Work Text:
Impulse had been awake all night, it was really no use trying to sleep any, not on Reaping day.
It wasn’t all bad, District 5 was truly pretty at night with its blinking lights, he didn’t think he’d manage his insomnia at all if he’d lived in one of the districts that had no power most of the time, there were problems in his district for sure, but electricity wasn’t one of them.
Still he had it better than most, being a Victor came with housing, a cushy place to spend your time between each kid sent to slaughter. It’s why he’d never married, never wanted kids, he could never fathom his own kid having the arena in their future.
Most other Victors that had been at it as long as he had had lost it, but he’d always managed somehow, just clinging onto the belief that someday, somehow, the Games would end. It had been 35 years since he’d won and he’d mentored 3 other kids to victory, statistically he wasn’t half bad, considering District 5 people rarely were on par with most other districts when it came to physical strength. Still 33 kids had died under his guidance, and that didn’t account for the fact that each year 10 kids from other districts would also die.
For Impulse, mentoring was a lonely job, he always made sure that he took on the burden each year, trying to spare as much as he could to his kids, a luxury that his mentor had not allowed him, as she’d been too focused on drowning her trauma in potions.
After he’d won, she had not hesitated to burden him with the role of Mentor, and within a few years she’d drunk herself into an early grave.
The warm summer air accentuates the sweet smell of Impulse’s home. Candy making had been his hobby of choice, when the Capitol had required him to do something with his time to show he was still a normal person.
It’s not a normal hobby, no one in the districts would be doing something so expensive for fun, and it’s definitely too much manual labour for the Capitol citizens, but it allows him to give back to the district kids by distributing the sweet treats he makes at no charge. He also discovered through the years that it allows him to gain the trust of his tributes, since they recognised him as the kind man giving everyone the candy, and not only the one that was gonna accompany them to die.
He’d been working hard all night, preparing all kinds of delicacies, so when the first natural light of the day started shining through his windows, he was finishing the wrapping on a small package full with all sorts of bonbons and sweets, the last of more than a dozen sitting on his dining table, ready for his little tradition of sharing them with the years tribute and his fellow mentors.
Proud of his work, a small consolation in the tragedy that had become routine in his life, he started making some coffee, expecting the knock on his door that came not half an hour after first light.