Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mags does not like the Hunger Games.  This is not a secret, nor is it hard to understand, but there are people who do not need to know it and so never will.  She is standing by as she always is, waiting for unfortunate children to fall into her unfortunate hands so she might give them half a chance at getting back out of that arena.  It is all she has done for years and years and years, and there are a few who stand alongside her because occasionally it works.  They still aren’t good odds.  They never have been.

The announcer is from the Capitol as every announcer is and always has been.  His clothes are rich and red in colour and they look like they are made of blood as they catch the light and throw it.  He looks a little less than human, his face full of implants beneath the skin that make the shape of it grotesque, awful.  She remembers a time when they looked more or less normal but these days it is like the Capitol does everything it can to make sure they do not look like the people from the districts.  Mags supposes it might make killing their children easier.

He stands on a raised stage in front of two glass bowls full of the names of the children who stand beneath him, small and afraid and all looking up like they aren’t allowed to let him know that.  They all wear blues and purples and greens and it feels like unity as he stands above them in his claret and throws his arms wide and puts on a show for his Capitol.  Mags gulps because she is also looking down on them because the Capitol makes her.  Most of what she has done in her life is what the Capitol has made her do; she has more or less belonged to them since her victory.

They call their boys first in District Four.  This is one of the few things she remembers being consistent across every Hunger Games aside from the fact that everyone dies, and horribly.  For a few years nobody was really even there to watch and then things changed.  She was a successful experiment for the Capitol and in a way she really can’t help but feel as though she ended up dooming every poor, executed child that came after her.

“Finnick Odair!” the man from the Capitol announces with a flourish and Mags’ heart flutters up into her throat.  There are really no names that wouldn’t devastate her but Finnick is fourteen and she has had a personal hand in his training for a long time.  She knows this boy and now she will watch him either die or change so much he will never find himself again.  She is aware that District Four is considered a career district like One and Two by many, but this is not a classification she enjoys.  Like many things in the Hunger Games, she very much feels like it is her fault.  She arranged the training of their children many years ago in the hopes that it might save a few of them.  It has, but not enough.  Unlike One and Two, District Four sees little glory in the Games.  They train to survive them, not to volunteer.

A child with sandy hair and his head bowed as if to hide his face from the prying eyes of the Capitol until he has gathered himself enough to face them, weaves his way through the crowds.  He moves slowly but confidently and Mags knows him well enough to understand that he is thinking right now about what sort of impression he might be able to get across to the Capitol viewers, how he might be able to make them like him.  It is always a good thing when the Capitol wants to see more of a tribute, until it ceases to be.

As is customary, the man in red poses the question for volunteers that almost always goes ignored, unanswered.  And then the unfathomable happens.  Mags has seen it before and still she takes a stumbling step back.  “I volunteer!”  A hand flies up from beside the empty space where Finnick was standing, tanned and well-worn but small because it is a child’s.  “I volunteer as tribute.”  Finnick whips his head around so Mags can only see the back of it from her vantage point, but she knows this boy well enough to imagine the horror splayed across it right now.

“No,” she hears him breathe as if that changes anything.  He has stopped in his place and the new volunteer is walking out of the crowd and into the alley where Finnick stands like all the life has left him.  Mags does not know this child which means he has not been trained for the Games and her stomach falls to her feet.  He is a volunteer which means there is no chance for another good samaritan to save him.  She has to mentor this boy and then sit and watch him die.  She can’t even hold onto hope this year, can’t even pretend to.

The boy stops beside Finnick and they hug until they are being ushered apart by Peacekeepers and the boy looks up, right at the cameras.  He looks tired but he also looks determined.  Mags wishes she could feel anything but despair.

“Well,” the man from the Capitol says.  It is all Mags can do not to learn his name.  “That was quite the show young man!” The boy is standing by his side dressed in his tattered best.  His hair is thick and dark and more than a little overgrown, so black it swallows even the stage lights, but his eyes are a bright sea green and he keeps staring at the cameras with his expression fixed and firm.  It’s almost like he knows what he is doing.  Mags doesn’t know how he could.  “I’m sure all of Panem wants to know right now who you are and what you’re doing up here.”

The boy takes a breath and closes his eyes for just a moment as a microphone is shoved into his face.  “My name is Perseus Jackson.  I’m here to save a friend,” he swallows again but Mags sees his image as it is projected, as he smiles and something about the scale of the projection and the distance of the cameras makes it look like it might even be half genuine.  Just like every other year, she is going to get attached to this boy before he is sent to the slaughter, she might even trick herself into thinking he has some modicum of a chance.

He stands to the side with his hands behind his back and his shoulders squared and never breaks eye contact with the Capitol.  He’s a good looking kid, like Finnick but very much not like Finnick.  They’ll love that.  Mags knows the Games are all about the consumption of their children, knows it well from her own Victory Tour--the first of many--in almost every way so long as the Capitol are the ones doing it.  There was a boy from Six a couple of years back who ate the other tributes and was killed for it, not by the other tributes but by the gamemakers.  The Districts say it was because he lost his mind, that they couldn’t have a victor emerge crazy and dangerous and inhuman.  Mags is old enough to know better and sensible enough not to say it: cannibalism was rampant in the Capitol during the war, the last thing they want is to be reminded that they’re just like the districts, that they are desperate and human too.

“Penelope Cassock!” the man calls.  An eighteen-year-old extracts herself from the back of the crowd.  Her clothes are plain and simple but they are neat, well-pressed and intact, a contrast to Perseus’ cardigan with the hastily darned holes and his too-short trousers, patched at the knee with a fabric that doesn’t quite match.  She cannot hide her horror as she walks with faltering steps up to the stage and the District is silent as they watch her.  She is short but well-built with a square jaw and watery, clear, blue eyes.  Her eyebrows are so blonde they may as well not exist and her bright hair is wrapped into a braid and pinned to the back of her head.  Her skin is tanned and freckled, spotted with the hand of the sun.  She looks like she works, which is to say she is not rich either, but she is wealthy enough that Mags knows her face.  She has trained at least a little and nobody is going to step forward to take her place.  It’s a shame, for many, many reasons, but Mags can’t quite let go of the fact that this was her last year of eligibility, she so nearly got out.  She doubts Penelope can let go of that either.

She takes her spot besides Perseus, four years younger and half a foot taller, and there is something about her expression and her faltering gaze that gives Mags the impression that she can’t quite believe it yet, that it hasn't registered completely.  The girl will be Marsh’s responsibility, not hers.  If the world decides to take pity on Mags and her soft old heart for once, that means she won’t be there when it does.

The ceremony continues but there will be next to nobody who is still really listening.  Mags certainly is not.  She looks out instead, seeks out Finnick and sees him standing there back in his assigned spot, next to the void nobody has moved to fill yet because that would be an act of giving up.  His brows are furrowed and his cheeks are wet and he looks distraught but he also looks angry.  Mags needs to stop thinking about him because her focus is Perseus now even if she can’t muster up the same hope that he might come out alive as she would’ve had for Finnick. Nobody under fifteen has ever won the Games, very rarely do the little ones get very far.  She has to change that or she will have lost another Hunger Games.  It’s a part of winning that nobody ever talks about: once you win once you will spend as long as you are useful mentoring tributes and almost every year you will lose and lose and lose.  It has been decades and she still hasn’t been allowed to age out of the Games.

She stands outside Perseus’ door like furniture.  Marsh walked straight through Penelope’s and left her family to wait outside, all tears and rumpled clothes and shaking like they will not be able to keep standing if he does not let them take the space soon.  Mags waits though, because it is polite and because it gives Perseus time to gather himself and mourn and then put his best foot forward and greet her with an idea and a smile or something else she might be able to work with.  Finnick walked straight in without asking her if it was allowed and he has not emerged and nobody else has appeared to wait alongside her.  An orphan then.

“Percy!” She hears Finnick call because Finnick is not trying to be quiet and the walls are thin.  Maybe they are made that way so that Perseus cannot hide things from her, but maybe they are made that way because any real privacy may as well be a gateway to rebellion these days.  “Dumbass!” Finnick’s voice shakes through a sob and Mags wishes they would just make their walls a bit thicker.  She’d give them privacy if she was allowed to but there are peacekeepers all over and she is right where she is supposed to be.

Finnick leaves eventually and it is clear from how long he spent in the room and how much of it he spent in a silence whose palpability Mags could feel even from outside of the room, that he wasn’t expecting anybody else to show up.  He smiles at her weakly and she can’t help but think about how he isn’t necessarily small but he is tiny because he is fourteen and his face is round and his eyes are too large just like his hands and feet and she has no doubts that he has a lot more growing to do.  He’ll have the chance to do it now, so long as fate is willing to skim him over for the next four years, leave him more or less untouched.  Perseus won’t be so lucky.

He is sitting down when Mags finally walks in, watching the door like he is waiting for someone.  She hopes it is her or else he will be sorely disappointed: there is nobody else there.  He doesn’t smile at her but he doesn’t break out into tears, fall to the floor and claw at her ankles either so it is far from the worst reaction she has ever had.  “So this is real then,” he says.  She wishes she could say no but she nods and he sighs and leans back, rubbing his hands over his face.  It is smooth and soft and his hands are rough and calloused and scarred much more than she’d expect them to be.

“Why did you volunteer?” she tries to ask the impossible question gently as she takes her own seat and tries to put enough space between them that it doesn’t feel like she is cornering him at all.  She heard the explanation when he was up on the stage and under every eye in Panem but she wants to know more.

He shrugs but his hands are shaking.  “I don’t really have anyone,” he says.  “No family, no real friends, just Finnick.  I’m not losing him,”

“But volunteering…” it is her turn to sigh, “aren’t you concerned about him losing you?”

“Sure, but we both know he has other people.  Besides, with the amount of tesserae I take, it’s like I’d already volunteered before they pulled the name,”

She raises an eyebrow at that.  “It’s just you and you take out that much tesserae?”

“There are a lot of people who can’t work to feed themselves or their kids around where I live.  They’ll take what’s given to them if you don’t give them the chance to give it back,”

She takes a moment to really look at him.  He seems to have a habit of recklessly throwing himself away for other people’s sake.  It doesn’t necessarily bode well for him in these Games.  “Tell me honestly,” she urges “do you want to win?”

“More than I want to lose.”

“We’ll work with that,” she tries to look him in the eye.  There’s something about them that is disconcerting, perhaps just that they are too bright to seem natural, like there is something about them that is almost Capitol.  The hunger pangs in his frame and the clothes he wears that have been torn apart and put back together are anything but, but the sharp angles of his face and the near glow of his blue-green eyes and the pitch dark of his hair… the Capitol will love him in a way Mags never wants anyone to have to be loved.  “I’m betting you know how to fish and forage.  That’s good but always be a little wary about poisoned arena traps.  If you can fish with a spear we can probably teach you to fight with one quickly enough.  We’d use more time if we had it.  I’m sure you know that,”

He nods.  “Right,” his teeth inch over his bottom lip and clamp down for a moment.  He lets it go and then sighs and drops his voice to what is barely a whisper.  There are peacekeepers right outside but not in the room because they trust Mags as an old lady who maybe isn’t quite harmless yet but is well on her way and there is more peace in 4 than other districts because they are a people who know how to speak in a whisper whilst being trusted not to do it at all.  “You can’t ask me why,” he looks up at her like he is seeking reassurance.  Standing he’d be taller than her but they sit on equal levels and his head is bowed so it feels like she is looking down at him.  “I can use a sword.  Well.  I want to get out of this.”

She doesn’t doubt him.  Everybody wants to get out of the Games, that is the point of them.  She thinks what she is feeling might be relief but that is not a feeling that belongs to today, not a feeling that often belongs to Mags Flanagan at all.  In fact she remembers the last time she really felt it: 11 years ago, when a wiry seventeen-year-old who could wield a weapon but hated doing it, who hated even killing fish, made it home, different but alive.  “Good.  We can discuss strategy in more detail later,” as if on cue, a peacekeeper outside raps his knuckles on the door, a 30 second warning “but at least for now, I think we keep that as a secret weapon.”

Mags knows every step of this process so well by now that she is certain there is next to nothing left in the world that could surprise her.  The bullet train, decked out as it is in the lavish furnishings of the Capitol, not afforded by more than a select few in even the wealthiest of districts, is just another of these things that she has seen become, change, and develop.  She takes her seat with little fuss and lets the Red Man from the Capitol flit about like a harried fly by her elbow but does not listen to the conversation starters neither she, Marsh, or either of their tributes seem especially eager to entertain.  He eventually gives up as he does every year and Mags looks up to watch the children being rocketed across the country to their slaughter.  They deserve whatever attempts she can make to preserve their memory; there are a few things in Panem that don’t exist except for in the minds of a few elderly people who know to keep their mouths shut if they’d like these things to keep existing at all.  Perseus is watching the window, looking back at 4 until the thin line of the ocean has disappeared entirely.  That’s the sort of thing she tries to hang onto.

The Red Man does not sulk at being ignored.  Mags has watched plenty of people take on his role and they have all shared in possessing this almost admirable diligence and little else of merit.  She refuses to pay them enough attention to learn how many: this year he is the Red Man, next year he might be dressed in yellow or else a different person entirely and it will all be the same to her.  She watches him catapult back to his feet and lead them through the carriage on the customary tour.

There is something indulgent about the drape of soft, heavy fabrics and the smell of food richer than anything regularly eaten amongst even the districts’ richest, a contrast to the dreamy lightness of the bright, yellowing light filtering in through large clear windows and refracting off of glass and crystal.  Mags remembers when the tributes were first granted all this luxury and excess but doesn’t think she has ever quite understood why.  She has a few theories she plays with in a loop without conclusion: perhaps it is a way to show off the wealth and power of the Capitol to those who were never blessed enough to be born into it; maybe the Capitol really is just that out of touch that they don’t even realise they’re doing it, too adjusted to luxury thrown haphazardly here, there and everywhere; it might be incentive, a way to show the tributes a taste of wealth, of what they could have if they they try hard enough.  Whatever the reason, Mags likes to think that, just maybe, there might be a sympathetic person somewhere in the process, choosing out crystal goblets and ornate throws weaved by hands they will never see with a whisper of an apology because it is all they can do to offer comfort or joy to children in their final days.  She isn’t sure if she believes it but sometimes it feels like she has to.

She takes her seat at the table before anybody else does.  It’s her age, just another of the many things she cannot overcome nor escape.  She reaches for a bread roll, bypassing the richer, more expensive foods, and smears it with butter that melts quickly into it.  She bites in and the crust crunches between her teeth.  She remembers the early days when the reapings, whether her own or someone else’s, left her completely without an appetite.  Now they are her life, like anything else.

Perseus looks over the spread of the feast and makes no effort to hide the glint in his eyes or the way his jaw falls slightly open.  He is a poor kid who is used to sustaining himself on what he can find, fish, and trade for.  This is worlds away from that.  “It’s yours,” the Red Man says.  His voice is soft, not like a child’s or a woman’s, but rather like he is whispering at full volume.  It makes Mags’ spine crawl.  “Help yourself,” he smiles and his teeth are too straight, as though they don’t each have a shape but rather merely form a flat, white block that fills his mouth, no difference between a canine and an incisor.

Perseus falls into the seat beside Mags like he has already decided that she is all he has right now and she hands him over the bread basket.  There aren’t any district-specific loaves, none of the green-tinged seaweed-flavoured bread he will be used to.  He takes a roll and rips it in half with his hands, clean likely only because that is what is done for a reaping, and offers the larger of the two pieces to Penelope.  She takes a chair uneasily and Marsh stays standing behind the chair she has chosen so that the only thing on his blind left side is the wall.

Perseus eats his half in two bites then leans across the table to gather whatever food catches his eye onto his plate.  “Skipped dinner?” the Red Man says through a laugh like it hasn’t even occurred to him that there are people in even the richer districts who are poor and struggling, who are starving.

Perseus does not answer him, does not humour the question.  He cocks his thick eyebrows then looks down to his full plate and eats in a pointed silence.  The tributes are usually politer and more scared, worried about what this representation of Capitol power that has come to their home uninvited and pulled them out of it might do to them if they do not at least try to engage.  Perseus doesn’t care.  Mags admires that, remembers herself at 16 sitting on a much slower train, nothing special but also not the cattle and cargo cars of the years previous, remembers how scared she had been of everything and how overly polite the whole thing had made her.  District 4 had a victor a couple of years before her, just the one, and he has been dead for a very long time.  Mags knew his face once, even now knows that it was the morphling that did him in, doesn’t remember his name or how he won or who he was.  In a way, there were no victors before Mags.  There certainly are not any who are older than she is.  There haven’t been in a while.  The morphling calls or else the drink does and Mags has tried both in desperate searches for solace that have only left her sobbing and shaking on the floor.  She is not a weak woman except for all of the ways that she is.

Marsh still does not sit down.  He was wiry once upon a time but now he is just skinny.  It is not morphling skinny; he shares Mags’ intolerance.  That’s why they train the tributes.  She might be old and Marsh might be brusque and detached and look like he is about to snap, but they are both present and as sensible as anyone in their position can be.  She still remembers being 22 and training her first successful tribute, how it felt like maybe she was finally useful until he died when she was barely thirty and she realised it was just another type of loss.  She thought it was safe to get attached and then, when she learnt that it wasn’t, it was already much too late.

They eat in a silence the Red Man accepts but smiles through right up until Penelope puts her knife and fork down and looks at Marsh with the desperation Mags has only ever seen in tributes.  “Where do you think I’ll place?” she asks him, sure she will not win.

“Maybe fifth,” Marsh says.  Even before his Games he did not understand how to spare a person’s feelings.  Tears well in Penelope’s eyes but she shakes her head and combs her fingers through the loose strands of hair near her face that have escaped her plait.

“I’ll have to aim for fourth then,” she flexes her fingers and looks at her hands like she is trying to figure out how to make them belong to someone else.  Fifth is a good prediction which means she has said or demonstrated something that has made Marsh happy.  Every year he will sit and tell Mags precisely where he thinks each tribute will place right before the Games begin.  He never gets it exactly right but he does always get strangely close; in a decade he has only wrongly predicted who the final ten tributes will be once.

Perseus looks at Marsh.  Mags knows he does not like people looking at his face, that he wears too much too ornate jewellery in the hopes that people will be distracted before they are able to meet his eyes.  But Perseus not only meets his gaze but holds it.  “Do me,” he demands more than requests.

Marsh looks away, at the wall on his blind side, and opens his mouth as if to answer before closing it again and doing the unthinkable and looking back over.  He looks Perseus up and down like he is thinking.  People do not look at Marsh and Marsh does not look at other people but here he and Perseus are, staring at each other.  “Depends.” he says and for a moment Mags thinks he has copped out even if that is terribly unlike him.  “Ask me again after your interviews,”  It’s just about the last thing Mags wants to hear: what she is seeing Marsh sees too, which makes it real.

Eleven years ago Marsh had the most beautiful dark blue eyes that seemed to always linger for much too long.  And then just an hour before he won his games the filthy nails of a desperate boy from 7 who didn’t want to be there any more than Marsh did clawed desperately at Marsh’s face until his left eye was destroyed and the surrounding skin was tattered.  By then their weapons had been swallowed by the arena and there was no opportunity for Marsh to fall back on the trickery and the poisoned traps he had relied on for most of the Games.  Victory was in sight, as was the only person standing in their way of reaching it and they had to fight with their hands because that was all they had.  Marsh’s eye pulled from his head, his shaking hands wrapped around the throat of a boy much larger than him but also much hungrier, a final whisper of “I’m sorry Spruce, I don’t want this,” before the lights went out: it made for a spectacular end and it made Marsh’s mother vomit and it probably did similar to Spruce’s way across Panem.

Marsh was supposed to be one of their beautiful victors, the kind who were perfect to exploit, then, at the last moment, he ceased to be beautiful.  The Capitol haven’t yet engineered the perfect prosthetic but they have gotten very close and Marsh has never wanted anything to do with them: he’s convinced they will just see everything he does, that it will be the perfect way to spy on victors, know which sparks need to be stamped out.  He’s probably right.  Far from the partway functional perfect replica the Capitol doctors offered him, he wears a prosthetic that is little more than a white block filling out the empty space, the surrounding skin scarred and brutal.  Every now and then he will touch a fingertip to the ruined skin and mutter gratitude under his breath.  Mags is just about the only person he allows close enough to notice and she really doesn’t have to guess who it is that he is thanking.

“Guesses aren’t final yet,” he tells Perseus and Penelope matter-of-factly and the Red Man looks positively elated that there is something resembling a conversation happening in their train carriage.   “I’ll give you an update on the final night if you still want it,”

“Final night,” Penelope repeats, her face suddenly ashen.  She looks down at her plate, at the cutlery she placed neatly to the side of it, and jumps to her feet.  “I-” she doesn’t say much else, just gestures vaguely in the direction of the bathroom and runs off.  Mags supposes it’s really starting to hit her.  A glimpse out of the window shows that they are passing through a shock of green trees that could be in any part of the country but Mags knows from experience that they aren’t far away now, that the Capitol is approaching and everything is only going to get more and more real.

Chapter Text

Percy stands by the window as the train pulls into the station, decelerating rapidly.  There are people waiting like they are watching animals in a zoo and he understands enough about the Hunger Games to know what he has to do.  He smiles and tries to meet as many prying eyes as he can, waves and tries to look friendly.  If they like him they’ll feed him and he’ll only have to worry about not getting himself killed.  He’s rather good at that.  He can suck it up and complain to Mags later.  Her eyes glint constantly with a spark of madness and the sorrows of an apology she can’t find the words for; he’s inclined to like her.  He looks over his shoulder at where Penelope is curled up on a plush seat, Mags sitting to her side and rubbing a hand on her back like she is soothing a child.  He doesn’t know where Marsh has gone but he does know that he isn’t here, that he will not face the Capitol right now because he doesn’t want to.  Part of him wants to ask Penelope to come and stand with him but she looks like there is no floor beneath her and there never will be again and he can’t escape the fact that, if he wants to go on living then that means that she cannot.  He doesn’t know her well but he knows her face and her voice well enough to know that she doesn’t look or sound like herself anymore.  She isn’t presentable enough to face the Capitol right now.

The faces that he looks out at are familiar insofar as more than a few of them sit on the wrong side of monstrous.  Still he waves and smiles and hopes his act is even half convincing because he feels thoroughly empty.  He hasn’t been in Panem long, this is only his second ever Hunger Games, but he understands exactly what the Games are and exactly what they will turn him into.  And still he cannot let Finnick either die or become that thing Percy will now have to fight tooth and nail to be reduced to.  It’s his fatal flaw and he knows that.  He also knows that it is going to make the whole business of alliances in the arena very difficult.

The man from the Capitol leads him, Mags, Penelope and Marsh out of their carriage and onto the platform where enough space has been cordoned off for them to be able to walk out whilst being separate from the crowd but always close enough to reach out and touch them.  A woman with marigold yellow hair and a face painted in ornate golden shapes holds her baby out, just a normal baby with chubby cheeks and dark, curly hair, dressed in yellow frills from her tiny head to tiny toes.  She reaches out because the people walking past are interesting and a nearby peacekeeper glances over as though ready to step in and intervene at any moment.  Percy feels sick as he does it, but he slows for long enough to press the pad of his finger softly into the baby’s palm and smiles directly at the mother, meets her pale brown eyes and hates how human she is up close because it means she has no defence for being here, for engaging in the slaughter.  The baby squeezes his finger and lets him go and he keeps walking, rejoining the group.

All around them the other tributes are getting out too, all one big spectacle very few of them were actually expecting to have to engage in.  District Three are right in front of them and Percy’s skin crawls because he sees the spotty kid with the crooked glasses and the hair he is trying constantly to plaster down to his head even though it is determined to constantly spring back up.  Children younger than him are here and for him to win they have to lose.  He absolutely will not be responsible for that if he can help it.  Penelope seems to share his thoughts as the boy scurries along, having to almost run to keep up with the adults and the female tribute who also does not look to be that much older than Percy but who is almost as tall as Mags and is keeping up even as she is sobbing.

Percy keeps waving and smiling and Penelope keeps watching him instead of the crowd who might actually be in a position to help her.  “How can you do that?” she whispers and there is a part of Percy that can’t help but wonder if she thinks he is enjoying this, that he actually wants to be here.

“If the Capitol likes you they can help you,” he whispers back.  She surely already knows that much but she seems too preoccupied to think about it.

“You really want to win,” she sounds disappointed, perhaps just because that means that somebody else will be fighting, winning will be that much harder for her.

“This isn’t an elaborate suicide,” he says back and the whole time they are trying to have this near-silent conversation amongst a very loud crowd of clamouring people he knows Marsh is listening in, probably still calculating.

They leave the station and he is handed to a team of people who guide him to a room that is brightly lit like a hospital and who do not speak aside from to instruct him bluntly to strip.

“What?” he says and, in lieu of an answer, they just start to pull at his clothes, getting his cardigan halfway down his arms before he scowls and takes it off himself.  It is strange really, that all these people could be so eccentric and unique that their bright colours and exaggerated features quickly blur into one, making them one vaguely human collective without a shred of individualism between them.  He stands in the middle of them in his underwear blushing bright red and refusing to take the final garment off despite their insistence until they give up and they start prodding and poking and plucking and waxing and he doesn’t quite succeed in his attempts not to tell at least one of them to fuck off.

They leave as a unit as though each movement they make is choreographed and they leave him standing in the middle of a bright, empty room, almost naked, sore and cold and exposed and he curses every single one of them though he does not think the gods have dominion here.  His senses feel as though they are under siege, the white light stinging his eyes and the air thick with floral smells underlined with something that is chemical, bitter and foul.  His skin feels strange, stinging where the hairs have been plucked and waxed, and rubbed red raw all over.  It is silent though, just him in this room where he is shivering with his hair wet about his shoulders and the pungent stink of the scrubs and oils and lotions in his skin and hair.

He might be there for one minute or twenty but either way it gives him time to think about quite what he has done, how he has stuck his head above the parapet.  This isn’t his world and still he is stuck in it, unable to get out.  That means, amongst other things, he does not have family here, nor his friends from camp.  He has only Finnick which means he cannot help but to keep Finnick safe, whatever it takes.  This is evidently what it takes.

In a way he isn’t scared because he knows how to fight and he is hardwired to stay alive when every bump in the night could be something with acid spit and gnashing teeth, and in a way he is terrified because these are not monsters but rather unfortunate children and he is perhaps much less human than he would like to be but not so much so that the thought of having to kill any one of the other tributes doesn’t open a nauseous pit in his stomach.  In a way, he’s not so sure he wants to win, and yet he doesn’t think he wants to die and he definitely doesn’t want Finnick to spend the rest of his life blaming himself.  He’d like to go home now, to where all the monsters and his mom and Annabeth and Grover and everyone else are.

A door opens eventually and he looks up to watch a woman walk in, disturbing his silence with the hydraulic click of the door falling back into place and the sharp clacking of her heels on the shiny white tiles on the floor.  “Well, just look at you,” she coos and he feels immediately like she is seeing him as a pet rather than a human or anything even close.  He isn’t sure whether he means it to be a smile as he bares his teeth and she rears back for a moment like she is startled before breaking into uneasy, tinkling laughter.  “None of that,” she commands in her breathy voice.  “I’m only here to help.”

“Who are you?” he asks flatly and, just like the Red Man, she at least pretends to be unperturbed by his failure to cooperate.

“Your stylist,” she says, “Trinity.  I control how the Capitol sees you so best not make an enemy, Perseus,” she admires her own nails, sharp and wicked like a predator’s talons, and his monster senses can’t help but tingle.  “Your lot are always a mixed bag: ugly beasts some of you, pretty little things others.  Some of you can fight too, but that’s none of my business.  All I care about is that you really are a pretty little thing,” she looks about twenty but he’s almost certain she is older from the way that she talks.  She leans in close to him, so that her face is maybe only an inch from his own, and he fights off the urge to stumble backwards.  “Just look at those eyes of yours!  It’s not often that I’m this excited about a tribute!” It is like she is having a conversation with herself.  Monsters have a tendency to do that and Percy hates it.

“I have a stylist?” He has to admit that this isn’t exactly a part of the Games he was thinking about when he volunteered himself. 

“Of course you do sweetheart, for the procession and the interviews.  We're sophisticated people: we like a good show,” she places emphasis on the word good in a way that makes Percy’s skin crawl.  “I saw you putting on a good little show of your own at the station,” she rubs her hands together like a fly and leans in again.  Her skin is preternaturally smooth, like it is made of polished alabaster, and her eyes are a sort of luminescent blue not dissimilar to Thalia’s.  “Keep it up little one, and they’ll love you.”

It doesn’t escape his notice that she keeps mentioning how small and young he is, like it would ruin her fun if he wasn’t a child standing far, far beyond his depth.  “How do I do that?”

“Play along,” she says like it really is that simple and turns to rummage through a drawer.  The door opens again and two of the brightly coloured women from earlier file back in to flank her, eagerly awaiting instructions.  Next to them she looks almost dull but all of the small ways in which her appearance is strange make her unsettling to look at.  It doesn’t comfort Percy at all to know that there are more than a few people who would say the same thing about him.  “Just smile and wave and keep that pretty little face intact and I’ll do the heavy-lifting,” she looks at her own spindly arms and her tone tilts humorously as her posse giggle politely,

“Keep my pretty little face intact?”

She hums.  “Some of you district kids like to squander your gifts.” it has an air of finality to it and, if he’s honest, Percy isn’t convinced he actually wants to know.  When she turns around she is holding a small, wickedly sharp pair of scissors and a spray bottle of some substance Percy doesn’t recognise.  “We can work with the length but we need to do something about these split ends.  We keep the makeup minimal, same with the outfit,” she grins, as do the women flanking her, and Percy feels like he has been left out of the joke.  “Get ready to outshine that plain girl.  I trust her stylist, of course I do, but the starting point matters,”  he’s frankly offended on Penelope’s behalf but doesn’t say anything because there are scissors an inch from his jugular and not even his self-preservation instincts are that bad.

Her spray smells like salt and her hands smell like rubbing alcohol and the way that she looks at him so probingly makes him more and more self conscious by the moment.  “What do they do to you in the districts?” she says judgmentally as she eyes his scars, most of them from his life pre-Panem, like her people are not sending him to be murdered for entertainment.

“Are you serious?” he responds before he can think about what he’s saying and she goes briefly silent, blinking slowly like a reptile.  And then she laughs because he is a silly little child who doesn’t know what he is talking about and she has done nothing but diminish him since she got here.  Of course.

“Fiery,” she quips while he seethes.  Her teeth are tinged blue.

She puts down the scissors eventually and her assistants brush the itchy strands of hair from his skin with robotic efficiency as Trinity finally collects a soft white robe for him.  He pulls it on with gratitude he tries not to let show on his face as he enjoys the warmth and comfort of the fabric against his abused skin.  Tastes of luxury like this can't help but feel taunting when he knows what lies beyond them.

One of the walls opens, pulling up into the ceiling, a hidden door, revealing a vanity with a polished mirror and an excessive supply of makeup lined up across it, clearly organised though he doesn’t understand how, as well as racks and rack of garments, accessories and sheets of fabric just shining with possibilities.  He is led straight to the plush stool before the marble vanity and confronted with his own reflection in stark clarity that he is neither used to or comfortable with.  His hair looks wet though it is dry to the touch, and it has been pushed back and away from his face except for a few strands that fall in front of his face, framing it.  He is reluctant to admit it, but there is something artful about how it is so artificially constructed yet natural-looking.  It must show on his face because Trinity smiles with smug satisfaction.

“You see what a little gift you are to me?”  Her hands are on his shoulders, her talons brushing against his clavicle through the fabric.  “Stay there and keep trusting me, pet,” he isn’t sure if he has quite given her the impression of trust but, though his gut curls and tightens like a clenched fist, he forces himself to at least appear relaxed as she starts applying sweet-smelling cosmetics to his face.

He has this urge to bite the hand that polishes him but he holds it back, if only because she doesn’t need another excuse to think of him as a caged animal.  Instead he closes his eyes and tries to imagine he is back in New York, back where he has a family and friends and creatures trying to kill him lurking around every corner.  The images start to fade around the edges and the faces blur into expressive colours and the knot in his stomach tightens so he thinks about District Four instead and hates the fact that he has to do it.

He thinks about standing with his shins in the sea, bringing in his nets, tethering his little boat to land, examining his haul.  He thinks about Finnick laughing alongside him, thinks about them swimming together, about Finnick bringing him bread and foraged fruits and vegetables while he fried fish.  Finnick is still there, still in Four where he is no doubt miserable but safe enough that it’s worth it. Percy thinks about the meagre earnings he lived on, the fish he caught that he would sell for cheap to anybody who had enough trust in him to spend their own hard-earned money on it.  He remembers Penelope standing at his door with a handful of coins, about how the only thing she had ever said to him before the reaping was that her dad swore by his fish, “Best value in all of Four!”  It echoes around his head and he feels sick because she will never be able to tell him that again and her dad will start buying elsewhere even if he manages to get home.

He opens his eyes and looks at his face until it ceases to be his.  His eyes gleam, lined with a subtle streak of blue-green and his skin looks like plastic, his scars coloured over, gone so long as he doesn’t touch them. He looks more like his father in miniature than himself.  “Like what you see?” Trinity asks.

“Not really,”  She acts like she hasn’t heard him.

Mags waits apprehensively for the procession to begin, for the tributes to begin filing out of the doors and into the carriages to be paraded about the stadium.  She knows Marsh well enough to know that he will be sharing in her apprehension but not showing it, his face fixed into an expression that is calm and disinterested even though she has never known him to truly be either.

District One are the first out, two eighteen-year-olds decked out in swaths of sheer fabric and expensive jewellery that shines with such lustre it can only look artificial, cheap.  Tributes from the same district rarely match but they look to despite being dressed in different but equally decadent colours because of the mimicry of Capitol fashions.  Their export is luxury which is a very hard thing for the Capitol stylists to satirise or recreate without falling right back to their own Capitol references.  Nothing about the way that they are dressed for consumption makes them, tall and well-built they may be, look less young.  And yet nothing about the soft, elegant drapery of their costumes makes them look less dangerous, like they will tear the weaker tributes apart.

District Two aren’t dissimilar but District Three look like their odds of lasting very long are rather slim.  The boy must be twelve, the girl maybe fifteen, and they are both too skinny, with bright eyes that are wet and unfocused behind exaggerated glasses that are a part of their costumes.  The costumes do not look like Capitol finery either, but rather like cheap robotic elements sewn into suits.  The girl wears a bedazzled toolbelt about her hips at a slight tilt and they both look terrified, a sharp contrast to the true careers who emerged before them.  Mags knows careers in a way most people don’t, knows that they are also scared and desperate even if they will not realise it until later, when they are in the arena and facing the reality that they have to become brutal if they want to win, feeling guilty for having signed themselves up for it but too ashamed to admit it, desperate for the glory and supposed forgiveness a win gets you.  Mags knows Panem forgives its victors but she hasn’t forgiven herself in all the decades since her Games and Marsh wallows in guilt whenever he is given time.

Their tributes are next.  Penelope is first, being led to where Mags and Marsh stand beside her carriage, teetering along in high-heeled shoes she cannot walk in and gripping the arm of her stylist.  In the shoes she’s probably almost Perseus’ height but he has yet to emerge.  She is wearing a long blue dress with fish embroidered across it.  It feels a bit like her stylist has given up but she does look nice, her long, blonde hair piled up in elegant ringlets and pinned into place with a clip shaped like a conch shell, her accessories made of mother of pearl and blunted fishhooks and knotted and braided segments of the rope Four makes their nets from.  They have not tried to make her desirable like they have the tributes from One and Two and, for just one moment, Mags lets herself get her hopes up.

Really she should know better by now because Perseus emerges as Penelope’s stylist helps her step up into the carriage and take her place, wobbling even as she stands still on the flat floor.  His stylist is a slender woman Mags is all too familiar with, who grins in self satisfaction as Perseus scowls at her with what Mags can only describe as loathing.  He has his arms wrapped around himself in an attempt to hide from the world but it isn’t doing much.  The woman has him wearing next to nothing, draped in sections of net like sashes and wearing some sort of skirt to preserve what modicum of dignity the Capitol is willing to give him.  Everybody is seeing what Mags is and she can’t keep pretending that it isn’t blatant what the Capitol has planned for him if he just so happens to defy all the odds and win.  He looks like he has emerged from the ocean, like a god of the old world, like a grown man and not a fourteen year old boy who must be terrified but who is doing an admirable job at hiding that fact.

“I’m sorry,” Mags tells him directly, paying no mind to the slighted glimpse of upset that passes across Trinity's face as soon as Perseus is looking elsewhere and will not notice it.  “Just ten minutes and we’ll have you back in proper clothes and away from the cameras for now,”

“These are better than proper clothes,” Trinity tells him solemnly, all but yanking him away from Mags and running a hand down his spine in a gesture that is probably supposed to comfort but that makes Perseus bristle like a threatened animal.  “They are going to love you, and when they are cheering your name you can tell them that it is all the handiwork of Trinity Price!”  She corners him into the carriage and finally takes a step back that allows Mags to fill her space, Marsh by her side.

“Look unified,” Mags says surely.  It is the same advice she gives every year, the same words.  She’ll tailor it when she needs to but the parade is just the time for appearances and all the real decisions have already been made by the styling teams.

“Smile and wave and don’t let them catch onto the fact that you hate them.” Marsh finishes, his own spin on what Mags told him once upon a time.

As they talk the rest of the tributes file out and into their own carriages until everybody is lined up and ready to go and the mentors are being ushered away and into their front row seats. As soon as they are out of earshot he looks at Mags and says “Is it bad taste for me to subtly suggest he lose an eye?” as if Marsh Holtz has ever been a person concerned with what is and isn’t bad taste.

The ceremonial music swells before she is given the chance to answer.

Men in militaristic uniforms play shiny brass instruments on a raised platform, the Capitol anthem washing over the crowd.  They are not real military uniforms though, because having a formal army is an admission that their wartime victory may not continue to hold forever.  As their music fades out Caesar Flickerman steps out onto a central stage, face stretched into a smile that is undeniably charming despite Mags’ hatred for it.  He seems to have opted for golden yellow hair, makeup and costume this year.  It is a strange family business he is in, but Mags struggles to imagine anyone who is not one of the near-identical Flickerman clan presenting the Games. This must be Caesar’s 30th year in the position and Mags hates that she can’t quite hate him.  He energetically announces the tributes district by district and they come out in their horse-drawn carriages.

Everyone looks young to Mags these days, but even as she sees the real careers standing straight and serious and respectable exactly how Cashmere and Gloss will have coached them to, wearing understated smiles and waving with careful composure, she can’t help but think about how these people not only should have an entire life ahead of them, but also did not live to see a single second of the war.  In fact, it has been a long time since the tributes knew the war; it is only her and Woof left and she was a child and he was a baby.  It is a wonder the Capitol are still able to convince themselves that this is punishment for that.

District Two follows District One, equally as well-composed, smiling and waving with a kind of rehearsed stiffness that very few people will be close enough to see.  Then comes Three, their smiles shaky and their eyes still wet.  Mags hasn’t once seen this girl not crying or on the verge of tears.  Marsh taps fifteen times on her knee and Mags counts each one.  He does not think she will last long; she will likely run from the bloodbath and perish soon after.

The cheers of the crowd pick up again as District Four emerges and she holds her breath as she watches Perseus and Penelope standing side by side, almost the same height thanks to Penelope’s ridiculous shoes, smiling and waving.  Her smile keeps wavering, falling away from her face before she remembers that she needs to replace it, and his doesn’t meet his eyes but his cheeks dimple and he doesn’t hesitate to look up at the crowd and the cameras, to make eye contact with the Capitol just like he did at his reaping.  They really are pretty eyes.  His skin glistens, smooth and tan beneath the harsh stadium lighting, his bare chest rising and falling at an astonishingly even pace for the situation he is in.  He doesn’t look fourteen, not dressed up--or dressed down, more accurately--and from this distance, but Mags knows he is just a child.  With how the Capitol viewers around them are cheering and squealing she has to bite back the urge to remind them just as impolitely as she can that he is a child and they are grown adults and they have a word for people like them.

Five follows, their tributes doing a passable job of hiding the fear, then Six, their tributes almost as young as Three’s.  The chariots keep coming, the children positioned on each smiling and waving and shaking and trying not to cry, all the way until District Twelve.  They do a final lap of the stadium all together and Caesar Flickerman tells them that there are already a few stand outs, naming no names as though just about everybody listening isn’t already pretty convinced they know who he is talking about, and then it is over.

They are led away from their seats, away from the public eye where they gather as a group of people, waiting for their tributes and their stylists to join them again as the Capitol announcers, the Red Man and his prosthetic smile easily spotted amongst them, approach with a general air of merriment that the mentors cannot share.  She watches Haymitch from Twelve take a glug from a flask then pass it over to Chaff from Eleven who does the same before handing it back.  It is concealed once again amongst the rumpled layers of fabric Haymitch is dressed in, his eyes half closed, swaying on his feet.  It is a cruel reminder if ever Mags needed one that some districts do not have enough victors to pick and choose who their mentors are.  Chaff sways too, smiles too wide as he tries falteringly to talk to Seeder where she stands beside him.  Mags knows exactly how much it hurts to have a child you mentored reduced to this sort of babbling mess but Seeder betrays no hint of pity but rather remains stoic and composed.  It is almost wondrous how well she seems to have coped in the aftermath of her Games all those years ago.  Mags knows a lot of people would say the same about her.

Still in order, the tributes from One are the first to return, handed over to Cashmere and Gloss who are ready and waiting.  It is Cashmere’s first year as a mentor after her victory in the previous Games but her brother is right there beside her, here as a mentor for the second time.  It is not a situation Mags can empathise with because this gathering of victors as mentors began with her; she has always been here, watched it grow up around her.  The careers from two are out next, walking with perfect composure over to Brutus and Enobaria.  It is her third year: the careers are on something of a winning streak at the moment.

Perseus and Penelope are returned to her and Marsh soon enough, both grasped by the hands and congratulated by the Red Man for putting on such a good show and both flanked barely a foot behind their backs by their protective stylists.  Mags knows Trinity Price, though perhaps not quite so infuriatingly well as Marsh does.  After all, she has been around for years and looked almost identical through each and every one of them.  Penelope’s stylist though, a young man who is slight and slim and seems to be standing constantly on his toes, is brand new.  He introduces himself as Hyacinthus in a soft voice.  He has allowed Penelope to swap her ridiculous heels for the grey pumps with the flat soles she was reaped in and pinned up her dress so that, even with her greatly reduced height, it is not dragging along the ground, whereas Trinity hasn’t even given Perseus so much as a shirt to make him more comfortable.  Mags is already inclined to like him more than her.  She knows well from Tigris who tends to the girls in District Eight and who has for many, many years, that the stylists aren’t all bad but Four has never had any particular luck with them.

“Marsh!” Trinity says with mock enthusiasm, “It is always such a pleasure to see you.  I can’t explain how lovely it is to finally be given a tribute with gifts who knows what to do with them,” Marsh and Perseus both look like they would like to punch her.

At long last, the children from twelve--both heart-wrenchingly young and dressed unflatteringly like coal miners--are returned to Haymitch and Effie, flanked by their own stylists, and they are all free to go.

Chapter Text

Percy is led into the lobby of a large, obnoxious building in the middle of the Capitol that the Red Man informs him has been purpose built just for the Hunger Games, that holds the tributes in the lead up to the slaughter.  He supposes that means it is just wasted space for the rest of the year.  There is a large elevator that he, Penelope, their mentors, stylists, and the Red Man are all able to easily fit into without so much as brushing shoulders.  The Red Man punches the button clearly labelled with the number 4 with a flourish and the elevator silently ascends.

Percy’s first thought about his living quarters for the next week or so is that it is much too much.  Mags, Marsh, Trinity and Hyacinthus all walk right in like there is nothing surprising about the apartment but he stands just inside the entrance with his jaw slack and his eyes wide, comforted by the fact that Penelope is doing much the same thing to his right.  Trinity looks over her slender shoulder at where they stand, struck by the excess and grandeur of the Capitol, and laughs that awful, tinkling giggle of hers.

“Oh deary,” she says, “welcome to the Capitol!” She sounds so intensely proud of it and he has felt thoroughly sick since he got here.  He doesn’t respond to her but rather looks past her at Mags and Marsh who seem genuinely upset that any of them have to be there, at the high, white ceilings and the elaborate, twisting decorative structures that fill the space.  The lights are bright white and glaringly artificial and he misses sitting outside with Finnick and watching the sea by the flickering light of a fire so much that it makes his stomach ache.

Hyacinthus takes pity on him and Penelope.  “Your rooms are up here,” he says, gesturing to the hallway behind him.  “We’ll call you for dinner soon,”

Just like the rest of the apartment, the room is gigantic.  There is a large, plush bed in the centre of it that calls to his aching bones, but more than he wants to sleep he wants to tear out of the nets he is wrapped in and finally cover himself up, dress like a real person and pretend like none of this is actually happening to him.  There is a bathroom, also oversized and ridiculous, attached to the room which he makes a beeline for.

He almost strangles himself in his attempts to tear the nets away from his torso as quickly as possible and he can’t help but wonder what the Capitol would do if he died here before the games begin.  Probably just keep on going without him, maybe even pull in a replacement from Four who erroneously believed themselves safe this year.  He’s not exactly eager to find out so he eventually manages to free himself from the entanglement of netting around his neck and throws the scraps of fabric Trinity tried to pass off as clothes to the floor with little concern for them.  They’re probably expensive but he doesn’t care.

He steps into the shower and where he wishes there were straightforward knobs or buttons he finds an elaborate panel with more settings than he has the energy to count, all poorly labelled as if whoever made it simply assumed he would know what each button did with the prompting of a single letter or abstract symbol.  He doesn’t.  He tugs at his hair in his frustration and it feels crispy, difficult to move.  He wishes it was clean but the shower evidently isn’t high-tech enough to read his mind.  He presses the button in the top left corner and hopes for the best.  The water streams out and he frankly doesn’t remember ever having water pressure this good but it is ice cold and he lets out a little undignified yelp as it strikes him between the shoulder blades.  He presses the next button along and it warms up almost instantly, becoming almost too hot, turning his skin red and filling the air with steam.  He feels himself relaxing under the jets, runs his hands through his hair and tries to work out the product.

Now to find the soap.  He tries one at random and a hatch in the wall opens and sprays something almost offensively floral at his side.  He chokes on the smell and tries another button and then another until he has soap of some sort that he massages into his scalp and through the ends of his hair then scrubs into his skin until the cosmetics covering his scars have dissipated and run down the drain.  He stands under the water with his eyes closed and his face turned up towards the shower head until he feels a little bit less like he could drop dead at any moment and he starts to worry that he’ll still be in the shower when he is called to dinner.  He doesn’t want to miss the meal even if he will have to spend it with Trinity and the Red Man because he is beyond hungry and he doesn’t doubt that the Capitol will keep him well-fed, like livestock they are ready to butcher.

