Shadsie
Sage of Tales
Disclaimer and Notes: The Hunger Games and related concepts and locations belong to Suzanne Collins. In fact, this is the first time I’m trying something related to the property that’s not a crossover darkening up an otherwise silly videogame. That said; I’m always a bit paranoid when I try stuff for English-language origin fandoms thinking “it is more likely than with my otaku-fandoms that I might actually get to meet the canon author.” I wrote a fanfic for “The Last Unicorn” once, and even though Peter S. Beagle is unaware of said dumb fic, I’ve met the man in person and could not stifle the shudder of shame for what I’d done that went through my spirit. This is tribute, nonetheless… probably a limping, sickly, already-doomed tribute…
What I’ve wikied on supplemental materials about the district this is centered on did not indicate that any particular type of livestock was excluded, despite the main industry of cattle. This is an original character fic – not wish-fulfillment, just an attempt to portray a “normal” person’s life in a hard world. The style is intentionally choppy and swift. Set in an unspecified Games.
LAURELS
The girl stared at the blood coating the knife. The sunlight caught the steel and caught the blood and lighted stickier and less romantic bodily products that lined the tip darkly. That was what happened a blade entered someone’s gut, she supposed, though it had taken more than that to fell her opponent. The boy from 3 wasn’t even all the way dead yet. She could see his lips parted, gently taking in breath, his eyes closed in a wince, not awake, not asleep, not yet dead, but not fully-alive, either.
Rhia Lancaster had no idea how many stab wounds it could take to kill a person and was horribly surprised. Her own middle was on fire, though she was quickly going numb. It was actually the little shallow cuts that bothered her more – the thin slices in tender skin at the surface where all the nerve endings gathered. Her main mentor, Ms. Austin, warned her that the wounds you didn’t feel were the most likely to get you and that the things that felt the most good and right could spell the end of the game. The sixteen-year-old Tribute had fought back the frigid winds of the Canyon when the Gamemakers had decided to drop a storm of snow and ice on the entire thing after making it blazing the entire week prior. Yesterday, Rhia had fought back the urge to sleep and the urge to strip off what little she had and lay in the snow when the hypothermia started messing with her brain. “Fight what’s comfortable,” Ms. Austin had said. The older male Victor, Tauren, had backed her up.
The idea of getting out of this place without committing murder had been a comfortable thought, too. When Rhia had entered the Arena, she’d had a loose plan. She’d wanted to be one of the few who had made it by taking cover and hiding out. She’d concentrated on survival skills in training and almost completely ignored combat. The problem was, even with the best of camouflage, there wasn’t a lot of cover in the Arena this year’s Games-Team had created – little cover from one’s fellow sacrifices and even less from the cameras. Before Rhia had been shunted into the Canyon, she’d had the thought of not just avoiding bloodshed, but of making a stand – shouting to the heavens and the cameras the utter wrongness of the spectacle. It was the world she’d grown up in… one in which you watched your neighbors fight and die on screen year after year, one in which you guard your friendships and stop forming too many attachments to your classmates once you hit age twelve… but everyone in her little town, at least, knew that it was still wrong.
The mental image she’d gotten when she’d met her attendant Avoxes - of them all wearing the faces of her older sister, little brother and best friend - had made her into a coward very quickly. There was no shouting at the heavens. This was also the way that she knew suicide was not an option.
When the girl from 6 had found her three days ago, the “coward’s way” of playing the Games quickly stopped being an option. Young Lancaster had told herself that it was better to die than to kill, but seeing that damned sword come at her head enlivened an animal instinct inside of her. She’d grabbed a large rock and used the other girl’s very sloppy sword-work and her skid on a patch of new-fallen ice to her advantage. One clumsy-but-forceful blow to the head was all it took. Pretty much the same had happened just now. Rhia had scavenged the knife off a Tribute she hadn’t killed, something of a lucky find before the corpse-catcher came and the canon roared. She’d gotten a bit of food off of that one, too.
She felt like a coyote… all notions of nobility and honor replaced with “I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die!” beating in time with her heart. District 3 had gotten her pretty good with his own knife – the same kind of model. Neither of them had been particularly “good” at knife-fighting. Tauren had told her that if she got a knife that the best moves to make on an opponent were to try for slicing moves to the neck or to the inner thigh, deep, fast and hard anywhere there were key arteries – like doing a mercy kill for a sick calf or sticking a pig. The problem was that Rhia Lancaster of District 10 didn’t work on one of the cattle ranches or in one of the slaughter-towns that were the fame and pride of her District. Her area’s specialty was in raising horses for the rich people at the Capitol to ride and to pull chariots in ceremonies.
Riding in the Tribute parade had actually meant being reunited with a pair of old friends for her. She took a tiny comfort to see that they’d been treated well – regarded better than her or her partner.
The District 3 boy had even less experience in killing things with knives than she did. He’d come on aggressive and she’d reacted in blind panic. The result was the two of them stabbing at each other haphazardly, like beasts fighting with steel teeth. He’d gotten her and she’d gotten him and now he was finally down and unconscious and she felt like laying herself down in the snowy dirt and waiting for the canons to sound. How many of them were left now? The last she’d seen, Levi was still out there. He was her partner – a strong boy with kind eyes whose father was an important cattle-breeder and a keeper of genetic secrets.
One canon. A lurch in her stomach. Two canons. Three? Wait a minute… she wasn’t dead yet. Her kill lying beside her… Levi… was there someone left? Had they jumped to declare it? Rhia knew she was dying, but they were supposed to wait until the trackers registered a stilled pulse. She’d heard stories from people who were sick and were close to dying that they’d felt like they had died and could still register the stuff of life when everyone had thought their bodies had failed… That and those spooky ghost stories told around bonfires about the dead seeing their own bodies. Rhia knew that this was neither. Ghosts didn’t have aching burning, lurching gut-wounds.
Seeing the corpse-catcher descend for her made her reconsider the whole “I am still alive” thing. She closed her eyes before it had come down. When she opened them again, she was surrounded by a room so white she could smell the lack of color. The first thing she noticed was the feel of tape on her left forearm. There was needle and tube there, running up into a bag of clear fluid. The girl noticed the feel of warm drool on her pillow when she turned her cheek. She jerked slightly and her stomach hurt.
“Oh, don’t move, dear,” said a presence beside her. White nurse’s uniform. The authorities and organizers of the Capitol sure seemed to like white. It was the color of purity, not dust and dun, like the prevailing workmen’s clothes back in her District.
“I’m alive?” Rhia asked.
“Congratulations, Victor,” the attendant nurse replied.
“Victor…” Rhia whispered, staring at the ceiling. More white.
“We almost did not have one,” the nurse said in her smooth, calm voice. It was passionless, almost monotone, but she had the shape of a human and not of a machine. “You have been mended, but you are still healing. We have cleansed your scars and most of your flaws-”
“Mirror!” Rhia demanded. “I want a mirror, now!”
“Whatever for..?”
“Give me a mirror, dammit!”
The nurse thrust a hand-mirror over her bed to stop her thrashing. Rhia reached up with a hand that felt like lead to hold it. She held it over her face, inspecting it carefully. Relief swept over her like a wave. They hadn’t changed her face. She knew of how the Capitol loved their Victors to be proper and pretty. Mr. Tauren had taken severe wounds to his face during his Games, but no one would know it for how the beautifying technology of the Capitol had fixed him. His right eye was artificial, robotic – a kind of camera that hooked directly into his brain. It looked just like his natural eye. And you’d never know that his skin had been ever been burned.
Rhia was still “horse-faced.” That’s what all the kids at school had called her. She still had her freckles. She was ugly and imperfect, just the way she’d always hated herself for when she was growing up and just the way she wanted to be now.
“We can give you the best cosmetic surgery,” the nurse intoned. “We did not do it for you while you slept because we wanted to give you a chance to look at the catalogue. You would not believe how many noses are options for your general facial structure…”
Rhia gave her a vicious glare as she set down the mirror on her sore middle. “No,” she said simply and fiercely.
“Pardon?”
“No. My face stays as it is. If I am a Victor, I am allowed that request, am I not?”
“Y…Yes… but I don’t see why you wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunities you have now.”
