Pro Patria Mori

by Sukkar

"There will be no reaping for the final Games. Twenty-four tributes, two from each district and two representing the Capitol, will compete. The search for these young men and women begins today - every contestant in the final Games will be entered voluntarily." These are the 90th Hunger Games, the grand finale.

3. Sweet Kid

Sweet Kid

x

I don't need the world to see
That I've been the best I can be, but
I don't think I could stand to be
Where you don't see me

'Francis Forever', Mitski Miyawaki

x

Marina Trevino-Snow, The Capitol (The 72nd Hunger Games)

"Me molesta la escuela!" she began, immediately upon pushing past the front door of her parents' apartment, not noticing the peculiarity that it was unlocked. "Papa! Wait until you hear… you're going to be so mad, my teacher is the worst, I'm going to drop out and join the circus!"

It was not an idle threat. Her father had taken her to a travelling circus not too long ago and she'd been captivated. The gowns, the glitter, the endless sound and motion and light and music. And it had been just the two of them, which made it better. She could relax with her father, while most of the time she spent in front of her mother felt like she was auditioning for something far more high-stakes than tightrope walking or trapeze artistry.

With a satisfyingly heavy noise, she briefly dropped her book bag by the shoe hutch.

"Enojadísima estoy yo!" she declared crossly, glancing around the living room and waiting for her father to walk out, ruffle her hair, ask what had happened to bother her so profoundly.

It had been the first day of classes in her new school. She was ten, and accustomed to her old school, where things has been done a certain way. Now she was stuffed into an uncomfortable uniform, surrounded by people who didn't know her, a teacher who stopped on her name and stuttered, then treated her weirdly all day.

A quintessential overachiever, Marina didn't appreciate being coddled in the slightest, had been looking forward to impressing her teacher with her ability to sign her name in cursive and with the writing skills her father, a university professor, had been helping her to work on in the time they spent together at home. She was a good writer. Her dad said so, but how was she going to prove that to anyone else if her stupid teacher didn't write a single red mark on her short essay and got too nervous to call on her in class?

"Papa!" she called again, frowning, having expected to find him in the kitchen or in his study off the front room.

"In the dining room, querida," her father called, and she let out the anxious breath she'd been holding upon hearing his voice, though he sounded…

"Papa?" she asked, dragging her heavy book bag into the dining room in the back of the apartment, frowning at the odd smell. "Are you baking something?"

Like flowers, sort of, with an undercurrent of…

Her father was a tall man, broad-shouldered, had a kind of imposing presence uncommon to a career academic until he smiled. But seated at their dining room table, the afternoon light filtering in through the fancy lace curtains of the house that had been theirs for the last few months, he looked… smaller than usual.

That wasn't the first cue that something was wrong, but it was the first that she consciously observed.

Across the table from her father, hidden until she stepped into the room, sat a man she'd only ever seen in family photos, whose name she only knew from her parents' tense conversations and muffled arguments overheard through their bedroom door. Well, outside of his face on banners, at parades, ubiquitously on the television, in her history books...

Those fights, in which his name came up, had grown more common lately. She figured it had something to do with her moving schools yet again, why they never stayed in one house for too long, her father's troubles at the university, his increasing paranoia that they were under observation, no matter how her mother tried to argue that surely her father would do no such thing.

Well, he was certainly doing something.

"Marina, is it?" her grandfather said kindly, smiling, she thought, quite sincerely.

But at the same time, more the way someone might smile at the antics of a prized show dog than, particularly, the way a grandfather smiles at a child.

She set her bag down, glancing worriedly from her father to the President of Panem and back again.

"Where's mama?" she asked.

"I love you, Marina," her father said, quietly but with a deeply unsettling urgency to his voice.

Now, she was well and truly worried, clamping her mouth shut and trying not to make eye contact with her grandfather. Nothing about his stature should have been terrifying. He was… well, it would have been rude to call him 'withered', right?

"You'll be joining your mother very soon," the President told her, still with a kind of mild, conversational tone.

"And where is Thalia?" her father demanded. "You can't -"

"Mr. Trevino, with utmost respect, we're well past debating the nuances of what I can and cannot do. I could have brought Peacekeepers with me - very honorably, I think, I chose not to, given your seditious past. Well, our pasts have a way of clinging to our present. I can't imagine you're much a fan of the armed forces."

"My wife -"

"Not for much longer. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the necessary papers have been filed. I'm just here to have a chat, you understand, to ensure we're on the same page about how this divorce will be proceeding, given the implications for family finances, Thalia being my legal heir."

Her father raked his hand through his hair, watching her, not her grandfather, with an emotion she'd never seen him wear before. She wanted nothing more than to run away, but felt transfixed by the situation, horribly, as she would have been watching two trains bound on a collision course. Unable to intervene, unable to do anything to stop what must be a disaster in motion, she knew these words, what they meant, but couldn't fathom why he looked so scared…

"I don't want your money," her father said, finally, tearing his eyes away from her and squaring his shoulders. "But you can't have Marina. I don't know where Thalia's head is at, running back to you, with everything I know… keep your filthy money, but leave my daughter out of it."

