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The 17th Games begin
The blaring horn sounds, and Nico is dead within a minute.
Lewis watches it from the town hall’s television, from one of the plush red seats with a cup holder like he could’ve held down any liquid at all watching his best fucking friend enter a fight to the death with a crazy bitch for a District partner and the survival instincts of a plant.
Said crazy bitch throws a knife she finds in three seconds across the way, zipping past her original ducking target and landing square in Nico’s hammering chest. They record his fall, the way his eyes widen and his hands go to clutch at his chest but abort half way because there is no muscle signal left to tell them to continue, and he’s falling, falling, fallen. There is a second’s worth of his face, shot shakily before it pans back over to the crazy bitch, who grimaces, shrugs, and moves onto her next kill. An accident, she’ll tell them here if she wins it after all. And they’ll believe her.
But for now, everyone’s rioting. Everyone’s standing up, angry at their favorite horse falling on its back and snapping it in half, angry at their favorite movie for not magically reviving a dead character, angry at themselves for having bet on who was supposedly the best Academy candidate of that Hunger Games season. A Rosberg, wealthy enough to load up on the Academy training. A young man, 18 years old enough to know better than to rely on your District partner’s alliance.
Lewis sees just his Nico, who told Lucky Flickerman on live television that his first act as a winner would be to find his mother the kitchen set she’d always wanted and pay his father back his dues for raising him, because he’s always thought of himself as a needy, quiet child. And he is frozen, in shock and disbelief, staring unblinkingly at the screen still trying to show him some new exciting action while all his eyes can play on loop like a fucked up movie premiere is the singular shot of Nico’s still, dead face half-hidden by the tall grass, pale blue eyes open wide.
If he looks over, just to his right, the edge of Nico’s knee will appear, always bruised badly against his pale skin. Then, the hem of his shorts and the twitching length of his fingers, dancing on the armrest no matter the situation. And he turns, just to see it disappear, to see the one empty seat in the whole hall that he’d saved with all his might until each person remembered who he usually saved a seat for and retreated out of respect, or pity. And he reaches over, into the cavity of the nice chair for a heat that isn’t there, a body that’s kilometers away, inside an unbreachable arena and carrying not any life left to warrant an irrational decision on Lewis’s part, necessary.
It is a body he’s known for longer than his own. If he reaches over, it will still be warm to the touch, the phantom antsiness of its familiar fingers ghosting over Lewis’s own tense arm. If he cranes his neck a little more, he can almost hear it breathe like he’s heard him breathe every other night this past summer, when they’ve shared the floor of Lewis’s bedroom or the rubbery surface of a big camping tent out in the woods of District One. His phantom breath ghosts over Lewis’s cheek, and then his eyes, always his careful, adoring eyes, running over the valleys of Lewis’s face under the waning starlight and hum-buzz of their District’s automated factories.
And the footage has moved on. The Cornucopia, shot from way overhead, is spacious and green and void of people, only it is littered with corpses in their impersonality, bloodied backs bent and twisted and a little group of Careers, missing one, chatting about nothing significant under the awning of the metal structure. And Lewis knows that one shot is all he will get of his best friend’s face, and he knows they will send him home clean and wiped with a funeral picture digitally altered to zap some life back into his hollowing cheeks, and he’ll never have to see it again, like his friend had never died, was never murdered in the first place, but he knows he’ll never forget it.
The break through the clouds before the big Capitol hovercraft comes to lift them all away opens a filling pool of light over the whole scene, and he sees the way a crumpled boy’s hair glints underneath it, fanned out long and unintentionally around his once soft head whose shape Lewis can feel, like a phantom limb, tucked between the pads of his thumb and palm, and he knows that that one, crumpled corpse is no one but his Nico, and he stands up, exits stage left, and throws up his dinner in front of Nico’s inconsolable parents.
—
7 days before the 17th Games begin
“Why are you mad at me for doing what I’m good at?! For doing what I’m supposed to do?!”
Lewis has him backed up against a corner, heaving and eyes open wide in something a little closer to fear than real anger. “You think that’s all you’re good for! And I’ve told you a billion fucking times that you’re not just their machine! Their— their product, to fucking— mold into what they want you to be! I know you better than that.”
