Chapter Text
Tony rolled the dice and he landed two sixes. The girls around him cheered and he pulled all of the chips in the center of the table into his already massive pile. A tall man with a military bearing pushed his way through the crowd and grabbed Tony by the shoulder. Tony turned with a scowl, then laughed when he realized who it was. “Rhodey! Hey! You here to play a game?”
“You know I’m not. We were both supposed to be backstage preparing for the opening ceremonies an hour ago.”
“Why in the world would I be backstage where it’s boring when I could be out here having fun with all of these lovely people?”
The people around him let out drunken cheers. The introduction was always broadcasted live at eight, and it was barely two now, so Tony had no clue why he had to be there so early.
He held out his dice and the woman hanging off his arm blew on them. Then Tony held out the dice to Rhodey. “Come on Honey Bear, give me a little good luck.”
Rhodey knocked the dice out of his hand and dragged him away from the crowd. “We’re late, and President Stane will have both of our asses on a platter if you aren’t there and looking perfect when the cameras start rolling. Come on.”
Rhodey dragged him out of the casino and down the hallways of the hotel until they reached the small door that lead to the stylists, who were all running around in a panic. They gathered around Tony with brushes and powders, dabbing at him furiously with makeup. Tony pushed them off. “I’m fine, I already look fine.”
“Not even close! We needed at least an hour to get you ready!” A woman wailed, while trying to put mascara on him. Behind him a stylist gelled his hair slicked back as he tried to dodge out of the way.
“We have your costume!” A different stylist said, holding up a sequined baby blue tuxedo. Tony shuddered in disgust. There was no way he was agreeing to wear that. He was already in a well tailored black suit, elegant and far more subtle than anything else people at the Capital wore. Fashion these days was unapologetically ostentatious and while Tony liked wearing stupid shit as much as the next guy, this would be his first time on national television and he wanted to look dignified, and not like some punk kid. His only concession to fashion was his goatee, overly elaborate in the current style.
They started to protest and were cut off as the screen above their heads made a loud buzzing sound and a countdown began. One minute until the cameras started rolling. Rhodey pulled open the door to the stage and Tony trotted out, running his hand through his hair and messing up the look the stylists had frantically tried to give him and leaving it tousled. He sank down next to Christine who gave him an unimpressed look.
“Cutting it close, aren’t you?”
Cutting it close? The whole room was empty, they hadn’t even let the crowd in yet. Once the doors were open it was going to be at least a half an hour of people shuffling around to find their seats. Tony leaned back in his chair, putting his hands behind his head and crossing one leg over the other. “I made it didn’t I?”
“You’re lucky you did. I don’t want to think what would Stane would have done to you if you didn’t.”
“Come on, Obie is an old softie.”
“You realize that he-” she was interrupted by a buzzer and the clock on a screen to the side flashed 0. She gave up on what she was going to say. She stood up and held her microphone close to her face, walking up to the edge of the stage with fake cheers played over the speakers mounted above them.
“Hello and welcome to the 74th Hunger Games! I’m Christine Everheart, coming to you live! Who’s excited to get started?”
A fake crowd roared and Tony sat up straighter in his chair. Was this it? Was this the actual interviews? Where was the crowd? In past years this event has always been with a live audience. Christine had said it was live, so what was going on?
In the middle of the aisle a camera watched, recording their performance and broadcasting it to the rest of the Capital and all of the Districts.
Christine paced back and forth, riling up the nonexistent crowd. “We have have excellent set contestants this year, are you ready to meet them?”
The crowd cheering sound played again.
“Excellent, excellent! Please turn your attention to the Coliseum doors!”
They were currently inside the game center, a building devoted entirely to the games. Right now Tony was on stage meant for interviews. There were training rooms below, and rooms for the contestants above, and in the basement was the control center for the actual arena. Leading up to the building was a long stretch of road with bleachers stretching high to the sky on either side, filled with people from the Capital who were lucky enough to get tickets.
