The Career Tribute
It matters not what someone is born as, but what they grow to be.
-Albus Dumbledore
A/N: I gave the intro in the random craziness version of this fic rather short shrift, so I decided to flesh out what my version of a Tribute Training Centre and the Capitol's political structure would look like. For the Capitol guys, think Rome-style City-State on the cusp of becoming an empire. Just a thought. Enjoy!
Rose woke up in a white room. The bed was fairly comfortable and the walls looked like the ones from where she'd lived before the settlement. Everything was completely, distressingly white without her glasses on. There were strange sounds coming from a box on the side of her bed, on top of which rested the aforesaid glasses. She didn't freak out this time, seeing as waking up in a strange place had happened before and being scared was something she had gotten used to during her lifetime. So she simply sighed, put on her glasses and went to open the door.
This place was strange, stranger than waking up in the wooden hut had been. She'd seen more new people here than anywhere else in her life beforehand. A couple of minutes wandering through the maze-like corridors of this place had seen her meet dozens of new faces, people of all different shapes and sizes and states of awareness.
Two things stood out to the girl. One, they were all wearing either a strange green uniform or clothes covered by a white coat. Two, they all looked at her once before summarily ignoring her. Rose was fine with that. Ignorance was better than the wary curiosity of the village had been. But that still left her without knowing where she was or what she was supposed to do, which meant finding out. Which meant getting the attention of one of the grown-ups. Rose bristled at the idea. She absoluted hated attention and now here she was, looking for it. It galled her.
So she wandered around, trying desperately to puzzle out the signs and find someone she could talk to. Finally, she came upon a sign saying 'reception', which sparked a dim recollection in the back of her mind about how there had been a reception area she'd had to wait in back when she was first starting pre-school. So she followed the sign until she found a man dressed in green behind a desk, busily typing away at a computer of some kind. Desks were good. Desks meant teachers and learning to her, which was what she was looking for.
"Uhh, excuse me sir?" She asked in her best 'scared' voice. The typing noises stopped.
"Hm. What?" The man asked harshly, clearly annoyed at something.
"I-I need help sir." She found that she didn't need to fake scared anymore. She'd been on the receiving end of many angry looks in her day, but this man was good at them.
"This is reception, not an information booth you little shit. Go bother someone else."
Rose baulked, shocked at the tone that distinctly reminded her of her uncle. Memories of dark rooms and hunger came back. "B-but I-i don't know where to go..."
The man grunted, angrily looking up and down the corridor for some idiot to foist the kid off onto. Spotting none, he sighed and glared at her again. "Alright. What is it you want?"
"I j-just woke up and... well, everything's strange and I was wondering if you could help me?"
"Huh-oh, you're that Barbarian kid they brought in yesterday." His sneer at the word Barbarian telling her that this probably wouldn't be as nice a place as the village had been. "Alright, I'll just get someone to come pick you up. Maybe now that you're awake someone'll finally see sense and kill you too."
With those words, the man picked up what looked like a phone without the wires in it and started talking. Rose, on the other hand, was puzzled. What did he mean by kill her? It was all so strange.
A few moments later, a man dressed in a completely white uniform with what looked like a crash helmet strapped to his head stepped into the reception area and whisked Rose away from the scary bad man behind the desk.
She was ushered into a small office a few floors up from where she'd been. The room had no decorations in it at all, just a desk, three chairs, a computer and a window looking out onto a courtyard. Nothing much to look at from Rose's perspective. After a couple of minutes sitting in the chair like a good little girl, she got up and took a look at the computer. It looked nothing like the computers at home. They all had that black background with green icky letters on them. This one was all sleek and cuddly, with a nice background and animated animals playing around on-screen. She took a closer look and accidentally toggled one of those mouse things Uncle had talked about one day. The cuddly animals were replaced by pictures of folders and an open box in which she could read text.
Quarterly District productivity report (summary):
As predicted, productivity over this quarter has experienced a drop of approximately two percent across the board, due mainly to assigning goods to winter storage and the Hunger Games preparations-
"Ah, there you are!"
She squeaked as the man, the old man, first she'd ever seen since arriving, entered the room. "Y-you were looking for me?" She stammered, trying to hide her fear of this man that her mind was telling her was terrifying.
"Indeed, since I was the one to find you amongst the Dissidents." he said as he stalked over to see what she'd been doing with his workstation. "You shouldn't have done that." He said, finger pointing at the screen. "This is sensitive information. Under normal circumstances, you'd have been in, ah, trouble." He growled, smiling at the soft flinch the girl gave. Ah, fear, his old friend. They made everyone else putty in his hands.
"Sorry, sir. I didn't know."
"It's alright. My name is Corolianus Snow, by the way. And yours, little lady?" He asked, smiling a smile that never reached higher than the underside of his nose while his cold, dead eyes drilled into her.
"Rose, sir."
"That's it?"
"As far as I know, yes sir."
"Alright then, Rose. Now, please tell me how it is that a child of the Capitol found herself in a Dissident village four hundred klicks away from the city." At this, his smile turned into a grim frown. "I am all ears."
President Snow sighed as he heard the story the chit had told him. It seems that his peacekeepers hadn't been doing as good a job at home as he'd heard. She was clearly from the Capitol; no other place in the nation held any of the technology she'd described to him in detail. Indeed, only the wealthiest of the Families could afford a car and the archaic, pre-War technology & products she'd talked about. But to hide a little girl in a house, under the nose of his authorities, starve her, drug her and leave her to die in a forest far from civilisation...
He thought he'd stamped out the practice of keeping the bastard offspring of servants as unpaid labour when he was still Capitol administrator. Antonius Dobna had assured him that that practice was no longer prevalent anywhere outside of the poorest districts! For such a dedicated servant to Panem to have failed so blatantly did not sit well with Snow. And now here she was, proof positive that his efforts had been undermined by someone powerful enough to hide her from him. Antonius would burn for this. Literally, if Snow had his way.
But that didn't solve the immediate problem of what to do with the girl. Being the bastard offspring of one of the Families was how he'd got started, and he thanked his lucky stars that his mother had had the brains to move back to her District before giving birth to him. The Snow patriarch had tracked him down after his son's death and offered to sponsor his attendance at the newly created tribute training academy in exchange for recognising his father's wife as mother instead of his actual mother. If mom hadn't moved back, he would have fallen victim to the very practice this Rose girl had found herself ensnared in. Pity she died not long after he started at the Academy.
Still, Rose was the child of someone fairly important, important enough that they hadn't simply strangled her and left her remains in a gutter somewhere upon birth. Which meant that she was of good Capitol stock, like him.
With the proper training, she could be more, much more than the servant and in-house entertainment she had probably been slated to become if the Family that sired her hadn't tried their level best to kill her without actually running her through with a knife, sword or bullet. Should he do it instead? It would be easy for him. Just do a quick grab, strangle the life out of her, forget this whole idea for good. It was tempting and would avoid a lot of tears and bloodshed in the near future. But he saw himself in her now and cursed his foolish self for meeting her before he'd thought this all through. As it stood, killing her now would probably raise questions with the reporters who'd no doubt already heard about his meeting with the girl.
No, he wouldn't kill her. But he could turn her into an asset for use at a later date. She just needed the proper motivation, is all. And he knew exactly how to motivate her.
Rose stopped talking, exhausted by the recital of her life up until the point where she woke up in this strange place called a hospital. She looked up at the man who'd taken to sitting behind the desk, the grim frown replaced by a fake look of sadness that had still made her heart sing a little bit despite knowing that it was fake. Nobody had ever gone through the effort to put up airs in front of her before. It was uplifing, in a way. Not enough to make her happy, but enough to make her feel a bit better about telling this man about herself.
"I... see." He sighed, laying back and thinking about the situation. Finally, he looked at her. "Clearly, I have failed you."
"E-excuse me, sir?"
"Do you know who I am, girl?"
"N-no?" He looked at her oddly. How did someone go through their whole life as a servant/slave of one of the Families and not know what his name meant?
"I am the President of Panem." Rose paled. Panem. She was in Panem. Home to the Districts, where blood, death and slavery were all that awaited those born within them. The horror stories told only a few days ago were fresh in her mind, including the games. Especially the Hunger Games. She started trembling. She was going to die here. It was an odd thought in her six-year-old mind, to have the one who'd dictate how she died just sitting across from her and telling her that he'd failed her somehow. This was very, very bad. Snow just chuckled at her expression, mistaking the look of terror and confusion for one of the little girl finding out that she was expected to defer and serve him as a servant of a powerful household would.
"Oh, stop worrying. I don't bite." As she gulped and nodded, he felt a small smile spread across his face. Odd, that never happened. "I failed you in that you were treated badly by people who should have known better, done better, before you were smuggled out of the city and left to rot in the middle of that goddamn forest on my watch. Now, this is incredibly embarrassing to me. I spent most of my life as a public servant stamping the practice of slavery out. Why bother, when there's the Districts that are so eager to please nowadays? But no, some people still do this and try to get away with it. And they almost did, in your case. Trust me when I say that I will find those who did this and kill them."
