Hunger Games 1. Chapter 1: The Announcement

"You're gonna catch your death out here like that."

"Eh. Had worse."

Brutus doesn't bother to look up from the silent contemplation of his beer bottle as he peels off the label in long, straight lines with his thumbnail. Lyme's footsteps crunch through the snow, her boots breaking through the top crust and sinking right down to the ground underneath. Behind her, the trail from her house to his will be scored with hollows from her feet, dark smudges against an otherwise unbroken blanket of white.

Clove probably could've run across the top of the drifts without any trouble, and for a second Brutus sees her, a wicked little girl with the evil little eyes and a killer's aim, scampering over the snowbanks while Cato, enormous and hulking as his district partner (_friend_) was tiny, flounders through by force. Maybe Clove laughs at him. Maybe Cato balls up a handful of snow and pitches it at her head, missing by a mile because Cato was strong but couldn't aim for shit. Maybe Clove packs a nasty ice ball and nails him right between the eyes. Maybe he yelps, crashes through the last of the snowbank between them and knocks her down, where they roll in the snow like puppies and try to shove handfuls down each other's shirts. Maybe Clove complains that he's made her cold, ass-fucker, and Cato laughs and wraps her up in his jacket and half-carries her home.

They're in the ground now, what's left of them, buried next to each other in a neat row along with every other tribute who didn't make it out, in the memorial field maintained by the Centre. The families are allowed to visit and pay their respects if they want. Most don't bother. Maybe Clove's daddy did before he hanged himself. Who's to say. Cato's parents didn't even bother to make it into town for the Reaping, so unless they hired some poor sucker to lay a wreath or something, his stone is likely as bare as hers is. The mentors don't go back after the interment. They accompany the body back, sit silent on the train with the coffin on the next seat over, and that's more than any sane person could take, year after year.

Used to be, Brutus could deal with the loss of a tribute over the summer and be back on his feet by fall. Used to be he knew his job and his duty and took comfort that the kids did too, and he hurt when they died but he could pull himself back. Brutus can't tell if it's the world that's changed or if it's him - maybe twenty years of mentoring is too much, maybe he's lost his edge, maybe he's an old man before his time - but here he is, months later and still unable to shake the ghost of the little girl with a spider's smile.

Lyme drops down into the chair next to Brutus on the porch, the one that might as well be hers because she's the one who uses it most. It creaks under the sudden weight, and she's one to talk, jibing about him freezing to death, when she's just in a sweater the same as Brutus is. When both of them got flung through the ice with the rest of the trainees at the age of thirteen, when both their Arenas had weather that fluctuated from blistering to freezing in a matter of hours.

"Thought I'd join you," Lyme says, tipping her bottle of expensive asshole brandy, or whatever it is she's drinking today. If ever Brutus orders for her and they're not at their usual place, he just asks them to give him whatever it is rich douchebags pour to impress their potential business clients. Brutus likes his drinks simple, local beer brewed right here in District 2, and he doesn't allow himself a lot of indulgences but this is one that's hard to give up. Even harder recently.

Lyme's been quiet the past while. She was never one of Two's flashier Victors - right from the Games she won through stealth and cunning as much as she did with swords, through to her plays for the sponsors, persuading instead of bullying - and she stays out of the cameras after that business with one of her own back in the 67th. This, though, this is different. She went two days without food or sleep during her Games and didn't look like this, exhausted and resigned, if not outright defeated.

She looks like the reason Brutus took down the mirror in his bedroom, wrenched off the reflective door of his medicine cabinet and threw it through a window like he was eighteen and fresh out again instead of almost forty-five. Every day that passes Brutus gropes for the conviction that's kept him going these past twenty-some years, the absolute knowledge that what he does is good. Every day that rebellion whispers its way down through the mountains from the outer districts while Cato and Clove lie cold in their coffins is another day where the rocks shift beneath his feet.

Not that rebellion is the answer. Brutus has not mentored since he was twenty-one for him to lose sight of being practical. He doesn't allow himself to think about whether the Capitol is good because there's no point in that, but they are clear, and consistent. Follow their rules and you'll be rewarded. Play their games and they'll provide you with ample protection. The Capitol has resources and power and reach that took more than a girl and a handful of berries to accumulate.

The rebellion, if that's what this is, will fail, and just like the Dark Days, the Capitol will remember who stood by them through it all. When the children of the rebellion are slaughtered once more, those of Two will be safe.

Except. Except. Except.

Brutus doesn't think about _except_, but he sees it on Lyme's face all the same. It's the reason they sit and drink together but don't talk about it. The rules are changing again - the double Victors from Twelve, even if never repeated, are still unprecedented - and this close to the Quarter Quell that can't be a good thing. The only thing Brutus can do is cling to tradition, to the rules, in the hopes that his loyalty will be remembered and passed on to the people whose children he's tried to save nearly every other year.

"Mandatory broadcast tonight," Lyme says, and Brutus glances at her. "Think it's the reading of the card."

Brutus barely remembers the last one. He'd been fresh from the hell of his Victory Tour, exhausted and half-crazed, nearly delirious from the medication his mentor put him on to keep him sane. He remembers the box, absurdly enough, the rich mahogany with the inlaid carvings along the side. He recalls admiring the craftsmanship.

Lyme draws one knee up onto the chair, looking out over the yard. A pair of tiny bird tracks dot the snow, until a large dent marks where a hawk landed and made off with it. "It was my first year in Residential," Lyme says, and they try not to talk about feelings with each other but Brutus does understand the need to talk to someone who gets it. "The fiftieth, I mean. I still remember the volcano, watching three of ours just -" She snaps her fingers. "They'd been stopping the footage every time a tribute died, asking us what they should've done, but I remember, they didn't ask us this time. They didn't say anything. The whole room just went quiet. One of the girls in my year started crying. I hit her to make her stop, but she didn't. They took her out and she wasn't there the next day."

Brutus gnaws the inside of his cheek. "Odin said 'What a shame'," he says. He doesn't look at her. "Started to say something else but changed his mind."

_What a waste_, his mentor's body language had said instead, the tight lines of his shoulders, the clenched fists, the taut jaw. Three Twos, two Fours and a One, wiped out by environmental catastrophe on the Gamemakers' whim, and worse because a move that wiped out nearly the entire Pack could only stand to benefit the outer districts.

"Yeah." Lyme swirls her drink. She didn't even bother with a glass this time, which Brutus thought defied some kind of dickbag alcohol law, something about letting it breathe, and now she takes a long pull straight from the bottle. "D's been having nightmares. He's convinced they're gonna send him back in. I told him that's ridiculous."

Brutus winces. It's no use trying to imagine what new rules sit in that box, though a few late nights have given his brain the occasion to try. "Nah," he said. "Kid's old news. They've got plenty of new threats to deal with." Actual threats, ones the Capitol might have to worry about, if the rumours of what went on during the Twelves' Victor Tour are anything to go by. Lyme's boy bent the accepted protocol a little his year, but he didn't stand there with a handful of poison berries daring the Capitol to break their own rules to save him or kill him and let him win anyway.

It doesn't make sense to send the Victors back in, not when making that last kill is what turns tributes into people for the Capitol. Standing on the stage and receiving the crown is license for the Capitol audiences to think of the new Victor as someone with relationships and tastes and talents. The citizens of the Capitol might cheer and eat popcorn while twenty-three children die every year, but even they would have trouble pulling back after years - decades, for many - of getting to know their favourites.

A Victor Game might be one of the most popular rumours, but it's only one of several. One theory is that the tributes will be chosen only from those children who have not taken tesserae, to remind the citizens that it is not just the poor who must sacrifice to the Capitol; another that only the Victors' relatives would be chosen, or that each tribute will go in with a parent. The Capitol is abuzz with speculation, and while Brutus has avoided it as much as he can, every time he sets foot in the city someone is asking him if, as one of Two's most illustrious mentors, he has any ideas. Brutus always says no. It's never good to try to second-guess the Capitol.

"Let's just hope that's what the broadcast is about," Lyme says. "It's not just D. I asked around, all the younger ones are getting antsy. They don't know what to expect."

"Mine too," Brutus says with a nod. Two's latest Victor is one of his; Petra turned twenty-one this past December. Enobaria is the last of their Victors to remember the second Quarter Quell at all, and even she was only six, not even in the Program yet. In interviews she says she mostly remembers how pretty the bright red blood looked, splashed against the candy pinks and greens of the Arena.

"I just want to get this over with." Lyme's mouth thins, and her fingers tighten around the bottle neck. "Maybe after the Quell things can go back to normal."

Wouldn't that be nice. A normal year where normal teenagers murder each other normally, no star-crossed lovers and dual Victors and a new Gamemaker after the old one wound up dead because a sixteen-year-old girl made him look the fool. No standing behind Lyme in Mentor Central for eight hours with Brutus' hands on her shoulders as Cato got chewed to pieces, pretending he didn't notice when her breathing turned ragged. Nothing but good, clean deaths for the Twos, not a swift, violent descent into madness ending in the most blatant execution since the avalanche took out Titus from Six.

Cato was the first Two tribute eliminated deliberately by the Gamemakers that Brutus can remember, regardless of whether their mutts or Twelve's arrow actually killed him. Clove died in the dirt like the rest of them, but at least she died true. If any justice exists in the world, after the Quarter Quell there will be no more Catos.

Hopefully, whatever card the President pulls out of his box will douse the fires of rebellion all over the country and things can return the way they were, safe and predictable. If Brutus has to choose between an uncertain future where anyone might die at any given time, and one where two are guaranteed to die but they get to choose those two and prepare them for it, he'll take the future whose rules he understands.

The part where the figurehead of the rebellion-that-isn't-no-really let Lyme's tribute take an entire night to die while she cuddled her boyfriend and complained about the cold doesn't help, either.

Every tribute who dies is another chain around their mentor's leg, but Cato and Clove hit hard for both of them, and Lyme even worse. Brutus never let himself believe for a second that the rule change would hold, regardless of which district managed to make it to the end. That was too much of a departure from the norm - not how the Games are played - and their kids, if they'd been the ones at the finale, would not have thought to defy the Gamemakers and threaten to deny them their Victor. Clove would have stuck a knife in Cato and come back broken and bitter and dead inside, or Cato would have snapped Clove's little neck and returned to them a monster. Either way, there'd be no winner left by the Victory Tour.

But Lyme allowed herself to hope, and Brutus saw it. It wasn't his business and so he said nothing, but then the ending had been worse than anything he'd imagined. Now the whole country holds its breath waiting for the axe to fall. Meanwhile every day Brutus watches Lyme lock a little more of herself away.

"Hey," Brutus says, and Lyme flicks her eyes toward him but doesn't move. "Bring your boy over, you can watch from here if you want. Petra's with the trio -" his Emory and Devon, her Artemisia - "so I'm guessing she'll just stay and watch there. What time's the broadcast?"

"Seven," Lyme says, and her breath fogs in the winter air. "Thanks, I think I will."

That evening the three of them sit in Brutus' living room, watching the television that he only uses for mandatory viewing because Capitol programming insipid and sets his jaw on edge, like the tiny sugary cakes that make his teeth ache and leave him feeling unsatisfied and vaguely queasy.

The feeling doesn't go away when the mandatory broadcast turns out to be the Katniss Everdeen wedding dress special. Brutus very carefully holds his breath, hiding any reaction when there's a younger Victor in the room, and beside him Lyme freezes. Brutus shifts slightly, pressing his arm against her shoulder.

"You gotta be kidding me," Lyme's Victor spits, and he's twenty-six, old enough to get bitter but not enough to be resigned and jaded. "This crap is mandatory? Are they punishing us by trying to make us vomit?"

"Claudius," Lyme warns, and it sounds like she's grateful for the minor insubordination because it gives her something else to think about. Brutus knows how that feels.

"Sorry, boss," Claudius mutters, crossing his arms. "Thank you to President Snow and the Capitol for providing me with this wonderful opportunity to get reacquainted with my lunch. It was a good lunch. I relish the chance to meet it again." Lyme smacks him on the back of the head, and he subsides, slinking down into the sofa.

"Still, this can't be it," Lyme says, frowning. "What are they playing at?"

Brutus thinks he knows, but he doesn't like it. A suspicion starts working its way beneath his skin like a sliver, that if they're starting with the wedding show then whatever follows will be in direct contrast to that. The Capitol purports not to know what's in the Quell box ahead of time - Brutus refuses to think about whether that's true, not his business not his problem - but whether they do or not, it will only serve as a sharp reminder that everything, including Twelve's fairytale wedding, can be taken away.

Sure enough, when the broadcast ends, Flickerman comes back and tells them not to leave their seats. Then President Snow stands up and asks for the box, and Brutus' breath squeezes in his chest he reaches inside and pulls out a faded envelope.

Claudius hisses a breath. "They're trying too hard," he says, and he tenses himself like he knows Lyme's going to whack him again but he doesn't care. "If those things are kept in a sealed box and only opened four times a century, they wouldn't be yellowed like that. It's just theatrics."

"Stop it," Lyme says sharply. Brutus tried to tell her that letting the kid do movie-making as a public Talent was a bad idea, too much thought into appearance and craft and showmanship, but she'd said she could curb him and he was her kid, not Brutus', and so he'd kept his mouth shut after that.

Then the President opens the envelope, takes out the card - tells all of Panem that next summer, the only tributes in the Arena will be the ones who've been there before - and the floor falls out from under them.

* * *

An hour later, Brutus stands with the rest of the Victors in the Village gym, all of them crowded into the open sparring court, their feet sinking into the mats. They're all clumped into groups without really meaning to, mentors in the middle with their Victors spiralling out in ever-widening circles, and in the centre stands Ronan, their first Career Victor, where it all began. He's in his seventies now but stands as strong as ever, his back unbowed and hands steady.

Brutus and Lyme keep near each other, five young Victors between them, their reactions a mix of steely determination and wide-eyed panic. Brutus' first girl, Emory, stands with her arms at her sides, fingers clenched into fists; she's hardly a child, only three years younger than Brutus himself, but that's the way things go. She might be forty but she'll still be his girl until the day she dies - something that made her smile when she was twenty, but now means something different when it could be less than a year.

Brutus swallows his fear; Emory can handle herself. It's Petra, his latest, that he's worried about, barely three years out and fresh from her Games with a hip injury - took a mace to the side, shattering her pelvis to bits - that doesn't want to heal no matter how many surgeries she goes through. She walks with a cane and a limp; the others joke that she and Claudius are the Village's youngest weather forecasters, since both her hip and his shoulder twinge when rain is coming.

"First things first," Ronan calls, his voice still clear and strong despite his age, a Career to the end. "I think we can agree. The youngest ones stay out."

Petra narrows her eyes and drums her fingers against the handle of her cane. No one turns to look at her but the attention of the room shifts to her anyway just because they're trying so hard not to. She's always despised pity, his girl, and it will stick her in the gut to take the exception, but she understands protocol and waits for the proper time to oppose instead of bursting out with it now.

Brutus can't second, not when the youngest is his, and his gaze flickers over to Odin without thinking. Odin doesn't look at him, but he straightens his shoulders. "I second," Odin says in his powerful baritone. "They're under our protection."

Technically everyone except the oldest are under someone's protection, but that's not what he means. Two takes care of its own, and that means not sending in the ones whose trauma has yet to fade. It's been over two years for Petra but she still hasn't healed, and even now when she tries to do something her body can no longer handle it's a tossup between whether she'll scream and smash something or burst into furious tears and a stream of curses that turn the air blue.

"Third," echoes Nero, and that brings it up for the vote. "Anyone opposed?"

Petra growls under her breath, and Brutus shakes his head to cut her off. "Don't," he says in a low voice. "It's not personal, we'd make the rule for anyone."

"Then it's done," says Ronan, striking the mat with his cane, which he carries more like a sceptre of office than a walking aid. It makes a muffled thump against the exercise mats, but the effect is the same. "I move to set the cutoff at those born after the last Quarter Quell."

Beside him, Lyme sucks in a breath, and it takes Brutus a second to realize why. On her other side, Claudius stands up straight and lets out a long exhale, and that's when Brutus does the math and realizes Claudius was born in the summer of 48, well before Ronan's cutoff.

Back in the 55th, Brutus watched Lyme navigate a minefield to get to her Cornucopia without breaking a sweat, but now the colour drains from her face and he learns what she looks like when she's afraid.

Mentors don't play favourites, but Claudius is her youngest, and not only does Brutus know how that feels, his own girl is safe from this rule already, no question. Almost before he knows what's happening, Brutus finds himself speaking up. "That's a lot of math," Brutus says, and despite the situation a low ripple of laughter spreads through the tense silence. "Let's just make it the past decade and save us all the trouble."

Claudius stiffens, but he knows better than to move or say anything, not yet. Lyme doesn't either, but her fingers slowly uncurl, Brutus counts two long breaths as she closes her eyes and gets a handle on herself.

"I second," Nero says immediately.

"Third," says Enobaria, crossing her arms. "You kids just had your fun, save it for the rest of us." The ones who've recovered enough that they don't reach for a knife when they go around a dark corner, she means; the youngest ones would never be able to go in again and walk out sane. Brutus feels a twinge of guilt that he couldn't push the age range up to keep her out - of all of them, she's the one with the most of her left behind in the Arena - but she's over thirty, and they can't start picking and choosing now.

The vote goes up, and again no one stands opposed except one.

"I can do it," Claudius protests, and Lyme tenses again. "I've been out more than enough time to detox, and I'm strong. It doesn't make sense to cut me out." He swallows and raises his chin. He's the least pretty tribute Two has ever sent and definitely the plainest Career Victor in all of Panem, and the Capitol forgot he existed within three years of his victory, almost unheard of. "Plus I don't mentor. I'm dead weight. You may as well designate me the tribute right now."

"Nobody's designating anybody," Brutus snaps, because Lyme can't, not with that much vested interest. "This isn't the fucking twenty-fifth, we're not starting that shit now. But you don't mentor because you ain't ready, and if you can't handle that then you're not going back into the Arena, do you hear? We've got consensus. You may as well just shove it."

Brutus does understand the drive. The kid won an unconventional Games that left a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and he's never been quite right for it since - never outgrew his mentor properly, never managed to start training to be one himself, never made any real friends. If someone's going to go back in, it might as well be the one who hasn't earned it as much as the others. Maybe this time he could win it for good and get himself a second chance.

Brutus gets it. He also knows it's bullshit. Anyone who walked through the gates of the Victors' Village has earned it, period. If they start scorekeeping behind the fence, there's no way it will ever stop, and that's no way for anyone to live.

"Nobody's gonna like you better because you killed Victors instead of twelve-year-olds," Enobaria points out - in Claudius' year every tribute Reaped had been as young as they could go - and he grits his teeth. He looks like he's about to point out that it won't do Enobaria any favours, either, and this is another reason why the babies should stay out, in Brutus' opinion; too easily riled. With everyone in the Arena knowing the other's weaknesses, their hot buttons, it makes sense for those who can keep their cool to be the ones who go.

"Enough," says Ronan, and that settles it. Claudius snaps his mouth shut, hands spasming at his sides, but he doesn't argue. "We're agreed. Any other suggestions?"

Claudius narrows his eyes, and Brutus has just enough time to think 'uh oh' before he speaks. "I propose an upper limit," he says. "No one of eligible Centre age or over by the first Quarter Quell."

That safely knocks out anyone fifty-eight or over, leaving Callista and Nero, in their mid-fifties, as the oldest possible tributes. It's a good, solid range, encompassing their best Victors that still have the physical strength to pull this off, even against the younger Victors from the outlying districts. Not a bad suggestion, all in all.

Ronan slits his eyes right back at Claudius, but before he can say anything, Emory says, "Seconded."

"Third," says Petra, her voice like layered steel. "You've done enough. You'll be the most help on the ground anyway."

They put it to a vote, and while Ronan's opposed, as are two of the others past the cutoff, the motion passes. Ronan's eyes snap with displeasure, but he knows better than to fight precedent when he's just used it to hit Claudius across the face. "Then it's decided," he says, somewhat sourly, but then he reverts back to professional coolness. "Anything else?"

One more. Artemisia, Lyme's first Victor, puts it forward. "No mentor should go in with their Victor," she says. A long silence follows, and she folds her arms. It's a safe proposal for her; while she's mentored for years, she's never managed to bring one out with her and that means this can't be called self-serving. "It's not right," she says, a note of desperation in her voice, the only hint anyone in the room is willing to make at what Brutus knows they're all thinking.

Because it isn't. Any mentor in with their tribute makes for an automatic choice of winner, because no mentor would ever, ever make it home in their Victor's place, but none of them know how to play a defensive game, and none of them have ever walked in determined to die. It would throw things even further into chaos than they already are. The problem is, if Emory goes in then Brutus would want to know her district partner would do his best to bring her back.

"Second," says Devon, Brutus' boy, and he's safe to make the suggestion because he's in the same boat as Artemisia, same-sex mentor and no Victors of his own to worry about.

At last Ronan nods. "Third," he says, and calls for the vote. This one takes longer - more of the mentors are affected, and while everyone agrees that the others shouldn't have to go through it, no one wants to give up the chance to protect their own tributes should the case arise. In the end, not enough hands are raised in favour to carry the motion through; Brutus gives a silent apology to Emory, whose own hand is in the air for the same reason that his stays firmly at his side, and he looks away to avoid her accusing, desperate stare. The same divide makes its way across the room, and Ronan announces the suggestion declined.

"All right." Ronan stands even straighter, his fingers tight around his walking staff. "Then it's decided. We don't choose our Volunteers ahead of time this year." They could, of course. They could spend the next month running trials and choose the best candidates, but there's no guarantee that they would fall within the accepted groups, and with those limitations in place the rest of the selection process would be invalid. Nobody argues. "We let the Reaping determine the initial candidate, and we call for Volunteers as necessary based on the agreed-upon criteria."

No one calls for any amendments after that, but even so, the atmosphere in the room lightens. It's not much, making these rules that have no legal binding, nothing but the verbal promise of the Victors together, but it's still something. It gives them back a sense of the control they lost when the announcement went live; it means that not everything will be taken from them. Two has never had much power, in the grand scheme of things, but they use what they have to its fullest to save the ones they can.

If they have to lose one of their own, at least they can limit which of them the Arena will take.

"Everyone, take tomorrow off, get things in order," Ronan says. "Day after we'll meet back here and work out a training schedule for those in the running. Those who aren't, we'll cover everything so the rest of you have nothing to worry about. Tonight we're adjourned."

Nobody speaks, but the groups splinter off, the youngest generation of Victors with their mentors in clumps. Odin holds Brutus' gaze over the crowd and nods at him, expression hard and determined, and Brutus matches the gesture before turning back to his kids. Two girls, one boy, one per decade, and something tears itself free inside Brutus' chest and tries to batter its way out of his ribcage at the thought of not being able to keep them from this.

"C'mon," Brutus says to his Victors. "Let's head back, I've got some beer needs drinking."

* * *

Of all the women Brutus makes a point of seeing in the Capitol in the hopes of gaining sponsor gifts or inside information, he minds Lucretia the least. Around twenty Brutus realized that he could get a much more satisfying time and greater dividends by ignoring the fluttering young heiresses and socialites, instead choosing the older, wealthier women with influence and the desire to use it. Most of them preferred their men young and eager to please, and that combined with District 2's image as savage and primal made it easy for Brutus to make himself a regular. The other bonus of older women being that they were much less likely to request Arena games, which Brutus didn't object to so much on principle as he thought them ridiculous.

The older he got the more difficult to maintain their favour as younger, prettier men kept winning every few years, but some, like Lucretia Bell, an Arena designer, never lost interest in Brutus. It's for that reason that a week after the announcement of the Quell rules, Brutus takes the train into the Capitol and asks to see her. She clears her schedule, orders dinner to her rooms, and they spend the rest of the evening together until Brutus gets her purring underneath him.

"Mm, you are my favourite, dear boy," Lucretia hums, running a hand over Brutus' shoulders. "You're like fine wine, you know that, you just get better with age. They don't make them like you anymore."

Brutus grins at her, sharp and predatory. "Well, you're the connoisseur." His job isn't pretty poetry; that isn't why she likes him.

"It's true, you know, all these boys today, they're so ..." she waves a sparkle-nailed hand. "Insubstantial. Ephemeral. You, on the other hand, you Twos are built to last."

"We try," Brutus says, and scrapes his teeth across her collarbone. Still later, once he has her flushed and breathless for the third time, Brutus presses an open-mouthed kiss against the inside of her thigh. "Any vacation tips for me?" he asks, trailing his fingers behind her knee.

Lucretia chuckles airily. "After a performance like that, I should think so." She beckons, and Brutus heaves himself back up, his heart rate picking up as she looks at him through lowered lashes. The expression is vapid but her eyes are intent under her violet-dyed lids. "What do you think about the ocean, my dear? Are you a fan?"

Brutus takes her fingertips into his mouth. "Can't say I've been much."

"Mm, well, you might want to consider it," Lucretia says, letting her head fall back against the pillows. "I've heard it's going to be a very popular destination this summer."

The next morning, Brutus takes the first train back to Two and heads straight for the Centre. "Find the biggest pool you can and rent it out," he says. "We've all gotta re-learn how to swim."

* * *

Over the next few weeks, Brutus isn't the only one who makes trips into the Capitol, and gradually the information trickles in. Two of the others confirm Brutus' intel on the ocean, and three come back with sketches of watch faces, though no one can understand what that's supposed to mean. It's not Brutus' job to figure it out, though, nor any of the ones in the eligible group; they pass their info on to those who won't be going in and let them and the strategy trainers in the Centre work it out.

They also get word on which districts are phoning it in and which are using the time given to their best advantage. Mostly it goes as expected, the usual mix of washouts, but the surprises this year are Eleven and Twelve. Sources say that both districts have been laying off the booze and making at least a perfunctory attempt at getting back into condition. It won't help them in the long run, but Brutus can respect anyone not willing to lie down and take it. At least the ones with only one male or female tribute on either side have the certainty of knowing it's them, may it give them peace.

Brutus and the others train every day they can, turning the Village gym into an impromptu adult education Career Centre while supplementing it with real-world conditions. The harsh spring - still winter, up in the mountains - makes endurance tests easy, and for the first time since he was a teenager, Brutus finds himself hiking barefoot in the snow with a heavy pack on his back. It brings back memories, both of training and the conditions of his Arena, and afterward Brutus stands in the scalding shower for nearly an hour, his hands shaking. It's fine. All of them have unpleasant things they don't want to unearth again and no choice but to do it, and it makes sense to dig them out now while they still have the resources to deal with them.

The main difference between now and their pre-Arena training is the lack of kill tests. Someone brings it up at a checkpoint meeting a few weeks in, uncertain and wincing, but the rest of them vote it down. They've all done enough killing for several lifetimes, and the two that go in will be murdering friends and colleagues, not strangers. They can practice the necessary physical skills, but no amount of facing down condemned criminals will prepare them for shoving a sword through the chest of someone they used to grab drinks with. Sometimes hands get saturated with enough blood that they can't hold any more.

Instead they focus on weight and diet, bulking everyone up as much as they can. Turns out Centre protein shakes taste just as bad as Brutus remembered as a teenager, but he chokes down four a day anyhow, watching with grim satisfaction as the numbers on the scale climb week by week.

As late spring comes to the mountain, bringing the annual floods as melting snow bolsters the swollen rivers, Brutus isn't the only one having trouble sleeping. The rest of them, despite the training, the preparation that keeps them sharp and on edge, can only stave off reality so much. The Capitol will expect a good show for their Quarter Quell - another reason, callous as it is, why it's a bad idea to send the elderly Ronan or the injured Petra - and that means Two's tributes must exemplify the district. All of them do, but only a few are so famous that the Capitol still remembers their names years later.

Brutus is one of them. Lyme is another.

It's that thought that keeps Brutus awake at night; the reason, he suspects, that both of them shy away from sparring with each other during training despite being constant platonic fighting partners since Lyme came out of the Arena. Their actual combat skills are about even - Brutus is bigger but Lyme is faster, and they're both about equal with the sword - but they're also stylistically similar, and Brutus can't decide if that would be the sort of parallel that made the game interesting or too predictable. Then again, their years of working together and the constant rumours of whether or not they're sleeping together might make up for the lack of diversity in their fighting styles, and already Brutus can hear the commentators remarking on the years of mentorship rivalry finally carried out in the Arena.

The difference between them is that Lyme left the Arena behind her the day she walked out, wearing sleeves to cover her Victor's tattoo and rarely talking shop unless she has to. She's popular in the Capitol not because of her Games themselves but because of how hard she works to get her kids out; they think it's admirable, laudable, selfless, a million other words that mean nothing, whether they're said sincerely by Capitol citizens or spat sarcastically by the outlying districts. They like her because she bucks the trend, because she's fierce and strong and absolutely refuses their best efforts to make her pretty, which in turn makes them giggle over her old-fashioned District 2 ways.

Brutus, on the other hand, never managed to scrub the Arena from his skin. As far as Brutus knows - not that they talk about this, all right, there are lines - no one Lyme brings home spends half the night cooing about the details of her Victory, shivering over how the iconic moments will never leave their minds. Few people born after the 55th have seen Lyme's Games at all, except maybe on clip shows, whereas Brutus gets the impression his are practically required viewing to have any sort of cred in Games circles.

They don't talk about it, because the best way for Brutus to stay on task is to avoid the things that would throw him off his game. Lyme compartmentalizes her life just as much as Brutus - maybe even more - and so now when they're not training they spend their time with their Victors, and keep away from each other.

Until the night before the Reaping, when Lyme shows up at Brutus' house again. Just like the night of the reading Brutus is on his porch, but this time instead of the crunching of snow it's the sudden silence of the screaming cicadas that lets him know she's coming. Tonight, neither of them are drinking. "Hey," Lyme says, sitting next to him, and Brutus nods. "I'm not going to stay long, I just. I have a request."

Brutus knows what it is. It's the same one he's been rolling around in his mind over the past few weeks, but hasn't given himself the time to think about. He looks out over the yard, at the garden he doesn't have because he never got a wife to help him plant it and it felt strange and stupid doing it by himself.

"If it's me -" Lyme leans back in the chair and stares up past the edge of the porch roof at the stars. "Don't, okay?"

Brutus sighs and rubs at his forehead with his thumb. "I can't promise that."

"You damn well can," Lyme snaps, blowing out a hard breath through her nose. "You're not the only one with a suicidal duty streak, let someone else. It's going to suck no matter who it is, but I really don't want it to be you and me, all right?" She grits her teeth. "If it's me and Devon I'll take care of him, same as you would. So don't, please."

Brutus drags his hand down his face. "I'll look out for Misha then, if it comes to it," he says, using Artemisia's nickname because she's not here to throw something at his head, and Lyme nods.

They sit in silence for a long time, long enough that the cicadas start up again like a dentist's drill or a surgeon's saw. Finally Lyme shakes her head and stands up. "Okay, I've got to go or I'll never -" she waves a hand, and she doesn't finish her sentence but she doesn't have to. Brutus gets the feeling there's a lot of _never_ going around the Village tonight. "I'll see you down there, then."

"Yeah," Brutus says. He wants to say something else - it feels weird, leaving things like this - but he's not great with words and neither is she. They're more than friends but never lovers, and somewhere they've become a matched set in spite of it and what could he possibly say? And so he lets her go.

Petra turns up after Lyme leaves, limping from the humidity, and her face is swollen and blotchy in the darkness. "Can I stay?" she asks.

Brutus scoots over, and she sits next to him on the swing. "Sure thing, sweetheart," he says. He doesn't call her that in front of people but no one else is here, and the stars ain't tattling.

"I can't sleep," Petra tells him. "I don't think I can."

"Ain't your fault," Brutus says, and he was never the cuddly mentor and Petra rarely asked him to be, but to hell with this. He holds her around the shoulders and pretends he doesn't feel the damp patch on his shirt. She doesn't ask him not to volunteer, and Brutus appreciates it; she's within her right to do it, but Brutus can't keep that promise and he'd hate to lie to his girl. Petra falls asleep after a while, breathing smoothing out, and Brutus carries her inside, sets her up on the couch, and heads upstairs to bed.

Tomorrow's coming whether he sleeps or not; no point in putting it off any longer. He crunches a sleeping pill for the first time in a decade and lets it drag him under.


	2. Chapter 2: Reap Me Twice

It's not Lyme.

Brutus has just enough time to weather the treasonous wash of gratitude before his brain registers who it is: Enobaria, young and bug-nuts crazier than everyone in the Village put together. He can't imagine what her mentor had to do to get her back to where she is now, or what happened to her before the Arena to make her like this, but normal Twos don't just go out and start biting people's windpipes. Brutus doesn't know and doesn't ask, and whatever Nero knows he ain't telling.

Lyme's kids all do their best not to look too happy about their mentor being safe, though Claudius clings to her pinky finger like a child and Brutus does his best not to notice. This year's escort calls for volunteers - Enobaria sings out _you'd better not fucking dare_ \- but the square stays silent. It's as good a choice as any, when the choices are between bad and worse and worst. She's young, she's strong, and she's got the chops to get the job done.

It makes sense by the numbers, too. Enobaria wasn't right when she went in and came out even more broken than ever, and Nero patched her up as good as he could, but with the Capitol's demand that she keep her image fresh, ain't much he could do to try to pull her back. They never got her fit to mentor, and that means while she's got people who care about her, she's not responsible for anybody's sanity.

Enobaria rolls her shoulders and narrows her eyes as she stalks toward the stage, teeth bared in the morning light. It's not relief that crosses her face, but it is something about the way she exhales, how she's barely holding back her pace, like she finally just got her nails into an itch in the middle of her back that's been bothering her for years. Like she expected the Reaping results, like she always knew it would be her, and she's glad to see the charade over and done with.

Brutus prefers not to chase that thought too close. This is the girl with the messiest Games on record despite not having an Arena that demanded it, who woke up in the hospital with teeth filed into points because one impulsive act rerouted the course of the rest of her life. The Capitol kicked off an entire decade of crazy Victors because she delighted them; Enobaria spent her ensuing years living up to her reputation.

The Village accepted her no matter how off she might be, but Brutus used to look at her out the corner of his eye and remember her in the Arena, covered in blood and laughing laughing laughing until she made herself puke from the force of it. Then he'd blink and focus on her there in the Village, safe and flipping a knife over her fingers, but with eyes that look far away.

Brutus has never been able to read her, one of many reasons why he didn't put his name in to be her mentor, and he doesn't try now. It would be wrong anyway, trying to pick her apart like a puzzle, when that's exactly what the Capitol commentators and Games pundits will be doing. Besides, what's done is done, but it's not over. Brutus straightens his shoulders, sweat creeping down his spine, as the escort reaches into the male tribute ball. He holds his breath as the name falls onto the square with a heavy thud.

Of course it's Nero. Enobaria's mentor, the only man in all of Panem who can look her in the eye and tell her to quit it and she does. Some of the others could maybe get her to knock it off, could argue using her personal brand of circular logic to get her to come round, but he's the one she respects, the one she'd listen to even if she didn't have to. It's Nero who took the busted-up killer and stitched her back together into something that could pass for human.

He won't want volunteers, that much is for sure, just like Brutus wouldn't if it was one of his girls in there. Nero will want to protect Enobaria, not to keep her alive - she can do that on her own just fine - but to keep her sane, to make sure she doesn't get lost in the dark and the blood and the show.

Even so, that only gets her to the Victory hovercraft; after that is a whole new life with a double dose of murder under her skin, years ahead of her without the only person who can call her 'Bari' and not get a knife in the kidney.

Nero takes a step forward, and no one else will dare. Before he can stop himself, Brutus glances behind him, where Lyme stands with her Victors. She shakes her head, the corners of her eyes tight, and without moving her mouth she begs him harder than he's ever seen her do in her life not to go. The only thing that comes close was when Brutus stood with her in the control room last year, kneading the fist-sized knot in her shoulder while she argued futilely with the Gamemakers to be allowed to send something to end Cato's torture.

Brutus couldn't help her then, and he can't now. He promised Lyme he wouldn't go in with her, but that's all he's got. The rules exist for a reason, because without them the Hunger Games would be nothing but a pageantry of horror and blood. The rules are what give it honour, give it purpose, stop it from being twenty-three kids who murder each other to no point again and again and again.

The kids were right when they put it to vote that night; Brutus couldn't see it then but now it's as clear as the sky on a summer afternoon. No mentor should go in with his Victor, not when the most important part of mentoring is the rebuilding process, and Brutus' duty spreads out in front of him. Lyme may as well ask Brutus to stop the sun from rising.

Nero walks toward the platform; onstage, Enobaria's Victor-face slips for a moment, the triumphant smile falling away to shock and fury. Brutus lunges through the crowd, hoping if he does it fast enough none of his kids will cry out or try to stop him. "I volunteer!" he shouts, and for a second the world fractures itself in two. He's split between the Brutus of now and the Brutus of then - the one with scars surgically removed and the one who hadn't earned them yet - but then he takes another step and everything slides back into place.

He doesn't look at Nero as he passes. If Brutus walks back down this stage in a month, he's not sure how he'll look Nero in the eye ever again.

Now's not the time. There are hundreds of cameras on him - the screen to the side of him divides down the middle as he strides up the stage, and for a second Brutus nearly stumbles. They've cued up the footage from his first Games so that himself at eighteen and himself in his forties mount the stairs side by side. On his left, twin Enobarias give the crowd identical wicked grins, save for the flash of gold in the older one's mouth.

Coincidental choice of cards or not - Brutus refuses to go down the path Claudius insists on whacking through the treason brush - this year is about punishment. It's to remind the districts that they aren't invincible, that just because Katniss Everdeen played the Gamemakers with her little stunt last year, doesn't mean anyone else will be allowed to do the same.

