Work Text:
The card arrives in Joseph’s mailbox two days before the Reaping. Plain card, good stock, incongruous against the handwritten note scribbled in pencil.
you’ll want to be there
No name. No return address. No postage, even. It’s a slip of paper stolen from a box of identical cards in an office somewhere, handed off to a colleague and passed down to friends of friends until it wound up here, caught between his thumb and forefinger. The wind is a roaring tunnel in his ears. The birdsong in the trees has fallen silent. Joseph stares at the paper and wonders who risked their job to send him this.
“Joseph?”
He looks up slowly, slowly (everything feels so heavy, the air thick and pulling at his every move), sees Julia at her front gate, dark brows knitted with concern, fingers curled over the hard edge of the white-painted wood. She’s barefoot: he put on his shoes to check the mail. Routines matter, even now; it’s the only way to hold on to sense when the world shifts around him.
As if morning coffee at the dinner table and bending down to lace his shoes before walking to the mailbox could have stopped this day from happening.
“Joseph,” Julia says again, sharper. The gate creaks as she pushes it open, starts to come through —
“They’re taking him.”
Bang! She let the gate go and it slammed shut, bouncing on its hinges before settling, a shocked inhale of wood and metal. Selene won last year and they can’t even celebrate, can’t take unbridled pride in their daughter’s victory because before that — before that —
Joseph’s breaths stutter. “They’re taking him,” he says again, a ghost of a whisper. Julia’s eyes meet his, wide and horror-struck, and they stand and stare in silence as cicadas scream in the trees overhead.
Adora almost doesn’t let him go.
“You can’t keep me from our son,” Joseph says, shocked, too shocked to be angry. He can’t imagine why she would even suggest it.
Adora stands in front of him, eyes hard and unflinching, arms crossed over her chest. “Because he is not the ghost of Creed.” Her words hammer him like hailstones. “He is our son, he is his own person, he is going in, and he has to win. He needs strength and support and absolute confidence. If you can’t give him the same respect you showed Creed in that room you have no business being in it.”
Except they spent Creed’s entire life preparing him for the Arena, filling his head with dreams of victory, and in the end Joseph watched him bleed out onto filthy concrete for hours and hours and it was all his fault, he should have known better. Joseph exhales hard through his nose but Adora only glares at him. She uncoils, posture lengthening, but only to jab a finger into his chest. “The only way he has a chance is if we have faith. If he believes in that faith. This is not the time for absolution. I will lock you in this house and I will see him off alone if I think for a second you will put an ounce of doubt into his mind, do you understand me?”
She is a force of nature, his wife, proud and furious and absolutely unyielding, and he believes her. Joseph straightens his spine, raises his chin and nods. “Yes, love.”
Her breath leaves her in a rush and she nods once, then turns back to fixing dinner. She makes a sharp silhouette in the evening sun, the lines of her shoulders taut, and Joseph is helpless.
He holds onto the hope that this is all some colossal joke until the escort calls for volunteers and Alec steps forward. Time flashes back and stands still at the same time, a horrible, rending screech in the back of Joseph’s mind as both his boys take the stage at once. Creed had smiled, sharp and eager and wicked, but Alec stands stoic and silent, his mother’s dark eyes flashing in his face as he stares down the crowd.
Alec in the Justice Building is tall and proud and distant, none of Creed’s little-boy enthusiasm that had shone through even the tribute’s steely passion. He carries that presence with him through the tribute parade that night, the glimpses of his training, the interview where he gives Creed the appropriate mention for context but doesn’t fall apart into sentiment or make it his only story. The commentators like him, as much as they like anyone before the story really starts, and Joseph watches in silence with only Adora’s tight, hissing breaths to mark the time.
Paul and Julia join them the first day in the Arena. This is no Hightown watch party with cocktails and chatter. It’s four friends and twenty years of history sitting in tense silence as the countdown clicks to zero, watching a child they’ve raised together squint into the sun for the third year in a row. Adora paces at the back of the room, worrying a thumbnail between her teeth and shooting sharp glances at the television. Paul sits rigid in his chair (higher than the others, so he can stand without pressure on his leg), Julia perched on the arm, expression closed. Joseph’s mind is a shrieking buzz as Alec tears toward the Cornucopia, snatching up a spear and hurling it into the chest of a stunned girl from the outlying districts.
He’d been so proud when Creed made his first kills. Now he’s — well he’s still proud, underneath it all, that’s his son out there being strong and fearless and picture-perfect in his technique, his boy causing the commentators to swoon and titter on the cursed audio channel, but he can’t sit back and bask in the glow of it anymore. The first time he’d analyzed everything with a lifelong Program alumnus’ scrutiny, balancing mental tables of skills and sponsor interest and Gamemaker favour. Now he holds his breath as Alec ducks beneath a wild swing by a tall, muscled farmer’s daughter — Alec narrows his eyes and opts not to chase her as she escapes into the trees — and Joseph couldn’t give a damn about strategy, that’s one less frenzied fight for now.
(“Good boy,” Joseph mutters under his breath when Alec’s district partner takes uncontested command of the Pack. Let someone else draw their focus. Let her take the first sword when the alliance splinters. Nothing matters now except Alec walking out the other side.)
Alec winks at the girl from One before heading out to gather firewood; she giggles and flips her ponytail over her shoulder. “He has my smile, anyway,” Joseph says. His voice sounds overloud in the quiet living room, but he has to say something. It’s been days and they’ve barely spoken, tension filling the house like rainwater in a damaged basement.
“Please.” Adora rolls her eyes without turning away from the screen. “You were never that smooth.”