On the screen to the side of the stage Tony watched as the doors swung open and the first two contests rolled out on a horse drawn chariot, waving. Each district sent two contestants to the Capital each year, a boy and a girl between the ages of 13 and 19. There were 12 districts so it added up to a lot of contestants, and Tony felt himself start to zone out. A chariot would enter the coliseum, the crowd would go nuts, the contestants would wave for the cameras and be projected for the world to see on the big screen, then it would be on to the next group. Boring. Tony looked down at his phone and started texting Rhodey.
The crowd let out a collective gasp, and Tony whipped his head up. On the screen there was the chariot for District 12. A curly brown haired girl stood beside a short blond boy. The camera jerked away to focus on the precious set of contestants, but not before everyone got a good shot of the blond kid giving them all the middle finger. The crowd on the bleachers was booing and hissing, and from the corner of the shot Tony could see things being thrown down onto the path.
“Who was that?” Tony asked. He had been watching the games his whole life (as was the law) and had never seen a contestant do something like that. This was the biggest moment of these dumb kid’s lives, a huge honor, and he was flipping them off? That kid had balls, damn. Tony hated to admit it, but he was intrigued.
“Some nobody from 12,” Christine responded with a downward twist of her lips. “His interview is going to be a disaster. Sit up straight, the camera’s are switching back to us.”
Christine sat down and gave the camera a hundred watt smile. “Alright, that was quite the entrance from our contestants!”
Above them a fake clapping track played and Tony tried not to wince. The illusion worked on TV, but in person it felt jarring. Were there really no people for this part? Was this new, or has it always been this way and Tony hadn’t paid close enough attention to notice?
“Now all the contestants are downstairs switching costumes and getting ready for their interviews. In the meantime, here’s a word from our illustrious President Stane!”
Fake clapping filled the room as the screens were all taken over by a shot of Stane from the waist up, standing in his office and looking dignified as he always did. He gave the usual spiel about how the Hunger Games were necessary to maintain peace and order, yada yada yada, superiority of the Capital, the Districts would kill each other without them, the games show how the people of the districts will go feral and kill each other if given half the chance, whatever, more on how terrible and uncivilized the districts were, boring. Boring, boring, boring. It was the same every year, and Tony would have thought that Obie just reused the same video if his clothes didn’t change each time. The video ended and Christine appeared back on the screen. “Thank you President Snow. Now listen up everyone, I have an extra special guest with me today. Please welcome Tony Stark, our new Game Master, and the youngest Game Master in the history of the Hunger Games at the tender age of 18!”
Tony stood up and smiled for the camera, waving and blowing kisses. “Thank you, thank you!”
They both sat back down and Christine leaned towards him.
“So Tony, I imagine this was quite the surprise. Remind us what you did before this?”
“Of course. I’m a weapons developer, I’ve built all of the defenses keeping our Capital safe. The Jericho missiles, flamethrowers, the guns our peacekeepers carry, all of that was me. When I was offered the job I refused at first, I’ve never had any interest in the games. I watch the government mandated half hour per day, and that’s it. And by ‘watch’ I mean it’s on in the background while I mess around on my phone. I much prefer the Bachelor, any Bachelor fans in the audience?”
Christine laughed, though the speakers were silent. Whoever was in charge of sound effects was a tough crowd. Tony shrugged it off and continued.
“Wonderfully addicting, isn’t it? I’d much rather watch a nice show about love than all this savagery. Sure, we all know that the people of the outer districts will tear each other apart at the slightest chance, but do we really need to see it? So I have no idea what this job is all about, but when the President himself asks, you don’t refuse! If he thinks I’m the right man for the job then I’m going to do it to the best of my ability, and have some fun along the way.”
The fake crowd clapped and he sat back in his chair, satisfied that he had done a good enough job even if he hadn't read any of the lines scrolling across the teleprompter at the back of the room. It was a live broadcast, they had no way of stopping him and what he was saying was much better than the stuffy lines they had written for him anyway.
“I didn’t even know the last guy retired, he seemed so young.” Tony mused. “I tried to reach out to him to get some tips and I couldn’t find him anywhere.”
Christine laughed nervously and her eyes darted from him to the Peacekeepers standing in their white armor in the back of the room. When had they got here? Were they allowed on the stage?