"Yes, custody will be an interesting question. You might begin preparing yourself for a verdict you don't quite like, Mr. Trevino. After all, it would be a shame to see a promising young lady like Marina raised in the household of someone with so many… skeletons in the closet. I've respected Thalia's wishes, thus far, but conveniently enough, she now wishes to return to my home, and for dear Marina to join us. I think that's very reasonable of her. Rather more reasonable than I thought within her capability, to be frank."

He smiled indulgently, as though he expected her father to join in, somehow. Of course, he didn't, wouldn't use that kind of tone to talk about her mother, definitely not in front of her. She frowned.

While she'd learned in school that the President had near-infinite power, that it was immoral to question it, that his position was ordained by his superior sensibilities and that sedition was tantamount to blasphemy, well… she was the President's granddaughter, even if there was something going on with her father that he couldn't… speak his mind, in his own house.

So if he could just march in like he owned the place, didn't it make sense that she could say what she wanted to say? Being related and all?

"Excuse me," she interrupted, before her father could speak again. "I think you're being really rude."

That was how her father chided her when she was snippy with Philoten, who she was always forced to spend time with at fancy events, and probably how he would have responded when she came home complaining about her awful teacher, so the criticism was fresh in her mind and she felt very justified in delivering it, crossing her arms and glancing, just slightly, up at her father to see if he was approving, maybe smiling…

All of the blood seemed to have drained from his face. Pure fear, the kind that made her chest feel cold and hollow, like her heart had sunk down to her knees all at once.

It was her grandfather who was smiling, now, just a little too wide and cold to be a real expression.

"Do you, my dear?" he said.

Well, she was in too deep to stop now, wasn't she? If she eased off, if her father stepped in, that would be… that would have to make things worse. So she forged ahead.

"...yeah. This isn't even your house, I don't even know you."

"A nice contrast with Herodotus," her grandfather observed, and she frowned, recognizing her cousin's name.

"What about Hero?" she asked, feeling her forehead pinch even further into the frown.

"Eight is early to make a verdict on a child's spinelessness, but I find I'm usually right about these sorts of things," he sighed.

"Please," her father said, his voice coming out sort of pinched, like his throat was closing up.

Her grandfather quirked up an eyebrow, waiting for him to elaborate.

"...don't take her."

"I'm not going to take her anywhere. Do I look like a kidnapper to you, Mr. Trevino? Quite an insult. No, but what a shame that I hadn't met my only granddaughter, and now with Thalia being so accommodating…"

The older man trailed off, watching Marina thoughtfully.

"Well, you met me!" she interjected, very awkward about everything going on, wishing her father would stop looking so grey and fearful, nervous that she'd said the wrong thing about her cousin and gotten somebody in trouble.

This really did feel like trouble, and she didn't like that one bit.

"Certainly. Marina, dearest, I have a small gift for you. It's very useful, not just an ornament."

He produced a little velvet box, offered it to her. She looked back at her father, then at him, waiting for someone to tell her what to do.

No one did. Her father wouldn't meet her eyes.

She opened the little box, to find a miraculous little pin, gold, with a carved emerald leaf and red petals made of glimmering red stones. It was probably the most beautiful thing that she'd ever seen.

"As I mentioned, it's a useful trinket," he explained, kindly, now, leaning in to take the pin and affix it to the lapel of her uniform with oddly slender, too-smooth fingers, not uncommon in the Capitol but unfamiliar to her.

So close, the smell of flowers was overpowering, and she could almost make out something sharp and metallic in the background.

"What does it do?" she asked, tucking her chin in so that she could look down at the sparkling pin.

"Many things. But most importantly, if you twist the head of the rose, you'll put a call through to your mother and myself. Should you ever need help. And it's our family crest. You'd do well to get used to wearing such things."

She nodded, reaching up and rolling the gold stem between her fingers.

"Ah, thank you," she said, unable to suppress the manners with which she'd been brought up, and surprised by the beautiful little gift. "It's really nice, thanks, um, Mr. President."

"Grandfather will do just fine," he said kindly, and she almost believed the kindness, for the moment.

Would have completely, really - it was such a lovely gift - were it not for her father's expression, the way he seemed to have aged five years since that morning, sitting across from her grandfather at their long dining room table.

"Thank you, grandfather," she said quickly, stepping back and offering him a little bow, hoping this would all be over soon, that the tension and the chill of the room might abate along with the smell of flowers and blood once he left the room.

He stood, easily for a man whose appearance conveyed such age, and offered her a little nod, something approaching the conventional bow himself. Which made her frown all over again, since it was unconventional enough for an adult to bow to a child, but the President to a ten year old, when she'd spent the whole day planning how best to whine to her father about how much she hated her teacher?

It was all very wrong, but in such an oddly flattering way.

And the chill didn't leave the house, after her father exchanged a few more quiet words with her grandfather in the hall. Once the door had closed and most of the floral smell had wafted out, her father returned to the dining room and held her to him in a crushing embrace, like he was terrified that she would be torn away.

She tugged on his sleeve and repeated the concerns of the day, hoping to get his mind on something else, that ridiculous Mrs. Stallings and how she'd completely known the year of the final triumph over the rebels and also basically everything about the history of that time period, since he studied it, after all, but she never got to say a word since every time Mrs. Stallings looked at her she made a face, and wasn't that awful? If this was the first day of school, how was she possibly going to get through two hundred more days of this before she got to move up a grade level and have another teacher?

