Y 184-09-01 T 22:31:49

Day 2

The juddering sound of cannons high above them set the speed to which they walked through the city. Sharp and heavy went Elizabeth's axe at her side close to him, swinging and swinging like a pendulum.

With every swing, Theon knew he could snatch it at its apex, strike with it before Elizabeth could react. He knew, that while he'd likely rip his stitches, he could kill Elizabeth without hesitation.

The axe swung. It swung again.

Theon walked alongside Elizabeth in the cooling night and said nothing.

When he had allied with Elizabeth, he had done so with a curved blade to his throat; he had vowed he would kill Elizabeth as soon as he was able, renege on their allied state before it backfired on him.

Hours had passed now, and not only had Theon not killed Elizabeth, he had proved his loyalty to her cause by swinging a bucket of blood at the face of a President.

Why the hell had he done that?

"So," he murmured awkwardly, watching Elizabeth's axe swing loosely in her grip, "Is it Elizabeth? Lizzie? Liz?"

Elizabeth glared at him. "It's Elizabeth."

"Okay."

The silence returned a moment.

"-Cause, it's a bit of a mouthful to say the whole time-"

"-You do get this isn't a date, right?" Elizabeth snapped, rounding on him. "You don't need to give me a nickname, we don't need to make small talk, you just need to help us not die. This is like the opposite of a date."

Theon couldn't help but smile innocently. "I never said this was a date. But, you know, the way you were staring at me back in the Justice Building, I don't think you know that."

Theon was a Career. He wasn't scared easily.

He definitely wasn't scared by the look on Elizabeth's face as she turned on him.

"This is not a date, Theon. You know why? Because unless we do what we've set out to do, at least one of us is going to be dead soon. So keep your speculations to yourself."

Theon frowned. The suggestion from that was that Elizabeth was planning some kind of rebellion that ensured both of their survival. Theon was relieved she wasn't dragging them into a suicide mission, but it still left a lot of questions about where she was taking them. Also- it left one other question. It wasn't quite pertinent to survival, but it still interested him.

"And if we do what we set out to do?" He asked. Elizabeth did not stop walking, but she did regard him out of the corner of her eye.

"Then I'll be demanding your shirt is off for the remainder of our time," she said curtly, but with the slightest hint of a smile to her tone. Theon couldn't argue with that tone, he really couldn't.

"Yes, ma'am," he replied, grinning and following after her in the dark. The sun was replaced by the moon now- Theon knew they were both fake, but the light gave him comfort as they travelled through the Inner City.

"You know," Elizabeth said at length, breaking the awkward silence that had settled, "I'm still not sure why you're doing this."

Theon bit his lip. Yeah, you and me both.

"Do I need a reason?" He tried, knowing it was lame even as he said it.

Elizabeth snorted with derisive laughter. "You're a Career, Theon. You're a District Two Career. You don't have any grudges, you do have an incentive to kill. So yeah- you need a goddamn reason."

Theon felt a swirl of anger at Elizabeth. Privilege was privilege, and he wouldn't deny that a Two citizen held more of it than a Seven, but it didn't mean that he couldn't hold a grudge against the Capitol. His people were held under the regime as much as anyone else. He had felt the pain of hunger, and fear, and blood and fire, as much as any other.

He spoke the words with a surge of anger, not thinking of what they meant.

"Arya."

"Arya? The hell's Arya?" Elizabeth stalled, looking at him- she seemed surprised that he was giving a reason at all.

So was he.

He rubbed his jaw anxiously. "She's, uh- Look, it's not important. Now, where are we-"

He made to move and Elizabeth moved to match.

"Uh-uh. You want to stay with me? You want to do this? You tell me what Arya is."

Theon didn't even want to stay with her, he didn't want a rebellion, he knew that, he knew that. Her axe was loose at her side. He could avoid the question, take the axe, push it through her skull.

But instead, he stood still and he sighed into the cool summer night and answered.

"Not what. Who."

Elizabeth's expression softened. "She a relative of yours?"

"She was my sister."

"Was?"

Theon looked up at the sky with its fake stars. He had spent many nights in his lifetime staring up at the sky- the faint distortions of the dome's projection felt like glaring deformities to him. He hated it. He looked down again at Elizabeth's eyes, only marginally easier to hold in his gaze than the makeshift sky.

He took a deep breath.

And he began.

He had always been named Theon, he was certain of that. He wasn't sure what his last name had originally been, but it had certainly not been Veux.

