Some of the things might be a little heavy here so TW for soft gore.

Ceres Walton of District Nine, Victor of the 78th Hunger Games, 53

May 115 ADD

Every Victor had their story to tell - a lesson to teach the new inductees. Aglaia's was that a legacy could pin a person down so much; Camelot often waved the stump where his left hand should be when he warned of knowing what was worth fighting for and Waverly lamented that the Capitol would find sick games to play at one's expense.

Ceres' lesson was to live the lifestyle given. To not question anything; to stay in line and do what was needed. She and her lesson were to stand as living proof of what the Capitol could do, even to it's esteemed Victors.

The times of the cruel lessons being so common were long since gone. Now, only the Victors who served a specific purpose were bestowed the burden of being living reminders. If they listened, Victors like the newly crowned girl from Five would have nothing to worry about. They could live their lives as best the could, mentoring the new generations of tributes and hoping in vain to bring one home.

If they didn't listen, they could join the messengers of warning.

Aglaia had tried to warn Ceres as much, when the latter was crowned. Although only winning two years before, the Victor from One spoke from a place of embittered experience. Ceres had, naively, ignored her. She had scoffed at the warning from the girl from One. Aglaia was, after all, the golden girl - the Victor that Panem was supposed to love enough to allow the continuation of the Hunger Games. Her uncle had been a Victor and she was said to be the top of her class in One's Academy. What did she, Ceres had thought scathingly once, Know about heading warnings.

That thought had been one of the last embers of Ceres' fire, it largely being extinguished when she defied the Victor from One and tried to divert from the path that had been neatly laid before her.

Her fire had extinguished, just like she intended to ensure for every Victor to protect them. To ensure the survival of them and their loved ones.

Ceres Walton of District Nine, Victor of the 78th Hunger Games, 17

April 79 ADD

The air of District Nine was cold. It hadn't been warm for a long time, Ceres knew that, but the edge felt sharper now she was a Victor. Nine's only Victor. She was now responsible for ensuring survival for the teenagers sent to slaughter. She, alone, would bear the guilt for failure. She hadn't even graduated from high school.

Even when she was alone, she felt the chill of someone staring at her.

"The fields have eyes, my love," Her mother used to say at night, fingers combing through Ceres' unruly mop of gingered curls. "They see all and remember everything."

Though the thought scared her more when she was younger, Ceres couldn't help but feel unnerved as she stepped down from the station's platform. It ran along one of the vastest expanses of Nine's wheat fields; golden grain as far as the eye could see. As if she were in the presence of her principal or the command of her stylist, Ceres straightened her back and held herself highly. I'm a Victor, she thought to herself sardonically. What can the fields do to me?

The falling dusk failed to help her nerves either; instead of arriving in District Nine's main station, Ceres had chosen the more secluded town of Foxtail to return home to. That had presented it's own myriad of issues, namely that the Peacekeepers themselves liked to keep clear of the town. One of Nine's processing towns, Foxtail was nothing more than a means of delivering grain to the Capitol. The people who lived there were rarely blessed with consistent electricity and were treated as beings of curiosity. Nobody stayed in Foxtail for long, not if they could help it. The stares from the closed, drawn windows were enough to unnerve anyone.

That and the constant hooting of owls, warning of deaths to come.

Ceres had come to ignore the owls; the wives of District Nine often lamented death at the hoot of an owl. She simply believed they were talking to one another and that the paranoia of the Hunger Games had warped any sense of rationality from the district. That wasn't to say she didn't shudder under the harsh, scrutinising gaze of a white owl on top of one of the lampposts.

The horse trotted at a respectable pace, the wagon trailing not far behind it. Ceres had missed the simple means of travel that most in Nine enjoyed, though she had gotten used to the comfort and speed of a car. She allowed herself a scarce smile, imagining what her now colleagues in the Capitol would say about her riding a taxi of a man she barely knew from the most obscure settlement of Nine.

"Imagining 'yer victory?"

