Chapter Text
The Hunger Games are a sacred tradition. For more than seventy years, they have kept the nation of Hawkins in order, quashing any potential rebel uprisings so the horrors of the Dark Days may never find the glorious Capitol again. Of course, the entertainment factor is certainly a plus. Watching those poor District children run, as if stuck in a deadly hamster wheel, trying to escape, trying to survive, has always been one of President Creel’s favorite pastimes. He cannot claim to have created the Games, he is far too young for that, but by God he envies the man who did. A mysterious, shadowy figure known only by his initials, M.F., the first Gamemaker and the greatest mind Hawkins has ever known. Henry Creel wants nothing more than to emulate that man in everything he does.
All across Hawkins, parents and children alike wake to yet another Reaping day—the seventy-first annual. In the Capitol, they sleep soundly and wake happily, excited to see what the districts have to offer. In the districts they are not so lucky. Each parent prepares for the possibility of their child’s death, while each child lies awake knowing it might be them or their friend.
In District Twelve, the mayor’s twelve-year-old son shuts off his alarm so he may pretend a little longer that the day isn’t happening. A few blocks down, in the market, his friend is woken by his little sister pulling the covers off of his bed. All the way across town, in the poorer area called the Seam, another boy their age is already awake, feeding his mother’s cat as he does every morning. Across the street, an older boy tucks his little brother in, while the brother pretends he is still sleeping.
Jonathan Byers has been skilled at hunting since he was nine. Not by his own choice. His father is—was, though he’s still alive—an awful man, who only ever does what’s best for himself. That happened to include teaching his nine-year-old son to hunt, though it’s beyond illegal to do so, let alone to own a gun or go beyond the fence. Lonnie always said the meat sold well, and they needed the money. Unfortunately, he was right about that, if nothing else, and after he left Jonathan had no choice but to keep hunting to support his mom and brother, though he’d never let his mom find out. Taking out tesserae was more than enough risk in her eyes, but that’s another story entirely.
He doesn’t manage anything as big or as expensive as a deer, but he does take out a couple geese and find a few rabbits and squirrels in his traps. It’s still early when he gets to the Hob, the black market of District Twelve. There, he finds Melvald, who always pays well. Today, he pays extra well, and even wishes Jonathan luck. Jonathan sincerely hopes he won’t need it. On his way out, he spots Jim Hopper, already nursing a bottle of moonshine. Useless fucking drunk. No wonder their tributes always seem to die first, when he’s the one mentoring them.
Hopper does try, of course. To save them, that is. He tries to teach them what to do, how to keep themselves alive for as long as possible, long enough for sponsors to take note of them. It’s not his fault the other tributes always seem to target them. The little kids from the mining district, not even old enough yet to mine. Yeah, why not target them? What are they gonna do, fight back?
She did. She fought so hard, harder than anyone else. She should’ve come home. She deserved to come home, with how hard she fought. But she didn’t. They killed her, just like they killed all the others. She didn’t get to come home.
He did, though. He came home, without her, and the only other person in that house walked right out the same day he walked back in. It’s not empty, though. It was for a few years, there, but not anymore. There’s a strange little girl there now, a girl who reminds him so much of her, the same age now that she was when she died. The strange little girl doesn’t look much like a girl with her buzzed hair, nor does she act like a normal kid at all, barely talking as she wanders the halls of his too-large house, practically haunting it. She says her name is Eleven. Hopper calls her El.
Today she’s more talkative than normal. Says she knows something’s going on, asks what it is. Hopper doesn’t answer at first, but she keeps pestering him. She’s very good at that. Sarah was, too. Begrudgingly, he tells her all about the Reaping, and pities whatever Seam kids with their names in fifty times will get chosen this year.
Will’s name is only in once. Jonathan had insisted on it, had all but refused to let him take out tesserae. “If we need more, I’ll take out more,” he said months ago, when Will turned twelve and became eligible. Their mother had taken Jonathan’s side in the matter, which was honestly kind of rare for her. The two of them argue more often than not. Will thinks his brother gets it from their father.
His name is only in once. That means he’s not going to be picked. Right? If his name is only in once, and there are a few thousand people in the district, then the chances of him being picked are slim to none. That’s how that math works, he’s sure of it. Mike would back him up on it. So would Dustin, and Dustin is smarter than Mike, though Will would never hurt Mike’s feelings by saying that to his face. But they would both back him up, and so would Lucas, and they would all agree that there’s no way he’s going to get Reaped.
That doesn’t stop the nightmares, though. He’s had three already this week, and he knows they won’t end until the Games are over. Even then, they’ll just come back next year. At least tonight he managed to avoid screaming when he woke up, so his family doesn’t know that he’s awake. When his mother calls his name, he pretends he’s just waking up, because it’s always easier not to worry her.
