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He keeps the tapes. Of course he does. If he was capable of self-loathing, he’s sure he’d feel it, but self-loathing is a young man’s game and Coriolanus Snow is no longer a young man.
It’s a fool’s errand, keeping the record of the very thing that could destroy him and everything he’s worked so tirelessly for, but after forty years, this is the one allowance Coriolanus allows himself. After all, he’s the president of Panem and the president should be allowed as many allowances as he likes.
So, he shuts himself up in a room where no one will think of finding him on particularly good days or particularly bad days or days when everything’s too quiet, or days where the voices will not leave him alone. He pops in the tape and watches the tenth Hunger Games. Disastrous. Ruinous. Traitorous. Addicting.
His girl dazzles on the screen. Forty years and she’s still his girl. She lived as his girl and she died in the woods as his girl. Static takes away the bright colors that adorned her, but no screen could properly capture her rainbow ruffles. For the Covey loved color and her more than most. What he once mistook for charm, he now sees as deception. What he once thought of has empathy is something that he know sees as a thinly veiled façade put on to inspire pity from the districts and Capitol alike. He sees right through her now. Liar. Greedy liar.
His boy’s harder to catch in the cover of nighttime, but he catches a few glimpses of him every time, darting through the arena with little attempt at stealth, but still melting into the shadows easily. A tip of a sturdy District 2 boot there. A wayward curl there.
Coriolanus sees himself too at this part. He pulls his boy out of the area, because unlike Lucy Gray Baird, Sejanus Plinth has nothing to hide. He plainly is. He hates them both for what they are.
What they were.
After forty years of being the only viewer of this horrifying, addictive footage, it’s a hard choice to part with his title, but he does anyway. With no interference or advice from any member of his staff, he sends a copy off to the newly crowned victor boy with olive skin and a headful of thick, dark curls for him to see.
The boy is in prison, even if any boy from the Seam would never ordinarily call a fully furnished apartment in the Capitol with as much milk and bread as his stomach could handle a prison. He’ll figure it out soon enough.
Even the thought of the Seam pulls the corners of Coriolanus’ mouth down into a tight frown, bringing back memories of his girl spinning in a beautiful dress and smiling fondly down at him from the makeshift stage, looking as out of place there as she had in the Capitol. Memories of a hand with dirt-caked nails covering his own, claiming brotherhood and maybe something even deeper. He never really figured out what he was to either of them. A blessing no longer in disguise.
Coriolanus tucks himself away in the room where he watches the tenth Games, but instead of popping in the recording, he turns to the live taping of the Seam boy watching them. He sees confusion briefly fill his eyes, followed by recognition when the music begins, loud and sweeping, and filled with Covey flair.
There. There’s the realization. Coriolanus would be smiling if it weren’t Lucy Gray Baird he was looking at. He hasn’t smiled at her in a long, long time.
He turns off the recording when the Seam boy’s expression turns from awestruck confusion to abject horror. His job is done. The boy is surely realizing how much danger he’s in, how much damage he’s caused to the Games. Coriolanus’ Games. He can watch him suffer later.
…
“Don’t see you down here very often, President Snow,” the man in the lab coat says, trying at a laugh as if that will erase the shakiness from his voice. He’s a young man, probably a lab assistant and probably a fresh graduate from the University if Coriolanus had to guess. If he were in the districts, he probably would’ve been newly safe from the Reaping.
Coriolanus doesn’t even attempt a smile for the young man thoroughly wrought with nerves; he keeps his gaze firmly set on the handful of gumdrops settled in his gloved palm and his fingers lightly tapping against the metal lab table in front of them. Red. Bloodred red. “It’s rare that we have jobs as important as this,” he replies, watching as another young woman scurries up to deposit a white paper sack on the lab table. She gives her President a quick, horrified glance before rushing off. No doubt she’s heard the rumors.
It clicks all at once in Coriolanus’ brain. Why every person in this lab seems to be under the age of twenty-five. Why every look shot his way is filled with thinly veiled trepidation. They’re all convinced of their impending death. Every last one of them is convinced that Coriolanus will have their head the second he’s squeezed every bit of usefulness from their admittedly unimportant bodies. The Gamemakers and head scientists had picked their youngest for the slaughter, hoping to preserve their own lives in a move disguised as seniority.
