Hello, everyone! Welcome to the second chapter with ~real~ content. I guess this is the start of the story!

*Michael Scott voice* OKAY, IT'S HAPPENING!

This will chapter will provide a bit of exposition on the Games and how they changed over time. The victors that I will be using are OCs of mine I created weeks ago, and I have grown very attached to them. I hope you like them as well. xx

~ Meghan

"The cause of the victors pleased the gods, but the defeat pleased Cato."

- Lucian, 125 AD - 180 AD, Roman Empire

The Nightmare.

...

Muscida Abyssal, Victor of the 16th Hunger Games

...

- District 4 -

Muscida was drowning in her own blood.

It filled her throat with the tang of metal and salt, stifling her screams. All around her, the ocean that had once been a cerulean blue had turned into deep red waves so thick she couldn't swim. A gulp of blood splashed into her mouth. The liquid seared her throat like a brand, taking her voice and pulling her under the scarlet sea.

"Musci-"

She slammed her palm into the tribute grabbing her, digging her nails into their intact throat.

Hands grabbed her shoulders, firm but gentle as they pulled her from the water, and her eyes opened to a dark room.

Green eyes glinted in dim lamplight, eyebrows drawn in a familiar concern. She was shaking but his arms were steady as always, cradling her shoulders so that she couldn't keep a hold on his throat. It was a practiced move. Percy didn't ever hesitate, even when she had smashed one of the bedside lamps in her sleep. He just reminded her to breathe every time.

Her breath came in waves. The air was clear and cool, mixed with salt, but not like the kind in blood. Instead it was the salty brine she had breathed nearly all her life, carrying the smell of the ocean with it, one that was bright cerulean blue and not red as blood.

"Just breathe," Percy murmured, reaching up slowly - he'd learned after all these years that you don't move fast around a victor - to stroke her sweaty braids. "Just breathe. I'm right here."

She buried her clammy face against his shoulder and breathed like they'd practiced: in, out, constant, focused, just like she was swimming.

"It was blood," Muscida finally croaked when she could breathe again.

"I know," Percy said.

"I was dying."

"But you're alive."

"I was in... I was back there."

"You're in District Four."

Muscida nodded, hands trembling as she reached her nine fingers up to her neck. The scar was still there.

"I'm in District Four," she echoed, trying to convince herself. The scar tissue was puckered and soft now, but she could still remember the feeling of her throat being slit open into a red smile and warm blood pumping onto her hands as she'd pressed them against her neck.

"The trachea is still intact," the Capitol surgeon had chirped an hour later.

By that time, Muscida wasn't in the arena anymore. She was in a room so white it seared her eyes.

The Capitol woman had smiled with lips painted bright gold. "The District Nine girl only managed to cut your veins. It causes quite a lot of blood loss, but not as much as if she had cut the jugular. It's good she didn't get the knife deep enough to sever your trachea." The doctor had laughed. "You would've suffocated right there on the beach, drowning in your own blood! That Mays girl would've been the victor then, wouldn't she? You're lucky, Miss Selkirk."

"Lucky," Muscida muttered. She couldn't tell if it was to the doctor or to Percy.

He pulled back, gently cupping her chin. His calloused palms scratched her jaw but she relished the feeling. It was real. He was real, here in District 4 in their little house near the sea, the windows open to show a full moon half-hidden behind the clouds.

"I'm here," Percy whispered.

Muscida finally took a deep breath - one that didn't shake - and pushed back the strands of hair stuck to her damp forehead. Even more was plastered on her neck, but she could live with that. Instead, her hands moved down to her stomach, finding the slight bump in her abdomen, fingers brushing over her soft nightgown.

Percy's hand covered one of hers. "I still think Triton would be a strong name."

"I like Pearl," Muscida responded. "For a girl."

"I like it too." Percy sat back on the bed, sheets as tangled as nets, and gave her a reassuring smile.