Rose's green eyes widened before she started crying with relief. He wouldn't kill her. Instead, she had the biggest monster she'd heard of vowing to hunt down Aunt and Uncle for her. Maybe he would get Cousin as well. Oh, that would be the day. She got up, crying and smiling, and ran over to hug the man.
Corolianus startled, then snarled as he flung the girl off him. Shocked and confused again, the girl looked up at him with the joy being replaced by hurt. "Don't you ever dare do that to me again!" He shouted at her. "Now let's make something perfectly clear right here, right now. I am not your mother. I am not your father. Neither am I one of the people that locked you up and tried to kill you. I am your President, and you will approach me as such. If you want to display affection or thank me, say so. But don't take my goodwill for granted. Is that clear?" He hissed out to her in an undertone that had caused many of his underlings to soil their pants in the past.
"Yes sir. Thank you, sir. I won't ever do that again, sir!" She managed to stutter out as she picked herself up, sniffing away the tears. He relaxed at seeing her tears. Maybe she was cowed enough now to make the next time he shouted at her even more entertaining.
"Good. Now, as I was saying, your former tormentors are going to be hunted down and killed, but that leaves me with the question about what I am to do with you. I can't just let you go since you don't have anywhere to go. I can't put you in the orphanage because your relatives, if they are powerful enough to hide you from me in my own city, are definitely powerful enough to deal with you permanently as well. As for me, though killing you would easily solve the problem now, it would complicate things further down the line. So what I am going to do is formally welcome you into the family as my grand-daughter. You look similar enough to my son to pass muster, which is good enough for the press."
Rose's brain froze. Adoption? Was that what he was talking about? "What?"
"I will welcome you into the Snow family. But, there are conditions."
She looked wary at this. Conditions. That's normally a term she associated with getting to eat at home. You get breakfast under the condition that you clean the house tonight. Or my condition for letting you stay in the house over the weekend is that you help do the gardening. Conditions had never been a good word in her book even before she understood what it meant. "What are they?" She asked, her up-and-down tone of before replaced with one that was too serious to come out of a six-year-old.
Corolianus smiled genuinely once again. Getting her attention had been easy, even with the hugging episode (presumptuous little idiot), now for the hook. "You are to acknowledge my son as your father and his wife as your mother at all times. At no point are you to even hint at the idea that they aren't your actual parents, is that clear?" She nodded. Acting as if they were her parents would probably be easy, since she'd never really met her actual parents in memory. "And second, you are to prove yourself worthy of the name Snow. How you do that will be up to you, unless you don't, in which case I will assign a task that you will complete on command, is that clear Rose?" She nodded again. It's not like she had a choice, which was what Snow hoped she'd recognise. "Good. Now, go to the guard outside and ask him to take you back to your room. I have work to do."
A few days later, Octavian Snow entered his father's office in the Capitol's political sector. He didn't come here as often as he used to anymore, which suited Octavian just fine. Coro, as his wife had taken to calling the old man, was a cold bastard. He distinctly remembered just how cold every time he though about what the old man had done to his mother. He still had nightmares about it, in fact.
He also didn't see eye to eye with him when it came to administering the Districts. Octavian believed that, as a gesture of goodwill, the Hunger Games should be abolished for good. Corolianus would hear none of it.
Oh, it was all well and good for Father! He didn't have to deal with upset parents fostering a rebellion in all twelve districts come wintertime. He didn't have to police District borders all through spring, drawing vital ressources away from the Peacekeeper corps, every time one of the damn Barbarian brats went missing. No, President Snow didn't worry about such things. District Governor Snow, on the other hand, did.
Not only did the Games kill people it was his job to take care of, no, it also sucked up huge amounts of his department's money and time every fucking year as desperate parents try to help their kids escape too. And who was blamed on the rare occasions where a kid or ten didn't turn up for Selection? Oh yes, it was him. Not the elders. Not the parents. Not the Peacekeepers. It was him, every time, who had to go and explain to dear old dad just why he had gotten a call from the Games organisers again.
So it came as no surprise to anyone when Octavian had District Administration headquarters moved from the Capitol to District one two years into his tenure. Yes, Father had shouted at him, but he shouted at him for every damn thing he did anyway, so might as well make it worth his time.
But, while it was usual for President Snow to summon Administrator Snow for an impromptu dressing-down twice a year, the next shouting match wasn't due until the early days of February next year when the militia heads start whining about how some of the current year's crop of rebels somehow got their hands on a pre-War weapons cache and had taken to shooting up the local barracks when they got bored with dodging the local Peacekeeper force.
So it was with a bit of uncertainty, anger and trepidation that Octavian sat in his father's office's waiting area listening to the CEO of the Energy Board getting his ass handed to him over yet another dismal performance from the 'restore Panem' initiative's repairing of the old electrical grid. He picked the lint off the ceremonial suit Administrators are expected to wear on formal business and ran his eyes over the majestic ante-room for the thousandth time. Murals and insets depicting the victories of Panem over the Rebel Forces during the Dark Days, complete with mushroom clouds and gory peasants, covered every inch of the ceiling. Closer to eye level, paintings representing the idyllic landscapes of the Districts in the process of being tended to by cheerful District residents shared space with portraits of the previous holders of the Presidential title.
His bored musings were interrupted as the ornate doors to the Presidential Office opened with a bang. Watching a portly charicature of a tuskless Warthog made him smile. Storming away was hard work for someone in as desperate a need for exercise as the CEO of the Energy Board. Not to mention funny. It was probably the only source of humour he'd get today...
"Presenting Octavius Snow, District Administrator!" the guard at the door announced in that pompous manner learned by announcers Panem-wide.
"It's Octavian, you idiot. Father?" He asked as he strode into the freakishly Spartan office of the President. Drab colours, a desk, three chairs, archaic phone, workstation and a mountain of paperwork. And that was, aside from the discretely distributed peacekeepers, it.
"Son. Have a seat." Corolianus said, waving his hand at the chair closest to him.
"Okay. Now, before we descend into the formalities, Panem business or family business?"
"Both." the President intoned in a low voice that caused Octavian to sit up straighter in his seath.
"Bad?"
"No, an opportunity. By the way, how is Julia doing these days?" His father asked.
Octavian smiled despite the strange atmosphere. "Fine. She asks about you, you know. It's always 'when's Coro coming to dinner this' and 'how's your father doing' that. It's quite tiring, having to make excuses when you miss another family dinner again."
"Oh, that won't be such a chore for you anymore."
"And why is that? Planning on visiting soon?"
"Yes, but that's not why. You see, I had to execute Antonius for dereliction of duty this morning."
"WHAT?" Oh dear god, what had the old man done now?
"You remember how I told you about where I came from?"
"Yes." Often, and at great length was left unsaid.
"You also doubtlessly remember how I stamped the practice of kin-servitude out as well, then." He nodded at that, often pondering how a man that can advocate the protection of children so forcefully can turn around and cheer the death of twenty-three teenagers every year like it's one of those pre-War ballgames.
"Yes. What does this have to do with you killing my wife's father?" A man who had been something of a surrogate father to young Octavian in the early years of public service, too. The old man didn't believe in helping out unless urged to, and did poorly when he tried.
"Now, now. I had him executed." He emphasised that word carefully. "Not out of spite or personal reasons, mind you. He was a close friend once upon a time. No, it was a court order and, by law, only the president could allow the execution to proceed once the sentence is handed down."
"Holy shit. Tried and executed for treason?" It was not unheard of, but damn you had to step out of line for the courts to order it. Treason as declared by presidential office was one thing. Being found guilty of it in front of a court of law required evidence, witnesses, a jury... the list went on. Outside of those mandated by presidential authority, executions were a rare event indeed. Swearing was a slight reaction when your father-in-law gets involved in something so incredibly bad as to warrant that punishment. "Y-you do know neither Julia nor I are involved in anything like that, right?"
"Yes, I am. And trust me, I checked thoroughly on you, Julia and all of your friends before inviting you here." Octavian didn't miss the be glad you weren't the old man was conveying to him. "Now let me explain what happened; last week, I decided to go on an inspection tour of a District militia barracks. During that time, a settlement of Dissidents was spotted nearby and, being in trouble, the commander decided to distract the newsies from his absolute incompetence by staging an impromptu Rebel Hunt. Of course, I tag along, as do a few of the other idiots. Good Press should never be disregarded. Imagine my surprise when the lone survivor of the attack happens to be a child from the Capitol. Imagine Antonius's surprise when he found out that I was the one who found her."
Dead silence met that statement.
"You know the rules Octavian. Antonius assured me that this kind of thing had stopped within Capitol borders. And, while I could give less of a shit about the double-digit Districts, hard as though it might be for me to actually care less about what they get up to out there, I do care when someone is not only doing something like this, but also has enough authority to go about covering it up!"
Octavian spoke up. "He, ah, lied to you then? Is that what this was about?"
The old man massaged his forehead. "No you dolt. He didn't just lie. He is the Capitol administrator, the only one capable of hiding this from me. He lied, then, when the scum that was doing this tired of the girl, he helped get rid of her, then covered it up!" Yes, dear old dad was enraged, alright. Even more so than when he'd stumbled across Mom and the gardener. "He fucking played me, Octavian. Like I was one of those whores of his! I worked hard, damn hard to stamp out slavery in the Capitol and that bastard had the unmitigated gall to condone it and help destroy my legacy! He made me look like a fool." Spittle was forming on his lip. Dear God, just how had he executed Antonius if this was the state he was in after killing the source of his rage?