Jonathan comes home just as Will is getting out of the bath his mother drew for him, bearing gifts of good meat for a stew. He says he got it from the butcher, on sale because of the “holiday”, but Will knows the truth. The butcher is a shrewd man who never gives sales or discounts for anyone but the few illegal hunters who bring him their best catches, and Jonathan is one of those. Their mother doesn’t know that, but Jonathan has spent some time teaching Will how to shoot in case something happens to him—in case he gets Reaped, though that goes unspoken—or their mother and Will needs to start providing for the family in either of their stead.
Goose meat will make for a good stew, a perfect celebration for surviving yet another Reaping. Their mother starts preparing it as Jonathan and Will change into their nicest clothes. Will’s outfit is one he’s only worn for his grandmother’s funeral and last year’s Reaping, which, he supposes, isn’t all that different from a funeral.
His friends will be getting ready now, too, Dustin’s mom fawning over how handsome he looks while Mrs. Sinclair forces Lucas into that dress shirt he hates. Knowing Mike, he’s probably just now waking up, most likely from Nancy barging into his room or little Holly throwing a fit loud enough for half the district to hear. That girl’s tendency towards screaming tantrums is just about the only reason Will has ever been glad to be Seam.
He probably wouldn’t be, of course, if not for Lonnie Byers, his deadbeat father who left three years ago to become a Booker Boy, one of the awful men who take people’s bets every year on which kids will be Reaped and how soon they’ll die. Lonnie and Will’s mother had loved each other once, but that was well before Will was born. The way his mother tells it, she was a stupid teenager just out of high school who thought love could make up for lack of money when she left behind her merchant family for Lonnie, but soon enough the love was gone, too, and she was left with nothing but two boys to look after. Will didn’t know his grandparents well before they died, but his grandmother once said it was a shock Lonnie stayed as long as he did.
“That man would send his own son to the arena, if he thought there was a chance he’d come out alive,” she’d once said. For a long time, Will hadn’t believed her: even Lonnie wouldn’t be so cruel as to kill his own child. But that wasn’t what she was implying. The Victors of the Hunger Games get money, lots of it. Enough money to bring Will’s family out of poverty, enough money to bring half the district out of poverty. Lonnie Byers is a greedy man who would jump at the opportunity for that money the first chance he got.
Luckily, he thinks far too lowly of both his sons to ever dare trying to rig the Reaping.
Will wishes his mother had never married Lonnie. He wishes she’d married some other man, if not a richer one than a better one, a man who she could’ve truly loved, so she could’ve been happy even if he’d died in the mines, like Dustin’s dad did a few years back. Or else Will wishes his mom would’ve married another merchant like herself, so they could live a comfortable life baking and decorating pastries all day, like Lucas’s family. Most of all, Will wishes his mom could’ve found a budding politician to marry, like Karen Wheeler did, so they could live in the big house by the Justice Building where the mayor and his family get to live, where Mike gets to live.
Mike wishes he weren’t the mayor’s son, though. His whole life, he’s wished he came from a different family, a better family. Maybe one more like Will’s, with a mother who's actually there for her kids and not busy all day acting as mayor while her husband sits around doing nothing. If Mike's older sister were anything like Will's brother, Mike thinks they might actually like each other.
For some reason, Nancy is incredibly worried about getting Reaped. Mike isn’t sure why. Her name is only in, like, four times. By her age, most kids in the district have their name in at least twenty times, considering about seventy-five percent of the district lives in the Seam (by their mother’s estimate, not Mike’s) and almost every kid in the Seam ends up taking out tesserae sooner or later. In fact, Will is one of the few Seam kids Mike knows that didn’t take out any the second he turned twelve. Just a few weeks ago, Dustin had to take out two, one for him and one for his mother. Now, his name is in three times, the most of any of their friend group.
He probably won’t get Reaped, though. Three is nothing. Almost every year, the names chosen are those of the seventeen or eighteen-year-old Seam kids, who have their names in at least thirty times or so. It’ll be the same this year, and Dustin won’t get Reaped, nor will Lucas or Will or Mike. They’ll all be safe.
Mike isn’t the first of the group to arrive at the town square where the Reapings occur every year, despite living the closest to it. Lucas waves to him from the small but growing crowd, and after Mike has had his finger pricked—the Peacekeepers need their blood to identify them, for some reason—he joins him in a section they haven’t stood in before: the section for those eligible to be tributes. The younger kids stay at the back of the crowd, while the older kids who are more likely to be picked go towards the front. As Mike weaves his way through to stand by Lucas, Nancy keeps walking.
