Chapter 1: The Reaping
A/N: This story originally began within a discussion between AM83220 and myself about other fictional universes that Hob (from the 1990 film RoboCop 2) could be pictured in. We figured he could have been just another impoverished citizen in one of the Districts, easy enough, and chose District 3 since Hob's keen intellect would match up well with District 3's specialization in electronics.
If Hob had indeed gone to the 74th Hunger Games, he would have been close to Rue's age, since Gabriel Damon, who portrayed Hob, was 14 in 1990.
"Why don't you take a look at it, Cornelius?" Hob asked again.
"Someone's stalling," Cornelius Lake, Commander and newly-appointed Head Peacekeeper of District 3 said with a laugh, leaning back in his swivel chair, cool and confident behind his desk.
"Not like the Reaping is starting right this second," Captain Sejanus Miles answered with a shrug. He and Lake were nearly the same age, and couldn't possibly have been more obviously ambitious. Sure, they could hide it well enough for average people, but Hob was anything but average.
Hob had gone into business dealing with Lake and Miles because unlike MacCready, whose ambition stopped at his own comfy existence, this pair of Peacekeeper officers had grander, more interesting goals in life. He'd started off by offering a few simple transactions, transactions they'd been receptive to. Mostly it was odds and ends, contraband that Hob could get and even a ranking Peacekeeper wanted sometimes. Today, it was a weapon design.
"You gonna look at it or not, Lake?" Hob asked, a hint of impatience coming into his voice. You had to be careful where, when and how you chose to push these soldier-cops. But he and Lake knew each other. They'd made a great team over the past year as Hob, eager for more than smuggling and working in the munitions factory, had aided Lake in planning an… early retirement… for the recently-replaced Head Peacekeeper.
Old land mines and air-dropped bombs were still lying around from the last war, the failed Rebellion against the Capitol. You just never knew when one would go off, who could step on one while going off to do some fishing on leave.
"Hob," Lake answered patiently, "I wouldn't have you here in this office if I wasn't interested. Be serious."
"I was just gonna tell you that. Look at the thing already."
Lake sat up, reached out and hefted the compact crossbow in his hands. Guns were restricted to the Peacekeepers, who had done a thorough job of rounding up and destroying old ones left over from the Rebellion, from even before Panem was created. But bows? Bows you could get a permit for. Bows you could own if you knew the right people.
"It's an old lunchbox," Lake remarked, eying the sky-blue enamel paint curiously. "Or a toolbox."
"Sure it is," Hob replied. "Same as the one I carry in to work every day."
Lake found the catches on the box, released them, and Hob had the satisfaction of watching as the career cop-soldier's eyebrows jumped as the little-but-lethal crossbow unfolded. It had one bolt all ready to go, and the rest, ten in all, were brought up from an internal magazine, one by one, as you went to cock the device again.
"You've been carrying this into work?" Lake asked in disbelief.
"It's a tough world out there," Hob said dryly, stating one of the first, hardest lessons he'd ever learned in his life.
"Where'd you even make this?" Miles asked. "All the weapons R&D is back in the Capitol."
"Not all the brains are back in the Capitol, Miles. You send 'em blueprints and a working prototype and they'll agree with you on that."
"Me?"
"I'm not Head Peacekeeper, genius," Hob deadpanned. "And this isn't the only thing I've got. You can take credit for it for now."
"Our plainclothes guys could use this," Lake remarked, turning the crossbow over thoughtfully.
"Or the Operators," Miles added. "You know they love fancy shit like this."
"It's silent," Hob added. "Just a little 'click' when it lets the bolt go, and that sound doesn't go past a few meters. The bolt goes just over a hundred. And it's dead accurate."
"You've tested that?" Lake asked.
"I've tested everything about it," Hob answered evenly. "The things you can get done when you live outside our 'fair City.'" He shrugged. "So whaddya say? You're both ambitious guys. You 'come up with this' in your off time and another gold star gets added to your files."
"And what do you want?" Lake asked. He was thirty-seven, quite young for a full Commander. "I know you're not just handing this over for free."
"Nothing's for free."
"Not at all. So. Tell me what you want."
Hob leaned forward in his armchair. "I want you both on my side," he said. "For good. I want you to take my name out of the Reaping- forever. Do that and we can talk about our… 'distinguished' Mayor."
"You better be careful where you mention him," Lake warned. "I'm Head Peacekeeper now but you know the Mayor's still got pull back in the Capitol. He knows more people than I do. More than Caius Willow did, too."
"You guys wanna keep going onward and upward or not?"
Lake and Miles went very still, assessing their young partner-in-crime anew. Hob looked back at them confidently, without a trace of fear. Confidence was something he'd learned swiftly; you had to believe in something before anyone else would. And Hob had mastered fear a long time ago.
If it was die on the streets of District Three or survive by your own means, by any means, letting fear control or even influence anything you did was a death sentence. Hob was going to live.
"Hob," Lake said carefully. "I can't get you out of the Reaping today. Even if he wasn't Mayor-"
"It's one day," Hob countered. "Give it one day. I think you'd like to have an ally back here in Three in a few years, wouldn't you? Once someone much younger, say, has taken office, and you've been promoted again?"
Lake scoffed but didn't have much heart in it. "Youngest Mayor in Panem?"
"It's got a ring to it, doesn't it, Cornelius? Kind of like 'General Lake' does."
"Why didn't you go into the Naval Service, anyway?" Miles asked.