It's not Brutus' fault, nor the fault of Two, that this happened, but that doesn't mean he can slip up in the slightest. If he's walking out of here - if he wants a district to come home to - there's no choice. Brutus wants the Games to continue without any more surprises, any nasty twists. He wants District 2's children safe in the knowledge that no one will ever call on them to face an Arena full of people out to kill them in brutal, creative ways. There's only one way to do that.

Brutus has to play the game, and play it well, with not a hint of hesitation. He reaches for Enobaria's hand, raises their arms above their heads, and together they roar at the crowd. It's enough to break the spell on the silent, shocked audience, and finally the people start to cheer.

The Victors in the square stay silent. In a time when a kiss of the fingers is a powder keg, half the districts smouldering and the Capitol ready to pull the trigger on the rest, they can't give any sign of a unified send-off. Nothing that might stoke the flames. And so they stand in silence, watching but unmoving, and Brutus turns and marches back into the Justice Building. He doesn't let himself wonder how many of them he'll see again.

* * *

The young Peacekeeper who escorts him to the waiting room keeps twitching, like he can't decide whether to try to bluster to make this feel normal or ask for Brutus' autograph. Likely as not he'll have grown up watching Brutus' Games and thinking of him as a hero; maybe he's one of the ones who collected the signed postcards, waiting in line at every event to get Brutus' scrawl across the laminated paper. It doesn't matter now, and Brutus ain't gonna hold a grudge. Kid's doing his job same as Brutus, and that's that.

Once he's alone, Brutus actually counts back on his fingers. He can do simple math in his head just fine thanks, but it's a good grounding technique even if he doesn't need it for the actual calculations, twitching each finger against his leg as the years go back. Five full runs of his hand tapping against his thigh plus one more finger for luck, that's twenty-six. Twenty-six years since he stood in this building as a tribute the first time, his head stuffed full of fire and promises and a whole lot of willful ignorance.

The room looks exactly the same, whitewashed and spartan and unforgiving, but that could just be a trick of memory because it ain't like Brutus has been back here since. Nobody ever does; every part of a Two's life gets split off into very clear sections for very good reasons, and you never cross those lines back again. The Justice Building is for the kids, and it's clear as he stands here, one personal Quarter Quell's worth of years between his experiences, why that's so.

There's nothing to reassure the tributes but nothing to distract them either, to break the careful programming wrapped around their minds. It's like the bubble plastic the people at those fancy shops wrap their knick-knacks in so they don't get smashed on the journey home. The tributes who stand here will be broken to bits soon enough; don't want to start the unravelling now by messing with their concentration.

Comfort is always more dangerous to focus than threats. Anyone who's ever lost somebody knows that it ain't always the death itself that gets you, that you can run for days on your own power and think you're doing just fine, but then it's a hand on the shoulder or a quiet word that sticks the knife in and leaves you unwound and shattered. The stark professional distance of the Justice Building reminds the tributes that they're nothing but statistics, and that's good, like the weight of a solid sword in their hands.

As long as there's no comfort then the tributes don't remember that they're human, and if they don't remember they're human then they forget that they can die. That delusion is enough to last them until there's no running from it and the only thing left to do is fight. It worked well enough for Brutus last time, but that was coming straight from five years of knowing that his life would end at eighteen and anything after that would be a bonus.

All fine, except that Brutus has spent the last twenty-six years living out that bonus, and he can't just climb inside that box again. He'll stick to the rules and tradition like he always does, but Brutus can't just rip out a quarter of a century of life experience and memories and knowledge of exactly what happens on both sides of the Arena and send himself back in raw.

It's one thing to be eighteen and avoid doing the math on his own chances; not so easy after decades of scribbling the adjusted odds on a napkin while listening to a pair of Gamemakers gossip at the next table over. Brutus can't just unlearn the years of tracking trends and calculating percentages. He can't forget how many times he's stood with a tribute on the Reaping stage in July (eleven) and how many times he made the return trip with a body in a coffin (eight).

It is strange to be in his forties and still have to go through the pageantry, standing in the Justice Building pretending to wait for the family that's never going to come. Brutus has no idea if his parents are even still alive; he hasn't seen them since he was eighteen, when two strangers with faces that tickled at the back of his brain came in and confirmed to him that the kid he'd been before the doors of Residential closed behind him was dead.

It's better this way, really. The last thing Brutus needs is to have someone try to call him 'little man' again.

No wife, no kids, either, and twenty years since Brutus gave up the possibility of that ever happening. It had been a stupid dream, the sort of thing a dumb young Victor thinks to himself when suddenly his life extends out far past the eighteen years he was guaranteed. Brutus had been young and idealistic, giddy with the glut of opportunity that now lay in front of him. He'd told himself to make sure he recovered and got his trauma under control, because no one would want to marry a man who still slept with a knife and flew into violent rages.

Years of utterly failing to make anything work with a non-Victor, every attempt at bridging that gap between them bursting into flames, convinced Brutus that no one but another Two could ever hope to understand him, and no one but a Victor would be able to handle him. With his own Victor off-limits, the next female winner from Two had been Lyme, and despite the efforts of many to get them together, they couldn't possibly be less suited. One awkward evening at the request of their mentors resulted in a textbook checklist of deal-breaker after deal-breaker until they both had to laugh so they wouldn't murder each other out of embarrassment. After that, there'd been no point, and Brutus married his job instead.

That's better anyway. Brutus isn't sure he would have been able to step in for Nero if he'd had a family waiting, and that kind of personal selfishness is absolutely unacceptable. It introduces ambiguity, a clouding of duty, and Brutus is the kind of man who requires clarity in all things.

He doesn't jump when the door opens, but it's close, and he raises an eyebrow when Lyme shuts the door behind her. "There something going on I don't know about?" Brutus asks her, and it's not funny, but he won his Games with a dark, sliding humour that shocked the Capitol audiences as much as it amused them, and he finds himself slipping back into it now. "Don't tell me you're having regrets about not letting me sweep you off your feet after all."

"Still not my type, caveman, but nice try," Lyme shoots back, and the familiar banter smoothes out some of the twisting in his chest. "No, I just - thought you'd want to know, before you got on the train. Odin called dibs on you."

Brutus isn't surprised that his former mentor is the one insisting on coming with him to the Capitol, but he can't divorce himself from the strangeness of it. On one hand, the direct flow of authority will help remind him where he is. It's been over twenty years since Odin gave Brutus a direct order and expected him to follow it, but if ever a situation arose where Brutus needed to defer, he would. That's the way it works in Two, the way it always has.

But on the other, Brutus isn't eighteen years old, and he's not sure how his brain will deal with the dissonance. He doesn't look at Lyme, not wanting her to see anything on his face. He's doing his best to hold it back, but the cracks are forming at the edges of his control and he won't have it. Lyme lets out a breath. "I'm coming, too."

His head snaps up. "What?"

"Yeah." Lyme gives him a thin smile. "I think it would be a good year for Claudius to shadow, you know, Victor Games, full of experienced tributes who know how it goes, it's a good warmup for him as a new mentor. But of course this is an important year, so we can't have Odin's time divided looking after him. I'm going along to make sure we always have someone to cover you."

It's bullshit, every word of it, and Brutus knows he should disapprove - it's a flagrant misuse of Two's mentor rules, which allow for additional mentors to accompany the tributes in the case of training a new one - but he can't. It has nothing to do with Claudius, that in all likelihood the kid will be sent to the sponsor floor and rarely be allowed in the control centre at all, but it means Lyme has an excuse to come along with him. It means that Brutus won't be stuck trying to fit his current self and past self together on his own.

"Nero's got Enobaria?" Brutus asks.

"Yeah."

Not surprising; nobody but her mentor would be able to handle her like this, and not many would work that hard to bring her home over Brutus, either, loath as Brutus is to admit it. So it's not surprising, no, but it does underscore just how _non-standard_ this is, that Nero now has to help his Victor-tribute kill the man who volunteered to ensure that he wouldn't have to go in with her.

Not wrong. It can't be wrong. But at the same time, it never should have happened. This isn't the way the Games are played.

Lyme lets out a breath and runs a hand through her close-cropped hair. "Your kids wanted to come see you. I told them not to, but I can call them back if you want me to."

Here in the Justice Building with only Lyme as witness, the last modicum of privacy he'll ever have for the rest of his life, Brutus allows himself a wince. "Yeah, don't," he says. Civilians say that no parent should ever have to bury their child, a lament that predated the Hunger Games and during the Dark Days must have been chillingly prescient, but for Brutus, no Victor should ever have to see their mentor in a situation like this.

And, more selfishly but no less true, Brutus' resolve is rock solid on its own, but if he has to look into his kids' eyes and tell them why he's leaving, he might find himself breaking down the door to take it all back.

"That's what I thought." Lyme looks exhausted already, but she'll take some stimulants and get some restoring cream under her eyes before she goes back out for the cameras. It's the only kind of cosmetic she or Brutus ever bother wearing. "Look, I need to ask. Are you going to play?"

Brutus stares at her, uncomprehending. "As opposed to what?"

She meets his gaze steady and unflinching, and in her eyes Brutus sees the same question that sometimes flits around Claudius' face before Lyme gets scared and gives him a smack; the one that looks awfully like the face Katniss Everdeen made when she reached into her pocket for those berries.

Brutus hisses. "Yeah, of course I'm gonna play," he says, and Lyme wipes the look off her face like it had never been there. "There's no other choice."

Because there ain't. Say there is or isn't a rebellion. Two has stood loyal this long and been rewarded; they're not going to fall like a shoddily-made granite pile just because the going gets a little tough. Not to mention, any rebellion will be led by people who will be happy to rip Two to pieces in the aftermath.

If they can't believe in the Capitol, what's left?

"Just checking," Lyme says, her voice a careful neutral. "We'll talk later, but I got them to let you go to the train early if you don't want to wait here for the rest of the hour."

It's tempting, but there are cameras documenting their every move, and while nobody ever pays attention to the Justice Building in Two because the farewells are boring at best and downright uncomfortable at worst, someone will notice if he leaves before his hour is up.

"No," Brutus says, and Lyme nods like she expected it. "Go do your job, I'm fine here."

Because she shouldn't be here - none of the trainees from the Centre are allowed to see their classmates off, no matter how friendly (or not) they are - and the longer she stays, the harder it is for Brutus to pretend it's just another year and all he has to do to come home is what he's always been trained to do.

Lyme's cheek twitches like she wants to say something else, but then she shakes her head and leaves, closing the door behind her.

* * *

Funny enough, once Brutus is finally on the train his head settles a little. It's not a big shock like the Justice Building, that slap in the face of familiarity after all those years away. Brutus has ridden this train as a mentor more times than he has fingers, and it doesn't exactly put him in the proper headspace as a player, but at least it's not a knife in the gut.

Enobaria's already there when Brutus makes it into the common car, sprawled across a couch with a blade dangling between her fingers. They'll have searched her the same they did Brutus, but any Two worth their scars knows how to keep a few knives hidden. "Mentors are talking," Enobaria says, a nasty twist to her voice. "Looks like it's gonna be a real party. Somebody's gotta be using up a hell of a lot of favours to get this one through."

"Who else you got besides Nero?" Brutus asks. The last time he did this as a tribute, he and his district partner Brynn (the commentators loved the symmetry of their names that year) had kept it professional, rivals but not enemies, not yet. Brutus is going to play the game, sure, but at the same time he doesn't see the point in that this year.

"Ronan," says Enobaria, and well shit. He did always have a soft spot for the lost causes. "Artemisia's the third, since you all had to get greedy."

Two of Lyme's - one mentor, one Victor - on the other side. Brutus swallowed and kept the grimace from his face. At least it wasn't one of his; when Lyme pulled the excuse to train Claudius, he'd worried they would give Petra to Nero just to make it fair. Half a second later it hits him that they probably tried exactly that, and Misha stepped in to stop one of Brutus' girls from going up against her mentor.

"Well," Brutus says. "I'm guessing the trade-off is making us spread around a couple of the others to the other districts, the ones who don't have enough left." Like Eleven, both of them going into the Arena with no one on the other side with a headset to send them miracles.

"Nero said they'll have to make do with their escorts instead of sending Twos." Enobaria shrugs. "Wouldn't make a difference, but I guess they figured that inter-district harmony wouldn't look too good when we're all helping the others slaughter us."

It's the sort of thing that Enobaria can get away with saying, because she plays up her crazy to the point where she could probably joke about chewing on the President's throat and just get a 'oh, you!' from whoever's in the room. Brutus can't afford that, and he doesn't approve either, giving her a hard look.

"Yeah, yeah, I know." Enobaria frowns and drags the tip of her knife across her fingers, just hard enough to draw a line of blood below each of her nails. She watches the red beads well up before sticking the tips in her mouth. "You realize, you try to save me and I'll fucking kill you myself."

Brutus raises his eyebrows. "Say what now?"

"You heard me." She looks at him, eyes narrow and teeth bared. "I'm going in, fine. I get to drag along Mr. Rule Book himself, okay. But you try to pull anything like protecting me, you're not gonna like what happens."

In spite of himself, Brutus barks out a laugh. "Girl, I don't like you half well enough to take a sword in the gut for you." He's not sure whether he means it, but he knows what he has to say, and that's easier. Better anyway to get used to talking without connecting it to anything real, since once the train stops he won't have a choice.

"Good," she snaps, settling back against the rich cushions. "Because we're winning this, I don't care who it is, and if we're going to do that, we both need to be sharp. Can't do that if one of us is thinking about dying."

She's right there, and Brutus nods. "Agreed. But standard rules apply, all right? Let's not be the final two if we can help it."

Enobaria sucks the last of the blood from a fingertip with a loud smacking noise. "If we are, I'll do you quick," she says, something flickering in her eyes, and that's as much of a promise as she can make him. "I won't play around, not with you."

"Same," Brutus says, but Enobaria only laughs at him and says she's so surprised.

Brutus rolls his eyes at her, but at the same time, she has a point. Everyone knows Brutus' game, the kind of angle he plays, and he'll have to work to make sure he's not predictable, to walk the line between familiar and boring. Except as the train whirrs through the mountains, tired adages about old dogs and new tricks come to mind. Brutus sighs before he can pull it back.

Enobaria eyes him over the tip of her knife, miming like she's going to throw it between his eyes, but Brutus wasn't reaped yesterday and the tendons in her wrist never flex, which means she won't. "You seriously gonna keep up with the honour shit this year, after all this?"

That, Brutus doesn't have an answer to. "Dunno," he says. "Guess we'll have to see what my mentor says."

Enobaria tips her head back against the sofa and laughs until her voice scrapes raw in her throat. Without looking she tosses the knife away and presses her hands over her eyes. Brutus sits still while the handle quivers in the mahogany panelling behind his head.

* * *

They already have the basic information for each district, phoned in from the Capitol as part of Two's privileged position, and Brutus glances at the sheaf of papers in his lap and shuffles through them. Names, districts, and stats, just like every other year, only this year it's more than age and basic figures like approximate height and weight plus any relevant facts revealed at the ceremony. This year the unofficial lists are bursting with information about the Victor-tributes, since the Centre has always had access to the winners' information as soon as everything is tallied after the Games finish.

It's a kind of morbid curiosity not entirely in keeping with proper Career spirit that makes Brutus flip through to his own sheet, but he needs to know. They'll be using this information later, either against him or to help him, and he can't go in blind. This is already irregular; the sooner he remembers that he's nothing but statistics on paper, the better off he'll be.

_District 2. Winner: 49__th__Hunger Games, age 18. Number of Arena kills: 9. Signature weapons: spear, sword, close combat. Sustained injuries: titanium bones in right hand (Arena); clavicular osteolysis in left shoulder (training). Overall health at time of 75__th__Hunger Games: good. Addictions: none. Current age: 43. Overall tribute ranking: 7__th__by popularity (last poll date: 72__nd__Hunger Games). Starting odds: 5-1._

Brutus grunts and slides the paper back in place. Could be worse, though the younger Victors have bumped his odds back since he was a teenager. He doesn't look at Enobaria's; that's too much too soon, and either way he's not going to be the one to kill her unless he has to. If they're the final two they'll see what happens, but Brutus knows her stats, and he's not going to plan the best way to do it.

They have time before the train hits the Capitol, and when the mentors return from their meeting, Odin suggests they watch the rest of the Reapings. For the first time since they called Nero's name, Brutus has to swallow a shout of protest. As soon as he sees the others on the stage, it's going to be real. They're not his friends exactly, not for the district that always stands apart, but colleagues and rivals and compatriots, and over the years sometimes that line starts to blur. Twenty-six years ago Brutus sat here and watched twenty-two strangers step up on the stage while he and Odin discussed the best ways to kill them, but this time it won't be like that.

There's no arguing with the tactics, though, and Brutus keeps his mouth shut and nods.

Right from the get-go, District 1 proves his point when Cashmere and Gloss glide onto the stage, each of them stepping forward before their escort finishes reading the name. It's the kind of twisted romanticism that the Capitolians sigh over, except these aren't dumb kids. They're in their twenties; they've seen horrors that Brutus has never had to face. He gives thanks to President Snow and the Capitol for making sure none of his Victors have, either, but that doesn't change the reasons why the siblings are the most popular Victors District 1 has put out in years.

They stand together, gold hair and glowing skin and bright green eyes, a matched set a year apart, their smiles hard and dazzling. Whatever their plan, they've already made it, and unlike Brutus he doubts there's even a shimmer of hesitation between them.

"Ah," Odin says quietly, his face drawn and lined. "Of course."

"Care to share with the class, gramps?" Enobaria drawls.

Odin doesn't even bother to chide her. "Everyone meets their end," he says. "For those two, this will be the only chance they have to make it theirs."

"What, so they're pushovers all of a sudden?" Enobaria wrinkles her nose. "That doesn't sound right."

"That's not what he means," Nero says, patient, and Enobaria subsides, pushing her foot against his thigh in a sulky gesture. "Pretty sure they're going to take out everyone they can before they go. They don't intend on walking out, but that doesn't mean they'll just lie down."

"Make their end and bring down the world with it," Enobaria says, and this time her eyes flicker. "I can respect that. Plus it makes it easier for me."

Enobaria isn't friends with Cashmere and Gloss - the One/Two rivalry is too strong, and they've always resented her for avoiding their fate - but they did win in the years following her, and that makes a kind of connection even if they never never pulled their claws in. It's one that Brutus definitely does not share. They're way younger than him, for one, and he stays the hell away from anyone the Capitol sells. He never managed to square that away in his head, it's sick any way he looks at it, and the less he puts it in front of him the better.

He stares at the siblings and their hard, bright smiles, and something unpleasant settles in his chest. It isn't just about making a good show and taking out the other Victors while they can, doing the Capitol's bidding to the end and outshining all the rest. There's defiance in the lines of their shoulders, the way they twine their fingers and raise their hands above their heads. There's an ugliness beneath their smiles that Brutus doesn't understand but makes his skin crawl.

This won't help him win - Enobaria's right, if they've decided they're not coming back then that means less guilt for him - and so Brutus shoves the thoughts away.

Nobody is surprised when the Career districts receive the most commentary and build-up out of everyone in Panem; they're the only ones with a pool of Victors big enough. Most of the others have barely managed to scrape up one living Victor per sex, and it's difficult for the commentators to draw out much anticipation out of a sure deal.

There are upsets. Mags from District 4 volunteers for Finnick Odair's girl Annie, a fact that seems to surprise the commentators but which Brutus and every mentor in the room saw coming. Mags started the Career system in her district; she's tough and fearless and one of the few non-Two mentors that Brutus treats with nothing but respect. She's brought more Victors out of the Arena than any mentor in Panem, and since her stroke a few years back, Four hasn't managed to net itself a single Victor.

"I'm surprised they let that happen," says Claudius, staring at the screen with a frown. "Mags and Odair aren't going to have the kind of onscreen drama that he and his girl would have, and Mags is far better known as a mentor than a tribute anyway. Won't the entire Capitol audience be throwing things at their televisions right now?"

Brutus glances at Odin, who lets out a breath. "Best not to question that sort of thing at this stage," Odin says.

Enobaria snorts. "Well if you won't say it, I will," she says. "They want someone pretty left over in case Odair doesn't make it out. If he dies they'll need someone to pick up the slack, and Little Miss Crazy has a better shot at it than the old lady."

Brutus actually winces, and Nero leans forward and rests his hand on Enobaria's shoulder. "That's enough," he says firmly. "Show some respect."

Enobaria sinks low in her chair, folding her arms across her chest in a mutinous gesture. "Why?" she demands. "What's the point? You know it's true."

Claudius looks green around the edges, but this is the big leagues now and that means he can't go running to Lyme every time he scrapes his knee, not anymore. For her part Lyme doesn't touch him, just lets him sit there and mull that over and try not to throw up all over himself.

The thing is, Enobaria is right. District 2 made a deal decades back that they'd provide the best show, the strongest tributes, the finest weapons and Peacekeepers and everything else in exchange for their Victors being left alone after they win. It's one of those things nobody talks about but everyone knows; it's just the Twos stay away from the sex trade because they can't stop it and the more they poke their noses in the stronger the danger that the whole deal will go away.

But Enobaria has this one nailed. There's no way Four's two youngest, most attractive Victors will be tossed into the shark pool leaving Mags behind. Not when they're already losing Cashmere and Gloss. Even more convenient that they won't need Annie's mind in tact for them to get what they want out of her - it might even be better if it's not, since they can just shoot her up with drugs and tell themselves it makes her happier.

No. No, Brutus knows better than this. He's been on the mentor circuit for too long to fall prey to this kind of thinking. This is for kids, and untrained kids at that, and if Brutus is going to have his world pulled out from under him before he's tossed back into the Arena, he sure as the Reaping ain't going to do it letting his mind fly to pieces like this. Enough. Brutus has been mentoring longer than the kids who would have gone in this year have been alive; he doesn't need his mentor to knock him down and set his brain to rights like he's a fresh Victor all over again.

As if he heard Brutus' thoughts, Odin glances over and gives him a serious look. Brutus wants to break his gaze but can't, that would be as good as bursting into tears, and he clenches his jaw instead. "We don't have to do this now," Odin says, but he knows the answer. Brutus shakes his head, and Odin nods and turns back to the screen, resuming the feed.

District 7's Johanna doesn't even wait for her name to be called, just pushes her way on stage with an irritated, "Well, we all know it's me, don't we," and crosses her arms, glaring out at the cameras. Enobaria rolls her eyes - the two of them clashed more than most Victors - and flips off the screen. District 8 has the next big surprise, when no one steps forward for Cecelia. They actually have to pry her kids off her before she can take the stage. The camera swings around to Eight's other female Victor, who stands and looks at the ground, refusing to let her eyes meet the screen.

Claudius makes a choking sound - kid's got mommy issues from here to Twelve and back again - and Brutus pretends he doesn't see Lyme shift position to press their shoulders together. Enobaria sometimes trains kids for the Games but would never, ever want any herself; Lyme thinks they're parasites that should be locked away until they pupate at thirteen and stop being so leaky and whiny and needy and disgusting. As for Brutus himself, Brutus is not going to think about it, not any of it, not right now. Everyone in the train car goes silent. Cecelia's kids sob in the square, screaming and begging someone to take her place. She stands, still and pale and wide-eyed, surrounded by crumbling grey buildings.

"And yet when this all gets aired everywhere, we're going to be the monsters because we jumped at the chance," Enobaria drawls, and she doesn't let a lot get under her skin because being crazy and detached is how she deals with things, but she's not inhuman, and her lip curls in disgust. "Meanwhile this'll get played off as a tragedy. Maybe I'll look forward to tearing out their hypocritical hearts after all."

"Enobaria," says Nero in a gentle, warning kind of tone.

"I didn't mean hers!" Enobaria protests, waving a hand at the screen. "She was stupid enough to have kids, but that's not what I'm talking about."

The gnawing feeling inside Brutus explodes outward. Before he can stop himself he snaps, "If anyone deserves to win, it's her. She's got kids. She _made_ something. What did any of us -" But they're all staring at him now, and Brutus slams his mouth shut.

"She pushed a bunch of babies out of her vagina," Enobaria says, her expression incredulous, waving her hands in short, spasmodic gestures. "That doesn't make her special, that doesn't make her _worthy_. It just means she let some jackass stick his junk in her. Anyone can do that, that's not a talent, and it doesn't make her deserve to win! We're the ones who fought to be here, we're the ones who worked every damn day so our kids have the best shot to survive. That's what counts, not being a - an incubator!"

Brutus clenches his jaw and crosses his arms, fingers digging into his biceps. Claudius is still staring at the screen, an agonized look on his face, but for once Lyme isn't paying attention to him. She's looking at Brutus, dawning horror and understanding on her face. _Don't_, she says, eyes tight and mouth pressed thin, just like she did at the Reaping. _Please don't_.

Brutus looks away.

Ronan clears his throat. "I think Odin was right, we should give the footage a rest," he says, using his politician voice. He taps his cane against the floor to punctuate the statement, and this time there's no arguing. "Mentors will review the footage and tell you anything you need to know, you have the files so that should be enough for now." He thins his lips into a line. "We all have a lot to deal with. Use this time to get your heads back in the game."

"Fine. Maybe I'll try to have a baby in the meantime so people will give two shits about me when I die." Enobaria touches her fist to her chest in a salute that's only a little mocking, then swings herself out of the berth and heads for her private compartment. Nero doesn't say anything, just gets up and follows her out.

Brutus exhales through his nose, forces his fingers to keep still instead of tapping against his leg, and heaves himself to his feet. "Gonna go look over the files," he says curtly. "I'll be ready."

Brutus guesses Odin will follow him in about an hour, but right now Brutus needs to be alone. The more he stares at the television, at the folder of paper in his hands that's full of information he already knows, the clearer it is that he can't outrun the weakness. He needs to let it catch him, needs to fight it, wrestle with it, stick a knife in its neck and watch it die, and then he'll be fine. But he can't let anyone see him like that, not Lyme, not Odin, not anyone. Not until he's gotten it under control.

When Brutus was younger, he would have trashed his compartment, throwing anything even remotely fragile into things that weren't, smashing the mirrors and breaking the lamps into pieces. But even in the depths of his rage and confusion now - faced with the thought of shoving a spear through the stomach of a woman with three kids; twisting the head off a man too drunk to notice because when he was eighteen years old he killed his own mother when she tried to bring him out of a nightmare - Brutus can't bring himself to do that. He has to let the horror find him, but that doesn't mean he can unleash the monster, not yet.

Brutus has been an executioner for the past twenty-six years, and you can never really forget how to be a killer any more than your fingers forget what it feels like to curl around the handle of a spear, but it's not a headspace he's occupied for a long time. The one promise that Two makes its Victors is that they'll never have to enter it again, and Brutus doesn't know what will happen if he does but he knows he can't do it on the train.

Instead of giving vent to the torrent inside him, Brutus grips the edge of his dresser and closes his eyes, his entire body shaking. For a few minutes he lets himself think what he can't, what as soon as this little fit is over he will lock away for the rest of his life - whether that's three weeks or thirty years - that this is wrong. All of this, this perversion of the rules, of the system he fought and nearly died to defend, this spitting in the face of every sacrifice that every tribute has ever made, be they Careers or outliers or the muddy bits in the middle, is _wrong_.

The thought pounds in his skull like a headache, and Brutus' breath leaves his body in ragged gasps. _Wrong_. They promised that not one Victor would ever have to take another life. _Wrong_. That he would send children to their deaths, but if he got them out he could make them the same vow. _Wrong_. That the Capitol loves and protects its loyal servants; follow the rules, don't ask questions, keep your head down, work hard, and all of it will be worth it. Wrong, wrong, _wrong_.

It's terrifying - it's like crashing through the ice when he was thirteen, thrown into the frozen lake to learn how to swim in the worst of circumstances, that initial shock before the pain sets in - and it won't leave. It creeps under his fingernails and into the space behind his eyes, but then Brutus exhales. Again, and again, and again. He opens his eyes, stares at the man in the mirror who could be the father of the boy who stood here all those years ago, and when he does, the breath comes easier.

It's wrong, but it's necessary. Brutus swallows, this time without pain, and he narrows his eyes. Yes, it is necessary. It became necessary the day that Katniss Everdeen and her boyfriend held up a handful of berries and dared the Capitol to do its worst. Since the districts took up that whisper of treason and turned it into a rolling wave.

It is wrong, but the Capitol knows that. What's happening to him, to Enobaria, to Cecelia and the others, is nothing more than an exercise in exactly how wrong things have become. They live in a world where sixteen-year-old girls think they can defeat the Capitol because they believe they're indispensable. Where an entire district can riot at the death of a little girl and feel justified in it as though Two doesn't lose both of theirs nearly every year just like the rest of them. Where the outliers can stop sending their supplies and blame it on the weather or downed train lines and think their anger justifies starving the ones who rely on those goods. This Quarter Quell is a natural extension of what needs to happen: to remind the people once again that their doom is always, always of their own making.

The people turned their backs, and now they will lose their heroes. There is no better reminder of the Capitol's power than that. You can't punish a traitor because they've already lost their core; the only thing you can do is take away the things they love.

Brutus closes his eyes, lets the thoughts roll over him like fog on the mountains, and when he looks up again, he almost believes it. All he needs to do is keep telling himself, over and over and over, keep throwing the spear into the target, and by the time the train reaches the Capitol and Brutus looks into the sea of cameras and painted faces, it will be a part of him.

There is no other way.

Forty minutes later, Odin knocks on the door to Brutus' compartment and steps through the door. "You all right, son?" he asks.

Brutus lifts his head. "Yes, sir," he says, and doesn't waver.

"Good." Odin nods. "Let's talk strategy."


	3. Chapter 3: Cognitive Dissonance

It's easier to think about Brutus, the tribute, as a separate person while talking strategy with Odin. They go over his appearance, what facial expressions Brutus ought to restrict himself to, whether he should go for familiar in the weapons training areas or try to shake things up and be unpredictable. They talk, and the act of planning and organizing settles the last of Brutus' nerves - not jitters, Careers don't get jitters - until the train pulls round the bend, flashing along the track that circles the lake at the city centre.

Brutus looks through the window at the glittering marble and glass. He's done this for over half his life now, made the trip almost every year whether he had a tribute in the Arena or not, save the handful of years he had a new Victor to take care of back in Two. The entire Capitol is a jewel of architecture, Panem's best artisans and carvers plucked from all over the country to build it, but Brutus does what he always does; he scans his eyes over the buildings and picks out the ones made from District 2 materials. There, that's marble from Palomine Bluffs; the pillars on that building there are The Plateau's best limestone. Brutus' own hometown, faded to nothing but a few pricks of sensory memory now and then, contributed the granite for the detailing on the municipal Justice Building.

District 2 is tied in with the Capitol in ways that the others can never hope to be; Two sends its children, its soldiers, its weapons, and its very bedrock. One stubborn snatch of recollection sticks in Brutus' brain no matter how many times he tries to forget it: a tall man, broad and muscled as Brutus - father, likely; warmth like afternoon sunlight tinges the memory and suffuses him with calm - hands Brutus, who's much, much smaller, a hunk of unworked stone. "This stone right here could end up on the countertop of the president," the man says to Brutus, who stares at it, eyes wide. "So don't no one try to tell you Two ain't the heart of this country."

If you paid him, Brutus couldn't tell you why those thoughts rattle around in his brain now, when he needs to be sharp - when Brutus the tribute is counting on him to be on his game - and he sits back from the window, cheek twitching. The train will disappear into the tunnel soon enough and there's nothing Two about that, poured concrete and tangles of electrical cables that flash past in bursts of light.

Brutus the Victor and Brutus the tribute keep themselves at a respectful distance until the train hisses to a stop at the station and Brutus automatically heads to the back of the car, closest to the mentor's entrance. He'll have to start checking the numbers, scanning the stats and running the sponsor polls - but Odin stands in his way, face twisted. "Brutus," he says, and his voice cracks on the first syllable like Brutus has never heard in all the years they've known each other.

Enobaria pushes past him toward the tribute door at the front of the car. "Dumbass," she shoots at him, knocking Brutus in the shoulder on her way through.

Brutus with his thirteen years on Enobaria has earned more respect than that, but right as he's about to ask her what she thinks she's doing, it hits him. There is no hierarchy between them. Not anymore. Tributes start at zero.

Zero, and Enobaria's already jumped in with both feet while Brutus shuffles at the edge, sticking one foot in at a time. Brutus doesn't look at Odin. "Won't happen again," he grunts.

The door slides open to the prep area, white and blank, the scent of astringent stinging Brutus' nostrils and jolting him back decades. Ahead of him Enobaria hisses, a short, sharp intake of breath that Brutus almost doesn't catch as the door shuts behind them. Brutus follows the cant of her head and bites off a hiss himself: it's the bins by the door where the tributes are meant to strip off their clothes in preparation for meeting the prep team.

Even Enobaria stops there, her hands spasming into fists at her sides, but finally she clicks her tongue against her teeth. "Don't have a heart attack from the thrill, now," she tells Brutus, and pulls her shirt over her head.

Every Career tribute practices stripping down for prep teams and submitting to their pawing. By the time they actually make it to the Capitol, nudity is no stranger than breathing. Brutus is not self-conscious even now, but the last time he did this he didn't know his district pratner's favourite food. He couldn't trace the scars on her body with his mind from watching her Games, the same as all of Two and Panem with him. She wasn't thirteen years his junior, in a position where she's earned his protection and he her deference.

Brutus turns his back as he tugs off his clothes, stomach twisting. Enobaria doesn't make any cracks after that, and soon after they step through their private doors on opposite sides of the empty room.

The prep team that descends around him isn't the one that got him ready for the Games the first time; they're all too old now, well past the Capitol expiration date of forty. Brutus gets a new team every decade; he's only been to the Capitol a handful of times with this particular set, and never for a full Remake. They look like infants, fluttering around him and giggling at his chest hair, and Brutus doesn't move because he's Two and he's a tribute and Two tributes don't move in Remake, but. But.

"Look at you, all rugged and shaggy," chides Lumilla, a tiny, stick-thin girl just into her twenties when she joined Brutus' team five years ago. She runs a hand down his chest. "We'll have to get rid of that, you know. You're not in District 2 anymore."

Her partner, Carnassus, gives her a sharp look. "He might not be in District 2 _ever again_," he hisses, and Brutus ignores the obvious assumption that because he's silent, he can't hear them, and looks up at the uniform ceiling instead. "Have some respect!"

Lumilla sucks in a breath and falls silent. "I know," she says, and her hands tremble against Brutus' skin. "I just - it does feel strange."

Brutus stares ahead until they finish, leaving him pink and scrubbed and smooth like a newborn puppy. It's just hair. Hair grows back; the injections they gave him will keep it from returning for the next month, but after that it will come back. Brutus bites down hard on the _if_ that follows and throws it across the room by the scruff of its neck.

"We're going for strength with you this year," says his stylist. Unlike the prep team, Nala has been with him since the beginning, despite being given two chances to retire. She's run from age like any Capitol citizen, performing every known surgery to keep her youth, which means that she looks half Brutus' age instead of being nearly a decade above it. "Now I know what you're thinking, this is a Quarter Quell, we should go for flashy, but -" she purses her lips. "I think dependable is the image we should strive for."

Brutus knows what she means. Appeal to the Capitol's love of tradition, play himself as something solid in a world of fluff. He looks at her, this woman who saw him through the Arena and countless Capitol appearances, and gives her a small, humourless smile. "So we're not jumping on the flaming costume train then? Not gonna mix the themes and go with a volcano?"

"Definitely not," Nala says sharply. "Fire burns out and fades away. Stone is forever."

Brutus keeps his face neutral, but inside he lets out a sigh of something that might be relief if he were allowed to feel it. "That sounds an awful lot like Two thinking to me. You going native?"

"Well, you spend enough years in that primitive district of yours, you can't help absorbing a few things," Nala says in a brisk voice. "At least you've kept in shape, that makes this easier."

"What do you think I am," Brutus retorts, and he never would have joked this way with his stylist the first time round, but some clocks just won't unwind.

The rest of the day does its best to drive Brutus insane by flinging memories at him in all directions, muddled and mingling through all the years. It's the wrong side of the glass for everything; his experiences in the Games Centre prep areas for one year as a tribute have long been buried by all the times he did the same as a mentor. By now Brutus would have hit the Control Room to check the initial standings of his tributes, to see how the first Capitol crowds liked the look of them as they exited the train. Instead he's hustled off to wait for Nala and the prep team to finish up his parade outfit.

Brutus closes his eyes, lowers his breathing into a meditative slowness, and goes through the other tributes' stats in his head.

* * *

The waiting area for the chariot tribute parade mills with tributes, only two of them actually within the normal Reaping window. Enobaria, dressed in gold with her teeth newly polished and gleaming, leans over to Brutus. "Look, it's like the world's most embarrassing Victor reunion."

Brutus has no authority to scold her anymore - Nero gives her a look that makes her roll her eyes but shut up regardless - but what's worse is that she's not wrong. All around them is a mixture of the young, still-pretty Victors and their older, infirm, or addiction-wracked comrades, each of them dressed as though they were eighteen years old. They all wander between the chariots, chatting as though they're here for a party and not to kill each other, delaying the inevitable.

Enobaria's right, but it's not funny. Brutus curls his fists; he and Enobaria got off easy, standard warrior costumes for the both of them, although no armour-maker would ever leave bare arms or midriff, but the others - Four's stylists have dressed Finnick Odair in nothing but knots of rope, which, given what gets done to that boy, makes Brutus' vision darken. He's at the Twelve chariot, flirting with a disapproving Katniss Everdeen, who at least isn't fainting over all that skin. They left Mags a little more dignity, but not much, and nowhere near what a Victor of over sixty years deserves.

