Chapter Text
Before Niki wins, they call her an angel.
She is not exactly well-known in District 6, but she is not glossed over either. If someone was asked about her, they would probably call her sweet and not have much else to say. Her peers do not hesitate to turn to her for help or for comfort, and she can keep a secret like it was never told to anyone.
She slips in and out of people’s circles as they have a need for her. She is known by face but not by name.
She doesn’t mind it. She enjoys being necessary, even if it means that when she meets someone she assumes that they will not stay. She prefers being helpful to being permanent.
This changes only when she is standing next to Sophie and Lucas and Luca, watching a single slip of paper be ceremoniously selected to die, and the name that she hears is oddly familiar. It is not until she sees Lucas looking at her, reaching for her, that she realizes she recognizes the name because it is her own.
Suddenly, Niki understands that she would do anything to be permanent.
Suddenly, she is glad that she did not try to be.
Niki shakes her head at each of the people standing beside her. Let me go. Do this for me.
She steps forward and takes her place on the platform.
When she sees her friends one final time before she leaves, she smiles at them as brightly as she can.
“It’s okay to cry,” she says quietly. “Please do not cry too much, though, okay? You need to live, and be happy.”
Do this for me.
Niki is sixteen when she leaves all that she has ever known, riding a train that was built by her people into a world where she will be expected to represent them all. On the long trip to the Capitol, she practices her smile, so that she can tell the people that she faces that she will understand when they do what must be done.
She is still sixteen when she steps off of the train in an outfit of soft metallics meant to catch the light in the way that a hovercraft would. Her eyes are widened and framed by glittering false eyelashes. She is still sixteen, but she thinks that maybe for the first time in her life, she looks younger.
(She thinks that maybe for the first time in her life, she feels older.)
The Capitol is bright and unfamiliar and filled with people who look at her in ways that put her on edge. The tower where she is meant to train, though, is cold and dim, and too much the opposite of the city around it to be a comfort. It reminds Niki of the inside of a half-built transport train, the type that is meant to keep things inside their containers. Within the building, people do not talk to each other, or even smile at each other. Instead, they stare at each other intensely, but for only as long as they need to.
Niki is glad that she is very quickly judged to be harmless. After that, she is mostly left alone.
///
When Joko meets Niki, he treats her like an angel.
From the stories that she had been told about him as a child, her Mentor seemed like everything that Niki could never be. She thought that he would be too loud and too direct and very, very ready to ignore her existence.
To her surprise, the first thing that he does is smile at her.
The two of them do not talk much. Both were taught to conserve their words, to save them for moments where it mattered. Still, he stays by her side every moment that he can, and he is always willing to give advice if an opportunity arises.
She quickly becomes used to looking over to him whenever she gets confused. When she does, he always rushes over to tell her what she needs to hear, and then he adds something that she never would have thought of.
“Hold the spear like this, Niki. Good. If you see someone else holding one, get into an enclosed space. It’ll be harder for them to move with it in there.”
Niki practices with the spear one more time. “Thank you.”
She wants to remain wary around Joko, but it is very, very easy for her to trust him. For the first time since she has arrived at the Capitol, Niki can speak to someone and be understood. She hopes that she can return the favor, that she can understand him just as well.
(She cannot, not exactly. Not yet. Three weeks from now, after her first public appearances as a Victor, she will be able to give Joko the understanding that he gave her. It is not an honor, and it is not a victory.)
The night before her first interview, Joko meets her in her room.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “We need to talk about it.”
“What will they do with me?” Her voice is quiet, almost afraid.
“I… I don’t know, Niki. I don’t know exactly what they’ll do. No matter what it is, though, your character is yours to choose. Pick something that feels natural to you, but that you can play up for an audience.”
Niki considers his advice for a moment, but she already knows what she wants to make of herself. After all, she has always defined herself by one thing above all else.
“Joko,” she says slowly, “I think that I will be kind.”
He is silent for a long moment, and Niki is almost afraid that he will ask her to choose something different, something that makes her look more like a winner.
He does not.
“Practice your smile,” he says. He sounds like he is choking some emotion down, keeping it trapped within him. This is all of the approval that Niki will get from him. She understands him well enough to recognize that, and she trusts him enough to know that he will show her the rest of his thoughts someday, and that he avoids mentioning them to her tonight for a good reason.
“I already did,” she says. “On the train here.”
He laughs. “You’re way ahead of the rest of us, Niki.”
///
When the Capitol meets Niki, they call her an angel.
Joko stands with her backstage, giving her more advice on how to handle the interview. Look into the lights, even though they are too bright. Laugh when there is a joke. Occasionally, laugh when there is not, to make the crowd laugh with you.