"Because 'Admiral Lake' just doesn't sound as good. And- my last name? Miles, it'd sound like a bad joke." Lake shrugged. "Okay. You come back here tomorrow, and we might talk about some things. This crossbow looks solid."
"How do I know this office isn't bugged, Cornelius?" Hob asked, half-jokingly. He knew perfectly well by now that it wasn't. Not least because Lake and Miles were as dead as he was if their mutual connection to the old Head Peacekeeper's 'accident' ever got found out.
"Miles, what was it happened to that guy, last one who tried that?"
"Oh, him? He, uh, he shot himself with his service rifle. Real shame."
"See?" Lake smiled, but it didn't touch his eyes. He was lethal despite that boyishly handsome face. Utterly lethal. It was something Hob respected about him.
"Certainly."
"You come back here tomorrow, Hob. We'll talk. But if you get snatched up at the Reaping, there is nothing I can do for you. I'll just stand there and look good in my nice white uniform. And, hey, if you go and you win, we'll talk when you get back."
"Don't worry about it, Cornelius," Hob told him, getting up to leave. "I'm two-for-two on skating past it so far."
"Be careful about the Mayor," Miles added. "He's not as dumb as he looks."
"I'm smarter than he is," Hob answered. "One day he's gonna know." One day all Panem's gonna know. "I'll be fine."
ΩΩΩΩΩ
The Reaping was never a popular event. No one wanted to be there. Even the Peacekeepers didn't seem to enjoy it. Hob had always found the event interesting.
You could tell so much about the people around you by seeing how they reacted to the Reaping, step by step.
Most common was reluctance. An unwillingness to even be there. Then fear. Fear that it might be them this time, if they were young enough, or fear that it would be someone they loved. Finally, an extra dose of fear if they or a loved one had been Reaped this year, or, for most, relief that they'd made it once more.
Having lived by his own means for as long as he could remember, Hob had long since gotten used to a simple fact- there was no one to look out for him. No one to care if he ever got Reaped or not. There was no one to speak for him, no one to look out for him unless they got something out of it, like Lake and Miles.
Ironically, Hob found this liberating. The Reaping held little interest for him. This was only his second year of even being old enough to for his name to go in that clear glass bowl on a little slip of paper. If he didn't get picked, better them than him.
And if he ever did… well, a few extra moves starting tomorrow, and his name would never go in the bowl ever again. His future would be assured.
The Games had never frightened Hob the way they did just about everyone else, anyway. They were a contest of survival, of will and ability to live at any cost. More than most in the Districts, Hob was well familiar with struggling to live. He had chosen to do more, too. He was going to thrive and no one was going to stand in his way.
ΩΩΩΩΩ
"Okay." Mayor Poulous MacCready slapped his palms to his thighs. "Okay, folks, time to get moving."
Hob stood quietly, anonymously in the crowd as MacCready heaved himself up from his chair on the stage. It was like watching one of those big creatures that supposedly still lived in the oceans, a 'whale' they'd been called, get up and walk.
But just as Miles had said, the Mayor wasn't as stupid as he looked. MacCready knew others in Three wanted his job. He knew and he didn't like it. And even if he was a mediocre administrator on his best days, he had friends in high places. He wasn't above using them. He'd done so several times in the past. Much as Lake was doing, the Mayor had done his share of backstabbing and leveraging political assets to get where he was now.
The Mayor had been content, secure in his position for many years. Only now was he starting to realize the threat was there at all, but by the time he figured out who it was Hob would be darting past him to the finish line.
Odd, Hob thought suddenly, seeing the Mayor sporting the exact same look of satisfaction he'd been suppressing just now. Man. It's like we're thinking- the same thing…
It all happened so fast after that.
The Mayor's little smile. A smile that said I know something you don't know.
His greedy little hands grasping the paper he'd lifted from the bowl. His eyes reading the name. And for just a second his eyes lifted, searched the crowd, and found his enemy, the one he'd known about all along.
The kid in the munitions factory who'd gotten himself off the shop floor after coming up with that improvement to the pedestal mines used in the Games when he was twelve. The kid who was gunning for his job and closer than ever to lining up and getting it.
You rat, Hob thought bitterly, You bastard. It was too late now, too late to even begin to guess how the Mayor had figured it out and acted fast enough.
And in that last moment, Hob realized that he'd lost long before the Mayor spoke one small, simple name.
A/N: October 10, 2023. Finally finished the first chapter to this story! I have others I need to update and finish, but sometimes I roam around when I'm going over ideas. I happened to start thinking about Hob being pulled from District 3 to fight in the Hunger Games, opened the document and started tinkering with what I had for Chapter 1. And here we are.
No timetable on when I will update this story next. This first chapter was about 10 years in the making, from first draft idea to creation of an actual Word document and the writing of the first chapter. I can say, though, that I will be getting this updated sooner or later. Hob is a surprisingly memorable character- in no small part due to Gabriel Damon's superb acting- and I can see him being a real contender in the Hunger Games.
The character of Mayor Poulous MacCready is derived from the name of Mayor Kuzak's treacherous aide in RoboCop 2, Poulous. I added the surname MacCready because I happened to be thinking about Mayor MacCready from Fallout 3, and I figured that some could still have fairly 'normal' surnames from the pre-Panem years.
Reviews are always welcome! If you have any questions or notice something about the chapter I could improve on, like a proofreading issue, feel free to let me know in a PM.