Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Watching it back, Mason seemed nothing but cold as he watched over the Career pack, twirling a dagger between his fingers. As far as the Capitol was concerned, as far as the tapes were concerned, this was the moment he decided to kill his district partner.

He might have done it that night, if the girl from District Two hadn’t startled awake, breaking his thought process. The tapes showed things no one in the arena had noticed: Mason slowly slipping extra food, knifes, supplies into his pack throughout the next day when no one was paying attention; practicing his aim by throwing daggers at the corkboard across the room; laying claim to one of the three masks the group had in their possession, a necessity in an arena trapped with fungal spores at every turn. 

The arena for the 68th Hunger Games made the typical hunting of the Career pack difficult. With overgrown, half-destroyed buildings on every block of a small town, there were too many places to hide, too few places for tributes to build fires and get caught from the smoke. Closer to the cornucopia, the buildings got taller and more dense, with an area to the west that completely flooded in one of the gamemaker’s attempts to flush people closer into the center. 

“We should check it out,” Mason offered up the next day after a kid from one of the outlying districts had set fire to their food stockpile. “Gwen and I are strong swimmers. Clearly there was someone in the area, they might have left supplies behind.”

“It’s worth a shot,” said Ginger, the girl from Two. With only eight tributes remaining, the four Careers left would have to split sooner or later. If something happened to Four while they were surveying the building, they all went their separate ways, Ginger said to the boy from One. 

The tapes show Mason and Gwendolyn wade downhill until they have to swim under the surface to get to the building’s door. As they make it through and resurface on the other side, Gwendolyn makes it to the small ledge that leads to some stairs. Then they show Mason come up behind her, dagger at his side, and push her against the wall, stabbing the knife through the center of her hand. Gwendolyn screams as he takes the knife out and turns her around, putting the knife to her throat. With a rush of adrenaline, she brings her knees up and manages to push him off her far enough to topple him into the water with the base of her trident. 

The camera shows Gwen hold the trident to toss and hesitate until the moment that Mason resurfaces and tosses a dagger at her head. 

“Don’t make me do this,” she says softly, clearly distraught at the betrayal but still unwilling to break the alliance on her own. Then he’s made it back to the stairs with a knife drawn, making a beeline towards her when she lets the trident fly into the center of his chest. A cannon sounds as Gwen pulls the trident free, crying as she pulls the body up to rest on the landing, leaning into his chest whispering tearful apologies. 

After a while, she stops to breathe and reaches up to close his eyes and place his hands across his chest. In a quiet voice, she begins singing the funeral song from District Four, and she hopes that her district understands she had no choice.

A parachute makes it through a broken window nearby, and she opens it to find a salve. She stays by his body all night, not giving the Capitol the chance to collect his body. She tends to her hand and goes through his pack, taking anything useful and adding it to her own. Two more cannons sounded that night, the boy from One and the girl from Seven. Only five tributes remaining.

Ginger comes after her the next morning, rightfully assuming that she hadn’t left the building. There’s a trident through her chest the moment she breaks the surface. Gwen goes to retrieve her weapon before flying up the stairs to make sure no one is waiting to ambush her as soon as she comes out of the building. When it looks clear, she finally makes her way back outside. 

For the rest of the Games, Gwen is lurking low in the water near the cornucopia as one by one, the remaining tributes are led towards the center of the arena by the gamemakers. And one by one, she picks them off like flies. 

Mason had been the first tribute she’d killed. And then she’d killed four more. After her Games, they called her the Siren. Deadly, beautiful, someone they couldn’t have unless they wanted to risk death.

Chapter Text

Gwendolyn isn’t sure how she gets through the interview with Caesar before watching that week of her life replayed before her. There are parts when she can’t look at the screen and instead looks down and traces the cool metal of her new right hand.

In the past few days or so of recovery after the Games, she’d gotten presented with a couple of prosthetics to replace the arm that had gotten ripped to shreds by sea serpent-lizard mutts in those last hours of the Games when she’d had to fight them off beside the boy from Seven before ending his life. The one she wore tonight was her least favorite. It looked as close to a real limb as anyone could ever imagine, but it was clunky and heavy in comparison to the other and since it looked so real, the coolness of it kept startling her. 

She’d spent most of her time with a different prosthetic, but this was the one that had been requested when she was to be in a seat before the nation. She assumed because it was prettier to look at, easier to pretend like it was a normal arm, easier to pretend she hadn’t almost died alongside the mutts. Personally, she thought the other was more beautiful.

The one she’d grown accustomed to was an attractive silver metal, blue wiring visible, plates and pieces that all served a function, and it fit right over the ghost of her elbow like a second skin. They told her it had been built specifically for her by the best of District Three. A quick turnaround, but she didn’t want to question it too deeply and see an ugly truth. It was light and quick to respond to her movements, the metal fingers moving sometimes before she could even think to move them herself. 