Enobaria snorts at the Tens and their flaming belts, but Brutus has to look away. They're Victors and mentors, all of them, whether they took their jobs seriously or drank themselves into a stupor and never climbed back out. They deserve respect. They're all participating in the Hunger Games for a second time, making this already the greatest honour and sacrifice that any Panem citizen has ever seen, and Snow willing will never see again. They deserve more than to be dressed as farm animals or sheafs of grain or an explosion at a textile factory.

Caleb of District 5 bends and vomits all over his sparkly costume while his stylist sighs and pulls out a towel from her supply bag. She wipes him down, an easy enough job given that they've dressed him in waterproof material.

Gloss wanders over to say hello; he and Cashmere hardly have any costume at all, spray-painted with glitter and little else. "Well at least you two don't look that embarrassing. Let me level the playing field." He lifts his palm and blows a handful of sparkles at Enobaria, who bares her teeth at him. Gloss glances out at the wide archway leading to the main courtyard, and his smile turns brittle. On their chariot, Cashmere stands still while her prep team fusses with her hair, woven through with gold and silver threads.

"I bet they're drooling, calculating how much they can charge for one of us if we win," Gloss says in a low voice, thickened with disgust only barely tempered with his usual black humour. "If it's me, maybe I'll negotiate for a cut of it."

Brutus grits his teeth to stop himself from reacting. Gloss cracking jokes in front of him, in front of the mixed team of mentors and Victor-tributes both, just throws Brutus even more off-balance. But then Enobaria snorts and rolls her eyes. "You wish," she says, getting in his space within friendly rival distance, jockeying but not challenging for real. "Two's taking it this year, but nice try."

Brutus doesn't get it until Gloss' shoulders fall, just a fraction, and the line of his jaw stops looking like it could cut glass. Then Brutus has to fight even harder to stay neutral, because Enobaria's just made a promise, and now it's his turn to back it up. "She's right," Brutus grunts. "Don't get cocky just because you're half my age, kid. One doesn't have a chance"

Gloss flicks his gaze over to Brutus. "We'll see," he says before sauntering off.

Nala adjusts the line of Brutus' tunic, her hands shaking. "Well, I think you're set," she says into the silence, breaking the spell, and her cheer might be as thin as Mags' costume but it snaps them all out of it. "Heads up, look fierce, and I'm sure you'll knock them dead."

The first trumpets play, and ahead of them, the One chariot jerks forward as the horses break into a trot. Brutus starts to take a step back, let his tribute climb up the steps into the carriage, but this time he catches himself before he actually makes the wrong move. His blood pounds in his temples as he takes his position, staring out over the heads of the night-black horses into the square beyond.

"Anyone say 'deja vu'?" Enobaria quips, her tone as nonchalant as usual, but even she curses under her breath. All around them the chatter dies, replaced by the jingle of harnesses and swish of fabrics as the other tributes get into position.

He and Enobaria stand with a third person's space between them, hands joined and arms raised, their linked fists at level with their shoulders. It's a show of solidarity in the face of uncertainty without looking like they're desperate and clinging. As their chariot pulls out into the circle, Enobaria digs her nails hard into the back of Brutus' hand. He retaliates by crushing her fingers, and she snorts out a laugh without changing her expression. Some of the tension eases.

They don't wave or smile - Two rarely panders, even in a regular year, and this time would only come off like begging - but they do look. Brutus casts his gaze over the sea of faces, holding position for a second each time so whoever's in that direction will think he's looking right at them. He can't tell which chariots get the biggest reaction, not without craning around far too obviously, but they'll check the footage later tonight.

President Snow gives the typical speech, nothing fancy, though he tosses in a few words about the dual honour of a double sacrifice. "Each one of you here has already proven your worth," he says, his voice echoing through the circle. "Now you will do the same again, in an Arena filled with nothing but worthy opponents." (One of the Sixes sways, but her stylist tethered her to her chariot, and it keeps her upright.) "We honour you for your courage, and thank you for your sacrifice."

Brutus keeps his head up until the last of the chariots return to the prep area and the doors close behind them.

More attendants and security here than in other years, though not surprising. Irregular years always amp up the precautions, and there's never been a room this full of practiced killers before. It's just Nero and Odin waiting for them. "Did Twelve steal the show again?" Enobaria asks with poorly-feigned nonchalance. Across the room, the lovebirds hold hands as they make their way toward the elevator, their costumes glowing like embers.

"Too soon to say until we watch," Nero reminds her, which means, very likely, yes.

"The Parade hardly decides the outcome," Odin says, giving a nod over Enobaria's head to one of the mentors behind them. "There's more than flashy presentation in the works this year, and neither of you is about to repeat last year's mistakes."

No, they're not. Cato and Clove allowed themselves to fall careless and complacent, but Brutus and Enobaria won't make that mistake. Even Enobaria, who likes to take her time with her kills, knows better than to stop for a monologue without tracking the surroundings for enemies.

They watch the repeat footage of the parades and check their odds over dinner, eschewing the banquet table for the main common room and eating with their plates on their knees. Enobaria sits on the floor, her back resting against Nero's shins, and for a split second Nero's hand twitches out to run a hand over her hair before he catches himself. Brutus rips his gaze away before Nero sees him looking; the man deserves privacy in his slip-ups the same way any of them do.

Nothing surprising about the tribute parade, except that the costumes have gotten even tackier this year. "What the fuck are they supposed to be?" Enobaria asks, leaning forward when District 7's chariot reaches the cameras. "Have any of these people even seen a tree?"

Claudius, budged in between Lyme and the corner of the couch, tugs his legs up to his chest and rests his chin on his knees. "I don't get it. These aren't teenagers they've never met before. The stylists know these Victors, they've worked with them for years. Why aren't they trying harder?"

"This is what the sponsors want," Lyme says, her voice flat. "Nobody actually wants to see a parade full of tasteful, elegant costumes. They're here for the spectacle, and this year is double. That's all."

Claudius grits his teeth. "It's Twelve's fault," he says under his breath, mulish and pretty damn brave considering how many authority figures are sitting around him. "All of this, it's them and their stupid rule-breaking that's doing it to the rest of us. It's not fair that they get the costume everyone's talking about."

Ronan clucks his tongue, and he leans over and pokes Claudius' shoulder with the bottom of his cane. "This is why you're not a mentor, boy. It doesn't matter what the costumes look like. The fact of the matter is, those two are going to kill themselves to save each other; you can see it in their eyes. They're flash in the pan, nothing more." Claudius rubs at his arm with a rueful expression, and Ronan nods. "Not that we're going to underestimate them, or anyone. But you wait until tomorrow's training, and you'll see."

The television replays portions of the Reaping, and Brutus watches himself rush for the stage like he's eighteen again, nothing but determination colouring his face. Good. "I think there's no real surprise there," chuckles Caesar Flickerman, pausing the footage on a close-up of Brutus' face, lips pulled back into a snarl. "Brutus always was one of the most bloodthirsty Victors. I was older than I care to admit when I saw his Games, and I tell you, that final moment was one of the most chilling things I've seen. I'd be disappointed if he'd decided to sit this one out."

"He and his district partner certainly are relishing the opportunity to go back to their glory days," his partner agrees. "I know I won't be able to look away when it's time to watch Brutus and Enobaria together in action. Maybe she can give him some tips on how to use those teeth of his."

Nero grabs the remote and turns off the television, his expression grim. "I think that's all for tonight," he says. "Everyone should get some rest, we'll want to be the first ones downstairs tomorrow morning and that means an early sleep."

"If by that you mean play cards until midnight." Enobaria stretches back, tipping her head to grin at him upside-down. The filagree on her fangs reflects the light from the chandelier. "Okay, maybe not midnight, but you guys have put me back on a Centre diet, and it sucks. If it's my last week to live, I'm going to win some cake out of you before I go."

Nero gives her a stern look, but Enobaria doesn't flinch. "All right, missy, but that assumes you're going to beat me, and that's just not going to happen." He leans forward to catch Ronan's eye. "You in?"

They're likely going to talk strategy, what to do if it comes down to a Two showdown, but it's as good a cover as any. "I might be an elder, but I can out-bluff the two of you blindfolded," Ronan says, lifting himself out of his chair with dignity. "I'll see the rest of you in the morning."

Once they've gone, Odin stands and claps Claudius on the shoulder. "Come, my boy, let's get you familiarized with the sponsorship agreements. Paperwork is not the most exciting part of mentoring, but it is important." Claudius flicks his eyes toward Lyme, but she only nods, and he scrambles to his feet and follows Odin. "We'll have breakfast at six," Odin says, and he leads Claudius away to his suite.

Artemisia gathers up her paperwork and slips into her room without speaking, and Brutus lets her go because what the hell is he supposed to say. That leaves Brutus alone with Lyme, sitting together in the lounge like they have countless times before. One year ago they were here, fretting as Cato strolled into Clove's room, not even bothering to sneak despite it being against the rules.

Lyme elbows him. "You think our mentors are trying to get us alone in the hopes we'll finally hook up?"

Brutus makes a face at her, but the ancient joke helps, weirdly enough. He and Lyme went on exactly one date, deciding with mutual agreement that they would both rather fillet themselves and be served as the entree at the next Victor barbecue than ever sleep together. "Is this your way of saying you want to, because I hate to tell you -"

"You wish, caveman," Lyme shoots back. "You couldn't handle me in your prime, and that's way behind you."

"Look who's talking, you've never slept with anyone who wasn't half your size and pretty."

Lyme snorts at him, but she doesn't bother with another riposte. Instead she leans back against the sofa cushions, bracing herself with her fingers laced over her bent knee. "Everyone's spooked," she says, not looking at him. "The mentors, I mean. Nobody knows what's going on or who to trust. I don't know if you can count on the traditional pack this year."

Brutus frowns. "I already talked to the Ones. Enobaria and I, we agreed to -"

He doesn't need to finish the sentence, luckily; Lyme's been in the game almost as long as he has, and she doesn't say anything but her mouth thins. "I'm not talking about the Ones. I'm talking about Four."

Brutus stops dead. "Are you serious?"

Lyme runs a hand through her hair. "I mean, it's not in stone or anything, all right, so don't panic, but it looks like something's going on. I tried talking with Tyde but he kept giving me the runaround, said they were waiting to see how things play out."

"What's there to play out?" Brutus demands. "There hasn't been a Games without a Two-Four alliance since as long as I can remember. This isn't untested kids, we all know each other. They know what we bring to the table. What are they waiting for?"

Lyme shakes her head. "I don't know. But maybe hold off trying to ask Mags or Odair about it until we have a better idea. I'll keep talking to the mentors, see if I can figure it out."

She'll never manage on her own. When it comes to alliance agreements and sponsorship deals, Lyme is a scalpel, easing her way through with words and cunning like she navigated the minefield around the Cornucopia during her Games. But if the Fours are playing their own game after half a century of alliances, then this calls for a sledgehammer. Never mind picking and slicing and searching, it's time to dive right in and start smashing away until the truth comes out.

It's the reason Brutus and Lyme work so well together; Brutus is the most ruthless mentor Two has, able to bully and badger to get what he wants when the most delicate, peaceable negotiations won't do. There are times when his method won't work, when it's Lyme's subtlety and calculation are what they need, but not today. Everyone's too busy tiptoeing; someone has to jump in.

Except that's not Brutus' job, not this year, and he has to trust that Lyme can do her job.

"I'll keep an eye out in training," Brutus says, rubbing his forehead. "Odair was cozying up to Twelve today. I thought he was just trying to get to her, you know how he is with fresh blood, but maybe not."

"I'll keep trying," Lyme promises. "But it looks like everything might be up in the air in more ways than one this year."

"Great." Brutus glares across the room at a blank spot on the wall; another loose stone in his foundation, just what he needs.

Lyme swears like a quarrier. "I shouldn't have brought it up. It's just -" she waves a hand. "All of this. I don't know. If it'll throw you off your game, tell me and I won't."

"No, I want to know." Brutus curls his hands into fists, waits until she looks at him. "I'm serious. I'm not eighteen anymore, you can't just throw me back in blind."

"Yeah."

Lyme and Brutus have built a friendship on comfortable silence, on being able to sit and drink or go through paperwork and not need to say anything for hours. They've never been afraid of quiet, and Brutus might know that he and Lyme would never, ever work as a couple but he can still read her as well as he can himself. He knows she's struggling with something when she touches the Victor tattoo on her right wrist or fiddles with her cuffs. That when she rolls up her sleeves to bare her forearms, whoever's in the vicinity better run before she explodes. Very likely she knows how to find the hidden discomforts in his posture, maybe even better than Brutus does.

This is different. This is the kind of quiet that fills the room, choking and drowning Brutus until he wants to pick up a spear and hurl it through the air to see if he can cut through it like a curtain, bring it down.

Finally Lyme laughs, a short, ugly sound. "Okay, this officially sucks." She curls her hands into fists before forcing her fingers to open again, splaying them out against the air. "We should sleep."

Brutus heaves himself up. "Yeah, don't feel bad, you've still got a few more chances if you want to try to seduce me," he says, because if he doesn't the silence will keep chewing on him like the mutts did to Cato.

"Fuck you." Lyme flips him a rude gesture.

"Not into that, sweetheart," Brutus drawls, and that's an old joke, too. He knows how Lyme likes to do her boys, and he always tells her he'd rather take a spear to the leg.

It's a gamble, but it works; Lyme growls and charges him head-on. Brutus could brace himself and stay standing, but he lets her knock him over backwards so he can twist midway down and slam her into the floor.

It's a messy fight. They can't lie when sparring no matter how much they try to hide elsewhere, and that's half the point. Lyme's arms tremble when she hooks her elbow around his throat and chokes him until he throws her. Brutus pauses when he gets her back against the floor, pressing his forehead against her shoulder before she shoves him off. At last he gets her down for real, but she heaves her legs up and deals a hard kick to his head, knocking him sideways. They both flop back against the carpet, chests heaving.

Brutus doesn't feel better, not exactly, but he has his head above water now. He flops one hand to the side and says "Not bad, sweetheart" while giving Lyme a condescending pat on the ass; she leans over and punches him in the throat. Brutus finally laughs, gasping for air, and soon Lyme snickers beside him.

"This is so fucked up," Lyme says finally, one arm draped over her eyes.

"Tell me about it." Brutus rolls over and gets to his feet, offers Lyme a hand up just so she can bat it away and call him a sexist bag of dicks. It lets him keep a hold of himself until he's in his room with the lights off, and by then the aches and bruises make themselves felt until it's easier to sleep than think.

* * *

He and Enobaria head down for training the next morning at seven, after a bland breakfast and a quick strategy session. "You realize there's going to be absolutely no one here," Enobaria gripes, and her hands swipe uselessly at the sides of their black and grey training uniform. "Ugh, no pockets, of course," she mutters. "This just keeps getting worse."

"Guessing they don't want any of us swiping stuff from the stations." Brutus doesn't look at the Peacekeepers who guard each door they pass. They'll be from Two, like any of the best of the best who score gigs at the Capitol, and at least ten years younger than Brutus. They'll have grown up with Brutus as a legend, watching the highlights from his Games when they repeat every year. He's glad for the visors.

Enobaria grins. "Well now I'm going to have to steal something just because you said that."

Brutus gives her a look. "How old are you?"

"Eighteen all over again," Enobaria says in a dark singsong, the kind of voice that sounds like blood smells. "I'm allowed to have a second adolescence. I'd say so are you, but you're old, it'd just be embarrassing."

The door to the training room slides open in front of them, and they cross through into an empty space. No other tributes, only a handful of trainers, and the Gamemaker booth at the end is empty.

Enobaria runs her tongue over her teeth, then licks her lips to get rid of the smear of blood. "How many do you think are going to show up?"

Brutus does the math in his head, counting through the ones who are too sick or impaired to make it, adding the ones who likely won't have two fucks to rub together to make a caring-fire. Cashmere and Gloss, he guesses, will come down by ten; they're Career enough that they won't skip the whole thing, but young and brimming with repressed anger so they'll want to sleep in. "Maybe half," he essays. "I dunno, we'll see."

Enobaria folds her arms and looks around, scuffing her boot experimentally against the soft, protective floor, cushioned so tributes don't break too many bones ahead of time. "Looks a bit different than in our day - or, well, mine, I should say." Brutus knows what she's going to say before she does, as it's a standard joke that everyone from the sixties or above loves to make, but he lets it slide because it's familiar, the mocking almost comforting. "What did they use to train Careers way back before the last Quarter Quell?"

"Ha, ha, ha." Brutus rolls his eyes, and he marches over to the weapons station. "Yours or mine?"

Enobaria eyes the racks of sharp and shiny things with a hungry gleam. She's allowed weapons in the Village the same as all Victors who clear recovery, but Nero always kept an eye on her. "Age before beauty," she drawls, waving an arm at the swords. "Don't want you to break a hip early on."

"You know you're pushing it," Brutus tells her. He doesn't actually care, but he's not about to let her get away with calling him old in front of the cameras, either.

The trainer in charge of weapons lets them peruse, choosing swords that work best for their reach. "No blood," she warns them. "I mean it, now."

Enobaria flips her sword over in her hand in a showy fashion, the way the cameras love but the trainers warn never to do in an actual combat situation. She makes sure to nick Brutus' arm on the way back to the start position, and he doesn't dodge because Enobaria will relax once she's drawn it. "Oops," she says, grinning. The trainer sighs but doesn't waste her time pushing for an apology.

Enobaria is fast, one of the quickest Victors District 2 ever produced; her specialty, before she lost her mind and went for the throat, was death by a thousand cuts. She would dart in, get in a hit, and leave before her opponent, hopped up on adrenaline and fear or rage, noticed she'd got them. She'd provoke them until eventually they collapsed from blood loss and she moved in to finish them off. It never came off as cowardly because of the way Enobaria did it, deliberately provoking and teasing, and by the end she never failed to work the other person up into a rage.

Past his prime or no, Brutus is no slouch himself. He likes to wait the other person out, to keep grinding and grinding until exhaustion wears them down and he overpowers them in the end. Both he and Enobaria can make quick, clean kills when they have to, but they also know how to put on a show.

Since it's a play fight, an exhibition match for the ever-present cameras even without the Gamemakers' physical presence, Brutus steps back and hefts his sword. "Stop just before body contact," he says. "Death strike wins, so don't fuck around."

"Who, me?" Enobaria grins, then lunges.

Brutus wins two out of three, but only because they're fighting clean. In the Arena Enobaria will have more than just a sword. She likes keeping knives tucked up her sleeve and into her boot, and if it comes down to them he'll have to watch out. For now, though, it's about form, and in a straight-up match Brutus will beat her almost every single time.

Afterward, Brutus hands his sword to the trainer in charge of the station, even though he knows they won't bother to sharpen it and will probably just throw it away. Weapons are disposable to the Capitol, but Brutus can't bear to toss it on the ground and leave. Enobaria doesn't bother, laying her sword on the top of the rack and sauntering off.

The matches took up the better part of an hour, and after that they split up. Official training still hasn't started, but it's always good to look eager. They need to play into the narrative Enobaria started when she forbade anyone to volunteer for her, which Brutus continued when he ran for the stage. They can't look like they're hesitating, not when a fair portion of the other Victor-tributes will be happy to get their hands on a Career. They say it's not personal, but Brutus wasn't Reaped yesterday - not the first time, anyway.

Enobaria swings herself up onto the parallel bars with a bored expression; Brutus eyes the other set but decides against it. He screwed up his left shoulder in training, years ago, when the trainers worried more about getting him ready for the Arena than making sure he'd be in peak condition if he came out. He wrenched it again during his Games, and over the years it flares up again if he pushes himself. The last thing he needs is to make a dumb mistake and throw out his arm before they start.

The survival stations are still being prepped, and so Brutus takes a turn in front of the dodging machine, ducking and darting to avoid the balls of paint while hitting the ones he can't avoid with a flat paddle. He finishes with his uniform clean of pink smears, as Enobaria drops down from the bars and brushes chalk from her palms. It's fifteen minutes to ten.

"Now what?" Enobaria asks. "Basket-weaving, maybe? Seems about your speed, old man."

"You know, little girl, you're asking for a basket to the face," Brutus shoots back, but then the door to the training room hisses open and the Twelves walk in, hand in hand.

Brutus and Enobaria draw closer together, standing as a unit with arms crossed as they watch the youngest Victors make their way into the room. Enobaria leans into Brutus' space. "Don't they look cute," she says, low enough that the kids won't hear them. "How much of that romance do you buy? I want to say it's bullshit, but that girl can't act for shit either, so I dunno."

Brutus shrugs. It's not his job to decide whether the games the other tributes are playing are genuine. "I think however it started, they're both Victors," he says, watching them as they circle the stations, fingers twined tightly enough that their knuckles pale. "Whether it was real when they started, they'd be idiots to push each other away now. They're not going to find anyone else."

Odds are Twelve won't get another Victor before the centennial, and certainly not soon enough to make a match for either of them if Twelve wins the Quell. Like it or not, those kids are all they'll ever have. No one will understand them like they do each other, and anything they try with anyone else will only ever die like a flame trapped in a jar.

Not that Brutus has experience. Definitely not like it would matter anymore if he did.

"_She's_ a Victor," Enobaria agrees, grudging. "He was just along for the ride."

"Doesn't matter." Brutus shrugs. "They went through it together, that's what counts. It ain't about who's got more blood on their hands."

Enobaria narrows her eyes. The others are trickling in now, and the Twelves glance at them as they enter, sticking together and refusing to let go. "It'll count when the sponsors eat up the romance like that's all that matters," Enobaria mutters darkly. "Because you know, those of us without adoring fiancés aren't worth shit."

"It's just the pre-show," Brutus reminds her, still watching as the teenagers shy away from everyone else. The boy looks curious enough, studying the other Victors, but Everdeen's face is hard, suspicious.

The Twelves haven't done the mentor circuit with the rest of them; haven't learned everyone's nervous tics as the hours creep onward and the remaining tributes catch a few short hours of sleep. She doesn't know that Hester from Nine sings under her breath to keep herself awake, that Edwin from Ten uses pencils and pens and anything in reach as drumsticks until everyone around him is ready to choke him to death. That Beetee, for all his glasses and twitchy appearance, has a sense of humour so dark and biting that half the time his targets don't realize he's just skewered them through. That most of them cheat at cards, but only a handful of them are any good at it, and if you got Woof drunk enough, back before he lost his hearing and half his mind, he could list off every Victor's tells when bluffing.

These kids are not part of the family yet, and now they never will be. Brutus knows exactly why the girl keeps her distance; why bother to get to know people just in time to kill them? Brutus gets it, and the hard truth is, if Twelve refuses to make alliances this year, that makes it easier for the rest of them. Last year everyone else fervently hoped the lovers would die in the dirt so their own could make it home anyhow. Better not to confuse things.

Katniss finds Brutus and stares at him, eyes hard and narrowed. Brutus stares back. He's surprised and a little impressed when she doesn't flinch away, and they lock gazes until her boy tugs her in another direction. She casts one last look over her shoulder as he leads her toward the paints, and Brutus puts her out of his mind.

She's marked for death as surely as if the Capitol painted a target on her back; if the other tributes don't kill her, the Arena and the Gamemakers will. He has bigger things to worry about.


	4. Chapter 4: New Rules, New Players

By ten o'clock, Brutus' prediction of only half of the tributes making it downstairs holds true. He's not the only one who's come to that conclusion; Atala doesn't even bother to wait for the others, just begins her spiel. Brutus tunes out, because it's better to stop listening than to explode at how offensive it is that she's pretending they're first-timers. He doesn't have to say anything anyway; several of the others roll their eyes or look at imaginary watches on their bare wrists.

He's fine until Cecelia slips in late, her face pale, eyes red from crying and framed with sunken hollows. "Oh, shit," Brutus mutters under his breath, but he clamps down on his expression and lets his gaze slide away as though he never registered her. Brutus needs her there about as much as he needs a slice across the femoral artery, and he heads for the edible plants section. Cecelia won her Games by poisoning the remaining tributes; she won't need the practice with toxic vegetation, and it won't hurt Brutus to keep his hand in. He could never remember the difference between wolfsbane and its nonpoisonous cousin the lady's hood, and eventually just told himself not to not to eat the purple ones.

It's a good plan in theory, except that Brutus is trying so hard not to look at Cecelia that he completely misses the wild shock of grey hair at chest level until he almost runs into Mags and Woof. She has her hand on the older man's wrist, patiently removing a handful of leaves from his mouth. "No," Mags says gently, but insistent. Already Woof's lips have broken out in blisters, and Snow only knows what will happen to him if he's swallowed some of it.

"Ah shit," Brutus mutters again. Apparently that's going to be his theme for the day. "Mags, it's fine, I got him."

Woof is twice Brutus' age and weighs almost nothing when Brutus heaves him up into his arms to carry him over to the medical station. Chances are worst thing that happens is he needs his stomach pumped, but even if he dies from it, that's one less person Brutus has to kill a week from now. He lets the thought wash over him and does his best not to let it stick.

He could try to find another station, but that feels an awful lot like running to Brutus, and thing about running is, once you start it's real hard to stop. And so he heads back to edible plants, where Mags stands there watching him, her mouth pinched and eyes solemn. She taps her chest to indicate her thanks, and Brutus nods. "Sure," he says, keeping his voice clipped, but this is Mags. She's known him since he was a wet behind the ears twenty-one-year-old; the first time they met in Mentor Central, she'd seen twice as many tributes through the Games as the years Brutus had been alive.

Mags holds up a green plant with saw-tipped edges, and Brutus knows every plant in Two backwards and forwards but the rest of Panem has never been his priority. "Eat," she says, her mouth working slowly around the word like it's wrapped in a ball of socks. Brutus went to visit her after her stroke; back then the doctors weren't sure she'd ever speak at all. Luckily Mags never let anyone, even people who'd trained in medicine their whole lives, tell her what her body could or couldn't do. She picks up another plant that's similar, but this one has a purple tint at the corners. "Don't eat."

"Yeah?" Brutus takes the leaf from her and twirls it in his fingers. It still freaks him out a little that something so small could kill him when a grown man and a gun would have to try pretty damn hard. "What'll happen if I do?"

Mags grins up at him, baring her teeth. "Shit," she says, and Brutus barks out a startled laugh. "Lots of it."

"Yeah, I don't think anyone back home will be too happy if I shit myself to death," Brutus says, and if there's a sour taste in his mouth he's at least used to it. Arena humour comes easier to him than most. "I'm hoping for something more dignified."

"Me too," says Mags, and Brutus hisses through his teeth. He starts to say something - what he has no idea, it feels like an apology that catches itself halfway and just sits there, a useless lump of dead thoughts in his vocal cords - but she waves him off. "Old age. Not pretty. This?" She taps the side of her head where a blood clot caused the stroke that nearly killed her. Her hand still trembles, even three years later. "Wake up call."

Brutus exhales slowly. "That why you did it? Song coulda gone in for Annie. Didn't have to be you." Four had enough Victors to make keeping the youngest and oldest out a viable decision, but they clearly hadn't gone for it.

Mags nods once, sharp and decisive. "Take power where we can," she says, picking up a rock and crushing one of the plants into a sticky paste. "Where we start - parents' choice. Where we end - ours." The words come out a jumble, and Mags pinches her mouth together, breathes out hard through her nose and tries again. "_Can_ be ours," she corrects herself, speaking slowly and carefully. Her Four accent has only thickened in her years of staying at home instead of coming to the Capitol for the Games every year, but Brutus is used to it. "If we get the chance - take it."

"Yeah, see, you and me, we understand each other," Brutus says easily, and only after he's said it he realizes he's using his schmooze for the sponsors voice - find a point of commonality and push it, make them feel like they're your friend. Except Brutus isn't a mentor and Mags isn't either and neither of them control anything anymore. Still, too late to stop now. "What do you say we stick to what we know, huh? The Arena, are you in?"

Mags sets down the stone. The leftover plant oozes sap from its broken stem, and for some stupid reason Brutus feels sick. "This year, different," she says slowly, and the pinprick of ice in Brutus' chest spreads outward. "New rules. New players."

"Sure, I gotcha." Brutus drops the leaf and feigns nonchalance. "My people will talk with your people later. Good luck with those plants."

He strolls away and doesn't bother to look back to see if she's watching him. Anyway, Mags is a Career the same as he is, and with twice the experience and more Victors to her name than Brutus could ever dream of; whatever he saw on her face would only be what she wanted to show him.

Brutus heads back for the range weapon station because he needs to settle himself, but just his luck, there's the boy from Twelve standing in front of the rack of weapons and looking lost. This is not Brutus' day by any definition, but the Twelves controlled the parade with their flaming capes and that means Brutus needs to show he's not intimidated just because the youngsters know how to work a crowd.

"Peeta," Brutus says in a neutral but not unfriendly voice. The boy whips around, and the teenaged part of Brutus that awakened when he stepped twenty-six years back in time has a laugh that Peeta's nose comes up level with Brutus' collarbone. The boy tilts his head back, eyes wide. "You know anything about chucking spears?"

"Uh, no-" Peeta says, biting off the end of the sentence in a way that means he was going to say 'sir'. Funny, Brutus would've never guessed that a kid from the backwoods would be raised right. Looks like this is the year for shifting paradigms all around. "Not much call for that out in Twelve." He says it in a dry voice, the perfect level of self-deprecation without dipping into self-pity, and Brutus will give him that. He's got the acting down.

"Not exactly a sack of flour is it." Brutus lets a hint of humour into his voice, because the boy was never the problem. It was his stupid love story that took the spotlight off of Brutus' girl last year, but Peeta Mellark is not the reason Twelve won the 74th. He doesn't deserve to be a Victor, but it's not his fault, either. He might have shivered while the mutts gnawed Cato to pieces, but there wasn't much he could've done to save him than roll off the side himself to see if they'd rather chew on someone fresh instead.

"Yeah, not really." The kid's shoulders come down from his ears a little, and he picks up the nearest spear. "You think you could show me?"

New rules, Mags said; new players, too. Like it or not, the Twelves are more wrapped up in this than all the other districts combined, and if Brutus is going to see this through he's got to play the game. "Sure, they're not complicated. This part's always straight, this part's always pointy. Even you can figure that out."

Peeta snorts. "Yeah, thanks," he says, hefting the spear experimentally. Brutus clucks his tongue and takes it away, arranging the boy's fingers into the proper grip so he won't sprain himself the first time out.

Brutus steps back and lets him throw, and while he's not impressed exactly - he's seen fourteen-year-olds, way back in the day, with better range and definitely closer aim - it's good for a rookie. For a Twelve it's almost cheating, and Brutus narrows his eyes at the muscles on the boy's arms, which stand out in the sleeveless training uniform. Then again, Twelve started training once they heard the news; Peeta isn't a Career and never will be, but for his district, it's far closer than they've been to one in all of Brutus' lifetime.

"Not bad," Brutus says when Peeta turns around, and damned if the boy's ears don't turn pink from the praise. Fucking outlier families, hug your damn kids. "You didn't hit anything, but you've got the range. This time you wanna line up your sight before you get your arm back."

Chaff saunters up in the middle of Brutus' lesson, and this, at least, is one alliance Brutus isn't worried about trying to make. He has no quarrel with Chaff except for the part where the man is an asshole and drinks away his tribute's lives every year like a point of pride - which, all right, that's a pretty big part. Chaff thinks Brutus is a privileged son of a bitch, but that suits Brutus just fine; Chaff refused Two's offer of an alliance with Thresh last year, and look how that turned out for them. Brutus could go days without food by feeding on his district pride alone, but at least he has something to be proud of. Chaff is just a dick, and it doesn't bother Brutus none if the man thinks the same right back at him.

"Trying to get in where the getting's good, huh, Brutus?" Chaff asks, leaning his elbow against Brutus' upper arm in a faux-friendly gesture. "Jumping on the Twelve bandwagon like everyone else."

"It's called strategy," Brutus says, keeping it pleasant, but he knocks Chaff's hand away with a careless gesture. "There's more to it than deciding whether to get a beer first or just skip straight to the hard liquor."

Peeta looks between them with thoughtful eyes. No doubt he's imagined all the other Victors as a monolith of support after all these years together, but it's so much more complicated than that. Too bad he'll never get the chance to see how it works. "Uh," he says, running a hand through his hair. "Is everything okay?"

"Fine, everything's fine." Chaff grins at him, his smile big and sharp and nasty. "You better watch yourself with this one, boy. Brutus here, he'll never stab you in the back, but he will gut you from the front and tell himself it's fine because that's the honourable thing to do."

Brutus narrows his eyes, and if they were alone he might risk taking Chaff's bait but here they have an audience. He's not going to let the man goad him into a fight in front of the Capitol's latest favourite victim. "Anyway," he says to Peeta, ignoring Chaff's snort. "Grab another spear and let's try this again."

Peeta, as it turns out, is not a bad kid, and he listens to Brutus' advice with a willingness to learn that's entirely sincere and - if Brutus were to admit it - a little too refreshing after all the shit he's put up with today. Born in Two he might've made a good Career; he has the build for it, and the Centre could help him build a persona that's likeable without going over the line to a pushover. He could've been another Devon, easy and engaging, and while Brutus never forgets where they are or why they're here, there are far more annoying ways to spend an hour.

But the real discovery is that Peeta would've made one hell of a mentor. Arms and strength or no, this kid belongs on the sponsor floor; he'd have them eating out of his hands in seconds. The dumb thing is, he'd be much more use to his girl in a place where he doesn't have to worry about running with an artificial leg and fighting with weapons he's never touched before a year ago. That's the problem with the young; so concerned with being there for Katniss that he didn't stop to think where he'd actually be able to help her.

No telling whether Haymitch tried to explain this to him or whether he did and Peeta was just too dumb and in love to listen, but either way, it's too late now.

At lunch time, Peeta sits down with Brutus, the rest of the Career pack and a handful of the others. Peeta doesn't even hesitate, just grabs an empty spot on the other side of Brutus and tells no one to steal his seat. That kind of easy confidence isn't learned in a year; before the Games this boy was popular. Before this he had friends, though likely he doesn't now.

It's worth nothing how well he blends into the group of Victors, joking and tossing around friendly insults as though he didn't just win the year previous, and he might never have taken a life himself but it's still one hell of a skill. Brutus revisits his earlier dismissal and Enobaria's scorn; Peeta might not have a lot of combat skills, but anyone who can work over a gang of seasoned mentors will do the same to the sponsors without even blinking.

What's more of note is that Peeta grabs his girl and convinces her to sit with everyone, and after that Brutus abandons all pretence of tasting his lunch and just watches them while he eats. Katniss Everdeen is a bowstring wound too tight, and each time one of the other Victors needles her she pulls in tighter, but Peeta draws her back with a few easy words or a light touch. By the end of lunch Katniss still hasn't said more than a handful of words, but she stops eyeing them all like they're going to slip poison in her drink, and the whole time Peeta hasn't even let his smile falter.

After that, all right, colour Brutus impressed. Even he spent the first few days of mentoring in awe of his fellow Victors, and they'd been competing through the kids in their care, not actually planning to murder each other. Peeta Mellark is clearly in the Arena just to make sure his girl makes it out safe, and he's going to pull out all the stops to do it. If nothing else, Brutus can respect that.

Nice of the world to make Brutus to start feeling like he maybe understands the kid a little just in time to kill him, but go figure.

That afternoon Brutus trains alone - he can't look at Mags or Cecelia again, and the others are too drunk or sick to be worth his time - but he keeps letting his attention drift back to the pair from Twelve. This time it's Katniss who surprises him as she makes the rounds of everyone, including the Careers - she builds hammocks with Cash and Gloss, and swings swords with an unenthusiastic Enobaria - and if none of them come away smiling, that's more effort she's put into getting to know them than her entire Victory Tour put together. Peeta watches her sometimes, hard enough that he drops knots and has trouble lighting fires, but then he catches himself and pours his mind back into the task at hand.

Mags' words run through Brutus' mind again near the end of the afternoon: _new rules, new players_, only this time they take up shop and refuse to leave. In the sponsor ring, Mags has a way of talking in code, weaving a web so that people dance to her tune without ever hearing the music; she passes messages to others by bringing them around to her way of thinking without ever having to say things outright. Now, after her stroke, every word takes concentration and attention she wouldn't waste if she didn't have to. She wouldn't waste her strength on meaningless chatter.

New players. New rules. At the end of training, Katniss and Peeta find each other, linking hands before walking out of the room, and Brutus follows them with narrowed eyes.

* * *

That evening, Brutus catches Lyme with a hand on her elbow as soon as he's through the door to the Two floor. "Put in a request to Haymitch," he says, and he's not so far gone that he can't enjoy the surprise that furrows her eyebrows. "I want in with Twelve."

"Really?" Lyme blinks at him. "I can go back down, but I can't guarantee I'll get in to see him. After this afternoon's footage, half the mentors were falling all over themselves."

"Well, no shit," Brutus says, shrugging. "The boy's good. I'm not surprised the rest of them figured it out."

"Wait, what?" Lyme holds up a hand, and this time it's Brutus turn to frown at her. "The boy? Who's talking about Peeta?"

This has been a long day; too many more unexpected turns and Brutus is going to fall on his ass. "Who else would I be talking about?"

Lyme makes a face, but some of the tension drains away, leaving behind good old-fashioned exasperation. "Everyone's clamouring to ally with Katniss after seeing her shoot. I thought for a second you'd lost your mind with the rest of them."

"Did she?" Brutus casts his mind back, and vaguely comes up with her standing and launching arrows at a bunch of fake birds while the others gawked like they'd never seen anyone with weapons proficiency before. "Oh, yeah, guess she did. No, it's the boy I want. Plus Mags said something that made me think we should try to get in on that."

Lyme narrows her eyes. "What did she say?"

Brutus tells her. "That sound like a message to you, because it did to me."

