Amaranth Harvey, District Nine female (12)
Charm thought she was more valuable than other people. I sometimes wondered, though, if that was really the case, or if she thought everyone else was less valuable than her. The more time I spent with her, the more I thought it was both. She thought she was a person and everyone else was something that existed in her life, either to give her what she wanted or to get in her way. I wasn't sure she'd ever done something entirely for someone else- something that wouldn't benefit her at all. It would have been easy to say she didn't have feelings for other people, or she didn't really think they were alive in the same way she was. No, Charm knew other people had souls, and that it was wrong to hurt them. She was just too selfish to bother caring.
When I got to the Capitol, I thought it would be Majesty I'd be up against. I'd known I was going to find the biggest bully in the Games and take them down a notch. It was a far more realistic goal than trying to stay alive and get back home. But Majesty died in the Bloodbath, before I had time to do more than troll him that one time in training. As I thought about him, I'd come to think he wasn't exactly a bully the way I thought he was. He was just... not right. I didn't know what in the world kind of mental illness made someone like him, but it was obvious there was something abnormal in his mind. Whereas Charm knew what she was doing was wrong and did it anyway, Majesty had much more potential for mayhem but I thought his morality was just all jumbled up and he didn't even know if there wasa right and wrong. So I was glad to devote most likely my last few days on Earth to showing Charm the little people weren't beneath her at all.
"You know what will happen if this is a trick," Charm reminded me again as I fiddled with the ingredients to our weapon. Since all I'd asked for was the flour, hydrogen peroxide, and the lighter I'd forgotten to mention earlier, the parachutes had started falling moments after Charm addressed the cameras around us. I'd saved her sponsors a little money when I said I could just use the gift container as the metal can.
"Yeah. I'll die," I said boredly. "You going to take it to the Cornucopia, or what?" Most of the people in the biggest alliance were already dead, but they still had two Careers, plus the boy from Twelve with all the survival skills.
"What's it to you?" Charm asked.
Sheesh, just trying to make conversation, I snarked to myself.
"You sure thing thing will work?" Charm asked again. "I had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide at home and it didn't have any warning labels."
For whitening your teeth, I suppose. "That's because there's no reason to mix it with flour, so this never happens by accident," I lied.
"Plus you need to light it on fire," Charm said, pleased with herself for picking out that detail.
"Right," I said.
"So how does it work?" Charm asked. She was trying to look uninterested but I could tell she didn't want to admit to stupid little me that she could be curious about something I knew.
"I don't really know the chemistry," I said. That should feed her ego. "Something to do with the pH value of the flour and the hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is acidic and flour is basic. Lots of things work, but these two things are cheap."
"So how'd you find out? A flour factory back home blew up?" Charm asked.
"Exactly. Like a hundred people died," I said. Which wasn't entirely a lie. I didn't know where the factory was, and it was hundreds of years ago, but I knew a lot of people died.
"Then be careful with that," Charm snapped as I fiddled with the lighter.
"The hydrogen peroxide's way over there," I said, pointing at the bottle behind Charm. Below me the flour, and the bits of metal we'd twisted off the other sponsor gift boxes, were packed into the first gift box, which was closed but not airtight. I picked up a handful of loose flower and tossed it lightly, making a little cloud. "This is just flour." Through the haze of flour, I saw Charm's face as I flicked the lighter.
You were right, Charm.She said if this was a trick, I'd die. Just like I would have eventually if I'd done what she asked. So as I flicked the lighter, I smiled. I smiled because flour and hydrogen peroxide did nothing but fizz a little when mixed. I just added that part to sound more plausible. Really, truth was stranger. Flour is dangerous all on its own. Not normally, when it's just a pile, but the dust it makes... oh, the fun we had in Nine taking leftover flour dust and lighting it up for down-home fireworks. So little flour, packed into whatever box we had lying around, packed in to be under pressure but with a little crack so the flame could get in and let the show begin.
My ears blared with a tinny drone. I looked up, my head spinning at the movement, and saw what I'd done. I couldn't really feel the half-dozen seeping wounds all down my front, probably because of the muddled and broken-up feeling in my brain. I was aware enough to see Charm, though. She was bent around a tree, where the blast had smashed her into the trunk headfirst. She was still moving- specifically, she was weakly clawing at her face, trying to clear the blood that was drowning her, as more blood oozed from her own shrapnel wounds. Honestly I hadn't had something quite that ghoulish in mind, but dead was dead, and dead was what we'd both be in a minute. Through broken teeth, I smiled once more.
That's how you go out, Charm. Charm Sterlingshire, the only person who reallymatters in the world, couldn't outsmart a twelve-year-old girl.
Polyphemus Ignotus, Games Master of Ceremonies
Of all the people involved in the Games, I was the one with the best job. So many of the others got involved with their Tributes and took it so hard when they died. Me, I was only there for the very beginning. The parade was the best part of the Games. No violence, no fighting, just pretty people in costumes made by the world's best. Every day during Games season, I woke up impatient to throw on my clothes and get to my job. I would have done it for free! Best job in the world.
Best job in the world any year but this one. For once I knew what the others felt like when their favorite Tribute died. Isabella wasn't a Tribute to me. She was an old family friend. What with her parents both being Victors, she was in the Capitol all the time. She got dragged here for one gala or another so all the Capitolites could look at her or hold her and talk about how their sponsorship and support let this love story be possible in the first place. So Isabella wasn't a Tribute to me. She was a tiny baby, confused by all the bright colors and crying when the music got too loud. She was a toddler who couldn't say my name and called me "Phemus." She was six years old at a gigantic birthday party in the Capitol, ignoring most of the presents in favor of a plastic piano. She was a girl, and then that awkward in-between, and then a lovely young woman.