But he didn't reply with the expected laughter, admonishment, advice about how to turn every day into a learning experience, reminder about how to learn things from people even when they were saying things you already knew.

He always had the answers, but now, it seemed, he had forgotten them.

After an almost uncomfortably long silence, he poured himself a glass of wine. Then another. Reminded her to get her homework in order, as an afterthought. That was the most shocking part of it, he always wanted to see her finish quickly, so they could spend the rest of the night going over her answers, he cared so much about school.

"I don't know what's happening, Marina," he said quietly, over an unusually simple meal.

"Is mama coming -"

"No."

"But she -"

"I'm sorry, querida."

He was. She could tell he was.

School was unpleasant, but she made do, as she always did. She'd never made friends easily. Her father used to joke about her high standards. Lately, he stopped joking about almost anything.

Her mother called in one night to let them know that movers would be coming by to take her things. He barely reacted, just poured himself more wine. Marina's room was untouched, but the room her parents had shared was nearly stripped bare.

She wondered how everything had gone wrong so quickly.

It must have had something to do with the new school, she decided. They'd fought over the uniform, whether it was appropriate to send her in on the first day with ankle socks instead of knee socks, as the requirements stated. Her father had thought it was fine - Marina hated knee socks, they cut off her circulation and left marks. Her mother had found the idea of her being singled out for poor adherence to dress code untenable.

That had to be it.

She shouldn't have complained about the knee socks.

At some point, her father stopped sleeping. She wouldn't have really noticed, but it was also around the time that he started to struggle to walk without stumbling into furniture, to speak coherently, to pour wine without splashing half of it over the tabletop. And snapping at her, which he had never done, would never do, it simply didn't make sense.

Once she went to bed each night, she could still hear him, shuddering and lurching around in the living room, knocking into the coffee table, the bookcase, seemingly not feeling it.

So badly, she wanted not to be scared of him, of what was happening. But the vitality seemed to be draining out of him, greying further with every passing day. At some point, she realized he had stopped going into work, hadn't picked up a book or opened his holo-tablet in days.

That night, she heard him stumble, heard his body hit the hardwood floor but continue to twitch.

She rolled out of bed. Her eyes felt wet, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She dug through her little box of treasures, found the flower.

Twisted the head of the jeweled rose, held her breath, and waited.

x

Marina Trevino-Snow, The Capitol (The 74th Hunger Games)

Now that she knew a thing or two about poison, she knew that it was mercury that he'd used to kill her father. Slow-acting, to obfuscate the point of exposure. In this case, the first few bottles of wine, though he was also partial to coffee. Equally bitter, obscured the taste. And of course, the descent into instability, into seizures and brain failure and death… in the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, with some help from a suspiciously clean autopsy report, it was just the sad story of a man who had lost his grip.

She never said as much, but there was an understanding between them, that she knew these things. He didn't exactly try to hide it. How could he really deny it to his family, with a physician on staff to administer antidotes, a silver-haired man named Cerimon Boult who might-or-might-not actually be a doctor?

It was Dr. Boult, as she called him (he seemed to appreciate that) who taught her about poisons.

Perhaps her grandfather had directed him to do so.

Even if he hadn't, he certainly didn't mind.

And what her mother didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

She withdrew from the private academy, where she'd never much liked it anyway. Instead, they brought tutors to the mansion. It wasn't safe, now that she was so close to the President, should his political enemies get ideas… she gathered that there were many of those. So she stayed inside, and didn't mind that part of the transition one bit. More time to read. In time, she requested a few of the books that her father had written, one of which was very hard to acquire, as it had been removed from public shelves under suspicion of treason.

One of her earlier memories involved her parents fighting over a court appearance whether to settle, who to pay and how much to keep him alive.

He was an excellent writer. So many ideas she'd never really considered outside of vague conversations, him always being so evasive, worried about what she might repeat. Well, now she didn't have to worry, right? What he'd feared had already happened.

It was hard, because waking up in such a fine bedchamber, practically being carried to breakfast by avoxes - she was certain that they would if she asked - felt like a terrible betrayal. Enjoying it felt like pure perfidy. But she did enjoy it. No one told her not to be rude to Philo anymore, and now that she and her mother were back in the arms of her grandfather, no one, not Philoten Lorca, not Lucia Aldon, not even Herodotus seemed able to find a bad word to say about her.

She regretted that last part. She and Hero had survived many an unbearable family dinner together, giggling over gossip about their own family members, making jokes about everything from aunt Helen's latest surgical mishap to poison, just whispers of it, really, though that was the one they really got in trouble over.

Now, he, like everyone else, was just a little scared of her. Careful, like he would have been while handling an expensive trinket made of paper-thin blown glass. Like if she broke, he might be cut viciously on the edges.

Who could she confide in, now?

More often than not, she found herself at the door of her grandfather's study. Since her mother, lately, was so pale and listless. Her few acquaintances always at arm's length, her tutors professional and businesslike.

One day, she finally had the courage to knock, hearing his voice ebb and the sound of the television rise to take its place.

Because she was lonely.

No other excuse.

"Grandfather?" she called.

"Marina? Come in, dearest."

She stepped in carefully, her sequined unicorn slippers and soft-but-sparkly pink nightgown suddenly feeling much too childish, ridiculous, too ostentatious for this errand.