"It could be," Lyme says slowly. "Snow only knows, with everything the way it is this year. But if Mags mentioned new allies, what other new allies could there be? Maybe there is something going on that we don't know about. Maybe Finnick heard something the last time he did his rounds. It might not be a bad idea at least to show interest, even if it doesn't take. If there is something going on, it would be in our best interests to be on the inside."

"We won't make last year's mistake," Brutus reminds her. "We know the girl is dangerous and we know the boy will sacrifice himself to save her. But if Mags thinks we should leverage their popularity, I think we oughta listen."

Lyme drags a hand down her face, eyes staring out at something far away, and for a second she looks old - older than thirty-eight, older than Brutus or even Odin - and exhausted. "I guess it won't hurt to ask. He's probably swamped, so I'll leave a message for him at his floor and that'll be it."

She turns to leave, but Brutus jogs after her. "Hey," he says, and he means it to come out serious and reassuring but there's an undertone of anger he can't quite chase away. "I haven't forgotten how Cato died." It's a betrayal of his principles to say it, in a way, since the essence of being a mentor is to give his tributes freely and without regret; to mourn them after the end of the official reflection period is to suggest that there is something to mourn, that their sacrifice alone wasn't glorious enough to override everything else. But principles won't erase the weeks Lyme spent at his house, drinking on his couch in silence; they won't remove her voice, telling him that after the Quell she was stepping down to floor mentor because she'd lost the ability to stay impartial.

("It used to heal," she told him, staring not at him but at light from his standing lamp reflected in her bourbon as she tilted the glass back and forth. "Now it just stays open and infected and rotting. I can't do it anymore.")

Oh, Brutus hasn't forgotten. Now Lyme stares at him for a long second, half-unseeing, then shakes her head. "We're all murderers," she says flatly, and slips out the door.

* * *

An Avox shows up with a message from Haymitch right when Brutus is considering hauling his ass to bed after a solid three hours of strategy planning. Lyme's half-buried under a pile of papers and Nero has Enobaria sprawled in his lap, and Brutus isn't going to make Ronan get up or wake Claudius, who's snoring over the past quarter's sponsorship agreements. "I got it," Brutus tells Artemisia, and she gives him a small, awkward smile and goes back to work.

Brutus blinks at the piece of paper in his hand, printed with Abernathy's hurried scrawl. "She's still making up her mind," Brutus reads out loud. "They're leaving the alliance decisions up to Katniss? The fuck?"

"That seems unwise," Odin says, employing one of the first skills Brutus ever learned from him: mastery of the understatement. "She's not exactly inclined to making friends, and victory or no, her intra-Arena politics were not the reason Twelve won the Games."

Enobaria snorts, but Nero hushes her and she settles back with her head tucked in against his shoulder. Lyme frowns, twirling her pen around her fingers. "I sent the request through Peeta."

"Maybe Haymitch didn't actually read it. If you're right and half the mentors went crazy over the girl's shooting, he just assumed we were in for the same reason." Brutus turns the paper over, holds it up to the light and tilts it back and forth, checking for any sign of hidden messages, but there's nothing. He lets it go and watches it flutter onto the tabletop with the rest of the stats printouts. "Well, whatever. Haymitch won't let them go it alone, so someone will talk her round."

Enobaria snickers, but this time when Nero gives her a quelling look she rides right over him. "Maybe we'll get lucky and they will say no to everyone. Let's see her last five minutes on her own with only Lover Boy to help her." She grins, her teeth glinting in the light. "I don't care whether she goes for an alliance or not. If not, I'm cutting out her heart. If she does, then as soon as the alliance breaks I get to skin her alive as a reward for listening to her whining."

Brutus shakes his head and ignores her. Let Enobaria pretend she's eager to get in there and tear everyone's throats out; she wouldn't be in Nero's lap if she was, but they have to make it out sane somehow and he's not gonna begrudge her what works for her.

He _is_ going to wonder what the hell Haymitch is thinking, putting this kind of decision on Katniss' shoulders when the girl ain't even been clean a year.

Ronan taps his fingers against the top of his cane. "This alliance is crucial, especially if Brutus is correct about Mags' message that the Fours will be allying with Twelve this year. We can't afford being pushed to the side when Twelve and the Odair boy already control so much sponsor attention. We have to strike and take it back."

Brutus picks up the nearest personnel file to him, only to drop it back onto the table when Cecelia's dark eyes stare up at him from the page. The file lands on the surface with a hard _slap_ that jolts Claudius out of his doze and makes the others glance at Brutus, their expressions a mix of confusion and concern. This has to stop; he tries to make himself pick up the file again, look at her picture until he dissociates the young woman with three kids from the tribute who will be in the Arena with him, but his hand won't obey the command to move.

"I think it's time we wound things up for tonight," Odin says, a little too loudly, a little too cheerfully, and entirely for Brutus' benefit as though he's an eighteen-year-old having a panic attack. "Brutus, I have a few things to go over with you before sleeping, but we have an early morning so I won't keep you for long."

On one hand, Brutus does not relish another get-your-head-together talk like this is his first Reaping, but at the same time, his head's not in the game and he needs it to be. Two can't afford one of their tributes going in muzzy-brained and conflicted; Brutus needs clarity of purpose and needs it fast, and if it takes Odin smacking some sense into him, he'll take what he can get.

Brutus turns and heads back to his room, but not before noticing that Odin stops to scoop up one of the files before doing so. He follows Brutus, shutting the door behind him and flicking on the broad wall screen to a slow panning shot of the cliffs in the western parts of Two, solid and settling. Odin sits down on the chair across from the bed, too small for him like it is half the Twos who come through here.

Brutus lowers himself down onto the bed, fighting back deja vu and only succeeding because they completely redecorate the Games Complex every year. "I'll get it together," Brutus says when Odin doesn't open the conversation himself, and he's on the wrong side of forty but he sounds young in his head, desperate to appease his mentor. "It's a lot to take in, but I'm fine."

Odin didn't buy his bullshit the first time around, and he's not buying it now. He hefts the file in his lap and tosses it across the room, the pages flapping like a wounded bird's before landing on the bed. Brutus flinches away from Cecelia, but at the same time he lets out a breath of relief. Odin will fix it for him; Odin will help him rearrange it in his head so it's all right.

"You want me to give you the answer," Odin says, and Brutus would nod except that Odin's voice is strange. It's flat and just this side of disapproving, and Odin hasn't spoken to him with that level of blatant authority for decades. "You want me to fix it. You want me to tell you how to justify killing that woman and leaving her children without a mother. How this is the noble and right thing to do."

"She's got kids," Brutus says, the world tilting beneath him. He tries to grip the blankets and ground himself, but they're shiny satin and slip through his fingers. "It's - I don't know how to make it right. I don't know how I can do it."

Odin lets out a long breath. "If you keep looking for ways to make it right, you're going to destroy yourself before you start."

Brutus jerks back. "What?"

"I believe you heard me," Odin says, and there it is again, the voice Brutus hasn't heard since the days when he needed Odin to knock him on the ground and hold him there until things shook into place. "Do you remember what they told you, when you were a trainee?" Lyme would make a joke about that occurring back in the Dark Days, but Odin doesn't, just gives Brutus a long, level look. "There is no argument toward killing a twelve-year-old that will settle every protest, and the more time you spend trying to devise a justification, that's time you're wasting that could be used for something else. In the Arena you don't have time to make it right; you barely have enough time to act. Whether it's right that you, Enobaria, Cecelia and the others are back in the Arena is immaterial. All that matters is that it's done and you're the one who has to finish it."

It was easy for Brutus to believe that when he was acing kill tests at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Even at eighteen when he killed his first tribute, an innocent girl instead of a condemned criminal who deserved the execution. But he's not a child, no matter how desperate the need for reassurance, and it will take more than that to make it right. Brutus will need something stronger than platitudes if he's meant to wrap his hands around a mother's neck until the cannon fires.

Odin narrows his eyes. "No?" he says, sharp and challenging. "You think you deserve more? You think you deserve answers, do you? You won the Hunger Games and that entitles you to a lifetime of having everything explained to you before you obey, is that it? Because that sort of attitude is exactly why we're here right now. We got complacent - _all_ of us."

This time Brutus opens his mouth and shuts it again. "Fuck," he says finally, and for a moment he can't remember how old he is, only that he feels like he's drowning and finding solid ground at the same time.

"You are not owed justification for your actions," Odin continues, remorseless and unforgiving. "You do not get to decide that you will follow orders only if you can make it pretty in your mind. You are a tribute, and tributes do not have that luxury. There is one - and only one - thing required of you, and that, my boy, is your obedience."

The words are a blast of cold water after the grittiness of a day of training: a shock and a welcome all in one, and Brutus nearly gasps from the force of it. Instead he nods, lets the truth sink in and knit him back together. The Capitol owes him nothing, no explanation; not even the years since they allowed him to leave the Arena and come home the Victor. Every trainee is taught to take what's useful and discard the rest; those who are raised to ask questions don't become tributes, and they definitely don't win.

Not everything settles - a broken bone still aches after it's been set - but Brutus breathes a little easier, and Odin nods. "Good. But I also want to remind you of something, Brutus. You volunteered so Enobaria didn't have to face her mentor, just as Mags did for young Annie. Both of you did the right thing. But Cecelia -"

Brutus' cheek twitches as he pulls back a wince, and a small part of him wonders how Odin will spin this. Cecelia is here because the Reaping Ball gave up her name; she's here because of a broken promise that will claim her life and her children's happiness. He clings to Odin's words - duty, obedience, trust - but a hollowness creeps into the centre.

Odin's eyes go dark. "Cecelia is here because no one did the same for her. She is not Eight's only female Victor, but she is the only Victor with children. The choice, to anyone with morals, is clear. She is here because her people failed her; she is here because they were cowards. There is no magic pill that will make everything all right, but we take what we have and we do what we can with it. You acted out of love and fealty; you will carry out your duty with a surfeit of the same, and lend dignity to those who were denied that right."

Brutus lets his eyes fall closed. Behind him on the screen, the wind whistles over the cliffs and the hawks screech as they dive in search of prey. Brutus is Two and Odin is Two and honour is Two, and he might be in the Capitol but his district is with him everywhere.

"You can't change what has happened, or what's ahead of you," Odin says, his tone softening. "But you know what you must do, and that, Brutus, is a type of freedom that only some of us understand."

Brutus nods. "Thank you," he says. "I needed that."

"And I will be here to set you on the path whenever you need me to," Odin reminds him. "You are my Victor and my tribute. I will do everything in my power to see you through to the other side. But for now, it's time to sleep."

Brutus can't decide whether he wants to sleep forever or never sleep again, but the gentle words of command act like a balm on his frazzled mind. "Yeah. What time's breakfast?"

"Given yesterday's turnout, I think we can safely move it back to eight," Odin says. "Take your time, we can brief after we eat."

Brutus doesn't turn the screen off after Odin leaves, just adjusts the time setting so the sun dips below the horizon and the stars spin out across the velvet sky.

* * *

Lyme flips her pen back and forth between her fingers, spinning it round over her knuckles because if she allows it to stop moving, she's going to stab it through someone's jugular. "Now Azalea," she says with a knowing smile, leaning forward and putting as little distance as she can between them without toppling. "You and I both know that Brutus is the one to watch this year. I'd hate to see you wait too late to pledge your support, especially once the prices go up."

The woman in front of her blinks eyelashes long enough to brush Lyme's cheek a full foot away. "Well, I'll be the first to say that Brutus is impressive, especially at his age, but you Twos haven't exactly put in a strong showing these last few years. Who was your last Victor, that little cripple girl a few years ago? And before that was that boy, what's his name, and all he had to do was fight a bunch of twelve-year-olds. Hardly something to inspire confidence."

Claudius, sitting on the far side of the large round sofa, stiffens and grits his teeth for a split second at the reference to his Arena. But insulted or no, he doesn't muddle his words or lose his place in his sentence. Lyme sends him a brief reassuring smile under cover of tucking the pen behind her ear; his lips thin in response before he turns back to his patrons. 'All he had to do' indeed.

Lyme swallows a hundred furious retorts and shrugs instead. Never look desperate; pleading and begging is for the outliers, as a trade-off for having fewer sponsor guarantees to start with. Even if her tribute is starving to death or dying of blood poisoning, Lyme always has to approach the sponsor den with nonchalance, like it doesn't really matter to her one way or another. Like there's always a line of potential sponsors out the door, and she's only asking this one to give them the opportunity to invest in a champion.

"You're not dealing with eighteen-year-olds now," Lyme points out with a vague, dismissive wave. "This is Brutus. There are records he broke in his Games that people still haven't touched. Who did you have your eye on?"

Azalea's hand flutters near her cheek, and Lyme swallows a snort of disgust. Of course. "Well, Finnick, you know, he's just so dashing -"

Lyme nods and pats Azalea's knee in understanding, but also letting the woman feel the iron grip of her hand even when she's not trying. "He's certainly very pretty," she agrees, stressing the last word and letting a hint of condescension curl around it while sending a silent apology to Finnick. She watched his Games the same as everyone, but outside mentor circles, the sheer bloodthirsty terror of it has all been erased by the butterfly, the man who flits from lover to lover and asks for only secrets in exchange for his company. (Amazing, what these people will tell themselves to sleep at night.)

It works. Azalea sits back, frowning as much as she can with the muscles in her forehead frozen to reduce the effects of ageing. "Maybe you're right. Looks won't solve everything; this isn't a beauty pageant, after all!" She titters at what obviously counts as some sort of clever remark in her head; Lyme returns her an indulgent smile.

"You never know." Lyme lets her teeth show. "Maybe the Arena will be a giant room of mirrors and all he'll have to do is dazzle everyone to death with his smile."

This time Azalea laughs outright, the sound sliding and nasty; nothing makes Capitolians happier, after the splash of blood on the camera lens, than humour at someone else's expense. If they had their way, sponsorship deals would be won with mini-Arenas all their own, the mentors and their bare knuckles in a ring, vying for matches and loaves of bread with their fists. "Now, now, my dear, be nice."

"You want nice, you ask the Sixes to paint you a picture. You want to win, you back a Two. That's just the way it goes." Lyme flicks her fingers, pulling her mentor's card with the sponsorship donation number from her sleeve like she used to do with knives. "I'll let you think about it, but don't wait too long. I've got a long list, and sometimes names get lost."

By the end of the day, Lyme would rather lock everyone in the room, choose a few to disembowel, and then collect all the necessary funds from the rest as they cowered in fear than keep playing the game. Instead she smiles, spins elaborate promises that end up binding the sponsor while leaving her free of actual obligation, and exploits every weakness she knows about and a few she only had hunches on. She snaps three pencils in her bare hand by accident, but she shoves the broken pieces down her sleeve and flicks a new one free without anyone noticing.

Lyme grabs Claudius on their way back to the residential complex, gripping him by the back of the neck. "How you holding up, kiddo?"

Claudius gives her a grim smile, his eyes shadowed. "Can I tell you something awful?"

"I challenge you to make it worse than Camphor Dale promising food in the third week in exchange for me fucking him in an alley," Lyme says flatly. Claudius winces, but it isn't exactly news to him that with Capitolites, a night of illicit activities can sometimes net more than a week of verbal wrangling.

"Okay, so it's not that level, but." Claudius runs a hand through his hair. "We said it would be bad for me to mentor years ago -" because he told her if he had to watch his tributes die year after year he'd set the Capitol on fire around him - "but I think I might actually be good at it. I don't have to play the game like you; one look at my face and they expect me to be mean and try to fleece them. It was almost easy."

He's not wrong, either about his face or his angle. He's not an ugly boy, her last Victor, no matter what he might think after years of living with the district's most gorgeous, but his features do resolve into cruelty. All but his happiest smile - always in private, usually startled out of him - makes him look like he's thinking about carving out someone's insides. Odin takes care of the hardcore patriots who support Two and Brutus and his steady lack of surprises; Lyme can catch and convince most of the rest; but Claudius and his nasty grin might draw in the ones more inclined to side with Enobaria and the other, less stable, Victors of the 60s.

Lyme hates that she has to make that choice, and she knows exactly who to hate for it. It just helps about as much as sending a tinderbox in the middle of a firestorm.

"No one ever said mentoring wouldn't suit you because you couldn't close a deal," Lyme reminds him, sliding her fingers up into his hair and giving it a comforting tug. She's doing her best to redirect herself, but the real reason for Claudius sitting out before this year prowls between them like a mutt in a hidden chamber, invisible but growling, and Lyme's own anger drums in her chest. One more year, she told Brutus, sitting on his sofa. She'd do the Quarter Quell, depending on the rules and the candidates, but after that, she didn't have the stomach to continue mentoring in this new world of changing rules and lessening sanity.

And now here she is, fighting for Brutus' life, arguing with coiffed and bedazzled idiots whether the man who's given the last thirty years of his life to serve his country is worth a packet of matches and a tin of dried beef. The anger rises, shooting past the black fire of rage and fury into something else, deep and sparking and all-consuming, and Lyme nearly stumbles on the first set of stairs from the force of it.

"You okay, boss?" Claudius asks, hand at her arm and eyebrows furrowed.

Lyme flicks her eyes up toward the ceiling and the cameras that line the walls. Claudius is still in mentor training and hasn't mastered all the hand signals that the mentors use to pass silent messages to each other, but he gets the message and doesn't ask again.

There's a bit of time before Brutus and Enobaria come back from training; for another day that means all six mentors will get together to pool their contributions and intel from the day and devise a strategy. After tomorrow they'll split into their separate camps to discuss how they'll handle it when the alliance breaks. In any other Games they'd already be doing it, but Lyme cuts all of them a little slack for dragging their feet this year.

Lyme steps away from Claudius before they cross the door into the main Two floor, leaving the moments of comfort just between them. He straightens his shoulders and heads for Artemisia and her pile of notes, and both of them are Lyme's Victors and here they are on opposite sides of the table. Lyme turns away, and she's heading for the bar to pour herself something when Odin stops her with a hand at her shoulder.

"Lyme, might I have a word?" Odin asks, in the tone of a superior who only makes it a question out of politeness.

Lyme keeps the wince off her face - Odin isn't her mentor and they've never had occasion to say more than a few words to each other before now - and shifts to take them to her room instead. Odin waits until the door hisses shut behind them, then turns to face her, hands clasped formally behind his back. "I'm speaking to you out of turn, and for that I'm sorry," he begins, and uh oh. "Normally I would take this request to your mentor, but given the circumstances -" A muscle in his cheek twitches, as good as a dramatic hand gesture from a man with his level of control. "I think it's best if you pull back from talking with Brutus, at least for the time being."

Whatever half-theories might have been floating around in Lyme's mind, this was not one of them. She blinks at him - opens her mouth, shuts it again - and finally says, "Why?"

She doesn't want to get angry at Odin; he was a Victor years before Lyme was even born, and whether she's in his branch of the hierarchy or not she owes him her respect. But he's right about extenuating circumstances; if he wants Lyme to give up any time with Brutus before he goes back into the Arena, Odin better have a damned good reason.

Odin is one of the few Victors with more than an inch of height on Lyme, and he uses every one of them to look down at her now. "Because if you don't, I'm afraid you're going to kill him."

Maybe on a good day Lyme would be able to stay quiet, to take the order with the grace a good Two should, but she's been in the sponsor pit since ten in the morning, fighting with people who have less worth in all of them put together than Brutus carries in his pocket every day. She spent three hours arguing with a woman who'd enjoyed Brutus' company every month for fifteen straight years - all the while never letting it slip that he wanted her money and not her - who now waffled on continuing her pledges because Brutus' odds had slipped two points from his first Games to the second.

"You want to tell me what the fuck you're talking about?" Lyme snaps, and it's suicide to talk this way to someone twenty years her senior but just try it. Maybe he'll snap her neck and she won't have to think about peeling her fingernails off while she watches Brutus die on camera.

Odin doesn't react, either to the profanity or to her insubordination, so points for that. "I understand what you're going through," he says in an infuriatingly patient tone, and this is why he would never have worked as her mentor. Lyme clawed herself to pieces working to get under Nero's skin and pry a reaction from him; with Odin she would have lost her mind trying to get him to do more than raise an eyebrow. "But it doesn't change the fact that you need to give Brutus his space. This is not an ordinary Games, and while we would be foolish to pretend otherwise, he needs to keep his head. He can't do that if you are constantly reminding him how unfair it is."

Lyme pushes both hands into her hair, fingers digging into her scalp. She didn't sleep more than two hours last night, poring over stats and sponsor sheets and every scrap of insider information they've managed to dig up, searching for anything that might help. She even sat with the official Panem Games Statutes, looking for a legal loophole she could pass on to those higher and with more smarts in that sort of thing than she has. She popped three stim pills when she started drooping at two this afternoon, and the burn of artificially postponed exhaustion starts up an itch behind her eyeballs.

"What am I supposed to do then?" Lyme demands. "I can't just smile and say 'May the odds...' like he's eighteen and too blind to know what he's getting into. It's bullshit and he knows it's bullshit." The flood rises, and she fights it down. "I'm not wasting the last few days I have with him on lies."

"My dear girl," Odin says, and his voice stays the same - calm, even, ruthlessly controlled - but then it dives down dark like a sabre to the gut. "I'm not sure what world you inhabit, but we are _all_ angry. Some of us, on the other hand, can think past our own feelings to the needs of others."

Lyme sucks in a breath hard enough she nearly chokes on it. "You want to say that again?" she demands, and this is Odin and she needs to back the fuck down because they are Twos and Twos have rules and without the rules they have nothing but it's too much.

"Very well." Odin smiles as though he had to carve the expression himself from a block of limestone. "You are his friend, and you are angry. That is admirable and understandable, but it is nothing - _nothing_ \- to being his mentor."

That knocks the wind out of her every bit as effectively as one of Brutus' hard tackles to the waist. Lyme runs a hand down her face. "Shit."

Odin ignores her. "When I sat by him after the Arena, when I patched him up and soothed his nightmares and ignored his cries, I told him - I _promised_ him - he would never, ever need to become a killer again. We hinge our lives on that promise; you understand that. I told him to find meaning in the rules, in order, in the system. I told him that his loyalty would be rewarded, that he had done his duty and that if he continued to do so then they could ask no more than that. I built his sanity and our relationship on that vow, that the Capitol pays us what we're owed. What do you think it means, then, for me to have to tell him that he must do it again?"

Lyme swallows the bitter taste in her mouth. "That's not what I meant."

Odin silences her with a slash of his hand, and Lyme actually jumps back. "If anyone in this Village can come close to understanding Brutus as I do, it's you, which makes your conduct not merely undesirable but just this side of unforgivable. It is selfishness in the extreme. Your own pain and rage at the injustice does not give you leave to throw it onto him. If Brutus is to survive this then he needs to remember how to be a tribute, not to wallow in futility, and you of all people should know that. He needs purpose. He needs a solid foundation. I am giving him that. I am filling his head full of patriotism and honour, and if it is like packing a wound with cobwebs until a physician can heal it then so be it, but you would let him bleed to death so you might have an outlet for your _feelings_."

Lyme's eyes narrow to furious slits at the barb sinks home, but after the wave of indignation rolls over her, it leaves the awful, prickling sensation that he's right. She might not throw Brutus a rod and reel and invite him to go fishing in Traitor Lake with her and Claudius, but he is her friend and she thought she owed it to him to let him see her anger. To show him that he wouldn't go unmourned, that even after the Capitol broke every promise and took him, he wouldn't be dismissed as a necessary sacrifice in a year when Panem needed its Victors to give their all - again - in order to keep the country together.

But Odin's right. If Brutus is going to walk out of that Arena alive and sane, he doesn't need her sympathy, or her pity, or even her rage. What he needs is to forget there's any chance of him not coming out at all. For Brutus, confidence comes from loyalty, from following orders and doing his duty; it's not Lyme's job to take that away, no matter how much bullshit that might be.

She will give Odin one point; he doesn't harp on her while she's thinking, just stands quiet and waits for her to puzzle it out on her own. When Lyme frowns and crosses her arms, Odin nods and dials down the intensity of his glare. "What would our tributes do, if in the days before the Arena we allowed them to sleep all day, gorge themselves full of every delicacy the Capitol makes ready, just because they're going to die?"

Lyme doesn't have to answer that, and fortunately Odin isn't a power-hungry school teacher and doesn't make her say it. "It is no different," he says. "You cannot think of these as your last days with Brutus; that would mean he has already lost. If you love him at all then you will indeed waste them; you will waste every moment on _bullshit_, as you put it, because it is precisely that bullshit he needs to make it out alive. Brutus draws his strength from his district. Swallow your hurt and give that to him. Tell him with no uncertainty that he will win and you will be there when he does."

When Lyme was a little girl - the details of the memory float just out of reach, hazy and forgotten by choice - she told herself that once she won the Hunger Games she would never cry in front of a man again. Sadly for her childhood self, Lyme has broken that promise more than once over the years (throwing up in Nero's lap, cursing between the dry heaves while he stroked her back and combed his fingers through her hair; crushed half to death against Brutus' chest with his arms around her the night they returned to Two with the chunks of Cato's body removed from the stomach of the mutts and shoved haphazardly into a box) but she does try.

Crying in front of someone else's mentor, a man she respects out of necessity but has never actually liked, pretty much tops the list of things Lyme never, ever wants to do. Too bad it looks like today doesn't give a shit. Lyme presses both hands over her eyes and hopes Odin won't notice - or will at least ignore - the ragged hitches in her breath. She struggles to control herself, but in the end the only thing she can do is bite out a hysterical "Can you just -" before the ability to speak dissolves altogether.

Odin takes a step back. "I will handle the negotiations with the other district mentors, if you need some time," he says with an air of graciousness that has always made her want to throttle him.

Lyme wants to stab him in the other eye and drive it right through his skull, but instead she flaps a hand at him and keeps it together just long enough for the door to shut before she loses it.

Half a minute in, everything in the room that can be broken is in pieces, smashed or shredded or sliced, and Lyme stands in the middle of the battlefield, chest heaving as though she's finished a training bout. It's not enough, nowhere near enough, and a decades-old urge begins to rise inside her, one that makes her forearms itch with thousands of insects beneath her skin, and if she could just get a blade and slice them out -

Shit. Shit shit shit shit. Of all the things Lyme doesn't need right now, it's this. Lyme scrubs her face with the torn pillowcase, runs her fingers through her hair and tugs at the hem of her shirt before opening the door. Enobaria's lounging on the couch, hugging a smoothie half the size of her arm to her chest. Brutus must have hung back to talk to Odin on the way out. "Enobaria, I don't suppose you'll let me borrow your knives?" she calls out into the main lounge.

"Fuck you with a cheese grater," Enobaria sing-songs back.

"Right." At least she didn't expect anything else. "D? C'mon, I know you sneaked some in, don't hold out on me."

Claudius' eyes do a guilty flicker like he's trying to decide it's a trap before he slides off the couch and darts into his room, coming out with a folded leather pouch. "Don't hurt them," he says, trying for joking and falling flat, but Lyme could kiss him for making the effort. "Everything okay?"

"Ran out of stuff to break, need something to throw," Lyme says easily, and Claudius laughs. "I'll sharpen them before I bring 'em back and everything." She tousles his hair - Enobaria, in the background, rolls her eyes - and Claudius respects his mentor by not pushing.

Throwing knives were never Lyme's specialty; she has the shoulders and bulk for the spear and that made for a much more impressive range weapon, and she never liked the girly ones anyway. Too bad sword and spear are a little harder to get past security. For a second, when she pulls the first knife free of its sheath, her eyes drag down to her forearm and the scars that are almost gone, only visible as a faint white line when the light hits the right way and you know where to look, but she lets out a breath and the urge lessens. When she whirls and flings the knife across the room, the blade landing smack into the wall, it fades altogether.

Lyme throws until she runs out of knives, then wrenches them free, chooses another wall, and does it again. She repeats until her arm aches, then switches to her non-dominant arm and tries again. Before the reading of the card, Lyme had let her coordination with her off hand drop, but the first thing she did after learning she might go back in was pick up a sword and re-train herself to fight wrong-handed. It doesn't translate to range for shit, though, and against her will Lyme laughs at how terrible her aim is.

If she had her way, Lyme would continue until her hands trembled, but in her condition that would take hours and she doesn't have that luxury. Odin threw her a parachute by allowing her time to tantrum and calm down, but much longer and the others will wonder. She and Nero are on opposite sides this year so he won't ask after her, but that's hardly the point. Lyme stops with the frustration still bubbling beneath the surface, but she's not in danger of bursting into tears anymore and that's got to be enough.

She sits down on the bed, pulls the sharpening stone from the back of the pouch, and runs the blades over it. The sharp _snick snick_ of steel against the rough grain of the whetstone at once calms and jangles her, and Lyme measures her breathing by the strokes of the knife. By the time she restores the blades to pristine condition, Lyme has settled herself down. Like it or not, she won't lose it again.

When she finally comes back out, tossing Claudius the pack of knives, Brutus is back and settled on one of the sofas with a file in his lap. He's spent the whole day pretending to give a damn at the various training stations, rubbing shoulders with people he's known for decades and will have to murder in three days, and here he is back at work now that it's his free time. Lyme digs her thumb between her eyes, exhales hard through her nose, and does what every good Career knows how to do: she flips the switch.

"Hey," Lyme says, reaching over Brutus from behind and snagging the file. "You're done for the day, get your nose out of the mentor files. Move your ass to the table and eat."

Brutus glares up at her, and his lip curls in a Game-face snarl that means he hasn't quite put himself back together yet after performing for the cameras. Lyme has never seen it on him in person, and for a second it jolts her with fear, but this is good. This is what he needs to do. "Fuck you."

"Not for a million sponsorship deals," Lyme says lightly, like it doesn't tear something out of her to pretend it's all fine, and she tosses the papers on the table. "C'mon, seriously, you've got weight to maintain. If you need the motivation I'll do a shot for every protein shake you can keep down."

Brutus meets her gaze, and he doesn't say anything but he and Lyme have had entire conversations in the silence over the past twenty years. His eyes hold hers for a handful of seconds, and during them the practiced arrogance falls off his face. For a moment he looks at her with his mouth turned up at one corner in a rueful smile that says he knows exactly what she's doing. Then just like that it's gone, swallowed by his signature blend of exasperation and ego, and Brutus snorts and hauls himself up off the couch. "Fine, you're on, but don't blame me tomorrow when you've gotta take one of those shitty fruity Capitol hangover cures because I've kicked your ass."

Lyme flips him off. Claudius watches them, frowning at the sudden levity, but Lyme shakes her head at him when Brutus moves in front of her and he turns back to the agreements in front of him.

By the end of the night Lyme has downed six shots, but she cheats by dumping an alcohol nullifier onto her food in between. Brutus catches her just before the final drink and roars in outrage, and they wrestle on the floor while the others snort and continue eating like nothing happened. At the end, Brutus takes her down so hard that her head cracks against the floor and she sees stars. Normally Lyme would cuss him out and kick him in the head and demand to know what the hell is wrong with him; now she swallows the vomit, stands up, and punches Brutus in the arm.

"Gonna have to try harder than that, asshole," she says as her head pounds and the floor tips sideways.

"Children," Odin calls out, amused, and nothing in his expression betrays that earlier that evening he tore Lyme to pieces and left her there. "Perhaps it's time to sleep. Big day tomorrow."

Nobody argues, least of all Lyme, who will need to sneak down to the medical centre after everyone's asleep to make sure she didn't just give herself a concussion. Claudius, wearing his full-on worry face, slips behind the couch and presses his fingers against the back of Lyme's skull before she knocks his hand away. "Boss, you took that fall pretty hard," he chides her. "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine," Lyme tells him, stressing the word and her authority enough that he bites his lip but backs off. "Go to bed, we've got a long day of kissing-up ahead of us."

Claudius makes a face, and he shoots one last concerned look over his shoulder but he does obey her. Lyme's head swims, and she holds a hand to her forehead as she retreats into her room, only to laugh when faced with the massive destruction in front of her. Right. Lyme leans against the wall, hands splayed against the cool wood for balance, and closes her eyes as she tallies her to-do list. Call an Avox to come clean the mess. Head down to medical to get herself sorted. Find a way to keep up the lie for the next two days, until it's too late and it won't matter whether she's murderous and selfish and emotional or not because Brutus won't be with her to see it.

Lyme takes the elevator instead of the stairs, and she presses her forehead to the mirrored back panel and practices her smile.


	5. Chapter 5: Break, Break, Break

Lyme buries herself in work after she talks with Odin, losing herself in sponsorship deals and personal appearances and the occasional fuck-for-business tryst because it's easier than watching Brutus disappear piece by piece. Brutus always had one foot in the Arena but not like this; now his eyes rove around the room searching for weaknesses, and his fists clench and unclench at his sides, hungry for blood.

Lyme was mean before the Centre took her, twisted by abuse and the powerlessness of childhood into a helpless, churning anger that struck out wherever she could; it didn't take much for them to turn her, take the violence beaten into her by her piece of shit father and help her aim it where they wanted. It meant, though, that at the end of the day it was easier for her to move on; the Games took all her fury and poured it out of her, and after the dark days of her recovery Lyme wanted nothing more than to leave that version of herself behind.

Brutus had been a good kid with a good family and a handful of rage issues that the Centre took and used to turn him into a murderer, and the problem with being a better person at the core is that it meant he has to justify what he did, make it right. For Brutus, letting all that go would be as good as admitting it meant nothing in the first place. Brutus converted himself over to the cult of the Games without anyone's help, creating justification for things that left Lyme's head spinning because he would've cracked otherwise. He wraps it all up in a neat package of duty and honour and noble sacrifice, things that Lyme couldn't give a shit about except that without her help more kids would die.

Odin's right; without absolute certainty behind him, Brutus will have a psychotic break; nobody freezes like Brutus when the rules aren't clear. He has to throw himself in headfirst now, because if they made him once then he can do it again; he only has to undo all the work Odin did bringing him back from the edge. And so Lyme watches as her friend with the dark sense of humour and free-flowing use of sarcastic nicknames because insults show affection better than feelings turns back into a snappish, tightly-wound tribute who's one wrong look away from breaking someone's face.

He needs to do it, but Lyme can't keep her part up for more than a few minutes, and so it's better for everyone if she dives into her job instead.

It only works so well, given that Lyme's job is the reason this is happening in the first place. It's rough every year, plotting against her fellow Twos to kill one of their own, but at least she doesn't know the tributes yet; Lyme might get attached to her own too early, but the other is never anything more than a target. Each year it's her fellow mentors she feels guilt for betraying, not the kids who die, and that might be awful but it's how she sleeps at night. This year she can't play that game; Lyme might not like her Victor-sibling much, but she's never, ever wanted Enobaria to die.

Lyme hates working against her mentor more than anything else. The last time, she and Nero were head to head in the 67th; she brought home Claudius, alive and half collapsed in her lap, and Nero got the consolation prize of Nikita in a casket. That alone had been bad enough, knocking their relationship off-kilter for a full six months. Now she's doing her best to ensure his own Victor winds up dead, and Nero, for his part, is letting her unravel because the less sane Lyme is, the higher the chances that Enobaria walks out alive.

She'd be more upset about that except that she's doing the same thing to Artemisia. Lyme pulled Misha out only two years after her own win, and her girl was wild and crazy and spent half her time sneaking out to bars and picking fights, but Lyme brought her back and held her down and loved her more than she thought she had inside her to give. Over the years they've avoided being paired up against each other because they both tend to pick the crazy, needy, desperate tributes, and that's not a great combination as district partners go; this year is their first.

Claudius is her youngest and her craziest and needs the most attention but Artemisia was her first, and it kills Lyme now to see her pulling away and not be able to help it. Lyme tried talking to Misha one night after Brutus and Enobaria went to bed, but her girl ratcheted tight and said no, she'd talk after the Games were over but it was too hard right now. It stuck Lyme right in the gut to let Misha walk away and close the door between them and know she had to let her go.

None of this should be happening. Katniss Everdeen might have crawled up the president's ass and set him to dancing, but he could have had her killed; he could have burned her village or slaughtered her family or sold her to the highest bidder, all things he's done to other Victors for far less egregious crimes than high treason on camera. But Snow chose to punish all the Victors to save himself the embarrassment of admitting a teenage girl made him look foolish, and so here they are, a family forged in blood tearing itself apart.

Lyme doesn't even bother to fight the thoughts anymore. What does it matter? She'd never get close enough to the president to kill him. Even if she succeeded, all she'd get would be two seconds of satisfaction before a guard blew her brains out, unless they kept her alive long enough to watch her Victors' Village burn first. The best Lyme can do is keep it off her face, bite back the bitter comments when talking to Brutus so she doesn't throw him off his game.

There is another option that crawls around in the back of her mind, but Lyme doesn't bother with it, either. It's selfish, solves nothing, and would leave her Victors alone and the rest of her fellow Twos to clean up the mess. Likely they'd all be punished for her weakness the same as if she went berserk and killed someone, and while technically she wouldn't be around to care anymore, it's been twenty years since Lyme was that selfish.

She doesn't want to die, anyway, not unless it's in the middle of a fire that takes out the entire Capitol with her. Lyme has always been practical.

One final option lurks behind the rest; one she's seen building up in District Eight, in Eleven, in Three, in the furtive whispers of the other mentors as they give her brittle smiles and a wide berth. Lyme does push that one back when it gets too close, shoos it away like one of Callista's cats when it twines around her ankles, and all it does is whisper. _Wait,_ it says in her ear when she smiles at Nymphadora Hunnicut and promises that if Brutus survives of _course_ he'd still be interested in continuing their arrangement. _Wait,_ it traces into the skin of her back with a fingernail when the footage of Brutus in the training centre, eyes wild with bloodlust and mouth set in a wicked grin, leaks to the sponsors and his odds shoot up two points. _Wait._

In a time when everything else slides under her feet like trying to keep standing at the top of a gravel rockslide, one thing Lyme knows more than anything: Brutus has to live. If he lives, they all go home and try to pick up the pieces and pretend that anything could ever be the same again. But if he doesn't - if he doesn't, then Lyme will take one of the options at her feet and run with it, and she might not know which but it's for sure not the one where she takes her loss with a smile, then packs her bag and heads for home like a good, respectable Two.