It impresses and disgusts Coriolanus all at once, how eager his workers are to save their own skin. In the end though, he can’t find it in himself to fault it. After all, there’s a reason that the Hunger Games targets children and not the entire district.
“I suppose not,” the young man says with a chuckle that’s probably higher pitched than he meant it to be. He carefully snaps open the white paper sack with one and begins to slowly pour the dark red gumdrops in with the other. The sleeve of his too-big lab coat falls down one arm, and he starts, hurrying to pull it up quickly with the hand holding the sack, as if such a small thing had been enough to sign his death warrant.
Coriolanus almost laughs, though he covers it with a quiet cough. It never stops being amusing to him, how willingly his own people are to cower at his feet at the drop of a hat. Necessary, of course, but amusing all the same.
“President Snow?” the young man asks. His voice has grown so high that it’s nearly a squeak.
“What’s that, boy?”
The lab assistant gulps, clearing his throat when the noise seemingly gets caught in his throat. “During the Games. These Games. When some of the Gamemakers went…” He shifts the white paper bag to one hand and uses the other to make a motion that Coriolanus interprets as ‘into the arena.’
Coriolanus nods, gesturing for him to continue. It strikes him very suddenly that this young man, still skating along the thin line between childhood and adulthood, probably knew the young Gamemakers that had been savagely murdered in the area. All four of them had probably just graduated from the University together, had maybe gone through all of their years at the Academy together.
He considers this, not with regret or solemnity for the lives lost, but with severe curiosity. Maybe he’d even loved one of them, or all of them. Maybe he blamed Coriolanus for the losses he’d endured and was plotting revenge; maybe Coriolanus was not meant to leave this lab alive. He dismisses this threat with a silent chuckle; this man’s arms are held too far from his body to be properly concealing a weapon. And even so, what if he was? He was going to kill the President in plain view of his own peers and Coriolanus’ loyal citizens? The thought was laughable to say the least.
“They told us that you had gone into the area once before,” the lab assistant says, all in one breath like the words are exploding out of him. He gasps lightly, like the outburst had sapped all of his energy.
Coriolanus freezes; his fingers stall against the cold metal of the table before he quickly catches himself and gets them tapping again, hoping that the movement was imperceptible. He hopes that the young man can’t see the cold dread building behind his eyes but decides to tell the truth regardless. He’s never been much of a liar. “Just once,” he confirms in a low voice that’s meant to be nonchalant.
The lab assistant nods slowly, and something about it makes Coriolanus instantly regret his decision to leave him unscathed, which is even further tested when he opens his mouth to speak again, apparently spurned on by the fact that he hasn’t dropped dead yet. “Which games was it? Sir?”
Coriolanus hums and leans casually back against the metal lab table like he’s trying to recall a memory long-forgotten instead of plucking it from the store of memories that are so deeply ingrained in his sense of self that he can practically taste it. “The tenth,” he answers. “I was only a student at the Academy then. Probably not that much younger than you are now.”
A pink blush rises high in the man’s cheeks, immediately confirming Coriolanus’ suspicions about his young age. He goes back to filling up the white paper sack with deep red gumdrops like he’s been caught doing something he’s not supposed to. Good. Maybe he’ll let him live.
Coriolanus continues to lean against the table as he finishes filling the sack; he’d stood out like a sore thumb creeping around the old arena in his bright red school uniform. Sejanus, on the other hand, in his District 2 garb, had been indistinguishable from every other speck of District vermin that crawled the place. Meanwhile, Lucy Gray, lying low in the tunnels beneath the arena, had nothing about her that screamed District even if it was her name that had been reaped, legal or not.
The animal pushed into purity. The muddied pure that was pushed into animalistic tendencies. The pure that was born into purity and was clever enough to remain that way. What a trio they had been. How right it was that only one of them still remained.
The lab assistant seals the paper sack with the weak adhesive that would probably be used in the District 12 candy shop, nothing like the glue manufactured in other districts, before carefully setting it in the metal tube that rests on every table in the lab. It’ll be tested and approved before being put to its proper use. Coriolanus can hardly wait.