The game had gotten repetitive, listing off the first baby names they could think of after each of her nightmares, but it was one of the few things that calmed her down. They were one of the only things that calmed her down: Percy, Tide, and this new child. It was 3 years ago when she was first pregnant with their son, but she already couldn't imagine a world without him. Not everyone agreed with her decision. The idea of having children was one that most victors had sworn off.

"I can't bring a kid into this world," Mags Flanagan had snapped one afternoon as they sat in a small skiff, baking under the summer sun. "Not after everything."

"You don't want a tiny Mags running around? Or a tiny Navy?" Muscida had joked. But she knew the seriousness of it. She just didn't want to admit it.

Mags tossed her red curls over her shoulder. "All the children in District Four are going to be my children, Cee-Cee. Navy understands. Says he wouldn't have married me if I had wanted a dozen babies. Neither one of us want to see them dead."

Muscida had just stared down at the sun shining on the sea. She had won her Games two years before that conversation. She was still so young, just twenty years old, a ring of woven rushes around her finger - a promise from Percy.

She had always wanted a child of her own. She'd grown up thinking of kissing their little hands, hearing them giggle, watching them grow up. She'd imagined working at her parents' netting shop, maybe one day marrying Percy, and having a tiny family of their own. But then the Reaping happened.

Then the arena, the blood, and her hand wrapped around the blade of a spearpoint as she stabbed the girl from District 9 to death.

How would she tell her children about that? She still hadn't gotten to that part.

Tide was still only a toddler, after all, and tonight he was sleeping over at his grandparents' house like he always did around the Reapings. The screaming would just wake him up. Otherwise, Tide slept soundly, like a baby in a lullaby, gazing up at Muscida's face whenever she sang him to sleep. Every time she held him in her arms, she would imagine getting in a boat and leaving Panem, breaking past the sea border, finding an island where Tide could grow up without his name in the glass bowl every year.

Sometimes, when she was all alone, she almost wished she did drown there on the arena's beach, her blood pooling into the surf.

But when she saw Tide's eyes open for the first time, the same kelp-green as Percy's, she knew she would live for him. So she got up each day, and Percy was always there with her, as constant as the ocean. He had been there to hold her before she left for the Games, he had been there in every green wave of the sea in the arena, and he had been there when she came home. He had always been there.

"It's tomorrow," Muscida said, remembering that he was still waiting patiently for her to speak here, in the present.

Percy nodded. "And then you'll be back home in a few weeks. We have Mags' forty-sixth birthday to plan, remember? You'll have that to look forward to."

"Mags hates it when we celebrate her birthday."

"And yet she always eats all the cake."

Muscida couldn't laugh. She tried to swallow but her throat was dry. "I don't want to go," she said, her voice breaking.

He paused. Even Percy never had the words when it came to this. "I'm going to call you every day. Tide, too. We'll both call you."

Muscida's hands flattened protectively against her stomach. The Capitol would be waiting for an announcement on her pregnancy. They loved any time a victor was having a child, continuing the legacy of their parents. They saw it as a success story. Sometimes Muscida would just think about all the kids that might have been alive now if the children in the arena had been allowed to live too. Maybe Mays would have a baby if she were alive. Maybe she wouldn't, maybe she'd be like Mags, and she'd be asleep right now in District 9. But instead she had died on the beach in the arena, her blood mixing with Muscida's and turning the blue seawater scarlet.

"Musci." Percy was back next to her, stroking a thumb against her temple, pulling her from the memories she was starting to drown in again. "Why don't we get something? Do you want some hot chocolate? We both know how much you love it."

She nodded. She forced herself to stand. Finally she was nearing the end of her first trimester and wasn't throwing up her dinner every time she got up.

Percy held her hand - even the stump of her index finger - and they walked down the creaking stairs of the cottage.

Their little house was right on the coast, near where she grew up. The Victor's Village wasn't far. Muscida just couldn't bring herself to sleep there during the Reapings, not during the years when was going to have to go to the Capitol as a mentor. She could still remember back around the 20th Hunger Games when they finished building the Victor's Village.

"You're going to move into this one," a Capitol representative in a bright pink suit had told her. He had pointed at the second mansion on the left.