On the holo-screen in his home office, a cavernous wood-panelled room filled with fresh-cut flowers, conspicuously missing any windows or doors other than the one reinforced entrance, the Games were indeed playing. A raw cut, she observed, watching the boy from District 10, the one with the bad leg, make a snorkling noise and scratch at his lower back.

The broadly disseminated cut always removed that kind of thing.

So she was watching it live, then.

"Trouble sleeping? I'll admit, I struggle with much the same problem," he said quietly, picking up a cup of tea, taking a long sip.

It was a beautiful tea set. Chains of little roses in every color, gilded, so it must be from District 1.

"Sort of," she said.

"You might consider getting used to that now. It won't improve as you age," he sighed.

She nodded, her gaze wandering to the holo-screen, where the District 11 girl, who was about her age, trembled in the upper boughs of a tree, supported by delicate branches, barely more than the diameter of her wrist.

"Rue Staton," her grandfather observed. "You enjoy the Games, correct?"

"Yes," she replied, still transfixed by the sight of the girl just… crying, it looked like, staring up at the sky and crying quietly.

They never showed this sort of thing in the main cut.

"Tell me, do you think she'd make a good victor?"

She turned away from the screen so quickly that she nearly hurt her neck, frowning at him without really meaning to, just not able to control her expression in her surprise.

"What do you mean?"

"Precisely what I say, usually. Why, or why not, do you think she might make a serviceable victor?"

Marina paused.

"'Serviceable' is different than 'good'."

"It is indeed."

"District Eleven would be… happy."

"Would they be?"

"...yes," she said, without much confidence. "They haven't had a victor in a long time, everyone says they're probably due one."

"So you believe that they'd like to see this child kill another child. That would appease them."

"No…" she trailed off. "Maybe not. But it would be… better than seeing her die, probably, right?"

"They've seen many of their children die. What makes this one different?"

Luckily, the screen shifted away from Rue wiping away her tears, sitting up, resolutely opening her bag for a handful of edible greens she'd collected to chew, before she could grow captivated by the scene again. It shifted to her district partner, asleep, deep in the grain field.

"Her score, and her… she's very brave. She's my age. I wouldn't…"

He chuckled.

"No, I doubt you'd fare especially well in the Games. None of us would. They're not built for us. I'm curious, though, if you can tell me why little Rue is not going to win the Games."

"She's…"

"I'll remind you right now, it's little to do with what she is, and everything to do with what she would represent, as a symbol. I've read your father's books as well, I understand he was fond of those. And he was correct about a great many of them."

She blinked.

"She means… something unexpected. Someone small triumphing over great odds, not exactly playing by the rules. The… norms, I mean, the way she plays isn't the way you're really supposed to win, the hiding and all. Her victory might be… inflammatory."

"Excellent choice of words. You're correct, though, to observe that District Eleven is due a victor… as much as they're due anything, really. Her partner would make a far better choice, in terms of in-district outcome. But tell me, how do you think Thresh would handle the Capitol?"

At events in the years since her father's death, she'd been introduced to a number of victors. Had her own thoughts on all of them. Sort of a fascination, really. It was always the first question she asked of her mother as they prepared for the galas held in the ballroom of her grandfather's house.

She particularly liked Annie Cresta, though she knew her grandfather didn't think especially much of the young woman as a victor. The others that he didn't like much tended to be the obstinate types, like Johanna, who seemed to hate her - and everyone, it probably wasn't personal - immediately upon meeting her.

"He might not… like the Capitol very much," she said. "Like some of the victors who… have trouble, here."

"Who would you suggest, were I to hand you the reins this second?"

"The boy from Twelve," she said immediately.

He smiled. As genuinely as he ever did.

"Ah, the certainty is admirable."

"Well, everyone likes him already. More than, you know, the girl, really. And she'd be… I think she'd be like…"

She didn't want to say Johanna's name aloud. People she named might get in trouble, and she got the sense that Johanna had already had more than enough of that. Remembered, too vividly, for just a moment, the sound her father's body made as it hit the floor, the way it kept moving for minute after minute after that.

"...unhappy," she finished. "Like, unhappy. I think the excitement over the two of them is… good, but it should be him who wins. He'd be fine on his own. She wouldn't be exciting without him."

"I may have to have Seneca step down sooner than expected," he sighed. "A replacement appears so readily."

She smiled.

She couldn't not, really, not when… well, it felt good, what he was saying about her. It usually did. He was very careful, never spoke poorly of her, in her earshot, at least. It felt just as sticky and unpleasant as waking up every morning that her father didn't, but it also felt so good.

"Did you have a question, dearest?" he added, as though he'd just consciously realized that she was in his study in her pajamas in the dead of night.

"...can I stay up with you and watch?" she asked.

"Of course."

It would not be the last time that she did so. That was how she witnessed the escalating tensions between her grandfather and the Head Gamemaker, Seneca Crane, who she'd met many times before. He'd seemed pleasant enough at victory banquets. But something seemed to be different about these Games.

The conversation about unrest had not been a one-off. Quickly, it seemed to be the only question on her grandfather's mind. How to quell it, what to do about it when Johanna Mason made yet another untoward comment, something about the rule change, just a silly throwaway line about how much easier her Games might have been if she hadn't been forced to kill her own district partner.