Ceres was snapped from her thoughts, eyes moving to glance over at her companion. She hadn't expected conversation - the cabmen of Nine were often solitary beings. Ceres supposed when one's customers were the criminals of Nine trying to use the basic nature of the district against the technological Peacekeepers, silence was an unspoken promise.

That or they were unwilling to let the fields know their thoughts.

"I'm sorry?" Ceres replied, flashing an apologetic smile as if the encroaching darkness of dusk wasn't obscuring it.

"'Yer smile Miss," The man continued, tipping his head in her direction. "You lookin' mighty proud of somethin'."

Ceres laughed sardonically, shaking her head. "Appreciating some home comforts." Her voice sounded more mature than it had done before the Games. She supposed living through the arena did that to a person. "Eager to get home, too."

"The Victors' Ball not all it made ter be?" There was a sincerity in the man's voice, as if he were trying to sympathise with the latest in Panem's restarted line of Victors.

The Victor went silent, the sound of hooves on the wettened mud road sounding over anything she may had said. Ceres waited a moment before shaking her head. "No," She sighed, looking down. She knew better not to lament to a stranger but, if she were to, the cabmen of Nine were the best to do so. Everyone in Nine remembered the Hollingway scandal of 72 where none of the cabmen gave away the secrets of a renowned serial killer - not even when threatened with execution. "I messed up - at the ball."

"Forgive me miss, but how does a Victor 'mess up'?" The question was rhetorical. All of Panem had felt how a Victor could mess up - the burn marks still marred the landscape.

"Offending a Head Gamemaker, apparently." Ceres' voice seeped with exasperation, leant ever so graciously by the return to her District. "She warned me... and I didn't listen..."

The man hummed thoughtfully but said no more. What else was there to say? They all remembered what punishments the Capitol could bestow upon their Victors if need be. Ceres only hoped it wasn't as bad as she thought.

...

Ceres knew in her heart what she would walk into. Her house in the Victor's Village loomed over her, imposing as a giant sizing it's prey. She hadn't been permitted to change the outside like she had the innards; unwelcoming grey brick formed most of her home's façade. If she had her way, the bricks would be a warm orange or brown - something more recognisably District Nine.

The doorknob was cold, the warmth that once teemed in the house no longer there to welcome her. Before, when things got too hard or she had Capitol business to attend to, the doorknob shone with the excitement of those inside, beaconing the warmth within. Even though the house had been so foreign before, it's front face ever unwelcoming, her family had turned it to a place of comfort. Inside the walls, Ceres was just another Walton. The middle child of five; her older siblings Earie and Harven tormenting her and Stephen and the new-born on the way looking up to her.

Little of that mattered, Ceres knew that. The doorknob was cold, for it's fire had died.

Finding them was like a cruel game of hide and seek, with the reward being another piece of her heart being snatched away to nothingness. The hallway of her home was pristine, just as her mother liked to keep it. Ceres saw the trail she was meant to follow easily. Small emeralds that looked as if they had been plucked from the dress she had warn at The Victor's Ball littered themselves here and there to the door that led to the yard. As she followed them, she could see offshoots to other rooms of the house, all leading to another horror for her to find.

For her father, they had turned him into a sadistic twist on a scarecrow. Ceres had found him outside, leant against the back wall. He had been unceremoniously slaughtered, hands bearing wounds that suggested he had tried to fight. Leant against him was a knife she recognised from the kitchen - no doubt what he had attempted to defend his family with. His face had been stitched into a scowl, glassy eyes staring accusingly into the growing darkness. If Ceres hadn't known better, she may had felt the blame.

For her mother, a melancholic scene of a widow slipping at a grindstone; the golden power marred with deep red. Apart from the unsightly, gnarly gash to her neck, her mother remained in tact. Elegant in both life and death, Demeter Walton wore a dignified expression. She must've known what they had come to do, Ceres thought to herself, walking over and removing some of the more valuable pieces of jewellery. Before the arena, too much blood would've frightened her away. Now, to her, it was just another liquid. Besides, the undertakers liked to swipe the expensive rings.

