A/N: Here is our second tribute, Tench Burgundy from District 4! Thanks for reading, and please consider leaving a review if you have the time (:
CHAPTER SEVEN: "DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH"
TENCH
A hundred and fifty miles east of the Oceana Pacifica, beside a humungous salt flat that spans wide and yearning under the burning sun, a boy is born to the House of Burgundy. It is the day the victor of the 303rd Hunger Games, Tench Belvedere, is crowned victorious, and so they name the child after him: Tench. An unassuming creature that nonetheless braves the harshest of currents and reaches its homeland each year.
Everyone knows the story of how the House of Burgundy came from District 1, shunned from its borders in fury, rage, and disgust when the related family who ruled District 4 found itself void of all assistance from the Capitol via the so-called Cordley plan: the enormous government budget introduced by President Stinn Hawke to help Panem rebuild after the nuclear war. There was a coup brewing in 4, and the help of the Burgundys was needed to help keep a district so large and wild in order. They never returned.
Now that humans are made in factories, the House of Burgundy transitions power in a ceremonial way. When the youngest member of the family turns eighteen, he or she is designated as the nurturer and protector of a developing human embryo – and up to four more throughout their life, depending on how many children they want (or can handle).
When Tench is born, his Caste-Mother, Amphitrite, is only nineteen. The Caste-Midwife – a similarly ceremonial role who must bear legal witness to the live removal of the child from the artificial amniotic fluid – says she has never heard a baby scream so loud. Yes, this is a spirited child. He will fight well in this spirited world.
The infant shrieks as an icy curtain of rain batters the roof. Poseidon, Tench's Caste-Uncle, left hours ago to summon the family from the salt flats; by this point, they've got to be hurrying the team home. The younger Caste-Aunts standing around her gape down and feel nothing but a blank canvas of grey as they watch him wriggle and shriek. They were born without the instinct to care for the weak. The Capitol ensures all children are born that way.
Amphitrite's Caste-Grandfather and Caste-Uncles come through the door aglitter with ice, their eyes wild. They haven't been expecting the Midwife to take Tench from the fluid so soon, yanking him from a cozy world of warmth and artificial comfort into a dark plain of black ice, and the news has come as a flurried shock.
"He fell – the horse…" one of them mutters. When he sees the baby, he stops. "Its hooves slipped, and the horse must have fallen in the dark, and the river, and…"
Terror fills the house. The family edges toward the door, a dark and primitive fear warping their faces.
The newborn shrieks.
"Lock your windows tonight, Amphitrite." That is all they can say.
Everyone knows the birth of a child at the same time as the death of a family member is a bad omen. "Lock your windows". In the districts, there was nothing scarier than being robbed.
Indeed, superstition abounds in District 4, from children's tell that eating a spider will make one's hair turn black to the adult belief that children born on Thursday are immune to their first reaping. The old miner's wives say that a girl born on the twenty-first will marry rich. When thirteen dine together, the first to rise is the first to die. Never follow music you hear in the forest.
Nobody can blame them. It is easy to be superstitious when you have everything to lose.
They send him to the academy because nobody wants him at home. The child who was born as the grand patriarch of the House of Burgundy met his end. Resentment festers inside him like infection until he reaches adolescence, and then he realizes he doesn't have to let that energy sit inside of him like carbonation against a cork. He can let it out through his training. He can take control of it, not the other way around.
Now twenty-one years have passed, three years since Tench was out of the reaping and four since he stopped training for the Hunger Games. However his family might dislike him, they must follow the time-honored tradition of letting him nurture a child. He has done it once before, carefully injected the growing human from its state as a little pink worm until it grew arms and legs and distinct facial features. They let him reach in his hands and bring it into the world. They let him cut the plastic umbilical cord.
This time, though, the sweat on his body turns cold, and dread eclipses joy. The Caste-Midwife backs away; she has delivered more than three hundred children and has not yet lost a baby, even believed herself to be blessed by Snow in that regard. And now this?