“No.”
Rhia Lancaster did not know why it was this part of herself – a homely appearance that she’d up until now despised – that was the part of herself that she’d chosen to keep… the thing that They would not touch. She’d wanted so badly for the “thing they could not change” to be her soul, her peaceful nature. That had been taken from her by sheer, semi-conscious survival instinct. They were going to take her homely face over her dead body.
“How was it that I won?” she asked.
The nurse looked surprised for a moment. “You prevailed over Lynk Gaites, the seventeen-year old from District 3.”
“I know that,” Rhia said. “Water, please…”
The nurse handed her a cup so she could sate her dry lips. “Thank you… I…I know I k...k…killed the boy. I thought I was a goner. What about the others? My district-partner?”
“Levi Blum and Mink of District 1 finished each other at the time of your victory.”
Mink… yeah, that was the District 1 boy’s name. Was the nurse forgetting his surname or did they just not have last names over there? She didn’t remember ever hearing a surname… And what names they gave their children in District 1! Mink… She supposed it rhymed with Lynk, but the two had never allied to her knowledge. They hadn’t seemed inclined to it at all in the training hall, instead opting to glare daggers at each other as those from Districts 3 and 1 tended to do to each other, or so the tales told. Rhia knew at that moment that she was quite dizzy from whatever medication they were giving to her. Two dead boys named Lynk and Mink…Sing-song, Lynk and Mink… Lynky and Minky…
The sleepy killer fell into the abyss again, trying to remember everyone that she’d fought
with.
The names. She couldn’t remember all of the names and that bothered her. She briefly remembered the faces, displayed in the sky as they fell - and passed-by in the training hall. She’d eaten and talked with people whose names she’d forgotten, whom she’d briefly known but would never get to truly know. She knew that it would be beyond criminal to ask Ms. Austin if she’d had the same feelings when taking the crown and when engaged with the Victory Tour.
Rhia Lancaster’s liaison – the one who pulled the lottery names and groomed Tributes for their service – was an improbably named woman and even more improbably colored and coifed. Betsy Brave, or as Rhia liked to name her inside her head “Miss Ninnybottoms,” insisted that she wear a crown of laurels when appearing upon the stage during the carefully rehearsed speeches. She got a fresh crown for every appearance and each time had to suppress the urge to rip it from her head and tear it to pieces.
The Capitol was watching. So was her family. So were those that created Avoxes.
District 12 challenged Rhia Lancaster to hold back her tears. Both of their Tributes that year had been twelve years of age. Undernourished and small, they hadn’t stood a chance. The boy had actually managed to live for a week, until an infection from the bite of a small coyote-like animal took him down. The girl was luckier – slit throat at the Cornucopia on the first day by District 4’s girl.
District 11 left the young woman almost speechless, at least after she’d seen the footage of the deaths of both of their Tributes. The girl, seventeen, had gone out in the artificial canyon’s river when she’d tried to cross it. It was deeper than she’d expected and the current pulled her under. The boy, fifteen, was hacked to death by the pair from District 2, who’d been especially vicious about it. The audio that was picked up revealed them making references to ancient history – specifically the days when slavery wasn’t confined to Avoxes and the beaten down people of the poorer Districts, but was the slated fate of people with certain shades to their skin.
District 9 left her feeling dull. She did not know the equipment-mechanic’s son nor the farmer’s daughter, just that they were twelve and fifteen respectively and had both died the first day in the Arena.
District 8 had left Rhia feeling a strange feeling of sorrow tinged with a slight happiness. The girl from 8, Marla Tweed, had entered the Reaping very ill. She’d been suffering from a chronic illness for several years – something to do with internal tumors that couldn’t be fixed. She was sixteen and was already dying before her name had been picked for the Games. She was thrown into the Games despite her condition on the grounds that having so little life left might mean that she’d fight for it all the more. Also, the Capitol crowd had decided that to go out fighting would be a more honorable death than rasping in a bed in some slum’s hospital.
Marla had hid out with her. She was Rhia’s ally for a brief time. Marla’d had a strength to her that belied her thin and already battleworn frame. She hadn’t been afraid to die and had given Rhia many kind words as they shared the small amount of food that Rhia had managed to grab. They’d spent three days together in a canyon-cleft before Marla laid herself down to sleep and did not get up again. The Lady Tweed had been no Tribute’s kill and no victim of the Gamemakers, but only of her illness, as she’d already prepared for. She’d defied the Games in her own small way, though not by her own will.
She’d been close to her partner, too. Pitcairn Woolworth had gone his own way. Rhia had only seen what he’d been at when she’d reviewed the Games’ video. The thirteen-year old had found a bow and a quiver of arrows. He’d found himself a little nest and tested them out until he got halfway-decent with them. Later on, “Pitty” (as Marla had affectionately referred to him) was attacked by an entire pack of coyote-muttations, ten-strong and had shot them all. He’d retrieved his bloody arrows, took the knife he’d found in the backpack he’d grabbed and effectively made himself an impromptu tent out of muttation-hides with his true weapons: a needle and thread. He’d apparently grabbed the bag slated for him. He’d had shelter from the blazing sun and the first day of snows. He’d picked a vantage point high in the canyon, yet inconspicuous to watch from. Unfortunately for him, the Gamemakers got tired of him hiding by his lonesome and sent a rockslide to send Pitty and his little tent tumbling to the canyon floor. The small boy’s bones had been crushed quite effectively.
District 7 – Rhia actually saw the deaths of both Tributes happen with her own eyes. She’d clambered up into a cliff-cave and saw the two, one carrying a hatchet and another carrying a full-scale battleaxe get into some kind of argument. The argument escalated into a fight, which escalated into a mutual kill. It would have been one of the funniest damn things she’d ever seen in her life if it wasn’t something that caused her nightmares. The nights she did wake up laughing were the nights she was sure she no longer had a soul.
In District 6, Rhia Lancaster was met with glares. She had to read from the script, even though every fiber of her being wanted her to fall to her knees and beg forgiveness of the people who’d lost one of their girls to her twitchy instincts. Lola Lionel – the girl she had killed had been Lola Lionel. If she never recounted the names of anyone else, she would keep the names of her kills in her heart for the rest of her life. She would remember their faces. She would make sure of it. Colton Ovlov had died a stranger death. Muttations patterned after coyotes were not the only mutts in the Canyon. The seventeen year old boy had tried to capture a wandering chicken-type bird with a hastily-devised trap. His “easy meal” had become a flock of birds that streamed in from various bushes and clefts in the canyon. They’d had sharp spurs upon their legs – biologically-engineered claws. Their beaks had small, sharp teeth.
District 5 – Paloverde Gutierrez and Ezra Springfield... first-day deaths. Rhia had only remembered their names because they were so unusual. Seventeen and thirteen. Neither of them had ever dealt much with combat or survival training, nor space to develop unusual hobbies.
District 4 – The girl had been vicious, but had not known a life without access to water. Even salt-water could be distilled. After the first day, she’d gotten herself lost in a part of the canyon far from the river. She’d died of dehydration. Rhia had almost thought she’d deserved it after her actions on the first day, but having almost died that way herself a few times before her Games, she decided that no one deserved to die that way. The boy from 4 had suffered the same fate. Rhia had no words to give that were adequate for the people of the District.
3… She got death-glares in District 3. Rhia inspected her feet as she read off her prepared speech. She wanted so badly to say “I didn’t mean to!” and to describe the rush of instinct and adrenaline, the absolute fear among the flashing of knife-blades. She wished Lynk Gaites had prevailed. She wondered what he would have thought upon reading a speech to District 10. The girl of 3 had suffered heat-exhaustion.
District 2 – Another dehydration. The same rockslide that took out Pitty. Rhia could not say that she pitied them much as she did poor Pitcairn – being so proud of their light skin, light hair and their District’s wealth.
