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The rules are simple. In punishment for the uprising in the Dark Days, each of the twelve districts must provide two tributes - a girl and a boy - to participate in the Hunger Games. The twenty-four tributes, all between the ages of twelve and eighteen, are shoved into an enormous outdoor arena that could consist of everything from a rocky mountain landscape to a frozen glacial tundra, and, over the course of several weeks, the participants are made to battle to the death.
The last man standing wins.
Like most things are, it's a power play. A demonstration of how much control the Capitol has over the districts. Prying children from their homes and forcing their loved ones to watch as they are killed, it's nothing but a reminder that nothing matters, not your wealth or your power or your charm, when you’re held in the Capitol’s careless embrace. The Capitol’s mercy, truly, because in the week before the Games begin, the tributes are treated to the best things that money can buy. For districts like One and Two, it's not much of a change, but for the poorer districts like Twelve, it's the difference between life and death.
Fattening them up for slaughter, as Shouto’s father used to say. And then he would hit Shouto. Again.
Shouto, he’d been raised for the Games. If the other tributes were victims of chance, he was nothing but a tithe, born to two victors and taught to kill the moment he could hold a weapon - a gun, a knife, an ax, it didn’t matter. He was able to wield them all as a flawless extension of his arm. His father had taught him, and it had hurt. His father had burned him and roared in his ears, had shown him the sharpened metal of a butcher knife before carving it deep into his skin, had taught him to build a fortress in his mind that he could hide in when the pain became too much. Had made him into a machine, deadly and brutal and cold to the touch.
He is a child when he watches his older brother die, torn apart in the arena by a pack of mutts. He watches it on the television in the living room, held firmly in his father’s lap while his mother pleads with her husband to let him go, saying that he’s too young to be seeing this kind of stuff, seeing the blood and gore and bone splayed across the green grass, and he slaps her so hard that she falls back onto the ground and sits there, silent. And then Shouto’s father looks him in the eye, says, “Does it hurt?”
Shouto, five years old and tiny, nods. Of course he does. He’s too small to know how to lock his tears away, how to stop them from dripping down his cheeks - on the screen, his older brother slowly dies, ripped to pieces with his guts hanging wrong-side out, this was the brother that had kissed his forehead goodnight, that had read him bedtime stories, that had loved him when no one else would. This was his brother, dying.
Shouto’s father smiles, slow and soft and as deadly as a coal-mine canary going silent. “Good.” His hands, pressing into Shouto’s skin, leaving marks. “And if you don’t stop crying, I’ll hurt you twice as bad.” And his mother would cry as it happened, and that’d be more than twice the pain, to make his gentle-hearted mother cry.
He stops crying.
Of course he does.
On the screen, the cannon fires.
And still, Shouto doesn’t cry.
Twelve years old, his father’s eyes burning into his back. The boy who's been called up isn’t him, is some lanky teenager with burnt-black hair and a watery voice, and the announcer grips the boy’s shoulder and asks, “Do we have any volunteers?”
Shouto glances up at the camera that’s already trained onto him.
He blows out a breath. Thinks of his mother, his brother. His father. His father, watching him, expecting him to step up - and the punishment of disobeying isn’t worth the price that such defiance would cost him.
“I volunteer as tribute,” he says.
He steps forward, speaks his name into the microphone, and the crowd goes wild.
When he looks at his father, he thinks that he finally sees pride in those eyes.
In the first fourteen minutes of the Games, seven tributes die. The girl from Twelve is blown to pieces because she takes a suicide leap off of her plate before the timer runs down. When the alarm goes off and the announcer's voice welcomes them to the 106th Hunger Games, the boy from Four takes off towards the Cornucopia and reaches for a something that looked a lot like a fish hook, but it’s heavier than he expected, and the weight of it sends him sprawling onto his back. The moment he hits the ground, he is promptly blasted into a mess of blood and bone. Two other tributes, the boy from Nine and the boy from Twelve, get into a scuffle over a set of knives that ends with both of them dead and the weapons in Shouto’s hands. He whirls around and slits the throat of a girl who had been sneaking up behind him, drags the knife fast and hard across her neck just like his father showed him, gashing her skin into a perfect red smile. Seven minutes into the Game, and his hands are thoroughly blood-soaked.
He can feel his father smiling.
He rummages through the Cornucopia, and the rest of the tributes give him space - because of his age or his skill, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. He was born for this. Pity will get them nowhere in this arena, will buy them no favors from him or from anyone.
He chooses his weapons.