He makes his way back into the bedroom wrapped in a plush white towel, his horrible costume left in a tangled-up mess on the bathroom floor.  If anyone wants to rescue it they can but Percy would quite like to see it burned.  There is a well-stocked closet taking up an entire wall, all the clothes in it his size like the Capitol is reminding him that they are incredible hosts ready to accommodate him in spite of what they have planned for him in the terribly near future.  There is a tablet on the wall beside the closet so he starts swiping through the items until he finds a soft pair of trousers, a loose, short-sleeved shirt and a cardigan almost like the one he was reaped in but that looks to be much softer and newer, as well as a simple pair of socks.  He pulls them on the second the quiet mechanisms of the closet have delivered them to him.

He sits down on the bed and buries his head in his hands, winding his fingers into his wet hair.  He has really been left alone in the Capitol for the first time and he has nothing else to do to distract himself.  This is it.  They’ll have about a week of training and interviews and then he’ll be on his own again, this time in the arena where everything and everyone will be trying to kill him.  And Finnick will be back home watching, remembering that he was supposed to be in Percy’s place every time anything happens.  He knows Penelope now, though not especially well, and he has another 22 kids to meet and in just a couple of weeks only one of the twenty four of them will still be alive.  If he lives to see his next birthday he will live to see it with blood on his hands.  And still he’d much rather it be him than Finnick.

The knock on his door is gentle and hesitant.  That means it can’t be Trinity, Marsh, or the Red Man.  He doesn’t really want to invite anyone into the space he has decided is his so he walks to the door and cracks it open.  Hyacinthus is out there, Penelope already by his side, looking sorry.  “Dinner’s ready,” he says.  Part of Percy wants to hear him shout, just to prove that he can actually do it, but the odds of anything happening in his charmed Capitol life that would warrant panic like that are slim.  Penelope is practically wearing pyjamas from her own closet, her hair also wet about her shoulders, but Hyacinthus is still all dressed up, wearing as much jewellery as Marsh, all of it in the shapes of gold leaves and flowers.  He smiles kindly but no amount of kindness gets Percy and Penelope away from the death game.

The spread doesn’t disappoint but he still resents at least a third of the company; he is still undecided about Hyacinthus.  He takes a seat nonetheless, and attempts to engage in as little conversation as he can.  Mags is looking at him probingly, her grey hair wispy and wild and her eyes alight with madness and sympathy.  He can’t decide whether they are fuelling or fighting each other.  “You look much more comfortable,” Marsh tells him.  Percy nods.

“It’s a shame,” Trinity says primly, sipping red wine from an ornate glass with a golden rim, “that comfort and beauty are so at odds.  The Capitol loved you today, sweetie,”

“Because you sold me to them,” Percy says acridly.  She somehow takes it as a compliment, smiling and fanning her pinkening face with her hand.  There are signs of ageing on the skin that her face simply does not have, no doubt thanks to surgical interference.

“The bets aren’t really in either of your favours,” Marsh tells them, stopping Trinity from saying anything in response like she clearly wants to.  “But people are donating,”

“The bets shouldn’t affect you,” Mags says, “They’re rarely actually right,”

“Only when One and Two win,” Hyacinthus says.  “The people that start betting before the Games will always vote for them.”

The Red Man nods.  “The betting doesn’t get interesting until the Games begin,”  Hyacinthus immediately looks at him like he has missed the point.

“Of course, we can’t tell you about the bets while you are in the arena,” Trinity pouts.

“I’m sure we’ll have bigger problems.” Penelope says.  Marsh makes a face, he hides it before Percy can look at it properly but he might even be amused.  Percy cuts the turkey onto his plate into bite-sized pieces and starts chewing each one thoughtfully so that whenever a question bounces around the table his mouthful might give him an excuse not to answer.  He drinks his glass of water, ignoring the wine on the table, and as soon as it is empty a young server dressed in a white tunic steps forward to refill it.  He thanks them and Trinity looks at him as though him acknowledging the servers at all is somehow shocking to her.  The server nods and smiles politely but does not respond.

“Training starts tomorrow,” Mags says, because this dinner is really more of an opportunity to train where only their team can overhear.  “I was thinking we start with spears?”

“Tridents would make for a better image,” Trinity objects.  Mags ignores her.

“Are we going to be allies?” Penelope cuts right to the important question.

“Ultimately that’s your decision,” Mags tells them.  “I always recommend it.”

“How about you?” Penelope looks at Marsh.  He is her mentor and Mags is Percy’s which means he is probably a better person for her to listen to.  “Were you and the girl from Four allies?”

“Don’t use me as an example,” he tells her, then pauses and exhales like it hurts him to.  “Ultimately she was my ally and she died anyway.  Do with that what you will.”

Penelope looks at Percy and he has the urge to hide his face but doesn’t.  She doesn’t say anything and he has never been one for quiet moments so he breaks the silence as soon as it starts to feel awkward.  “I won’t kill you whether or not we’re allies, so we’ll need to split at the final five,”

“If we both last that long,” she says without pause as though she can’t help herself.  She immediately snaps a hand to her mouth and Percy doesn’t know whether she is doubting herself or him or perhaps the both of them.  She clears her throat.  “Don’t you want a say in this?”

He shrugs.  He doesn’t exactly feel nonchalant.  “I don’t want to die and I don’t want you to die.  In fact, I don’t want any of the others to die either,”

“That’s not an option,” Marsh reminds him as though he could ever forget.

He snorts despite himself.  “No shit.  Your choice Penelope,” it’s a lot to put on her and he knows that but he doesn’t know what to do.

“I’ll decide later,” she reiterates, then sighs, “Are you going to have half a chance at this?”

A shiver runs up his spine.  “Maybe,” he swallows painfully then reaches for his water and downs half the glass in one gulp.  “I’d like to think so,”

“We’d also not like anyone outside of this room to know that,” Mags chimes in and then looks at Percy.  “I’d like to verify your skills before we set anything in stone, but I say we aim for middle of the pack scores so nobody will target you outright as a threat or an easy target,”

He nods and Marsh squints at him.  “She thinks you could maybe be a threat,” he mumbles.  He looks like he is calculating.

“What about the career alliance?” Penelope asks.  Percy knows the tributes from One, Two and Four were allied in the last Games but it hadn’t really occurred to him before now that this was a common occurrence, the done thing in the Games.

Mags shrugs.  “Wait until we meet them,” she says.  “They tend to work well in the early Games but they turn very sour very quickly,” she looks over them.  “Besides, I’m not sure if either of you really qualify.  They might accept you into an alliance just to use you and then have easy access to you.  It’s too early to tell,” Penelope looks pale, she might have always done but there is something about the conversation and the sterile lighting that is making her look like she is halfway to the grave already.

He doesn’t stick around for idle conversation once the meal is over, receding into his room as soon as his plate is clear and he feels simultaneously pleasantly full and sick to his stomach.  In more ways than one, the Capitol and all of their overindulgence remind him of the gods.  That’s not a good thing.  And still he understands the trick, because he has never seen so much food and he didn’t even have to work all day for it.  Food will be in front of him as soon as he asks for it and all of the work will happen behind the scenes where he can pretend it isn’t happening at all: he could win convenience like that if only he keeps killing for it.

Mags and Marsh stand beside Perseus and Penelope as they take in the wide open space of the training centre’s main room, lined with weapons and sparring mats and stations.  There are private training spaces too, walled off from the central space and thoroughly soundproof so as to allow for tributes to keep their strengths and weaknesses to themselves.  They’ll be making use of those.  Unless they’re playing the intimidation game, so will most of the other tributes.  Marsh explains the stations briefly, skimming over all of the skills they might need and how they may or may not be helpful because the mentors aren’t privy to the peculiarities of each arena prior to the year’s Games either.  Mags doesn’t need to listen to it so instead spends a couple of minutes really taking stock of the other tributes relatively up close and when they aren’t putting on a show for the Capitol.

The careers are exactly what she expects them to be: all as old as the Games will allow, all strong and capable and jumping right in, all confident where they are safe for one last week.  As she looks over at the tributes from One as they examine a weapon rack with familiarity, more than ready to put on a show, she catches Gloss’ eye.  He’s twenty now and still alive and, quite frankly, she quite likes him.  He’s polite and welcoming and much more humble than Mags has assumed he’d be after watching how ruthless, efficient and effective he had been in his Games.  She supposes she should know better by now than to use the Games as a judge of anyone’s character outside of them, but even so his Games had been especially impactful, lasting little more than a week like the much earlier Games.  He has one of the highest kill counts in this room full of victors.  He smiles at her so she smiles back and wonders, not for the first time, as her gaze skims over the golden crown of Cashmere’s head, quite what their parents think of them, what they were thinking when they signed both of their kids up to fight and what they were thinking when, two years in a row, the training academy chose their kids to volunteer.  She wonders what Gloss thought last year too, when he managed to get out of the arena and then had to guide his little sister into it.

The kids from Seven seem sturdy, strong and fit, like they work and eat well.  They won’t have been trained to kill but they’ll know how to use an axe.  In the Games that can be enough.  The girl is young though, maybe Perseus’ age, which doesn’t have to doom her necessarily, but does not bode well.  She and Ash, her mentor, are deep in conversation between the axes and the foraging station.

Haymitch from Twelve positively dwarfs his tributes, both of them his because he is the only living victor Twelve has.  The boy, a cherubic little thing with blond hair and pink cheeks, must be twelve because, had Mags met him in any other scenario, she’d assume he was maybe nine or ten and definitely no older.  The girl is older and taller but not by much, and she looks hungrier.  Mags dreads hearing Marsh’s estimate for either of them.

“Jade vs. Vicuna,” Enobaria from Two announces, her teeth wickedly, artificially sharp.  Her tribute, the girl from Two, and the girl from One step onto a training mat facing each other.  They look comfortable because this is just training and they must both be very used to it by now.  They’re putting on a show and Mags is inclined to make sure Perseus is watching it.  These are the people he is going to have to beat to get out of that arena alive, after all.

Enobaria is one of those victors who is loved by the Capitol in all the wrong ways.  She won’t tell Mags as much but Mags knows.  Even if she was never really particularly beautiful herself, she was the first victor who was given celebrity status and that allure was enough, at least until she was too old to be desirable and there were newer, fitter models available.  Enobaria was vicious in the arena and had her teeth sharpened and inlaid with gold almost as soon as she got out.  Mags thinks it is because she knew what was waiting for her on the other side.  She also thinks it didn’t work, after all the Capitol loves a bit of eccentricity, the allure of the illusion of danger.  Even still, Mags is somewhat surprised the Capitol was okay with her biting that boy’s throat out; she couldn’t have known but the only difference between what she did and what got Titus killed the next year was the moment when she decided to spit the viscera out.

Mags has a sneaking suspicion that the way the careers look is part of why the academies choose them.  All the examples of real careers she currently has available to her definitely seem like they support her theory.  It makes sense and strictly, officially, careers are against the rules of the Games.  The Capitol takes too much joy in punishing the districts for the slightest infractions for them to be willing to overlook such flagrant ones without getting something in return.  The careers make the Games more interesting to the Capitol viewers, sure, but Mags doesn’t think that’s enough for them.

Jade and Vicuna spring at each other as Enobaria claps her hands together and the meek girl from Three flinches back so she is no longer in arm’s reach of the mat.  They both clearly know what they’re doing, guarding their own weak points whilst aiming powerful jabs at each other’s.  They’ll be peppered in bruises by the end of it, and medics will be right there to sooth them because the Games are more interesting when everyone comes in on top form.  It isn’t long before Jade, the larger and angrier of the two, has wrestled Vicuna to the mat and pinned one arm to her side, twisting the other at an angle that shifts from uncomfortable to painful in a few seconds, swiftly forcing her to yield.  There are a few cruel seconds, too long for it to be completely accidental, where she doesn’t, where she keeps pulling and twisting until Vicuna lets out a pained little yelp like an animal in distress and then Jade finally lets go.

She bares her teeth at the crowd as it disperses, letting them all know that she is dangerous and they should steer well clear now that she doesn’t have to sell herself as attractive and capable to the Capitol.  It’s just a different show she is putting on for a different audience, not necessarily any more sincere.  Marsh leads Perseus and Penelope to one of the private training spaces and Mags goes to the racks to grab a collection of weapons: two swords, two spears, a bow and a quiver full of arrows, some daggers and throwing knives, and an axe.  There are avoxes around who, upon request, are quick to help her bring the weapons over to the room.  She has always hated asking things of them but the Capitol seems to go out of their way to put them directly in her line of sight every Games, like a reminder to victors of what the best possible outcome for a rebel looks like, and the task is one which would take her much too long to do by herself.

“Do you two want to do this in front of each other?” she hears Marsh asking as she walks in.  It will be easier if they want to train together but doing that is an expression of trust, a precursor to an alliance.

“The ball is in your court,” Perseus tells Penelope, a funny turn of expression Mags doesn’t think she has heard someone use before.  He keeps refusing to have a say in whether or not they will form an alliance and Mags can’t help but wonder why.  His life is on the line: if there has ever been a time to have an opinion this is it.

“I want to train together,” Penelope decides quite quickly.  “I don’t know if we’ll be allies but I wouldn’t be able to kill you,” Marsh makes a calculating face behind her, a twisting, displeased one.  He knows the difference between her can’t and Perseus’ won’t and he doesn’t like it.

They start with the spears and Mags is somewhat comforted by the fact that they both take them without flinching and hold them efficiently.  Penelope has trained with them before, Mags knows it, and they clearly both know how to spearfish.  She guides them through a few drills just to get them warmed up and to double check that the first impression of general competence they gave her wasn’t completely misguided.  Then she tells them to fight.  It’s a blunt instruction and Penelope immediately looks at her for further guidance but she won’t be giving any, at least not for a few minutes.  She wants to see what they can do without it.

“That’s it?” Penelope asks, incredulous.  She looks between Mags and Marsh but they are both quiet.  He knows what Mags is doing and his head will be full of numbers by now.  “Nothing?  No rules?”

“No maiming?” Perseus suggests, a glint in his eye like he is joking despite there being nobody here who gets the joke and can share it with him.

They face off against each other and Penelope looks terrified because these are not blunted or decoy weapons: they really need to get as comfortable as they can with the thing that can do the killing in the week they have left.  Still, she makes the first move after they have spent a moment circling each other, just a textbook jab but a move nonetheless.  If Perseus moved the wrong way it could have gored him and it is clear Penelope knows that.  It doesn’t.  He dodges to the side and meets her spear with his own so she cannot make another move to stab him as he regains his footing.  It is a bit clumsy, a bit stumbling, a clear sign that this is not used to using a spear like this, but it works.

They keep going.  Penelope makes it clear that she has been trained in this before, but not much.  Her moves are utilitarian and uncreative but she is strong and her base is stable and she is at least competent.  Perseus doesn’t use the spear how somebody who has been trained to fight with one would, but he is energetic, quick-moving, and completely impossible to predict.  For Penelope, this exercise is all about the spear, but for Perseus it is all about the fight.

Mags feels like a weight has been lessened on her chest; not removed but as close to as she can get right now.  She doesn’t know where he could have learned it, certainly not at her academy, but he can fight which means he has half a chance.  She hands them the swords next and tries not to let herself get her hopes up too much as he tests the balance like he knows what he is doing, twirls the blade and takes a few practice swings.  Penelope looks uneasy with the weapon, not used to the shape, weight or wicked sharpness of the thing.  It is not usually Mags’ first choice for training kids with in Four because it is alien to them whereas the spear is familiar, Penelope is proving that.  To give Perseus a good sword fight she’d have to pull in a career or another mentor but that would undermine their plan so instead she and Marsh lead Penelope through a few more drills before she drops the sword, evidently far from her weapon of choice, and picks the spear back up.

The mismatch of weapons is typical of the Games: sword against spear; an axe-wielder drawing closer to a tribute armed with throwing knives until all they are really left with is a clumsy set of daggers; one tributes bare, sliced up hands against another’s scimitar.  Marsh counts them down as they circle each other again and Mags becomes quickly enlightened as to what the difference between a spear and a sword in Perseus’ hands is.

He doesn’t wait for Penelope to make the first move this time, springing forward to take a confident swing at her side that Mags is worried for a moment might actually connect and cleave but slows enough as it draws close to flesh for Penelope to bring her spear down and slide it into the empty space between her skin and the sword so that all the blade connects with is the handle of her weapon.  She looks terrified but Perseus has told her in no uncertain terms that he won’t kill her, let alone before the Games even begin.  She makes the next move before he can swing again, jabbing her spear in his direction.  He sidesteps it and uses the flat of his blade to push her weapon away, forcing her to slow down and readjust her grip.  Mags doesn’t think it is inaccurate to say he is enjoying this.

Penelope swipes at his legs next to knock him off balance but he nimbly jumps over her spear, landing on one foot and using the other to propel himself into a short run before Penelope can react.  He meets her spear with his sword, pushing and twisting it until it falls with a dull thud to the mat and, before Penelope can pick it up, the point of his sword is pointed at her neck, incredibly close but pointedly not making contact with the skin.  She gulps and shakily holds up her hands.  Unlike the girl from Two, he doesn’t wait at all before stepping back and dropping his sword to his side.

He looks around and smiles at Mags and he suddenly looks incredibly young for the first time since he was handed the sword, a child with a deadly weapon dangling comfortably from his relaxed grip.  Penelope has a fearful respect for the weapons but he is completely at ease with them.

Lunch will start soon so they head out early to watch the tributes who have chosen to practise at the stations in the public space.  They step out just in time to witness Jade take down her district partner so he is face down on the mat, the point of her spear against his back, touching his clothes but not piercing them.  Once again, she lingers for just a moment too long until Brutus is forced to step in and save his tribute.  “Okay Jade,” he says not unkindly, “that’s enough; let him up.” Somewhat reluctantly, she does, shuffling away with another proud grin on her face.  The boy rolls over, breathing hard, and Brutus offers a hand to help him to his feet.  “Everything okay, Hearth?” he checks as the kid tries to push his sweat-soaked chestnut hair back away from his face.  He nods, still trying to catch his breath, and Brutus steps back.

The bell rings as the girl from Twelve finishes a forageable foods exercise rather deftly and the tributes and mentors all disperse to the dining area.  Mags stops Perseus as he makes to follow Penelope and Marsh.  “I’ll go and grab us some food,” she promises, “But I’d like to sit up on the roof and talk to you for a while,”  He nods obediently and perches on a featureless bench next to one of the racks of weapons while he waits for her.  She slips through the crowd in the dining area, collecting stacks of disposable napkins then moving across the table, picking up cakes and sandwiches and cheese and crackers as well as an apple each and wrapping them in the flimsy paper.

Marsh catches her before she can slip back out with her haul.  “That girl from Two,” he starts.

“Jade,” she fills in.  In much the same way as she refuses to learn the Red Man’s name, she makes an effort to learn every tribute’s.

“Jade.  She’s definitely strong but I think she’s too aware of that.”

“Bloodbath?” Mags asks.  She understands where he’s going with this.

He nods.  “I’d say 20th,”

As she walks away from him and back to Perseus she can’t help but wonder, despite her general respect for Marsh’s predictions, who he thinks will take her out.

She collects Perseus and takes him to the elevator, hitting the button that is labelled with the letter R rather than the number 13 like all of the other floors.  It rises swiftly and the doors open after they have reached the top.  They step out into the fresh air and Perseus takes a deep, grateful breath as the wind rustles his hair.  There is a garden growing on a small section of the roof with a bench placed between manicured sections of lush grass and beds full of white roses and pretty, sweet-smelling yellow flowers that drown out the roses so they are devoid of both scent and colour.  They take a seat beside each other on the bench and she unfolds the paper around their food, taking a sandwich and passing another to Perseus who sinks his teeth into the soft bread without asking what is in the middle.

“I don’t know what Penelope wants to do,” she tells him honestly.  He looks at her and the sunlight makes his eyes less blue-tinged and more of a striking, vivid green.  “But you need to go for the Cornucopia.  I know I can’t make you do anything, but for the sake of a poor old woman’s poor old heart,” she caricatures the feeble old lady she hasn’t quite turned into and he snorts a semblance of a laugh in her direction.  “You should be in that arena with a sword,”

He nods.  “They’ll definitely have them?”

“That’s not a word I can use,” she admits, because it is just like the gamemakers to take something that has been a given in the Games for decades and completely remove it to make life harder for the tributes.  “But they usually do.  It’s very likely they will this year too.”  He finishes his sandwich and brushes the crumbs from his fingertips as she passes a parcel of crackers and cheese into his lap.  “I’m trying to be careful about what we say where the others can hear.  You’re from Four so a lot of the other districts will assume you’re a career even though you aren’t.  We want to disarm them, get across that you’re just a normal kid who can hold his own but isn’t anything special.  That way there’s no glory or any particular ease to killing you and they might let you slip away for a while.”  It's all true but they are also on the roof because she wanted a break from the bright lights and the pressure of winning again, of being a mentor who is expected to do well because she knows this whole process better than anyone else.  Up here where it is just her and Perseus they can just talk and she can pretend she isn’t his lifeline.

He flicks a corner of a bland cracker at the railing going around the roof’s edge and instead of sailing over it hits the electric barrier running over the top of it and fizzles for a moment before it is bounced back onto the roof.  He raises his eyebrows.  “I’ll bet they didn’t think of putting that in until after someone thought to jump,”

Mags shakes her head.  “Exactly right,” she says, looking over the roofs of the nearby buildings and the baby blue sky that sits over top of it all rather than at who she is talking to.  “It must have been about-” she counts on her fingers “four years after they built this place.  Boy from Six lost his arm in an incident with a train a few months before he was reaped and got hooked on the morphling they gave him to deal with the pain,” she thinks about the mentors from Six for a moment, about Magnotta and Pace and their easy, absent morphling stares.  There seems to be a particular problem with morphling there but she isn’t privy enough to the inner workings of Six to understand why.  “He was in pain and withdrawal and still missing his dominant arm and not well-adjusted to using just the other one so he decided he wouldn’t make it to the arena the night before the Games,”

“So did they go ahead missing a tribute?  Or did they pull someone else in?”

“Well that’s not fair,” Mags says wryly, shaking her head.  She sighs.  “They brought his little brother in.  Poor thing was barely thirteen, had no public image and no training  at all.  Suffice to say he didn’t last long,”

They sit in silence for a moment until the doors to the elevator open again and a series of footsteps tap over the roof.  Mags looks over her shoulder and sees the kids from Twelve wandering aimlessly along.  She contemplates them as Perseus waves them over.  They hesitate at the sight of him and Mags for a moment, hovering by the closing doors, before the girl decides to make her way over and the boy follows, twisting his hands together in front of him.

“What are you doing up here?” Mags asks them.  They are allowed to be here but tributes rarely choose to split from their mentors like this, especially not so early on.

“He’s drunk,” the girl says flatly.  Her voice sounds like it is half missing, scratchy and sore and quiet.  She looks frail, like the Games might have provided her the first chance she has had in her entire life to eat until she is full, but the look on her tanned face is one of defiance and determination.  The boy meekly stays by her side, looking at the floor rather than Mags’ face.  “Again.  I didn’t feel like being thrown up on,”

“He smells bad,” the boy nods.  Mags smiles tightly.  They aren’t wrong about Haymitch but she also understands the rotten lot he was handed quite well.  He is their only victor, the only mentor Twelve has, and his Games were awfully hard on him after what happened to his district partner, and then every year since he has sent two children to gruesome deaths he is supposed to be able to save them from but can’t.  Mags has never been shocked by the ways any victor has tried to cope in the aftermath.

They introduce themselves as Daisy and Serinus and Perseus slides off the bench to sit on the floor between Serinus and a planter full of thorny white roses.  When Mags hands him his cake he splits it into almost even halves and hands one of them to the little boy who thanks him in a small voice, so Mags takes her own cake and splits it into two uneven pieces, eating the smaller of the two in one bite and giving the rest to Daisy who nibbles at it tentatively for a moment before eating almost the whole thing in a couple of desperate bites, like she is scared somebody is going to steal it from her.

Chapter Text

Percy sits twiddling his thumbs and waiting for his name to be called for his presentation to the gamemakers and Penelope is watching his hands while she sits on hers.  They are only seventh and eighth respectively and each tribute is only given a relatively short slot to present but it still feels like it is taking forever as they sit in the long white room on the cold chairs where nobody speaks because nobody wants to say the wrong thing.  The boy from Three, Flick, walks out of the gamemakers’ room, wringing his hands and taking faltering steps back into the waiting area where he is met by Issie, the girl from his district.  They call her name the moment he leaves the room but she doesn’t respond for a moment, looking down on Flick with her watery eyes and taking him by the hand and pulling him into a hug.

Percy looks away from them because they are too aware of their impending doom and he is trying to pretend not to be aware of his own for as long as he can.  His throat feels dry because he isn’t doing a very good job so he gets himself and Penelope a glass of water each from one of the silent servants who stands watching them with sad eyes and the stiff posture of someone who is scared of what might happen if they move.  He hands Penelope hers as she sits and Issie finally scurries away from Flick as the Capitol guards threaten to intervene and drag her into the gamemakers’ room.  She has probably ruined her chance to make a good impression either way.  He can’t help but watch the door shut behind her and Flick sit right on the floor a good few feet away from his seat.  Percy looks away and makes eye contact with Cotton from Eight who is sitting across from him, his eyes wide and blank like he is also practising not acknowledging his doom until it is staring him in the face.

Percy tries to smile at him because he is holding Percy’s gaze much longer than any mortal is typically willing to, perhaps just because he is really somewhere else, but the corners of Cotton’s mouth just dip in response, like a scowl.  Maybe being cold to the other tributes will make the Games easier, at least as much as possible, but Percy can’t look at all of these kids who have been served up a death sentence on a glimmering silver plate and not want to do anything he can for them.  Lots of them look like they could have come straight from camp--Serinus like a little Apollo kid, Cotton straight out of cabin 11, Jade just like a daughter of Ares--and he just can’t make himself do it.

The room where they are being tested is thoroughly soundproof so he can only guess what is going on behind it; whether Issie is running and leaping and climbing and fighting for her life or if she has broken down on a gym mat, sobbing and shaking with her head in her hands.  He’s sure it wouldn’t be the first time and every time he sees that poor girl she is teetering on the edge of a breakdown.  In her defence, he’s only ever one good step away from it himself.

Mags has told him that most careers will score between 8 and 10 with a few, like Gloss and Glimmer, occasionally scoring as high as 11.  Nobody has ever gotten 12 points and most tributes from outside of the career districts will only get about 5.  She wants him to get a 6 but he doesn’t know enough about the scoring to be confident in his ability to do that.  There is a part of him that wonders what might happen if he walks in and picks up a sword and really shows off everything he can do, what number they might give him. It is, however, very much overshadowed by the much larger part of him that wants to live.

Time drags on and he watches the doors, knowing his name is next along with his chance to completely ruin the careful plan Mags has had thought out for as long as she has known him.  He feels cold all of a sudden and gulps down half of his water in one desperate swallow in the hopes that it will make him feel a bit better, spilling some of it at the sides of his mouth.  Issie comes out long before her fifteen minutes are up with a red face but dry eyes.  She is breathing hard and Percy stands before his name is called because he knows what is coming next.  Issie takes Flick back to their seats then looks over and smiles sadly at Percy right before he slips through the imposing doors.  He smiles back and wishes not for the first time that he knew how to save each and every one of them.

It is too cold for the time of year in that big room and the floor is all his, littered with mats and training stations and nobody milling between them.  He swallows an uncomfortable pocket of air that sits in his throat like a stone and looks around, up to where the gamemakers are watching him from above like gods.  His fate is in their hands and he can imagine the blades of the shears striking against each other, imagine the string snapping.

“Hi,” he says.  He can hear them talking amongst themselves but the moment he speaks they go quiet and his solitary little word reverberates in empty space.  He feels like he is in the throne room of Olympus, like there is an ever present threat he will just have to ignore if he wants to get anywhere.  They watch him without responding, a cruel glint in each of their eyes.  He gets the feeling that if he underperforms he might be smitten right there on the spot.  He gulps because underperformance is exactly what he is aiming for.

He heads to the foraging section first, because it is something which comes easily and that he is sure, no matter how good at it he may be, won’t risk him ticking his points too high.  He only has fifteen minutes and a gut feeling that the Gamemakers don’t have the greatest attention spans so he doesn’t spend long there, just long enough to acclimatise himself somewhat to the emptiness around him.  He sees one stifle a yawn with their palm and decides that his next station should probably be weapons if he wants any points at all.

He doesn’t dare touch a sword, instead lifting a spear from the rack, wiggling his fingers and adjusting his grip on the weapon as he tries to get used to the weight.  It is nothing like Riptide, nothing like anything he would choose to fight with, but it isn’t unfamiliar and he can learn to adjust quickly enough to put on a satisfactory show.  For a score of six, satisfactory seems like a pretty safe goal.

He strikes the training dolls hard and confident even though the balance of the weapon feels wrong and he would much rather be using it to spear fish for dinner than to impale kids to have half a chance of keeping himself alive.  He gets lost in the mechanics of it, feeling for a moment like he might even be back at camp if he just closes his eyes and blocks all the glaring artificial light out.  He focuses on regulating his breathing, on keeping his movements harsh and effective but not overstated so as not to open any more weak points than is strictly necessary.  His footwork is as careful as he can make it but the training mat is somewhat softer underfoot than he would prefer and, only once, he stumbles somewhat over his own feet.  If he was fighting the right enemy they would strike right then and there, gut him like a fish.  As it happens, the training dummy is not that opponent and Percy is able to recover and strike it across the chest, dragging the spear’s sharp point in a long diagonal line from hip to clavicle so the stuffing comes spilling out and the form begins to lose its shape.

Percy steps back from the mat, breathing hard but regular, placing the butt of his spear on the ground beside his feet and leaning against it for a moment.  He looks up at the gamemakers and sees that they at least look intrigued, maybe even impressed, and his heart stops hammering for long enough to fall to his feet.  He takes in what he has done to the dummies and glances at the ticking clock to take in how little of his allotted time he has spent doing it.  He may have overperformed and that just might cost him his life.

He decides to all but waste the rest of his time, climbing ropes, matching images, weaving fibres into twine, twisting miscellaneous materials into fish hooks, proving he can feed himself and keep himself alive in varied terrain whilst pointedly avoiding anymore demonstrations of the killing capacity he knows they want to see from him.  Their rapt attention fades and, as his timer ticks to nothing, he can only hope he has done enough to knock his points down a little.

One of the gamemakers waves a hand towards the door as the timer hits zero so he leaves the room but stays just on the other side of the entrance to wish Penelope luck as she enters for herself.  She looks grimly determined and just as terrified as she must feel, near-inevitable doom looming just in the horizon.  Percy has an uncanny ability to defy the odds and for him to win that means Penelope and everybody else must lose.  He tries to ignore that fact, because that is much easier than attempting to make peace with it.  She pulls him into a hug just like issie did to Flick and he feels like a child even though he is much taller than her.  He isn’t sure if she is doing it for her sake or his but he returns it anyway, suspecting it might do them both some good whilst also having a feeling it might get them both somewhat too attached for the circumstances they are in.

He slips through the doors and he settles back into his seat, trying to keep his face as impassive as he can.  If they think he is a career and he looks disappointed or frustrated they will think he has underperformed and, if he has actually done better than he should, that can only end badly for him.

Cotton looks up from the floor tiles he is staring at and attempts to meet Percy’s eyes again.  Perhaps against his better judgement, Percy lets him, expecting another scowl or perhaps some fighting words or other form of scorn.  He gets none of it.  Cotton’s face twists into an expression he can’t quite make sense of, something like confusion in the crease between his eyebrows, regret in the twist of his mouth.  He looks like he wants to say something but he doesn’t, just looks away at where Serinus and Daisy are huddled together, tiny and hopeless.  Cotton is as large as the two of them put together, with strong hands and nimble fingers and a confidence akin to foolishness or else an act entirely, but he looks just as hopeless in this moment.  Ester, the girl from his district, is seated to one of his sides and Kadia, the girl from Seven, to the other and he neither speaks to nor glances at either of them.  It’s like he has decided that Percy is somehow different.  He doesn’t like that much.

Mags watches Penelope and Perseus over the spread on the table, used to the tender, roasted pork and the sweet-sour plum sauce and all of the fresh vegetables and rich, creamy side dishes occupying the table.  Sometimes she likes to imagine what her fifteen year old self might think about all of the indulgences she can’t help but take as a given these days.  She was never really starving or hunger-panged but on many days her family would eat only oily, unseasoned fish, porridge that was either offensively salty or entirely tasteless, and only what greens could be foraged from the same sources as every other hungry person in the district would ravage, as considerate as they could be for everyone else but never able to procure enough for everyone.  Now she puts a slice of pork in her mouth and feels it practically melt as the tang of the sauce makes her mouth water and doesn’t even question that she will have just as delectable a meal on her table tomorrow.  This is what she won all those years ago, after all, and it has never once been worth it.

The children look nervous.  Like the food, she takes that as a given these days; she has only ever known one tribute from her district not plagued with nerves in the lead up to the Games and, as she found out at the sound of the klaxon, that was only because the girl had already made peace with her death and found comfort in knowing she’d be the one responsible for it.  Ever since, Mags has been almost glad to see the jitters, the fidgeting, the apprehension: it means they think they still have something worth living and fighting for.  It probably won’t save them but it is a starting point.  Still, she chews her mouthful and watches Perseus, who usually eats too quickly like he thinks it’s some sort of mistake that so much food has been placed in front of him, push his food around his plate.  Penelope is sitting strangely close to him too, like she is scared of losing him.  She will.  Mags decides to ask.

“How did it go today?” Marsh nudges her and she passes over a ceramic vessel full of thick, savoury gravy without needing any more prompting.  Before his Games she had tried her best not to know him anymore than strictly necessary but these days she knows him better than she knows anybody else.

Penelope shrugs.  “Well I didn’t fall on my face or my spear,” she tries for a joke but she doesn’t even smile and nobody else laughs.  The Red Man slurps his posca too loudly and Mags has half a mind to stab the back of his hand resting on the table with her unused dessert fork. Penelope sighs.  “I think it went okay, I’m hoping for a seven,”

Perseus doesn’t say anything, looking down at his plate and the fork he is using to stir together mashed potatoes and gravy so Mags says his name, asks him directly and holds eye contact for as long as it takes for him to let out a laboured exhale.  “I don’t know,” he admits, looking at her like he is sorry, like he is a scolded child.  She has no idea what he could have to be sorry to her for.  “I might have messed it up,” he admits, “They seemed a bit too happy with me,”

“We’ll have to wait and see,” she tells him.  She wants to say that it’s okay, that everything will work out, but it categorically will not and, though Perseus is a child, he is not naive nor stupid enough to believe that it will.

“What if I have messed it up?”

“We rework the plan a bit,” she says, but this was almost the entire plan and she really isn’t sure what to do.  She doesn’t typically tell her tributes to do anything but their best in their evaluation but Perseus will do just fine with donations so long as he keeps playing up appearances--and she knows Trinity will not let him stop that--and to have a six be an underperformance he has much more of a chance than most of the people she guides into the Games.  She doesn’t want to think that means he will be walking back out the other side just yet but she is fooling nobody, especially not herself: she has already gotten her hopes up.

The television is playing the broadcast to them and all of Panem but it is currently just preamble before they get to the scores which is all anybody will really care about until the interviews start in a couple of days.  For the people in the districts the scores are all about the hope and the despair, calculating their odds and hoping it will be one of their children coming home this year, or else starting the grieving process early.  For the people of the Capitol it is about the bets, about monetary gain and just how interesting this year’s games will be to watch.  The conversation around their table dies down as the broadcast progresses and they wait with bated breath to see what they are up against.

Predictably the true careers rake in high scores: two nines, a ten, an eleven for Jade from Two.  Marsh flattens his lips into a line when they hear that one and Mags asks “That doesn’t change your opinion at all, does it?” He shakes his head silently and the announcements continue.  The kids from Three score as low as she was worried they would and then it is her kids’ turn and her organs feel like they have rearranged themselves throughout her body as the announcer takes his precious time.  Perseus is first and she can practically feel him holding his breath across the table as the announcer says his name then lets a single word fall from his lips.

“Nine!”

“Crap.” Perseus says and Mags feels sick to her stomach.

“Penelope Cassock: Seven!”

Penelope celebrates quickly and quietly and the broadcast keeps going and Mags keeps making notes but most of their attention is on Perseus now because this absolutely is not what they were aiming for.

“That’s a career score,” Marsh says flatly and Perseus winces.  “And you didn’t pick up a sword?”

Perseus shakes his head vehemently.  Marsh looks impressed and Mags’ ill-contained hopes soar just a little more.  Penelope leans just a little closer to him and Mags knows that this dynamic is a terrible idea, that they are all just going to end up disappointed, perhaps even distraught,at the end of it.  She tries to avoid it every year but she has never completely managed it; this year she seems to be doing a worse job than usual.

“How bad have I messed this up?” Perseus asks.

“You’ll never be lacking in donations,” Mags says instead of answering.  It is for her sake, not his.  She knows she can sit and watch and make sure he stays well-fed, make sure he has a weapon if he can’t get one from the cornucopia or loses his, has supplies if he or Penelope get sick or injured.  She knows she can do a lot, just not enough.

“Have I just gotten myself killed?” he reiterates.

“You might have done that when you stuck your hand up,” Marsh says.  It is another answer Perseus clearly is not looking for.  He sighs and cuts a gravy river through his potatoes with a quick slice of his knife before pushing his plate away from himself, almost full but sliced and mixed into one almost homogenous mess.

“Better me than Finnick,” he mutters but, at least to Mags, it may as well be shouted in an otherwise silent room for all the clarity she hears it with.

“Better nobody at all,” she says in much the same way.  It is as close as she will get right now to telling him that he is wrong because she doesn’t want FInnick or Perseus or Penelope or anybody else to be here at all.

“So what are we doing about the interviews?” Penelope asks, trying to cut through the unease and tension and only barely succeeding.

Mags thinks quietly for a moment.  “Play up the surprise,” she says to Perseus, “reiterate that you are not trained for this, that you fish a lot back home to make ends meet and you must know your way around a spear better than you ever realised.  You are capable, you are not vicious or confident,”  It’s a longshot; this whole time they have been working with nothing but a series of longshots that, as she skips from one to the next, seem very much like they are becoming more and more unlikely to help.  And still she hangs onto them because they are all she has, and maybe it’s the lifetime of being hard or the old age sanding down her corners, but she needs and wants desperately for them to work out anyway.  She always wants it to work out for her tribute and everybody else involved in the Games but this year is different in a way she can’t quite place.

Perseus looks at her probingly for a moment, his too-bright eyes wide and young and pleading,and then he closes them and looks down and nods slowly only once.  He’s terrified, very much like how Penelope is and very much not how Penelope is.  He seems to be turning his fear into resolve.  If that’s the case then it will only work in his favour, but if it is not then Mags’ hopes are soaring and she is going to let these Games destroy her in a way she hasn’t let them in decades.

“What do I do?” Penelope asks.  Her voice sounds small, soft and young like that of a much younger child and not herself at all.  She is a young woman for all intents and purposes, one who has set herself up for a successful life that should be unfolding in front of her instead of crumbling beneath her feet every second of every day.

“You keep going,” Marsh says.  He hates giving advice, which is to say that this really is not a position he is made for, which is to say that if they are so lucky as to get a winner this year who can make it through to the next Games without falling victim to those signature Victor’s Vices he will be done.  He will be out as much as any victor can be, not only out but still mostly sane and mostly sober.  The same cannot be said for Mags, who is in this for life no matter what becomes of her.  If she’s honest with herself, which she very rarely cares to truly be, she doesn’t know who she’d be or what she’d do if not for the Games.  It’s a bleak life she leads, the kind she would give up if only she could without hurting anyone else.  But she knows with Marsh, bad eye facing her because she is just about the only person he trusts, good eye looking anywhere but Penelope, Penelope looking at Marsh, pleading for something more and getting nothing, and Perseus with his full plate and his frustration, in this room with her that is a fantasy.  That doesn’t mean she isn’t going to die one day--with each new ache and pain and weakness she feels she becomes more and more aware of that fact--just that she hopes it is worth it, that she dies for something worth the trouble to make up for everything else.  She fights the Games, sure, which means her life is far from wasted, but she also has to play them every year.

She goes to bed after everybody else, once an hour has passed of her sitting alone in a room with all the lights switched off and a slowly nursed glass of red wine in her hand, and doesn’t realise until she is standing in her room, staring at the mirror that takes up much too much of her wall, that she has been crying.  She reaches up to touch a tear, as if to check that it is actually real because she doesn’t understand how else she wouldn’t notice them, then wonders exactly how long it has been.  She doesn’t need to wonder what it is that she was crying about though.

She doesn’t wipe her face before she falls back and looks up at the ceiling.  This has been her room ever since Tribute Tower was built and still the only thing in here that makes it seem like her own is the scented candle on the dresser, burned halfway down.  It claims to smell like seasalt but it doesn’t smell like home how she hoped it would.  It’s still nice though, fresh and clean and sweet and absolutely nothing like the ocean, so she burns it.  She didn’t even get it in Four, bought it instead from a little boutique in One for an extortionate price, the kind she needn’t even blink at, what with her victory earnings.  Of course it isn’t right: an imitation made by people who know what makes things nice but not what makes them real, who create for the people of the Capitol who would seldom think to step foot outside of their own gilded city, who would never know the difference.

It must be getting late but she doesn’t much like the thought of sleeping right now, of letting time pass by without her at least trying to slow it down.  If she sleeps it will be morning much too soon, which means it will be the day of the interviews, which means they will have whittled their week of preparation down to just a few days and she will have to watch them all die again, unable to look away because she has to keep an eye on her tribute, know how to spend the donations, what they’ll need and when.  She has been keeping enough of an eye on the funds to know that she won’t really have to budget this year.  It’s a small relief, a drop in the ocean; she can’t help but budget like her tribute is going to last through to the very end every year, which just leaves her with spare funds she could have used to make their last days a little more pleasant, or even their chances a little better.  She walks away from every Games absolutely laden with guilt and it’s only mostly not her fault.

This year she has funds from a tribute the Capitol adores in ways that make her skin crawl, a tribute who can fight, who has resolve, who is determined to win.  She sees herself making the mistake of thinking all of that means he actually will and yet she still makes it.  The guilt and regret is for later, and she is under no illusions: she knows that, no matter what happens, it will hit her, no matter who is and who isn’t by her side, no matter how much money she wastes, no matter what.

This is time she should be using to think but she can’t use it to do much more than despair and imagine time running past her at speeds she can’t keep up with until she falls asleep on top of the plush duvet, still wearing all of her clothes sans the shoes.

She’ll wake up only hours closer to the Games and feel like she has wasted the whole day.  Part of her is frankly impressed she can still clearly separate one year of her life from the next what with the routine sameness imposed onto her by the Games, but part of her knows she owes it to the kids, the ones who lost, the ones who won, the ones who won and swiftly paid their dues in morphling or booze or anything else that might kill them, to remember them all.  She swears--even as she gets older and the people she was close to when she was really a person and not whatever it is she became that day when she stepped back out of the arena, bloodied and bruised and victorious in nothing but name start to call their children by their siblings’ names--that if she was given time and pen and paper she could write down the name of every kid in her first Games and every one after.  If she were to do the same with the kids she went to school with she would probably manage fewer than half.

Chapter Text

Percy’s day starts with four consecutive hours of time alone with both Trinity and the Red Man whilst Penelope spends her time with both of their mentors.  They will swap later but for now he can only feel jealous and perhaps a little bitter as Trinity pokes and prods and the Red Man watches with eyes that are too wide, that aren’t quite right.  They look like they’re made of glass.

“I’m so excited!” Trinity squeals like Percy isn’t only a couple of days from the start of the slaughter. She claps her hands together and her nails clack against each other in a way that makes his teeth hurt.  Percy stays quiet and makes a point of not wincing when she pulls his hair whilst combing indelicately through the tangles.  She has him seated in front of a mirror but he doesn’t look at it, looking down at his hands instead and pulling at dry skin around his nails, making Trinity’s job just a little bit harder.  He’s fully dressed this time at least, which is a marked improvement on last time he was subjected to Trinity Price’s machinations.  She’ll get to play dress up with him later, but for now it’s just prep work.  He’s going to be seen up close this time, by a live audience crowded close to the stage, and cameras that will be much too close to his face, and Caesar Flickerman who will be seated right across from him, and Trinity is almost fanatical about making sure he looks his best, that not a single hair falls even slightly out of its artfully selected place.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” The Red Man says, not like he is chastising her but rather like he is focused on his task so intently he can’t even stand the thought of getting distracted from it for even a moment.  Maybe Percy should appreciate it but he can’t bring himself to.  He looks at Percy and Percy only knows because he catches movement in the mirror.  “We need to get you ready in more ways than one.  And I know just where to start,” he seems much too happy with himself and Percy is quickly reminded why it is that he can’t appreciate the Red Man.  “Eye contact!”

Percy doesn’t like that.  People like looking at his eyes but not into them, he knows this and he accepts this and he knows how to talk to people whilst doing as little as he can to unnerve them.  The Red Man is telling him to throw away all that learning, to not only let the Capitol see him but to look right back at them.  He doesn’t like that they’re watching him but he knows he can’t escape it, not now and definitely not in the arena, but that doesn’t mean he has to look back.  He doesn’t much like knowing that there are people on the other side of this, not monsters.  Maybe that’s why he is Perseus here rather than Percy, because it only feels apt that almost everyone in this strange and dangerous place refers to him just as the monsters back home do, like they are about to try to kill him.  He hasn’t died yet.  He can only hope that luck will last a little longer.

They make him practise walking like he is a baby who has yet to learn how to do it.  He feels patronised.  He also feels like the shoes he has been given are too small, the leather stiff and shiny and brand new.  He has a feeling Trinity has done this on purpose, to punish him for being rude or to stop him from running away.  Something.  They make him run lines and conduct practice conversations like he has never learned to talk.  They make him smile until his cheeks are twitching and his mouth is dry.

“Oh, so darling,” Trinity coos, poking his dimple with her index finger.  Her nail is sharp and he only doesn’t twist his head and bite because he can’t see that ending any way but badly.  “Remember,” she says.  Her face is too close to his.  He could headbutt or bite like an animal, some desperate creature in a cage she has stuck her fingers into.  The people of the Capitol don’t think about such things; for them there is nothing to run from.  “The Capitol just wants to know you.”

He all but runs away from Trinity and the Red Man, slamming himself much too enthusiastically into the seat by Mags’ side.  There might be a small bruise on his hip.  He’s not too concerned about it.  She looks over at him, her grey hair pulled back from her face.  It makes her look younger, makes her face seem rounder.  She looks a little bit like Percy’s own mother, or at least his ever-fading memory of her, and he’s struck with a sudden urge to cry.  He doesn’t, won’t.

“That bad?” she asks.  She fills up a plate for him as though she really is his mother.  “The next few hours will be better,” she promises.

Percy almost asks about the next few days, then the next few weeks, then, if he’s lucky, the next few years.  It’s not fair to her though, because it is not her fault he is here, just her job to get him out.  “Do you get anything for your tributes winning?” he says instead.

Mags puts her sandwich down.  She shakes her head and a strand of hair by her face falls out of its tie.  “We get to take one of you kids back home.”

“That’s it?”

She just nods.  Penelope is sitting across the table, pointing at the dishes in the middle of the table and asking Marsh what each one is.  He’s almost surprised that Marsh answers each question when it is asked and not after a moment of silence like he is being forced to do it.  He is here not because he wants to be but because, just like Percy and Penelope, he has to be.  The only thing he gets out of being here is knowing the tributes before he loses them.  And he has to be here anyway to give them half a chance.  It’s selfless really, but Percy does wonder, if the victors aren’t paid to be here, what would happen were one of them not to show up.