For her brothers, Harven and Stephen, they became a wing each of the gutted bird of their sister, Earie. They had taken amusement in the pun her name leant itself to - each of her ears had been removed and pinned to the forehead of a brother. Their deaths had hurt Ceres the most. All of them had been so grateful at her winning, thanking her again and again for letting them move to the nice part of the district. The normal sibling antics resumed soon enough and, unlike others, they treated her as normal. Other kids her age were too scared to get close to her, afraid that the 'Reaper from Nine,' as she had been donned by the Capitol, would hurt them like she had done the Careers.

For baby Hestia, the youngest who had yet been born when Ceres had entered the arena, they had left her crying and malnourished. Ceres hadn't expected to find her alive and in a manageable state, evidenced by the carnal way she snatched her sister up and hugged her. A desperation was felt in every way she moved her body, an innate desire to keep the only link she had to her family alive.

...

Ceres cried after finding the bodies. She cried again and again, entering a competition with Hestia for whose cries could sound the most pained.

Her cries became choked sobs quickly, knowing that she was all her sister had; knowing that her sister was all she had.

Just as the escort from Nine had instructed her to do before she left the Capitol, for her feared the fate that had befallen her family, Ceres walked to the nearest phone. She called the clueless undertaker first, then the guilty Peacekeepers, to tell them both that a tragedy had occurred in her home. She told them that her father had gone insane, killing his family and then mutilating himself excessively in penance.

...

She hadn't thought she did anything bad. Ceres had thought that the Head Gamemaker, though clearly displeased at her attempt at small talk, wouldn't think anything of it. She should've known better. She should've known that the Head Gamemaker, Icharros, would run to President Akheron as soon as she mentioned she found her arena easy. Had she been a Career, such a comment may have been taken lightly but, being from Nine, it was an insult.

An insult that President Akheron, Coriolanus Snow's protégé, knew how to repay.

There had been warnings given to her, small musings from around the Capitol on not what to do. She had ignored them, believing the same spunky, likeable attitude that had seen her popularity inflate during her Games would carry her through life as a Victor.

As she clutched her younger sister, holding her close to her chest, she realised how wrong she had been.

Ceres Walton of District Nine, Victor of the 78th Hunger Games, 53

May 115 ADD

Visits home to District Nine were few and far between, for it's only Victor. Ceres was among the few Victors that took a more permanent residence in the Capitol, owed to her personal popularity amongst the Capitolites. Such popularity granted her a lot of things; a personal stylist team independent of the Games' pageantry, a small apartment in the nicer quarters of the city and, in secret, marriage to a prominent Capitolite actor. Such things came with the cost of her family all those years ago, but Ceres thought of it as good karma. She had rectified her mistakes and was being allowed to reap the rewards, no matter how strict they were.

District Nine's graveyards were different to the rest of Panem's. Ceres had figured as much growing up but had it confirmed after years of frequenting the Capitol. Whilst other Districts used headstones and marble plinths, tall trees or banners that blew in the wind, District Nine turned their lost ones into scarecrows. It was one of the only lucrative industries in the district, namely because few wanted to deal with the dead. Ceres only knew of the process because the oldest weaver, a small old man named Harrow, had been friends with her grandmother and pitied the punishment the Capitol had given her.

The process was rather simple - Ceres had watched it with her own eyes. The bodies were wrapped neatly in an intertwined weave of straw and fragrant plants, to save people from both the sight and smell of decaying corpses. Then, after donning whatever clothes the bereaved family were willing to part with, the scarecrows were ready for their masks. The masks of District Nine's scarecrows were most of the appeal. Made of porcelain and the accuracy dependent on wealth, many people threw away life savings to ensure their loved ones were remembered correctly. Ceres had heard that some even forced their children to take extra tesserae out to fund the masks.