Nico tilts his head up to the sky, groaning in deep-seated frustration. He brings his two soft hands to his head, rubs them over his already sensitive eyes and dry forehead, and Lewis peels them off, replacing them with his own. Something familiar, before they tear him away and whisk him off to the Capitol on a bullet train faster than Lewis can scream his name. His cold hands must feel like sweet relief on Nico’s heated skin, the way they make imprints on the redness of his cheeks. Nico, when Lewis’s fingers ghost over the corners of his familiar mouth, shakes him off completely and pulls his long legs up onto the windowsill, wraps his barely-muscled arms around himself in a poor mimic of the comfort Lewis so desperately wants to give him. “Well it’s too fucking late now, Lewis! Let’s face it: it’s always been too fucking late for me. Just– for who I am!”
That again. It jabs at Lewis’s chest like a wooden javelin when Nico thinks he’s all his family is, that he’s all his money is. But they’ve had this argument before. He doesn’t want this to be his last act for his best friend, if it comes down to it. Instead, he tucks himself into the bones of Nico’s knees and Nico’s hands shift to hold his neck, instinctual. He will never forget how this feels, no matter how many times Nico holds him like they can do anything about it. He continues in a building whisper. “It’s too late for me, always. But not for you. You can run, Lewis. You’re— this was your last Reaping. You can— go on, and have children, and a lovely fucking wife, and you can— you can live!”
He chokes up, and Lewis grasps onto his arms, so that they’re all locked up, limbs digging into windowsills and the harsh wooden panels of the Capitol waiting room, and he breathes a shaking breath into the soft fabric of Nico’s pants, hoping it will breathe some life into his strong calves so that he can run when he’s in there, and not have to fight a thing he doesn’t want to fight. For all that he was the Academy’s first pick, Nico will never, ever be someone Lewis calls a winner. Because when it comes down to it, Lewis is still certain that he will not know how to kill. “I’m sorry, Lewis. I’m really, really sorry it has to be this way.”
Still hiding from his best friend’s gaze in the familiarity of his bent knees, Lewis whispers, “You could’ve just said no. You could’ve— told them you didn’t want the drawing, and they would’ve been— scandalized, maybe, but it wouldn’t have happened at all, and— and it would’ve gone to someone else who wanted it more than you. Nico, I know you never wanted this.” He looks up, facing the truth at last. “So why did you— why did you lie and say you did?”
Lewis meets his quivering eye, and he knows he doesn’t want the answer to this question. Not now. Not when he’s about to lose him, and there are more important things than the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, but he can’t help himself. It is the simplicity in his tone, the matter-of-fact placating that gets Lewis. “I just couldn’t have. Trust me, I couldn’t.”
And Lewis doesn’t— he doesn’t want to hear more, because he has a suspicion he already knows why, a suspicion that they both have known why since Nico stepped foot on the Reaping podium with a too-wide smile and avoided Lewis’s eye with all his might, and only let him see him truly in the last scheduled meeting slot before the train’s culling call drags him off to be just another name etched into the halls of history. “Why? Nico, tell me. Why?!”
The door opens. Their time is up. Still, Nico takes one last killing blow at Lewis, breathing out his last ever curse, just like Lewis asked of him. “Because you were their second choice. And I know you would’ve said yes.”
They drag him out screaming and biting, and Nico shuts the door himself without making a single sound.
—
8 years before the 17th Games begin
Realistically, Lewis has thought before that Nico could just bypass the Academy altogether. It’s not like he’s a victor’s child, or known to be much of a fighter in their primary school, anyway. He’s just an investor’s son. Well, Nico’s never been just anything, but he’s been— he’s not been the most ruthless boy since the moment Lewis met him when they were 7 each.
Nico just doesn’t have the stomach for it, Lewis thinks. Of course, that means he’ll probably never get picked for the District’s “Reaping”, plucked and primed straight from the Academy when he’s old enough to be even considered a real threat. And that’s a good thing. Lewis would much rather it be himself on the Reaping podium, because he thinks he could really win it. He wants it, deep within himself. Nico is always uncomfortable when he says this, but he gets uncomfortable with a lot of things.
