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Chapter Text

1 - Cashmere

Cashmere wasn’t born to die, no child from One is. She was born to fight and taught to win, brutal and bloody and utterly beautiful. 

She learned how to die from a girl six years older than her who would make it eleven days into the fifty-eighth games. Her throat slit and soaked with blood, hair splayed out around her in a lovely halo. 

Lilac favored two long knives, death in each of her hands. When she fought she was a blur of tense muscles and deadly precision. She also knew her angles, when to turn and flash a too-sharp smile. Lilac was perfect and four weeks from the day she would volunteer, she would sit Cashmere down and tell her the truth.

(See it was one of the few things they could give to each other. A tradition as old as the cracking gravestones of those who failed. The only thing pretty girls like them could offer each other. I can't save you but you will never be a lamb walking to the slaughter, blind and utterly loyal due to it.)

She told Cashmere, blonde and pretty and a touch too innocent, about what it meant to be a One girl. How beauty was intertwined with death, how sex was a tool as much as any weapon. How the Capital would demand and demand, and no was not a word that you could know. 

Lilac was sixteen, Cashmere was ten but in that moment they were the same - violent, jagged edges of girls who were told to look beautiful amongst a massacre.  

And Cashmere was many things, a daughter, a sister, a friend but more than anything she was a good soldier. She knew how to play her role, her duty, she knew her place in this world.

So when Lilac told her what it meant to survive, and how to die, Cashmere bared her pretty teeth in a smile. Lilac would laugh, because it couldn’t be a cut-off sob, and that would be that.

Lilac wouldn’t live past sixteen, but Cashmere would. She would walk out of the Arena soaked in blood and as she stood - trembling, wavering on the metal floor - her only thought would be of how her hair was an utter mess and no one would like that. She wasn't supposed to be anything less than perfect.

(You can’t blame her, truly. She has only ever been what they made her.)

1 - Gloss

The day that Cashmere comes home from her games he doesn’t recognize her. Gloss looks at this girl - blonde hair in loose waves, makeup flawless and you would never be able to tell that a week ago she had sunk her hands into a boy’s chest and pulled. Gloss looks at the winner of the sixty-fourth game and he doesn’t see his little sister. 

It’s her eyes, because she doesn’t have new scars or aches, everything about her is pristine. Everything but her eyes.

Gloss looks at his sister (one year younger than him, always his to protect and care for, she used to look up to him with something more than hate) and a stranger looks back.

Her eyes are hard, glints of silver that fit the knife that never leaves her side. They dig into his soul, into the things beneath flesh and bone like her hands had done to the boy from ten. 

Every look is an accusation and condemnation for a crime he doesn’t know he committed. And worse - pity. 

Before his game, he wants to tell her, soft in a way he has never been, “Be free of it.” The pity and the sorrow and the hate in your eyes.

Gloss has never begged anyone for anything but there is something about Cashmere, about his not-sister, about the hollow shell that came back from the game makes him want to.

When he walks out of the sixty-fifth arena, tropical forests with vines that dangled you from the canopy, he thinks he understands it. When he makes eye contact with her from across a glitter-filled room, a man twice his age biting his neck, two on her, then Gloss gets it.

For a moment he wishes that neither of them walked out of their Arenas, that neither of them were survivors down to the last bitter bone in their body. Then there is a flicker of pain in his neck, fingernails digging into his sides and Gloss has never learned how to be sorry for being the one to live - for being the one with blood on his hands.

He’s alive and he doesn’t recognize his sister but she still breathes, still breathes when his dull sword cracks against her arm, still smiles too sharp when she draws blood with her ax. They’re alive and they’re victors and God, there never was another road they could have walked.

2 - Enobaria

She tears a girl's throat out with her teeth. It tastes like iron, like swallowing a sword. It - the blood and muscles and gore - is thick on the way down. That’s what Enobaria had told Caesar and half a dozen interviewers.

She had smiled with each one, bared her teeth, and cackled at the way they had all flinched back.

