Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The uproar was such that even Haymitch Abernathy, who had been promptly banished to the Victors’ Village upon winning the Fiftieth Hunger Games, heard about it: A strangely dressed teenager, well-fed and looking like no one from their district, had wandered into the Seam from the wilds beyond the fence. She had been brought to the peacekeepers, placed in the group home, and was now attending the district school with all of the other children.

Word had been sent to the Capitol.

For himself, Haymitch was ambivalent about the girl’s existence. That she was there – alive, healthy, and speaking a forgotten language – meant that there were other places and other people out there, ones that were not part of Panem. None of that was going to do him or the other Victors a damn bit of good however. Panem would never let any of the Victors escape, not now that they were known and broken and beloved by the Capitol. And existing was not going to do the girl any good either. She was going to pay and pay dearly for daring to exist when she should not.

Haymitch wanted nothing to do with any of it, so he didn’t. He bought his rotgut, imported his canned goods and liquors, and kept to himself like every other year. He was determined to know and hear as little about the girl as possible, which worked out rather well since most people became suspiciously silent when he was near anyway, but not even Haymitch could ignore the sudden infusion of quiet buoyancy and color in a district that was generally known for being dour, downtrodden, and gray. There were other places out there, and the Capitol wouldn’t notice if they went missing… unless the coal quotas stopped being met, of course.

Haymitch envied his neighbors’ anonymity as bitterly as they envied his wealth.

The days steadily lengthened, the temperature rose, and that year’s Victory Tour came to the district before any official word of what to do with the wild girl. This year’s Victor, a girl out of District Four named Annie Cresta, was barking mad. She had lost her mind when her district partner was beheaded about thirty seconds into last year’s games.

Haymitch had to hand it to District Four’s Career program because, mad or not, Annie Cresta had still managed to kill several other tributes at the cornucopia, including her district partner’s killer, survive over a week on her own, and end her Games by treading water for twenty-six hours. Even when she had lost her mind, she had still had her training to fall back on.

There were good, solid reasons that Haymitch had never brought home a living, breathing Victor, reasons beyond his alcoholism, a crippling lack of funding, and his general refusal to be whored out. (No, not even during that ten year period when all of his tributes who managed to survive the cornucopia were torn to shreds by mutts instead.)

When the Victory Tour arrived in District Twelve, Haymitch prepared himself to go through the usual motions (meeting the new Victor at the train, the speech in the square, the dance that night, and getting on the train the next morning) in the usual way: he got a little drunk the day before, misjudged, and ended up thoroughly soused.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, when one was a Victor ‘meeting the train’ did not actually mean going out to wait for it on the train platform. What it actually meant for Haymitch was waiting in his house until his prep team, which had ridden into the district with the Victory Tour, arrived to try to sober him up, stuff him full of pills designed to undo some of the damage that he had been doing to himself since he left the Capitol, and make him look less like himself. It was only after he had been transformed into something passable by Capitol eyes that Haymitch was allowed into the train station and on camera.

That year, Haymitch was making use of one of the floating prep teams commonly used as stopgaps by older Victors whose prep teams had quit, retired, or died while those Victors searched for replacements. Floating prep teams were invariably young, fresh out of the academy, and doing their time as a common resource in the hopes of being impressive or likeable or lucky enough to be offered a permanent position by one of the Victors, hopefully from one of the lower numbered districts.

Haymitch had used that particular team of two a couple of times and did not entirely loathe them, which was not to say that he liked them either. They were just… there and mostly inoffensive about it. And they seemed capable of mostly resisting the impulse to make him look as ridiculous as they often did, a rare virtue when dealing with people from the Capitol.

When the knock came, Haymitch answered it. At the sight of him, Portia sighed.

“Well, at least you don’t have vomit in your hair this time.”

Haymitch raised a bottle to her in a silent toast. “Where’s Cinna?”

“On the train,” Portia replied as she edged into Haymitch’s house. “He’s doing Orpha’s prep.”

Portia managed to get him cleaned up, but the sobriety issue was a lost cause. Despite her best efforts, the local Peacekeepers had to practically carry Haymitch to the train station. Haymitch was not sure, but at some point he lost his bottle and even his emergency flask. He thought Portia had stolen them, but it might have been a Peacekeeper.

It worried Haymitch because what if he got thirsty?

He would have argued against his losses but as he began to he got distracted vomiting into the bushes that lined the perimeter of the train station. When he finished, Haymitch looked up to find Portia gone and Mags standing next to him and armed with a bottle of water and a disapproving expression.

Haymitch took the bottle and ignored her censure. He swished a mouthful of water around in his mouth and spat it into the bushes.

“You’re looking good,” he said finally.

“You look the same as ever,” she snapped, as if Haymitch was the first Victor to disgrace a clump of bushes. “Have a mint.”

Haymitch popped the little hard candy in his mouth and refrained from asking if she carried them for District Four’s most celebrated Victors. It was better not to know.

“So, aside from the new girl who’s on the train?” asked Haymitch. “Anyone I know?”

Mags snorted.

“Orpha came,” she said and Haymitch nodded. That was to be expected. It was tradition for successful mentors go on the Tour with their newly minted Victors, partly to allow them to enjoy their success but mostly because they were expected to keep their Victors in line. Even six months after being fished out of their arenas, most Victors were usually still at least half mad.

The rest of the list was equally predictable – an assortment of stylists, Peacekeepers, and current Capitol favorites among District Four’s rather large pool of Victors, including Finnick Odair. There was no one among Four’s Victors or support staff that Haymitch particularly looked forward to seeing, although he was on fairly friendly terms with Mags and Finnick.

“Which ones of you are mentoring next year?” Haymitch asked as if he did not already know. Mags was practically an institution within the Games, and last year’s Victor always mentored the next year’s tributes. It would be Mags and Annie Cresta, although the rest of Four’s Victors would no doubt be in and out of the Mentor’s Lounge to help watch over the tributes in the arena, work out strategies, and scare up sponsorship money. The difference in resources between inner districts and outer districts was not just felt in terms of pre-Games training. It was in the help offered to tributes during the Games and the support given to Victors after they left the arena.

“Come on,” Mags ordered. “Orpha will introduce you to Annie.”

“Is there anything that I should know?” Haymitch asked as he fell into step with the older Victor.

“Move slowly, speak softly, be calming, and keep an eye out for knives. She keeps stealing them from the dining car.”

Haymitch nodded, his fingers ghosting across the knife that he almost always carried. He understood the impulse, even if the other notes were worrying.

Annie Cresta and her mentor from last year, Orpha Tallow, were waiting for him in the exact center of the train station. Four’s other Victors, most of whom would be living in the Capitol during the six month period between the Victory Tour and the end of the next set of Games, were arranged in a row behind Orpha and Annie while assorted stylists and carefully selected members of Twelve’s merchant class made up the crowd of onlookers. The peacekeepers skulked in the corners of the room, out of the direct line of the camera shots taken but their presence still felt.

Tall and thin as a rail, Orpha Tallow had tired eyes, bitten nails, and a cigarette permanently clamped in the corner of her mouth. Haymitch knew from experience that none of her cigarettes were ever filled with mere tobacco.

Annie was crouched on the floor, her hair tangled and her hands clamped over her ears. Her sea green dress was a puff of fabric around her. There was a long smear of blood across the floor’s bright tiles.

Next to Haymitch, Mags cursed and rushed over to help Orpha persuade District Four’s newest victor to stand up and pretend to be happy to be there. Uninterested in trying to help, Haymitch stayed where he was and waited to be needed for the photo shoot.

It took forty-five minutes to get Annie up on her feet, drugged to the gills, and sluggishly responding to questions. Her eyes were too wide and too bright eyes, her hands shook, and her hair was still somewhat tangled but she better than before and deemed good enough for the cameras. By then, Annie’s victim, a burly peacekeeper recently assigned to District Twelve, had been stitched up and sent home to recuperate.

Haymitch and Annie were formally introduced by Orpha, the sweet smoke from Orpha’s cigarette curling through the air between them and twisting through Haymitch’s stomach. Annie did not offer her hand to Haymitch, he was not offended, and they both tried not to vomit on the other’s shoes.

Since everyone’s shoes stayed dried and no one tried to stab anyone else, Haymitch considered it a wildly successful meet and greet. Better than last year’s at any rate, although from the looks of it, Annie was still more than half mad. Orpha probably had her hands full.

When the camera crew declared the train station scene over, everyone was herded out to the town square for the next carefully orchestrated scene.

In the square, all of the Victors had to stand on the stage that was only used twice a year for Reapings and Victory Tours. Below them stood the meager crowd that was District Twelve, the families of the two dead tributes front, center, and cordoned off from the rest of the mandatory audience. Her eyes glazed from whatever she was being liberally dosed with, Annie trembled as she delivered her canned speech, starting, stopping, and stumbling over the words. Haymitch ignored her words, all of his concentration on staying more or less upright. Finnick’s hand, warm and steady on his elbow, helped with that.

When the speeches, congratulations, and condolences were finally over, the crowd gratefully dispersed. Orpha took possession of Annie again, and everyone gratefully left the stage.

There were a few hours between the speeches in the square and the dance, hours in which everyone who was attending it was meant to get ready. Haymitch preferred to use that time to drink; unfortunately his prep team of two seemed to have different ideas. They forced food, coffee, and medicinal pills into him, and left him on a couch in the Justice Building. Haymitch was so distracted by the churning in his stomach and the blazing pain spreading through his organs that he barely noticed when Portia returned to leave a glass of something on the little table near Haymitch’s head. As it probably wasn’t something alcoholic, Haymitch paid it no mind.

By the time that Cinna returned to fetch him, Haymitch’s physical misery had dulled to an all over ache and a general sense of queasiness. Worse, he was actually beginning to sober up.

Cinna did not have to do much to get Haymitch on his feet and moving towards the booze.

“Remember, no liquor while you’re on those pills,” Cinna warned, and Haymitch grimaced.

He knew from personal experience that although the pills’ warning labels said ‘no alcoholic beverages’ in reality there was actually quite a bit of wiggle room. Capitol citizens, the people the product had originally been developed for, did not like being entirely sober any more than he did, although their reasons and preferred substances differed.

The first thing Haymitch did on entering the Justice Building’s ballroom, which was filled with peeling gilt and had dust in the corners, was to acquire a beverage, alcoholic naturally.

Fresh drink in hand, Haymitch was ready to mingle with a roomful of people that, although he had grown up with most of them, he had absolutely no interest in and who had absolutely no interest in him to the point where neither side would be particularly bothered if the other suddenly and inexplicably died. It made for a macabre sort of liberation; at least it did on Haymitch’s side of the equation.

Mingling went about like it always did for Haymitch in his home district, and he soon remembered why he spent so much time drunk and in his house. Unfortunately, going home to drink and glower hatefully at the nearest wall was not an option. Instead, Haymitch went to find the other Victors, intent on inflicting his company on them for the rest of the evening. He was less familiar with Four’s Victors than he was with the Victors out of Eleven or Three, but Victors were Victors. They were the last people who would hold survival against someone.

Interestingly, none of the District Four Victors were in the Justice Building’s ballroom. In fact, none of them were in the building at all. Haymitch found them outside, combing the district.

“We’ve lost Annie,” Finnick said bluntly. “Can you think of anywhere she might be hiding?”

“No,” sighed Haymitch. He tossed back his drink and put the glass on one of the Justice Building’s windowsills. “But I’ll help you look.”

Victors were Victors, after all, and the last people to hold survival against someone.

Fourteen hours after Annie had wandered off, Orpha found her in District Twelve’s group home. Haymitch heard the particulars while nursing a glass of the hard stuff in the bar car on the train.

“She had curled up in bed with another girl as peaceful as you please,” said Orpha, while puffing smoke like a chimney. “The other girl was using her as a hot water bottle.”

Haymitch snorted. “She’s lucky your girl didn’t stab her.”

“Annie came from the group home,” Finnick said softly. “It would be familiar to her.”

Haymitch, who vaguely remembered something about Finnick coming from Four’s group home too, filled his mouth with spirits and said nothing.

“It was the wild girl,” added Orpha carelessly, “the one from beyond the fences.”

Haymitch scowled down into his drink. From the corner of his eye, he saw Finnick’s shoulders straighten. His were hardly the only ones. Rebellion ran deep among Four’s fishermen and Victors. Haymitch had no doubt that everything Four’s Victors had managed to learn about the wild girl while they were in Twelve would be transmitted to the rebellion… the one that he refused to notice on general principle.

“Oh?” creaked Mags, whose shoulders had remained still. After decades in the Games, she was a crafty and pragmatic liar. “How was she?”

Orpha snorted. “She tried to protect Annie from me.”

People like her did not last long in Panem. Given her origins, Haymitch had not expected anything else. While the others danced around wild, half-formed ideas to rescue the wild girl and hide her in their districts, Haymitch half listened but mostly drank. He was clever enough to know impossibility when he encountered it. And honestly, he was uninterested in the wild girl or her fate or what she symbolized. She wasn’t a Victor, and for Haymitch those were the only people that he had left.

Annie’s Victory Tour rolled through each district in turn, the train leaving each district longer by a few cars. Housed within the new additions were next year’s mentors and this year’s guests of the Capitol, victors who would spend the next six months living in the Capitol and following President Snow’s orders. The mentors would be sent home as soon as they had finished with Annie’s Victory Party at the Presidential Mansion and registering as mentors for the next set of Games. The Capitol’s guests would return to their districts with the mentors and corpses after the Seventy-First Hunger Games, and, if invited back to the Capitol next year, return with the Seventy-First’s Victory Tour to do another six months in the Capitol.

Some on the train, like Haymitch and Cecelia out of Eight, belonged solely to the former category, while others, like Finnick Odair out of Four, belonged solely to the latter category. There were a few rare ducks, mostly from outer districts, that belonged to both categories because their districts did not have enough victors to satisfy all of the Capitol’s demands on their district without someone or even everyone doubling up.

Sometimes, Haymitch was grateful that there was no longer anyone that he loved.

From District Seven onwards, he and Johanna Mason – the new example for a new generation – toasted freedom and vengeance. Neither of them was a nice drunk.

Of course, no one else on that train was particularly nice either. They had all killed someone to survive. Most of them had killed several someones, a few of them doing it gleefully. And all of them had their vices – alcohol, sex, and drugs being the most common. The few Victors who didn’t, like Cecelia, were freakish even on a train filled with murderers, addicts, and whores.

When the train pulled into the Capitol, a crowd was waiting for them. Capitol fashions, like the citizens who wore them, were as frivolous and ridiculous as ever. Haymitch did not take as much caustic delight in that as others might have (and definitely did.) Mostly, he drank and tried not to think about how the woman with the pink feathers in her hair and glittering yellow beak on her face reminded him of his arena. It was difficult though, especially since she was waving a sign with his name on it.

“Ooooh, look!” exclaimed Effie. She nodded at the lady with the beak. “Haymitch! You still have a fan!”

“Great,” said Haymitch flatly. He staunchly ignored his urge to stab the bird-woman, because she was not a real, throat gouging mutt-bird. And he was not in his arena.

The Capitol was nothing like his arena.

Except for when it was exactly like his arena.

Haymitch drank more.

Registering as District Twelve’s mentor was fairly simple. Haymitch merely had to show up at the Training Center and, under winking camera lens, flashing lights, and reporters, put his name in with the secretaries waiting there. The mentors usually did it after the train ride and before being prepped for Ceasar’s interview with that year’s victor. It was also a chance to play to the cameras, start drumming up support for the as yet unknown tributes… and size up the competition. Most of the outer districts had the same mentors from year to year but the Career districts had people to choose from. Even when they came from Career districts, different mentors favored different strategies.

There were a lot of familiar faces milling around the recording table. Haymitch, Beetee, Wiress, Seeder, Chaff, Blight, Johanna, Cecelia, and Woof were all givens. District Four had a large pool of Victors to choose from, but the sight of Annie Cresta and Mags milling about near the table was hardly surprising. As that year’s Victor, Annie was expected to serve as one of the next year’s mentors. And having recently spent roughly two weeks in her general vicinity, Haymitch knew enough about Annie Cresta to know that it would not go well for her or her tribute.

Cashmere and Gloss, siblings out of District One, were a surprise, though. The last that Haymitch had heard, they were both highly popular with and sought after by the Capitol’s citizens. It was less surprising that they were mentoring in the same year. Word had it that they had been practically inseparable since Gloss had won his Games.

Brutus from District Two was also a surprise, since Lyme usually mentored District Two’s boys. Enobaria, while also a new face, was not a particularly shocking choice as district mentor. The girls’ mentor for District Two changed every year, but it was usually someone who had wiles, feminine and otherwise. Enobaria probably fit the bill.

Haymitch registered, briefly chatted with one or two of the others, and then went to spend the next few days in the Victors’ medical bay having the previous six months’ excesses excised from his body by the doctors assigned there. He was hardly the only one to occupy a bed. By unspoken agreement, everyone thoroughly ignored each other.

They were all deemed well enough to attend Annie’s ball in the Presidential Palace, which was when various escorts, Effie included, began coming around and making noises about not embarrassing the districts this year. As victors, they bore it with about the amount of good grace that could be expected, (which was none at all,) then proceeded to do whatever they had been going to do anyway.

It was in the course of sampling the free liquor on one of the tables that Haymitch bumped into Annie Cresta again. He was discreetly leaning against a potted tree until his balance firmed up, and she was hiding behind it. Haymitch had only interacted with her the once in District Twelve’s train station, but that one time had been wildly successful, especially when compared to his introductions in the previous few years, and who knew, maybe she was saner than she looked. It seemed unlikely though, what with the way that she was rocking and humming to herself. Haymitch decided to stick around for awhile, keeping a bleary eye on her until one of Four’s Victors arrived to collect her.

It was while Haymitch was about this self-imposed task that Plutarch Heavensbee sidled up to him. Haymitch, who would usually have enacted a strategic retreat at that point, stood his ground and glared at the game maker. Plutarch either didn’t notice or failed to care.

“Aaah, Haymitch, just the man I was looking for,” oozed the game maker.

Haymitch scowled at Plutarch. He had done the math once when he was slightly more sober than usual and in the mood to punish himself, and Plutarch was about the right age to have been a junior game maker during Haymitch’s own Games. It had hardly been a surprise.

Haymitch had done the math because he had recognized the Fifty-Sixth arena, had known it in his bones and seen it in his nightmares. Although the arena’s landscape had been different, a frozen wasteland whereas his had been a fairytale forest, it had lacked basic survival resources, been overly complicated in its design, and had possessed more mutts, all of them vicious and deadly, than any of that year’s tributes had known what to do with. It had been Plutarch Heavensbee’s first year as head game maker in his own right but those three things would all become hallmarks of his evolving style of game making.

Haymitch especially despised Plutarch’s turns as head game maker.

“Plutarch,” Haymitch said curtly.

“I hear that District Twelve has finally become interesting.”

“Not that I noticed.”

“The wild girl,” continued Plutarch, ignoring Haymitch. “I suppose you’ve seen her.”

“No, can’t say that I have.”

Plutarch’s eyebrows twitched. “Not even once? Maybe on the street? I hear District Twelve is small enough for things like that to happen.”

“Folks in District Twelve tend to keep the kids clear of me.”

“You can’t tell me that you haven’t been the slightest bit interested in her or where she’s come from.”

“I have my interests.” Haymitch tipped his glass meaningfully at Plutarch. “Teenagers from the wilds aren’t one of them.”

Plutarch heaved a sigh. “I see that I shall have to get my news elsewhere.”

Haymitch turned and looked down his line of sight to one Effie Trinket, her head thrown back as she laughed at something that one of the President’s junior secretaries was saying.

“Good luck,” Haymitch replied, not meaning it at all. As Plutarch finally began to move away from him, Haymitch tipped his head back and bitterly drained his glass.

When Plutarch was gone, Haymitch tipped his head towards Annie. “You ready to come out yet?”

The tree rustled but no girl appeared.

Haymitch sighed.

While he didn’t think he had anything left to lose, Haymitch was in no hurry to be proven wrong. And he never wished to discover what more could be taken from him.

And if there was one thing that the Capitol was good at, it was taking more.

Haymitch did not particularly like District Twelve but it was always a relief to return to it, probably because the only time he ever left it was on the Capitol’s business. And District Twelve had the added charms of both not being in the Capitol and also being the site of his house. So he gratefully went home to read and drink too much and try to avoid the nightmares.

Haymitch was generally successful on at least one of those fronts, occasionally even two of them.

The night before the reaping, Haymitch toasted the soon to be dead and woke up with the pointed toe of Effie’s sparkly purple pump digging into his side. Haymitch retaliated by vomiting on her foot. Vicious satisfaction, unfocused and nearly obscured by his throbbing hangover, warmed his heart for the entire split second it took Effie to realize what had happened and begin screaming at him.

Stumbling to his feet, Haymitch quickly retreated from her piercing shriek. He ended up in the downstairs bathroom.

Years ago, Haymitch had worked out that on some days it better not to even attempt the stairs in his house. He had not survived the Fiftieth Hunger Games to be killed by his prize. With that in mind, one year he had put a portion of his annual salary towards renovating his downstairs bathroom. Now, his living room was smaller but his downstairs bathroom was roomy, tiled, and had a shower complete with garbage disposal in addition to the usual sink and toilet. There was no mirror.

Haymitch turned on the shower and went to liberate a bottle of white liquor from beneath the sink. He took several pulls of the stuff, ignoring the burn as it slid down his throat.

The surest way to avoid a hangover was the keep drinking.

Bottle in hand, Haymitch stumbled back toward the shower. He did not even bother to take off his clothes before he got in.

Much later, Haymitch emerged from his shower scrubbed, warm, and somewhat drunk to find Cinna sitting on the lid of his toilet, a bright green parasol propped against the wall.

Cinna looked thoroughly disapproving.

Haymitch, well past caring what Cinna or anyone else thought of him, submitted to Cinna’s scrutiny, tooth brushing, and primping, but he ignored the accompanying lecture. Cinna did his makeup, dressed him, and made him eat toast. And, just before Haymitch staggered out the front door, Cinna took his current bottle away.

“There will be plenty more waiting for you on the train,” Cinna said firmly, his grip on the bottle surprisingly strong.

Haymitch would have argued the point but just then Effie, now wearing a pair of sparkling red pumps with large, purple feathers on their heels, dragged him out the door. Thanks to his breakfast (the booze, not the bread) Haymitch was already too unsteady on his feet to hold his ground and either continue the argument with Cinna or get another bottle. Instead, he found himself tripping down his front steps, half supported and entirely guided by Effie Trinket’s grip on his arm.

The entire walk to town, she railed at him about her destroyed pair of shoes.

If he were a better man, Haymitch might offer to replace them.

He was not a better man.

And he hated Effie when he was not indifferent to her.

She was making it very difficult to be indifferent to her that morning.

It was almost a relief when they reached town, and Effie, conscious of her image, finally shut up about the damn shoes.

Together, they walked through the town. Haymitch pretended not to notice when people that he had known his whole life shied away from him. For once, it was not Effie’s fault.

To a greater or lesser degree, they had been shying away from him like that since he had come home from his games. The other victors talked about the old friends, pretty girls, and distant relatives who had come out of the woodwork to help them spend their winnings. But Haymitch had come home to find nothing and no one waiting for him. His family and his girl had been murdered. His childhood home had been burned to the ground. And everyone had seen him murder two out of the three District Twelve tributes on national television.

No one had wanted to stand too close to him much less be seen speaking with him.

These days, some people could bring themselves to nearly overlook who he was (and what he had done to survive) in, say, December or February. But on reaping day, no one wanted to come near him, as if he was bad luck or possibly vindictive enough to have Effie choose their children just to spite them.

After twenty-odd years, he was used to it. He certainly no longer cared that it happened.

Haymitch scowled at the baker and sent him scurrying back into his shop, never mind that Haymitch was one of the very few people who ever bought his pretty, overpriced cakes.

In the square, Effie hustled Haymitch up onto the stage where he gratefully collapsed into his assigned seat. From there, he watched the children file into their assigned pens, their parents loitering around the edges of the square in small clumps that alternated between resentful and terrified, and in due time ignored the mayor speech. It was the same string of justifications that had been mouthed in every district in Panem since the very first set of Hunger Games.

And then came the reaping, Effie clattering up to the girls’ ball, the ridiculous feathers on her shoes waggling in her wake.

She made an enormous production out of riffling through the slips, each of which was treated with a chemical that would later stain them pink where she had touched it, before pulling out a single name.

“Buffy Summers!”

It was easy to see who the name belonged to. The population of the girls’ eighteen year olds block shrank away from a single girl, short and blonde.

The peacekeepers fetched her.

As they roughly prodded her up onto the stage, Haymitch recognized her as the girl who had wandered out of the forest. Well, at least that answered the question of what the Capitol intended to do with her.

When Effie rushed to her, prattling about the honor she had been chosen for, the girl smiled and nodded, her expression pleasant but uncomprehending. Her bright, pleasant smile never wavering, the girl let Effie guide her to where she was supposed to stand.

The outsider had absolutely no idea what was going on.

Haymitch’s guts twisted and ached.

Cinna had been wrong.

He needed a drink right then and there.

He needed to drink until he blacked out and it was suddenly tomorrow when he would be too busy vomiting to care that this year’s female tribute was going to trustingly follow he and Effie to her death.

At least the others had always known what was happening.

The boys’ tribute, fifteen and skinny, certainly knew what to expect. He was shaking and glaring as he stumbled up onto the stage. He did not let Effie touch him and, when it came time to shake hands, he roughly grabbed the girl’s hand, pumped it up and down once, and let go of her immediately.

There was no lingering friendship or pity in Burdock Jones.

As usual, Haymitch allowed himself to be hustled into the Justice Building with the tributes where he watched a steady stream of people enter and exit Burdock’s room during the hour’s grace period granted to tributes and their loved ones.

No one visited Buffy Summers, not to say goodbye, wish her good luck, or give her a token. Apparently no one, except the rebellion, was going to miss her after she died.

Rather than considering what he might be feeling at any length, Haymitch went to go find a drink.

Chapter Text

There was this short story that Buffy’s Freshman English had read shortly after she had been Chosen. It had been so apropos to her own situation as the Slayer that she had not forgotten it unlike so many other reading assignments. In the story, a woman wins her town’s lottery and is promptly stoned to death by her friends and neighbors.

Buffy had the terrible suspicion that she had just won The Lottery.

The clues were subtle but there: the looks everyone had shot her when the lady in the clown makeup had loudly mispronounced her name; the way the other girls shrank away from her as if bad luck might be contagious. And given that her life had usually come up roses before she was Chosen and now came up crap given half a chance, Buffy wasn’t sure that there wasn’t anything to their theory. She didn’t begrudge them it at any rate, not like she begrudged them so many other things.

Buffy really did not like District 12. She hadn’t liked it when she had wandered into the fenced community three months ago, and she hadn’t liked a single day of it since then.

And now, they were planning to stone her to death and she was quietly lying in wait, waiting for them to make their move. While waiting (for their opportunity and hers), Buffy let armed guards escort her first onto the black stage, then into a dusty closet, and finally onto a sleek train.

(She would not accept their decision or beg for mercy. She would burn this backwater, coal-dusted hellhole to the ground and skip town; screw them and their fences and their lottery.)

Buffy stepped onto that train knowing full well that something bad had happened to her, seethed about it while the clown-lady showed her and the kid around, and then forgot about it entirely for two whole heartbeats while she fell in love. It was impossible to remember that terrible things were happening to her when she saw her cell’s shower.

It was not just any shower – although after the never ending camping trip that was living in the shanty town’s orphanage any working shower with clean, running water would do – but the most amazing shower that she had seen since waking up in that damn forest. And all of the soaps, shampoos, and conditioners smell delightful.

Since that probably wasn’t true, Buffy picked a few that she knew she would still love the smell of after the euphoria of having access to running water wore off.

Buffy spent a long time in the shower scrubbing at the accumulated grime from her current living conditions. There were no razors, tweezers, or hair dyes to be found in her bathroom, but there were bottles of scented lotion and what might have been hair dryers or makeup applicators. Buffy slathered herself in lotion, pulled on a complimentary robe, and tried to figure out what to do with the teeny tiny bathroom thingies.

She was still trying to work that out when there came a knock at her bedroom door and a woman’s voice trilled something at her. Distracted, Buffy called, “Come in!” and then had to repeat herself in that awful, mush-mouthed version of English that everyone else seemed to speak.

It was the woman from the stage, the one who had made Buffy’s bad luck known, and she started to trill something else at Buffy before stopping suddenly. Buffy looked up from the tube that she was fiddling with to see the woman looking at her very intently. Her awful makeup made it impossible for Buffy to guess what she might be thinking or feeling.

“Help?” asked Buffy, gesturing at her face, and the woman sprang into action. She happily showed Buffy what all the little contraptions did and how to make different colors come out of them, and Buffy soon had flawless hair and makeup, by her own standards if not her helper’s.

“Thank you!” Buffy enthused, liking her reflection in the mirror for the first time in months. “Clothes, yes?”

The woman showed Buffy the clothes, all of it in different sizes, and Buffy touched one of the colorful sundresses longingly.

Not with the state of my legs and armpits though, Buffy thought and sighed. She settled on a pair of black pants, a cute little blue top, and comfortable new underwear. After months of Little Orphan Annie chic, short-sleeved, colorful, and pretty felt like luxury. So did nice underwear. Buffy enjoyed all of it immensely.

When she was finally dressed, Buffy emerged from her bedroom to find the lady waiting for her in the hallway. At Buffy’s appearance, the older woman smiled.

Buffy automatically smiled back, bright and happy and real.

So far, her annual stoning wasn’t going so bad. No one had even brandished a stone at her yet.

It made Buffy feel all suspicious and pretty and snarky.

With flashbacks to Slayer Fest dancing in her head, Buffy made awkward conversation with her escort. In short order, she learned that the woman’s name was Effie Trinket and Effie learned how to say Buffy’s name properly.

When they entered the dining car, Buffy lost track of things for awhile.

There was just so much food! And all of it laid out on a long table, complete with table cloth, silverware, and cut crystal glasses. It was like every fantasy Buffy had ever had while contemplating the thin glop served at the orphanage where there had never been enough food, not even for a regular human girl never mind a Slayer, and all of it had been disgusting.

 After going for so long with so little, Buffy made a pig of herself, shamelessly and without regret.

It was all so delicious!

Buffy was on her third helping of everything before she discovered that the spicy peanut sauce was her favorite and promptly poured it all over everything on her plate. On her fourth helping, Buffy realized that the table’s other occupants were staring at her, Effie with horror and the boy, whose name seemed to be Burdock, with awe. The man, looking somewhere between envious and disgusted, tipped his glass at her, the ice cubes in it clinking against each other.

Feeling self-conscious, Buffy fished her cloth napkin out of her lap, dabbed at her mouth, and made a conscious effort to eat in a slower, more ladylike fashion and less like what she was, which was a half-starved Slayer.

Burdock smirked. A moment later he seemed to remember something that made his eyes narrow and his mouth turn down into a scowl. He bent his head over his own half-eaten plate of food and began shoveling handfuls into his mouth voraciously.

Buffy, whose mouth was full of shrimp salad at the time, shrugged and returned her attention to her own meal. After months in Twelve, she was used to it. She still preferred a fork if she could get her hands on one, but she was inured now to people eating with their hands.

Judging by their expressions, the man was too, and Effie was not.

Much later, when everyone else had finished eating, Effie began trying to herd them away from the table and toward the far side of the dining car. Buffy, who was still grazing albeit much more slowly than earlier in the afternoon, took a few snacks to go.

The next car was set up like someone’s living room, complete with comfortable chairs, a couch, and an enormous television attached to the far wall.

Burdock rushed ahead to plop into one of the two individual chairs and, after a harried glance towards the man, Effie claimed the other, leaving the couch to Buffy and the man. Buffy claimed the corner closest to Effie and sat with her plate in her lap. The man collapsed into the other corner of the couch, sending a gust of sour air over Buffy. He sat with his legs splayed wide, a bottle of something alcoholic clutched in one hand and a chunky glass in the other.

Effie turned on the television, fussing with the channels until she found the program that she was looking for. The first part, which seemed to be some sort of talk show, was boring and Buffy soon lost interest in it in favor of contemplating the question of how to make her remaining smears of peanut sauce last longer. The next part of the program was about people getting called or dragged or even volunteering to go up on stages. Buffy paid close attention to that bit.

She knew the first four. Not personally, of course, but in the sense that she knew what made them tick. Whatever Watcher or Council had raised them had left their marks on them as surely they had left their marks on Kendra and Faith. Those four kids had something to prove, and they would die proving it. They probably thought it was their job to volunteer, to take some unlucky kid’s place in the lottery of as yet indeterminate suck but (probably) not stoning.

The next pair of kids was openly terrified. They were both short, pudgy, and the girl was wearing coke bottle glasses. The boy had an honest to goodness pocket protector. When they shook hands with each other, they ended up grabbing and clinging.

The fourth pair of kids was another set of those damaged, Council-raised Stepford Smilers. The most interesting thing about them was the dark-haired girl standing behind and to one side of them on the stage, part of a small, grim-faced crowd. She was sobbing as if her heart was breaking. It was hard to tell, what with the way that her face was pressed into a tall, skinny woman’s shoulder, but Buffy thought that she might have met that girl once; and the woman too, come to think of it.

The girl from the fifth pair was about Buffy’s age, the pale of someone who did not see the sun often, and coldly furious. The boy, who was maybe twelve or thirteen and equally pale, was sobbing as hard as the woman on the previous stage had been. They had had to carry him up onto the platform.