At the edge of the tribute’s circle, he stops. Turns back. Smiles, and cocks back his gun, and shoots both tributes from Two through the heads.
And then he runs.
For all he knows, there could be random mines scattered throughout the arena, and so Shouto takes to throwing bits of trash before him to determine what path was safe to walk. He’s not sure if they’ll detonate for anything but a human being, but it's better than nothing.
There’s another rustle of movement behind him. He sighs.
“I know you’re there,” he says, but doesn’t glance back. “Come on out.”
There’s a pause, like the person is considering whether or not to stay in hiding, but then the girl steps out. Shouto recognizes her. Hadou Nejire, from his own district - their mothers went to school together. She smiles at him, almost sheepishly. “Hi.”
Shouto raises his eyebrows and wordlessly levels his gun at her forehead. Her eyes go wide. Her face goes pale. She holds up her hands, like that’d do a damn thing to protect her, and says, “Wait! I was thinking - we could work together!”
Strapped to her back is a bat, metal and gleaming in the sunlight through the trees. It's not the kind of bat that’s made to be a weapon. It's for playing games.
Shouto lowers the gun. “Do anything weird and I’m ripping out your throat,” he says, voice as flat as the look in his eyes.
Hadou shudders. Nods.
And so they continue like that for the rest of the day, walking, talking very little, keeping their eyes peeled for any other tributes headed their way.
As nightfall approaches, they find a safe spot and set up camp. The Capitol’s anthem starts to play, and the sky lights up with the faces of the dead tributes. Shouto recognizes the first seven of them: the girls from Twelve, Six, and Two, and the boys from Four, Nine, Two, and Twelve. And then there come two more, a girl from Five and a girl from Eight. Hadou laughs as their faces appear, and Shouto can only assume that she’s the one that killed them.
After the anthem plays again and the sky goes dark, Shouto presses a knife into his ally’s hands and tells her to keep watch.
She glances at the knife. Glances at him.
“How do you know I won’t kill you?” she asks, head tilted. There’s a gleam in her eyes, something playful, something telling him that she’s every bit as deadly as he himself is - he knew that already, of course. He’s seen her in action in the training room, quick on her feet and ruthless when she needs to be.
But she doesn’t need to know what he knows.
So he just shrugs, rolls his eyes. “If you were planning on it, you wouldn’t have asked me that question. Good night. Don’t get me killed.”
He rests for a few hours, sits up, and tells Hadou to get some sleep. She smiles at him and then lays down, her long hair dirty down her back and pulled into a messy braid, and, within minutes, her breathing evens out. She must be exhausted.
Shouto watches her, arms crossed.
And then he walks up to her, kneels down beside her sleeping form. “I’m sorry,” he says, soft enough not to wake her. “But you’d never make it, anyway.”
He slits her throat, stomps out the fire, and continues eastward.
Alone.
At dawn, a silver parachute floats down towards him. It lands at his feet. He glances around, making sure that no one is hiding in the trees and waiting for him to let down his guard, then stoops and picks it up. He holds it in his hand for a long, slow second, just feeling the weight of it in his palms.
He opens the parachute and finds a single vial of liquid. It glows a muted shade of purple-red, and he uncaps it, takes a hesitant sniff. The sweetly bitter almond smell of it makes him wrinkle his nose, but it's a smell that he recognizes from one of the training stands. It's poison, a cyanide-benzene compound, to be specific. It's from his father, no doubt - he’s probably mad that Shouto is making as much of a mess as he is. He’s telling him to kill his opponents in a way that is more pleasing to the eye.
“Noted,” he says, voice wry, and puts the vial in his pocket. He doesn’t know if his father can hear him, but he can picture his proud smile all the same.
He continues walking.
That night, the sky lights up with Hadou’s face. There are other tributes, too - the girl from Nine, the boy from Eight - but all he can think about is Hadou. She’s smiling in the picture. Their mothers were friends. She was only fifteen. She had so much more to live for. She’d trusted him.
Twelve tributes dead. Twelve tributes left.
Shouto doesn’t sleep.
In the morning, he tracks and hunts a deer-like animal, fells it with a single bullet, and then tears into it without even cooking it. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until now, how starving - he gets blood smeared all over his face and bits of raw meat stuck in his teeth and he thinks, a little hysterically, that at least the rest of him matches his hands now. His stomach rolls. He forces himself not to throw up. He might get sick from this, might get some kind of disease, but he’ll deal with that when - if - it happens.
