within the first few days, taking a page out of Neveah's book, though she learned from his partner that he'd been chasing after some late-district girl he'd found captivating. Well, good plan - she killed the rest of the trainees quickly when they reached the final ten. He would have been among the dead if he'd stuck around. No one expected it of her. All business. Nothing personal about it. Four allies, four throats, four cannons, that simple.
People were just people, after all. Dying just a thing they did rather easily, when they became inconvenient.
All her life she'd seen people trip up by making things too personal. Anger complicated strategy, lost wars, cost battles and dignity with it. So she didn't repeat the mistake.
Running off like a coward seemed to have served Tomini well enough, since he made it to the final two, but she was determined to win on her own terms, to vault straight from victory to the future she envisioned, a glorious one… just one person remained in her way.
He really didn't stand a chance. A creative enough opponent, but badly injured from his time wandering in the iced-over dilapidated cityscape, which had concealed a variety of vicious mutts. The massive white bears, in particular, had mauled him thoroughly in the process of devouring the district girl he found so infatuating. She wasn't uninjured from her own trials, but she wasn't stupid, either. Knew precisely when to fight and when to let things go. He clearly didn't.
People typically used the final matchup to take some kind of stand, make a point, go out in a blaze of glory. She knew it was expected of them - so did Tomini.
But all she had to ask was what had happened to Saye, his District-8-sweetheart, and that was it. He did most of the work for her. Hurled insults along with clumsy spear-thrusts, nothing she couldn't handle easily with a short sword and a clear head. Poor idiot.
It was cruel to drag it out, she knew, but that was just how things were done. She told him what a shame it was that he had joined her in the final two instead of Saye - perhaps she would have won the fight, hadn't she been a little more talented than he was? - and then eviscerated him.
Unkindness had never really brought her joy, but neither had anything but victory. Winning wars, winning Games. She resolved to do more of each before she died, and she smiled for the entirety of the hovercraft ride home.
The 79th Hunger Games
Victor: Cereus Gardner, District 11
He wasn't the first late-district volunteer, but he became the archetype of one. Eighteen, a few minutes away from being free of the reaping forever. But the boy selected looked so young, so hopeless. There were a million reasons, and there were no reasons.
Before he said the words, he threw up his hand and shouted 'wait!', though he never thought of applying his own advice to himself.
And that was it. He was in.
Hubris, or perfectly rational confidence? It was a thin line.
His district partner planned to join him in facing the arena. They were going to make a break for it together, just cut and run from the Cornucopia. Magnolia was younger, but level-headed, accustomed to hard work, and, pivotally, she was with him on what District 11 should represent, how important it was that they be seen for what they really were. Times were different. They had come a long way since the Mockingjay Rebellion. Cereus didn't bear the scars of the Peacekeepers' whips, but his older sister did.
Then she was killed almost immediately. The District 4 girl, with a makeshift spear, in the food court of a massive shopping mall where the Cornucopia jutted from the tile floor. She caught him in the side with a second volley, but he shook it off and ran. By a stroke of luck, he found himself in a nursery stocked with all varieties of plants, some kind of garden shop, slightly overgrown but all of it still usable. He armed himself with a shovel, treated his wounds, fed himself, and waited.
He didn't have to wait long for others to get hungry, the food court largely controlled by the fractious trainee alliance. Most turned tail and ran before getting more than a good look at him, one of them having the utter nerve to knock over a few young tomato plants on the way out. In some ways, the intimidation factor was a godsend. He'd never been the type to seek out a fight, and was determined not to make something terrible of himself, even in the arena.
For District 11, and for Magnolia, too, he would set an example worth following.
A sensible older girl from District 8 struck up a sort of tenuous alliance with him - she looked out for his storefront from her camp in a mannequin display across the hall, with an alarm she could trigger to cause confusion if anyone got too close. He brought her fresh vegetables and swore that at her signal, he'd come running to her aid.
Cereus was nothing if not a man of his word. He meant to keep his promise. And he did, when she finally sounded the alarm - only to find her near-dead by the time he made it out, a torn-up pincushion of the District 4 girl's makeshift spears, from the shafts of wooden mops and brooms.
That was how he learned that the trainee alliance was over, that the Four girl, Scilla, had done something to make it all fall apart, and that the smoke had cleared to find only her and the One girl, Ceramic, alive. It was the two of them who'd flushed out his sort-of-friend.
He didn't cry over her. That wouldn't have been appropriate. But he took the spars of splintered wood from her body, dressed her in fresh clothing from the abundant options on display, and as soon as he looked away, she'd been vanished into the tiles beneath her as if by magic.
And that was that. Now he had a mission, didn't he? In theory, at least. He turned off the alarm and waited, returned to the nursery, and set up, as best he could, a fresh tripwire to alert him when the trainees returned, as he knew they would.
They had taken the Eight girl's vegetables, the ones he'd carried over just that morning, so they must have suspected something to do with the plant shop.
Oddly enough, it was a different pack of competitors who made his life difficult first. A sort of rival band had sprung up in training, the surviving pair from Six and the pair from Nine, of whom only the boy remained. They'd led the two trainees to his friend across the cavernous hallway, and now that her ability to warn him of their arrival was gone, they had a mind to take him out in his sleep.
They certainly tried.
His lack of kills so far in the Games was not the indication of weakness they seemed to think it was. Three scrawny outer-district types against one of him, asleep or not? Hardly a fair fight. While he didn't emerge fully unscathed - in fact, the modified clothing hanger the first girl had stabbed him with would remain in his chest, holding a web of blood vessels together, until the end - he walked away from the ambush.
That much couldn't be said for any of the three assailants.
He spent the rest of the day cleaning up the nursery. The cement floor was scrubbed of blood and tissue by the time the trainees arrived. He was waiting for them, shovel in hand.
Scilla seemed almost surprised that he was still alive. No one immediately struck first. He'd tidied up the nursery, of course, but he couldn't hide the fact that he'd recently been in combat, the three cannons they surely must have heard in quick succession.
Even thinned out, their food-court reserves not having lasted all that long, the two trainees put up far more of a fight than the stragglers from earlier. It ended abruptly when he caved in Ceramic's skull with his shovel. Rather than fight on, Scilla ran.
He was left to clean his wounds, wash away yet more blood, and water his tomatoes. Waiting, again.
It was almost the final two, and she'd have to come back eventually, or else the Gamemakers would have to flush him out. The former proved to be the case, as Scilla reappeared one night after somehow setting most of the arena on fire. Emergency sprinklers on, red emergency lights illuminating the steaming nursery, the flicker of flames just barely held at bay… it was a wildly disorienting final fight.