The sixth and seventh pairs of kids were wearing the same, grim expression as the boy who had been chosen with Buffy. She could kind of see their point. Half the people on the sixth stage were obviously high in the chemical sense and in imminent danger of falling off said stage at any moment. The seventh set, both members of which were dressed in lumberjack chic, had to put up with some crazy chick cackling at their misfortune.

“Better luck next year,” she told the glaring kids. The guys standing with said crazy chick looked resigned. They were probably used to her.

Everyone in the eighth place – the people on the stage, the people in the crowd, and even the pair of kids called up onto the stage – looked terribly, terribly sad.

The ninth place was the land of cowboys! The two kids who ambled up on stage wore boots and hats and scowls.

No one had any expression whatsoever on the tenth stage. The adults were blank-faced. The chosen kids were as empty as non-possessed dolls. Even the crowd was still, silent, and blank. It was enough to make Buffy shudder.

Everyone in the eleventh scene was openly furious when two kids, both about the same age as Buffy had been when she first became the Slayer, were called up onto the stage.

And then there was Effie calling out her name and that of the boy, Burdock. Buffy sighed, hating that people were watching actual footage of her looking like that in public.

The feed cut back to the talk show, and Effie turned the program off.

So, thought Buffy, there are twenty-four of us. And everyone but me seems to know what they’re going to do with us.

Buffy hated it when she was the last to know a secret.

The man grabbed a fresh bottle of liquor and disappeared down the length of the train car, while Effie seemed to take it upon herself to herd Buffy and the boy back to their rooms. Buffy waited in her room just long enough to wash her face, brush her teeth, change into pajamas, and pull on a pair of slippers. Effie’s footsteps were long gone when Buffy left her room to explore.

Knowing the ins and outs of the high school had saved Buffy’s life more times than she could count, and it wasn’t like anyone could tell Buffy what was going on even if they wanted to. (Buffy cursed again the miserable excuse for what passed for schooling in this place. They should have worked harder to teach her their version of English! And who ever thought that she of all people would have super strong opinions about schooling and education of all things? Certainly not Buffy herself, that was for sure.)

Lacking any better idea of where to start, Buffy started at the front of the train, looking in on the engineers and the police people that watched over them. From there, Buffy made her way through the cars, looking in on servants’ quarters, police quarters, a pantry, and a kitchen. There were two cars that they wouldn’t let her look into and several creature comfort rooms, including the living and dining areas that they had been in before, as well as the sleep cars – Effie’s, then Buffy’s, then the boy’s, and finally the man’s. At the very end of the train, there was a viewing car complete with a cute little train balcony to stand on and watch the world go by.

Buffy claimed a seat in front of one of the windows, watching the darkened scenery speed past. She wondered where they were going and what they would do when they got there. Between one blink and the next, Buffy fell asleep.

She was dreaming of the mall and days spent there with friends before slaying changed everything, when a crash obtruded on her dreams.

Buffy jolted awake to find the man with the shaggy hair had banged the car’s door open. As she watched, he staggered down the length of it, dropping a long, orange bottle along the way. The bottle clattered against the floor and ended up on its side, strong smelling liquor pouring out of it as it rolled across the car.

Meanwhile, the man had gotten the back door open and collapsed to his hands and knees in the doorway, the better to wretch violently onto the little balcony at the end of the train, forever ruining the cuteness of the viewing car in Buffy’s estimation.

Buffy wrinkled her nose, both at the smell and the emerging theme.

“You’ve got a problem,” Buffy informed him in her own, crisp English rather than the local dialect, which meant that the drunk probably had no idea what she was saying. Nevertheless, Buffy scrambled out of her chair, scooped up the bottle in passing, and rushed to get a firm hold on the man’s collar, lest he fall off the train.

When he finished, the man wiped his mouth against the hem of his shirt and sat back, looking exhausted. It was only when Buffy reluctantly let go of his shirt collar that he seemed to notice her or that she had been holding onto him.

He scowled at Buffy and clumsily grabbed for the orange bottle.

Irritated, Buffy tossed it over the railing. There was a soft pop and a brief flash of light, then the orange bottle sailed back towards Buffy. Shocked, she snatched it out of the air on reflex. A moment later, delight filled her.

Buffy tossed the bottle over the side again and laughed when it flew back at her. It landed in her hand with a satisfying smack of flesh against bottle. She threw the bottle several more times, playing catch with whatever force sent it back to her, and ignored the man’s groans, uncoordinated movements, and grumblings until he muttered something about eating breakfast.

That got Buffy’s attention.

“Breakfast?” she asked. “Now?”

“Breakfast now,” he agreed, the tilt of his mouth sardonic. Buffy ignored it in favor of hauling him to his feet and towing him down the length of the train car, stopping only briefly at her sleeping car.

“Stay,” Buffy ordered as she propped the man against the bit of wall across from her door. “Stay here.”

He grumbled something, but Buffy ignored him, already rushing into the room for a quick bathroom trip. Fresh makeup and clothes would have to come later. If there was one thing that Buffy had learned at the orphanage, it was that the last person to the table did not get fed.

The man was still where Buffy had left him, leaning against the wall and paling every time that the train swayed. Ignoring the danger of his unsettled stomach, Buffy hauled him off of the wall and leaned him against her shoulder to continue the trudge to the food car.

The man was muttering to himself again, his breath rank, and Buffy figured now was as good a time as any other for introductions.

“I am Buffy,” she said.

The man ignored her.

Buffy pinched his side, not very hard, but he grunted and reeled as if trying to escape her. Buffy propped him against a handy bit of wall and tried again. Moving to stand in front of him, she pointed at herself and said, “I am Buffy.”

The drunk stared at her, either uncomprehending or uncaring.

Sighing, Buffy resumed lugging him towards the food.

In the dining car, Buffy found Effie but not the boy, Burdock.

Effie was already seated primly at the table, wig and clown makeup firmly in place. At the sight of Buffy and the man, Effie tensed and gripped the arms of her chair, her eyes narrowed. Then Effie deliberately relaxed, smiled, and said good morning.

Dumping the man into a chair near Effie, Buffy pointed at him and demanded, “What is this?”

It was a phrase that she was particularly good at saying.

Effie’s cheeks briefly hollowed, distracting Buffy with the sight of her contorting lips, which were painted three eye searing shades of neon green, before Effie said something sardonic. Whatever it was, Buffy only picked out one word that might be a name.

“Victor?” Buffy asked, turning on the man. He grimaced. “You are Victor?”

“Yes,” said Effie, smiling, and Buffy nodded.

Claiming the seat across from Effie, Buffy began helping her plate. Effie poured Buffy a glass of hot chocolate, and Victor simply watched them eat breakfast, his expression sour. He eventually went with the liquid option, something from a silver flask that was strong and white and possessed more than a passing resemblance to rubbing alcohol.

Buffy was on her third of everything when Burdock finally wandered into breakfast. He was lucky that the train seemed to have a never ending supply of food because Buffy hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to leave anything for him. Watching Burdock help his plate reminded Buffy that Victor the Drunken Alarm Clock hadn’t exactly eaten yet, and, as she had taken some pains to get him there on time, Buffy generously passed him a roll, saying, “Here, Victor.”

Victor promptly threw the breakfast roll into a distant corner of the room.

It would not have bothered Buffy before when she had lived in Sunnydale or Los Angeles, but lately there hadn’t been enough niceness or food in her life for Buffy to accept that sort of waste of either, especially when it was her giving them. Incensed, Buffy glared at Victor.

As if sensing her thoughts, Victor arched an eyebrow at Buffy. His expression was pure, vicious mockery.

Buffy put down her fork very, very carefully.

She stood.

She lunged under the table.

Buffy grabbed Victor by the ankles and yanked him out of his seat, surprising a squawk out of him. His yell ended in a grunt and Buffy, who was already on her side of the table again, risked a glance back to see that he had only had the wind knocked out of him. Standing, Buffy hoisted his feet under one arm and began striding across the room before he could reach out and grab his silver flask, which had landed next to him and was spilling spirits all over the carpet.

Buffy knew when Victor got over the shock of being hauled out of his seat, under the table, and across the room because that was about the time he began to shout and thrash, twisting and kicking his feet and forcing Buffy to see-saw her way across the dining room to accommodate his movements instead of dropping him.

No way was she letting him escape.

Instead she hauled Victor the length of the car, only stopping long enough to yank open the doors between that car and the next. There was a slight resistance when Buffy started to move again and Buffy glanced back to see that Victor, his mouth twisted into a snarl, had braced his hands against either side of the doorframe. He wasn’t going to come without a fight.

Buffy applied a bit more force to the situation and yanked Victor through the doorway. She hauled him into the next car, leaving the doors open behind them.

There were two rooms in the next car – hers and Effie’s – and it was starting to look like dragging Victor all the way back to his own room would be a lot of work. So making a swift change in plans, Buffy dragged him into her sleeping area, through it, and into the bathroom.

It really was not difficult to manhandle Victor, larger than her but still inebriated, into the shower and turn it on, full blast and bone cold.

Victor howled wordlessly and tried to escape the spray.

No such luck.

Buffy shoved him back where he was and snapped, stress making her revert to her own form of English, “You can sober up or drown, I don’t care which.”

Except that she had absolutely no intention of killing him because she didn’t kill humans. Victor didn’t need to know about that, though. It might just confuse him.

Victor seemed to pick the third option. He didn’t look appreciably more sober, and he didn’t drown. Instead, he sat on the floor of Buffy’s shower and glowered up at her with an expression that promised dire retribution. He hadn’t tried to stab her though – and Buffy could clearly see the outline of his giant hunting knife against the sodden lines of his clothes – so that was probably something.

Or maybe he was going to get back at her when she was asleep. That’s what Buffy might have done if she was the human facing down an irate Slayer.

Annoyed, Buffy punched a few buttons on the side of the shower and closed the door.

She grinned at Victor’s shout when the water turned lukewarm and the lavender scented soap jets came on. It really was the shower of the gods.

“Haymitch, she’s a tribute. You can’t kill her.”

Effie had been repeating some variation on that at him for over an hour, her voice shrill and a tiny bit desperate, and as annoying as it was to keep hearing it, that fact probably did bear some repeating.

Still.

Haymitch was going to kill that girl.

It had taken him ten minutes to escape her shower and cost him a turn through the lavender and cherry blossoms settings. Hung over and half drunk, he had inadvertently swallowed some of those soaps and damn near drowned on the bubbles. Now warm, dry, and unpleasantly close to sober, he smelled like flowers and his mouth tasted like soap.

The girl, who would be a clear contender if she was off to face a competitive stump pull instead of a death match, had returned to the table for another helping of everything. With the sheer amount that she was stuffing into her face, she was going to make herself sick.

Since stabbing her was clearly out of the question, not least because the idea of it made his hands shake, Haymitch decided that he was going to start attending meals on purpose. He was going to be there when she finally started puking up some of what she was putting away. And he was going to return the favor by dumping her in an ice cold shower and attempting to drown her in bubbles.

Vengeance, Haymitch had always heard, was a dish best served cold.

“Haymitch! You can’t kill her! She’s a tribute!”

Of course, he might just kill Effie first.

All in all, the train was kind of boring.

Effie insisted on keeping them all together in the living room car, which might have been okay if everyone hadn’t spent the day glaring at everyone else. More specifically, Effie and Burdock were glaring at Victor, who in turn seemed to be splitting his attention between glaring at Buffy and deliberately sipping liquor straight out of the bottle. Buffy had the impression that his drinking was meant to be some sort of challenge and screw you rolled all into one.

For herself, Buffy wished that she had advanced beyond reading Carl Coal books or that someone had thought to put a few of the stupid things on the train. There were a few shelves of books dotted around the living room car, a thin wooden bar about midway up the width of the shelves keeping the volumes all in place, and at that point even practicing her reading would have been better than watching everyone glare at everyone else.

Frankly, lunch was a relief.

Well, it was until the boy, Burdock, lost it and started shouting wildly at Victor, who stared at poor Burdock with unfocused eyes. Buffy only understood snatches of words here and there, but apparently Victor was meant to be teaching them something. Burdock didn’t care about her, but apparently he wanted his lessons, and he wanted his first one right now.

When Burdock finally finished shouting himself hoarse, Victor bared his teeth in a grin.

“Stay alive.”

Victor burst into ugly, raucous laughter.

Burdock paled, and (beneath all of her makeup) Effie (might have) frowned at Victor.

For herself, Buffy thought it pretty good advice. It was the more positive spin on the first two rules of slaying.

Burdock seemed to strongly disagree, however, because he slammed to his feet and stormed out of the room. A few minutes later, Effie went clattering after him, leaving Buffy alone with Victor, who raised his current bottle to her in a toast. Buffy rolled her eyes, stood, and went back to the living room car to see if they had any picture books on the shelves. She dragged Victor along for the ride. Buffy figured that he could drink just as well in the living room car as in the dining room one.

There were no picture books or the masterpieces that comprised the Carl Coal series, but there was an old checkers board to be found tucked away between two books. Behind the books was a dusty little cloth bag filled with wooden checkers pieces.

Her prizes in hand, Buffy turned back to her unwilling companion, intent on bullying him into playing with her, when she felt the first twinge.

It shot through her, as bright and tingling and terrifying as being hit by a bolt of lightning, and her fingers went numb. The tingles against the back of her neck felt more like claws raking through flesh, and her Slayer senses screamed a warning.

Wheeling around, Buffy found herself facing a wall. But she knew that in that direction there were more vampires than she had ever felt in any one place before.

Buffy rushed to the nearest window, trying to see the place where the vampire army was lying in wait.

Standing upon the hill was a beautiful, shining city full of vampires, and apparently the train was headed straight for it. Alarmed, Buffy turned on Victor and jabbed an accusing finger at the window and the city outside of it.

“What is this?” she demanded, and Victor laughed his ugly laugh again.

“That’s the Capitol, Sweetheart.”

Chapter Text

It was the girl who got into trouble first.

Haymitch was unsurprised by that, although, considering this year’s costumes, he had no doubt that the boy would also be getting into trouble soon enough. Apparently, old Marcus had lost his mind since the last Hunger Games. It was the only explanation for his insistence that painting coal dust onto the kids in whimsical patterns might count as a costume.

“Haymitch!” screeched the man, whose left eye was already beginning to swell shut. Apparently, the girl had hit him in the eye and scared him out of her room. “You have to do something! She can’t go into the parade without a costume!”

“Haymitch,” murmured Cinna, who had just finished Haymitch’s prep, “you have to. You’re her mentor.”

Haymitch sighed. “Fine.”

He stormed towards the girl’s prep area, intent on bullying her into a costume that he would not be caught dead in, with the two stylists lagging behind him.

“She’s a savage, an absolute savage,” muttered Marcus to Cinna. “Look what she did to my face!”

Haymitch snorted, and Cinna made all of the appropriate little noises of comfort.

At the girl’s door, Haymitch rapped once and opened it to find the girl dressed in a bathrobe and already glaring, a clean paintbrush clutched in one hand. She was clean, waxed, plucked, and polished, her hair cut shorter and dyed blonde. Apparently, she hadn’t had a problem being reduced to beauty base zero. It was just the costume to which she objected.

“And look what she did to her hair,” wailed Marcus while pointing an accusing finger at the girl’s head. “I don’t know how she talked her prep team into it!”

“It looks better than it did,” Cinna said and was rewarded with a glare from Marcus.

“Stop making trouble,” Haymitch tiredly told the girl, ignoring her hair. As far as he could tell, it probably wasn’t worth fixing and wouldn’t matter in the long run anyway.

The girl cocked her head to one side, studying Haymitch intently.

Marcus, seeming to take that as a sign of deference to Haymitch’s authority, rushed towards the girl only to be shoved back by the girl for his efforts. When she began making stabbing motions with the rounded end of the paintbrush, he shrieked and scrambled back behind Cinna.

Maybe there was something there that he could work with after all.

While surprising strength and threatening an old man with violence weren’t much in the scheme of things, they were more than Haymitch had had to work with in a long time.

“See?” demanded Marcus. “She’s a savage!”

“I’d have been pretty savage too if you’d tried to paint me with coal dust when we first met,” Haymitch said, turning on Marcus. “Put her and the boy in miner costumes.”

Thanks to Marcus, District Twelve had a surplus of miner costumes. Marcus swore that each was slightly different than the last, but Haymitch couldn’t see it. What he could see was that a miner costume was better than coal dust.

“They can’t wear last year’s rags!” exclaimed Marcus, sounding scandalized. “Haymitch, I have a design!”

“Then put them in something from a previous year,” Haymitch snapped. “Marcus, you’ve got about twenty years of miner costumes to choose from!”

For all that he looked more or less the same as when Haymitch had first met him as a tribute, Marcus had been District Twelve’s stylist for as long as Haymitch could remember.

“Ingenuity and thrift,” said Cinna, nodding. “We can say that District Twelve’s ingenuity and thrift are the traits that will help them win this year.”

“What about my design?”

“Stop wasting time and go get those costumes,” snarled Haymitch.

“Maybe she’ll let you paint her hands and face after she has something on,” Cinna soothed as he herded Macus away and, hopefully, towards District Twelve’s storage closet. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

Haymitch sighed and fumbled his flask from his inside pocket. The girl’s expression tightened, but she didn’t say or do anything when he took a swig. Haymitch suspected it might be gratitude.

“Victor…”

Or not; he had been wrong before.

The girl grimaced, her hand twitching towards his flask, and just like that, anything warm or fuzzy that might have been putting down delicate roots in Haymitch’s heart died a swift and unceremonious death.

“What am I going to do with you?” Haymitch wearily asked the girl, who looked about as confident and clueless as she had on the train. Apparently, no one had bothered to communicate to her what had happened to her. Haymitch made a mental note to have Effie scare up video of one of the previous games. He didn’t have great hopes for her survival, but she needed to know what was happening.

He needed her to know what was happening.

Across from him, the girl started twirling the paintbrush through her fingers with surprising dexterity.

They eventually got the tributes into a couple of repurposed miners costumes, the stylists quickly hemming, taking them in, and letting them out as necessary, and true to Cinna’s predictions the girl only grimaced when old Marcus took another pass at painting patterns on her in coal dust.

Haymitch got his tributes down to the staging area and onto their chariot then went up many, many flights of stairs to the Victors’ box, half of whose occupants were already off of their skulls on their favorite vice. The Victors out of Six were the worst off by a long shot, but those who had stayed in the Capitol after Annie Cresta’s victory tour weren’t much better.

Cashmere and Gloss, although generally prickly, seemed to be looking after One and Two’s worst off Victors, and Johanna had already made herself the keeper of Finnick and Annie in Mags’ absence.

Haymitch, while making his way to the empty seat next to Seeder, exchanged nods and greetings with several of the others and helped Seaweed, another of Four’s Victors, to a seat next to Annie. He made no mention of the slight hiccup in dressing his tributes and none of the other mentors offered anecdotes about their tributes in passing either. For the mentors of the Seventy-First Hunger Games, the games had already begun.

So the parade was actually kind of fun, but afterwards they seemed to expect Buffy to eat, go to bed, and sleep.

They were clearly insane.

Every silence, even the ones between words and looks, was filled with the prickling signatures of thousands upon thousands of demons, most of them vampires, all moving about and living on top of each other.

She was surrounded with not a stick of wood in sight. There was no way that she was going to sleep in her assigned bed in her allotted room on her appointed floor in the high rise of the doomed in the City of Demon-y Love; no way, no how.

Too jittery to eat, Buffy picked at her food and chose not to even try to decode Effie’s prattle or Victor’s surly asides. She ignored Burdock’s ongoing suffering as there seemed no change in it and he seemed not to want anything from her anyway.

After dinner, while the others drifted off to their bedrooms one by one, Victor taking an extra bottle to his, Buffy went to the bank of elevators. Her heart pounding, she pressed the silver call button.

Nothing happened.

Surprised in spite of herself, Buffy pressed the button again; and then again and again, each press of her thumb harder than the last. The button clicked, something within the elevator dinged, but no car ever arrived. It was a greater effort than Buffy liked to admit to make herself stop pressing the call button.

Apparently, she was that kind of unlucky prisoner. Either that or someone else had tried to escape by walking out the front door. Buffy wondered if it had worked out for them. She hoped that it had.

Trapped in the suite, Buffy began to poke around, looking for weapons or a backdoor. Either would be good. What she found was a living room, dining room, kitchen, library, five bedrooms, a conference room, and a locked door.

The kitchen was fully stocked, although none of the appliances would work for her, and there was not a splinter of wood in the entire suite. When she invaded their rooms, Burdock glowered at her, Effie squeaked and lectured her, and Victor sneered at her. The servants, vampires who shared a room off of the kitchen, sat up attentively and stared at her. The shapes of their mouths were weird, but they seemed fairly non-bitey. Or maybe they just weren’t hungry yet. Since she had no intention of sleeping anyway, Buffy was not overly worried. If they tried anything, she would be awake to deal with it.

Buffy glanced into the conference room, tried the locked door again, and refrained from knocking it down. She retreated to the library. It wasn’t anything like Giles’ library in the high school, but their suite’s library, with all of its unfamiliar books and familiar smells, was soothing to her.

Buffy claimed a seat at the polished wooden table and stared at the books, all of them neat and new without the creases or suspicious stains that gave Giles’ books character. She tried to believe that there might be a book somewhere among those perfectly regimented rows that could help her figure out how she had gone to bed in good old Sunnydale and woken up in the forest surrounding District Twelve.

Stupid nature.

At least she had been wearing her yummy sushi pajamas and a pair of socks when they took her. Trekking through the woods in the cold while wearing silky shorts, a teeny, tiny t-shirt, and barefoot would have been unbearable.

All in all, she had been pretty grateful to run across the kids; them not so much.

She had been treading water in District Twelve ever since, getting through each day as it came and waiting for someone at home to figure out how to get her back.

After a few minutes of staring at the books, Buffy gave up trying to pretend. What she needed wasn’t going to be on one of those shelves. Nevertheless, she heaved herself up out of her seat and went to sort through the books. Nothing there looked promising but even demonology books had to have later editions. And maybe they were commonly distributed in Panem.

Sighing, Buffy reached out, grabbed the nearest book, and flipped it open.

It opened to before and after pictures of plastic surgery that turned average people into faux demons.

It was going to be a long night.

In the morning, Effie came and found her. She looked distraught at the state of the library.

Buffy was feeling pretty distraught herself. She had known when she had started looking through the books that there would be nothing useful to her in them but she had still hoped…

“Come,” said Effie and put an arm around Buffy’s shoulders. She said several other things, her voice cheerful, but Buffy was too tired and dispirited to bother trying to pick out the words she knew from the rest of the deluge. She merely went along with Effie, allowing the older woman to steer her where she pleased, and was pleasantly surprised when Effie sat her down at the breakfast table.

Effie knew where her priorities lay.

But not even an enormous breakfast eaten under Victor’s bloodshot eye could cheer Buffy up.

As soon as she finished, Effie herded Buffy back to her bathroom for a shower and a change of clothes. She was oddly insistent that Buffy wear a set of sweats, even going so far as to thrust them into Buffy’s arms and then gently push Buffy into the bathroom. And she was in a hurry too, rapping on the door while Buffy was showered and calling to her to hurry up. Bemused, Buffy did as Effie asked.

When she emerged from the bathroom, dressed and with her makeup in place, she found Effie sitting primly on the edge of her unused bed, one ankle neatly tucked beneath the other. Effie beamed at her, and then whisked Buffy back to the dining area where Effie collected Burdock and Buffy collected another piece of toast for the road.

“Watch them,” Victor said just before Effie took Burdock and Buffy away. In the elevator, Effie pressed a button for a much lower level then, when Buffy and Burdock failed to respond, made cheerful small talk with herself.

The elevator doors opened onto the most well appointed gym that Buffy had ever seen.

There was an entire wall of weapons, some of them things that even Buffy had never managed to get her hands on for one reason or another, and a corner range in which to practice with them. Little skills stations were set up throughout the gym, each manned by a pair of fit, muscular men and women. A tower for climbing, its sides alternately rough, dotted with handholds, netting, and sheer rock, as well as weights and standard gym equipment filled another corner of the room. Along another wall, there was an obstacle course. The elevators and first aid station took up most of the third wall.

The gym was practically perfect, save for the lack of gymnastics equipment… and the window that filled the fourth wall, through which a crowd of men and women watched the teenagers in the gym.

Buffy did not like the look of that window or the people that she could see through it. They reminded her too much of the Council of Watchers.

She refused to put on a show.

Instead, she took Victor’s advice and turned to watch the others.

Already, the gym was filled with the Council-raised kids, all of whom had congregated in the weapons area. As Buffy watched, a burly girl with a two on her shoulder launched a spear at a target with a hoarse yell. The spear slammed into the thin black line that separated the red bull’s eye from the yellow ring that encircled it, and the girl turned to her peers with a smirk.

Buffy didn’t know what she thought she was gloating about. She hadn’t hit the center of the target, and she hadn’t been very far away anyway, only about a dozen meters or so. It wasn’t a very good shot.

But maybe the standards are different for non-Slayers? Buffy thought as she watched a boy give the girl a friendly punch in the shoulder. On the television program, he had been the boy to stand on the stage with that particular girl. He also had a two on his shoulder.

Xander would have been proud of that shot, though, which probably answered Buffy’s question. It was a very good shot for a non-Slayer.

Some of the other kids, the regular ones, the ones who weren’t brittle from a lifetime under a Council’s thumb, were mooching around the edges of the gym. They watched the Council kids with wide, frightened eyes. None of them made a move to take advantage of the excellent gym equipment.

Next to Buffy, Burdock squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and marched over to the nearest skill station. Buffy watched, interested, as everyone else reacted like it was some sort of signal. The moochers stooped lurking and rushed at the nearest stations while the other kids, the ones who reminded her of Kendra and Faith, alternately watched them and made loud comments, their smirks derisive.

Buffy’s gaze flicked over to the watchers, no capital W as far as she knew but no less shady for its lack. A few of them were watching the gym through the window. Most of the watchers, however, seemed worried about getting breakfast off of a buffet table.

Buffy crossed her arms over chest and leaned against the wall, settling in to watch them back.

Later in the morning, a few of the non-Council kids got up the nerve to try the weapons area. The Stepford Smilers were not particularly welcoming. They did not try to run them off or try to keep the aides assigned to the station from trying to help them, but they weren’t welcoming either. Mostly, they pointed and laughed, while the others tried to ignore them with varying levels of skill.

Buffy’s eyes narrowed and her arms tightened across her chest.

That was uncalled for, especially since she had (narrowly) resisted the temptation earlier to make fun of their crap sword work. Even by non-Slayer standards, most of it had been pretty dire.

And of course the watchers just watched… and napped. There was a lot of napping going on up in that booth.

Annoyed, Buffy stalked over to the elevators. She had done all of the reconnaissance that she was capable of doing. Lacking any interest in immediately returning to her own floor, Buffy chose to go to next floor up from the gym.

The elevator doors opened out onto a lobby. When Buffy tried to step into it, armed guards blocked her way so Buffy hastily pressed the next button up as well as the button to close the doors between her and them.

I wonder if any of the others can leave… and why they’re keeping us here.

It would be ominous at the best of times. In the City of Vampires, however, it was enough to set Buffy’s teeth on edge. She made sure to turn her expression into a smile when the elevator doors opened onto a floor with a layout that looked suspiciously like the one that she was rooming on. Set at an angle from the bank of elevators, there was even a little table with a vase on it. The vase was in shades of gold while the one on her floor was in shades of black, but that was the only difference.

Since there was a distinct lack of armed guards on this floor to stop her, Buffy got off the elevator for a look around. She was investigating a living room, disappointed at both its sameness and color scheme, when a door down the hallway to Buffy’s right opened. A man, large and broad-shouldered, started to come out and then stopped in the doorway. He stared at Buffy for several seconds then twisted and called back into the room. Another man and a woman, dark-haired and definitely siblings, pushed past him, revealing a glimpse of a conference room with a long table and at least a dozen people squished in around it.

The woman closest to the conference room’s door, striking even if she had filed her teeth to points and tipped them in gold, said something, her tone caustic, and snapped her teeth at Buffy.

Buffy grinned, because as impressive as her teeth were, the woman was still only human.

The woman huffed, her features twisting into something ugly, and that was when the brother and sister grabbed Buffy. There was a brief scuffle, lame but something of a relief after the gym, before Buffy let them hustle her back towards the elevators. When the elevator finally came, they shoved her bodily into it, and, since their hands were conveniently full, Buffy took the opportunity to jab the button for the next floor up and then the door closing button.

The woman skipped out of the elevator before its doors closed, but her brother got stuck in it with Buffy. He glowered at her, and Buffy retaliated by smiling as cutely as she knew how. If anything, it made the guy glare at her harder.

On the next floor, there was another little table and another useless little vase, this time done in swirling shades of red. When she tried to get off of the elevator, the man standing next to Buffy leaned over to press the door closing button. When he tried to press the button for the top floor, the one that she, Burdock, Effie, Victor, and the two vamps shared, another half-hearted scuffle broke out. It ended when Buffy successfully pressed the button for the next floor. The man sighed and, judging by his tone, muttered something uncomplimentary about her. Buffy pretended not to hear him.

When the elevator doors next opened, there was an older man waiting for them. He had a paunchy middle, wore thick glasses, and possessed a steel glint in his gray eyes. He looked like a member of the League of Tweed, and Buffy hurriedly pressed the next button up and then the door closing button for good measure. The very last thing that she saw before the doors closed was the little gray vase on the little round table. Then it was just her and the black-haired man, who was eyeing Buffy oddly.

The next time that the elevator doors opened, there was an old woman waiting for them. She smiled genially at Buffy and said something that sounded pleasant. When she gestured for Buffy to get off of the elevator, the man standing next to Buffy rolled his eyes but made no move to stop Buffy from joining the old woman in the hallway. He stayed in the elevator, and in the time that it took Buffy to glance over at the vase on the table, see that it was done in shades of dark blue, and return the old woman’s knowing smile, the elevator doors were closed and the man was gone.

The old woman said something else, something cheerful, and when she reached for Buffy’s hand, Buffy let her catch it. She tucked her arm around Buffy’s and led her down the hallway, kindly showing Buffy all of that floor’s common areas one by one. It was all the same as on the floor that Buffy shared with the others, except where Buffy’s floor had a library filled with useless books, this floor had a full length swimming pool.

Buffy squeaked, and immediately turned on her host, making the saddest, most pleading face that she knew how to make. The old woman laughed, swatted at Buffy, and pulled her to a door. She knocked at it, spoke briefly with the dark-haired girl whose room it was, and secured a bathing suit and a bathroom to change in for Buffy.

The old lady clapped when Buffy surfaced from her running dive into the deep end.

Buffy was still splashing around and pretending that she might get serious and start doing laps at any moment, when she looked up to find the pretty, brown-haired girl watching her. She was human, maybe a few years younger than Buffy, and as far from the pool as she could be without leaving the room entirely. She sat with her back pressed against the wall, her arms wrapped around her bent legs, and watched Buffy with too wide eyes.

“Hi!” called Buffy. She smiled a quick, bright, cheerleading smile. “Remember me? I’m Buffy! We met that one time you pretended to be my electric blanket.”

Buffy certainly remembered Annie. The night that she had bunked with Buffy had been the only time that Buffy had been properly warm since she had woken up in that damn forest.

If anything, being directly addressed made Annie curl up even tighter on herself.

Buffy frowned and then tried not to, because something was obviously wrong with Annie. That had also been true when Annie had showed up at the group home and, although she looked much better now, it was still apparently a thing with her.

Buffy got that.

She swam to the side of the pool and heaved herself out, water splashing off of her and onto the cement floor. Nearby, Annie gasped, a sharp little sound that she quickly muffled with her arm, and began to rock.

Buffy upgraded her assessment to ‘very wrong’ and approached slowly, making sure to speak softly and as in as soothing tones as she knew how. Annie did not stop rocking or move her arm from its place over her mouth or uncurl her limbs.

Buffy crouched down next to her, reached out, and, ignoring the other girl’s clenched fingers and trembling form, casually twisted a gleaming black buttons off of her shirt. Then she tossed the button into the pool and jumped into the water after it.

It took Buffy a couple of minutes to find the button and when she did, she threw it again and then swam after it. She had been playing her game for awhile when she happened to glance Annie’s way and found her watching intently. Buffy smiled, a dimmer but more honest expression than her last one, and offered Annie the button.

Annie shuffled around a bit, clearly uncertain, before she bravely edged toward the side of the pool. Moving slowly, Buffy went to meet her.

She shivered when Buffy’s wet fingers brushed against her palm, but Annie closed her fingers over the button and tried on a smile. It wasn’t very good, but Buffy smiled back anyway. Then she pushed off of the wall, careful not to splash, and treaded water, waiting for the button to be thrown.

Annie threw the button, and Buffy dove after it.

When Buffy returned the button to her, Annie took happily, if not without shivering.

They were still playing, now with three out of the five buttons on Annie’s shirt, when Buffy glimpsed copper from the corner of her eye. Turning her head, she discovered a man lounging near the doorway, half-dressed and half-smiling, his eyes bright but empty.

Hel-lo salty goodness, Buffy thought and then yelped when the man yanked off the remnants of his clothes and took a running dive into the pool. Her hands flew up to her hot face and clamped themselves over her eyes, but it was too late. That sight was seared into her brain.

Embarrassed, Buffy reflexively turned her back on the man, who laughed and splashed his way around her. Annie scolded, her tone mildly angry, and the man said something in reply, his tone conciliatory.

There were several moments of silence before the man said something, his tone teasing, and then Annie carefully said a word that might have been Buffy’s name. She said it twice more before Buffy, hoping that she had heard aright, dared to peek between her fingers again.

Annie was still dressed and still standing on the pool deck, and the man… was now wearing pants. Annie had thrown the man’s pants at him and then bullied him into wearing them.

Buffy was unutterably grateful to her.