…
No one expects Coriolanus to come along on the would-be solo hovercraft ride to District 12 on the day of the Covey girl’s execution. Not that they explicitly know it’s an execution, of course. They’ll have their assumptions on why their president is suddenly sending a precious hovercraft to the district that’s far outlived its wealth and usefulness, but no one will have the courage to ask questions. The only people that know of the poison gumdrops were the handful of scientists that manufactured them to have the perfect blend of familiarity.
His wife gives him a strange look over breakfast when he tells her how he’s spending his day and most of his night, but offers no protest. His advisors take the opposite side, peppering him with questions and concerns. Coriolanus brushes them all off and they eventually go quietly.
The pilot’s eyebrows furrow in a brief moment of confusion when Coriolanus boards the craft alongside him, carefully toting a white paper sack with him, but quickly snaps his jaw shut, probably afraid of losing his job or life if he questions a damn thing about today. Smart move.
While still far from the most comfortable place, Coriolanus is able to settle into the plush seats of the hovercraft for the hours of airtime without much difficulty. There’s a screen built into the wall opposite his seat, and at his request, it shows footage of the soon-to-be dead girl when he clicks it on.
This isn’t the first time, nor is any of this footage strange or unfamiliar to him. The camera, smaller than the nail on his pinky finger, had been mounted on the wall of the tiny house, really no more than a hovel, the night that that victor boy had presented him with the corpse of that young girl and applauded him for it. The night that the light had glinted ever so perfectly off of that flint striker. That Covey made flint striker.
Really, Coriolanus should have been keeping even closer tabs on the Covey this whole time.
The girl loved gumdrops and her beloved victor loved giving them to her; once he had had that much information, a week and a half ago, he was clear to turn off the television, but he hadn’t. He watched the Covey house, and he watched its inhabitants.
Clerk Carmine. Tam Amber. Once strong and youthful boys, now hunched over with age and weariness. The curiosity hidden behind every teenager’s eyes had been replaced with a tiredness built up by years of hard work and exhaustion. Smile lines had been replaced by frown lines. Even the house was more broken down than it had once been; the appliances were creaky, and the wallpaper on the walls was chipped and peeling. The instruments tucked against the wall were still beautiful, if noticeably older.
And he watched the girl. Largely not from the camera in the home, as due to her arrest, she hadn’t been there all that much. But he dispatched Peacekeepers to keep watch and report back to him. He studied the footage from the Peacekeeper base in District 12. He saw the beds, the mess hall, the training. Everything he and his boy had gotten up to for months. It was a memory that tasted sour in his mouth.
The girl too left a sour taste in his mouth. She had dark curls that bounced around her shoulders, only a shade darker than her skin which was the color of the coffee beans she’d never been able to afford. Her eyes were dark as well and filled with an untamable sort of mischief.
Maybe it was her cadence, maybe it was the strange way she spoke, or her looks, or that damning sweet, melodic voice, but all of it reminded him so strongly of his girl. It all screamed Lucy Gray. There was deception in the way she carried herself and the way she interacted with the world around her. Something to be eradicated. His fist clenches tighter around the bag of gumdrops.
…
The scent of smoke in the air is distant but still so acrid that, even so deep in the Meadow, Coriolanus is nearly bowled over the second he steps off of the hovercraft. The pilot tries to grab for his bicep, trying to steady him, but Coriolanus shakes him off. “M’fine,” he says, coughing into the crook of his arm.
He rights himself quickly, ignoring the pilot’s worrying gaze and trying to keep his balance on the deep green grass, slowly yellowing in the hot July night. Even the absence of the sun doesn’t take away the harsh sting of heat that starts sweat pouring from his scalp and down his cheeks. The smoke continues to burrow its way into his chest to wrap around his lungs, and it’s an active effort not to choke on it. It tastes like the hottest and worst days of the war, fifty years ago now, but it feels so familiar that it could’ve been yesterday.