She got to his shovel before he did, smashed the thing since it was too heavy for her to wield. Kept her distance, having learned better than to get in range of his fists. One makeshift spear to his stomach. Another grazed his neck, spilling blood down his shirt. A third rendering his left arm near-useless, a fourth lodged between his ribs, not quite deep enough to puncture his lung.
That was the one he ripped out of his own body and used to kill her.
Over and over again, the trainee districts killed and burned and savaged the rest of them, only to be rewarded for it. Was it worth it, then, to be crowned on the same stage as the victors who had come before him? To add his name and his district to the ranks of One, Two, and Four?
Yes. Of course it was. The world was changing, and Eleven would have to change too.
He knew that, if nothing else, with complete certainty. And now, as a victor, he had the tools to help them do it.
The 80th Hunger Games
Victor: Sequin Singson, District 1
The eightieth Games were the last that really went the way they were supposed to go, or so most of the trainee mentors had always been convinced. Sequin was an excellent volunteer. She worked hard, had something to prove in a room full of trainees whose parents could buy and sell hers, had they cared about her enough to try.
When she volunteered, it truly was her year.
She'd earned it. Every bit of it.
Faience, her partner, was one of those talented-but-oh-so-vacant types who'd never really struggled for anything more than a sixty-third pull-up on assessment day. She was fond of him, though, and they made a good match, since he managed to muster up some respect for her situation, and she for his. His stories of overbearing parents made her look at her own mother and father with more gratitude than she'd thought possible, whether or not they were home often - they made time for her, never raised a hand to her, never let her feel truly worthless.
So when they saw the arena, it seemed obvious how things were going to play out. Sequin knew cars. It was one of the few things she'd ever done with her parents, her happiest memories streaked black with oil. The deserted strip of highway, raised hundreds of feet above a yawning precipice to either side, littered with abandoned vehicles, might as well have been designed for her specifically.
Even Faience knew it, though they kept it hidden from their allies. Cimber from Two was their biggest competition, even after Faience handled his partner, Olivia, in the bloodbath… easy enough to kneecap her and push her over the edge of the arena to test what kind of force field it was.
Not one of the friendly toss-you-back-all-gentle-like kinds, it turned out.
There wasn't a force field at all. Just jagged rocks, a few hundred feet below.
So it was them, the pair from Four - a girl who was clearly very into it, a boy who wasn't - and the grieving ten-scoring golden boy whose ally they'd already knocked off, literally. Perhaps not the dream team, but not bad, either.
They set about paring down the population of the arena with all the efficiency expected of the trainee alliance, challenged at intervals by overgrown vulture mutts, periodic stampedes of massive cowlike creatures larger than the broken-down cars which came like clockwork when the sun was at its peak overhead, and small legions of squirrel mutts that inhabited the strips of trees to either side of the highway before the steep drop.
The crush of mutts claimed the life of the Four boy when he struggled to get into the car they chose for shelter. Sequin surreptitiously locked the door from the inside, so that couldn't have helped.
It should have been her and Faience in the end, she was certain of it, but the nature of the arena intervened. She had been holding back on her ability with the cars, not wanting to confer too much of an advantage to her formidable allies.
The allied pair from District 3, it turned out, had no such reservations. They had made camp in the fringes of the forested area adjacent to the highway; the Three pair ran them down in the middle of the night, headlights blazing, and Faience was the unlucky casualty.
After that, she pulled herself together fairly quickly; it was on her, now. She made a great show of digging up a bundle of wire she'd retrieved from the Cornucopia and declaring that with it, she could do what the Threes had done, after all. Cimber bought that well enough, more because she was, presumably, as messed-up as he still managed to be over his ally's death.
She wasn't.
In fact, she fiddled with the engine of the car she rendered operational for his use such that he died, too, in a fiery explosion. With hers, she hunted down the Threes, taking out a straggler on her way. Floored it and killed one of them in the crash.
The other, she wanted to make just a little more personal. For Faience, who shouldn't have died like that, never deserved that kind of ignoble end. So the other Three, whose name she never bothered to learn, found herself sliced to ribbons at the tip of Sequin's sword.
She was a mechanic second, a trainee first, after all.
And then, she was District 1's second victor, making them the first district to bring home more than one. The respect she'd earned was everything, and she had no intention of giving back a fraction of her dignity, once she'd clawed her way to personhood, hand over hand.
It didn't last forever, but in the days after her victory, it felt like it could.
The 81st Hunger Games
Victor: Polly Matzeliger, District 3
She'd never been a great student in the ways that mattered. Talented, sure, but too inclined to talk back and too disinclined to follow directions, excessively fond of her own world, her own ideas. Talent mattered in District 3, but not enough to keep her out of trouble.
No one was especially surprised when she fell in with the wrong crowd. It fit the stereotype, the few remaining dregs of the rebel element in District 3 preying on clever school-age outcasts in an effort to claw back power. Mayor Rhodes was always speaking on the importance of flushing such delinquents out.
Most of them were kids her own age, though, and she got to mess with lasers, and it was rewarding enough until the 'jail' part, and then the 'being reaped' part. Which was a shame, because she didn't mind solitary all that much, so long as she had the opportunity to tinker. And she did, under strict supervision. None of that in the arena.
A shame.
She didn't expect to make it past the first day, not after treading on so many toes in training. Lucien Navarro, from Two, allegedly had his sister as a mentor. Someone mentioned as much at the snare-building station, where she was toying with the materials that had kept her predecessors in District 3 alive, wishing for the opportunity to steal a holo-tablet or literally any other piece of equipment worth using.
"Well, hope she taught him how to use a sword, since he seems basically as smart as one," she said carelessly, which should have been the kind of funny throwaway line that made people laugh uncomfortably and recognize that she would be mean as hell if she wanted. But someone heard, and that someone passed on the commentary, and then he was gunning for her, of all things, her - and, well, it was just too idiotic not to comment on it further, right? This square-jawed trainee boy who could probably punch through steel, so bizarrely threatened by her reedy self?
Her interview was one for the history books.
Combined with her generally standoffish affect, and the fact that she sincerely would have preferred death over 'making new friends' in this sort of environment, things looked fairly grim, though at least she felt confident that she would die with the last word.
And then, at some kind of dilapidated beach resort, with fading red shutters on sunken-roofed wooden cottages, greyed out by proximity to the sea, she survived the bloodbath, escaped into a sort of mangrove forest on the fringes and kept her distance for as long as she could.
Not long. Outer-district stragglers kept stumbling into her, and she knew it was only a matter of time before they sent Lucien her way, gave him the chance to finish her off, likely, show the might of the early districts once again, just as they had so many times before.