Coro settled back into his chair. "Still, I found out. I talked to the girl when she woke up and offered her a deal. In exchange for saying nothing about this, I would take her into our family and see her tormentors brought to justice. I've already talked to the heads of both the militia and the Peacekeepers so that they did exactly that. What I want you to do is adopt her."
"What?" Octavian asked. "Adopt her? Adopt her? Julia-"
"-Is barren." the old man chuckled at the look on his son's face. "Come now son. It's not like it's a secret, really. You've been trying for years after that miscarriage. And what do you have to show for it? Just bills for IVF treatments, gene therapy, doctor's visits... all covered by me, I might add. I read the files after the doctors were done too. Julia. Cannot. Have. Children. And we all know that infertile couples-"
"-Are sent into exile, I know. But you're asking Julia to take care of a girl who was instrumental in getting her father killed. That's just cruel."
"Yet fitting. Her father's meddling is what caused this to happen. With all the damage that's been done with that little revelation, I should think it's the least punishment she could be saddled with under the circumstances."
Octavian hung his head. There was no use arguing with that. Being found an accomplice after the fact was a popular way of silencing the more violent members of the opposition completely legally. Him persisting on this would probably push the old man to explore his usually bloody alternatives instead. "Alright, but I want to know two things." His father nodded. "First, can we keep it from Julia? She doesn't need to know about the girl's involvement in this, right?" A hesitant look, then a nod. "Good. Now second, why do you want to do this Dad? It's not like you to just do this out of the goodness of your heart."
"Oh, that one's easy. We Snows have done a lot in Panem. For Panem too. We are the most powerful Family of them all and have been that way since the Dark Days. But there's one thing, one thing, that we've never managed to do."
"And what is that?"
"There has never been a Snow who won the Hunger Games. And Rose Snow will be the one to bring us that victory... or die trying."
Octavian could only stare at his father. His father, who was looking back at him with that horrifying grin on his face. Oh dear god, that poor thing.
Three years passed since Rose Snow was accepted into the family. Julia never found out about her involvement in her father's downfall and Octavian never said a word about it. They treated her like a daughter, showering her with the love and affection she had so desperately craved when she was younger. She had her own room. She was allowed to study. She only did chores like cleaning up her room and washing after herself. She attended school with the more privileged District children. In short, for three years, she was in heaven. She would always look upon those years with fondness and regret.
Then came the day that would mark the start of a new life for the girl. Neither the Snows nor Rose knew exactly what day she had been born, so they had settled on a date. The final day of Victorius. Once known as Halloween.
Octavian and Julia had cared for the girl as best they could, better than expected even. But that day was her ninth birthday, which marked the end of her life with the people she had grown close to. For she received a letter that day, confirming her entry into the tribute trainee program.
The District 1 tribute training centre is not what you would call a humane environment. Out of all the training centres, it is the biggest, with the most comprehensive terrain-specific training grounds offered by any training centre in Panem. Rain soaked jungles, stagnant cesspools that pass for swamps on a good day, mountainous environments, small villages, ruined cities, empty plains and lush forests are but a few of the areas that the various career tributes 'enjoy' during their training. Then you have the classrooms offering a high-quality education, complete with the latest in electronic gadgets & computing technology as well as a luxurious set of dorms that include a spa, well-appointed gyms, TV rooms, libraries and even an indoor amphitheatre where the students could indulge in theatre performances, political debates, public lectures and even the odd honour duel.
In theory it's all bright and lovely and a tribute to the generosity of the citizens of Panem in general and the Capitol in particular.
The reality is far more sinister. The tribute training centres provide the best, yes. But the whole purpose of these facilities is to train children to kill on command. The students that roam these grounds, attend these classes, enjoy these facilities and entertain themselves here are stuck in a gilded cage. Outside, no future awaits. Inside, the sole path to glory is through murder. For a select few of them, eternal glory and undreamt of wishes await if they survive the gauntlet of the hunger games. In the meantime, the children learn all about the price of ambition, the cost of privilege and the depths of depravity humans will embrace if only it makes their lives that tiny bit better. And the greatest tool they have is that they can, within these walls, kill with impunity. All have a reason to, though many refuse to indulge in such acts. Mostly. But the children that go here are, regardless of origin, all united in their desperation for advancement once outside the walls.
The elite students, the ones who came from the Capitol's more influential families, were those that stood to inherit nothing since their siblings or cousins would, as they say, get it all. They were sent to the academy to train them to be as ruthless & bloodthirsty as they possibly could be, to prepare them for success in the vicious set-up that was everyday life in Panem. They will brutalise and kill all who oppose their rule.
The orphans, the ones who were dumped on the training centre's doorstep, belonged to the training centre. Only the best would thrive alongside the children of the major families there. The rest would become the target practice Career tributes use to bloody themselves in preparation for the Games. They are both the most numerous and the most viciously competitive students in the centre and will stop at nothing to keep themselves alive.
And then you had the orphans who caught the eye of self-same influential families, adopting them in exchange for services rendered later. These children would be granted the same privileges as the elite, never having to fight their peers for better grades to avoid being used in the training areas as prey to their faster, smarter and stronger peers. Never having to go hungry if they missed a meal after being chased by those looking to eliminate the competition for their grade point average. Never being hamstringed in some way, shape or form before phys-ed evaluations take place, where the fates of those not up to snuff is rumoured to be short, painful and loud. Begging for mercy is not an uncommon sound to emanate from the phys-ed teachers' offices following said evaluation. However, all this comes at a price.
To the families, it guarantees that those with abilities far exceeding those of their peers' get to benefit from their skills, an investment of sorts.
To the adopted, it's an understanding that they will spend a decade calling this or that person boss, master, sir or any above combination, depending on whether the family had adopted them for family-related matters or if they were simply acting on behalf of one of Panem's numerous business interests.
To the other students, it's a means by which the orphans cheat their way out of their proper place by whoring themselves out to the highest bidder. And since a great number of elites attending the training centre have mothers who were 'adopted' by their fathers whilst studying in the centre's halls, there is a grain of truth to the whoring out part of the equation.
Of course, everybody completely ignores the lengths the Orphans went to to net themselves such benefactors. It was normal for aspiring adoptees to sabotage or even outright kill their rivals if it meant making their odds that much better, staying ahead of the pack for that much longer. And after they get what they want, the adoptees still have to shield themselves from assassination attempts by both the Orphans looking for a second round and the Elites looking to warn off the other aspiring adoptees. So they retaliate. And as time goes by, the attacks get more and more vicious while the retaliations become downright horrifying. Most of the deaths are attributed to adoptees looking to save their skins, gradually losing their faith in humanity in the process and pre-empting their perceived enemies by killing them as viciously as they can. By the end, the most successful start murdering for sport, simply because they can no longer dissociate their peers from their enemies. Anyone in their age bracket is a danger, and killing is the only viable response they know that works.
This was the environment Rose came to live in.
Rose Snow of Panem. Her first two years at the academy had been brutal for, even if the loyalty of Districts 1 and 2 to Panem was legendary, the name Snow was spoken with hatred and disgust in private. The majority of the staff had fought under Corolianus at the Battle of Toronto, the greatest disaster of Snow's career. Not only had he failed to secure the northern border to the Barrens, he had also failed to finish off the remaining descendants of the District 13 Armoured Cavalry regiment. That failure had killed untold thousands, emboldened the rebels and terrorists calling the Barrens home and utterly crippled Panem's chances at claiming the entire continent for itself. The entire force had been drummed out of the militias and the Army in disgrace, most of the regimental sub-commanders having been executed for insubordination and cowardice. And here came their chance for revenge, all sugary sweet smiles and demure countenance.
To the elites and the orphans looking to be adopted, she was a threat and an opportunity in equal measure. There were two factions that formed in the wake of Rose's arrival; those that wanted to use her as a means towards currying favour with the President, and those that intended to kill her because of what her family had done to gain power.
Rose didn't understand any of this, at first. The teachers hated her, the kids either hated her, or worse, tried to get into her good graces and nobody wanted to believe that she was just Rose. She took to fleeing to the Academy's library when not in class or in her room, preferring the company of books to the other, openly hostile kids. When the library closed, she took to spending two hours at the gym, running, doing whatever exercises the phys ed teacher assigned and generally anything that would make her sweat and forget while her yearmates laughed their asses off at those cartoons they watched.
After a year, a new facet to a tribute's education was introduced to the curriculum: fighting. The children had to attend lessons after class to learn the ins & outs of hand-to-hand fighting, weapons training and how to survive in a hostile environment.
More importantly, students were forced to spend their weekends doing exercises in the training grounds.
These things, Rose took to like a duck to water. She knew how to survive in a hostile environment. The settlement had given her some training in how to hunt, use a bow & arrow and how to handle a knife against most animals that tended to roam around the forest. While she couldn't take a mantis bear in a stand-up fight, she did know enough to avoid one. She quickly gained a reputation for being gifted at fighting and vicious with the people that angered her.