“I’m talking to you and Marsh after lunch, right?”

Mags nods.  “You are,”

“Why?” Percy doesn’t exactly have any complaints but he’d just like to understand.  “I’m not his tribute,”

“Not officially,” Mags says.  “They leave these things more or less up to the districts.  If our tributes are training together then us collaborating can only help,”

“Why do tributes choose not to collaborate?” the more he thinks about it the more it strikes him as odd, leaving your only connection to home behind, letting them suffer, going through the worst, last days of your life alone up until the moment somebody finds and ends you.  He is used to company and comrades and allies: they go on quests in threes and try their best not to leave anybody on their own, they try to protect each other.  Penelope has been thrown into this mess alongside him and now for as long as she will have him, he will do what he can to protect her.  This is how it has always worked: him and anybody stupid or unlucky enough to stand beside him against the world.

“It can be hard to trust people in the arena,” Mags frowns at him, like his mom does--or did--when he asks difficult questions with terrible answers that she has to tell him about anyway.  “Sometimes tributes prefer to go it alone just so they can’t be stabbed in the back.  It isn’t always a bad idea; I’ve seen plenty of kids get plenty stabby when scared.  Sometimes tributes just don’t line up.  If one is much more capable than the other alliances just tend to bring the strong one down.  Sometimes you want to win more than you want to buy another kid a couple more days of misery.  I won’t say I don’t get it, Perseus, but I really can’t recommend it.  As far as I or anybody else has the knowledge to say, you and Penelope are doing the right thing,”

“How about you?” he says before he can think about what he is saying.  “In your Games?” they’ve asked Marsh but not Mags, maybe just because her Games were so long ago, such a different thing entirely from what theirs will be, that he isn’t even sure her experiences in the arena even really apply anymore.  Still, he has lived a life modelled by the Fates on events which transpired millenia ago and too little has changed since then.  In lots of ways the world is stagnant which is perhaps why he, swilling, churning swill of the sea he is, has always been so at odds with it.

She sighs, a sad, laboured thing.  She seems older than she ever has before.  “The Games were faster back then.  We worked together and he didn’t really do badly at all but we had no idea what we were in for and he couldn’t stick the whole thing out.  The thing about alliances is they make your chances of winning much better but they also mean there is no way that you don’t get close to and then lose someone, just like that,”  She shakes her head.  “That’s enough about me.  I’m old and it is all over and done with.  These are your Games, not mine,”

“Mine?  Does that mean you think I might win them?”  He’s trying not to be optimistic but he wants to live.  He has faced death plenty but right now, more than ever, he is rejecting it with everything he has.

“It means I hope so,”

“What about Penelope?”

“Only one of you can win.  The Games are designed that way on purpose, Perseus.  Nobody actually wins.  A victor who isn’t trodden down is a victor who can fight back,”

“Are you trodden down?”

“Perhaps,” she hums thoughtfully, “but I don’t think I’m quite flattened yet,”

“The Capitol cares a lot about what you look like,” Marsh says flatly, a hollow echo of something Trinity told him this morning, “how you present yourself.  The whole thing really is a game to them.  Make them think you’re playing it.”

“And how do I do that?”

“How good of an actor are you?” Marsh sounds tired.  He always does.

“Not very,” Percy admits.

Marsh shrugs, working eye as blank as his prosthetic one.  He is never really engaged in the world around him, separate from it because he knows what the world does at its worst and now that is all he can see wherever he looks.  The vantage point he has been given certainly isn’t helping any.  “Shame,” he says, “and here I was starting to think you were the perfect tribute,”

“ Marsh, ” Mags’ voice rings with the same level of warning as a mother gives her misbehaving child.

“You are pretty young though,” Marsh shrugs, “Nobody your age has ever won.  I guess that’s two things that are working against you.  At least,”

“I’m sure everybody else has just as many,” Mags says.  Percy doesn’t need her to.

“More,” Marsh confirms.

“So does that mean you’re ready to give me my number yet?” Percy asks him.  He doesn’t think this is particularly how these sessions are supposed to go but he also supposes that, like much else about these Games, is subject to the whim of the mentors.  Keep it entertaining and keep the children dying and the Capitol does not care otherwise.  Keep the picture pretty and bloody and gory and all remains well.

“Not yet,” Marsh says.  “I told you I’d tell you after your interview,”

“Remember,” Mags warns, “Marsh’s guesses are good but he can’t actually tell the future,”

“I get it,” Percy waves a hand, “he isn’t an oracle.” he looks at Marsh.  “Do you ever think it’s a shame you can’t bet on the Games?”

“Money might be the only thing I don’t need,” Marsh’s jewellery glints gold and bronze and silver beneath the artificial light.  He may as well be made of metal for all he doesn’t want people to look past it.  It’s a facade really, gold plating over a ring trying its best to convince you it is the true article, one that works.  “My brother and I used to bet with chores and dessert and our favourite tackles because it made the mandatory slaughter-watching go down a little easier.  I’d sooner have a sinker and a slice of my grandma’s blackberry pie and one last talk with my brother than Capitol riches.  I’m not convinced they’re really worth much,”

Percy doesn’t ask about Marsh’s brother or who tended to win or the blackberry bushes he has picked almost clean himself.  He thinks he might be doing Marsh a favour, just letting it sit there in the air where it can exist only until it fades, the sound gone and the thought not slow to follow.

“Play up the nerves,” Mags tells him, letting Marsh stop where he wants to without prompting him to continue.  “You need to figure out how to balance terrified and charming and a little bit shocked,”

“So no pressure then,” Percy says.

“I think we're quite far past no pressure,” she admits.

“A lot of pressure,” Marsh says, “Life or death,”

“You really aren’t here to make this easier on me, are you?”

“I’m here to try to keep you alive,” Marsh says, somehow the kindest words Percy has heard from his mouth.  He’s talkative today, maybe just because they are running out of time and he has been collecting things to say.  “If it’s easy, that means you’ve already given up.  We can’t be having that,”

“Why not?”

“Well, you’d ruin my predictions, for one,”

“So you don’t have me dead last then?”

Marsh isn’t quite smiling but he looks a little less miserable than usual.  “That spot’s occupied,” he confirms.  “What if I didn’t actually tell you your number at all?  You can find out how wrong or right I was if you win,”

“Is that supposed to be motivation?  Like my life isn’t enough?”

“Is it?  You can make peace with a lot of thing in that arena, I’m just trying to keep you wondering,”

“Marsh Holtz doing me a favour?  Really?”

“I try,” he says, voice dry, like he has almost used it all up, like a marker whose ink is beginning to run thin and streaky, “for the kids that end up here.  Most aren’t so receptive to me,”

“I’ve met stranger people,” Percy tells him.

“I’ll be sure to factor that in,” Marsh says back.

All in all their little training session feels more like a conversation than anything else, like one that could happen any time it was just the three of them alone but that is happening now.  And then it is over and he is sitting backstage with the other tributes and the other mentors and the silence feels eerie because when these people are gathered together there are usually games being played and battles being fought.  Now they are just waiting.  The games will come later, will start before the Games begin and continue until they are over, perhaps even once everything has ended.

Trinity has dressed him up again, in what should be a suit but which is made of a flimsy, sheer fabric that shimmers blue-green iridescent like fish scales and does nothing to make him feel clothed.  The capitol can see all of him again, this time up close, all their cameras focused on him without the distraction of spectacle after spectacle around him.  He misses his reaping cardigan, knitted by one of his neighbours for her grandson but fixed up for Percy in the absence of another child to wear it.

Caelus from One leaves the waiting space and Cashmere, Gloss and Vicuna wave him off.  Vicuna is next, then Hearth, then Jade then Flick and Issie and then Percy.  He had thought the waiting would be excruciating but it feels much too short, like it could go on for an eternity and still he would always wish for just another moment longer.  He gulps and stands, brushing off the fabric that has neither dust nor wrinkles on it and that frankly may as well not exist at all.

“Remember to put on a good show for the Capitol,” Marsh tells him.  All Issie got was ‘good luck’ and ‘don’t cry’ but his mentors seem to have more in mind.  “End it as abruptly as you like but only once you’ve won.  For your own good.  The show doesn’t end until it’s over.”

“The Capitol wants to know you,” Mags says.  “Don’t let them if you can.  Just let them think they do.”

He nods his head once, twice and offers Penelope a watery smile before taking a deep breath in and stepping out into the lights.

Mags watches Perseus squint beneath the lights as he walks to the chair across from Caesar Flickerman, the marigold yellow of his hair and clothing this year garish and gleaming.  She thinks her heart might be in her throat because she can feel it pounding in the base of her skull and it hurts to swallow.  This whole thing is very real but there is something about the interviews that always seems to cement it.  These talks matter deeply to the Capitol and that determines what she will and will not be able to do to help him during the Games, and the fact that they are happening now means they have only a matter of days left.  Like every year she worries she has wasted these poor children’s final week.  The Games don’t count; by the time they are in the Arena life is already over, regardless of what happens next.

Perseus does not falter in his step even as he squints, keeps his hands by his sides and takes a deep breath before he sits, looking out across the crowd with his startling eyes almost like he is challenging the audience to meet them before he turns them to Flickerman himself.  Loathe as she is to give Trinity or the red Man any credit, they know what it is the Capitol is looking for.  Mags holds her breath when Perseus turns his challenge to Flickerman and exhales only when he meets it with a smile.

“Perseus Jackson,” Flickerman looks gilded in all his gold, “You have been making ripples around here!”

Perseus’ smile isn’t very convincing and Mags can only hope she only thinks that because she knows him better.  “I’m surprised,” he says and she thinks it is lucky the Capitol has not heard him speak at length before because that is not his voice, “I volunteered to save a friend, not for glory,”
“You may find glory yet.  That 9 of yours is nothing to scoff at!”

“I guess not,” he sounds humble.  That’s good.  He rubs the back of his neck, tousles his salty hair and lets the Capitol watch how the fabric moves like a cascade of water over his skin, how his skin moves beneath it.  She bites down the urge to cover every eye in the place.  She has to let them watch.  “It was a shock, honestly.  I’ve never really fought with a spear before,”

“Well you must be quite the fisherman,” Flickerman is one of the few people in the Capitol Mags will readily give credit to.  He is nice, not just to her but to every tribute that approaches him on that stage, everybody who he has half a chance of helping.  The Capitol hangs on to his every word and he uses them wisely.  She resents his position really, but if it is one that has to be filled she is glad it is his.  “Speaking of, how is your life in Four?”

“Humble,” Perseus says honestly.  Mags is glad to hear him say it because the Capitol loves a good story to hang onto and he is giving them one, one that makes him impressive without making him a career.  It is all she can ask for at this point.  “I don’t have family or much else, really.  I make do,”

“And how are you finding the Capitol? I suppose it must be rather different than what you’re used to.”

“Definitely,” Perseus laughs.  Mags doesn’t believe it but she is one of the only people who doesn’t have to.  “The food’s amazing and I haven’t even had to catch any of it,”

“Isn’t it just?  I have to ask how it has been for you and your District partner so far,”

“Penelope?  She’s great.  She’s starting to feel like a big sister to me,” To Mags’ side Penelope smiles stiffly.  A big sister who he is going to lose soon.  It is one of the only things they can know for certain now.

“Isn’t that just darling?” The Capitol sighs alongside Caesar Flickerman and that traitorous little flicker of hope in Mags’ chest will not go out.  Maybe this time it will end differently, maybe this time Four will win again.  Maybe this time they will have something to celebrate as well as something to mourn and she will be able to look Finnick in the eye again.  “What will you do if you win, Perseus?”

“I’ve been taking out a lot of Tesserae, to help the people in my neighbourhood who can’t help themselves, even if they aren’t family.  I’d like to be able to do more for them,”

“Selfless,” Flickerman sounds impressed, “though the real question is do you think you can win?”

“I’d hate to sound arrogant,” Perseus says, likely because Mags has tried her damndest to drill into him that arrogant is the last thing he should be right now.  She’s glad he listens.  “But I think I’m pretty good at fending for myself and I’m clearly not hopeless with a weapon.  I know I’m young but I don’t think I should be counted out yet.  The Capitol has been so generous to me,” Mags can’t help but picture him gagging around the words, the last thing in the world anybody in his position wants to do is give the Capitol any kind of praise but it is all the Capitol wants to hear from him.  “Now all I can hope is that they continue to put their faith in me,”

The buzzer goes and the whole thing is over just like that.  Penelope’s hand finds Mags’ and squeezes tight enough to hurt.  The moment Perseus gets back it will be her turn to step out.  He stands and faces the audience.  Mags watches his smile projected up onto giant screens like he is right back at his reaping, and it suddenly strikes her that he has been playing this game all along.  He’s almost the perfect tribute, Marsh said the same thing earlier, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  The sheer fabric he wears is the same colour as his eyes and the lights are catching his face and the fabric almost perfectly, emphasising the spectacle of him in the perfect moment right before he leaves.

As soon as he is backstage with her Mags takes off her cardigan and throws it around his shoulders, pulling him into a hug he did not ask for and may not want but that she needs.  She has been given this near-perfect tribute this year and something about him has turned her into far from the perfect mentor, made her revert back to everything she knows she isn’t supposed to be.  She catches Marsh’s eye as he looks at her, disapproving yet understanding.

“Good luck,” Perseus tells Penelope as soon as Mags has released him.  She is wearing the same sheer blue-green fabric as he is but unlike him he has been given a layer of off-white silk chiffon to wear underneath and because she does not have to stand next to Perseus this time the shoes she wears, though heeled, do not look like they are about to kill her.  Mags is starting to suspect she may quite like Hyacinthus in his position as a District Four stylist, at least more than she likes Trinity in hers.

“You did fantastically,” Penelope tells him back.  “I’ll try not to ruin that,”

“You’ll do fine,” Perseus tells her.  He said he wasn’t a good actor but Mags is starting to suspect he may have undersold himself because truly she doesn’t think he could believe that any more than the rest of them do but still he says it like Penelope is a real career, like she has been chosen for this and knows better than to stumble here.  Even if she does stumble here mags suspects all will be fine anyway because Perseus will likely make up the funds to support the two of them.  They won’t have to go without water or basic first aid or have to do as Marsh did and walk into that final battle all bare hands and rock-roughened nails and the sort of desperation that turns men near feral because she should even be able to get them weapons.  She has done a deeply foolish thing and already decided that they will be walking into that final battle at all.  Knowing better doesn’t seem to have been doing her any good as of late.

Penelope is eighteen and sturdy and can hold her own and whatever else the Capitol needs her to be.  She is there by Perseus’ side, fighting for him as much as herself, as much of an older sister as he said she was.  “He’s a funny little thing,” she tells Flickerman and everybody else in the entire country, all of them listening for myriad reasons.  Mags smiles sadly because though that is true, at this point it cannot remain so for much longer.  “I’m sure you all find him charming too and you haven’t even sat down to dinner with him,” if he wins they’ll get the chance to.  To sit down with him and talk to him and do every other thing that crosses their minds provided they have the money.  Like everything else about the Games the thought makes Mags sick to her stomach.  “We plan to play the Games together and we don’t plan to go down without a fight,”

Fight is one of those words that can mean many things to somebody in Penelope’s position.  The last stand of a woman who is doomed and knows it, the clawing and the biting of somebody with no other way out, the careful choreographed dance of weapon against weapon until somebody’s step falters, anything at all except falling to her knees and taking what the world has to give, allowing it to happen.  She will not lose easily, which is not to say she will not lose just that she will have some kind of say in how she does it.  Not enough say, but some.

She does a worse job than Perseus at selling herself as anything more than the spare part in a team and her smile is not convincing but she manages to smile anyhow, to look at the crowd of people practically salivating to watch her slaughter and dip into a shallow curtsy and show her teeth in something more pleasant than a grimace or a snarl.  Mags isn’t sure she has ever had it in herself to play the version of the Games these children have to.  She is not a hostile person without prompting but she is also not one who is good at being gracious.  She will never thank the Capitol for her Games or her earnings or any of the rest of it.  She can bite her tongue which, in her position, might just be enough. In these Games all that would mean is that nobody who is able to help her will want to.

“I didn’t think I wanted to die alone,” Penelope says to Mags when she is back with them and Linnaeus from Five has taken her place on stage, in the plush chair beneath the white lights.

“But it has a strange new appeal?” Marsh says.  He knows the feeling well and now, more than a decade after his own Games, he seems to be setting himself up for it, living in a large, empty house without family, without friends, without servants or pets or anything more than the spiders in the webs spun too high for him to reach.  He will die alone too, a long time after Mags does.

The children go to bed as soon as they have eaten and she and Marsh stay awake, a glass of red wine steady in her hand and a glass of tonic loose in his.  It feels a little bit like they might be a real family somehow, just for a while.

“We’re running out of time now,” Mags says, feeling as though she has spent all her life doing nothing but running out of time.

“ They are,” he corrects her, “ we have nothing but time,”

“And all the riches we could ask for,” she reminds.

“That too,” his hands find his face, where the skin is split and healed over and his rings glitter and his bangles jingle against one another, “and yet I don’t remember asking for any of it,”

“I might’ve,” Mags smiles apologetically, “when I was a little girl.  I don’t think I ever imagined paying this kind of price though,”

“That doesn’t count,” Marsh says in the way he says most things: unconvincingly.

“Can I ask you something?”

“I can’t stop you,”

“You could always kill me.  I know you still carry a knife and a little vial of something a little left of morphling,”

“I see you haven’t lost your wit,”

“Just like you haven’t lost your cunning,”

“I wouldn’t kill you, you know,”

“I’m sure I do.  And yet you still carry a little box of poisons,”

“I feel naked without it,” Marsh says more honestly than he says anything else.  “I feel more like a killer when I’m empty-handed,” he admits.  Mags can practically see Spruce’s face as he says it, dark hair limp and dirty, grey eyes tired and red-rimmed, cheekbones carved hollow with hunger.  What a way to die, already a shadow of one’s self before the end even greets you, to kill for your own life and to die anyway, to know you are facing a fight you should be able to win and be able to do nothing but lose.  She remembers Marsh’s blood on Spruce’s collar almost more than she remembers anybody else's on her own hands.  “What was your question?”

“I know you won’t tell Perseus because you don’t want to distract him but I’d really like to know-”

“How I think he’ll do in the arena?” Marsh sighs.  “Are you sure?”  Mags nods.  “Third,” he says tersely.  Which is good but is not get-your-hopes-up good, which is not start-planning-a-party-and-draft-a-letter-to-Finnick good.

“Third,” she repeats like she is holding something sacred between her teeth.  “Third.  And Penelope?  Not fifth anymore, right?”

“Not fifth anymore,” Marsh drains his glass with a swallow that sounds like it must hurt.  “I’d give her eighth,”

Mags’ stomach aches.  “I think with every passing year I get worse at this job,” she says.

“You’re still plenty good,” the stilted tone of Marsh’s voice reminds her that she is next to the only person he really talks to these days, that to most of Four it really is like he died that day in the moment before the klaxon finally released him from the arena.  “It’s just that the job is impossible,”

“I can’t wait until you’re out of it,”

“You think this year might be the year, don’t you old woman?”

“I want every year to be the year, Marsh,”

“Not usually like this,”

“Do you ever resent that we know each other so well?”

“Only how it happened, Mags,”

“Did I ever tell you how sorry I am?”

“I don’t think you’re the one at fault,”

“That doesn’t make me feel any less sorry.”

Chapter Text

It’s the last day, the only thing they have left.  Mags could spend it in the training centre, watching Perseus swinging a sword and Penelope manoeuvring a spear, both things they already know how to do, watching these children spend what might just be their last full day alive sorting foragable plants into edible and inedible, watching them tying ropes into knots and bandaging imaginary wounds with the help of some Capitol super serum some of the tributes might not be able to afford in the arena, all things they have done over and over already.  Maybe it is how they should be spending this last day, getting in all the practice they can before there is no more time for it and all that is left is reality at its harshest, confronting them face to face.  But Mags can’t make them do it.  Unless a tribute specifically asks to spend this day training, and some do but in all these years only as many as she can count on one hand, she will steer well clear of the training space, won’t even bring it up.

“Do you want to watch the reruns of the interviews?”  She will only do what Perseus wants today, if that is training then it is training and if it is to do nothing but sit on the roof all day in silence then that is what they will do.  There will be interviews playing all day, so that the Capitol can do nothing but think about who they are going to bet on and who they would most like to see live and whose premature death they can find the most entertainment in.  Mags has spoken to the parents of enough dead children to know this day of nothing but looping interviews brings some comfort in the districts too, a chance to look at your kid one last time before they are fighting for a life they are probably about to lose, a chance to hear their voice like a goodbye because the arena never counts.

“Why not?” he says in the dejected tone of a tribute on their last day.  Mags doesn’t like hearing it from his mouth, if only because it makes this year feel like every other--on Marsh’s last day eleven years ago his flat affect had been something of a reprieve.

“We don’t have to,”

“No, I want to,” he closes his eyes and looks down so that she is looking across the table at the crown of his head, his hair clean and shiny.  It won’t stay like that for much longer.  “I just don’t want to watch myself,”

Mags nods.  She can understand that, understand not wanting to listen to your own voice, not wanting to witness yourself playing the game and speaking the last of your life away, and she remembers what precious little Trinity had him dressed in again, knows just how the Capitol will be looking at him.  He doesn’t want to see himself like that.  “We can do that,” she confirms.

They start with the careers now that Perseus can actually think about and focus on what they are saying and what show they are performing for their audience, at once both the same as his own and something entirely different.

“She’s confident,” he comments when Jade’s interview draws to a close, her grin to the camera sharp and wicked and just a little bit too forced to overlook.

“She is,” Mags smiles tightly and tries to commit this image to memory, of Perseus sinking into the sofa, his heels digging into the cushions and his knees up against his chest like he is trying to make himself smaller.  Almost against her will she finds herself telling him “Marsh doesn’t think she’ll survive the day,”

“What do you think?”

“That I know better than to bet against him,”

“Do you know how he thinks I’ll do?”

“I do?”

“And you agree?”

“The thing about rules, young Perseus, is that there are always exceptions,”

“I knew I liked you,” she has the urge, then, to correct him, to tell him to hate her with everything he has because she is leading him to the slaughter, because she has nothing good to offer him besides sub-par company and advice she can never be sure is actually applicable let alone useful and as much of her dread as he cares to borrow.

“I’m about to ask you a question that’s going to make you change your mind,” she says instead.  He just blinks at her in response, his eyes bright and pleading.  She can imagine him like an animal at the abattoir,, herself an executioner who has to close her eyes or else turn and leave entirely.  “Are you ready?”

He lets out an exhale that is almost half a laugh if she decides that is what it is.  “Does it matter if I’m not?”

“Admittedly not.  But I hope you are,”

“We just talked through Flick’s interview,” he says, not answering Mags’ question.  She lets him skirt it because this is his last day and no matter what she says there is nothing more she can do.

“It’ll play again later if you’d like to watch it then,”

Perseus looks intently at Flick’s face on the screen as he waves timidly at the camera, his eyes behind his glasses filling with tears and his mouth not even attempting a smile.  “I don’t think so,”

Mags just nods and does not tell him that she agrees, that this is one of those interviews there is no point in watching back.  She wonders not for the first time what Flick and the tributes just like him are thinking when they walk into the arena knowing that they have no chance at all, not even the thin, fraying thing she had to hold onto when she walked into the ring with her breath held and her head high, the cameras these large, obvious things once upon a time, that looked down upon her like the giant, beetle-black eyes of some giant, monstrous god.  Do they hope anyway?  Can they?

Issie holds it together better than she ever has before which does not mean it is enough but does mean it is something.  She might get some donations, the kind only offered in high-stakes Games very few sensible people really care to play, or else offered out of pity, like she is a charity.  Mags supposes that she is.  They switch the television off for the duration of Perseus’ interview and sit in silence.  Three minutes exactly.  It is a small moment Mags gives herself to think about Penelope, wherever she is today, Marsh by her side.  Mags is hesitant to call him good company but she has a policy against insulting victors and she is closer to Marsh than any of the others.  She’d call him a friend, even, a friend who understands that no matter how many times she washes them and how many years have passed, every time she closes her eyes she pictures her hands wrinkle-free and stained with her actions and the Capitol’s intentions.  She feels like a puppet for three minutes then switches the screen back on and looks into Penelope’s digitised eyes until she doesn't feel like much at all.

Linnaeus is next, looking tall and thin like a boy made of string.  Mags knows nothing about him even this close to the Games and she doesn’t have any idea yet if that is intentional.  He scored low but Mags has watched a victor emerge from a four before.  His district partner, Cord, follows after him, her stance stronger, her shoulders wider, her resolve more solid in her face.  That doesn’t necessarily mean much, none of this really does.  They are both old enough that they seem to have half a chance but as far as she knows that may be all they have going for them.

Parson, the boy from Six, spends the entire interview looking at the floor.  He’s a year older than Perseus but he does not look like it, both his face and body soft and young and lovely.  She can imagine him wrapped in a hug like a blanket, his mother trying to steal him back from the Capitol as soon as they staked their claim on him, the feeling of her arms still imprinted on his skin if the way he holds himself in a tight embrace is anything to go off.  The girl that comes after him is tiny but she is not shrinking like her partner.  As if in protest she does not sit for the interview, does not fidget and does not fiddle.  She looks Caesar in the eyes and laughs at his jokes and promises to be like a ghost haunting the arena.  Mags can’t help but think, confident as this little girl is pretending to be, her words are giving away more than she cares for them to, because a ghost she will be, a body without a spirit or a spirit without a body.  The Capitol must be full of ghosts by now, the old arenas epicentres for the restless, vengeful, sorrowful dead as well as tourist destinations.

There are no surprises this year, nobody who is not playing in the confines of one of the pre-defined strategies herself and the other victors have spent lifetimes deciphering.  Not one of them wants to send another child to their death and so they all know how to play the Games.  Children do not make good game pieces though, and the thing about these games is that they can be played but not beaten.  So children lie and fib and exaggerate and bat their eyelashes and straighten their spines and try to smile in a new configuration of the same old choreography they have been working with for decades now.  Mags never knows who will win and still she always knows exactly how this ends.

“Can we go to the training room?” Perseus says, not much of a question because he is already on his feet, leaving their floor with or without her.  He is more angry than despondent then.  This happens sometimes, neither an inherently good nor bad thing: she has seen it drive one child to victory then to morphling, another to a valiant second, and another to step off the platform a moment before the klaxon, angry enough at the Capitol to throw her own life away in a protest they all knew would be futile the moment it happened, blown to smithereens before she could be a pawn.  She made herself a spectacle anyway.  Most people, if ever they talk about her these days, the story one which everybody lost interest in rather quickly, remember it as an act of nervousness, a heart racing and blood rushing and a mistake being made.  Mags knows better but there is a lot which she knows and doesn't say out loud.

She takes him to the training room which smells more of cleaner than sweat today, and which is mostly empty.  She can hear people training but cannot see them which means they must be using the private rooms.  No doubt the only other people here will be the real careers but they have nobody to perform for today, just fear and frustration and perhaps regret to let out. She’d love to sit down with a career sometime and ask them but no current tribute would tell her the truth and asking a victor feels disrespectful somehow.  Mags has no interest in that, after all the careers are victims of the Games too, raised to revere the slaughter then slaughtered nonetheless.

She expects Perseus to beeline for their typical training room but he stands instead in the middle of the large training space, surrounded with dummies and holding a sword like a lifeline.  It is a good lesson to learn now, to stay vigilant and not to let go, though it is the kind which will stick long past when it is useful if it is successful.  The older Mags gets the more she thinks they should be called survivors because the only victors here are Capitol born-and-bred.

She sits down out of the way, content to watch his frustrations manifest themselves in the wicked arcs of his blade.  She has seen him use a sword before of course, but she has never seen him lose himself in the fight, really let go, stop holding back.  She can tell now, though, that he is concerned with nothing but letting go.

It is almost like a dance, a frenzied, angry thing but beautiful nonetheless.  His feet are quiet and his breathing is even and she can hear the sound of the blade slicing through the air.  He slices one dummy, cutting through its stuffed flesh until he meets the pole holding it in place and moves onto the next as the first purges its innards from the wound.  He slices and he stabs and he keeps moving like a natural disaster, tearing up dummies perhaps because they are Capitol property just like he is and, unlike him, they are easily replaceable.  She imagines he is hoping they are expensive, that the costs will begin to add up.  Sometimes she thinks she might be petty because small victories are the only type she has been allowed to have and, as time goes on, she is scared that they are all that there is.

He lays waste to the dummies like a killing machine and Mags can’t help the way her confidence in him, an already ill-advised thing, soars.  This is a different thing from the arena of course, because he is well-fed and cared for and the centre is fully staffed with avoxes despite it barely being in use and they are ready and waiting to answer any whim he may have, scared of what might happen if they do not, and, of course, these dummies neither breathe nor fight back, are not just as desperate as he is.

“I’d advise you to get an early night,” she tells him later, as they finish their dinner and Penelope begins to cry quietly into the food left on her plate that her constitution cannot handle so much as the thought of eating anymore, “but I understand you want to savour every moment you have left,”

“Not as much as I want to win,” he says, sounding tired, and Mags is reminded of that first conversation they had what feels like a lifetime ago now but is really little more than a week in the past, about wanting to win only as an alternative to losing, not for glory or prowess or bragging rights or money, just survival.  Her kid, and he is hers because every poor soul she has ever taken by the shoulders and guided into that arena is hers , has seen the best that the real career districts have to offer and has shaken it all off and decided not only does he still want to win but he still thinks he can do it.

She nods approvingly.  “I won’t get any sleep,” she tells him, “I’ll be thinking of you instead.  You too, Penelope.  I’m sorry this didn’t all go differently for you,”

“For what it’s worth,” Penelope says.  Mags gets the sense it might be the first thing she has said all day based on how Marsh is looking at the back of her head as though he is contemplating her.  “I’m sorry your life didn’t go differently, too,”

“Thank you,” Mags says, a little taken aback.  Tributes don’t normally apologise back to her and she never expects that they are going to.

“I’m sorry we met.” Marsh says to Penelope and she manages a weak grin.  He has a charm about him really, but it is hard to reach, the sort of thing not typically grasped until the moment it is being torn away.  He swears up and down he is not built for this job, which really Mags thinks nobody is, but he isn’t half bad at it.  He has never had a win but that’s not a strike against him, just the system, the Game.  “We won’t see each other tomorrow,” he tells Perseus, “I’m no good at goodbyes,”

“Guess I’ll just have to see you again, then,” Perseus says with the grim determination of somebody who is going to go out fighting no matter what, someone like Marsh or like Spruce.  It doesn’t mean he will win but he’ll try and that is all Mags can really ask of him.

Exactly as she thought, Mags doesn’t sleep.  She sits awake and thinks about what more she could be doing, how she could snatch up these children in the dead of night and smuggle them out of the Capitol, take them all home, and when the sun comes up and the Games begin and the platforms rise there will not be a person standing on a single one of them, no game pieces and no players left.  It is not a thought she hasn’t had before, there is not much at this point she hasn’t already considered, turned over until she has uncovered all its futility.  One does not just escape the Games and Mags has the misfortune of remembering the 10th Hunger Games, the first ones that anybody really watched.  She remembers that boy--unfortunately not his name nor district because this came before her own Games, before she knew better than to let anything be lost to history--who had run when he was given the chance and who entered the Games manacled and beaten, never anything more than a mercy kill.

She burns her candle that doesn’t smell like the sea and watches the flame waver in the breeze entering the room through her open window, like a thing fighting its own death.   She sees the Games everywhere these days, like all there is to life between is the waiting.  If the Capitol wants the districts scared and downtrodden they have done it but, she thinks, they may have failed to account for an ever-growing cast of victors who, if only they are able to survive the aftermath of their Games too, are angry and trained to kill.  It’s wishful thinking because she knows all too well that the Capitol has yet to be overthrown, but she hangs onto that yet like a lifeline.  There is always time.  All things must end eventually.  She likes to think she will live to see the moment it happens but if she does not she hopes somebody will remember her, that they are thinking about her as they gut Snow like a pig for a feast.

She blows out the cable eventually and shifts her gaze from the flame to a small gap in her curtains just large enough to see a sliver of the sky through.  If she opens them anymore there will be more highrises on every side but just like this she is able to pretend she is anywhere else in the world, where all there is to see is the dark sky.  With all the light pollution here she can’t really see the stars but she can pretend anyway, like she is back in her own little town in Four which she hasn’t seen in quite some time, a ways away from Victor’s Village.  She doesn’t go home, scared it will either be nothing like she remembers it, or it will be exactly as she remembers it but she will not be and the whole thing will be ruined at once.

She keeps watching until the sky turns from black to blue to pink-tinged, until the dark nothingness is swapped out for the shape of the sun low against the horizon and she hears the others begin to move around their floor.  So it begins, so it ends.  She pulls the silk-cased pillow tight to her chest and waits like she is supposed to do as she hears Trinity and Hyacinthus enter then exit, Perseus and Penelope in tow.  She will see Perseus at breakfast and then she will only see him projected on her screen, hers to look after and take care of with Capitol money.  He will likely die in that arena and she will have new guilt to add to her collection, but he has a chance and she is clinging to it like it is her life on the line.  Her sanity might be, but that’s an ongoing risk for every victor out there.

Breakfast is a sombre ordeal, Perseus wearing plain, white clothes, thin and loose like pyjamas, Trinity hovering over his shoulder for the duration of the meal, fussing over his hair and his face and pointedly not touching a single item of the food she has placed onto her plate.  Mags picks one of the pastries from the middle of the table out of habit, her favourite since she first tried them on her own journey to the Capitol when she was sixteen, and finds that it just tastes like sawdust today.

“They’ve injected your tracker?” she says before she swallows.

“They won’t lose me,” he confirms, holding up his arm, a tiny speck of red staining the sleeve.

“Onto the Stockyard next,” she tells him, sure he already knows.

“Launch Room.” Trinity corrects as she does every year.  As always, Mags ignores her.  It’s like their own little routine, one she cannot wait to never have to go through again.

“ Oh goody, ” Perseus says flatly, ignoring Trinity entirely.  “I can’t wait,”

“I’m sure you’ll put on a lovely show,” Trinity preens.  Much like the Red Man, she is resilient and has little to nothing else going for her.  “I’ll be watching.  Do try not to ruin your good looks,”

“That’s a slight against Marsh,” Mags tells him.

“I guessed so,” he looks at Trinity, squinting like he is trying to bring her into focus.  “Does it really not bother you that the kids you dress up for this thing all die,”

“Not all of them,” Trinity says, as though it isn't most.  “Your dying has nothing to do with me.  I’m just here to enhance the show.  I take offence when good work is ruined,”

“Wow.” Perseus’ eyebrows are high, his eyes wide but his tone entirely level and even.

“It’s a living,” Trinity says with an air of superiority as though she is chiding Perseus in these last moments.

“It’s a killing,” Mags corrects.  This is an argument she and Trinity have had many times before, the words different but the sentiment exactly the same.  She knows she is in the right like she knows Trinity will never see sense, like she knows the districts are tortured by that which entertains the Capitol.

“What are the odds it doesn’t kill me?” Perseus asks.

“I thought you knew better than to ask that,”

“I’m a big fan of doing stupid things,”

“Yes, I think I got that impression when you volunteered,”

“Hold onto it,” he tells her.

“Why do I get the sense that you’re planning on doing something dumb in the arena?”

“Not planning, per se,” he says, grinning like a boy who is not about to be marched to his death.

“You’re cute,” Trinity reminds him and the grin immediately falls.

“You’re ruining this,” he says, after all he really has nothing left to lose.

“It’s okay that you believe that now, I understand this is hard for you.  You’ll feel differently knowing you are loved,”

“That’s a word for it,” Mags guffaws and Trinity acts as though she hasn’t heard it.

He is dressed properly when Mags sees him next, some of the hair at the top of his head tied back so that it won’t fall into his face aside from a few pieces left out specifically to frame it, the clothes Trinity has put him in finally actually covering him, likely only because they are exactly what everyone has to wear in the arena.  The outfit doesn’t give much away, just a thick, dark form-fitting suit, patterned all over like netting.  They didn’t have the uniforms back in her day so she doesn’t know how comfortable they actually are.  She’s never heard a tribute complain about them but by the time they’re wearing them they have plenty of bigger things to worry about.

He must see her looking at it.  “It feels pretty waterproof,”

“Hmm.  Well, that could either be very good for you or very bad for everyone,”

“Let’s go with very good for me,” his eyes sparkle and Mags’ gut twists.  He should be crying by now, mourning himself, doing something other than accepting that he is here in the Stockyards and the only other place for him to go is into the arena itself.  She chooses to interpret it as confidence rather than apathy.

“Those boots look heavy,” she remarks lamely, knowing well by now that there aren’t nearly enough words in the world to say anything much better.

“Maybe they want me to sink,” he shrugs, like it doesn’t even scare him.

She wants to say more, wants to invent words that are all hers but that he will understand without explanation, wants to tell him all the secrets to winning if she can’t pull him out of the Games entirely.  There isn’t time though, because the lights begin to flash and a voice which sounds like no real person’s tells him to get into place and get ready for launch.  “Good luck, Perseus” she says because she will not say goodbye, not to this one, “I can't promise you anything but I like your odds,” She is holding his district token, a homemade-looking necklace, clay beads on a leather strap.  She holds it up and he bows his head so that she can put it on him.

“Thanks,” he says, “If I see you again I’m getting you a gift,”

“I already have all the money I could want,”

“That’s so not the point of a gift,”

She smiles in spite of herself.  “No, I suppose it isn’t.  I guess I haven’t gotten a present in a while,”

“Keep your fingers crossed,” she holds up her right hand in front of her face, middle finger crossed behind index, and the clearly marked section of floor he is standing on begins to shift.  “And it’s Percy, by the way, at least to you,”

Percy.  She remembers now that it is what Finnick called him, a nickname used by his one friend and nobody else in the world and now her.  She thinks it suits him much better than Perseus ever has.

Chapter Text

Percy immediately feels sick to his stomach as soon as the floor starts moving, lifting him away from Mags and into a place which is new and strange and unnatural, constructed with the explicit purpose of leading to the deaths of a group of children.  A group of children which he is part of.  He shivers even though the outfit he has been dressed in, finally not one of Trinity’s, keeps him at a temperature so comfortable it is almost like he is not feeling it at all.  This is it: Mags is behind him and the Arena is ahead of him and all there is between is a dim space, an interstitial nothing.  He’d quite like to go home now, really home, to New York, not to District Four.

It’s strange to think the gods would be something he could ever miss but there is no sign of them here and everything is worse.  There are no demigods here either, at least not as far as he can tell, no monsters and no titans, no sign that any of his efforts ever actually meant anything.  He can’t really know for sure, but he has this gut feeling that all of this has happened because he wasn’t there for the prophecy, that he was pulled away from whatever his fate was and dumped here instead, that without him Kronos won and someway, somehow, that spiralled into the pervasive nothingness he feels now.

He shakes his head as though he can shake the thoughts out.  He doesn’t have time for them now and might never have it again; his sole focus needs to be staying alive, using every advantage he has as much as he can.  He lets Mags’ hope and Marsh’s cautious not-quite-optimism bolster him a little as he does nothing but wait for that torturous, infinite moment in between to pass, not knowing if it will hurt or hinder him in the arena.  He won’t know until he is dying or the Games are over and he is being lifted out and away from the arena so he lets himself do it because it is just barely reassuring and there is precious little in the world right now that could accomplish even that much.

The air smells salty suddenly, and fresh, like they are much further outside of any city than Percy knows them to be.  He can’t help but make a face at it, having apparently grossly underestimated the realism of the arena, more than just the aesthetics he was forced to watch in abject horror the year before.  He resents that it is a pleasant smell, the first sign that he will be forced to kill kids in some sort of paradise.

There is a hydraulic click as the platform which he is standing on finishes its ascent and he is suddenly standing in what feels like an open space but which he knows has walls and a ceiling and, rather intentionally, absolutely no easy way out.  There are sixty seconds between him and the killing Games now, just a minute before the gong which gives him permission to leave his platform without being blown to bits.  He knows he needs to use it, to take in the arena and the tributes and start putting a more concrete plan together, to figure out how much of Mags’ advice and his training he should be hanging onto.

The first thing he notices is the water and his heart does this little swoop, lodging itself right into the base of his throat and beating so loudly he worries he might not hear the gong over it.  There are no paths to the cornucopia, itself a large twisted metal sculpture of a horn, which towers over the stacks of supplies, in fact their platforms aren’t connected to anything at all, each spaced out with nothing surrounding them but a stretch of water they will have to pass to reach the cornucopia or any other part of the arena.  If anybody here can’t swim they’re fucked.  It makes him think the Games are at least a little rigged, like they’re favouring Four and perhaps the other coastal districts this year.  It’s hardly a shocking revelation and, even if it were, he doesn’t have enough time to linger on it.

There are backpacks around the edge of the cornucopia and he has no way of knowing what is in any of them so he continues to look past them.  The weapons start to appear a little closer to the centre, spears and swords and more knives than he has time to count, a club or two, a single trident proud and obvious in the very middle, and a lone, worn out-looking bow he will be avoiding like the plague.  There is a sword right in front of him, just past the backpacks--he wouldn’t even have to lift himself fully out of water and onto the central platform to reach it--but it looks blunted, like it has appeared in Games before these ones, shed blood before and not been cleaned adequately.  It looks more like a katana than anything else too: a curved, single-edged, two-handed blade.  It could do him in a pinch but he’d prefer not to have to bet his life on the thing so he continues looking past it, standing on his toes on his platform until he sees it right there by the trident.  It’s not quite his xiphos but it might just be close enough, at least as far as he can tell from his distance.  It glints gold and wicked sharp and leaf-shaped, double-edged and single-handed and exactly what he was hoping against all common sense that he might be able to find.

He must be running out of thinking time now so he looks across the other tributes, watches how they are doing their own observing.  He looks to his right, at Issie from Three wearing the same thing as he is, her hands shaky and her vision more than a little bit too focused on one of the backpacks right at the edge.  Flick is looking at her desperately but she is not looking back.  Percy doubts she means anything by it but it doesn’t bode well for either of them.  He can just about see the careers past them, taking in the cornucopia and the arena and the rest of the tributes like something to be hunted or pitied, some of them likely unfortunate enough to be both.  Before the imposing form of the cornucopia and its island cut off his view entirely he can see Serinus and Daisy too, the kids from twelve, both too small and cowering to be made out in any detail.  He looks to his left next, sees Penelope right there next to him, looking right back, and then sees the kids from Five, Six and Seven lined up behind her.  He can just about see Cotton too, half hidden in the curve, but Percy can imagine the determination on his face, the mask over the fear.

He has just enough time to offer Penelope a weak smile she can’t quite return before the gong sounds and he dives head-first into the clear, cool water ahead of him, launching himself as far from his platform as he can.  He understands it is unfair as he takes in a deep breath of salty water but it will do him no good to deny what he is when it just might save his life so he moves just a little too fast through the water, letting it refresh and strengthen him as he slices through it.  He is the first to reach the island; another advantage which he will not waste.

The water moves under his feet, giving him a little boost as he lifts himself up onto the island then stumbles to standing.  Right now he has to run and get that sword, pick up a bag or two, then get right back out, grab Penelope by the arm and flee the bloodbath.  There will be time to slow down later but right now all he needs to do is rush.  He bypasses the bags right towards the edge of the cornucopia, the kind he sees Issie, apparently a strong swimmer, rise out of the water just enough to grab hold of before swimming right back to where she started then past it.  He’s pretty sure she and Flick are supposed to be allies in these Games but the poor kid remains frozen on his podium, unmoving with his eyes wide, like he wants to take the step forward but can’t bring himself to.

He bends to grab the last bag he sees, the one closest to the centre, at least on this side, and when he straightens he is no longer alone on this island.  That means it is starting.  He does everything he can not to trip, to get that sword and leave.  Penelope isn’t too far behind him, already with a bag of her own and searching for a weapon.  There are plenty of spears but no doubt some are sharper than others, some longer, some more likely to fall apart.  He hears a scream as he bends to pick up his sword and its sheath, because it is his now and nobody will be taking it away from him, and when he straightens he can see exactly who is dying as the boy from One, Caelus, picks up a spear and thrusts it straight into the side of the girl from Eight’s neck.  Percy thinks it must hit an artery or something because her eyes widen and she stops in place, lifting her hands to her wound and pressing down, doing nothing to stop the bleeding as blood starts to coat her hands too quickly to fight and she falls back, off of the island and into the water which starts to turn red.  Caelus throws the spear in after her, one of the flimsy weapons at the outer edge of the cornucopia, not worth his time but perfectly capable of taking Ester’s life.  It’s real suddenly and Percy needs to get out now because the careers are closing in and he is still for a moment too long in the middle, wishing there was anything he could do to help Ester but knowing there is not.

Flick has finally started to move, to swim to relative safety, and Jade has decided she can’t have that.  He poses no danger to her but he is an easy kill so she throws a knife at his retreating form, misses then throws another.  It strikes him and he splutters, splashes and sinks and doesn’t come back up.

The killing continues and Percy is right in the middle of it, at a part of the cornucopia everybody else has yet to reach.  Caelus takes out Rye from Nine next; his body is large and strong and he falls hard, victim this time to a spear Caelus has decided is satisfactory to hang onto.  His body stays right where it falls, bloodied and very much in the way.  It’s Jade’s turn again, armed this time with a large club which she swings right at Daisy’s temple.  Her body doesn’t make any noise as it crumples like all the life has left it in just a moment and Percy sweeps up a tent kit and keeps moving because he really needs to be anywhere but here right now.  Linnaeus from Five rushes Cotton but Cotton is stronger and the dagger he plunges into Linnaeus’ chest just is not survivable.  Percy keeps moving.

Penelope is right there ahead of him, the promise of escape accompanying her.  He is almost out, almost free, almost back into the water that will protect him, tainted as it may be with the blood and bodies of fellow tributes.  Bloodbath might be a more apt word this year than any other.

The ground is littered with leftover supplies which he jumps over and dodges around as Penelope is ready to jump right back into that water and swim away but suddenly Jade is right there in front of him, between him and the only person in these Games Mags wants him to trust.  Her club is raised and Penelope must know she is there but that doesn’t mean she has time to turn on her heel or react and Percy cannot watch this happen.

He sprints faster, feels the burn in his lungs and his muscles and feels his heartbeat pounding in his head.  It will always impress him, in hindsight when he has time to think about it, what he is able to achieve when he is panicking.  He raises his sword, leather-wrapped hilt warm and familiar in his hand and blade just as sharp as he had hoped it would be when he risked everything to reach it, and slashes.  He isn’t close enough to do all that much damage but Jade curses and turns and Penelope can get away now.  Whatever happens next, he’s glad he accomplished at least that much.

Jade smiles at him, well-aware of the cameras overhead even if they can’t see them.  She’s putting on a show for an audience and he is fighting for his life; that has to give him some kind of advantage here.  She gestures upwards with her club as though ushering attention towards herself, making sure that everybody is ready to watch her clobber the boy from Four the Capitol is only too happy to watch kill and die for them.  He won’t let her.  He understands the body quite well, because Camp wanted him to know where to aim in a real fight and where not to aim to avoid killing or maiming in Capture the Flag.  He remembers Annabeth telling him that the brachial artery was a good place to aim because it is hard to protect and their armour doesn’t really cover it and he sees Jade’s lifted arms and swings before she has the chance to bring her weapon down on his head.