She was forced to fight for her life a few times, but never in a way she couldn't manage, outsmarting a hoard of click-clicking red crabs that descended from the trees in which she sheltered, running for the ocean rather than the beach. The other tribute sheltering in the forest, with whom she'd made an uneasy truce, the girl from District 6, wasn't quite so clever. The crabs were held at bay by the crashing surf, but also by the smell of blood as they devoured her body beneath an undulating sea of blood-red carapieces.
That was interesting. The fluid dynamics of a swarm of mutts. She wished she'd brought her sketchbook.
For the next few days, she tested the limits of the tree-crabs. How far they would chase her down the beach, how deep into the water they could go when deprived of food, growing hungrier and more aggressive by the day after skeletonizing that unfortunate girl. She created a system of irrigation ditches, slowly, that allowed her to sleep safely at night.
Meanwhile, the trainees did what the trainees always did, sticking mainly to the resort village, which had the benefit of shelter from a few overgrown seahawks that posed a real threat to anyone thinking to make camp without a roof or a canopy overhead. Polly coexisted with the crab-mutts, which kept her safe from the potential for death-from-above.
A loner from Nine tried to take her setup. She only had to cut him once and follow her much-practiced plan to avoid the flood of crabs that ensued, and that problem was eliminated. In high tide, at least, with her ditches overflowing, her setup was impenetrable.
Lucien wasn't as stupid as she'd speculated. Eventually, the trainees having been thinned out by the many mutts, and, she later learned, his complete willingness to kill his own allies, she faced off with him. Low tide. He'd been waiting for it.
It wasn't her and Lucien in the final two, as she'd worried. In some ways, the final three was worse. The only other competitor left alive was some thirteen year old who'd been particularly adept at hiding, a little girl from Five who had grown up on the riverbanks, who'd outlasted more floods in her day than the arena could throw at them. Solana off hiding somewhere, Lucien and Polly facing off on the deserted beach.
What an odd final three. Even she was cognizant of the strangeness of the year… a villain, a loner, and a little girl. She had no idea how anyone running the show wanted anything to go. It felt like a free-for-all. No rules.
She loosed the mutts, slicing her own bicep to wet the sand with blood and bring them into the frey. Soon, there was far more than just a few drops of blood running down her arm. Lucien was a devastatingly talented fighter, and she was armed with a spar of driftwood that had splintered into unusability with his first blow.
Had he not been toying with her, she would have been dead in twenty seconds, even with the sea of little red crabs slicing up their ankles.
So how did she survive?
She could never be completely sure, despite mentally going back to the moment many times over her quiet years as victor. He lost his footing in one of her trenches, which had been deepened and rendered unstable by recent rainfall. The crabs swarmed. She watched. He screamed.
It took an appropriately long time for him to die. She didn't have any intention of expediting the process. Blood ran through the trench, and the surf was stained with it by the time his cannon sounded. Mysteriously, the kill was credited to her and not to the Gamemakers, though she never so much as touched him.
And then it was her and little Solana.
Here, as well, the Gamemakers had her back. They flushed the little girl out of hiding at last by toppling the broken-down beach houses under which she'd been hiding, sent her fleeing Polly's way with sand agitated so that it seemed to take on the properties of a liquid.
Polly won the Games by unhesitatingly killing a terrified child. An armed child, of course, Solana had a knife. But that didn't make it any less…
She'd done things most people would struggle to comprehend. Been a party to horrific mutilations in the last few days alone. But somehow, swinging the spar of driftwood at the little girl was the worst of it. Somehow, it worked. She was a delicate little kid, after all, not the best fed. Twitched a lot.
What was she supposed to do?
There was no beautiful principle behind this death, nothing worth understanding but the sound a person's temple makes as it fractures. How could she live with this? What kind of person was she, that… all this… all this and they didn't even have the presence of mind to put her back in jail. Where she surely belonged.
If she could kill a child like that, she could do anything, and so she did.
And now the pods beneath the Capitol hummed with a power she had given them, with Claudia and Mayor Rhodes to twist her arm, yes. But no one had twisted her arm when she killed Solana. She found it hard to believe that a painless genocide could be any worse. But she also found it hard to get out of bed most mornings.
There was some sense to be made of all that, she supposed.
The 82nd Hunger Games
Victor: Niagara Banerjee, District 5
A normal-ish girl had won the previous year, so she didn't not have a chance, right?
Barely fifteen, though. Long odds, even she had to concede that much. Not stupid, though, and utterly unwilling to count herself out. The trainees were more wary of a mouthy district girl than they had the year previously, after Polly's victory. She found that part delightful.
The youngest of eight siblings, she'd been around the block a bit when it came to getting attention. Walked into training ready to start a fight. Found one immediately; the District 4 girl, Moira, had been reaped with no volunteer to take her place. The trainees were refusing to take her, the poor idiot, barely sixteen and just not able to commit to the kinds of things that the more serious volunteers from One and Two were asking of her.
So it was her and Moira, and then Kune, a wisecracking blond from District 10 who eschewed traditional ideas of gender. It was a fragile alliance, as interdistrict groups tended to be, but they all liked each other by the end of pre-Games, at least a little.
It ended quickly in the bloodbath. The trainees weren't ready to see the events of the past year repeat, and made a point of going after them, as they should have expected. Killed Kune - overkill, really, they were a slip of a thing, no one needed to be stabbed that many times. Nearly killed Niagara.
The dropoff point, though, was next to a massive lake in the middle of a desert, and Moira managed not only to kill her own district partner, but to drag her half-dead ally through the water, billowing blood behind them, a sufficient distance to take some time to recover and heal before the trainees, constrained by land travel, caught up with them.
Once Niagara was back on her feet, she was ready to be proactive again, but Moira wasn't. She was determined, in fact, not to kill anyone else, after the horror of her own partner's blood on her hands. Reluctantly, Niagara yielded to her ally, though most of her compunctions about killing trainees had evaporated after what she'd seen with Kune.
Moira had saved her, and that didn't count for nothing. They fought mutts instead of trainees, for the most part, exploring the desert and relying largely on their sponsors for water. If Niagara could do anything she could hold sponsor attention, especially with someone like Moira to bounce off of - she ribbed her ally mercilessly about her mentor, Neveah, knowing that the crowds would find that sort of talk hilarious, kept their feud with the trainees alive for the audience even as they evaded the hunting parties day after day.
And they didn't do too badly with the mutts, either, combatting, at one point, a thirty-foot snake with a massive… hood?... which proved to be wildly venomous. The fangs, not the hood. Niagara broke one off as a keepsake as they defeated the mutt with their hard-earned knowledge of the terrain, luring it into a narrow cave near the oasis and hacking their way through the long vertebral column when it lodged itself inside.
All the while, Niagara found herself, almost unwillingly, becoming attached to her ally. From District 4, of all places. Moira could give as good as she got, but chose not to, seemingly still grateful to Niagara for initially reaching out in friendship, even though she'd saved her so many times since then, kept her alive even at the expense of her loyalty to her district of birth.