The child is a twisted lump of deformed flesh, pulled from the dark amber and seen by human eyes for the first time when the Midwife drops it into Tench's arms. It is as slimy and unsightly as if someone has turned over a rock to reveal something revolting living underneath. It is the law, of course, that a child cannot be seen by human eyes before it is taken from the amber after nine months. This comes to each of them as a total surprise.
"The bottle, quickly!" Tench barks.
The child shrieks and an icy rain batters the roof, just as when Tench himself was born twenty-one years ago. Tench tries to brace him upright – they can just barely tell it's a boy child – with his thighs while squeezing the bottle into what resembles a mouth, but the child's lips won't form a seal. His mouth gulps, his body shivers, and there is no sign of a cry. Merely a pitiful creature squirming in a world of apparent agony.
No, this is impossible. This can't be. The odds of something going wrong in the development process – these days it is almost completely perfected – less than a million to one… But still… just to look at that child…
The news spreads like wildfire. The people in the neighborhood scream in horror to hear it. This is a horrible sign, a terrible sign.
"Is it a demon?"
"A fiend?"
"How will it breathe?"
"How will it eat?"
"Will Tench throw it in the sea to die?"
The child is dead by the end of the night. By the end of the night, too, Tench is driven out with tridents and torches. The man whose birth caused the death of his father, bearing a deformed lump of flesh that was supposed to be a baby. There is no explanation but some horrible supernatural force at play. He harbors a demon inside, and the horrible circumstances of his life are proof.
After dark the clouds fade and the sparkling banner of the night sky unrolls high above. He tries to make a fire but finds himself humiliatingly helpless despite having done this many times before. The bow he tries to fashion keeps cracking in half, and it is not for five hours that he manages to create the spark that lights the eventual flame. It has been years, yes, since he went to the Academy, but he remembers more than just a thing or two the Trainers drilled into his mind. When a person is lost in the wild, they're dumber than they think.
Dawn finds him miles and miles upriver, frightened and cold without the lights of civilization in sight. Fortunately, he had the foresight to take some money with him, and he bribes a peacekeeper into carrying him back to civilization in her beaten up jalopy.
Thirty miles from the City they pass the town where Tench was born. The car halts in the road while the peacekeepers run into the town to gather (steal) food and supplies. Rain falls steadily – not icy anymore. Tench watches the water trickle down to low ground and remembers what Amphitrite used to tell him about how the smallest stream runs down in the widest river which runs into the ocean that circles Panem, containing all the dreams ever dreamed.
Daylight has drained from the world again by the time they reach the city. He might wonder, briefly, how the rest of the House of Burgundy is doing, cooped up in the town by the salt flat where the Burgundys who don't actually rule the district live. To be clear, they have lived comfortably though they have never been given the privilege of governing District 4. The thoughts are dispelled from his mind quickly. They never cared about him, never loved him. To them he was nothing more than a liability.
He sets his eyes on the horizon as the jalopy reaches the City, the lights of the Justice Building just barely coming into sight in a faint burbling haze in front of them.
The first month he finds work as a servant. Despite how much his family has rejected him, they have furnished him comfortably and kept him in a high-standing place for his entire life. There is a very powerful force inside of him now, something nobody can take away: pride.
It is humbling and humiliating to stoop so low, he must admit.
The second month the Blight goes around. It doesn't normally leave the borders of District 7, but travelling peacekeeper merchants carry it south and in a matter of weeks half the district is sick. He lies helpless in his own vomit for weeks before he can rise again. Those who survive the Blight never get it again. And it will not come back around for decades. It never does.
By the end of the first year, the Blight has gone away and Tench is back in the Academy. They've decided to let in participants over the age of eighteen because of the Quell twist, and he goes in not expecting much – but the District 4 tribute lot is far worse than he remembers it to be. The Blight has thrown a wrench in the works, and maybe the only reason he survived it is because he grew up in the salt flats where everyone was exposed to every fungus under the sun from birth.
"You've got a hunger," a member of the Tribute Selection Board tells him. "They're going to like you. Congratulations, Mr. Burgundy. You're in."