Muscida had shaken her head. "I like my house."

"President's orders," the man had merely answered with a smirk.

She and Percy lived with the other victors in the little gated neighborhood inland, the house too massive to feel like a proper home. So they always came back to the cottage now and then. It was here that she could listen to the ocean and smell the salt in the balmy breeze. It was a place she and Percy had built together, somewhere that the Capitol couldn't reach. Still. The nightmares always found her.

It was bad at first when she came back from the Games. Her family had been there, and she had been allowed to stay at home. But then, they started bringing them back each year to the Capitol to be "mentors." Muscida thought it was an odd word, because she and the other victors knew it was just another way for the Capitol to turn them into tributes again, vicariously living through a new set of children.

Then the volunteers had started becoming common. The tributes from District 4 almost always offered themselves up now. They walked voluntarily to the slaughter.

Muscida sighed. She forced herself to watch Percy as he opened a cupboard decorated in sea glass. "Can I have extra marshmallows in mine?"

"Anything you wish, Mrs. Abyssal," Percy responded, throwing her a lopsided grin.

For the first time that night, she smiled back.

"...the victor of the Sixteenth Hunger Games, Muscida Selkirk!"

Her smile fell.

"They always get my name wrong," she murmured.

Percy didn't even have to ask what she meant. She said it every year. "They don't know you, Musci."

She bit her lip. Even after all these years, even changing her name at the Records Building, they insisted on using the name Selkirk. It was a beautiful name. It was her parents' name, and her grandparents' name.

"Our name tells us who we are and where we come from, my angelfish," her mother had once said as she'd brushed Muscida's hair when she was tiny. "We Selkirks come from selkies. Do you know what those are?"

"They're people who can turn into seals," Muscida had answered. She'd heard this story a hundred times over, and it was always the same. That was something she loved about her mother. Even at such a young age, Muscida knew this woman had survived more than she could comprehend. A war had turned her parents into ashes, and yet her mother still stood, spinning tales of people running from the sea with the skin of a seal.

Her mother had nodded. She'd smoothed a light-brown lock of Muscida's hair, the same color as her own. "Their true home is the ocean even if they live on the land. And they always want to find their way home."

"I would too," Muscida had said happily. She'd smiled. "I'd always want to go home."

Muscida leaned against the cottage's kitchen window. Outside, the wind blew the clouds away from the moon. It glowed brighter, shining off the black ocean.

After coming back from the arena, she'd sat with her feet in the frigid night water, and imagined she could run into the waves with a seal skin and run from Panem forever. Instead, she had vowed that one day, she would bury the name Selkirk beneath the waves and she would step out, a new woman.

Each year, the Capitol took the drowned name from the depths of the ocean and forced it into her mouth.

Percy stepped over, handing her a steaming mug heaped with marshmallows.

Muscida cracked a smile. "You weren't kidding about the marshmallows. This has to be twenty."

"Twenty-one, actually," Percy joked with a wink.

The clouds shifted again. A ray of pale moonlight shone into the small kitchen filled with salty air. Percy's eyes glowed kelp-green.

Home, Muscida thought, or maybe she said it loud. Either way, it didn't matter. Percy understood. She was home, at least for another night. The Reaping would begin in eighteen hours, and she would have to be on the train leaving home, with a child who volunteered as tribute under her care. She would have to be Muscida Selkirk, a victor, again.

She swallowed a gulp of hot chocolate. It almost tasted like blood.

Hi, again!

After the A/N last chapter, I got plenty of feedback, so thank you all for that! Everyone's opinions differed a bit, but there was a consensus that having 1 chapter per tribute would be too repetitive (which I agree with) and that even doing 1 chapter per district could get a bit mucky. I'm very tempted to do one chapter per district, but I think the results were divided enough to make me want to try something else. In light of this, I've taken everyone's advice and sort of made a Frankenstein's Monster of an intro series!

I really hope this format works for everyone! Thank you for reading, as always x

~ Meghan