But there was one thing she had learned during her stay with the settlement that came in extremely handy during the weekends; how to build and hide small traps.
Without that skill, Rose would have been dead long before the end of second year. Her name, while still carrying some weight during normal cirricular activities, made her the target of choice in the training grounds. Snow hunting became a regular pastime for any tribute trainee looking to make a name for him or herself, sometimes with entire classes joining forces in order to hunt down and 'accidentally' kill their elusive prey.
Her budding fighting abilities helped a lot against those in her year and above, but soon some of the older kids joined in, teenagers that were head & shoulders above her in terms of skill, abilities, training and talent. She learned early on that to even attempt to engage an upperclassman was tantamount to suicide, courtesy of one of the younger kids challenging a fifteen-year-old to a knife fight. She'd seen the older boy train with his peers during her night-time exercises, often begging off a few lessons even from those a year below him. Everyone saw him as a pathetic moron in terms of fighting ability, a view that had perhaps contributed to the young child's decision to challenge him with knives. The older boy tore the younger kid apart. Literally. If even the worst of the worst could do this to a kid...
She needed to try something other than close quarters fighting. Ranged fighting was out since, despite being really stonking good with a bow, she simply didn't have the muscle to match the bows the older kids used. She would have to close to within fifty-sixty metres if she hoped to hit her target, while the stronger bow's engagement envelope habitually ran into the hundred-two hundred metre range when it came to accurate, direct fire. A spear, while multi-purpose, had the same problem; her range was simply too limited despite the intense training she underwent.
Brute musclepower simply cancelled out any advantage she could think of. Which is when she remembered the old man that'd found her in the forest. He'd taken her out hunting the most, having grown fond of the strange girl. He showed her how to skin rabbits, snakes, goremoles, the works. How to aim accurately and shoot a bow without injuring herself. Even how to improvise a crude crossbow should her bow break during a hunting trip. And, of course, how to make rabbit snares. Bear traps. Trapping pits. Deer stakes. Log bombs. All of it.
And, come to think about it, the kids that hunted her tended to be way too focused on catching her to watch their surroundings as warily as, say, a deer would. Which meant that, if she could figure out a way to scale up the traps and use whatever she managed to scavenge before the weekend, then she could build and use them against her enemies.
It took a few months to figure out how to scale them up. It would have been sooner, but the pressure was being ratcheted up as both the tension between the students and the coursework became close to unbearable. Without the benefit of having weekends off and little alone time, the best Rose could do was to focus on a few traps she knew required little effort to set up and hide in a relatively short timespan. As she steadily got more and more familiar with how the training grounds were structured, she refined and added other traps to her repertoire. It was often slow-going, too slow in her opinion, but she persevered.
The first time she used traps was, oddly enough, in the desert arena. While the edges had nothing but sand-blasted dunes to offer, the middle was a honeycombed maze of tunnels and rivulets running up to a klick deep in some places. This made the centre a natural gathering point for practically all the trainees, with the cornucopia located in the entrance hall and odd spires providing easy access to the more remote tunnels and the bigger streams. Rose's idea was simple; grab a surprise pack at the outskirts of the cornucopia, run hell for leather for one of the shafts and set up shop near the closest water source. Once there, use the butt of the knife to wear down the underside of whatever protrusion there was and the wire to trip up unsuspecting pursuers during her getaway.
It didn't go well. The chaotic nature of the tunnels meant that the closest water source to the vent she crawled down was, paradoxically, the deepest and strongest underground river of the arena. Unlike with the softer rock further up, the bits of cave closest to the stream itself had either washed away long ago or near impossible to weaken as it was. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that the river would simply sweep anything that fell into it down a nearby waterfall, likely killing the unlucky trainee on impact with the bottom.
She only realised this little problem upon arrival, her panting and sweating frame looking at the completely undefendable space she found herself in with dismay. The other trainees had undoubtedly seen her crawl down the vent by now and if even one of them knew where it led to, then they knew that she would be forced to fight her way back to the surface unless she crawled back up to the cornucopia again. Which meant that the traps she'd planned on testing wouldn't work and she was in a tactically untenable situation, having to watch a dozen different entrances at once.
Okay, plans A and B were scrapped. This left plan C; set up a trap course as quickly as possible and act as bait. She worked as fast as she dared, setting up tripwires along her planned obstacle course and taking careful note as to where she set them. It was an exit tunnel on the far side of the river with two natural bridges the others would have to cross if they intended to reach it. She crawled up and down the tunnel, trying to conserve the glowsticks that came with the pack as much as she possibly could by feeling her way through places where the ceiling stooped down.
At the mouth of the exit, she managed to jury-rig a suspended rock to act as a swing trap. Stepping on the small plate at the exit would trigger a medium-sized boulder, which would swing its way towards the entrance. Anyone engaged in hot pursuit would catch a rock in the ribs for their trouble, though Rose wondered what would happen if anyone were actually hit by it.
Carefully climbing back down, the girl then filled up the two gourds of water she was carrying and put them back in the bag, sealing them tight so as not to lose a single drop. It was nighttime when she heard unnatural noises coming down one of the tunnels. She looked at the entrances on the side she'd come in on and gasped. She could see five sets of bright greenish-grey light from five different tunnels, a sign that almost all the trainees in the arena were converging on her position. She legged it for the exit, careful not to make too much noise as she scrambled up the tunnel in near darkness. Not that it mattered much, as her ragged breathing echoed down into the chamber she'd just left, telling anyone within hearing distance where she was. A muffled shout from one of the others told her she'd been heard, the hunters confident enough in their victory to no longer bother hiding their approach.
Rose cursed as she struggled to get the glowstick to flare up. Right, time to leg it. And leg it she did.
The first wire saw shouts of elation turn into shouts of surprise, the deceptively steep incline of the tunnel being made slippery thanks to the abundance of water dripping off the walls and an incredibly sleek floor Rose had cunningly concealed undernath some sand and gravel she'd gathered earlier. The first trainee through had tripped on the wire and had gone sprawling back down into the gathering throng underneath, taking the snapped wire, gravel, sand and rock with them. The second wire saw shouts of anger turn into pained gurgling as the near invisible metal filament caught the unsuspecting victim in the upper torso/neck area. The third wire told Rose, who was still scrambling up the slope at that stage, that the others had gotten smart, sending scouts ahead to either find the traps for them or trip them before they could damage the main body of the party too badly. The sharp Twang of snapping wire told her that it had been noticed and cut through with a knife. Pity they didn't notice that she'd kept that particular wire tense with a rock suspended above the tripwire itself. The muffled oomph and clonking of rock hitting floor told her that yes, that had been a good plan.
She made it out of the cave safely, avoiding the trigger tile at the mouth of the cave and sprinting straight for the second closest sand dune, which meant that she missed the remaining surprises she'd left behind. Hopefully they were as effect as she expected them to be. Snickering to herself, she made her way deeper into the artificial desert, hoping that the thin roll of tarp would be enough to give her shelter until the following night.
The roll of tarp had done a great job of sheltering her from the elements. She'd dug into the side of the dune, made herself a small cocoon out of the roll and climbed in just fine. Snug as a bug. In a tarp. Heh, she killed herself sometimes. As an added measure, she'd taken off her shirt and used it to cover her face while sleeping, hoping to keep any sand that came into her little nest out. That had been a brilliant idea as well; by the time she woke up, she was buried up to the waist in the uncomfortable granules that seeped in everywhere.
That was the good news. The bad news was that, by nightfall, she only had half a gourd's worth of water left. Turns out that, even buried under the sand, her little hidey hole had gotten insanely hot during the daytime. She'd started sweating profusely even as she snored herself happy. And that sweat, while it did evaporate in the heat, had nowhere to go thanks to the tarpaulin cocoon. Which meant that, while the outside world was hotter and drier than Hell, the inside was worse than the jungle arena in terms of both heat and humidity.
Long story short, Rose, upon waking up, felt thirstier than she'd had since the cupboard five years in the past. Thanks to that little episode of her life, she'd developed a near crippling fear of going hungry or thirsty for any length of time, which is part of the reason why she'd taken two gourds instead of the usual one. One thing you never wanted to do in the desert is run out of water.
She'd learned in class that some of the district residents stuck in arid areas of Panem had evolved entire economies, entire cultures around the acquisition and retention of water in the Nevada desert. There was even one weird little tribe that made the trek from District Six to District Five for the sole purpose of acquiring water on the cheap and crossed the desert in special suits that allowed them to consume any moisture their bodies gave off.
The best answer to learning that there were people who willingly drank their own sweat had been along the lines of Yeurch when that idea got discussed in class. However, a single day in the open desert had a way of changing your mind when it came to such things, which is why Rose dearly wished that she could have brought one of those suits into the arena with her when she woke up.
She panicked at the signals she was getting from her body. The headache was back. The stomach cramps were back. The Cocoon was as dark and as sweaty as her close quarters fighting instructor's armpits. It was a hot, stinking version of the cupboard. For a brief moment, she thought herself back in that personal hell that had been her old life again and lost it. When she finally came to, she had drunken 75 percent of her water rations that were meant to last for two days, was losing energy due to crying and hyperventilation and was starting to shiver as the temperatures started to drop to below freezing under the cold night sky.