He hits her suit, slices right through and breaks skin with no trouble at all.  He will feel bad about it later, when he has time to think about it, to think about her as a human girl whose circumstances are not much less unfortunate than his own and not  a monster, but now he needs to catch up to Penelope, escape the bloodbath with his life because it is all he has left.  He doesn’t stay to watch Jade bleed out but he hears a splash as he swims away.

They call this the control room but, like every other victor in here, Mags knows it is a misnomer.  She doesn’t have any control; control is for the gamemakers and most of what her job entails is sending water bottles and care packages and watching the donations tick down as the timer ticks up.  This isn’t the real control room, they aren’t permitted access to that, just the closest thing anybody from the districts has.

She takes her seat at her desk between Beetee’s and Marsh’s and watches the screen in front of her as the arena depicted across it comes into focus.  The desks are lined up in a sort of semi-circle, 24 of them each with a touch screen a foot wide, pens and papers and water and a table full of snacks at the back of the room and avoxes to bring whatever else they might ask for at the ready.  Victors, after all, get exactly what they want except all the things they know better than to ask for.  There is a larger screen at the front of the crescent of desks, showing what the rest of the world is seeing of the Games as their screens focus in on their individual tributes.  Mentors are steadily filing in, each taking their assigned seat behind their assigned desk, aside from Haymitch who has twice as many tributes and twice as many desks.  He drags his chair loudly to be positioned between the two then watches neither screen, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

The initial wide shot reveals something a little more like home than Mags expects to see anywhere outside of District Four, let alone this close to the Capitol.  The cornucopia is an isolated little island, surrounded by platforms suspended in the water.  There is a ring of sand a few metres back from the starting points, like a miniature beach, and then an overgrown, open space which breaks eventually into winding rivers and sparse wooded areas, some of which thicken as they radiate out from the centre whilst others break, give way to more water, another beach in the north west, a stretch of ersatz farmland that climbs gradually then suddenly into a miniature mountain at the arena’s south edge.  It’s halfway between home and paradise and it is the furthest thing from either one of them.

“They like you this year, Maggy,” Porter says.  She was the 38th victor and she stays 18 in Mags’ head even in her middle age, still wearing the halo brace from her victory tour even though now there is nothing more than the stiffness in her neck to prove anything was ever broken.  “Just look at all that water,”

“It’s probably poisoned,” Haymitch slurs, leaning so far back in his chair that it threatens to topple.  The avoxes stationed behind him make no attempt to stop that from happening, standing still and silent with their hands clasped together in front of them, the proper stance to ensure they cannot hide anything behind their backs.

Mag squints and taps about her screen, zooming in and pulling up what precious little information the gamemakers allow them to access.  “Not poisoned,” she says,” there are less than fifteen seconds left until the Games begin.  The large countdown on every screen is impossible to ignore.  “Salty.  There isn’t any drinking water but this stuff won’t kill them,”

“No drinking water at all?” Blight from Seven confirms.  He isn’t much to look at now, never has been, but he’s alive so there must be something more to him than Mags has ever been able to see.  The only potable water in the arena is bottled, either ready and waiting to be donated or packaged into bags around the cornucopia.  If they’re lucky a tribute or two might also find a filter in their pack but otherwise a lack of donations this year might be a more immediate death sentence than it usually is.  Mags doesn’t know exactly how well or poorly that bodes for every individual tribute at this moment but she can hazard a guess: Blight’s tribute, Coy, is sixteen, so on the older side for a tribute, and he seems to be strong though not fast and is likely rather handy with an axe which means people will donate to him, but District Seven always seems to draw the short straw when it comes to stylists and so never makes much of an impression on the Capitol.

The gong sounds and Mags forgets all about talking to the other mentors, about the arena and the donations and everything else, just for now.  None of it will matter if Perseus-- Percy --does not make it out of the bloodbath.  She tries her best to split her focus between her screen and the main one up front, watches how Percy is the first into the water then the first out of it, how he has a plan and a mission, how he reaches the middle of the cornucopia before most of the other tributes, even the careers, have even reached the island’s edge.  She thinks she might be holding her breath.

Ester is the first tribute down.  Mags doesn’t need to look at Marsh because she hears him hum and knows by now that means he guessed right.  Flick and Rye are next and the humming continues.  His guesses are always pretty good at the start because the initial bloodbath stays largely the same regardless of the arena and all of its surprises.  Percy is still as safe as he can be, in the middle of the whole thing where nobody else has quite reached, sword in hand.  It makes her confident, even if only because age has made her soft and too optimistic for anyone’s good.

Jade takes out Daisy and Haymitch lethargically pushes himself across to Serinus’ desk without standing from his chair.  Linnaeus starts a fight he cannot win and then she turns her focus on Penelope who is waiting for Percy who is so close but not quite close enough and Mags thinks she might be sick for the knot it ties in her stomach.  It wouldn’t be the first time a mentor vomited in the control room, though it would be a first for her.

It’s like time slows down as Percy speeds up and his sword slices right into Jade’s suit between her scapula, drawing up a thin line of blood, enough to make her wince and curse but not much else.  Still she turns and the main cameras pull in close to her face as she raises her club again, this time with a different target, because this is the first time this Games where somebody has had the chance to really fight back.  Jade seems to know it because she grins wide and a little manic, her eyes dark and narrow and glossy, like she could start crying any moment.  It is a show that she is putting on with her oversized gestures and her oversized smile, a plan she has likely had in mind since long before the reaping where she threw her hand up.

Percy isn’t putting on a show though.  Because he is approaching this like a fight and not a game and he has shown Mags that he knows how to fight.  Her arms are raised which means her pose is threatening but she is largely undefended and if he comes at her from the side she will  not even have time to hit him back and she is pausing for dramatic effect as Perseus darts in close enough to cut right into the artery beneath her arm.  She drops the club quickly and her jaw drops open as Percy and Penelope dive right back into the water and leave her behind as the blood begins to pulse from her wound before the tears finally fall from her eyes.  She’s losing too much blood much too quickly from a place she can’t really bandage or tourniquet and nobody, not even Hearth, is trying to help her.  She seems small suddenly, and young, like a child who knows they are dying and they don’t even have enough time to fully compute it, and not the biggest threat in this arena.

Vash, the boy from Ten, and Parson fight briefly over a tent kit before a few stabs of a long, curved knife take Parson down and Vash runs as fast as he can with the kit under the arm not coated in blood.  And then it seems like the bloodbath might finally be over after the longest couple of minutes in Mags’ year and she lets herself exhale and slump down in her chair as Cotton dives back into the water right before Hearth can strike him in the side with one of the prongs of that obnoxious trident.  It seems the three remaining careers are planning on staying camped out at the cornucopia, a good plan though one that many alliances fail to hold up for very long.  They’ll leave to hunt for other tributes or food or any other way to finish these Games that they can think of.  The cornucopia has been thoroughly raided this year, most of the packs stolen away, some that weren’t taken having been sunken in the surrounding saltwater moat in the struggle.

“You were right about Jade,” she says to Marsh who is watching Penelope and Percy as they reach the edge of the thicker wooded area and continue to run until Penelope is doubled over trying to breathe and Percy is panting as he tries his best to wipe Jade’s blood from his sword onto the grass, the threat far enough behind they just might be able to afford to slow down.

He shakes his head and makes a sound low in his throat.  “I had her and Linnaeus the other way around,”

“But you were right about what ended up happening to her, weren’t you?”

He shrugs, like it’s nothing.  “Kid’s scrappy,” he says, then quietly continues to watch.

“How did you know?” Enobaria asks, her eyes wide.  She was expecting a different outcome then.  Of course she was.  Jade was only her third ever tribute and the brute force approach worked for her, then for Gloss, then for Cashmere.  Mags can imagine Enobaria saw herself in Jade, right up until the moment those traitorous tears started to fall; Enobaria is, after all, all public persona, all sharp teeth and animalistic grin and facade.  Her screen is blank now, except for the number of donations she received that were not used to save her, and which have now stopped ticking upwards.

Marsh says nothing so Mags says “He has an eye for these things,”

“He definitely has an eye,” Haymitch chortles.

Marsh still does not say anything to him but does pop out his prosthetic eye to launch it at the side of Haymitch’s head.  Even with his impaired depth perception he still has pretty passable aim.  This is the first time since before his victory tour that Mags has seen him with his socket empty, a different kind of blank than the plain prosthetic is.

“The others?” Wiress asks, speech short and clipped.  She gets worse every year, like a little bit more of what she was made to do in her Games catches up with her every year,  Mags is always the crazy old lady, always said with at least a little tinge of affection, but Wiress is just crazy, Nuts.  She has already lost her tribute this year but she will have to keep coming back to the control room anyway.  Mags is sure that doesn’t help but Wiress is essentially a very smart woman, one Mags likes very much, and Three isn’t exactly overwhelmed with eligible victors ready to take her place.  She’s only 32 but she often looks as though she could be fifty.

Marsh shakes his head.  He and Wiress have a sort of understanding, a way that they communicate that Mags can only half decipher.  She is one of the very few people in the world Marsh will put even the slightest bit of effort into not offending.  “I had Cord in Daisy’s place,” Porter looks up from her screen, turning her entire body because she still struggles to turn her neck more than a few degrees, to glare mockingly at him, “and I didn’t call Parson,”

“Maybe you should’ve,” Magnotta, Parson’s mentor says slowly, her typical morphling drawl.  Her tongue keeps darting out to lick her lips, then she swallows then blinks too hard and repeats the whole process.  Her cheeks are hollow and her eyes are sunken and her arms look like nothing but sinew beneath skin.  She won the 60th Games: the morphling hasn’t had all that long to do an awful lot of hard work.

“Do you even know the kid’s name?” Chaff asks, as indelicate as Haymitch.  Mags knew Magnotta as a brilliant kid for all of a week and a half a few years back and has known her as this shell which does not even realise it is expected to respond ever since.  The morphling is an effective vice, capable of blocking everything you are trying to escape and more readily available in Six, Magnotta’s district, than anywhere else, not that it is ever hard to find if you know where to look for it.

These conversations are similar every year, never quite the same but always close enough.  Mags is content to just let them go on until she is called upon specifically and so she looks up at the big screen, still focused on the cornucopia as Vicuna gathers the last of the supplies into organised piles in the mouth of the horn and Hearth uses the butt of the trident to push the remaining bodies into the moat and Caelus builds a fire.  They don’t need to worry about anybody knowing where they are because everybody already knows; that is a part of the strategy.

“That wasn’t a lucky strike, was it Maggy?” Porter asks.

“Hm?”

“Your kid.  He beelined for that sword and he knew just where to hit Jade and he was quick about it,”

“I thought he wasn’t a career,” Gloss remarks.

They can’t talk to their tributes now and Mags is more or less amongst friends by this point so she can tell them.  “He’s not a career,” she confirms, “I’d never even seen him before he was reaped.  He’s a poor kid who knows how to survive and how to fight, I don’t really know why,”

“He got a career score,” Brutus points out.

Mags nods along and grins in spite of herself.  She’s strangely out of control recently, not quite able to reign herself in.  “He did.  He really isn’t a career but we didn’t want anybody else to know he could fight like he can so he didn’t touch a sword in front of the gamemakers,”

Wiress’ eyes are wide.  “Nine!” she chirps.

Beetee nods along.  “A nine and he was holding back,” he laughs lowly and shakes his head.  “I don’t know why I keep underestimating you, old woman,”

She is old to all of them, the block that this control room was built around.  She’s seen all of this, watched all of them fight for their lives and win them, knows more about them than they will ever know about her because there is a lot which she knows better than to say.  “It’s not me you’re underestimating,”

Cashmere levels her a look, here for her first year and very much out of her depth. She’ll get used to it, figure out how to tread water very soon.  “It’s not just you,” she says, “but you’re not what I thought you’d be,”

Mags smiles at her softly, “I’ll assume that’s a compliment,”

Cashmere returns it.  “I think it might be,”

Chapter Text

Penelope is looking up at the sky, clear and fake between the breaks in the trees, perhaps also made in a lab, as the canons sound symbolically and the artificial light forming the faces of the deceased is projected up against it where the stars should be.  Ester, Flick, Rye, Daisy, Linnaeus, Jade, Parson: another boy went down after Percy killed Jade, when he and Penelope were fleeing the bloodbath.  He’s pretty sure all the deaths on the first day happened right there at the cornucopia.  Percy isn’t really watching the display for the most part, more like watching Penelope as she takes it in.  He counts the sounds, each beat a life lost, one of them at his hands, and does not look up until he is as close to certain as he can be that he won’t see Jade’s face in the sky.

“I killed someone today,” he breathes, whether to himself or Penelope or the crickets (he assumes, though he cannot know) chirping in the long grass.

“That’s not your fault,” Penelope says back just as lowly.  They are camped out between the trunks of trees, speaking quietly so they can hear if anybody is coming and so that they will be as hard to find as they can be.  Something about the night is intimidating in a way the day isn’t, perhaps because they can’t see now the light of day and that of the projections has disappeared, perhaps because it is when they should be sleeping, which will make them vulnerable.  “That’s just the Games,”

“I hate them already,”

“You’re only just catching on?” She is just about close enough for Percy to make out the details of her face, heavy brow bone and transparent eyebrows low over eyes which he knows are blue even if they could be any colour at all for all the light he has to see her by.  She has freckles all over but there are three under her left eyes that are larger than most that form a perfect equilateral triangle and he finds himself tracing the shape in the grass absentmindedly.  She’s joking, one corner of her mouth turned up into a half-hearted smile but her hands are shaking and she is looking a little to the left of him.  She tugs on her braid nervously and her hands shake and he tries not to let himself think that is a bad sign for either of them, because until this is over they are both alive.

“Penelope,” there is nobody else here he could be talking to but he likes her name if only because it is hers, something that makes her more than just that girl tribute from Four, a real person with a real life and everything that goes along with it, “what would you be doing if we were back in Four right now?”  He’s well aware there could be cameras on him at any moment, that in these worst, and possibly final, days of his life he has to constantly be putting on a show.  If Panem is watching, and they may well be, he wants to remind the Capitol that they were people before they became tributes.  He doubts it’ll do much but he can hope against all reason if it helps him at all: this is not the time nor place to deny himself comfort, no matter how minute it may be.

She leans back on her hands and looks up at a sky without stars, like a big sheet of black fabric stretched across the dome they are being held in.  “I don’t even know what day it is,” she has angled herself so he can’t see her face anymore and the way her voice shakes is either half a chuckle or half a sob.  “I’d be asleep, probably,” she shrugs, not as nonchalant as she wants to be, “or fixing something for my dad so that everything was in working order by the time he got home.  He swears his old radio is better than the new models because of how reliable it is,” she shakes her head, fond and soft and sad, “It’s a hunk of junk really, breaks weekly if I’m lucky.  How about you?”

“Bringing in the traps,” he looks at the same spot of the sky as she is even though it is no different from any other.  Can the Capitol not picture a sky full of stars?  Too used to the light pollution to even think about the sky without it?  It reminds Percy, a little bitterly, of New York, of his real home.  “Or sitting on the beach with Finnick, cooking over a fire, looking up at the stars,”

“That sounds nice,” she hums, more nasal than she normally sounds as though she is holding back tears.  Given the circumstances she should probably get a medal for doing even that much.  “I know you must have been close considering…” she trails off.  Percy knows precisely what she means and doesn’t need the reminder of where he is currently sitting, on top of grass that is just a little too green and a little too sharp.  She pauses.  The crickets don’t.  “You can call me Penny, y’know?  My dad and my friends all do and if I’m dying in here-” the tears really do start to fall.  It’s too dark to see them but he can see her swiping them away clearly enough, hear her sniffling, defiantly out of time with the crickets’ grating song.

“Percy,” he tries for a smile but he is still thinking about Jade, about cleaning her blood from his sword, about swimming through that water as her body, likely still alive at first, fell in and her blood leached out.  He’s probably had her blood in his lungs.  “It’s what Finnick calls me,”  Finnick, who is still there in Four because Percy intervened, who is going to stay there in Four waiting, and who will never forgive himself if Percy doesn’t come back even though none of this has ever been his fault.  It strengthens his resolve.  If he hadn’t killed Jade she would have killed Penelope-- Penny-- and then him.  It was self defence.  It was justified.  He needs the reminder even if it doesn’t make him feel any less nauseated by the whole thing.  What if it had gone the other way?  If she had gotten to Penny before Percy could step in?  If she had found a weak spot in his form rather than the other way around?  Would she regret it later?  Feel the guilt he is feeling now?  What about when she was dying: did she regret volunteering?  Regret devoting her life to this, then losing day one?

The careers are just people too.  People who live and breathe and die just like the rest of them, who have extra training and preparation but probably not anything quite like Percy’s even if he has let himself get a little rusty since he ended up in Panem.  It’s a reassuring thought in a way, and a bleak, depressing one in just about every other.

They set up the tent he managed to collect from the centre of the cornucopia along with his sword when there was still enough light to see by without straining their eyes, picking a place in the thicket of trees where they would be as hidden as they possibly could be in the arena which, as large as it may be, essentially has them trapped in a cage with the enemy.  They can hide all they want and run as much as they can but there is only so much they can duck behind, a boundary at the edge of the map that dictates how far they can actually go.  The silvery insulation had rustled when they pitched it and a blanket, like the kind they gave to people they pulled out of fires back home, had rolled out along with the poles and the groundsheet and the rest of the tent.  There was no hammer but it was fine enough because Penny had the butt of her spear--one of the sturdy ones, the wood of its shaft strong and polished, the butt like a metal pommel, and the wickedly sharp metal spearhead affixed to its other end steadfast and sturdy in its place--and Percy had the sturdy soles of his heavy boots.

He isn’t wearing them now, as he sits outside as Penelope shuffles into it so that he can take the first watch.  His socks, thick and warm but, unlike the rest of the suit, not waterproof at all, are still damp which is better than the soaked that they had been earlier but still uncomfortable.  He doesn’t much like the thought of them giving him trench foot.  He could just dry them and might if they aren’t 100% dry when he needs to put them on next but he can’t exactly explain that without giving himself a way so he has left them to dry on a rock right by their makeshift camp, right alongside Penny’s.  She sticks her head out of the tent before she closes the tent, handing him the blanket to keep him warm on his watch while she tries to get a few hours of sleep in spite of everything.

The more he thinks about it, and think about it he does, for lack of a better distraction from the everything of the Games, it’s strange that the socks wouldn’t be waterproof when everything else is.  It seems like a stupid oversight which likely means it is actually an intentional and slightly nefarious ploy from the Gamemakers to make them all just a little bit more miserable than they actually have to be.  He sighs.  It’s not a big enough thing to really make much difference to the Capitol’s viewing experience but he can imagine the one Gamemaker who thought it up sitting and cackling to himself with a strange sort of glee when tributes started peeling themselves out of sodden socks.  He supposes if anyone gets caught off guard after wading through one of the many water sources cutting across the arena they will likely have to leave their shoes behind, make their way through the Games barefoot.  The soles of his feet are pretty calloused but the ground is rough and there are stones peeking up from beneath the turf, all manner of sticks and twigs and what look like strange, unnatural seed pods from the trees laid out across them: it would hurt like a bitch regardless.

He holds his sword even as he sits on the floor outside of their tent.  It is unsheathed because he doesn’t want to waste any more time than he has to if they are ambushed in the night.  As it stands, no matter how hard he strains his ears, he can’t hear a sign of another person, let alone one who is approaching.  There is a rush of moving water not far away, maybe ten minutes walk to a bubbling stream.  He can smell it from here, as salty as the moat around the cornucopia.  There is some kind of filtration straw in the pack he grabbed from as close to the middle of the cornucopia as he could but nothing of the sort in the one Penelope grabbed from a spot that was ultimately not that much further out.  For anyone who doesn’t have the filter the donations are going to go down quickly, sending bottles of water because there isn’t a single drop of it that is drinkable in the arena.  Needless to say, Percy has every intention to share his with Penny.  He can hear the wind too, the way it rustles the trees and the roar as the biting chill it carries passes right by his ears.  The cold came on suddenly, a new development, and even under the blanket he shivers against it.

The more he focuses on the crickets the less like crickets they seem.  He can’t actually see them, though he would bet that there is something there in that vegetation making that noise.  That noise which is slightly too loud and slightly too harmonic to sound quite right.  A bird chirps occasionally, a vaguely robotic warble that rings shrill and sharp through empty air.  But, other than that and the occasional, miscellaneous scuffle of something smaller and faster scaling a tree, it is silent and it is strange to be sitting there alone.  He’s sure even without the cold he’d shiver when his brain helpfully supplies him with the thought that it feels vaguely like everybody else in the arena might already be dead.

Mentors don’t usually get much sleep during the Games.  They have comfortable rooms all ready and waiting but they also have cots closer to the control room and those, for what they are, are frankly shockingly comfortable.  Still, no mentor retires there for much more than a power nap, usually avoiding sleeping at the same time as their district partner so that they don’t miss anything important.  The comfortable rooms are for commiserating when both of your district’s kids are down and out and not getting back up.  Mags is one of a few mentors who has been known to sleep in her chair from time to time.  They aren’t allowed to send each other’s tribute care packages, no matter whether or not Mags gives Marsh permission her computer won’t let him.  It puts her off of sleeping, because she could be asleep the very moment her tribute needs something urgently and she could let them die for a few hours of restless sleep.  Hers is a guilty job, one she does not wish on anyone else so she will keep doing it until she is no longer able.

The first day ends relatively peacefully, the tributes who escaped and survived the bloodbath dotted about the arena, setting up camp and keeping to themselves.  Her kids have a tent.  They won’t quite be comfortable but they’ll be as close as they can get and the fact that the kits were put so close to the centre implies--though does not necessarily mean--that they will be of use.  Mags hasn’t been in the arena but it looks balmy, she knows enough about these things to presume they will turn the nights suddenly frigid.  There’s always a chance she will be wrong though, that the Gamemakers will drastically change tactics and leave her floundering.  It is not a chance she can ever discount for the sake of her kids.

The day’s deaths are flashed up against the sky and the main camera focuses on the careers at the cornucopia sitting around their fire and watching it through the smoke.  Caelus grins as Ester and Rye’s faces flash up, expression cold and almost reptilian through the camera.  She knows well enough the games those lenses can play and can’t help but wonder how the expression, or at least her impression of it, might shift if she were able to get up close and look at it with her own two eyes,  She suspects it will ring with forced bravado, that fear or something close to it will hum underneath the skin, that he isn’t happy about the blood on his hands or the splatter from Ester’s neck that has matted a patch of his hair on the side of his head.

They toast with bottles of clean water taken from the leftover packs which surround them, drink them down greedily and perhaps a little irresponsibly but they all have plenty of donations for their mentors to get through and there are plenty of other packs around and she wouldn’t be shocked to find out there was some kind of filtration device or water-purifying tablets or something somewhere in the arena.  The Gamemakers love to include something small but rare and useful if not almost necessary for tributes to fight over.  It doesn’t always come to fruition but when it does, the Capitol just loves to watch a child die over something that seems to them to be nothing more than a piece of plastic.  They consider it a sign of the districts’ barbarism, perhaps, whilst the districts consider the Games themselves a sign of the Capitols’.

The camera leaves the careers and focuses on Issie who is crying as she looks up at Flick’s face against the sky.  She is standing as though she was moving before the presentation started but she is still now, leaning against a tree like it is the only thing holding her up.  Nobody from the districts would judge a child for crying in the arena but none of them are expecting a girl who looks like this on day one to make her way back home.  Beetee has probably met her parents, they may or may not be expecting her back, may or may not kid themselves all the way to the grave.  Like most other things, Mags has seen it happen before.

Her kids are next, sitting in front of their tent in close quarters and talking as they watch, the forest thick around them, the projection obscured by the canopy.  The projection ends and her kids keep talking, swapping stories and nicknames and dimly lit teary smiles.  It was no accident Percy called Penelope a sister in his interview, it is no accident they are talking like this now.  It bodes well for the Capitol’s impression of them, for the future of their alliance, but the higher Mags’ traitorous hopes climb the further they have to fall.

“Who do you have as victor?” she asks Marsh anyway, like she can’t help herself.  Age is doing strange things to her, making her soft like rotting fruit.

“Caelus.”

Mags hums.  Marsh has been by her side as a co-mentor for a decade now and she has heard his lists of predictions ten times over; he has gotten the top ten right nine times, the bloodbath is never exact but it’s always close, and he has gotten the victor right four times.  Marsh’s odds tell her a lot more about how she can expect these Games to play out than the betting pools the people of the Capitol participate in but they’re still never exactly right.  She needs them not to be right this year.

Cord from Five has caught up to Serinus from Twelve and the two of them are walking together across a stretch of land that, though hidden from the cornucopia, is remarkably flat and open and vulnerable from just about any other vantage point.  Their alliance seems like one which has been cobbled together: Cord who has lost her district partner taking pity on the twelve year old boy who has lost his.  They seem to be heading straight south, towards the mountains.  If they’re lucky it will work out, at least for a while, if only because nobody else has decided to head in even remotely the same direction.

The girl from Six, Suzi, is small and her bag is heavy and she is alone but she is also lithe and nimble and determined and the camera only manages to hang onto her for long enough to see her slip into the trees above, stowed away and relatively safe so long as nobody decides to look a little too intently straight up.  She wouldn’t be the first to win her Games by hiding.  Mags looks pointedly at Marsh sitting to her side.  She is on his left side so he doesn’t react until she asks him what he thinks.

“10th”

It’s better than most kids that young and that small would get.

The girl from Seven, Kadia, is only a year older--Percy’s age--but she is also a whole head taller and maybe twice as wide across.  She looks like she could maybe hold her own in a fight in a way Suzi probably can’t and she is accompanied by Coy who is even taller and ever broader and has an intelligent glint in his dark eyes that can spell trouble in the arena if somebody actually knows what to do with it.

Cotton is sat in a tree, a lower branch than what it seemed like Suzi scampered up to but one that is still a good few metres up off the floor.  He has his back against the trunk of the tree, his eyes closed and his breathing even as he sits with his knees pulled up to his chest and his chin pointed up at the sky.  He got a kill today.  It doesn’t seem to be tearing him apart but he isn’t putting on the same sort of show Jade was, or even anything close to Caelus’ more diluted version thereof.  He is just closed off, alone, prepared to do what he has to do to get out of the arena and not think about it too much until he can afford to.

The girl from Nine is on her own too, though evidently much less at ease with it as she shifts and fidgets and pulls up handfuls of grass like a bored child.

The kids from Ten and Eleven have been lucky enough to stick with their district partners, setting up with nothing but a tarp and a couple of trauma blankets each in the same woods as her kids.  It is one of the only things making her especially nervous this year, besides the Games themselves, of course, though she tends to assume those go without saying: a lot of the tributes have, whether knowingly or not, beelined to the same section of the map as her kids have.  It’s a large enough area that they might not all clash, at least not right away, but it feels pretty inevitable that their numbers are going to shrink faster than anywhere else in the arena, especially as the active bounds begin to shrink when the Gamemakers decide things are getting a little too boring for their tastes.

Following its checkup on all the tributes the main camera has focused back in on the careers at the cornucopia so Mags diverts her gaze and attention back to her own screen, at Penelope scrambling into the tent and Percy taking first watch, sitting just outside of the tent with his weapon ready and the blanket from his tent kit covering from shoulders to midway down his shins.  Seeing as he is taking the first watch, Mags does the same.  Marsh knows the drill by now: she’ll wake him up when the kids switch shifts or if something happens and she will do everything in her power to make sure he doesn’t miss anything because he will blame himself just as harshly as anyone else if something happens and there was anything at all he could have done to fix it but he missed the chance because he was too comfortable in his cot.

Just like her and Marsh, almost every other pair of mentors sleeps in shifts so they always have eyes on the screen.  There are exceptions, namely Haymitch, who does not have a partner nor all his faculties at the moment, who drifts into fitful sleep, wakes up, stares at Serinus asleep tucked under Cord’s arm, then falls back asleep in his seat, snoring deeply and twitching until he has dislodged himself from the chair all together and he is sprawled across the floor practically under his desk, drooling on the floor and ruining the immaculate polish.  Mags glances at him occasionally, when he snores with enough force to remind her that he is still there, to check that he is still laying on his side and is not about to aspirate on his own vomit any time soon.  The mentors from Six can’t quite stick to everybody else’s methods either and Mags watches them press vials to their lips occasionally, not even trying to hide what it is they are doing, and sometime in the night the easy, absent stare turns into stupefaction turns into eyes fluttering closed, muscles so relaxed so against their will that, had Mags not seen it all before so many times over she can’t hope to keep count, she might be tempted to assume they are dead.  They’re plenty alive though, with their shaking hands and their broken composures and the emptiness behind their jittery eyes, Suzi will just have to fly on her own for a while.  Chaff dozes in his chair too, but Basil and Anissa are lucky enough to have Seeder there to pick up the slack, even if she can actually only act on Anissa’s behalf.  Mags suspects the mentors from Eleven are just as used to their little routine as she and Marsh are, perhaps even more so, but these weeks of minimal sleep would exhaust Mags even without all the emotional taxation so she can’t imagine the toll this is taking on Seeder.

The night passes without incident, mentors switching shifts in times with their tributes, lone wolves hiding themselves away strapped to sturdy high-up branches or trees or wherever else they can find secluded space to hunker down sleeping through the night as well as they are able and hoping for the best.  Nobody dies and nobody hunts, at least not yet, and the arena looks almost peaceful so long as she doesn’t look at the cornucopia, scattered with weapons and stained with blood.  The drones have been sent to collect the bodies but they won’t clean the arena because the tours for the Capitol are always more interesting when they can see evidence of all the carnage.  She switches with Marsh when Penelope wakes up and Percy crawls into the tent in her place, pulling his socks and shoes back on because they should be dry by now and sleeping in the boots will be worth it if he has to run.

Marsh wakes her when both of their tributes are up, hurried in how he conducts himself so the two of them don’t miss anything more important than Percy swiping sleep from bleary eyes.  “We should try to find food,” Penelope says.  It is morning but only just and the sun is low in the cloudless sky.  If they light a fire everybody will know so they will just have to hope nobody is nearby and on the hunt and be prepared to make a speedy exit.  Mags finds herself watching with bated breath as the camera follows them walking, seemingly following the sound of the brook.  Maybe they’re hoping for fish.  If they’re lucky there might actually be some in the arena.  If they’re unlucky they’ll be poisoned.

There could be another tribute behind any trunk wide enough to conceal them, somebody waiting above them where the camera doesn’t allow her to see, any step could trigger an arena trap of some description.  It could all end any moment and, with the way Mags feels her heart in her throat, beating at the base of her skull, it feels like she might be right there next to them, like it is her life on the line for Capitol engagement.  The Games are always hard to watch, harder still after you’ve played them, and she is in a room of victors who are being made to play them over and over and over again, their tributes like their avatars.  It might be a half sensible decision to take to booze or morphling as a crutch just to make yourself a less suitable candidate so long as your district has the numbers to replace you.  It’s too late for Mags to make that choice, not that her unique position ever really afforded it to her, so now she sits and waits it out as her kids walk in apprehensive silence towards the stream in a room full of people who get it.  The control room is no stranger to sobbing, shaking, panicking, trying to claw their way towards an escape they have already reached.  They are all still in the arena, all kept in a cage, the only difference is that this one is too large to find the edges of, that this one has a real sky and real stars and nobody even pretends there is a chance of winning.

Penelope uses a match from her pack to start a fire by the creek as Percy uses her spear to skewer a couple of silver-scaled fish.  They look familiar and remarkably normal, not like arena mutts.  That doesn’t mean they can’t be, of course, but there are no real warming signs.  They might be sea bream, though Mags can’t quite tell from her vantage point.  A good fish to eat though one that can be hard to debone.  She doesn’t think her kids from Four are going to particularly struggle with that though so she tries to force herself to worry just a little bit less, to sit down enough that her back is at least grazing the back of her chair.

They eat hurriedly, refill their bottles with salty water straight from the stream then bend down to take turns using a filtering straw to drink before they leave as the other packs up.  They understand well enough that they have broadcast their location to anyone who might care to know it, so are determined to be far, far away by the time anybody else can get there.

The other tributes are awake too, hunting or foraging for food, collecting water, lighting fires, packing up their camps and moving on or else staying in place until their location is compromised.  The main camera moves in close to Issie who is twitchy and on edge for good reason and Beetee sends her a bottle of water.  Mags doesn’t even want to know how much just that much has depleted her donations.  She seems to be heading towards a nearby salt water river, perhaps to try to catch some fish of her own.  Mags has no idea and she never gets the chance to find out.

Coy and Kadia are stood at the river’s opposite bank with a filter straw of their own--if Mags had to guess she’d wager there are only two in the whole arena--and the moment they hear her coming they take a step back from the water and pick up their axes from the ground by their feet, listening silently to see if somebody is coming their way.  When they’re a bit more sure they duck behind vegetation and Issie wades into the water, wincing at its apparent cold, and by then it is much too late for her. She doesn’t even have a weapon.

Coy and Kadia abandon any idea of stealth they may have had and sprint forwards, splashing inelegantly through waist-high water, axes high, letting out something like a warcry that warbles because neither of them want to be here either but they will do what they have to to get out.  Issie won’t.  She doesn’t even try to run.  Screams and cries and pleads to someone other than these other tributes who can’t afford the mercy she is begging for, but does not run.

Kadia is smaller and faster than Coy and she gets there first, swinging her weapon wildly this way and that, not caring where she strikes Issie, just hoping she makes contact at all.  She slices Issie’s forearm shallowly and then her hamstring deeply and she falls to her knees with a squeal, her head now the only thing above the water.  She bows it but does not submerge it and keeps crying so hard the water around her ripples with every sob. Kadia takes a step back, crying silent but persistent tears of her own, face distinctly green, staring at her own hands as they shake, like they are something new and horrible which she has not seen before.  The axe falls out of her lax grip and she keeps staring at Issie’s blood as it tints the water.

Coy steps forwards, his face blank like he is somewhere else entirely, and places a hand on Kadia’s shoulder as she retches.  He holds up his own axe, and takes a faltering series of deep breaths.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Please!” Issie forces out between her sobs.  His axe comes right down on the back of her neck where it is exposed and vulnerable, cleaves right through her brain stem.

Beetee sighs and turns his back to his screen.  He doesn’t linger in the control room beyond when he is needed and Wiress goes right along with him.

Coy and Kadia leave with shaking knees to find somewhere else to drink.

Chapter Text

There’s an eerie sort of quiet to the arena that Percy wasn’t expecting there to be.  Fake crickets chirp and fake wind rustles leaves and he can hear the water wherever he goes, Penny breathing beside him, the mechanic warble of not-quite birdsong, but it really is just him and Penelope here in these woods, parked beside a pathetic creek not worth following.  Nobody has found them yet and it feels like all that they can do until they stumble upon somebody else or somebody else stumbles upon them is wait for it to happen or for the arena to start to close in.  He doesn’t know how big the arena is, how far from the edge of it they have situated themselves, or where anybody else is.  He doesn’t know if or when the gamemakers will set fire to the outskirts or leech poison into the water and make his desalinating straw more of a curse than a gift, when the fake crickets will reveal themselves to be horrific monsters lurking just a little out of sight, or whatever else they may have come up with to bring excitement to misery, to facilitate an end and minimise the lull in the middle.

“I don’t think I was ready to be bored,” Penny admits, picking through another meal of small, bland fish, a little seared from the naked flame it was cooked over, and foraged greens that taste somewhere between medicinal and like nothing at all.  “They should put seasonings in our packs,” 

“I don’t think that’s really a top priority,” Percy half laughs, still too aware that the same woods that are keeping them hidden could be keeping somebody else just as concealed right around the corner.

“No,” she agrees, “I guess not,” she looks down at her hands, fingertips tinged with chlorophyll.  “I really wish I got the chance to try out some of those Capitol recipes.  No doubt I’d be a few ingredients short but I think I could make it work,” she smiles more so to herself than to him.  “I just know my dad would love that plum sauce,”

“You might still get the chance to make it for him,” he tries to reassure her, aware even as he says it that the only way it can be true is if he dies in here, in some big, elaborate cage in front of a camera and a nation licking their greedy lips or waiting with breath so bated it has turned stale in their aching lungs.

“Here’s hoping,” she says with all the enthusiasm of a woman facing the gallows.

“I’m sure he appreciates the thought, no matter what happens,” he’s grasping at straws but they are all he has been given to hold onto.

“My dad?”

“Yeah.  I wonder if they hear us right now, if your dad knows that you’re thinking of him,” she shakes her head forlornly, finishing her meagre meal and wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. 

“I hope he doesn’t.  If I don’t make it back home to him I don’t want him to ever have to think about me again.”

His chest hurts.  “He will though, won’t he?”

She sighs, wringing her now-messy braid between her hands.  “Yeah.  That’s what I’m worried about,”  She rubs her eyes defiantly and changes the topic deftly even if she can’t quite stop herself from sounding a little like she is trying to blink back tears and he lets her.  Upsetting her doesn’t do either of them any good. “I’d kill for some carbs,” she looks up at the sky where she must imagine the cameras are hidden, “Marsh, if you could send me some bread I would…” and she trails off and pauses and a bright red blush crawls up the pale flesh of her neck.  “Well I guess I don’t have anything to offer you but you can offer me bread, right?”

It’s maybe a little early in the Games to be spending their donations when it isn’t urgent but they need to keep their energy up, as well as their spirits, and though he may not actually know how much money in donations they have to spend, or how much something like bread costs when the Capitol is selling it like some sort of lifeline, Mags has reassured him that all of their efforts before the Games were worth something, that they have enough donations not to worry too intently about how to ration them.  He is pretty used to hunger too, the limited availability of food on quests, the way he often had to evade the kitchen in the days of Smelly Gabe, those first days in Panem when he didn’t have anything and had little to no idea of how to obtain it, but Penny probably isn’t.

It doesn’t take long for a drone to appear, carrying a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and twine that comes floating down to them on a little parachute.  It looks just like something he would pick up from the market in Four, wrapped tidily and handed to him with a smile in exchange for some of that day’s fresh catch.  Penny stands to catch it out of the air, pulling it to her chest like she is scared it will be taken from her.  She unwraps it almost reverently, holding her hands tight around it.  “It’s warm,” she tells him and he grins as he watches her shove the parachute into her pack before she pulls the knots in the twine undone and reveals a hunk of bread , maybe a third of a loaf, with a familiar green tint.  It isn’t lovingly shaped into the little fish-shaped rolls it usually comes in but he’s sure this is a recipe taken straight from Four, just like all the other aspects of the arena.  It’s not quite his home but it is perhaps the closest thing he has left and here the Capitol is, trying to ruin that too.

“Here,” she breaks it into near-perfect halves with her hands.

“You eat it,” he insists, “it’s your money,”

She shoves it into his hand anyway.  “You’re family,” she insists.  They’ve known each other for less than a fortnight but he is all she has in here and vice versa.  “We’re sharing funds,”
She leaves no room for argument that is not outright rejection, not just of her offer to break bread, but of her.  “Cheers,” he relents, tapping his half against hers and watching the crumbs rain between their hands.  It doesn’t compare to his mother’s cooking and it has nothing on ambrosia, it’s not even as good as the bread he normally gets in Four, but it’s delicious--one of the only things in this gods-forsaken dome he can actually enjoy.  He likes Penny’s comfort too, sure, but it is accompanied with the looming caveat that it must end soon forever, that he will lose it some way or another and never get it back; bread is just bread and he is signing Penelope’s death warrant in his attempts to evade his own.

The day passes without event--they leave the creek in case anybody is following the smoke from their fire, and head ever deeper into what is beginning to feel like an endless forest that grows ever thicker even though they’re both well-aware it must eventually come to a very abrupt end.  They eat half the bread in the morning and half in the evening and they watch the sky for the portraits and listen for the cannons but there are none.  There was one yesterday--Issie from Three, maybe Percy knew she wouldn’t last long but he still took no joy in seeing her face there against the blank canvas of the sky, smiling uneasily but smiling nonetheless and now gone, forever, just like that--and it is only the third day but the sky remains clear.  It only makes him worry more about how soon the gamemakers will interfere and force the surviving tributes closer together.

When Mags returns to the control room after maybe half a night of fitful sleep Beetee and Wiress are no longer there.  They will have to return later on, after all viewing is mandatory for everyone, even after a mentor has lost their tribute, even after a parent has lost their child, but the mentors from Three needn’t worry about rationing sleep when there is absolutely no good they can do anymore, nobody they can help even in the incredibly limited way the gamemakers allow them.

Brutus is still asleep and Enobaria, now without a tribute, is sitting at his desk instead of her own, her head in her hands but her eyes trained on the screen before her, watching Hearth as he and Vicuna discuss how they are going to feed themselves whilst Caelus takes all of the spare packs and supplies that the careers don’t want and shoves them into the moat around the cornucopia so that nobody else can have them either.  The stats on her screen tell her it’s fourteen feet deep--trying to rescue any of those supplies now will be risky, especially when the odds of the items being ruined or just generally a little bit useless is so high.  It’s a good strategy then, but a mean one--though, she supposes, no matter how sorry one feels as they are doing it, killing is hardly kind.

Haymitch is asleep on the floor and an avox--a young man who is stick thin and missing three of the fingers on his left hand--is serving tea to every mentor who is present.  She smiles at him and thanks him before she asks for the honey and whispers an apology only when he is close enough to her that nobody else will be able to hear it or even see her mouth move.  A victor can never be too careful: this is a fact which has been proven a few too many times.

Marsh offers her no greeting this morning but tells her to be careful when she promptly burns the roof of her mouth and cracks a semblance of a smile as she swats his arm.  He is wearing the same clothes as yesterday and his necklaces are tangled together as though he slept in them--he isn’t willing to miss a moment of this year’s Games, at least as long as their tributes stand a chance.  It’s relieving in a way, to know that she isn’t the only one suffering a strange sort of obsessive optimism this year, even if Marsh is doing a better job at hiding it.

Percy and Penelope are awake, splitting a meagre breakfast and talking and she feels an awful lot like she is eavesdropping even though she’s sure they both know there is no such thing as privacy in the arena and it is far from anybody’s top priority once that first klaxon sounds and the Games begin.  Penelope looks up at the sky, not towards the camera Mags and Marsh are watching her through but they get the gist anyway, and asks something of them directly and it’s always nice when tributes do this and let them know how and when they want their money spent.  Marsh’s predictions are more than just a game, a bet made between himself and his brother’s ghost, but rather a tool at times.  Whilst Mags cannot help herself but to assume her tribute will last right up until that very last day, Marsh has a more realistic picture of the Games and he spends accordingly--he does what he can for as long as he can do it in a way that Mags, even after all these years and knowing his predictions and having the power to ask him for more detail whenever she would like, cannot bring herself too.  She thinks she is a bad mentor not infrequently, despite it being the only thing she knows how to be.

The day passes without event--no violence anywhere in the arena, no teams colliding and no traps being activated, no poisoned forages.  It’s nice insofar as it means all these children have another day to live but she knows the gamemakers’ patterns well enough to understand that the relative peace cannot last long, only long enough to fool the more naive tributes into thinking they just might survive this before they are struck down, bolstered by a confidence that will only make them fall harder.

With nothing more interesting--at least from the Capitol’s perspective--to focus in on, the main screen moves from tribute to tribute in a way that feels almost like a second round of interviews, a chance for the Capitol to get to know the tributes and somehow still miss that this whole thing is sick and sad and cruel, that 65 years on it should be at least a little bit difficult to continue to convince themselves that the deaths of what will soon be 1,519 children but may as well be the full 1,584 has ever been a fair retaliation to an uprising that, despite what the history books will say over and over again, she knows better than to truly blame on the districts and can only hope the young people of Panem will understand even if there are not many people who will be brave or stupid enough to spell it out plainly for them.  The people from the districts were rejecting the Capitol’s tyranny and they responded by doubling down on the tyranny and sometimes Mags feels she is only able to motivate herself to go on living because she is waiting for that next uprising.  For that wide-spread anger to crescendo and the Capitol to feel the pain of every single one of those deaths over and over and over again until it falls.  And she has to believe it will fall if she wants to get out of bed in the morning, she needs to avenge the death of every child whose hand has slipped through her grip, who she has failed to bring home.  She needs to forgive herself and she can’t do that if nothing changes.

It is easy to think of this Capitol as this inhuman thing.  This grandiose city where nothing truly capable of empathy or sympathy resides, an uncaring construct of stone and marble where only animated statues reside.  They don’t look like the people anywhere else, their faces distorted, their clothing almost unthinkable, where practicality has to be put above all else, their riches unfathomable to most.  But there are people here who she knows are human because they have shown her: Tigris, whose mercy has been a kind of open secret for years; Caesar Flickerman who may make a show of the Games but does so by trying to prove that the tributes are human, who makes the point that these Games will be robbing these children of their full lives as loudly as he is able to slip past Capitol censors; Hyacinthus who genuinely seems to want his tribute to come out of this okay, who can’t apologise for everything in words but can in his efforts to help.  They break the illusion, shatter whatever faint hope she might hold that people who are human just like she is cannot truly revel in the horrific and unnecessary deaths of faultless children.

On the central screen, Coy and Kadia are sitting around a fire in silence, not looking at each other.  Coy’s head is bowed, focused on his own hands and the callouses every axe he has ever used has left on them, whereas Kadia is facing the sky, her eyes closed and her mouth moving even as no sound is coming out.  God is nothing but an outdated idiom in Panem--there can be nothing greater than the Capitol, no being more important than Snow, and still they swear to a god they do not believe in--yet Kadia looks to the clouds and seems to ask something for forgiveness even though Mags is certain she doesn’t believe there is anything out there that can offer it.  The Capitol will be enjoying their suffering as well as Issie’s, revelling in the aftermath of the killing until the Games are over and they inevitably forget yet again that they are a punishment for the victor too.  Coy sighs and picks at his own hunk of seaweed bread that Blight must have sent his way while Mags was asleep, handing a piece to Kadia who doesn’t so much as look at it as she passes it from one hand to the other, squashing it and never actually bringing it close to her mouth.

She stands to get her own bread from the table at the back of the room, suddenly eager for the taste of home even though she knows the Capitol’s rendition of Four’s bread will pale in comparison to what the bakers back home make.  They have actually shaped the loaves they offer to the mentor’s but they are too big and too ornate and a little bit too green, and they have laid them out alongside small individual pots of rich, salty butter.  Mags knows well enough how savoury this bread is alone and reaches over instead for one of the glass pots of jam set out beside the croissants.  As she sits she tears the head off of her fish-shaped loaf and hands it to Marsh who shoves it into his mouth in as few bites as possible, not looking away from his personal screen as Penelope stamps out their fire.  She thinks back to what Penelope said to Percy earlier, about him being the closest thing she has to family, and then about Marsh who, by now, is probably filling that selfsame role in Mags’ own life as she does it.