It was admirable, in a way, how Moira could grow to trust someone so quickly. She wanted to deserve that trust. And more often than not, she found herself holding her tongue, trying to make the girl smile rather than going for the cheap laugh, as had always been her impulse.
They had to confront the trainees eventually, though they'd been winnowed down, by the final eight, to the allied pair from Two and the boy from One. Niagara was determined not to force Moira to fight for her again. She spent the better part of the day on a trap, submerging sharp spars of wood retrieved from the thorny trees of a brush forest they encountered, preparing for what she knew was coming.
She hoped Moira wouldn't watch, whether she died or became a killer. Tried to send her away, since it would be for the better, wouldn't it? Final eight?
But no, her ally stayed stubbornly by her side, and together they killed two trainees that evening. One with the serpent mutt's fang in her heart, the other stumbled into the trap, who Niagara tracked down as his blood seized the sand. One more to go. The smarter of the pair from Two, Viben, a boy who'd never seemed as rattled by Niagara's taunts as his partner.
They met him again, after a few more nights, these spent shivering together as the temperature dropped. At least one person simply froze to death. Moira and Niagara held on. The lake, when they returned to it, out of water and short on further sponsors, had dried up to an icy puddle.
Viben showed up for the last of the water, as did their long-dead ally's district partner, Xuyen, an imposing young woman who'd showed next to no interest in them during training. Now, though, she was willing to side with them against the formidable threat posed by the last trainee. Neither Viben nor Xuyen made it out of the fight alive. Niagara found herself, once again, badly injured.
Moira, who had held back, was as healthy as a person could be after three weeks in the desert.
She waited for her ally to finish her off.
Instead, Moira helped her back to her feet, bandaged her wounds, seemed not to hear her as she insisted that people in the final two just weren't allowed to do this, didn't Moira understand? How could she not see that the Games wouldn't be allowed to be a love story, no matter what kind of love was on display?
Where they failed to kill each other, the arena intervened. After a night in each others' arms, the sand came alive as the sun rose. It was not how she'd expected to die, in an unwinnable fight against the desert. They held out as long as they could.
Then Niagara, worse off to begin with, felt her strength beginning to flag.
Moira saw it too.
Driven to the edge of the rocky cliff where they'd killed the snake mutt together, Moira kissed her forehead and jumped as a wave of sand bore down on them.
She spent the rest of her short life as victor trying to deserve the devotion that Moira had offered her. Befriended the wrong people, fought for the wrong causes, and died for it. The lost victor from District 5. From the moment she met that girl, Games or not, she didn't have a chance.
The 83rd Hunger Games
Victor: An Akimoto, District 6
Fairly earned, a training score of three had previously been little more than a death sentence. An wasn't stupid, but she was no District-3-brainiac, either. Just resented the whole thing so thoroughly. The Games were never supposed to happen to someone like her. Her parents gave to charity, for the love of goodness!
To top it all off, she wasn't much of anything. A decent student. A perfectly fine friend, though only her mother had wept over her during their goodbyes.
She was exceptional in one respect: intense, unyielding, directionless anger.
By luck as much as by any of her own skill, she made it over the black ice stretching between herself and the Cornucopia without falling. Grabbed what she could. A blanket - critical. A satchel of protein bars. And a backpack, which seemed promising even though the weight of it nearly kept her from making her escape.
It was loaded, though, with nothing but a massive container of strychnine. Strychnine?
She couldn't very well eat that. Couldn't burn it for warmth. But she lurked near the trainees' camp, as the best water source, a warm mountain spring that sent a crystalline river snaking through the icy forest, was tightly under their control. And she found a way to make use of the poison, and killed three off the bat, cut the throat of a fourth who was clever enough to force herself to vomit with a knife liberated from a still-twitching body.
Not too bad for the little girl with a three.
Most people don't remember that she killed more than those four, though. The pair from Three, after drinking downstream of the slaughter, took ill, but not ill enough to die. Not until she'd joined them, briefly, in an alliance. Cut short by the same knife.
It was a kindness, after all. She knew better than anyone how terrible a death by strychnine could be. A kindness, relatively. They went fast. Their tremors stilled along with their cannons' blasts.
Only the fifth day, and half the deaths were to her name. An avalanche left a straggler from District 5 helpless, both legs broken, struggling to draw breath from a chest framed by shattered ribs. She gave up on the pretense, at this point. Didn't know his name and couldn't find it in her to care. One more down.
Killing didn't make her feel any better, of course, but that was part of the agony of it - waiting for guilt or shame or regret to replace the burning. Only growing hotter.
The girl from District 8 saw her brightly-colored jacket from a distance, offered her an alliance after they were driven together by a herd of massive deer with thorny, jagged growths in place of antlers. An was injured in the stampede, had her leg sliced open, narrowly survived a near-goring.
So she waited a day before she killed Moire, more to recover and sleep with a guard than out of any particular affection. This one wasn't a bloodless kill like the others. Moire, after all, had killed on her own by then, wasn't poisoned, put up a fight. A lighter sleeper than she'd bargained for. Still lost, though. Still died.
By the time she reached the final two, she'd already killed more people than any tribute since the Mockingjay Rebellion, dethroning District 2's Claudia Navarro.
Fittingly, her final competition was her own district partner.
Gavin hadn't paid a second's attention to her in training. He'd acted as though she didn't have a chance. Like everyone else. Him and his stupid seven, so proud of it. Asshole. Clearly, he knew something was different about her. It wasn't just Moire's blood - they were both covered in blood.
Maybe she walked a little different with eight murders under her belt.
He was injured about as badly as she was from his last confrontation, the abrupt conclusion of his alliance with the girl from District 10. Perhaps a little worse off. That wasn't what decided the fight, though.
An didn't like to admit it, but she'd always had a bit of a melodramatic streak. She didn't know much about strychnine, but she knew she was fond of it, by then.
She'd saved a little just for him, on the blade of her knife, wetted with Moire's blood.
It wasn't as long of a fight as they must have been expecting. She didn't let him writhe and spasm for too long. That would have been excessive. Finished things with all her weight behind the knife. Right through his eye.
They didn't know what to think of her back home. Most people, including her family, though they took the money, lived in the house, of course they did… most of them just wanted to move on, to forget it. To forget what she was, and in doing so, to forget about her as much as they could manage.
She didn't mind all that much. To her, the Games seemed to have laid the fabric of Panem quite bare. Not a kind place, not a fair one.
The sort of world where a person like her could win.
Who would want to embrace an awful truth like that?