He had grown up first amongst the miners of District 2, not the Peacekeepers, amongst stone and earth and dust- he remembered little of his childhood there, young as he had been then, but a few vivid images always stuck in his mind, embellished in his imagination after years of playing and replaying these treasured memories.

One was an image and nothing more, a cavern larger than the grandest halls of the Capitol, lit by swunging fluorescent bulbs, where a team around him set up diamond-edged cables and high-pressure hoses to cut through marble like it was paper. The cool spray hit his face in the memory's confines, sharp against his face.

He remembered a man, although he did not remember a name- his father, his /real father, a tall miner with calloused hands and a thick dark beard and crinkled smiling eyes who wore the burdens of his job as if they were merely clothes to be shrugged on. He was kind and clever, a man who led his fellow miners into deeper caverns and greater spoils, who had pioneered new sampling techniques and tripled output to the Capitol.

But accidents will happen, and his father, his kind and clever father with smile-wrinkled eyes, slipped on the shelf of rock they had created and under the precision-angled, diamond-edged wire.

The wire, carefully checked for its tensile strength that morning by Theon's father, cut through obstacles like they were paper. A quarter of a mile underground, with no medical help for miles beyond even the surface, Theon's father never stood a chance.

So Theon received the standard bereavement grant, remained at home alone, young and lost- miners came and went and offered food but could not offer permanency, struggling as they were. Theon's mother was long since gone; he did not remember ever having met or even seen her.

So, as the money ran out and the Peacekeepers came to relinquish his home to federalised control, Theon became a child of the streets, begging and stealing like so many others. It was not proud, but pride is not something you think of when survival is your only object.

Still, Theon had always had a strange, broken sense of pride, of possessiveness- and where his fellow denizens of the street were reluctant to give and take trust when it was all they had left to give, Theon gave freely, gave what he could to two younger children he shared his life on the streets with. One, the youngest, Rickon- the other, the older, Arya. None of them were related, but the three were bonded by the pain of shared struggles to survive. Theon and they shared what they could. It was not exactly friendship, but it was cameraderie at least.

Food was scarce in a District careful not to waste anything. The mountain ranges were cold at night. It had been on one such cold night, when Arya had been desperate and hungry enough to lose the last of her dignity and sense, that she stole a Peacekeeper's wallet.

Or, at least, had tried. Theon, then eleven, toughened by years of the streets but softened by the children in his care, came running when Arya screamed. And when he had seen her held up by her hair by Kai Veux, a notoriously dangerous Peacekeeper, common sense dictated he should retreat.

He instead rushed forward, disregarding logic and sense, and began hitting the Peacekeeper with everything he had. It did nothing to harm Veux, but it intrigued him. The Peacekeeper, a son of a Victor, a failed volunteer from the Games, wanted to create his own glory but he could not bear to place his own daughter in the Training Center. So, desperate to reclaim the glory he had always thought promised to him, Kai pinned his hopes on this strange street boy, angry and defensive- a tool ready to be moulded to Veux's liking.

And first on Kai's list was moulding those unfortunate ties between him, Rickon and Arya into something else.

He took the three of them home. He fed them and he watered them and offered to give them beds in his home. They came to the door he opened, innocent and trusting, and Kai kicked them down into the basement and locked the door.

Kai promised his home and his wealth and the glory of the Training Center and the Games- but promised it only to one person. He told them they would stay down in the basement, in the darkness and thirst and hunger, until one remained, and they alone would see the sun again.

At first, none of them wanted to do anything. None of them wanted to turn on each other, Theon only eleven and still the oldest of the three children, the one caring for little Arya and littler Rickon. It was unthinkable to do anything.

So they remained for a day. Then another. Rickon, still so young, the thinnest of them all, began to look wan, worse than even they did. Then he collapsed, parched lips moving silently in desperate pleas for help, and no manner of begging and screaming from Theon would coax Veux to help.

So then there were two, and Arya realised only one of them could make it out alive.

He remembered this vividly, lit from the small grate in the basement. He never would forget it. As the night fell and Rickon's body lay in slow states of decomposition, Arya took a shard of glass, shining in the moonlight like a star, and tried to force it into Theon's eye.

Perhaps he should have only disarmed her. Perhaps he should have stabbed himself, been selfless for once in his life, and let Arya live.

But what Theon did do, as the sightless dead eyes of Rickon's cursed him to whatever awful fate he deserved to suffer, was rip the glass shard from Arya's hand and bury it deep into her stomach.