District 1 – Infected knife wound. Her partner, Levi and a spear. By this time, she felt sick that all she knew of most of the people she’d survived were how they’d died…
The Capitol – Rhia Lancaster had up until recently lived a quiet life. She was used to fields and scrub. She was used to quiet animals and to the strong, oft silent folk who worked with them. She felt like a spooked horse during the Palace Party, or like a lamb pressed in among the flock, wanting to break away and skip free. She wished she could spend time with that carriage-horse that looked on the verge of becoming lame. Instead, she was with people and perfume and hair that was way too big. Fireworks and colored lights were pretty, she had to admit. She gorged herself on roast beef and spiced pork.
The people of District 10 were only allowed so much of what they produced. Families raising livestock for their own use raised the animals differently, too. Beasts raised for the Capitol were raised lean, bred and groomed for muscle-mass. In the District, people raised pigs almost as much for lard and cattle almost as much for tallow as for meat, because those things provided the materials for making household goods that they could not afford factory-made. Folk weren’t exactly worried about their waistlines in 10 like they were in the Capitol.
Rhia became the life of the party – not that she wasn’t already, it being a thing created to celebrate her, or at least an image of her that the people of the Capitol had created for themselves – when she encountered her first leg of crab. She chewed the pliant shell in her mouth, trying to figure out how to eat it. Oh, the roar of laughter and condescending applause! Ms. Brave showed her how to “open the package” with a silver-plated cracker to get at the meat within.
Rhia became sick with all the food. She did not take an emetic. Everything was rich and spiced in ways she had never before encountered and the lights and the noise twitched up her anxiety and she kept seeing blood in the wine.
District 10 – back around again. Levi had taken the same kind of spear he had killed his adversary with. His town had been far away from Rhia’s own. She made a special trip to lay flowers on his grave. In the brief time she had known him, he was a good kid. If there was one good thing that had come out of their Games, it was that they did not have to kill each other.
She was told not to apologize for surviving.
Her family moved to the Victor’s Village. It was far away from her hometown – near the place where Levi had lived. There were laurel shrubs planted by Rhia’s new house, or at least some kind of plant that reasonably resembled them. She tore at the leaves of the ones nearest the front door the first time she entered the place.
Ms. Brave explained to the Lancaster family that now that they were being cared for by the keeping of Panem, that Rhia was expected to pursue a talent.
“A stable,” Rhia said simply. “I want a stable.”
A small farm for horses was established in the cattle-town. None of the horses were to be Rhia’s, as they were Capitol property, but she was allowed to pursue work with them. The girl impressed her new handlers with her ability to handle horses – including riding tricks, new ones that she came up with year after year. She impressed the public with her jumping skills as well as some of the baser “rodeo” style sports. A pair of teachers was brought in from the Capitol to train Rhia in fancy dressage skills.
Rhia thought hard about training up innocent beasts to be given to the Capitol. Her horses were not slated for slaughter, at least. Horses raised on those farms were raised differently – bulked up in meat with no real need for obedience or fancy hoof work. She needed the horses. There was something about looking into the eyes of a creature that only asked for your care and not for your past.
Horses were unique among animals. Cattle and pigs were creatures people guarded themselves against getting attached to, for they were food, doomed from the day of their birth to a short life of grooming their flesh and flavor. Dogs were fellow social predators, looking up to their humans as their pack leaders, perhaps even as gods. Cats gave and took love from people on entirely their own terms. They were both predators and prey, being small creatures that naturally ate smaller creatures. Even the most affectionate cats went their own way. Horses were different. They were prey animals – large and strong, but ever wary of smaller, more vicious creatures… yet they partnered with the same. Maybe it was just millennia of artificial selection and the important socialization that made them like this, but there was a nobility, Rhia found, in animals willing to face through their natural fear to accept a predator as a friend.
Rhia Lancaster knew two things to be true; that she was a killer and that large, gentle beasts trusted her.
Deep eyes and gentle whickers soothed away the faces and the screams and that morning when her sick friend could not get up. The gentle rhythm of warm flesh and thumping hooves beneath her in a trot took away the sounds of tumbling boulders and of axes embedding themselves in bone. The sweet-hay smell of equine sweat erased, for a short time, the scent of an opened gut.
Rhia also prayed a lot. It wasn’t something that many people did anymore and many people thought of her as superstitious for it. The other Victors she knew in the Village understood, though. They couldn’t fathom the idea of any benevolent higher force, however abstract, that had any actual power greater than the President’s watching over Panem, but they sort of understood when Rhia told them that she “wanted to believe in a benevolence, but didn’t think it had any power but through their own hands.” It helped her, in any case. She felt a desperate need to be forgiven by something. She had not dared ask it of the families of the young people whose lives she’d taken when she was on the Victory Tour. She knew that she could not ask it of the victims themselves.
She met a boy named Dally Prescott working with her horses. He was one of the hands the Capitol maintainers had hired on for help. He cleaned the stalls and hauled water and was past the age of Reaping so he was safe to let herself start liking. His smile and the way he took her in a gentle strong hug whenever she’d come back from the Capitol after the Games always soothed her nerves and self-hate away. For a time. For a time.
Rhia Lancaster learned that just because she was victorious, it did not mean she got to “rest on her laurels.” Just like Ms. Austin and Mr. Tauren, she was expected to help train successive Tributes. The first Games after hers had her training a former classmate of hers as well as a girl from some town to the south. They both came home on the casket car of the train. The Victors had managed to bring their girl-Tribute home the next year. The year after that held losses and so on it went, through the years.
Lancaster couldn’t help but be impressed by some of the Arenas she saw. The Gamemakers liked forests – for they gave a fine mix of good cover and good challenge. Experiments were made with a temperate forest in one season and then in another. The equatorial ancient-African jungle was an interesting addition to the roster. There was a scrub-desert that was not much unlike her Canyon.
Rhia had hated the “Enchanted Forest.” It was done up to be straight out of a fairy tale – with beautiful fairy-like butterflies that left burning poison on the skin where they landed and swarmed. The stags with golden antlers were created with an overage of testosterone and ramped-up aggression. There were jewel-colored lizards that glided between the trees upon flaps of wing-like skin and they resembled little dragons. These, strangely enough, were not dangerous and only had fearsome faces to frighten the Tributes. The boy from 12 that year found that they were, indeed, quite edible. Seeing one of the nicest young men in her new hometown – a kid who’d smile and wave at her and make deliveries to her door – speared on the horn of the Arena’s pet clockwork-unicorn had ruined every beautiful bedtime story Rhia’s parents had read her during childhood for her.
The “Sugar Bowl” was almost as bad. Candy-pink cliffs and stones covered in fluffy snow… plants with leaves in garish pinks, purples and blues. Beneath appearances, the “sugar” was all poison and broken glass.
Rhia had been mildly amused by how the Gamemakers had scrambled to make the “Night Arena” work. The lay of the Arena was half forest, half beach and it was lighted by artificial stars and an artificial moon. The moon had been full the first day of the Games and progressively waned. Never did the sun rise. The idea of the Arena was to see how the Tributes would cope with perpetual darkness as a feature and hazard. The problem, of course, with this was in audience-visibility. The Gamemakers had installed cameras that could capture the actions of people and beasts in the night, but the colors were washed out and dull. The quick, artificial splashes of color added to the televised segments were obvious and garish. Some of the Games-team had lost their jobs over the fiasco. Two had lost their lives.
Rhia Lancaster’s least favorite Arena she oversaw, by far, was the “City.”
She had felt safe with Dally… to grow an attachment as a friend and then as something else. Before the two had fully realized it, they were speaking to the people at the Justice Hall about marriage. Starting a family of any kind was always something Victors took great caution in. Dally said that he chose the danger, for it was better to have it with her than to be “safe” without her.
Rhia had asked Ms. Austin about all manner of sheepskins and gut-sheathes, what hormone-pills she could afford access to, and how to time her cycles. Ms. Austin had a life without children, despite being one of the “Capitol favorites.” That was an alternate career Rhia had learned about - and had learned she’d narrowly dodged. She’d always wondered about how she’d chosen to keep her homely looks as “the last bit of herself” the Capitol could not have. Apparently, it has saved her from an alternate career “entertaining” high-level members of the Capitol government and celebrity-set. Mr. Tauren wasn’t of much help to her in this matter despite being a confidant in so many other aspects of post-Victory life. Not only did he have a man’s body, the spouse he’d chosen did, too. Two men did not have to worry about the same things she and Dally did.