A moment later, she dropped her hands from her face and glared at the man, who was holding all three buttons and smirking insufferably.

“Again!” she demanded, using their strange, slurry version of English. Buffy gestured emphatically at Annie, and the laughing man obediently passed the buttons to her. After that, it was a race to every button thrown, one in which Annie, who remained safe and dry on the pool deck, cheered them on as they searched, dove, and cheated outrageously, yanking each other away from buttons with hands curled around arms and waists and ankles.

Around lunchtime, the old lady and the thwarted nudist threw Buffy out. They were nice about it, but the way that they herded her out of the pool, draped a warm towel over her, and bundled her clothes into her arms made it obvious that they wanted her gone. From the way the old lady and the honey kept glancing at various clocks, Buffy got the distinct impression that they were expecting someone. Not one to overstay her welcome – unless it was a matter of slaying, of course – Buffy went along with the program and let the shameless one escort her back to the elevator.

He was much more accommodating to her impulses than the other guy had been. He let her visit every floor that she wanted to, which was all of them save the one that she was assigned to, and he smoothed things over with whoever was waiting in front of the elevator to bar the way, their arms folded meaningfully over their chests, and frown at Buffy. Word must have gotten about Buffy’s interests.

It was all useless and terribly unfriendly… except for the roof.

The roof was perfect.

There was nothing up there, not even a deck chair, but it was flat and sunny and that was all Buffy really needed. Buffy had found her napping place.

Her escort took advantage of her happy distraction to press the button for the twelfth floor where, to her surprise, Effie and Victor were waiting. For once, they seemed to be on the same page. It was not a page filled with friendliness and warmth.

Buffy’s companion said something, his tone bright, and whatever it was actually made them madder. The playful nudist helpfully shoved Buffy off of the elevator and made his escape.

As soon as the elevator’s doors shut, Victor and Effie started in on Buffy. Neither of them raised their voice but their tones, his nasty and hers earnest, got their points across.

“I listened!” Buffy yelled back. “I looked!”

It had all been very, very boring. And pointless, unless boring her had been the point.

Victor gave up first. Sneering, he took himself and his current bottle off to parts unknown.

That seemed to be some sort of signal to Effie. She visibly calmed herself, pasted on a smile, and promised Buffy… something. She patted Buffy on the shoulder and led Buffy back to her room where she showered, changed, and reapplied her makeup.

It was unfortunate that her entire wardrobe seemed to be made up of ugly workout gear.

When Buffy emerged from her room, Effie took her back to the gym level. It turned out that there was a cafeteria behind the first aid station, so the trip was not an entire waste of time.

After lunch, everyone else went back to frantically training. Buffy watched for a few minutes but, seeing nothing new, took the first available opportunity to quietly slink away.

She went upstairs and fetched from her assigned room the blankets and pillows on her untouched bed.

On a whim, Buffy investigated the locked door from the previous night and discovered the stairwell. She used it to make her way up to the roof.

At the top of the stairs, Buffy toed off her shoes and nudged them into position as makeshift door props to keep the door from fully closing and possibly locking her out. Then she stepped out into the sunshine, the roofing painfully hot beneath her sock-clad feet.

Buffy quickly picked her way around to the far side of the little building that housed the stairwell and the elevators. In its shadow, she made her pallet. The jaunty little breeze that had picked up sometime during the lunch hour was a happy bonus.

As safe as she was going to get in her little island of shade surrounded by lots and lots of sunshine, Buffy peeled off her socks, got comfortable, and dropped quickly into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

Contrary to popular opinion, the days leading up to the Hunger Games were as busy for the mentors as their tributes. There were meetings to be had with the game makers, side deals to be made, and gossip to be collected about the game makers, both new and established. There were cocktails and cures to be taken with the other mentors, deals to be made with them, and double crosses to be planned. And of course, there were sponsors to meet, greet, and charm for pledges or, best of all, cash.

The currency used in the transactions depended on who was making the deals. The Careers dealt in sex and violence, while the outer districts traded in flattery and guilt. It wasn’t a matter of morality. They had all tried it the Careers’ way at one point or another, usually at the beginning before they accepted what it meant to be a mentor from an outer district. Even Haymitch had tried to go at it like a Career for a year or two near the beginning of his illustrious career as a mentor.

It had made no difference.

None of his tributes had survived longer or had it appreciably easier in the arena. His district had not noticeably profited from his misery. It was all so pointless.

Like all the others, Haymitch had eventually quit trying to outmaneuver the Careers at their own game, given up whoring, and started planning for his one good set of Games. He had plans, dozens of them, and he ran over them between the Games and Victory Tours when he was less miserable and, more importantly, less blindingly drunk. When the right tribute came along, he was going to be ready. Someday, Haymitch was going to bring some poor kid home to the Victor’s Village.

But this year was not that year.

And no one else thought it might be his year either. Haymitch did not take it personally that no one was clamoring to make deals or alliances with his tributes.

As District Twelve’s mentor, Haymitch never had a lot of deals to make either with the game makers or the other mentors. His district’s tributes were not often in demand and rarely lived long enough to be of much use to themselves, let alone to anyone else. It had been years since one of his tributes had gotten the chance to double cross someone. But every year Haymitch went to the meetings, mingled with the other victors, met potential sponsors, and collected his information. You never knew what might be useful later his poor mother had always said. And also, it was slightly better for him than staring at the wall in his assigned room and getting drunk. The year that he had blown off the pre-Games circus to do that, he had given himself alcohol poisoning. And he had still been expected to endure a lecture from the game makers and make an appearance on one of Caesar Flickerman’s Games-related talk shows.

Haymitch was busy.

All of the mentors were busy.

No one needed his tribute to go invading the other districts’ suites, interrupting their secret strategy sessions, or playing in Four’s indoor pool. It was a small mercy that it was lunchtime, one of the girl’s favorite three times of day, which meant everyone would be safe from her for at least an hour or two.

“She’s just curious.” Mags, who had looped her arms around one of Haymitch’s, gave his arm a little squeeze. “And she kept Annie and Finnick out of trouble, so no harm done.”

Swimming; the girl had at least one potentially useful skill, and not one often seen outside of the Career districts. Unfortunately for her, it was unlikely to be a particularly wet arena, not after last year.

“We’ve scheduled an extra meeting with the game makers,” Effie rushed to assure Mags from her place on Haymitch’s other side. “We’ll request a copy of last year’s Games. Tomorrow she’ll understand how important her training is.”

“Any set of Games from the last twenty or so years would do,” Haymitch inserted, while watching Mags closely. He knew for a fact that Districts One, Two, and Four all kept copies of previous Games, all carefully selected to highlight potential game makers’ favorite themes and quirks. During training, they reviewed the ones matched to that year’s head game maker.

The Career districts would already know which videos they needed for their own tributes. Mags could quietly loan them one of the others for the girl.

“Good luck,” replied Mags.

Haymitch had expected nothing less, not during the Games.

Just then that year’s head game maker, Plutarch Heavensbee, entered the meeting room, and the little clusters of conversation broke up, everyone retreating to his or her assigned seat. He was flanked by his senior game makers, every one of them pale, bloodless, and of indeterminate age. The transition from junior to senior game maker seemed to leech the color right out of them.

Plutarch took his place at the head of the table, the light from the window behind him making him a silhouette, and frowned at the empty chair beside Mags.

“Where’s Annie?” he demanded.

“She’s busy,” Mags said shortly. “I’ll explain to her anything that she misses.”

Plutarch’s lips briefly thinned before he remembered to smile, but his assistant, the small and unusually devoted one, was still scowling at Mags. Haymitch had no doubt that Mags would be getting an earful later about the proper respect due game makers in general and that one in particular.

“Very well,” Plutarch said smoothly. “Let’s not waste any more time. You all have your meeting schedules before you. We’ll begin by discussing this year’s catalog of gifts that a tribute can receive in the arena.”

One, Two, and Four listened attentively; Haymitch not so much. For mentors from outside of those three districts, most of the catalogue was theoretical.

Sort of like the girl’s current location, it turned out. Theoretically, she had been in the gym, training with the rest of the tributes. In reality, she had apparently eaten lunch, watched the others for about half an hour, and then gone up to the roof to sleep off her lunch feast.

Haymitch envied the girl her ability to sleep anytime, anywhere, and just because she was tired.

Plutarch did not share his sentiments, something that he expressed to Haymitch and Effie at length during their private meeting with the game maker after the others had left.

“She’s wasting her time here!” railed Plutarch. “We can’t even begin to rank her because she hasn’t given us anything to work with since she got here! And now on top of everything else, she’s going to look like a boiled lobster!”

“There are creams –” began Effie timidly.

“You had better hope they can undo that!” snapped Plutarch, stabbing a finger at the screen. “It’s not photogenic. No one is going to want to watch someone who is already cooked.”

Haymitch snorted.

“This isn’t funny, Haymitch!” Plutarch rounded on him. “I had plans for her, the first wild girl to ever compete in a Hunger Games.”

Haymitch had no doubt that Plutarch had plans for the girl. That was what game makers did: they made plans for other people’s lives.

“It’s just that she has no idea what’s going on,” Effie bravely interjected. Well, it was brave for her. “She doesn’t understand most of what anyone says. If we could get a copy of a previous set of Games, we could show her why it’s important that she does her best in the gym.”

Slanting a look at Haymitch, he said to Effie, “I will personally see that they’re sent to your rooms.”

“Thank you!” Effie exclaimed, her face bright. “I know that Buffy will do much better tomorrow!”

Haymitch doubted it.

No one won their Games off of what they learned in the gym. They won based on what they brought with them from home – knowledge, skills, determination, and desperation.

All that girl had going for her was that she could swim well.

“She’d better,” Plutarch said grimly. “Everyone is looking forward to watching her compete.”

Not everyone.

Haymitch kept that tidbit of information to himself.

The Games that Plutarch sent up were Haymitch’s own.

The boy watched the first couple of reapings before retiring to his room. The girl sat and watched with rapt attention, her plate of after dinner snacks forgotten in her lap. When Haymitch tried to follow the boy’s example, Effie caught him at the door.

“Haymitch!” she hissed. “You can’t leave!”

It wasn’t that Haymitch did not have the time to watch hours and hours of old footage but…

“Why?” demanded Haymitch.

“Because you’re her mentor, Haymitch! She needs you!”

“I know that,” Haymitch snapped. It was one of the many things that he hated about her.

Haymitch did not have high hopes for Buffy Summer’s chances in the seventy-first Hunger Games. He nevertheless returned to his seat in one of the armchairs. He took the bottle of vodka with him.

They were through the reapings, the parade footage, and most of the scores when the girl barked, “Stop!”

Effie stopped the recording.

The girl looked between the screen, which had Haymitch’s name, picture, and training scores displayed on it, and him.

“Haymitch?” she asked. “Not Victor?”

Haymitch snorted. Jabbing a finger in the general direction of his head, he said, “Haymitch.”

The girl frowned. “Who is Victor?”

Haymitch stared at her, dumbfounded. It had never occurred to him that –

“Who is Victor?” pestered the girl, and with a sigh, Haymitch shoved himself to his feet.

He flapped a hand at the girl, who set aside her plate on the couch. She bounced to her feet and followed him to the elevator. When he pressed the call button, his finger only shook a little. Haymitch ordered “Effie, tell Four that we’re coming,” and did not bother to wait for her reply.

The ride to the fourth floor made his stomach slosh unpleasantly.

An assortment of Four’s Victors was waiting for them across from the elevators, their current tributes out of sight, both of which made Haymitch’s job easier. He pointed at each person in turn, including himself, and said their name. Then he pointed at each person and called them what they were, a Victor.

The girl looked confused.

“Buffy Summers,” she declared, pointing at herself. Then, questioningly, she added, “Victor?”

“Not a Victor,” Haymitch snapped in tandem with several other, angrier voices. He only heard Annie’s whimper because she was so close.

The girl crossed her arms over her chest and glared at them all indiscriminately. “What is Victor?”

Haymitch drowned the impulse to sigh or say something cutting with a swallow from his current bottle. She wouldn’t understand anyway.

“Come on,” he said instead and, with a jerk of his chin, directed the girl back into the elevator.

He vomited on the way up. The girl seemed to take it as a personal offense.

When they reached their level, Haymitch herded her back to the living room area. She got settled with her plate, he went to wash out his mouth, and Effie called someone about the elevator.

The boy was waiting for Haymitch when he reemerged from his room. His arms crossed over his chest, he glowered at Haymitch.

“When are you going to train me?” he demanded.

“Now if you want,” Haymitch said carelessly, startling the boy. Hating every word, he added “Come watch the recordings.”

The boy scowled at Haymitch. “I know what the Games are! I told you on the train! I want to be trained separately from her!”

“You’ll still probably pick a few things up,” Haymitch sighed, resigning himself to the evening ahead of him. It was going to be nasty. He planned to black most of it out.

The boy followed him back to the living room, rushing past him to claim one of the two easy chairs. Effie had already claimed the other, sitting catty corner to the girl, who was seated at one end of the couch and steadily eating her way through her previously abandoned snacks.

Haymitch dropped onto the opposite end of the couch and, leaning tiredly against the arm, ignored the way his damn tributes wrinkled their noses at him. They could judge him when they were Victors themselves, not before.

Effie resumed playing the recording.

The interviews were lost on the girl, but for the boy’s benefit he said, “The crowd likes a personality. Tributes with the right sorts of personalities get gifts.”

“And if I don’t have the right sort?” demanded the boy.

“Lie,” advised Haymitch. When boy nodded, Haymitch turned to the girl. He pointed at the screen and said, slowly and loudly, “They are tributes. They are not Victors.”

The girl nodded and offered Haymitch a roll. He ignored it. Huffing with annoyance, she took it back and bit into it.

When the video footage followed one of the tributes up the chute and into the arena, Haymitch closed his eyes. Opening them was almost like being back in the arena.

Almost.

Nothing in the living room smelled as good as his arena had.

Effie let the footage roll without commentary until the countdown began, then jabbed at the screen with one finger, its painted nail carefully honed to a fine point, and began laboriously explaining to the girl in simple sentences about staying on the damn platform until the bell rang. There may have been pantomiming involved. There were definitely several replays of the two or three kids that year that lost their heads and stepped off of their starting platforms too soon.

Haymitch was too busy getting his breathing under control to add to the discussion. And he chose not to watch the bloodbath, opting instead to study his tributes during it.

The boy watched it with a hard, assessing expression. He had seen it all before and knew what to expect.

The wild girl was appalled, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. She looked like she was going to be sick. And she never even noticed when she dropped her plate, her snacks scattering across the carpeting. When one of the avoxes crawled over to clean up the mess, she startled violently, her hand twitching into an aborted motion before she got control of herself.

Effie helpfully stopped the tape.

Whirling on Haymitch, the girl stabbed a finger at the still figures on the screen, a spear halfway through a girl’s chest, and demanded, “Me? Us?”

Haymitch inclined his head, “Yes.”

“Yes!” echoed Effie, beaming.

Turning again, the girl stared at Effie very, very hard.

Haymitch figured that now was the time to mention the importance of not going anywhere near the cornucopia. Effie made it her job to convey the information to the girl, shaking her head and wagging her fingers sternly as she tried to impress the importance of Haymitch’s advice on her.

When the girl nodded, her eyes flickering to the retreating avox and away, Effie restarted the video.

It took most of the night to get through the damn highlights video, Effie stopping the footage every few minutes to point out mutts and skills possibly learned in the gym. Haymitch mostly drank.

At the end, when he was the lone survivor, his guts in his hands, Haymitch, who was more than a little drunk, gestured broadly at the footage of his younger self and said to the girl, “Now, I am a Victor.”

The girl nodded, her expression hard, and stood. She returned to her room on quiet feet and gently shut the door.

“Buffy!” gasped Effie, startling to her feet. Haymitch barely caught her arm as she rushed past him, dragging her to a halt.

“It doesn’t matter,” Haymitch said tiredly. There was a heavy thump from the direction of the girl’s room. “Let them do what they want before they die.”

“Haymitch!” shrilled Effie, aghast. The boy fled the room. “Haymitch, how could you possibly say that? And in front of poor Burdock too!”

“Because it’s the truth!”

“It is not! They have just as good a chance at winning as anyone else!” Effie wrenched her arm out of Haymitch’s grip. “Just when I think that you’re trying, that maybe you’re making an effort to be a good mentor for once, you always go and do something like this! I could almost hate you, Haymitch Abernathy, I really could!”

Haymitch snorted. “You’d hardly be the first.”

Effie glanced at the girl’s room then headed for the boy’s room. Haymitch stayed where he was.

It was sometime later when he looked up from the highlights of his victory tour to find Buffy staring at him. Her expression was very hard, the look in her eyes sharp. Haymitch found that he liked her better that way. It was a relief.

“How much?”

“How much what?”

“How much Victors?” She spat the last word like it was a curse. As a younger man, that would have hurt Haymitch’s feelings.

“Seventy,” he replied and took a swig of his neglected drink. After a moment’s consideration, he offered it to her. She had had an unpleasant shock.

The girl brushed away his offer. “I don’t know it!”

With a much put upon groan, Haymitch put down the bottle and began holding up fingers.

Disgust creased the girl’s face. “Why?”

Haymitch decided to ignore that question. Some things were not worth the effort of communicating.

“Why?”

At Haymitch’s continued silence, she slapped the bottle out of his hand.

He glared at her, but otherwise let it go this time. The girl had had a hard night.

She jabbed a finger at the television. “When?”

Haymitch held up four fingers. “Four days.”

Two more days of training, interviews, and then the Games; from Reaping Day to the start of the Games was only a week.

The girl snapped a nod. Turning on her heel, she disappeared back into her room.

Haymitch slumped down in his seat. He wouldn’t be sleeping that night.

“She didn’t sleep last night!”

Haymitch ignored Effie in favor of concentrating all of his efforts on staggering into the nearest seat at the table.

“Haymitch,” repeated Effie. “Buffy didn’t sleep again last night!”

“It’s hard to sleep before the Games.”

“She needs to conserve her strength!” fretted Effie. She swatted Haymitch’s shoulder. “And so do you. We have lots and lots to do today!”

Haymitch grunted. He let Effie put a copy of their schedule in front of him. There were a lot more sponsor meetings than usual.

“What’s this?” he demanded around a mouthful of plain toast. He sounded like the girl.

“Buffy is exactly the sort of tribute that Capitol audiences will love,” Effie brightly informed him. “She presents herself well, she has lovely table manners, and she has a winning personality. Her makeup could use some work, but I blame the stylist for that. And who knows what’s fashionable in the outer districts anyway? At last, that’s what I’m going to say during interviews. She’s the complete package!”

“You like her?”

Effie looked guilty. “I like all of our tributes. Burdock isn’t so bad. Underneath all of that brooding and sulking, he really is a lovely boy even if his manners and deportment do leave a lot to be desired. I wish he’d at least listen to me about using his napkin. And his silverware! When they play the training clips during the Games, no one is going to take him seriously! If he would just listen –”

“Let it go, Effie.”

“I will not let it go! I’ve seen your district, and I know that no one cares about anything important there, but in the Capitol manners, personal presentation, and deportment matter! Polling has shown that audiences hold failures in those areas against tributes. You should know that by now, Haymitch.”

Haymitch sighed heavily, trying to expel some of the anger twisting through his guts. The edge of his toast crumbled between his fingers. Twenty years as a Victor, and the Capitol’s priorities still enraged him.

“They know it in Districts One, Two, and Four,” Effie huffed, seemingly oblivious to Haymitch’s darkening mood. “Their tributes always have the best manners. And they’re always the most graceful. Except this year, that is. Buffy conducts herself just as well as they do. It’s a pity that her costume was so terrible.” Effie startled. “Which reminds me! Haymitch, we really have got to get rid of Marcus before next year’s Games. His work has been just dreadful lately. I really thought that he might have something with those body paint sketches – it could have been a high point to retire on – but he went back to those frightful miner’s costumes and now he’s just got to go. No excuses.”

“I agree,” Haymitch said, choosing expedience over arguing. Shouting would aggravate his hangover. He planned to save his next screaming match with Effie for when he felt more human. A thought sparked at the back of his poor brain. “Cinna and Portia aren’t unendurable. And their stuff isn’t bad.”

Across from him, Effie’s face brightened.

“I’ll keep that in mind when I take submissions for the position,” Effie promised. Either she had seen the designing team’s work and liked it – a terrible thought – or she was trying to be supportive of his most recent (and extremely reluctant) stab at responsibility. Haymitch suspected that it was the latter. But as it made his life easier, he decided not to ask… just in case.

She was Charlton Heston.

There was no excuse for any world in which she was Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. The difference in facial hair alone ought to make that impossible, and yet there she was: Charlton Heston.

Somewhere, Merrick was spinning in his grave.

Planet of the Apes had been one of Merrick’s favorite movies of all time. Buffy had seen it only once and under duress. All during it, Merrick had lectured her about the importance of shutting up, lying low, and blending in so that she never had to rely on the good nature of sapient monkeys… or vampires in her case. She had hated the movie and the astronaut, but the lecture on hiding in plain sight had turned out to be a life saver, literally, and it had served her well over the years.

And now, irony of ironies, she was living Planet of the Apes: the Demonic Apocalypse edition, in which starving humans lived in hovels, demons consumed everything, and she was the whiny, bearded astronaut from the past. It was just one more indignity in a life currently filled with them.

Merrick would have loved this, Buffy thought and smiled despite herself, in a tweedy, understated way, of course. And he would have been clutching a cup of tea to ward off all of the excitement, never mind that a bag of sharpened stakes would be much more useful.

And Giles would have been just as bad as Merrick, clutching cups of tea and scribbling notes into his Watcher’s diary and wanting to know where this world had gone wrong instead of focusing on how to fix it or Buffy’s current and woeful lack of stakes.

Watchers, Buffy thought, disgusted and comforted in near equal measure.

Buffy was in the middle of trying to remember everything that Merrick had said during their monkey fest about lying low, blending in, and striking when their evil ape overlords least expected it, because she was definitely, definitely not going to end up lobotomized, castrated, on the run, or dead and stuffed.

She was going to keep her mouth shut and play along until she understood how things worked. Then she would make a plan – a good one, something better than kill them all at the first available opportunity, which was the plan that she was currently operating under – and execute it along with every last demon in Panem.

Simple.

So when Effie bustled into the library the next morning, her smile strained, Buffy made an effort to look like it might have been Burdock who had spent the night sorting the books by color and stacking them by size. She tried to look embarrassed, chagrinned, and not at all like someone plotting to bring an entire society crashing down.

She must have succeeded because Effie took her to breakfast without comment. Victor – Haymitch – glowered at her across the table, and Buffy returned the look with interest.

Effie disappeared during breakfast and returned after Buffy was change into yet another of her tracksuits, her makeup firmly in place, to escort Buffy and Burdock back to the gym. Most of the other teenagers were already there, as were the watchers, who were once again stuffing their faces.

Buffy hesitated.

One the one hand, she stood by her previous decision not to do any tricks for those guys. On the other hand, she was supposed to be blending in. A dark-haired, olive skinned man approached her, solving Buffy’s dilemma for her. He dragged her over to his station, because he apparently had a burning desire to try to teach her about edible plants.

After seeing Victor’s – Haymitch’s – home movie, Buffy couldn’t see the point. She wasn’t going to eat or drink anything she found under the Murder Dome, not after seeing that one kid burned from the inside out after drinking water from a stream. She was going to stick to eating things from the supply packs.

But she dutifully paid attention to the man’s lessons, passed his quizzes, and allowed herself to be kidnapped first by a lady who taught her about purifying water and then by a man who had her climb nets under his watchful eye. She took herself to the knots, snares, and first aid stations, things she was keenly interested in for professional reasons unrelated to her upcoming stint in SlayerFest: the Return.

Then it was lunchtime, after which Buffy snuck away for her afternoon nap. A well-rested Slayer was a Slayer at the top of her game, something she would need to defeat the ape-like forces of evil.

Yeah, she was never going to get over becoming Charlton Heston.

His girl tribute disappeared up to the roof after lunch for her afternoon nap. No one was impressed, least of all Effie, who was beside herself in her frustration, but Haymitch stuck by what he had said. Let the girl spend her remaining time as she chose. He had a meeting with the game makers about his tributes’ tokens, something that usually took about five minutes, and then half a dozen meetings with prospective sponsors.

Charities liked to throw a little money towards the outer districts from time to time, not much just enough to salve their conscious. Haymitch was usually pretty good about getting money off of them, managing to scrape out something every two out of three years or so, but competition was fierce among the non-Career districts for the funds. He needed to be at his best – as little booze as he could make do on and no worrying about extraneous matters.

The meeting with the game makers did not take five minutes. And it was unusually grueling.

Haymitch missed his first two appointments – he did not have high hopes of rescheduling them, those funds were already lost to him – put aside his disquiet about his meeting with the game makers, and concentrated on charming his last four appointments. They seemed to go well, but something about them made him uneasy. Something was wrong, although Haymitch could not say what. He would only be able to rest easy when that money rested safe and sound in his district’s accounts.

When he returned his suite’s apartments, Effie was slathering the girl in green gunk designed to get rid of the worst of her sunburn. The boy was still in the gym, presumably still frantically practicing for his turn in the arena. Haymitch almost wanted to tell him not to bother. If he did not have it by now, he was never going to get it.

Haymitch waited to broach the subject of the girl’s tokens until after dinner, when Effie and the boy had already excused themselves from the table. When they were alone, he took a swig of the hard stuff and, the burn still fresh at the back of his throat, nodded at her tarnished jewelry.

“You can’t wear any of those into the arena.”

The girl looked up, her expression one of polite interest without true understanding.

Glowering, Haymitch raise a hand, the one holding onto the neck of his most recent bottle, and pointed his forefinger at the teenager’s chest.

“Give them to me.”

One of the girl’s hands rose to cover her necklaces, the fingers splayed wide as if to hide them from his sight. Drawing back, she said fiercely, “No. It’s mine.”

Haymitch sighed. “I’ll return them when you get out of the arena,” he said, not even lying. He refused to keep mementos of a dead tribute and not even he would sell a dead girl’s silver.

Looking frustrated, the girl dropped her hand from its protective place over her jewelry and shook her head, saying, “I don’t know it!”

“You don’t know a lot of things. Why start now?” Haymitch said dryly and then at her scowl, he sighed. “Let me see your necklaces.”

The girl did not look persuaded. Or maybe she still had no idea what he was saying.

Hating himself a little – and hating her and the game makers more – Haymitch put his glass down and flailed his now empty hand at her, trying to speak to her in gestures the way that Effie seemed to do.

The girl studied him thoughtfully. “You’re a bird?”

“No!”

Her expression lit up with some awful form of understanding. The girl’s hand dropped from its protective place over her jewelry so that she could offer him the remnants of the chicken. Frankly, Haymitch was surprised that she had not gotten around to polishing that off yet. The girl was an eater.

“No,” he said, pushing the dish back towards her. Pointing at her necklaces, he said slowly and distinctly, “I want those.”

“It’s mine!”

“Of course, they’re yours! No one else even knows what they are!”

But that was not entirely true. The senior game makers had known what they were. During their conference on Twelve’s tokens, a conference that had never before taken more than five minutes, they hadn’t even wanted to look at her necklaces in the video from that morning’s gym session. They were somehow important.

“Give them to me,” Haymitch said, trying again, “and I will give them back later.”

After you’re dead, he thought, and the girl hesitated like she knew that there were things that he had not said.

“Give them to you,” she said, pointing from herself to Haymitch. “And give them back later,” she added, pointing from Haymitch to herself.

“Yes.”

“When?”

Haymitch thought a moment before saying, “Two weeks.”

Chewing her lower lip, the teenager thought about that.

“Yes,” she decided. “Two weeks and you return them.”

“Agreed.”

Finally, she reached back, undid the clasps, and passed her necklaces across the table to him.

He leaned to the side, the better to stuff them in a pocket, when the teenager barked, “No!” She tapped her throat. “Here.”

Haymitch did as she asked. It just seemed easier than the alternatives. Well, he tried to but it was impossible to latch the fiddle little clasps behind his own neck and without looking and –

“I’ll help,” sighed the girl, looking amused more than anything else.

“Don’t do me any favors, sweetheart,” he sneered, even as she stood and moved to his side in three quick steps. His skin pricking with his discomfort, Haymitch let her move to stand behind him and at a narrow angle, looping the necklaces around his neck one by one and hooking them into place.

“Thanks,” said Haymitch dryly. “I’ll treasure them always.”

He left them alone until after she had returned to her seat, letting her get a final look at her silver. Then he tucked them under his shirt and took a drink. She didn’t sigh like Effie or scowl like the boy. She passed Haymitch a dinner roll, and when he failed to take it put it on the bit of tablecloth in front of him.

“Charming.”

The girl, her head already bent over her plate again, either did not understand or chose not to respond. She had been like that since the train, and Haymitch had the savage urge to shake her and shout at her until her cheerful indifference fell away. He wanted her to be afraid, to be furious, and to regret ever wandering into District Twelve. He wanted her to understand what was happening and rail against it.

“Stop eating!” Glaring, Haymitch uncurled a finger from around the long neck of the liquor bottle and pointed it at the teenager’s face. “Those kids are going to try to kill you!”

The girl stared at him intently for several moments, parsing that sentence in her head, and then smiled at him. She looked genuinely touched.

Then she reached out and reclaimed the dinner roll from its place in front of Haymitch. She dragged it through the last of her gravy, carefully sopping up the last little bits of her dinner.

“I know,” she said and popped the soggy bit of bread into her mouth.

Haymitch’s lips curled into a disgusted snarl without his permission, and he shoved his chair back, hard. Taking the bottle with him, Haymitch left to go drink in the privacy of his own room, his hands still aching with undone violence.

Buffy felt bad after Vict – Haymitch left. He seemed to care – really, genuinely care – that she might be killed, and that hadn’t happened to her often, not before she became the Slayer and certainly not after.

Even after everything that she had survived, it made her nervous.

Fear was catching, and Buffy refused to catch his. Haymitch was afraid, but Buffy could not afford to be, not if she was going to turn this thing around. She wanted her time here to be like SlayerFest with Cordelia or even like graduation had been – all the intended victims banding together to survive. If she could just get past the language barrier!

Buffy was still thinking about that, and about how she could get all the other teenagers on her side, when Effie and Burdock took themselves off to their beds. Alone, she went to watch what passed for television programming in the city, trying to ignore the legions of vamps and demons scraping at her senses. It didn’t count as brooding if you did it while watching television.

Everything – the television programming and the city itself – was impossibly horrible, so Buffy retreated to the library for some quality time with the books, all of which had been returned to their shelves. Lacking anything better to do, Buffy took them down again, this time sorting them by usefulness.

When Effie came to fetch her for breakfast, she looked unhappy. Feeling tired (and angry) and unhappy herself, Buffy let Effie shepherd her back to the dining room. Breakfast, clothes and make up, and then it was back to the gym for Buffy.

Buffy went back to the edible plants, water purification, and climbing areas because those instructors were nice enough to worry about her. She went back to the knots, first aid, and snares stations because they really were relevant to her interests.

After lunch, things got weird.

No one was allowed to leave the lunch room. Instead Buffy watched as people were taken from the cafeteria one by one, in nearly the same order that they had appeared on the television. No one ever returned. Eventually, it was just her and Burdock, who was jittering nervously.

Then it was just Buffy.

When they came for her, Buffy let them take her, reminding herself fiercely all the while that astronauts who stuck out got lobotomized or stuffed.

They led her back to the gym. It was empty, save for the watchers behind the glass. None of them seemed to be watching her very closely.

Buffy crossed her arms over her chest and watched them back. She tried to memorize faces where she could for later. These people were apparently important. Buffy could not decide if she was going to kill them first or last when her revolution came, but she was definitely going to make sure that they were dead before it ended.

Eventually, she got bored and left.

It was too late in the afternoon for a nap, not if she wanted to be awake before sunset, so Buffy resigned herself to a sleepless night, went upstairs to retrieve Annie’s swimsuit from where it was hanging in her bathroom, and got back on the elevator. No one was on the fourth floor so Buffy went back upstairs.

It was going to be a very long, very boring night. Or at least, she had assumed it was. Burdock was a bundle of nerves and, although they hid it better, so were Effie and Haymitch. Apparently, something important was going to happen. Buffy hoped it would be interesting.

It was not.

Honestly, Buffy had not yet figured out what the bit about the faces and numbers was all about. There had been a flash of a scene like that in Haymitch’s video, one with his name, a smiling head shot, and a large number six. That had been her first clue that his name might not be Victor. The video had also included a few more of those name, head shot, and magic number combos for a few other teenagers, all of them big boys and girls that Haymitch would go on to kill. Effie had tried to explain what it all meant but most of that had gone over Buffy’s head. All she knew for certain was that six was a far worse score than ten, which had been the number beside the girl who would later disembowel Haymitch.

She should probably be devastated that, according to the TV, she had scored a two. Effie looked pretty damn devastated. Buffy made an effort to reach out and take Effie’s hand.

“I am okay, Effie,” she said and smiled. “I am fine.”

Effie bravely managed a smile for Buffy.

“Of course you are,” she agreed, her voice wobbling, and squeezed Buffy’s hand. Nearby Haymitch, who seemed to have nothing to say one way or the other about their scores, was drinking heavily and glowering at the television. “It’s – It is a good score.”

The tiny little sob that escaped her sort of made it seem like Effie was lying to spare Buffy’s feelings. For Effie’s sake, Buffy allowed her smile to widen into a grin.

Burdock, who had scored a seven, looked relieved and even a tiny bit pleased with himself. He was still smiling ever so slightly when Effie herded him and Buffy – who she still had by the hand – off to bed. Not that Buffy slept, not even after the door locked behind her.

