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Minx peers down from the balcony to the training room floor and searches for her tribute. He isn’t very hard to pick out, loud and taller than any other tribute by a good margin, his presence is far too commanding to be missed. He's a decent fighter, actually has a good grip on some of the weapons available to him. He isn't small, not like some of the tributes she's had to mentor in the years past. He's underfed as all children of 10 are, but there's a decent amount of lean muscle on him that gives him some advantage over most of the other tributes from years of heavy lifting that comes with working out on a ranch.
For the first time in a while, Minx's tribute has a decent chance of winning the Games.
It's not just physical attributes that give this year's district 10's candidate the edge, though, oh he has far more working for him than that.
Ted Nivison is a force to be reckoned with as far as tributes go. He’s far too smart to fall prey to the social aspects of the Games. As far as tributes Minx has had to mentor go, he's probably the first to realize just how important the pre-game is. He is probably the most charismatic person Minx has ever met in her life not to mention, something that not only astounds her, but something that gives him a sweeping edge. If Minx is impressed with him then she knows every citizen of the Capitol just has to be absolutely taken with him.
It’s a well-known fact amongst the Victors that it’s not physical strength or ability that will win you the Games, these so much more to it. The whole thing is very much a personality contest above all else. Who can steal the spotlight? Who can win the hearts of the people?
If anyone can this year, it is Ted.
The whistle is blown, signaling the end of the training day, and Minx walks down the stairs to the training floor to go find her tribute where he waits for her.
“How did things go today?” she asks like she hasn’t been watching him the entire time from above.
“They went well, I think I’ll get a pretty decent training score.”
That, for sure, he will get.
Minx runs her tongue over the pointed tips of her upper teeth, thinking. The training score he definitely has in the bag, no questions asked, but she needs to prepare him for the other things to come. There is a game that begins long before he ever sets foot in the arena and she needs to be here to help him through it. He's already halfway through it with the Opening Ceremony and the interviews already out of the way, but there's still more to come.
As they head back to the floor they’re staying on of the training building, Minx speaks up again. “I was thinking we should talk about the Naming Ceremony over dinner tonight, it’s a pretty big deal and I think we should go over some ideas for what you’re going to choose.”
“Sure,” he says, and they split ways for the afternoon.
In her room Minx takes off her heavy, gaudy earrings and kicks off her giant, heeled boots. She doesn’t bother taking off the awful dress or wiping off layers and layers of makeup on her face, knowing there’s a chance she’ll be seen by camera again and she doesn’t want to have to redo everything.
Minx takes a seat on her bed, lying back and looking for imperfections in the white ceiling. This is her eighth year mentoring now, but one of the few times she actually has a tribute who is younger than her. Ted may only be two years her junior, but that’s still something. The first year she mentored a tribute, he was eighteen to her mere fourteen and everything about it felt off. No one should ever have to mentor someone older than them. It was so strange to try and guide someone, to try to advise them when they were fairly older than her. What right does she have to tell them what to do? What life experience of value does she even hold when she's spent the past year living in splendor while he's worked tirelessly under the sun?
That hadn’t gone too well.
Minx thinks about what’s to come for the next few days. There’s the training score and lining up the sponsorships and the galas and parties. So much to do, but Minx focuses on the nearest issue at hand, and the one closest to her heart.
Tomorrow is the Naming Ceremony.
Over the past few days of knowing him, Minx has grown an actual liking to the boy. He’s funny and loud and he never shuts up. He’s just like a little piece of home cut out and dropped in front of her. He carries the weight of their people, their charisma and joy, their burdens, and their booming disposition. He is district 10 personified.
She wants to see him win, to see him die would be just like being ripped away from the only home she’s ever known just like she was at 13. She can’t have that happen again.
But Minx, as much of a chance as she thinks he has at winning this, also fears for him. She fears for the fact that he most likely will win. The games that are played after are just as bad.
All tributes are full of naivety when they are brought to the Capitol, even for the first hours after they win their Games and see their first sunrise as a newly crowned Victor. They always think the Games are over when the other tributes are dead, when they emerge from the grasps of the arena as newly coronated kings, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The arena is only the very beginning of the Games, and it is by far the easiest part.
The real games are played in the Tower, played in front of a Capitol audience as a child actor in their play. She fears even more for Ted if he walks from that arena victorious more than she does for him entering it.