“Sir?” the pilot says timidly. He’s not as young as the lab attendants had been, but he’s nowhere close to Coriolanus’ age either. He’s probably in his early thirties and judging by the apprehensive expression written across his classically handsome face, he’s just as worried about the possibility of his own death at his president’s hands. He continues when Coriolanus turns to him and raises an inquiring eyebrow. “Do you think we should-?”
Coriolanus nods impatiently. “Yes. Yes, of course. If I could have some privacy…”
The pilot steps back, surprised, but he goes willingly, climbing aboard the hovercraft like he’s glad to be away from him and leaving Coriolanus alone in the startling green of the Meadow.
The fence, erected four days into Coriolanus’ presidency, remains stagnant if annoyingly free of electricity. Thankfully, he doesn’t see any spectators in the distance; they’re all dealing with the flaming wreckage that’s sure to have been made of the house once lived in by a boy who’s now a Victor. If all goes according to plan, he has hours to get this done, even if realistically, it shouldn’t take longer than ninety seconds.
But Coriolanus ignores the clock, ignores the hovercraft with the pilot waiting inside, ignores the smoke pouring from the district in the distance, and crouches down onto the grass that covers the hard-baked dirt he’d tried to forget.
Here, forgotten by all but a handful of District 12’s residence, a girl once sat and strummed her guitar; beautiful melodies poured from her throat and lies fell from her lips. If Coriolanus squeezes his eyes shut tight enough, he can almost picture his girl’s laugh, the look on his girl’s face when she leaned in to kiss him like nothing else in the world mattered.
But of course, so much more had mattered. To both of them. He had the world in front of him, even if she had nothing in front of her. Even if she had escaped, she would’ve been faced with the woods and no other prospects. She had never returned to District 12. That, he had made sure of.
And there, he can see the tree that, at least once upon a time, had been known as the Hanging Tree. Traitors, criminals, scum of the earth. They’d all met their doom there. His boy had met his doom there.
Unlike Lucy Gray, Coriolanus can’t close his eyes tight enough to conjure up the image or feel of Sejanus’ lips; he can’t easily recall the way that the boy’s arms fell around his waist or shoulders to pull him closer. But the longer he thinks about him, dark curls and a heart that had been too kind for his own good, he hears his boy’s haunting last word echoing and bouncing around in his skull. Ma! Ma! Ma! He finds himself reverting back to Coryo. Not a President, barely even a killer. A boy.
See what filth they made him into? What love made him into?
Coriolanus sets the white paper sack down into the grass, but instead of rising from his crouching position, he just stares at it. Sejanus Plinth had loved gumdrops. He remembers the little boy, tromping across the Capitol playground with a bag so achingly similar to this one clenched in his fist.
Sejanus with the gumdrops. Lucy Gray with her guitar. Sejanus standing up to Dr. Gaul. Lucy Gray singing to the snakes in the arena. A flash of orange as Lucy Gray disappeared into the woods. The snap of Sejanus’ neck breaking as he dangled from that fucking Hanging Tree- Ma! Ma! Ma!
Vomit comes roaring up Coryo’s throat without warning and splattered onto the grass, though he has the good sense to turn and aim it away from the sack of gumdrops. A sob rips his way out of him and he collapses sideways onto the grass, clutching his convulsing stomach.
Sejanus Plinth. Lucy Gray Baird. His boy. His girl.
Dead. Gone.
It takes half an hour for Coryo to pick himself up off the ground and limp back onto the hovercraft, where it’s clear that the pilot had seen the whole incident. He’ll have him killed the moment the craft lands back in the Capitol.
Coryo stands at the craft’s window and stuffs his hands into his pockets as he watches the smoke rise from the district he’d sworn never to return to as the sunrise begins to peak through the trees.
Goodbye Lenore Dove. Goodbye Lucy Gray. Goodbye Sejanus.
He’s no stranger to the age-old promise to not let love weaken him. But as he’s learned, and as he keeps learning, over and over again, it’s more complex than that. It’s a promise not to let love into his life, to not let any semblance of whatever love he’d ever felt in any way worm its way into the life he’d worked so hard to build. It’s a promise that indifference is the only option in a world of hatred.
It’s a reminder that love kills.
Over and over again.