Not even sheathes and the most careful timing could prevent disaster, however. Rhia had hoped that she was barren, but that had not been her luck. Nights spent in pacing conversation had led the two to risk a “legacy” - to let life be in defiance of death. They had a daughter who’d made them happy. Despite the yearly Reapings and trips to the Capitol for Rhia, her life started to feel normal again. It would never be the same as it was before her Games, but the nightmares had become fewer. She and Dally created more lives to replace lives lost. A house filled with the laughter of children that she could afford to feed well due to her status as a Victor had almost made her forget the kind of world she’d bought them into. Almost.
Valerie dodged the bullet the first three years after her twelfth birthday. There were rumors of the Victors’ children, how it was often that their names had been slipped in extra times, despite not taking tessare. For three years, the Victor’s daughter watched classmates and strangers from other towns across District 10 become the lambs for the Capitol’s altar. When the name “Valerie Prescott” was read over loudspeaker, Rhia screamed and cursed and had to be held back from charging the stage by Dally, who pretended to be in control, but cried just as hard.
After this, Rhia worked her tail off to get sponsorships. While she, herself, had survived with none, she wasn’t going to leave her child high and dry. Valerie was naturally good-looking and her stylists had done wonders making her attractive to the Capitol crowd. Rhia figured she’d protect her from the consequences of that later. “Pretty” was a good thing to be in the beginning. Neither the mother nor the fifteen-year old Victor’s daughter knew what the Arena was going to be like, but Rhia had spoken to her of every Arena she’d seen thus far and the one she’d survived. Importance was given to finding fresh water and in using tablets or finding something to distill it with. Rhia told her daughter of camouflage and of instincts.
“Don’t hate yourself if you kill anyone,” she said. “Don’t go out of your way to engage in combat, but if you find yourself in that situation, your brain is going to scream things at you and you won’t always have the control.”
“You got the boy from two years ago out, and others…from before I was born” Valerie said. “So… I trust you, Mom.”
Rhia saw her eldest child off the morning of her Games. Before she was roughly taken to the hovercraft for the journey to the Arena, Rhia cupped Valerie’s cheek and kissed her on the forehead. “Remember I love you” were her parting words.
The Arena for her daughter’s Games was unlike anything Rhia Lancaster-Prescott had ever seen before. It was a city – not the ruins of a city, but a city that, save for the Tributes, was devoid of people. There were skyscrapers and shops and empty streets, all groomed to look like they had been recently lived in.
Electricity worked in the buildings and so did running water – though Valerie, such a smart girl - did not trust it. She put herself up on a hotel room and used the things she found among the shelves and cabinets to make a simple distiller. Soon, she’d had a coffee-pot filled with drinkable water that she was sure didn’t have any filth or poisons in it.
Other Tributes made use of food stores in some of the shops. One of the Career-Tribute alliances found food and equipment ready to go in the kitchen of a restaurant and set to making themselves a meal. Rhia had to admit that she found it cute that they were “playing restaurant,” even if they’d been the more dangerous-looking kids. The cuteness wore off when it turned out that the glazed roast duck they’d found had been booby-trapped with poison that killed much too painfully and much too slowly.
Creatures roamed the streets and alleys – muttations of scraggly gray cats, the size of lynxes, rat-mutts the size of dogs. There was a blackout on the third night. When the lights came back on, Rhia’s heart lurched. Her daughter had laid down to sleep in a soft bed only to wake up screaming, covered with cockroaches that were chewing through her skin with what looked like acid from their mouthparts. Valerie swatted them off her and stomped and stamped until there was a fine insect-jelly coating the floor of her suite. After surviving that, Rhia was able to send her a sponsor-gift of salve for her bug-bites.
The City experienced more blackouts and random events such as broken electrical wires, sizzling and sparking as they swung over the streets erratically. When the few Tributes that were left after a week had gotten too comfortable camping out in offices and hotels – even with electrical blackouts and tainted water - a tidal flood came barreling through the streets. It forced anyone it did not kill into the higher floors. Buildings began crumbling and collapsing until Valerie and the boy from District 1 - who had not been a part of the ill-fated restaurant alliance - met on the roof of hotel she’d made camp in. She’d found a chain and had used it as a blunt, whip-weapon, but the boy had a sword. He tripped her and put it through her heart.
After the homecoming, Rhia stood by Valerie’s casket, draped with the Panem flag. She wanted to take the flag and burn it. Ms. Brave, not showing her age, presided over the service and gave cold condolences. When the Victory Tour came through District 10 and Rhia stood beside Dally near the Justice Hall, she wanted so badly to hate the boy giving the speech. He was not crowned in laurels or anything else. Apparently, his liaison had better taste than District 10’s.
She wanted badly to hate the boy who’d taken away her daughter, but something in his eyes, or, perhaps, a slight tremor in his voice that she picked up on kept her from giving her heart over to the rage that burned its edges. It didn’t even matter that he’d been trained to his task, in wealthy District 1. Rhia remembered her own time giving speeches, wearing hollow victory upon her head – and the eyes of the parents of her victims. There was nothing that she felt over her daughter that they had not felt over their children. They were all just slaves here, in the Districts. Every Victor that had ever been was as much a slain sacrificial lamb as the Tributes that did not come home warm and breathing. Valerie was now free and she was not.
Her eldest son was sixteen when he was Reaped; however, his best friend stepped in and volunteered. Rhia Lancaster-Prescott and the rest of District 10’s Victors brought that boy home, safe, though not sound. Mostly-sound in body, perhaps, but no Victor was ever sound. Rhia’s son was never chosen again. She did not know if it was sheer blind luck or if his name, perhaps, had been secretly slipped out of the running. It was possible, for his friend’s volunteering was seen as a fine thing by the Capitol spectators and he had conducted himself with uncommon nobility in his Games. He had not done a pacifist-run (dear Valerie had not killed anyone), but he had prevailed in the next best way… fighting for allies, taking wounds for them and killing the audience-designated “bad guys” of the “story” that year at the end, avenging his fallen friends with great decisiveness and mercy. Maybe the “hero’s” volunteerism was honored, despite the general clamor for the progeny of Victors to fight. He became a favorite among the Capitol elite.
The poor kid took to dabbling with morphling. He’d originally been given it for his injured leg, but had scripts written long after he was healed. Others among the “Flock” of District 10’s Victors drank quite a lot. Tauren continued to lose himself in painting even as he aged and his hands shook with the brushes. Ms. Austin had an entire room in her home that held shelves and stacks of journals she’d written and was continuing to write that she wouldn’t share with anyone. She’d entrusted them to Rhia upon her death, but no one, not even her, was to view them a moment before. Every time Rhia had visited the woman, it seemed like she was writing, scrawling madly in one notebook or another as if on some kind of impulse – a substitute for chemical medication. Rhia had, as always, the companionship of horses. She also had the tendency that disturbed others of mouthing silent prayers and occasionally going into a small trance when she was upset, but they understood. They all understood the quirks and the twitches shared among them.
Her remaining son and daughter were never Reaped. This seemed like sheer blind luck.
Rhia and Dally had some years of peace again, until dread crept in anew when the grandchildren started appearing. Again, their home was filled with the play and laughter of children whenever they visited and the stuff of joyous life soothed the aches of a cracked and shadowed world.
Rhia smiled when she was able to present a gift to her eldest grandchild. She’d been given permission to purchase a small, stout pony to give to her granddaughter upon her twelfth birthday. The pony would be kept in the town stable, but would be the child’s own, never to be shipped to the Capitol or to be sent to work anywhere around the Districts. The girl had squealed in delight, but of course, knew just how to approach her new partner due to her grandmother’s careful teaching.
The pony was an extravagant gift for a special birthday… one that came only two months before the next Reaping. The animal was young, something of a promise for many years together – at least that was what Rhia hoped for.
When the celebration was over and Dally cleaned up cake-stained dishes, Rhia wandered outside. She tore branches off the shrub by the door and carried them with her as she walked to the town graveyard. She mouthed her odd little ritual prayers and knotted the ends of the branches together. She walked past the old grave of Levi Blum. She walked past the other stones bearing other familiar names in the Tributes’ Section. She knelt before the grave of her eldest daughter and placed the crown of laurel-leaves she’d made against the tombstone.