“Doesn’t matter. Let’s meet the contestants! Bring them out!”
The door where Tony had entered earlier swung open and a tall well muscled boy walked out. He was dressed in medieval armor and had long blonde hair. Just from looking at him Tony could tell he would do well in the games.
He introduced himself as Thor, and after a few inane questions Christine was shuffling him back off stage and bringing in the female contestant. Occasionally the teleprompter in the back would pass over to Tony to ask the next question, then nicely list out the question for him to say, and Tony would ask whatever the hell he wanted.
He tilted his head to the side and looked over the current tribute, a thin boy dressed in ripped purple pants, with his torso and face painted green. This was why Tony never trusted the stylists. Why would they dress the poor guy like this? Awful.
The kid had introduced himself as Bryce or Bruce or something like that and was squirming awkwardly in his seat, clearly uncomfortable with being on TV. Tony wondered why he volunteered if he didn’t want to be here.
“So, what do you think about Moore’s Law?” he finally asked, curious to see if it was possible for the kid to get even more uncomfortable as he tried to bullshit his way through an answer on a topic he had never heard of.
“I think that without the invention of quantum computing it’s fundamentally unsustainable.”
Tony blinked at him. That was actually a decent answer.
Tony had always been told that people in the districts thought that computers were the work of witches and any school beyond learning to spell made them prey to the devil. Who was this guy? Was he special? Who had he learned from? Were there other people in the districts like him?
Before he could ask any more questions the green guy was hustled off the stage and it was time for a new contestant. Tony would have to find him later. For now he suffered through another twenty contestants, Christine cutting him off whenever he tried to talk and the teleprompter no longer showing his name, until they reached the last one.
A skinny blond boy stepped on stage in a blue spandex suit with a white star on the chest and Tony recognized him as the guy who had taken his time in the spotlight to flip everyone off. This was going to be good.
He walked across the stage, and instead of sitting in the interview chair like a good little contestant he charged up to Tony and started jabbing him in the chest with a finger.
“Monsters! Murderers!” he yelled.
Tony stood up and pushed him away. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Tony had thought the rude gesture earlier was a sign of some spunk, or a way to get more attention. Now it was looking like the guy was just nuts.
“I’m not going to play your little games!” The blond kid yelled, so worked up he was almost spitting. “I’m not going to sit here like a lamb for the slaughter and pretend that this is all ok! This is wrong and you should all be ashamed of yourselves! Our lives are not a game!”
The peacekeepers rushed the stage and grabbed him as he lunged for Tony. They dragged him off as he screamed and cursed, cutting off as a peacekeeper hit him in the head with the barrel of his gun. The boy went limp, and they dragged him backstage. The door swung shut with a click, audible in the silence of the empty auditorium.
Tony sat back down and took a deep breath. He noticed that his hands were trembling and he put them together in his lap to hide it.
“Do you know what he was talking about?” he asked Christine who was staring at the door, grim faced.
In all of his years of (sort of) watching the games, nothing like this had ever happened.
Christine cleared her throat. “And those were our contestants,” she said with a wide smile.
“Christine, what’s going on? Why are you acting like this?”
She ignored him. “They’ll be spending the next week training, and I’ll see you all again for their final score before they go into the games!”
“Christine!”
“Thank you, and have a great night!”
The sound of an audience clapping and cheering rained down from the speakers, drawing Tony out as he tried to figure out what was going on. He grabbed the arm of one of the peacekeepers. “What was he talking about? Why is Christine acting like nothing happened?”
The man shook him off. “I need you to come with me. The President wants to see you.”
Tony followed him off the stage, two more guards with guns following behind him. They went to the lower levels and the first guard gestured to a waiting car.
“Thanks, but I think you guys already took care of the crazy guy. I don’t need an escort, I’ll just take my own car.”
The guard pushed Tony's head down and forced him in the car like he was some sort of criminal. He tried the door handle and it was locked. He pounded on the divider between him and the driver. “Let me out! Hey!”