The 84th Hunger Games
Victor: Saxaul Eslami, District 7
He could list the reasons for volunteering. Number one, he was hungry, literally. A dead dad and a flipped-out mom, and him as the eldest of four, not even part of the predominant religious institution of the district, still just a smidge too young to pick up the kind of work that garnered decent pay. Number two, dear fucking god, he was going to lose his mind if he had to spend another goddamned day in District 7, if he had to hear another goddamned person call him 'Syca', which was not his name. Not who he fucking was anymore.
So out he got. The one way out. And he volunteered as Saxaul, and christened himself in the deluge of attention and options and - god, there was a whole world beyond the fence, and he just wanted to see all of it! Be part of everything! Do something worth doing, even make someone proud, maybe, actually make the world a little better someday instead of slogging around in some paper mill for the rest of his life.
The Games, when all the glamor and ceremony was done, were a rude and abrupt awakening to reality: there would be no pride for him there.
Just as well, not like he left any of that behind at home or, god forbid, tried to carry it along with him. They told him to play, and he put his head down as much as he could and played along. Tapped into years of stifled anger and a true self-preservation streak. Found himself to be quite the actor. Killed a trainee in the bloodbath, on the way out with his district partner, barely-fourteen-year-old Jacara. Not a massive accomplishment. Someone had left an arrow in her, it was more a finishing of the job. But there went the girl from District 2, who had been a favorite to win in pre-Games, and just like that, he was a contender.
He turned seventeen in the Games, had been counting down the days. He and Jacara celebrated with the last of their food, by a little fire to beat back the cold as the tundra iced over. That night, his partner, who had made things tolerable at first, for whose sake he'd been able to excuse the rising guilt of what he'd been made a part of, tried to kill him in his sleep.
So that was two dead people, then. This one scooped up by the hovercraft with still-cooling tears in her eyes from insisting that he should have volunteered for her if he wanted to die so badly. How could he? How could he?
As points go, it was not a high one for him.
That particular abject suffering earned him a brief reprieve as, elsewhere in the arena, the population was winnowed down as the steeply falling temperatures brought a strong late-district alliance into a clash with the trainees that left the two survivors badly injured. He could take the mutts they sent his way, a freakishly overgrown dappled grey-white fox, a flock of owls with razor-sharp talons.
Before they drove him back into conflict with the other tributes, they tried to shoehorn him into another alliance. He was willing to have exactly none of it. Khazal, a lanky butcher's assistant from Ten, had his jacket and much of his ribcage shredded by the owls. Was prepared to beg to share his bedroll and his first-aid kit for the night as temperatures plummeted below zero.
The turnover time from 'feeling the undisclosed knife in the young man's pocket' to 'cutting his throat' alarmed even Saxaul. This time, though, he was determined to stab first and ask questions later. Couldn't take another antemortem conversation like the last one. Just couldn't.
It came down to him, Linalool from District 1, and a young man named Danh from District 9. She came very close to killing him, had about fifty pounds on him, was prepared to hold him down and make it slow. In the howling wind of the blizzard that had rolled in for the finale, she didn't seem to realize that they weren't alone. Not until Danh put a blade through her throat from behind, or rather, overhead.
Khazal's blood was still stiff in his hair, and now he was drenched afresh in Linalool's. Regardless of any favors passed between the two of them, both he and Danh had seen and done far too much by then to turn back.
He was truly just a little faster. Slightly quicker to aim to kill rather than to injure. In better shape, Danh having lost use of an arm in an earlier confrontation with the trainees. That was all it came down to, in the end. Two guys with knives, one of them bleeding out on the tundra, the other kneeling beside him, hesitating, unsure of what to do. No comforting words to offer.
Saxaul was baptized twice, first by a dead name, the second time in blood and his own stunned silence.
The 85th Hunger Games
Victor: Timothy Graham, District 10
No one volunteered for him in the year with the most outer-district volunteers ever recorded. Young and old, in some districts the process dissolving into fist-fights in the aisles. Who could blame them for wanting to be Saxaul?
But none of them was a District 10 boy to take his place, so Timothy bowed his head and took his reaping in stride as best he could. He was no real firebrand. Didn't think his life was shitty enough for the Games to be a real alternative, but close, he supposed. Not like he hadn't thought about it, more as a fantasy than anything. At least it would be a break from his parents, who turned the floor of their home to eggshells whenever they were in it.
He was strong, because the best way to stay out of the house was to work, and his work kept him on a slaughterhouse floor. Some would say equally hellacious; he didn't especially mind it. Work was just work to him. He mopped up blood, cut throats, hauled carcasses. It beat getting caught in his parents' crossfire, for the most part. While he didn't envy his younger siblings, still too young for work, it wasn't like his older sister, Ruth, had ever stepped in to help him out.
Now she was God-only-knew-where, having fucked off as soon as she could tie down a husband, and he was on the stage, preparing to die.
Though he wasn't leaving behind much of a life, he'd never hoped for it to end quite like this.
The bloodbath was utter madness that year. None of them should have made it out alive, really, with so many sincere competitors, so many people there by choice and determined to fight it out. The Gamemakers must have planned for that, because when the gong sounded, the arena, which had seemed for the first minute to be an innocuous sandbar near a rocky shore, grey skies, low waves, suddenly dissolved into a stampede of horse-mutts that seemed to materialize from the water with steel-sharp hooves and wild eyes and gnashing teeth.
He'd always planned to make a run for it. This cemented his convictions, and he ran.
People's death screams sounded different than those of animals. Even with his back to the fighting, he heard more than enough of both to make that judgement. The trainees were nearly wiped out. Half the arena dead. The largest bloodbath on record.
When he picked his way back to the Cornucopia a day later, he found it abandoned, masses of horse carcasses rendering the area quite uninhabitable, the waves still murky red with blood as they lapped at the golden horn. He was able to acquire some supplies that had been abandoned in the fray, and with a heavy knife, easily butchered a few of the mutt corpses and did quite well for himself.
Cooking the meat over a brush fire, he met the first of his competitors, having been careful to avoid making friends in training. The allied pair from District 7 approached, seemingly uncertain about whether they were supposed to kill him or not. He suggested they give it a try, but maybe wait until he finished cooking the meat, since they likely wouldn't be able to handle the cuts as well as he could.
That broke the tension enough to laugh, and somehow he was allied with Lyrata and Bret, two volunteers who'd made it out of the havoc of the previous few days, the population of the arena already down to eleven.
Lyrata was insistent that there was something that could be done with the horse mutts, which returned periodically and seemed to have a taste for the flesh of their own kind. That was how she ultimately died - having constructed an elaborate trap with Timothy's help to lasso one, intending to ply it with the grasses on which they'd seen the mutts graze.
In her excitement at the prospect of taming the feral horse, she missed the one surviving trainee, the boy from District 1, who'd retained a spear and his ability to use it from the confusion at the bloodbath.