She groaned. It seemed that the only way forward for her was to go back to the cave system and resupply. She needed water. She needed food, which had been ditched for the extra gourd since, well, she'd survived longer than two days without anything to eat, a mistake of epic proportions as her stomach growled about as loud as a forest cat now. A few more clothes would have been nice. Come to think of it, she needed everything. Seemed like there was nothing for it but to find some other trainee, knock them out and steal their stuff.
She crawled out of her nest, rolled up the tarp and stashed it in her bag before cleaning her glasses agains sand-caked trousers. She looked like one of those cartoon mud monsters some of the other trainee kids watched shows about in her year's mess hall. Growling to herself, she put her shirt-mask back on, shivered in the encroaching cold and made her way to the tallest spire of jagged rock piercing out towards the top of the dome.
Which was when she started to feel the sand vibrating slightly beneath her feet. That was bad.
She started running, momentarily forgetting that sprinting in the sand was both pointless and incredibly tiring as she tried to outrun whatever it was that was causing the sand to beat like a drum. She measured herself as the fear overtook her flight instinct, weaving out of the path of the vibrations and avoiding having to scramble to the top of a dune to get to the other side. She set her brain to work out the problem.
It seemed that the vibrations, while they were spread out across a large area, tended to be pointed in one direction. Also, when she turned away from the vibration, it would take a few seconds for the more intense drumming to catch up to her. She remembered some of the stories about submarines and how they used Sonar in a similar manner. So, whatever it was, it used sonar to find something scurrying on the surface and oriented itself so that it could face them head-on, which implied a straight-ahead attack vector. Therefore, as long as she avoided the strongest vibrations coming from the sand, she presumably could delay the attack strike just long enough to reach solid ground. She prayed that, whatever it was, it did not hunt on rocky land.
She spent an hour dodging the sonar, bobbing and weaving between the smaller dunes and studiously avoiding having to go around the bigger ones. Being underground, whatever was coming after her had the advantage of not having to bypass these obstacles, meaning that she was steadily losing ground to that thing even as a cave entrance drew tantalisingly close.
She reached Rocky soil in a whoosh of released air, sucking deep breaths into her sweating body as she slowly approached the entrance. Squinting in a dark the artificial moonlight was too dim to pierce completely, the girl drew a glowstick. Which is when whatever was chasing her washed up on rocky land. She gasped and turned around, looking at the thing that had blown out of the sand and was now steadily pawing towards her. She recognised that thing now; it was a Sand Shark, a genetically engineered monster amalgamation from the Dark Days.
Those things were set loose in arid environments to seek out and kill anyone trying to cross such areas. They were specifically designed for interdiction purposes, bred to seek out desert-dwellers and kill them in the most painful and horrifying manner possible. When the Rebels tried to cross the arid plains and set up a defensive line on the other side, their entire expeditionary force disappeared into the shifting sands underfoot. A massive release of Sand Sharks was to blame.
They could burrow through sand, mud and even swampland when needed. They had a massive pulmonary network, lungs whose connections could change on the fly to reflect their current hunting environment. Their mouths instinctively configured themselves as well, able to change from nothing more than a sand-propelled jet engine intake to a maw capable of shredding a truck in seconds. Their brains contained a highly sophisticated toolchain that could locate and hunt down any target walking on the sand within a range of two kilometres. Smart, adaptable, sophisticated. Deadly. They were supposed to be extinct, eradicated by a lack of food and pre-programmed infertility. But here she was, watching one of the massive beasts come ever closer to her, its legs gleaming with chitinous armour and claws used to smash through solid rock making a click, click noise every time the beast moved.
Thinking quickly, Rose cracked the glowstick open as the beast's movements started to smooth out, indicating that reconfiguration time was officially over. She then ran pell mell for the opening behind her, her fearful breathing and whimpering being slowly overshadowed by the grunt of a beast picking up speed for its final charge. At the last moment, she threw herself to the side, feeling the wake of the thing barging through the space her torso had been in a second beforehand. Still, her shoulder got clipped by one of the beast's massive fangs, her shocked cry of pain echoing through the arena.
The pain and the slick feeling of blood starting to pool underneath her clothes told her everything she needed to know about the wound she was now sporting. She lifted the glowstick up in front of her... and saw the Sand Shark flinch back from the light. The squeaky 'whoa' that escaped her at finally seeing the enormous insect made it squeal in pain. Of course! That was one weakness that every ultra-sensitive monster shared; sensitivity. The Sand Shark was only ever meant as a nocturnal predator, with extremely sharp hearing and a kind of eyesight that allowed it to navigate pitch black terrain without giving itself away too fast. This left it susceptible to high-pitched sounds. The glowstick in her hand probably blazed like a miniature sun in its brain. This gave her a plan, a very simple and dumb one, but a plan nonetheless. She waved the glowstick around in her hand and screamed her head off.
The creature gave slight moans of pain at the high-pitched thing that was waving a pain source around in front of its face. It could not attack the source of the sound without getting a faceful of light for its efforts. It didn't know where the source of light was coming from, so it couldn't extinguish that either. It was simply too young to overcome such an enemy. It bolted back for its grainy home, reconfiguring its body even as its legs picked up the speed needed to get away from the thing.
Rose slumped down onto the ground in relief. Now that had been a lucky break. She wasn't sure if she would get out of another encounter like that alive. Maybe. Maybe not. Luck played an important part in her survival this early into her stay at the academy, which pissed her off no end. The thing about luck is that it, too, tended to follow the basic tenet of the Murphyist Faith: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Indeed, it even made the Heretic's addendum possible: anything that cannot go wrong, does.
It was her job to minimise the risks she took since, one day, luck would go the other way and she would end up as something's lunch... or a casualty in the arena. Even at the age of ten, this basic rule had been drummed into her again and again; one day, your luck will run out. On that day, the only thing between you and a painful death will be your skill and ability to get out of the situation. Nothing else. Never count on luck getting you anywhere.
Talking about luck, she had been giving anyone camped out on the crags a nice little song and dance number, which probably meant that she'd been spotted already. She sighed. She only had to survive another twelve hours. If the dome's timer wasn't glitching again. It wouldn't be the first time though.
The rest of her time had gone swimmingly. She'd evaded the others who'd come to check out what all the noise was about, stumbled upon a corpse in the room she'd set her traps up in the previous day (which, she realised a few days later, meant that she'd probably killed the boy), took all the stuff the others had left behind, refilled her gourd and gone spelunking up a different spire than the one she'd crawled down in. Her wound, despite being dressed with the change of clothing the corpse had left inside its rucksack, made her left shoulder simply too painful to use climbing up the first spire again. The other one, while slightly riskier to use due to the possibility of detection, spiralled up in a manageable incline. As long as she kept her right arm holding onto something and didn't jostle the left one too badly, she found that she made good time going upwards. She then found a nice little hole to hide in close to the Cornucopia and the final exit, which allowed her to catch some rest and listen to the conversation going on close by.
She almost pissed herself laughing. Seems like, after her little trap party, the factions within the hunting group had dissolved. While she'd been snoring her face off in the desert, these idiots had taken their training weapons and started fighting each other rather than going outside to look for her! Idiots. Nobody knew how Bren, which was apparently the name of the corpse she'd stumbled upon, had died, only that he'd come tumbling down the tunnel with half of his face caved in. Two others had gone missing when the battle had started moving into the smaller tunnels and at least one group was trapped by a cave-in. Huh. One dead, five possibles. This had definitely been an interesting weekend for Rose.
She kept watch until the voice of the instructor declared the weekend arena exercises over, leaving her free to escape that bloody desert and make her way back to her room. Seemed like luck was still on her side, then.
After her performance in the desert arena, things started to heat up for little Rose. Father Octavius and Mother Julia came to visit her after they heard of her injury before leaving on another dinner with the District Elders. President Snow sent her what can be best described as a 'get well-or else' card, leaving her to ponder as to whether or not he was joking. She usually found that 'grandpa' had an odd sense of humour and an unhealthy appreciation for the comedic value of intimidating people for no good reason.
And, the following week, her wondering about whether or not she'd actually killed the boy came to an end with a letter from the Academy's chief of Student Relations, congratulating her on her first kill and informing her that, as of yesterday, she was formally inducted into the accelerated Career Tribute program.
She'd come to expect such a letter. Everyone who survived to reach fifteen in the Academy tended to talk about it in hushed tones, that so-and-so got a letter congratulating them on killing such-and-such during their scheduled outings. It was an object of fear, really, for to receive a letter for killing a person meant that you instantly became the primary target for retribution by that person's friends. But it was also something that a lot of the kids would admit to wanting should you ask them about it. A kill meant that you were better than the other guy, faster, meaner, smarter or just plain stronger. Kills were rumoured to carry rewards for those that performed them, though nobody would admit to getting them. So she knew about them. Knew that, eventually, she'd get one for killing someone or that she'd end up being the subject of someone else's letter.
She just hadn't expected it so soon.