It would be hard to deny he sets the standards fairly low for a career tribute, especially by the standards of the first and second Hunger Games centuries. But the drive to succeed, to show his family exactly what they threw away, he feels will never fade. Pride like a thorn in his side, for better or for worse. That's something they can never take away.
The gate that leads into the square of District 4 is engraved with the names of every tribute from 4 who has ever died in the Hunger Games. There are more than half a thousand of them, scrawled in tiny lettering across the arch. The names of certain undesirables have been vandalized over the years, with vain efforts to remove the graffiti resulting in unsightly splotches and cracks in the stone. Will his name join them?
No. It is no use wondering.
"A career tribute knows his purpose in life. No matter what happens to him in the games, no matter how he dies – he has made it worth his while." Repeated thousands of times in his sleep when he was a baby.
The reaping balls this year are twice as full as usual. The tesserae system has had to be reworked with the Quell twist; rather than staggering the number of entries each person has in the reaping ball depending on their age in increments of one, it has been done in increments of two: the five- and six-year-olds have one entry, the seven- and eight-year-olds have two, and so on. That way the reaping isn't extraordinary skewed in favor of the adults. Of course, the Quell would be no fun without little kids. Not that it will matter in the career districts.
District 4's escort seems to have dedicated her entire salary to looking like some kind of eclectic deep-sea creature. Lionfish spines protrude from her back, and mottled scales like those of a sparkling fish lay in thick layers over her skin. It is unsettling, almost disturbing, to watch as her coral-red fish lips read the name of a female tribute. The name has hardly been read when a volunteer steps up, and then it is time for the male tribute.
"Si…"
"I volunteer as tribute!"
Suddenly all Tench can think of is the horrible mottled red baby he pulled from the amber. Like if all the skin was peeled off a human and only the muscle and blood was left visible.
"How will it breathe?"
"How will it eat?"
"Cast him out!"
The stabbing motions of salt-crusted tridents and the crisscrossing kisses of flaming torches left in the night.
He might hesitate for a moment in stepping up, but no. He is leaving District 4. He is never coming back.
"What's your name, dear?" the escort asks.
"Tench Burgundy."
The name rolls over the crowd like thunder. It might not be true that everyone has seen him, but everyone recognizes the name; Tench Burgundy, the poor boy who caused his father to die. If he had never been born his father would never have died. The grand patriarch of the House of Burgundy, the noble and most ancient house who migrated from District 1 to help District 4 during its time of great need. And the news of the stillbirth has rattled around the district like a flame sucking up the oxygen in a small space. Everyone knows about it by now.
"Mr. Burgundy – as in, the House of Burgundy?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Any ideas of how you'll fare in the arena?"
"I know how to pack a punch when it matters."
"Oh, brilliant!" the escort blurts out. "Ladies and gentlemen, Tench Burgundy!"
Amphitrite is his only visitor. She comes in looking worried out of her mind – but that doesn't fool him for a moment. She is as faye and distant as ever, a futile soul in a futile body. They might look like they're made of flesh and blood, but really every human's heart is made of stone.
"I'm going to be okay, Amphitrite. I'm going to make it. I trained for this, remember?"
"I… I just had no idea you were selected! And don't call me by my name! Aren't I your Caste-Mother? Aren't I?"
Silence falls in a thick foggy blanket over the room.
"I think it's time for me to decide for myself what really matters to me," Tench whispers.
"Don't I? Don't I matter to you?"
"Yes, you do. You've… you've left your mark on me."
And that is undeniable.
"I'm so worried about you, Tench. When I remember the day you were born – you might not believe it, but I remember it fondly. My Caste-Grandmother always said that human souls are reincarnated, not sent to heaven or hell. They run down through the salt flats into the ocean where they join with all the souls ever sent up from the earth. Then they rise into the air and fall back down onto the land. You are your Caste-Father's child, Tench. Make us proud."
Us. That is such a strange word to hear.
Tench lifts his head gently. "Don't worry, mom. I might not be the strongest career, but I've got some brains in my head. When I make a hit, I make it count."