At some point Wiress enters the room and parks her chair about a foot back from Mags’, situating herself between Mags and Marsh so she can watch both of their screens and try her utmost to avoid her own, now displaying nothing but a black backdrop and white writing, large and obnoxious and always on display, reminding every mentor whose tribute has died that they have failed to keep them safe and showing them just how much funding they had left to try.  Otherwise, not much changes.  Mentors send water and food and Chaff sluggishly sends some basic medical supplies Basil’s way after he slips whilst passing through a river with his boots in hand and slices his foot on a sharp stone.

“I’m glad it was such a boring day,” Porter stretches her hands over her head and yawns as Serinus offers to take first shift and Cord retires for the day, their camp exposed but situated in a part of the arena the other tributes have yet to venture to.  As she stands Pip slips into her seat.  “I wish there were only boring days,”

Mags smiles at her sadly and she returns it with something halfway to a grimace.  “I feel like I should be doing more,” Cashmere admits, “I have so much money to spend and I’ve barely sent Vicuna anything,” It’s her first year as a mentor and Mags gets the worry but it is very early days and the thing about being a mentor is that, during the Games, most of the time they really aren’t needed, they are all just terrified that they won’t be there the one time that they desperately are.

“You’re doing just fine,” Mags tries to reassure her, standing from her own seat so she can look over Cashmere’s shoulder at the screen where the tributes are just talking, their postures almost relaxed, like they aren’t in the Games at all.  “You’ll be there when she needs you but for now she’s doing just fine on her own.  You might really need that money later.  Gloss didn’t send you much at the start last year, did he?” She’d ask Gloss herself but he is sleeping in the other room and, really, she doesn’t need to ask anyone--after all, Mags lives and breathes these Games every year, sees everything happen and commits it all to memory, writes it all down in a journal hidden in the walls of her home in Victor’s Village as soon as she returns so she loses as little as she can to the ageing process or next year’s bloodbath.  From the twelfth Games to the 64th there has been a lot the Capitol has glossed over and left to be forgotten, hidden from the viewing public who see footage on a delay the mentors do not, which she is clinging onto, just in case nobody else is.

There is always something strange about being in the control room at times like this, about helping and consoling other mentors when she is so aware that they have conflicting goals, that they cannot both win.  She supposes it’s that soft old heart of hers--that really was soft long before it was old but that has only softened more with age--though she is really rather desperate to win it is nigh on impossible for her to really want the other tributes to lose.

Penelope takes the first shift tonight so Mags is content for Marsh to do the same but she waits up for maybe fifteen minutes after Percy has gone to sleep, nursing a hot cup of chamomile and waiting for something to finally go really wrong out of nowhere.  No such thing happens but Penelope turns her gaze skyward again, unintentionally averting her gaze from the direction of the camera Mags and Marsh are watching her through.  Her spear is tight in her grip and the shiny blanket is on her lap but she shivers regardless.

“Spend my money,” she says to the sky, loudly enough for them to hear her clearly but hopefully not so loudly that anybody else will be able to follow the sound of her voice to their camp.  “All of it before you even touch his,”

“No!” Mags jumps up from her seat, suddenly indignant, sloshing her hot tea all over herself and barely even noticing as a team of avoxes rush forwards to clean the spill and pull the wet fabric away from her skin so she doesn’t worsen the burn.  She expects Marsh to agree with her, to tell her that he won’t.  She can’t believe it, that Penelope would be giving up like this.  Sure, she hasn’t handled this whole ordeal with the same strange resilience as Percy has but she has done a hell of a lot better at coping than most of the tributes that have had the misfortune of falling into Mags’ care.  And she’s throwing it all away!  She has a chance, at least a small one, and you absolutely cannot throw hope away in a place like this.  “Marsh!” she says emphatically, suddenly aware of the silence that has fallen over the room.  All eyes are on her but she is right and she is certain of that fact; tributes are not disposable, cannot just be throwing themselves away like this.  “She can’t do that!”  It’s not that no tribute has ever killed themselves in the arena before, but they don’t normally give her forewarning like this, don’t normally implicate her, nor give her the chance to stop them.

Marsh doesn’t say anything though, just swipes his fingers across the screen, pulls up the list of gifts, and sends an apple her way, shiny and bright green.  Mags doesn’t say anything either, just sets the cup down a little too hard on his desk and storms out of the room, letting an avox press a small pot of burn salve into her palm as she goes and trying not to look at Penelope’s pale face on the central screen, smiling through tears and sinking her teeth in.

Chapter Text

There are no more deaths until the 6th day of the Games and the mentors are almost as on edge as the tributes, waiting until something happens because it is inevitable that it will.  On day four Suzi passes in the foliage almost directly above Coy and Kadia’s heads and Mags is sure all of Panem is holding its breath just like the mentors in the control room are, as she briefly loses her footing on a piece of damp bark or a slippery section of moss, letting out a stifled yelp and dislodging a loose twig which narrowly misses the back of Coy’s head.  He startles anyway, stopping in place and looking up at the branches passing overhead.  The primary camera feed tightens in on his face, his dark eyes wide, and then refocuses itself on the overhead canopy, Suzi’s eyes bright blue and clear in the spaces between the leaves.

“Is something wrong?” Kadia asks, already sounding terrified.

Coy clears his throat, looks down at his hands holding tight onto the handle of his axe, then right back up at Suzi who is frozen in place.  He keeps walking.  “Nothing,” he says, “A squirrel.  It might be an arena mutt--I really don’t want to stick around long enough to find out,”

Suzi could jump down and attack them both then and there but she stays right there in the canopy, hugging her knees to her chest and breathing deeply, and they pass without incident.

“Shit.” Blight says earnestly back in the control room, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.  This happens sometimes, a lot of the time: some tributes look at their bloody hands after their first kill and decide that it can’t be for nothing, that once they’ve killed once to survive they have to keep killing to keep surviving, and others replay the moment in their minds on loop, reliving it until the thought of living at all just isn’t one they can justify if this is what it costs.  He had half a chance before this but he froze once and that almost always means he will do it again.  He did everything right up until this point and still it isn’t really over, but, well, in every way that matters, it is.

“ Blight,” Ash, his district partner, says.  It sounds like the start of a sentence, one that ends with something like he hasn’t lost yet , but Ash guided Blight to victory--or the mimicry of it they all fought tooth and nail to scrabble away from the Arena with--and he knows better than Blight does what comes next; when you stumble in a race like this one, you lose it.  There is no right thing to say so Ash does not say one of the multifarious wrong ones.

And that’s it for the rest of the day and all of the next one, and Mags spends that entire time sitting there in her chair in a stiff sort of silence that, despite his generally quiet disposition, has never existed between herself and Marsh before.  Even when he was her tribute and they both understood the odds of him making it out alive were few and far between, they spoke and they communicated and they traded in apologies that the other neither accepted nor understood.  Now they don’t talk at all and he always seems to send Percy and Penelope exactly what they need before she gets the chance and, despite the silence, he knows her more than well enough to know she could never bring herself to waste Percy’s funds to prove a point.

The room is never quiet, of course, what with the chatter from the screens and the other mentors, but Beetee and Wiress are spending as little time as they can get away with in their seats and even Enobaria is oddly sullen this year, her tribute once promising yet quickly scuffed out.  Mags feels strangely isolated, almost like she has been sent back in time to the 12th Games, when it was just her, seventeen and terrified and out of her depth, sat in front of a smaller screen that was less responsive to her touch, crowded on all sides by Capitol citizens who knew where they were and what they were doing, and were content to stare unsubtley at Mags but never once dared meet her eyes.  A lot has changed since, and yet nothing is different at all.

She watches her screen with an intensity she usually reserves for the tenser moments of the Games, watches Penelope and Percy grow tired as they walk, watches the angles of their spines go bent and weary, watches the grip of hands on weapons loosen as days pass without surprise, then tighten when they notice the slack.  She listens to them talk, remembers her own partner in the Games with as much clarity as she can manage the memory little more than a smudge, blurred with age and panic and repetition.  Percy and Penelope talk a lot, and with the quiet start these Games are going through, it is not unusual for them to appear on the main screen, the one all of Panem gets to see, their conversations, both tender and vague, broadcasted to the people who want them dead and the ones who want nothing more than to get them home safe, regardless of what the odds say.  Penelope says something and Mags watches her mouth move on the big screen, and Percy laughs in response.  Weak and watery, perhaps, but a laugh nonetheless.  Laughing in the face of death, in the face of the Capitol.  They will read it as resilience; Mags knows him well enough to identify defiance when she sees it.

“You have a good tribute,” Marsh tells her flatly, the first thing he has said to her since her sent Penelope the apple.

Her first instinct is to nod.  She does, and she has hope--in her experience an ill-advised thing yet one she tends towards nonetheless.  But she also has anger, a simmering, insidious little pit in her stomach.  She shakes her head instead.  “No excuse to throw yours away,”

“There’s a lot I’m supposed to understand that I don’t,” he returns tensely, too honest for his monotone, “but I get the Games,”

“You can’t wait to get away from them,” she reminds him.

“You’re the same,”

She shakes her head again.  “Not until it’s over.  I don’t know what you think you’re doing but from here it seems an awful lot like you’re trying to find your replacement,”

“Our whole purpose here is tipping the scales and we’ve always shared tributes, Mags.  It’s what Penelope wants, and you want and I want and Perseus wants.  This shouldn’t be an argument,”

“You don’t speak for me, or for Percy,”

He considers her for a long moment, looking at her face but not her eyes and chewing on the inside of his cheek.  “What do you want then?  What’s the difference?”

She doesn’t answer.

Day six begins with a fake sun rising over the arena at exactly 6am, warm and a bit too orange.  It isn’t actually raining outside but it is pouring in the arena and anybody who doesn’t have a waterproof tent groans and shivers as it wakes them, and Mags watches Penelope wake Percy up and duck into the tent alongside him to shelter herself.

Between the mock farmland and the mountainous section at the arena’s southern edge, Cord and Serinus are clinging to each other’s sides, grimacing as they walk against the wind.  Mags is sure they don’t particularly know where they’re going but has no doubt heading to some of the cover offered by the caves and foliage scattered across the mountains isn’t a bad idea.  They are in a field now, waist-high stalks of wheat that look plastic and fake even through the cameras not doing much to hide them from the sight of anybody else who might head their way.  They are who the main camera is following, their hands clasped together in the screen’s centre.

“I miss home,” Serinus says.  Mags has heard most of the tributes say almost the exact same thing in the past week.

Cord smiles tightly at him, her gait uneven and her wince every time she bears weight on her left leg not obvious but definitely there.  “Me too,”  It is a very difficult thing to contend with as a mentor, that the best Mags can hope for right now is that neither of them ever get to see their homes or their parents again.

“What will you do if you win?” he asks her.

Cord looks up at the sky for a moment, considering the precise shapes of the fake clouds.  “I’d never leave the house again,” she says, “and maybe it’ll be a bit like nothing else bad will ever happen,” she sighs and does not ask him the same question and they keep walking in a not-quite comfortable silence whilst Mags watches them past the droplets of water on the camera’s lens.  In spite of the quiet, the camera lingers, following them as they finally reach the greenery on the mountains.

Serinus gasps suddenly, his round face lighting up and his eyes going wide.  Cord, ever on edge as anyone hoping to survive the Games must be, panics before she realises that it was a good gasp.  Serinus points her towards the purple berries--rich in colour, perfectly round, glazed in rainwater and glinting beneath the orange sunlight.

Cord hums, tilting her head to one side.  “I don’t recognise them,” she says cautiously, “they weren’t on the training exercise.  I don’t know if we should-” But Serinus is already running, grinning as he treads over weeds and does his utmost not to slip in the wet mud.

“I do!” he says, “they grow in Twelve.  My sister and I pick them all the time,”

“You’re sure?” Cord follows after him at a much more reasonable place, the wince growing more noticeable as the ground beneath her feet grows steeper and more uneven.

“Completely,” Serinus reassures her, already gathering the fat berries in his hands, cradling his haul against his chest with one hand as the other adds to it, his fingertips stained purple.  He pops one into his mouth and chews before eating a couple more with a smile.  “Try one,” he tells her.

“Okay,” Cord says unsurely, plucking a single one of the berries offered to her and holding it up to the light to examine it.  Mags doesn’t think she even knows what she is expecting to see but it doesn’t look like there is anything wrong with the berry so Cord eats it then immediately makes a face.  “Bitter,” she comments.

Serinus nods.  “Sometimes they can be.  You must have gotten a bad one,” He eats two more then makes a face himself, “I’ve gotten a few but most of them are nice.  Try another one,”

Cord shakes her head, suddenly looking terrified.  “I don’t think we should eat any more of them,” she says, “just in case,”  She grabs him by the hand and pulls him along, making him drop the rest of the berries which quickly get trampled underfoot.

They can’t be walking for more than thirty seconds when they stop as the incline of the path suddenly gets much steeper and Cord lets go of Serinus’ hand, bringing her hand up to her mouth as she sees it.

“What’s wrong?” he asks her, sounding terrified suddenly, and Mags’ heart falls to her feet.  The little kids never make it and it’s never easy to watch, not that any of the Games is.

His hands and lips are turning purple, a horrible necrotic sort of colour and not the rich jewel tone of the berries, and he is swaying where he stands.

“Sit down,” she tells him, looking around frantically at the nothingness that surrounds them.  There is nowhere to go but she picks a direction and walks towards it with anxiety masquerading as purpose.  “I’ll be right back,” she promises, then she stops for just long enough to demand at the top of her lungs, not even thinking about who might hear, that Haymitch sends him water and whatever else he can.

She downs all the water she has on her and sticks her fingers down her throat and tries to save her own life because she knows as well as Mags does that it’s too late for Serinus--he’s tiny and there’s no way those bitter berries weren’t poisoned and he ate too many of them and, and…  She returns to Serinus empty handed, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and wincing as she comes to sit next to him, looking much worse than he did only a few minutes ago.  Haymitch has sent the water and keeps sending it, pressing the button over and over and over again until the funds are all gone and the only thing showing up on his screen is an error message.  The drones come one by one, dropping package after package.  Cord unwraps one and hands the bottle to Serinus who presses it weakly to his lips but doesn’t drink any of it.

“I’m so sorry,” she tells him over and over again, kneeling at his side and hovering over him with shaky hands that can’t do anything but rest on his sweaty forehead or hold his ice cold hands.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,”

If I win,” Serinus says, words sluggish spilling from his lips like he doesn’t even have the energy to open his mouth, “my dad will never have to work again.  The mines are dangerous, you know?  He swears he’ll never let me work there,”

He expires shortly after.  Haymitch drains the contents of his flask in one movement and stands quickly as his screen goes black, the remaining donations reduced to almost zero.  Mags sighs, rests her head in her hands and finds that her cheeks are damp.  Haymitch stumbles forwards into his desk and the screen teeters before it falls and Haymitch storms out of the room.  They’ll drag him back later, but for now the avoxes rush forwards to right the screen and Mags wonders not for the first time what it must be like to be in their position instead of her own.

She keeps watching the big screen and tries not to think about how the gamemakers are able to catch every death on it, how they are always looking in just the right place.  Cord cradles Serinus’ body to her chest, small and limp and empty, and hums to him like he is simply sleeping as she blinks back tears.  Porter sighs sympathetically in the control room.  She puts him down eventually, crossing his arms over his chest and tucking a sparse sprig of something white and just barely flowering between his sternum and forearm.  She goes about gathering up and unwrapping all the water bottles next, picking up Serinus’ bag as well as her own and packing in as many of the bottles as will fit.  She uses the fabric from the parachutes and the wrappings to cover his body over, so the prying eyes of the Capitol will be able to see it no longer, and continues forwards.  This time she makes no effort to disguise the limp.

There are more berries ahead, and Cord kneels beside them and dread climbs in Mags’ gut.  She can’t end it like this.  She can’t.

She doesn’t.  She picks the berries one at a time and crushes them between her thumb and forefinger.  Most seep red-purple but some leak an almost clear fluid and her eyes go wide as she digs out some of the bottles of water and starts squeezing the clear, syrupy liquid into them.  She leaves some of them there and marks the others by tying scraps of fabric around their caps before putting them back in her bag.  Just in case.

Mags looks back down at her own screen and tries not to feel her heart sink as he takes in the image of Percy sitting all on his lonesome, packing the things from their camp back into their bags, and a glimpse at Marsh’s screen shows that Penelope is foraging for food.

Penny has spent every single moment since she left Four completely exhausted--she goes to sleep bone tired and wakes up just the same and she is still far from convinced that she hasn’t dreamt this whole thing.  Twice a day every day she pinches herself on the arm just to double-triple-quadruple check that there is absolutely no chance she could still wake up back home, in her own warm bed, to the sound of her dad’s old, warbling radio coming through the wall, to a hot cup of tea and two pieces of yesterday’s bread with margarine and raspberry jam, to a day of work and something worth coming back to at the end of it.

She doesn’t have a real sense of time in the arena, but she took the late shift last night and she watches the sun rise this morning and she wakes Percy up once the rain starts to fall, cold and heavy.  He shifts to the side and lets her clamber into the tent alongside him and they sit there together for longer than they usually allow themselves before they get moving.  Maybe they’re getting complacent because they must be almost a week in and almost nothing has happened since the first day, but it’s almost like if she lets herself forget everything but the moment, this could almost be nice.

Percy is an odd kid maybe, and she doesn’t think she was expecting to like him.  He volunteered and he put on a show she didn’t know how to put on and there were a few moments when she thought he might be genuine about it, and then he was there and a lot more like her than she expected him to be.  If she shuts everything else out, it’s like she is camping with her little brother who just so happens to already be taller than her father and look absolutely nothing like her, watching the sunrise through the rain.

They have to move eventually, when the already thin illusion dissipates into nothing and the chirping of the not-quite crickets and the too-orange light of the not-sun remind her of where she is, what this is, and the fact that it will all be over soon.  She didn’t think she’d like Percy at first and now she has decided to sign away her life for his.  It’s not a decision she regrets, but as soon as she remembers she has made it she feels like her stomach is full of bugs--not butterflies, something worse, like horrible fake crickets.

They can’t light a fire to cook fish or anything else in the rain and there is nothing around them that offers shelter besides the tent she’s sure neither of them are particularly eager to burn down, so she goes off to forage whilst he packs up their camp, a little too aware that if she can’t find anything they are going to spend the day hungry.  Her hair is soaked the moment she steps out of the tent and she almost slips in the wet mud underfoot.

“No real rain has ever been this bad,” she says and Percy laughs at her.

“I’m sure it has been,” he says, prying the pegs from the soft ground, “but I also never want to defend anything the Capitol does so, you know what?  You’re right,”  She smiles at him and grabs her spear, just in case this is where their good fortune ends--not that she supposes she has any of that left after ending up here.  “Don’t go too far,” he says, just like her dad used to.  She wants to cry more than a little bit but she keeps it together.

“How far is too far?”

He considers her for a second, narrowing his bright eyes against the sun.  “If you scream I should be able to hear you,” he says.  She almost asks why she would be screaming, and then she remembers.  It’s like ice all over her body, her skin prickling as her brain catches up with the reality she has been forcefully submerged in.  If someone comes across her on her own and they have even a little bit of hope that they might win, they’ll try to kill her.  It should be harder to forget that she’s in the Games, but it’s taking a lot of conscious effort on her part to remain sane and it’s the only way she knows to go about it.

She puts her spear down to her side as she drops to her knees in the mud.  The suit isn’t hers anyway and she won’t have time to care about stains when she’s dead.  And how strange is that?  She’s eighteen and she’s going to die--she’d give herself a week, maybe a week and a half if she’s lucky, but she’s no Marsh and she’s pulling her numbers out of nowhere.  Her life should be starting now, her name should be disappearing from the reaping, the fear should be going away.  And now it is ending and in a year’s time the only person who will still be saying her name is her father and maybe Percy is he really does manage to do the impossible, and she’d almost rather they both forgot about her too.  A ghost is not a happy thing to be, and she thinks she might prefer to be nothing at all than something which can only make the people she cares about miserable.

She collects leaves and tubers and berries and hopes she studied the foraging exercises for as long as it felt like she did at the time, and then picks out dirt from beneath her fingernails and tries to pull the wet hair away from her neck.  And then she hears a gasp, really more of an inhale, and absolutely not Percy.  Her heart stutters in her throat and she drops everything she has collected and reaches for her spear as she jumps to her feet.

“Cotton!” There are tributes like Suzi and Serinus and the other little ones who would take pity on her, who would send her worried looks and strained grimaces and turn and run or hope she was willing to offer them the same mercy and stick around for longer.  Cotton is the perfect opposite: tall and nimble and in command of his body in a way Penny never has been.  His eyes are focused on her like a predator hunting its prey and the spear in her hands feels more like a desperate lifeline than the tool it usually is.

“I don’t remember your name,” he tells her, voice quiet, his own forages dropped at his feet.  She knows he favours daggers and only hopes that means that, so long as she can keep a little distance, she’ll have the upperhand.  She tries to remember what his score was but can’t think of anything besides danger danger danger, and the chafing texture of the lacquered wood under her hands.

This isn’t one of the novels on the wonky old shelves at home, one of the only vestiges left of the mother she never met; they don’t need to banter before they fight, she just needs to fight before she ends up dead.  She might have signed her life away but this is not a suicide mission.  She isn’t just going to lay down and die here even though she’s not planning on making it home.  She is dying on her own terms or doing something worthwhile like saving a friend, but not here, not like this, not on her own in a clearing at the hands of a tribute who clearly can’t see past his own drive to win.  He’ll regret this whole thing if he survives it.  She needs to believe that for her own sake rather than his.  Her mother already died to give her life, and she has struggled with that fact for as long as she has known it, and it has never sat right that her life has always felt like a transaction.  If more death is the cost for more life, she doesn’t think she is all that interested, and yet she is willing to inflict it if it will do someone else some good.  It’s a strange knot she has tied herself in, and she is under no illusion that she has sufficient time left to unravel it.

Cotton runs at her and she jabs her spearhead at his side and he spins in an effort to avoid it.  She feels immediately sick.  She knows how to fight, technically, but she hasn’t even broken skin and still all she is thinking about is her own hands coated in claret.  She doesn’t understand how anybody wins the Games and lives with themselves after, and still she is trying to help Percy win in an act that is all goodwill and more fear than she knows what to do with.

He grunts and the daggers he is holding in either hand are wickedly sharp and glinting in the daylight and just maybe, stupidly optimistically, they might be what she needs to finally wake her up from this weeks-long nightmare she is stuck in.  It’s a thought that brings her precisely no comfort so she shoves it to the side and steps back away from Cotton as he comes running, doing her best to jab her spear into the same space her body was just occupying.  Real fights move faster than practice.  She thinks she already knew that but she knows it now.

He can’t get in close but there is no etiquette in the arena and only so much that fighting fair can do--when it’s life or death fighting dirty is just part of living.  Her hands are the only part of her he can reach with his short-ranged weapons so he reaches for her front hand, angling her body so her spear doesn’t touch him, and as she draws her weapon back, his blade slices deeply across the back of her hand.  She’s never been much good with blood and she resists the urge to close her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at the way the wound opens like her skin is screaming before the blood fills the gash, quick-slow.  She cries out and Cotton’s face twists into something halfway between a grimace and a grin, like he isn’t even sure how to feel about this tactic he has chosen for himself.

“Penny?” Percy calls, clearly worried, and Cotton’s strange expression twists into an all-out grimace.  Right.  As much as she doesn’t want to put Percy at risk if she doesn’t have to, she has something Cotton doesn’t: an ally .

She doesn’t want to wait for Percy to get here though, so she lunges forwards again, this time stepping into Cotton’s space instead of out of it, and he just jumps back again but he can only move so quickly and she strikes him squarely in the stomach and she feels the disgusting way the sharp point of her spear sinks about an inch or two deep into his flesh.  The suit feels thick and tough and protective as she wears it, but under the spearhead it becomes fragile.  He shouts and Penny has a feeling that if Percy isn’t on his way already, he is running now.

He charges at her, one arm raised and the other pressed against the wound on his stomach and it’s probably not a smart way to fight but she doubts he’s ever had to practise whilst contending with a stab wound before.  He’s too close for her to do much more than block him from getting closer with the shaft of her spear and with the rain and the blood it is becoming harder to hold onto than she’d like, and the sight of the seeping scarlet and the sensation she is playing on repeat in her mind of metal sinking into flesh, of satisfaction being overwhelmed by revulsion in an instant, is making her feel nauseous and dizzy and her feet are sliding around beneath her and this can’t last much longer.  The dagger misses her torso but catches the arm she puts between the blade and her body, and her suit tears just as easily as she did, and she watches a freckle on her arm be perfectly bisected by the sharp point.  There is a moment where it doesn’t hurt at all before the pain comes sharp and undeniable and hot.

She swings her spear around, not really sure what exactly she is doing besides trying to end the encounter, and doesn’t even register what is happening as it slices deeply between two of his ribs and he moves like he is going to return the attack but, as she finally lets herself close her eyes, too close to him to know what she can even do next, he falls heavily to his knees, coughing and spluttering and looking up at her with his eyes wide.  The daggers fall into the mud and blood trickles over his lower lip as it quivers and this boy is a year younger than her and he suddenly looks like it.  The blood on her hands is her own and the blood on her weapon is both of theirs and she’s pretty sure the dampness on her face is a mixture of tears and rainwater, and her hands are shaking so bad she drops her spear at her feet and stumbles backwards so quickly she falls over her own feet.

“Penny!” That’s Percy.  Her eyes are still closed but she knows his voice by now, just like she knows the sound of Cotton gurgling on his own blood and choking on air in a way she will never be able to forget.  She doesn’t really know what’s happening because her eyes stay closed and the pain stays blinding, and the mud and the rain stay wet and cold, but Percy is here now and that doesn’t make it okay, but it does make it better.  It’s the best she can hope for, in this place where even hope’s memory shrivels.

She opens her eyes eventually, tentatively, and tries to pretend there isn’t a body on the floor, that she didn’t put it there, that Percy crouching to its side and picking up the daggers he dropped and all the ones on his person and in his bag isn’t actually looting a corpse.  She looks at a tree instead of at her friend or the blood or the body and tries to think of anything else but the moment where instinct took over and she killed a child.  It’s what the Games are and apparently what she is too and she knows she made the right choice because in the impossible world where she gets out of this, she knows she does not cope with it.

She hears the buzz of a delivery drone and she is sure Percy is speaking but nothing is louder than the memory of Cotton’s last breath playing over and over and over again.  When Percy killed Jade he didn’t think about it for hours after and that tells Penny everything she needs to know.  “Here,” he says and he is closer to her than she thought he would be.  She startles and he apologises but his hands are back on her skin before she can even think about what is happening.  They’re warm in spite of the cold and she is sure the broken skin he is gently probing is equally burning because it definitely feels like it is on fire.

He unwraps some kind of salve or ointment Marsh has sent her and wraps her forearm tightly in the fabric from the parachute and it is like he has done this a thousand times before, like her blood and the exposed layers of her skin and the corpse that is at most a metre away barely even bother him.  She has been keeping the fabric from the other donations in her bag and he rifles through her things to find something clean enough to wrap her hand up in and she isn’t entirely convinced she is still in her body at all.

“Can you promise you’ll forget me when you win?”  She isn’t intending to talk but the words find their way out of the body she is not occupying without resistance.

He looks at her sadly, his eyes not a colour anybody’s eyes should be, and his face so young--younger than her own and Cotton’s and, she’s pretty sure, younger than what it was yesterday.  “There’s not a lot I wouldn’t do for you,” he says slowly, “but I can’t do that,” he sounds like he might be crying but with the rain and the strange ringing in her ears that distorts every sound she hears, she can’t know for sure.  She nods and swallows and hopes this will all be over soon and she will never have so much as the opportunity to worry about anything ever again.

Chapter Text

Penny hasn’t stopped shaking since she killed Cotton.  It has been maybe twelve hours and she has barely spoken and she keeps looking at her hands, clean and bandaged, like they belong to a stranger.  The guilt must be haunting her and something about that is getting to Percy because it should be haunting him too.  Or doing a better job of it at the very least.  He thinks about Jade every night before he goes to sleep and again every morning as he wakes up, like her face is painted on the back of his eyelids, like her blood is still painted all over his hands, still in his lungs.  But that’s it.  He shuts the ghost out, goes about his day, pursues survival even as it tries its damnedest to slip past his fingers and outrun him, leaves Jade behind until he is still for long enough for her to catch right back up.  Cotton stays with Penny, closer to her than Percy is, than her will to live is.

He feels guiltier about that than he does killing Jade.

Jade was self-defence.  It was Jade or Penny and then it was Jade or himself.  Cotton was self-defence too, Penny’s life or his.  She had to make a choice and she made the right one and Percy wasn’t even a part of it.  But he could have been.  He could have been right there next to her and it could have been his life or Cotton’s, his hands bathed in blood.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, not sure how to find better words for his apology.  It doesn’t matter anyway, because there is some awful haze around her that she can’t see or hear through and he can’t push past.  He could say anything and she wouldn’t hear a word.

It rained for most of the day but it has stopped now and still Penny stays shivering and sopping wet, curled up in the grass a little too far away from the fire he is cooking over.  He has stared at her for so long he is sure he will never forget her face as it is how, transparent eyebrows low and heavy over her eyes, watery and wide and glassy, like there is nothing at all behind them besides emptiness.  Now he watches the fish he is cooking instead as the naked flame turns the skin blistered and charred.  He is sick of fish and bitter berries and tasteless greens, sick of the arena’s uniquely awful cricket-song, of knowing there are cameras everywhere even if he can’t see any of them.  He’s a demigod, one who was never supposed to exist at that, so he is used to being watched and yet this feels more insidious somehow.  Gods are one thing but people who should be more human than he is are another entirely and the glee with which they watch children kill and die is a little harder to reckon with than a pantheon of infinite beings to whom his existence is really just a blip, a story that lasts only a moment before it ends.  There are no gods in Panem, but there are monsters everywhere and their beady little eyes are all over him as he walks and runs and forages and he crouches by the fire and slices his sword right through Jade’s flesh.  They are all over Penny as she grieves and despairs and doesn’t even look at him.

The sky is all the wrong shades as the sun sets and Percy watches it because he has nothing better to do.  The clouds are weak, thin and wispy--half-assed, like the Gamemaker responsible hadn’t really been trying.  He’s lying on his back in the grass, his limbs spread out and his hair fanned around him, and it’s almost like he is relaxing, with Finnick in Four where the grass turns to rock and sand, or with his mom in Central Park.  Only he isn’t, because the sky is wrong and his stomach is tight and toiling, and Penny is silent like neither Finnick nor his mother ever would be, and, gods, more and more with each passing moment, he feels as though he’ll never get back to either of them.

Part of being a demigod has always been knowing that he would die young.  He would probably never make it to adulthood.  Camp Half Blood was always teenagers, Luke one of the oldest and Percy had seen what he had done to steal those years from the Fates.  Really, these Games probably aren’t cutting his lifespan any shorter than it was supposed to be, but he was just starting to believe that he might get to grow old--or at least middle-aged--in District Four, where there aren’t monsters or quests.  And now he is in this Arena and he feels more like he has an expiration date than ever before.  He’s used to the looming spectre of death, not to it being maybe a week away--maybe less--not to it having a surprisingly youthful face.  He had thought Cotton might make it longer, Jade too.  He’s not Marsh, doesn’t know how this thing will go, but he can more or less guess how it ends.

That doesn’t mean he is giving up though.  He has to remind himself of that when he looks over to Penny who is sitting and staring and so still it is like she is practising for being dead.  He doesn’t have to die here, he’s just probably going to.  He’s sure he has had worse odds before.

He watches the colours go dark, fade to black-blue and starless, before he hears the canons.  One.  Two.  After days of silence it knocks the air out of his lungs as he watches the soft face of the boy from Twelve with whom he once shared cake on a rooftop with electrified edges, smiling uneasily against the sky.  So he’s gone now too, is never going to grow up.  A morbid part of Percy’s mind wonders what did him in.  Cotton comes next, his photo unsmiling, eyes looking up from beneath his eyebrows.  Unlike Serinus, he doesn’t look scared.  Jade’s early loss pretty much proved to Percy that doesn’t mean anything at all here and Cotton is only able to reinforce it.  Percy doesn’t know what is coming next: what grand plans the Gamemakers have; what winning entails; what losing exactly entails either, here in this place where there are no gods left.  Whatever it is, he's committed to fighting it.

Mags thinks she knows what is coming when Cotton stumbles into the same clearing as Penelope, when the main screen moves away from Coy and Kadia mid-sentence and refocuses on one of her kids, on her knees and unprepared.  Maybe it’s lucky that Cotton isn’t expecting the encounter any more than Penelope is, that he gasps rather than pounces, flails momentarily instead of going for the jugular before Penelope can even realise she isn’t alone, that he isn’t as ready for this as he has been pretending to be.  The problem (admittedly one of so many Mags has long since lost count) is that Mags has been running on the fumes of hope for a while now and they gutter pathetically as the camera pulls in tight on the fear on Penelope’s face and then draws back just enough for Mags to see the trembling of her green fingers as she clutches at her spear with a stark and undeniable clarity.  This doesn’t end well.  Mags knows the Games more than well enough to know that much and not hope otherwise.

She’s going to die, she thinks and does not say as Marsh holds his breath, looming over his screen even though there is nothing he can do now but wait and hope--that’s usually where Mags shines, where Marsh does not even seem to try.  Perhaps if she were meaner she’d scoff at him, tell him this is just what he has been waiting for, what he and Penelope have been preparing for, but she’s not and she knows that isn’t quite right.  She’s going to die, even on her feet with her weapon in hand and her eyes dark and focused, with her training and her practice and everything Mags has ever been able to give her.  She is going to die.

She is going to die until she doesn’t.  Mags is going to watch until every screen in this room goes black until next year.  Marsh is going to stay on his feet with the air trapped in his lungs until he’s sure the moment has really passed because he does care, really, in his own oddly detached way Mags can’t understand.

The blood on Penelope’s hands is all her own but Cotton is the one on the floor, choking, flailing, garbling wetly as his face goes white and his lips turn blue before startlingly, violently red.  Penelope is going to die--Mags knows this, has known it, has refused it, doesn’t want to accept it, has forgotten how to hope otherwise--but she is not going to die today.  Woof’s screen goes black and Mags spares him a glance, just the momentary kind because she can’t bring herself to look anywhere but her own screen for longer than that, and can’t help but wonder when he got so old.

Percy is wrapping her wounds with gentle hands that resolutely do not shake, looking at Penelope’s face even if she will not look at his, glancing at his handiwork then looking up, catching the camera for just a moment with his not-quite-right eyes like it is a confrontation even though there is no way he could actually know where he is being watched from.  Just that he is being watched, that he will be being watched for the rest of his life or--if he’s ‘lucky’--just most of it.

“How much money do you have left?” she asks Marsh.  He’s still standing over his screen, wincing at what Penelope is saying, squeezing his hands together tightly enough to make the bones creak.  She doesn’t want to talk to him but she is above risking punishing her tributes for a grudge.  She could never forgive herself for that.  For not doing everything in her power to help them through.

“Enough for bread,” he says back glumly.  After all of these years of sitting through hell side by side, the emotion in his voice catches her off-guard.

“So big purchases are on me, then.”  It is a conclusion she does not struggle to reach, one that feels more like acquiescence than she wants it to.  She hates this plan-- Penelope’s plan, though she does what she can not to think of it as such when Penelope is in no place to be blamed for anything--and she wants nothing at all to do with it.  Apparently she is going along with it anyway.  Her stomach turns.

Penelope is despondent.  Percy is trying very hard regardless.  Mags is starting to feel as though Marsh was right.  All in all, it’s a world away from where she would like to be right now--and isn’t that just one of those thoughts that would ring just as true any day of her life?--but at least Marsh isn’t being smug about it.  Of course Marsh isn’t being smug about it; Mags knows him better than that.

“You aren’t sorry,” she tells him quietly.  There is nothing happening on any of the screens right now: tributes talking, walking, eating, setting up camp.  Nobody is laughing today.  Nobody has sung in the arena for years.  It’s not quiet but it is awfully close for how much life there still is between the control room and the arena itself.

Marsh shakes his head.  “I was right.”  She knows better than to take it as an I told you so, as a taunt of any kind.  Marsh says what he means, means what he says, and thinks everything would be easier if everyone else did the same.  He can’t tell her he is sorry for doing something he is still sure was the right thing to do.  That’s all he means so she takes him at his word.

“You’re already running out of funds.”  They never know how long the Games will go on but they are moving more slowly this year than they have recently.  Past the Bloodbath there have been no massacres and days and days of nothing but talking, slipping, tripping, crying, eating, sleeping, going hungry.

“If I play my cards right I will have drained them entirely.”

“And what if you run out and she keeps going?”

He sighs.  “I’m not too concerned.”  Flat, monotonous.  She has to remind herself that she knows he cares.  “In the event that it comes to that, we’ll switch to Perseus’ funds.”

“And you’re just assuming I’ll let you do that?”

“I know you will.”  She doesn’t argue with him. It doesn’t serve her to make a tribute suffer and she has more donations this year than any other.

“I could use a drink,” she says, in the way her mother used to say it.  In the way she can wait until the games are over to imbibe, in the way there is no flask of expensive whiskey--money, after all, stops meaning much when you have more of it than you know what to do with--hidden on her person, no twitch in her fingers, ache under her skin, screaming in her head as her hands shake, just a dull sort of want, a weariness trapped somewhere between her head and her heart.  She is able to need a drink and have that mean nothing more than that; in the world she lives in that makes her lucky.

“Tea?” Marsh suggests.  He is back in his seat, half-watching his screen because he can stand to see Penelope like this but knows right now he doesn’t need to monitor her so closely.  She is in good hands.  The best either of them have seen in a while.  Mags wishes their confidence in Percy could mean more.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” she says wryly.

“I’ll buy you a bottle when your job here is done.”

“Do you mean when he wins?”

Marsh does not say yes. He also does not say no.  Mags knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Penelope starts to talk again the next day.  Not like she did before.  Not in thought-out sentences, not in clever quips that make Percy laugh in spite of everything, not in resilient little sparks of spite.  It is like the words--sparse and sad and scraggly--are being torn out of her like weeds ripped up at the root.  Something vital and aching about each of them.  She has seen what the Games are first hand and turned away from them, left Mags to reckon with that--selfish of her to even think that, to even think about herself when all she is doing is aching in a chair, tapping a screen and pretending she doesn’t feel the prickling of tears behind her eyes.

It’s a quiet day in general.  Another where not much happens, at least not by Games standards.  A mutt rises from the moat--something amorphous and strange, bloated like a sunken cadaver, semi-translucent and lumbering, as though it is supposed to be unintelligent but when its eyes meet the camera they shine with understanding, with what might be salt water or tears, with something between fury and regret.  Mags decides they are not familiar no matter what the twisting of her stomach says--and leaps at the careers, teeth bared, gnashing.  It warbles more than growls, like a woman’s voice in an old recording, like a sob and a war cry in one.  Between the three of them they take it out, slice at its neck to shut it up, silence it before it falls once there isn’t enough body left to hold it up.  Hearth lands the final blow then sits by the pieces of it as he nurses a shallow slice on his calf, dressing it in salve and makeshift bandages as he looks into the thing’s face, takes it in, focuses on all the details Mags is ignoring.  He plants the butt of his trident on the ground by his side, uses it to pull himself to his feet and leans on it, in a moment of weakness, like a crutch.  He catches his breath, looking away from the mutt finally, before using the prongs to shove it somewhat too delicately back into the moat.  His sigh isn’t loud but it cuts the silence nonetheless, and then the main feed simply moves swiftly along.

It moves from conversation to conversation, to Cord in her solitary silence hovering a hand over a bottle with a rag tied to it, hesitating and trembling for just a moment before she brings one of the non-tampered bottles to her lips--Porter slumps in her chair, mutters something between relief and defeat.  Suzi somewhere in the trees, perched on a branch and running her fingers through clumps of hair matted by wind and salt, pulling at knots until they come apart or break away.  Penelope pulling up handfuls of grass and Percy fishing for the dregs of the conversation that came easy a little more than a day ago.  Coy and Kadia looking scared of their own hands.  Vash and Kinley from Ten, looking like an older brother and his younger sister, sitting close together on the ground as though they are almost safe.  Basil and Anissa from Eleven moving quick and quiet, finding the remains of someone else’s fire at the edge of the arena where the trees break and looking around themselves like they suspect they have been caught in a trap.

They find Vash and Kinley first though, don’t sleep through the night as they follow trodden trails of damp grass like bloodthirsty hounds with their snouts pressed flush to the ground.  It doesn’t even occur to Mags anymore to be disturbed that they are hunting.  The Games only end when everyone dies and everyone dies much faster if killed when the opportunity is presented.   It’s a cold fact, one she hates with all she is, but she doesn’t think to contest it.  It is good when the Games are over, it is good to win.  The Games turn placid, docile people either ruthless and desperate or helpless and dead, turn ruthless people desperate and violent or overconfident and dead.

The first signs of sunlight break the canopy as Basil and Anissa come upon the campsite, brown skin dappled mandarin orange in the shapes of the negative space between leaves and branches.  The gap between the trunks of the trees is barely large enough for the tent to fit in but the path of footprints and trampled twigs they followed to get here negate the efficacy of the cover the area offers.  Anissa places a slender, calloused hand on Basil’s shoulder, digging her blunt nails in and holding him in place behind a tree trunk.

Next to the tent--really nothing more than a tarp they have manipulated and draped to protect them against the wind as well as the rain--Kinley sits with her knees pulled up to her chest, a foil blanket around her shoulders.  Her eyes are half-lidded and unfocused, looking nowhere in particular as she shifts, slumps, then startles as her head starts to drop, thirteen years old and fighting desperately to stay awake when there is nothing to do but fret and watch the artificial wind rustle through the artificial trees.

Anissa presses her cheek against Basil’s and whispers something so quietly that even the Capitol’s recording equipment can’t pick up more than a hiss of ill-defined syllables, consonants and the blurry spaces between them.  He leans back, does not step for fear of snapping a twig or crunching a leaf or otherwise revealing their position before they are ready, nods resolutely.  He pulls a dagger from his pack, the burlap, sagging and half empty, slumping against his spine.  It isn’t wickedly sharp like Percy’s sword, like the weapons the careers deemed worth hanging onto, isn’t well-built and sturdy like Penelope’s spear.  It’s a non-distinct thing, the hilt and crossguard unadorned, the blade maybe eight inches long, the edge rough where it has been sharpened with the improper tool or by somebody who wasn’t sure what they were doing.  Still, it is a piece of metal, sharp though jagged, that has no purpose here other than to break skin.

Like somebody Mags never wanted to be, someone that would horrify the child she was until abruptly she wasn’t, she winces but does not even really consider looking away as Basil sprints forwards, fast despite the hunger and fatigue, and stabs the point of the blade into a little girl’s throat before she has even had the chance to scramble to her feet and call out.  The skin splits around the dagger as he sinks it a couple of inches deep then pulls it back out, hot blood spilling down the blade then spraying across his arm, his chest, the bottom of his face.  He licks his lips then spits pink froth on the ground, steps back as Kinley falls forwards.  Artery and windpipe severed.  It was a well-aimed strike.  Mags is the sick sort of person that thinks things like that with a clarity not befitting the horror.

Kinley can’t scream but she can gurgle, she can fall heavy like a stone, whack the tarp as life drains from her eyes.  She can warn Vash and it is the last thing she can ever do.  He stumbles into wakefulness, eyes blown wide and his own knife already gripped tight in his hand.  It looks nicer than Basil’s.  That isn’t saying much.  He looks at Kinley and his face goes red.  He looks at Basil who is standing there beside her body, covered in her blood, still wet, trailing in fat droplets down his skin, drying in streaks that turn dark and flaky where the drops pass.  It doesn’t take long for him to decide to pounce, fallen tarp half-draped across his back as he sobs half a shout and stabs at whatever flesh is available to him.

Basil howls as the knife glances across his collarbone and jabs blindly in retaliation. He gets in too close to Vash as he slices into his side and Vash has the wherewithal to clasp the back of Basil’s suit in his hand, to use his free arm to hold Basil tight, force him to stay close.  He grunts and cries out as he stabs and stabs and stabs and stabs, making it clear this might be more about vengeance than survival for anybody who can stomach keeping their eyes open to watch.  The whole control room sees it clear as day, watches as Basil slumps, heavy and lame, and the dagger drops out of his hand, quiet where it lands in a whorl of tangled, torn tarp.  Vash goes limp then too, letting Basil’s weight topple him backwards as his grip on his knife goes slack.

He lies there on the floor, Basil draped over his legs, one side of his suit and stomach sliced into red-brown ribbons of flesh and viscera and blood seeping from each and every wound in earnest.  Basil is so, so still and Vash, bleary now, clinging to consciousness, makes no effort to move him.  The only sign Mags is given that anything has changed is the sudden way Chaff’s screen goes black.  He leans back in his chair, away from his screen, and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes.  His eyes are unfocused, body language syrupy and uncoordinated.  He doesn’t say anything before he stands and sways and leaves the room like he would run from it if he could but his body won’t let him.

“Well,” Abigail from Ten says, staring at her own dark screen.  She is touching her neck delicately, skimming fingers across the soft flesh like she is imagining how easy it would be to break, “these Games are picking up.”  By some miracle, next to her Angus’ screen remains lit up.

The main feed lingers for a moment, on Vash taking deep, quivering breaths, sliced to shreds and laid out on the filthy ground, blanketed by another boy’s dead body, fingertips skimming Kinley’s ankle--the only part of her he can reach--with a tenderness that never survives the arena.  It moves after a moment, to the blank space between two trees, then again to boots running, air heaving from lungs.  It isn’t clear when Anissa abandoned her hiding position but she is gone now.  She is scared and she is running and the fear and anger are fighting their way onto her face as she pants and swallows back sobs.

Maybe she saw Basil die but Mags doubts it.  In Anissa’s place, anybody with much chance of survival here would have seen Vash in his sorry state and seen a means to an end, an easy kill.  Mercy, like shooting a lame horse who is still dead regardless of how it got there.  She probably ran as soon as she decided Basil was going to die, maybe when Vash landed the first hit.  It’s cruel to leave an ally.  Mags understands it nonetheless.

Like Mercy, cruelty doesn’t mean a whole lot to the dead.  It’s for the living.  And right now Anissa is alive, guilty but breathing.

Chapter Text

Mags understands well enough that she is supposed to feel horrified watching Vash on his hands and knees, heaving breaths as his blood seeps through hastily wrapped bandages, and cradling Kinley nonetheless, cradling her head so tenderly in his lap her neck almost seems to be intact.  But Mags isn’t horrified.  It’s upsetting and it’s awful but it’s also nothing she hasn’t seen before.  He cards his hands through her hair and his skin is stained with streaks of all of their blood and this is a picture Mags has seen so many times before she’d think it pastiche if she were more callous.  She wonders sometimes how the Capitol could still be enjoying this when they must have seen every possible version of the story by now, gore and misery and evil, evil suffering of it all aside.

Vash eases Basil’s eyes closed too, looms over him with a grimace for a moment too long before his shoulders start shaking, like everything at once has come crashing down upon him as he cries and his tears cut clear paths through the drying blood on Basil’s face.  Vash won’t last much longer.  Not because he is crying now--if he can dry his eyes and get back up then crying is really just catharsis and in the arena you need to take every modicum of relief you can grasp.  Mags knows this first hand--the problem here is the blood, the wounds, the way his limbs shake and the chalky pallor of his face, the effort every move takes and this wince that accompanies it.  If Anissa is braver or more loyal than her hasty retreat implies, she’ll be back soon, bringing doom with her.  If not her then somebody or something else.