Here’s what she didn’t tell them: they had started to run out of food in the end, the game was coming to a close and it wasn't needed. Enobaria had been on the hunt, trekking through dark forest and brush, she had been tired. Aching.

Here’s what she never told the interviewers and curious Capital’s because this would be a step too far. Because there is a limit, and they'll watch her slaughter nine children, they'll watch as children tear into each other but - When she tore out the girl's throat, a Five with too pale skin, she had been so hungry. 

It was an act of desperation, an act of a girl who was never taught how to give up, how to give in. It was the act of a Two girl, raised at the Center, raised to be a fighter - to be a gleaming reflection of her unbreaking District.

So Enobaria had smiled at the cameras after and pretended like her stomach was turning, like for the first time in days she was no longer hungry. (The next time she ate meat, the rot of death, the sound of a torn fading scream, would follow her for days.) 

2 - Brutus

He kills ten children, he crushes the head of a twelve-year-old girl with a rock. Brutus comes out of the arena half delirious from adrenaline and dehydrated. Everything for the first few hours is a blur, a haze of blood that’s his and blood that isn’t.

When he finally regains a semblance of logic. When the world has stopped spinning and the dead children that surround him have quieted, he wonders what he did wrong.

His attendings, in various shades of gold, won’t look him in the eyes. One of them flinches away when he twitches. The only person who will look at him, who smiles, and after a pause long enough for him to run away, holds him - is his mentor.

Brutus doesn’t understand, not even when the blood has been cleaned from his skin, the torn skin mended and covered. He doesn’t understand why they won’t look at him, why they aren’t proud of him.

He was only doing what they wanted. He was only giving them a good show.

3 - Wiress

The first time she watched the games her older sister, Cyra, distracted her. Cyra would always pass the time singing as she worked away in the factories and when she came home, her hands coated in silver dust, burns on her forearms. She had a voice that was soaked with love, every word shone with it.

So while the District Eight boy was screaming, howling as he burned, Cyra braided her hair and sang. Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one, the mouse ran down. Hickory Dickory Dock. 

The girl from Seven, too soft eyes and a trembling smile, her head crushed and blood splattered on the top white sand. Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck two, the mouse turned blue. Hickory Dickory Dock.

Cyra’s hands slipped through her hair, and Wiress could almost feel the metal dust she was leaving behind. She could almost feel them melding with her skin, twisting her into something else. Into something more than just a girl.

Two years later when Cyra had an accident in the factory, her hand caught in the machine and there had been so much blood she had died on the floor, Wiress would sing the song to herself. She would curl into herself in the too-still house and sing the song until her mind slowed, until her thoughts became logical.

Until she was able to make sense of her grief, of the gaping wound that was inside her chest. She had always been a girl more suited to math and science, to the rules of nature and man. Wiress had never known what to do with all the illogical, irrational love and grief she felt.

The first time she kills someone - nine days after the reaping, two after the games had started - she whispers the song under her breath. It’s so quiet the cameras can’t pick up on it but it slows her heart, and her hands don’t shake as she wraps wires together.

They don’t shake when the Six boy stumbles into her trap, hungry and half mad from it. They don’t shake when it snaps around him like jaws, like a feral animal lunging at the first thing that moves. They don’t shake when the canon fires, his blood sliding along the concrete floors.

Her hands don’t shake and Wiress keeps mumbling, and despite her mind throwing words like tactile hallucinations and dissociation, she can swear she feels her sister's hands. Kind fingers threading their way through her hair, pulling it back, brushing against the back of her neck.  

3 - Beetee

His intelligence, his far too clever mind is the reason why he walked out of his Arena. On his best days, he’s thankful for it, for keeping him alive then and keeping him alive day by day. On his worst days, all he can remember is how easy it had been - killing the six careers who despite all the odds had formed something that could have turned golden.

In a different life of course, because in this one, they had thrashed on the still wet ground. Electricity had run through their veins, blood had pooled under their heads from the crack of their skull against the ground. In this life, they had died quickly enough, and all Beetee could think about was how easy it had been.