Buffy spent the night doing calisthenics and rifling through her closet. She really only had three types of workout gear in a variety of sizes and colors. Buffy wondered where her interview clothes were going to come from, because there was no way that she was going to let Mr. Body Paint coat her in anything.

In the morning, Buffy went to breakfast showered, dressed, and with her face in place. Haymitch looked as crappy as usual, and Burdock looked like he had slept poorly. Buffy, who had slept not at all, did not have much sympathy for either of them. Effie looked as cheerful and perky as ever.

After breakfast, Buffy bounced over to the elevator only to be waylaid by Effie and led into the conference room. She spent about half an hour proving that she could walk in heels, sit up straight, and parade around in a poufy skirt and high heels while balancing a book on her head before Effie beamed at her and said something in happy tones. Apparently, Buffy had passed some sort of test.

Given life in District Twelve, Buffy was not surprised to discover that most people lacked the basic date night skills that Buffy had perfected before she was thirteen. The people there had lacked basic necessities like shelter, warmth, and food. Next to all of that, knowing which fork to use, how to swish your skirt to hide a stake, and being able to sprint in high heels seemed kind of frivolous. Less so in the Capitol though, where Buffy could feel the press of too many vampires in too small a space against her senses every second of the day and night. There, her date night skills were probably essential, especially the stake-concealing ones.

Effie soon declared Buffy’s lessons complete and disappeared, which Buffy took as her cue to go up to the roof for a nap. Maybe it was the exhaustion speaking, but she slept better than she had since getting on the stupid train.

Effie eventually came to wake her and escort her down to the suite that they shared with the others, scolding her all the while. Buffy took a quick, cold shower before Effie helped to slather her in a green lotion that was heaven against her rising sunburn.

After lunch, Buffy was locked in the library with Haymitch.

Two of the chairs had been pulled away from the table and angled towards each other, close but not too close like in a therapist’s office. Buffy had the sneaking suspicion that neither she nor Haymitch was qualified to provide the kind of therapy that the other needed. She sat in one of the chairs anyway, Haymitch claimed the other, and then they stared at each other.

They stared at each other for a long time, Haymitch occasionally taking long pulls from a flask.

Finally, he asked her a question. Too bad that Buffy had no idea what he said.

The mock interview did not get better from there.

Finally, Haymitch said something sharp, his tone mocking. To the untrained ear, whatever he said was thoroughly unpleasant. Buffy had used that exact tone enough times to guess at some of what it was meant to hide. So she sat with him and told him about her old wardrobe, carefully omitting the list of what she had killed in which outfit and how she had gotten any resultant stains out of the fabric, as Haymitch got drunker and drunker. She was bright, he morose.

Eventually he slammed to his feet, wobbled, and staggered away. Frowning, Buffy watched him go.

Being Charlton Heston was a lot harder than she had thought that it might be. Aside from anything else, people around here actually seemed to worry about her. Stuff like that didn’t usually happen to her. People usually just blindly believed that, as the Slayer, she would slay whatever the Big Bad was and then they would party. It never occurred to them that she might be hurt or killed. Haymitch, who seemed to believe in the inevitability of her defeat, didn’t want to watch her die. He was tearing himself up over her and Burdock. It made dealing with him difficult. If she kept ignoring him and his obvious distress, however, he would probably die of alcohol poisoning.

Buffy preferred to kill people directly.

Sighing, she stood and dragged herself down the hallway to the room that she knew to be Haymitch’s. She knocked on his door.

Nothing.

Buffy knocked on it again and then knocked on it some more. She kept knocking until he shouted something, his tone hostile, which Buffy decided to take as an invitation to enter.

For a guy who seemed to be a professional alcoholic, his rooms were like his clothes: surprisingly neat. Buffy put it down to the servants. Vampires or not, they did their jobs well and without complaint. Frankly, if she were in their position, Buffy would have complained a little.

At the sight of her, Haymitch lurched to his feet, slurring, “What do you want?”

She wanted to tell him that she had never come in second place in her entire life, and she absolutely positively was not about to start now. She wanted to tell him that she and Burdock and most of the other contestants were going to come back because she was better than anyone here could imagine and the Death Dome actually played to her strengths. She and Burdock were going to be fine so he could stop drinking and brooding any time now.

Thankfully, there was that pesky language barrier between them.

So what she actually said was, “Stop it. Stop drinking, Haymitch.”

Glowering, Haymitch locked eyes with her and deliberately took another swig from his latest bottle.

Her eyes narrowed a fraction of a second before she dropped to the ground and swept his legs out from beneath him. Haymitch hit the ground, Buffy grabbed his ankles, and it was back into the shower for him despite all of his shouting and kicking. She was a little more careful about her soap selections this time. Haymitch was going to come out of there smelling like lemongrass and citrus.

Buffy took advantage of the situation to wedge the shower door shut. Unless he was willing to break one of shower’s glass walls, which Buffy sincerely doubted, he was trapped.

While he was otherwise occupied, Buffy took it upon herself to empty his current bottle down the sink, doing so under Haymitch’s murderous eye. Then she made a quick search of his room for any other bottles in need of emptying, her years of hiding weapons among her own things helping Buffy to know where to look.

At the end of his rinse cycle, Haymitch came out of the shower soaking wet and furious.

Buffy grinned.

What followed was a short, heartfelt struggle, uncoordinated but heartfelt on his part and careful on hers. Buffy did not want to hurt him. At the end of it, she was fairly certain that Haymitch was not entirely certain how he had ended up on the floor with her sitting on his back. Over his long, slow snarl – death threats, she was sure – Buffy said carefully, “Stop drinking. I need you.”

Haymitch snarled something about her mother. Buffy narrowly resisted the urge to slam his head into the floor, because nobody but nobody talked about her mama like that.

“I need you to help me, Haymitch. Please, stop drinking.”

Beneath her, Haymitch stiffened. His words ceased, as if cut off with a knife.

And then, all at once, Haymitch seemed to crumple in on himself. Buffy had the absurd sense that, if she had not been anchoring him in place, he might sunk through the floor or blown away.

“I will drink less,” he said at last.

Buffy, who figured that was the best she was going to get out of Haymitch, got off of him. When she offered him a hand up, he even took it.

“Thank you,” Buffy said, meaning it. Then she got while the going was good. If she hurried, she could squeeze in another nap on the roof before dinner!

“Absolutely not,” Buffy snapped. “No!”

Seven hours later, a vamp was trying to stuff her into a handful of fabric that he claimed was a dress. No way was she going to wear an ugly handkerchief masquerading as a dress anywhere or at any time. To be certain that the vamp in charge of dressing her understood how she felt about it, she threw the tiny ugly dress across the room.

The vamp couldn’t take a hint, though. He tugged at her sweats, which yes, not cute, but better than anything that he had suggested she wear, and talked at her self-importantly and Buffy ached for a good old-fashioned wooden stake, she really did. She fended him off and threw a shoe at him for good measure, only a sneaker unfortunately, which sent him scurrying from the room. Buffy threw the dress-kerchief after him but kept the heels – which were high even by her relaxed standards – because they were the only pair of heels that she had.

When he was gone, Buffy did her makeup and dug through her closet of assigned clothes, looking for something, anything, that she could wear to her interview. She was tossing workout clothes over her shoulders, most of it in shades of black or gray, when they sent in the other guy, the one with refreshingly understated clothes and impeccable gold guy-liner.

Honestly, if she had not already been subjected to Whistler, Buffy might never have guessed that he was a balance demon. He was so normal looking. And in the Capitol there were a lot of demony tingles to sort through at any given moment. Generally speaking, it was a lot easier to just stick with ‘human’ and ‘not human’ and go from there. But demon or not, he was familiar and he seemed to possess a sense of shame, so Buffy let him come in and boss her around. It helped that he brought with him a selection of tasteful dresses and fabulous shoes.

Buffy let the balance demon, which smiled and reminded her that his name was Cinna, shoo her into the bathroom for a second shower. He styled her hair, painted her nails, and applied her makeup, before offering her a sundress, roasted tangerine in color and paired with sparkly sandals. It was just the length that Buffy preferred and the color looked good on her.

As he worked on her, the balance demon chattered at her, not seeming to care that Buffy was not listening to him. She was too busy trying to figure out what she should do during her interview. On the one hand, she had a plan, one that was better than most of her plans. On the other hand, there was no way that she was going to go along with this Murder Dome business. She wasn’t that kind of girl. And on a third, borrowed hand, she was Charlton Heston. The vamps couldn’t hunt her if they couldn’t pick her out of the crowd. And Buffy was very, very good at maintaining her old Valley Girl façade. She could be what they wanted to see… provided no one cared enough to look too closely. With this crowd, that didn’t seem too likely.

She was still debating her options when they herded her first into a line and then into a chair, a single point in a color symphony. None of the contestants, seated in a row along one side of the stage, were what they had been in the gym. Everyone had transformed themselves into what the Capitol had wanted them to be, illusions of brightly colored fantasy.

In the center of the stage sat the host, a vampire with powder blue hair and matching eyebrows, an empty seat slanted towards him. The audience, currently filing into the room in small groups, would be seated across from the host and his current victim. High against a back wall of the auditorium was a box in which Haymitch, Effie, and a much smaller group of people were seated. That box was already full. Eventually, the overhead lights blinked repeated and then went out, the spotlights came on, and the show got underway.

The vamp conducted his interview like an orchestra of strings, teasing, baiting, and flirting with his interviewees as he gently guided them through their performances. As Buffy watched, the others sliced themselves thin, becoming as real as the arrangement of dots and lines in a comic book. They did and said as the crowd wished, hiding the reality of themselves in service of upholding the audience’s dream.

The scowling girl who wore the number one jersey became a sleek, smiling sex kitten. She practically purred when the host leered at her, and the boy that she had come with was no better. The big, muscular girl who threw spears and her partner were bright, boastful, and slightly maniac like comic book super villains. The next pair had stage fright, shivering, shaking, and stuttering, but the fourth set was another pair of those Stepford Smilers. Her dress was shimmery, he was tangled in fishing nets, and they both seemed to be working a seafood angle with mixed results.

On and on it went. The others a symphony of color and illusion, moving inexorably frame by frame through their scripts, frantic to do or be whatever would save them, not seeing how absolutely hopeless it really was. Buffy pitied them.

When it was her turn, Buffy claimed her seat across from the host and tried not to think how much she wanted to stake him. It must have worked, because he dared to smile at her.

As soon as the buzzer went off, he began to prattle at her, telling her how pretty she was and asking what she liked best about the Capitol. To his credit, he mostly used words and phrases that she understood. Someone had definitely coached him in how to speak the Buffy-speak. But Buffy was determined to succeed where other, hairier people had failed: she was going to keep her mouth shut.

“Do you want to say anything?” demanded the host, a trifle desperately. “Anything at all?”

Buffy turned to look at her competitors, who looked scornful or bored or quietly terrified, then turned back to the vamp. Slowly, clearly, distinctly, she said, “I will not kill them.”

It would have been satisfying if her declaration rocked Panem and realign the stars. Instead, the crowd fell silent, and the host gaped at her for a moment before laughing.

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying folks!”

“I will not kill them!”

A buzzer went off somewhere and two demons in white, this place’s version of troops or policemen, Buffy still wasn’t sure which, hustled Buffy from her seat so that Burdock could replace her. For a moment, just a couple of heartbeats, Buffy considered killing both her minders and the host.

The moment passed.

Mostly.

Mostly, it passed.

It was harder being Charlton Heston than she had ever imagined.

Damn dirty demons.

They locked her in her room that night. Buffy was not sure why, since she had not tried to leave since seeing how Haymitch became a Victor. She had things to do, demons to slay, and governments to topple; she couldn’t run away now. But locked in she was and painfully bored to boot. There were only so many times a girl could go through her closet and admire her tracksuits and sneakers.

It was a testament to how bored she was that Buffy actually settled down to meditate, something that she had not done since Giles – since her eighteenth birthday.

She tried to relax, to put aside her worries and plans and quietly simmering rage to drop into the center of herself. But how could they give up? How could they let children fight to the death for the demons’ entertainment? Not even in Sunnydale were they that callous.

Although SlayerFest had been a thing… and no one had batted an eye at the Mayor… or the vamps… or any of the other weird stuff that had happened…

Clearing her mind and settling in to meditate was difficult.

But when she did…

The other girls, the Slayers who had come both before and after her, had been waiting for her.

Chapter Text

Haymitch hated a lot of things about his visits to the Capitol, not least the part where he was annually forced to participate in the murder of twenty-three teenagers, but even he could see the sense in banning weapons from the mentors’ lounge. Next to several of the other Victors, he was practically sober and nearly careful about where (and into whom) he stuck his blade.

He still hated to leave his knife behind.

“Hurry up, Haymitch!” shrilled Effie from the hallway outside of his room. There was a pause, and then she asked suspiciously, “You’re not drunk are you?”

“No!” Haymitch snapped, reflexively touching the pocket in which he kept his emergency flask. Irritation helped him to turn away from the bedside table on which his knife lay and storm across the room. Wrenching his bedroom door open, Haymitch snapped, “Do I look drunk to you?”

Effie looked him over critically. “Not yet.”

Snorting, Haymitch shouldered past her. He ignored her squawking about his manners, or rather the lack thereof. He wasn’t a tribute, his life being weighed against how neatly he cut his meat. In private moments, his manners no longer mattered.

Together, he and Effie made their way to the mentors’ lounge, which was in the building across from the training complex. The building’s lowest floor was divided between conference rooms for meeting with potential sponsors, the escorts’ offices, and media areas in which the more photogenic mentors were sent to either watch the games or be interviewed for them after their own tributes died in the arena. The floor above that was devoted to the mentors’ lounge, and all of the floors above those two were devoted to the game makers; easy access and all of that.

The mentors’ lounge was roughly divided into three large areas – the room in which all mentors started the Games, the room filled with sleeping cubicles in which those lucky few whose tribute survived the first day caught some shut eye (or tried to at any rate), and the room where the less photogenic Victors sprawled on various couches and chairs, got drunk, and commiserated as they watched the mandatory viewings after their tributes had died. All three rooms possessed fully stocked bars, complete with snacks and sandwiches, a silent legion of avoxes, and a handful of runners that could be sent on errands or to the kitchens. Over the years, Haymitch had rarely made use of the room with the sleeping cubicles.

The room in which all of the mentors started the Games was windowless, painted a cool shade of blue, and filled with twenty-four consoles. Dominating one wall, the one to the left of the door, was a big screen on which the working mentors could watch the live feeds, canned daily recaps, and discussion groups as they were aired in the districts. Each district had access to two other channels, one focused on each of their tributes. His first year mentoring, Haymitch had discovered that those channels were basically one of the mentors’ feeds, seemingly chosen at random, broadcast live to the home crowds.

As soon as they set foot in the room, Haymitch signaled to the nearest avox for a bottle of mead. It was alcoholic, but not so much that he would be on the bad side of the shifting line should either of his tributes make it past the cornucopia.

And he had promised the girl.

That stupid, cheerful girl who had liked the Capitol’s food and lights and silly makeup, not knowing the truth of her situation – they had brought her here to die for the Capitol’s amusement. And even after she had known, she hadn’t really seemed to understand. She had left the suite that morning with a grin and a bounce in her step. The girl had even gone out of her way to pat his and Effie’s shoulders before she left. Just thinking about it was enough to make Haymitch’s hands ache with unspent violence, the urge to shake some sense into her having never truly left him. Of all the people going into that arena, she was the least prepared. The bloodbath was going to be a nasty, and most likely fatal, wake up call.

He at least had some modest hopes for the boy, who was mentally prepared and determined. The boy had listened attentively to Haymitch’s advice, and he thought he really might survive the bloodbath.

“I hope that Buffy does well,” gushed Effie as they took their places at Twelve’s consoles.

A second mentor should have had Effie’s seat, and Effie should have been downstairs with the other escorts, but since District Twelve was always short a mentor, Effie usually filled in as one. It never took very long. One or both of the district’s tributes usually died at the cornucopia.

Looking suddenly guilty, Effie hastily added, “I’m sorry! I know that an escort shouldn’t have favorites, not when it comes to her district’s tributes, but I can’t help it. I like her, and I want her to win.”

There were no winners in the Hunger Games, Haymitch had been at this long enough to know that, but he did not bother to correct Effie. She wanted Buffy to live, and that was enough.

“You take Buffy then,” he said as they began to power their way through the administrative tasks that needed to be completed before the countdown began, Haymitch’s efforts fueled by the bottle of mead. “I’ll take Burdock.”

“Thank you, Haymitch!” Effie beamed at him like he had done her a favor, though Haymitch had done nothing of the sort. Effie, who usually had little emotional investment in their tributes, had managed to bond with Buffy. Making Effie responsible for Buffy now would make Buffy’s death that much harder on her later. He remembered that much from the early days of his mentorship, back when he had not been the only Victor in his district. Back then, he had still gotten attached to his tributes. Haymitch refused to do that anymore.

There were three screens dedicated to each tribute – one to watch them on, one to keep track of their financials and odds, and a third was a data screen that listed their current injuries, weapons, clothes, equipment, and allies. At that moment, the third screen came to life for Haymitch and a few seconds later, Effie’s data screen came online too. The medics on the hovercrafts must have just finished injecting the trackers into the kids’ forearms.

Haymitch glanced over their vitals, taken after the chips were injected while the techs monitored for adverse reactions to the trackers.

Judging by his heart rate and breathing, Burdock was terrified. Buffy’s vitals were…

“She has no idea what’s going on,” Haymitch said, horror and disbelief mingling in him.

“Of course she does,” Effie said stoutly. “We watched your Games with her. Remember? You didn’t seem that drunk. Although –”

“She doesn’t understand a damn word that anyone’s saying, including you!” Haymitch reached over and roughly jabbed a finger at Buffy’s vitals. “These aren’t the stats of a tribute on her way to the arena. These are the vitals of someone only mildly interested in what’s going on around them. She doesn’t even know to be scared.”

“Well, it’s not like they ever include the chipping process,” Effie argued. “But we saw you ascending in the tube. She’ll understand when she sees something familiar.”

“She’ll be at the cornucopia by then.”

“I told her what you said about the cornucopia,” Effie insisted, “twice. She knows what to do. And she’s not worried because she’s a competitor.”

Haymitch laughed bitterly, ignoring the way that Effie flinched. She turned away from him and, with a few quick jabs of her fingers, brought up Buffy’s pledge account, which was as empty as the accounts of nearly every other tribute that Haymitch had ever mentored.

Next to Haymitch, Effie’s plucked and penciled on eyebrows flickered, almost inching their way into becoming a frown. Almost. Haymitch braced himself for her complaints.

A sudden commotion at the front of the room caught Haymitch’s attention, and when he held a finger up to Effie, she obediently fell silent.

Most of the room fell silent, everyone listening intently to the hushed phone conversations going on at five of the six consoles manned by Career mentors. Last year’s Victor and this year’s newest mentor, Annie Cresta, was curled up in her seat and rocking, seemingly unaware of whatever had the other Career mentors’ undivided attention.

The most visible aspect of the Games was the tributes’ life and death battles, but the quiet, invisible battles that occurred between mentors were no less important. Everyone strove to bring home that one, precious life that they had been entrusted with, and the bloodless maneuvering between mentors, even mentors within the same district, could get vicious. Most of the year, Beetee and Wiress were inseparable, but even they put that aside when they both had tributes in the arena.

From what Haymitch could discern, the career districts had just discovered that their most dedicated and generous supporter, a corporation called Taraka O., was in the mood to be even more generous than usual that year. The decision had been made during the tribute interviews.

There had really only been one noteworthy interview. Everyone else had played to District stereotypes.

Haymitch lost interest in the conversations. He had already known that the game makers would be taking aim at the girl. That one of the wealthiest, most powerful sponsors was too was… unfortunate.

Haymitch took a healthy slug of mead, grimaced, and wished for something stronger. Instead of asking for it, though, he turned back to Effie, whose expression was tight, and nodded at her to continue.

Effie quickly pulled herself back together.

“Buffy’s account should have money in it,” she said, every bit as peevish as if he had not just interrupted her and spent several minutes eavesdropping on the Careers. “I spent all year making contacts. And I’ve been making the rounds since we got off the trains. I had several firm promises for both of our tributes this year. Haymitch, open Burdock’s accounts and let me see if anything has come in for him yet.”

“You do this every year,” Haymitch tiredly reminded her even as he did as she asked. “And every year they forget their promises when they see what’s come out of One or Two or Four.”

The boy’s account was not completely empty. A few of Effie’s promises had come through, as well as the charities that Haymitch had canvassed. He had done as well as he had thought he had during those interviews. But it was strange that all of the charity monies had been sent to the boy’s account. Usually, those funds were deposited to the district fund shared by both of the tributes. At least all of the donations in the boy’s account had the little addendum attached to them saying that, in the event of the boy’s death, the money could be transferred to District Twelve’s other tribute, which was just the way that Haymitch liked his individual tribute donations, even if it put him in an ugly spot.

As District Twelve’s sole mentor, Haymitch could potentially withhold aid from a more popular tribute and allow him to die in order to give his less popular, but much fiercer, district partner a better chance at survival. Haymitch wasn’t even tempted to try that this year, but given the right tributes…

There were reasons that the other districts assigned one mentor to each tribute.

“Oh, I’m so glad,” gushed Effie, who never seemed to notice the potential within that stipulation. She was leaning against Haymitch’s shoulder in order to better view the boy’s accounts. “That’s a very good start. Oh, I hope that Buffy’s money starts to come in soon too!”

Haymitch doubted that anything was coming for the girl. She was pretty rather than beautiful or sexy, and the language barrier prevented her from being witty or clever. She had gotten a two out of her private session with the game makers, and her interview with Caesar had been a catastrophe. With five words, she had insulted the Capitol and all its citizens and shamed the rest of Panem for knuckling under. It had probably been bravado but when it came to the Games no misstep was forgiven. And powerful sponsors like Taraka O. were lining up against her. As far as tributes went, she was a dead man walking.

No one donated money to uninspiring tributes much less overtly hopeless ones. After twenty years of being a mentor for District Twelve, Haymitch knew that for a fact. She was so hopeless that, even after living with her for a week, not even he was tempted to throw money her way.

Without difficulty, Haymitch said, “Effie, I don’t think she’s going to get anything. She’s been a disaster since we got here.”

“Oh, I know her score from the game makers was appalling, but she didn’t understand what was expected of her during her session,” Effie fretted. “It’s too bad we didn’t think to ask for copies of your session with the game makers! I’m sure that she would have done much better if she had known how important it was.”

Haymitch was indifferent to Effie’s continued existence on his best days, but he did not harbor an active desire to see her hurt either. Losing a tribute that you cared for hurt, no matter how realistic your hopes and expectations for that tribute had been. What Effie hoped for Buffy was completely unrealistic. She expected the impossible. Effie was setting herself up to get hurt… not that it was any of his business.

“She’s not going to survive the cornucopia, Effie.”

“Don’t say that!” Effie chastised. She immediately moved away from Haymitch, sitting as far away from him as her console would allow, which was not very far. She was still within arm’s reach. “Buffy is going to make it! I just know that she is! I’m rooting for her! And you know how good I am at picking Victors, Haymitch. If I wasn’t an escort, I’d be rich off of my Hunger Game winnings.”

Sighing, Haymitch set aside his mead, fished out his flask, and took a solid pull of the white.

He was too damn sober for any of this.

An hour later, the coverage on the big screen to the left of the door smoothly transitioned from Caesar Flickerman’s show, on which Finnick and a handful of the other more photogenic Victors were making predictions regarding the climate and terrain of the seventy-first arena, to breaking Games coverage: a sweeping overview of that year’s arena.

In school, they taught that the places directly outside of the districts’ fences were filled with vicious wild animals, lost ruins, and leftover war mutts. The places beyond that were supposed to be barren wastelands. The arena was apparently meant to represent the best of both predictions.

The ruins of a small town had a thin rim of desert to one side and a larger beach to the other. Oily, black waves lapped at the sand, leaving filth and garbage in their wakes. The cornucopia was at the center of the town. And even in the sweeping overview, Haymitch could see mutts skulking in the shadows. To survive in that arena for any length of time, a tribute would need gear and weapons from the cornucopia. The bloodbath was going to be worse than usual that year.

There’s no way that was the preplanned arena, Haymitch thought, despairing, while in a voiceover Claudius Templesmith, the voice of the Hunger Games, gleefully speculate about potential mutts hidden within the arena. It must have been a rush job to finish, maybe a little tweaking to next year’s arena or maybe even the next Quarter Quell. They’ve got to slap us down and put the Districts in their place, before anyone starts getting too serious about the wild girl or the rebellion.

The arena was an answer to the Districts’ current mood and the recent, whispered conjecture about the potential for life outside of Panem.

Whether the girl actually came from a place like this or not, she didn’t stand a chance. Neither of his tributes did. It was going to be another Career this year.

Next to him, Effie clapped her hands. She looked openly delighted.

“What good luck!” she exclaimed, beaming. She even included Haymitch in her happiness. “Now Buffy has a better chance of making it to the end!”

Haymitch scowled at Effie. “No one lives in a place like that! There’s no water and nothing to eat! There are mutts everywhere! It’s a Career tribute’s arena!”

Frowning, Effie glanced at the big screen where Flickerman was congratulating the game makers for their ingenuity and relevance to current events then back at Haymitch.

“Are you sure?” she asked uncertainly then, before Haymitch could snap at her, shushed him saying, “The tributes are being lifted into the arena! Pay attention, Haymitch!”

It was almost exactly like his own arena had been, except everything was as ugly as it ought to have been. And, if the tributes’ expressions were anything to go by, it smelled bad too.

The tributes’ platforms were in a straight line and, theoretically, every tribute would have to run the same distance to reach the cornucopia. In reality, the tributes at the outer edges were at a severe disadvantage. They would have to cover more ground to reach the same place.

The boy had gotten lucky, he was almost directly across from the cornucopia, but the girl was on the platform furthest to the right. Only seven’s female tribute, who was being mentored by Johanna Mason, would have to run as far as she would.

As Haymitch watched, both of his tributes assumed running positions. The boy was still and focused. The girl was practically vibrating in place, the very image of arrested motion. And above them all, the clock made its slow, steady march towards zero.

The control room was utterly silent, every eye on the arena’s clock.

Three… Two… One…

A canon shot, and pandemonium erupted.

The morning passed in a blur, leaving Buffy with only vague impressions of things like the roar of a flying ship, a pinch as something was injected into her arm, and secret relief at the practicality of the clothes and boots offered to her. (Already this was shaping up to be better than SlayerFest!) Only the balance demon turned professional dresser managed to catch Buffy’s attention.

“Here,” he said. He very slowly and carefully extended his hand to Buffy. “It’s a gift from your friend. The game makers approved it this morning.”

He handed Buffy a narrow bracelet woven from a series of bright strings. Attached to the friendship bracelet were four shiny black buttons. Buffy thumbed one of the buttons, recognizing it from the games in District Four’s swimming pool. The gift must have come from Annie.

Buffy was touched.

A moment later, an awful, practical part of her wished that Annie had thought to send a can of hairspray and a lighter or a nicely carved stake, although she had always been good at improvising when she ran short of those. It was harder to make instant fire without combustibles. Buffy would have appreciated those things just as much, and they would have been useful.

“All tributes are allowed to bring something from their friends and family back home into the arena,” added Cinna, his dark eyes bright with interest. “She didn’t want you to go into the arena without a token of your own. I didn’t know that you knew each other.”

“There are a lot of things that you don’t know,” Buffy retorted as she handed the token back to Cinna. She held out her left wrist in a silent invitation for him to tie it on.

“I might know more than you think,” Cinna demurred, a strange weight to the words as he nevertheless complied with Buffy’s silent demand.

“Doubtful,” scoffed Buffy, who was privately wondering why everything had to be embroidered with the number twelve. Her shirt was already making her breast itch. There was another twelve stitched onto her jacket’s right breast and a patch on one shoulder with the number seventy-one on it. While her current outfit wasn’t the most hideous thing that she had worn since she had won the Lottery of Doom, given her Slayer dream it was the most ominous.

She was going to a place that no previous Slayer had come out of before.

Of course, she was no dewy-eyed baby Slayer, heady on new power, vicious, and out of control. She was stronger than ever, she could control her impulses, and she had experience, both in impromptu arenas and as a Slayer. She could do this.

“Good luck,” said the balance demon, drawing Buffy’s attention back to him. Seeing that he had her full attention again, he smiled. “Not that you need it. I’ll see you later.”

Buffy nodded. As a rule, she didn’t particularly like balance demons, but they only showed up when something was badly in need of balancing… usually with lethal force. By happy coincidence, that was her specialty.

The balance demon herded her toward a silver circle in the floor and a clear tube lowered itself over her. The floor beneath her feet jolted and began to take her upwards. The balance demon watched her go, his expression troubled. Buffy decided to ignore that, pushing that last image of him to the back of her mind with her last glimpse of Haymitch, who had looked downright despairing, in an utterly murderous sort of way.

Frankly, the long ride in the glass tube was the very best thing about this place that she had ended up. It was cool and futuristic and there weren’t any demons in it. As she rose through the long tube to the arena, the Slayer essence rose within her.

Sunlight, harsh and bright, fell over her, and Buffy blinked her eyes, trying to make them hurry up and get used to it. With the light came a blast of bakingly hot, dry air. Buffy breathed deeply, glorying in it. While it wasn’t exactly right, it was a lot more like home than Twelve’s cold, miserable mountains had been. In her heart, the Slayer essence roiled, and the hairs at the back of her neck bristled. Wherever she was going, it was crawling with demons.

It figured.

But her Slayerliness was stronger than it had been since the Master had drowned her, splitting the Slayer line in two. She could handle a lot more demons. Given her current circumstances, that was probably the thing that was going to save her life.

She was going to be the first Slayer to go through an arena and come out the other end of it.

She was going to be a Victor.

And then she was going to burn Panem to the ground.

At the top of the tunnel, Buffy found herself in some sort of town, long decimated and now rotting. There was rubble everywhere, and what few buildings remained looked like they were in danger of collapsing at any moment. There were demons in the ruins; lots and lots of demons. She was standing on the last of a long line of podiums and was one of the ones furthest from the weapons, which seemed to be piled in the mouth of some sort of horn. Packs, survival equipment, and less impressive weapons seemed to radiate from the horn in a rough spiral. And there were random bits of gravel and large chunks of concrete between her and everything else.

That all seemed like very bad luck on her part.

Buffy glanced at the clock hanging overhead. Thirty seconds.

She edged forward to the very edge of her disc – every little bit would help – and glanced down the line again. The kids closest to her look terrified, not a killer among them.

It was probably a good thing.

Another glance, twenty seconds, and her shoulders tightened. Buffy turned her attention forward, towards her goal.

Those six kids – the brittle ones that did a damned good impression of any Council-raised Slayer that Buffy had ever met – were out there. They were closer to the weapons, and if Haymitch’s home video was anything to go by... She had to get to the weapons first.

But without betraying herself as a Slayer, as per the Charlton Heston plan. Whatever happened, she had to remember about Charlton Heston. So, do her best but never her very (Slayerly) best, so to speak. She had to be utterly, boringly human, not worth a second look, not her, not until it was too late for anyone to stop her from decimating Panem.

The clock hit zero, somewhere a canon roared, and Buffy leaped from her podium.

She hit the ground running, sprinting for the pile of weapons, and so did everyone else. Her feet pounded – or maybe that was her heart – eating up ground, and Buffy leaped over a particularly large chunk of concrete.

Somewhere behind her, someone began to scream, but Buffy didn’t slow down or turn to look back; weapons first, everything else second.

More running and another leap, this time over a backpack, and she was there.

Buffy snatched up the first weapons to hand, a couple of knives, and turned to find what looked like a horde of barbarians bearing down on her. Further back, a giant brown and white thing that could only very loosely be accused of being a bear was mauling a screaming tribute. Whatever it was, not even the demons were willing to try to get past it.

From behind her came a series of strange coughs, hoarse and not very loud, and she turned to find a pair of… of… Those were not bears. Buffy had seen enough nature programs to know that much.

They were like a child’s nightmarish rendition of a bear – super fuzzy fur covering an overly stocky frame, too many wickedly sharp teeth in an overly large mouth, and enormous claws that could have doubled as scythes. Brown and white, they moved together, a pair of hunting adults.

They were definitely not bears… or demons. But they were dangerous, and they were lumbering straight at her from the depths of the horn.

Buffy changed her grip on the knife, weighing it up in her hand in preparation for a throw. The knife’s weight distribution wasn’t great, but it would do for her purposes.

Using her right hand, Buffy threw one of her knives at the first not-bear. The knife sailed point first into its eye. The creature roared once and collapsed in a heap, as its partner continued to shamble at Buffy at completely un-bearlike speeds. Fortunately, Buffy could be pretty fast herself.

Clutching the other knife in her left hand, Buffy darted off, running at an angle to the approaching animal. It took some doing to get around behind the creature’s back, not least it was smarter than it ought to have been, but Buffy had a lot of experience at that from patrolling Sunnydale. The Hellmouth had regularly belched up all sorts of things that it was better not to approach head-on.

When she finally had the advantage that she wanted, Buffy took a running leap at the creature. She slammed into its mass, her knees and feet digging into its back and one hand gripping onto its neck ruff. Startled, the not-bear reared up on its hind legs and threw back its head.

That was its last mistake.

Even as one of its enormous, powerful paws reached up and halfway under its armpit to swat at the weight on its back, Buffy hauled herself up with her right arm and reached around with her other hand to drag her blade halfway across the thing’s throat. It was not enough to kill the creature but, combined with its agitation, it was enough to send the not-bear crashing to the ground, blood gushing from its cut throat.