The thought-she-isn't-having slides a tongue across the back of her neck. _Just wait_.

"Boss?" Claudius slips halfway into her room the night before the individual sessions, hovering awkwardly in the doorway with his hand curled around the edge of the frame.

Lyme waves him in, belatedly registering she's been staring at the same page for over an hour now while her thoughts floated away. "You okay, D?" she asks, but then she looks at him, really looks, and oh no. Oh no no no no _no_.

She knows that face, eyes furtive but mouth and eyebrows determined, because she's seen it before. She saw it five years ago, the year she was given the task of making sure that a twelve-year-old who'd volunteered on a dare met with a quick and politically obvious end. The year Claudius held her pinned with his gaze and told her that one day she'd run, and when she did to take him with her.

"Not now," Lyme says immediately, before he has a chance to speak. Every room in the Games Complex is bugged, and while before last year the Twos had all the hidden cameras and microphone placements memorized, after the 74th the security teams changed them up and eliminated the known blind spots.

Claudius gives her a flat look like he's annoyed she thinks he's stupid. "I was just thinking about the summer," he says, casual, and he's one of the finest liars Two has ever seen but he's never fooled her. "Like, five years ago maybe? I don't know why."

"I don't remember." Lyme wets her lips, gripping the pen in her hand until the plastic casing cracks beneath the pressure of her fingers. She lets go just in time to stop from splattering herself with ink. "Sorry. Remind me when we have more time?"

Claudius perches on the edge of the bed, keeping his weight on his feet like he's expecting to have to run any second. "We were gonna take a vacation somewhere, just you and me, but we never did."

He looks at her, his eyes grey and dark and solemn, and the other reason Lyme never gave him the green light for mentor training is that if they paired him against her he'd let his tribute die in the dust before he crossed her. She can't have any more blood on her hands. She never asked for this kind of loyalty, this codependence, except - well, yes, she did. If she hadn't wanted this she wouldn't have fought so hard to bring him back. Everyone knows the Arena is the easy part.

Lyme runs her hand through her hair, fighting back the shiver of determination she doesn't have the freedom to feel. Not yet, not yet. Wait wait wait. "Let's see how the Games go down," she tells him neutrally. "With how crazy this year is, maybe I'll need a holiday."

Claudius nods, and some of the tension leaves his shoulders as he pushes himself back onto his feet. "See you at breakfast, boss." He tosses her an indifferent salute and leaves her alone.

Lyme slides her feet up and drops her forehead to rest on her knees. Brutus has to win. He has to, because like it or not, there's only one real choice left, and he's the only one in Panem who can talk her out of it.

* * *

Brutus and Enobaria don't bother with private training the day of the individual Gamemaker sessions and the scores; what's the point? Brutus knows the best way to kill Enobaria is to use his bulk, because she'll always be faster but she can only stab him so many times before he breaks her neck. Meanwhile, Nero will have told her not to let him get that close, to knife him from a distance or slit his throat while he's sleeping after the alliance cracks. There's nothing new their mentors can tell them in an hour that they haven't learned from over a decade of living in the same village, and Brutus is too experienced to kid himself that there's any way to prepare for specific scenarios. Hard enough in a normal year, but this year - forget it.

He'll snap her spine or she'll flay open his neck, and one way or another Two will take this one home. There's no point in pretending to have any secret strategies other than that, and so they take the morning off. After breakfast, Brutus and Enobaria head down with Odin and Nero to answer a few questions for the reporters crammed outside the building, but that's it; compared to the usual hectic schedule, having a couple of hours before the private sessions is an unthinkable luxury.

The message shows up an hour before the tributes are due downstairs to assemble for the sessions. Brutus looks up as Odin takes the slips of paper, giving the blank-faced Avox a hearty thanks. "Final alliance confirmation?" Brutus asks.

"It appears so." Odin crosses the room and sits back down with a thump. "One has confirmed, of course. Twelve - ah, Twelve has declined."

Enobaria snorts. "Their loss," she says around the straw in her mouth as she sucks down another smoothie. "Nero, if I'm good will you send me a blowtorch so I can make her the girl on fire for real?"

Nero's face pinches around the nose, but he's mentored Enobaria too long to react more than patting her on the arm. "I think that's a little close to Titus territory," he says in an apologetic tone that doesn't convey how absolutely batshit that suggestion was. Brutus swallows down a wave of horror at the question. "But we'll see."

"What's the matter?" Artemisia blurts out of nowhere, brow furrowed, and Brutus glances first at her, then follows her wide-eyed gaze to Odin.

Odin sits with the final piece of paper in his hand, his expression slack at the mouth, shocked into blankness but for the twitching around his eyes as the muscles tighten. Brutus sits up straight. "What?" he demands without thinking.

Odin exhales through his nose, then balls his hand into a fist, crushing the paper between his fingers. Brutus exchanges worried glances with Lyme. "Four has declined," Odin says calmly, the kind of calm that speaks to just how much media experience he's garnered over the years because what in the unholy _fuck_. "They do not feel an alliance with One or Two is profitable at the current time. Odysseus sends his apologies."

Claudius bursts up from his chair and stalks out of the room, probably to go get his knives and throw them into the walls; Enobaria starts to jump out of Nero's lap, but he pulls her back down and wraps his arms around her waist, holding her in place like a giant, muscled seatbelt. Lyme hisses through her teeth, sharp and furious and betrayed, while Artemisia falls back in her seat and turns slowly pale, then green. Lyme reaches over and grips her girl's wrist, and Artemisia doesn't pull away.

Brutus, for his part, tries to figure out where his stomach has gone, and why it bothered to take the rest of his insides with it.

Ronan stays where he is, spine as unbowed as the cane resting by his chair. His eyes burn hard in his face, the lines slowly resolving as his jaw clenches. "Does it say anything else?"

"No." Odin slowly uncurls his fingers, peels the crumpled paper flat again and hands it over to Ronan. It's the most control Brutus has seen him lose in all their years together; his heart thumps in his chest. "I can only assume that Four has decided to shift the narrative. We are to be cast as the villains this year, it seems."

"Good!" Enobaria bites out, still struggling half-heartedly against Nero's iron grip. "Then nobody will care when I tear Odair's pretty little eyes out and make him eat them!"

Nobody bothers to hush her, but they don't respond, either, and without an audience Enobaria soon subsides, teeth bared and snarling. "We can still play this," Nero says, hooking his chin over the top of Enobaria's head to try to settle her. "We all know that the president wants Katniss Everdeen and her boyfriend dead. If Four is throwing in their lot with her, then they're putting themselves on the Capitol's hit list. No matter what Twelve tries to do, we're the ones they want to win this year, not her."

Everyone nods except Brutus, because that makes no sense. Not that much has this past week, but Four and Twelve? It's suicide, and Mags isn't stupid. None of the Fours are.

"We don't know they're with Twelve," Brutus says. They all look at him, and he crosses his arms and sticks out his chin. "What? We don't. All we know is they're not with us. Maybe they figure they don't have enough to bring to the table to guarantee we won't take them out first. Mags is an asset in the sponsor ring, but she's dead weight in the Arena. Odair won't abandon her, even if he wanted to, because the sponsors would never give him another fucking breadcrumb, let alone a trident. Maybe they know we have the advantage and they're going it alone and hoping we'll kill each other off first."

Lyme shakes her head. "Mags tried to warn us, we just misunderstood. 'New players' meant she was planning on allying with Twelve, and she wanted to give us a heads up not to expect Four's support."

"Until I see Finnick Odair and Katniss Everdeen walk hand in hand away from the Cornucopia, I'm saying it's bullshit and I'm gonna keep saying it's bullshit," Brutus bites out.

Mags wouldn't do this to him, to Two; the Pack always splits in the end, but not like this. Never like this. She'd never plot against them from the start, never forego the near-sacred alliance for - what, exactly? What could any other district do for Four that Two couldn't? Nothing, that's what, and Mags is no idiot. She didn't pull out more Victors than any solo mentor in history by being rash. If Four doesn't want to ally with Two, it's because they'd run the numbers and decided they have better odds on their own. That's all.

Lyme slides a hand down her face. "I'm going to make sure Claudius hasn't crawled out through an air duct to murder someone while we're all distracted," she says, her tone artificially light, and nobody argues.

After she leaves, Odin shifts into a deliberate stance, feet at shoulder width and hands at his sides, looking at Brutus and Enobaria both. "You're angry," he says, his own voice like the thin layer of ice over a snowmelt river of fury. Enobaria rolls her eyes in a _no shit_ expression. "Good. Use that, both of you. The Gamemakers will want to see your anger, so keep it with you and show them everything you have."

Brutus nods. That won't be difficult, and at least it's familiar; back in the early, fuzzy days of his all but forgotten childhood, the Centre used his indignation at unfair situations to fan his anger into violence. Now, the urge to dig his hands in and tear something apart turns his fingers into fists and starts up a drumming in his blood that won't end until something is broken or bleeding beneath him.

"Then let's get going," Brutus says, and for once Enobaria doesn't whine or disagree to try to get a rise out of him. She leaps to her feet and bounces on her toes, and Brutus holds his breath for a moment to feel the pressure build in his chest and head. They are Two. They are united. They will overcome this.

They will kill each other or die trying.

They will win.

Brutus exhales. "Right," he says. "Let's go remind them why we're the ones to watch."

* * *

The twenty-four tributes assemble in one cramped space outside the training room, but unlike the past week, any pretence at inter-district friendliness is gone. They all pair off and talk together in groups, stare out into space or up at the ceiling or at their fingernails, and no one speaks above a whisper.

Brutus lowers himself down onto a bench built for someone maybe two-thirds his size, stares down at his knees two inches away from his chin, then snorts and slides down onto the floor. Normally Brutus wouldn't show such blatant disregard for propriety, but there's a damn line, and with the anger still buzzing in his veins, he's not sitting with his damned knees shoved up his damned throat. Enobaria sprawls with her back to the wall and her feet splayed out into the space where Brutus was sitting, and she pulls a knife from nowhere and flicks it into the air, spinning it so the blade catches the overhead lighting.

"So, I heard the little bitch is too good to join an alliance," Cashmere says breezily as she and Gloss sweep into the room, sitting down together on the bench as a single unit. She uses a voice just loud enough to alert the Twelves but not so much that she can't pretend it's accidental. "Fine by me. The less time I have to waste playing nice, the better."

Enobaria bares her teeth. "If you think I'm letting you have her, you've been sniffing too much of your own perfume."

Cashmere raises a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. "What, and you think you have the right to kill her?" she drawls with a casual unconcern that the lines around her eyes reveal as pure bullshit. This time she keeps her voice down; this time it's real anger, private and poisonous, not an attempt to startle the outliers off their game. "Please. If anyone gets to cut her self-righteous little heart out, it's me. I'm sick of watching her moon all over the place, so sad because they had to cancel her _wedding_."

"Well you know what they say..." Gloss grins, hard and nasty, and Cashmere leans her head against his shoulder. Brutus looks away. "I'll be happy to give her something to cry about."

"You can have whatever's left when I'm done with her," Enobaria says, tossing her head, and she balances her knife on the tip of her finger. "See, Nero said I should share and so I'm sharing."

Cashmere snorts. The announcer calls Gloss' name, and he disentangles himself from his sister and kisses her hair on the way out. She watches him go, anger and worry contorting her face, and no sponsors will see this footage so there's no point in pasting on the smile. Nobody in this room, except maybe the babies, would buy it anyway.

"All I want to know is, why should anyone give a shit that she's going to die before she can have her perfect little love story," Cashmere snarls, too ugly and real to be for Katniss' benefit, but her voice rises high enough that the girl's head snaps up anyway. Brutus sucks air through his teeth, trying to decide whether it's worth intervening or if he can wait it out until the Gamemakers call her in. "The rest of us had to sit through our own shitty lives and then die anyway. I'm pretty sure there's no contest."

"Hey," Katniss snaps, and she starts to stand but her boy gets a hand on her arm and pulls her back down. "I didn't ask to be here, you know!"

Cashmere stands, the motion lithe and sinuous, and Brutus fights the urge to cross his legs and hide. "Honey, let me tell you a secret; none of us _asked_ to be here, but here we are, and it's the fault of only one person in this room."

With that, Cashmere stalks out, likely to wait outside the door for Gloss directly.

"Fuck," Brutus mutters, rubbing a hand over his face, then looks up right into the sea-green eyes of Finnick Odair.

He stiffens, but the kid just holds his stare for a few seconds, the corner of his mouth turned up in the enigmatic smile that captivates his audience but anyone with a brain knows means 'fuck you'. Odair looks away after a few seconds, unconcerned, turning to say something to Mags in a low voice, then lets out a throaty laugh and twirls a strand of her hair around his fingers. Brutus tears his eyes away before he tries to set the kid on fire with his mind.

They're supposed to be allies. In a year where everything else has gone to hell and back, allies are the one thing that's meant to stick. And maybe Brutus is naive, maybe he really was just reaped yesterday, but he thought that the years of working together would've counted for something. Not just the hours spent in the control room, hunched over their consoles, but after: the victory parties, the tours; the days when they couldn't deal anymore and everyone, Brutus included, flopped in the Victor common lounge to make fun of shitty Capitol movies. The time Brutus caught seventeen-year-old Odair puking his guts out in the lounge and carried him up to the Four floor, the boy cursing Brutus the whole way even as Brutus' shirt went damp beneath his face.

But no, apparently not. Apparently none of that is worth shit, and Brutus knows how to play the game, all right, he's been a Victor since before Odair was no more than a twinkle in his daddy's eye, but there is shit you do to win and shit you don't because it takes the meaning out of winning. Brutus grits his teeth and looks away. Maybe he's old-fashioned. Or maybe he's just plain old.

Except Mags is twice his age and should know better, but here she's tossed them to the mutts all the same.

The anger rises again, a screaming crescendo that pushes Brutus to his feet and starts him pacing well before Cashmere's session finishes. The room is cramped, and he crosses it in four strides before spinning on his heel and stalking back. It raises the tension between the Victors - the smattering of conversation sputters and dies, except for Poppy from Six, who's counting the colours in the room in a dreamy voice - but ask Brutus if he cares. Let them feel it. Let the discomfort crawl under their skin and keep them up at night for once.

"You're driving me crazy," Enobaria calls out, and she whips a knife straight at his face. Brutus snatches it out of the air and hurls it right back at her, all power and no aim. The blade flies past her head and embeds itself in the wall behind her while she cackles.

By the time they call his name, Brutus has worked himself up into a froth, and he turns back to the room to blast it with an undirected glare before heading out through the side door. Let them all think it's for them - Chaff, alcoholic and neglectful and self-righteous about his own failings; Katniss Everdeen, judgemental but with no less blood on her hands than anyone else; Finnick Odair and his smug secrets. Even Mags, whose hand on Brutus' shoulder got him through his first tribute's death but who couldn't even stab him in the back in person.

They want to cast the Careers as villains in their little story, then a villain he'll be. If this past year has proved anything, it's that only traitors and idiots love a hero.

Twenty-six years ago, Odin urged Brutus not to be too arrogant when he walked into the room for his training session; stalk but don't saunter, stride but don't strut. There's nothing the Gamemakers enjoy more than cutting the legs out of an overconfident tribute, Career or no; they like a little humility, for the tribute to remember who built them up and who can tear them down.

It's not the 49th anymore, and Brutus marches into the room like he owns it. "District Two at your service," he says, his voice bouncing off the walls. For a split-second the deja-vu threatens to swamp him, but Brutus raises his chin and fixes his gaze on Plutarch Heavensbee and lets his rage ground him. "What would you like to see today?"

Heavensbee smiles. "Remind us why you're the favourite," he says, picking up an apple from the table and rolling it in his fingers.

Brutus salutes. He picks up the nearest spear, tosses it in his hand to test the weight, then throws it straight through the line of dummies stacked against the side wall.

He doesn't bother with fancy tricks or changing personas; no point to that, when half the tributes in the Arena this year are batshit crazy. The Gamemakers will have _personality_ coming out their ears; what they need is reliable, strong, surefire and absolutely dangerous. Odin and Brutus agreed on the strategy this morning, and Brutus keeps his expression deadpan as he goes through the motions, sword and spear and falchion, cutting the physical dummies to pieces and scattering the virtual ones into cubes of light.

Except that halfway through the poker face falls away; his muscles sing with the long-familiar rhythm, and he's tapped into a well of fury he hasn't touched since he was a teenager. Even when sparring off against other Victors in the Village, friendly matches that ended in broken bones and bloodied faces, Brutus always kept well back of the line, content never to use that part of himself ever again. The Centre made him a killer but he made himself a man, and for the last two and a half decades Brutus has lived without the need to look back.

Except the trainers didn't get the murder from nowhere; they might have teased it out of him, drawn it out and magnified it and set it on fire, but they didn't put the spark in him. They didn't invent the sick twist of pleasure the first time he beat the shit out of a boy who insulted his mama, the sharp spark of satisfaction when the little asshole didn't get up again.

For the first time in years, Brutus shoves both hands into the box where he keeps that part of himself and digs deep.

They call time, and Brutus whirls around to face them, blood pounding and head ringing but not a whit out of breath. "Very impressive," Heavensbee calls down from his platform. Brutus breaks his rule of no showy shit to spin the sword around in his hand before plunging it into the fallen torso of the final dummy, blinking in confusion at the lack of blood before his mind slides back into place. "We'll be watching you in the Arena."

Brutus fights the impulse to glance down at his hands to check if they're clean. "Looking forward to it," he says with a shark's smile, and he almost believes it.

* * *

That night, Brutus scores a ten, same as last time, and his past and present self glare out from the screen as the numbers spin between them. Lyme claps him on the shoulder and Odin nods his approval, but then it's Enobaria's turn and she whoops with triumph as the double-ones rotate back and forth. "Suck it, caveman," Enobaria hoots, pointing her finger close enough that if Brutus were another kind of person he'd threaten to bite it off. "Eleven, ha!"

"Do I even want to know?" Brutus asks dryly, batting her hand away and crossing his arms.

Enobaria chuckles, ending in a nostalgic sigh as she wipes away an invisible tear. "I turned a dummy into little Miss Everbitch and set her on fire, among other things."

Claudius snickers behind his hand. "Did you draw the braid on the dummy's head?"

"What, you think I'm an amateur?" Enobaria shoots back. "No, I took some rope from the knot-tying station, braided it all nice and pretty and painted it brown." She rolls her eyes. "She's the one who got to have a _hairstyle_ as her signature look, for fuck's sake. At least it was easy."

Nobody looks at her fangs, glinting sharp and wicked in the fluorescent lighting.

"An excellent showing from both of you, especially given that in an all-Victor year they'll have adjusted the scores accordingly," Ronan says with a nod.

Cashmere and Gloss scored twin nines - like they give a shit about scores when they're not planning on walking out, but even sleepwalking they could hardly score lower - and Odair nets himself a ten. Mags gets a one, which shocks even Brutus before he remembers he's not supposed to care. After that it doesn't matter - none of the outliers, not even Johanna Mason and her personal blend of crazy, are real contenders - until at the very end, when both Katniss and Peeta manage to earn a pair of twelves.

Claudius whistles, low and impressed, and the rest of them fall silent. No tribute has ever earned a twelve in the history of the Games, but it doesn't take a genius analyst to know what that means for the Careers. Odin clears his throat. "Well," he says into the silence. "It appears it's fortunate they rejected our alliance after all."

Enobaria lets out a long hiss, eyes fixed on the TV screen even after the lovebirds disappear and the commentators start their analysis. Claudius pretends he's dropped something in the couch cushions so he can scoot away without looking like he really wants to run.

"It's not real," Nero reminds her quickly. "It's to make them a target, that's all. You still have the highest score."

"I don't care!" Enobaria explodes, and Brutus can't even blame her this time. "That eleven is _mine_ ! I earned it, not them, and now everyone will be talking about the nasty little cheating traitors _again_! It's not fair! I want to kill them right now!" Nero wraps an arm around her, and she puts the teeth away but doesn't stop shaking. "Does this mean I get my blowtorch?" Enobaria asks, fingers twitching against her legs.

Nero grimaces, and Brutus watches the man wrestle his girl's sanity against the orders that no Career can ignore without committing suicide. Finally he presses his mouth together and makes the decision every mentor makes whenever this choice hits them: you can weave the pieces of their minds back together after, but only if they're alive for you to do it. "Looks like it does."

Enobaria doesn't even gloat, and Brutus exhales a long, slow breath. "I'm going to bed," he says. Lyme opens her mouth like she wants to say something, but then she nods and starts scooping up her paperwork instead.

Brutus stares at the ceiling for a long, long time before he finally falls asleep.


	6. Chapter 6: Aggressive Negotiation

If Ronan has learned one thing in his seventy-six years of life, it's that no matter how many people scream, how many people die, how many people pray or cry or love or fight or never get out of bed, the sun will rise each morning and District Two will endure.

Ronan lived out his childhood as his district pulled itself together from the ashes of rebellion; watched the volunteers from Two grow from misfits and criminals and would-be murderers to the proud, if hopelessly naive, Careers of today. He spent his early years in the uncertainty and low-grade terror of the first decade of the new era; trained and fought during the grim, bleak acceptance of the teens, when Two began to realize the Games were a fixture and that they had the power to bend this fledgling system to their will. He survived the first Quarter Quell and the resignation of the twenties, when the districts, shocked by their own brutality as they sent their children to their deaths, fell into passive obedience. Still in his youth, Ronan brokered the deal that left Two's Victors safe from the threat of prostitution to which every other district lay vulnerable.

He conquered the unrest and grumbling of the thirties, coached his young mentors through three of Two's noblest victories and restored honour to the image of the Games, providing hope for a people who had begun to question. The forties, when Two stood strong despite the rising whispers of revolution in the advent of the second Quarter Quell; the fifties, Two's most prolific decade, a prosperous era when the rest of the nation struggled. He predicted the sixties and its rash of unstable yet entertaining Victors as the audiences grew bored of stoic quarry children who did their duty with solemn pride. He cautioned the Centre against churning out more and more volatile tributes in an attempt to ride the wave and sacrifice their souls in so doing, taking them through to the 75th with fewer Victors, but saner ones than would have been otherwise.

In that time, District Twelve lost its first Victor to suicide and had its supplies ravaged and its fields burned, the district boundary moved inward to encircle it in a tight grip, abandoning all arable land to the wilds outside. District Ten made a desperate bid for Career status and found themselves without a Victor for thirty years in recompense for their arrogance. Eleven fell to the lash; Eight and Six staggered beneath the weight of industrialization as their people choked on fumes and smog; Three turned on itself to create the best and brightest and discard the rest.

And through it all, District Two prevailed, strong and true, its people proud and humble all at once, as solid and unchanging as the mountains within its borders.

It's something Ronan doesn't expect the younger Victors to understand, and certainly doesn't blame them for the lack, especially not this year. Whether it's Brutus - whose commitment to the mythology of a nonexistent honour makes him remarkably effective yet psychologically fragile - or Lyme - too smart not to see the strings that make her dance, and smart enough to pretend she doesn't - the children fight to understand, to conquer, as if anything they do can change the tide.

Are the Hunger Games a true pageant of nobility, virtue, and integrity? No. They're a tool of intimidation and fear, and no amount of window dressing will make it any prettier to Ronan, no matter how much the children he's trained to believe it cling to the justification. But on the reverse, will acknowledging their brutality and pointlessness spare a single life, or feed the hungry, or save parents the district over from seven long years of fear? No, no, and no. There is no justice, no honour, no pageantry or self-deceit or truth, only what will be done, what must be done, and what must never be.

The 75th Games are nothing more than this. Ronan's children, they look on them as a betrayal of everything they were promised, but Ronan knows better. They were promised nothing, assured nothing. Every advantage Two has over the other districts is because someone like Ronan clawed it out until their fingers bled; every privilege could disappear the next time the president decides he has a headache. Nothing is guaranteed, and that means nothing is a betrayal; there can be no betrayal when there's no contract in the first place. Loyalty between Two and the Capitol only runs one way, and Ronan has walked that particular tightrope all his life.

The question of the Quarter Quell is not whether the Capitol is right to take their Victors back after all but promising them life; the question is, is this an anomaly, or the beginning of a new era? There's a fine line between allowing the Capitol to have its fun to avoid being flattened and knowing when to dig your heels in. The trouble is this: zero hour is closing in, Ronan still hasn't found it, and he knows better than anyone alive the consequences of what will happen if he fails.

Everyone in the interior knows that Two's secret export is weapons and soldiers; it's been that way since Ronan was a boy, trading personnel and equipment for more food runs, faster maintenance, better infrastructure. Everyone also knows that District One does the same with whores. Not everyone can remember the year it happened.

Ronan remembers Amberly. She won the first Quarter Quell against an Arena stacked with the undesirables, murdering her own district partner in the bloodbath to show everyone her worth. When Ronan shook hands with her on her Victory Tour - the last stop before the Capitol - she dug her nails into the back of his hand, gave him a sharp grin and said maybe they could see each other again some time. Ronan, who hadn't thought about girls in years with all the work he'd thrown himself into, found himself flustered. She'd laughed, winked at him, and taken a little too long to release his hand.

He never saw her again, but he heard plenty. Rumours said that when her Tour reached the Capitol, she had a very special assignment waiting for her. At the time Ronan dismissed it, as did the rest of Two - until Amberly turned up dead in her bathtub, wrists slashed and blood pooling on the linoleum. The photos were leaked, circulated, then very quickly erased from existence, but it was too late. Everyone knew.

Thanks to Twelve, everyone also knew what happened to a district whose Victor suicided out, and District One scrambled to avoid the same fate. Ronan wasn't at the meeting, but he heard about it later when Eluria broke into his suite in the Capitol and crawled into his bed, not to seduce him but so she could drink an entire bottle of hard liquor without worrying she'd poison herself alone.

"I did it," she told him, slurring into his lap. "I sold it. I told them if they'd just let us prepare the girls first, they could have whoever they wanted. Just don't throw them in without training, that's what did Amberly in. If they know what's coming they'll be prepared, just like we were." She laughed, hiccuped, and shifted to puke over the side of the bed. Ronan still recalls the soft slide of her hair through his fingers as he held it back. She rolled over and grinned up at him, vomit shining on her teeth, eyes bright and red and swollen. "We were prepared for anything, weren't we. It's no different. We teach them to kill; now we'll teach them how to fuck. It's no different."

Whenever the Capitol makes a demand, it's always, always willing to make a trade if the alternative offered is worse than the one they presented. Over the years District One gave the lives and bodies of their prettiest children - girls first, then boys, first only the Victors but then the washouts as well - in exchange for the lie that preparation lessened the hurt.

Ronan could have fought the Quell when the card was announced; he could have taken the first train into the Capitol and asked for an audience, talked with President Snow man to man, but for what? What would he be expected to offer in exchange? Never saying no means the Capitol will take and take and take until there's nothing left, but every resistance comes at a cost - especially when it's the case of the Capitol saving face.

The mountains in Two will stand when the people of Two have fallen into dust, and Ronan draws not just his strength but his perspective from the district that raised and sheltered him. President Snow was outwitted by a teenager and needs to remind the people who's in charge; once this is over, things will return to normal. The very nature of the Quell must be anomaly by definition; after this the Games will resume, if the Capitol is allowed to flex its muscles. If the districts bow their head just this once.

If they let their Victors die.

If it saves the district, if it protects the people - the families, parents, and children; the workers who make its backbone and the military that wields its strength - then yes, Ronan will make that sacrifice. But rather than weeping victims, what Two will have is a martyr, and there is no finer martyr than Brutus. He is Two as sure as trees have roots, and his loss will prove that Two is loyal in a way that cannot be controverted.

But Ronan does not sacrifice his children lightly, and if he's going to give Brutus over to death immemorial then it will be for a reason. Brutus' life is a trade, not tribute, freely given but not deserved, and Ronan would not do so without recompense. Through Brutus - the greatest Victor of his generation, the paragon of loyalty - Two will remind the Capitol of everything it has offered in the past, and mark itself for future favour yet again.

Ideally, anyway. This time the ground is shifting and Ronan isn't as sure as he would like to be, and so he watches, and listens, and lays weights on both sides of the scale - and never stops looking for an alternative.

The interviews will be the final test. How the Capitol audience reacts to their pets being taken away; how the president works to leverage their demands. If there is an out - if there's any room to wedge in a crowbar and start wiggling - it will be now. If Two shows itself utterly committed to the end, then a reprieve would be a show of the president's mercy, not caving to a demand. If the other Victors can keep themselves from losing it - if when they make their inevitable pleas they stay away from demands that would require a double show of force as a reminder - then maybe, maybe. But relying on his fellow Victors for restraint has never been one of Ronan's top plans.

It starts off well enough. Gloss makes Ronan wince right out of the gate with a dig against the buyers who have paid for him and his sister since their victories ("thank you for your kindness" indeed!) but he says it with a picture-perfect smile, and the point of the remark flies over everyone's heads. Ronan pinches the bridge of his nose anyway.

"Ballsy," Claudius says after a pause, his face screwed into a wince. The One siblings never forgave him for managing to escape sex slavery twice over by virtue of being a Two and physically unappealing to their clientele.

"Foolish," Odin counters, shaking his head and frowning. "An unnecessary risk. Although I cannot say I fault him."

When it's Brutus and Enobaria's turn to leave their prep area and head backstage, Nero catches Enobaria by the arm and pulls her in close, his head resting against her forehead so she can't escape his stare no matter how great her distraction. "Save it for the Arena," he tells her, hands firm on her shoulders. "They already know what to expect from you in general, so don't give it all away."

"Don't worry." Her teeth glimmer in the light. "The blowtorch is our little secret."

"Defend our honour," Ronan tells her, and Enobaria flashes him a hard glance. It's never been her specialty, and with Brutus in the room filling the very air with the force of his, she must feel like any attempt of hers would be a wasted one. "I mean it." Ronan holds her gaze, and this time Enobaria narrows her eyes but she doesn't argue. "The Twelves will be looking to discredit us. Brutus won't attack, so that's your job. The best defence -"

She grins.

"I don't know what her problem is," Enobaria says to Caesar, shrugging one smooth, muscled shoulder. Every ounce of her drips danger, confidence, excitement. Most of Two will be betting on Brutus, but Ronan did not back her just to even the numbers and keep it fair. "We offered her an alliance and she turned it down. I guess we're not good enough to be in her little club or something since we won on our own instead of through the power of true love." She laughs, mean and mocking, and some of the audience with her. "But fine by me. I was willing to be friends, but if she doesn't want to play then I won't either. I just hope Twelve remembers that we didn't make an enemy out of them, but she sure made one out of me."

Brutus, for his turn, doesn't take the bait Caesar offers by asking whether Brutus holds a grudge from last year. "This isn't about Twelve, or rivalries, or any of that," he says, leaning back in his chair like he owns it, feet planted wide apart and eyes skimming the crowd. "This is about proving what everyone already knows about District Two: we always go above and beyond. We don't complain, we don't negotiate, we just bring our best to the table every time. My being here is part of that commitment."

And this, this is why Brutus will make their martyr and Enobaria their Victor. Enobaria's danger is remembering the taste of blood and forgetting she's meant not to love it; the other Victors worry that if she gets to kill again, she'll never come back. Brutus is the safe bet, the sane bet, but it's that very reason why Ronan knows otherwise. For Enobaria, the other tributes are not her colleagues, not her friends. She stays within the confines of the Village, safe and all but cosseted by Nero; all he has to do is tell her to do whatever she needs to do to come home, and she will.

But Brutus - he is a good man, perhaps the best Two has ever raised, and he cannot kill his fellow Victors and return home the same. Once the surety fades he will break, and Ronan would not see their most loyal Victor fall apart. It's kinder for Brutus to die knowing he did his duty, not only to his district and his country, but also to his fellow Twos, in giving Enobaria a mentor to return to when she wins.

As for the Quell itself, Brutus' interview is not a plea. He gives himself, his last breath and heartbeat, without reservation, his words ringing clear over the audience - but it is, in a way, the only kind of appeal Two is capable of making. Brutus is the paragon of duty and obedience; how can they look at him, stalwart in the face of death - again - when the other districts will surely snap, and throw him to the mutts?

It is Two's last chance - their only chance - but he played it to perfection, and Ronan carries the hope inside him until the man from Three opens his mouth and the rest of the evening goes straight into the depths of hell.

The rest of the interviews are a mess. The other Victors sob and plead and cajole; they presume to tell the Capitol its business, recite its statutes; they define its morals, challenge its sovereignty, and all but dare the president to gun them all down at that very moment.

"Fools," Ronan grits out under his breath, and they are safe from the cameras here in the Two backstage enclave and so he allows himself the luxury. "Idiots! They have no idea what they've done."

Claudius glances at him, frowning with his thumbnail between his teeth. "What? They're desperate, it's not that weird. What are they supposed to do?"

"Not 'weird', perhaps, but idiocy, yes," Ronan hisses. "They've backed the president into a corner. If he recants now, it will be because he caved to their demands, and anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows he cannot back down now. Our only hope was his magnanimity."

"You can't blame them for not holding their breath on that one," Lyme mutters. Nero breaks the alliance line to silence her with a look, but she glares back, unbowed.

"Well, you can't," Artemisia agrees, taking her mentor's side for the first time since she was drafted to work to bring Brutus down, though she doesn't look at her. "Two is the only district that could expect mercy and everyone knows it. The only thing they can do is fight. It's not because they know they can win, it's because they'll lose themselves if they don't."

Ronan allows himself another five seconds of furious frustration before he exhales and pushes it out with the breath of air. It's the opposite of what he learned as a boy - inhale the anger, hold it, let it spread through him and turn it into something physical - but Ronan has had decades upon decades of practice with patience. There's no point to holding onto anger with nowhere for it to go, and he lets it dissipate out into the room.

His children are right, of course. There was never much hope for rationality from the others, but even less reason for Ronan to expect it. The other districts do not receive the privileges of Two, and it would be the height of unfairness for him to demand them to act like it. He should know better; call it a nasty side effect of retiring twenty years ago and spending the last few years rocking on his porch and smoking cigars. Ronan still meets the president for his monthly poisoned teacakes and verbal sparring, but otherwise his only company are the young Twos he trounces in checkers.

Ronan grips his cane until his fingers ache. "Well, the die is cast now," he says, grim, and looks up at the camera just in time to watch the boy from Twelve bring down the house.

"...if not for the baby," Peeta says. He speaks with an exaggerated hangdog expression that would have won him no points in the Centre, and possibly a reprimand for overdoing it, but of course this is the Capitol where there is no such thing as melodrama.

"You've got to be _fucking_ kidding me!" Claudius explodes, and no one bothers to scold him. Behind him on the Two screen, Brutus maintains a stony expression while Enobaria's grows steadily more furious, eyes narrowed and snapping.

Nero pushes a hand into his hair. "We should have seen it coming. How would they top a surprise love confession and an on-stage proposal? Of _course_ there's a baby."

Lyme lets out three long breaths, her throat working and nostrils flaring, and finally she turns on her heel and stalks away into the adjoining room, where the sounds of fists hitting steel filter through the closed door.

Ah.

Last year, the lovebirds from Twelve stole the show from Two, and while Ronan willingly acknowledges the years when another district outplays his, Two's 74th pair played to perfection and deserved the win. He's seen too many Games to hold grudges, but Cato and Clove certainly did not deserve to be cast the villains in a love story as false as the One girl's vapid persona. Careers make their living off of media training and invented personas but they never resort to such obvious falsehood. Then again, they have the advantage of not needing to, and Twelve can't be blamed for clawing any advantage where they can.

Ronan has not had the time to devote more than cursory attention to Lyme this past year, but as far as he's seen she has held up well, avoiding the bitterness that would not be surprising given her tribute's grislier-than-normal death. But now it's her best friend up against another manufactured tale, Two's honesty and valour undercut by Twelve's deception. Lyme is only human, and her temper has always flowed close to the surface. Ronan understands her grief and frustration, but it has no place in the mentor's chair; better for her to let it out now and move on. Claudius, having made his outburst, is back to the screen, watching the rest of Twelve's interview with narrowed eyes and a keen expression.

Nero closes his eyes, and Ronan recognizes the flicker of movement behind his lids that signifies going through the death list as a means of calming himself. A moment later he hisses between his teeth and heads after his Victor, and Ronan lets him. The cracks in Lyme's sanity are deep enough now that one indulgence on Nero's part will not harm his efforts to bring Enobaria home.

"This is ridiculous," Artemisia says, still frowning and setting down her needlework, a half-finished cross-stitch with the words 'fuck the haters' picked out in cheery blue thread. "It's obviously a lie, he's not even trying." She waves a hand at the secondary screens showing the audience reaction, currently a compilation of various painted figures in attitudes of caricatured grief and shock. "I mean, I know _they_ can't tell, but the Gamemakers and the hardcore sponsors, they'll see through it in a second."

The audience erupts into chaos; the Capitol citizens weep and scream and wail, and Ronan jerks back a little as the first strains of "Stop the Games!" begin to filter through the wordless shouts. A chill runs up his spine. The Victors and the districts can't change the president's opinion, but his own city's citizens -

Caesar Flickerman ushers Peeta Mellark back to his post, and then the unthinkable happens: the Victors join hands in a wave, starting from the outlying districts and moving inward, ending with Cashmere and Gloss, faces radiant and eyes hard with challenge. Caesar's face loses all colour under the pounds of makeup; he makes a hasty gesture, and the lights go out right before the cameras cut off and the screen goes black.