How it hadn’t even occurred to him - sixteen and slightly dehydrated, blood stuck and dried in the lines of his palm - to hesitate. 

Beetee’s mind brought him from his Arena, and now it keeps him alive in a different sort of game. The game where there are no Victors, just survivors.

4 - Mags 

Mags knew a world, a life before the games but she didn’t know one of peace. The war had torn through the Districts and the Capital. Like a hurricane battering the shoreline, unrelenting and deadly, a power they couldn’t dream of stopping.

But despite the death and pain, despite the horror of the games as she grew to learn the world, her earliest memory is not of the War or of the Games. Her earliest memory is of the sea, the sun glinting off the waves, and her brother’s laughter as he popped up from under the water. 

He was smiling, bright and glowing and so young. In time she would grow to know dozens of boys like him, and bury all of them except for one. But then, six and so happy it felt like she would burst, Mags had only known Lye and how his eyes were glimmering. 

The day had been calm, unburdened by work although she couldn’t have told you why. All Mags could tell you were stories of the sea, of tall gods with deep emerald eyes and a body made from writhing water. All Mags could tell you were the stories, the worlds her brother created for her. 

Lye was kind and when he flopped beside her on the boat, soaked in water and smelling of salt, Mags laid beside him. They looked up at the perfectly blue sky, clouds tugging at the edges, smearing it with white, the sun a glint in the west. It was mesmerizing, it was free from the dark clouds of ash and fire, and it was free from the war.

So when Lye laughed, looking for all the world like he belonged to the sea rather than the land, Mags joined him. She was happy, she was young and the world seemed so very far away.

The world would not be far away when Lye was killed by a stray bomb two months later, a final bomb, a bang to end the war. The world would not be far away when Mags stopped smiling, when the games began, when her friends and cousins started dying terrified and young.

The world would not be far away when her own name was called, Mags Flanagan. She would not shake and bend like the ground had when bombs tore through Four. She would walk to the stage, to death in a brightly colored suit, without flinching. She would win, desperate and terrified, and the blood under her fingernails would remain there for weeks.

The world would not be far away when she watched her tributes scream, watched as children who looked at her for their answer died one by one. The world would not be far away when a boy who laughed like Lye, who belonged to the sea like Lye, would stand before her.

When she brought Finnick back home, fourteen and hollow-eyed, Mags decided that everything she had done was worth it. That even if it wasn’t, she would make it so. 

4 - Finnick 

The first time he has sex it’s with a woman ten years older than him, and she groans like the first girl he killed. 

He’s sixteen and high off some random colored pill, he can feel it burning in the back of his throat. Finnick sinks back into silk sheets and lets his body become a shell, become a hollow thing built for others and not meant for him. He can distantly feel fingernails digging into his skin, pulling, tearing, taking.

The woman has bright red hair - not blood red but the sort that glints in the light, that shimmers under them, false and wrong. He notices this and not her pale skin, not the tattoos that sink up and down her body. She takes and takes and when she throws back her head and moans, all he can think about is his first kill.

The girl from Eight, blonde hair and brown eyes, a sweet smile. Finnick had met her eyes during training, and had winked and laughed when she flushed. A few days later he had thrust a broad sword (not his preferred but he made it work) into her chest.

It had sunk in deeply, enough that the tip could be seen shining in her back. He met her eyes, blood sticking to her lips, her hands fluttering uselessly at her chest in surprise, and he watched as the light faded. Finnick had pulled the sword back and she had moaned, a gurgle of blood as it flooded her lungs.

Then she had sunk to her knees and he was gone before she could fall further, off to kill another, off to live another day while she died choking on her own blood.

The first time he has sex Finnick isn’t there. He’s in the Arena, killing eight kids who were just trying to survive like he was. He’s smiling at the cameras, blood splattered across his cheeks and he feels like he’s just sold his soul to the devil but he doesn’t know why. He’s in the Arena and he was damned since the moment he decided to live - screaming and kicking and golden. 