Later, when a shoving match with the boy from One takes a hard right into unexpected territory, Joseph coughs and clears his throat. “You’re right, I didn’t teach him that.”
Across the room, Julia snickers.
I know who I am, Alec snarled to One Boy before kissing him in the middle of the clearing. It’s a simple phrase, punchy, good for the cameras, but it sticks in Joseph’s head long after he sends himself to bed. (The night shift crew up at Eagle Pass have the Games on, anyway, they’ll call him if anything happens.) Joseph last saw Alec at thirteen, but those last two years as Creed and Selene disappeared into Residential he’d withdrawn into his preparations until they barely spoke at all. Joseph would be hard pressed to name his son’s favourite colour after all these years
Creed, he’d seen echoes of the boy in the young man on camera; this Alec with the hard grin and the Arena showmance may as well be a stranger.
I know who I am. Spat like a badge of honour, a Victor’s tattoo in and of itself. Joseph closes his eyes against the replay in his brain and wishes he’d had a chance to learn.
That first day a casserole shows up on their front door. A few days later it’s a basket of vegetables from the community garden. A fresh-baked loaf wrapped in a cheery blue cloth. A pot of soup. Adora washes the dishes when they’re done and leaves them back outside, a silent thank you note, and the next person always takes them back. They know too much to knock, ask how things are going, but the connection is there, and each time Joseph opens the door to see a carton of blackberries or a rhubarb pie still steaming from the oven he feels the arms of his community around him.
For a community who celebrated Creed’s entry into the Residential program there’s a quiet sense of shared grief and — not guilt, exactly, this is the society they built, and Creed’s death is the noble sacrifice he promised it to be, but solemnity, whenever the Games are mentioned. Joseph can’t imagine running to the store for his weekly allotment of eggs and milk and bread and having to make small talk with Benny and Peggy while his son’s Games play on the small screen behind the counter. Not this time, not again.
(“I saw his play against the boy from Four, couldn’t take my eyes off it. You gonna want bread this week, Joe?”)
Joseph doesn’t leave the house the whole month.
The phone rings one evening while Joseph and Adora are preparing dinner, the television on mute in the other room. Tonight is Alec’s turn for the Final Eight interviews, and while Joseph has been glued to the screen ever since it started, he has no need to see trainers pretending to be sports coaches and picture-perfect tribute candidates playing the part of school friends. Interviews in District 2 are always the least compelling, an interesting exercise in creating convincing characters and committing to the role, but no heart or honesty.
“Get to the TV, both of you,” Sue barks. A voice in the background hollers for her to hurry up and come back before she misses it, and she wishes them both well and hangs up.
“Joe,” Adora calls out, already in the living room. Joseph turns the corner so fast he barks his hip against the countertop, and right away he freezes because it’s not a trainer or a classmate or some fatuous commentator, it’s Selene.
Selene, their Victor next door, on television talking about Alec.
They’ve dialled back the wild-child leather and steel for this one, dressed her in simple blues and left off the mirrored nail polish and hairpins shaped like tiny knives. She looks her age, as far as tributes ever do, and she has makeup to cover the circles under her eyes like anyone this late in the Games but she’s a far cry from the tight-lipped, tightly-wound girl Joseph saw on stage at the Victory Tour. He takes a second to be happy for her before her words take over his attention: pushing Alec out of trees and playing tributes in the woods and talk of his bravery and courage, all with that irreverent Selene charm she’d had even as a little girl.
Joseph can’t breathe. “Have any of them ever —”
“No,” Adora says, reverent. “This is the first.”
The first Two Victor to speak on behalf of a tribute, and it’s the girl who used to think Joseph didn’t notice when she asked for two cookies instead of one.
“He’ll have to earn it,” Joseph says after the interview ends and the commentators return, giddy with excitement. Selene has marked Alec as exceptional, and the Gamemakers will not make it easy. “Maybe now more than ever.”
Adora’s smile is the promise of a blade pressed flat against the skin. “He will.”
The girl from Nine shoves Alec over the edge of the cliff and Joseph’s brain blanks white. Images burn behind his eyelids: Alec’s head dashed on the rocks on the way down — Alec lying, broken and bleeding, at the bottom of the cliff for hours, with no stroke of mercy to end his suffering — Alec trapped and hemorrhaging, staring up in helpless torture while the girl makes her inexorable way down the cliff to smash his skull in with a stone —
Alec catches himself on the jagged cliff face. Face twisted in pain, he hangs for an eternal patter of heartbeats before hauling himself up, hand over agonizing hand.
Adora’s nails dig into Joseph’s skin. He grips back, fingers spasming. Even the commentators are silent, the remaining tribute count spinning in the bottom corner of the screen.
He pulls himself up over the side. Drags himself to his feet, stumbling. Turns, runs — the girl screams — he ducks, rolls, grabs his spear, throws —
The phone starts ringing while the last note of the victory trumpets hangs in the air.
Stars twinkle over the tops of the trees. Frog-song trills from the stream as fireflies flicker in and out at the far end of the yard. Joseph leans back in his chair, bottle balanced between his fingers. “I hope he knows how proud we are.”
Adora smiles, the first time in weeks that doesn’t look like it’s trying to crack her face in half. “I’m sure he does.”
Julia lifts her glass. “To Alec.”
To the nation, Joseph might have said once; he raised his children to give their all for their district, not to ask for praise. Creed was prepared to make that sacrifice before he was old enough to understand the gravity; by now Alec has made the same vow.
They will never see him again.
Joseph leans forward, and all of them clink their drinks together. “To Alec.”