“I knew him, you know,” Angus says somberly, scrolling through the menu of possible purchases like he will find a miracle in there.  “I’ve been friends with his sister forever.  I watched him grow up.  She wanted me to promise I’d bring him home.”  He sounds guilty as he says it, is only 22 but looks like he is missing four years of sleep and there is something strange about how expression even at rest, like he has to hold it in place on purpose lest he start crying or else go blank entirely, like he hasn’t felt nearly that young in years now.

“Gus, you refused,” Porter tells and does not ask him.

“You weren’t there,” he says back glumly, big brown calf eyes downcast and watery.  It strikes Mags with the sort of clarity she occasionally can’t help but have that he shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be anywhere near here, should be out working and laughing and having fun and crying over things that aren’t the blood on his hands that hasn’t been there for a long time but also will never come off.  Nobody should be here.  Not even Mags.  She has to remind herself sometimes that when she considers these victors who are all more victim than anything else, and for all of whom she is deeply sympathetic, that she is included in that category, that she fits in amongst them and is not a somehow different and entirely worse thing, deserves that same pity even if it has been a lifetime since anybody really stopped to afford it to her.

“Gus.”

“Fine. You’re right.  I refused and I no doubt lost one of my best friends and got a kid I’ve known since he was in diapers killed.”  From the big screen Vash grunts and whimpers, wounds aggravated by being pressed against the unforgiving ground and body not strong enough to hold them away from it.  It is as if to remind Angus that he is still alive.  Surely not for long, but right now at this moment.  Mags doesn’t live much in the present, dwells on the past to keep dead things as alive as possible, to push back the inevitable until it is upon her again, and again, and again.  Angus slumps against his desk.  “They should tell you that winning isn’t worth it,” he says.

“Don’t say that,” Abigail warns him sincerely, perhaps just because she is the reason he is still here, who coached him to victory and right back to the Capitol, into the Control Room where he would be able to do nothing but keep playing the Games through fragile avatars with lifes that can only change for the worst from the moment he meets them.  Being a mentor, even just a victor, makes you an omen, a harbinger, a sign of death and the looming memory of an ever-growing list of dead children.  Mags is a mentor before she is a person, Marsh is a victor in a way that makes it hard for anyone to see him as anything else at all, Pace and Magnotta are what happens to victors who are trying to escape the reality of it.  Reminders of what comes next for someone like Abigail who, in spite of her protests, of the way she wants to seem upbeat and optimistic because she probably really was a while ago, is betraying the early signs of morphling abuse.  Her skin is sallow and the shadows on her face are heavy beneath her cheekbones and under her eyes.  Her hands shake and her brow sweats insistently even in a cold room and most people probably wouldn;t notice, but when you;ve lived a life like Mags’ you will have seen this before, over and over and over again.  Everything is the same as everything else-- except, her traitorous optimism pipes up, Perseus who is different and is wrong and has to make it.  There is a world between Abigail's healthy figure and Magnotta’s rickety frame but it is the sort of world that ends with a bang at the final claxon call.  This time next year she’ll have that same wasted look, the same uncomprehending morphling stare.  “Just don’t say it,” Abigail repeats, like somebody they all know thinks the same thing often but never says it aloud.

“I thought he’d last longer,” Marsh mutters, mostly to himself.  On his screen Penelope is looking wearily out at the world, back to the tent Percy is sleeping in, shoulders hunched and body tense.  She looks like a prey animal staring down a predator’s maw, like she is seeing saliva glinting on sharp teeth and she knows what comes next, that she should fear it but cannot avoid it.  Mags is trying not to look at her.

“Vash,” Mags asks to clarify, “or Basil?”

“Vash.”  He is rubbing his fingers repetitively over the largest of the chains hanging around his neck.  It is bronze and textured like scales, fastened where one end fits into the snake’s head at the other.  It’s a strange item, ornate in an almost unappealing way, a unique piece bought somewhere in One, constructed in a style that seemingly never caught on.  A lot of his jewellery is like that: gaudy and intricate statement pieces clustered together, collected from here there and everywhere, each worn with the intention to distract, to draw attention away from the scars and the blind side because Marsh knows he will always be watched wherever he is and wants desperately to shift the stares just a little.  “I had Basil exactly right.”

“How do you always have such a sense for the Games?” she asks, aware suddenly of the fact that it has never occurred to her to ask before.

He shrugs, body language tense in that way it usually is.  He looks like a prey animal like Penelope, the poisonous kind that can’t stop you from killing it but can take you down with it.  Only Marsh could stop everyone in that arena from killing him, even when he had nothing left but his empty hands and both eyes on the finish line, then only one, staring down the Capitol’s cameras and not crying or smiling as he was finally let out of his cage.  “Scores help.  But I’ve usually got enough to go on by the time the sc0res come out.  I know the mentors, that helps.  I want to do right by our tributes so I take it upon myself to know what works,”
“And how do you do that?”

“You, Mags.  I understood the Games as a kid as well as anyone who has never played them can, and then I met you and you know everything .  If not what to do with it.”  She doesn’t want to think about that right now, about her own role in all of this when she knows things could have changed shape so quickly had the morphling created more absence than nausea, had the booze brought about relief instead of drowsiness and headaches.  If somebody else had won or she had been worse at it then nothing would be the same but the alternative is nothing but a question mark, something unknowable she wants to know just as much as she doesn’t.

“Where would you have rated yourself in your Games?”

“I did rate myself in my Games.”

“Oh.”

“Careers are always a safe bet but there was something about Spruce--he was strong, he was driven, there was something about him that made you want to be on his side and he knew it, I’m sure you recall.  I figured he’d win and I’d come fifth and I figured my brother would be proud of me for trying as hard as I did.”

“He didn’t win.”

“And I didn’t come fifth.  It’s all just probability and sometimes unlikely things happen.  If that exact Games were to happen again I probably wouldn’t win it.”

“Does that bother you?”

“As much as anything else.”  He looks at Penelope again, as she sits stock still and stares with her spear gripped so tightly her knuckles tremble.  “My guesses haven’t been so good this year.  I’m trying not to read into it.”

“I’ll read into it for you,” Mags half laughs, struck with the urge to cry but practised in ignoring it.

“Don’t I know it.  What if he does win, Mags?  What does it really change?”

Mags swallows and feels like her throat is full of gravel.  They are being watched all the time and never is that more true than when they are in the Capitol, when they are sat in the control room doing exactly what the Capitol wants them to, essentially corralled into a pen where they can all be watched at once.  She shakes her head and hopes Marsh knows what it means.  “I like him.  You don’t want to be here.  I’d say more if I could find the words.”  The annual lack of sleep is catching up to her now, more than it ever used to.  She is getting old, is getting slow, is getting sentimental and losing her effectiveness but not her anger.

“He won’t want to be here either.”

“The problem with you,” Mags leans across her desk to touch his hand and doesn’t even think about the decade-old gauges across the back of it, deep then shallow, all left as the light started to leave Spruce’s eyes and he fought for as long as he could to pry Marsh’s hands from his throat but never succeeded, “is that you’re too reasonable.  You keep letting common sense get in the way of blind optimism.”

“I suppose you’ll just have to be optimistic enough for the both of us,” he says, as though he just says things like that.  Mags knows he doesn’t.  She stares probingly at him as he looks away, his mouth a tight line and his gaze focused but relatively easy.  He wants Percy to win too, like he has never wanted any of their tributes to win before.  Maybe it’s just self-interest but, seeing as he just told her to double-down on the optimism, she chooses to believe that it is something else. If his knowledge is just her knowledge repurposed then perhaps his hopes are also her hopes restated.  Maybe things are just starting to work out, fall apart then back into place.  She follows optimism’s upward spiral and doesn’t think about Vash who is dying, about Angus who is watching too helplessly, about Abigail who is aiming to comfort even as she shakes and sweats and blinks too much and everybody here knows what that means.

Anissa finds Vash where she left him about 24 hours after she ran away.  Seeder watches her with a grimace as she picks her way through fragile twigs and crisp leafs.  The grimace has been more or less fixed on Seeder’s face all day as she has watched Anissa wrestle and hesitate, watched her tug hard at her hair and fret and worry, watched her being loud and reckless, trying to shout the guilt out but never being able to get rid of it.  It’s a miracle nobody else has found her; perhaps they just assumed the screaming meant that somebody else already had.

She has made her decision now.  Dagger held decisively in her hand, feet moving towards instead of away, eyebrows low and cheeks visibly wet even though the sun is barely light enough to illuminate her face.  “She needs to do this,” Seeder says, presumably to herself.  She is stoic and composed and good at this, but she is also nervous, aware of what comes next and scared of it because she doesn’t know how Anissa will cope with it.

Basil and Kinley’s bodies were taken in the night by the drones so now there is just Vash, clinging to life and sloppily bandaged.  He’ll be dead soon even if Anissa chooses to turn away again but she doesn’t.  Doesn’t run.  Stands there with her feet shoulder’s width apart, dagger level with her hip and eyes wide, sad.  Still.  The blood has soaked into the ground, left the grass stained and the dirt darkened.  Even without the bodies it is clear people have died here, exsanguinated in the soil.

“Hi,” she says.  She probably shouldn’t.  The big screen telegraphs the way her voice pitches up and wobbles.  Vash tries his best to look at her, his eyes unfocused, movements slow and imprecise like he is moving through molasses.

“Kill me,” he responds. He’s quiet but all of Panem hears his plea.

“Oh my god.”

“Quick.  You owe me.” He looks like he’d like to say more but the words come slow and difficult and the breaths between are laboured

“You could kill yourself,” Anissa points out.  She’s amongst the older tributes but her voice is small, tentative.  She is still holding her knife but the determination has gone from her grip.  Slack and cautious.  She wants to leave again.  She stays.

“I won’t.”  It takes Vash long enough to say that it quickly becomes clear he won’t be able to elaborate.  Anissa just nods, flexes her knuckles and completely readjusts her grip.  There’s no fight here.  She drops to her knees and a shaking hand brings a sharp point to press against the soft skin on the underside of Vash’s jaw.  His bright blue eyes meet Anissa’s dark brown ones and he makes her look at him as she does exactly as asks.  She sobs as she applies pressure but she does it anyway, dispatches Vash as Basil dispatched Kinley.  She makes her first kill and gets blood on her hands and all over her sleeves then stands up and wipes her palms on her thighs, drapes the remnants of the ruined tarp over Vash so the Capitol can’t linger on her handiwork, and leaves.  She cries as she goes then wipes at the tears with her sleeves, smearing wet blood like war paint and taking a deep, stabilising breath to compose herself.

“That was bleak,” Seeder says, rubs her eyes and smears her mascara.  Chaff hasn’t stumbled back in yet.  He will have to at some point but for now District Eleven is just Anissa and Seeder and is perhaps better off for it.  Angus doesn’t say anything as he gets to his feet with a deep sigh, his screen finally dark.  He hasn’t been watching it.  The avoxes are probably going to get in trouble for not making him.  Or so Mags assumes.  She supposes she doesn’t really know much about them aside from how they get to be avoxes in the first place.

Like Anissa, Seeder steels herself, wipes the mascara off of the soft skin under her eyes and takes a deep breath.  The mask is back and the mask is effective.  It makes Seeder seem solid and unshakable, no matter how recently she proved that she isn’t quite.  Her gaze and hands are steady, the set of her jaw is firm and her shoulders are squared.  She looks prepared to fight and instead sits at a desk with perfect posture, watching her avatar with a sad sort of determination as Anissa keeps moving through the forest and passes by one of many streams without making an effort to wash the blood off.

The rest of that day and the entirety of the following one pass without event.  In the early days these pauses felt like breathers, brief moments of relief. These days they keep Mags on edge, waiting for the next bad thing to happen.  They feel foreboding.

“Hurry up and get this over with!” Haymitch jeers at the big screen as he inevitably does at least once in every Games.  It’s cruel, perhaps, but the sooner the Games are over the faster they can all leave, stop watching children die on the big screen until next year, go back to their big empty homes in their district’s Victor’s Village and their fully stocked liquor cabinets or poorly hidden morphling stashes.  He and Chaff are only here because they have to be, passing a flask back and forth and facing in the right direction as the main screen flicks between tributes running, talking, foraging.  Penelope isn’t joking anymore so Perseus isn’t laughing and Mags is watching the downward turn of his lips as he talks to her and she agrees and disagrees and barely elaborates and tears the tasteless greens she is supposed to be eating into tiny shreds that are carried away on the wind.

He’s still trying though, and that makes Mags hopeful because Marsh has told her to be and she knows by now that if she goes without hope she has nothing to live for.  Things cannot continue as they have been indefinitely and Mags is sure she cannot prove that has decided not to get bogged down in the details.  And Percy is in the arena with chlorophyll-stained fingertips and dirt beneath his fingernails and he is talking about Finnick and fishing at night and lighting fires just to dance around them, about the smell of the sea and the dark of the night and how there was a time when his mom told him about the stars and the shapes they could be combined into, the names they were given that Panem has forgotten but he has not.  He says the stars in the arena aren’t right, don’t make the right shapes, and the salt water running in the rivers doesn’t really smell like the sea--and Penelope will softly say “Yeah, it’s weird,” and Mags will pretend her voice still sounds like her own--and there’s something strange about the fish because they all swim in the same direction at the same pace and whenever he catches one he can’t help but feel like he is cutting a single head off a hydra.  He says the hydra was another of his mom’s stories, another of the shapes in the stars, “but I think the constellation is more of a snake really, and the actual hydra is more of a horrible--well I guess it’s still kind of a snake but it has more heads and it’s way worse.”

Mags listens to him ramble because Penelope isn’t filling much space and probably fails to understand most of what he is saying but still likes the strange way he says these strange things.  An orphan reminisces about his mother and Mags pretends the Capitol isn’t listening and cooing, and the boy who volunteered to save a friend talks about that friend like he is amongst the only things this poor doomed child has left and Mags doesn’t know if he is still playing it up for the Capitol but she knows she is buying it either way so everyone else must be too.  She tries not to think of what his life as a victor might be like, about all the ways the Capitol will pamper him and pester him and impose themselves upon him until the day he dies or they decide he’s no longer something shiny and precious and worth wanting (in Mags’ experience, death comes first, comes early, comes on purpose in some way or another).

He cuts off when the elusive crickets finally make an appearance and Mags is honestly surprised to see that they are not some horrible beast but rather just an animal in the distorted form the Capitol tends to reproduce them in.  They are too big, too brightly coloured, too loud and too discordant, but they just stand on long stalks of grass and stare, silent suddenly in a way that can be nothing but eerie.  They have appeared as a unit, more of them than Mags cares to count just standing, looking out.  Percy clambers to his feet, drags Penelope up by the elbow.

“They might be fine,” he says, “but they also might not and I think we better not risk it.”  He quickens his pace to a run and Penelope is forced to speed up her steps to keep up and something in her face loosens as she runs against a cold breeze that whips her hair behind her and makes her nose and cheeks pink as breath heaves out of her with the exertion.  She exhales a little breathless laugh as they stop by a stream where the trees they have been hiding in break and they can see the twisted metal shape of the cornucopia looming in the distance but not so close the careers camping there would be able to hear them speaking.

Percy grins at her laugh, grabs her hands and spins her until they tumble over each other and into the water and all of Panem gets to see them really selling the narrative from their interviews that they are like siblings, that any story the Capitol is able to get out of them will be tragic and horrible and awesome.  The splash means they probably shouldn’t stay here lest the careers decide to strike but for now they surface with smiles--and perhaps Penelope’s isn’t convincing but it’s there so for now it’ll just have to do--and Percy shakes the water out of his hair like a dog and floats on his back like he’s just relaxing at home, like he will not let the Games break him.  Mags likes that decision, likes what she is seeing right now as much as she can like anything that happens within the arena’s dome, but does not like the lingering knowledge that it can’t last, that it won’t, that Penelope will start thinking again soon and something else will try to kill them and, odds are, that eventually something will succeed.

It’s a short stint of peace.  Percy and Penelope move on and Penelope stops laughing but continues talking and the careers investigate the spot by the forest’s edge where they had been previously but are much too late to catch any sign of them, long since disappeared back into the cover the trees offer.  Anissa wanders, blood no longer on her hands but still stubbornly staining her sleeves, Coy and Kadia talk about the quiet, how they have been mostly undisturbed since the second day, and Coy fails to mention seeing Suzi in the trees.  Cord traverses as much of the arena as she can, planting her poisoned water bottles all over in the hope that someone will find and drink one eventually.  She takes the scraps of fabric that she is using to tell them apart from the drinkable bottles with her, stuffing them back into her pack and doing everything she can to make the suspicious bottles seem as inconspicuous as she can.

She is bent over one, working a knot loose with once-nimble fingers that now shake with hunger, cold, fear or any combination of the three, ne one knee to take the weight off her injured ankle, when Maizie from Nine, after days of wandering alone in anonymity, finally stumbles across another tribute.

She startles as she steps out from behind a tree and sees Cord vulnerable on the floor.  Mags doubts she even registers who it is--there is nothing that distinctive about her back, her shoulders which are neither especially broad nor especially narrow, and her mousy brown hair which is plaited and hanging over her shoulder.  It doesn’t really matter.  The heart is in the same place regardless of whose it is.

There is a moment in which Maizie hesitates but Cord cannot see her either way so it doesn’t matter and Porter is already grimacing at the big screen, clasping at her own face and not tearing her eyes away even though she knows she is not going to like what’s coming.  Maizie’s sword is nothing like Percy’s, nor the double-handed blade with the wicked edge Vicuna has attached herself to, but rather a blunt thing roughly the length of her arm, nicked and worn with its hilt wrapped in leather that looked chewed up on the edges and appears to be coming somewhat loose in her hand.  It’s still a sword, is still sharp enough to cut flesh if not to slice at the slightest brush-by.  Her hesitance doesn’t last long.

She runs and twigs snaps and she isn’t trying to disguise the thudding sound her boots make over the ground and Cord tries to jump to her feet but her bad ankle buckles and robs her of the chance to fight back as she struggles for balance and Maizie sinks her sword right into Cord’s back.  Through the skin, through the fat and the fascia and the muscle, skidding grossly against a rib, nestling somewhere inside the chest cavity.  It’s a cleaner death than a lot of them have been this year--no arterial spurt, weapon still inside the body, staunching the bleeding.  Mags tries to remember a time when she was normal, when she didn’t watch a child die and think unflinchingly of cleanliness.  Still she knows that when the Capitol starts to conduct their tours of this year’s arena this place in the forest between identical trees will not garner the same sort of sick fascination as the blood-soaked soil where Kinley, Basil and Vash all met their unfortunate ends.

Cord slumps and Maizie looks at her still body with wide eyes, her sword still nestled between ribs.  She considers it briefly before grasping it by the hilt and pulling it free with a sickening squelch she cringes away from as the blood gleams scarlet in the sunlight breaking the canopy.  Maizie stays there for a few minutes more, standing over Cord’s body as the sword in her hand drips viscous blood onto her boot, just staring.  She doesn’t look happy, doesn’t appear to be proud of her handiwork, but she does look intrigued, maybe somewhat confident.  She feels like she is playing the Games now, maybe feels like she has to win because she has already done what was all but unthinkable a month ago.  She nods to herself before she turns and leaves and Mags doesn’t like the gut feeling she has, telling her that Maizie is going to seek the next fight out, chase the next kill by tracking tributes like game animals.  There is nothing a tribute wants more than for the Games to be over.

Chapter Text

They are twelve days into the Games and there are ten tributes left.  Percy has been keeping count of the faces projected against the black velvet sky, keeping track of who is left and how far away the end seems.  It’s one of those things that he feels guilty for if he thinks about it too much: waiting for children to die to facilitate his own exit.  It’s selfish.  It would be stupid, suicidal, or reckless not to do it though.  The sort of scenario he can’t win.  Bodes well.

As if to celebrate them making it to the final ten--again, a sick thing when one dares to dwell--Mags and Marsh have sent them a slight improvement on the usual plain bread.  There is blackberry jam and real butter--not margarine, he’s sure the Capitol could never conceive of such a thing--and an apple each all wrapped up alongside it, then a second parcel carrying a large thermos of sugary tea.  It’s not much except for the fact that it is in a place like this.  As soon as the tart jam touches Percy’s tongue he bites back the urge to cry.  Penny takes the green apple, leaves him the red one, and sinks her teeth in with reverence before the desperation wins over and she demolishes the whole thing including the core, spitting out the seeds.

“How long do you think?” she asks him and he hopes she doesn’t register his surprise that she is asking questions again.

“What?”

“Until the Games are over?”

He shakes his head.  “I have no idea.  I’m really smartly not thinking about the future at all and dealing with the bad things only in the moments they’re actually happening.”

She looks at him too closely for a moment and he sips the tea and savours the sugar.  “I like that strategy,” she concedes.  “Do you think it’s strange the arena is still so intact?”

“Come again?”  Percy has only ever seen one Hunger Games before, doesn’t really have any baseline at all for what to expect, what is normal and what is strange and what he is supposed to be suspicious about.

“There are only ten of us left and it’s almost been two weeks and there have been some pretty quiet days.  Maybe they’ve already started on the other side of the arena but it feels like they should be pushing us all closer together.”

Percy nods along now, remembers last year when the air around the arena’s edges had started to look strange and shimmery, when the tributes who were caught up in it woke in the middle of the night with a start and began choking, spluttering, coughing and collapsing, and the tributes on the outside of it had to outrun it, pushed closer to the cornucopia and each other.  That was about halfway into the Games.

“Either our arena is just smaller than usual or we have an unpleasant surprise coming,” he says, keeping his tone light because he hopes feigning nonchalance might help him to actually feel it.

“Bets on the latter.” He’s conflicted because he hates the way she says it, like all the hope has been stripped from her, but he loves that she’s talking to him again, in full sentences and like she actually has something to say.  Like she still cares, even if she cannot hope.  “We aren’t that close to the edge, are we?”

He shakes his head.  “I don’t think so.  We were right by the Cornucopia yesterday, we couldn’t have gotten that far.”

“Thank you for that,” she says, smiling sadly, “I needed it.”

“I didn’t do much,” he shrugs, “you just need to live in the moment a little.”

She hums, fiddles with her filthy hair.  “And only deal with the bad things when they’re actually happening?”

“Exactly.”

“Easier said than done.”

“But when it works, it works.”

“You’re really weird.”  It doesn’t sound mean from her mouth, accompanied by something which would not sound like humour if they weren’t in a place like this.  “And I have to say, you don’t smell great either.”

“Hey!  I don’t exactly have any soap,” he looks up into the sky like Penny does when she’s asking Marsh for something, “which is not me asking you to send me some, please do not do that!”  He looks back at Penny, proud to have put a smile on her face again, no matter how watery.  “You know, you’re pretty ripe too.”

“I know!” she bemoans, trying to untie her braid and quickly thinking better of it when she realises quite how stiff and tangled the salt and the mud and the blood has made it. “I’m starting to think I took my last shower for granted.”

He shrugs, says “Well, now you really know to appreciate the next one,” and staunchly does not think about how slim the chances of there being a next one are.  Penny presses her lips into a line, looks at him with something incomprehensible behind the obvious sadness.  She looks down at her hands, at the ring she wears with the gold band and the inlaid mother of pearl--her district token--and slides it off her finger.

“It’s my mom’s engagement ring,” she tells him, “my dad said she wanted me to have it.  I don’t think this is what she was imagining.”

She passes it to him and he holds it carefully up to his face so he can see how the nacre catches and warps the light, scratches a flake of dried blood from the band and reads the delicate inscription on the inside.  Every penny for my Treasure.  “I’m sorry,” he says, doesn’t know what he is apologising for.  “It’s beautiful.”

“My auntie’s favourite story to tell me was always the one about their engagement.  My mom used to complain that my dad would make all these promises about forever but he took so long to propose that she was scared he wasn’t going to.  Naturally my auntie bore witness to all of this and she knew what was happening but couldn’t say anything.  My dad saved up for almost two years to get the ring custom made because he was so scared of getting it wrong.  She proposed first in the end, and he gave her the ring the next day and told he she should have just been patient for a few more hours.”

“It’s a good story.”

“I like it a lot.  I never got to meet my mom but my auntie’s stories made me feel like I knew her, you know?”  Percy saw Penny’s aunt on the day of the reaping, weeping with her father, knows that she is still around to share stories.  Penny is speaking about herself in the past tense and Percy wants to yell at her.  He keeps his mouth shut and passes the ring back over.

She shakes her head, pushes his hand back to his chest.  “I’m giving it to you.  She left it to me and I’m leaving it to my brother.”

“You’re no deader than I am.”

She makes a face at him, as though he is missing something obvious.  “I want you to have it,” she reiterates.  “I’m not having some light-fingered gamemaker take it off my body.”

“You should take it back,” he tries again, but when it becomes clear that she will do no such thing he sighs and unties the leather strap of his necklace and strings the ring on so it sits alongside the beads against his sternum.  Just like that, just like Camp and his friends there, like Grover, like Annabeth, Penny becomes an inextricable part of him he knows he is doomed to lose any day now.

The fear is a constant thing but a background one, a low buzz in the back of his brain he pushes back because if he doesn’t it will stifle him.  He’ll think about it when it is relevant and only then.  It’s a good little tactic he has devised, not one that can work all the time but one that might be saving his life when it does.  He’s scared when he bundles the remainders of their breakfast into Penny’s bag for her, and he’s scared when he disassembles the tent, and he’s scared when he passes Penny the last of the tea.

He’s scared when a twig snaps behind them but the fear is overshadowed by more important things.

“Get back!” he tells Penny, pushing her behind him as he turns on his heel, lifts his sword and steadies his stance.

In front of him Maizie flinches.  She is one of the older tributes but she was slim, willowy, before they ever entered the arena and now she is hungry too, face sunken and hands shaky.  Her eyes are red-rimmed and glassy and the line of her mouth is grim, determined.  She holds her sword as he holds his but the blade is in bad shape, not one of the best the cornucopia had to offer, and is stained with the blood of another tribute she hasn’t bothered to clean off.  She paints a dangerous picture, standing a couple of meters in front of him, almost six feet tall and determined because she is already a killer now so she may as well keep going.  She isn’t waiting like he is, for the numbers to trickle down.  She wants to end this.  Percy can’t let her do that.

Penny tries to say something back to him but he is already moving, not giving Maizie any upper hand she doesn’t already have.  The odds are exceedingly slim that she knows how capable he is with a sword and he finds himself hoping yet again to be underestimated.  Penny, thank the gods, hangs back, ready to remind Maizie she is outnumbered if it comes to that, but not eager for a repeat of Cotton’s final day.

He aims his first strike at Maizie’s midsection, no time to hold back and draw this out.  She yelps as she stumbles backwards, panic making her movements loose and uncoordinated as she flings her sword down like an axe.  He sidesteps it, presses forwards, keeps her moving back.  The trees behind her are thick, each trunk twice as wide as her narrow shoulders.  If they keep going this way he will have her more or less cornered.

The only problem with this strategy is that he fails to consider how, once cornered, Maizie will become desperate, scrabbling and clawing and fighting with the reckless abandon of someone who has run out of things to lose.  She swings wildly and unpredictably and he can’t keep track of where her blade is flying because she doesn’t have a plan, just a will to live that’s stronger than the urge to give in.  He blocks what he can, ducks low and aims strikes upwards because she isn’t giving any consideration to protecting her weak points, shouts as her blade slices diagonally through his left eyebrow and nicks the side of his nose but keeps forging forward nonetheless.  The blood pools and spills and he tries to no avail to blink it out of his eye before he just accepts the temporary deficit to his vision.  This fight is already one-sided; so long as he doesn’t get cocky about it he should get out of this just fine.

She flings her body to the side as he goes for the jugular, and the impeccably sharp point of his sword slices through her ear instead of her neck, lops off her earlobe--along with it one of the small silver earrings serving as her token--and cuts deeply into her cheek and jaw, opening a hole in her face he can see her gritting her teeth through.  The nausea clenches in his stomach as his own blood runs into his mouth and abject terror replaces the dregs of determination on Maizie's face.

She swings her sword again, angry and scared and hurting and perhaps knowing she is about to lose in the same capacity Percy knows he is about to win.  It’s no fun from his side either but he pities her even as she lashes out from her place on the ground, stabs at his stomach and swings at his arms, a flurry of limbs and scarlet-stained metal.

Penny unleashes something like a cry from deep in her throat, drawing Maizie’s attention as she leaps forwards towards the fray.  Percy doesn’t wait for her to get there.  The distraction is all he needs to land a definitive blow, create a mortal wound, and not have to look her in the eyes as she does it even if he can’t escape her blood-garbled pleas.  He strikes straight down, uses his body weight to force the sword down through her throat and into her chest cavity.  It quiets the begging pretty effectively.  Now only her lips are moving, her eyes wide and tears streaming.  He can see her tongue writhing through the hole in her cheek as she searches for words then, abruptly, stops searching altogether.

He steps back, horrified at what his hands have done, and Penny skids to a stop, blue eyes wide and terrified, white-knuckled grip on her spear not relaxing.  His sword stays stuck in Maizie’s body as he falls to his knees and finally tries to wipe the blood away from his eye with his sleeve.  He doesn’t know when he started shaking but he knows that now he can’t stop, that suddenly the cut on his head hurts like it is burning after being nothing more than an inconvenience when his life was on the line.

And still, he doesn’t regret living.  Doesn’t even regret volunteering for Finnick's sake.

He wishes he had the wherewithal to have mercy, to apologise to Maizie, to let her see him cry, not to have skewered her when opportunity and panic clashed.  He wishes he hadn’t had to kill her in the first place.  But he is alive and the moment is over and her ghost can join Jade’s and never let him sleep for the rest of his life but he needs to keep moving forwards, leave her here where the drones will collect her.  Nothing he can do will help now, probably wouldn’t have helped to begin with; she is dead and sorries and self-loathing can’t help her or anyone else.  What he has done here is irrevocable and he needs to leave it at that, remind himself that it isn’t his fault that she decided to ambush him and Penny even though she was outnumbered, that his options were limited to fighting back or showing her his belly.

He stands up, swipes at the blood and tears streaming down his cheeks, and turns his face upwards just as the vaults in the prosthetic sky open above and the rain begins to pour.

Mags watches Sylva slump in front of her screen as it goes black but Maizie’s body remains on the big screen, larger than life and gruesome.  Mags can’t help but think about all the people who knew Maizie back in Nine, who are seeing her now for the very last time but in this mangled way; she wonders if they are still watching, unable to look away and desperate to keep her, even though she was gone as soon as her name was drawn, or if they have all averted their eyes, refusing to let the sight of her body pervert all their memories of her.

Percy, on his feet and rebuilding his resolve as the rain irrigates his wound and watered-down blood streaks his skin, settles his hands on the hilt of his sword.  He offers her an apology as he pulls and the sword slides free and the Capitol’s cameras are sure to capture the way her dead flesh must yield to allow it passage, the way the blood it was holding in starts to seep, the way Maizie’s body slumps without it.

“You-” Penelope says falteringly and Mags is hit with a wave of fear as she imagines the rejection that follows, all the ways she could call Percy a monster for surviving and not falling into irreconcilable pieces in the aftermath.  She finds herself reaching for Marsh, clutching at his sleeve as he scowls at the big screen.  “I don’t-” Penelope sighs, much more upset than angry, and Mags tries to force a bit of the fear to dissipate.  “I can’t do that,” she settles on, “but you can.”  Mags lets go of Marsh’s sleeve, lets her eyes leave her screen when Penelope ties a scrap of fabric around Percy’s head so the blood can’t keep running into his eye.

There’s this strange impulse that one gets from time to time as a mentor, to celebrate that your tribute is the one doing the killing, that your tribute is able to handle themselves in the arena, that the numbers are dwindling and the end is drawing closer.  Logically it’s an impulse she hates.  There is no positive spin to play on Maizie’s skewered corpse, on Issie’s severed brainstem, on Cotton’s punctured lung, on Basil’s eviscerated abdomen.  The urge to celebrate anything that happens in these Games that isn’t them imploding, ending forever, is one that belongs to the Capitol, one she shouldn’t feel.  And yet.  Her tribute is doing well and she needs to bring him home and there is only one means to that end she can conceive of at this moment.

“Only nine left,” she says, looks around at the almost full room of mentors who are collecting snacks from the back table and talking in low voices and trying to look at the remaining screens as little as they think they can get away with when they are so closely monitored.

“I got the top ten wrong.”  Marsh doesn’t sound upset about it.

“Well here’s hoping that isn’t the only thing you’re wrong about this year.”

Marsh looks at her, his good eye narrowed.  “I’d like for you to be right,” he tells her earnestly, “but what if you aren’t?”

“The same thing as usual, I suppose.” She tries to shrug but it feels unnatural even to her.  “You had Penelope in eighth.  That would mean there's only one more before her.”

“Well maybe I’m wrong about that too.  She’s getting ready for it though.”

“She has been for a while,” Mags admits with a sigh, “but I still can’t get behind giving up on her like that.”

Marsh grimaces right back at her, then lets his attention drift back to his screen as the primary feed finally leaves Percy and Penelope, to refocus on the careers who are hunting in sight of the cornucopia, the strategy of lying in wait not one that is working for them this time.  Theirs is the largest alliance in the Games this year at only three strong, and it is clear they are trying to keep some distance from each other.  They don’t talk how Percy and Penelope do, how Coy and Kadia do, how Cord and Serinus did.

Their heads will be full of strategies that are supposed to make the Games easier to live with, that are supposed to get them to the end, that are supposed to make them think of the other tributes as less deserving, of murder as mercy, and, when the time comes, make them consider their allies that way too.  Only, they are people before they are careers, teenagers before the training kicks in.  Caelus and Vicuna will have known each other for years by this point.  They don’t talk about home, about their plans for the future--because they are Careers and they are not allowed to have those, are not allowed to dream beyond the arena and the control room that succeeds it, about a life better than Mags’--or their families.  But Mags is sure they still know: about Vicuna’s mother who tried to look proud on the recording telegraphed to all of Panem but whose smile faltered; about Caelus’ younger brother who is too young for the Reaping and too young to keep up the act, who cried and begged his brother not to go; about all the things they are leaving behind and all the ways they will be missed.  Because she knows what she is looking for, she sees the ways they look at each other, the ease of their movements and how they work as a unit, the way they create a space for Hearth to fit in.  The ways they are friends before they are allies, teenagers before killing machines.

She wonders if they know that there is no guarantee their strategies will work, in the arena or after it.  That there is a reason Brutus has been mentoring for Two for almost twenty years now; that the Enobaria of three years ago surely wouldn’t recognise herself now; that victors don’t go the way of Pace and Magnotta, Chaff and Haymitch, because they are failing to recognise the glory of the Games.  That they are just as likely to find solace in substances that dim the mind as anybody else.  She imagines they can’t know, that they have to be fed lies to end up here, that it doesn’t matter that they will know better if they win because victors are a small and easily silenced group.  They mustn’t know what the Capitol will want from them next, must be being lied to, chewing on enough propaganda and all the untruths that come with it that honesty is unbelievable.  She pities them.  Not more than she pities any other tribute, any other victor, mentor, or loser, but somehow differently.

“I don’t know who I’d be,” she says, meaning for there to be more to the statement but not finding the rest of it.

“Me neither,” Marsh agrees, understanding anyway.  Of course.  “I’m a terrible fisherman.”  Because he hates killing, she reminds herself, tries to reconcile the thought with a tribute who killed with his bare hands and coped regardless.

“And a worse cook.”

“You’d make a good oddsmaker,” Haymitch interjects, loudly planting his chair somewhere behind Marsh’s, choosing to watch his screen instead of the main one.

“A noble profession,” Marsh responds sarcastically, self-deprecatingly.  Haymitch doesn’t say anything else, just leans forwards in his uncoordinated way to watch Penny kneel to the ground to pick up Maizie’s earlobe with a grimace, giving her token back to her.  Of course the Capitol doesn’t need all of Panem to see that, to see all the ways even the most doomed of tributes might remain unbroken, the unity between the districts, the seeds of uprising that exist wherever one may seek them.

Now that Sylva’s job here is done she can leave for the time being, but Hull, the other mentor from Nine, has had no tribute since the bloodbath and has returned to the control room every day since anyway, to allow her to sleep and to satisfy the watchful eyes of the Capitol.  She’ll have to come back soon too, to her blank screen with its white numbers, to the big screen that never misses a kill, to the stress and the sleep deprivation that is steadily growing in every mentor who still has a tribute left.  She places her hands on Hull’s shoulders on her way out, squeezes them and lingers for a moment with a soft and genuine affection.  They know each other as she knows Marsh, as Abigail knows Angus, as Seeder knows Chaff: regrettably, completely.  “Rest,” he tells her, his own voice rough and tired.  He’s a large man but a quiet one, a gentle one in spite of the fact that he is here, “properly.”  Sylva nods, presses her lips to the crown of his head as though he is her son, and leaves.

Just like Mags and the vast majority of other victors both within this room and outside of it, she doesn’t have children of her own, wouldn’t risk it.  There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but victors have a tendency to become rather solitary, to shut themselves away from the people they used to know, who they can’t remember how to relate to.  Besides, they know what the Capitol does to the districts’ children, know that safety and respect aren’t included in their earnings, that nothing is fair and the Capitol loves a good spectacle.

On her screen, Percy and Penelope are standing in the rain, letting it wash the blood and the dirt and the sweat and the salt away, their suits stripped down to their waists.  Percy has ditched his hair tie and is helping Penelope unwind her long braid, combing his fingers through the hair to work some of the dirt out.

It’s sweet in a way that makes Mags incredibly sad, incredibly aware that for all she has wanted Percy to win this whole time, that must have meant she has wanted Penelope to lose, though she’d never say it so directly.  She understands why the careers wouldn’t want to do this, wouldn’t want to forge a relationship that even borders on familial when they know it will be torn away from them.  She also understands that the Capitol loves this, continues to watch the bets and donations for Percy and Penelope tick upwards as they persist and inevitable tragedy takes shape around them.  It’s like fiction to them, like the books most in the districts can’t afford.  To them, the districts’ children really may as well be fictional characters for all their worth can be reduced down to entertainment value.  Their suffering doesn’t matter beyond how invested it can make Capitol audiences in the slaughter, and the people who will mourn them do not matter at all.  Victors are just spectacles to gawk at, their own class of celebrities that, celebrated as they may be, will forever be subject to the whims of the Capitol that owns them, that controls them, that feeds, houses, and exploits them.  She tries to stop thinking about what Percy will have to live with if he wins, tries to refocus on how much she wants to be able to hug him again, to watch him reunite with Finnick, to bring a child home again so her people can be the ones that get to balance their despair with relief.  The Games are a time to be selfish or else immobilised entirely.  This is a lesson she is reminded of every year.

Percy starts humming to himself as he pulls a particularly stubborn knot apart and Mags must admit she quite likes knowing that the Capitol will not be sharing this moment, will let it stay between the people in the arena and the control room.  His hands are so careful that Penelope doesn’t even flinch as he tugs at her hair with his fingers.

“ It’s raining men, ” he starts to sing, quietly and not especially well but he is singing in the arena and Mags must be one of the only people left who really knows the gravity of that,

“ What?” Penelope guffaws, pitching forwards so suddenly as she laughs that she pulls her own hair.

Percy starts laughing too, stops singing to explain.  “I don’t know,” he admits, “it’s an old song my mom used to like.  She’d sing it if we got caught in the rain.”

“Oh.” Penelope looks down at her feet, the imprints her boots are leaving in the mud.  “Could you teach it to me?”

“It’s a silly song,” he says, “and I think I only remember the chorus.”

“Perfect.”  Penelope shrugs.  “I could stand a silly song or two in my life.  My dad is a little bit too partial to sad songs.”

So, together, they stand beneath torrential rainfall and they sing.  For just a few minutes, they decide not to care that someone might hear them, that someone who wants these Games to end might follow the sound of the voices they have raised and find them unprepared to retaliate.  They decide to leave Maizie behind them, under a tree where a drone will collect her body and in the past because she has no future.  They decide to act like they aren’t in the arena, like they are back in the home it is mimicking, like the end isn’t looming and they won’t be torn apart.  They decide to pretend that they are safe, that they are happy, that they will continue to be indefinitely.

And Mags decides to enjoy it along with them, just for the sparse little moment it lasts.  Half the words they sing are lost to laughter and she has never heard this strange song either.  If this really were the moment they are pretending it is she wouldn’t even be there to watch, but still she smiles along, huffs out a laugh of her own, and tries to learn the somewhat nonsensical words as Penelope picks them up.

Ten minutes later the rain starts to stop and the sun crests high in the sky again and they leave that happy little clearing, push further forwards into the woods then through it, to the beach at the northwest of the arena, where wet dirt gives way to wet sand and deep blue water stretches out in front of them as far as the eye or the cameras can see.

Penelope starts to set up their tent on the edge of the wooded area and Percy takes her spear to the edge of the great stretch of water to catch them some fish, leaving his sword with her just in case, so both of them are armed should they be ambushed again.  The cameras follow Percy as he plods barefoot across the sand.  There is seaweed on this beach but if this water is supposed to be posing as a sea it is doing a rather unconvincing job because it is completely still.

He bundles some of the seaweed over his shoulder, reasonably assuming it might be edible, and continues forwards to the too-straight line where the sand meets the water where suddenly he stops and Mags is filled with the strange sort of dread she often is.  Beneath him fish swarm, wriggling silver bodies moving quickly as though panicked, pressed too closely against each other as though there isn’t enough room to accommodate them all despite how expansively just this body of water in an arena that is full of it stretches.

“Well,” Percy says, takes a faltering step back, “that’s not good.”

Chapter Text

The fish in Panem have always been strange to Percy.  They still speak, but never to him.  They don’t know who he is, don’t revere him as a sort of young lord, don’t know who his father is, who their god is, that there are any gods they should kowtow to at all.  Panem is without gods, without anyone higher than President Snow, without anything that sits above the Capitol.  Percy has been well-aware of that for a while but the simplicity of the fish that do not know they are even supposed to recognise him strikes him often.  Perhaps because he’s around them all the time, because his altercation with Kronos landed him in Four.  Either way, he tries not to think about how adjusted he had become to killing things that plead for their life before he ever even entered the arena, tries to focus instead on the way these fish swarming at the water’s edge do not speak at all but rather drone.  Long and low and warbling.  Like chanting over radio static.  Like the music of a hellish choir.  They all have these non-voices of their own, he’s sure of it, but the sound they make is one of mindless togetherness as they swim and swim and finally the still stretch of water begins to ripple with their efforts.

“We aren’t staying here!” he declares, runs back over to Penny as fast as his bare feet on the loose, wet sand will allow him.  He regrets taking his shoes off now, in the sort of background way he has learned to regret the things that aren’t actively killing him.

“What-?” Penny stops mid-stomp, her foot hovering in the air above a tent peg that needs to be driven further into the ground.  Only it doesn’t because they are leaving.  Right now.

“You know what you were saying about the arena getting smaller?  Well I think we might be near the edge and I have no interest in finding out what happens next.  The fish are being weird and I am not being killed by a vengeful fish, Penny.”

“Okay,” she says, holds her hands up in a sort of surrender and brings her foot down slowly to the side of the tent peg.  “What do you mean they’re being weird?” Even as she asks it, she is kneeling in the mud, undoing all of her work.  The sun is starting to set but they have bigger problems than sleep right now.

“There are way too many of them and they’re swarming and we have to go.”  He kneels to pull his socks on, decides that the horrible feeling of the sand trapped between flesh and fabric is one he can deal with later.  He laces up his boots as Penny disassembles the tent and they are ready to leave long before they figure out what the deal with the fish is.  Percy doesn’t know much about the Hunger Games but he knows enough to deduce that it can’t be anything good.

They don’t waste time, fall into a steady jog almost immediately, sidestep the trees in their way and move efficiently to anywhere but here.  Ideally they’d run right out of the arena but that doesn’t exactly seem to be on the cards currently.  He’s not sure where exactly they’re running to which feels like it might not be the smartest choice.  He’s well aware that there are other tributes camped out in these woods--or at least there were--and they could stumble across one at any moment, out of breath and unprepared.  And if they get too far they will reach the Cornucopia, where the careers lurk, assuming they haven’t left to be more active hunters, to try to force these slow-moving Games to end sooner than it seems they’re going to.  He’d like to think he’d stand a chance, needs to think that if he wants to believe he might win, but he doesn’t want to test that theory right now, ideally never, and he’s falling into the trap of thinking about the bad things prematurely.

Penny’s jog slows to a walk then stops completely as she braces her hands on her knees and breathes deeply and Percy fishes a water bottle and the desalination straw from his pack.  He gulps about half of the bottle down then hands it to Penny and looks around.  It has become dark rather suddenly, the last of the fake sunlight weak and dim, the thick cover of green leaves overhead blocking almost all of it out.  He can see Penny clearly where she stands, maybe a foot away from him, but if anyone is intending to sneak up on them now would be the time to do it; he’s having trouble separating one tree from the next, let alone making sense of the dark spaces between them.  It keeps him on edge as he tries to orient himself with absolutely nothing to go on.  He doesn’t know how far they’ve run, what direction they went, even how big the arena is.  It seems ridiculous to him even in the moment but he can’t shake the disquieting feeling that they’re lost.  He tries to remind himself that doesn’t matter here, doesn’t even mean anything. But he still doesn’t like it.

“We can set up camp here,” he says, “Or we can keep moving.”

Penny shakes her head, drains the last of the bottle and looks at him from across the darkness.  She means to speak but the music and the claxons start then stop soon after.  Only one death today.  Percy can’t see Maizie’s face as it is projected against the sky and, he must admit, he’s glad for it as only the odd abstracted section of her visage breaks through the canopy’s cover.  Penny clears her throat and tries again.  “Let’s stay here.  It’s not like we have anywhere to go.”

“Home?” He suggests, knowing full well that his home is years away, lost in a past he has no way back to, and she makes another of her incomprehensible faces at him.  She doesn’t say anything else, just looks at him for too long and too closely when the light to see him by at all is rapidly fading, then turns to set up the tent.

“I’m taking the first watch,” she says after a while, and he just nods.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to eat.”

“And I’m happy we got away from that edge.”

Nobody tries to strike in the night and they continue forwards as usual the next morning, all the while resenting that there is a usual at all.  The dark shadows, the warped shapes that twisted boughs cast, are menacing in their imprecision, their ability to disguise what is really there.  It’s strange, almost, to have to revert back to expecting doom to loom around every corner, to knowing there are monsters watching his every move.  It’s strange that he thought that maybe he was alone in Panem but he was reasonably safe there--he should have known that these things don’t just happen to other people, that he could never just stand back and let them.

And now this arena that was modelled on his replacement home, the one that had seemed safe when he’d been naive about it, feels like a special hell.  He has an advantage here, one he knows better than to deny when his life is on the line, and still it feels like torment.  Sure, nothing is quite right but it’s all close enough to get the point across.  Even if he wins he’ll go back to the closest thing to a home he has left and he will see the arena wherever he looks.  Fires on the beach, the smell of salt water, walks in the woods, the act of fishing, Penny’s freckles on Finnick’s face.  These are thoughts for later, of course, but the woodland is quiet aside from the chirp of incessant cricket-things and the rushing of water that grows ever closer as they move, and his mind has always wandered, unbidden by whether or not he wants it to.  He’s ready for anything, built for battle, and so unsuited for silence he feels like it might just be the thing that kills him.