Only the tiniest fraction of Ceres' Victor money had paid for expensive masks, her wealth far beyond the means of anyone in Nine. The masks she received, however, were of the finest quality anyone had ever seen. Another testament to my Victory, Ceres had thought to herself at the time, wholly embittered. Aren't the Capitol giving?

Each mask bore the face of her loved ones. Her parents and siblings had been captured perfectly in porcelain, eyes closed and set to rest forever more. Accredited to their cost, each had gilded golf leaves around certain features, and each donned a golden crown. Ceres knew it was the least she could to - set them to rest as members of Nine's newly deemed legacy family.

District Nine called its graveyards meadows. Wheat and grain still grew amongst the scarecrows and were harvested all the same, but the people of Nine distinguished them from the other fields. Each meadow had a moniker unique to itself - a testament to those who stood watch. The meadow where fallen tributes were sent to, The White Meadow, was called such from the Old World belief that white was a colour of innocence. It was the solemnest meadow of Nine; each scarecrow had a partner and stood watch in pairs. All but one; the scarecrow of little Jonah Weirgreyne stood alone, for his partner had survived what he couldn't.

Ceres often dreaded returning to The White Meadow year after year. Never because she felt guilty for failing to bring the children home - she had, unfortunately, let those thoughts leave her heart long ago - but rather to race Jonah's scarecrow.

"I should be next to him," She had said to her sister when they visited after the 104th Games. "Standing watch like everyone else."

Hestia had, naturally, tried to dissuade her sister from thinking that. If anyone else had tried to do so, Ceres would've brushed them away and insist they didn't know things she did. When her sister spoke, however, it felt like it came from a realer place.

...

Ceres had called the small meadow where her family was buried 'The Quiet Meadow.' All of the meadows were quiet - nobody in Nine frequented them enough to warrant a sound - but she felt hers was particularly silent. The Walton family had been one of the few in Nine that enjoyed life, even when times were hard. Their jovial atmosphere was felt in all the streets near them. Some found it optimistic, others deemed it annoying. Ceres never cared, not back then at least. Life was good - fun.

"We need to make the most of life!" Ceres' father would chortle, not too dissimilar from the jolly men in the few storybooks that survived from the Old World. "We'll be quiet when we die."

Her father and his family had taken that motto seriously; for when they died, they silenced the house.

Some were lucky enough to have their loved ones come back as fleeting shadows, reclusive reflections or just their presence being felt once more. Neither Ceres nor Hestia had been so fortunate. Ceres liked to think she had felt her mother once in the Mentor Plaza during the 87th Games, when she had decisively let one of her fragile tributes starve to death. Capable to win, the boy had been, but too breakable to be a Victor. She felt a warmth when his cannon sounded, something forgiving who acknowledged it was a kind thing to do.

Her mother had never judged her before, so Ceres took silent, guilty joy in thinking it was her.

Ceres Walton had never forgotten that scene as she walked into her home, it being a particular nuisance of a memory to try and scrub away. She had only been seventeen, yes, but what did she expect from President Acheron, the protégé of Coriolanus Snow? That was what everyone had said to her, at least.

She had known she failed in some capacity when she saw the Head Gamemaker's smile turn to a slight frown at one of her stupid throwaway comments. It hadn't meant anything. She hadn't meant anything. The old Gamemaker had thought she had, thus her family paid comeuppance.

It was why Ceres smiled sweetly to the new Victors, the blood of their victims still very much soaking their hands even if the crimson had long since been washed away.

It was why she always harboured that tiny hope that her tributes would fail in the arena.

It was why she always tried to extinguish the flame of rebellion in any new Victor, lest they pay the price she did.

I never intended for Ceres' backstory to be so dark. Oops!

She was meant to be a little more light hearted but, when I read back through the chapters and looked at what notes I did have for her, a melancholic reason for her warnings seemed apt.

Now we get to know a little more about her!

In any case, we're very nearly to the start of the Games! The deadline for tributes is 31st May/1st June and the form and interest list are both on my profile! If you haven't signed up, please do! I can promise these Games will be super fun B)

- Oli