He barely remembered the scent of pine trees.
Or the stench of the paper mills, or the rush of the creeks near Camp 4 where he had grown up. Sometimes incense from the shrine to the unnamed gods wafted through the open windows and mingled with his mother's baking. She could take tessera rations and weave a forest feast from them. Honey and homemade blueberry jam and sesame seeds crammed into his mouth. Sometimes there was roast groosling, on Wintermas and Reaping Day. His ma smiling at him. The smile straining as he asked where Pa was. At the Tav again, she said. She was lying.
He remembered that.
He remembered the Games. No one ever forgot the Games. It was a prison, each and every arena was a prison of death and horror. The palace, the forest, the desert, the tundra, the Giant's City and the rain-soaked patch of rock. His, though. His arena had been a literal prison. No one ever accused the Gamemakers of subtlety.
They turned into a laser tag adventure park. It opened right before the Forty-Fifth. They made him play a few rounds against squealing Capitol brats with a camera shoved in his face.
He remembered the screech of the girl he shoved into the fire. He shoved her, right? He thinks he shoved her. Or did he let her fall? He remembers the fire crisping her hair, and her screams turning into a piteous gasp as the fires roasted her lungs and airway. Her skin charred black before her heart went into cardiac arrest. There was some debate on when exactly true death happened, especially as the nerve endings seared away and sent the limbs to twitching. There was always debate about incineration deaths.
Maisy. Her name was Maisy. He let her fall into the furnace.
She had a cat back home in 6. It's name was Pebbles. They told him that on the Victory Tour. Why would they tell him that. Why would he remember?
He remembered the day his father left for good, traveling across the district to live with the trapper in a cabin outside Camp 9. He remembered his mother sobbing into a lace doily, the salt of her tears as he kissed her.
The life of a Victor. Oh, he remembered that. Parties in the Capitol beneath laser lights and crystal chandeliers and champagne and so much food. Plates of food, platters of food. Samson's casino, Madame Nigella offering him any luxury, every pleasure. Always more to buy, more to gamble on, more to indulge on. More and more and more until even a Victor's salary couldn't keep up. He remembered the small things too. Cheese and butter and whiskey in the Victors Village, electricity at every hour and heat during the winter, and machines that washed his clothes at the press of a button. Those are the luxuries he missed the most.
He remembers when he stopped visiting his mother. Right after the Forty-Eighth, Brutus's year. Each visit was the same. Strained silences. Silent tears. Angry pauses, vicious outbursts. Blame. So he left her, just like his pa. Even though he swore he would never be like his pa.
Something he and Blight Gavin had in common. He didn't want to think about that, but day after day, year after year, of working in the sewers of the Capitol, the intrusive thoughts usually win.
He remembered Blight Gavin, of course. As much as he didn't want to, he remembered the tree-elf of District 7, slight and strange and stormy. The creature who brought about his fall from grace, his downfall.
No, not even he could fool himself on that count. Nor was he allowed to. "You brought this on yourself," said Snow in the Catacombs, as he was forced to kneel in a cement room under bright fluorescent lights. "No one meddles with my Games. No one wins my Games.
"Blight Gavin is ten times the man you'll ever be. Ten times the Victor. I've been looking for this excuse for years, ever since you came out of your arena like you deserved to. The fact that Mr. Gavin provided me this chance with his serendipitous survival is the only reason Jason Mellark is still alive. A gift from the state. He's impressive, and he's mine.
"Happy Hunger Games, Sullivan." The president's white patent leather shoes wiped the filth of the Catacombs off on his designer shirt (Junova Jacobs) and glided out of sight.
They put mirrors around the cement cube that was his cell and even fixed an adhesive to his eyelids so he would have to watch them take his tongue from six different angles. He struggled as two Peacekeepers held him down and positioned his head, screamed and begged for mercy, promised rewards and bribes as they gripped his tongue with iron tongs. The silver surgeon's knife slipped through the red flesh like butter. It was over in a moment and then there was just pain and a red river of blood pouring from his mouth onto the filthy ground.
He heard later that Madame Lucia fried his tongue up and ate it with pearl onions and goat cheese fondue, washing it down with a District 1 merlot from the St. Martin vineyards. An exquisite red to pair with a rare cut of red meat. Notes of peppercorn, blackberry, and vengeance.
There wasn't much to remember after that. Day after day in Avox reds. Month after month. Year after year. Victor after Victor.
Connor Murphy, who Eamon could have saved in half the time. Johanna Mason, the disgusting, sniveling weakling. Gloss and Cashmere, who he should have been arm-in-arm with at parties at the presidential mansion. Enobaria, far more an animal than he ever was but praised and loved and feared for her arrogance, while he was broken for his.
Where once he spun the wheels and pulled cards, he now vacuumed carpets and served brandy from golden trays with a muzzle around his mouth so everyone would know what he was. From Samson's he was moved to street-cleaning, then the sewers, then the brothels. No, not as a worker, no one would mate with an Avox, it was like mating with an animal. No one would do such a thing, at least where it could be seen. The Capitol gossips were vicious.
Day after day. Year after year. Victor after Victor.
