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He’s five when the country’s wounds finally heal, at least according to the television. The First Quarter Quell is a grand affair, the final triumph.
Every district has a different strategy, and it’s a strange group that ends up being assembled. Most seem to be picking children they believe really can win, and that strength is all Beetee notices at the time, but looking back a lot of the decisions also seem based on divisions he was told the new government had healed.
The winner is from Nine, just three or four hours away from Beetee by train: an olive-skinned, six-foot-tall eighteen-year-old whose token is a small, intricately woven hoop of net and feathers. When he sleeps in the thick forest, he ties it to a branch above him. He never explains the significance of it, even when interviewers press him, and overdoses at age twenty-four before Beetee can meet him.
Three, however, had no such illusions of winning. They picked people who were useless, who couldn’t produce: an eighteen-year-old who had lost both arms in a machinery accident and had phantom pains that made him scream for both nights he lived for, and a thirteen-year-old with a cleft lip who they didn’t even bother to interview because no one could understand her garbled speech. It’s couched in cool, logical language, this decision, and everyone buys in sooner or later.
When they think he can't hear, his parents say how glad they are he's not older. At this point, that would be one of the few ways for people to show their resentment at families like his, who looked at the rubble of the war and saw opportunity, saw gold. When he meets Wiress almost twenty years later, she’ll joke that she’s glad she wasn’t around for it for entirely different reasons.
Beetee learns two lessons from the First Quarter Quell, even if he doesn't realize it at the time:
The first is about himself and his family. You pay a price for power and comfort, and that price is trust.
The second is about his homeland and what it values. If he ceases to be useful, he may as well cease to exist.
He’s ten when a skeletal young man shoots himself in the head outside of the Manufacturing Administration Office in protest of wage cuts. His father says he was late to work that day and didn’t see it. Neither Beetee nor his mother seem to believe him.
Strange how protest in this country always seems to involve looking death straight in the eye.
He’s eleven when he gets into the most elite science-focused secondary school in the Districts. He doesn’t take the entrance test because his father’s name is on the library, but he gets his hands on a study version with an answer key from an acquaintance’s older sister and fills it out. He would have passed with flying colors and he tells himself that means something.
This is also when his father starts telling him war stories, mostly to scare him. Beetee never points out that he never even fought in the war. He was at university, he didn't have to.
The plan was that he would inherit his father’s authority, but his skill at the technical side of the business (and, although his parents won’t say it out loud, his inability to look people in the eye) has made them set their hopes even higher, westward. If you do well enough there, distinguish yourself enough, they’ll send you to the Capitol to work on infrastructure after you graduate– that is, if you and your family can pass enough of a background check. Beetee is one of a very few who probably could, and even at eleven it’s not lost on him that if they hadn’t made so many intellectuals disappear during the Dark Days, they probably wouldn’t need to be going to the Districts for the next generation of brilliance.
During his first week, he and the other first-years are shown documentaries to keep them in line, and make sure they will never use their gifts to work against the nation. He watches most of it impassively. The only part that sticks with him is the bombed-out hospital, because none of his classmates seem to believe the rebels were responsible for it.
The pressure to succeed is suffocating. Amphetamines, which Beetee doesn’t need but will become very familiar with in the coming years, become the subject of a sophisticated black market. All for the chance to get out of Three.
Once, before the announcements as to who would be leaving Three were made, his history teacher told the seniors an old story of a man named Sejanus Plinth. Beetee never saw her again, and by this time, knew better than to ask.
He climbs higher and higher through the ranks, coasting on his classwork with ease, sketching out inventions in back rows when he’s no longer remotely challenged.
Most of his teachers love him. Most of his classmates despise him because in the end, winning the Hunger Games is the first difficult thing he ever does.
He’s twelve when his father slips a tiny piece of scrap metal in his hand and tells him a story about how at age twenty, he was present for the building of the first operational factory after the Dark Days and stole a sliver of steel– as a surveyor, of course, not getting his hands dirty on the job site. He could see the desperate look in those men’s eyes, though, how they seemed to be searching for a purpose, and how by helping them to help the Capitol, people like him gave them that purpose.
And if the worst were to happen (although it probably won’t, his family has certainly never taken tesserae and hasn’t angered anyone that they know of) he should take this and remember who he is, remember that the world is rightfully his.
He is sixteen when the worst happens and his parents are shocked they cannot pay their way out of it. He makes a split-second decision to leave the piece of metal in the Tribute Building because if he’s going to do this, he knows he needs to sever all ties to himself and his homeland. At sixteen, he still thinks that’s possible.
Afterwards, when he returns to that high-rise, he tells his parents he didn’t take the metal piece because it was rejected due to being too sharp. It’s the first, but not the last lie he tells them.
His father's war stories change, too, when he comes home. More carnage, less focus on the glory of what was rebuilt.
A part of Beetee, the part he learns to bury in code, thinks that the man lying dead in an office building parking lot six years ago was someone's son too.