The Many
AN: Trigger warning: this chapter is rated M for language, violence, sexual assault, and general Petra-badassery.
I have no insults, no pleas, no defiance, only instinct. "No."
"You had your chance at mercy, Butcher," Snow tells me with disdain. "Now taste my vengeance. Your parents as well."
"Liar."
"Explain," he demands.
"You said they'd be the last resort." He also mentioned Mason. He's been through this before, I realize. He has nothing left to control her with…
…he's not afraid of her. He's too powerful for that. But she is an inconvenient annoyance. Like me. And sometimes the buzzing fly can be more a pest than the wolves that hunt you. I'm on dangerous ground, the ice above a raging river, with the cracks stretching both behind and before. Death lies in all directions, but in all my long life there is only one way I would ever willingly go: on.
"Killing them, yes," Panem's President reminds me. "But if your village were to burn, your father detained for questioning, and your mother forced to fend for herself…" he tilts his head, fascinated. "It may serve as a physical reminder. It appears you fail to be …impressed with mere conversation alone."
"Mudak."
"I told you Panem needed you, Butcher," he glances past the smoldering corpses to the endless lines and light of the city below. "If you will not comply willingly, you will find she takes what she needs."
A rapist. Just like him. "Fuck you."
"Continue this infantile behavior, Butcher, and you may yet have that opportunity," he turns, regards me with the longsuffering pain of a wizened parent. "Now take her away. Return her when she has learned to be more compliant."
Barefoot. They're booted. I'd never make it to the stairs in time. No escape. Not from Snow. Not from the Colosseum. Not from the Capitol. Not from The Hunger Games, certainly not from what comes after. I'm Petra Angelovna, the Stone-heart. I survived starvation, the White Winter, Dmitri and that mob. I drove horses to their death and I shot a man. I want to live. I will live. Will live through the Hunger Games no matter what—or who—it takes. Snow could've killed me like all those others, yet needs me alive…
…so I will make them kill me first. I am Petra Angelovna, and I am no man's whore.
The stairs are too far. I can never escape…But the ledge is not. I tear away, wrench from their grasp, bare feet against stone and sand, heat and smoke blinding me, searing my skin, now stone under my fingers I graspscrabbleclimb! onto that narrow brink, see one sickening swell of the spiraling city below…
And I—I—I almost do it. But I can't.
Armored arms seize me, wrench me down. Too late my resolve finds me, my courage returned, every sense screaming to wrest away, to flail again for the nothingness that awaits me below…
But they are too many. Too armored. Too strong. My blows bruise my skin, shatter my nails, but their shins, their groins, their stomachs and faces are slick and senseless. In all my struggling, they never feel a thing.
"NO!" I gnash my teeth, gag on spit and blood scream my throat raw as my chest sears. No avail. That's when I begin to cry. Fuck. Blyad. I fucking cry. Fat tears of frustration. And fear. Disgusting globs of snot drain from my nose, and I'm forced to swallow them, utterly wretched and sobbing. Death was the only other option, and I couldn't even make them kill me. I am a coward. A worthless, mewing coward. This is why my sisters died. My mother sickened. Why Malcovitch and Holi and hundreds of others must be killed for sport. Will continue to be. Forever and ever, on and on. More like Finnick and Annie, like Johanna and her parents…and it will never stop. It will never, ever stop. Panem will churn on, grinding us down like bone to sow on a farmer's field until there is nothing left. We are weak, all of us too weak, and far, far too selfish.
So am I. Tears keep flowing, My aching throat threatens to choke me. Not in fear or sadness, but in shame. I am Petra Angelovna, my father's Stoneheart…yet I too am a coward, after all.
"Take her away," Snow finally orders. "I find the sight of her entirely unbearable."
"No," someone speaks. My tears stop flowing in shock at my savior.
Smoke and ash scatter from the remains of women and children. Skeletons on cross-beams continue to smolder. But in that silence, not a one of us dares to breathe.
Snow turns. "What, Raelius?"
"No," Marcus Raelius repeats hollowly, staring into the sand. Not once does he raise his eyes to mine. "Not the Tribute, Coriolanus. Punish me."
I can't breathe. Can't blink. Can only stand and stare stupidly as this man takes the punishment meant for me.
"Very well," Snow gestures to the guards. "Kill him."
I won't get involved. I can't get involved. I'm Petra Stoneheart: rock can't feel, rocks can't die.