"Well." Ronan sways, and Artemisia leaps out of her seat to push a chair close to him so he can collapse into it. "We're all dead now."

* * *

The summons comes moments later, before the tributes have even returned from the stage. "The president requests one mentor from each district to accompany him for an emergency session," says the woman in the crisp white suit, and Ronan raises himself to his feet with his stick.

"Shall I go?" Odin asks, but Ronan shakes his head. Odin is Brutus' mentor twice over, and even if it did not affect his objectivity, after what they've all witnessed, Brutus will need a steady and settling hand. Nero, likewise, will be required to ensure Enobaria does not set the room afire, and none of the younger Victors have anywhere near the calm required for such a meeting.

Ronan is aware he will be the rock in the centre of a raging storm, but that is why he's here. He stands, putting more weight on his cane than he would have liked. For a moment the years press down on him all at once, and Ronan fights the urge to lower his head into his hands. Instead he straightens his spine, raises his chin, and follows the aide through the corridors up to the presidential chambers.

The mentors mill together outside the massive oak doors while they wait for the cue to enter. Ronan skims the crowd and finds Lumina, the Victor from Three who won the year before him, standing off to the side, fingers tapping against her skirt. "I don't like leaving Eibhlin alone," she says to Ronan in a low voice when he draws near, putting a hand on her elbow. Three's youngest is skittish and moody, and Ronan winces at the thought of her sitting alone. "She's upset by all of this as it is."

"At least you don't have to worry about her gutting an Avox and painting the walls with the blood, as Enobaria might without supervision," Ronan says lightly, squeezing her arm and defaulting to exaggeration to make her smile.

It doesn't work, not today. Lumina draws her mouth into a thin line. "No, just drawing so far into herself that she never comes out again. But even if they hadn't limited us to one per district, I wouldn't have brought her here. Not with _him_."

Ronan winces, mentally giving himself a rap over the head with his cane like he does the youngsters when they're inappropriate. He only resorts to black humour when his control cracks, and Ronan makes note of his mental state and resolves not to slip again. This is the last place Ronan can afford a slip of nerves, and he's hurting his friend besides. "My apologies," he says, and means it.

Lumina shakes her head. "Do you really think the Games will be cancelled?"

Ronan looks out over the mentors and their mix of fear, fury, and catatonia, and a sick dread fills his chest. "No. And I'm not sure they should. I'm afraid of what he'll ask for in return."

"As am I." Lumina sighs, and she holds out one hand in front of her, flexing her fingers as the veins show dark under her pale skin. "We're old, Ronan."

Ronan grips her hand, his fingers no less wrinkled than hers, and his district's tributes have killed hers eight years out of ten but when you've lived as long as they have some things transcend the piles of corpses. "Not so old that we've seen everything."

She turns back to the giant oaken door, the Panem seal carved into its centre. "Apparently not."

They wait outside for a good while longer, a standard tactic employed by the Capitol that Two makes no use of after the Centre, but finally the doors swing open and an aide urges the mentors inside. President Snow stands at the head of the room, hands on the table in front of him with fingers half-flattened from the pressure, and Ronan holds his breath. Coriolanus has always favoured deliberate unconcern when facing his opponents; remaining calm in the face of anger or fear is his favourite way to showcase his power. Whenever the man is too agitated to trust himself with pruning his roses, that's a bad sign for everyone.

The Victors file in, and Ronan takes his place at the head of the group, the others in a misshapen phalanx behind him. There are other Victors older than Ronan, but only a handful still alive and most in the grip of senility, and none of them have come out the better in deals with the devil against three presidents. Of all the Victors in this room, Ronan is the one with the most to lose and the least to fear. He and Coriolanus have played this game for decades; it's a chess match, a dance performed on razor wire, and both of them know the other's moves.

More than anything Coriolanus loves to show off, and since the inauguration of his presidency he has invited Ronan to his mansion for a game of strategy nearly every single month. Ronan has bargained - for extra supplies, for funding, for the installation of a new mine in a town whose quarry ran dry - over black and white pieces and a chequered board for decades. He has learned how to play in more ways than one: how to gauge when Ronan hedging a victory on the board will make Coriolanus pleased and inclined to be generous, or when he'll feel insulted that Ronan lost on purpose and feel the need to recoup his honour by taking something dear. Ronan can track the progress of the negotiations by the other man's moves: slow and deliberate, sliding the pieces with one finger; or slashing and violent, knocking the taken pawns with his bishop so they clatter across the table.

But there is no game board here, the table bare and forbidding. Ronan will have to predict the weather without looking out the window.

The first time Ronan saw the newly elected president, he'd called Ronan in for a friendly game of chess while he described his ... unique situation. Certain people felt he had not come to his position honestly. Certain people had been dealt with, he said, shifting his queen forward two spaces, putting her in danger of a gaggle of Ronan's pawns. Not everyone could be dealt with by force, Ronan agreed, and deployed his knight to protect her against his own pieces. Power requires legitimacy, and legitimacy means backup; Ronan agreed to modify the existing Peacekeeper training system, creating an elite band to act as the president's personal guards and hit squad, and in return, his Victors could do as they wished after they won.

Back then, Coriolanus had been dark-haired and ruthlessly handsome, his pictures gracing the walls of teenaged girls all over the Capitol. Now, Ronan looks up at the man who poisoned his way to power and wonders when he got so old.

"I'm glad you could make it," Coriolanus says, but his hand stay on the table, no theatrical gestures. Ronan's fingers tighten on his cane. "Now that you're all here, give me one reason why I shouldn't shut the doors and burn the Games Complex to the ground, taking you and your seditious tributes with you."

Silence. Ronan battles back the weeks and months of uncertainty and fear; he smiles, deferent but not self-abasing. "You'd waste one hell of an Arena."

A pause, long and brittle, but finally Coriolanus laughs - just once, short and sharp and nasty, but he straightens his spine and stands, his hands leaving the table's surface and curling at his sides. Better. "Good point. All right then, tell me this: what am I supposed to do about a city of screaming hysteria, caused by _your Victors_, who should know better? How are you going to fix this mess?"

"Cancel the Games," says Diana from Eight immediately, as of course she would. She allowed a mother of three to stand for the Reaping and told everyone who questioned her that the blame lay with the Capitol, not her cowardice. Any chance to soothe her guilty soul.

Ronan exhales through his nose, and he looks back to Coriolanus just in time to catch the president's wry smile as he flicks his eyes up toward the ceiling and back to Ronan. It's a gesture of exasperated camaraderie not lost on Ronan, and certainly not on the other Victors who are half the intended audience. "That wouldn't solve my wasted Arena problem, now would it," Coriolanus says in an attempt at his usual overly patient tone, but there's too much ice in it.

"You could run a regular Reaping instead, maybe," says Angus from Ten, speaking slowly, and he at least is smart enough not to make it an order. The farming districts move slower, but all that means is they don't charge head-first into stupidity quite so much. "Or, well, an irregular one, bein' as it's the Quell, so you could make your own rules."

A good effort until that last, and Ronan nearly flings up his hands.

"I do make my own rules," Coriolanus says mildly, exactly as Ronan knew he would.

Cora from Nine stares down at her hands, twisting her wedding ring around her finger. "Kill the girl," she says, and the room whips around to stare at her. She looks up, face hard, and she won her Games with little more than a bullwhip, strangling half her victims at close range after luring them in with her pretty face. "Mr. President, we all know this is about Katniss Everdeen. Kill her publicly and send a message. Half the people on that stage tonight have been punished for less."

She and Burt are expecting their second grandchild; Ronan sent a card when he heard the news. In his interview tonight, Burt showed Caesar a photo of the first, a little girl with a smile like the sunshine, perched atop a giant horse. "Two years old and already riding," Burt told the audience, grinning like a fool until the lights recalled him to his place and he shoved the picture back in his jacket.

"Now that's the first useful suggestion anyone has had today," Coriolanus says, pleased, nodding at Cora like she's a student who answered a tricky question. Ronan holds his breath. "Let's say I do kill Katniss Everdeen, just for the sake of argument, and get myself a new crop of tributes for another Quell. You would all like that, would you?"

At the back of the room, Haymitch Abernathy twitches. "That girl didn't make the riots in Eight," he says, his voice harsh the way it always is when he's sober and loses the lazy drawl. "She didn't single-handedly stop production in the farming districts or cause the shipping problems or any of that. She's just a dumb little girl in love who had no idea what she was doing. Executing her won't solve anyone's problems."

"Will it not, Mr. Abernathy?" Coriolanus turns his cobra stare on Twelve's only mentor. "I rather think it might."

"You'll only make her a martyr," Haymitch points out, and Ronan could curse the air blue. Trust the man to start caring about his girl's welfare _now_. "I understand that's a chance you're willing to take, but you don't have to do it. Send them home. I can promise you, I'll keep Katniss in the Victors' Village and no one will ever hear from her again. She'll just disappear, and they won't even have a body to rally around. Nobody can make a symbol out of silence."

"I would rather not be hostage to your good intentions, Mr. Abernathy," Coriolanus says, emphasizing the name again like he always does when circling his prey. "All right, I'll play. I cancel the Games. You all go home. Katniss Everdeen disappears into the same haze of alcohol that has kept Twelve silent and passive these last twenty-five years and drowns in her bathtub at the age of thirty. It's like the Harvest Festival in July, candy for everyone. I still see a problem. Can anyone articulate this problem for me?" His gaze flits around the room, taking in the silent stares, before landing on Ronan. "Well?"

Amusement, one on one, was always a good sign; Coriolanus in a good mood could be prevailed upon for all kinds of favours to those who knew how to play him. But in a group, this is a cat toying with its prey. Ronan lets out a breath. "It's the problem of precedent. What pattern would this set, and would it be worth messing with tradition."

"Yes, thank you, Ronan." Coriolanus beams at him, and he's enjoying himself. "Would it be worth it, indeed. What would each of you be willing to provide to ensure it is?"

Beside him, Lumina draws in a sharp breath. Three's position as technological supplier to the Capitol makes her one of the rare Victors in the room to have anything to offer, but that does not mean they have something they're willing to lose.

Ronan looks away from the president and to the other Victors, who stare at him with daggers in their eyes. They'd kill him if they could, charge at him and tear him to pieces to satisfy their impotent rage, but of course they can't, not here. Not even with their president tossing him indulgent looks and singling him out for favour. "I think you need to remember something," Ronan says, and they won't understand but he isn't speaking to them. He can't allow Coriolanus to think he can demand the world to save the Victors. "It's just two lives each. Is it worth changing the rules for the lives of two people? If we make one exception, where does it stop? The rules give us security. They give us peace. If we sacrifice those to save two people, what are we doing down the line?"

"You can say that because Two is overrun with Victors," Diana snarls, glaring poison. "You wouldn't even notice if you had two missing, but this is all the rest of us have!"

The rules - Ronan wants to say but doesn't, can't - are all that keep the Capitol from swooping in and taking everything. Each district gives two so they don't have to give a hundred, a thousand; how can they not see it? "Then what would you give?" Ronan challenges. "I say two lives are two lives and worth no more. What do you have that's worth those lives you say are priceless? How would you repay the Capitol for its mercy?"

"Anything!" Diana snaps, slashing a hand through the air. "Because some of us don't measure lives in terms of compensation. What would I give? What wouldn't I give?"

"Then you're an idiot, and may the Games take you all," says a new voice - Dexter, from One, who enters the ring with swords flashing. "The only people who say that are children and fools, and you deserve what you get." He turns back to the front of the room, his biceps standing out as he folds his arms. "Mr. President, District One has always given everything you've asked for and more. We ask for nothing else. Cashmere and Gloss will play the Hunger Games as promised."

Ronan thinks of Eluria, who took to the syringe soon after she gave her Victors to the cattle market and disappeared into herself, taking long enough to deteriorate that her eventual overdose was deemed a tragic accident and not one of intent. District One has had its fill of deals, now that its children fill the beds of any Capitol citizen with cash, and unlike the other districts, it is not only their Victors who make the list.

"Two votes no," Ronan says, and there was no official call for a vote but it's as good a gamble as any. "Cancelling the Games would mean too much uncertainty. This way we know where we stand, and exactly what we owe. Brutus and Enobaria will fight."

Coriolanus gives him a small, narrow-eyed smile, the one he saves when Ronan captures a crucial piece on the board. "So that's two in favour of the Games. Let's continue, shall we? Ms. Albrecht?"

Lumina closes her eyes. She never told Ronan the details of the incident a few years ago, the last time the Capitol made a demand of Three and Three had the audacity to think they had the power to deal. She never told him, but the next time Ronan saw their youngest Victor - a cocky little genius who had bossily corrected her district's escort on the pronunciation of her name - she cringed away from conversation and all but panicked when any man came within touching distance. It didn't take a novel to work it out.

"Three votes no," Lumina says at last, and her voice shakes but it holds firm and doesn't crack. Ronan wants to reach for her hand but it would weaken her and so he leaves her be.

The other Victors gape at her and the apparent betrayal by a district that's meant to have good sense, but she doesn't explain herself, doesn't give justification, and Coriolanus nods in acknowledgement and they move on.

Odysseus, the man with the unenviable position of filling Mags' seven-league boots as leader of Four, speaks up before he's called, and the room goes quiet. Four has sway over the other districts in a way that none of the others can come close to matching. "I think if Mags found out I'd traded even a handful of sand to save her, she'd pull my brains out of my nose with a fishhook," he says, and he's smiling but his eyes are grim. "Whatever I could offer, I think she'd say it's too much. I think we all need to remember the big picture. Of course our Victors' - our friends' - lives are important, but they're not the only things at stake." Odysseus straightens. "Four votes no."

This time something ripples through the room, though no one says a word. The mentors glance at each other, and looks pass between them fraught with meaning in ways that Ronan, as a Two and an outsider to their camaraderie of suffering, will never understand. Even just the mention of Mags' name invokes a power that none of them can deny, and Ronan holds his breath as he watches decisions being made in the cant of eyebrows and tightening of mouths.

"Even if I did, mine would end up passed out on the streets with needles in their arms as soon as they got home," says Phillips from Six, speaking in gruff exasperation. He won his Games despite his mentor, the current female tribute, sending him glitter paints and a rolling pin as sponsor gifts. "Six says no, too. Won't make a damn bit of difference."

The room falls silent after that, the loudest sound that of Cora's ragged breathing as she digs her fist into her chest and fights back tears. Ronan tries not to look at her but she draws his gaze like quicksand, and she meets his eyes only to shake her head. On one side of the scale sits her husband of thirty years; on the other, the daughter and two children who could have a long lifetime ahead of them. Ronan knows which Burt would choose, and so does she.

"Anyone else?" Coriolanus asks, practically jolly now, but no one says a word. He smiles, thin lips stretched in his face, and Ronan might have first name privileges, might joke with him over a game and a bottle of fine wine, but he never forgets that Coriolanus is a serpent who will always, always bite. "Then I think that's settled. The Quarter Quell will continue as scheduled; thank you all for your cooperation."

Ronan bows, lowering his torso a military-precise forty-five degrees, then turns and marches out of the room. The others follow, shuffling slowly or striding with anger, and he waits outside the door for Lumina, who moves with a distracted air and nearly passes by him without noticing. "I'm sorry, Lu," Ronan says quietly. "I wish it could be different."

She looks at him then, her eyes quiet and sad, but not quite defeated. "It's not your job to save them," she says, and something curls in her tone, strange and almost defiant. She walks away before Ronan can ask her whose job she thinks it is.

An aide slips back through the door, stopping Ronan with a gesture and disrupting his thoughts. "The president asks if you'd like to stay behind and play a few rounds."

Ronan glances back at the doors, and imagines a long night of losing game after game after game while Coriolanus grins like a deaths-head mask and gloats over a situation well handled. "Perhaps another night," Ronan says, bowing again. "I think I've had my fill for today."

He waits to hear the response, and Coriolanus' chuckles follow him out to the corridor. Ronan shakes his head, grips his cane and begins the long trek back to the Games Complex.


	7. Chapter 7: Desperate Times

Brutus is fine until the interviews.

Really, he is. For better or for worse, Odin screwed Brutus' head back on and knocked him around until things settled where they should be, and he makes it through without even a twitch. He thinks of his kids back home, watching together in the Village, and that carries him over the awkward questions and Flickerman's too-white teeth and the roar of a crowd that doesn't care if he's dead or alive as long as he makes a good show.

Afterward Brutus stands at the back of the stage with crossed arms and barely stopped himself from shaking his head as the other Victors disgrace themselves, challenging the Capitol and the president and all but daring a squad of Peacekeepers to march onto the stage and gun them all down. If President Snow had ordered them all executed, Brutus almost wouldn't blame him. You don't stand at the bottom of a rockslide and expect not to get crushed. He imagines his Victors' horrified faces at the shameful display and entertains himself by imagining the Two-channel commentary.

He keeps his expression stony through District Twelve's attempts at manipulating the audience yet again, though this time Brutus' head aches from the effort of not narrowing his eyes. He almost cracks when Enobaria, practically hissing in anger, leans over and stage-whispers, "Do you think she'll magically come to term in the Arena and give birth there? I mean, why not?" Brutus steps on her foot and enjoys the sharp jab of her elbow in his side.

The detachment keeps him going right to the end - the Arena is a presence in his mind, humming like the district boundary fence but not intrusive, not yet - when the Victors in front of him join hands. Brutus sucks in a breath hard, the air slapped out of his chest by a wall of freezing water. It's suicide, worse than the treason that already coats the stage and drips from the walls, worse than the audience shrieking and wailing, worse than a girl too young and stupid to know what she'd started by raising a handful of berries to the sky.

These are Victors. They _know_ better.

His only consolation is that One and Two will stand alone against the madness - until a small hand touches his, fingers curling around the side of his palm. Brutus yanks his hand away and glances down as Wiress - half his size, a third his weight, and dead, dead meat in the Arena - looks up at him. Her eyes hold him fast, dark and solemn, and Brutus' mind flashes through a dozen ways to kill her (throw the spear or break her neck, she deserves fast if nothing else, she deserves - she _deserves_) but then she smiles. Wiress has half a dozen smiles, some goofy, some terrifying, but this one is small and warm and sad, one corner of her mouth twitching up.

"Tomorrow is tomorrow," Wiress says in her half-lilting, not-always-there voice, and she twists her hand to lace their fingers together.

_Fuck_.

Brutus' fingers twitch - his hand swallows hers until she looks like Chaff with his stump, almost, and the ghost of a laugh burns in his throat - and he raises their arms. And now he's really done it because he can't stop there, can't look like he's siding with the outliers and not his own people, and so Brutus risks manual removal and links his hand with Enobaria's.

"Really?" she mutters under her breath, but the wave has started and any Two knows how to read the room, and so Enobaria and the Ones finish the pattern. For better or worse the Victors are a unified front, standing together - against what, the Games, the Capitol, the president? Brutus' heart pounds and he almost lets go of the girls' hands to wipe his palms - and the crowd roars and Caesar Flickerman is pale with fear and Brutus' head swims with decades of interviews and piles of the dead and promises made and promises broken and when did the lights get so bright why won't they stop his eyes are prickling -

The lights cut out. The spell breaks; hands fall, Victors glancing at each other uncertainly; Wiress' face is a ghostly smear in the darkness.

The march of booted feet, rhythmical and precise and speaking of visors and batons. Brutus recovers first. "Go," he barks out. If they have to be escorted off the stage like dissidents it'll mean trouble for all of them. "Back to your floors, everyone, and keep your heads the hell down." Some of the others mutter that they don't take orders from Twos, and fine, their funeral; Brutus shoos Wiress in front of him and shields her with his bulk until they get offstage, Beetee silent at his side before the pair slip away.

They don't bother heading to the Two dressing room backstage, just take the elevator straight up to their floor. "Holding hands," Enobaria spits out, ripping off the gold headband they wrapped around her forehead and using it to wipe a smear of blood from her lip. "Precious, that's great. Maybe tomorrow we can all do it again and sing songs and have a cookout. Morons."

Brutus doesn't answer. The elevator door opens and he almost stumbles into the central Two lounge, dropping onto the couch so that the frame creaks in protest. Enobaria glances at him, stalking back and forth and flicking knives out of nowhere and flinging them into the furniture. Last year after the interviews, Clove stormed back inside and skewered a lampshade with her hairpins.

"You okay over there?" Enobaria asks, sending a knife flying past his head to embed itself in the sofa cushions. "Not gonna have a perfect soldier meltdown?"

"Fine," Brutus grits out. "Thanks for your concern."

The others show up soon after, minus Ronan, and Enobaria immediately shoves Nero sideways onto the largest armchair so she can crawl in his lap. Brutus, for his part, avoids eye contact with Odin because he is an adult and doesn't need his mentor to hit him upside the head anymore.

"Well I wouldn't call that an unqualified disaster, but I will say it's close," Lyme says, running a hand through her hair.

"Ronan has gone with a delegation of mentors to try to stem the damage," Odin reports. "I imagine they'll be at it for some time. In the meantime we might as well discuss how to manage this ourselves. We always knew Twelve would pull something in the eleventh hour, since that has become their apparent trademark. The question is, what to do with it?"

Artemisia pulls a thread so hard it snaps, and she scowls at the frayed blue string as though it did it on purpose. After a moment she mutters a curse and tosses the embroidery aside. "So the boy says she's pregnant. Is that Two's business?"

Odin folds his arms. "It could be, depending on the angle. If the president wanted someone to refute the boy's claims, he would have pulled the girl in for a pregnancy test immediately and had the results broadcast, yet he hasn't. Why?"

"Because he knows it's real?" Lyme suggests in a dubious tone, twirling a knife between her fingers. She doesn't believe that more than anyone else. "Okay, no, that's bullshit, and the president will know it too. So you're right, why would he want people to think she is if it causes this much panic?"

For once Brutus can't answer, but for once it's also not his job. He's here as a tribute, not a mentor, and while his years of expertise are appreciated, it's more important for him to stay in the proper headspace. It's not really a relief, and the question gnaws at the back of his mind until he almost wishes for a drink to take the edge off.

No one says anything for a minute until Claudius lifts his head. "Okay, so, is this a trick question, or am I really the only one seeing it?"

Brutus blinks at him, and he's not the only one. Lyme gets a thoughtful expression and turns to face him, sitting sideways on the sofa with one leg drawn up under her. "See what, D?"

Claudius waves his hands in careless gestures. "Right, so I'm not the pregnancy expert or anything, but it can only be hidden for a few months usually, right? Especially in all the tight training gear and everything we've seen her in. If she's pregnant, she's not showing yet."

Odin nods. "They could easily claim she's only a few weeks along, yes, that's when most people figure it out, I think."

"Okay, so..." Claudius waits, and when they don't finish his sentence, he lets out a short laugh. "So I'm the only one mean enough to think this, huh? Look, they said she got pregnant after they ate their special weirdo wedding toast, right, that means she got knocked up after that, and that's why she's not showing yet. But they got married after their official wedding was cancelled because of the Quarter Quell announcements. It means she got pregnant _after_ she knew she would be going back into the Arena."

Silence. Brutus turns that thought over in his head, and Claudius is right - Brutus would not have thought of that on his own because it's the type of manipulation that, to him, undermines the entire point of the Games. Lyme would not because pregnancy fills her with a creeping horror so strong she would cut anything inside her out with her own knife and hope for the best.

Odin, like Brutus, is used to dealing with desperation, but rarely outright dishonour. He looks at Claudius, eyes slowly widening. "My boy, I think you've found something."

"Right?" Claudius grins, sharp and nasty. "So I'll bet my stipend that's the president's angle, that's why he's leaving it alone for now. Either they're liars, taking advantage of honest people's sympathy, or they're not, and that's worse. Then they deliberately got her pregnant, knowing she was going into the Games, hoping to use it to garner sympathy. Either way we can spin that our way."

"Or she just got knocked up by accident," Artemisia points out in a warning tone. "It's not like they have birth control out in Twelve. Who knows if they even know what that is."

Lyme shakes her head, chewing on her thumbnail. "They won't know that here. You've talked to the sponsors, half of them don't understand how people in Twelve say they're starving when they could just phone up and order food for delivery. I doubt anyone is going to jump to unprotected sex and unplanned pregnancies when they all have injections. Certainly nobody's heard of back-alley abortions, either. I think D's right. That's our angle."

"They probably still won't listen," Claudius says, wrinkling his nose. "People love tragedy way more than they love deception, but it's a shot, right?"

"The audience should find out too," Artemisia says slowly, and back in her day she gutted a boy who had a pregnant girlfriend back home in what was voted one of the Games' most cold-blooded moments. "When you kill her, cut her open, show everyone the truth. Let them see they were all taken for idiots by a pair of liars and they'll thank you for it."

Brutus gapes at her; Claudius looks thoughtful, and Lyme gives her girl a look that nobody else could hope to parse. Enobaria speaks up for the first time, pulling out a knife and whipping it at her, but Artemisia just catches it in mid-air and throws it across the room into the door frame. "That was my idea!" she snarls. "You can't have it!"

Artemisia rolls her eyes. "Nobody outside this room heard me say it, and you're the one who gets to do it for real," she points out, and Enobaria subsides, hissing, as Nero strokes a hand over her hair.

"If she's really pregnant they won't do the math to find out when the baby got there," Lyme says. "Be careful."

"She's not pregnant," Artemisia says, still not looking at Lyme. "Peeta Mellark is a liar but he's not a monster. He'd never risk a baby knowing the Arena was coming."

"In any case, I believe we've found our way out of this." Odin smiles down at Claudius, broad and pleased. "We'll make a mentor of you yet, boy."

Claudius falters, shooting a glance at Lyme before staring down at his hands. The kid's been off the hook for mentoring because he's a little too crazy, a little too unstable, and takes everything personally; they're all afraid the first time he loses a tribute he'll set the whole damn room on fire. But depending on how this goes, Two could be down two mentors in a matter of weeks - Nero could have his hands full dealing with a twice-Arena-crazed Enobaria, and Brutus -

Brutus jerks half to his feet before he realizes what he's doing, and the others turn to stare. "Just getting antsy," he says, cursing himself. "Zero hour's coming. I hate sitting around."

"It's likely best if we all sleep once we hear word from Ronan," Odin says, and Brutus nods. When he was eighteen, he and Odin spent the night talking, quelling the last of Brutus' nerves as the final night hung over his head, and then he crunched a tranquilizer and stayed asleep until his escort came to wake him in the morning. Now his thoughts rattle in his head, and Brutus doesn't like to take meds to put himself down but tonight he just might.

Except Odin is right, they have to wait for Ronan, because what if - what if. Brutus played his role to perfection, he and Enobaria both; they showed themselves willing to perform any task the Capitol asked of them, wholly and without reservation, none of the complaining and judging and challenging of the other Victors. Two stayed stalwart as always, a true rock in a sea of quicksand. Surely the president must see it. Fealty is rewarded: the Centre told him that as a boy, when he first broke a girl's arm and stared in horror; Odin reminded him the night Brutus couldn't shake the memory of neck bones snapping beneath his hands.

The Capitol protects its loyal subjects, and while he'd never dare say it aloud, everyone knows there is no one more loyal in all of Two than Brutus. It's treason to expect anything for it - the whole point is to give without hope or presumption of reward - but still. Of all the Victors, Brutus has never wavered -

Except he has, in the most public place possible.

"I shouldn't have taken Wiress' hand," Brutus bursts out, and he slaps a hand over his eyes and drags it down his face. "Shit. I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't - fuck!"

He shouldn't swear in front of the kids, shouldn't lose it either, but he's not their elder he's their tribute and they're ten, twenty years his junior and his mentors at the same time, and now they're staring at him, eyes wide. He helped Lyme pull Misha out of the Arena alive and now she'll be working to bring him home in a box -

Brutus swallows a snarl, working all his Centre training to take the fear and doubt and turn it into anger, push it out instead of let it fester and turn to poison. Lyme watches him with eyes that say she knows exactly what he's doing, and the problem is that tomorrow is too soon and not soon enough all at once.

The door hisses open, cutting Brutus' rage short, and Ronan steps through; he shakes his head first thing, and something inside Brutus' chest deflates. "I'm sorry," he says simply, and this time it's Odin who turns away, his massive shoulders hunched. "The Games will go on as planned. The good news is that the president is pleased with Two; you have made no missteps, which is impressive, if not surprising."

Brutus grimaces. "I joined hands."

"So did I, and you don't see me crying about it." Enobaria rolls her eyes. "It's not a big deal, it's just stupid idealists being stupid. With us joining in it stops being a revolutionary act anyway, since everybody and their mother knows I'm going to rip their little mockingjay's eyes out. Two wouldn't join in on anything _seditious_."

There's a nasty twist to her voice that Brutus doesn't bother trying to work out, but Ronan waves his hand in a shooing gesture. "If the president were displeased with you, I would hear be vomiting up poisoned biscuits right now. I venture that at this juncture, Two is the only district not currently under strict watch." Brutus has never really gotten what the deal is with Ronan and the president - only that Ronan still gets called to the Capitol at least eight times a year and when asked will only say that they played _chess_ for fuck's sake - and he's not asking. "I suggest we all get some sleep."

"Yeah," Brutus says, squaring his shoulders. "Sleep."

He's lived through eleven of these nights from the other side, watching his tributes as it sinks in that this is it, that they now have fewer hours than fingers before they're herded onto a hovercraft and flown to the Arena to die. Some of them want to talk, to tell him a story of their fuzzy pre-Centre childhoods or share their dreams for a post-Arena future based on clouds and spiderwebs because they've never given much thought to _after_. Some want to share their fears, spill out their worst nightmare of the most agonizing deaths, alone and forgotten. Some want to be left alone. Brutus usually knows what each tribute wants, and by the end of the night he sets them back on course, maybe a little shaky but filled with the fire of optimism.

Brutus isn't eighteen anymore, and he's seen seven of those eleven end in fire and blood and dust. Odin shook him back into place and reminded him of his duty - humbled him, tore him down and took all Brutus' foolish, arrogant demands from him - and Brutus isn't doubting his job anymore. He will go into the Arena tomorrow and he kill some of the only people who have ever understood him, people who hold a piece of each other after walking through the same wall of flames.

He will do his duty; he will fulfill his role as the Capitol's hand of justice and do what needs to be done. But no amount of rhetoric from Odin, no rousing speeches, no hands on his shoulder, can quell the feeling that he's not meant to walk out.

"Hey." Lyme stands up and jostles him with her elbow. "Let's go up to the roof, I want to talk to you."

He almost says no - it's been weird with Lyme the past few days - but Odin catches his eye and nods. "Sure," Brutus says, because what does he do except follow orders nowadays. And because the best way to ease pain and rage and helplessness is to spread it, he opens the door to the elevator for Lyme and waves her through in a bow. "Ladies first."

Lyme doesn't even blink, just passes under his arm and hits the button, and Brutus gives up on anything ever being normal again.

* * *

One look at Odin after Ronan delivers the death blow tells Lyme he's losing it, and she hasn't mentored for almost twenty years not to know why.

It's a grim parody reversal of last year, when Lyme heard the rule change allowing for two tributes and really thought it would make a difference. Last year the hope bubbled up inside her that she wouldn't be faced with the choice of a Victor dead on the inside or just plain dead, but then Clove took a rock to the head and the demons chewed away Cato's humanity long before the mutts did the same to his body and they never got to find out. Afterward Brutus told her - mouth flat, eyes fixed on his beer, shoulders tense and hunched - that if Cato and Clove had been the final two, there would have been no miracle. The Centre builds warriors first and children second, and Cato and Clove would have known their duty when the Gamemakers revoked the change.

This year it's Lyme who has no faith, but Odin and Brutus have always held the Capitol to a higher standard. Lyme can serve the Capitol and hate them too, and Nero taught her to see mentoring not as a glorious service or glory but a mad scrabbling in the sand, pulling out any lives she can. "Only one will win regardless," Nero told her when she was young and twisted and angry (not much has changed). "They may as well be ours."

When someone has your arm twisted up behind your back and a foot between your shoulder blades, there's no choice but to kneel. Lyme doesn't need to pretend there's honour in swallowing the dirt.

Odin put his faith in the Capitol; he built his entire life on the premise that the rules must be necessary, and that if he can't see the justification it's only because the Capitol doesn't owe it to him to explain. It's a nice, high platform to stand on, and it keeps him out of the muck that Lyme has been slogging through for years, but the foundation is sand and the waves are coming and the problem with a pedestal is that it means there's so much farther to fall.

Odin drives Lyme crazy day-to-day with his rhetoric and his posturing and his talk of nobility and sacrifice and duty, but now she looks at him and sees a surrogate father giving up his son. No argument from here to the ruins of District Thirteen that can make that stop hurting. For all her anger, for all her enlightened you-can't-fool-me attitude, if it were Claudius or Misha in the Arena tomorrow, Lyme would be standing aside to watch them die all the same. That she saw the betrayal coming only means she had more time to turn and shield herself from the blow.

It means she can't even triumph in private that Odin - after shouting at her not to let herself _think_ about Brutus' death anywhere near his presence - is clearly fighting back image after image of Brutus bleeding out on the rocks. Self-delusion always cracks, in the end. Odin needs time to recalibrate and Brutus needs a reminder from someone who doesn't remember what he looked like as a painfully earnest teenager.

"Hey." Lyme stands up, crosses over to Brutus and knocks him in the side, startling him out of whatever self-destructive spiral he's drowning in. "Let's go up to the roof, I want to talk to you."

Not that she has any idea what to say, but while Odin is insufferable and a little bit sexist in an old-fashioned aw-shucks sort of way, he's still hurting, and as a fellow mentor that means it's Lyme's turn to take a hit. Brutus gives her a weird look, and for a second she thinks he's going to say no before he finally agrees.

They ride the elevator up to the roof in silence. "So now what?" Brutus asks once they reach the roof. He scuffs his shoe against the concrete while Lyme drags over a box and braces the door open. "You gonna give me a pep talk?"

Lyme at nearly forty has no idea what to say to that; she's seen too much, sat with too many tributes and listened to them spill their secrets before they spilled their guts, to think that Brutus is doing anything but walking to his death. But behind that there's another Lyme, younger, wilder, arrogant and cocky. Lyme at eighteen is absolutely sure that the world will give her what it wants because she took its shit for a decade and now it's _her turn_ Games-damn it, with utter contempt for anyone who thinks otherwise.

Maybe Brutus isn't the only one who has to turn the clock back. She closes her eyes, then takes a three-count to open the door and let it happen. The change slides over her like walking through a spiderweb.

"You fucker," Lyme snaps, and she shoves him. Brutus stumbles a step back, eyes narrowing. "Stop whining and look at your odds. It's an Arena full of drunks and geriatrics and people who are willing to suicide out because there's nothing else for them. In a normal year you'd be looking at five solid competitors plus a handful of unknowns. This year you've got Enobaria, Finnick and maybe Johanna if you're being nice. These are the best odds you will ever have. Why the hell are you moping?"

Brutus stares at her like she's lost her mind, and Lyme holds the anger and disgust between her palms and weaves them together. "Because it's not just about winning, and you of all people know that. Fuck! How can you tell me to go out there and kill our friends?"

Lyme falters for a second - she never expected him to say it out loud - but props to Brutus with his back against the wall. She snarls instead. "They're going to die anyway. The only way I'm not going to lose my fucking mind and burn everything down is if you come back to me after."

Brutus sucks in a hard breath. "You don't mean that."

Lyme fists her hand in his shirt and shoves him back against the wall. "Try me. I fucking _dare_ you."

For a long, ragged moment there's nothing the sound of their breaths. Brutus' hand comes up to pry Lyme loose, and his fingers close around her wrist and press down but then they stop, his grip sending a low ache through Lyme's arm. "So then what?" Brutus asks, but he's not in her face, not demanding. His head thunks against the door. "How am I supposed to kill them? I know I have to, all right, but that doesn't fucking tell me _how_."

Lyme steps back, heart thumping in her chest. "We practice. Right now."

"What, you're gonna make me kill you to get used to it?" Brutus snaps, but his eyes go wide and the fear puts a crack in his voice. "Have you lost your fucking mind? Forget it."

"No." Lyme rolls her head back and forth, the joints in her neck cracking, and she stretches out her arms. "But you're gonna hurt me so you can see it's not the end of the world. You can do it, and you will, and nobody will hate you for it."

"No." Brutus shakes his head, and he tries to step away but he's flush against the concrete and there's nowhere for him to go unless he flees down the stairs. "No, I won't."

"Yeah you fucking will."

"No!" Brutus says again, his voice scaling up, and a red flush starts at his throat and moves up to swallow his face. "No, I fucking _won't_. I'm not going to hurt you, I'm not a -"

"A monster?" Lyme pulls a dagger from her belt and flips it over in her hand; Brutus doesn't bother looking at the knife, but trains his eye on her shoulder, where he'll see the muscles tense before she makes a move and know where it's going to land. "I'm a monster. News flash, we're all monsters, and pretending you're not is going to get you nowhere. Right now Nero is downstairs telling Enobaria if she chews your face off he'll give her all the smoothies and a nice shiny knife collection. So I'm telling you, right now, that you're going to snap her neck and come back to me because that is how the fucking Games are played."

Brutus opens his mouth to argue, and Lyme flies at him with dagger at the ready. Brutus blocks the strike because meltdown or no he is no greenhorn, but it puts him off balance and Lyme shoves him into the block holding the door open. He stumbles - she gets him behind the knee - and when he twists around she knocks him down and sits on his chest, dagger at his throat. They've fought until neither of them can stand just for the fun of it, but today Brutus gapes up at her as Lyme presses the blade down until it nicks his skin.