“There is no such thing as victory,” she said.
END.
Shadsie, Dec. 2013
People reading who roleplay here on ZD with me might recognize a name I used. Otherwise, if you think you saw a stupid reference to something, you probably saw a stupid reference.
What I’ve wikied on supplemental materials about the district this is centered on did not indicate that any particular type of livestock was excluded, despite the main industry of cattle. This is an original character fic – not wish-fulfillment, just an attempt to portray a “normal” person’s life in a hard world. The style is intentionally choppy and swift. Set in an unspecified Games.
LAURELS
The girl stared at the blood coating the knife. The sunlight caught the steel and caught the blood and lighted stickier and less romantic bodily products that lined the tip darkly. That was what happened a blade entered someone’s gut, she supposed, though it had taken more than that to fell her opponent. The boy from 3 wasn’t even all the way dead yet. She could see his lips parted, gently taking in breath, his eyes closed in a wince, not awake, not asleep, not yet dead, but not fully-alive, either.
Rhia Lancaster had no idea how many stab wounds it could take to kill a person and was horribly surprised. Her own middle was on fire, though she was quickly going numb. It was actually the little shallow cuts that bothered her more – the thin slices in tender skin at the surface where all the nerve endings gathered. Her main mentor, Ms. Austin, warned her that the wounds you didn’t feel were the most likely to get you and that the things that felt the most good and right could spell the end of the game. The sixteen-year-old Tribute had fought back the frigid winds of the Canyon when the Gamemakers had decided to drop a storm of snow and ice on the entire thing after making it blazing the entire week prior. Yesterday, Rhia had fought back the urge to sleep and the urge to strip off what little she had and lay in the snow when the hypothermia started messing with her brain. “Fight what’s comfortable,” Ms. Austin had said. The older male Victor, Tauren, had backed her up.
The idea of getting out of this place without committing murder had been a comfortable thought, too. When Rhia had entered the Arena, she’d had a loose plan. She’d wanted to be one of the few who had made it by taking cover and hiding out. She’d concentrated on survival skills in training and almost completely ignored combat. The problem was, even with the best of camouflage, there wasn’t a lot of cover in the Arena this year’s Games-Team had created – little cover from one’s fellow sacrifices and even less from the cameras. Before Rhia had been shunted into the Canyon, she’d had the thought of not just avoiding bloodshed, but of making a stand – shouting to the heavens and the cameras the utter wrongness of the spectacle. It was the world she’d grown up in… one in which you watched your neighbors fight and die on screen year after year, one in which you guard your friendships and stop forming too many attachments to your classmates once you hit age twelve… but everyone in her little town, at least, knew that it was still wrong.
The mental image she’d gotten when she’d met her attendant Avoxes - of them all wearing the faces of her older sister, little brother and best friend - had made her into a coward very quickly. There was no shouting at the heavens. This was also the way that she knew suicide was not an option.
When the girl from 6 had found her three days ago, the “coward’s way” of playing the Games quickly stopped being an option. Young Lancaster had told herself that it was better to die than to kill, but seeing that damned sword come at her head enlivened an animal instinct inside of her. She’d grabbed a large rock and used the other girl’s very sloppy sword-work and her skid on a patch of new-fallen ice to her advantage. One clumsy-but-forceful blow to the head was all it took. Pretty much the same had happened just now. Rhia had scavenged the knife off a Tribute she hadn’t killed, something of a lucky find before the corpse-catcher came and the canon roared. She’d gotten a bit of food off of that one, too.
She felt like a coyote… all notions of nobility and honor replaced with “I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die!” beating in time with her heart. District 3 had gotten her pretty good with his own knife – the same kind of model. Neither of them had been particularly “good” at knife-fighting. Tauren had told her that if she got a knife that the best moves to make on an opponent were to try for slicing moves to the neck or to the inner thigh, deep, fast and hard anywhere there were key arteries – like doing a mercy kill for a sick calf or sticking a pig. The problem was that Rhia Lancaster of District 10 didn’t work on one of the cattle ranches or in one of the slaughter-towns that were the fame and pride of her District. Her area’s specialty was in raising horses for the rich people at the Capitol to ride and to pull chariots in ceremonies.
Riding in the Tribute parade had actually meant being reunited with a pair of old friends for her. She took a tiny comfort to see that they’d been treated well – regarded better than her or her partner.
The District 3 boy had even less experience in killing things with knives than she did. He’d come on aggressive and she’d reacted in blind panic. The result was the two of them stabbing at each other haphazardly, like beasts fighting with steel teeth. He’d gotten her and she’d gotten him and now he was finally down and unconscious and she felt like laying herself down in the snowy dirt and waiting for the canons to sound. How many of them were left now? The last she’d seen, Levi was still out there. He was her partner – a strong boy with kind eyes whose father was an important cattle-breeder and a keeper of genetic secrets.
One canon. A lurch in her stomach. Two canons. Three? Wait a minute… she wasn’t dead yet. Her kill lying beside her… Levi… was there someone left? Had they jumped to declare it? Rhia knew she was dying, but they were supposed to wait until the trackers registered a stilled pulse. She’d heard stories from people who were sick and were close to dying that they’d felt like they had died and could still register the stuff of life when everyone had thought their bodies had failed… That and those spooky ghost stories told around bonfires about the dead seeing their own bodies. Rhia knew that this was neither. Ghosts didn’t have aching burning, lurching gut-wounds.
Seeing the corpse-catcher descend for her made her reconsider the whole “I am still alive” thing. She closed her eyes before it had come down. When she opened them again, she was surrounded by a room so white she could smell the lack of color. The first thing she noticed was the feel of tape on her left forearm. There was needle and tube there, running up into a bag of clear fluid. The girl noticed the feel of warm drool on her pillow when she turned her cheek. She jerked slightly and her stomach hurt.
“Oh, don’t move, dear,” said a presence beside her. White nurse’s uniform. The authorities and organizers of the Capitol sure seemed to like white. It was the color of purity, not dust and dun, like the prevailing workmen’s clothes back in her District.
“I’m alive?” Rhia asked.
“Congratulations, Victor,” the attendant nurse replied.
“Victor…” Rhia whispered, staring at the ceiling. More white.
“We almost did not have one,” the nurse said in her smooth, calm voice. It was passionless, almost monotone, but she had the shape of a human and not of a machine. “You have been mended, but you are still healing. We have cleansed your scars and most of your flaws-”
“Mirror!” Rhia demanded. “I want a mirror, now!”
“Whatever for..?”
“Give me a mirror, dammit!”
The nurse thrust a hand-mirror over her bed to stop her thrashing. Rhia reached up with a hand that felt like lead to hold it. She held it over her face, inspecting it carefully. Relief swept over her like a wave. They hadn’t changed her face. She knew of how the Capitol loved their Victors to be proper and pretty. Mr. Tauren had taken severe wounds to his face during his Games, but no one would know it for how the beautifying technology of the Capitol had fixed him. His right eye was artificial, robotic – a kind of camera that hooked directly into his brain. It looked just like his natural eye. And you’d never know that his skin had been ever been burned.
Rhia was still “horse-faced.” That’s what all the kids at school had called her. She still had her freckles. She was ugly and imperfect, just the way she’d always hated herself for when she was growing up and just the way she wanted to be now.
“We can give you the best cosmetic surgery,” the nurse intoned. “We did not do it for you while you slept because we wanted to give you a chance to look at the catalogue. You would not believe how many noses are options for your general facial structure…”
Rhia gave her a vicious glare as she set down the mirror on her sore middle. “No,” she said simply and fiercely.
“Pardon?”
“No. My face stays as it is. If I am a Victor, I am allowed that request, am I not?”
“Y…Yes… but I don’t see why you wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunities you have now.”
“No.”
Rhia Lancaster did not know why it was this part of herself – a homely appearance that she’d up until now despised – that was the part of herself that she’d chosen to keep… the thing that They would not touch. She’d wanted so badly for the “thing they could not change” to be her soul, her peaceful nature. That had been taken from her by sheer, semi-conscious survival instinct. They were going to take her homely face over her dead body.