Her grandfather was livid, and she couldn't figure out precisely why. It didn't seem the worst thing that a person could say, after all. He explained, calmly, succinctly, in the way he only did when he was barely concealing a bout of fury, that the setup relied on the rule change being treated with the gravity that it deserved, that it was vital that no one, particularly not the victors, who wielded such influence, be treating it like a joke.

Johanna could not be made to apologize, for some reason she didn't fully understand. But she did disappear from the public eye for some time.

Personally, she was beginning to observe some cracks in the structure of the thing. Forcing everybody to take things so seriously seemed counterproductive, almost. Wouldn't it be easier to make a joke of Johanna, to get people to take her less seriously?

But, no, she had to be punished. Everything seemed to lead back to a need to punish people into submission.

She wondered if that was the best way. If Johanna would be so inclined to speak out the way she did if she weren't so frequently made the object of her grandfather's wrath. His administration's wrath, of course, but it was really his. After all, Finnick never seemed to be the one whose family had to be harmed, himself imprisoned or disappeared from public eye, and he never caused trouble.

Maybe she had it backwards. It was hard to get a straight answer from anyone about the victors' treatment, especially her grandfather.

But she had ideas. About how things could be better.

No one ever explicitly said the phrase 'when she was President' aloud, but increasingly, she was convinced that was the end goal. Her math and science lessons, after all, had taken a back seat, lately, to history of government, economics, organizational planning.

She learned that her father's continuing to speak a tongue other than the common language of Panem was itself an act of rebellion, and quieted her own use of it as the word was thrown around more frequently.

The issue was no longer just unrest.

Rebellion.

It was more a curious concept to her than a bone-chilling one, as it seemed to be to her grandfather. The penalty, she guessed, of all the cruelty he had done. She hadn't forgotten, though to do so would have been precariously easy.

He might have been stylish about it, might have dressed it up in banners and anthems and loyalty and ceremony, but he was a bully. No different than Philoten Lorca making fun of her father's shoes.

Well, that wasn't exactly true.

There was much more to it than the little that she understood. Hard though it was to admit. The world was far more complicated than she liked.

Perhaps the worst part was that she seemed to be good at it, the way things worked. He was fond of asking her what she would do in response to inconceivably complicated political dilemmas, and only rarely acted even marginally on her advice. But it was the quickest way to get a nod of approval, she found.

And she couldn't not appreciate those nods, no matter how she tried.

She was watching in his study when Katniss and Peeta of Twelve jointly won the 74th Hunger Games. She was the first to witness the fireworks that ensued.

She knew that Seneca Crane was dead before he did.

x

Marina Trevino-Snow, the Rebel Capitol (after the 75th Hunger Games)

The rebels were deliberately careful about how they handled her, which was something of a relief after what a small band of them had done to her mother.

She and her grandfather both, him chained in his gardens, her confined to her chambers, were neither beaten nor murdered. They were kept separate, save for dinner, which she was permitted to bring to him. The treatment with soft gloves now, she knew, concealed something much worse yet to come.

Bruises showed better on clean skin.

She was technically, if not in actuality, prepared to die. As ready as a freshly fourteen year old could conceivably be. She imagined, vividly, in the hours staring at the canopy of her bed, unable to focus on her book, what that sound her father's body had made as it fell would be like from inside the falling body itself. What it might be like to hit the floorboards and never get up again.

Hopefully, she wouldn't twitch. That had been the worst of it, the twitching. Hopefully it would be fast.

That was just a hope, of course, and a stupid one at that.

It hadn't gone quickly for her mother, now, had it?

Half of the rebels were barely more than her age, which made it all much worse. She'd never been especially good with other young people, and now here were a number of them, armed and often masked and almost always shouting orders, at each other or at her.

And, well, they weren't wrong. She was certainly complicit. Had certainly enjoyed her soft bed and soft hands. Had blood on them, even if she hadn't spilled it herself, even if she'd never been able to look at her father's body, let alone touch it.

So she didn't fight it. Just let the current move her.

The rebel government, headed by President Alma Coin, announced that the surviving victors had voted, and that a new Games would be held. It wasn't quite what she'd been expecting, but in hindsight, it made perfect sense. The Capitol Trials. It would not be a trial any more than her grandfather's 'quell' had meaningfully quelled anything more than his ability to maintain cohesion in a splintering country.

She would inevitably be called on to compete. And she would die.

It took about a day to accept that much. She didn't cry, knowing they were waiting for her to cry, to be pathetic about it, to prove everyone right about her, that she was some spoiled idiot thing, a symptom of the poisoning rather than the poison itself.

Privately, she knew better.

Held herself together.

Wondered if the arena would have a hardwood floor for her to collapse on. Probably not. So she wouldn't die like her father. Her mother might be a better example of what would happen to her.

She should be grateful, probably, that Herodotus has been air-lifted out in the Snows' last hovercraft. At least they wouldn't have to hurt each other any more than they already had, just by being part of this stupid family. Because he surely would have been called on to compete as well. Barely twelve to her fourteen. That wouldn't have gone well.

A few things still seemed incomprehensible about the whole situation.

For one, her grandfather seemed unphased by all of it, even as he sat shackled in his own rose garden. Over dinner, he asked, inevitably, for news of District 2. Which was ridiculous, because District 2 was long fallen, the taking of Mount Lupus publicized months ago, around the time the Mockingjay had been shot. She couldn't imagine what he expected to learn. What about the 'no news, I don't think, but I'll ask again if you like' seemed to bring him such comfort.