"I'd murder all of them if it were me," Lyme growls, and she doesn't have to lie or even exaggerate to say it. There it is, the madness she's held back for years and years, that she pretended she left behind because she's not like them, she's smarter, she's above all this. In the beginning Lyme was a crazy little girl who wanted to inflict pain on everyone she saw, and that doesn't go away. "You think I'd die a noble death and leave my kids all alone? Fuck you! I'd break Enobaria's neck and I'd slit Cashmere's throat and I'd slice little Katniss Everdeen right across her lying belly and pull her lying guts out so don't you _fucking_ tell me you're too good for this. Honour doesn't give a shit about you but I do, you hear me?"

She slams Brutus back against the ground, and he bites off a curse and flings her off him, the knife skidding across his collarbone and leaving a trail of blood. He gets her down with his arm across her throat and stares down at her with half-crazed. "You're a fucking liar. You wouldn't be able to kill Mags and you know it."

Lyme slashes the knife across his ribs, and Brutus grunts but doesn't lose his grip. "Yeah, Mags, who's throwing us overboard so little baby Finnick can go back to his girl? You think she doesn't know how to play the game? She's been playing since before our fucking _parents_ were alive, don't make her into a saint now. She's not planning on walking out, but that doesn't mean she hasn't planned six ways to take you down." Lyme glares at him, and his expression flickers. She finds the crack, wedges her knife into the gap, and wiggles. "I'm not fucking playing. I'd kill all of them to get back to you and my mentor and my kids."

Brutus huffs out a laugh, blood trickling down his chest and staining his collar, and he settles more of his weight on her stomach. "All of them, huh?. All twenty-three? That's not a bit of a stretch?" His eyes spark. "What if I killed ten?"

"Ten's the record, and guess who holds it," Lyme shoots back, and it's true. Petra tied it but no one in Two has ever managed to take out more than forty percent of the competitors. "You really telling me you have the chance to beat my streak and you're just going to pussy out of it? I'm disappointed."

Brutus snickers, and he pushes down against her throat hard enough that her vision blurs before letting her up. "Put that damned knife away and let's do it, then."

Lyme grins and rolls up onto her feet. "Ladies first."

The thing about backing off and letting Brutus kick the ever-loving shit out of her is that, well, he kicks the ever-loving _shit_ out of her. Lyme and Brutus have favoured sparring over feelings for some twenty years now, and in the past they've ended up with broken bones, cracked ribs, and, on one memorable occasion, missing teeth. But that was always matched, and Lyme gave as good as she got. It's never been about fighting on the defensive, taking every hit Brutus lands on her so he can remember the feeling of landing a blow on someone who isn't fighting back at equal strength.

It hurts - a lot - and worse is that with every swing Brutus takes at her, every time his hands close on her throat or his weight presses down on her back, Lyme fights years and years of combat training and danger reflexes not to turn and make him stop. Flashes of the Arena push at her from all sides like a pack of mutts, and she struggles to wave them away and let Brutus hurt her because if he doesn't he'll never make it out alive. Any hesitation in the Arena could mean death; not just from the other tributes, but from the Gamemakers if they think their perfect soldier isn't performing up to spec.

Panic and adrenaline flood through her as the fight continues, and Lyme retreats into her head because it's the only way she'll make it out. Now and then something jars her hard enough that she cries out, but if Brutus stops she screams _don't you dare you stupid fucker keep going_ while sucking in shards of glass into her already-lacerated lungs.

By the time Brutus is done with her, Lyme's not sure she'll ever be able to find herself under all the blood and bruises. She staggers to her feet, and one leg gives out from under her, foot skidding off to the side, but if Brutus has to carry her down then that will ruin everything. Lyme forces her leg to bear her weight, gritting her teeth against the wave of fire that races up her hip, and she rubs the tears and blood from her face with her sleeve.

"Not half bad," she says, raising an arm that screams in protest and punches Brutus in the chest. Her vision swims but she holds it, holds it, digging back to all her training, the endurance tests and the pain tests and strength tests, and she manages to stop herself from reeling. "See? You'll be fine. Plus I can kick the ass of anyone going in tomorrow, so if you can beat me, you can beat anyone."

"You are one arrogant son of a bitch," Brutus tells her, breathing hard, and he drags an arm across his forehead but the dark light still gleams in his eyes.

"As are you," Lyme reminds him, taking the first stair and gripping the railing with fingers that do their best to spasm and send her tumbling. Whose genius idea was this again - oh yeah. "Don't fucking forget that. You deserve to win and you're going to win, and you and your kids and I will all go out for drinks and everything will go back to normal."

The world will never go back to normal, and a black weight settles in the back of Lyme's mind: a feeling that no, she and Brutus' kids are never going to get that drink. But the pain has reached euphoric levels, and Lyme blinks slowly and lets the bad feeling disappear. Everything will be fine. Brutus is strong and she is strong and Two will win because they fucking have to. That's all there is to it.

"I'll see you tomorrow," Lyme says to Brutus when they make it back down to the main Two floor, and she gives him another sock in the arm and watches him stride back to his room. She lasts until the door closes behind him before collapsing on the floor and coughing up a mouthful of blood. The world tilts itself on a diagonal and that's fine, everything is fine.

Footsteps come closer, then the ratty pair of sneakers Claudius likes to wear when he's not around the sponsors shows up in Lyme's limited field of vision. "Boss, I say this with love," he says, his voice filtering down from above through a hundred layers of gauze. "What the _fuck_ did you do?"

"I helped him." Lyme coughs again, and wow, breathing hurts, maybe she should stop. That sounds like a good idea. Her eyes flutter closed.

"Oh no, don't you dare." Claudius drops to his knees, shoves her over onto her side while Lyme makes a low mumble of opposition and curls into a ball. "Boss, get the fuck up right now or I'm slitting my wrists and it will all be your fault. You hear me? Suicidal Victor right now, wake up and do your mentorly duty."

Lyme blinks up at him, but she manages to get herself onto her knees. Claudius heaves her weight onto his shoulders and gets his arms around her waist, and he's half her size and half her age and that's funny. Everything is funny except for how much it hurts to laugh. "Snow on a fucking dungheap," Claudius mutters, and that's even funnier. "Whatever you did, that better be worth it."

Lyme tries to remember what she did, but it swims in her head, dizzy and hazy, and flits out of reach like the time she tried to catch her own reflection in a puddle. "I think so," she slurs, and Claudius swears again and hauls her toward the elevator. "It's important."

"Remake is going to have my head, I hope you realize," Claudius tells her, but it doesn't matter because she did it. Lyme closes her eyes, lets her head fall onto Claudius' shoulder and lets him lead her, staggering and stumbling, to the medical ward.

The remake nurses scream and flutter their hands to their mouths - Claudius immediately shouts "Not my fault!" - and Lyme cackles for a whole five seconds before she passes out.

* * *

Brutus doesn't wash his hands. He curls them into fists and flexes them open and back again; stares at Lyme's blood drying on his skin, ground into his knuckles and the lines on his palms like black spider veins. He scrapes his thumbnail over a smear of half-congealed red on his wrist, pulling back the crust and sliding his fingertip back and forth through the tacky liquid until it crumbles into little balls. He rubs his hands together until the palms stick, pries them apart so the blood pulls loose in long strings.

His heart pounds in his chest like a low drumroll, the distant rumble of thunder behind the mountains as the clouds gather for the storm. The sour-sweet scent of blood curls in his nose, metallic and sharp and enticing. It's been years - so many years - since Brutus hurt someone on purpose but it's there now, back like a bad-idea lover who beckons him closer with a crook of the finger, promise in her wink and heartbreak in her smile.

His ribs burn in a long line where Lyme caught him with her knife. An hour ago Brutus took his fists to the one person who understands him better than anyone but his mentor, used them until she lay battered and gasping on the ground, and after she hauled herself to her feet and clapped his shoulder because she is Two and Brutus is Two and so will be the win this year. They know what needs to be done.

Tonight he beat Lyme purple and bleeding with no one but the security teams as witness. Tomorrow he'll pick up a weapon and take his first life since he dashed a boy's brains over the rocks with his bare fist, and tomorrow he'll do it on camera for everyone in the nation to see. He'll bring pride to his district, the Capitol, the president and Panem, today tomorrow and forever - but it's even more important than that.

Tomorrow his Victors will be watching.

They're there when he closes his eyes, sitting together on the couch and staring at the TV. Emory, first and never forgotten, will keep half her eye on the screen and half on her younger Victor-siblings, always mature and responsible even when she was nineteen years old with the Arena still hissing in her ear. Devon, charming and easygoing and a still dreamer despite sixteen lives - five in training, seven in the Arena, and four tributes he couldn't save - hanging from his shoulders, wrapped around a pillow because he'll want to hold Petra but she won't allow it.. And Petra, his youngest, his firecracker, who hauled herself out of an Arena with a busted hip and learned to walk against all the Capitol doctors' predictions, who cried herself to sleep in Brutus' arms the night before the Reaping, Petra will refuse all comfort and sit up straight, fingers tight on the handle of her cane.

Brutus pulled them from the miasma of self-doubt and guilt that is recovery, and they're brilliant, his kids, proud and flawed and perfect. He will win and he will come home to them. When he does Petra will fling herself into his arms, cane and broken hip be damned, and Brutus will pick her up and kiss her hair like she's eighteen all over again. Devon will curl up against his side like an overgrown puppy dog who never slit a boy's throat after kissing him in the firelight, and Emory will stand back and fight to keep her face neutral before Brutus hauls her and grips her by the back of the neck, resting their foreheads together.

He fixes the image in his mind, using the techniques the trainers would drill into him in the Centre (picture your opponent dead, picture the blood on your hands, their pulse stopping beneath your fingers, picture the satisfaction and the relief and the power) until it burns into his brain. Brutus will win and he will come home and his Victors will love him no matter who he kills to get there. Petra would put a knife in Mags' eye herself if it meant she'd see Brutus home.

He'll come home a Victor twice over; he'll hug his kids, climb rocks with his mentor, and a month later Lyme will ambush him and pay him back for every bruise he put on her, laughing at him the entire time.

And then, Brutus thinks with a stab of dark satisfaction, he is Games-damned well going to retire.

The clock ticks over to midnight, and the refrain of _tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow_ in his head takes up a new, urgent note, thrilling with promise: _today_.

Brutus collapses on the too-soft bed, and he falls asleep with Lyme's blood flaking from his hands and the anthem humming in his ears.


	8. Chapter 8: The Arena, Part I

Brutus stands alone in the tube as the modulated voice announces ten seconds to launch, balanced on the balls of his feet and testing his weight, bending his legs to stretch out the muscles of his calves. The countdown takes up in his veins, flooding through him and shooting energy into his limbs. The final minutes are the worst part, trapped on the platforms and unable to move, unable to act, until the timer hits zero.

Lyme was right; it's the Hunger Games, there will only be one winner, and it's not just enough for Brutus to do his duty and go in to die. He has to _win_. Not just for Two, to restore their honour after last year's catastrophic failure; not just for the president and the Capitol and Panem, but for himself. For the three kids he pulled out of the Arena a decade apart each who will be watching and waiting for him to come home. For the mentor who sacrificed everything to get Brutus where he is and never demanded anything back but Brutus' love and obedience. For the friends willing to take a beating so that Brutus can get his head pounded on straight.

Brutus has killed before, and he'll kill again. At the end of the day it doesn't matter; they're all going to die save one, and if the years of mentoring have taught Brutus anything - with Mags withdrawing from the alliance underscoring it more than ever - it's that at the end of the day, you do what you have to do to survive because everyone around you is doing the same. What happens in the Arena stays in the Arena; every crime is forgiven, washed away in blood and the Capitol's mercy. The only thing Brutus owes the others is a quick death, and he will give them that.

Not a single one of his 'friends' would hesitate to kill him, if they had the strength to do it; it's only their physical limitations that will stop them, and it won't keep them from trying, either. It would be weakness for Brutus to hesitate to do the same. Why privilege their lives over his own when his people - his Victors - depend on him?

The nice thing about the Arena is that it strips everything down to the barest essentials, ripping away all delusions and attempts at heroics or mental gymnastics: Brutus will survive. The end.

The platform rises. Brutus drops into a half-crouch, lowering his centre of gravity in case the Arena is unstable when he gets there. He narrows his eyes against potential glare and prepares for a long swim; if his contacts hadn't warned him to expect water, the flotation material in his belt would have tipped him off.

It's water, all right, with jungle around behind them and the Cornucopia in the middle, and as soon as the countdown ends, Brutus flings himself into it. He's not Two's best swimmer by a long shot but it will do, and instead of fighting the waves Brutus angles himself toward the thin stretch of land nearest him and heaves himself up with a few short jerks of his arms. His feet slip on the wet sand but he finds his footing, just in time to avoid crashing into Katniss Everdeen as she tears toward the Cornucopia.

Brutus takes a few steps after her, but then he stops: Finnick Odair's arms rip through the water, pulling him up even with Everdeen as she runs; he should reach the middle a few seconds after she does. A few spokes over Gloss runs at full-tilt toward them, but Brutus narrows his eyes and takes it at a slow jog instead. None of the others will bother crossing the water to get to him on his strip of sand just yet, and the cameras will want to see the moment where Twelve will show their colours.

Let everyone see that the darling of the revolution is just as quick to bloody her hands as the rest of them. Brutus slips back down into the water when he reaches arrow range and closes the distance with a few strokes, treading water and staying just out of hearing but close enough to read lips. Once Twelve and Four have their showdown Brutus will slip in and finish the rest; if Odair takes out Everdeen then Brutus will have to deal with Enobaria being pissed and sulky until the end of time, but he's not interfering. Everdeen made her bed; let her lie in it.

Except instead of a fight, Brutus takes a slap of water to the mouth and nearly chokes as Odair waves his wrist in Everdeen's face and reminds her that they have an alliance. An _alliance_, the very thing that Haymitch swore they didn't want, and that Mags had thrown Brutus and Enobaria over to avoid.

Odair's glance flicks over the water, and he meets Brutus' eyes for two whole seconds before his mouth twitches up in a smirk and he looks away. "Don't trust One and Two," he shoots at Katniss before barking out the rest of their attack strategy, and oh he fucking did _not_.

Brutus' trademark cool determination is no match for the hot wash of rage, and he shouldn't take it personally when they're all in it to win except _fuck_ District Four. Fuck them and straddling the Career-outlier line, reaping all the benefits from the Capitol while still making nice with the others, playing the cuddly Careers while painting One and Two off as the real villains. And fuck Odair for rubbing it in - Everdeen made it clear as an avalanche that she doesn't trust One and Two as far as she can spit, so there's no reason why he'd have to waste precious breath saying it again.

Maybe he's worried that if Brutus has half the chance, he'll tell Everdeen that her new ally is a backstabbing son of a bitch.

Under cover of the water, Brutus pries his belt loose; floating is no good when diving down will protect him from anything they can throw at him. Gloss and Enobaria reach the Cornucopia first, and Brutus pulls himself back up onto the sandbar just in time to fling himself back off when Everdeen fires at him. The belt stops the arrow, splattering him in the face, and Brutus rolls into the water and scrubs himself clean of the blinding gunk before climbing back up, this time directly onto the central platform itself.

The Twelve-Four alliance takes off down another spoke, running toward Mellark, and Brutus puts them out of his mind. His allies are here; the Careers have the Cornucopia, and that's all that matters. "Food?" he demands, wiping the last of the purple goo from his face.

"Nothing. Looks like they're counting on us putting our popularity to good use." Cashmere's hair sticks to her neck, and she pushes it out of her face with a careless gesture. "Shouldn't be a problem for us, anyway." She shades her eyes and peers out over the water, the heads bobbing above the waves. She picks up a wicked pair of throwing knives and tosses one to Gloss, then hefts a mace and twirls it with as much ease as if it were made of foam. "Looks like they're getting close. Here we go."

Brutus takes a sideways leap over Caleb's corpse, slowly bleeding out onto the sand with Odair's trident stuck through his chest; he whirls in the direction of footfalls and heaves his sword around, where it cuts through skin and stops hard against the spine, jarring Brutus' arm. Amanda, from Ten, gurgles and scrabbles at Brutus' chest with her bare hands. Brutus wrenches his sword free and swings again, finishing the job - sloppy, sloppy, one blow each should do it - and Amanda collapses onto the sand and rolls halfway down toward the water.

The clash of metal sounds from the far side of the Cornucopia followed by Enobaria's sharp shout of triumph; Brutus turns away, focusing on the figure running up the sandbar to his left. Dark hair, slim build - Cecelia, running toward the Cornucopia instead of swimming away toward the jungle, hoping for what - food, water, a quick death?

Brutus backs up, grabs a spear from the pile of weapons and tests its heft and balance, still leaning backward. Then he flings his weight forward onto his left foot, brings his right arm up, and lets the weapon fly.

The spear hits her straight in the chest; the cannon fires as her body hits the water.

* * *

Lyme exhales as Brutus turns away; behind him Cecelia's body bobs gently in the waves. The hovercrafts won't bother in this chaos, not until the initial frenzy dies down, and her blood spreads out in a dark red cloud, her hair fanning around her head.

"Bastard," Diana snarls under her breath, fingers tight on the console. "He didn't even hesitate. You'd think someone so obsessed with _honour_ would at least have second thoughts. Fucking Twos."

"She's only dead because you were too much of a coward to volunteer for her," Lyme says in a mild tone that belies the spark of fury, and normally she wouldn't get involved in mentor spats - that's for newbies and angry outliers - but enough is enough. "There's a mirror in the bathroom if you want to start pointing fingers."

Diana's nostrils flare as she glares in Lyme's peripheral vision, but even if she had the chops to back her up in a physical fight, she's not fool enough to start one. Not when Lyme rolled into mentor central with bruises that not even Remake could clear in time, only to answer her fellow mentors' horrified stares with a sharp grin and the offhand remark that Brutus had wanted to practice against someone worth his time.

Claudius is down in the sponsor ring with an earpiece in case Lyme needs to relay information, and there he'll stay for the remainder of the Games if Lyme has anything to say about it. It's been hard enough reining him in without him watching the Victors die, whether he wants Brutus to come home or not; one wrong word and he'll end up with his knife in someone's eye.

The initial bloodbath is short and ultimately - in terms of ratings - boring. Six deaths start to finish: the only outlying tributes to rush the Cornucopia are the ones presumably on a suicide run; the others stay on their platforms or hide half-submerged in the water, waiting for the Pack to leave, or don't bother with the weapons at all and take off for the jungle. Eventually Brutus rolls his eyes and orders the Pack to abandon the post and make for the trees; there's no strategic advantage to holding a rock full of weapons in the middle of nowhere, and so they load up and head off.

Lyme takes the Cornucopia feed and minimizes it down to a small square in the corner of her screen, keeping half an eye on it while she tracks the Pack. Only once does anything interesting happen - Seven and Three team up against the pair from Nine, which ends with the Nines dead and Blight hauling a half-conscious and wounded Beetee away down the spokes - and while Lyme notes the oddity of the alliance, it's not her problem right now.

Cora drops her headset and buries her face in her hands, and for a second Lyme can't figure out why because she's always been more matter-of-fact about her tributes' deaths than some of the others. Except that this isn't just a tribute, it's her husband, and Johanna Mason hurled an axe into his chest and now it's over, and he'll never see that grandchild he was telling Caesar about. Lyme swallows and looks away; no one notices because they're all doing the same thing, avoiding the grief rolling off Cora in waves.

Focus.

The readouts of the Arena worry Lyme far more than the deaths, anyway; no fresh water anywhere on the island, no atmospheric indicators of rain, and with his bulk Brutus will succumb to dehydration fast. Lyme touches her earpiece, tapping twice to bring up Claudius' frequency. "D, any chance they did enough to get us some water?"

A pause - Lyme drums her fingers against the desk, chest tight - then Claudius comes back, his voice flat. "No dice, boss. Sponsors say they made a disappointing start. They want to see a few more kills before they'll fork over anything for food or water."

"Shit," Lyme mutters, rubbing her forehead, but it's not like she didn't see that coming. "Okay, thanks, keep me posted."

"That's a no?" Dexter asks when Lyme pushes her microphone out of the way. Lyme nods. "Well this one's going to hell straight from the platforms, then. Did they say why? What do they want us to do?"

"Kill more." Lyme rolls her eyes, because it's either exasperation or blinding rage and she has to keep her focus. "Sponsors are bored."

Dexter curses under his breath. "Shit, they're changing the rules already, that's just great. We've never had to earn food on the first day. Fuck! They made their bloodbath kills and everyone else was hanging back so they left to hunt. What were they supposed to do?"

"Hold the Cornucopia, I guess," Lyme says, but it's not a strategic position like in other years. There's no food, no cover, and even a Career Pack entirely made up of Victors can only use so many weapons each. The four of them huddling on a slippery rock surrounded by piles of swords and knives until the others gave up and swam for the beach wouldn't make any more of a good show. Maybe they should have run down the sand bars back toward the platforms and tried to pick off as many as they could from a distance, except that just would've meant the loss of all their range weapons pretty quickly.

"This is a fucking mess," Dexter mutters, jamming his headset firmly into place and turning back to his screen. Lyme isn't going to argue.

* * *

"Okaaaay," Cashmere says slowly, barely repressing the venom in her voice, when instead of the water she asked for they get oil and rags and whetstones to keep their weapons sharp. "Anyone want to venture a guess here? What are we supposed to do with this?"

She has to know because they all know. No gifts until they kill more, but there's no surer way to die than to force themselves through the jungle on a wild goose chase in this heat without any water. Already Brutus has a headache behind his skull, dull and throbbing, and his mouth sticks dry and his tongue feels swollen in his mouth. Brutus wipes the sweat out of his eyes and glares at the ground, weighing his options, but finally he shakes his head. "E, gimme a knife."

Enobaria bares her teeth. "Get your own."

Brutus rolls his eyes. "Cash?" She produces one from her cleavage and flips it over to him. Brutus stalks over to the nearest tree and drives the knife into the trunk, digging upwards through the bark to the wood beneath and sawing back and forth to make a hole. "Somebody get me a hollow stick and sharpen the end for me," he says, jamming the blade to the side and twisting it, widening the gap. A minute later Gloss hands him a thin branch with a newly-sharpened end, and Brutus works it inside and hammers it in with the handle of the knife.

He waits, and sure enough, moments later water trickles out from the makeshift spile. Cashmere claps her hands in delight and Gloss punches him in the arm. "So now you're, what, a bushwhacker in your spare time, mountain man?" Cashmere asks.

"I like surviving," Brutus says simply. He lowers his hands beneath the stream of water and splashes it onto his face, then ducks down and swallows a few mouthfuls. "Take your fill and then we'll move. No point carrying it, the sugar in the sap will sour pretty quick in this heat."

Cashmere lowers herself to her knees and tips her head back, and Brutus turns away. She'll make it sexy for the sponsors - already Gloss stands behind her, hands on her shoulders - and if there's one thing Brutus can't deal with on top of being back in the fucking Arena, it's watching the siblings play their creepy incest game. He'll take the gifts it gets them, sure, but that doesn't mean he has to stand there and watch.

"Move over, sickos, we're not filming a porno," Enobaria snaps a few minutes later, and Cashmere gives a throaty laugh and asks her if she's jealous. Brutus picks up one of the cloths and starts scrubbing the blade of his sword.

* * *

It's a good fucking thing that none of them have forgotten their survival training, because a whole day goes by and _nothing_. No other tributes, no more fights, no showdowns, zilch. They even head back to the beach around sunset to see if anyone will risk it, but the thin strip of land at the base of the tree line is too open and exposed for any of the others to try making it down.

No kills means no food, and Brutus' stomach growls as they work their way through the jungle in a methodical fashion. Finally the kids make a game of spearing the tree rats with their knives, and they roast those over a fire for a not overly disappointing supper. (Normally Brutus would rather starve than risk it, but these aren't city rats and were likely cloned by the Gamemakers a few days ago so they shouldn't - he hopes - be crawling with parasites.)

That night Enobaria jeers as the faces float in the sky, and Brutus knows he should join her - good for their image, bloodthirsty and brutal and vicious - but he's tired and doesn't have the heart for it. Cecelia's face is solemn as she stares down over the Arena, and her eyes stay with him even after Brutus closes his.

* * *

They don't get any food, but they do get a pack of cards, and Brutus shoves down a wash of irritation. "Strip poker it is," Cashmere says, giving them a suggestive grin and waggling her eyebrows. She's good, Brutus will give her that; she actually sells it, makes it look like she really wants to spend her last days alive taking off her clothes with her brother and a couple of Twos.

Brutus loses almost every hand when he's up against Cashmere even though he's the better player, and the sponsors will whine about their luck but too fucking bad. Better him sitting there in his underwear than her, and so he throws away a pair of aces and a three-set of tens and yanks off his shirt to Gloss' convincingly enthusiastic wolf whistle.

He is way, way too old for this shit.

* * *

Late that night Brutus jerks awake as twelve loud gongs wrest him from uneasy dreams. Enobaria's on watch, and she shrugs at him when Brutus asks what the hell is going on. "Dunno. There was lightning a little while ago, but this is the first time there's been any noises. Must be midnight."

Cashmere makes a disgruntled noise and tucks herself in closer against her brother's chest. Gloss grunts and settles back down with his head in the crook of his elbow, his other arm draped over Cashmere's back. "They'd better not be doing that every hour or I'm gonna be pissed," Gloss mutters, and Brutus isn't going to bitch about the Arena where the Gamemakers can hear him but he's inclined to agree. Messing with the tributes' sleep is a pretty standard tactic to keep things interesting, but every hour seems a bit excessive.

Brutus stays awake and counts the next hour off in his head, but nothing happens at one a.m. Who knows what they were thinking, but Brutus has long learned that you don't stay alive by trying to second-guess the Gamemakers. Better just to take the lumps as they come and ignore it if there's nothing. He rolls over and drops off again, grateful that the ability to sleep on command isn't one that fades with time.

* * *

He wakes again when a cannon fires in the middle of the night. "Shit," Brutus mutters. If someone else is being exciting and doing the killing then they're all in trouble. They pack up and move out but once again find absolutely no one, and by the time a second cannon goes off an hour later Brutus has all but given up on finding anything but more tree rats.

"I'm going back to sleep," Enobaria says finally, flinging a knife into a tree and skewering a rat to the trunk. "This is stupid. If Nero wants me to be up and hunting he can at least send me ice cream."

"I'll take watch," Brutus says instead of bothering to argue. So far the Arena has been boring as shit; no traps, no tricks, no nothing, just the trees. Hopefully something happens soon or he's afraid that Cashmere will start trying to feel him up for lack of anything better to do.

* * *

Claudius keeps the smile on his face; whenever it starts to slip, he imagines taking his pencil and driving it through a sponsor's skull. That gives him a jolt of pleasure like an epinephrine jab, enough to keep him going through the conversation. "I promise they're doing their very best to make this exciting," Claudius says, leaving the channel open, and Lyme lets out a disgusted snort in his ear. "They've been hunting all morning; if you have any complaints about the lack of deaths, you might want to bring your concerns to the Gamemakers. The way the Arena is set up this year makes running into each other very difficult."

That's a nice way of putting it, when the truth is that every time the Pack tries to make it down to the beach, a forcefield at the edge of the tree line stops them and forces them back into the jungle. It's like someone doesn't want them out in the open where it's easy to catch the others, though for the life of him Claudius can't figure out why. They're demanding the Pack murder more tributes but making it impossible to find them, forcing them to sweep the entire jungle piece by piece while the ever-widening group of allies waltzes around and survives a host of Arena traps and nets themselves all of the airtime.

"I'm just not sure if they're worth the investment this year," the sponsor says, her mouth turned down in a disappointed pout. "Have you seen what the others have been doing? Fighting monkeys and poison fog and all kinds of exciting things! It seems like your group is playing it safe."

Pencil through the eye, Claudius reminds himself, and stretches his mouth into a grim parody of a grin by imagining the spurt of blood.

* * *

Mid-morning the Arena goes completely dark. Brutus closes his eyes, presses a hand hard over his lids, and counts to twenty before opening them again, but it makes no difference. "Well, this is fun," Gloss drawls from beside him, and Brutus turns toward the sound but makes out absolutely nothing, not even a smear of movement against the thick blackness surrounding them. "Now what?"

"Now nothing," Brutus says, and he shuts his eyes again just because it's less of a head trip that way. His heart hammers in his chest against his will; he's not afraid of the dark or anything stupid, all the trainees had to deal with that when they were thirteen and he survived that just fine, but it's still nothing he'd do for fun. "We sit tight and wait for it to go away. No point crashing around and tripping over roots and breaking our skulls on tree branches."

"Sounds good to me," Cashmere says, and the leaves rustle as she drops. "I'm sick of this already. Let the meat run around and trip and fall to their deaths. I hope half of them drown in the mud.'

"Have I mentioned how much I hate this Arena?" Enobaria asks, hissing the words and punctuating her t's with loud clicks of her tongue against her fangs. "Because I really hate this Arena. What's the point of the dark? We couldn't even find them in the daytime!"

Brutus has no answer for that, but a minute later the air fills with screams. Not human screams, and not animal ones, either; they're high-pitched and screeching, tearing through Brutus' skull and drilling through his teeth, and he grunts in pain before the first bat flies into his face.

He can't see them any more than he can see anything else, but Brutus recognizes the shriek of batt muttations anywhere. His Arena had them, the time he sought to hide from the blistering sun in a low-lying cave and really should have known better. The air fills with the mad flapping of their wings, and between that and their hunting cries the entire jungle is a cacophony of noise.

"What the fuck?" Gloss yelps, and it takes a lot to genuinely unsettle a Career but even they have limits. "What the - get off!"

Brutus forces himself to breathe slowly, and he backs up one step at a time until he hits a tree, bracing himself against the trunk with one foot planted on the far side of a large root to ground him. "Move back, find a tree and grab on!" he yells over the din. "Sound off so we know where we all are, we don't want to hit each other!"

"This is the worst Arena ever!" Cashmere shouts as she moves a little way off, cursing and stumbling in the pitch blackness. And maybe he's wrong, maybe they're not the same mutts that attacked him all those years ago, except that first Cashmere lets out a shriek, and a few moments later Enobaria and Gloss explode into fits of swearing.

The first bat sinks its teeth into Brutus' arm, sharp points of pain piercing his skin, and he beats it off with his free hand. "They'll drink you dry if you let them," he calls out, and he abandons proper form to grip his sword like a bat, swinging it with no regard for technique or style but just to connect and keep them away. "Keep them off any way you can but don't throw any fucking knives, E! I don't want to get skewered."

"I'm not going to waste my pretty knives in the dark," Enobaria snaps back, but her voice is tight with determination and fury and that's a good thing. "Come on, you little bloodsuckers, you think you can fight me? Bring it on!"

What makes the most sense would be to crawl into a ball to make himself the smallest possible target and try to hide beneath the roots or cover himself with leaves, but that ain't Brutus' style and it's not what the sponsors will want to see, either. They've finally been given the chance to do something interesting, and he can't waste it being practical. So instead of hunkering down and waiting for it to end, Brutus attacks the howling bats with his sword, grunting with satisfaction every time he connects.

It's Gloss' idea to start the count. "I'm at three!" he yells at one point. "I bet you I get more than all of you."

"What?" Enobaria bursts out. "Nobody told me we were counting! That's not fair!"

"It's not a contest," Cashmere challenges.

"That's just because you're losing," Gloss shoots back.

And the thing is, it's not a bad plan. Brutus grins, manic and more than a little mad, but let them see it; they'll be watching this with special cameras anyway. Let them see that Careers won't be taken out by a little darkness and some flying rats. "That's what you think," he shouts. "I'm already at four."

"Fuck you, old man!" Gloss yells again, and Brutus barks out a laugh.

Brutus doesn't bother to count the minutes, not when his concentration is focused on not bashing himself in the face or getting his sword stuck in a tree or letting enough of the mutts past his guard to leech away his lifeblood, but he guesses they keep at it for about an hour. The lights come back on out of nowhere without warning, and Brutus flings an arm over his eyes to shut out the blinding sunlight. He keeps his sword hand free to fend off the bats, but their cries die off just as sharply and instead the air whistles with the sound of their wings as they fly away and disappear into the trees.

Brutus opens his eyes, blinking against the stab of pain in his eye sockets, and takes stock of the others. They're all bleeding - Cashmere, the smallest and lightest of them, weaves a little, looking woozy, and Gloss darts over to wrap an arm around her waist and hold her steady - but other than that they're fine. A few puncture wounds, a little blood loss, but nothing they can't fix. Black, winged corpses litter the ground around them.

"Count the bodies in your zone," Enobaria says, breaking the silence. "I want to make sure none of you fuckers cheated."

They count, and Brutus wins. "Age before beauty," he sneers at Enobaria when she shows her fangs at him.

"Just one more and I would've tied you," Cashmere complains, kicking at one of the bodies with the toe of her boot. "They couldn't have given me ten more seconds?"

"Besides, you're so huge, you probably just had to stand there and they ran into you like a wall," Gloss adds, and Brutus takes the ribbing because it looks good. Yeah, they just survived an hour in the dark with killer mutts, and they turned it into a game and now they're laughing about it. Surely that at least is worth some fucking breakfast.

It is. The parachutes drop soon after, and Enobaria snatches the one painted 'E' out of the air and cradles it to her chest, screwing off the cap and cheering when Nero sent her the fucking ice cream after all. Brutus and the others get regular food - some bread and dried meat and fruit, easy to carry on them once they move - and a pack of bandages and salve to split between them.

"Fuckin' finally," Gloss mutters under his breath, too low for the microphones to catch, because they all know better than to act entitled. Out loud he tilts his face up and gives the cameras a bright, commercial-ready smile. "My thanks," he says, raising the cap of his canister, which he's using as a makeshift cup for his lukewarm sap-water.

"Bon appetit," Cashmere says, and Brutus rolls his eyes. They're always using pretty nonsense words like that in One.

"Cheers," Brutus says instead like a normal person, and doesn't bother to cut off a slice, just tears into the bread with his teeth.

* * *

That afternoon it's blood rain, pouring down thick and hot and choking, and this time Brutus doesn't even bother to play it up for the sponsors. He grabs the nearest person - Enobaria, she sinks her fangs into his wrist before she realizes he's not trying to throttle her - and pulls her close, then keeps his head down and yells for Cashmere and Gloss until they find them. They huddle together, turned inward in a circle, and they lower themselves down to their knees.

Brutus peels off his jacket and drapes it over Enobaria's head, and instead of snarling at him she pulls it closer. Now would be the perfect time to stab each other in the gut if they wanted to break the alliance and improve their odds but none of them do. They cling to each other in grim silence with their heads pointed toward the ground and shoulders pressed close.

The rain stops as suddenly as it began an hour later. Brutus rears back, wiping the blood away and heaving in gasps of humid, moisture-filled air, spitting mouthfuls of blood onto the ground. Beside him Enobaria shudders, scrubbing at her face with her arms, and Brutus winces; the last time she swallowed that much blood would've been in her Arena, but he can't comfort her. It would weaken their image and she wouldn't accept it anyway.

"I take it back, what I said about it being boring," Cashmere says, slumping back in exhaustion and letting her head fall against Gloss' shoulder. He works his fingers through her hair, separating out the clumped, matted strands. "I'll lie around braiding flowers in my hair if it means I never have to do that again."

"We're going to smell," Enobaria complains, and she's not wrong, not in this heat. Her voice shakes, too subtle for the audience to notice but obvious enough to a fellow Career, and this time Brutus has to bite back a curse. Enobaria hates being dirty, hates it more than almost anything else. It reminds her of the Arena, not the fun parts where she got to flay open a girl's throat or jump into a melee with her sword flashing, but the low, slogging bits in the middle where the food ran dry and the tributes too thin to make it fun.

Brutus tilts his head up to the sky. "Any chance for a bit of help here?" he asks. The only good thing about this is that Nero is in the mentor's seat, and Enobaria's mentor knows her better than anyone. He'll be cussing his head off and scrambling for a way to get her clean, because he loves his girl and wants to keep her sane.

It takes a minute - Brutus slices into a tree and opens up as big a spigot as he can, letting Enobaria sit beneath the stream and scrub at her face - but finally Nero answers. The skies open up, but this time instead of blood, the clouds let loose a cooling torrent of water. It's only five minutes but after the gunk and the stickiness and the stench it feels like an hour, and they strip off their clothes and let the rain sluice away the blood.

Brutus doesn't bother with his shirt; Enobaria chewed a hole through it while waiting for the blood to stop, and he pulls on the bottom half of his uniform and leaves it at that. Gloss and Enobaria follow suit - at this point there's hardly any point, they're hot and confining and Brutus swears the material keeps shrinking - but Cashmere clenches her jaw and zips her uniform straight up to her throat. Brutus ain't gonna touch that.

"Let's move out," Brutus says instead. The alliance still has the beach, and there's no point even bothering trying to head down when they'll just get another fucking forcefield keeping them back. "See if we can find Chaff."

* * *

They don't find Chaff, and by the time another hour or so slides by they're all feeling it. "I want to kill someone," Cashmere says, eyes hard and flashing. "I'm sick of this. I don't even care anymore, I'm sick of this jungle and these trees and traps. Why are we even here if we don't get to murder anyone? What is the _point_ ? Are we supposed to stand around while the Arena picks everybody off one by one or what? What kind of a Victor Games _is_ this?"

The alliance is huddled at the centre of the Arena, gesturing over the Cornucopia. Even Brutus is feeling it now, the hot surge of impatience and frustration, and so he makes a gambit. "Let us out and I guarantee a kill," he says to the air. "We know how to give a good show, just give us the chance."

The air in front of them shimmers, and the forcefield disappears. Brutus grins and salutes up toward the sky. "You won't regret it," he tells the Gamemakers; Enobaria cackles, and to the side Cashmere and Gloss share a private glance.