They follow the sound of the water with more than a little apprehension, unsure if it will be choked by shimmering bodies, swimming towards nothing, just like the water at the arena’s edge, but very much conscious of the fact that their bottles are bordering on empty and need to be refilled.   It’s not good news.

Penny crouches by the edge of the water, careful not to touch it, and looks at the orange-silver of not-quite-sunlight on scales.  “I see what you meant by weird,” she remarks.  Her hair is still loose, hanging in front of her face so he can’t see her expression.

“Do you think we can still get water?”  He doesn’t like the question even as he asks it.  His monster senses are odd to have in Panem where there are no monsters, just Peacekeepers with their faces hidden behind masks, anonymised in their cruelty, Capitol citizens with their faces twisted and pulled and shaped and warped into something that has long since ceased to seem human.  And now there are these fish, with their senseless moans and their frenzied, fruitless movements, and his skin feels like it is prickling, like all the hairs he has left after Trinity got to him are standing on end.  More than anything else here, these almost innocuous creatures feel like monsters.

“I’m not putting my hands anywhere near there.”

He shakes his head.  “Me neither.  Do we have any bread left?”

“A little.  Are you hungry?”

“Always,” he concedes, and never more so than in this elaborate cage that is steadily perverting the few comforts he has left, “but that’s not why I’m asking.”  Penny stands up, steps back from the edge of the stream and rummages in her bag for the little wrapped-up package of yesterday’s leftovers.  They finished all the tea and the jam and the butter almost as soon as that little indulgence was put in front of them but there’s still a hunk of bread left, not enough to be satisfying but better than nothing.  She passes it over and he tears off a chunk and throws it into the water where the fish swarm.

The second it touches the surface, their movement becomes much less mindless.  They make it clear that they are vicious, that anything that touches the water will be torn to shreds with sharp teeth hidden inside of these seemingly harmless creatures.  Penny gulps and takes another large step away from the water for good measure.

“I’m not touching that,” she reiterates.

“So our bottles are staying empty,” Percy agrees, not eager to see what the combination of those razor-sharp teeth and that rabid frenzy could do to his hands.  He pauses for a second, tries not to let any additional despair crawl its way down his throat, tries to think of anything else.  “Can I use your spear?”

She hands it over with a shrug and he promptly skewers one of the fish; there are enough of them in the water it would be much more of a feat were he to miss.  They circle the metal spearhead as soon as it breaks the water’s surface, and begin to rip and tear at the flesh of the skewered fish as soon as it is rendered immobile, as though they suddenly cease to recognise it as one of their own once it is unable to participate in their eerily synchronised movement.  He doesn’t waste time before he pulls it out of the water, and still half of it has already been savagely eaten away.  He makes a face at Penny, just a little surprised that it still has a form at all and didn’t dissolve into golden dust immediately.  “So we can’t eat them either,” she concludes.  He waits for just a moment to respond, watches as the space the dead fish left in their ranks is filled with haste and the swarming mass of writhing flesh just beneath the river’s surface seems to have become somehow more dense.

“Would you want to?”

She makes a face.  “I’ve been doing a lot of things I don’t want to do recently.”  He supposes a statement like that leaves no space at all to argue.

Mags is trying very hard to balance relief, anxiety, and the annual dose of anguish.  Her kids are doing about as well as she can expect them to, which is always a much better sign than the alternative.  A victor has to be able to hold up at least adequately whilst still within the confines of the arena.  They can fall apart at whim the moment they’re out, but at least until then they have to be able to keep moving forwards, prioritising survival over guilt.  Penelope is managing better than she was before but Mags knows she wouldn’t be if it weren’t for Percy, that if he dies she will cease to be a contender.  She feels like Marsh when she thinks it, struggles to reconcile the sick feeling in her stomach with her fondness for him.

The arena itself is becoming dangerous.  It’s an inevitability, of course, but they've gone easy on the mutts and traps this year.  She can only assume that is because the Capitol wants to see the districts’ children kill each other more than it wants to see them die in the most creative ways the gamemakers can concoct.  But it’s a fairly large arena and at least some of these tributes are somewhat kinder than the scenario attempts to demand of them, so these Games have been consequently slow and the audiences who actually enjoy the spectacle will be growing tired of the way it’s dragging on.  She’s sure the ravenous fish are just the start of it, knows as well as anyone who is not permitted amongst their ranks can, how the gamemakers operate.

Glances around, at her own screen, then the big screen, at Brutus’ and Pace’s, seem to demonstrate that the fish haven’t gotten very far yet.  They seem to be moving across the arena, working their way from the outside in.  From the comprehensive aerial view of the arena available to her it doesn’t appear that all the water is connected, but she understands that there is always a lot going on that she can't see, the arena’s inner workings hidden beneath the ground, around the more inaccessible edges.  There’s probably something beyond the ersatz sea, that the tributes and the cameras won’t be able to pick up.

But the fish have a mission programmed into them and, with their quick pace, it won’t take too much longer for them to reach the centre of the circular arena, for all the water to be rendered dangerous, untraversable, undrinkable even to those who got lucky at the Cornucopia, for the primary source of food available within the arena to be gone.  They are almost two weeks in and donations are getting more expensive than they have been in a while, even with the impressive funding she has at her disposal this year.  She tries not to think about it, tries to hope that it will all be over soon without hoping that the remaining tributes will all die.  It’s impossible when you’re being realistic about the Games so she tries her hardest not to be.

The control room is getting somewhat hectic, what with all the mentors who are now free to come and go so long as they fulfill their requirements, no longer holding a child’s life in their unsteady hands.  People are moving, walking around, making the same sort of uneasy conversation as always.  It feels wrong to talk about anything other than the Games as they are still ongoing, as old friends and acquaintances remain glued to their stations, holding onto a life that is steadily slipping through their fingers.  But mentors are just very specifically damaged people and most people in the districts hate discussing the Games already, without their close connections.  So, quietly and with no small amount of shame for breaking the contract nobody has made and yet they almost all attempt to abide by, they’ll talk about other things too.  About the weather, about the food, about the new wine they’ve been getting into and the things they’ve purchased recently.  About the way people they knew in the before times look at them from a distance like they are a ghost, how it has never felt right that all of Panem knows their name when they cannot respond in kind, about the Capitol dinner parties they dread and the awful reprieve from them the Games provide, about being a piece of meat, about whose teeth have sunk into their flesh recently.

Percy and Penelope are idling away time, weighing up the pros and cons of jumping across the river--it’s surely a jump they could both make but the banks are slippery and knowing the cost of failure on such a simple task has Penelope convinced it is a doomed pursuit--so Mags lets her attention drift just a little, never straying so far that she won’t be able to pull it right back at the first sign of distress.  She notices how intently Enobaria is listening to what Brutus has to say to her, like she is learning the imprecise art of being a mentor, like she wants to come back and keep doing this awful job; no doubt she is one of the victors to whom this time of year feels a little like amnesty in spite of all its horror.  She notices how Wiress sits with her feet tucked up on her chair, with her vision focused a solid foot to the left of the big screen even though nothing especially horrible is happening on it.  She watches Porter tear apart a pastry with her fingertips rather than eating it, watches Pace unabashedly down a vial of morphling, clearly under no delusion that a single person in that room doesn’t know how it is he makes it through his days, watches Abigail, hands hovering halfway beneath her desk, surreptitiously dump a vial into her lemonade and stash the evidence up her sleeve until she can get rid of it.  The chatter is hard to parse, all of it quiet, hushed voices overlapping each other.  Mentors wander and avoxes rush around, trying to complete tasks for people who feel guilty asking anything of them.

The arena, though, is quiet.  Another day passes without significant incident and the aching pit of foreboding in Mags’ stomach widens and widens until it is threatening to consume her.  She needs these Games to end, would see them go on forever if it could mean no more of the remaining tributes have to die, knows that is impossible so hopes, instead, that the deaths are easy, that they are clean, that they hurt as little as possible and they underwhelm the Capitol.

The careers wake up early to hunt the next day, all three of them up and ready as the sun paints the sky in a beautiful tableau of all the wrong colours.  Penny is taking Four’s second watch and Percy is asleep in their tent where the cameras can’t actually see him so Mags is watching the big screen and trying not to notice how even the careers are starting to look like their muscles are wasting away.  She wonders if they regret it yet, if so when they started to, if not when they will.  Caelus is the only one of them who has done any killing, and even he hasn’t dirtied his hands since the bloodbath.  Nothing like Gloss and Cashmere, then.  Maybe that doesn’t bode well for them, or maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything specific.  She tries to remind herself sometimes, that careers are not oh-so fundamentally different from other tributes, that the strategy of waiting out the days until they can no longer afford to could work just as well for them as it could anyone else.  She just doesn’t want it to.  It feels cruel to think, certainly too cruel to say outright, but it’s more the Capitol’s cruelty than hers, their blame to shoulder when she isn’t sure how much more of it she could bear to carry.  She isn’t sure who she is trying to convince, just knows that if it is herself she could stand to be doing a better job.

They have all swam between the island where the Cornucopia sits and the point where the arena really begins before but that doesn’t make it seem any more dignified as they paddle through deep water with heavy weapons on their backs, fighting to stay afloat.  It humanises them, even to Mags who was already well-aware that they were teenagers, all just like Penelope but considerably more brainwashed.  Vicuna laughs just a little bit as she tries to swim forward and the way her giant sword is slung across her back unbalances her enough that she rolls in the water and its cruciform hilt is the only part of her or her weapon that breaks the surface.  She no doubt swallows water as she giggles but that only makes her laugh harder through spluttering coughs as she comes back up for air and Mags gives Cashmere the good grace of pretending not to notice her teary eyes a few seats away.  The way Caelus, evidently a stronger swimmer, looks at her from the shore is almost unbearably fond and Mags sort of wants to burn all of Panem down to its rotten foundations because it is making her root for these kids to die.  Hearth doesn’t smile so openly, but he does turn around to swim back to Vicuna and offer her a hand.

They can’t know it yet, but those strange piranha mutts are still steadily making their way through the arena like a virus through a body.  Their hunt has a time limit and they are either going to end up stranded at the Cornucopia, with all of their supplies but unable to participate in the Games until the mutts are gone--and who knows how long that would be--or they will lose all of their supplies for the time being, lose their base and their sense of security.  Half of her wants to think of either of those eventualities as a probably good thing, and the other half is horrified with almost every thought she’s had recently.

They move as a unit, through the woods they must know the remaining tributes are all scattered throughout, seeking out signs of life: a drowned fire to the side of a stream, a boot sole printed in the mud, discarded fish bones and scales, a full water bottle that must appear to them to have been dropped by mistake, perhaps in some skirmish or other.  They are quiet as they move like lithe predators, their earlier moment of levity and camaraderie left behind them for now.  Now they need to be effective, ruthless, trained killers before they are teenagers.

It doesn’t take them long before they have found Anissa, following the burned-out remains of last night's fire to the bush she is sleeping in, snoring gently with no remaining ally to watch over her.

Mags gets one of her innumerable wishes which is better than what she normally manages, because Anissa’s death is quick, is easy, comes to her without pain, in her sleep, obscured to the cameras by twigs and leaves and milky white berries.  The face Caelus makes as he lifts his spear to drive it into her chest is blank in a way Mags struggles to reconcile with the boy who was looking at Vicuna less than an hour before like her amusement was something special, like her resilience was admirable, like she was all of his favourite things all at once.  There’s nothing soft or sentimental about his face now, just edges that have never been harsher than they are presently and brute, unfeeling efficiency.  He was chosen by the academy for a reason and Marsh thinks he might win for probably the same one.  Mags sees it.  She also sees a point at which this ability to bisect the self into kid and killer collapses in on itself like a dying star, when everything implodes and rushes together and falls apart.  But that is a victor’s issue, one that cannot happen inside the arena, that won’t occur until the necessity is long gone.  As Mags would have it, it would never be allowed to become an issue at all.

He raises his spear, mouth closed in an easy line, and thrusts it down with no great cry to declare his presence or his victory, to put on a great show for the Capitol, just a little grunt of effort as he completes his task with a precision that seems indifferent but cannot be.  And Anissa just dies.  He doesn’t taunt her, he doesn’t make it interesting, he doesn’t wake her so she can beg or fight back.  He just kills her and leaves and the cameras pull in close but every image they can produce is more corrugated leaf than body that still appears to simply be asleep.

They continue searching and Caelus betrays no hint that he feels any sort of guilt as they pass silently in the shadows of trees and Mags realises that she doesn’t actually know where precisely in this forest anyone is.  These careers are on a mission and her kids could be right around the corner, blinking sleep from their eyes and trying to ration the last of their water--she’d send them more but even that is so expensive now that she is struggling to justify it, at least until they really are well and truly out.  She tries to watch both her screen and the main feed at once, tries to match up gnarled tree trunks and abutments of earth.  She doesn’t think they are particularly close but she doesn’t know for sure and it’s making her want to rip her hair out.

“You haven’t slept,” Marsh tells her in that flat way of his and she shakes her head, each hand full of grey hair, the strain on her scalp grounding in its dull pain.

“Well, I can’t sleep now.”

“I could come get you if something happens,” Angus offers, looking at her with his big, dark eyes wide like dinner plates.  He is glancing between her and Abigail and Mags wonders if maybe her whole life has been a nightmare.  She appreciates it but she really can’t leave.  Not now, maybe not ever.  Maybe her vision is blurry, maybe she is having trouble completing thoughts, maybe her hands are shaking and she has been eating snacks instead of meals and fantasising about a full-bodied red instead of drinking water, maybe her head aches and her back hurts and she can’t remember having ever been this tired, but she can’t sleep when it’s so likely they will need her.

“Mags,” Marsh says, makes her name sound like an accusation.  “If I need to I can help them and we won’t let you sleep through anything important.  You aren’t saving him like this.”

“It’s morning,” she protests.

“Have a nap,” he says anyway.

“Not until they go back,” she argues.  “Until the careers are done hunting I am staying right here.”  Marsh looks at her with much too much judgement for a man who has been sleeping in four hour increments for the past ten years.  She tells him as much and he scowls but doesn’t protest so she counts it as a win.  That’s immature of her but it feels good for just a split second, like a bright spark in the darkest of nights, like a moment of her life she doesn’t feel quite so obliged to overthink until she regrets it.

It isn’t Percy and Penelope that the careers find in the end.  To Mags it is mercy, to Blight and Ash a nightmare.

Coy and Kadia are awake when the careers find them, trying to pretend that half an apple split between the two of them makes any kind of breakfast.  They must be running low on donations.  They’re on their feet quickly, but unsteady after having spent so long in the arena, underfed and exhausted.  For kids from Seven, the axes they are holding no longer look right in their shaky hands, and they are outnumbered on top of it all.

Blight is scared Coy is about to give up, chanting “please, please, please,” under his breath as though it will change anything.  Maybe it even works because he is not particularly fast but still Coy tries to run, calls to Kadia to come with him with the desperation of a person who knows that the best case scenario he has left is that he leaves her behind.  Vicuna, fast on her feet, dashes to catch him as Hearth and Caelus circle Kadia like sharks and, to her credit, she tries to push past them but they are both much taller than her and steady in their stances.  Mags tries to imagine herself in Kadia’s place, staring up into the faces of Death: younger, more handsome, and neither as cruel nor as tender as one would want them to be.

Vicuna is much faster than Coy is but the uneven ground is slowing them both down and Coy is weaving a winding path in the hopes it will be hard to follow, shouting and sobbing but never stopping.  And Mags is watching them on the big screen, biting her nails and glancing occasionally back at her own screen to make sure Percy and Penelope really are far enough away that they don’t even seem like they are able to hear the commotion, that they still seem as relaxed as they can knowing what they know about how these next few days will go.

Vicuna catches up to Coy despite his best efforts, grasps at his arm with a deceptively strong grip, and Mags watches the way the fear settles on his face before it blooms into determination and he spins, knocking her ever so slightly off balance as he swings his axe at her, at the point where they connect.  She sees what he is doing and springs back, far enough that his swing can no longer cleave through her arm at the elbow where it was initially aimed, but not so far that she doesn’t cry out as three of her fingers sliced clean through at the first knuckle.  Not wasting any of his limited time, Coy doesn’t stop to take stock of what he has done, doesn’t wait to see what Vicuna will do next.  He just runs.  Faster than he has probably ever run before.  He is long gone before the butt of Hearth’s trident shatters Kadia’s skull with a sickening crunch that Mags can’t help but play on repeat in her mind as she watches the careers trudge back to Cornucopia, all horrified to find that, by the time they return, they can no longer actually reach it.  It promptly joins the ever-growing and frankly exhaustive list of horrible things that haunt her whenever she dreams.

Chapter Text

Percy wishes he wasn’t scared.  He wishes that all the awful things the Capitol is doing didn’t matter somehow, that he was able to rise above them, that he felt untouchable.  But that’s impossible in a place like this and he is on his knees about a foot away from the steep bank of an artificial river, watching the way the fish swim along tirelessly, bodies pressed against each other like they are fighting for space.  He is looking at these things and every part of his body is screaming monster and if the Capitol wants him scared he’s afraid that they’re winning.

“You’re freaking me out,” Penny tells him.

“I’m trying to explode them with my mind,” he replies.

“Let me know the second you figure that out.  Sounds like a helpful skill.”

“You’ll know when I do.  Are we out of water?”

“And bread.”

“Well, that doesn’t seem all that great.”

“Probably because it isn’t.”

“Do you think this is payback for all the fish I’ve killed in my life?”

“Well, it’s kind of your job,” she shrugs, and he likes how she says it like he is still right there in Four, like he’ll be back on the beach in the morning, bringing in his nets, that she or her father will come down to the sea again to buy some of his catch from him.  He likes less how intentional it seems to make the fact that she keeps talking about herself in the past tense.  “But I doubt the Gamemakers were thinking about you specifically when they built this place.”

“Don’t you hate how much it looks like Four?”

“I keep expecting to see people I know,” she admits.  “When Maizie-” she gulps and waves her hands and Percy can fill in the space easily enough without her spelling it out, “-there was a moment--not a big moment, but definitely a moment--where I thought she might have been my cousin.  I hope she didn’t just hear me say that.  I wish I hadn’t said it.”

“Maizie wasn’t a bad person,” he says, finding the past tense easy because they’ve been still enough recently that the ghosts haven’t even had to do any running to catch up.  He tries to remind himself that he isn’t a bad person either but it’s hard to do when he’s pretty sure there is still blood under his nails, along with all the dirt.  “She was just here .”

“You’re right,” Penny says, “but I don’t want to think about the people I love being here.  I feel like I owe their memories more than that.”

“They’re still alive.”

“And what am I?”

“Also not dead yet.”

She smiles at him in that sort of sad way that she has been lately and he wants to tear his hair out about it.  “As good as.”

“No.”  He’s insistent but he is also sure she is not listening.  She’s killing him; he almost wishes she’d use her spear.

The thirst works quickly, much faster than the hunger.  And Percy knows that, even as a person who rarely isn’t thinking about food.  They’re staying put because any bearings they had are all but gone now, and moving just feels like a waste of energy when food and water are suddenly so hard to come by, but the stillness is making him antsy.  The fish still swarm and should they want to move in any direction other than backwards they will have to cross that infested river, hope the jump isn’t much harder than it looks and the banks aren’t quite so slippery as they seem.  But they are safe here for now, where nobody has found them yet and bitter greens grow beneath the trees.  It’s not much and it certainly isn’t enough, but it’s what they’ve got.

Without water to drink, conversation starts to slow, anything more than a few sentences here and there becoming a chore that feels like a cheese grater across the throat.  Penny is sprawled across grass and mud and what is probably a pipe of some sort disguised as a tree root probing invasively against her spine, and she should probably look relaxed all laid out like that but the ragdoll splay of her limbs is all wrong, like a doll that has been dropped from a height--or like a body, left where it fell between these trees to rot.

His stomach rumbles loudly and his vision swims a little bit when he moves and he wonders if they’re being stupid by just sitting there but he doesn’t know what else to do.  He’s more than a little bit concerned about the lethargy, about how each of his limbs weighs as much as it would were it made of lead, and his sword has never felt too heavy before but it has definitely never felt light.  He dreads to think about being caught unawares here, about the time it would take him to jump to his feet, the effort it would take to swing his blade, the risk that his demigod senses might be too exhausted from blaring monster at him like a siren to actually kick in.  They have situated themselves far enough back from the river that he can’t see it anymore but it doesn’t help much when he already knows exactly what’s there.  He knows it probably isn’t smart to keep pushing forwards in a state like this but he’d kill to be on his feet; if he has to be a target--and he does, he’s under no illusions about that--then he’d at least like to be a moving one.  Right now he feels both scared and helpless and he tries not to show it because he is allowed to know that the Capitol are succeeding in killing him bit by bit, but they are not.

He’s starting to think that this will all be over soon in a more visceral way than he has been previously.  No matter what happens to him, or Penny, the careers, or anyone else who is lucky--or perhaps unlucky, given that they were ever here at all--enough to still be clinging to life by their fingernails, it will end.  And life will go on.  And then it will start again.  A new crop of children, whoever managed to claw their way out, dragged right back into the fray; death and new clothes, and death and fancy food, and death and somewhere to live that doesn’t let the rain and the cold in.  None of it could ever be worth it and he wonders, not for the first time since he ended up here, whether he may already be dead, toiling away his days in the Fields of Punishment for some offence he doesn’t remember having committed.

“I hate this place,” he says.

“I’d be worried if you didn’t.”

“I don’t think I’m just talking about the arena.”

Penny looks up at him from her sitting-duck-spot on the ground and he slumps further against the tree trunk--rougher than the genuine article--that is the only thing holding his limp body up.  “Yeah,” she agrees, “that makes sense.”

“I don’t know how anyone is just supposed to leave this place and live like normal.”

“I don’t think they are.  Lots of love to them both, but I don’t think I’d call Mags or Marsh normal and ending up like them is almost the best case scenario here.”

He nods.  “Not like normal then.  Just how they leave this place and carry on.”

“You should start trying to figure it out.  You’re going to need it.”

“It’s too early to say that.”

“Or don’t figure it out,” she continues, like she can’t hear him or doesn’t want to, “figure out an alternative instead.”  She starts to cough and the look on her face is one of pain and this is not how Percy wants to remember her--and, gods, he hates that he’s falling into all the graves she keeps digging for herself.  She doesn’t have to die here, she certainly isn’t dead yet, and he has a good shot at winning which is nothing like actually having won.  And won is not the right word, not at all.  He has lost already.  Not to the other tributes but certainly to the Capitol, to the Fates or what remains of them, to Trinity Price who he has let parade him in front of a hungry audience like a prize pig, to the audience he couldn’t prevent from watching.  He’s sick of losing.  So he starts to think about winning.

“I want to destroy it.  All of it.”

“You have my full support.”

“I’m serious.”

“And I believe you.  I’ve been believing in you.”  Something in how she says it strikes him as odd.

“What does that mean?”

“That you’re going to get out of here,” she doesn’t say win, perhaps like she knows what he is thinking, “and when you do, I think you’ll owe me one.”

“You can’t know that,” he says, knowing by now that it is much more for his benefit than hers.  She isn’t listening no matter how much he insists and still he insists, just to be able to tell himself that he tried.

“I know I can’t make you forget me,” she all but laments and he shakes his head, knows that even if he tried he wouldn’t be able to, that her memory will always be a bittersweet one that he owes it to the both of them to keep intact, “and I know my dad won’t forget me either.  Come to my funeral.”  She sounds like she might be crying a little or else it’s just fatigue from having spoken so much when she’s as parched as she is.  He can’t tell because he falls more than leans forwards to get a better look at her face and she just turns it the other way.  “I know they’ll have one.  You didn’t know me before this, but try to remember me how I was outside the arena.  In that nice dress Hyacinthus had me in at the interviews maybe.  And take care of my dad, he’ll need someone to.  He already likes you from a distance, he’ll like you even more when you get back.”

“You’re too sure that I’m going to get back.”

“You, Percy Jackson, have never gotten to have the pleasure of knowing yourself.”

“Most people wouldn’t agree that it’s a pleasure.”

“Yeah, well.  Maybe most people are stupid.  Or maybe I’m crazy.  It’s the least of my problems now, and either way you’re here and I’m here and you owe it to me to trust my opinions.”
“Do I owe a lot to you?” he asks, trying to burrow inside her brain.

“More than you know.”

The suits they wear in the arena have, up until this point, done a pretty decent job at keeping the cold out.  Even with the slightly too-strong or else conspicuously absent wind and the perpetual dampness about the air, with the lack of cover from anything other than flimsy leaves.  But now the night starts to fall--no deaths today, no faces in the sky, no klaxons, no closer to the end--and he and Penny are sitting shoulder to shoulder around a fire as weak as their morale--it reminds him of Camp just a little bit, in only the worst of ways--shivering.  Maybe it’s the hunger, maybe it’s the thirst, maybe it’s just how tired they are, how quickly the fear is working its way through them, how closely over their shoulders the ghosts loom.  They have water finally, and food.  It doesn’t last them long: a canteen of water that sways its way down on its parachute as though from the heavens, as good as a gift from a god in that desperate moment of theirs; another hunk of bread, no butter, no tart jam, dry but filling; a single apple to share, ruby red.  He cuts it in half with one of Cotton’s daggers and does not think about how this same instrument made Penny bleed.  It takes all the effort they have combined not to down all the water at once, to save half for later.  It makes him think about the people from the Capitol who are taking a break from their lavish lives to leer at his misery.  He doubts self-restraint is a thing many of them are used to.

“I think I’m out of money,” Penny says with a confidence Percy doesn’t understand, not bothering to finish her mouthful of dry bread or to cover her mouth before she speaks.  She is looking at the half of an apple in her hand and it looks small, pathetic, and glorious.

“You keep saying things that confuse me.”

“Well, you’ll have plenty of time to figure them out.”

“Not helping.”

“It wasn’t supposed to.  Messing with you a little bit is kind of the only joy I have left.”

“The water is pretty good too.”

“And I’ve never been so excited about half an apple.”

She tells him, an indeterminate amount  of time later, when the sky is not much darker but the air is colder and everything but the amber embers of their fire has entirely burnt out, that she is taking the first watch tonight.  He doesn’t argue.

The tent isn’t particularly warm when he first crawls in but the longer he is in there the nicer the reprieve it offers becomes.  It’s dry in there, the dull green tarpaulin stretched all around him almost like a cocoon lends to it a feeling that borders on safety despite him being well-aware that there is no such thing anymore, that there never has been.  The ground is hard and not very comfortable and his shoulders still ache with days-old exertion and he’s pretty sure he doesn’t care.  It gets warmer the longer he’s in there and he leans into that fragile sense of safety and lets the exhaustion he feels but doesn’t think he has earned take over.

He doubts anyone sleeps well in the arena, but he sleeps well enough.  Well enough to dream about the real home he left behind and can’t get back to.  To dream about Grover and Annabeth and his mom, to dream about Camp and his empty cabin and capture the flag and feeling like a person again.  He wasn’t safe there either, of course, but the ruination wasn’t quite so close, and when he thought it might have the face of a monster rather than a child it was easier to contend with.  And all the while he had Riptide: a weapon that he could cling to like a lifeline, that he couldn’t lose, that felt like it just may have been made specifically for him.  Now he’s lost all of it, probably forever, and he feels like he is spinning in a void, watching the life he was supposed to have passing him by just out of reach; not a good life by typical metrics, perhaps, but his.  And now nobody’s.  And now a wistful dream he gets to have in the middle of a death game, a thing he yearns for when what little he had left has been taken from him too.

He wakes with a start, still thinking about everything he can’t get back, to Penny shouting, shaking him, to a strange light penetrating the green and a stranger heat that is already making him sweat.

“We have to go!” she shouts and he is quick to accept that this isn’t the time when he should ask why.  He’s glad he slept in his shoes but in his half-awake panic, or perhaps just because he was thinking about Riptide, he forgets to pick up his sword as he stumbles out of the tent, leaves his weapon right there with his bag and the rest of the water, leaves it all behind.  None of it is worth his life.

The fire is raging already and it’s definitely still night because Penny would have woken him up to take the second watch long before the morning, but everything is bright and orange and red and angry.

“The crickets!” she tells him breathlessly as they run as fast as they can right towards the river they have been avoiding attempting to cross.  “They started to sound different and it was like their wings were matches or something.”

He nods as he runs, doesn’t respond because exertion and smoke inhalation probably already aren’t a great combination for the respiratory system.  Now that he’s focusing on it--not much, just enough--he can hear them over the crackling of flames, not chirping anymore but calling, like a sinister warning, and new flames appear in patches of the trees faster than he thinks they can outrun them.  Pessimism like that won’t help him so for once he tries to focus on the fear instead, on the horrible moment and how he might escape the horrible eventualities that follow.  As quickly as he can without leaving Penny in the dust, a little in front of her but never so much that she can’t reach out for his hand, he keeps moving.

The ground is rough and the air is sweltering hot and the sweat stings as it rolls down his forehead into the half-sealed cut above his eye.  He does his best not to trip and they reach the river quickly.  They spent a long time debating whether they should jump it, considering the pros and cons.  Now they just leap, don’t stop, don’t think, barely look.  Just jump.

He makes it from one bank to the other.  Simple as that.  Mud squelches underfoot and he’s across.  Penny, the advocate for staying put and not risking it in the first place, doesn’t have quite the same luck.  She almost makes it but she starts to slip down the steep bank and she doesn’t cry out until her feet are already touching the water which means the fish are swarming, attacking, and his instincts do the work for him before his brain can catch up.  The water lifts her up and he feels the tell-tale pull in his gut as he grabs her by the arms and pulls her out.  Her face is damp with tears and sweat and she is trying to conceal something between a blubber and a whimper and he dares to look down even though he doesn’t want to think about what he has seen those fish do.

It’s not good, to say the least.  Really it’s a blessing that the water here isn’t deep.  Her boots are bitten through and her left leg, the one that spent most of the time beneath the water, is chewed to bits, through skin, through fat, through fascia to muscle, glistening red with watered-down blood that runs weak and orange-y and worryingly quick.

“It’s okay,” he says, lying.  “Come here.”  He doesn’t have time to wait for her to listen so he just ducks, pulls her arm around his shoulder and wraps his around her waist, grateful that she is so short as he takes on her weight and makes her keep moving with him, their runs slowed to a hobble as the fire, unsympathetic, rages on unabated.  She muffles a scream on every other step, biting down hard on her lower lip, stumbling like she is about to drop, and the heat is making her skin bright red and blotchy but it seems like it might be going white again.  He’ll have time to patch her up later, hopefully soon, and until then they’ll just keep going.

He tries to run, manages to get their pace up to something that is almost a jog and keeps them moving.  Penny starts to flag more and more and he lets the adrenaline take over, carries her body as well as his own as quickly as his legs will allow, and tries his level best not to think they’re doomed to die here, that there is no coming back from this.  There just has to be.

He can feel the oppressive heat at his back and doesn’t dare to waste time they don’t have looking over his shoulder to see where it is; he’s already as motivated as he possibly could be to stay away.  Penny slumps the rest of the way against his side and her head drops, chin lolling against her chest, eyes half closed.  He’s dragging her more than he’s helping her run now but he keeps going.  It seems like an especially awful way to die, burning alive, and he isn’t about to let her find out what it feels like.

There’s another river coming up ahead of them--this gods-damned arena is full of them and he was almost glad about it up until very recently--and he slows to a stop as he approaches.  Penny is short and she’s lost a lot of weight over these past couple of weeks and he’s so hopped up on adrenaline that he could probably pick up a tree right now so he’s fully prepared to fireman carry her and jump.  She doesn’t let him.

“Percy,” she says woozily.  They don’t have time to talk right now, they can do this later.  “Percy!  It’s okay.  Please.  Nobody has to kill me this way.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” He thinks he has earned the right not to listen to her this time when she has been disregarding everything he has tried to tell her for so long.  He adjusts his grip around her upper body and reaches for her buckling knees, deciding to disregard the bloody, mangled mess that’s left of her leg.

“Percy!  Percy!  Perseus Jackson, listen to me!” she’s sobbing now and she seems strangely more alert.  He tries to interpret it as anything other than a last stand.  “Either I die here or we both do.  Fucking run! ”

He doesn’t want to listen to her.  He has no intention to.  He doesn’t leave his friends behind, keeps a vice grip on all the family he has, can’t just throw Penny to the fire to save himself.  He tries to hold onto her, tries to keep moving, tries not to think about how this river is wider and deeper than the last one, enough so that he will struggle to make it over on his own.  It’s fine.  He’s the son of Poseidon and that’s probably cheating but he simply can’t be concerned with that when so much--everything, in fact--is on the line.  Even if he can’t make it he can have a little extra help and he can get them both out of it.  Protecting the people he loves is all he has ever wanted to be good for and it rarely seems to work out how he hoped it would but he has to believe that this time can be different so he holds on.

But Penny doesn’t.

She braces her hands against his chest and does everything in her diminishing power to make it impossible to get a satisfactory hold on her legs.  “Penny!” he protests, not sure if he is crying or just sweating because the fire is really catching up.  With her better leg she kicks at his hand, forcing him to lose the feeble grip he’d managed, and at the same time she pushes him backwards with all the might she has left.

He stumbles back, away from the water, and she falls where she stands, crumples like she is boneless.  He rushes to grab her again but she shifts her weight, not much but enough, and she is over the bank.  Submerged.  And that’s that.  He knows it.  He might be the son of Poseidon but there’s nothing he can do about it now.

He hears the splash and with a cry of anguish he starts to run again, clears the river with an efficiency he’s not so sure is possible just so he doesn’t have to stick around to watch the blood tint the water, to see if the fish will just strip the flesh and leave the bones or reduce those to tiny pieces too.

The fire keeps moving and so does he and Penny doesn’t and he wants to stop there, to wallow then burn, to choke on the smoke and scream and scream and scream as his skin blisters and bubbles and sears and sloughs off and then stops hurting all together, but he thinks about Finnick.  Who will only blame himself.  Who is waiting back in Four.  Who he promised to come back to.  And he thinks about Mags, who is watching this on a screen somewhere, who wants him to win and apparently believes in him, and Marsh, whose prediction he is still yet to hear, who hasn’t expressed a whole lot to him, just that he has a shot at this and should take it.  He thinks about his mom, who isn’t here and can’t tell him so herself, but who would want him to live, to hold onto hope no matter how frayed it becomes and who he owes more than he could ever give back to her.  He thinks about the Fates, who he wants nothing more than to spite.  He has reasons to keep going, fewer than he’d like, so he holds onto life with everything he has left and sprints so fast he thinks he might fall and the fire keeps swallowing everything in its path and he’d hate to consider those last moments with Penny wasted but he couldn’t hold onto her at the end of them and they only let the fire catch up to him.

Breathing is hard.  Running isn’t.  His brain might be struggling with it but his body wants to live.  He doesn’t know what comes after this, if or when the flames will cease, where he will be when they do, if anybody else is caught up in them too.  He wishes he still had his sword for then but he doesn’t regret that right now it isn’t weighing him down.  Penny had clung onto her spear but in her departure it hadn’t been the thing he thought to reach for and Cotton’s daggers were stored in the pack he left in that tent, along with the rest of their water.  He might be screwed.  He’ll never know for sure if he doesn’t make it out of this, though.

The only option is forwards so that’s where he goes.  He sidesteps trees and jumps down short slopes and tries his level best not to stumble.  It feels almost like he is passing over the arena rather than interacting with it, like he is above it.  He wishes that were true.  He steps over a stream and shouts at the fish that populate it, decides against all evidence that they can understand him as he curses them, that maybe they might feel sorry or ashamed for what they’ve done.  It’s stupid, probably, to try to humanise these fish, especially after he has killed so many of them, but he has killed people now too and this is nothing but a guilty knot he doesn’t have time to tie himself up in.

There is nothing he can do to stop the fire, to stop the awful crickets striking their wings and making more of it, and even the fastest run he can manage doesn’t feel fast enough but he is committed now, to surviving, to not losing, to holding his resolve.  There is another river up ahead cutting the landscape, seething with the throes of aquatic doom, and there is a wall of fire behind, so close behind, and just maybe he has a chance with one of these things but he knows the other is a lost cause.  He doesn’t have much time to think; the fire is gaining and the burn at his back has turned quickly from uncomfortable to painful.  The water is deep and the fish are hungry and the fire is not capable of mercy, shows no signs of slowing and has no shortage of fuel and still the crickets call.  And he is the son of Poseidon.  It doesn’t mean much in Panem but it might mean something here.

He jumps, and he hopes.

Chapter Text

It’s like torture seeing Marsh’s screen glow this offensively bright orange one moment and then turn pitch black the next.  The numbers are still there, but they’re essentially pennies, too few to have bought a single additional item on that donation list.  To Marsh that must be a victory--the deeply unsatisfying kind they are both used to--or at least a step he has placed between himself and the regret Mags doesn’t remember how to live without.  But it is a victory for later.  Not right now.

Not now when everyone in the control room seems to be holding their breath, where the vicious flames on the big screen have cast everything in an ominous reddish glow, when Marsh’s screen has gone black and Mags’ eyes are so glued to her own that she can barely even see it in her periphery and still it strikes her to her core like a dagger made of ice.  Not now when Marsh is furious in a way Marsh Holtz is never furious.  He’s angry and he’s bitter and he has so many chips on his shoulders his spine is forever bowed, but he is not furious.

And now he is on his feet and, even though she knows Marsh, she is almost expecting an outburst to follow, for him to start shouting like Percy is on the big screen, for him to throw a tantrum like a child and do more than the usual bare minimum to reassure her that he is still alive.  She almost wants to see it.  But he doesn’t.  He just stands there, tight as a loaded spring, jaw clenched so hard she’s half convinced he’s about to break his teeth, eye so dark it looks more black than blue, whole body shaking.  He knew this was coming, of course, accepted that Penelope would die and shaped his strategy around that fact, but seeing it is altogether different and, with Percy where he is, Penny’s plan might never have time to even play out--Mags thinks he has earned his ire, even wants him to double down and make a scene.  But he just leaves.  And Mags doesn’t watch him go but she does hear the crash in the hallway and hopes it was even a little bit cathartic.

Instead she watches Percy who is still sprinting, who is moving faster than his legs can carry him but who is not outrunning the fire behind him, who is stuck between a rock and a hard place without a way out.  Her heart is in her throat and her stomach itches and she’s regretting everything: getting attached; knowing better and ignoring everything she has ever learned; the fact that she is soft inside like the saccharine rotting fruit she hasn’t had to eat since she won her Games all those years ago; ever winning her Games and not just falling on the first sword she saw.  She regrets her position as a victor whenever she is reminded of it, whenever she sees the bloodstained tapestry of her legacy spread out in front of her and cast over all of Panem like a great and terrible pall, but she has been trying very hard since those early days of getting too sick on booze and morphling to really understand the appeal, to not regret that she is alive.  It’s hard work in the position she is in but she tries and she usually succeeds.  And now she fails.

She has done the stupid thing for the first time in a while and pinned far too many of her hopes on a poor, doomed kid who she knew from the beginning was doomed regardless of how the Games played out.  And now she’s about to watch him die and she starts thinking that maybe she was selfish to want him to win as much as she still does even though her hope has left and now she feels empty, hollowed out.  Maybe it was horrible of her to want him to do anything but die in the least painful way possible when she knows what would come next for him if he won.  The fire keeps gaining and his skin is shining with sweat and tears and the fish mutts are swarming half a step ahead of him and she tries to believe that it’s better this way, that the Capitol won’t be able to get their hands on him like they want to, that he never has to know about just how lecherously they watched all his misery play out.  Somehow all she manages to convince herself of is that she should have died a long time ago, that these decades of being under the Capitol’s collective and pressing thumb are the price she has paid for wanting to live when she was a teenager and didn’t have a clue what came next.  Death is nothingness.  Predictable, perhaps even a relief to old bones or old women who regret like it is breathing and can’t give up only one of those pastimes.

But it is too late now--for her when the path she has trodden is set in stone she has tried and failed to chip away at, and for Percy who, like every tribute, she owes infinitely more than she has at her disposal to give him.  So she does the only thing she has the power to do in that moment and watches as he jumps, holding onto him for as long as the Games will let her.

It really is torture when her screen stubbornly does not go dark.

She leans in so close her nose is almost touching it and zooms in on the water in a vain attempt to catch a glimpse past the shoal but sees nothing but scales shimmering like a vibrant sunrise atop the waves, like another fond aspect of home she will never be able to look at the same again.

She just wants proof.  That he is dead and she can let the faint remnants of hope die away completely.  But maybe that he is alive, that there is something impossible happening, that she isn’t as foolish as she thinks.

She lets herself think about it and then she can’t let it go.  It’s hard to tell beneath the pervasive orange glow of the fire that is showing no signs of stopping any time soon as it swallows more and more of the arena, but she doesn’t think she is seeing any blood in the water.  And surely if Percy was being torn to pieces beneath the surface there would be some sort of evidence of that.

This whole process is meant to be perfect, ironed out so it is without a wrinkle, the biggest show of the year, proof of the Capitol’s superiority and the districts’ subjugation by a power they cannot hope to surpass.  So they shouldn’t be making a mistake like this, should know if he is dead and shut her screen off with the same decimating finality they have everyone else’s.  But if they are supposed to have their torture down to a science by now, all growing pains soothed away, then their mutts should work.  Every time without fail.

But she knows the process isn’t perfect, that everything is always on a delay because mistakes and problems and embarrassments are always to be expected, that what the Capitol is really good at is propaganda and lies and covering over the truth with clever edits and Peacekeepers who couldn’t care any less about actual peace.  So maybe her screen really is broken, or Percy’s tracker is and it isn’t able to communicate that his heart has stopped beating.  Or maybe the mutts are…

She looks up at the big screen and sees that it has moved focus to the careers, floundering now that they are without food and water, still stronger than the other tributes but waning.  They aren’t being especially interesting but whatever is going on with Percy is and the fact that the Capitol has made the choice not to show that does seem to indicate that something is wrong and she isn’t the only one who has noticed it.

But she can’t decide if that is good or bad.  If he is alive or dead.  If she should keep hoping or just deflate, let it all go  That’s where the torture comes in: the not-knowing, the doubt, the liminal purgatory she has no hope of getting herself out of.

“Mags,” Angus says.  His voice is soft and careful and she is so much older than him but he speaks to her like an overtired child and she lets him, “we all saw him jump.  Your screen isn’t changing.  The tech probably just isn’t working right.  Go to bed, please.”

“Their tech definitely isn’t working right,” she says back, regretting that she even has to blink as the fear of missing something important grips her with a ferocity it hasn’t since she was in her own arena, fighting for her life, winning it, losing everything else.

“Maggy,” Porter says with more directness in her tone than Angus dared to put into his, “even if something did go wrong with the mutts, he’s been under there for a long while.  If he hasn’t already, he’ll drown soon.”

“There are divers in Four who can hold their breath for a very long time.” She is arguing with herself more than them.  She isn’t really sure they realise that.

“But is he one of them?” Angus asks tentatively.

“I never got the chance to ask!” Mags barks back with misplaced rage she will be able to apologise for later.  She has time after all, swaths of it, and nothing to fill it but the same old horrors, the same old failure, the same old victory that is nothing but a longer-lasting loss.  Percy doesn’t have anything like that.  Unless he does.  And in that case she can’t give up on him yet.

Time passes, well beyond what even the best divers in Four can survive, and he doesn’t resurface but Mags’ screen is still lit and there is no sign that anyone is trying to fix it, no gamemaker coming to explain the mistake and send her on her way, so she stays put, keeps her hope on life support and tries to believe that he is still alive because maybe it is selfish of her to want him to win as she does, but that doesn’t actually make her want that any less.  For herself, for him, for Finnick, for Marsh, for Four.  For Penelope.  Who doesn’t have to have died for nothing.  She had a last wish--or a series of them, and a very realistic understanding of how this would all go--and so Mags hopes for her that it will have the chance to come true.

Hope is immaterial.  Perhaps so is regret.  But for now her options are limited; accepting certain facts, rejecting others, interpreting the truth until the actuality of it almost doesn't matter anymore--she decides that he is still alive because it is not like believing he is dead will fix anything.  She is an irrational creature.  She accepts it and Angus and Porter let her live in her delusion because her screen is still bright orange-red-yellow and that is less than enough but still all she has.

The careers are wandering somewhat listlessly, dragging their weapons behind them, without food or water or a plan and she’d wonder how hopeless they must feel if she had the capacity left to wonder about more than what is happening or not happening to Percy.  Their advantages are running out but so are everyone else’s so maybe nothing means anything anymore and she remembers Penelope’s family suddenly, like they are haunting Mags in her place because she is gone and ghosts are nothing but a nice thought and death is nothing at all.  And Percy is a strange creature, different, somehow, from everyone else Mags has ever met, and it is almost simpler to believe that he is still alive than it is to believe that he is nothing now.  Nothing , like Penelope who was torn to pieces, whose near-empty coffin Mags will have to take back to her family, full of apologies that mean less than nothing coming from her.

Even now the careers aren’t really talking, refusing to get to know each other anymore than they already do, trying to make the missing that follows every victory smaller, easier to hold.  She can’t get into their heads, doesn’t really have the energy to try right now when she is beating hope’s heart manually, but she does wonder if that doesn’t just amplify the regret.  Your allies are gone and you spent their final days doing what?  Dehumanising them to make their deaths seem smaller?  

She’s glad Percy and Penelope didn’t do that.  This way she got to know the girl before she lost her, got to appreciate the person and not just mourn the death.  Missing is almost a pleasure sometimes, when one is lonely in the way all victors are lonely, and as much as she hates the whole thing, she loves her memory and the way she is able to keep dead things alive inside of it.  When Percy--because he is still alive, because Mags will not do him the disservice of believing otherwise--looks back on Penelope there will be something there, larger than life could ever be, calling him a brother, holding his hand.

When Hearth, desperate with thirst, finds a full water bottle abandoned behind a tree and does not question its origin before gulping it down, denying Brutus the chance to send him a new one despite the substantial dent even that will put in his funds at this point, it strikes her that Caelus and Vicuna will have nothing to remember.  An advantage lost or a step closer to victory or however else they want to frame it, whatever they are left with will not be-- cannot be --Hearth.

Vicuna drops to her knees as Hearth goes suddenly pale and starts to sway, helps him to the floor with the tree to his back supporting his weight.  It’s too little too late.  She leaves him with a couple of sparse, trodden-on daisies--the best she could find--tucked into the collar of his suit, body slumped and limp and empty.  And Mags knows that is how Vicuna will remember him: an abandoned shell and a sprig of sad flowers.  She doesn’t know him either, but she knows that every tribute deserves better than that.

Brutus leaves and he bumps into Marsh by the door.

“You’re still here,” he tells her, voice almost shaking with the strain of maintaining its characteristic flatness.

“So is he.”

Marsh cranes himself over her head, large hands gripping at her frail shoulder, like he is seeking comfort from her.  Not that she knows how to offer it right now.  “Your screen is still on.  That doesn’t seem right.”