Focus, she snaps to herself, don’t think about those things.
The Naming Ceremony tomorrow, that’s what she needs to think about.
Minx cannot give Ted a name herself, only he can choose it. She can guide him, yes, and she will do so, but she cannot be the one to choose directly for him. They need a game plan though.
There’s already tons of talk about hin on the capitol gossip channels and predictions for his victory so he needs something to really secure that lead he has above the others. He needs something big, something that stands out and separates him from the others.
Iconization is key, but Minx also wants so much better for Ted than she got stuck with in the naming ceremony.
JustAMinx, for her, is her prison. It is something she is forced into, a role she has been driven back into and had burned into her side with a branding iron. She can’t escape Minx ever, it’s the very thing she has been completely reduced down to. She is just a Minx, not a person at all but a character, a charade.
She sees the name now for what it is all these years later. In the beginning, when she was nothing more than an unfortunate tribute, she used Minx as a shield, a mask to hide her hurt behind. She was all rage and bravado and flaming bullets. What sadness she felt, what sorrow was leftover from home was hidden behind that mask.
It was a perfect plan until it wasn’t. For a while it had worked, she’d been able to hide behind her persona and be fine until the capitol had finally decided they’d had enough of her insults and her rebellion and turned it all into one big joke.
Don’t take Minx too seriously, she’s just like that. Her words mean nothing at all, she breathes fire at everyone like the beast she is. Don’t be fooled by her pretty face.
She spoke and she fought and she threw out every insult she had at the Capitol and they laughed in her face. Poor, little idiot girl.
Perhaps she is like Cassandra, always telling the truth, prophesying the Capitol’s evil but she’s been cursed to never be believed. Every word she says, no matter how much truth and venom there is behind it, they’ll never listen to, she’s just a primetime actress spinning lies. Look at her go! they say.
Oh and how she’s tried to run from this, to break free of the brand they’ve locked her in, but it doesn’t matter how many bricks she brings to the wall, how hard she slams her fists upon the glass, she’s never going to be free of it. She’s going to have to spend the rest of her life being as genuine as possible and will never be believed.
Most of the other Victors of floor 5 thought she was acting for a long time, especially those who came after her. Surely she isn’t really like this, they said, surely she is only acting this way, she doesn’t really hate the Capitol this much. It took them forever to trust her, forever to see she was genuine from the start.
She knows Ted thought the same way when he met her. He acted like he trusted her, pretended to take her every word to heart, but Minx could see the liar in him far too easily. It danced so slightly in his brown eyes, played so quietly across his lips that he thought she was a phony. He’s a fantastic liar, she’s never seen someone so skilled, but that doesn’t stop Minx from being able to pick out the truth. Every word he breathes can be a lie and no one would ever be able to tell the difference.
(Minx can tell. She’s better at reading people than anyone will ever know. It’s a skill she brings with her from 10, a place that’s so family and community founded. They’re a loud people, a people proficient in any kind of communicative skills. Their work there is based mostly around tending to animals, but they are the most people-oriented district out there. That’s what gives Ted his ability to lie so naturally, but gives Minx the same ability to pick out a lie from a million miles away. She knows how to read people from 10, she knows their tells more than she knows herself.)
She’s a doomed liar every time she speaks the truth. This is her punishment for her rebellious words.
It hurts sometimes, knowing she’ll never be understood, knowing that all she is to anyone anymore is the comic relief, but it’s an old wound now. She’s sustained it for long enough.
But she doesn’t want Ted to live out the same fate, she doesn’t want him to be put in a box where he’s trapped by everything they think he is. She doesn’t want to see him fall into the same trap she is damned to live and die in. She wants him to have the room to be open, to be genuine. He shouldn’t have to be anything other than himself, and he’s going to need a name to go with it, to represent it.
If she’s doomed to always tell the truth and never be believed, cursed to be something she is not, then she wants Ted to have the better end of the stick. He can lie as easily as he wants and they’re always going to believe him, hanging onto the edge of every single one of his booming words. He can’t be boxed in by a name and a brand that turns him into a beast, a monster like she is, please if anything please let him remain human.
She doesn’t want to see him suffer the same fate she has for far too long.
That night when they reconvene over dinner, she tells him about the plan. She can’t tell him which name to pick, but she can advise him. Don’t pick anything too flashy, too out there. You need something real, something genuine, something that you feel represents the true you, not some character you’re trying to create, it will only make things worse in the end.