All of that considered, though, it’s strange that he’d ask to be entered into the Academy 2 years even before his first Reaping. “I need all the help I can get.”
“Well you wouldn’t need any at all if you didn’t enter the Academy in the first place, would you? I mean,” Lewis reasons, picking at the browning strands at the very back of his head, the ones you don’t see if you’re looking at him full force and he’s looking back at you, all sunshine and blond smiles. “You’re smarter than them. You’re smarter than all of them, and you know how to use the money you’ve got. You can just… get away from it all.”
“And what am I going to do with that?” When he speaks with all of his indignance, Lewis has to stop himself from laughing at the tickling motion of Nico’s wavering head on his lap, and all the stark white hair that fans out over his bony dark thigh. “Do I just live out on the outskirts of town all alone? Come in for business meetings and retreat from the rest of society from shame in the afternoon? With nobody? No! At least, if I can win the games, I can do all that and still be able to show my face to the rest of society.”
Lewis laughs, but it’s not funny at all, that he thinks no one would come by to see him if he refused to enter the Academy at all. Give Lewis some credit! He leans back against the tree trunk behind him, sap wet on his neck, and lets himself imagine a world where Nico is a victor, and he’s right there alongside him. The image is all blurry. “I think— I think I want to enter the Academy the first chance I’ve got, too. Maybe in my first Reaping year.” He looks down at Nico, toying with his furrowed eyebrows. “I think I’ve got what it takes to win the Games. Show them what I can do.”
Nico shuts him down without a second thought. “No.”
“No?” Lewis giggles, but it’s a nervous one. “But you were just defending your own early entry like a minute ago. Why can’t I— you don’t think I can do the same?”
Irrationally, Lewis finds himself getting angry. “You don’t think I’m good enough for the Academy? Like you are, with your— with your money and your— your wits and—“
“That’s— It’s different for me! I don’t think anyone should want to be entered into the Academy, because— because you’re never ever guaranteed a victory, no matter how much you think you deserve it.”
“So, what? You think I’d let some little kid from Seven kill me on live television? Make some rash mistake and fall off the side of a mountain? You think I can’t win it?”
Nico shushes him, because they may be hiding in the woods from their parents, but they are still getting very loud. He drags himself up sluggishly from Lewis’s warm lap and throws himself to sit against the tree trunk, too, ear to ear and thigh to thigh. His head lolls to the side, and he’s just close enough to whisper into Lewis’s ear, red with indignance and face pinched in disbelief that his own best friend doesn’t think he has what it takes to come out of the Academy and the Games a victor. A killer. Nico leans in, one of his hands bracing itself on Lewis’s outstretched leg. “We’ll enter you into the Academy, okay? Next year. Maybe— no, next year. But only if you promise me, and look me in the eye and tell me you will never, ever put yourself in harm’s way when you don’t need it like you need to breathe. Okay?”
What he means, Lewis later discovers, is ‘don’t make yourself stand out so much that your name climbs the ranks of their lists for the “Reaping” and you find yourself at the very top, and at the very bottom of the Capitol’s food chain’. Of course, as with everything else they’ve ever hoped for with each other, futures they’ve mapped out to the very addresses they want to keep when they’re living as adults in the same neighborhood, it’s always too little too late.
Lewis, smiling like he’s the one with the world’s best kept secret in his hands, taps Nico’s head with his own. “Promise.” And Nico whispers it back to him, but he doesn’t hear it.
—
11 years before the 17th Games begin
“Hello? I— I swear I’m friendly! Do you maybe… want to come down from that tree? Down here? With me?”
A little blond head inches out from behind a rather thick branch, and tiny, gripping fingers hold onto another one to steady himself in revealing where he is to someone he’s never seen, ever.
Lewis smiles at him, trying to be encouraging. “Come down! I have— snacks? If you’d like?”
He waves him over to the sunny patch of meadow that overlooks a big, green field, and the border fence that’s almost never electrified because no one from District One would be stupid enough to give up their favored status for prison time, no matter how restricting the place gets.
Torturously slow, the boy walks across the green towards where Lewis is sitting cross-legged, and just basking in the whispers of nature again before he has to come down to the factories and bring his parents their lunch. “Do you— are you any allergic to peanuts?”