“How was it that I won?” she asked.
The nurse looked surprised for a moment. “You prevailed over Lynk Gaites, the seventeen-year old from District 3.”
“I know that,” Rhia said. “Water, please…”
The nurse handed her a cup so she could sate her dry lips. “Thank you… I…I know I k...k…killed the boy. I thought I was a goner. What about the others? My district-partner?”
“Levi Blum and Mink of District 1 finished each other at the time of your victory.”
Mink… yeah, that was the District 1 boy’s name. Was the nurse forgetting his surname or did they just not have last names over there? She didn’t remember ever hearing a surname… And what names they gave their children in District 1! Mink… She supposed it rhymed with Lynk, but the two had never allied to her knowledge. They hadn’t seemed inclined to it at all in the training hall, instead opting to glare daggers at each other as those from Districts 3 and 1 tended to do to each other, or so the tales told. Rhia knew at that moment that she was quite dizzy from whatever medication they were giving to her. Two dead boys named Lynk and Mink…Sing-song, Lynk and Mink… Lynky and Minky…
The sleepy killer fell into the abyss again, trying to remember everyone that she’d fought
with.
The names. She couldn’t remember all of the names and that bothered her. She briefly remembered the faces, displayed in the sky as they fell - and passed-by in the training hall. She’d eaten and talked with people whose names she’d forgotten, whom she’d briefly known but would never get to truly know. She knew that it would be beyond criminal to ask Ms. Austin if she’d had the same feelings when taking the crown and when engaged with the Victory Tour.
Rhia Lancaster’s liaison – the one who pulled the lottery names and groomed Tributes for their service – was an improbably named woman and even more improbably colored and coifed. Betsy Brave, or as Rhia liked to name her inside her head “Miss Ninnybottoms,” insisted that she wear a crown of laurels when appearing upon the stage during the carefully rehearsed speeches. She got a fresh crown for every appearance and each time had to suppress the urge to rip it from her head and tear it to pieces.
The Capitol was watching. So was her family. So were those that created Avoxes.
District 12 challenged Rhia Lancaster to hold back her tears. Both of their Tributes that year had been twelve years of age. Undernourished and small, they hadn’t stood a chance. The boy had actually managed to live for a week, until an infection from the bite of a small coyote-like animal took him down. The girl was luckier – slit throat at the Cornucopia on the first day by District 4’s girl.
District 11 left the young woman almost speechless, at least after she’d seen the footage of the deaths of both of their Tributes. The girl, seventeen, had gone out in the artificial canyon’s river when she’d tried to cross it. It was deeper than she’d expected and the current pulled her under. The boy, fifteen, was hacked to death by the pair from District 2, who’d been especially vicious about it. The audio that was picked up revealed them making references to ancient history – specifically the days when slavery wasn’t confined to Avoxes and the beaten down people of the poorer Districts, but was the slated fate of people with certain shades to their skin.
District 9 left her feeling dull. She did not know the equipment-mechanic’s son nor the farmer’s daughter, just that they were twelve and fifteen respectively and had both died the first day in the Arena.
District 8 had left Rhia feeling a strange feeling of sorrow tinged with a slight happiness. The girl from 8, Marla Tweed, had entered the Reaping very ill. She’d been suffering from a chronic illness for several years – something to do with internal tumors that couldn’t be fixed. She was sixteen and was already dying before her name had been picked for the Games. She was thrown into the Games despite her condition on the grounds that having so little life left might mean that she’d fight for it all the more. Also, the Capitol crowd had decided that to go out fighting would be a more honorable death than rasping in a bed in some slum’s hospital.
Marla had hid out with her. She was Rhia’s ally for a brief time. Marla’d had a strength to her that belied her thin and already battleworn frame. She hadn’t been afraid to die and had given Rhia many kind words as they shared the small amount of food that Rhia had managed to grab. They’d spent three days together in a canyon-cleft before Marla laid herself down to sleep and did not get up again. The Lady Tweed had been no Tribute’s kill and no victim of the Gamemakers, but only of her illness, as she’d already prepared for. She’d defied the Games in her own small way, though not by her own will.
She’d been close to her partner, too. Pitcairn Woolworth had gone his own way. Rhia had only seen what he’d been at when she’d reviewed the Games’ video. The thirteen-year old had found a bow and a quiver of arrows. He’d found himself a little nest and tested them out until he got halfway-decent with them. Later on, “Pitty” (as Marla had affectionately referred to him) was attacked by an entire pack of coyote-muttations, ten-strong and had shot them all. He’d retrieved his bloody arrows, took the knife he’d found in the backpack he’d grabbed and effectively made himself an impromptu tent out of muttation-hides with his true weapons: a needle and thread. He’d apparently grabbed the bag slated for him. He’d had shelter from the blazing sun and the first day of snows. He’d picked a vantage point high in the canyon, yet inconspicuous to watch from. Unfortunately for him, the Gamemakers got tired of him hiding by his lonesome and sent a rockslide to send Pitty and his little tent tumbling to the canyon floor. The small boy’s bones had been crushed quite effectively.
District 7 – Rhia actually saw the deaths of both Tributes happen with her own eyes. She’d clambered up into a cliff-cave and saw the two, one carrying a hatchet and another carrying a full-scale battleaxe get into some kind of argument. The argument escalated into a fight, which escalated into a mutual kill. It would have been one of the funniest damn things she’d ever seen in her life if it wasn’t something that caused her nightmares. The nights she did wake up laughing were the nights she was sure she no longer had a soul.
In District 6, Rhia Lancaster was met with glares. She had to read from the script, even though every fiber of her being wanted her to fall to her knees and beg forgiveness of the people who’d lost one of their girls to her twitchy instincts. Lola Lionel – the girl she had killed had been Lola Lionel. If she never recounted the names of anyone else, she would keep the names of her kills in her heart for the rest of her life. She would remember their faces. She would make sure of it. Colton Ovlov had died a stranger death. Muttations patterned after coyotes were not the only mutts in the Canyon. The seventeen year old boy had tried to capture a wandering chicken-type bird with a hastily-devised trap. His “easy meal” had become a flock of birds that streamed in from various bushes and clefts in the canyon. They’d had sharp spurs upon their legs – biologically-engineered claws. Their beaks had small, sharp teeth.
District 5 – Paloverde Gutierrez and Ezra Springfield... first-day deaths. Rhia had only remembered their names because they were so unusual. Seventeen and thirteen. Neither of them had ever dealt much with combat or survival training, nor space to develop unusual hobbies.
District 4 – The girl had been vicious, but had not known a life without access to water. Even salt-water could be distilled. After the first day, she’d gotten herself lost in a part of the canyon far from the river. She’d died of dehydration. Rhia had almost thought she’d deserved it after her actions on the first day, but having almost died that way herself a few times before her Games, she decided that no one deserved to die that way. The boy from 4 had suffered the same fate. Rhia had no words to give that were adequate for the people of the District.
3… She got death-glares in District 3. Rhia inspected her feet as she read off her prepared speech. She wanted so badly to say “I didn’t mean to!” and to describe the rush of instinct and adrenaline, the absolute fear among the flashing of knife-blades. She wished Lynk Gaites had prevailed. She wondered what he would have thought upon reading a speech to District 10. The girl of 3 had suffered heat-exhaustion.
District 2 – Another dehydration. The same rockslide that took out Pitty. Rhia could not say that she pitied them much as she did poor Pitcairn – being so proud of their light skin, light hair and their District’s wealth.
District 1 – Infected knife wound. Her partner, Levi and a spear. By this time, she felt sick that all she knew of most of the people she’d survived were how they’d died…
The Capitol – Rhia Lancaster had up until recently lived a quiet life. She was used to fields and scrub. She was used to quiet animals and to the strong, oft silent folk who worked with them. She felt like a spooked horse during the Palace Party, or like a lamb pressed in among the flock, wanting to break away and skip free. She wished she could spend time with that carriage-horse that looked on the verge of becoming lame. Instead, she was with people and perfume and hair that was way too big. Fireworks and colored lights were pretty, she had to admit. She gorged herself on roast beef and spiced pork.