She was still on the not-bear’s back when it collapsed, but that was fine. Its giant, lumpy carcass was way more comfortable that any bed in the orphanage. It was warmer too.

The kids, however, were making a fuss.

Buffy reached over to stab the not-bear through the eye then clambered off of it. Turning towards the commotion, she found the others brutally murdering each other, while the third giant not-bear shambled through the melee, taking swipes at whoever was within reach.

Glancing at the weapons surrounding her, Buffy spotted a short spear to her left. She snatched it up and, ignoring the more immediate danger surrounding her, took aim.

Buffy threw the spear.

Then she turned and ran.

The girl was running down a blind alley, half of the Career pack on her heels, and Haymitch was trying not to scream at her that she was going the wrong way, that she was going to die. She couldn’t hear him anyway.

“Not that way!” snarled Haymitch, gripping the edge of his console so hard that his hands hurt. “It’s a dead end! Don’t go that way!”

The girl, like all the tributes before her, ignored his advice. She hurled herself down the alley, the Careers on her heels, and Haymitch glanced up, hoping against hope that Effie’s angles on the girl were not being spliced into the live feed that went out to all of Panem.

No such luck. She was front and center on the big screen that loomed over all twenty-four of the mentor’s stations.

Haymitch’s stomach twisted, its contents roiling dangerously, because Twelve’s tributes only got that sort of attention before they died. He needed a drink to settle his nerves, to prepare him, but to get at his flask he would have to let go of the console.

Haymitch pinned all of his hopes on not being violently ill in the next few minutes.

He watched on the big screen as the girl somehow found it within herself to speed up. It wasn’t a bad idea, except that there was nowhere to go. But, to Haymitch’s surprise, she instead leaped off of a chunk of rubble and caught a metal pole that jutted out across the width of the alley. The tattered remnants of a rotten banner twisted themselves around her wrists as she swung herself forward and up to somehow balance herself end over end on the bar, the line of her body as straight as a knife’s blade.

As long as the Careers didn’t look up, she would be safe.

“What the hell?” demanded one of the other mentors, Haymitch was too distracted to determine who.

Someone else yelped, “She’s a gymnast!” and Haymitch spared a glance to see that it was Cecelia.

“A what?” asked Chaff, asking the question so Haymitch didn’t have to; he was too busy willing the Career pack not to look up to string words together. They were literally walking underneath the girl’s perch and if they didn’t look up… if her arms didn’t give out… if she had a single shred of luck…

“A gymnast!” repeated Cecelia, seeming to seize on the opportunity to look away from her own set of screens. Eight’s boy had been practically eviscerated by Two’s boy and was consequently dying a miserable death. Haymitch refused to look at the main feed when it lingered lovingly on the boy from Eight’s suffering or even to consider glancing towards Cecelia’s screens. “It’s a lost form of athleticism. Wherever she’s from, they still practice gymnastics!”

“It’s not very useful,” opined Brutus from his place next to Enobaria.

On the big screen, Haymitch’s tribute rocked into motion, swinging down behind the last Career in the pack. Haymitch made an awful, strangled sound, his fingernails scrabbling uselessly at the edge of his console, and next to him Effie shrieked, small and half strangled, her hands flying to her mouth. They watched as the girl slammed feet first into the nearest Career, sending him careening into the others.

The fight was short and brutal. The three Careers had weapons, but the girl was fast and shockingly good with her fists and feet. The Careers seemed not to know what hit them.

Neither did Haymitch.

Afterwards, the girl was the only one still standing in the alley. Her hands clenching and unclenching, she stood scowling over the other tributes, which were fallen and unconscious but not yet dead, and Haymitch knew the moment. He had never had a moment like it himself, he had been too desperate during his fights to have one, but he had seen it played out countless times both before and after.

Buffy was working herself up to killing them. She may not want to do it, but she was going to do it because she wanted to live.

Two rows ahead of him, tiny, terrified noises were escaping Annie Cresta, who had sunk her teeth into her arm, probably to keep herself mostly quiet. She had done that a lot during last year’s Games.

Only Johanna was laughing, her mirth raucous and more than slightly maniacal. She had every right. Johanna had used the exact same trick, although to less infuriating effect, a couple years ago during her Games. Haymitch didn’t begrudge Johanna, but he really wished –

Buffy squatted down next to the nearest Career, the big boy from District One, and relieved him of his knife. Gloss threw down his headset, and Haymitch reflexively braced himself because the first kill was the hardest, especially in situations like this one where a tribute had time to reflect on what she was doing. He needed Buffy to be able to do this, needed it because she was the closest he had come in twenty years to bringing a tribute home alive.

Somewhere in the distance, Claudius Templesmith was shrieking, “She’s pulled a Johanna Mason! She has pulled a Johanna Mason! We are looking at a complete upset in the Seventy-First Hunger Games! Half the Career pack going out on the first day! In the first hour! What a coup! District Twelve should be proud!”

Buffy collected the kids’ weapons – the knife, a short spear, and a short sword – and retreated to the mouth of the alley, from which she surveyed the melee going on at the cornucopia.

No one’s throat was slit.

Johanna Mason stopped laughing.

Haymitch suddenly realized that he was standing and promptly collapsed into his seat. He began to work at the task of prying his fingers free of the console. He needed a damn drink. If he was lucky, he would already be wrecked when the girl got herself killed.

“There’s something wrong with your girl,” Brutus eventually declared without looking away from his screen, and Haymitch grunted, because there was no getting around it. He scowled when Brutus added, “I think she might be soft in the head.”

“No shit,” Johanna Mason snapped loudly. She glared one more time at Haymitch’s girl on the main feed then returned to setting up at Annie Cresta’s console. Seven’s tributes had both been killed in the bloodbath, the girl killed by a bear mutt and the boy by One’s girl, and Annie Cresta, who was whimpering into her arm, needed help.

Haymitch glanced at his other tribute, the good one that had actually taken his advice and run away from the cornucopia rather than towards it, and found him alive and well and scrambling through the ruins. With any luck, this would be one of the years in which the game makers had hidden packs and supplies throughout the arena rather than concentrating them all in the cornucopia.

“What’s she doing?” demanded Enobaria, and Haymitch shifted his attention to his screens. Then he leaned forward, peering more closely at the stupider of his two tributes.

The girl had returned to the cornucopia.

Of course she had.

Buffy Summers was going to get herself killed.

When she stepped into the town square, the boys from Ten and Two turned on her. Buffy carefully cracked the nearest one in the side of the head with the blunt end of her spear, dropping him and his axe, and then had to parry a blow from the other boy.

His sword work was shameful. Buffy would definitely have been ashamed at hacking about like that.

In the brief amount of time it took her to take his sword away and crack him in the head with her spear, one of the other boys shot no less than three arrows in Buffy’s general direction, two of which she deflected and one she dropped her spear to snatch out of the air.

Then she got a tiny bit distracted blocking a blow aimed at beheading boy-Eleven. She kicked that kid in the chest, rolled out of the way of a fourth arrow, and popped up to punch the archer in the face. He fell backwards, hitting his head against the edge of the cornucopia. A quick flurry of blows sent two others, including the guy who had tried to behead boy-Eleven, to the ground.

A whistle of air was Buffy’s only warning to duck and twist out of the way. Buffy blocked a second, this time frontal, attack from girl-Two and her spear. Another block, sword rasping against sword as she came face to face with boy-Four, and Buffy congratulated herself on having found the last two Council-raised kids.

Girl-Two and boy-Four might have been interesting to fight individually, but they weren’t any good at fighting as a team. More often than not, they got in each other’s way. Their inability to get it together was almost like having a silent partner on her team, which was just frustrating. Buffy preferred to team up with other people, not to rely on her opponents’ incompetence.

In the middle of her fight with the Council kids, a flicker of movement caught Buffy’s eye and she threw her sword at boy-Eleven, forcing him away from unconscious boy-Two. With one, frightened glance in her direction, boy-Eleven grabbed the nearest backpack and supply bag then took himself and his scythe away from the cornucopia.

That left her unarmed, except for the arrow. Buffy dropped it, rather than give into the impulse to stab someone in the eye.

A certain amount of dodging and acrobatics later, Buffy came into possession of a second spear. The business end of it was kind of gory, having until recently been lodged in a not-bear’s head, but still functional. And it left an excellent smear in boy-Four’s hair when Buffy cracked him in the head with it.

Buffy hoped to anyone who might be listening that the not-bear’s blood wasn’t acidic or poisonous like so many things had been in Haymitch’s arena.

One on one, Buffy discovered that girl-Two was exceptional at close combat with spears. Without boy-Four to foul things up, Buffy really enjoyed fighting with her. But girl-Two was serious about trying to kill her so when Buffy spotted an opening, she snaked in and cracked the length of her spear against the side of girl-Two’s head.

Girl-Two girl collapsed in a heap, and Buffy turned to see who and what was left.

There were too many dead and dying tributes, some mauled and the rest murdered. Boy-Eleven and most of the others had run away in all the confusion and all of the more distant packs and survival gear had gone with them.

Buffy sighed.

She spared a glance for the fallen Council-kids, who were still unconscious but breathing, then she swapped the spear for a pair of butterfly swords. The spears might be the only wood in the arena, and Buffy needed them for stakes. Then she went to check on the other tributes, the ones downed by not-Buffys. She really, really hoped that they only looked dead.


 

“She robbed Panem of the story that we deserve!” railed Claudius Templesmith. “Can you even imagine what we would be saying right now if she had succeeded at the bloodbath? This set of Hunger Games would have been talked about for years – decades even – as the year when all the Career tributes died within the first hour of the Games!”

“It would have been amazing,” commiserated Caesar Flickerman. “I would have broken out that bottle of the bubbly – you all remember, I’m sure, that bottle I’ve been saving for a special occasion – although I probably would have been too excited to enjoy it properly.”

“All that potential! Wasted!” wailed Claudius.

Haymitch really wanted to stab the Hunger Games hosts. He was sick of hearing them moan about the girl. Yes, she had screwed up. Yes, it was likely to come back and kill her. And yes, she was going to haunt him after she died. He could feel it in his bones.

Robbed of any more slaughter at the cornucopia, Panem’s main feed was lingering in loving detail on Cecelia’s dying kid. His death throes were apparently more interesting than whatever most of the other tributes were doing; most, but not all, because Haymitch’s girl was in the feed.

After the bloodbath had ended with surprisingly little blood spilled, she hadn’t grabbed what she wanted and headed out into the ruins. Instead, she had stayed to check on the fallen tributes, wasted first aid supplies on what were obviously mortal wounds, and sat with them while they died. Of them all, only Eight’s boy was not quite dead yet.

His head in her lap and a couple of axes piled at her side, she listened intently to the boy’s incoherent pleas and rambling. The girl ignored the handful of tributes – the boy from Six, and the girls from Eight, Eleven, and Ten – that darted into the town square to grab gear and food. She only casually menaced anyone who got any violent ideas about her or the dying boy.

Nearer by, Cecelia made a pained sound.

“Idiot,” snarled Johanna. The parallels between herself and Buffy Summers were probably killing her. The similarity between this arena and his own Games certainly weren’t doing anything good for Haymitch. None of which was lost on Caesar Flickerman either. He seemed to find the parallels between this Game and theirs hilarious.

The main coverage shifted to Five’s boy, who had run into fish-men mutts on the beach and looked unlikely to survive the encounter, and Haymitch switched his attention to his and Effie’s smaller screens. He watched his district’s boy struggle through the ruins, unequipped for the arena and hopeless, and the girl’s vigil. Her expression remained soft and open, right up until the boy’s canons sounded. Then it hardened and set like that night in District Twelve’s suite. But still the girl did not leave. Instead she went to find a pickaxe and shovel among the cornucopia’s supplies and began digging.

“Haymitch,” hissed Effie. “Do you know what she’s doing?”

“No idea,” admitted Haymitch. He scowled.

After the fish-men mutts finished tearing Five’s boy apart, the main feed flicked back to Haymitch’s girl tribute. Caesar Flickerman and his guests were equally baffled by her actions. The broadcast quickly bored of the girl’s digging and resumed following other tributes.

Across the room, the mentors from One, Two, and Four also seemed to lose interest in the girl. Instead, they took advantage of their tributes’ unexpected down time to rearrange their individual stations into one, long table; Brutus, Mags, and Annie and Johanna on one side, with Enobaria, Gloss, and Cashmere sitting across from them.

Haymitch, however, was far from bored with his two – two! – living tributes. One was struggling and the other was unbalanced, but they were both very much alive. He watched them, enthralled, on their small screens while Three’s two tributes and Five’s girl formed an alliance on the main one.

It was with an ugly swoop in his stomach that Haymitch finally recognized what the girl was digging.

She was digging graves.

Haymitch spent about two minutes cursing her and another three trying to remember if he or Effie had ever told her what happened to the tributes’ bodies after they were killed in the arena. His memory failed him. Mostly he remembered the expressions on her face as she watched his Games and then later when she had come to find him. He could have asked Effie if she remembered, but Haymitch preferred to fill his mouth with mead and keep his own counsel. Whether they had or they hadn’t, the girl was set on wasting her energy digging graves. There was nothing they could do about it, a fact that he conveyed to Effie in an undertone when she finally cottoned on to what their stupid tribute up to.

“Surely there’s something you could send her –”

“And pay for it with what? She has no funds.”

Effie bit her lower lip, careful not to muss her lipstick. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

“No.”

While Three’s two tributes and Five’s girl psyched each other up to trying for supplies at the cornucopia, the girl finished digging five graves for the five dead tributes – far fewer than usual – and began dragging the bodies over to their respective graves using a blue tarp.

The main feed stuck with the Three-Five alliance as they crept back to the cornucopia, no doubt expecting the Career tributes to be holding it – that was a strategy that the career districts had worked out about thirty-five or so years back and stuck with ever since – only to discover Haymitch’s girl tribute trying to work out how to get the bodies into the graves without just rolling them into there.

She looked frustrated.

The engineers looked flummoxed.

Before the other mentors could say anything, Effie raised her chin and loudly said to Haymitch, “She’s just a very kind person.”

“Yeah,” agreed Haymitch. He took a swallow of mead. “Although as someone else pointed out, there might be something wrong with her.”

“That person is wrong,” Effie said firmly, oblivious to the look Brutus directed her way. “She’s just very – very good to worry so much about others. It’s something that I will make certain to convey to sponsors.”

On the main feed, the Three-Five alliance held a brief, whispered conference, which ended with a resolution to go ally with the wild girl in order to get access to the cornucopia and its supplies. It was a waste of effort, from what Haymitch had seen she would have given them what they wanted without the offer of an alliance, but they didn’t know that.

Yet.

Making an alliance with her, however, proved to be more challenging than either Haymitch or the Three-Five alliance had predicted. All of the tributes’ quick, friendly greetings – made loudly and from a distance – were met with blank looks. Finally, seemingly grudgingly, she said the sentence that Haymitch had come to loathe hearing.

“I don’t know it.”

To their credit, the engineers did not give up.

Neither did the girl, taking shameless advantage of the other three’s interest in her to get them to help her lower the five dead tributes into their assigned graves.

“Does this…” murmured Wiress to Beetee, who shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he replied to his partner. Raising his voice, Beetee called to Haymitch, “Does this count as an alliance?”

“Hell if I know,” Haymitch replied. He sipped his mead meditatively. “Let’s give it until sundown. If they bunk down together, then we’ll start moving stations around.”

Beetee inclined his head. “That sounds fair.”

The main feed switched between scenes of the tentative Three-Five-Twelve alliance filling graves, the other three tributes having given up on trying to explain to her that there was no need to bury the dead, and scenes of the Career pack, now awake and holding a council of war a few blocks away. Haymitch wished fiercely that the girl had plucked up the nerve to kill them when she had had the chance and been done with it.

Of course, it would have also been good if she had killed the three tributes that she was maybe in an alliance with and the four tributes that she had let raid the cornucopia for supplies. Then she would only have four other tributes left to find and kill, none of them trained Careers. Ideally, she could have wrapped up the Seventy-First Hunger Games before sundown on the first day. Instead, she was digging graves while the Careers that she had spared plotted against her.

Haymitch could almost hate her for that.

The Three-Five-Twelve alliance was still filling in the graves (and the Careers were trying to sneak in to attack the girl from behind) when Haymitch’s boy tribute came skulking about the edges of the square. Normally, it was a move that would have gotten him killed – even under the current circumstances it made Haymitch’s stomach twist – but when he was noticed, by his district-mate no less, the girl waved him forward with an empty hand and an encouraging smile.

That drew the Threes and the Five’s attention to him. They would have blocked him from the supplies but the girl blocked their way first. Still smiling at her district-mate, she said, “Take everything you want, Burdock.”

The boy didn’t need to be told twice. He got in, grabbed his food, gear, and a pickaxe and left before the other members of the alliance had finished trying to argue with the girl. Conveniently, she didn’t seem to understand anything that they were saying to her.

When she insisted on letting the two tributes from Nine take what they wanted from the supplies too, the Three-Five alliance had had enough. They took what they wanted and left. The girl watched them go, her expression sad. When they were gone, she turned shadows in which the Careers were skulking.

“Come here.”

The Careers froze.

“I see you!”

Still no response from the Career pack; they seemed to think that so long as they remained utterly still, the girl couldn’t possibly know that they were there.

Across the room, Brutus slapped himself in the forehead.

The girl flipped up a chunk of rubble with the toe of one boot and caught it in her hand. She flicked it at the Careers, hitting boy Two in the shoulder. “You are there. Come here now!”

“Charge!” shouted boy One, and the six Careers rushed at her head on.

The fist fight was painfully one-sided.

“All right,” Haymitch murmured. Effie’s grip on his arm was painful. So was his grip on the edge of his console. “Good job, sweetheart. Now go ahead and kill them.”

The girl was once again staring down at the prone and unconscious Careers.

“You can do it,” coaxed Haymitch, his voice low. He deliberately unclenched his hands and flexed his fingers. “Just be quick.”

She turned away from the Career tributes, leaving them alive again. The girl resumed filling graves.

Cursing, Haymitch slammed a fist down on his console. There came an answering thud from across the room.

“What is wrong with you?” demanded Johanna from across the room. She was on her feet, her fists on Annie’s console. “Stop fucking around and just do it already!”

“Hey, I thought you were allied with us,” noted Gloss sardonically.

“I’m here for Annie,” retorted Johanna over the anguished screams of Claudius Templesmith. She glared at Gloss fiercely. “Otherwise, I’m still a free agent.”

Good thing, too. If his tributes kept up their living streak, Haymitch was going to need someone to spell him as mentor, and so far Seven was the only District entirely out of the Games.

The main feed lingered on the girl longer this time, the Game makers apparently as surprised as anyone else by her disinterest in killing the Career pack. Under the eyes of all of Panem, the girl finished burying the dead and, after a bit of unsuccessful scrounging, seemed to resign herself to marking each grave with a largish chunk of rock at its head. Then she moved among the Career tributes, making a small stack of gear, packs, and food next to each of them. When she began dithering among the weapons, Johanna Mason flung down her headset and turned on Haymitch, her eyes blazing.

“What did you even tell her the Hunger Games were?” spat Johanna. She jabbed a finger at the big screen which the girl was carefully distributing weapons among the unconscious Careers. “She has no idea what she’s supposed to be doing!”

“She knows!” shrilled Effie, her frustration evident. “We told her! We showed her!”

They had, and she did. She just didn’t care.

Haymitch had the sudden, ridiculous urge to try to bargain with the girl, maybe scrape up some of his old charm, to get her to do what he wanted. Some corner of his mind began to pick at the problem of what sort of gift he could send her to get his point across.

Nothing came immediately to mind.

It was probably just as well. She didn’t have any money in her account anyway. Although money was a problem that, while not easily fixed, was something that he could affect. Then he would send her a gift – something cheap but meaningful – and get her to try to win.

And then he would bring home his first Victor.

He would finally have a neighbor.

But first, he had to find someone to watch over his tributes while he was out fundraising.

Not Effie, she wasn’t cunning or duplicitous enough and he was going to need her help besides, which meant asking Blight or Johanna as Seven was currently the only district that was entirely out of the running. Blight had disappeared immediately after his tribute died. He was probably stinking drunk by now, and Johanna was busy with Annie.

But Districts Five, Six, Eight, and Ten were all down to one tribute apiece. Ten and Six’s mentors made Haymitch look mostly sober, but Five and Eight were clever and trustworthy. With a little luck, he might soon be able to ask one of them to babysit his tributes while he was out, but until then…

“Effie, it’ll be nightfall in the arena in a couple of hours. Things will be winding down.” Unless the girl had given the Career pack night vision goggles, a worry that he was not going to share with Effie. “Go see if you can go figure out how all of the charities’ money ended up in the boy’s account. They were supposed to have been deposited to the shared district fund so that I could do what I wanted with them. And if you can, get the funds shifted to where they’re supposed to be.”

“Sure thing, Haymitch!” caroled Effie. She bounced to her feet. “You can count on me!”

The absolutely terrible thing was that she wasn’t wrong. If Effie was anything, she was reliable. He could rely on her to be vain, selfish, shallow and utterly insensible to others’ suffering. And –

“I’ll see you later, Haymitch!”

And if someone had to track down what had gone wrong with the money and find a way to fix it, Effie Trinket was the right person for the job. She was annoying reliable like that.

Effie left in an officious clatter of heels, and Haymitch scooted his chair so that he straddled the two tribute consoles, one leg under either desktop. He tilted the tributes’ screens so that a turn of his head was all that he needed to take in all of either tribute’s screens at a glance.

The boy was looking for someplace to hide for the night.

And the girl… the girl had cleared a space directly in front of the cornucopia. She was practicing with a sword, her movements smooth and practiced.

Haymitch glanced up at the big screen and sure enough, she was on it again. At the Career table, five out of six Career mentors looked like they had sucked a lemon. The sixth mentor was rocking and singing to herself, her eyes fixed on the main screen.

Things were quiet for awhile in the arena. The Careers were unconscious again, the girl was practicing her weapons – she had finished with swords, done a bit with spears, and moved on to axe throwing – and everyone else was looking for a place to bed down for the night. Since nothing more interesting was happening anywhere else in the arena, the main feed lingered on the girl’s weapons practice with the occasional, deliberately blurred cuts either to war mutts hunkered down in the shadows of the buildings or the something writhing in a cavern beneath the ruins. All that could be seen clearly of either were their glowing eyes.

“Why hasn’t she left the cornucopia yet?” demanded Enobaria, sounding thoroughly disgusted. Her revulsion was just as likely to be aimed at her own tribute as at Haymitch’s. “She isn’t going to try to hold the supplies, is she? There’s no point to her hanging around.”

“We should be grateful to her,” said Mags coolly. “A mutt or another tribute could have killed them all before any of them come around.”

“She should be so lucky,” snarled Cashmere from her console.

When the girl finally took a break from her weapons practice, it was to hack one of the spears into roughly eight inch chunks.

Enobaria just about lost it.

Hunkering down behind his consoles, Haymitch tried to ignore Enobaria or at least not draw her attention. He watched his tribute sharpen bits of wood, and tried to figure out why she was doing what she was doing.

Nothing came to mind, immediately or upon reflection.

Little hand spears were probably less useful than a full spear – at least, judging by Enobaria’s reaction, and none of the other Careers were arguing with her – but the girl thought that they were worth the effort of making. She had specifically stopped what she was doing to make them.

When the sun began to set and the shadows began to lengthen, the girl took a break from sharpening bits of wood to drag the careers and their gear closer to the cornucopia, eliciting more scorn from the Career mentors.

Then she began collecting her weapons. The wooden spears were left in the cornucopia but most of the tridents were jabbed into the dirt and left standing upright in front of the cornucopia. A pair of short swords that she had practiced with earlier went down her boots. Two sharpened bits of wood ended up tucked into the waistband of her pants at the small of her back. She strapped a longer sword across her back, pulled on a pair of night vision goggles, and lined up half a dozen axes next to the tridents, blades down and handles sticking out of the ground.

The handle of a very large axe held in one hand and one of her little hand spears gripped in the other, the girl waited patiently.

When the sun finished setting, the war mutts attacked.

Chapter Text

The scourge of the last rebellion, bloodsuckers were one of the few types of war mutt still used in the modern Hunger Games. They were nearly unstoppable, laughing off wounds that would have killed a tribute. And they were sadistic, often torturing and draining their victims to death across the course of days. Worst of all, no one, not even the Career districts, remembered how to kill them. The knowledge had been lost in the years since the Dark Days. Running into a bloodsucker was every tribute’s nightmare. Running into two or more was a death sentence.

When half a dozen bloodsuckers swaggered into the town square from the surrounding ruins, their faces distorted with ridges and their mouths filled with fangs, Haymitch despaired.

That stupid girl was going to die horribly. And she was going to make Haymitch watch her do it.

Signaling a nearby avox, Haymitch sent him to fetch a bottle of rotgut from Twelve’s suite, while on the big screen, the main feed cut away from the girl. Panem watched as other packs of bloodsuckers searched the ruins for the other tributes, and Haymitch switched his attention to his tributes’ live feeds.

The boy was hidden, sleeping, and as safe as he could be under the circumstances.

And the girl was… grinning, nearly as widely and toothily as the bloodsuckers. She watched and waited as they closed in on her, her little hand spear twisting through her fingers.

“What have you got, Haymitch?” demanded Seeder, her voice tight.

One bloodsucker got ahead of the pack, and Haymitch’s eyes shut without his permission. He pried them open in time to see the girl’s face thin and her arm swing back and then forward as she –

The image skipped twice and went fuzzy. It skipped again, and Haymitch glimpsed flames before the girl’s feed gave up and winked out, leaving only his own reflection framed by the monitor.

“Haymitch!” snapped Chaff.

“Nothing!” snarled Haymitch. He slapped the side of one of his monitors, changing nothing. “Her screens are black!”

“Merely technical difficulties, I’m sure,” murmured Beetee, although they all knew better.

Haymitch glanced up at the main screen, for once hoping to see his tribute’s last life and death battle on it, but the girl’s coverage had been preempted for images of the other tributes, safe and sleeping in their bolt holes.

The game makers did not want anyone to see her die.

Such a thing had never happened in Haymitch’s twenty-one years as a mentor.

Something was happening in that town square that required careful editing. Whatever she was doing, not even the Victors could see it, and the Victors were allowed to see and hear nearly everything that happened in the arena, including the passionate political speeches of doomed tributes.

His girl tribute had trouble stringing sentences together.

Haymitch glowered at the empty screens, his lungs aching, only breathing easily when he saw the girl again. She was grinning, bouncing, and clearly pleased with herself. And he could see no bloodsuckers. For a single shining moment, Haymitch dared to rejoice.

“Sorry about your tribute, Haymitch,” said Gloss, and for once he actually sounded regretful. Even Career packs ran from bloodsuckers.

“Don’t be,” Haymitch blurted, too overwhelmed to be cagey. “She’s alive!”

It’s the old techniques, Haymitch realized. She has them. And they don’t want us to learn them from her.

The scrape of chairs being shoved back as some of the others left their sleeping tributes nearly obscured the tinny sound of someone clapping in the arena. A half dozen other Victors peering over his shoulders, Haymitch watched as his idiot tribute turned in a slow circle, her expression intent as she searched for the source of the sound.

A bloodsucker stepped out of the shadows, grinning and clapping as if it were at a dinner show in the Capitol. With it came five other bloodusckers, ranged out behind it in a semicircle.

At the bloodsucker’s appearance, the girl didn’t look afraid. If anything, she looked disappointed. That was probably for the best.  Fear wouldn’t do her any good, and Haymitch was frightened enough for both of them.

When the lead bloodsucker pointed at the Career pack then at its pack, the girl shook her head. It pointed at the Careers and then at its pack again before drawing an imaginary X over her and miming pushing her to one side.

She would be excluded.

The girl would live.

And the Career pack would die.

Behind him, Gloss and Johanna hissed.

“Make the deal,” Haymitch ordered from between gritted teeth. He was holding onto the edge of his console so hard that his fingers hurt. “Say yes.”

The girl yanked a trident from her line of weapons and flung it at the mutt. A heartbeat later, the girl’s feed winked out again.

Johanna blistered the air with her curses.

“Technical difficulties,” repeated Gloss hoarsely from his place behind Haymitch, and Chaff squeezed Haymitch’s shoulder with his good hand.

The main feed flicked through the other tributes, most of which were sleeping or hiding, before settling on the Career pack. They had woken up at some point during the fighting and, without having to discuss it, were quietly taking what they wanted and sneaking away.

Haymitch didn’t blame the Careers, but he sincerely hoped that the bloodsuckers ate them. The girl had already shown them mercy twice, which was two times more than the Careers were going to show mercy to anyone else. And it would make everything a lot simpler for both of his tributes.

Sadly, it was not to be. The Career pack escaped, and his tribute was… still moving. The camera angles on the main feed, although strange, had been carefully chosen to avoid most of the life and death battle occurring on the other side of the square, but there was a gut churning amount of screaming going on in the cameras’ carefully constructed blind spot.

“Cashmere?” asked Gloss, raising his voice to be heard across the room. “Any better angles on Twelve’s girl over there?”

“We’ve got nothing. Brutus? Enobaria?”

The mentors out of Two shook their heads, and so did Mags, after checking both her and Annie’s screens.

Haymitch knew what was expected of him. Dully he said, “They must have damaged the cameras earlier, maybe during the bloodbath at the cornucopia.”

He didn’t believe it, but it was the appearance of the thing that mattered. But as long as the girl’s feed remained unreliable, she was probably still alive.

As the others began to move away from his station and return to their own, Johanna flopped down next to Haymitch, laying claim to Effie’s seat and his bottle of white liquor. Rarely subtle was Johanna.

Haymitch settled in to wait. One way or another, he’d see that girl again.

Johanna drank most of his white liquor and told Haymitch that she was doing him a favor. Since she probably needed it more than he did, Haymitch let her do as she pleased. What had happened to Seven’s tributes hadn’t been subtle. And neither were the parallels between the girl next to him and the one in the arena.

Haymitch barely dared to hope that she was still alive.

He stuck to coffee and mead in nearly equal quantities, because drinking the white probably fell under the category of keeping less of a handle on things than he should.

“You aren’t a complete waste,” Johanna told a monitor’s blackened screen, and, uncertain if she was talking to the girl in the arena or her own reflection, Haymitch wrestled the bottle away from her. He didn’t have time to clean up or care for a morose drunk.

By then, the other districts were deciding among themselves who would stay and who dared to try to catch a few hours’ shuteye. Haymitch took the opportunity to pawn Johanna off on Seeder when she passed them on her way to the sleeping cubicles in the next room. Then it was just him, the sleeping boy, and the girl that he couldn’t even watch over.

Haymitch probably did a bit more drinking and brooding than was good for him. But he was still alert enough to notice when the girl’s feed fixed itself shortly after dawn.

At his first glimpse of her, filthy and with blood liberally splashed across her face, the nearly unbearable tightness in his chest finally began to ease. Haymitch watched the girl pick through the cornucopia’s remaining gear and weapons, finally choosing equipment for herself. When she left the main square, it was with two boxes of matches, food, water, a tent, and a variety of weapons, as well as a rope, first aid equipment, and none of the water purification equipment.

And she took a shovel.

Of course, she took a shovel.

Haymitch had strong feelings about that choice, which he shared at length as she hiked out of the town square, a bulging yellow pack on her back. It was a pity that she couldn’t hear him.

Around breakfast time, someone in the game makers’ control room must have decided that the girl was finally far enough from the town square, because a hovercraft descended to rip up and retrieve the bodies that his silly tribute had buried.

Haymitch held his breath, only letting it out when the hovercraft escaped the arena unmolested by his girl tribute. He wasn’t sure what she would have done had she noticed – or maybe hadn’t discounted – the hovercraft’s appearance, but he was happy not to find out. Either way, the girl was scrambling through the ruins, hopefully looking for a place to sleep the morning away.

Around the time that the girl was ending her day, the boy was starting his. Where the girl had run down blind alleys and confidently strode down the center of streets, the boy went slowly, keeping to the shadows as best he could. He crouched down to peek around every corner before he turned it and scurried between bits of cover. It was a good strategy for him, but it was exhausting to watch.

“He looks squirrelly,” declared a cracked voice from nearby, and Haymitch reflexively quashed a shudder. He hated squirrels, and had ever since his games. Turning, Haymitch glared at the speaker.

Johanna Mason, pale and more miserable looking than usual, plopped down in the seat next to Haymitch. She was wearing dark glasses, yesterday’s clothes, and a nasty expression.

Movement across the room drew Haymitch’s attention, and he watched as Seafoam claimed Annie’s seat. Haymitch had yet to see Annie Cresta that morning.

“Go to bed,” ordered Johanna, drawing Haymitch’s attention back to herself. “You look like shit.”

“You hate my tributes.” Well, probably just the girl, but…

“Just the girl,” said Johanna, echoing his thoughts. “But I enjoy a thorough ‘fuck you very much’ more than anyone, so we’re good. Go to bed, Haymitch.”

“Don’t scare off Effie,” Haymitch said as he stood. Hers was probably the only offer of relief that he was going to get. “She’s tracking down some misplaced money for me.”

Johanna grunted.

Haymitch fled the monitoring room before Johanna could change her mind.

It was late afternoon when Buffy woke feeling hungry and ready for a shower. But, since there were no showers or clean clothes to be had under the Demon Dome, she settled for finding a safe place to pee without being filmed. It was even trickier than she had suspected that it might be.

After that was done, Buffy took a stab at cleaning herself up as best she could under the circumstances, gave up, and went to pack up her gear. She was only slightly better at that than at putting up her tent, so it took awhile. While she worked, she tried to ignore the warnings thrilling up and down her neck.