And the rumours were right, to an extent; her kill meant that she'd been put in the smart kids' program. She knew that she was getting decent enough grades to qualify for the purely academic side of the accelerated program. Seems that getting your first kill at the age of ten tended to bump you up into the physical side of things as well. This meant that she now had access to areas normally declared off-limits to second-years; the senior's library, advanced weapons training facilities and the technical training curriculum were now open to her.
What made her breath hitch was the list of responsibilities. Apparently, the accelerated career tribute program meant that she was now meant to act as a role model, the perfect example of what a career tribute was and what they did. Not only was she expected to get top marks for everything now, she was also expected to mentor a group of other youngsters in her age bracket. Youngsters who, by now, hated her with a passion bordering on extremism.
She was also expected to make a minimum of one kill a month starting next year. How she did it and where she did it was up to her. Why she did it wasn't. She either had to kill someone in the arena or kill them in a formal duel in front of students and faculty. She'd been to a few of those, the term vicious being far too lenient a description of just how violent things would get during such a match. She wouldn't be penalised for any kills made in self-defence outside of those instances, but wanton murder would see her stripped naked, flung into the most poisonous arena they could find and hunted down by a squad of upper-years. If she survived three days, she was pardoned. If she didn't, well that's just bad luck isn't it?
On the plus side, it meant that she could graduate before she hit fourteen. On the minus side, it made her a target for every single person looking to prove themselves or to seek revenge for killing their friends.
She hated this, but could see the advantages of graduating early. That much less time being around those who hated her for the name she bore. That much less time being shouted at by people who thought her an uppity princess that should have died long ago. That much more prepared for when she volunteered come her sixteenth year. It just meant that she had to survive the next three years.
Her last thought before slipping into bed that night was that she'd totally forgotten the name of the kid she'd killed with that trap of hers. She remembered the face, though. Kind of hard to forget a boy with half his face missing, his ruined head surrounded by a halo of dried blood on a sandy floor. It was a very long night.
She'd expected the added workload, of course. That had been nicely detailed by the letter and the instructors she'd talked to about what the ATP entailed. What she hadn't been expecting was the sudden increase in hostility towards her. It's not like it was immediately obvious just how it could increase either. She was a loner with a nasty reputation stemming mainly from her family name and conduct during training fights. The few that actually came up and interacted with her did so out of some sense of misplaced importance. They left fairly quickly after she disabused them of any notion of getting through the academy easily if they brown-nosed her into oblivion. Nobody got close to her or let her get close to them. Except during training exercises, of course. Though killings were still way rarer than they were amongst the older kids, she'd gotten caught out during arena sessions and beaten more than once. All in all, she was shunned, a loner among a group that was mainly made up of other loners.
It soon became obvious that what she'd experienced beforehand had been nothing compared to what her new social life was like. Indifference was replaced with hatred. Hatred was replaced with loathing. But the worst were the jealous ones. The kids that were more followers than anything else, the sycophants that had wanted to ride on Rose's coat-tails all the way to graduation and beyond now thought that she'd been lying when they'd talked and that she was being treated the way she was because of who her parents and grandparents were. They now did anything they could to undermine her, constantly trying to prank her, steal her stuff, provoke her into doing something stupid or even injure her before phys ed classes.
All that because they thought that Rose was having it easy, that she was coasting through class because the teachers treated her like a spoilt princess. Coming from those to whom the moniker 'teacher's pet' was a guiding fact of life rather than a source of derision, that was a bitter pill to swallow. She would gladly have swapped her position for that of one of those toadies. Friends, family and all you had to do was pander to some superficial Family brat two or three sessions a day? Count her in! Far better than being weighed up by every punk in the Academy every time you walked into a room.
Her parents helped a lot. Grandfather was Grandfather; openly derisive and deaf to her complaints, but he did go out of his way to praise her when she did something appropriately violent. But she seriously doubted she would have survived the first three months without their tacit support.
But there was trouble brewing.
In the aftermath of Rose's acceptance into the accelerated training program, outsiders started to take an interest in the goings-on at the academy. She was a media darling, her darling little face playing well with the news crews that came to check out the new face of the Snow family. The President's grand-daughter, accepted into a program that only the best of the best ever entered. One that virtually guaranteed her a spot in one of the upcoming Hunger Games. She was articulate, intelligent and just cheeky enough to be adorable. The public ate it up like it was going out of style.
And Rose was being blamed for it.
The Academy was largely closed off to outsiders. It relied on children volunteering to join the Academy, as having a large number of Orphans and a small number of Elites with nobody acting as a buffer between the two parties was a recipe for disaster.
In fact, District Five had encountered that exact problem about thirty years ago; a particularly brutal death of one of the Academy's most promising graduates in the Hunger Games had seen most of the normal District kids drop out of the program, leaving only the Elites, the Orphans and the completely crazy to interact with each other. All the Elites were dead by the end of the first trimester. The Academy closed its doors for good and District Five lost a large amount of prestige in the bargain. .
The spectre of that little SNAFU continued to haunt the remaining Academies. Public relations became a core competency for any aspiring Academy principal. Image management trumped any other consideration when dealing with Academy issues. All any outsider could see was the shiny beacon of awesomeness that only admitted the best of the best. Once inside, of course, the truth became apparent but, by then, the stigma of failing out of the Academy was so great that it would destroy whoever bugged out before graduation.
And the attention focused Rose's way meant that thirty years' worth of damage control was being jeopardised because the newsies had found themselves a little Panem Princess to focus on. It was all oh-so-sweet and incredibly nerve-wracking for the Academy's department heads.
Rose was not thrilled either. The attention directed her way was yet another unforeseen consequence of her admittance to the ATP, one that would have caused her to flat out refuse to join regardless of the consequences. However, the eyes of Panem were on her now. Grandfather had made it abundantly clear that he wouldn't tolerate any on-screen dramatics designed to turn away the reporters, as it would reflect badly on him. And with that little tiff going on between the President and the new head of the Dobna family, he simply couldn't risk giving his enemies any more ammunition than what was already lying around.
So Rose grit her teeth, bore it all with a smile and set about trying to survive the incredibly brutal training her instructors were forcing upon her.
There was little time to focus on how her classmates reacted to her admission to the ATP program and what the fallout of her little stint as the celebrity du jour would be, which is why she ditched that consideration as quickly as she could and focused on her extra-curricular reading instead. She thought that the new wave of hatred and jealousy would be the end of that episode. Six months later, during her re-introduction to the arena training weekends, she found out just how wrong she was.
An ATP trainee was never trained with those within her age bracket. The best you could expect for was to be dumped in the arena with a group that were at least a year older than you, though most of the time the group was two or even three years older.
Rose, after six months intensive education and training, was at the level of a thirteen-year-old already. So, naturally, her instructors stuck her with a group of fifteen-year-old trainees. Who, it turned out, had seen the vids of her smiling for the cameras and were sick to death about hearing of this or that guy being mentioned as a potential match made in heaven. The opportunity to finally get the four-eyes off the stations and forget all about being mentioned as being part of a friendship circle with her and someone they knew was enough for the group to agree to kill her first before figuring out what to do for the next few days of arena time.
Monday morning, Rose was the only one to make it out. Her trainers were impressed, having watched footage of the battle to see how she was doing and to update the betting pool. The fight had been very different from the ones she'd been in before. The eleven-year-old was a great deal more vicious than she'd been in the desert Arena, using weapons and traps to great lethal effect. The Log Bomb had been of particular interest as well.
Rose was, apart from the trauma of having had to kill a large number of people, just grateful that the schmucks had tried to attack her in the Jungle arena. She absolutely loved fighting in lethal environments with lots of cover. A lot of the kids hadn't taken her seriously until they sported a broken appendage and enough wounds for any infection to be lethal. The few that had had decided to try and flush her out by burning the patch of forest she was supposed to be hiding in. The bow she'd lifted off one of the corpses had allowed her to engage them at range and set off booby traps from a distance too.
She hadn't gotten away unscathed though. A vicious swipe from a machete had almost cut her leg off at the calf muscle. A bit lower and she wouldn't have had enough muscle left to move. She was in extreme pain, but alive. Of course, the cut got infected by something quick and nasty on the day she was due to get out of the arena, which meant that she spent an additional five days in the infirmary after that.
Following her recovery, she spoke to some of the teachers about how the other kids saw her. The answer shocked the girl. She was eleven, but that had not stopped the gossip mongers in the school. There were allegations that she'd done things she didn't even understand, but was sure that they weren't good. The general consensus seemed to be that she allowed the staff to have their way with her for special privileges, that she used her name to get better grades, that she peddled drugs to the other kids... the list went on. And with each addition, she got angrier.
How dared they? To spread such rumours about her, to undermine her abilities, to dismiss her accomplishments when they saw what she did on a regular basis... She sneered at the ceiling. They, whoever they were, had denied her her dues at every turn, denigrated her and sidelined her, hoping to make an easy kill later on.
She would show them who they were messing with. Oh yes, they would regret this.
Her plan was simple; she needed to focus on her training. But she couldn't do that without exposing herself to danger if she was constantly exhausted. One moment of inattention when she had so many enemies living in close proximity to her would mean her death. On the other hand, she couldn't simply kill those who had done this since, well, there were too many rumour-mongers out there to catch those responsible. So she couldn't kill them, incapacitating them would just make them more determined and leaving them alone meant dying a horrible death.