Lewis looks up at him, and the sun is in his eyes so he shields it with a tiny hand, and Nico reads it like an invitation to fold himself up sitting on the grass next to Lewis, an arm’s length away in case that wasn’t what Lewis was trying to get at and he’d need to make a swift escape. Luckily for him, Lewis knows how to roll with the punches. Nico, startled into remembering his earlier question, shakes his head ‘no,’ to which Lewis smiles, then offers up his bag of boiled peanuts.
In a bubble of silence broken only by flickering birds, they deshell them one at a time, plopping the little things inside their mouths and chewing until the taste spreads all over and covers up the bitterness of the late summer’s day. Another Game has come and gone, and their District has won again, but it’s not much cause for celebration. Michael had had to kill his District partner, after all.
It had been spectacular, so Lewis remembers viewing it. They’d wound up between thick trees in a damp forest, both of their legs caked with mud and swamp sludge, and the fight had been a test of endurance more than one of pure skill. Of course, Michael had both. The girl only sliced his shoulder once, and then she’d fallen back in shock as he’d flung that gushing blood onto her eyes, blinding her even more to the swinging vines all around them. He’d killed her with her head half-submerged underwater, and her legs kicking at him like a helpless animal. Then Lewis’s parents had turned the television off as Michael started to look up at the sky, drenched in muck, and grinned through the dripping blood like he’d never tasted anything better.
He’d seen Michael before, in school with all his best friends and all the fumbling girls he’d had eating out of his palm. Everyone was ready for his Reaping. Everyone knew they were saving him for his 18th, and that he wouldn’t take the drawing until his brother was old enough to join the Academy for free at 15, until he’d be prepared, too, in case one Schumacher winner wasn’t enough and they’d try for two. Or in case he wouldn’t make it at all, and Ralf would still have something to defend himself with if they tried their luck with the second brother the very next year. And he remembers another brother, maybe, though he was always very shy. Hid behind Michael a lot, but was never to be seen when he was at lunch. Looked to be his age. Looked to be—
“You’re Michael’s other brother!”
Nico, eyes wide and in the middle of popping open a peanut shell with his teeth, releases it quickly to shake his head frantically. Finally, he speaks. “No, I’m not. Just— he takes care of me, s’all. Took care of me. Kept me from getting beat on too bad.”
He has the sweetest voice Lewis has ever heard, and the saddest expression on his face, at that. And Lewis decides that won’t do. “Well he must be spoiling you rotten now with all that prize money he’s got! Tell me! ‘ve you been to his house? In the Victor’s Village? I’ve heard he keeps getting visitors all day, but he never lets anyone in.”
Lewis reclines back, leaning on his bony elbows and revelling in the way the tiniest bit of cold moisture from the morning dew digs into them, so that he won’t fry up completely in the sunlight. He throws a casual look over to the other boy, but he can’t meet his eyes. Instead, he’s stiff, and looking directly down at the empty peanuts, and clutching at his thighs with shaking fingers. “Yeah, I have. It’s— nice.”
Lewis clambers up, and it drags a little flinch out of the other boy. “Hey, hey— what’s wrong? You— did he— do anything to you?”
Flashes of that bloodied grin flash through Lewis’s head, and he shakes it off. Michael’s not like that. He was— the Games had dug something deep inside and clawed it all the way out, but it shouldn’t have changed him so much as to— as to hurt someone Lewis had never seen him fail to protect.
The boy draws his knees up, and the shells go tumbling down onto the grass. He rests a pink cheek on the crook, and looks over at Lewis, but he’s not really looking at Lewis. “He’s different, now,” he whispers, running his small fingers over the bruised knees school boys always sport. “He drinks a lot. Doesn’t like to speak much, and— when I come over—“
He shudders, meeting Lewis’s eye with the most certainty he’s had all day. “When I come over, he doesn’t let me out of his sight until he passes out. If I— If I try to leave, he gets really mad and shuts the door, and no one knows how to get him to calm down. And he never hurts me, always holds me until he stops shaking, but he can’t let me go until— until he passes out. It’s— his brother says it’s because of the girl.”