The people of District 10 were only allowed so much of what they produced. Families raising livestock for their own use raised the animals differently, too. Beasts raised for the Capitol were raised lean, bred and groomed for muscle-mass. In the District, people raised pigs almost as much for lard and cattle almost as much for tallow as for meat, because those things provided the materials for making household goods that they could not afford factory-made. Folk weren’t exactly worried about their waistlines in 10 like they were in the Capitol.
Rhia became the life of the party – not that she wasn’t already, it being a thing created to celebrate her, or at least an image of her that the people of the Capitol had created for themselves – when she encountered her first leg of crab. She chewed the pliant shell in her mouth, trying to figure out how to eat it. Oh, the roar of laughter and condescending applause! Ms. Brave showed her how to “open the package” with a silver-plated cracker to get at the meat within.
Rhia became sick with all the food. She did not take an emetic. Everything was rich and spiced in ways she had never before encountered and the lights and the noise twitched up her anxiety and she kept seeing blood in the wine.
District 10 – back around again. Levi had taken the same kind of spear he had killed his adversary with. His town had been far away from Rhia’s own. She made a special trip to lay flowers on his grave. In the brief time she had known him, he was a good kid. If there was one good thing that had come out of their Games, it was that they did not have to kill each other.
She was told not to apologize for surviving.
Her family moved to the Victor’s Village. It was far away from her hometown – near the place where Levi had lived. There were laurel shrubs planted by Rhia’s new house, or at least some kind of plant that reasonably resembled them. She tore at the leaves of the ones nearest the front door the first time she entered the place.
Ms. Brave explained to the Lancaster family that now that they were being cared for by the keeping of Panem, that Rhia was expected to pursue a talent.
“A stable,” Rhia said simply. “I want a stable.”
A small farm for horses was established in the cattle-town. None of the horses were to be Rhia’s, as they were Capitol property, but she was allowed to pursue work with them. The girl impressed her new handlers with her ability to handle horses – including riding tricks, new ones that she came up with year after year. She impressed the public with her jumping skills as well as some of the baser “rodeo” style sports. A pair of teachers was brought in from the Capitol to train Rhia in fancy dressage skills.
Rhia thought hard about training up innocent beasts to be given to the Capitol. Her horses were not slated for slaughter, at least. Horses raised on those farms were raised differently – bulked up in meat with no real need for obedience or fancy hoof work. She needed the horses. There was something about looking into the eyes of a creature that only asked for your care and not for your past.
Horses were unique among animals. Cattle and pigs were creatures people guarded themselves against getting attached to, for they were food, doomed from the day of their birth to a short life of grooming their flesh and flavor. Dogs were fellow social predators, looking up to their humans as their pack leaders, perhaps even as gods. Cats gave and took love from people on entirely their own terms. They were both predators and prey, being small creatures that naturally ate smaller creatures. Even the most affectionate cats went their own way. Horses were different. They were prey animals – large and strong, but ever wary of smaller, more vicious creatures… yet they partnered with the same. Maybe it was just millennia of artificial selection and the important socialization that made them like this, but there was a nobility, Rhia found, in animals willing to face through their natural fear to accept a predator as a friend.
Rhia Lancaster knew two things to be true; that she was a killer and that large, gentle beasts trusted her.
Deep eyes and gentle whickers soothed away the faces and the screams and that morning when her sick friend could not get up. The gentle rhythm of warm flesh and thumping hooves beneath her in a trot took away the sounds of tumbling boulders and of axes embedding themselves in bone. The sweet-hay smell of equine sweat erased, for a short time, the scent of an opened gut.
Rhia also prayed a lot. It wasn’t something that many people did anymore and many people thought of her as superstitious for it. The other Victors she knew in the Village understood, though. They couldn’t fathom the idea of any benevolent higher force, however abstract, that had any actual power greater than the President’s watching over Panem, but they sort of understood when Rhia told them that she “wanted to believe in a benevolence, but didn’t think it had any power but through their own hands.” It helped her, in any case. She felt a desperate need to be forgiven by something. She had not dared ask it of the families of the young people whose lives she’d taken when she was on the Victory Tour. She knew that she could not ask it of the victims themselves.
She met a boy named Dally Prescott working with her horses. He was one of the hands the Capitol maintainers had hired on for help. He cleaned the stalls and hauled water and was past the age of Reaping so he was safe to let herself start liking. His smile and the way he took her in a gentle strong hug whenever she’d come back from the Capitol after the Games always soothed her nerves and self-hate away. For a time. For a time.
Rhia Lancaster learned that just because she was victorious, it did not mean she got to “rest on her laurels.” Just like Ms. Austin and Mr. Tauren, she was expected to help train successive Tributes. The first Games after hers had her training a former classmate of hers as well as a girl from some town to the south. They both came home on the casket car of the train. The Victors had managed to bring their girl-Tribute home the next year. The year after that held losses and so on it went, through the years.
Lancaster couldn’t help but be impressed by some of the Arenas she saw. The Gamemakers liked forests – for they gave a fine mix of good cover and good challenge. Experiments were made with a temperate forest in one season and then in another. The equatorial ancient-African jungle was an interesting addition to the roster. There was a scrub-desert that was not much unlike her Canyon.
Rhia had hated the “Enchanted Forest.” It was done up to be straight out of a fairy tale – with beautiful fairy-like butterflies that left burning poison on the skin where they landed and swarmed. The stags with golden antlers were created with an overage of testosterone and ramped-up aggression. There were jewel-colored lizards that glided between the trees upon flaps of wing-like skin and they resembled little dragons. These, strangely enough, were not dangerous and only had fearsome faces to frighten the Tributes. The boy from 12 that year found that they were, indeed, quite edible. Seeing one of the nicest young men in her new hometown – a kid who’d smile and wave at her and make deliveries to her door – speared on the horn of the Arena’s pet clockwork-unicorn had ruined every beautiful bedtime story Rhia’s parents had read her during childhood for her.
The “Sugar Bowl” was almost as bad. Candy-pink cliffs and stones covered in fluffy snow… plants with leaves in garish pinks, purples and blues. Beneath appearances, the “sugar” was all poison and broken glass.
Rhia had been mildly amused by how the Gamemakers had scrambled to make the “Night Arena” work. The lay of the Arena was half forest, half beach and it was lighted by artificial stars and an artificial moon. The moon had been full the first day of the Games and progressively waned. Never did the sun rise. The idea of the Arena was to see how the Tributes would cope with perpetual darkness as a feature and hazard. The problem, of course, with this was in audience-visibility. The Gamemakers had installed cameras that could capture the actions of people and beasts in the night, but the colors were washed out and dull. The quick, artificial splashes of color added to the televised segments were obvious and garish. Some of the Games-team had lost their jobs over the fiasco. Two had lost their lives.
Rhia Lancaster’s least favorite Arena she oversaw, by far, was the “City.”
She had felt safe with Dally… to grow an attachment as a friend and then as something else. Before the two had fully realized it, they were speaking to the people at the Justice Hall about marriage. Starting a family of any kind was always something Victors took great caution in. Dally said that he chose the danger, for it was better to have it with her than to be “safe” without her.
Rhia had asked Ms. Austin about all manner of sheepskins and gut-sheathes, what hormone-pills she could afford access to, and how to time her cycles. Ms. Austin had a life without children, despite being one of the “Capitol favorites.” That was an alternate career Rhia had learned about - and had learned she’d narrowly dodged. She’d always wondered about how she’d chosen to keep her homely looks as “the last bit of herself” the Capitol could not have. Apparently, it has saved her from an alternate career “entertaining” high-level members of the Capitol government and celebrity-set. Mr. Tauren wasn’t of much help to her in this matter despite being a confidant in so many other aspects of post-Victory life. Not only did he have a man’s body, the spouse he’d chosen did, too. Two men did not have to worry about the same things she and Dally did.
Not even sheathes and the most careful timing could prevent disaster, however. Rhia had hoped that she was barren, but that had not been her luck. Nights spent in pacing conversation had led the two to risk a “legacy” - to let life be in defiance of death. They had a daughter who’d made them happy. Despite the yearly Reapings and trips to the Capitol for Rhia, her life started to feel normal again. It would never be the same as it was before her Games, but the nightmares had become fewer. She and Dally created more lives to replace lives lost. A house filled with the laughter of children that she could afford to feed well due to her status as a Victor had almost made her forget the kind of world she’d bought them into. Almost.