“No,” she agrees, “it doesn’t.”  And she is expecting Marsh to pick up where Angus and Porter left off, to tell her it is a glitch and she is just torturing herself for nothing.  Because this is Marsh who doesn’t know how to approach these things delicately, who gets logic like she doesn’t and doesn’t understand emotions like she does.  But he sits back down in his chair, turns his blacked-out screen just so, so he doesn’t have to look at it, and joins her, watching in seemingly uncritical silence.  “What’s happening?” she dares to ask.

“I don’t know.  That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“With you, I mean.”
“I don’t know that either.  This has been like this for a long time?”  She nods.  “And there’s no indication anybody is trying to fix it?”  She shakes her head and he shifts his chair enough to the side to knock hers a little bit out of the way.  Haymitch, stumbling blind drunk into the room only because he is obligated to be there, crashes into Marsh’s abandoned desk and the screen falls, to the desk then to the floor, where, by something that probably isn’t a coincidence, it ends up under Haymitch’s boots.  The avoxes swarm to rectify the issue but the damage is done and Marsh doesn’t have to see Penelope’s absence in front of him, his failure as a mentor, an eleventh loss to devalue his single win.

They watch the night start to fall together again, like today hasn’t taken a good thing (at least as good as these circumstances will allow) in its teeth and torn it to pieces--like fish muttations to teenage girls.  The darkness descends quickly and the fire starts to burn out.

Mags’ screen goes black.

The panic radiates out from her stomach as the hope fights for its life for the moment it takes her to realise.  This is not the darkness of death, not the black of a game over.  This is night and ash and the fire has died and the lens is dirty but the charred remains of the forest are still there if she squints.  And right there in the middle of it all there is the river, still alive with the thrashing bodies of fish that are moving at pace like they have somewhere to be.

The anthem plays and the klaxons begin and, after the second, when close to every eye in the control room is watching Mags like they all believe she really is as fragile as she has come to look, the surface tension breaks and the fish are displaced and Mags is seeing the back of a head that is nothing but sodden black hair in poor lighting behind a veil of ash, but she’d know it anywhere.  Like an excitable child, like someone who is anywhere other than where she is right now, Mags jumps to her feet, hardly even noticing that she has knocked her chair over.  Percy is pulling himself out of the river, nibbled and bleeding here and there but mostly intact, and he is gulping down the air no matter how choked with soot it is, and swiping at the salt water in his eyes and he is no doubt in an awful place but he is so undeniably alive.

Mags can’t help it.  Standing there, in the middle of a room full of people she respects and who respect her even though she traced the path of their doom, she laughs and laughs and laughs so hard there are tears streaming down her face and her lips are cracking in the corners and her mouth tastes like blood, like a reminder that she is alive.  That she is not the only one.  And then she is just crying, sobbing in a horrible, ugly way and there are hesitant hands on her shoulders, a rickety breastbone against her head, a fine silk shirt she ruins with her snot and her tears.  A person, an old friend, who doesn't complain as she clings to him like a lifeline when she knows he was already struggling to hold himself up.

As soon as Percy jumps in the bites begin, fast and sharp and sore, and he keeps chanting like maybe the monstrosities are listening, are understanding, can comprehend like they are natural enough to belong to his father’s kingdom, like his father still has a kingdom at all.  It’s a long shot but he knew that when he decided to jump and he is committed now and he is screaming to the fish as they sink their teeth in, not ready to admit the idea was a bust quite yet.

And then they stop.  And he’s breathing in his own blood in the salt water and the fish are still moving but as they pass him they are almost staring and they aren’t saying anything back.  “I’m a friend,” he tells them in language they seem to have lost--or perhaps been robbed of the ability to produce--”I’m just like you,” and it doesn’t matter whether or not he believes what he is saying, whether or not the thought of being like these machines made to tear Penny to pieces is making him feel uniquely and profoundly sick.  He gets the sense from a few of them, as their droning warbles and warps but never rounds out into words, as they break from the group for a moment, that they are trying to address him, that they want to say something back.  It makes him think of the Capitol’s strange, silent servants who no doubt are not silent because they choose to be.

Now that the water, amongst the fish who are all moving past him, whose sharp, shiny scales keep nicking him, ripping his suit and abrading the skin beneath, has become a place of relative safety from which he can wait out the inferno, he sinks.  He sits on the bottom with his knees pulled up to his chest and tries to physically hold himself together and now that he has stopped he can think about Penny.

He’s angry, so much so he is half sure the water all around him is beginning to boil, but more than that he’s miserable and he feels guilty about it.  He should be able to avenge her and everybody else’s slaughter the Capitol has incited and revelled in, but for now all he can do is sit and wait and all of that waiting is allowing for the rage to be eroded away while the misery grows and there is a part of him, not nearly as small as he would prefer, that regrets that he can’t drown here.  He pulls up the the river bed, displaces fistfuls of plastic stones and sobs and sobs and sobs.  It feels wrong that Penny was never a part of his life before the Games--aside from occasionally buying her dinner from him, a neutral role any person in Four could fulfil--that if he really does get to go home the only thing about the life he has established for himself in Four that will change is him.  Finnick will still be there, just like the sun and sky and the sea and the sand and the flint and the fish and his old hut, even if he won’t be able to live there anymore.  But Penny won’t and he won’t even know what little pockets of the District to find her absence in, the shapes of all the empty space she has left behind.  He knows about her as a person but, in practice, she will always be a tribute in all his memories of her, a victim.  He feels he owes her better but cannot offer it.

So he cries for her.  Powerless and lost and the son of some dead god that means nothing anymore, he thinks about a future he was supposed to be able to shape and the horrible distortion of it he has ended up being stuck in.  He thinks about everything he has lost and tries to remember anything other than his leather camp necklace that he has been able to hold onto.  The wound of Penny’s death is fresh and oozing, but all those older losses keep reopening every time he jostles them and it feels correct to be covered in those salt-stung nicks and bites, to be torn and bleeding.  The water is healing him bit by bit, stubbornly pulling the edges of his wounds together at the corners, sealing them shut, and he wants it to stop.  But he knows very well by now that wanting something is little but a way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Eventually--he has little idea precisely when--the fire above the surface dies out and he can leave the river, teeming with things that just barely don’t want to kill him.  It’s hard to decide that he wants to.  Even as he does it half of him still wants to remain on the plastic river bed, to lie down there and do nothing but wait until he starves to death or all the others are dead and he is all that is left.  But he has never been a person predisposed to inaction and there is frustration and grief and all things unnameable and unforgivable and unfair and horrible and monstrous and human thrumming under his skin, making him antsy.  He feels too big for his body, too small for his life, doomed no matter what he does or does not do.  He tries to believe that takes just a little bit of the pressure off.

The burned up arena is blackened and crunchy beneath his torn boots and his suit is tattered and his skin cold, the air hurts to breathe but he knows he is on camera so he gulps it down greedily anyway, even though it cloys and stings and makes him cough.  He’ll formulate his excuses later on the off chance he’ll actually need them.  For now he just moves forwards and tries not to think that maybe he could have saved Penny had he thought up his idea a few minutes earlier, had he remembered who and what he was.  He doubts there’s much of the arena left standing and hopes that both the end and the cornucopia are in sight.

He isn’t sure how to do it, but he wants to tear the Capitol down, wants to rip the whole awful system apart, wants everyone that has ever enjoyed the games to have to look at themselves, to really see themselves and know what they really are.  He wants to be a bad victor, wants to make the Capitol regret everything, wants to make the Districts proud.  He chooses not to think about the logistics, about how slim the chances of something actually working are.  He has to be good for something, has to use being a gods’ son to do some good, no matter what became of the gods themselves.

He passes over the blackened landscape with nothing but his own company and he feels light without his sword, without bearing Penny’s weight as well as his own.  He has no food and no water and no weapon but he has his life and he’s lucky to even have that so he forges onwards through the hot, dark air and the crickets are finally silent.  He hopes they burned to a crisp in their own blaze.  Gradually, the further he moves, the more the arena starts to return to its regular imitation of life: verdant green leaves and grass that isn’t singed and bark that has not been warped well out of its original shape.  By the time he reaches the first tree without scorch marks, he can already see the cornucopia up ahead, through the thin layer of the remaining trees.  He pretends that the fear doesn’t grip him, that he isn’t terrified of the desperate tributes he is sharing the remaining space with, that the anger drowns it all out.  But they are probably just as desperate as he is and that makes them dangerous.  It makes him dangerous too.

He spots movement in the distance, fast enough that he can’t be entirely sure it’s even human, like a small person sprinting by the edge of the forest.  Desperate and dangerous as he may be, he is also exhausted and grieving and burdened with empathy and pity and all the things that make him a good person and a poor tribute; he doesn’t chase after it.  He climbs a tree instead, uses the last of his energy to haul himself up a few branches, grazing his shins and forearms on the bark, reopening his half-sealed wounds.  He hopes the blood on the wood isn’t that obvious in the daylight if any of the others start hunting, but it’s a background sort of hope, far from a priority.  For now he sleeps, belted to a branch above the remainder of the arena, and does not think about death because he will have forever to do that, to mourn himself and Penny and every other tribute for the entire rest of his life, no matter how long or short it ends up being.

Chapter Text

Mags isn’t sure how long she spends just standing there, in the middle of the control room, sobbing into Marsh’s shirt.  She isn’t sure if everyone else has really gone silent around her but she knows she can’t hear them, and she knows that Marsh, as much as he isn’t a touchy-feely person, is letting her stay there for as long as she likes, with his hands on her shoulders and her snotty nose ruining his nice shirt.  She knows that he won’t hold that against her.

The tears dry up eventually and her throat hurts and her head aches and she’s absolutely elated whilst also being burdened with guilt and shame.  Maybe she should be embarrassed too, but she thinks she might have left that behind when the worst things she has ever done were broadcast for all of Panem to see and remember her by.

“You should sleep,” Marsh tells her and she wants to protest because she did not stick with Percy this long to leave him now, did not spend so long agonising to do anything other than hold on with all the strength she has until he is back in Four where he belongs.  It’s like Marsh is reading her mind.  “I’ll stay up while you do, and he’ll get all my attention now.”  She thinks they’re both making the choice not to think about why that is, to keep the momentum going until they can afford to give it up.  “I’ll send someone if you’re needed, but you’ll be of no use to anyone like this.  If you won’t do yourself a favour, do him one.”

And Mags doesn’t quite know how to say no to that, so she lets him send her away.  She feels a little bit like she has left her body as she sways her way down the long corridor that is wider than it needs to be because the Capitol cannot help itself but to show off.  There is art here, in this horrible hallway very few people will ever have the misfortune of passing through, more than in most homes in Four: a painting that’s not really of anything because it doesn’t need to be, because it isn’t there to look nice; a tall, narrow vase that flares suddenly at the neck, positively brimming with roses so white they look sterile, as if Mags or any other victor really needs the reminder that Snow is always watching,  And then the empty space, where a porcelain pillar and an abstract sculpture of twisted, shimmering glass stood this morning.  She’s sure the mess was dealt with quickly, that avoxes swooped in to clear away any sign of the destruction as soon as they heard it shatter, but everyone will notice that it isn’t there.  Nobody will miss it though.  The Capitol, at least the parts of it she has been allowed to see, and increasingly as time has gone on, is one big status symbol.  This is no different.

The room with all of the cots, comfortable as they may be, is as bleak as ever, with its stark white walls and deeply impersonal flourishes.  Perhaps more so now, because she is the only person there.  There are only a few tributes left, after all, and so there are also only a few mentors who are still practically living out of the control room.  Most of them are just showing up and then retiring to their individual quarters within the tower, likely without flourishes more personal than her own single candle.  It’s just an obligation to them now, a hopeless cycle of in and out and in and out and over and over again.  It’s not much of a life at all, this one that they’ve been handed, and that is a strange thought to have when she has so much more than she needs except all of the things that are actually worth living for.

It’s quiet and it’s dark and Mags is positively exhausted, so the sleep should come to her easily but life does her no such favours.  She’s wound-up, coiled tight as a spring, still shaking.  And every time she gets close to falling asleep she jolts back awake like she is falling off a cliff.  Because she is terrified and has been, at least in the background, for 54 years now, if not her entire life.  Because when she is her most vulnerable, she is still 16, still about to be killed in her sleep.  She’s still in that arena.  She knows she’s never getting out.

She sleeps longer than she means to and jumps to her feet as soon as she is awake enough to realise there is somewhere very pressing she needs to be.  Her hair is knotted and her clothes are rumpled with sleep and, perhaps if she’s lucky--which she isn’t, of course, and she’s increasingly starting to think that perhaps nobody really is--the Games might end today and she might end up on camera for the millionth time, her state broadcast to all of Panem as she hugs her victor and promises--means it--that she will never let him go again.  But all of that is less important than being there for Percy if and when he needs her, so she rushes right back to the too-bright light of the control room, back to her comfortable chair and her brightly lit screen.  She spots Pace sprawled across the cot closest to the door on her way out, and is hardly surprised that he looks no more aware when he is awake than when he is asleep.

The walk back to the control room is a short one and the way she almost runs down the horrible corridor despite the ache deep in her bones and the sleep that is still trying to cling to her, makes it even shorter.  But, try as she might, she is apparently running late.

The first thing she sees as she arrives at the doorway is Vicuna’s face on the big screen, her eyebrows low over her tired eyes, her whole face cast into shadow.  Her cheeks look hollow, like the hunger is catching up to her, her skin dry and chapped, and the missing fingers on her left hand bandaged, clearly with care but the circumstances have made them impossible to keep clean and they are crusted over with dirt and maybe still blood, perhaps even the signs of a burgeoning infection.  Maybe she’s feeling it, maybe she’s already dying, maybe that’s almost a good thing from Mags’ perspective.  She doesn’t have much time to think about it.

Because Vicuna and Caelus are on the big screen, and even as they’re wasting away they cut intimidating figures in the morning’s low light with its long, harsh shadows, and they are looking at each other with wide eyes by the base of a blood-stained tree.

Mags knows that tree.  She saw Percy clamber his way up it in the dark after he pulled himself out of the river and back from the grave.  She knows that’s his blood on the bark, that he’s sleeping in the branches.  She can’t believe he dies here, like this, that, after yesterday’s miracle, he’s going to go out so unceremoniously, like any other tribute.  She’s had so much practice at this horrible task, she can handle it.  She has spent the last 50 years handling it.  But something about this kid who shouldn’t be alive for so many reasons and yet is, has undone her.  She feels brand new again, the sore thumb in a room full of Capitol mentors who had studied all the theory and had none of her practice, who didn’t care or cared all wrong, who stared at her back and kept her feet chained beneath the desk.  Like she’s chained to the floor again, she’s stuck in place, staring, helpless.

Above the Careers’ heads, the canopy rustles and they look quickly at each other with narrowed eyes in an almost feline way, like they were born to be predators.  It doesn’t matter at this moment that Mags knows they weren’t.  Because their hands are on their weapons and Vicuna’s flinch when she tries to wrap her injured hand around her sword’s hilt is just that, a flinch, a brief moment where the pain pierces the facade.  They look at each other for a moment more, quiet so as not to alert their prey of their presence, communication in blinks and twitches alone, proving just how well-acquainted they are, and then Caelus takes his back hand off the shaft of his spear to count slowly down on his fingers, and knowing that they are about to strike all but brings Mags back to life.

“How dare you!” she tries to yell but kind of sobs, like she is twenty again, like she is hung over half the time and angry and sad in equal measure all of it.  Marsh turns in his chair at that, looks at her uncomprehending as she runs as fast as old, abused knees will allow without falling out from beneath her.  She doesn’t wait around to hear what he has to say, just shoves him out of her chair and pulls up her donation menu in what she cannot let be a fruitless attempt to save Percy’s life.

She watches with bated breath as she tries to think of anything at all that she can do.  And, as she does that Marsh is talking but she is not hearing, and Caelus and Vicuna are maintaining their eerie silence as he gives her a boost up into the tree and her right hand claps around a thin ankle and a boot falls to the ground as a small foot in a filthy sock kicks and fights back and forces its way out of her grip.  She growls like an animal and the person in the tree shrieks and scuttles clumsily away and…

And that’s not Percy’s voice.  It’s too high.  And that can’t be his boot either, it’s too small.  And she can hear Marsh again, over the blood rushing in her ears which is finally starting to slow.

“He moved,” Marsh is telling her, and she decides to do herself a favour and not ask how many times he has said that exact thing.  “First thing this morning.”  She is looking at him now and he is looking back, just past her, how he normally does.  “You know I would have sent someone if there was trouble.”

And she does, of course, and she trusts Marsh as much as she can trust anyone, but trust is a fickle thing and nothing in her life has ever stayed good for long.  “Oh.”  She swallows so hard it hurts and there is a cup of tea and a piece of bread with jam in front of her and she is reminded that Marsh knows her, that he has earned her trust, that it is her own failing that she can’t give it.  “Who is it?”

She doesn’t have to wait for him to tell her.  She clutches her tea until her palms are burning and watches as Vicuna, flinching the whole way up, pulls herself up the tree with her sword strapped to her back, as Caelus looks carefully up at the rustling leaves for a moment before sprinting with a lithe sort of stealth about him to the base of a different tree which he scales with grace.

The footage on the big screen shifts and the cameras up in the trees are much less clear than the ones lower down, with branches and leaves blocking parts of the shot.  The Gamemakers probably aren’t thrilled about that.  Between the disruption she can see Suzi for what might be the first time since the Games started.  She’s small and she’s fast and she’s used to these trees, to balancing precariously on bowing boughs.  But she’s also starving, by far the most sallow of the remaining tributes, and she’s terrified, and she’s thirteen and she’s outnumbered and she scored low in the ratings for a reason; confronted head on, even in what is ostensibly her territory, she doesn’t stand a chance against the best One has to offer.

Vicuna takes the sword off her back and grits her teeth as she tries to adjust her grip to make up for recent deficits, and then she swings.  Suzi, unarmed, out of her depth, no doubt aware of her own doom, takes a stumbling step back, and Caelus quickly rounds his tree’s wide trunk and jabs his spear at her from the opposite direction, startling her right back into Vicuna’s range.  All it takes is one more swing.  One more swing that sinks through skin and muscle and catches at the clavicle, that should be very much survivable were it not for the fact that it happens so high up and Suzi bears so little weight.  She tumbles from the branch with a cry and then goes completely silent the second her head hits the ground and her neck cracks.

“Pace missed that.”  Mags knows there was nothing he could have done to stop it, but he still should have been there.  No matter how much of him has been drowned out by the morphling, he’s still a mentor and it is a horrible and almost always thankless job that he needs to do right.  That he owes it to tributes like Suzi to do it right, even if she’ll never get the chance to find out that he didn’t.

“He missed it last year too.”  Marsh sounds the same as always: flat and straight to the point.  He sounds like he doesn’t care.  But he’s here in this horrible room because he does.

“Magnotta isn’t here either.”

“I don’t know why you’d expect her to be.”

She looks around the control room then, at the sea of blacked-out screens and empty seats, at all the people that aren’t there and the few that are: Gloss, Cashmere, Brutus who is just eating a sandwich and pretending to watch the big screen to fulfil his obligation, Sylva who is doing a similar thing, Abigail who is half asleep in her seat, scratching at her arms somewhat too intensely, and then the two of them, Marsh and herself.  “Blight isn’t here either.  Or Ash.  That’s not like them.”  Blight’s screen is tilted so she can’t see it and she feels sort of sick.

“The careers got Coy at first light.  He tried to run but there isn’t much of the arena left, and he didn’t try to fight back.”  She nods, lips pressed tightly together, and can’t help but feel so guilty.  Coy was never hers to look after but she has seen every other death in this Games and she feels like she has done him a disservice.  Her memory is a good thing, and a grisly thing, and she tries her best to write everything she sees down so that it might outlive her, and she wants to do every tribute justice, wants to make sure it is known for a long, long time after the Games are finally over what it was that the Capitol did to them.

“There are only three of them left,” she says.

“It’ll be over soon.”

“He’s outnumbered.”

“I said he’d die next.”

“And do you still think that?”  She tries not to sound as desperate as she feels and Marsh’s expression, as ever, completely fails to give away whether or not she has succeeded.

“I don’t know what I think,” he says matter-of-factly.

“What does that mean?”

“This year is strange and my list is no good.”  He’s sort of smiling, more of a slight upturn to the corners of his lips than anything else, and she lets herself read into it.

“You think he can do it.”

“I think you think he can do it, and trusting you has worked out well for me in the past.”

“Not that well.”  She feels bad as she says it but she also knows he agrees.  He regrets winning as much as anybody else does, it’s an open secret.

“Hmm.  But that doesn’t have much to do with you.”

“Doesn’t it?”

He doesn’t actually answer her, just presses his mouth into a line and blinks slowly at her, scratching at the rough scars around his blank, white eye.  “I need some sleep.”

“Go upstairs,” she tells him, “to your own room.”

“I’m not a child.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she says, very aware of the fact that he is a child, in the same way that she is, that he’s nearly as trapped as her.  He doesn’t say goodbye before he leaves and she doesn’t expect him to.  She knows him better than that.

She needs to really buckle down now, to take full advantage of the fact she is well-rested and has more practice than anybody else in Panem.  She needs to do everything in her power to help Percy win.  She really looks at her own screen for the first time today, pushes her donation menu to the side of the screen so she can see Percy sitting on a sturdy tree branch, his back against the trunk, looking down at the Cornucopia.  She wonders if he knows how close to the end they are.  He’ll find out tonight at the latest.

Until then, until the moment it becomes too late, she has more money than she ever has available to her, and she has spent almost none of it, and he can’t win without a weapon.  This isn’t like Marsh’s Games where there are no weapons left, his bare hands will not be good enough.

She scrutinises the donations menu like she doesn’t practically have it memorised by now, looking through the weapons available to her.  They’re horrendously expensive--they would have been pricey at the start of the Games but now they are extortionate and she wouldn’t drain Percy’s budget for this if she didn’t think she had to but she knows she can’t afford not to.  She finds a sword in the menu that looks similar to the kind he seems to favour, double checks then triple checks that she has enough money to buy it, and waits for the right moment.  She can’t send it now without giving his location away, and she doesn’t want him going in the same way Suzi did, so she holds off and hopes it isn’t the wrong choice.

She doesn’t keep record of gifts in the same way she does tributes, but she’s well-aware that it is rare to send tributes weapons--in fact she can’t remember the last time anyone did it.  She certainly has never made a purchase this pricey before and she’s maybe half sure that nobody else has either.  She decides against forming an opinion on that and watches Percy watching Caelus and Vicuna making rounds of the arena, presumably in search of him, instead.  If things take a sudden turn for the worst, she’ll give up on stealth and send the sword right away but for now she just waits on the edge of her seat.

Caelus and Vicuna stop eventually, sit down next to each other between a scorched tree and an intact one, and start chewing on the same greens Percy and Penelope and almost every other tribute relied on for sustenance throughout much of the Games.

“We need to find him,” Caelus says.

“What then?” Vicuna asks, and then they both go quiet.

“You’re feverish,” he says.

She nods.  “You should kill me.”  It’s chilling, the way she says it.  It doesn’t matter how many times Mags has heard it before.

Caelus has been a very pragmatic tribute thus far, he really is a well-made choice from his training academy, but before that he is an eighteen year old boy and Vicuna is his friend.  “We should split up,” he says, when Mags and Vicuna are both expecting to hear assent.

“It’s too late to decide that.”

“It’s not too late until we’re the last ones left.”

And suddenly Mags has a new infusion of the sick sort of perversion of hope that is found in places like this. Percy isn’t as outnumbered as she thought.

Chapter Text

The arena looks different from up high.  Percy can see the defined line, only a few feet behind him, where the fire turned everything to char and then stopped.  It doesn’t look natural.  Nothing here does.  And the whole place is quiet.  The crickets have gone dead, Penny alongside them, and his brain is screaming at him with nothing at all to drown it out.  He hasn’t seen another tribute all day, hasn’t heard a peep from any of them, and he isn’t sure whether the thought of being alone in his enclosure is a comparatively good one or just a different, somehow worse doom.

He’s out of food, and he left all his water and everything else behind when he was desperate to escape with his life, and his hands won’t stop shaking no matter how much he tries to hold them still.  He feels like death.  He feels like a hole in the ground, like a mass grave.  He doesn’t feel like a person.  The hunger is an awful, cramping ache in his stomach and his stomach is consuming him because it has no other option, and he would kill for a cheeseburger right about now, but he’d die to go home.  Really home.  Away from here, away from Four, away from Panem all together.  Back to New York, back to what is probably only ruins now, what is hundreds of square miles of a sunken city nobody remembers.  A city that can do nothing else but sleep.

He tries to imagine the life he should be living, as if having anything else to mourn could bring him any comfort, but he’s struggling.  He realises he can’t quite recall his mom’s voice and decides to think about Penny’s instead because he hasn’t had time to start forgetting her yet and he doesn’t want to think about the little patches of absence he is starting to find where his memories should be.

But thinking about Penny, even if it’s just the way she laughed, or the slow, tuneless way she picked up that stupid song, makes him think about death.  Makes him think about how all he has is memory when there isn't so much as a body left behind.  He thinks again about how she died--as if he’s been able to stop since it happened--and how sure she was that she was doing him a favour.  That he would live and she wouldn’t.  And he’s still alive and she isn’t, so maybe she was right even if he is loath to admit it, and it’s not like he has been trying to get himself killed thus far, but somehow all of this hollowing guilt strengthens his resolve.

He continues to watch the day pass, tries not to think about how dry his mouth is or the way his throat smarts, the way his stomach churns and his head spins.  He thinks about how close the end must be, rather than how weak he will be by the time it arrives.

Apparently that time is sooner than he thinks.  The day passes him by in something of a fugue state until suddenly it is getting dark and the canons are sounding.  One, two.  Coy from Seven, Suzi from Six.  That makes three.  And he’s one of them.  This should be the final day and he is going into it without a weapon and against a team.  He’s a demigod and he knows that means he has had worse odds before, but still these are not ones he likes the sound of.

He doesn’t want to think about trying to kill Caelus and Vicuna at all, much less with his bare hands, but his worn-down body is just about the only thing he has left so he tries to plan.  He hits one wall then another then wishes Annabeth were here to help before deciding he is actually glad she isn’t, because, if she were, he would not be making it out alive.  He thinks about hunting them down in the night, of ending the Games on his terms and as soon as demi-humanly possible, but he can’t quite bring himself to do it.  It’s probably a good idea, but it would feel risky given that he knows they still have their weapons and he doesn’t, and there is no guarantee he could even find them, even if he could bring himself to terms with just how cruel it feels.  He makes the decision to think that is a good thing; that after everything that has happened in here and all the blood on his hands, he can still care about being cruel.

He stays awake thinking and it feels a little like self-sabotage not to sleep before what is ostensibly the most important day of his life, but he doesn’t think he’d be able to if he tried.  So he keeps thinking instead, in circles and spirals and the semblance of the shapes of old, familiar faces that are no longer really familiar at all.  He thinks in the quick-moving rotations of the big drone’s whirring blades as it drops down from somewhere unseen above, beyond where the vault of the false sky ends, to collect the broken, empty bodies, and he tries not to watch the limp, drooping shapes they make as they’re lifted.  Instead he watches the smaller drone come in, its own warbling completely drowned out by that of the larger drone as it hovers almost in front of him, pulling what used to be Coy slowly upwards.

The small drone cuts through the dark and he strains his eyes to watch it come right towards him in his hiding spot, trying his best not to let the fear rise up inside of him.  Donations pass through Mags and Mags knows what she is doing and wants him to get out of this alive; if this drone was going to put him in danger she wouldn’t have sent it.

He stops caring as soon as he sees what the drone is carrying.  A sword.  Ornate and golden and shiny and brand new like nothing in the weapons sheds back at camp.  The metal is cold to the touch and wickedly sharp, and the leather wrapping the hilt is soft and ever so slightly yielding to the touch, and the pommel is shaped like a rose with a blood red stone inlaid at its centre.  And, because there is something fundamentally wrong with the way his life has played out, he feels almost safe, and almost excited, and more than a little relieved.  He tells himself, armed and trained and hardwired to win fights for his life, that he is getting out of this arena, because he has no other choice.

He contemplates sleep but ultimately decides against it.  The night is only so long and the other tributes might wake up before him and find him and a sitting duck is not a thing he has any interest in being.  If he’s lucky--and perhaps every shred of evidence he has points to the contrary, but he values truth less than optimism right now--this could all end in the morning, and he’ll be able to sleep the rest of the day, week, month away, and a single sleepless night won’t matter.  He stays up and he stays alert and he thinks it’s probably cheating to be a demigod in the Games for what is far from the first time, as his body does what it is made to and lets him abuse it, and decides again that it isn’t his fault and he’ll have time to feel guilty about being alive when he can be sure that he actually is.

The rest of the night passes slowly like dripping molasses and he yawns and he blinks away sleep but his brain keeps ticking--quickly, for once the appropriate pace--and he keeps watching, and the sun rises. And he wishes that at some point in those empty hours he had managed to concoct a better plan than to wait until he wins, but he did manage to build up his resolve and he chooses to believe that is the next best thing.

Caelus is, in fact, awake and hunting as soon as dawn breaks, just as Percy feared he would be, but Caelus is passing along with his nose close to the ground, seeking clues like an experienced hunter in the yellowed grass with his spine stooped and his head down, and Percy sees him from his vantage point.  He tells himself it isn’t cruel or wrong or cheating to use the upperhand that has been given to him even if he doesn’t believe it, and flings himself from his branch to the ground with the sort of reckless abandon that comes all too easily to him.

Caelus is fast on his feet and probably about as resilient as any worn-down, dehydrated, starving teenager could be, but Percy is cheating, and he has sharpened his resolve like his brand new sword.  Caelus manages an impressive dodge for someone facing a sneak attack, but his grip on his spear is slack and unprepared, and he is able to avoid a strike straight to the jugular but it cuts cleanly and deeply into his shoulder instead, the momentum of the swing carrying through and pulling the joint straight from its socket with a horrible pop that is too loud in the near silence of an empty, burnt-out arena.  Percy dislodges the blade from where it sits deep--too deep-- in muscle and the blood starts pouring and when Caelus swears it echoes in vacant air, and, even if it would have ended this all quickly, Percy is kind of glad the strike didn’t hit its real target.  He had overestimated how sharp this new sword is in comparison to his last one, and, as much as he has a strong stomach, he isn’t sure he’s up to the challenge of holding his nerve in the presence of an almost decapitated head.

Dominant arm out of commission, Caelus returns the attack with a clumsy one and a grimace.  “Didn’t think you’d make it this far,” he grinds out through gritted teeth as Percy jumps back from his jab before batting the spear away with his sword and spinning into the undefended space on Caelus’ injured side.

“That was sorta the plan,” he admits.  “Where’s Vicuna?”  Maybe she died in the night or the early morning.  Maybe he killed her.  Maybe she never saw it coming.  Percy almost hopes that is the case, whilst in equal measure hoping that it is not.

Caleus blinks at him and Percy is regretting engaging in any sort of conversation when the only way this fight ends is with one or both of them dead.  Because Caelus isn’t a monster, and his eyes are almost watery, and maybe he’s brainwashed but at his core he and someone like Penny aren’t especially different.  It’s not fun to trade quips alongside blows when he can’t convince himself Caelus deserves to die here any more than he does, and every word just reminds him of that.  “You haven’t seen her?”

“No?”  More so out of panic than strategy, Caelus thrusts the butt of his spear into Percy’s stomach, right up under his ribs, and knocks the air out of him before he can slice into Caelus’ side.  His stomach, empty of anything but acid, swills and churns and smarts and he feels sour bile rise in the back of his throat he is quick to swallow down.

“So she’s alive.”

“I guess.”

And then Caelus does the strangest thing.  He must have spent practically his entire childhood under the guidance of the best trainers One has to offer--perhaps the best in all of Panem, if Percy had to guess--and they decided that, of all of the candidates he was the one with the best shot.  Who might have what it takes to win.  But he hesitates.

Not for long, definitely long enough that it looks like an act of giving up, maybe not even long enough for everybody watching from outside the arena to even realise it is happening.  But he definitely hesitates, and Percy can’t afford not to notice something like that.  He thinks, against his will, about skewering Maizie, about the barbarism of that split second decision, and then he thinks about striking Jade just so, about it being messy but, in a backwards sort of way, clean too.

He aims for the jugular again, and Caelus, his own resolve blunted, doesn’t do too much to make it miss.  Percy apologises over and over but Caelus slumps faster than he thought he would, and his eyes don’t flutter for long before they go blank, and his blood is so red it looks fake but it smells like iron and life and death and he goes from pale to paler as it pools around him and all over Percy’s boots.  He doesn’t know anything at all about Caelus, really, but he thinks it’s safe enough to assume that Vicuna isn’t right behind him, so he gets blood all over his hands and his arms and his chest and his chin so he can move his body from the awkward, twisted way it fell, and lay him on his back instead.  He’s lighter than he looks and his skin and his blood are still warm to the touch, though cooling quickly, and maybe he’d look peaceful in his rest were it not for the arterial bleed staining everything in sight.

Percy tries to wipe the blood from his chin and just ends up smearing it all across his cheek.  There’s not much he can do about it when it’s all over him, and the fish in the rivers aren’t something he wants to try his luck with a second time if he can avoid it, and he can’t feel any rain waiting above the boundary of the artificial sky.  These Games are much longer than last year’s and he can’t help but wonder if that is because they have run out.

And then there are two.  He’d like to think the odds are more than 50/50 at this point, that they genuinely are in his favour.

Even so, he doesn’t know where Vicuna is and he doesn’t want her to catch him out how he did Caelus, and if she is nearby she will have heard him killing her friend and he will have heard nothing of her at all.  He makes the choice to run before he can think very hard about it.  He wants to get away from the tang of shed blood, and he wants to get away from the guilt that is starting to creep in, and he wants to bring his body back to life because it has started feeling sluggish suddenly and he can’t afford that.  Maybe he’ll be harder to find, or maybe he won’t because his footsteps will be pressed into the ground and Vicuna will know how to follow them--and actually he hopes she doesn’t follow them, because she won’t want to see Caelus all hollowed out, and he doesn’t want her to have to see that either--and maybe this is just going to draw the Games out for a few more hours, but there isn’t much usable arena left, and a few hours don’t mean much after eighteen days of this and the lifetimes of despair packed into them.

This time he doesn’t lie in wait though.  He can’t bring himself to.  It doesn’t take long for the blood to dry on his skin and start to flake away, and he scratches ineffectively at it and daydreams about a shower with more enthusiasm than anybody else in the history of the world ever has, and he thinks that it seems strangely mean to face Vicuna like this even though there isn’t much in his power he can do to fix it.  His necklace bounces against his chest as he runs, and in the eerie quiet he can hear the way Penny’s ring rattles against the clay beads in the spaces between his exhales and strides, and he can’t help but think about the troupe of ghosts that will always be right there over his shoulder for the rest of his life.  He thinks about Finnick too, because Finnick is still alive, and he’ll be there to welcome Percy back to the closest thing to a home he has left, and he is safe and he will be happy to see Percy even after seeing everything he has had to do to get back, and that’s why he is here.  Because he knows he can survive it.  He knows he has to if he ever wants Finnick to do anything but blame himself ever again.

He smells Vicuna before he can see her.  There is something like rot in the air, something putrid and cloying and bodily that makes his head ache and drowns out the acrid sting of all the burning.  He doesn’t realise it’s her at first; some combination of memory and instinct starts crying monster strongly enough he can’t dismiss it outright despite how long it has been since he last encountered one.  And then he thinks the smell really is of something decomposing, some small part of a body left out in the open.  But it’s getting closer and his run has since slowed to a sluggish walk he is forcing himself to do because he doesn’t just want to stand still.

He realises as soon as he sees her, all but dragging her Zweihänder with one hand only, that the stench is infection.  A bad one that has been festering out here for days at least.  The cloth bandaging her left hand is dirtied and crusted over with streaks of blood that have dried a dark, rusty brown, and yellow-green puss.  And she looks sick.  Not how every tribute he saw in these Games started to when the hunger and the exhaustion and everything set in, not how Caelus did this morning, not how he is sure he would too were he brave enough to face his reflection right now.  She looks sick like she won’t last much longer, like her face is sallow and her eyes are red and she has probably been tracing the dark track of the infection up through her veins, like she is shivering, freezing and sweating at the same time.  He could run, flee, evade her for a few more days and never have to kill her at all.  The thought occurs and it doesn’t feel as much like mercy as he had hoped it would.

She doesn’t jump to attack him right away, and he doesn’t jump to attack her either.  They just stare at each other.  He tries to find the words to apologise to her about Caelus, about all the blood he couldn’t wipe away, but he comes up blank and he can’t school his face into an expression capable of conveying anything but how tired he is.  She must know from the look of him that this is the final fight, that there are only two of them left, that this will all be over soon.  She must also know she is too weak for it not to skew her odds, and though she might be driven by adrenaline to keep going in spite of that, it’s not like he won’t also be.

There’s not much she can do about the fact that her sword is supposed to be wielded with two hands and one of hers is strictly out of commission, but her good arm is still well-muscled and strong, and she still knows what she is doing even as the infection is eating its way through her.  Her sword is heavy and has a much further reach than his and she swings it at an angle low enough he doesn’t have time to duck beneath it, and high enough he can’t jump over it, and there isn’t enough space between him and the tree at his back to jump all of the way out of its way.  It slices a gash deep into the fat across his stomach, all the way from right to left, right below the bruise from Caelus’ spear, but the adrenaline and the determination are buzzing too strongly for him to feel anything more than a sting giving way to warmth as slowly, then too quickly, the blood wells then overflows.

She is not quick.  Not with the infection and the unwieldiness of her weapon.  But still he can’t move any further backwards, and between him and her is a wicked piece of metal that is longer than he is tall.  If he cannot work his way around that, it doesn’t matter what the odds say: he will be impaled against the tree and she will have the Capitol doctors saving her from her infection, knowing that failure is not an option.

In most people’s lives, being used to having weapons pointed at you is probably rarely, if ever, a good thing.  But Percy isn’t most people, and he’s pretty sure he does most of his best thinking when the only alternative is dying, probably in a painful, horrible way.  A tree is not a wall, and there is no way to go backwards, and darting forwards increases the probability of complete, through-and-through impalement to frankly unacceptable levels, so before the next swing can strike him he darts to the side.  It still catches him, just barely, nicking him just above the hip and just below the gash he is making a very conscious decision not to look at right now, lest he be forced to confront the fact it is probably worse than he currently thinks.

And now he isn’t trapped.  But he still has to get close enough to make his weapon useful and hers useless if he expects to win this fight.  He briefly contemplates the thought of running again, but can’t bring his brain around to thinking of that as anything other than leaving her to die, more slowly and painfully than she should have to.  And he’s probably at risk of developing his own infection now too.  Hers would kill her before his would, he’s sure, but somehow the misery in this place which leaves no room for anything else would only grow.

He’s still fast on his feet, and it has always been an advantage of his that he tends to move in ways he isn’t expected to.  So, as Vicuna does everything she can to fortify her injured side, he chooses to ignore that her strong side is her strong side for a reason, and darts right towards it.  He doesn’t have quite the options he had with Caelus earlier, so isn’t able to choose what sort of blow his final one will be.  With no time to think and his heart hammering so hard the sound is filling his ears, he pulls back the arm holding his sword and plunges it deep through her stomach.  She’ll only die slower if he leaves it there, so with a swill of nausea he is quickly losing the capacity to keep pushing down, he braces himself and pulls it back out.

It would likely be in vain, but it won’t be the fastest death so she could almost certainly keep fighting back.  She doesn’t.  She falls back onto the grass, and he looks at her face, at the blood pooling at her lips and her half-lidded eyes, rather than the way her organs are shifting through the hole in her abdomen.

“Stay,” she urges through a croak, her hand twitching at her side almost like she is trying to reach out to him.  He doesn’t tell her that they don’t know each other, that he is done here, that this microcosmic hell is over now.  He sits.  He picks up her uninjured hand and holds it in his, hardly even noticing how cold and clammy it is.  “It wasn’t worth it,” she says slowly, every word a labour, each syllable painful to force out of her mouth.  He wonders if Caelus and Jade, and maybe Hearth too but he doesn’t really know what happened to him, thought the same thing, if they were able to see through the brainwashing just in time to regret everything, or if they died believing it was noble and honourable and whatever else they believed it was to bleed out in an overgrown terrarium.  He squeezes her hand and then it goes limp in his.

And, just like that, he has won.  It doesn’t feel like much of a victory.

He uses the last of his energy to throw the sword to the side, far enough away that he can’t see it, and he just remains sitting there, by Vicuna’s side.  He contemplates getting away from her, trying to pretend he didn’t just do that, but she asked him to stay so he will, for as long as he can.  It doesn’t help that he feels too heavy to move, like now he has stopped and everything else has stopped and the ghosts are no longer right behind him, only able to catch up in sleep or contemplation, but rather bodies, full and corporeal and weighty, and numerable enough to bury him.  It feels like he should be having a stronger reaction, like he should be cheering or sobbing or shouting or vomiting up nothing but bile because that is all that is left inside of him.  But he doesn’t.  He just sits.

Mags is given no time at all to come to terms with the way this final day ends at noon, with something like calmness that sets her teeth on edge.  Avoxes swoop into the Control Room to gather her and Marsh from the crowd of mentors that is, for the first time in at least a week, actually complete.  Nobody is saying much.  Porter lays a hand on her shoulder in something like a congratulations, and Angus smiles at her with his lips pressed together and his eyes wide, and Marsh doesn’t do anything at all except stand with her, and leave with her, and stay outwardly emotionless but right by her side as they are escorted from the control room, around corners and down corridors, and into the hovering craft that looks very little like it did eleven years ago.

“It’s over,” she says on an exhale, trying to convince herself she believes it.

“Far from it!” Trinity Price declares as she stomps into the craft on heels that look ready to break, and Mags bites back the urge to spit at her like the animal she probably already thinks Mags and everybody else from the districts is.  Instead she just looks at her and hopes every ounce of the disgust she puts into it really comes across.  The Red Man swoops in, laying one hand on Mags’ shoulder and the other on Marsh’s, and she’s almost proud of the way they both shrug it off in perturbed unison.

Only she is too wired to be proud.  Her nerves are all over the place, and the moment Percy had won, even as he sat sombre and bloodstained, that sick sort of excitement had welled up inside of her.  It hasn’t given way whatsoever as the craft rises, but there are only so many moments between now and the time when she will be reunited with Percy, and fear sits heavy like a stone in the base of her stomach.  She isn’t really even sure why.  Maybe she just worries he will blame her, that he will be the one who finally sees just how much of this is her fault, or maybe she’s scared he will be different in a way there is no coming back from, that now he has won--a hollow win, the kind that is easy to regret--and she will have to watch him deteriorate now.

Trinity and the Red Man are talking and she and Marsh are not, and she can’t decide if she wants time to crawl along as slowly as possible, or if she just wants it to end, to be over.  She can’t kid herself and pretend the Games themselves are ever easy on her, on anyone who plays them, but she doesn’t have as much practice at this part, and the adrenaline has all drained out by now, and she feels kind of lost.  Like she is floating in space, like the craft has moved on and left her behind, suspended in the air without support or a way down, with nothing to do but stay in the same place and never be able to move on from it.

“This is finally happening.”  Marsh sounds as flat as always, so she infers a sense of awe and projects it onto him.  If all goes well he won’t be back in the control room next year.  She doesn’t tell him that it won’t really be the same as getting out, that he won’t be able to escape being a victor, that he will end up back in the Capitol, that he will end up here again somehow, someday.  That’s just how it works.  She doesn’t tell him, but Marsh isn’t a person predisposed to any particular optimism, so she doesn’t doubt he already knows.

“Are you ready for the shit show?” she manages to force out.

“No.”  Marsh hasn’t been part of a victory tour since his own, has never been one of the Capitol’s favourite victors, has had as close to anonymity as one of the least anonymous people in Panem can achieve.  Not now, though.  Now it implodes, and then it stops.  And then it all starts again.  Round and round until you die.  Mags can’t pretend she doesn’t understand the urge so many victors have to speed that cycle up to a premature end.

When they set down in the arena, Mags does what she knows she is not supposed to and runs right out of the hatch, right onto the grass, right to Percy’s side.  Nobody stops her so she drops to aching knees that protest and creak with age and abuse and pulls his shoulder into her chest.  He lets her, almost limply, like he is dead too, and she holds him tighter.  He is all bones, is much too still against her sternum, is covered in blood that is mostly not his and will probably ruin her shirt, but he is warm to the touch--hot, even--and he is alive and this is all too real, even in its artifice.  The grass is too scratchy and something about the wind or the atmosphere isn’t right, but Vicuna is right there, and Mags can smell sweat and infection and blood and death and it transports her back to her own Games in an awful, visceral way nothing has in years.  “I’m so sorry,” she murmurs again and again into greasy, matted hair as she feels warm tears finally start to seep into her shirt.

Back in the craft, Capitol doctors tend to the worst of the wounds with steady hands, as Trinity takes stock of a whole host of half-healed nicks with a series of nods that Mags decides she has neither the want nor need to decipher.  She reaches a hand up to Percy’s face, tries to brush her thumb through the somehow already healed gash cutting above his left eye, but he flinches back, makes a sound sort of like a growl in the back of his throat, and Trinity, despite all her years of experience, jumps back, her eyes as wide as all the filler in her face will let them open.  She shakes her hands and brushes her fingers against each other, and Percy takes the damp towel she offers him and uses it to wipe the blood from his own face as he winces at the prodding at his stomach.

“Inspiring,” she tells him, “truly.”  Mags rolls her eyes and Marsh is looking at Trinity with a hatred that is plain and honest in spite of the inexpressive nature of his face.  “I couldn’t have asked for a better performance.”

“Don’t touch me.”  Trinity betrays no signs she is really planning on listening.  Percy sips slowly at the cold water he has been given, and eats one saltine then another with a trepidation that soon gives way to desperation, and Mags tries to imagine herself all those years ago, looking just like this.  She can’t do it, but she can remember Marsh with perfect detail, can see his decimated face in as much clarity as had it only happened yesterday.

“A lot of blood,” Trinity goes on, like she is talking about the weather and not someone’s dead sons and daughters. “That’ll leave a fair few marks.  Not so much what happened to poor, plain Penelope, but Caelus?  How you cut him?  The tour guides will have no trouble at all finding that place.”

Mags watches Percy’s face do this terribly complex thing where it races through every conceivable iteration of agony before it becomes angry in a way that ages it more than the past couple of weeks already have.  “Tour guides?”

Trinity nods brightly, leaning forwards in her seat like she has something fantastic to say that he is just going to hate to miss.  “Tour guides!  We just love the Games here.  We love people like you and remembering just what you’ve done, just how hard you fought.  It simply wouldn’t do to forget it!  These old arenas make for fantastic day trips for well-paying Capitol citizens and their families to really marvel at.”

And Percy’s face changes then.  Like the anger falls right off of it, replaced in an instant with an eerie sort of blank calm.  Mags stares, tries to work out what he is thinking, what is making its way through his head, what he is going to do next.

And, behind them, the arena they have just left, sits still and silent for a moment.  Before, with a mechanical moan followed by a great organic crash, the whole thing floods.