The car pulled out of the underground garage and drove to the center of the Capital, to the tall white building where the President lived and most of the politics of the country happened. The doors didn’t unlock until Tony was inside the building, with six inch thick doors locking them tightly inside the Capitol building. Tony knew that they were just there as a safety precaution for the president, and he had never felt trapped by them before. Tony got out slowly, and the guards walked him right to the door of the President’s office. The door swung open and Obie threw out his arms. “Tony my boy!”
“Obie!”
Tony hugged him and Obadiah Stane, President of Pandora, patted him roughly on the back. Tony immediately felt better. Obie was practically his dad, since his parents had died four years ago. And even when they had been alive Obie had been much more of a parent than his actual dad. Obie wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him.
Obie led him inside the tasteful office, and offered him a glass of scotch which Tony gratefully took. He sat down in one of the comfortable chairs facing the desk and Obie sat on the other side.
“How’d it go?”
Tony looked over his shoulder, to make sure none of the guards were in the room. “Terrible. And you need to hire so new peacekeepers, these guys forced me here like some common criminal!”
“They’re just trying to keep you safe,” Obie said patiently. “Do you need to go through the training again?”
Every person in the Capital went through training every month on how the peacekeepers were their friends and were there to keep them safe. That’s why they could be found on every street corner, and had the authority to search your house with no warning. Some people said it was invasive, but those people always ended up having their homes searched and were quickly locked up for illegal activities. There was no reason to fear the peacekeepers unless you had something to hide. And Tony had nothing to hide, he loved the Capital. He had devoted his life to making defenses to keep it safe.
Obie put a hand on his shoulder comfortingly. “You can retake the training, and I’ll talk to them, how about that? Now tell me about that tribute, the one from 12.”
Tony frowned. The guy who had ruined their perfectly nice show? He didn’t want to talk about him. The contestant had sounded so sure of what he had been saying, filled with righteous rage as he spat out his accusations. He had gotten under Tony’s skin more than he wanted to admit, so he played it off.
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I don’t know. He was crazy. He called me a monster! All I was doing was sitting there, what’s so monstrous about that?”
Obie watched him closely. “That’s all you think?”
Tony looked away, fiddling with the edge of his shirt. “Yeah, what else would I be thinking? I was more interested in the green guy. I didn’t know the districts were advanced enough to have computers. I thought the Capital had offered and they always turned us down, that’s what I learned in school. Did you make a break through with them? Is that why you’ve been so busy lately? If they’re willing to accept more technology and education I think we could really start improving their quality of life.”
“There are always a million things in the works, you know that,” he said noncommittally, then changed the subject. “I’m glad to see you’re safe. I’m much less happy with your performance. The teleprompter is there for a reason.”
Tony rolled his eyes. “It was so boring, I spiced it up!”
Obie shook his head. “You have to follow the prompter. Being Game Master is a big responsibility, and I was trusting you to be mature enough to handle it.”
“I’m mature! I can totally handle it.” Tony insisted. Suddenly he didn’t feel like a maverick for going off script, he felt more like a disobedient child who had colored outside the lines and now his father didn't want to hang it up on the fridge.
“I’m going to need you to stand in front of the green screen, and read the lines like you were supposed to earlier. Then we’ll edit it in post and it’ll be like you did it right the first time.”
“What do you mean? It was a live broadcast, it’s too late.”
Obie laughed. “Live? Why would you think that? No, everything goes through a round of editing before we broadcast it tonight. It’s so we can edit out trouble makers like the boy from 12. We don’t need to be broadcasting rude gestures and profanity, children watch this show.”
Tony frowned. When he was younger, he had gotten nightmares for weeks from watching a child from district 3 bash another child’s head in with a rock. The sounds had sickeningly wet, and even after the child was lying still and limp, the boy from 3 kept smashing, his labored breaths turning into wild laughs. He didn’t stop until forty minutes later when another contestant shot him through the head. By then there had been nothing left of the first boy’s head except a mushy red pulp.
Tony made sure to watch only the legal requirement's worth of the games after that, and at night when most of the contestants were sleeping and there was nothing going on.
He could still remember the sounds it had made, and it troubled him much more than hearing the other kids swear on the playground.