She knew that she was surrounded by demons, that seemed to be part and parcel of the whole Demon Dome experience, but her spidey senses insisted on telling her about it every minute of every day. It was distracting. And it wasn’t particularly helpful, not like back on the Hellmouth.

Buffy was chomping her way through some freeze dried pears, when someone started screaming. That was her cue; once a Slayer, always a Slayer, and all of that. Stuffing the rest of her pear in her mouth, Buffy grabbed her pack and took off running towards the cries.

What she found was a feeding frenzy.

As far as she could tell, someone had wandered into a vamp nest on the edge of town and been torn to pieces before the vampires turned on each other. Back in Sunnydale, dying in a feeding frenzy was one of the worst ways that she had ever seen anyone go. Here, it was another of these stupid kids dead before she could find a way to help them.

There’s only one thing I can do for them now, Buffy thought, her stomach churning unpleasantly.

Long bows had been Faith’s thing – crossbows had always been more Buffy’s style – but she knew how to use one. And she had taken one from the horn, mostly because the shafts of its arrows were wooden.

No one in the warehouse below noticed when Buffy snapped the metal tips off of her arrows.

She had dusted three of the vamps before the remaining four thought to look up.

By then, it was far, far too late. Buffy put an arrow through each of their eyes before any of them made it three steps. Then she went down to gather up and bury what was left of the other tribute.

“Ten and Eight are out,” reported Johanna as soon as she laid eyes on Haymitch. She looked better than she had that morning, which wasn’t saying much. She still looked like something that Haymitch had scraped off the bottom of his shoe. “The Career pack killed Ten’s girl, and a pack of bloodsuckers tore Eight’s girl to pieces. Your brain dead tribute ran towards the screaming, not away.”

Haymitch sighed. “Is she hurt?”

“I don’t think so, but I didn’t get to see any of the actual fighting.” Johanna said, scowling. Almost as an afterthought, Johanna added, “Your other tribute’s annoyingly twitchy, isn’t he?”

“It’s keeping him alive,” said Haymitch mildly. “Where are they now?”

“They’re both in the town. He’s hiding, and she’s burying Eight.”

It wasn’t unexpected, but Haymitch had hoped the girl would get over that whole burying the dead bit.

Effie, who was sitting in what had started out as Haymitch’s seat, helpfully added, “Did you know that there isn’t a single shot of the hovercrafts taking away a body in your victory reel? I know! It sounds impossible, but I went back and checked. Even the game makers were astonished when I told them.”

“You told the game makers,” said Haymitch flatly.

“They asked at the escorts’ meeting,” sniffed Effie. “Don’t look at me like that, Haymitch! I had to tell them! I didn’t want them to think that Buffy was deliberately being…” Effie dropped her voice, “…difficult. It would have hurt her chances.”

That would have been bad, especially since the girl was deliberately being difficult. And she knew things that the Capitol would rather keep secret from the districts. Either would have marked her as one of the ones that definitely wasn’t coming back, but both together…

“Hate for that to happen,” chirped Johanna. “What with the cutthroat way that she’s playing the game and all.”

“What about the money?” demanded Haymitch, before Effie could even try to respond to Johanna. “Did you get that sorted out?”

Effie’s smile crumbled. “It wasn’t misdirected. The charities meant to send all their money to Burdock rather than the joint account.”

Haymitch cursed.

“Don’t worry!” Effie rushed to add. “I’ve been cold calling potential donors for Buffy. In fact, I’ve got my first meeting in forty-five minutes. I only stuck around to tell you that I’ve booked Cinna and Portia to dress you for the top twelve parties.”

“There are still sixteen living tributes in that arena, Effie. And even if there weren’t, I couldn’t go. I’ve got two tributes to babysit!”

“You always have a reason that you can’t go! But this year it’s important that you see people and are seen by them! Finnick, Cashmere, and Gloss always pull in about forty to sixty percent of their districts’ games budgets at the parties.”

“I’m not Finnick!”

“I’ll be happy if we get anything,” Effie retorted waspishly, “but we have to try. It’s only fair to Buffy and Burdock.”

“Look on the bright side, Haymitch,” inserted Johanna. “By the time we get down to the top twelve, your tributes will probably already be dead.”

Haymitch glared at her. More surprisingly, so did Effie.

Grinning, Johanna stood and stretched. “And on that note, I’m off.”

Effie waited until Johanna was gone to say stiffly, “I should go too. I don’t want to be late.”

Haymitch nodded. Then, because Effie seemed off her game, added, “Good luck.”

Effie brightened and nodded. “I’ll check in with you later, Haymitch!”

Alone, Haymitch ordered dinner and settled in to watch the miracle that was his two living, breathing tributes. The boy was already settling in for the evening. He was well hidden, and Haymitch dared to think that he would probably survive the night. The girl finished burying the dead tribute from District Eight then went mutt hunting. Sometimes they let Haymitch and the rest of Panem watch, other times they didn’t, but from what he could see, it was a bloodbath. The girl only stopped actively hunting down and brutally murdering the arena’s hazards to watch the nightly tribute to the fallen. Rather than looking relieved to have outlived two more of her competitors, as most tributes did, she looked angry.

Haymitch sighed.

After the tribute to the fallen, half of the remaining mentors disappeared into the room with the sleeping cubicles, and things began to quiet down in the mentors’ lounge. The quiet was only broken by the occasional murmur or the ping of someone’s console.

Funds trickled into the boy’s account at a steady pace, none of them very large and all of them flagged just the way that Haymitch liked, but nothing came for the girl, who was inarguably the more viable of his two candidates. And she was Effie’s favorite. Effie would have been pushing hard for her, and maybe mentioning the boy in passing. Of the two of them, the girl should have had more money.

Haymitch frowned.

In the arena, the girl left the ruined town to go hunt in the desert.

Around midnight, while the boy slept and the girl was busy killing every mutt that she laid eyes on, Gloss said, “So what do you do to people out in Twelve?”

Surprised, Haymitch glanced up at the big screen and discovered that yes, the girl had made it back onto the main feed. As he watched, she gleefully beheaded a scabby looking lizard mutt.

“What do you mean?” Haymitch inquired without looking away from the girl, who seemed to be systematically working her way through a small pack of the things.

“That girl is a Career through and through. She’s a highly trained killer, and your district broke her.” Gloss sounded disgusted. “What did it take to soften her up?”

Haymitch elected not to answer. The other nine mentors in the room studiously ignored them both.

“Twelve finally gets lucky and pulls a tribute that could actually win, but she refuses to even try. Of course, having been to Twelve, I can understand why she might want to escape your district the only way that she can.”

“Gloss,” Haymitch said, low and hard. He finally looked away from the girl. “Shut up.”

For answer, Gloss grinned at him, quick, insouciant, and utterly unrepentant.

“I was just saying. It’s pure Twelve. You’re all hopeless.”

“Stop saying. Don’t talk to me, Gloss.”

“You’re so touchy lately, Haymitch. Feeling hopeful this time?”

“And you, Gloss, are you feeling hopeful regarding Hue’s chances?” interrupted Beetee.

“I’m feeling more hopeful than I was this morning.”

“Yeah, well, you know what they say,” retorted Haymitch with the quick, savage smile that he had perfected at fifteen. “Third time’s the charm.”

“Haymitch!”

“It’s all fine, Volts,” said Gloss coolly. “He’s got a couple of tributes that don’t have what it takes to survive. I’d be pretty frustrated by that too.”

Haymitch snorted.

“Your boy hasn’t killed anyone either. He’s been relying on the pack to get by. At least mine could if she wanted to.”

“But she doesn’t want to.”

“She might change her mind. Your kid is what he is, and it’s too late to change him.”

And she was going to change her mind. Haymitch was going to change it for her. He just needed money… and some idea of what to send her.

He was still brooding on the girl and what he could do with or for her when Cecelia and Woof appeared at his elbow. In tow, they had Blight, stinking drunk and surly. Cecelia’s hand firmly gripped his elbow. Cecelia and Woof didn’t look much better. Woof looked every one of his years and a dozen besides, and Cecelia looked downright haggard, her eyes red-rimmed and ghastly.

Haymitch was surprised that they were doing so well.

“Have you eaten recently?” inquired Woof, the words directed to Haymitch.

“No.”

“Good,” said Cecelia. “We’ve arranged a breakfast, and Blight has offered to watch your tributes for awhile.”

Haymitch shook his head. “No way. I want them both to still be alive when I get back.”

“And what could you possibly do for either of them from here?” asked Woof gently.

Haymitch glowered at him, hating Woof because he was right. If the boy was discovered by either the Careers or the mutts, it would be over too quickly for Haymitch to help him, and there was no money to send the girl anything. They both needed him to get out there, fundraise, manipulate the situation to their advantage, and grease the wheels in whatever way he could… even if that meant leaving them in the care of some other slobbering drunk.

Not that the boy was giving him much to work with.

And the girl… she was a pain in the ass, but she was the sort of pain in the ass that might appeal to the outer districts, provided that they weren’t still smarting over her interview.

She strings together one complete sentence, thought Haymitch, disgusted, and it’s that. And the way she said it…

She still didn’t deserve Blight. And neither did the boy.

“What about Johanna?”

“We couldn’t find her,” said Cecelia impatiently.

It figured.

Haymitch locked down his tributes’ consoles, lest Blight accidentally or intentionally make things worse for either of them, before surrendering his place to Blight, who collapsed into his seat like Cecelia’s hand on his elbow had been the only thing holding him up. It very well might have been. Cecelia was stronger than she looked. Then it was Haymitch’s turn to be escorted out of a room by Eight’s Victors, Cecelia’s iron grip on his elbow.

They led him downstairs to one of the private conference room where a relatively simple meal had already been laid out on the conference table. Haymitch made a beeline for the booze cart, his hand automatically going for his favorite…

…and settling on a bottle of carbonated water instead.

When he turned back to the table, Woof was fiddling with the television on the wall, turning it to Twelve’s channel, while Cecelia helped everyone’s plates. Since Cecelia and Woof seemed to have claimed one side of the table, Haymitch took a seat on its other side, accepting a glass of orange juice to go with his bubbly water.

“Our district is grateful to your Buffy,” said Cecelia, finally getting down to business after everyone was settled and had eaten a few bites. “We want to send her a gift. Perhaps a loaf of our district’s bread?”

“She wouldn’t understand the message. The girl barely understands half of what’s going on at any given moment,” said Haymitch, because it was true, and at the same time, it wasn’t. “She spent a week calling me Victor, because she thought it was my name. She’s still not entirely convinced that I’m really called Haymitch.”

Woof grinned, and Cecelia snorted.

“So we’ve heard,” said Cecelia, a smile lingering around her full mouth. “But she’s a kind girl and – and our district really appreciates what she did for our tributes.” Her voice broke on the last words, and Cecelia blinked hard. Haymitch politely pretended not to notice how wet her eyes were. Sniffing, she added, “Even if she’s really a Career.”

“She needs money more than she needs bread,” Haymitch said bluntly. Whatever they might throw the girl’s way wouldn’t be much in the grand scheme of things, but it would give him options. Assuming that he could figure out what they were… “She’s got food and water, and if she runs out, she can go take what she needs from the Career pack.”

“Buffy’s lack of funding surprises me. She’s such a sweet, old-fashioned girl,” said Woof ponderously, and Haymitch reflexively narrowed his eyes. There was something in that, a meaning that he didn’t understand. “We can’t be the only people to appreciate it.”

“Donors seem to appreciate the boy more.” Except nearly all of his money was transferrable to the girl in the event of his death…

“Well, we appreciate her,” Cecelia said firmly. “What does she need?”

“Hell if I know,” Haymitch admitted, running a hand through his hair. He sat back in his seat. “I’ve never mentored a Career before. Maybe medicine? If she got cut or burned, there wouldn’t be anything I could do for her.”

“Everything we have isn’t enough to buy a single pot of salve.”

“Maybe not by itself, but with her other prospects…” Haymitch artfully let the sentence trail off there.

When he smiled, sharp and unpleasant, the other two returned it.

“We’ll discuss it with our district,” promised Cecelia. “If it approves, we’ll make the funds transfer. And if not…well, I would have killed for warm bread in my arena.”

“Food is never a bad gift,” Haymitch agreed, because it was true even if it wasn’t crucial to this particular tribute’s continued survival. Careers.

On his way back to the mentors’ lounge, Haymitch detoured to the training complex. Ten’s mentors were where he had thought that they would be: holed up on their district’s floor and shitfaced drunk.

It was considered bad form to take advantage of another mentor’s advanced stage of slobbering drunkenness to divest their district of whatever funds they had managed to scrape together for that year’s dead tributes, but it happened, particularly when none of the other mentors with still living tributes were around to protest. It had certainly happened to him in past years. Desperate people did desperate things.

And Haymitch was as desperate as anyone else.

So he helped his friends out of District Ten to transfer whatever monies they had directly into District Twelve’s general fund. Then, because he wasn’t entirely heartless, Haymitch helped them both to bed and helped himself to a bottle of Ten’s particular brand of rotgut when he left; less to tempt them when they next woke.

When he returned to the mentors’ control room, Haymitch discovered Johanna Mason sitting at Twelve’s consol. His chair was missing, and there were the strong, lingering scents of stomach acid and disinfectant in the area.

“What’s the big idea?” she demanded, gesturing at the blank screens in front of her.

“I left Blight in charge.”

“Yeah, well he fucked off across the hall to bed and left me in charge. Log me in.”

Haymitch did as she asked, relieved to see that neither of his tributes had gotten into serious trouble while he was away. The boy was creeping through the town’s ruins, while the girl was trying to set up camp out in the desert and failing in new and annoying ways. If she managed to survive the arena, he was going to teach her how to pitch a tent.

Exhausted, Haymitch went to bed.

Buffy had played a lot of deserted island games over the years. She had lists of ten movies that she would bring with her, ten books, ten weapons, ten pieces of equipment, and so on. The only list that she had never made was of the ten people that she would take with her. Yeah, it defeated the purpose of the whole deserted island bit but after three days alone under the Demon Dome, Buffy would have traded all of her tens for one other person. She was so lonely that she no longer even cared who.

Of course, she was never really alone. There was a multitude of cameras all over the Demon Dome, watching, watching, always watching her, and so many demons that her spidey senses made it hard to sleep, although given her current circumstances it was probably a good thing. It gave her the heebie jeebies.

And it made bathroom trips completely nerve wracking. Buffy always tried to find a quiet blind spot before doing her business – one without cameras, demons, mutants, or vicious teenagers – but she wasn’t perfect. She missed things sometimes. (Buffy tried her best not to miss things when it came to bathroom breaks.)

But cameras and demons aside, Buffy was for all intents and purposes alone, and she hated it. No man was an island and all of that, but, all things considered, making new friends under the circumstances seemed unlikely. They all had blood in their eyes, and she couldn’t even talk to them. The fluency that she had possessed while speaking with Cinna had left just as quickly as it had appeared. It had probably never been hers to begin with, all of it the coincidences and persuasion that balance demons often used to their advantage.

As far as Buffy could tell, her only advantages were herself, Haymitch, and Effie, and Buffy wasn’t so sure about Haymitch and Effie. Haymitch, who was supposed to spring into action at a moment’s notice and send her a silver parachute attached to something that she needed, seemed like the sort to get worked up, drink too much, and pass out just when she needed him most. Buffy didn’t even know what Effie was supposed to do for her. There hadn’t been a lot of examples of it in Haymitch’s highlights reel. But being on Team Buffy meant they were probably watching her, didn’t it?

And they, unlike everyone else, could not change the channel when she was boring, not if they were even pretending that they might be on top of that silver parachute business.

They couldn’t escape her.

The only question was whether to talk to Effie or to Haymitch.

Effie could be kind and Buffy was certain that she would be attentive if Buffy spoke at her, but Buffy had a feeling that talking to Effie, really talking to her about something other than makeup or clothes, would go about the same way that talking to Buffy about the intricacies of nuclear physics would go.

Haymitch was a dirty, angry drunk with violent tendencies and an incurable ass besides. Buffy was nearly certain that he would ignore her, but that could be kind of comforting. Giles had ignored a lot of the things that she had said to him too. Buffy wouldn’t have confided in Giles nearly as much as she had if she had thought that he actually listened to a word that she was said.

So, Haymitch it was.

That decided Buffy cast about for a conversational topic. Talking about how grody she felt was probably not a good way to start. Complaining about the Capitol and District Twelve’s hair, makeup, and fashion choices would have been comforting and familiar, but it would probably have hurt a lot of people’s feelings. It might even make waves that she didn’t want or need just yet. People often got touchy when you told them that they couldn’t dress themselves.

Well, she was walking on a beach; a gross, polluted beach with nasty, black water and trash everywhere. And there was probably something wrong with the sand too. That could be a place to start.

Having grown up in Los Angeles, Buffy had a lot of beach and boating stories to share. There had been a decent beach near Sunnydale too, although Buffy hadn’t been able to get Xander or Willow anywhere near it until Faith and Oz had come along.

Only Kendra had loved going to the beach as much as Buffy had. They had gone a couple of times, just the two of them; a couple of sister Slayers having fun in the sun. It had been Kendra who had taught Buffy how to use tridents and spears to fish. (Buffy had reciprocated by eventually getting her killed.)

Looking around, Buffy found the nearest camera, and, moving to stand near it, she positioned herself so that it would be level with her face. Hoping, that the right person was paying attention, she smiled into it and tried to look friendly.

“Hey, Haymitch?” Buffy said. Not even bothering to try to speak the local dialect of English, she continued, saying, “Have you ever been to a real beach? I have. Back home, I went a lot. I haven’t gone much lately, but I still love it! Well, I don’t love this beach. But warm, sandy beaches in general make me happy, especially when…”

“I hate your tributes,” Johanna said immediately upon setting eyes on him, “especially the feather-brained one, who, by the way, has been talking to you for about an hour. It’s the most boring thing that has ever happened to me.”

Surprised, Haymitch automatically glanced at the main feed only to see Nine’s two tributes locked in a life and death struggle with a snake mutt in the desert.

“What about?” he asked as he closed the short distance between them.

“Fuck if I know. She just stopped walking, plopped herself in front of the nearest camera, and started talking. At least she’s started walking again.”

Haymitch took the seat next to Johanna and found that yes the girl was talking directly to him as she picked her way across the beach, keeping up a steady monologue and occasionally glancing into the nearest camera. She looked almost… happy.

Haymitch honestly didn’t know what to think of it – nothing like it had ever happened to him before – but he hoped that she wasn’t trying to tell him anything terribly important, because he didn’t understand a word that she was saying, which, honestly, was probably how the girl felt most of the time.

And look how that’s turned out for her, thought Haymitch, scowling.

His girl talked at him for at least another hour before the Career pack interrupted, and she finally had to drop the conversation to glower at them meaningfully.

The Careers chose not to engage with her. They went their way, and she went hers.

The girl resumed her slow trek up the fish mutt infested beach and one-sided conversation with Haymitch. He was watching when she found the boy from Five’s gear. Rather than taking it as a hint, she began looking for the dead tribute.

Haymitch wished her luck with that.

A couple of hours later, the Capitol began providing translations.

The girl was reminiscing about home; specifically, about fishing and old friends and bonfire parties on the beach. It gave Haymitch an odd feeling in his chest, one that he couldn’t identify, that at a time when most tributes were trying to hide who they truly were even from themselves she was reaching out to share her life with him.

“I really hate her,” Johanna said to no one in particular, and across the room Seafoam nodded.

Day three, Haymitch learned during the nightly recap, had been a series of near misses that had kept Capitol audiences on edge.

Shortly after dawn, a pack of bloodsuckers had nearly stumbled over the sleeping members of the Three-Five alliance. Later in the morning, Eleven’s girl had nearly run into the Career pack. At the last moment, she had careened down a side alley and up a metal ladder, disturbing a nest of rat mutts that had turned on the pursuing Career pack, whose members had abruptly found themselves fighting for their lives. At lunch, Eleven’s boy had nearly walked into a bloodsuckers’ nest.

In the early afternoon, the Career pack had nearly attacked his girl’s lopsided tent. Only a late minute bout of paranoia had stopped them. They had apparently mistaken shoddy workmanship for a trap. Six’s boy nearly fell off of the small cliff that overlooked the black waters. Nine’s pair had nearly been killed by a snake mutt.

In the early evening, shortly after he had gone to ground for the night, Haymitch’s boy had nearly been found by the Careers. A pack of bloodsuckers nearly got away from the girl, but didn’t quite make it.

And at the beginning of day four, Haymitch nearly had heart failure when he looked up from watching his girl bed down at the very edge of town in a bloodsuckers’ nest – one that she had personally emptied not ten minutes earlier – to discover Seafoam standing at his elbow; with her was old Mags. Seafoam was glaring balefully at the girl.

“What?” Haymitch demanded suspiciously. The Career districts were never particularly friendly with anyone except each other until all six of their respective districts’ tributes were out of the running. It didn’t happen often.

“Buffy,” said Seafoam simply. “We wanted to see her.”

“Why?” inquired Haymitch, watching them narrowly.

“Because we were curious,” snapped Mags. “Were you always so suspicious?”

“Since the day I was born,” Haymitch deadpanned, and Mags grinned.

“The morning recap is starting,” said Seafoam. “Look, they managed to get Finnick and Annie.”

Looking in the same direction that she was, Haymitch saw that she was right. The coverage on the main feed had shifted from the arena to a studio somewhere where Claudius Templesmith sat at the straight side of a white table shaped like a semicircle with his panel of experts ranged around its curved side.

“Let’s take a look at who our surviving tributes are and what they’re doing this morning,” said Claudius, briefly looking directly into the camera before his image was replaced by a montage of the sixteen living tributes. In a voice over their names, major accomplishments to date in the arena, and shifting odds were given. The recaps for Haymitch’s tributes weren’t particularly flattering, not that he had expected them to be.

When the focus returned to him, Claudius said, “So far, these have been the most frustrating Hunger Games in over a decade. What do you attribute that to?”

“It’s the lack of desperation, I think,” said the nearest expert promptly. Plump and blue, she had white rhinestones embedded across her torso and scattered along the length of her arms.

She wasn’t the first person that Haymitch had heard say it. Claudius Templesmith and Caesar Flickerman had said as much every night in their nightly recaps of the Games, and every halfwit had been parroting the same sentiment ever since.

Haymitch hated it.

“But you don’t blame the game makers for that,” interjected another panelist, this one with twisting horns.

“No, no, of course not,” said the first woman hurriedly. “I blame Twelve. Their wild girl just doesn’t know how the Games are played! She gave food and weapons and gear to everyone. It’s like the tributes don’t even have to try this year!”

Haymitch snorted.

Oh, they were all trying this year the same as every other. They all wanted to stay alive, even that one particularly dumb one that he had gotten stuck with.

“Don’t be so hard on her,” gently chided Finnick. He favored everyone with a boyish grin. “I can’t speak for anyone else in District Four, but personally I like the wild girl.”

From a few seats over, Titus, who was another Victor out of District Four, grinned brightly. When he grinned, it pulled at his scars, which were too deep even for the Capitol to erase.

“Me too,” said Titus, startling Haymitch. “Don’t get me wrong, I want one of District Four’s tributes to win, but anyone who likes to swim in the ocean and party on the beach is fine by me.”

So long as their district still had a tribute in the running, no Career Victor ever had anything nice to say about any of the other tributes. And yet, there were two of them saying that they liked the girl.

It’s the swimming and the beach stories, realized Haymitch. They think she’s a long lost Four who had the bad luck to wander into the wrong district.

Haymitch wondered if she was doing it on purpose. If she was –

“Look at her,” sneered Hove, a Victor out of Five. “She’s practically one of you already.”

“She’s definitely got the knowhow and a ton of style,” said Lyme warmly, apparently deciding to take that as a compliment rather than a cut. Haymitch was surprised that they’d bothered to fetch her out of Two. Lyme was the winning-est mentor any of the Career districts had ever produced, but she had gotten more and more difficult with every passing year. “She’s just a little old-fashioned in how she’s going about playing her games. Which is understandable, if you remember that whatever academy she graduated from doesn’t have seventy years of Games history behind it like ours do; she’s making it all up as she goes along.”

Old-fashioned, noted Haymitch, surprised. That’s the second time that someone’s called her that.

He was really going to have to look into it.

And maybe try to see Lyme about a personal donation. Mentors, escorts, game makers, and their families couldn’t bet on or donate to tributes, but Victors otherwise unattached to the Games could certainly make personal donations. Most didn’t, not unless they had a personal stake in the tribute. Then they would be out there campaigning, raising funds, and pulling strings with the best of them.

“She’s a drag,” snapped Shimmer, a Victor out of One. A moment later, the video feed shifted to her overly made-up face. “She’s managed to single-handedly throw off the whole rhythm of the Games.”

“Last year, they spiced things up when the Games started to drag,” said someone else. His subtitle proclaimed him to be an expert on games theory from the Capitol. His tentacle implants proclaimed him to be an idiot. “The dam wasn’t subtle, but it sure was surprising. It was a lot more fun than watching the tributes scrabble between caves every night. I think that they’re going to have to do something like that again this year to reintroduce that lovely element of desperation.”

Haymitch had private theories as to why the game makers had chosen to blow the dam rather than use a landslide, none of which he would ever breathe a word of to anyone. Finnick was shaping up to be a good man, better than most of the rest of them, and there was no guarantee that Haymitch’s tribute that year would have survived a landslide any better than a flood.

“But not another flood!” chirped the blue woman.

“No, definitely not another flood!” tittered Claudius Templesmith. “That really would be boring!”

Haymitch quickly glanced at his tributes, waiting for disaster to strike them down. In the background, he heard Claudius say, “What about you, Annie Cresta? Do you like the wild girl? Can she claim a clean sweep among Four’s Victors?”

“I made her token.”

Surprised, Haymitch’s glanced up. He caught a glimpse of Annie’s solemn expression before Finnick leaned into the frame, his arm going around Annie’s shoulders, and the focus shifted to him.

“We were lucky enough to meet Buffy before her Games started,” said Finnick, grinning like the cat that got the canary. “She doesn’t say much, but she’s a lot of fun.”

Haymitch sat back in his seat.

When did they – Cinna. They got Cinna to give it to her just before she went into the arena. But why? And what was it?

“A token?” inquired Claudius Templesmith. “What was it?”

“A bracelet,” replied Finnick. “Friends wear them in our district.”

“Ah,” said Claudius Templesmith, looking disappointed. Caesar Flickerman would have made something of it, used it to make some point about the girls or an insinuation about Finnick’s interest in them. Claudius merely turned his attention to taking guesses as to what the game makers were going to do.

It didn’t seem like much to Haymitch, but Effie was seething when she came in later that morning.

“I thought you would like them endorsing the girl.”

“I’m sure that they brought in sponsors, but what sort?” cried Effie, her voice rising. “How could he smile like that and insinuate – insinuate – Every ounce of trouble that he saved Annie Cresta is more trouble for Buffy Summers. I really don’t know what Finnick Odair thought he was doing!”

“Probably exactly that,” Haymitch replied wryly. “But you don’t have to worry. There haven’t been many calls for her.”

That brought Effie up short. “There haven’t?” she asked weakly.

There were all kinds of donors in the Capitol, and an interview in which Finnick Odair called a tribute fun and smiled the way that he had should have brought a certain, unpalatable segment of the Capitol’s citizenry out in force. That it hadn’t was as good as a memo from the game makers. This one wasn’t meant to survive.

Haymitch shook his head. “There were only a few. They were easily gotten rid of.”

“Haymitch! She needs every credit that she can get!”

“She doesn’t need those,” said Haymitch shortly. And he wasn’t that sort of mentor. Against Effie’s obvious ire, he added, “She wouldn’t want their donations anyway.”

“You don’t know that! The Career districts –”

“She’s not a Career! She’s from Twelve! And we don’t run our games that way!”

That brought Effie up short. “I don’t understand you,” she said stiffly. “But I really hope that you don’t someday have cause to regret it, Haymitch.”

So did he; rather than drinking on it, Haymitch said, “I’m waiting for a gift from Eight. How’d you do?”

Effie visibly deflated. She slumped down in the seat next to him. Looking down at her hands, which were neatly folded in her lap, she said, “I’m sure that you’ve seen. I talked about her until I was hoarse, but everyone promised to send their money to Burdock! I guess I’m happy for him, I just…”

Effie sighed.

“Well, look on the bright side. At least you got the addendums that I like.”

Effie nodded listlessly. She still didn’t understand the value of those little flags. Frankly, it was probably better that way.

“Go get some rest,” ordered Haymitch. “You look worse than usual.”

Effie was so tired that she did not even have it in her to protest or scold him. She mere stood, said, “If you need me, I’ll be in District Twelve’s suite,” and left.

Alone, Haymitch slumped in his seat. He took a pull of the white for intestinal fortitude and tried to think.

People were willing to donate, but no one wanted to be the one who donated directly to the girl. That was a problem, and it wasn’t one easily fixed, if at all. Someone, somewhere, was scaring her potential donors away. He didn’t know who, although he could guess why. And the only things that he could do to help her were things that made his skin crawl.

But he still might do them.

Haymitch was still brooding on the girl’s situation when a quiet ping drew his attention.

District Eight had made a generous donation to District Twelve’s general fund. It hadn’t gone directly to the girl, but it was something that he could work with to help the girl.

Infinitely relieved, Haymitch signaled an avox and ordered breakfast. He had time to eat his eggs and toast, watching as the Career pack dug out Nine’s two tributes. By the time that Johanna Mason slouched into the control room, Nine’s tributes were dead and their mentors had disappeared from the control room. Word had it that after they had finished with their vid-calls home, they had holed up in their district’s suite in the tower with a care package from Six.

“Get out.”

“Thanks, Johanna,” said Haymitch sincerely as he stood.

“I’m not doing this for you!” she shouted at his back, raising her voice to be heard over the dying.

Haymitch didn’t bother to ask who she was doing it for.

When he rolled out of bed that evening, Haymitch showered, dressed, and went to express his condolences to District Nine. He took District Twelve’s account numbers with him.

Unfortunately, District Eleven had already been there, and there was nothing left for Haymitch to con out of them. Annoyed, he stumped back to the mentors’ control room for breakfast.

A few hours later, shortly before sunrise on the fifth day of the Hunger Games, the girl pitched her tent in the brightest, sunniest spot outside of the desert: on top of that rocky little cliff overlooking the fishmen’s beach.

Determined not to see her go the way of District Five’s boy, Haymitch pulled up that year’s catalog of gifts, searching for anything that he could afford to send her with the money in the district’s general fund. He couldn’t afford to send her any medicines – there had been a mysterious jump in the price of medical equipment, he should keep an eye on that – but the price of resources relatively common to the arena remained low. Lighters cost more than any family earned in a year in District Twelve, but relatively speaking, they were dirt cheap.

Haymitch selected a cherry red one to be sent to the girl.

It was a stupid gift, but the gift itself wasn’t the point. The point was to make contact with the girl and lure her off the beach and away from the fishmen mutts… assuming that she could take a hint.

She can’t possibly be as impossibly dense as she pretends to be, Haymitch thought as he carefully typed in the coordinates of the drop. Not the girl who’s been playing to win since she got on the train. Now if I can just get her to kill a few people… Thirteen, tops.

The girl was a pain in the ass.

Something silver gleamed at the corner of her eye, drawing Buffy’s attention to its lazy movement. She turned her head and watched as a silver parachute slowly wafted down toward the ground. Attached to it was a small white package.

Better be more careful, Buffy thought to whichever tribute the gift was meant for. I could follow that thing back to you.

She wouldn’t, of course, but she could.

Except no one appeared to claim the gift, not even when Buffy pretended to look away.

Maybe it’s meant for me? Buffy thought after the parachute had lain where it landed for awhile. Since she was too tired to wait any longer, Buffy went to see what some mentor had sent their tribute.

Attached to the parachute was a little silver ball and inside of the ball was a lighter, cherry red and better than any book of matches.

And it had been meant for her.

“Haymitch, it’s perfect,” Buffy whispered to the nearest camera. “This is exactly what I wanted.”

Except it had landed a long way from Buffy’s campsite; she had had to go and get it. And she knew from watching Haymitch’s trip through Candy Land: the Insanely Murderous Edition that it was possible to drop the gifts so precisely that they landed on the recipient’s head.

But Haymitch had made her go and get her lighter.

Maybe he wanted her to leave the beach? And go in that direction?

Well, it wasn’t as if she were super attached the idea of sleeping on the little cliff on the beach anyway. It was dirty and gross and smelled terrible. It really only had three good points: it wasn’t in the town, there was only one easy way to get up to her, and it kept the demons from getting too close to her.

But as history had proven, she had no idea how to pitch a tent on a sand dune. Not that she knew how to pitch a tent on more solid ground either though – witness Exhibit A, her lopsided tent. And maybe she had overlooked a particularly awesome dune or ridge during her first visit. So, the desert it was.

Buffy went back up the cliff to pack up her things.

Haymitch had tried to warn her, but he hadn’t been fast enough, and she hadn’t realized that the gift was for her soon enough. That was probably his fault too. It was all probably his fault.

He didn’t want her to die, and he didn’t want to watch her die, but the girl was going to make him do it anyway. It was basically his entire experience of her in a nutshell.

If nothing else, she’s consistent, thought Haymitch, his thoughts already beginning to blur pleasantly. Crazy stubborn girl.

He kept drinking.

Next to him, Effie chanted, “Turn around, turn around, turn around,” and digging her ridiculously sharp nails into his arm despite the two thick layers of fabric between them. “Turn around, Buffy!”

Haymitch didn’t see the point. Dully he watched as wave after wave of fishmen rode the breakers ashore. Limbs and fins that had made their movements impossibly smooth in the water made them ungainly on land, but they had already shown that they made up for it with their ferocity. The game makers weren’t taking any chances this time.