He killed the horse first. And then her, almost as an afterthought. Bret and Timothy had kept their distance while she attempted to calm the mutt, Timothy's wheelhouse being 'killing livestock' rather than 'domesticating livestock'. They were too late to save her, too late to catch the boy - Bezel - as he retreated.
Timothy had never been especially strong-willed, and Bret, spurred on by strategic gifts from Saxaul and what must have been a particularly profound mentor-mentee relationship, took over entirely from there with his feverish quest for revenge.
They weren't so much 'together' as Timothy was brought along in tow. While Bret didn't seem to mind killing everyone they encountered, anyone interfering - implicitly, by their sheer existence - with a matchup with Bezel, he didn't seem to have any interest in harming his ally, either. Timothy was profoundly uncomfortable with the whole thing. Considered making a break for it after Bret killed a boy who must have been barely fourteen who was just hungry, for the love of God, they could have fed him but he killed him.
But if he wasn't proactive enough to volunteer, he certainly didn't have the gumption needed to walk out on an ally, and so he stayed, and waded through the blood that Bret shed until they reached Bezel in the final three. Two against one.
He wasn't as useful in the final fight as Bret must have hoped, keeping him around for so long. He'd never killed anyone, after all, this was so different from the slaughterhouse floor, this was a person, even if it was a person that his ally was convinced was something less than human.
Covered in blood, after all, it was so hard to tell the two young men apart.
Timothy would never be completely sure why he won, of the three of them. It felt a little like a mistake. Like surely Bezel's last eviscerating strike was meant for him, like there was no way Bret's knife, mid-fall, should have been allowed to sever an artery in his hated opponent's thigh. He was in the thick of it, after all. Shouldn't the Capitol have preferred a more charismatic victor?
Well, they'd have had to resurrect one if they wanted someone other than him. And they didn't.
He was the first of the victors since the Mockingjay Rebellion to win, drenched in blood, yes, but with none of it on his hands. His first and only kill, should he ever work up the courage to do it - unlikely - would be himself.
Not yet. But maybe someday.
The 86th Hunger Games
Victor: Aaron Stenberg, District 2
District 2's Center was never the best place for a truly good kid. Most of those bled out on the mat during culling matches or were quickly and quietly funneled to the Peacekeeping force before they could make fools of themselves. He wasn't the best, but he wasn't the worst, either, at least as that kind of 'goodness' went.
He had friends, after all, which was unique in the Center, even if some of his willingness to take that risk came from a confidence that, if need be, he could beat anyone in a match. Beat them he did. All of them, until the volunteer slot was his. Acquaintances, boyfriends, it didn't really matter, even though it did. Claudia thought that he was special, and there was nothing more important than her continuing to think that.
Anyone who'd experienced the Center would understand - her approval, her special attention, it just wasn't something you relinquished lightly. It was life or death in the culling matches. She might as well have been a deity of some sort, for all anyone was free of her power.
Aaron wasn't an exception, even with a life that extended outside of the Center's grip. The other planned volunteer had a twin brother, Luca, not in training but familiar enough with the whole process that nothing Aaron said could surprise him. He probably heard worse from Julia, after all. Things were good. He'd found a kind of happiness. He had something to lose. Claudia knew that all too well.
But life was pretty perfect, and he believed before anything that it would be even more perfect when he made it home from the Games, untouchable and exalted and everything he had always said he'd someday be. Well, him or Julia, but he was willing to gamble on its being him, their good-natured camaraderie concealing the truth they both understood in a way that Luca never truly could. One of them would die, and that was how it had to be. Claudia had taught them well. Prepared them - this would be their year.
Julia had style in a way that he didn't, but Aaron had perhaps just a little more natural talent, especially with negotiating alliances. None of that mattered once the trainee alliance fractured along district lines before the Games even began, the pair from District 1, Treasure and Ora, just too goddamned personality-having to really mesh. An amiable enough split, but a disappointment to Aaron.
As a pair, they got along fine, racking up kills at the bloodbath as they encountered, to their delight, a massive mountain encased in an enormous forcefield, a tremendous advantage for a pair of Twos with great familiarity with the terrain.
Meanwhile, a loner from District 11 named Loblolly established herself as the one to beat, methodically wiping out the competition one by one with fancy-looking sponsor gifts, a few times evading him and Julia, perhaps aware that she wouldn't be the one to come out of that alive. Managed to kill off Treasure, though, at some point. He definitely high-fived Julia when they saw that particular face in the sky, one true competitor down, one step closer to home.
Tragedy, or rather, Loblolly struck before they could really get around to resting on their laurels. She caught Julia while she was on guard, late in her shift, having concealed herself expertly in a stand of trees that bore inedible fruit. He lost his partner in a few seconds to a sword in her stomach. Woke up just a little too late to save her, or even to say goodbye, but not too late to tear Loblolly limb from limb.
Earlier they had ribbed each other endlessly about which of them would comfort Luca after the other's death. Well, now he knew for sure. And Claudia certainly knew as well, because he began to receive gifts from a code in loaves of bread they had devised, based on the code that the victors had used during the 75th, to prepare for their rebellious escape. These loaves gave him specific instructions.
The first was to kill indiscriminately, to be done holding back.
With Loblolly's death, they had reached the final seven; she didn't need to tell him twice. Attacked by a mountain lion mutt, he shook it off immediately. The allied pair from Seven made the mistake of getting in his way. What he did to them was almost worse than what he did to Loblolly. Nothing distasteful, but so much blood, barely anything left for the hovercraft.
He could feel himself losing his grip. Claudia had to remind him to eat and drink with the loaves, or he might have starved. It was all so sick, so…
But so much more important, now that he understood, now that it was all on him. She might as well have been whispering in his ear in the night, Claudia's voice indistinguishable from his memories of Julia. Telling him what to do next. That was new, the hearing-voices. He didn't try to fight it, didn't question it. Just killed anyone he encountered. Felt his connection to anything real fraying. Wondered what Luca thought of all this.
Held on, just for him.
Finally, it was him and Ora, though his former ally was badly injured, desperate and fragmenting after the loss of her own partner. His demeanor must have been positively stoic in comparison; realizing how badly off he could be, he managed to rein himself in. To speak with her, though his voice was rusty with disuse.
Once he'd fought his way through the worst of it, of course. It was at the point of his spear that he asked her who had killed Treasure, who's name she had been repeating feverishly throughout their confrontation. As he killed her, quickly, mercifully, in contrast with all the others, he told her that he'd been the one to kill Loblolly, about Julia, about all of it… so close to spilling out the tumult of emotions, though he managed to hold them back as she choked out a thank you with her dying breath.