Still, he didn’t say anything. They did the games the way they did for a reason, and they had been successful for 74 years. That’s what Tony had learned from school. It was important to support the games to keep the Capital safe and remind everyone that the districts were savages, and to remind the districts that the Capital could crush them at any time if they threatened them. It was the way the system had to work. No one ever complained.
Tony obediently stood in front of the green sheet and repeated the lines from the teleprompter word for word. When he was done Obie sent him home with a slice of cake and a pat on the back.
Tony sat on his couch and checked his phone. Three missed calls from Rhodey. He called him back, and as the phone rang the tv turned itself on with a burst of static.
“Please pay attention, the following broadcast is mandatory for all citizens. All drivers please pull over and all manufacturers halt production,” a robotic voice droned. Outside peacekeepers prowled the streets, harassing people who weren’t standing in front of the large public televisions, and using their universal keys to go inside randomly selected houses to make sure the occupants were in front of the tv. Rhodey picked up the phone.
“Tones? What happened today? They hustled you out of there really fast.”
“One of the contestants was getting aggressive, so they wrapped things up quick. Then Obie made me rerecord all my lines because I went off script.”
“I thought it was live?”
“I thought so too.”
Tony looked at the TV as it showed the contestants riding in on their chariots. In the corner the word ‘LIVE’ blinked brightly.
“Whatever. I’ll stay on script next time.”
On the other side of the line Rhodey snorted. “No you won’t. I gotta go, don’t want to get in trouble for not listening to the broadcast.”
“Alright, ‘night.”
Tony put his phone down and turned his attention to the tv where the 11th district had just appeared on screen. After a couple minutes of waving, the camera shifted to District 12. Tony leaned forward and took a good look at the boy. He looked like he hadn't had a good meal in weeks, and he had deep bags under his eyes, visible under the layers of makeup they always slapped on the contestants. He was wearing a red white and blue spandex jumpsuit, with a white star on the chest. It looked as dumb as the other costumes in Tony’s opinion. They showed the chariot emerge from the doorway, and a few seconds as the boy tried to regain his balance on the shifting chariot. The camera cut to Christine the second the boy started to raise his hand, so it looked like he was about to wave, except for the angry face he was making. If Tony hadn’t known what was coming next, he never would have been able to guess the by was about to flip off a whole stadium of people.
The segment with Christine played, and when the camera cut to Tony it was a close up head shot where he said everything he was supposed to. They skipped the whole interview with the boy from 12, instead showing a small banner on the bottom of the screen saying he was sick and unable to come up.
The broadcast ended and the tv switched to playing a reality show. Tony turned it off.
He scrubbed his hands up and down his face. Were the games always like this, and he had never noticed? He had thought that it was all real. How much was cut?
He used his phone to pull up last year’s opening ceremony, and watched it through. They never showed the chariot from district 10. Tony watched the sequence again, sure he had somehow missed it. There was no district 10. In the interviews, there was no female contestant from 10. How had he not noticed? He went back another year and watched through the interviews. The interview with the boy from 11 cut off after less than thirty seconds, as he started rising up from his chair. Tony went back another year. This time both the girl from 12 and the boy from 6 were missing from the interviews. With 24 people, it was easy to lose track of who all had spoken and who hadn’t, especially when the games happened every year and Tony didn’t care to watch closely. He didn’t like to know who the contestants were because then he got upset when they died. It was better to not get invested.
Now he was invested in the skinny blond boy from 12. He pulled up the district 12 reaping ceremony. It wasn’t required watching for Capital citizens, so he hadn’t seen it. Nobody ever watch these, they were supposedly boring as hell. He was under the impression that they rounded up all the volunteers then did some sort of random drawing to pick who got the honor of going to the Capital and competing in the games. Tony would never volunteer for something like that, and couldn’t understand why the people from the districts would want to volunteer either. Fame? Fortune? There was a decent prize at the end, both for the contestant and their district. Maybe they just wanted an excuse to kill. Some of them were crazy enough.
He played the longest video that showed up in his search results and watched shaky handheld footage of the tops of people’s heads as an overdressed woman dug her hand around in a fishbowl full of paper. She pulled out a slip and read, “James Barnes!”
Was that the boy’s name? James?