Further up the beach, the girl was packing while two or three particularly intrepid fishmen sneaked up behind her. His tribute, oblivious to the danger, was humming while she packed. As Haymitch drank – toasting the girl’s completely stupid and useless death that could easily have been avoided if she had just shown a shred of self-preservation and killed everyone when she had the chance – the girl momentarily stilled and cocked her head to the side as if listening.

The fishmen stilled too. Even their gills stilled, as they seemingly held their breath and waited for the girl to resume her humming.

The girl frowned.

For a moment, Haymitch nearly dared to care, but there was no way out for her, and he had just begun make up his recent liquor deficiency. He took another pull and watched with everyone else on the big screen as the girl resumed humming and packing, and the fishmen resumed stalking her, their giant feet quietly slapping against the sand. It probably sounded like surf, rustling garbage, or maybe both to her.

She was the deadliest tribute in there, but his girl was going to die like that poor kid out of District Five.

The girl had just finished fitting everything into her pack and was fooling with her stupid shovel when the first fishman reached her.

“Turn around, Buffy!” wailed Effie, and elsewhere in the room Annie began to keen as, with a powerful flex of his shoulder, the fishman drove his spear towards the girl’s back.

Haymitch closed his eyes.

He couldn’t help it.

He didn’t want to watch her die.

Buffy twisted out of the way of the attack, bringing her shovel up and around in a move proven to decapitate zombies.

It actually worked really well on fishmen too.

She rolled out of the way of a thrown trident, popping to her feet in time to use a third fishman as a human shield; or a demony one, whatever. The point was that she used its body to deflect oncoming projectiles. And bonus! She now had lots more spears and tridents, none of them wooden, unfortunately, to throw back at the fishmen.

Buffy got on that, working to keep her back to the cliff. It wasn’t a foolproof plan – if it was her, she probably would have led by climbing up the cliff and attacking from the supposedly safe side of her campsite – but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.

Namely, being tired, hungry, completely filthy, and suffering from a fritzing Slayer sense. If not for Giles’ insane training drills and the fishmen’s giant webbed feet, which were pretty damn noisy she might have been in trouble.

Although it probably wasn’t good that, as far as she could tell from a couple of quick glances – now that she was forced to rely on her sight thanks to her stupidly overwhelmed Slayer sense – she was outnumbered and surrounded by fishmen.

That was probably pretty bad, actually.

What I need to do, Buffy decided, is something wildly destructive. Preferably, something that will kill them pretty quick.

Well, as Giles always said, there was a reason that the classics were, well, classic.

Buffy grinned.

She totally had a plan.

Step one, get to the medical kit.

Buffy filled her mouth with rubbing alcohol and before Haymitch could flinch, because as far as drinks went rubbing alcohol was one of the worst, she struck a light on her lighter and spat the rubbing alcohol across its flame, engulfing the nearest fish mutt in a cloud of fire. Seemingly unbothered by its screams, she kicked the creature off of the cliff and did not even pause long enough to watch it fall like a comet into the dark sea below. She was too busy stabbing another fish mutt in the face to care that her previous kill was alive and screaming when it hit the water.

There was a brief moment in which Haymitch assumed that the water would put the fire out. It was a flashy, if ultimately useless, method of killing a mutt but maybe they could use it to scare up some –

“Shit,” he hissed when the black water caught fire, orange flames racing across its surface with shocking speed. In mere moments, a third of the arena was on fire. The fish mutts that had been pulling themselves through the surf and onto the beach below the girl’s low cliff gave up chasing Buffy in favor of rolling in the sand and screaming, the occasional fiery wave that washed over them serving to reignite them. One by one, they twisted, convulsed, and burnt to ash.

It was horrific to watch.

Somewhere, Annie was sobbing and someone else was retching. Effie had gone from digging her claws into his arm to clutching at it.

The game makers must have been concerned about the literal ocean of fire, however, because there was a crack of thunder and it suddenly began to pour rain from previously clear skies.

It was an obvious flaw in the arena’s design, and the first time that Haymitch could recall a tribute forcing the game makers to change the arena in response to their actions… if one overlooked the suspicious mudslide that happened to kill the tribute who turned cannibal.

Most people tried to overlook him.

On the cliffs above the inferno, the girl was busy rolling corpses to the edge and shoving them over it, seemingly oblivious to how dangerous what she had just done was to her continued good health. The dead fishmen fell, dark shapes against a now half lit sky, burning to cinders when they hit the water rather than sinking beneath the waves. The girl looked entirely unconcerned by the dying mutts on the beach, the inferno, the storm, or her rapidly dwindling chances of dying from something other than Capitol interference.

That was okay. Haymitch could worry enough for both of them about the arena, the game makers, and now the entire Capitol being out to kill her. She just had to worry about making it out of the arena in spite of herself.

On the bright side, Haymitch thought as he watched the girl heft the fishmen’s weapons, she’s a firebug. Accidents could happen; maybe one that burns everyone else in the arena to death.

It was probably too much to hope for. And, honestly, if it happened, Haymitch wouldn’t envy what the other mentors would be taking home with them from these Games. And he sure as hell wouldn’t be looking into the boy’s coffin. But Haymitch would gladly trade spending a few years on everyone’s collective shit list to finally bring home a tribute of his own.

The biggest obstacle to that, of course, was going to be the girl herself. Buffy could apparently kill an army of fishmen mutts without batting an eyelash but could not bring herself to slit a few throats when she had the career pack down and out.

Haymitch scowled.

There had to be a way to make her get with the program before the game makers figured out what might actually kill her. He had to send her something that would covey the absolute necessity of putting aside her stupid ethics or morality or whatever was keeping her from killing all those other tributes as quickly as possible.

But what? Haymitch wondered. Next to him, Effie bounced to her feet, already prattling about how she was going to use that clip in Buffy’s social media presence and all the donors that she needed to talk to as soon as possible, if not sooner.

“Oh, Haymitch!” she caroled. “We are going to be busy, busy, busy!”

They actually were, although maybe not in the way that Effie meant.

“Don’t use the whole clip, Effie,” he said sharply, and Effie frowned at him. “It’s striking enough, but she broke the arena. That might make the game makers look bad.” Here, Effie pressed a hand to her mouth. She looked horrified. “Just use the first part with the shovel; and maybe something from the part where she used the fishman as a shield.”

It had all gone fiery shortly after that.

“I’m on it, Haymitch!” chirped Effie.

Tiredly, Haymitch watched her go.

I really need to get to sleep, he thought as he turned back to the control panel… and startled badly.

Annie had commandeered Effie’s seat. He hadn’t even seen her do it.

Damn Careers, he thought, annoyed.

Annie ignored him, so he took his cue from her and tried to ignore her too. He had two tributes to watch and no time to babysit her.

Well, that was his intention. Haymitch kept finding himself peeking at Annie Cresta from the corner of his eye. The last time that he had spent any time with her, Annie had still been attempting to kill people with butter knives.

They were eating breakfast, and Haymitch was watching Annie, or more specifically her cutlery, very carefully from the corner of his eye when Johanna dragged herself into the control room. She looked and smelled like she had come directly from a party.

“Get out,” she croaked, and Haymitch was too tired (and buzzed) to argue with her. He did as she said without asking any inconvenient questions.

Haymitch didn’t sleep well. He dreamed about blurry, monstrous Careers, long pink birds, and red, red blood that turned to fire and woke gasping, his head pounding and his hands clutching at the sheets. Even Haymitch was not certain whether he was reaching for his absent knife or the nearest bottle, but he split the difference and took a drink.

He took several drinks.

Haymitch was nicely blurry around the edges when it finally occurred to him to stagger out of bed. He left his sleeping cubicle, flipped the sign to SERVICE in passing, and made his way to the bathroom facilities for a piss, shower, and change of clothes. When he returned to the mentors’ control room, he found Cecelia sitting at Twelve’s consoles.

“What’s the word?” asked Haymitch tiredly. He didn’t really want to know how much less he had to work with after the girl’s stunt on the beach.

“Everyone’s staying out of the rain, including your girl and the mutts,” reported Cecelia. “Johanna has gone to rest, and District Twelve’s donors are exceedingly generous. I’m jealous.”

“Not usually, they aren’t,” replied Haymitch, frowning. “Which account?”

“The general one,” said Cecelia as she pulled up the pertinent information.

Haymitch blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked at the figures again. “That can’t be right.”

It was a lot of money, more than District Twelve had seen in the last five years, combined.

After the interviews, Haymitch had been willing to swear that the girl had been blackballed by the game makers. It happened to troublesome tributes, and the girl was nothing if not that. After the beach, Haymitch had assumed that he would be bleeding money as donors pulled their gifts and distanced themselves from the most troublesome tribute since the rise of the Career Districts. He hadn’t thought that anyone would be crazy enough to mistake the girl or District Twelve for an investment opportunity.

“That’s what I thought,” said Cecelia, “but there it is.”

Haymitch squinted at the information, counting zeroes and checking that the decimal point was actually where he thought that it was. But yeah, it really was there. Haymitch wondered what a career was supposed to do to work off that kind of donation.

“I’ll call and ask,” Haymitch decided, but Cecelia shook her head.

“Have something to eat first,” she said reprovingly, “and maybe some black coffee. You need to be clear-headed when you talk to that sort of donor.”

“I hate it black.”

“I know, but you deserve it.”

It was stupid to hesitate or question the generosity of the Capitol’s citizens, but Haymitch couldn’t help but to wonder what it would cost the girl later, provided that she managed to survive long enough for there to be a later for her. Unasked for generosity was never unpaid for in the Capitol.

He was mostly sober by the time the earthquake hit the arena.

Chapter Text

It had started raining, like, two minutes after the ocean caught fire, and it hadn’t stopped since, something that made Buffy suspect that the people in charge just weren’t very good with fire. At the very least, they hadn’t paid attention in their mandatory life skills classes in high school – if they even had life skills classes in the evil empire. No one had made Buffy attend one in District Twelve, but given what she had seen so far, that probably didn’t mean much.

She could have mentioned in passing to Haymitch that water didn’t have much of an impact on grease or oil fires, but, honestly, she suspected that it served her purposes better to keep silent. Not even the most murderous of demons would be willing to go out and wreck mayhem in that kind of downpour – it even put a damper on Buffy’s fighting spirit – which meant fewer dead tributes.

Somehow, she had to get those guys to work with her on this whole arena thing.

If only I spoke the language, Buffy thought for about the zillionth time, feeling about as frustrated as she had the first time. No, that was a lie, she was more frustrated. The first time that she had had that thought, she had just wanted to know where she was. Now, she wanted everyone to slow down and stop being idiots. It was more important now.

At any rate, it was pouring rain, and yesterday, they had added little ‘quakes to the arena, something that had so far not killed anyone at all. Today was shaking out to be another day of minor tremors and unrelenting rains that had absolutely zero effect on the fiery ocean of fire.

Buffy was not impressed, not least because she was out in the rain.

Honestly, Buffy would have preferred to stay inside and laze around all day, chatting at Haymitch and plotting and maybe squeezing in a second nap after lunch, but around midmorning her bolt hole had started shaking down around her ears; literally, shaking down around her ears. Buffy had had to grab her things and get out quick. It hadn’t even been a big or bad earthquake, just another of those piddly little tremors, which was just so totally lame and something that she had complained about at length to Haymitch.

But then, after growing up on the San Andreas Fault, Buffy knew about earthquakes. She knew what to do before, during, and after them. And after nearly four years as the Slayer, she certainly knew how to slay during them – not that anything shaking its way through the arena really counted as an earthquake. The only reason that everything was falling over was because the whole town was a crumbling ruin that should have been bulldozed under years ago.

But since she had already been out and about and looking for a new and reasonably structurally sound bolt hole, and everything locked under the Murder Dome – weird creatures, vamps, demons, and other tributes alike – was careening around like a few falling buildings and an ocean of fire were, like, the worst thing ever, she had thought, Hey, why not? Seize the day and all that.

Which is how she had ended up slaying where and what she could; it wasn’t like the search for shelter had been going super well before that anyway.

It felt good to be up and doing something after doing nothing for most of yesterday. And the unrelenting rain and treacherous footing certainly added an interesting element to the slayage – something that she happily remarked on to Haymitch.

Talking to Haymitch was getting to be something of a habit.

And as she cut her way through the slim pickings, Buffy hoped - but didn’t tell Haymitch, because it was just a little too honest – that if she killed enough demons, her Slayer sense might become useful again. You know, if she killed practically everything in the arena except the other tributes, and frankly, Buffy suspected that if she was smarter or more desperate (or Faith), she might be up for killing them too.

It would definitely make everything simpler.

Speaking of which… Buffy thought that something might be closer than everything else. Listening harder, she thought that she heard it again – fwop, fwop, fwop – and a shuffling sound that might have been someone trying to sneak up behind her. It could also have been the wind smashing raindrops against rustling garbage though.

Well, there’s only one way to find out, Buffy thought and grinned.

She really had missed slaying.

The girl’s chances of survival had never been inspiring, not after her interview and especially not after she had made it her personal business to exterminate everything in the arena but the other tributes. Then she had set the ocean on fire, inadvertently proving Haymitch’s personal theory that no matter how bad things were they could always get worse.

Haymitch liked to think that the girl had hit rock bottom – that at this point there was absolutely nothing she could do to make her situation worse – but he wasn’t willing to bet on it. She had a talent. And he was a realist.

“So,” drawled Johanna, “do you think she still has to work at being this irritating or is it just a habit by now?”

“Habit,” he said. Haymitch didn’t even have to think about it. He knew the girl well enough by now to at least know that much about her. At Johanna’s look, he added, “I had to live with her for a whole week, and she was this annoying even before she understood why they’d tossed her on a train to the Capitol.”

“Well, damn.”

“She has her good points,” Haymitch said defensively, and Johanna snorted. Scowling, and maybe more emotional than he otherwise might like, he added, “I mean it.”

He really did.

His girl was a remorseless killer with extensive training across a variety of terrains, weapons, and circumstances. Earthquakes, storms, and fiery oceans of death were all mere annoyances to her, ones that she complained about at length. She was vicious in a fight, a firebug, and absolutely lethal to mutts.

It’s too bad that she categorically refuses to play to her strengths and kill a few people, thought Haymitch gloomily.

“It could just be natural talent,” inserted a new voice before Johanna could say anything cutting, and Haymitch glanced that way to see Finnick Odair bearing down on them. Tucked under one arm he had Annie, who was damp-cheeked, bleary-eyed, and vaguely disheveled. When she stumbled, he righted her. Annie was on a lot of tranquilizers, and apparently had been since the storm started in the arena. Four’s other Victors were taking turns manning Annie’s station and looking after her.

Frowning, Finnick nodded at the screen behind Haymitch. “What’s she looking at?”

Haymitch turned to find his girl tribute crouched at the corner of one of the cracks in the arena’s ground. She was crumbling a clod of dirt between her fingers and frowning.

“Please let it be flammable,” crowed Johanna. To the small screen in front of her, she said, “Set the town on fire too, Twelve.”

“During a rainstorm?” asked Finnick dubiously.

“The ocean is still burning,” retorted Johanna. “I have faith in her talents.”

“Strong words,” teased Finnick, and Johanna scowled.

The ocean was still burning, and it was still raining, but the rainstorm had done nothing to lessen the blaze. It looked like a wasted effort, but the game makers never did anything in an arena without having an underlying purpose of their own.

I’m missing something important, Haymitch thought, frowning. What’s the rainstorm for if not the fire? They can’t be planning to flood the arena again, can they? It’d be boring to Capitol audiences. Except the ocean is on fire this time, so it would be a flood of fire this time instead of water…

Haymitch tried not to shudder.

“Idiot! They’re not anything of the sort,” scoffed Johanna, drawing Haymitch’s attention back to the others. “I just like it when the walking dead give the Capitol something to remember them by. It’s even better when it’s something that’ll shame the Districts. Make them regret everything.”

“Johanna!” snapped Finnick.

“What? Are you worried that someone’s going to hear me?” snarled Johanna, leaning toward Finnick. She bared her teeth at him in a smile. “Even if they did, who do they have to hold over my head? Those unlucky kids they keep randomly pulling from the fishbowls? Those pieces of shit that I’m partnered with? Please,” sneered Johanna. Leaning back, she flapped a hand through the air. “I’m as free as anyone can be around here.”

“Some of us don’t have the luxury of not caring,” said Finnick coldly.

“Poor little Career boy,” mocked Johanna, and Finnick flinched. “Surrounded by people he can stand.”

“Because it’s not like you can stand anyone,” Finnick said steadily.

Not even yourself, thought Haymitch, as Johanna toasted him with Haymitch’s flask.

“Damn straight,” Johanna agreed cheerfully and knocked back a slug of his liquor.

Johanna had learned her lessons and learned them well.

Haymitch watched as Johanna’s face twisted. She swallowed, hard, choking on it a bit on the way down.

“What is this shit?” she roared.

“Watered down,” Haymitch admitted with a certain grim amusement.

Johanna’s eyes widened then narrowed.

“Buffy.” She breathed it like a curse.

Shrugging, Haymitch looked away, knowing even as he did it that it was a mistake. Johanna tore weak things to shreds.

“You’re going soft,” crowed Johanna, as he knew she would. “When did you start? It was real the last time that I borrowed a swallow off of you. Don’t tell me that you’re actually beginning to hope that –”

“Now who’s an idiot?” sneered Haymitch, because he couldn’t bear to hear the rest of that sentence. It was too close to the truth. The sharp, mocking cruelty in Johanna’s face, a thin veneer over something more volatile, compelled him to admit, “She made me promise… before she went in.” Purely for spite, he added, “You did me a favor finishing the other for me. Got rid of the temptation.”

Even with his flask drained and refilled with watered down swill, the temptation was always there. All he had to do was ask – or demand – or even just throw something at the nearest avox and –

Buffy said something then – more complaints about her socks being wet, as if it weren’t her own damn fault that they were – and she neatly diverted Haymitch’s thoughts from all the alcohol that he could be drinking to herself.

Sometimes, Haymitch wondered if she talked so damn much to remind him of his promise, to make him care, to keep him on track. It was a possibility. She was a Career. They got that sort of training along with everything else.

“Then she was playing to win even back then,” said Finnick. He sounded satisfied, even a bit smug, and Haymitch dragged his thoughts away from his (possibly nefarious) girl tribute to the two former tributes snapping at each other like a pair of back alley curs.

“Wonder what changed her mind?” said Johanna, vicious. “Maybe Gloss is right. Maybe she really is trying to commit suicide to escape Twelve.” Canting her head toward Haymitch, she said, all bright malice, “Is he right, Haymitch? Is living in District Twelve that bad?”

Haymitch’s fist clenched, but otherwise he ignored her.

She didn’t mean it.

Johanna rejected the people around her just as thoroughly as her district had rejected her, as Haymitch’s own district had rejected him, after Snow had made examples out of them. It was as much for her own sake as theirs.

Haymitch was more selfish. If he ever managed to bring one of his tributes home a Victor, they were never going to get rid of him. There would be game nights. He would palm Effie off on them as often as possible. And someday, he would hold their hand when he died, hopefully of something boring like old age. He might even share his white liquor with them; maybe. Well, occasionally, provided that they didn’t take up drinking too.

The girl didn’t seem like she would be a heavy drinker – Careers never were. They preferred other vices – but the boy was harder to predict. With Haymitch’s luck, he’d drink like a fish. That wouldn’t be entirely terrible either. They could pretend to be social drinkers together like him and Chaff and everyone out of Ten.

“Stop it,” snapped Finnick, rising to the bait. He almost never did that. “She’s still trying to win, but on her own terms. I admire that.”

“It’s suicide, pure and simple,” said Johanna harshly. “If she wanted to win, she’d have killed them all at the cornucopia. She’d be out already.”

“Shut up,” said Haymitch fiercely, the words directed as much to himself as Finnick and Johanna. “You’re wasting time. Either make yourself useful or get out. Neither of you is supposed to be here anyway.”

Imagining a future with either of his tributes was rushing towards disappointment. Sooner or later, one of them was going to have to kill someone, even if it was just the second to last tribute. The girl wouldn’t, and the boy couldn’t. Haymitch was going to have to go home to an empty Victor’s Village and spend another year in virtual solitude.

“Fine!” Johanna slammed to her feet. “I’m gone.”

Finnick flopped down in Johanna’s vacated chair before Johanna had even finished storming out of the mentors’ control room. Then he stared at Haymitch meaningfully until Haymitch realized that Finnick meant for him to give his seat to Annie Cresta.

Haymitch sneered at him. He did, however, gesture to an avox to bring Annie a chair. She ignored it and them, apparently too busy watching Buffy slog through the mud to bother with anything else.

Finnick stared at Haymitch. Hard.

Haymitch pretended to ignore him.

Burdock was dry in his bolt hole, obsessively packing and repacking his pack. And Buffy – Haymitch slid his eyes to the side to read the subscripts – was telling a story about singing in the rain? That couldn’t be right.

I’ll have to go back and reread that bit later, Haymitch decided; maybe make Effie put together a video of all the girl’s ramblings, see if she trying to say something useful to me.

Finnick was still staring at Haymitch, his pleasant expression as flat and empty as his pale eyes.

Haymitch hated it when the Careers looked at him like that.

“Why are you still here?” asked Haymitch tiredly, giving up and giving in. He wondered if Careers trained to be as irritating as they were or if they all just excelled at it. Either way, the Career districts were probably really annoying places to live.

“You said to be helpful.”

“We aren’t even allies.”

“Haven’t you seen any of our interviews?” said Finnick, gesturing between himself and Annie. “We like your wild girl. She’s practically a Career. And who better to help mentor a Career than a pair of highly successful Careers?”

“I have two living tributes.”

“Yeah, but we aren’t interested in the other one.”

“Just the girl,” Haymitch sighed. One way or another it always came back to the girl.

“We’re drawn to her sparkling personality,” said Finnick blandly.

Haymitch actually laughed at that. “Seriously, though, what do you want with her?”

“Nothing, yet,” said Finnick, flashing Haymitch one of those bright, empty smiles that he had perfected after becoming a Victor. “But if she makes it out of the arena, District Four would like Buffy Summers to think positively of us.”

“She’s not a long lost Career,” said Haymitch, even though it was patently obvious that she was someone’s long lost Career. “She isn’t going to understand what you’re angling at.”

“Even if she’s not one of ours, she’s someone’s Career,” said Finnick placidly, echoing Haymitch’s thoughts. “And when Careers become Victors, they owe it to the ones who come after them to teach a few classes at the academy.”

“Twelve doesn’t have an academy.”

“Twelve doesn’t have an academy yet,” corrected Finnick. “But when you do, District Four hopes to someday have the same close relationship with District Twelve that Districts One and Two have with each other.”

Haymitch looked at Finnick very, very hard. He looked sober, and he looked mostly sane, but sometimes it was hard to tell with him. Finnick was good at hiding things about himself, maybe even from himself.

Finnick smiled at Haymitch again. It was neither bright nor empty. In fact, it was almost kind. But he was looking at Haymitch as if Haymitch had failed to grasp something so patently obvious that even Effie Trinket might have understood it on some level. Effie Trinket.

Haymitch disliked Finnick intensely in that moment.

“Where there are Careers, Haymitch, there are academies,” said Finnick patiently. “No one wants to see the ones who come after them go into an arena unprepared.”

The idea of District Twelve ever becoming a Career district was laughable. But the mere thought of it was enough to make Haymitch’s stomach twist and churn. He couldn’t teach kids how to murder other kids or train them to look forward to the arena. He was already more involved in their deaths than he could stand. An academy in District Twelve might actually break him again.

It was true: things could always get worse.

“Twelve isn’t going to have an academy,” said Haymitch harshly. He wouldn’t let his district have an academy, not one that he was in any way, shape, or form involved with. And as one of the district’s two living Victors – there would have to be two Victors for this to happen, one of them that silly Career girl – he would be expected to help with any academy that the district started. Therefore, the district couldn’t have an academy no matter which of his tributes survived – if either of them survived.

You need to focus on the problems that you actually have instead of borrowing trouble, Haymitch thought harshly, choking off that entire line of thought. To Finnick, he said, “So what are you going to actually do for her?”

“Nothing,” said Finnick. “We can’t. Four’s Victors only support our own district’s tributes until they’re both out of the running. Then we can do whatever we want. All the Career districts are the same way. We’re here in a more advisory capacity.”

Yeah, right. Good advice was helpful. It was more likely that Finnick was there to help his district’s tributes somehow, since it was painfully obvious to anyone with eyes that the Careers in the arena weren’t up to killing Haymitch’s girl on their own strengths.

Annie was probably just along for the ride.

Or to visit the girl, conceded Haymitch, glancing towards Annie. Her attention hadn’t strayed from Buffy’s monitor the entire time that she and Finnick had been there. And she had made the girl’s token… although, at the moment Annie didn’t need to come to Haymitch’s stations to see the girl. The only Career tribute to ever be fielded by District Twelve was dominating the main feed, probably because it was otherwise a slow day in the arena.

The fire, rain, and earthquakes had put a real damper on the other tributes’ activities, and even the Careers had gone to ground, saving their strength for a day when the arena was easier to navigate. Only Haymitch’s stupid tribute was out and about: stabbing mutts, sliding between falling bits of masonry, and looking like a drowned rat while doing it, much to Effie’s open despair.

Haymitch thought it an improvement.

Sure, the girl was pale. And yes, her hair was plastered to her skull, but at least her hair was golden blonde again. For awhile in there, it had been matted with ashes and the fish men’s ichors, rendering her hair an unpleasant grey-green color. Haymitch was no personal branding expert, but he thought somewhat cleaner hair was probably better than dirty hair for a tribute’s image.

“Haymitch,” said the girl, pulling Haymitch’s attention back to her once again. She flashed a grin at the nearest camera, her teeth gleaming wetly in the rain. When she spoke, the game makers translated, her words appearing in bold white print along the bottom of the screen. “What do you think of that sad little forest north of town? It’s just a few trees from the looks of things, but I haven’t been there yet.”

Because there’s something wrong with the dirt in town, thought Haymitch, remembering how Buffy had frowned at that clod of dirt. It was as good a reason to go somewhere in the arena as anything else.

“Does she ever shut up?” demanded Titus from his place at Annie’s console.

“No,” said Seafoam bitterly from her place next to him. “Never.”

“She’s got to sleep sometime,” said Gloss practically.

“We’ve never seen it,” retorted Enobaria. “For all we know, she talks in her sleep.”

“Haymitch,” called Gloss across the room. “Does she talk in her sleep?”

“Shut up,” snapped Haymitch. “I’m busy.”

“See? She talks in her sleep,” said Gloss semi-seriously to the other Careers, and nearer by, Finnick snorted.

Haymitch ignored them, because Buffy was telling him about hunting in the rain and during earthquakes back home. Apparently, she’d never done both at the same time before, and she was excited for the experience. Despite himself, Haymitch smiled.

Since that day at the beach, Buffy had kept up a running commentary, most of her remarks aimed squarely at Haymitch. Once or twice, she had stopped and apologized to Effie for looking a fright – something that never failed to make Effie straighten and earnestly assure the nearest monitor that it was all right, because it showed how hard she was working to stay alive – but all the rest of her words and reminisces were for Haymitch.

He found it charming.

Honestly, it was the only thing about her that Haymitch found charming.

But then, he’d never had a tribute try to woo him before.

And to his utter embarrassment, Haymitch suspected that it might be working – despite his best efforts to ignore and resist her dubious charms, Buffy Summers was getting under his skin. Careers were insidious like that, even the crazy ones from beyond the fence.

“At least she’s not boring to watch,” said Brutus, and a couple of the other Careers nodded.

Haymitch wished them all the joy of that. For himself, he found it exhausting… and irritating. She was irritating. She was the most irritating tribute that he had ever had or even seen in action. And despite the odds against it, some tiny, unutterably stupid part of Haymitch hoped to someday tell her just how much she irritated him.

Hopefully, by then she would understand what he was saying.

Although speaking of annoying tributes…

“Isn’t Annie supposed to be advising her own tribute this year?” Haymitch asked dryly and was rewarded with nearly identical looks from every one of District Four’s Victors currently in the room.

“She’s with me,” said Finnick brightly from his place at the boy’s console. He smiled that winsome smile at Haymitch, the one that made Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith melt.

Haymitch snorted. “That’s not the recommendation that you think it is. Go away, Finnick.”

“But we were helpful!”

“Not that helpful.”

Finnick theatrically huffed out an annoyed breath, although he looked amused more than anything else.

“Fine, but we’ll be back.”

“I can hardly wait.”

Standing, Finnick waited a moment for Annie to join him, but when she seemed content to stay where she was, he took her hands and pulled her with him. Annie stumbled and looked surprised but, thankfully, not particularly murderous.

But then, she hadn’t looked actively murderous during her victory tour either, and Annie Cresta had tried to stab most of the other Victors touring with her at least once. Not Haymitch – he rarely went to the effort of chasing after new Victors, not unless they actively needed his help – but most of the others.

Finnick tugged at Annie’s hands again, but she dug in her heels. She peered at Finnick, then Haymitch, her eyes sliding past him to focus on Buffy.

“You can see her from your own station,” said Haymitch roughly. And he had some calls to make; ones that he preferred the Careers not overhear all the details of. He and Cecelia had spent all of yesterday trying to track down the source of that sudden infusion of cash to the general fund, but to no avail. Rather than wasting more time of it, he and Effie had decided to strike while their District was running hot. Tiny donations had been trickling into the general fund all morning.

At his words, Annie’s eyes returned to Haymitch. Her gaze was lapidious.

Sighing, Haymitch relented.

“You can come back later,” he said. “After she leaves the main feed, you can come back over here to watch her.”

After a beat, Annie finally nodded. She allowed Finnick to escort her away.

As soon as the Victors out of Four were a decent distance away, Haymitch began making calls. Effie would give him hell if he didn’t at least try to hold up his end of their responsibilities.

There was something hinky going on.

Theoretically, the town should have been the safest place in the arena during an earthquake. It was a crumbling wreck, but it was a crumbling wreck that seemed to be standing on a solid foundation of bedrock, and that was probably the most important thing. Bedrock was supposed to be the best place to be during an actual real earthquake.

Except there was that aforementioned unnamed hinkiness to consider; it was something to do with the dirt’s consistency, although Buffy didn’t remember enough Earth Science to say what. All she could say for certain that someone was up to something and it probably involved the arena’s dirt.

Probably shouldn’t have slept through class so much, she thought grimly. But honestly, who could have guessed that it was Earth Science and not French that was actually going to be useful to her someday? She certainly hadn’t.

So Buffy went north, determined to see what was over there and maybe get away from the dirt that was wigging her out. It might be on fire, it might not, but either way, it was hitting two birds with one stone.

She was coming up on the center of town and the cornucopia when the first earthquake hit – a real one, not one of those stupid little tremors. It sent Buffy scrambling to avoid falling bits of building.

She was doing her best frogger impression when another random not-bear came charging around a corner, no big deal except for the claws that were longer than her hands and the teeth like swords… and the shifty footing.

On the bright side, it’s stupid, Buffy thought grimly.

But between surviving the earthquake and killing the not-bear, Buffy had her hands full. She had to ignore the sudden, frightening spike in demonic heebie jeebies in an arena already chock full of the damn things.

That turned out to be something of a mistake, though, especially when she stepped backwards onto thin air and no vibrating bit of earth jumped up to fill the gap, not even temporarily.

Horror clutched at her throat as she reeled, her balance entirely lost.

Stupid, she thought furiously. It nearly covered the heart-stopping fear. Nearly. Stupid!

The crumbling ground dissolved beneath her feet and Buffy fell, screaming, into the chasm.

There was a short, sickening fall, and something hit her in the head, her scream cut off in a burst of pain. She was dizzy, and it was dark, but she definitely noticed when her flailing leg bumped something hard enough to send it numb.

Yelping, Buffy twisted sharply and reached out with both arms to grab onto it. Her arms wrapped around a curved surface – length of pipe, maybe, she thought – and the abrupt stop wrenched through her shoulders, knocking the breath out of her. Under her hands, the pipe jerked – and her heart lurched with fear – but it held.

It held!

To Buffy’s left, the howling not-bear kept falling.

She held on as around her the ground shook itself to pieces, gritting her teeth against the pain in her leg and the weight of her pack dragging her down.

It was only a few seconds, Buffy knew that it was only a few seconds because she kept count in her head, but it felt like the quake went on and on forever. But when the ground finally settled, Buffy was still there. She was gasping for breath, and her mouth tasted like mud. Her leg was a fiery agony, and her lungs felt like they were filling with dust, but she was still there, and she was still alive.

At the moment, that didn’t feel as good as it probably could.

But at least I’m not dead, thought Buffy grimly, as she waited for the dust to settle. She needed to know which way to go, forward or back, on the pipe.

When it cleared, Buffy squinted at the far side of the chasm.

Forward wasn’t good. It wasn’t a long distance, but there was nothing for her over there. Twisting, Buffy kicked her legs as she tried to evaluate the wall past her shoulder. Backwards was… even longer, but it ended in a narrow ledge.

Buffy hoped that the ledge was strong enough to hold her weight.

Untwisting herself, Buffy turned herself around on the pipe, the backpack making her ungainly. She made her way back to the wall, moving steadily hand over hand despite the little aftershocks rattling through the arena. The ledge was too low for Buffy to test it with her foot before she landed on it, so she dropped the pack on it, wriggling out of first one arm strap on her pack then the other.

The pack hit the ledge with a clunk.

It held.

Buffy’s heart leaped.

A heartbeat later, there was a low rumble, and the ledge crumbled away. She watched, horrified, as her pack joined the not-bear in the seething darkness beneath her.

Wait, seething darkness? Buffy wondered, angling her head to try to look down past her heaving chest.