The one he had to kill last. She’d been around school, too, one of the younger ones from the Intown. Strange to think victors are only made from the bloodshed of the losers, no matter how similar they are. “That’s— you shouldn’t go to his house so much, anymore.”
“I have to,” the boy blinks, like it’s not a question of should, but must. “He’s— he was there for me when I needed him. And he needs people now. Ralf is helping, but he can’t take all the blows.”
“But you shouldn’t have to take them for him. You’re not even really related!”
The boy giggles, bone-weary. “That’s not what it’s ever been about. If you love someone enough to stick by them, no matter what, what does the blood matter? That girl, he’d protected her until it came down to it. He didn’t know her, but he did anyway. And myself. He was a really, really good person. I don’t think the Games could have changed all of it so quickly.”
Funny. That’s what Lewis had thought, too. He smiles at the boy, who still looks a little sad and a little lost, but he still smiles back for all it’s worth. Lewis sticks out a hand. “I’m Lewis. I think we could all use a few more good people in our lives, and I think you’re pretty good. Want to be friends?”
The boy looks down at it, like he’s never seen a handshake before, or even the prospect of making a friend all on his own, just for being his kind self. But he’ll take all the chances he can get. “I’m Nico. I’ve never had a friend before. I don’t know— I don’t know how to do this.”
Lewis shrugs, and clasps Nico on the shoulder. “Well, there always has to be a first, right? You just have to come here every once in a while, and I’ll most likely always be here. I live,” Lewis points in the vague direction of his apartments. “About a 10 minute walk that way, right on the edge of the District. So I’ll always come here.”
Nico smiles at him fully, now, and the sheer joy behind it threatens to blind him. “Sure. I’ll come all the time. I’m only a walk away, too. Just over that hill, there, the one that leads up into the clouds. Not too far if you’re up for the challenge.”
Lewis giggles, tipping his head over into Nico’s shoulder. “A friend is never too far to walk for.”
—
After the Games
They’ve had the bodies baking in the heat for hours by the time Lewis is up, running, and getting to the train station before the first rooster croaks. He’d wanted to get up sooner, come sooner, but he’d spent the last night mopping vomit from Michael’s floor after he’d found the old pile of letters Nico wrote him when he’d first entered the Games, one for every day he’d been in the Arena. Ralf wanted to burn them, but Lewis slapped the daylights out of him before he could, and took them all for himself. They’re in a box under Lewis’s bed right now, between his nicest shoes and the record player that had cost Keke a fortune to import from District Three, but Nico had wanted it so bad for Lewis that he’d begged for days and days until he’d given in. It’s like— all of Lewis’s shit is Nico’s shit, and he’ll never be able to get that stain out from every corner of his room. Fuck.
Fuck!
The station is empty. It’s maybe too early, yet, to go look at corpses. He’d be more surprised that Nico’s parents aren’t there if he didn’t know they haven’t so much as touched their television since the Bloodbath, since that first day, when they got the resolution they were waiting for from the Games, and decided there was nothing left worth seeing. He’d watched the rest of it—just to see if the crazy bitch lived or not. Thank God she didn’t, or her homecoming would be very different from Michael’s, as long as he’s there to greet the corpses.
But there’s not a soul aside from himself, under a lantern by the two wooden coffins, each marked with a pristinely printed name and locked with a hatch to keep the animals and the maggots out until they’re claimed.
And so Lewis carries Nico’s coffin alone.
He weighs about as much as half a sack of iron dustings, which would be a strain on pretty boy Nico himself, who’s never worked real manual labor in his life, but is all in a day’s work for Lewis. If he shuts his eyes, ignores the faintest stench coming from the cracks in the wood, it’s almost like he’s just doing his day job now that he’s out of school. He’s just lugging a sack of iron from the factory to the plant, and it’s unyielding, unmoving in his strong hands, so he does his job without complaint. Over the hill, and far away.
He walks across the Square that way, to the nice neighborhoods of Nico’s house that sit at the foot of Victor’s Village. Michael’s house, only the third occupied since the beginning of its construction, sits quiet and still, like the rest of the world before the sun has even begun to rise. In the upstairs, though, Ralf must still be awake, signing bills, and making sure the house is running as it's supposed to while his brother rots away on the couch downstairs. Lewis can’t help but think, guiltily, that that's a privilege in itself, to have a rotting loved one to take care of—and not in the literal sense.