There was a wail and a woman in the back of the crowd held on tightly to her son. The peacekeepers stepped forward and pulled them apart, and the little girl beside them burst into tears. They dragged the boy to the stage as he panicked and fought.
Tony must have the wrong video, this wasn’t the same boy. This one had long shaggy brown hair, and only one arm that he was using to punch at the peacekeepers.
The Capital woman held up the piece of paper. “By entering your name into the drawing in exchange for extra food rations, you have volunteered yourself for the Hunger Games. Everyone please clap for our first volunteer!”
There was a scuffle in the crowd and the blond boy ran towards the stage.
“I volunteer as tribute!”
Everyone turned to look at him, as he used his thin frame and sharp elbows to fight his way to the front of the crowd where the other boy had been forced on stage.
“I volunteer! Take me instead of Bucky!” he shouted, his breath wheezing.
Bucky held out his hand. “Steve don’t you do this, don’t you dare do this. You have no chance of winning.”
Steve climbed on stage and grabbed onto Bucky. “Neither do you. No one from 12 ever wins. You have your mom and sister to look out for. What are they supposed to do if they lose you?”
Bucky opened and closed his mouth, his eyes seeking out his family in the crowd. They were huddled together, tears streaming down their faces.
Tony noticed that nobody was crying for Steve.
“Please, Buck, you must’ve saved my life a hundred times over, and who knows how many more winter’s I’ll last anyway, especially without your help. Let me do this. I have to do this.”
Bucky held onto him until the guards ripped him away and forced him back down to the muddy town square. His family immediately rushed to him, and he held onto them as he looked up at Steve with guilt ridden eyes.
The Capital woman held Steve’s hand in the air.
“Our male contestant for the 74th annual Hunger Games!”
The footage cut off before Tony could see the crowd’s response.
The black screen reflected his face back to him and he looked like he had just seen a ghost.
“What the hell?” he whispered to himself. He fisted his hand in his hair and leaned forward, staring blankly at the floor.
That had to be a joke, right? That was nothing like how a reaping was supposed to go, it was supposed to be a great honor to be picked.
He had seen people edit children’s movies into horror movie trailers, so this was probably something like that. He searched around and found the official video, posted by the Capital broadcasting center. The same woman drew a paper out of the bowl.
It cut to a close up shot of her face, the same way it had done for Tony’s redone lines in tonight’s broadcast. “Steve Rogers! Who graciously volunteered earlier this morning.”
It cut to a shot of Steve yelling that he volunteered, as he ran towards the stage.
It cut back to the Capital woman, who held Steve’s hand in the air.
“Our male contestant for the 74th annual Hunger Games!”
It went to a shot of a train, which played for the rest of the video as it drove through grassy meadows. Stats scrolled quickly across the screen in a loop listing Steve as 18 years old, 5’4” and a hundred pounds even, and that was the end of the video.
It felt incredibly fake next to the handheld footage shot from someone in the crowd. He went back to the first video and got a notice that it had been taken down. He switched back to the train video, watching it again with a frown. It felt even faker and more disjointed the second time.
How could the official channel be lying? All of the contestants wanted to go into the arena, right? Why would they have to fake it?
He dialed Rhodey and waited as the phone rang.
“The contestants are volunteers, right?” he asked desperately when Rhodey picked up.
“Hello to you too. Yeah, they are. Why do you ask?”
“Did you watch the reaping for the guy from 12?”
“No, those are always boring as hell. It’s like ten minutes of train footage.”
“I found a video from someone in the crowd, and-”
“Someone in the crowd? You can’t trust random videos, they’re fake. You can make up anything you want with computers anymore. You remember the movie we saw last weekend? You really think they found an octopus the size of a house and had him eat the actors? No. It’s not real.”
Tony let out a sigh of relief. “Yeah, you’re right. Thanks Platypus.”
He ended the call and flopped sideways on the sofa. The contestant from 12 had gotten under his skin more than he wanted to admit. He had seemed so sure of himself that he had had Tony questioning everything he had ever learned. This guy was just crazy, that was all there was to it. The games would go on, and Tony would be proud to run them.