Niki is dressed in a long gown, white and gold, that she can walk beneath in a certain way to make her look like she is floating. The stylist showed her that trick a few minutes ago, and now she practices it the way that she practiced her smile, making small circles around Joko as he watches her.
There are wings on her back. The feathers are iridescent, sparkling, white that turns gold when it catches the light. She had to stand very, very still as they were put on, feather by feather. Now, she watches them move slightly with the breeze that her steps create, and she sees why they took so long.
Her face, too, has been framed in gold, and contoured to make it rounder. Her eyes are emphasized, so that when she narrows them in a laugh they still look wide and innocent to an audience.
Niki thinks that she may hate her costume, despite the amount of effort that her stylist clearly put into it. She does not look like herself, and she is terrified by the idea of acting like the person that the world sees right now. She knows that, whatever she truly feels, they will recognize it in her eyes.
Niki catches every emotion but calm kindness in her throat and chokes them back down. She buries them deep within her, never to be taken out without her permission again.
Joko watches her face carefully. Once it has been cleared of everything that matters, he nods.
“It’s time,” he says.
He cannot climb the stairs with her. She must do that part for herself.
The interview goes surprisingly well. Austin knows how to work with Tributes, and Niki knows how to work with people. She reads his cues instead of the ones that the audience gives her, leaning into things that make him smile and making a mental note whenever he raises his eyebrows at her.
By the end, he is all smiles. Niki knows that she has done well.
She steps down from the stage and lets Joko walk her back to her room, where she struggles to tear the wings off of her back. Once she has taken off her dress and washed the lies off of her face, she lays on her bed for a long, long time, feeling the emptiness grow within her. It is unfamiliar. It finds a home where her easy kindness used to live.
Niki chooses her arena name, Nihachu, with little help from Joko. It is just her last name, but she likes how it feels on the other part of herself. It sounds soft, like she knows that it needs to, and she doesn’t need to explain much about it.
Plus, Niki is an only child. When she was younger, her mother would sit with her and tell her lists of names, in family memory or the back of history books.
It seems fitting for this to be the final thing that she does for her parents.
Niki opens her door on the morning of her seventh day in the training center to find her stylist looking back at her. She lets herself be dressed in a simple outfit, a shirt and pants and combat boots.
Niki spends her last minutes with Joko, who hugs her tightly and tells her that he is proud of her. She lets her nervousness show, just for a few seconds, and manages to thank him without crying.
Niki lets herself follow him with him as he walks away, leaving her body behind.
Nihachu stands on a platform, listening to Capitol citizens read her paragraphs of nothing from golden cue cards. She thanks them each for their efforts.
Nihachu forces a smile onto her face and an easy calm into her movements as she is taken into the Arena.
Nihachu listens for the end of a countdown.
Too many people watch her take off running.
///
As Niki wins, they call her an angel.
She stands in the middle of an arena, alone with the knowledge that she will never truly be able to forgive the world for putting her in a situation where what she has just done was necessary (never be able to forgive herself for being convinced that it was necessary in the first place). She stands in the middle of an arena and then, the next second, she is no longer where she was, instead being lifted into the air on a hovercraft as the cameras watch. Three weeks ago Niki would have smiled at them and she would have meant it, one week ago she would have smiled at them and been lying. Today she gives them nothing, because even her blank gaze is reserved for her own unfamiliar reflection in the metal ground.
(The last time she looked at herself without recognition, she had been too delicate to touch, lovely beyond compare, an absolute lie. Now, she is shattered and held together by nothing, too distant from the idea of home to ever go back, and far too close to the truth.)
She is taken into a room that is more blindingly white than the dresses that she will have to wear for the rest of her life, where people with cold eyes and cold tools try to remove all of the blood. Niki wants to thank them, because they are doing their best to help her with an impossible task, but instead they poke her and make her pass out and she realizes that she is nothing more than an object to them.
She is tired of being an object already, and there wasn’t even a purpose to it this time. The blood stays on her hands. It will no matter what they try, and none of the doctors actually care enough to look at her face, where she has written that clearly. When Niki wakes up, she is in an empty room with a body that has been returned to exactly how it used to be and a mind that can never be. The dissonance of it threatens to overwhelm her.
Joko walks in and greets her before anyone else does. She tries to smile at him, because she knows that she should and because he is the only person left that she truly wants to smile at. He waves her expression away.
“Don’t,” he says. “You’ll be doing too much of that later.”
“But…”
“Trust me.”
Her words get caught in her throat. Niki cannot explain to Joko that she could never possibly regret smiling at him. She cannot explain to him how much he saved her, how much he still saves her. She cannot find the words to tell him that, if she can survive the next years until she fades into irrelevance, it will all be because of him.