It’s three hours long, and the thing that she thinks about most is watching how the other tributes got driven to the center by trick after trick from the gamemakers. 

The girl tribute from Nine had been the closest to the cornucopia. The building she was hiding out in started to collapse. The footage shows her racing to the stairs but they collapse under her just as she puts her first foot down. She’s quick on her feet, though, and manages to turn around, look at the busted windows and jump through. She’s jumping from the second story and nearly manages to stick the landing, but her foot gets caught on the root of a tree bursting through the concrete and her ankle folds underneath her body. 

The crowd gasps, and Gwendolyn winces. The girl had been limping as she’d made her way towards the center of the arena. That explained it, she supposed. The girl had shown a ferocity with a scythe, taking out a number of tributes on her own. It was lucky, really, that she was injured when she came upon Gwendolyn, only her eyes and her forehead visible over the water, watching as the tribute barely missed the collapse of the building towards the cornucopia and made her way to the water. 

She’d been excited to see the water. She’d been relieved when she stuck her foot into the cool stillness because it stopped her foot from hurting for just a moment. She hadn’t expected it when Gwendolyn’s hands grabbed her leg from under the surface, pulling the girl under and drowning her. Watching it back, she wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. The poor girl’s screams wouldn’t let her turn away.

The boy from Five and the boy from Seven had actually been near each other. Seven had been hunting the small boy from Five. Gwen remembers him only being fourteen or fifteen, and she was impressed that he had made it so far for a boy so small. Seven is nearly about to take off the boy from Five’s head when he steps on something in the treeline and suddenly it’s like the trees have come to life. They’re spewing spores and vine-like branches start to twist out and reach for both of the tributes. 

Seven was lucky enough to have a mask from his pack, so he puts it on and runs through the cloud of spores until he reaches the waterline, where there are no living trees and no mushrooms to accidentally step on. Behind him the fog of spores is slowly pushing him towards the center, but it seems to be out of it’s main reach so it only slowly dissipates downhill with him towards the center. 

The boy from Five wasn’t so lucky. In an attempt to run away from the spores and the vines trying to rip the limbs from his body, he runs right into Gwen, who had just pulled herself out of the water and onto the rumble-filled ground. Seeing the spores that now surround the boy, she pulls on the mask she’d taken from Mason, picks up her trident and tosses it at the boy without even giving him a chance to pull out his weapon. 

It’s for the now two deadliest tributes that the Capitol saved their display of deadly mutts. It’s as the boy from Seven was walking along the waterline on the screen that she remembers his name: Foster. Just ahead of him, there’s a movement in the water that starts as only a few ripples before it turns into a barrage of sea serpents hissing out from the water at him. A few stay in the water, but most of them speed out of the water on lizard-like legs, hissing and snapping and trying to wrap their long bodies around him. Foster takes out a few in the fight before he shakes off enough to start running. As he’s running, there’s a constant stream of blood that trails from his calf. 

Those few that stayed in the water went straight for Gwendolyn, who while out of earshot of Foster, was close enough that the serpents sliced through the water towards her with ease. One wraps around her legs, binding them together, and the other starts to go for her throat. Gwen raises her arm, and its teeth slice through her skin with ease. The Gwen on screen lets out a gruesome scream, and the Gwen on stage tries to ignore the phantom pain surfacing again. 

What doesn’t show for the cameras is the venom that each strike of the serpents inflicted on the tributes. With her off-hand, Gwen takes her trident to stab at the one under the water, eventually finding purchase and buying her freedom. The other, seemingly egged on by seeing her bleed, kept going back for her arm as she scrambled to the surface. 

She’s crawling backwards away from the serpent, sure this is how she dies when Foster comes barreling into them, taking out the creature with a wild swing of his ax. “Help me with these things!” And when she sees another ten, twelve of the creatures following after him, she knows that the only way either of them gets out of this alive is to kill the mutts, so they do. And for a moment, these two tributes who have never exchanged a conversation become allies. They get beaten up and they’re worse for wear and they almost make it out of the entire exchange alive before the last of the mutts rips through the skin of Foster’s stomach, his guts stumbling out of him as he sinks to the ground and tosses his ax through the last mutt. 

The boy is holding his stomach together as he looks up to Gwendolyn, tears streaming down his face. And she knows that even with the Capitol’s advanced technology there’s no saving him. She’s starting to get woozy from the venom, and she can no longer feel any part of the mangled forearm she’s clutching to her chest. And she needs treatment soon if there’s any hope for her either, so with what requires not an insignificant amount of effort, she balances her trident in her left arm and drives it straight through Foster’s chest. 

What's cut out of the broadcast is Foster pleading to Gwendolyn before she killed him, “Kill me, please, kill me.” 

The last canon goes off, there’s the faint hum of a hovercraft in the distance, and Gwendolyn Covell is being announced as the Victor for the 68th Hunger Games.