The answer was obvious. She needed to take over the student body and hamstring the bastards when she could.
She started with her classmates who, after hearing about her killing off a dozen of the best fighters in the Academy, tentatively latched onto the girl as a possible leader despite the many nasty rumours about her. Then, she expanded her reach in the dorms, using her new minions to quickly subdue the younger ones while she systematically beheaded the leadership of the older classes in the arena.
She sent Grandfather the severed heads of those she'd found started the rumours about her, with a plea to make them into trophies. He indulged her in that. The girl truly was taking after him to a most satisfying degree.
Rose then opened negotiations with the older elites by approaching those who had younger siblings under her yearmates' control. While pointing out that she couldn't kill the younger ones due to her being an ATP trainee, she could ask her minions to, ah, deal with it.
With the Elites agreeing to staying out of the way of her and hers, she pushed herself to mastering all aspects of training and education, often ending up with scores above the theoretical maximum awarded. Oh, it sometimes dipped when some of the dimmer minions tried to set themselves up as competition, but they never lasted very long. After all, the highest grades always belonged to her and her followers. If they ingratiated themselves with her, they got personalised training by her as part of her mentoring duties. Seeing a mediocre Orphan languish at the bottom of the class only to rocket to a position in the top 5 within a month showed just how effective she was, oh yes. And they'd do anything, anything to stay close to her, to reap the awards being in her good graces brought, to live just that tiny bit longer than those who had tried to resist only to end up dead in their bed or beheaded in the arena training areas.
During her third year, she finally had a strong enough power base amongst the students and the staff training her to ignore the 'no unwarranted killing' rule, effectively ending any further challenges to her surprise rise to power. Forcing the wannabe rebels to watch one of their own be slowly disembowelled by a media darling, in broad daylight, inside the administrative building's Atrium was probably the reason.
The heads of the Academy were left reeling when they were found out just what Rose Snow had done. Indeed, if there were ever any doubts as to whether or not Rose was Corolianus's granddaughter, seeing her dirty up the reception area and then smile her way out of the punishment was the point at which such doubts were put to rest. Her takeover was a fait accompli. And while Octavian had most definitely not been impressed, it seemed that both Julia and the Snow patriarch approved and so had wisely kept his silence.
And so Rose continued her training, keeping abreast of her workload and getting ever better with her weapons while all the advice and lessons Grandfather gave her helped keep her little fiefdom stable until graduation.
After receiving her Diploma of Academic Accomplishment, she put in a request to join a hunter-killer squad that was rounding up Dissidents outside the districts. The officers had grumbled about having a teenager join what amounted to a frontline combat/sometimes spec ops unit, but that had quickly disappeared beneath a slightly awed respect for Rose's skills and the fear of what any of the Snows would do to them if a bunch of their nominal social subordinates continued annoying them.
Needless to say, for her superior officers' quick thinking and performance managing Rose in the field, the man had been appointed as part of President Snow's personal guard squad. After all, she'd gotten so good at her job that if Rose ever came after him, Coro wanted someone who knew exactly what it would take to kill the girl before she got to him. And so it went for two years, pitting herself in battle against the toughest & most determined enemies of the state left within striking distance of the Districts.
And now, following two years of distinguished service fighting Barbarians, Dissidents and Terrorists in the woods around Panem, here they were back on campus.
"Are you ready for this?" He asked, clearly proud of the girl that carried his name now.
"Yes sir, Mister President, sir!" she exclaimed, the salute ruined by her cheeky little smirk as Julia and Octavian looked on. Huh, he probably would have shot her on the spot before she'd made him laugh at her Medal of High Merit Awards last year. Now he merely smiled at her antics. How strange.
"Well, if you're sure..." he shrugged. "Don't get too cocky. The Hunger Games have proven, time and again, that training and experience may work most of the time, but that you don't stand a chance in hell if you don't follow your instincts."
"Yes sir." She said, once more completely serious. He nodded, then grabbed the back of her head and brought her to eye level with him.
"And if you lose, I will erase you from history. Nobody will ever know your name, Lady Snow. You know I can do it." He hissed at her, smirking at her whimpering flinch. That was what she'd come to crave back at the Academy; the power her name would bring. The power she gave it. The fear it brought to her enemies.
Rose's actions on the battlefields no-one talks about in Panem made it clear that the secret to her success was that she always put everything on the line. To her, being remembered was more valuable than being alive, and her reaction confirmed that she understood his threat perfectly. "Ah, so now you understand." His smirk turned into a crazed grin at seeing her glare. "Ah ah ah now, fair warning is all I'll give you and I just did."
"Yes. Sir." Ah, but the grinding of teeth was music to his ears. He released her from his hold, letting her stand to attention again after re-adjusting her uniform.
"Now rein in that lip of yours, girl." Ah, that delightful flinch never gets old. "Save your energy for your prey." At her nod and slightly relaxed shoulders, he clapped his hands together. "Excellent! Now go in there and show the world what it means to be a Snow. You know the consequences of failure girl, now get to it. And may the odds ever be in your favour."
"Yes sir. And thank you... Gramps." And with that, she walked away, not seeing the look of shocked surprise on Octavian's face. "May the odds be in your favour as well." Was the last thing he heard before the doors closed on the strange girl.
"All rise." A roar of squeaking chairs and muffled curses followed that statement. The non-descript Capitol Celebrity stood there, all done up in what the currently trendy fashion designers thought looked pretty enough to go on camera. Instead, she looked more like one of those circus clowns to young Rose; all make up and strange shoes with little in the way of substance lurking beneath. That lady was a disgusting creature, made even more so in Rose's eyes at the idea that this was what the newsies had wanted to turn her into back before she enlisted. Rose wondered what the boys back at the barracks would be willing to pay for her, then dismissed the thought. They were too used to not paying for anything like that out in the Wilds. And, quite frankly, the wilds had better girls than that... thing strutting in front of the cameras right then. More sporting ones, at the very least. Still, maybe she could ask Grandfather for the use of her and a couple of other throwaway camera girls as a birthday present next year. The thought left her smiling in anticipation.
The clown in expensive clothing cleared her throat. "Dear students, may be the first to congratulate you on this day, the last day of Victorius, for having completed your final year here, at the District 1 tribute training centre-"
She stopped listening at that stage, merely nodding along in the right places while she drifted off into her own little world. After her class's graduation, she would be eligible for voluntary entry into the Hunger Games as befitted the top student in her class. And all would know her name.
Three hours later, a tired Rose Snow was sitting in the presidential ground car, staring out at the outer rim of the Capitol flashing by. A massive tent city had built up over the past few months, courtesy of Rose and her fellow HK troops raiding an almost intact small town that had been lost in the woods for years. There had been thousands living there when Rose abseiled into an important-looking structure and started rounding up and executing whoever she came across. It helped that she had a rough idea of what to expect, courtesy of her initial stay in the settlement a decade ago. Only a couple of hundred could have been left over from what she saw going into the suburbs. Say what you want about morality, but an HK squad is thorough. And the best thing, to her, is that most of the survivors would then come to Panem requesting citizenship! She still found it baffling. Panem troops had just killed everyone and everything they ever knew and now here they are, begging to be assigned to a district? What the hell? Though, come to think of it, why was she so surprised? When you got right down to it, that's what had happened to her as well.
If there was ever anything that proved her Grandfather's old adage about Might being right true, it was this. He was evil, he was immoral, heedless of the well-being of others and known to be a sadist without par in Panem, which was quite the achievement. But he was also her Grandfather and, for all his faults, he kept his promises and had come to treat her with respect. Loads better than what she had become accustomed to before... Anyway, no use thinking about Before. Nono, bad place Rose, baad place. No food, no water, no fun, no space. Think about other things...
She had graduated early and at the top of her class. She was the most succesful ATP in the program's history, with perfect marks across the board. She had earned herself a place in the history books alread. But she hadn't been chosen to participate in the next Hunger Games. Hadn't been given the chance to prove herself as quickly as she wanted to. She shrugged. Maybe a few more years taking out Barbarian settlements would do her some good. Maybe not. She was lucky to be here now. She was lucky to escape the Dark and the Damp, though she did spare a thought for the spiders she'd left behind. She just wished that it had not left her with so many unanswered questions.
She shuddered, her cheerful spirit broken by that one question she'd never dared to ask anyone, either Before or during her time in Panem. She thought about it, the question that she wanted an answer to so badly it burned sometimes. The emotions and thoughts behind it were complex (I mean, who thinks about green laser shows and insane laughter when dreaming about one's parents?), but the question itself was rather simple;
"I wonder who my parents were." Too late she realised she'd said it out loud. She looked around the car, half expecting a hidden murder machine to shank her in the kidneys or even a bomb to go off. She had seen more than a few of Grandfather's more interesting assassinations in person. Those never got old, but also warned her that she better be damn careful about opening her mouth at the wrong time. She waited fifteen seconds before sighing in relief – and promptly disappearing with a CRACK.