"Well, no news is good news," he would say calmly, sipping his tea, hollow-eyed and paper-skinned, looking sicker and smaller than she'd ever seen him.

Dr. Boult had escaped along with Herodotus and the rest of their family.

If this went on for long enough, her grandfather would simply die of his own poisoning, which would be poetic enough, she supposed. But likely not what the rebels would prefer. Just what he would deserve, and they didn't seem to care all that much about what anyone deserved.

Her mother, after all, hadn't deserved what they did to her.

She tried to talk to him about that, knowing it was intended to demoralize him, to hurt them both, thinking they must have some common ground on this, at least. It was a sad thing, that her dying grandfather was the only person left with whom she had any common ground to speak of. Not as though she was going to discuss the trauma of finding her mother's body with any of the young rebels who guarded her door.

"It just seemed like they were trying to… throw what you… we… what had been done… back at us," she said one evening, over a plate of stew on rice. One for him and one for her.

"Violence begets violence," he said, and she suspected that he would have shrugged had all his faculties not been necessary to keep hold of the stew with trembling hands.

"Then why did you…" She trailed off, not knowing how to express it, the magnitude of what had been done.

"Well, there's a reason that violence begets violence. It's hardly a platitude and certainly not a useless one. Violence works. You'll notice that, as dire as the situation may seem in the present, Panem has remained stable for three quarters of a century. This is merely a return to the old style of violence, in the Dark Days. What happened to your mother is nothing new."

Involuntarily, she felt herself nodding along. It sounded right, like an observation of, more or less, the same things she'd been seeing in past years. Twisted in a way that reflected his vision of the world, of course.

"There won't be peace until we can find a way to stop this," she said quietly. "You know that, though."

"I've never been much of a peacetime ruler," her grandfather said, his chest shaking as though he might like to chuckle but couldn't quite muster up the energy. "Fight your way through the trials and perhaps you'll have the opportunity to give it a try yourself, dearest."

"You don't think they'll let me win."

"Of course not. You'll die, and far more terribly than your mother, I daresay. I wonder if they'll keep me alive to watch, or if my knowledge of that will be enough of a punishment," he said, smiling thinly, no real sadness in his expression.

"But you hope…"

"Oh, as always, dearest, I hope to live to see what comes next."

He didn't.

It wasn't the Games, or the Trials, or whatever they were calling them.

The Mockingjay was set to execute him, and she was set to watch. A date was set, a mostly-constructed arena from the Gamemakers' lineup had been settled on, she was critically aware of all of it. As was he. They so badly wanted him to die helpless, hopeless, and he so adamantly refused.

Katniss Everdeen turned her arrow on the rebel President, and he died laughing.

It was what he would have wanted, she supposed. Though he would have been delighted by what followed, the coup by District 2's underground Center, the thousands of child soldiers who spilled into the streets, wiping out any rebel they encountered until the pavement was wet with blood and the candy-colored buildings were more red than anything.

Not that she was there for any of it. She had retreated into a wardrobe in a room that had once been her mothers, found a nest of silky dresses already assembled, settled down and waited to die, having had no idea what was happening in the chaos. It smelled like her mother's perfume. Not a hint of blood.

They found her after a day and a half of searching. An older woman in Peacekeeper's garb lifted her out of the wardrobe like a kitten. Offered her food and water. Her old room. She wasn't sure what had happened at all, wasn't sure what she wanted to have happened until the television came back to life and the announcement clarified, once and for all, the fate of the country,

A woman named Margaret Lancaster had ascended to the role of President. On the older side, very normal-looking. Marina had never seen this woman before in her life, but she had the mannerisms of a dozen Capitol politicians, the sureness of her voice and affect, the deceptively friendly smile, even though the look in her eyes was as haunted as that of most everyone she encountered outside of white armor.

The vast majority of the unnecessary functions of the country would be put on hold to ensure their collective continued survival.

This included the Capitol Trials, of course, and also the Hunger Games. What a relief that was, for as long as it lasted. She wondered if President Lancaster might be the one to do it, to conclude the seemingly endless cycle of killing. For a year, then for two years, no children died.

She returned to school, as much of a pariah as she'd expected. That was fine. She'd had a lot of time to read during her imprisonment, made excellent grades. Certainly no one was afraid of her, anymore. She was free to overachieve in peace.

The kind of peace one only encounters when all of one's relatives are dead or deserters.

It was fine. Really, really, really fine.

Two years later, they brought the Games back. That was, she thought, probably less fine, but it wasn't as though she had a role in the decision-making process. It was true, that unrest had spread in the Capitol, as so much of life returned to normal, other than that key component.

Perhaps they were difficult to control without a handful of victors to hero worship. Perhaps they were simply loathe to let the arenas already constructed go to waste. A former Gamemakers' apprentice, Chiron Rometo, was elevated to Head Gamemaker.

The rest were dead.

With the reimplementation of the Games, her family, among many others, returned home. What was left of them, of course. Hero, looking quieter, more anxious, and dramatically thinned-out. The rest of them nothing of the sort. Prepared to move into the President's mansion, since Lancaster seemed to have no interest in it, and it was technically under the family's stewardship.