The second time he has sex there is no pill, he is forced to be in body and it is only the thought of his father’s laughter, of his mother’s warm eyes, that makes Finnick get up, and act. It’s the first time he puts on a role, and it horrifies him at how good he is at it. At pretending, at being theirs, at being an object, a commodity rather than a person. 

Years later, he falls for a broken girl with flaming red hair so unlike the woman’s, and the very act feels like a sin. Years later, Finnick will wonder if the reason he’s so good at it is because he isn’t pretending. 

Years later, Finnick will wonder if he’s human anymore with bruises across his body, bite marks wrapped around his throat, and blood still on his hands. He won’t find an answer. 

Chapter Text

5 - Lan 

She’s sixteen when she wins her games, covered in mud and trembling. If Lan was a different girl, and she isn’t, she wouldn't say it was from the cold and rain of the Arena.

If she wasn’t a liar, if she hadn’t been raised to choose logic over heart, to survive and adapt as surely as any algorithm must, then she would say it was from the District Eight boy. His head lolled back, his neck gaping and she had clutched the shard of glass so tightly she’d have a scar.

Or would have a scar, if the Capital didn’t hate any imperfection they didn’t make.

Lan remembers shipments of technology, solar cells, and turbines, beautiful things of metal and energy that she could feel in her bones. Lan remembers the shipments being returned, all because one happened to have a crack or a break. Lan remembers the head of the factories, gone in the middle of the week and everyone knows that he didn’t just leave.

Lan remembers a lot of things: the clinical feeling of her mentor's hands examining her lean frame, the gray of her district from the buildings to the metal sheen covering everything, and how the sun never shone in her Arena.

But for everything she does remember, she forgets two more things. Her mother's voice, soft and thin, Oh love, there is always a price. You’ll learn that soon enough.

She doesn’t remember Adran’s death, his pale brown hair stained a dark brown, just like the mud. The suffocating thick sludge, slipping down her throat, choking her.

She doesn’t remember getting to the Capital, just waking up spitting and screaming. Hands pinning her down and the calm, sad eyes of her mentor before she was pulled under.

Lan doesn’t remember the first time Snow bought and sold her, the threat being her little sister who had yet to ache due to this world. She remembers the silk sheets, and the shimmer of her skin as the Capital made even her alluring. She remembers the mirror on the ceiling and how her hair had spread around her like a halo.

Like something that belonged to an angel, and not girls with blood on their hands and hell dripping from between their legs. 

Lan doesn’t remember some things, but she remembers the first boy she killed, and how in that moment she truly was the desperate animal they had sought to make her.

5 - Kieran 

He used to believe in God, or something close to it. Then he killed three kids, younger than him, terrified. Then he came back from the Arena covered in blood and grime. 

He used to believe in God, and then Lan who used to smile so easily, and oh, how everyone loved her. Lan, who never smiled, offered him a bottle of whiskey and then told him how the Capital took and took. How he had to give in. 

Kieran drinks the entire bottle, and then shatters it against the wall. The next night he falls into bed with Lan, only a few years older, who gets his quiet desperation.

He’s terrible, all fumbling hands and shame. But it’s quiet and Lan lets him tuck his head against her neck. And when it’s done, when this isn’t a thing the Capital can take, she pulls him closer and holds him against her chest like he’s young.

The only reason Kieran doesn’t slit his wrists is because of his mother’s laughter, and Lan’s gentle touch. He used to believe in a God, he doesn’t believe in much now but hell.

6 - Regan

She wins her games by chance, by an ice that sinks into your bones. She didn’t kill the last tribute, a boy from five with his eye carved out, he froze to death covered in his own blood.

Regan was meek, a barely there thing of a girl who never quite came out of her Arena. She didn’t win by killing, by breaking and shattering into a monstrous, survival-driven thing. The Capital never forgave her for it.

There are few Capital’s who want to fuck her, but there are some. Maybe patheticness gets them off. Regan will never learn because she tells Snow no.