Albus Dumbledore was an old, old man. Many would have said that he was past his prime, too far removed from his own experience with adolescence to be expected to understand the vagaries of youth nowadays. For all that, though, there was a reason why being a hundred and fifty had not impacted his career as a politician and part-time diplomat too badly. Simply put, he looked old. But that was it. Massive amounts of magical power and a judicious use of potions had done nothing to make the outside look better, but had kept him out of the retirement house for close to fifty years now. Inside, he had the muscle tone and healthy organs of a laid-back twenty year old; not perfect, but he'd take what he was given.
His hidden youth and vitality was nowhere near as obvious most of the time, except on special occasions such as the one he was currently presiding over. He grinned at the residents of the great hall.
"And I think that it's about time now..." He said, covertly hoping that those ministry idiots hadn't screwed the pooch again. Merlin, why had the Wizengamot elected to keep Cornelius in the drivers' seat for so long? It would be just like him to have the ceremony delayed by about a minute or so just to make a fool out of Dumbledore once again. May the gods have mercy on the man, but there were days where Albus wanted to team up with Lucius and turn the little rat into... well... a rat.
Finally! The first piece of paper fluttered downwards, its seemingly random vector pointed unerringly at the palm of his hand. He snatched it out of the air anyway, hoping to speed this up.
"Victor Krum!" the Durmstrang delegation erupted in cheers, clapping their comrade on the back as he walked down the aisle towards the head table. "Mister Krum, could you please proceed to the back room please?" The boy nodded, changing directions and making haste out of the room.
The second piece of paper came flying out of the Goblet as the door closed, Dumbledore snatching it out of the air once again.
"Cedric Diggory!" The Hufflepuff's reaction was... predictable, really. The whole house was known collectively as the House of Losers, and to have one of their own be declared the best representative of what Hogwarts had to offer was a powerful statement to the three other houses. And so the newly crowned King of the Badger House received his congratulations and sped off to the back room, eager to meet his competition.
The third and final piece came flying out.
"Fleur Delacour." Ah, a subdued reaction to their new champion. A few shook hands with her, congratulated her... but the vast majority of her colleagues just glared at her. He just shrugged it off as a French thing. Merlin knows they'd gotten better since his youth, but they still were a bunch of pretentious bastards whenever he had the misfortune of running into their ICW delegation. So much class, so little in the way of tact. How on Earth they got along with the myriad American governments was beyond him.
The blonde bombshell made her way to the backroom, her delicate derriere leaving Albus to ponder about whether he should look into making himself a bit younger at some stage. Ah, no matter. His little break from reality would soon be over. Back to the grind, as they say.
"Ah, now that the selections have been made, I believe that food will be arriving shortly. If you would please wait until after the feast before questioning the champions, it would be greatly -"
The Goblet flared once more, the eerie blue-red colour of the flames gaining a sickly emerald and grey colour. The ceiling flickered and the candles vanished, leaving the goblet as the only light source in the room. The fire fanned itself and blasted towards the ceiling, the flames bathing the whole room in a sickly green light that had many of the Blood War veterans instinctively ducking for cover.
In the meantime, the stupefied headmaster looked down into his hand, feeling a strange sensation there. It was a piece of paper. Staring at it stupidly for a moment, the name on the parchment-like material only registered as the flames when from an eerie green to an Aqua Blue.
Rose Potter.
He'd said that out loud? Why were they staring at him? Was this some kind of sick joke? He'd spent the better part of the last nine years looking for her, did whoever had done this really think it'd be this easy? Hell, the entire Wizarding world had looked for the ever-elusive Girl Who Lived for years! The cash bounty alone would be enough to set anyone up for life. Add in the expected titles... When he found the bastards that had hi-jacked this tournament and endangered the life of an innocent girl then, light-sided or not, he would take a special kind of joy in presiding over their execution.
"Rose Potter!"
Nobody said a word, horrified glances darting left and right, searching for the face, the scar, the legend. And still nothing came. The flames of the Goblet started to recede, candles appearing once more in their predetermined spots and the ceiling's enchantments returning to normal.
"ROSE POTTER!"
CRACK
A body appeared in thin air directly above the head table, crashing down hard on top of the enchanted Ebony surface. Not that that stopped the body from reacting ever so suddenly. Whoever it was, they'd ducked underneath the table before anyone else in the room could blink, coming up behind Albus and putting a knife to his throat so fast, nobody else had even moved. Oh, a complete unknown now held a knife to his throat. How nostalgic. It was like he was fifty all over again.
"Old man." a young female voice asked in a panicked voice. "What the fuck am I doing here?"
"Rose Potter?" He breathed, not daring to hope, after all this time.
"That's Lady Snow to you, Barbarian. And shut the fuck up!" She hissed, the knife digging ever deeper into the tender, tender skin above his carotid artery. "I asked you a question. Answer the fucking question, then we can play the 'I show you yours if you show me mine' game."
He looked down at the scrap of paper, marvelling at the irony of having the girl he'd long thought lost drop into his lap, almost literally at that, after so long only to be killed by said girl once he told her about this. "Well, Lady Snow... It seems that you've been selected to participate in the tri-wizard tournament." He closed his eyes, waiting for the startled twitch that would end his life...
Only, the knife loosened its hold on his neck. "Is that so? And where are the two others that are chosen for this... tri-wizard tournament?"
"You are the fourth contestant, actually."
"What? But it's tri-wizard. Tri. As in three. Can you Barbarians actually count?" She asked, clearly amused about the whole thing.
"Trust me, nobody was more surprised than I when your name came out of the goblet."
"I bet." He could hear the cheerful tone coming out of her mouth, sounding strikingly like her mother at that point.
"Now, can we please adjourn to the anteroom? We both doubtlessly have some questions, which I won't be able to answer correctly if I have to watch my breathing as much as I currently am."
"Hah!" She withdrew the knife from his throat, making him and most others in the room (wands all pointed at him rather than at her, the stupid idiots) relax... until he felt the sharp pressure of a blade against his kidneys. "Lead the way. And oh," she said in a louder voice "if any of you fucks does anything stupid, then grandpa here is going to be spend the last minutes of his miserable life trying to keep his guts from falling out through a hole in the back. Is. That. Clear?"
Well, Dumbledore thought, she sure knew how to handle a crowd. The old man chuckled. This would be a challenge, probably one worthy of his genius. Then again, maybe he shouldn't tempt fate too much, given his track record these days.
"And by the way, the name's Snow. Rose Snow."
Little Rose Snow sat at the table, clearly stunned at the things she was learning. The other officials just looked on in disbelief at the fact that their supposed Hero knew nothing about magic, nothing about the wizarding world and nothing at all about her heritage. This was a disaster!
"Magic exists. Well shit." she stated. It was kinda hard to ignore that something was going on when one of the most heavily scarred people she had ever seen turned the chair you were sitting on into a pony. Of course, said person had almost been killed when she drew and threw a dagger at him, but the old man had had the foresight to deflect the projectile into the ceiling and call in the school nurse for later. Rose hadn't missed the implications of being given immunity from prosecution for justifiable actions taken during the tournament, no matter how stunned she was. What it translated to was being allowed to kill anyone who gave her any lip during the whole of this year. Power of life or death over a bunch of teenagers. Ah, it was like she was back at the Academy again. And the headmaster looked like he hadn't missed the grin on the girl's face either.
"Indeed." The old man said, eyeing his awesome-looking wand in puzzlement. What was the big deal with that, anyway? So it didn't work once or twice, so what? "Say Rose, can you please hold this wand for me?"
"What?" Was the old bastard using slang for something?
"The wand." He said, waving it around in mid-air. "Can you just hold it for a second, please?" She just nodded, clearly skeptical about why this man was handing his weapon to her. But she put that aside and reached for the length of darkened wood.
The feeling the wand gave her was... orgasmic. It felt like her body was on fire! She was vaguely aware of the world around her, but not so much that she noticed her skin glowing a deep emerald green while her body convulsed at the sheer amount of power, pure, unrestrained power, coursing through her veins. Then, it stopped just as suddenly as it started, leaving her panting, gasping, aching for more. More power. More control. "More knowledge." She whispered, the stick (no, wand) in her hands responding on its own. She didn't even see her own hand, still clenched around the wand, shoot up at her head at snakelike speeds. The tip of the wand reached the small, barely visible scar sitting on her forehead andpushed through the skin. A roiling wave of black pus squirted out from the scar, covering her face as she screamed in incredible pain. And then she knew no more.
The other people in the room, having just sat through what could be best described as a one and a half minute trip through insanity land that ended with this strange Girl-Who-Lived impaling her scar on the headmaster's wand (who, by the by, had fainted by that point as well) and then passing out after screaming bloody murder, just stared at the two people lying on the floor, one covered in blood while the other was covered in robes. At least, until Poppy Pomphrey finally arrived
"What in the name of Hades is going on in here?" The irate nurse exclaimed as she dashed towards the two unconscious people on the floor.
"I have no fucking clue." Barthemius Crouch said, still eyeing the dagger embedded in the ceiling. The others in the room silently agreed with him. This whole event was turning out to be too weird for words.
A/N: There you go! Complete intro of Rose's life from discovery by Corolianus to return in one chapter! One fucking long one, but it still technically qualifies as being a chapter rather than a book in its own right. Now I can finally get some sleep.