He shed a tear over her body as the anthem played in a way he couldn't for Julia. The Gamemakers wouldn't let him, had to rip her away and throw a mutt at him for distraction.
They had joked about him comforting Luca, but he never did. Couldn't look at him, at first, and then couldn't bear the thought of what Claudia would do to him if he failed her.
It was a hollow victory. They usually were, for the trainees of District 2. He understood that, now, why the Center had taken so much away from him already by the time he volunteered, so many friends, so many loves, so much of what he cared about.
They were preparing him for victory.
To Claudia's credit, it had worked.
The 87th Hunger Games
Victor: Sharon Munhoz, District 11
Cereus had long dreamed of a pair of volunteers every year in Eleven, an end to the uncertainty of the reaping, envious of the security with which the youths of the trainee districts went about their lives, confident, for good reason, that they would never be torn away for a day of bad luck.
Sharon had a day of bad luck. Her partner volunteered, but her smile was all fake. Appearances mattered, she knew that much, but she also knew that her odds weren't ideal. Cereus, to his credit, did not play favorites, despite having apparently worked with Aloe for years prior. His chief concern was that they both maximize their chances of bringing home the crown.
That - living through the Games - was a plan she could get behind.
He pulled some strings, though not too many. She'd scored an eight, after all, that was nothing to look down one's nose at. But it wouldn't have guaranteed her a spot in the trainee alliance had Cereus not leveraged some kind of friendship with the mentor from District 2.
It was persistently difficult not to loathe the trainees, even once she was technically with them, as they were technically her allies. She gave it a real try, though, and succeeded in actually liking the boy from District 2, whose name was Elex and who seemed almost as done with the whole situation as she was. He had an easy sense of humor that matched her own, and as they entered the arena, a dense and unyielding jungle, they fought back to back in the bloodbath while she claimed her first kill, a loudmouthed older girl from District 6 who'd given her a particularly hard time in training over her allegiances. In doing so, she cemented her place in the pack. They talked it out afterwards, this time face-to-face. He told her about the culling matches they did in District 2, about being forced to kill his friends, how, perversely, after that, the Games seemed almost easy. At least no one was breathing down his neck, here. Bizarrely, she found herself comforting him.
She would have fit in more easily if the pair from District 1 weren't so relentlessly skeptical of her. The girl from District 4, Epaulette, was killed by some kind of shadowlike panther mutt in the night while she was on guard, but what was she supposed to do about that? It was invisible! That was the point of the mutt - and didn't she raise the alarm before Epaulette so much as screamed?
It was an unbelievably uncomfortable position to occupy, and the fact that he was more-or-less the only person being decent to her made her like Elex all the more, which was even itself even more uncomfortable, somehow.
Especially once they banded together to hunt about a week and a half in, a few kills already under their collective belts, and came upon Aloe, of all people. He could move about in the trees in a way they couldn't, managed to evade them without so much as a glance at Sharon, but Anneal from District 1 was growing ever more suspicious.
She was even more so after she'd lost her partner, Doublet, this time when the alliance had gone head to head with the allied pair from Ten, unusually formidable this year. Still bound home in pine boxes, though they'd done more damage than anyone had expected.
Sharon was left to wonder how long she could keep things up in the alliance until Anneal finally had enough of her. That moment seemed to draw closer every day, and the trainee alliance was set to expire at the final eight.
And then it happened. Like anyone else, Sharon had to sleep. She woke to a blade on her throat, foiled what should have been a quick and easy execution by struggling even as the cold steel sunk into her neck, no no no she had to get home, no! She hadn't killed those people for nothing!
Of course she hadn't.
Elex lifted Anneal off her bodily, as he would have hauled a misbehaving cat away from a beloved houseplant. Sharon didn't need to be told to kill her, wrenched the still-slick knife away from Anneal as she struggled and put it between her ribs, just like she'd learned in training.
All that, and he'd still valued her over another trainee, still chosen to save her. Final nine, the trainee alliance down to her, Elex, and the quiet boy from District 4 who'd never really shaken off the bad leg wound incurred in the same fight that had seen the One boy dead. It would have been almost pleasant, in a 'denial' sort of way, had they not encountered Aloe again just two days later.
Elex threw his spear, finally managed to knock him out of the canopy. Her district partner lay, prone, bleeding, skewered on the jungle floor, and her ally grinned back at her, nodded her forward encouragingly - she had paid lip service to wanting to kill Aloe, after all, but she'd just been trying to get Anneal off her case, how could he not understand that...
She stabbed Elex in the back, literally. Didn't wait to see him die before she killed the boy from District 4, too, his cannon sounding before any others. And now she had two dying boys before her. Who to comfort? Who to aid?
Aloe's neck was broken. She knelt beside him as he choked to death, helpless. Repositioned his head just slightly, helped him get his last goodbyes out. District loyalty, it turned out, ran deep. He died in her arms. Elex bled out somewhere behind her, alone. She wept over a different body.
Somehow, she managed to pull herself together for a showdown with an unknown quantity, a shrewd loner from District 6 who'd been stalking the trainees throughout the Games. Entirely without their knowledge. He struck a day later, once she was about to drop from exhaustion. Final two.
He'd seen everything. Knew everything about her, about all of them. Tried to convince her that Elex had loved her, that she was something even less than worthless for having…
For a minute, she let him pretend the gambit was working.
Then she killed him, far more savagely than she had anyone else thus far. She didn't give a shit about the growing pile of dead men in her wake, they were dead, they were free of all this, they'd be fine.
God fucking damn it, she wanted to go home.
And she did. Cried in Cereus' arms until she had nothing left, then dried her eyes for good. Moved on to other things. The world opened up to a victor willing to do what needed to be done, and Sharon had never forgotten that her allegiance was to District 11, first and only.
The 88th Hunger Games
Victor: Corsage Perrier, District 1
It was never really a question of whether he was a good person. He'd always known he wasn't. Good people didn't want to do the things he did. And he knew what a bad person looked like, too, because his family was full of them.
Unfortunately for almost everyone, he was a quick learner.
From the beginning, he couldn't do anything right by Sequin's standards. Everything was too 'excessive', every idea he proposed, often as jokes, too 'disgusting' - as though she knew what the Capitol wanted, when One hadn't had a new victor in nearly a decade. Finish was mostly absent, but he did come through at the last second, get Corsage into the volunteer position, inadvertently sparing his family what he'd been planning to do to them if he truly had no way out.
Sequin was furious. That made it a lot more fun, even though Finish seemed to want little to do with him. When he finally cornered the older man to demand that he tell him why he'd so thoroughly gone to bat for someone he wouldn't even speak to, Finish smiled, drained his glass of wine, and told Corsage that he was curious to see what would happen.