That was how she learned of her grandfather's final gift to her.

Legally, by deserting, her family had forfeited any claim to the Snow family fortune.

She was the sole heir in his will, and the sole arbiter of his estate.

While she had never considered herself a vindictive person, never really considered herself angry at her family in particular, even as she watched the bay door of the last craft close, watched the thing disappear into the sky along with everyone she'd ever thought even might take care of her…

She ordered the mansion demolished.

Forfeited her apellido materno, enrolled in university as Marina Trevino. A different institution than her father's workplace at the time of his death.

And then she disappeared into academia, and for over a decade, she didn't look back.

No one had looked back for her as they'd fled the sinking ship, after all.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol (The 90th Hunger Games)

"How was the announcement received?" President Lancaster asked, looking as though she'd prefer not to know.

"In the Capitol? With general delight," she explained with a sigh. "As expected."

"And you have the -"

"Viewership and randomly sampled response information by district have been sent to your tablet, to peruse at your pleasure, Ms. President."

"And this is the right thing," the President said, with all the certainty of a child looking over the precipice of a particularly lofty diving board at an unfamiliar pool. "This is how we end them. For good."

"To the extent that I can be sure, yes," she replied.

President Lancaster put her head in her hands, propping her elbows on the desk.

"Why do you want to end them, Marina?"

There were a number of answers to that question, none of which she especially wanted to offer to the cagey President, who hated nothing more than anything that reminded her too excessively of her long-dead grandfather. Who seemed to remain, willfully or otherwise, ignorant of who she was.

She wanted a country free of corrective violence. She wanted to rule that country. Not Panem as it currently existed. A better one that she intended to build, a last fuck you to her grandfather. She'd always been better than him, she knew that. She liked to think that he knew that too. That he'd died knowing it.

At the same time, the things she wanted had become, quite involuntarily, tangled up in the people she cared about, now, because there were far more of those than she'd ever anticipated having. Saxaul, who doubted her so adamantly about this, who had once been the only person she could talk to. Who was still the only person who really seemed to understand the truth of her.

Even if he found the truth of what he saw repulsive, at times. That was understandable. So did she. She saw him in the mirror, in her ambitions, in the echoes of her past, most horribly in Hero's face, as he'd grown up to look so much like his great uncle.

('Not what I'd call great', he liked to joke drily over a glass of wine.)

Poor Hero, who she'd roped into this so thoroughly. Who owed her so infinitely, as much for being the one he'd taken as for generously funding his education and offering him a substantial piece of the family fortune, once they'd managed to make up, years later.

Cora, who stuck with her so doggedly, who had grown into such a powerful ally in time, but who remained so profoundly hopeful about this whole thing, so willing to see the best in her, so insistent that this was something that could be fixed, a betrayal of the victors in her care that she could nonetheless come back from.

She wasn't so sure. But she appreciated the vote of confidence.

And Polly, of course, who came and went like an outdoor cat, but who seemed as hurt by this as anyone, despite her odd way of showing… well, anything.

"They're poison to this country," she replied, after a second's thought. "We need to get the poison out before the wound they've made can heal. And this, I believe, is how we finally prove… what they are."

The President nodded absently.

"Yes. I suppose so. Annia thought so too."

Her heart sank just slightly. This wasn't exactly an ideal time to have the President dwelling on the very-dead several-years-former Head Gamemaker. Not when she'd very recently elevated her own cousin to the position.

"Hero won't let us down," she said quickly. "I'm not concerned about our ability to follow through, Ms. President. What she believed in, it's what we believe in, too."

More or less.

"You had another reason to come and see me," the President sighed. "Please, out with it. I'm exhausted."

"The mentoring situation has been handled. My solution may be somewhat inelegant, but I believe it will accomplish both the primary objective of explicit equity and a secondary objective of reintroducing the idea of constructive unity within Panem."

"Your solution," the President clarified. "Which is…"

"Effectively, a lottery. One of the twelve most recent victors placed in each district. I've already assembled the list, but we'll make a bit of a pageant of the reveal."

The President, frowning, gestured out over her desk, summoning the list that Marina sent over from her own tablet with a flick of her fingers.

"Claudia in Two?" she asked.

"Luck of the draw," Marina said, shrugging.

"But luck had nothing to do with it."

"And the preservation of our collective peace of mind had everything to do with it," she explained.

The President sighed yet again.

"I can't hate her. Annia… what happened to her, that wasn't her intention, even if it was the effect."

Marina bit back a sigh of her own.

She had debated attempting to explain the severity of the Claudia situation to the President, but if the older woman couldn't fathom that Claudia had never acted out of anything other than self-interest with the context of her best friend's death, she'd certainly have no better luck convincing her that the pods beneath the Capitol had been activated on Claudia's orders. Which sounded more like a conspiracy theory than anything.

In fact, she had reason to expect that Claudia or her affiliates were involved in disseminating very similar theories in the districts and the Capitol alike. Without an ounce of credibility.

Making it that much harder for her to be taken seriously.

The same problem by a different name. Megalomaniacs clinging to power.

She hoped that Cora had the right idea about killing Claudia not being the answer. About her reflecting a cultural problem. She could solve a cultural problem without descending too much further into dramatic hypocrisy.