She doesn’t tell him about how this all comes from her personal experience, how she’s advising him against all of these things because they comprise her own hell, but she thinks he knows it anyway. He can lie to the rest of them, but his face displays the truth to her.
Minx knows he’s listening though, paying close attention. He may not trust her fully, and he really shouldn’t, but she can tell he’s starting to warm up to her, starting to realize she is no child actress. This has been Rebecca all along.
The next morning as Minx rushes to gather last-minute sponsors for her tribute, she watches the Naming Ceremony play out overhead on the screens. She watches as each tribute comes in, chats with Pyrocynical for a little while, the blond man cracking a couple jokes here or there to get the audience going. Then the child will announce their arena name, explain a little bit of the backstory behind it, or why they chose it, and then Pyro will move onto the next tribute.
Finally Pyro makes it to the final few districts and Ted walks on stage, his presence utterly demanding.
They chat for a while, Pyro making a few jokes here or there and Ted running with them, stirring up the audience until they’re howling with laughter and applause.
“So,” Pyrocynical drawls, “What name did you pick as your arena name, Ted Nivison.”
“Well it’s a funny thing, but I think you’re going to like it.”
“Oh yeah?” Pyro laughs, “enlighten me.”
“Ted Nivison.”
Pyro is quiet for a moment longer than he needs to be. Not too long for anyone to notice, but Minx has lived on the same floor as this man for eight years now, she’s attuned enough to him to see the mask fall for only a millisecond.
“Ted Nivison? What do you mean by that? That’s just your real name.”
“Exactly!” Ted says. “I don’t need a name for my Games, I’m going as Ted Nivison all the way through. This is all you’re going to get from me, baby: real, genuine Ted!”
Pyro’s face doesn’t falter again and Minx thanks her lucky stars for that.
“Interesting choice, interesting choice. We’ve definitely never seen anything like that here before.”
“Well get used to it because you’re going to be seeing a whole lot more of me, Pyro.”
The naming interview closes out, Pyro and Ted talking a little more about silly things before moving onto the district 11 tribute, but as Minx stands there watching the screen, she starts to smile, showing off her fanged teeth.
No arena name at all.
It’s the perfect choice. If he doesn’t choose a name at all, no brand to run with except for his very own, then he will never be able to be pushed into a corner like she is, wrapped tightly into a box and presented to the Capitol like a caged beast. He’s free to be Ted Nivison until the very end.
It’s also the perfect act of silent rebellion. He didn’t not pick a name, he picked one, but in an unprecedented act he chose his very own. He is his brand.
And that’s what makes Minx the happiest. At least she can stand here rest assured that she has done her part to save him. She didn’t save him from the brutality of the Games, he will have to do that part himself, but she has saved him from the harsh spotlight of the Capitol. He won't have to live out her curse, from that he has been spared.
It’s only many years later as she watches Ted plaster on yet another smile at a New Year's Gala that she realizes only how naïve she was during the year of the 63 Games. She really thought she had gotten ahead, found a way out for Ted that would save him from the Capitol’s reaches, but she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Like this he is doomed to spin every sentence he speaks into a lie and always be believed for it. What he is saying is never called into question, it’s just the enamoring charisma of Ted.
But it is the very thing that she now realizes sealed him into a fate as bad as hers. She didn't save him like she always believed she did, she only made things worse.
Because Ted can never be genuine, never tell the truth like his entire performance is based upon, everything he now says must be a carefully crafted lie. Ted Nivison who he shows to the world is not the same person as the Ted Nivison he is underneath.
The members of district 10 are a loud people, a truth-telling people, and Ted can never be that again. For Ted to tell the truth of what he thinks of the Capitol, of his views on their tyranny, it would be seen as an open act of rebellion because every word he speaks is taken as gold. Minx can throw whatever firebombs she wants at them and they'll never believe her because she's nothing more than a joke, but at least she can speak freely. Ted will never be afforded such a luxury at the fault of her own naivety.
The blame of this curse that belongs to Ted Nivison is solely on Minx. Ted will forever be forced to live out an inauthentic version of himself carefully crafted upon layers of lies.
For that, for the way she has doomed Ted, she will always be sorrowful. Above all others that will be her biggest regret, her biggest grievance. There is no saving anyone in the Hunger Games, she now realizes, not when there are so many more games being played.