When he gets to the Rosbergs’ house, a half-hour walk with the added weight of his luggage, he’s still not quite processed that there is a person inside of the box over his shoulder. No, sorry. Not a person anymore. Just a body. The person is long gone, just wisps of memory in the sky and threaded through the crevices along the largest parts of Lewis’s brain like a binding that will never give, and the more he thinks about it, the shakier his arms grow until he’s dropped the coffin, still locked shut and sturdy, onto the cobbled pathway into his best friend’s house.
Inside, a set of lights turns on in startled succession, and Lewis can imagine Nico’s parents waking up in a fit, running through the hall to get to their window, and there’s Sina’s terrified face peeking past the curtains and down at Lewis and the coffin, and she screams, and Lewis falls onto his knees beside the heavy, wooden thing. It’s improper. It’s so improper, but he can’t help himself. His hands move of their own accord, pop open the loose lock and open the lid like it’s just any other chest, but inside it is the deathly-still corpse of his best fucking friend, only the slightest bit blue and hollow from the chemicals they pumped into his body to prevent decay until it reached its destination, like he’s some kind of preserved food for later and not the first person to reach beyond Lewis’s chest and drag his heart out kicking and screaming, and devour it as easy as breathing. It’s so sick, how they deny him his escape, even when he’s already been made into a television star by the sheer fact of dying to his own District partner.
Sina runs out, while Keke makes some phone calls from further inside the house. She’s shaking him, and speaking in hushed tones and smoothing the baby hairs back from his sweaty forehead, but he refuses to let go of the wood. Of Nico, who he carried for half an hour only, but is going to hold in his heart for a lifetime.
“Darling, Lewis, you have to move,” she soothes, petting his swollen neck and keeping all eyes on him so she does not have to look left, and see whatever is left of her son. “I’m sorry, but we have to move him into the plot. It’s– it’s ready.”
The plot?
“Yes, darling. It’s been a few hours since you came here. We didn’t want to interrupt you.”
And how selfish is that? He’s just Nico’s best friend, who he died trying to protect from the Games, and he’s hoarding his body like a fucking child while his actual parents made the arrangements for the plot and watched him sobbing into their son’s knees like a fucking idiot. Sina tugs him up from the body, dislodges his grip on Nico’s leg and soft, cotton pants, so that she can tuck his head inside of her collarbone, above her big heart that Nico had inherited in its entirety. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Lewis. It’s not your fault. He chose this. He told us over and over that he chose this.”
She takes him by the cheeks with her warm hands, pulling him taut like the emaciated face of his best friend next to them, and searches him like she’s searching for the last living traces of her own son in the smile lines caked on his face. “He knew exactly what he was doing, every step of the way. He wanted you to live, darling. That’s all. He wanted you to live for him, and for yourself. And maybe we’ll all get to see him again some day over the clouds, some day far away from now.”
“But I want him now,” he whimpers. He’s never so much as cried in front of anyone but Nico, but Nico’s fucking gone, so he’ll cry where he pleases. “Please, I just want him now.”
“I know,” she whispers, and her voice shakes like the grip she has on his head. “I know you do. Come on, darling. Let’s go. The sooner he’s tucked in, the sooner we can let him rest. He deserves that much, right, darling? Come on, Lewis. You can— you can carry him if you’d like.”
And so Lewis does carry him, holding him in the coffin like he’s the most precious of treasures to be hidden from prying eyes, but not never to be found. Keke’s chosen a good spot, next to a little creek out the back of their house, where the treeline breaks apart and the spot of sunshine they’ve created promises, in a few weeks or a few years, a smattering of wild daisies to push up from the remains of a dead boy, and create something beautiful that the Rosbergs will see for years to come from the love their son carried so deep in his heart. And Lewis, after doing his daily rounds of checking in on Michael and Nico’s parents like he’s forced himself to do because he knows Nico would be the one to do it otherwise, will come, sometimes, to the patch of new grass behind their house and the simple gravestone Keke carved out himself, and sit for a while, with his knees tucked up under his cheek, and rest for a second, next to his best friend, where he swore he always would be until fate would have them meet again.