"I understand, Ms. President," she said, wishing she didn't.

"Any other news? The arena, is it ready? Should I pay it a visit?" the President asked, expression shockingly anxious.

"No news is good news," she said. "All is proceeding according to plan."

President Lancaster rested her head on her desk in earnest. It was increasingly easy to accept that her employer was ninety-two years old, approaching ninety-three. She was beginning to truly look it.

"They will end," the President said. "I keep my promises. Please, Marina, you must help me keep this promise."

She bowed deeply.

"It will be my privilege, Ms. President."

The enormous west-facing window was lit up with pink and gold as the sun set hazily over the Capitol's skyline. The infrastructure had healed, the last of the skyscrapers finally repanelled and returned to its former state. At long last, the city no longer bore the scars of the violence that had preceded them into power.

"Are you holding up, Marina?" the President asked, looking over at her, wrenching her gaze away from the sunset. President Lancaster had always seemed to have a bit of a thing about sunsets.

"As well as I can," she laughed.

"Your friends, the victors…"

"They're not pleased, but they'll come around once we end this. We just need to prove that we've acted out of necessity, and we have."

"That's always what it comes down to, isn't it?" the President said sadly. "What else can we do here?"

"We can't be anything more than what we are."

Nothing more, nothing less.

She reached up to roll the gold stem of her rose pin, battered, now, but still very much intact, between her fingers.

While there were parts of her she had managed to leave in the past, where they well and truly belonged, other pieces of herself defied all attempts at excision. Some of those parts, she knew, were monstrous. Capable, at least, of monstrous things.

"I need to make a few calls, get everything in order for the mentorship announcement," she informed the President, who nodded absently and waved her away, back to gazing out at the colors of the setting sun.

She hurried out into the darkened halls of the innocuous government building that had been restructured to house the Office of the Presidency. A staid sort of building, now, adjacent to the Training Center, a fixture of the Capitol's uptown sector.

With a swish-flick over her wrist device, she placed a call to Hero, who picked up immediately.

He looked utterly unhappy, sipping out of his rose-patterned teacup, making absolutely no effort to hide the fact that he was exhausted.

"Fucking hell, Marina," he sighed. "What is it now?"

"Just checking on you," she said.

"Oh, because my health is the biggest problem on your plate, I'm sure."

"Call it a pleasant distraction?"

"Fairly unpleasant, as distractions go."

"Saxaul is back in the Capitol as of last night," she observed. "Have you talked to him?"

"I would sooner pull out all of my fingernails than, as the Head fucking Gamemaker, make his life any more unpleasant."

"Be careful where you place those expertly timed profanities, Hero," she sighed. "Head Gamemaker. Someone could make an innuendo out of that, you know."

"Please don't remind me."

"Let me know once he gets in contact, okay? He's staying with Cora, I give it a week."

"A week? Marina. He's not going to talk to me."

"A week, Hero. Just call me when he does. And check your inbox, I'm sending you the mentor assignments and my thoughts on the matter. I heard we had some temperature control issues with the arena?"

"We're a year out. There's 'prepared' and then there's 'overprepared' and then there's 'pathological'. The techs are on it."

"I just want to be sure…"

"You can be sure. Are the mayors cooperating? That's more your angle than mine."

"So far, so good. Even Rhodes in Three is making it suspiciously easy on us. I'm flying out tomorrow to get the ball rolling in One. You'll be kept up to date, of course."

"Wow. Being Head Gamemaker is shockingly easy, what with you doing literally ninety percent of the work," he said drily.

"Yeah, welcome to hell, man, population you and me. It only gets harder from here."

"I'll be waiting on the edge of my seat," he said, taking another sip from his teacup. "Take care, Marina. I have things covered on my end. Just be smart on yours."

"You know me, Hero, I'm always smart."

"God help us all."

He hung up on her somewhat unceremoniously, which she supposed was to be expected. Hero had never managed large crowds especially well, tended to wall off like a turtle when faced with an audience larger than a dinner table. The announcement proceedings must have been exhausting for him. Perhaps not the ideal Head Gamemaker, but she absolutely didn't want to put herself in that role.

In recent years, if not long before, she'd learned a few valuable things about the consequences of visibility. The less visible she was, the more power she would have to spin any story that came of this into one that kept Hero slightly more alive than Annia.

As confident as she was in all of this, as much as she believed that she was doing exactly what needed to be done, there would always be a part of her that doubted these methods. A part that, speaking in the voice of a long-dead tyrant, warned her that violence irreversibly begot more violence, that her part in it would inevitably be punished just as his was, in the end.

Well, the blade of a guillotine hanging over her was nothing new.

One more year of this, and she would be able to protect herself, and the people she loved, for good.

If she didn't have that faith, she had nothing.

x

Pro Patria Mori marches on! I have twelve submissions at the moment - you can view the list on my profile. While the 'deadline', as it were, is April 6th, I recommend that you drop me a tribute as soon as possible if you're looking to get a particular spot! At the moment I've only accepted a maximum of two submissions per person, but I'll expand that if things look sparse, as I'm really looking forward to getting this show on the road.

Thanks, as always, for your following this, and for your kind comments! I know I write... a lot, but it's just kind of what you're signing up for, so be advised: while not universally 9k+ (there's a lot of backstory!), chapters will tend to be long!