Theon was proclaimed the victor- his first taste of a Games in which there could be no victory. Theon, nameless child of the streets, became Theon Veux, the son of the Peacekeeper that had forced him to murder his adopted sibling. He took the name but not proudly- he took the training but only with his own goals in mind. No glory or riches would reach Kai Veux. Theon had always planned to take it all for himself, home and glory and all, and share it with as many of his fellow children of the streets as he could.

But now-

"-But now-" Theon murmured, not sure what he could say. Now he had unwittingly destroyed his Career pack, allied with a rebel, brought unto himself something that would likely kill him, if not now then after the Games, and yet he still could not run.

He felt- God, he- he wanted to do this. He honestly wanted to rebel with Elizabeth, to watch his siblings of the streets rise up and kill their masters, to watch- he wanted to watch-

"I want to watch the Capitol burn," he said, and God, God, he meant it. His new purpose burnt like a flame inside him, because now he wasn't playing their game, not anymore, he was breaking their game and it could kill him but he didn't care anymore.

Elizabeth watched him heavily for a moment. Then, for the second time that day, she dropped her axe. But last time, not trusting him and rightly, she had thrown it halfway across the room in order to get rid of it. Now it clattered to the ground between them both, heavy and sharp, the last of Elizabeth's waning defences.

Slowly, tentatively, a rebel towards a Career, Elizabeth pulled him to her. There was a large height difference, but the hug still felt comforting to Theon, still felt like an enveloping security. He tentatively brushed his hands across Elizabeth's back, before committing and hugging back.

They remained this way for a moment.

"So is this a date now?" Theon asked with a lopsided smile. Elizabeth pulled back and hit him around the head, making him yelp as she rolled her eyes.

"You're a one track record, Theon Veux."

"And you're-"

Theon did not finish that sentence, because a soft chiming and a glitter of silver overhead drew his eye. A package in a silver orb, a shining parachute billowing behind it, drifted between them in the dark- they stepped back and it landed between them.

Elizabeth frowned. "Is that-"

Theon laughed, shock threaded through his voice. "That's a gift. Someone sent us a gift."

"Well, they clearly haven't been watching- they probably still think you're a Career," Elizabeth laughed, bending down and unhooking the orb from the parachute, holding it out between them and twisting it open. A steel box lay in the middle, with a note on top.

That was when Theon first noticed something was wrong.

He had studied the Hunger Games all his life, and he knew every strategy and every turn. But, like everything else this year- like the arena, like the Careers, like the allies and rebels and chariot rides marked with flame- something was just, ever so slightly, wrong. The note was not a neatly printed strip in capital lettering- it was a ripped piece of paper, hastily folded, tucked into the lip of the steel box that was their gift. Elizabeth went to grab and unfold it, in full view of any cameras, but Theon grabbed her wrist, taking the paper before she could argue with him. He palmed it in his hand, angling it downwards and between them so they could read the messy handwritten lettering as surreptitiously as possible.

It read three words only, in capital lettering written by a human hand and tucked hastily into the machinery of the Capitol.

WATCH IT BURN.

Theon looked up at Elizabeth, whose face had gone pale with shock. She put down the orb and picked up the steel box within it. She opened it to reveal at least a hundred matchsticks.

Theon stared at the box and back at the note.

He quickly placed the note in his mouth, chewing it to a soggy pulp and spitting it on the floor. He wasn't sure who had written that, but they had just risked their life in sending words that were so clearly treasonous- and, most likely, they were near them now, a Capitolian working in the arena itself, someone who had risked their life to send them matches and tell them to-

Theon looked up at Elizabeth, who was stroking a shaking finger over the matches, brushing a minute amount of phosphorous from their heads. Theon knew she was a rebel- she had lit her dress on fire at the chariot rides, waving the defiant flaming paper like a flag until it burned her hand. Theon knew she was a rebel.

The only difference now was that he was too.

"Let's go," Elizabeth said, sure of her direction as she pocketed the steel box of matchsticks and walked through the Inner City. Theon walked beside her, sure that his direction was exactly the same as hers.

Sorry for the delay on this one- I had a few birthday celebrations to organise for someone, and actually attend as well.

I've revised the chapter plan and I'm not all that certain there's even as many as ten chapters left. Perhaps- seven? Eight at a push? We're so close to the end now, and you guys have no idea how happy I am to be getting there. I planned the whole SYOT basically for the final two chapters. You'll see.

As ever, thank you for reading this far.