She doesn’t like how close to the front she’s getting. Sure, she’s still only fifteen—a couple months out from sixteen, though birthdays are meaningless today—but that’s directly in the middle of the age range for the Reapings. In a few years time, she’ll be right at the front of the herd, one of hundreds of sacrificial lambs, ripe for the taking.
Barb says she has a way with words, and she should try to get a position with the small District Twelve newspaper that tends to report only on the Hunger Games and whatever disaster has most recently occurred in the coal mines. Nancy dearly wishes she could, too, but that paper isn’t exactly legal in the eyes of the Capitol and the daughter of the mayor associating with it would draw far too much attention, and then Peacekeepers would come and shut the whole thing down and it would be all Nancy’s fault.
Nancy isn’t sure which fate is worse: being the reason one of the few good things in this place ends, or being the lamb that gets sacrificed.
It’s not long before Barb finds her, standing beside her just like every Reaping prior. That’s how they became friends, actually. When they were twelve, they were both so nervous and mostly friendless, that when they ended up next to each other by chance they spent the whole time whispering to one another, trying to convince themselves that neither of them would be Reaped. When neither of them was, they became inseparable almost immediately, repeating their first meeting exactly as it was for every Reaping since.
This year, just like any other, it begins with the mayor, Ted Wheeler, reading off his script about the histories of the Dark Days of “savagery and terrorism” and how the Capitol’s victory against the districts and the subsequent establishment of the Hunger Games gave way to a “brighter, better” era for Hawkins. His voice drones on and on and Nancy knows, though she has no sure way to prove it, that every ounce of it is bullshit. Her father being called the mayor surely is, considering at least half the district knows it’s really her mother that runs things. As far as Nancy knows, that’s a sort of sexism specific to District Twelve, since they’re the only ones who only let their men do the job of the district.
Once the “mayor” is done speaking, another man takes center stage, one only seen once a year but still a familiar face. Murray Bauman. He is District Twelve’s escort from the Capitol, the man graced with the respectable duty of delivering two children every year to their deaths. And choosing which children die. That’s also… a pretty big part of it.
He’s never liked this job, okay? It’s not his fault his family forced him to do something “worthwhile” and somehow that led to him spending half his life stuck going to District Twelve, of all places, once a year for the Reapings. Sure, a Tributes’ Escort is an honorable position, even for the worst of the districts, but Murray never asked for it and he sure as hell doesn’t want it. Entertaining as the Hunger Games are, he’s never particularly liked the look on the kids’ faces as he sends them off to their doom with the Capitol’s signature well wishes of, “May the odds be ever in your favor!”
Most years, he’s just drunk enough to say it cheerfully. This year he thinks he might’ve needed a stronger vodka.
The girl is chosen first, always. That is how it is done in Hawkins. “Ladies first”, even in deciding who will die. Murray reaches deep into the bowl full of name slips, digging around like he does every year, trying to pull an “unlikely” candidate. He really hates seeing practically the same two kids go every year. If it weren’t for differing last names, he would be convinced half the tributes were siblings.
“Barbara Holland!”
A name that means absolutely nothing to him, of course. But somewhere in the crowd, right in the middle, there is a commotion. Two girls, clinging to each other, one staring at him in shock while the other starts to cry. God, Murray hates when they cry. The one who’s not Barbara must be a sister, or a best friend. Probably a best friend. Those tend to cry the most, he’s learned.
Barbara is a redhead, and her best friend calls her Barb. Murray files that away, and he’s sure, on the stage behind him, Hopper does as well. The two of them don’t exactly get along, but when it comes to the tributes, they’re a team. They always do their best to make the poor children feel comfortable and, to some extent, cared for, even in the days leading up to their deaths.
Right now, Barb feels surprisingly cared for. As she makes her way up to the stage, she hears Nancy somewhere in the crowd, still crying out for her. She thinks her parents are doing the same, but the sight of them in this moment might kill her prematurely, so she tries not to look. Murray Bauman shakes her hand with a firm but shockingly gentle grip, and asks, more to the cameras than to her, if he heard correctly that her friend called her by a nickname. Barb nods.
The boys are next. In the very back of the possible tribute pack, four of them huddle together, arm in arm, sure that none of them will be picked but waiting all the same, watching as Murray reaches deep into the other bowl, deeper than he did for the girls, digging around for several seconds before pulling out a slip of paper.
One tiny slip of paper. That is all it takes to ruin someone’s life. To end someone’s life, and to ruin countless others.
The crowd holds its breath. Four boys hold each other tight.
“William Byers!”