And her parents... Of course I'd never been intimate friends with Vera and Frankie, but I'd seen them around. I'd seen how Vera had settled into motherhood with surprising tenderness for someone whose victory was one of the bloodier in Games history. She'd started wearing the sort of clothes you can't categorize other than "mom clothes". She fussed and worried over Isabella doing things she'd done a hundred times as a new Victor. She'd even started to age. Despite the Capitol's best offerings of fillers and cosmetics and injections, there were light lines on her face, and the unmistakable indicators of more mature fashion and bearing. Meanwhile beside her, Frankie's face was entirely unchanged. No movement, no wrinkles. He looked somewhat disturbingly cherubic for someone so bluntly cold. I'd wondered for years what she saw in him before finally understanding there must be more to him than I thought just in that he stayed with her and Isabella loved him.
"Is there any way, you suppose, for someone to ever get pulled out of the Games?" I asked Theodora, fiddling nonchalantly with my jacket.
"I can't imagine," she said. "Goodness knows Harley would have found it by now to get Des out."
"But what about Lyte? Snow let him out," I protested.
"That wasn't a normal Games. And he saved his daughter," Harley said. She looked at me with amusement. "What, you trying to save someone? Their costumes don't get destroyed, you know."
"Just wondering. Purely hypothetical," I said.
"Can you sponsor anything at all?" I asked Lysander, the head of the sponsoring department.
"Just about," he said. "Not you, of course, since staff aren't permitted, there are ways around it. If someone happened to get money from you and sponsor entirely on their own..."
"What's the biggest thing someone ever sponsored?" I asked.
"The most expensive was Finnick's trident. I don't remember the exact number but I remember it was more than twenty times the average Four citizen's lifetime earnings."
"How much would it cost to sponsor someone a ticket out of the Games?" I asked.
Lysander's face went gentle. "Sorry, old fellow. Not permitted. No ways around it."
The last person I wanted to talk to was Titian Qin. No one liked Titian. Most of us were scared stiff of him. I'd seen enough footage to know what he was willing to do. Willing- more like delighted. Every time I looked at him I saw a crocodile looking back at me without the slightest care whether or not I saw through the mask. I just can't, I thought, and thought it all the way up until we started the final eight interviews. We liked to have options so we started early, plus everyone knew Vera and Frankie's kid would make it that far. I sat across from Vera asking banal questions as she faltered, then cried, then wept, and then folded into Frankie's arms. I saw the tenderness in his embrace, the same tenderness in him when he held little baby Isabella, and coughed away my own emotion at someone with so little choosing for himself to be greater than he was by birth. For them, I couldn't not.
Titian wasn't hiding it at all anymore. I knew Snow wasn't afraid of him, but I wondered if he kept him around entirely out of hellish respect. On his desk, where most people kept photos of their families, he had a little lineup of Tributes. Dead Tributes. The ones he hated most. As I came in, he looked at me with the boredness he reserved for people he didn't have an excuse to hurt.
"What would it take to get someone out of the Games?" I asked.
Titian's eyes lit up. Suddenly he was interested in me. My heart rose in my chest. "Who is it?" he asked.
Cold dread washed over me. My throat clenched as I knew that Titian was interested in this new opportunity he had against someone he'd never had a chance to hurt before.
"Dahlia," I lied, ignoring the guilt at throwing her under the bus.
"Yeah, me too," Titian said. "She's my favorite."
I made up an excuse and fled.
Back at my house, I sat up late in the night doing something I'd never in my life enjoyed: reading. I sifted through pages of boring jargon on my pad screen, looking for something we'd all missed. Law codes with their terms I couldn't even decipher. Lists of strangest Games happenings. Telechats with lawyers who specialized in loopholes. At some point I noticed the sun coming up, but I didn't stop. Just let there be something. Anything.Vera's face flickered into my mind again and I kept going.
10th place: Charm Sterlingshire- explosion caused by Amaranth
This story has been unorthodox, so I took an unorthodox path for Charm. The obvious choice would have been an early death showing she wasn't nearly as perfect as she thought, especially in this arena. Instead I thought I'd see what would happen if she doubled down and went full-on insane survivalist. She embraced the worst of herself and made no attempts to be better, in defiance of my usual style. I had planned to have her snipe at the Cult of Mothman for a cool horror movie-ish plot, but I wrote myself into a corner since I needed them all for the murder mystery. So that will have to come some other time and Charm had to settle for a respectable body count and a very cinematic death. Charm was a bit of an understudy, since the 1F was meant to be a Harley Quinn reference before her submitter dropped out, but she was a very entertaining replacement from idekfanfiction.
9th place: Amaranth Harvey, District Nine female: explosion caused by self
For what it's worth, I don't classify this as self-harm, since Amaranth was 100% right that Charm was absolutely going to kill her soon. She took charge of her own life and found the way she could at least take Charm with her. Amaranth succeeded in her mission to vex bullies, showing both Majesty and Charm that they weren't all that after all. The flour bomb stuff is loosely accurate, though it's less dramatic in real life. This one goes out to the exploded mill museum I visited a few times. Thanks Very New to This for the little Tribute who could and did.