She pulls away from Finnick Odair’s dance, from his golden-smeared lips and the terror in his eyes. There is always a price, and you don’t want to pay it.  She feels so much disgust towards him that she nearly retches. Because this beautiful, golden boy is the Capital's in every way and she can't stand his touch.

Regan says no because if there is one thing she has always been, it’s herself. Or maybe she’s a coward, or maybe she’s just sixteen and already a touch too broken.

Her brothers, one older and one younger, die in an accident while working on the trains. There aren’t bodies left to bury.

Regan sits alone in her empty house, with too many rooms and golden-plated mirrors. A pearl-hilted silver knife is in her kitchen, and tucked into a drawer from her mentor is a vial of a clear liquid. He had only said, a little pityingly, mostly hollow, For when it’s too much.

She doesn’t slit her wrists, instead, she loses herself in a bliss that will never leave her. Regan won’t let it.

(In the brief moment when she dies, cradled by the boy who painted flowers in the midst of hell, there is no bliss. But there is a sort of quiet she rather likes.)

6 - Clay

He’s half in love with his partner, Sierra is kind, and she is good. She offers him a slice of bread with butter and olive oil, it tastes like home. She laughs, footsteps light on the ground and more fitted to a dance floor, and it sounds like the sort of thing he could get drunk on.

Two days before the end she pulls him into a darker hall, into a corner where for a moment they can be lost to time. She doesn’t kiss him, she pulls him closer and closer until they’re folding around each other. Sierra presses their foreheads together, eyes slipping shut, and in the dark, she tells him a story.

The words have been lost to time, like her laughter, but Clay remembers bits and pieces. When he isn’t lost to the high in his veins. 

So the moon reached her fingers across the earth …

The sun and stars cried out, in fear or in exhilaration. But whether it was said in dread and pride, they all echoed the same thing - 

The boy, with the stars, burned into his skin, laughed so madly that the world flinched back.

…she said, “How could I ever run from this? I was born to be here.”

They fought the stars and sun and moon, and they won. 

He had pressed closer to her, close enough that she was mouthing the words against his skin. Sierra whispered, and he shivered with every word, Oh, but it isn’t their end. It is only the beginning. 

Clay could have loved her, could have loved her the way they do in stories. Loved her enough to fight the stars and sun and moon. He had really wanted to.

Eight days into the game she slips poisonous herbs into his food, and he slits her throat while she sleeps. 

Regan, two years older and already an echo of a girl, tells him it’s easier to forget. She presses a vial into his hand, slips a belt around his arm, and a needle into his skin. She was right of course, some things are better lost.

7 - Johanna

Her legal name is Johanna, but it’s not her name. Her mother in a whiskey-soaked voice calls out, Jolene, Jolene, come on running. Her father sweeps her up into his arms and presses an ax to her hands, whispering in a soft way, You got this Jojo, show them whose boss.

After she wins a Capital, a woman with bright purple hair and sage green skin, whispers into her skin, Mercy, Johanna you are vicious. The only reason she doesn’t snap and break like a hollow tree is the fact that this woman is in bed with Johanna Mason, not Jolene, not Jojo, not Joey. 

Johanna Mason, she reasons, is the Capital’s. She can smile at the same parties where Finnick Odair is slowly losing his mind. She can tilt back her head and not shatter the champagne glass in her hand, not drive the shards into the neck of the man holding her. Johanna Mason can be the Capital’s girl, as long as her family still has their girl.

It takes a year and a half before it stops working, before the lines blur and she jerks away from her mother singing, Jolene, my darling Jolene. Before it takes four tries for her father to get her attention because he kept saying Jojo and that isn’t her.

It takes one year, and five months before she can’t separate the blood under her fingernails, the ax clutched so tightly in her hand that she has a faint scar of the handle across her palm. Before she can’t separate the before and the after. 

Jolene Mason, Jojo, Joey, dies a quiet, unnoticeable death, unlike the five children Johanna Mason killed. 