As the show ends, the crowd in front of her goes wild, and Gwen is suddenly very thankful that she doesn’t have to go through another interview directly after watching that. Caesar Flickerman is reminding the crowd of the final interview tomorrow before the broadcast is cut and they’re all whisked away into a party in celebration of her victory at the Games. 

“You did good today, kid,” her mentor wraps an arm around her shoulders on their way out of the party now late into the evening. Mahone was a tall, wide shouldered man in his mid 30s who'd won the 52nd Hunger Games. During her training, he had a fairly laissez-faire attitude, serious in a few moments from time to time, but since her exit from the arena, his expression was more stone-faced. 

Until last year, it had been Mags and Mahone that visited the Capitol every year as mentors. Last year was the first year that Finnick had joined the yearly trip to the Capitol, giving Mags a well-deserved break from her mentorship. Gwen remembers that the coverage of the Games that year had almost been as much about Finnick as it had been about the Games. She almost wished, now, that she had been selected that year. She wouldn’t have won that year, to be sure, but she would have at least not experienced the same fervorous lust that the Capitol citizens had regained for the Games this year. 

Maybe they were always like this, though Mahone reassured her that they were not, but the Capitol citizens would not leave her alone for even a moment. The party had been a horror to get through. It had been like a constant game of ping-pong as Mahone pulled her from person to person throughout the night. Often, Finnick was no more than fifteen feet away, stopping people halfway to her with his smile, or waving them over to him after a few moments of talking to her. 

“Let us get a good look at District 4’s siren, eh?”

“I hear your Siren’s got a good voice, I wanna hear her sing.”

All night, people had been clamoring to get close to her, and despite all the training and mentoring Mahone had done to get her through the arena, it was that night she was most thankful to him. 

“Don’t worry ‘bout it, kid,” he patted her arm on the walk back to the Tribute Center, “it’s my job to look after you now, too.” When they’d made it back to the fourth floor, he escorted her all the way back to her room before he stepped away from her. “Get some sleep, okay? Prep team will be here at noon.”

Her sleep is fitful, and her morning passes in a blur from the moment the prep team she doesn’t remember the names of are pulling her from bed. She doesn’t remember eating anything until halfway through her hair being trussed up and curled to perfection when Finnick walks by and hands her a lap tray with a bowl of cereal and a coffee. It’s probably the first food she’s eaten in a day, and as quick as she eats it, another bowl appears. 

Everyone on the fourth floor is abuzz until they lead Gwen into the main sitting room, now adorned with cameras and lights and two crystal blue chairs, one empty, one already seated with Caesar Flickerman. 

When the cameras go live, it’s mostly easy questions. Is she excited to go back to her family, her district? Of course. What’s the first thing she’s going to do once she’s back? See her sister, sit by the ocean. How’s she adjusting to the new arm? She raves about the technology of the Capitol and the genius of District 3 that had made it for her. 

“Now, I have to ask about that day in the arena with your district partner, Mason.” 

Gwen suddenly feels sweaty, sick with the thought of it. She glances behind the camera. Finnick is whispering with Plato, the District 4 designer, and Mahone gives her a nod. Eudora Wexley, District 4’s escort to the Capitol, is miming taking deep breaths with wide eyes and a smile.

“Walk us through what was going on in your head.”

She inhales and looks back at Caesar, who’s looking at her with a particularly kind expression that reminds her of how he’d interviewed the particularly young tributes this year. “Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting it.” Gwen says it with a soft sort of smile beginning to grace her lips. She couldn’t make District 4, couldn’t make all of Panem hate someone that she didn’t even blame for his actions. “But we all did things in the Arena that we aren’t necessarily proud of to survive. I think he just wanted to get back to his family as much as I wanted to get back to mine.”

Mahone gives her a thumbs up and a tight smile. 

“Well, Gwen, based on what we saw, it certainly seems like you don’t hold any resentment towards Mason for what he did. That song you sang to him, tell us about that moment.”

“I don’t know how familiar the Capitol is with the customs of each district, but in Four, there’s a song that we sing before we send our dead out to the sea. I think . . . I think I just wanted him to know that I wasn’t angry at him for what he’d done, and to bring a little piece of Four to the arena in that moment.”

“And it was a beautiful moment, Gwen, we were all very touched. Not to mention that you have a beautiful voice, so it wasn’t bad to listen to, either.” It brings a smile to both of their faces before he continues asking about the other tributes in the arena. 

Eventually, Caesar signs off, and the show is over. Everyone is hugging and chatting and laughing, but Gwendolyn is stuck in her chair. The show was over. The last coverage of the Games until the Victory tour in a few months. What happened now?

“Hey,” Mahone looks like he’s being held hostage between Caesar and Eudora, so it’s Finnick that’s crouched next to her, “you did good. You ready to go home?”

Her hand goes instinctively to the sea glass necklace that she still wears, the token of her district, the only thing she has with her from home, and she nods.