Valerie dodged the bullet the first three years after her twelfth birthday. There were rumors of the Victors’ children, how it was often that their names had been slipped in extra times, despite not taking tessare. For three years, the Victor’s daughter watched classmates and strangers from other towns across District 10 become the lambs for the Capitol’s altar. When the name “Valerie Prescott” was read over loudspeaker, Rhia screamed and cursed and had to be held back from charging the stage by Dally, who pretended to be in control, but cried just as hard.
After this, Rhia worked her tail off to get sponsorships. While she, herself, had survived with none, she wasn’t going to leave her child high and dry. Valerie was naturally good-looking and her stylists had done wonders making her attractive to the Capitol crowd. Rhia figured she’d protect her from the consequences of that later. “Pretty” was a good thing to be in the beginning. Neither the mother nor the fifteen-year old Victor’s daughter knew what the Arena was going to be like, but Rhia had spoken to her of every Arena she’d seen thus far and the one she’d survived. Importance was given to finding fresh water and in using tablets or finding something to distill it with. Rhia told her daughter of camouflage and of instincts.
“Don’t hate yourself if you kill anyone,” she said. “Don’t go out of your way to engage in combat, but if you find yourself in that situation, your brain is going to scream things at you and you won’t always have the control.”
“You got the boy from two years ago out, and others…from before I was born” Valerie said. “So… I trust you, Mom.”
Rhia saw her eldest child off the morning of her Games. Before she was roughly taken to the hovercraft for the journey to the Arena, Rhia cupped Valerie’s cheek and kissed her on the forehead. “Remember I love you” were her parting words.
The Arena for her daughter’s Games was unlike anything Rhia Lancaster-Prescott had ever seen before. It was a city – not the ruins of a city, but a city that, save for the Tributes, was devoid of people. There were skyscrapers and shops and empty streets, all groomed to look like they had been recently lived in.
Electricity worked in the buildings and so did running water – though Valerie, such a smart girl - did not trust it. She put herself up on a hotel room and used the things she found among the shelves and cabinets to make a simple distiller. Soon, she’d had a coffee-pot filled with drinkable water that she was sure didn’t have any filth or poisons in it.
Other Tributes made use of food stores in some of the shops. One of the Career-Tribute alliances found food and equipment ready to go in the kitchen of a restaurant and set to making themselves a meal. Rhia had to admit that she found it cute that they were “playing restaurant,” even if they’d been the more dangerous-looking kids. The cuteness wore off when it turned out that the glazed roast duck they’d found had been booby-trapped with poison that killed much too painfully and much too slowly.
Creatures roamed the streets and alleys – muttations of scraggly gray cats, the size of lynxes, rat-mutts the size of dogs. There was a blackout on the third night. When the lights came back on, Rhia’s heart lurched. Her daughter had laid down to sleep in a soft bed only to wake up screaming, covered with cockroaches that were chewing through her skin with what looked like acid from their mouthparts. Valerie swatted them off her and stomped and stamped until there was a fine insect-jelly coating the floor of her suite. After surviving that, Rhia was able to send her a sponsor-gift of salve for her bug-bites.
The City experienced more blackouts and random events such as broken electrical wires, sizzling and sparking as they swung over the streets erratically. When the few Tributes that were left after a week had gotten too comfortable camping out in offices and hotels – even with electrical blackouts and tainted water - a tidal flood came barreling through the streets. It forced anyone it did not kill into the higher floors. Buildings began crumbling and collapsing until Valerie and the boy from District 1 - who had not been a part of the ill-fated restaurant alliance - met on the roof of hotel she’d made camp in. She’d found a chain and had used it as a blunt, whip-weapon, but the boy had a sword. He tripped her and put it through her heart.
After the homecoming, Rhia stood by Valerie’s casket, draped with the Panem flag. She wanted to take the flag and burn it. Ms. Brave, not showing her age, presided over the service and gave cold condolences. When the Victory Tour came through District 10 and Rhia stood beside Dally near the Justice Hall, she wanted so badly to hate the boy giving the speech. He was not crowned in laurels or anything else. Apparently, his liaison had better taste than District 10’s.
She wanted badly to hate the boy who’d taken away her daughter, but something in his eyes, or, perhaps, a slight tremor in his voice that she picked up on kept her from giving her heart over to the rage that burned its edges. It didn’t even matter that he’d been trained to his task, in wealthy District 1. Rhia remembered her own time giving speeches, wearing hollow victory upon her head – and the eyes of the parents of her victims. There was nothing that she felt over her daughter that they had not felt over their children. They were all just slaves here, in the Districts. Every Victor that had ever been was as much a slain sacrificial lamb as the Tributes that did not come home warm and breathing. Valerie was now free and she was not.
Her eldest son was sixteen when he was Reaped; however, his best friend stepped in and volunteered. Rhia Lancaster-Prescott and the rest of District 10’s Victors brought that boy home, safe, though not sound. Mostly-sound in body, perhaps, but no Victor was ever sound. Rhia’s son was never chosen again. She did not know if it was sheer blind luck or if his name, perhaps, had been secretly slipped out of the running. It was possible, for his friend’s volunteering was seen as a fine thing by the Capitol spectators and he had conducted himself with uncommon nobility in his Games. He had not done a pacifist-run (dear Valerie had not killed anyone), but he had prevailed in the next best way… fighting for allies, taking wounds for them and killing the audience-designated “bad guys” of the “story” that year at the end, avenging his fallen friends with great decisiveness and mercy. Maybe the “hero’s” volunteerism was honored, despite the general clamor for the progeny of Victors to fight. He became a favorite among the Capitol elite.
The poor kid took to dabbling with morphling. He’d originally been given it for his injured leg, but had scripts written long after he was healed. Others among the “Flock” of District 10’s Victors drank quite a lot. Tauren continued to lose himself in painting even as he aged and his hands shook with the brushes. Ms. Austin had an entire room in her home that held shelves and stacks of journals she’d written and was continuing to write that she wouldn’t share with anyone. She’d entrusted them to Rhia upon her death, but no one, not even her, was to view them a moment before. Every time Rhia had visited the woman, it seemed like she was writing, scrawling madly in one notebook or another as if on some kind of impulse – a substitute for chemical medication. Rhia had, as always, the companionship of horses. She also had the tendency that disturbed others of mouthing silent prayers and occasionally going into a small trance when she was upset, but they understood. They all understood the quirks and the twitches shared among them.
Her remaining son and daughter were never Reaped. This seemed like sheer blind luck.
Rhia and Dally had some years of peace again, until dread crept in anew when the grandchildren started appearing. Again, their home was filled with the play and laughter of children whenever they visited and the stuff of joyous life soothed the aches of a cracked and shadowed world.
Rhia smiled when she was able to present a gift to her eldest grandchild. She’d been given permission to purchase a small, stout pony to give to her granddaughter upon her twelfth birthday. The pony would be kept in the town stable, but would be the child’s own, never to be shipped to the Capitol or to be sent to work anywhere around the Districts. The girl had squealed in delight, but of course, knew just how to approach her new partner due to her grandmother’s careful teaching.
The pony was an extravagant gift for a special birthday… one that came only two months before the next Reaping. The animal was young, something of a promise for many years together – at least that was what Rhia hoped for.
When the celebration was over and Dally cleaned up cake-stained dishes, Rhia wandered outside. She tore branches off the shrub by the door and carried them with her as she walked to the town graveyard. She mouthed her odd little ritual prayers and knotted the ends of the branches together. She walked past the old grave of Levi Blum. She walked past the other stones bearing other familiar names in the Tributes’ Section. She knelt before the grave of her eldest daughter and placed the crown of laurel-leaves she’d made against the tombstone.
“There is no such thing as victory,” she said.
END.
Shadsie, Dec. 2013
People reading who roleplay here on ZD with me might recognize a name I used. Otherwise, if you think you saw a stupid reference to something, you probably saw a stupid reference.