One month after that she breaks the nose of the man tearing into her skin because for once she can’t lose herself, for once she is stuck firmly in a body that is hers and doesn’t belong to a murderous girl. Her little brother goes missing on his way to work, they never find a body.

Three weeks after that, after a week of no sleep, she shatters, she breaks, Johanna Mason cracks in two. She says no, she spits in their faces and breaks the wrist of the first person who touches her.

A week later Johanna Mason is an orphan. Although, she reasons, she hasn’t had a family in a while. Their daughter died in the Arena, and someone else came back. 

7 - Blight 

His father dies in the forest, an accident, a leftover rebel landmine. There are only bits of a body for Blight to bury in a wooden casket he made himself. His mother gets sick four months later, she falls asleep with a cough that rattles her chest, and she doesn’t wake up. Then it’s just him, alone in an empty house.

The truth is, Blight hadn’t meant to come back. He hadn’t wanted to, he had wanted to live of course, but he knew that there was no one to mourn him when he didn’t. He knew that the girl, Erin, deserved-needed it more. 

But they make it to the final eight and she dies to a trident, ripping through her torso. Blight snaps the Four boy in half, his spine breaking like a petrified piece of wood. The next day in the Arena is a blur. 

Erin, a year younger and with a wicked temper and three siblings, dies and Blight decides to carve a bloody path through the Arena because what other option is there? Laying down and dying has never been his style.

He wins after taking a rock, an arrow through his arm, and cracking open the One boy’s head. Blight doesn’t feel regret then, only when he sees the little girl with Erin’s hair and the two boys with her eyes. He’s never regretted living, but sometimes he regrets coming back.

Johanna asks him once, drunk and no longer snarling, what he remembers. Maybe she was too drunk to recall it in the morning, or maybe she does have a heart, but she never mentions his response. “Erin, her eyes glimmered in the firelight. She seemed so alive.”

8 - Cecelia

The first time she holds her daughter, green eyes staring up at her with such awe, Cecelia realizes then and there that she's done. That she won't stand aside and let the world destroy this beautiful thing cradled in her arms. That she won't be yet another person to watch as their children are led to slaughter, as they are sacrificed for sins that were never their own. 

Cecelia holds her daughter for the first time and she loves her so much it hurts, it feels like it'll kill her. A tiny hand grips her finger with all the strength it can manage. A tear falls down her cheek and lands on her forehead, her daughter scrunched up her face and giggled. She gets it then, how easily love can destroy you.

When Haymitch Abernathy comes around with Rebellion on his tongue, a fire burns within his eyes for the first time in a decade, Cecelia thinks of her daughter, of her sons. It takes her all of five minutes to make her decision. 

The Capital has long outlived its purpose, and her children will grow up to know peace.

8 - Woof

He had a wife, Nala. She braided her hair with the scraps of cloth the factory threw away. She made tea in the morning, and curled around him when he woke up screaming. When he comes back from the Capital, with more dead children, or those who share his fate, she holds him until he stops shaking.

She died to natural causes, slipped away in her sleep, tucked against him. A kindness so many never experience.

Nala never hates him for the blood on his hands, for his shaking body, and the way he can never look her in the eyes. Nala loves him and Woof has a luxury so many are denied, he loves and is loved. He gets to grow old with her in an empty house. (He has already buried so many children.) She isn’t gentle, she doesn’t know how to soften her voice but she holds him when he breaks. She never flinches from him.

Nala is lovely, was lovely twenty and unlike everyone else, not once looking at him in either pity or disgust. Nala is lovely, seventy-two and graying, her hands wrinkled, the wooden ring in the same place it’s been for fifty years. 

He buries her in a garden of flowers, forget-me-nots, and daisies wrapped around her gravestone, carved from old limestone. Vines crawl over her name, over the carved-out lines that represent a life. Woof can only hope that he gets that same luxury, being forgotten to time because you are mundane, because the world does not need to see you rise or fall.