She didn’t seem much, no matter how she strained to see what was going on beneath her. Worse, her arms were beginning to hurt, and her leg was killing her.

Buffy shook her head at herself then quickly stopped when it made her dizzy.

Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought, Buffy thought. She nearly shook her head at herself. One problem at a time, Buffy decided. I can’t hang out here forever. I’ve got to get on this pipe before I lose my grip and fall off of it. Or pass out. What did I do to my head?

Moving both of her hands to the same side of the pipe, Buffy heaved herself up onto it. She balanced on her shin for a moment, before sliding her leg across the pipe so that she was straddling it. Then she sat there, panting… and trying very hard not to think, because thinking hurt. It felt like her every thought was swimming through pudding. When she brushed her fingers against the source of the pounding pain, Buffy’s hair was wet to the touch, and her fingers came away red.

Well, that explains a few things, decided Buffy.

Head injuries were the worst.

So she sat and shook out her arms, because now that she was no longer in danger of falling to her death, it was easier to appreciate how they burned with lactic acid, and tried to remember what, if anything, she had ever known about head injuries.

All she knew for certain was that she probably shouldn’t let herself sleep. She might not wake up! You know, if she didn’t slide off the pipe first.

A flash of fire and then another at the corner of her eye snagged Buffy’s attention. Leaning to one side, she tried to see what was on fire.

A moment later, Buffy really, really wished that she hadn’t.

In the weeks surrounding graduation, Buffy had comforted herself with the thought that the Mayor’s true form would probably be the worst thing that the demonic world would ever throw at her. And after finally seeing it – disgusting, centipede-like, and practically indestructible – she had been sure that there could be nothing worse.

She had finally found worse.

And she really, deeply regretted taunting the universe with her previous assumptions.

Because beneath her seethed an entire nest of those nasty, man-eating centipede demons, their exoskeletons gleaming dull red and lilac in the brief flares of fire.

But they don’t spit fire, Buffy thought. She squinted, trying to make out the source of the flames. As Buffy watched, one of the plumes of flames winked out, while at the same time one of the larger demon-pedes snapped something up and arched, swallowing the thing whole.

A handler, maybe? Buffy thought. Armed with a flamethrower? If I could get down there, I could have a flamethrower.

Buffy considered that carefully.

It might have been the concussion talking, but for the first time in her Slayerly career, the flamethrower option felt like too much work.

Slowly, Buffy leaned back the other way. She leaned too far and had to catch herself on the pipe.

I’ve got to get out of here! Carefully. Because I’m hurt.

Suiting actions to words, Buffy inched backwards until her back bumped into stone, sending pebbles careening to the ground.

She froze.

When no immense, demonic arthropod reared up before her, intent on swallowing her whole, Buffy relaxed enough to let a slow, shaky breath escape her.

So far so good, Buffy thought grimly. Step one: get out of here. Step two: destroy the nest. Step three: escape the murder dome. Somehow. Step four: burn Panem to the ground. Step five: celebrate!

It was a good plan; a great plan even! And that wasn’t just the head injury talking. Probably.

If any one of those things escaped the Demon Dome, even in a place like Panem, humanity would be doomed. It had taken a volcanic explosion to kill that one in Italy way back when, and Pompeii hadn’t exactly fared well in the aftermath. She had done better, of course, but she had had a better handle on it thanks to that other Slayer’s diary.

It was all in the diaries.

Buffy vaguely wondered if anyone in the orphanage had found or read hers yet, and despite everything, felt a brief twinge of concern at the idea. There wasn’t even anything good in it!

Stupid, she scolded herself, and then banished that thought entirely in favor of focusing on the matter at hand: namely, her escape from near certain mastication.

Buffy took careful inventory of her surroundings, studying the sheer earthen walls around her with a practiced eye. She wasn’t much of a rock climber – she probably should have gone to that station in the gym – but she refused to despair. Despair was for vampires and demons with her hands around their necks. She was going to figure this out.

Plus, Slayer.

She could do this.

She could!

As soon as she figured out a likely looking place to start. None of the crevice’s walls seemed to have steps or any obvious handholds or toe rests.

But they must, thought Buffy grimly, because rock climbers do this sort of thing all the time; for fun even. Or I could make some hand and foot holds, I suppose.

An image – the vague memory of Charlton Heston’s beardy face as he betrayed himself to the monkeys – flashed across her mind, and Buffy grimaced.

Muscling her way out of this mess would be like holding up a flashing neon sign that said, “SLAYER!” That would go against the entire spirit of the Charlton Heston plan. Her awesome Slayer-ly powers were going to be a fun surprise for everyone not named Buffy. Or at least, that was the plan. She thought that’s what it was, anyway. So for now, she was going to have to muddle her way out of this. Maybe figure out what handholds and toeholds looked like.

Settling back on her perch, Buffy studied the wall more carefully for any advantage to be had on it.

She was the Slayer.

And she was going to figure this out.

“It was just so unexpected!” simpered Caesar Flickerman to his captive studio audience. He flashed a wide, insincere smile at the camera. “Earthquakes! We haven’t had one of those in awhile! And who knew that they could open up a tear in the ground like that?”

His tribute had known.

Somehow, she had fucking known what end those earthquakes were heading towards, and Haymitch still didn’t know how. All he knew was that something about the dirt had bothered the girl, had made her want to leave town. She just hadn’t been fast enough.

He tried to consider that and all its potential ramifications as he watched the girl struggle, his one hand wrapped around a couple of her tarnished charms and the other around the neck of a bottle, but mostly Haymitch worried about the girl’s bloodied head and her injured leg. They were affecting her performance, but how much? She needed medication for her head and maybe something for her leg. But could she even catch a capsule without falling off of her perch? And what if she needed something more later on?

Haymitch was loathe to fritter away her hard won funds on medical supplies now, when she might need them more later. But if he didn’t send her anything now, and she died because of it – because of him – then it would have all been for nothing; or maybe for Burdock, though Haymitch hadn’t truly chosen him over her. (Though he would certainly let Burdock think that he had should Burdock survive long enough to become District Twelve’s other Victor.)

On Haymitch’s smaller screen, the girl tried again to climb out. She was about halfway up the side of the crevasse when she lost her footing again and fell.

Haymitch’s breath caught in his throat, some sharp, brittle emotion lodging itself behind his breastbone, as the falling girl reached out to catch herself on the pipe again. The length of metal jerked under her hands, but thankfully it still held. The girl swung herself around it in a move that reminded Haymitch of those first, terrible minutes when he had thought that that the Career pack was going to kill her down that dark alley. He didn’t breathe again until the girl was seated on her pipe again, relatively safe and sound and not being torn apart by snake-centipede mutts.

She was still sitting on her pipe – probably resting up for her next attempt to escape the crevasse – when Flickerman left off prattling to ask today’s panel of experts to explain how the crack in the arena had happened.

There was a lot of technical jargon, but apparently what it boiled down to was the rain. It hadn’t been for the fires in the ocean, after all. The game makers had left those burning as a decoy. Their true intent with the rain had apparently been to saturate the soil so that the water filled the gaps between the grains of soil, causing it to lose all its shear strength, something that would eventually cause the ground to flow like liquid during a larger earthquake. Soil liquefaction, it was called.

“The results aren’t usually so spectacular,” added the speaker, a geologist, Haymitch thought. “But everything is bigger and better in the arena!”

Including the foreshadowing, thought Haymitch bitterly.

The girl’s fall into the pit full of mutts had probably been meant to serve the twofold purpose of killing off this year’s most troublesome tribute while providing a bit of tragic foreshadowing as to what awaited this year’s final four. But she had caught herself, and it had instead turned into a gut wrenching demonstration of the girl’s will to survive, one that he hadn’t been able to look away from.

Haymitch had faithfully watched over the girl all day, forgoing sleep to stay with her and listen to her silence. He had spent all of those hours struggling with the desire to demand that the avoxes bring him something harder to drink, because he hated being lucid when they died. But he had promised, and he intended to keep his word to the girl at least until she died.

He did.

But Effie’s arrival was severely testing his resolve.

“I’m here, Haymitch!” she caroled. “You can retire, if you wish!”

“I’ve got some stuff to do first,” said Haymitch. He had said something similar to Woof, Cecelia, and Johanna when they had each in turn offered to take his place at District Twelve’s consoles. It wasn’t necessarily a lie.

Effie’s expression briefly faltered before she seemed to regain her usual verve. She beamed at him.

“It’s so good to finally see you doing your job, Haymitch,” she said as she claimed the seat in front of Burdock’s console. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Lunch,” said Haymitch, although he wasn’t particularly hungry. Still, he probably needed something in his stomach to help soak up all the watered down booze that had found its way into his belly.

Nodding, Effie turned to direct soft words to the nearest avox.

In relative silence, they picked at their lunches and watched their tributes struggle through the arena. The girl was doing fuck all to improve her situation, despite her best efforts to the contrary. It should have been something of a relief to know that she wasn’t terrifyingly good at everything. Instead, it just made Haymitch tired and anxious and furiously angry.

“Burdock’s doing fine,” Effie suddenly reported, after a half hour of silence between them. Her voice betraying her worry, she asked, “How’s Buffy?”

“The same as the last time you asked,” Haymitch snapped, his mood foul. “Still trying to climb the wall and get out.”

“I’m glad,” breathed Effie. “You can’t make it through the Games if you don’t even try.”

It had been a trying, stressful day, and Effie’s last remark was just too Effie.

“Get out.”

“Pardon?” Effie actually looked surprised.

“Get out,” snarled Haymitch, rounding on her angrily. “Go write some press releases or drum up some more sponsors or something.”

“Who will watch over–”

“I’ll manage. Leave, Effie.”

“All right, Haymitch,” said Effie, less bubbly than usual. “If you’re sure?”

“Yes,” gritted Haymitch. “Now, please.”

It was a relief when Effie left, her heels clacking against the floor.

Signaling to the nearest avox for another and harder drink, Haymitch settled back to watch his tributes try to stay alive.

Buffy glared at the nearest wall of the chasm. There was this long stretch of wall that she was having serious problems getting past. Every time she made it there, something would squish or crumble under her hands, and she’d fall off the wall. Then she’d have to catch herself on the pipe, cutting up her hands up worse and worse every time, and have to start all over again. And the ongoing rain wasn’t helping.

It was just so frustrating!

If she could have, Buffy would have punched handholds into the wall and been done with it, Charlton Heston or no Charlton Heston, but not even Slayer strength was going to make that bit of wall more capable of bearing her weight. She honestly didn’t know what else to do – or even what else she could do.

It was while she was looking for an advantage against that bit of wall, no matter how small, (and secretly hoping for a handy ladder or rope or even a nice set of stairs,) that Buffy noticed the suspiciously regular shadow. She squinted, putting a hand to her forehead to block some of the drizzling rain from her eyes. It didn’t help much, but…

Rounded top, flat bottom, straight sides, and a tumble of rocks, noted Buffy. That looks an awful lot like a blocked tunnel.

Getting into the tunnel, which was only halfway up the chasm’s side, even if it was about ninety degrees to her right, would be easier than dragging herself all the way up the crumbling wall. And it would be easier, which, considering her state – pounding headache, soaking wet, freezing cold, bone tired, bleeding hands, and a leg that hurt like hell – could only be of the good.

She had to get out of here sooner rather than later. It was only a matter of time before the demons below her noticed her or the post-earthquake tsunami of fire hit. And there would be a tsunami of fire. With the ocean burning, it was too good of an opportunity for the demons in charge to pass up. And she was exhausted. Sooner or later, she was going to run out of gas, screw up, and finish her fall.

And any way you cut it, I’ll be just as dead, thought Buffy, and a small, unworthy part of her twisted with fear. You’re a Slayer, whispered that treacherous part of her heart. And Slayers don’t survive arenas.

Buffy crushed that part of herself.

This Slayer is going to survive this place. I’m not going to die here. I’m not going to die like this, Buffy thought fiercely, and it wasn’t enough. Aloud, she said, “I’m not going to die here.”

Her voice was strange in her ears – low and rough and hoarse, her thirst making her tongue feel dried up and clumsy – and she felt stupid saying it at all, much less aloud, but Buffy said it again, louder.

“I won’t die here. I won’t die like this. I won’t!”

She had too much to do.

She was going to be the first – the only – Slayer to ever make it out of an arena.

Then she was going to burn Panem to the ground, starting with its capitol.

And then she was finally going to get to go home, screw those other, deader Slayers and their angry eyes and their stupid demands. And screw the game makers! Screw this whole lousy hell dimension!

“Screw them all!” snarled Buffy, her fist pump nearly unbalancing her from her seat on the sagging pipe. Catching herself, Buffy glanced down – no snake-centipedes honing in on her yet – and said more quietly, “Surface dwellers, look out! Here I come.”

Step one, escape this literal hole in the ground.

Step two, kick ass.

Step three, escape the arena.

Step four, burn everything.

Step five, burn the ashes.

But first, step one.

Screwing up her mouth, Buffy visually picked out a few jutting bits of hard rock that she might be able to grip onto and a few depressions that she might be able to jam a hand or the ball of her foot into. Recent experience had been a hard lesson in what to grab and what to avoid.

Path decided, Buffy carefully stood up on her pipe.

I hope I can find any of those spots again when I’m actually climbing, she thought, taking a deep breath.

The place she was aiming for might not be as stable as it looked. It could crumble under her weight. She might already be too tired to do this. One of the snake-centipedes in the pit could finally think to look up, notice her, and snap her up like Tucker Wells at graduation. A post-earthquake tsunami of fire could hit at any moment, killing her before she found shelter and making all of this an exercise in futility.

Slowly, Buffy let the breath out, trying to exhale her fears with it.

I can only do my best.

Another deep breath in, another breath exhaled.

And it will be enough. I can do this. I will do this.

A sharp breath in and then, Here I go!

And Buffy jumped.

His heart in his throat, Haymitch watched as his tribute leaped at a new wall.

She didn’t even know if that wall could hold her weight!

The girl hit the wall with a bone jarring impact, crying out breathlessly with what sounded like pain.

But she held on. She stayed there.

And thankfully, so did the wall.

After a few moments, the stupid, brave girl began her ascent, moving slowly, doggedly, and while always favoring her injured leg. She slipped once – only the once, thankfully – and Haymitch nearly died in the moments that it took her to grab a jutting bit of stone and regain her balance.

“It looks like she’s angling right,” said Cecelia’s voice from behind Haymitch’s shoulder, startling Haymitch badly. Twisting in his seat, Haymitch discovered Cecelia standing behind him, her head tipped back as she watched his tribute attempt to climb to freedom on the big screen. Woof was slowly making his way across the room to join them.

“Haymitch,” said Cecelia, and pointed at a corner of the big screen. “What’s over there?”

Haymitch fiddled with Buffy’s observation windows for a moment before saying, “Nothing obvious.”

“Maybe it looked like an easier way to go,” opined Seeder from nearby.

“No, she’s got a plan,” disagreed Seafoam from her place at Annnie Cresta’s console. “She had to jump and hope for the best to get over there. That was a huge risk. She’s heading for something specific.”

“But there’s nothing there,” argued Cecelia.

“There’s something,” said Seafoam grimly. “No one like that one would do something so stupid unless the potential reward vastly outweighed the obvious risks. She’s got a plan this time.”

Her plan, it turned out, was to make for the mouth of a tunnel so thoroughly collapsed that it had honestly looked like part of the wall to Haymitch – and Claudius Templesmith and most of his panel of experts, judging by the official commentary happening on the main feed as Haymitch’s clever tribute pulled herself up onto the narrow ledge between the edge of the tunnel and the rounded side of a boulder. She slumped against the stone with open gratitude in every line of her face and form.

Good girl, thought Haymitch fiercely. You’re almost there.

He wondered if it would be worth it to go through the catalogue again. The game makers rarely added things to it after the games began, but maybe he had missed something useful to the girl on his previous passes through it. Maybe it was worth looking again.

“Well, now that she’s halfway up the wall,” began Gloss, only to fall silent at the simultaneous ringing of all six of the Career consoles’ phones.

Everyone shut up.

They sat in silence, every ear straining to hear the hushed phone conversations happening at the Career consoles. From what Haymitch could discern, the Taraka O. Corporation, the Career districts’ most generous and dedicated supporter, would like to make another donation, but there were conditions attached to this one – conditions that Haymitch couldn’t quite hear.

There was a brief pause, during which all six Career mentors clicked through their screens and exchanged nods, before Cashmere said, “Thank you. It will be as you wish. The gifts are on their way.”

Haymitch promptly lost interest in the conversation. In an agony of anticipation, he waited to see what Taraka O. had sent to the Career tributes. And while he waited, he watched his girl tribute poke at the rubble, looking for ways to climb through it and into the tunnel behind it rather than continuing up the wall. Haymitch approved of the shift in her plans. She was shit at climbing. And if she was lucky, it would put her out of the way of whatever the Career districts were plotting.

Haymitch wondered if her head was still bothering her.

Buffy said something – “I think I can shift some of this and maybe make it through, Haymitch,” according to the subscripts – and pulled one of her sheathed swords from one of her boots. She used it as part of the fulcrum – the sheathed sword was the lever and a carefully chosen rock the pivot – which she used to shift a few of the smaller rocks, opening up a gap near the top of the tunnel. The sword went back down her boot, and the girl through the gap.

Head first, the girl slithered into the tunnel behind the rock slide, landing on her forearms. She walked forwards on her hands, pulling her lower body through the small hole until her legs finally came through after her. When they hit the ground, Buffy yelped. A moment later, the girl popped up onto her feet, hissed, and staggered a few steps before regaining her balance. Slowly, she limped down the crumbling tunnel.

The picture on the main screen flicked away from his girl tribute, going to the heaving seas rather than the Career pack.

Annie whimpered, Four’s other victors hissed, and Haymitch frowned.

Those waves were alarmingly tall. It was hard to tell without anything to directly compare them to, but Haymitch thought that they were probably at least a couple of stories tall.

“Tsunami!” gasped Seafoam, and several of the Victors out of District Four cursed. To the others, she said, “Can we send them into the desert?”

A flurry of tapping keys answered her, as every mentor in the room tried to access their gift catalogue, failed, and tried again.

“No,” said Mags grimly. “We’re locked out of the system.”

There were limits to every mentor’s powers.

Mentors could manipulate and maneuver each other or the game makers. And they frequently lied, cheated, and stole from each other. Stabbing each other in the back, (mostly) metaphorically speaking, wasn’t unheard of between districts or even within districts. Mentors interfered with each other’s plans as a matter of course.

But when it came to the game maker’s actions within the arena or against the tributes, things got trickier. A mentor with enough credits could send a weapon to a beleaguered tribute or medicine to a sick one. A tribute could be warned away from dangerous conditions or even other tributes. But mentors were helpless against overarching conditions within the arena. And no mentor could protect their tribute from direct actions taken against them by the game makers – for instance, a dam breaking and flooding an arena or, on a more individual level, a rockslide designed to kill a particular tribute.

A tsunami of fire was apparently the sort of thing that a mentor couldn’t help their tribute to overcome or avoid. All they could do was sit, watch, and wait to see how their tributes fared when left to their own devices.

In Haymitch’s experiences, it was one of the worst parts of being a mentor.

Claudius Templesmith squealed, his voice laid over the action going on in the arena, and it grated on Haymitch’s last nerve.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” intoned Claudius Templesmith dramatically, “I have just been informed that what we’re looking at is a tsunami,” a dramatic pause, “of fire! This year is certainly looking up, up, up!”

Haymitch snorted.

He glanced between the monitors dedicated to his two tributes, his chest drawing tight. The girl was struggling onwards, while the boy was asleep in his bolt hole. He had no idea what was coming for him.

“Wake up,” snarled Haymitch. He slapped the side of the monitor, as if the boy might feel it. “Don’t sleep through your own death!”

But Haymitch couldn’t warn him. And locked out of the system as they were, Haymitch couldn’t do anything for him either. If the boy survived, it would be by sheer luck.

Haymitch didn’t believe in luck.

Forcing himself to look away from the boy, he turned his attention to the girl, who was her own worst luck.

She was still trotting down that dark tunnel. As he watched, Buffy tripped over a long length of…

Is that a snake skin? Haymitch wondered, as he toggled between his angles on the girl.

It was a snake skin; a really fucking big one. There were lots of them winding through the tunnels, the girl careening past most of them through blind luck. What she knew or suspected, Haymitch couldn’t say, but it was obvious that she was in a hurry. Hopefully, she was headed to the desert, the farthest part of the arena from the ocean.

“Don’t go back to the cornucopia,” he whispered to her; pleaded, maybe. “I’ll send you what you need.”

She had guessed something about the dirt. She had to guess about the tsunami too. She had to.

“Let’s check in on our tributes in the area!” caroled Claudius Templesmith as the shot of the tsunami of fire was replaced by a map of this year’s arena.

“Our One-Two-Four alliance is hunkered down in a building northeast of the cornucopia,” said Claudius as a red pin appeared on a building near the edge of town. The map disappeared, replaced by a visual of the Careers. They were outside in the rain, watching as large packages equipped with a parachute and a cheerfully beeping tracker lazily drifted down to them. “It’s pretty far inland so, with a little luck, they might be safe.”

They’ll be safe, because the game makers want them to be. And because some Victor out of those districts will blow the right game maker to make sure that they don’t change their minds, thought Haymitch bitterly. Already Finnick, Cashmere, Gloss, and a handful of the other Career mentors had quietly slunk out of the mentors’ control room.

“And our Three-Five alliance is due east of the cornucopia,” continued Claudius, another pin appearing on the map. The image on the screen briefly flicked to the trio, one of the Threes sitting with the Five, while the other Three watched them warily. “In the normal course of things, they might be considered by some to be worrisomely close to the One-Two-Four alliance, but now that’s looking like it might be the safest place to be!”

Lucky for them that the Careers weren’t as dedicated to their craft as Haymitch’s girl was. If they had been, the kids out of Districts Three and Five would already be dead.

“Magnet of District Six is, unfortunately, at the western edge of town,” said Claudius, and a pin appeared in one of the buildings closest to the seashore. On the screen, their oblivious tribute hunched over a map of the arena drawn in the dirt floor of his hovel, and at their consoles, the two out of District Six began quietly weeping. As far gone as they always were, even the morphlings knew what was about to happen.

“Welt from District Eleven is in the south,” said Claudius as another pin appeared on the map, “but he’s one of the few tributes to take shelter from the weather in a tall building, so we’ll have to keep an eye on developments there.”

There was a brief glimpse of a dark-skinned boy, hair cropped close to his head and asleep, then the map reappeared and Claudius continued, saying, “His district mate, Laurel, is southwest of the cornucopia.”

The pin that landed in the map was about as far as one could get from the Careers and still be in the town. Under other circumstances, the girl’s hideout would have been smart. Now it was probably going to be the death of her. There was a brief cut to a girl lying on her back with her black hair haloed around her face, her dark eyes half-lidded and her face sweet, and Chaff threw his headset at his console.

Haymitch took a deep breath, bracing himself against his tributes.

“Burdock of District Twelve is southeast of the cornucopia,” said Claudius Templesmith, as a red pin appeared in one of the last buildings before the town gave way to the desert, and Haymitch felt a loosening of the knot in his chest. The boy might make it, despite himself.

There was a clip of the boy napping – there was little else to do right now in the arena – and then the screen returned to the map.

“And Buffy of District Twelve is west of the cornucopia,” said Claudius Templesmith, “but steadily working her way east toward the town square and the cornucopia.”

A red pin appeared on the map, this one the only one in motion. Haymitch watched the pin’s slow pace against the wave’s rapid one, trying to estimate the distance between the girl and nominal safety, and his chest tightened.

She’s not going to make it, realized Haymitch, despairing, and drank deeply from the bottle in his hand. It tasted like… severely watered down wine.

Haymitch squinted at the large green bottle in his hand.

Where did I get this? When did I get this? Haymitch wondered, his mouth turning down, while on the main feed, the red pin that was the girl stopped. And then it started going backwards.

“Oh ho! What’s this?” Claudius Templesmith chortled in a voiceover. “A twist! Let’s look!”

The map was replaced by an image – his girl, grimacing, as she ran back the way that she had come. Her gait was painful to watch.

What is she doing? Haymitch wondered as she lurched to a stop near a tumbling mass of shed snake skins. As he watched, the girl dropped to her knees, bringing it close to her face to try to see it in the nearly pitch black darkness.

The girl frowned. Under her breath, she muttered something. A moment later, while she was looking up for something, the translation popped up underneath her image on the big screen. It read, “This would be so much easier with those goggle thingies. Haymitch, can I have night seeing goggle thingies?”

She could not, but Haymitch tapped at his keyboard anyway, just to make sure that he was still locked out. But if he could have, he would have sent her a set of night vision goggles, if only because of the four of them – him, Effie, the boy tribute, and her – she seemed to be the only one of them with an actual plan. That had to count for something.

The girl sighed.

“When I find another set of goggle thingies, I’m putting them in my pocket. I’ll just… try really, really hard not to break them.”

Haymitch snorted. Is that why she kept them in her pack? No one’s even touched her yet.

Although all those flips and falls probably wouldn’t have been good for a pair of night vision goggles.

On the main screen, Buffy fished her lighter out of her pocket. Haymitch watched, mystified, as she put the skin in it, watching carefully as the flames licked over the snake-centipede’s scaly skin.

Buffy’s face lit up with a smile.

Quickly, she snapped the lighter shut, pocketed it, and began gathering up lengths of shed snake-centipede skins.

“At this point I have to ask the esteemed members of today’s panel,” said Claudius Templesmith, the main feed flicking over to him. Buffy was relegated to a small square in the corner of his screen. “What is she doing? Any thoughts?”

No one had a clue what she was about, but that seemed about right to Haymitch. He never knew what the girl was doing either. He just had to hope that she did.

Slayers, by definition, had fantastic night vision. It was one of the things that let her fight on equal footing with the vampires, the demons, and all the bumps in the night. But it was much, much easier to see what she was doing when there was ambient light to see by. Willow would probably know why that was. All Buffy knew was that in the tunnel it was a pain in the ass.

By touch, Buffy found and gathered as many discarded demonic centipede-snake skins as possible. She was pretty sure that she wasn’t moving fast enough to make it out of town before the tsunami of fire hit. This was plan B.

If there’s a tsunami of fire…No, there’s definitely going to be one, Buffy thought, scowling. The burning ocean left to burn, the rising water, the earthquakes, and the sinkhole from hell meant to keep me in the burn zone – it all adds up. They’re just lucky that I hurt my leg or I’d be out of here so fast, it’d make their heads spin.

Buffy draped the lengths of shed skins around her shoulders, tied them around her waist, and tried not to trip over them where they trailed behind her. They felt like snake skins, sort of anyway, and smelled faintly musty, but other than giving her the heebie jeebies, there wasn’t anything particularly offensive about the demonic centipede-snake skins in and of themselves.

Buffy tried really hard not to think about how big or fat any of the skins were – or, correspondingly, how much bigger and fatter the snake-centipedes trapped in the arena with her must be to have grown out of them – because that way lay borrowed trouble, and she was in enough of trouble as it was, thank you very much.

When she had them all, or at least as many as she could find and carry, Buffy made for the nearest manhole cover. Navigating the rusty ladder while wrapped in flapping demonic snake skins was tricky, but not impossible, and Buffy popped up in time to hear the sucking sound as the ocean was pulled away from the shoreline.

Six minutes, Buffy thought, as she hauled herself through the manhole opening and onto the muddy ground. I’ve probably got about six minutes at most.

Overhead the sky was pinking with the beginnings of sunset, and around her loomed the dead town’s remains, ominous shadows in which nothing living stirred.

Nothing dead is stirring around here either, Buffy noted with some surprise. From the lack of tinglies on the back of her neck, it seemed like the demonic element had gotten the memo to clear out. Bitterly, she thought stupid demons and their stupid, unhurt-y legs.

It seemed like a lot to ask Haymitch if he could swing anything for it. He had already sent her a lighter, and that was one more thing than anyone had ever sent him during his trip through Candyland, the Shockingly Murderous edition. And he hadn’t been able to send her the goggles. So Buffy bit the inside of her cheek and limped onwards, reminding herself that Slayer healing would take care of it sooner rather than later. Reminding herself that it would probably hurt much worse, or maybe even be broken, if she was just a human girl was cold comfort, but it was better than nothing.

By the time that Buffy reached the cornucopia, the sky was scarlet. Sunset came quickly in the Dome that Demons Built.

It’ll be super picturesque when they roast us, Buffy thought darkly as shrugged free of her snake skins. Try to roast us, Buffy corrected a heartbeat later, because I’m not dying here. Not like this.

If her stupid, insane, completely terrible plan worked, she might very well be one of the ballsiest badasses to ever be called as a Slayer; or at least, the only one to have taken Star Wars quite so seriously. If it didn’t… well, she wouldn’t be around to endure the shame of being yet another Slayer to fail, fall, and die in the Demon Games.

Just the thought of seeing her Slayer Sisters again – the uncounted and uncountable girls who had come both before her and after her in the Slayer line – was enough to make Buffy work faster.

She had to live through this. She had to. And those skins – gross and ominous as they were – were her only hope.

The Star Wars references, they just make themselves, thought Buffy. And then, to distract herself from the fear jittering in her stomach, through her veins, at the back of her brain, Buffy told Haymitch the story of Luke, Han, and the poor dinosaur that they had to camp out in overnight as she worked.

If this didn’t work, George Lucas was going to have a lot to answer for.

The girl had gone straight for the cornucopia.

Of course she had. God forbid she ever do what Haymitch wanted her to do.

Frightened for her and irritable from it, Haymitch watched as Buffy tied a knot at the bottom of one length of skin and began haphazardly dumping provisions, weapons and packs into it, all the time breathlessly telling him a story about someone called Luke, who got carried off by something called a yeti.

A knot was tied at the other side of the lump of things, enclosing them in a closed off sheathe of snake skin. It left several dozen feet of empty skin flapping off of the other side, into the end of which the girl tied a rock the size of Haymitch’s two fists together. She lugged the whole thing over to the nearest streetlight, flinging the end with the rock tied into it over the arm of the light so that she could haul the lump of supplies off of the ground. She wrapped the end of the skin around the bottom of the light post and secured it there.

“It’s a makeshift bear bag,” said Johanna Mason from behind him, startling Haymitch badly, “and a complete waste of time, the little feather-brained idiot.”

Seemingly just to spite Johanna Mason, Buffy made and filled another makeshift bear bag, hanging it from another nearby lamp post, puffing something about “Just in case,” as she did.

Just in case of what, Haymitch didn’t know.

The sour taste of wine lingering at the back of his throat, Haymitch watched as Buffy double knotted a third skin, Cecelia hissing, “You don’t have time for this!” from her place behind Woof’s chair.

On the big screen, Buffy stepped into the length of skin, arranging it so that the knot lay against the top of her foot. She pulled it up the length of her leg, looped it around her thigh, and tied it in place. She covered her other leg the same way, and began arranging layers of skins around her thighs, groin, and torso. Buffy made herself into a ball of red-gray skins and knots, even going so far as to pull a skin, knotted at one end, over her head and wrap it around her neck and torso like a particularly long scarf before fumblingly tying it off.

She was looping her last bit of skin around a third lamp post, when Buffy said, her voice badly muffled, “Haymitch? Effie? Are you watching me?”

She paused a moment, and in the lull, Haymitch, fool that he was, nodded as if she could see him, because yes, he was watching over her. Right now, everyone in Panem was watching her.

“If you’re not, I hope that someone tells you to watch this recording,” said the girl. She was testing lengths of skin against the pole. As they watched, she tied a knot in the skin and leaned back, using the tension in the loop of shed skin to help her shimmy up the lamppost.

When she reached the top of the post, she stopped. There, the girl dragged in a deep breath, expelling with it a cloud of words.

“Look, this is… not one of my better plans. I mean, I think it’ll work! I am fifty – well, maybe more like forty or, uh, twenty-five – percent sure that this is going to work the way that I think it will, which, hey, is better than a lot of the other plans I’ve had over the years. But if it doesn’t – if something goes wrong, I want you both to know that whatever happened to me wasn’t your fault.”

And there, Haymitch closed his eyes, feeling pierced through. She couldn’t have hurt him more if she had cut him up and left him with his guts hanging out. Again. Fucking Careers. They always knew where it would hurt the most.

She said something else – something involving his name – and Haymitch’s eyes snapped open, lest he miss any of what were likely to be her last words. But her image had already disappeared from the main feed, replaced by an aerial shot of the Career tributes in their lair, and Haymitch switched his attention to his own monitors in time to see her say, “Did you hear me, Haymitch? I am not your fault. You never could’ve changed my decisions. So if I die here, it’s my own damn fault. Don’t you dare try to take responsibility for me, Haymitch. The only person responsible for me is me.”

She briefly glared at the camera there, like she was going to toss him in another shower, and Haymitch automatically scowled. The familiarity of it hurt enough to make his eyes ache.

Damn Career, he thought, as he dashed a wrist across his watery eyes. They must practice that; hurting people in ways that they can’t expect.

A hand settled on Haymitch’s shoulder, its painfully tight grip a welcome relief when Buffy said more gently, the subtitles flicking under her masked face, “If this goes wrong… Look after yourself, okay, Haymitch? And keep my necklaces. If I can’t wear them anymore, you should. Effie, keep being fabulous. And don’t let Haymitch drink too much. He’s kind of an idiot that way. And Annie? If you see this, thanks for the bracelet. I loved it. Oh man, I can hear the wave coming. I really hope this works.”

The sound of Buffy breathing in and out heavily, catching her breath… and then a wave of fire swept over the arena. In moments, Buffy was underwater – fiery, burning water that was going to burn her to a cinder.

Annie screamed.

A lot of people did – including Haymitch.