He resolved, then and there, to give Finish a show to make all the trouble worth his while.
And he did.
Things no one had thought to do in the arena, no one believed they would get away with… he gave it a try, knowing that Sequin surely had no intention of letting him leave the Games as victor, so why not try it all… everything he'd ever wanted to do? His district partner, Star, ever the level-headed good-girl, grew progressively more horrified with him, but suffered too adamantly from loyalty, the worst of vices, to walk away or put him down.
They'd grown up together, after all, everyone in the District 1 Center. This side of him was new to her. He'd hid it well. Didn't bother hiding anything from the District 11 girl, the District 5 girl, the District 10 girl, their ally from Two, even, when she seemed to be getting big ideas about ducking out of the alliance early.
He waited for the divine to intervene and strike him down. It would feel like vindication when they did, surely. He waited, waited, waited for an intervention that would never come.
Well, eventually a pack of mutt hyenas did intervene, in the final six, when Star had finally had enough of him. Funny to think that her continued allegiance had been keeping him alive all that time. The overgrown dogs had a go at tearing into him, and he thought, finally, this is it, finally it's all over. He'd expected to die violently all his life. Anyone raised by his particular parents would see that as an eminently viable option.
But then, Star, that loyal goddamned idiot, had to come back and intervene. She saved his life, and he found himself abruptly furious - did she not get how this was supposed to work? Did she sincerely think she was that much better than him? That had to be it - she'd always thought she was so much fucking better than him.
Surrounded by piles of bleeding carcasses, both of them badly injured, he showed her just how fucking right she'd been. And then it was final five, not six.
If what he'd already done wasn't enough, then what would be? He'd just have to try harder, and so he did. By the final three - him and the allied pair from Eight, oddly enough - he could almost match An in terms of body count. And then he killed the both of them, too, starting with the girl, of course, having broken her partner's arms and legs so he couldn't stop him.
At some point, it all started to blend together. All the blood and all the screaming.
Not that there'd been any more of that, since he won. He woke up with a chip in his brain and Sequin out for fucking blood, kept on a tight leash - he figured out the limits to what he could do pretty quickly, but pressed at them relentlessly, pressed past them until it bled, as he'd always done.
Funny how everyone who'd created him was so quick to disown him once he actually did what he'd always been very clear about wanting to do.
Even Finish. Even his fucking family.
He just thought it was kind of funny, and someday, he was going to figure out a way around the stupid chip and kill every last one of them. Just had to bide his time until then. And he would.
While he was never an especially patient man, for this, at least, he could wait forever.
The 89th Hunger Games
Victor: Cora Davis, District 2
She would prefer not to think about her Games. Most of the memories are too foggy, anyway, for the exercise to be of more use than watching one of the cuts. People on the internet seem to remember more of the specifics of what she did than she does, and in some ways she's grateful for that, because it was terrible. She was terrible. She knows, intellectually, that she is capable of terrible things.
There are excuses she could make; a cruel and manipulative mentor, absent parents, unrestricted access to opioid analgesics throughout her childhood. She tries not to. Healing requires an acceptance that something fixable was wrong in the first place. The only thing she can fix is herself.
For the most part, she'd prefer to look forward. Lately, though, the finale of the Games has been looming over the dashboard. Marina believes this is the way to heal the country from the Games, to ensure they don't slip back into the fabric of everyday life. She has the numbers, as Marina always does, the research and the schematics and the focus groups to back it up.
This should do it, settle it for the generations to come.
One more Games.
Greater and more terrible than ever before.
She's not sure if she buys that. Saxaul certainly doesn't, but she's torn between two of the people she trusts most in the world, here, people who built her up from nothing. Because of Marina, she can walk into work every morning in a pair of rough calico scrubs and heal people, really do something with her own two hands, really be something other than a murderer, other than what Claudia made her, other than what she allowed herself to be made.
Spending half her life knitting flesh back together, it's stomach-churning to remember that she'll be forced to be a part of it again. All over again. So soon. Just a year to go before they'll have to do what she did or die. Or both. Both is always a spicy option.
For the moment, she ignores the oncoming finale as best she can, which is a coward's way out, she knows, the opposite of what Saxaul is doing, having fought it every step of the way. She can't bring herself to fight anymore. She made a promise to herself that she would never kill another person. And here she is, so desperate not to be a part of killing, yet fundamentally unable to stop it.
How is it possible that they're all so utterly helpless? The victors, the most powerful people in the country, in theory - they fuel the machine, in their way, and it grinds on around them endlessly.
The past three years have been so much healing. But not enough.
Maybe Saxaul is right and Panem is rotted from the inside out.
She can't be sure of that, but if he's right, well… she's a trauma nurse, now, and she's treated gangrene before. Right now, the closest thing she has to a shred of power in all of this, the same as the rest of the victors, is mentorship, though she's in the unique position of never having done that before, an amateur in a cast of experts.
Whoever her tributes will be, she'll do her best to do right by them.
But she'll miss the certainty and the routine of the hospital, where, at the very least, she knows when a choice was the right one. There are rules, and patterns, and clearly desirable outcomes. The patient wakes up, the baby gasps her first breath, the lesions disappear from the arthritic's joints.
As far as she can gather, Marina's buoyant confidence notwithstanding, no one's completely sure what's going to happen with these Games. Even Herodotus can only give them apologetic platitudes; he doesn't know, himself, every part of these Games he's supposed to be making. Marina is pulling the strings, like usual, and as is typical of her, she's keeping most of it close to the vest.
Greater and more terrible, though.
A Games to end all Games.
As all the victors must, she wonders what could be worse than what happened to her, what she did, what she has to live with.
They'll all find out soon enough.
x
Meet your mentors! As you submit tributes, moving forward, be aware that one of these stellar young people will be 'randomly' assigned to mentor each district, including those without victors, in accordance with this list (which will also be posted on my profile). We'll elaborate on why and how in the next chapter.
District 1 - Timothy
District 2 - Claudia
District 3 - Neveah
District 4 - Saxaul
District 5 - Corsage
District 6 - Cora
District 7 - An
District 8 - Aaron
District 9 - Polly
District 10 - Sharon
District 11 - Sequin
The Capitol - Cereus
Particularly if you've read Memento Mori, where all of them get a lot of screen time, as they will in this work, you may be interested in submitting to specific districts based on this information. Additionally, particularly when you're submitting to districts that have been more fleshed-out in canon (such as the trainee districts), this chapter may prove helpful. I'm still looking for tributes very flexibly across the board, and I hope that if you're interested you'll send some my way!
Additionally, I should have mentioned this earlier, but if you're new to the universe I highly encourage you to read the first chapter of Memento Mori, which establishes the 'givens' of the universe in relation to canon. Thanks for all the submissions so far!