For now, he just needs to -
He needs to -
From behind him, there’s a low whistle. “Damn, you were hungry, huh?” It's a boy’s voice, so low and smooth that it makes his shoulders tense automatically. He turns, and looks directly into the eyes of District Three’s male tribute, a teenager with wavy hair and a seemingly smile on his face, a boy who crouches down beside Shouto and raises his eyebrows. “Kid?” he asks, and Shouto realizes that he hasn’t even moved an inch.
He still doesn’t move.
He just stays there, frozen, staring at District Three’s tribute. Finally, achingly, he says, “Are you going to kill me?” Logically, he knows that it's an irrational question. Because Shouto was raised to be a killer, a monster, and this boy may be older but he is no match against a child afraid of disappointing his father.
“Haven’t decided.” The boy smiles, like it's a joke. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Todoroki. Shouto. Todoroki - Shouto.” It's like he has to force the words out. He’s startled by how steadily the boy asks the question. The worst thing anyone could ever possibly do was assign a name to an enemy, to think of them as human - and suddenly, painfully, he’s reminded of his brother. The memory slams into him with such force that it's hard to breathe.
The District Three boy smiles again. Does he ever stop smiling? “Nice to meet you, Todoroki. I’m Shirakumo Oboro.” And then he leans in closer, squints. “You look like you haven’t slept in days, squirt.”
“I… haven’t.”
“Lay down. Get some sleep.”
And, against his better judgment, he does.
He wakes up to the sound of a cannon going off. For a second, he thinks that it's his own, that Shirakumo decided to just get him out of the way after all, but then he sits up and his skin is alarmingly bloodless.
He looks around, wide-eyed.
He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He’s not -
And then he notices that the vial of poison is gone. And then he notices that Shirakumo’s body is lying just a few feet away. And then he notices that Shirakumo is still smiling.
He knew what he was doing. He took the poison and he smiled as he died and Shouto should be glad, Shouto is glad, that’s one less enemy, one less threat, he’s glad he’s glad he’s glad -
Shouto throws up.
He doesn’t know if it's the fact that he ate the raw meat, or the horror of the situation, but he throws up. Everything in his stomach, the deer and bile and pain, splashes on the forest floor, and Shouto watches with blank eyes as the helicopter drops down to retrieve Shirakumo’s remains.
After a long, long moment, he stands up.
He continues walking.
A cannon goes off, somewhere.
He keeps walking.
Faces flash in the sky, burning bright and blurry and Shirakumo is there and he’s five years old again and watching his big brother get ripped apart by mutts and Touya, Touya - bedtime stories and forehead kisses and gentle hands, voices, speaking, Touya died afraid and Touya died alone and his father had made him watch. Held him in his lap. Trapped him. Slapped his mother, mom, mommy, he hit her and she didn’t say anything else and -
Todoroki Shouto clamps his hands over his mouth, curls up further, and begs himself not to cry.
Blood. Bone. Hadou’s eyes. Shirakumo’s smile.
There’s the gunshot-fire of a cannon, and brain matter sprays across his face, and Shouto wakes up screaming.
Something is wrong.
No new cannon fires. No more deaths. Shouto doesn’t know how many tributes are left, but he knows that he’s one of them, and so he makes himself keep walking. His head pounds. His throat is dry. His fingers twitch at his sides, aching to claw at something, but there’s no enemies in sight and he’s not going to mutilate himself for the sake of scratching his itch for destruction. Because that’s what it is, right? Destruction. He was made for destruction.
He keeps walking.
He doesn’t know where he’s walking, doesn’t know anything, really, but he needs to keep moving. One foot in front of the other. He’s burning up, he’s shivering, his stomach aches like a hollow drum and he’s hungry, but he can’t eat a knife and to put a bullet in his mouth would be suicide, and for the first time he wishes he grabbed something other than weapons from the Cornucopia.
He keeps walking.
Day turns into dusk turns into evening turns into night, but he doesn’t stop. Why is he walking? Where is he going?
Hell, probably.
He keeps walking.
The rules are simple.
His chest hurts.
In punishment for the uprising in the Dark Days, each of the twelve districts must provide two tributes - a girl and a boy - to participate in the Hunger Games.
He can’t breathe.
The twenty-four tributes, all between the ages of twelve and eighteen, are shoved into an enormous outdoor arena that could consist of everything from a rocky mountain landscape to a frozen glacial tundra, and, over the course of several weeks, the participants are made to battle to the death.
Keep walking. Keep walking. Don’t stop.
The last man standing wins.
Shouto falls to his knees.
Fattening them up for slaughter.
He screams.