“Thank you,” she whispers instead. She hopes that he understands. Neither of them have ever made a habit of saying more words than necessary.
“Listen, Niki. I can’t tell you much right now, the reporters are going to show up in five minutes. Just stay in character and you’ll be fine.”
Niki doesn’t feel ready. She wants to smile at Joko even more badly, now, to practice making one look real, but her time is almost up and there are more important things for them to tell each other.
Joko leans close to her. “Niki,” he whispers, “I’m proud of you.”
They are words meant only for her. Niki briefly wonders how many more of those she will be able to experience.
Then the reporters arrive, and Niki’s Mentor is swept away, through a different door than the one he entered. She is left alone with a crowd of people reaching for her, clamoring for her voice, touching her hair and focusing their cameras on her smile.
She gets through each moment as it comes, remembering to smile more gently than she feels capable of and answer questions with a softness on the edge of her words. She pretends that she is still in the Games, with no greater concern than her own life.
(Maybe she is not pretending. Maybe this is the only thing that she will ever be able to be honest with herself about again.)
After the last reporter leaves, Niki drops her smile. They have left her with a mirror placed directly in front of her, as if she would want it. Her only choices are to look at her own reflection or nothing at all.
Too late, Niki realizes that her hospital gown is thin and white. It is cut loose, as if to hide a pair of wings underneath.
///
After Niki wins, she is an angel.
In interviews, she is allowed no sadness, no space to recognize the faces that hurt to keep in her mind. She is allowed no time to focus on her own actions and explain how she won. Instead, she giggles and acts like nothing has changed at all. She tells the world that it was all by chance, that anyone could have done it. She smiles shyly as reporters force cameras into her face and call her blessed.
Her stylist will not stop putting her into bright white dresses and angel wings. The color of the metallic accents changes sometimes, gold and then silver and then a soft pink, which Niki tries and fails to satisfy herself with. The dresses are always too thin for her to want to keep them on a second longer than necessary, always just a bit too short in one place or another. The cameras love it, commenting on how precious she looks, how peaceful, how otherworldly.
She is none of those things and she knows it too well.
Niki leaves the Capitol on her Victory Tour with Joko by her side. Her wings cannot fit through the train door without his help, but he is always there to pull them back and hold them in place until she can walk by herself again.
In front of each District, Niki reads golden cue cards that show her exactly how to lie. She does so with a smile, and gives up on trying to tell secrets in her tone. They will be too hidden to be caught by anyone, or they will be cut out by the camera operators.
The only District that Niki knows how to tell secrets to is her own, and they seem unwilling to listen to what she needs to say. As she speaks, they stand silent and cold, measuring how much she is no longer herself.
After the speech, Niki has an hour.
She runs to the home where her family now lives, a pair of Peacekeepers following behind her. Her mother tenses at Niki’s hug and hands her a bag to fill with clothes without saying a word. In her old room, Niki pulls open her closet and yanks down black turtlenecks and dark grey dresses, shoving them into the bag without bothering to fold them.
Everything white, everything soft pink or blue, is left behind. When she leaves, Niki knows, her mother will take the remaining clothes out of her room and leave them somewhere where they will never be seen again. Niki recognizes this, and she hopes that it is done quickly.
“I love you,” she tells her mother as she leaves.
“I’m sorry,” her mother whispers in return.
Niki finds her friends on the street in front of the house where she once planned to spend the rest of her life, waiting. She does not have much time left, so she talks to them all at once.
Now it is her turn to apologize.
The four of them don’t talk about much. Lucas tells her how he cut himself on a piece of jagged metal, Sophie complains about school, and Luca complains about Sophie. Niki watches as her three friends exchange glances that she is no longer a part of.
They have forgotten the art of telling each other the things that matter to each other. Niki accepts this and turns away.
On the long ride back to the Capitol, she leans on Joko’s shoulder. He tells her about his own life, about the trickery of giving speeches and about a woman named Bee who he lives with and who he thinks Niki would like, until she can fall asleep.
When Niki leaves a train for the last time and finds herself back in the Capitol, Joko guides her once again. This time he takes her to a building with an empty bottom floor and a steel elevator.
She leans against him on the ride up.
“This is where we leave each other,” he says. “You’ll get off first.”
Niki pulls herself closer to him. He wraps his arm around her.
“It’ll be fine,” he says. “They’ll understand a lot of it.”
The door opens. Joko gives her a small shove towards the room on the other side of it.
“I’m ready,” she whispers.
Niki leaves the elevator and watches it close. Joko gives her a wave.
Feeling more alone than ever, she turns to face the people that she will spend the rest of her life with.