* * *

The Cornucopia spins, throwing the corpses of Wiress, Gloss and Cashmere into the water and knocking Brutus and Enobaria flying. The others cling to the rocks and to each other, and Brutus and Enobaria take the hint and swim away before the whole thing stops moving and the rest of the alliance regains their bearings.

"What," Lyme grits out between her teeth, "was that?"

She doesn't let herself think of Wiress, floating in the water as Katniss Everdeen flounders out and untangles the coil of wire from her body, as anything more than a statistic, because there's no time for that. Cashmere and Gloss bob in the waves, blood spreading out in dark clouds.

Dexter rips off his headset and throws it so hard against the wall it explodes. "Well that's that," he says, exhaling through his nose. "Looks like I'm coming out of retirement."

He's not talking about mentoring, and Lyme doesn't comment because he wouldn't want her to, not when District Two privilege means Lyme's body is hers and hers alone until the day she dies. With Gloss and Cashmere dead, the remaining Ones will be making up the difference from their furious, desperate clientele.

No time, no time. Lyme brushes the thought aside to focus on what's important: namely that Brutus and Enobaria could have taken out at least two more if the Gamemakers hadn't spun the island.

Between that and the forcefields that have been keeping the Pack from hitting the beach when the allies hold it, Lyme can't shake the feeling that this Arena was not meant for the Careers to win. Except that after the disaster of last year - not just the Games but the whole mess of uprisings in the months following - she would've thought it would be the other way around.

The other mentors stare at their consoles in silence, and it could be respect for the newly dead except Lyme isn't stupid and it really, really fucking isn't. The longer she sits there, the more she glances at their faces and catches the furtive looks they shoot each other, the more it feels like the alliance is about something much, much larger than who walks out of the Arena.

* * *

"I told them." Brutus stabs his sword into a tree and digs it sideways, relishing the jolt against his wrist as the blade catches in the heart-meat because it gives him something else to think about. "I fucking _told_ them. Go for Odair or Mason. We could take the Threes out any time. The fuck were they doing?"

"They've always been like that," Enobaria says, combing the last of the saltwater tangles from her hair and pulling it back. They're not allowed to talk about Cashmere and Gloss suiciding out - which is what the siblings most definitely just did - but Brutus knows what she means. "It's not like we didn't know it was coming."

Not on day fucking two, they didn't.

"It still doesn't make any fucking sense for them to go for Three," Brutus grits out. He yanks his his sword free from the trunk; a few moments later, water trickles out from the gash, and Brutus cups his hand underneath and scoops it up to his mouth because waste not want not. "You wanna fight, you go for the ones who are gonna fight you."

If they really were looking for a chance to commit suicide, afraid that the Arena would slowly pick off the other tributes until there was no one left strong enough to do it, why choose Wiress? Why not run right for the middle and take out one of the ones worth fighting? Cashmere never liked Mason - the two of them got on like wet cats trapped in a paper bag - and Gloss thought Mellark was a stuck-up little prissy boy with his idiotic notions of love and noble sacrifice. Neither of them had any problems with the half-crazed woman who sang to herself and made them little trinkets of wire and bits of glass.

"Fuck if I know what crazy people think," Enobaria scoffs, and Brutus doesn't laugh even though she set him up for that one. He should at least shoot her a grin until she glares at him but he's not in the fucking mood.

"Well it's done now," Brutus says darkly. Two days in and half the Pack is gone; it's him and Enobaria versus the rest of the Games-damned Arena, apparently, since all but two of the remaining tributes are down there on the beach having a grand old time.

Brutus lost one spear in the attack and didn't have the chance to grab any more, but that's fine. The alliance won't hold the beach forever, and once they're back in the jungle he and Enobaria can slip out and restock. It's only Day Two. There's plenty of time.


	9. Chapter 9: The Arena, Part II - The End

That night not even Enobaria jokes as the day's count flashes across the sky. Cashmere and Gloss go first, and it's what they wanted and Brutus is - glad, sort of - for them, but at the same time it's such a fucking waste.

The worst part is, pretty much nobody liked Cash and Gloss, even the ones who were whored out with them; they were too hard, too bitter, too wrapped up in each other and quick to attack anything that moved. Gloss had been quieter, swallowing his anger and following his sister's lead, but Cashmere could smell fresh blood a mile away and never passed up an opportunity to go for the throat, nasty in the way that only a dog chained up and kicked before it gets its food can be.

"I bet they're applauding," Enobaria says, and she never got on with the siblings either, but that's just because the list of people Enobaria likes has maybe two people on it. "Across the districts, I mean. I bet they're glad One got comeuppance so early." Enobaria doesn't give a shit about District One but she hates traitors more, and her voice takes on a disgusted edge. "I bet the only people crying are their -"

"Don't," Brutus snaps. Technically the kids are too dead to care, but true or not it feels like shitting on their bodies to say it out loud.

"Meanwhile everyone's sobbing their eyes out about Mags," Enobaria continues, thankfully letting Wiress pass without comment. Brutus closes his eyes. "Why? Because she's old and that makes it sad? Who cares? Lots of people are old."

"She's the most successful mentor in all of the districts," Brutus points out, and he's still angry - her betrayal of the standard Career alliance and all her double-dealing still sting - but there's no point in stewing in it anymore. It's done, she's dead, and even the parade moves on, flashing up Maria from District Five. However she went, he hopes it was quick, clean and dignified, though in this Arena he wouldn't bet his next meal on it. "And not a lot of people make it to her age. She should get respect for that."

"I hope when I'm old I get respect for more than not dying," Enobaria snarks, but abruptly she snaps her mouth shut, teeth clicking. She turns away from the sky, curling up to sleep with her knives tucked close to her chest.

Brutus sighs. "I'll take first watch, then." Enobaria doesn't answer, and he tosses a branch onto the fire and watches the flames sputter.

* * *

Lyme rolls her eyes up to the ceiling when Beetee walks his allies through a painstaking hand-holding to figure out why Brutus and Enobaria aren't on the beach, complete with a question and answer period like he's a schoolteacher and they're a group of rather dim students. Threes, never change. Still, it's got to be boring for him being stuck in a place like this, the man might as well get his kicks somehow. The best part is when they come to the conclusion that the Twos must be close by, and listening - ten feet back behind the tree line, trapped by the forcefield and hidden away in the shadows, Brutus shoots Enobaria an exasperated look - but then Beetee goes right ahead and describes his plan in detail anyway.

Lyme would chalk it up to one of those moments where Beetee outthinks himself, or the Three thing where looking clever is more important than acting smart, except that Lumina stiffens at her console. "What are you doing?" she hisses under her breath, and she wouldn't do that if Beetee was making an arrogant mistake and not realizing what he's saying. Lumina notices Lyme's eyes on her and sits back, pressing her lips together, and wait, what?

If it wasn't an accident, then why would Beetee describe his plan where Brutus and Enobaria could overhear? And if so, why would that upset Lumina?

Lyme glances sideways at Nero, and he lifts his shoulders in a shrug. What in the _hell_ is going on?

Onscreen, Brutus listens to Beetee's cockamamie scheme with a skeptical frown and drums his fingers against the tree trunk.

* * *

Enobaria folds her arms as the allies pack up and head down across the beach. "I don't care how special that wire is, there's no way he can electrify the whole lake with one lightning strike. I call bullshit."

Brutus ain't an expert either, but he's pretty sure Enobaria's right this time. "Even if he could, it wouldn't work on the sand," he says slowly. "It - I don't think it would stick together enough, and it sure as hell wouldn't hold a charge afterward. If lightning hits sand it turns to glass, kinda, makes this weird tentacle shit that looks like something from a nightmare. It doesn't make the whole thing into a danger zone."

Enobaria tilts her head. "Glass, really?" she asks, the Arena forgotten for a second. She's always liked pretty, destructive things.

"Yeah, it was one of the Fours' talents a few decades back," Brutus says, staring out over the water as the allies disappear into the jungle. "He'd stick metal poles in the ground before a storm to try and attract the lightning, polish it up after and sell it in the Capitol."

It's not important, especially not now, but talking about stupid shit makes Brutus feel a little bit better. It helps him compartmentalize, occupying the part of his brain that wants to overanalyze and second-guess everything. Too bad it only lasts a minute.

He could've sworn that when Beetee said the Twos would be hiding in the tree line that he'd looked straight back at Brutus. It's just that that makes no fucking sense, if the plan actually will do what he says it will. Why would Beetee waste time constructing an elaborate trap, only to let Brutus know exactly what to do to avoid it?

So. Say the plan is bullshit. Whatever it is Beetee's doing with the wire, it's not actually about making a bunch of fried shrimp and instantly-seared fish. Brutus isn't going to waste a second trying to deconstruct a Three's plan backwards; what Beetee really wants to do isn't the point. The real question is what part Brutus is expected to play in it all, and whether he trusts Beetee's hint - if it even is a hint, after Mags' 'new players' shit Brutus is a little wary of making assumptions - or chooses to ignore it.

The one good thing to come out of the conversation is the explanation of why the Arena has been so bizarre, with traps starting and stopping at one-hour intervals, followed by long, tedious stretches of nothing. If it's a clock, that means that outside the one active wedge, the entire place is essentially a safe zone, since the jungle is too thick and impenetrable for them to trek through and find each other.

That seems, to Brutus, to be a really stupid way to set up an Arena, since if no one is inside a live wedge when it goes off then that essentially wastes the hour. As for figuring it out, either a group gets unlucky, running from one trap into another until they're forced to get it, like the allies, or they miss them completely and wonder what the hell is going on, like the Pack. You'd think that would make for an unbalanced viewing experience.

Then again, that's just Brutus' opinion, and why he's in here for the second time and not making the big money sitting behind a fancy desk.

"So what, then?" Enobaria asks, and Brutus pinches the bridge of his nose.

"We have until midnight." Brutus shrugs. "See what they do and go from there."

* * *

The first real sense of unease creeps over Lyme when Lumina sends the alliance a pack of twenty-four rolls of bread on the second day. Twenty-four won't divide evenly between them, and that's not a mistake Lumina would make. Lyme tries to push it aside - there are more important things - but it happens again the next day, once in the morning and once in the middle of the afternoon, the same twenty-four rolls. As the third day drags on past sunset, finally it hits her.

Lumina sent the bread. Lumina of District Three, where sponsors are thin on the ground and her tributes all but guaranteed to lose. Not even Lyme wants to think about the price of that much bread with half the tributes gone, only three days in or no; for Lumina to have given it, she'd have to have help. It's not feasible, but unless Claudius has fallen asleep at his post, Lyme would know if the other mentors had pooled their funds.

And why? It's just bread, not even necessary with the tree rats and the seafood and everything else. This isn't a wasteland. More than one spile would make much more sense, since once Katniss is dead only the person who steals the metal tube from her corpse will have access to drinkable water.

Unless. Unless it's not about the bread at all.

Twenty-four loaves, twenty-four hours. Twenty-four, midnight. District Three, the third day.

The bread is a signal. On Lumina's screen, Beetee examines the tree and mutters to himself while the Twelves spread their hands and laugh at their own ignorance. Midnight. The lightning tree. The wire. It's all part of something much larger than electrifying the lake and killing all the fish and somehow making the sand conductive. Something else is happening at midnight, and Lumina told Beetee to do it.

Brutus and Enobaria trek through the jungle in silence, Enobaria staring at Brutus' neck and playing with her knife while he pretends his best to ignore her. A drumbeat of panic starts up in Lyme's chest.

It's evening on the third day already, and midnight is closing fast. Lyme gets up from her chair with a clatter and taps her earpiece, signalling Odin on the sponsor floor. "I need to see you," she says under her breath. "Send Claudius up to watch the screens, nothing's happening and it'll be good practice."

She tells him in whispers, but Odin doesn't believe her. "I would have heard something," he says, and he's been mentoring for thirty years so maybe he has a point, but Lyme can't shake the feeling. She doesn't bother arguing with Odin on the basis of a gut instinct; as a mentor she's found that hunches should rarely be ignored, but Odin is old-school and would likely say something about women's intuition having no place in the sponsor ring.

"Something is happening at midnight either way," Lyme says instead. "Three's plan, whatever it is, hinges on that lightning, we know that. Maybe the lightning is just a smokescreen or a distraction to throw us off, but midnight is important. We should be careful."

"Brutus and Enobaria are already aware of the plan," Odin points out. "There's nothing we can do but let them play it out. They're good strategists both of them, if something is afoot they'll catch on."

It's not unreasonable, is the thing. It's good advice, especially since Lyme has no idea what the alternative would even be, other than break in and pull them out because she's being ridiculous. Odin is right; as mentors they can't directly interfere, and no gift Lyme can send can help when she doesn't even know what it is she's afraid of.

It's just - something smells wrong. It's the bread and the message that Lyme may or may not be inventing; it's Lumina and Beetee and the plan that makes no sense; it's Johanna dragging the Threes around for half a day because Katniss Everdeen wanted them; it's the alliance sacrificing themselves to help the Twelves, over and over and over, when only one of them can walk out. It's the Gamemakers penning in the Careers hour after hour while letting the outliers lounge around on the beach roasting shellfish.

"Fine," Lyme says finally, and Odin claps her on the shoulder. "I don't like this, but you're probably right."

"There is much to dislike," Odin agrees, expression darkening. "I'm returning to the floor. I have it handled, if your Claudius wants to take a break for a while. He's been working himself hard."

Lyme nods and heads back to mentor central, slipping back in through the door and standing behind Claudius as he monitors the feeds. "How are they doing?"

"Enobaria is edgy," Claudius says quietly. "Much longer and I think it might break. If something else doesn't happen tonight I'm worried she'll knife him in his sleep just so she won't have to chew his throat out."

Lyme winces. It makes a certain kind of sense, is the sad thing; the closer she and Brutus get to the end, the more spectacular the fight will have to be, and that means reliving a moment that Enobaria would much rather forget. If she does it now, Brutus gets a clean kill and Enobaria can save her crazy for the outliers. Maybe Nero even told her to do it that way.

"It won't be tonight," Lyme says, fighting off the shiver that runs through her at the thought of Brutus dying. "Something is going down, and chances are they'll both be too keyed up to sleep after that. That should buy us at least a day."

"Yeah, I guess." Claudius leans back in his chair and yanks his headset down from his ears; Lyme drops her hands to his shoulders and works the taut muscles with a few deft gestures. "I hate this," he mutters, dragging a hand down his face. "I hate everything."

"Head back to the floor for a bit, I'll take over here," Lyme tells him, and she takes a quick glance around the room. No one is paying attention to them, since most of the mentors are out and have headed to the common area to drink their feelings away. "Listen, around eleven I want you to excuse yourself and head back up to the rooms," Lyme says in a low voice, and Claudius glances up at her but she shakes her head. "I have a bad feeling, and I want to know where you are and that you're not surrounded by people. Okay?"

Onscreen Enobaria flings a knife at a tree and shouts something, likely complaining about another dinner of foraging while the alliance got something fancy, and Claudius tugs his headset back on and clicks his teeth. Lyme watches as he argues into the mouthpiece for a while, but finally he nods and punches something into the console.

"Sorry," Claudius says a minute later, relaxing when Brutus looks up and catches a parachute. It's a pair of canisters, each filled with soup, one hearty meat and vegetable for him for him and the other blended smooth, no chewing required, for Enobaria. Claudius glances up at Lyme and flicks his fingers: _what's up?_ Lyme doesn't bother signing, just shakes her head, and Claudius nods. "Sure, I'll head back then. Just come get me when you want me, I guess."

"I will." Claudius gives her back the chair, and Lyme sits down and tries to ignore the twisting in her chest.

* * *

The insect mutts chitter off to the side as eleven o'clock hits; several of them buzz in close before smacking hard into the forcefield separating the wedges. Brutus doesn't turn his head, even when one the size of a big dog and pinchers the length of Enobaria's forearm keeps trying to get at him.

_If she can't chew through that field, neither can you_, Brutus thinks in a grim parody of amusement. Enobaria certainly tried, that afternoon when the alliance lounged on the beach and had a party.

No parade of the fallen this time; the third day passed without a casualty. The time gleams faintly on his wrist from the watch Lyme sent him after the anthem, and Brutus keeps half an eye on it, throat closed. There's no need for a watch here in the Arena, not with the clock code cracked, and with the beach closed off to them they have no way of telling which wedge they're in half the time. But Brutus has worked with Lyme for almost twenty years, and Lyme doesn't send useless gifts. This one arrived with a note that said 'TAKE CONTROL'.

Brutus and Lyme have been fluent in the mentor code of sponsor gifts for some forty years between them, and this one has the mark of desperation. Lyme may as well have sent a giant sign with the words "STOP THE ALLIANCE'S PLAN" scrawled in giant block letters, and Brutus made sure to strap it to his wrist as soon as realization sank in.

Nero sent Enobaria two small rolls of Two's dark wholemeal bread, and Enobaria stared at them with a dark scowl on her face before shoving both in the pouch at her belt. She doesn't like fresh bread because it gets caught in her fangs, turns soft from her spit and requires effort to get it all out between the serrated points, but it's not about the bread, is it. Enobaria doesn't show him the note, but Brutus can read Nero's handwriting in the gift anyway: two loaves from their home district. Stick together and trust her district partner, at least for now.

And so here they are, crouched in the vines halfway between the lightning tree and the beach, waiting for the girls from Twelve and Seven to bring the coil of wire down.

"I want to fight," Enobaria hisses under her breath, fingers playing over the hilt of her sword. After the anthem, she and Brutus headed down to the Cornucopia and restocked themselves on weapons, but since then it's been nothing but waiting. "I'm sick of this."

Brutus doesn't answer her. He's the leader and he will stay the leader as long as Enobaria backs him. They're going to take the most effective route and stop the girls from bringing the wire down to the beach instead of trying to take on the trio back up at the tree. It might only be Odair who's combat-ready, but that's good enough when he's in the fortified position.

Sure enough, the girls head down through the vines, Mason going first with the coil in her hands, shoulders whipcord tight, and Everdeen following, eyes and stance alert and her bow held at the ready. Enobaria shifts, but Brutus reaches over and holds her down with a hand on her shoulder, ignoring the sting of pain when she digs her teeth into his fingers in retaliation. He'll take her sulky complaints if it means she listens.

Everdeen's voice floats up, offering to switch roles, and once they're past Brutus slips out of his hiding place and nods to Enobaria. She creeps up beside him, draws her knife and slices through the wire. There's a moment of resistance but then it parts, and with the tension released the wire snaps back in either direction. Brutus throws himself back to avoid getting sliced open by the sawn-off end as it slithers past.

"Now," Brutus barks at Enobaria, and they burst through the trees into a small clearing, the moonlight bright overhead. It illuminates the silver blade of Mason's knife as she brings it down toward Everdeen's prone body.

The _hell_?

"She's mine!" Enobaria protests, but again Brutus holds her back. It's not a kill strike - there's blood, black and shining in the moonlight, but not enough to cause death, not yet - and soon Mason slips off into the trees. Enobaria stops fighting against Brutus when it's clear that Mason isn't going to finish the job. "My turn," she says with savage glee, a knife in each hand. "I'm going to set her on fire and cut her open and show everyone there's no baby because she's a filthy little liar."

Brutus swallows a growl. "Not yet," he tells her, hand curled hard around his spear. "You'll have time to play with her later, but not now. Now we have to stop them so you'd have to make it quick, and you don't want to waste her on a quick kill, do you?"

Enobaria bares her fangs at him, but Brutus stopped being impressed by that over ten years ago and she stops. "No," she grits out finally, eyes darting down. "But you could stop them and I take my time. What if she gets up and runs away -"

This time Brutus lets the rumble of anger starts in his chest and escape him in a snarl. "She's as good as dead!" he snaps. "Come on, Enobaria!"

The hard command doesn't go unnoticed, and Enobaria glares at him for a full second before she puts away her knives and pulls the sword from her back instead. "Fine," she mutters, and they take off through the jungle after Mason. Brutus has to get Enobaria as far from her prey as possible, give her someone else to kill and something exciting to do or he'll never drag her away, and he might not have a fucking clue what's going on but he knows this isn't the damn time for an extended torture show.

They follow Mason's trail through the jungle, snaking down and across in a crooked zigzag moving down toward the beach. They're catching up, and Brutus keeps an ear out for any sound of a pause, any indication that she's going to stop and make a stand instead of run. He's still listening when he has to fling himself sideways to avoid running straight into Chaff.

"Where the fuck have you _been_ ?" Brutus bursts out, and that's not his finest moment of showmanship except that honestly, where _has_ he been? Brutus and Enobaria have trekked all over the jungle and the alliance has held the beach and there's been no sign of him for three days.

But Chaff is not in the mood for banter. His good hand clutches a machete, and there's blood and murder in his eyes. Brutus will bet that wherever he's been, it wasn't sipping drinks in a hammock and letting the others have all the fun. His skin glistens with sweat, his shirt is gone, and deep claw marks score his chest and arms.

Brutus blocks Chaff's retreat back up the hill, and Enobaria slips down on the other side, stopping him from heading back toward the beach. She has her knives again - if nothing else Brutus will always admire the way she switches weapons in a matter of seconds - and that means she's going for her usual combat style, death by a thousand cuts.

They don't have time for that; Chaff's eyes gleam with madness and dehydration, and he might be fun to torture when he's half-crazed and out for the kill but midnight is coming. "You're not going to ruin this," Chaff rasps out. Enobaria darts in, slices him low across the ribs and dances back before he can swing - but he doesn't try, doesn't even seem to register the wound at all. Enobaria hisses in disappointment and circles again, readying her other blade. Once one has tasted blood, the other won't be far behind.

Brutus narrows his eyes. Maybe Chaff knows about the alliance's plan; maybe he's raving. It doesn't matter. It's too close-quarters for his spear, and Brutus cross-steps back, leaves it against a boulder and brings his sword up to bear.

Chaff lunges first. Brutus blocks his wild strike with ease, but the footing is uncertain and Chaff is big and fighting out of rage, not self-preservation, and Brutus stumbles back a step. "Enobaria!" he bites out. "Now!"

But Enobaria doesn't move to take Chaff out from behind; instead she tears off to the side and catches a startled Finnick Odair.

Fuck.

Brutus drives Chaff back, and like it or not they're each on their own. Enobaria can handle Odair at close quarters without the element of surprise, so he'll just have to hope she does her job instead of getting caught up in the excitement and the bloodlust. Chaff comes at Brutus again, and Brutus wrenches his brain back to the fight, shutting off everything else.

It's the first honest fight Brutus has had since the initial bloodbath at the Cornucopia, and after two days of frustration and impotence, fighting the Arena and his doubts and everything else, it feels good - real good - to cross blades with someone who honestly just wants to kill him. It's uncomplicated, and the fight sings in Brutus' blood and his muscles burn and yes, this is perfect. Chaff shouts at him the whole time, spitting curses while foam flecks his mouth, but Brutus tunes it out and focuses on nothing but the trill of combat.

He's almost disappointed when the cannon sounds. Brutus pulls his sword free, grabs a handful of leaves from the tree above him and wipes off the blood as best he can before it dries and turns sticky. Enobaria and Odair have gone, racing away back up the jungle path toward the lightning tree, and Brutus will trust that Enobaria can take care of it.

That leaves Mason as the wild card. Brutus grabs his spear and takes off through the jungle where she disappeared.

* * *

Nero holds his breath as his girl trades blows with Finnick Odair. Of the remaining tributes, Odair is the only one besides Brutus with a danger of taking Bari out at hand-to-hand, and Nero has faith in her but accidents can happen. If the last year has taught Nero anything it's that nothing is sure; he staked his honour as a mentor that Bari would never have to kill again, and look how well that ended up.

At least Bari isn't playing; she has her kill face on, eyes narrowed and mouth thin instead of grinning, and she's forgotten all about her games with Twelve as she darts in and catches Odair in the arm. A long line of red bubbles up on his skin, and Odair dances back, parrying her next blow but not responding.

And - what the hell? Because the Twos are the only ones who'd be able to take out Odair unless he lets Twelve and her bow get a bead on him in secret, and the boy is too smart for that. Except somehow he's not smart enough to do more than take the defensive against Bari, apparently, like that will make her spare him or do anything but get annoyed and kill him faster.

"Stop playing!" Bari snaps, and yup there we go. Nero's hands tighten on the edge of the desk, but this is her pissed and focused and she can do this. Stay on task, he pleads silently. She lunges forward, sword flashing, but again Odair ducks under the blow and moves out of her reach, and still doesn't run. "Stop being such a coward and fight me for real!"

"You really don't get it," Odair says, and he keeps his weapon up but he doesn't attack her, and what is going _on_. "This is so much bigger than you, or me, if you would just stop being so crazy and listen for a second!"

Rookie mistake; never call Bari crazy, and sure enough she pulls back her lips and snarls at him, teeth shining in the pale light. "Say that again, you fucking cheater. I know you fuck the Gamemakers to try to help your tributes."

Odair breathes out hard and his eyes go hard, but he catches himself. "Just listen to me! I'm trying to help you. It doesn't have to be like this, there's another way. Just come up with me to the tree for five minutes, okay? Wait for the lightning. You can kill me after the lightning."

Bari snorts and draws blood again but still Odair doesn't return the blow, and Nero winces as his girl's expression starts to slip, concentration giving way to the madness underneath. "I could kill you right now. I'm going to kill you right now, because I'm a special Victor and you're a piece of traitor trash."

"I won't fight back," Odair says. "I'll just let you kill me right here, and that will be boring. Or you can come to the tree, see what I have to show you, and after if you don't like it I'll fight you for real and it'll be interesting. Okay?"

Bari narrows her eyes and tosses her sword from hand to hand in thought, and just like the day before with Lumina after Beetee saying his plans where Brutus could overhear, this time it's Odysseus who sits up straight and mutters "What are you _doing_?" at his screen. Now Nero officially has no idea what the hell is happening, and it's his girl's life on the line and the other districts have been fucking around behind Two's back the entire damn time. If Odair wants to have a flash of conscience about it, Nero isn't going to complain.

Finally Bari takes a step back. "You'll fight me for real?" she asks slowly, and Nero can't decide if he wants her to go with it or run in the opposite direction. All his alarm senses have gone off at once, but the problem is they're just firing at everything every which way. Odair promises, and Bari nods once, sharp. "Fine. But if I don't like your surprise and you don't fight me then it's going to take me until morning to kill you and you'll wish you didn't lie to me."

Odair nods. "Deal," he says, and he and Bari run off toward the tree together.

Nero looks over at Lyme, but she's fixated on her own screen and doesn't return his glance. Well, fair enough; Nero has hung his first Victor out to dry this year, with all his attention on looking after Bari, but what choice does he have? Lyme he can fix later if she feels betrayed or goes crazy; Bari being dead, there's no coming back from that.

One thing is for sure; if Odair kills Bari anyway and wins, it doesn't matter about the old adage and what happens in the Arena. Nero will hunt the pretty boy down and tear him to pieces.

* * *

"This has gotten out of hand," Coriolanus says, setting down his teacup with a rattle of porcelain against porcelain. "I don't like this. I don't like any of this. Something is going on and I won't have it."

Ronan does not tell Coriolanus to join the damn club. He does not say any of the million things that have been flying around in his brain since the president overextended his authority and turned one vendetta against a single girl into an all-out attack on the entire country, including those loyal to him. He does take his napkin and mop up the spilled liquid on the table before it can stain the mahogany. "It's a Victor Games," Ronan says, keeping his voice neutral. "You can't expect them to behave logically."

"I can expect whatever I want, Ronan, I am the president," Coriolanus snaps, and this time Ronan does freeze because he knows Coriolanus' tantrum voice and this is it. "Get me Heavensbee," he says, and for a moment Ronan thinks Coriolanus is actually asking _him_ to play messenger before he registers the man's hand against the comm button on the side of the table.

"What is it exactly that has upset you?" Ronan asks, treading carefully. He certainly has a list of his own, but most of the things that have caused Ronan to lose sleep would only set Coriolanus to cackling.

Coriolanus jabs a finger at the images floating between them, cycling through the feeds with irritated taps of his finger against the controls. Finnick and Enobaria, side by side; Beetee unconscious after his unsuccessful attack on the forcefield; Katniss surveying the area with her face screwed up in a mix of panic and determination, following the line of the loop of wire from the ground to Beetee's abandoned knife; Peeta screaming Katniss' name from the one o'clock wedge, Johanna cursing and changing direction to come after him. Brutus, working his way up toward the mess at the top.

"There are plans afoot," Coriolanus hisses, eyes bloodshot and lips flecked with blood and foam. "Too many plans, and I didn't orchestrate any of them. Do you know how it makes me feel, Ronan, knowing that the tributes are scheming against me?"

"No one in this room is scheming," Ronan reminds him. "Two is doing its duty by you as always."

"Are you?" Coriolanus demands. "Because what I see is your Enobaria teaming up with Finnick Odair when she should be gutting him and peeling off his skin."

Ronan swallows, but before he can rally, the president's comm beeps and Heavensbee's smooth, cultured voice interrupts. "Sir?" he asks. "What can I do for you?"

"They're planning something and I want it to stop," Coriolanus says, the ire in his voice cooling to ice. "End it, now."

"Sir?" Heavensbee's voice comes back after a moment's pause. "I'm not sure I understand."

"End it! All of them. Kill them, I don't care how. Activate the Arena wedges, whatever it takes, and don't stop until everyone but one is dead."

Heavensbee takes even longer to respond. "Sir, are you sure that's wise? The sponsors -"

"The sponsors are not the leaders of this country, and they do not hold the keys to your freedom, or have you forgotten?" Coriolanus snarls, but it's cold fire now and Ronan has to fight to keep his breathing even. If he were screaming this would be one thing; his hot rages burn out fast, and after acquiescing to him and appeasing his immediate fury, it's often possible to talk him down. But this - this is the snake, and Ronan has never won a negotiation against this side of him.

"Seven-F and Twelve-M are in the blood rain zone," Heavensbee says. "That can be activated immediately, no problem. But the majority are in the twelve wedge, and the lightning countdown has already begun. There's no way to preempt that, and safety overrides will prevent us from activating anything else until it's dissipated. Fortunately it's only minutes away."

"Do it," Coriolanus orders, and now he's even calmer. "As soon as you can, flood the entire twelve o'lock wedge with nerve gas. Who else is left?"

"Two-M, currently in the two o'clock wedge, but we don't have the fog cued up yet."

"Nerve gas, then," Coriolanus says coolly. "Do it now."

Ronan only just stops himself from leaping over the table and throttling Coriolanus with his bare hands. "I'm not sure that's the wisest choice," he interjects, and up until this moment he had Brutus pegged for the perfect martyr but plans change, and Ronan can be flexible. "You still need a Victor, and of the remaining choices, Brutus is the obvious one. He's loyal, as is Two. It will send a good message to spare him; that you reward those who are faithful to you. Kill him and what sort of message are you sending to the country? To District Two?"

Coriolanus turns his gaze on Ronan and tilts his head to the side. "That sounds like a threat."

"It is not a threat," Ronan says immediately, but now he's backpedalling, and once on the defensive against President Snow there's no coming back. "It's - I'm just asking you to be realistic. There's no one else who would be a more grateful recipient of your mercy than Brutus, and the district will stand behind him."

"And if I don't, you and your district will turn against me, that's what you're saying," says Coriolanus, tapping one finger against the tabletop. "You've overreached this time, Ronan. Heavensbee?" The man makes an affirmative, and Coriolanus keeps Ronan trapped in his gaze, cold as steel and unblinking. "Execute Two-M immediately as ordered. Nerve gas seems the most efficient."

"Yes sir."

Coriolanus cuts the connection and gives Ronan a smile that slithers in between his bones. "Now. What were you about to say? That I'm making a mistake? That I'll regret this?"

Ronan takes a long breath without moving and lets it out through his nose. He offers up a silent apology to Brutus, about to become a martyr after all. "No," he says, and he doesn't manage to wrangle his face into a smile but Coriolanus won't want to see it anyway. There are times for Ronan to lose with grace; today Coriolanus wants to see him crawl. "Far from it. You've made the right decision, as always."

"I thought so." Coriolanus lets out an indulgent sigh and reaches into the tin in front of him. "Have a scone," he says pleasantly, and slides it over.

It will be poisoned, of course, and Ronan will spend the evening hunched over the sink, vomiting up everything he's eaten since the morning. Ronan takes the biscuit and bites deep.

* * *

Lyme's console explodes with warning a second before Brutus drops, clawing at his throat. His collapses to his knees in the jungle, and there's nothing onscreen to explain it but his vitals have gone crazy, his respiratory functions kicking into overdrive as something unseen attacks his lungs. Brutus' limbs convulse, and he thrashes amid the vines, staring up at the cameras with his blue eyes wide and accusing.

Nerve gas. Lyme finally dredges up an old memory of training and makes the connection, not that she can help him one fucking bit for knowing.

Brutus twitches and writhes, but he fights, his right arm coming up in slow, jerky movements, and he closes his fingers into a fist even as his entire hand spasms. Tears and streams of red trickle from the corners of his eyes - his nose runs with blood and mucus - but Brutus never loses sight of the camera as he brings his fist up to his chest.

His dying act as the Gamemakers murder him is not to flip them off - as Lyme would have done - but to give the District Two salute. Lyme laughs even as she rocks back and forth in her chair, the sound bubbling up damp and wild, and she touches her fist over her own heart. Spit runs from Brutus' mouth - the spasms intensify, full-body shudders that roll faster and faster - but still he fights, and Lyme holds her eyes wide open and refuses to blink and miss even a second.

The live broadcast indicator died when Brutus fell, but the mentor consoles are hardwired; it would take a full system reset to knock out Lyme's feed, and so she watches because the rest of the district can't. She salutes him back in place of the people he thinks are with him as he dies.

The cannon fires.

Lyme claps both hands to her face as tears burn trails down her cheeks and her head fills with pressure. A scream builds up inside her and fights to release itself, and Lyme might have been lying when she told Brutus she knew he would win but she never thought it would be like this. Not like this. The sound makes it halfway out, and Lyme clamps it down to a half-crazed gurgle and bites the flesh on her palm to keep it inside.

A message flashes across the bottom of Lyme's screen: HANGAR 15, 10 MINUTES. TELL NO ONE.

Lyme stops rocking, hands still plastered over her mouth, and she sucks in several long, wet breaths. Onscreen the hovercraft descends and picks up Brutus' body; he hangs limp in the claw, arms extended and head flopped to the side, and he's dead. Her _friend_ is dead. The best, most loyal, most stupidly honourable Victor Two ever produced is dead and the Capitol killed him. Sure, they killed him the day they announced the rules for the 75 th , but this is worse, so much worse.

The message flickers out, and Lyme takes another breath. Brutus is dead but this isn't over. The people who did this are still alive, and Lyme will make them pay. Them and the whole system they built - the one she's been a part of since she was seven years old - and she is going to tear it to the ground and set the foundations on fire. Brutus would hate her for it, he'd tell her he's not worth it, but he's not here, is he.

Lyme takes one last look at the screen as the claw retracts - presses her fingers against the glass over Brutus' body before it disappears - then pushes herself to her feet and slips out. Nobody even glances at her, too transfixed by the drama on their own screens, and Lyme heads straight for the elevator that will take her to the Two floor. It'll be a stretch to make the hangar in ten minutes, and this doesn't exactly qualify as telling no one, but they take Lyme with Claudius or not at all.

He's sprawled on his bed with one arm over his eyes, dozing after working almost twenty-four straight hours on the sponsor floor, but he sits up with a jolt when Lyme tosses his bag at his head. "Well?" Lyme snaps. "You coming?"

Claudius scrambles out of bed, shoving his arms through the straps of his bag. "Thought you'd never ask."

Lyme pulls him in and presses a hard kiss to his hair a she tugs him out of the room. "It's just us," she says. "We've got a ride out and everything."

Claudius nods, eyes darting as he takes in the hallway cameras and does his best to keep his body language and expression neutral. "What happened?" he asks under his breath, not moving his lips.

Lyme exhales. "Brutus."

Claudius says nothing, but he twines his fingers into hers, and Lyme grips back hard.

The corridor leading up to Hangar 15 is empty, and inside is a small personal transport shuttle. "I said come alone," says the man waiting at the ramp, but Lyme doesn't let go of Claudius' hand, and he clicks his teeth after a short staredown. "Never mind. Let's go."

Lyme looks back once, but there's nothing to look at. The others are still doing their jobs, still hoping if they play by the rules then there will be some exception, some salvation, but there's nothing. Brutus is dead, and with him any hope Lyme had of surviving in this hell without setting it all on fire. She's leaving her mentor and her girl, Nero and Artemisia still working to bring Enobaria home, and a part of Lyme tears itself loose and stabs her in the heart but what can she do? Nero would argue with her and try using logic, Misha would beg her not to go, and both would ask too many questions and waste time. Maybe it would even work - maybe Lyme would calm down, agree not to do anything irrational, come back home and mentor tribute after tribute until the day her body gives out around her, but no, she can't. No more children will die if she can help it, not next year or any year after that.

"C'mon boss," Claudius says, and Lyme nods. She turns her back on her life and loved ones and everything she knows to stalk into the shuttle, holding her breath until the ramp closes behind her and the vehicle lifts off into the air. Tears press at the backs of her eyelids but she blinks them back in a fury. It's too late for that. Lyme will shed no more helpless tears, not ever again.

"Now that I'm here," Lyme says to the man, lifting her head and squaring her shoulders. "I'd like to know who I'm working for."

* * *

_Notes: Anyone who says "but Peeta killed Brutus!" will be bludgeoned to a pulp by my well-worn copy of Catching Fire and my diagrams of where each tribute has to be based on what happens in the narrative. Fight me, internet. But there you have it. The end of Part One: The Quarter Quell. Next will be the Interlude: District Two Mourns._


End file.