Get up. Defend yourself! Fight back, fight back, you coward—! But I don't dare turn away, don't dare flinch, know I must watch, I will watch, as I kill the only Man I've ever met worthy of that name.
They don't spare him pain. No pity. No mercy. Not a single stroke falls against his skull. They bash the meaty parts, where no organs can rupture and speed his death. He never cries out, but with every blow he bleats a little through his bleeding lips, a sound so piteous it could break a heart of stone. Like little lambs in springtime, smelling for the first—and last—time the blood of their kin.
Aquilla's words come back to me: There must be someone, somewhere, someone you've dreamt of, fantasized of… someone you foolishly love or loved. There always is. It matters not. I will find them, and when I do you will come to me and beg me take you instead.
I've known Marcus Raelius for less than a day. Pizda, Petra, what are you thinking?
My body, or his life. I've known since I was a girl that women are raped. In some places in District 6 it's so common as to be expected. My ugliness, my strength, my size have saved me. All these years it's been so damned important, but now it seems such a stupid, selfish thing to ask a man like Marcus Raelius to die for. Marcus. His uncle. All those Libertas Peacekeepers…that Game Enforcer with her yellow skin and wide brown eyes. The Capitol citizens in the stands, all those crushed under tanks or mown down, men, women, and children alike. Malcovitch and Holi?
Do all of them deserve to die? Do any? And if so, why? Who makes it so? Suddenly the world is a much larger, much crueler and much stranger place than a girl from District 6 could ever comprehend. It's dizzying and sickening and I feel I need to retch all over again. Those Libertas Peacekeepers immolated for me, that unnamed woman bleeding out just to save me…all those people, their families, their children…they risked it all, sacrificed their lives, their loved ones' lives, and all for strangers.
…all for Panem.
And for the first time in eighteen self-centered years, the sudden sensation that I don't matter. Not really. Not ever. None of us do. The only thing that matters is President Snow and the Tributes he's murdered...and the men who might defeat him. Men like Marcus Raelius.
Even helpless and stricken, overpowered and imprisoned, like Tasha Pushkina, he grows giant in my eyes, no longer a Man, but something More.
Panem needs Marcus Raelius, his genius and his courage. He's a medic and a soldier. Libertas' leader. Hero of the Resistance…and I know what I must do.
Bl'yad. Fuck. Hell. I'm only Petra Angelovna, the Butcher's daughter. A girl from District 6. Ugly, insignificant, unimportant. No one needs me.
No one has ever needed me. No one ever will.
…No one but the little boy back in my bed, waiting for me to kill him. Panem doesn't need him either.
Just this morning Tasha Pushkina said I wasn't a woman yet. For the first time today, I know her to be wrong.
I sniff. Wipe my face. Dry my eyes. I turn to Snow. "Leave him alone."
The corner of his mouth curls upwards in cruelty. "Ask."
"Please," I choke.
"Beg."
"I'll do anything," I plead, and for the first time he hears my sincerity. "Anything. Just let him go."
He stares at me in silence, the night punctuated by the Peacekeeper's blows and Marcus' muffled moans.
Somehow I know what his answer will be. His lecherous smile leaks drops of rotting blood. He nods to the Peacekeepers, and gestures to the ground in front of him. "Kneel."
I am released. The stone is cold beneath my knees.
"Petra, Petra, I called your bluff," Snow crones, forcing my face to that shaggy ugliness spreading between his legs. My neck is rigid. I smell the stink of his sweat, piss and shit, shudder in the stench of rotting blood. He slicks the hair from my tearing eyes as his skin meets mine. "You see, my dear Butcher, everyone has a breaking point," he whispers.
"Even you."
My name is Petra Angelovna. I am about to die.
Snow strokes my hair, fingers of his other hand forcing my gagging mouth open. I jerk my chin at the last second, eyes to those Peacekeepers. "Now leave him alone—"
"Butcher, Butcher, Butcher," He leers, the hand in my hair yanking me back to face that horrid hunk of growing flesh. "You foolish girl. You don't learn from others' mistakes, do you?"
My heart heaves. Liar, I called him. He'll rape me and kill Marcus Raelius all the same.
My mouth goes slack. He means to enter me—
Neither do you, mudak. Then his left testicle bursts between my teeth like a rancid bite of spoiled salo.
The sound of his scream is indescribable.