He never knew if the order to put him in the Training Center came from President Snow or someone on the Council or if he was just so forgotten and anonymous that they rotated him without thinking. He still had enough of his mind and memory left to desperately breathe a prayer to the old gods of his people that it wouldn't be a district with any hope of remembering him, and the gods heard this one prayer. He ended up in the District 12 suites, where two sniveling coal miner children wouldn't notice anything but the food, the escort was too young to remember anything past the Fifty-Fifth, and Haymitch Abernathy long since pickled his brain beyond recognizing a Victor he had met on his own tour a quarter-century ago.
They did reassign an Avox deliberately though. The slight redhead from the kitchens who he's watched for two weeks. Maybe they'd let her be his wife. Avoxes were allowed spouses, specifically to breed kids for couples whose cosmetic alterations had sterilized or inhibited their natural reproductive abilities.
The female tribute was a slight little thing with a dark braid and grey eyes who asked the stupidest questions when she wasn't stuffing her face. A volunteer. Stupid girl.
What makes it burn? Is it alcohol?" Idiot. "That's the last thing I wa — oh! I know you!"
The girl (Lavinia, her name was Lavinia, the grandchild of Adonis and Simona Silvertree, the only survivor of the purge of the Silvertree line after her father's treason was uncovered, the girl who took the fall for Larissa Farrar and he shouldn't know that, he's not to know that, he must not remember that), the girl was clearly terrified. The escort was appalled. The tribute gawped like a stupid cow.
"They cut her tongue out so she can't speak" said Haymitch. His grey Seam eyes found his own and oh fuck, he knew. He knew. "Not likely you'd know her."
The male tribute saved her in the end. Some story. They'll both go down ten minutes into the Games. He'd seen enough to know that at least.
The note came past midnight, Oenimus passed it in the communal lavatory far in the bowels of the Training Center.
Get her out.
For a moment he considered refusing, rolling over on his thin cot and going back to sleep, but the Avoxes would know, they'd all know. And once you were a pariah among your own kind, it was over. Spoiled food and feces in his cot if he wasn't just strangled in the sewers. He'd might as well leap off the Remake Center. The Avoxes only had each other, and betrayal was death.
So he snuck into the women's dorm, woke Lavinia, and led her silently through the tunnels down below the Bank of Pompey. Paths he knew like back as his hand after twenty-three years. Secrets he remembered like the scent of Ma's bread.
Lilia was waiting at the end. Of course she was. Snow's favorite concubine was queen of the underworld, she held as much power as some ministers. The Gavin woman took Lavinia in hand, exchanged a look of pure loathing that he returned in interest, same as every time they encountered each other, then disappeared.
Until next year.
Next year, he watched Blight Gavin die in the Quarter Quell and felt nothing.
Next year he heard about Lavinia's fate and sobbed. He didn't know he was capable of it any more.
They assigned him to three private residences when the war started, each worse than the last. The final assignment was a horror. A woman who was once wealthy, whose investments in District 1 and 4 and 10 were now burnt wreckage. A woman used to every luxury who now had to scrape for her living in tenement housing in the Lavender Quarter and spent half her pittance on an Avox because she couldn't attend to even the most basic tasks for herself.
He'd sympathize, but the beatings and cuffs and slaps were a bit too loose and too regular for him to find any empathy.
The bombs were falling, the Capitol burning, children and women and mindless droves of citizens being slaughtered in allies and squares when the scraping came from the utility room.
"Boy!" (She was ten years younger than him). "Boy! What is that?!" She picked another sausage from a platter and stuffed it into her mouth, the gilt butterflies in her magenta hair quivering in fear.
He moved towards it, and then remembered.
Killer. Victor. Murderer. Villain.
But not this.
"Boy! The door!"
No. He remembered. He remembered the scent of pine trees.
"I will beat you boy!"
Maisy's screams as she fell into the furnace.
"Useless mutt!" His mistress threw her hands into the air and strode across the derelict apartment, her turquoise robe billowing behind her, and threw the door open.
She only had time to scream.
She fell with an arrow in her throat, and then Katniss Everdeen, the mockingjay, the stupid girl gawping at a burning cake, stepped over her corpse. Her cousin kicked aside the half-eaten sausage. A squad of soldiers followed.
He pressed himself against the wall. He was stone. He was a statue. Furniture.
"No one here," said the Mockingjay, and of course there's no one here. An Avox is furniture.
Only one member of the squad noticed him. Looked at him and saw a person, not an accessory. Tall, blonde hair tied back, armed to the teeth, certainly not the man he'd known for nearly a decade in the sewers.
His lips moved. No sound came out. But lip-reading was second nature at this point.
Eamon.
The Mockingjay squad left soon after. Perhaps he remained there. Furniture. Perhaps he slipped out and started a new life in the new Panem, as so many of the Avoxes did. Perhaps he settled in District 14, or the beaches of 4. Perhaps he returned to 7 at last and drank himself to death a year later.
But when District 13 firebombed the apartment complex and fourteen stories collapsed in a tangle of horror and hellfire, Eamon Sullivan's legacy fell with it.
Unremembered, and silent.
There were always a few loose ends from TVP that I never tied up, always a few ideas I never indulged, a few silly scenes that never made it in. I thought I'd put a few of them here, considering I'm celebrating signing with a literary agent and being on sub to publishers with my original work. I don't even know if the audience for TVP still exists, but I hope a few folks enjoy this.
I have no idea how many pieces I'll put here, but I do promise I'll let you know when I'm officially out of ideas.