Of Butchers, Bakers, and Victormakers

by wanderlustlover

Summary:

The aim of this will be a collection of 100 word stories. Exactly 100 words. Any canon pairing, any canon character, any moment in the stories, before them, after them, any theme. It could be fluff, horror, romance, family, drama, anything. Whatever decides to inspire me.

Chapter 1

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!

Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

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Number One

Title: The Things We Don't Know
Summary: Perspective is a very fluid thing.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Cato POV. Hunger Games Book One.
Prompt: (From Stephanie) Cato, Happy

The road to being happy is simple to Cato: kill everyone.

Alliances were forged—only in convenience—to be broken later. Every weakness displayed remembered for when it could be used to demolish that person. Never sleeping without his sword clutched in his hand, never sleeping less than prepared to rouse and kill them all.

Cato was there to survive, to do well by his family, his training.

Then he could go home and be happy again.

(How strange it is, then, that his last thought is how happy he is he'll never have to live with any of this.)

Chapter 2: Breadcrumbs

Notes:

Number Two
Title: The Truth of Assumptions
Summary: "Of course, practically everything we eat is stale."
Perspective: 3rd Person. Peeta POV. Hunger Games Book One.
Prompt: (From Kate) Peeta, breadcrumbs

Peeta rolled over after saying those words, pulling the sleeping bag tight. Not fast enough he hadn't seen the confused surprise dawn through Katniss's face. That look alone was enough of a reason to fake snoring some thirty or forty seconds later.

He didn't want her to ask or apologize. He wasn't sure which was worse.

She had assumed they were soft. Merchants had it easier than those in The Seam. Maybe there was always a roof, always food, but he'd still lived in District 12, just like her, and he'd eaten very little more than old leftovers and breadcrumbs.

Chapter 3: Duty

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Three
Title: The Things We Do For Love
Summary: Prim is not so much a little duck anymore.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Prim POV. Hunger Games & Catching Fire.
Prompt: (From Karen) Prim, Duty

Prim knows what they think of her. Too young, too fragile, too innocent. Shielded from all the world by Katniss, her staunch defender and best friend in the world. But that girl vanished in the strangled suck of air when her name was called.

They don't think she knows about duty.

But she does.

Duty is watching The Games, no matter what Katniss does, because it is for her. Duty is not correcting Katniss when she calls her Rue on the worst mornings. Duty is finding a way everyday to pay back her sister who threw everything away for her.

Chapter 4: The Last Midnight

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Four
Title: Always This Thing Bigger Than Ourselves
Summary: Katniss tells herself she won't go to him.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Katniss POV. Six months post-Mockingjay, long before the epilogue.
Prompt: (From Kate) Katniss, The Last Midnight

Katniss tells herself no, yet she slips like a ghost into his house, like a wraith through to the bedroom. He squints in the darkness, opening the blankets for her, as she whispers, "This is the last time."

He pulls her into his bed, into his arms, smelling of yeast and turpentine, and tucking her head under his chin. Peeta's words are faint into her hair, into the darkness, as he only says, "I know."

In that way where she knows he doesn't know if this is real.

She tells herself no. But she can't sleep until she's here. Every night.

Chapter 5: Haymitch

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Five
Title: He Knows the Odds
Summary: We are what our history makes us.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Haymitch POV. Hunger Games & Catching Fire.
Prompt: (For Solaryllis) Haymitch

He couldn't afford to see them. They were going to die.

The Girl on Fire with her razor sharp tongue, her dangerous animal-like panic, and utter obliviousness to everything around her. The Likeable Baker-Boy with his liar's smile, astute tactical mind and his even more dangerous idealism.

Haymitch had been here before. Twenty-three times, with forty-six children.

And when they've uprooted the government in their naïve lover's game, making themselves and half the surviving Victors the newest tributes of the third Quarter Quell, Haymitch knows it's even more true.

They're going to die.

But they might save Panem doing it.

Chapter 6: Water

Notes:

Number Six
Title: Even When You're Gone
Summary: Annie has to remind herself.
Perspective: Annie POV. Mockingjay, while a prisoner.
Prompt: (froggyfun365) Annie Cresta, water

They leave a glass of water each time. It's a game to them.

They take her out of the cell. They put her back in.

All she ever asks for is a glass of water.

To make water rings on the floor with. Never to drink. Hundreds of them.

Dried circles, chalky white, cover her whole floor. They don't understand.

She's from District 4, where the world is made of water. That's in them, even unseen. She has to remind herself. Of Home. Of Finnick. That his mark is still there, underneath, no matter what they do to her now.

Chapter 7: Power

Notes:

Number Seven
Title: Fashion's Fancy
Summary: Cinna knows real power.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Cinna. Catching Fire.
Prompt: (ReadrOfBooks) Cinna, Powerful

Most people don't get it.

Cinna in his chic, drab clothes. His normal haircut. The brightest up and comer, exiled to District 12, where he succeeded against decades of failure. When offered any district for the 75th Games, he still chose Them.

They think it's because he know a good thing.

The Lovers are a goldmine. Even their dying would sky rocket him.

They know nothing. Children aren't chattel. Fashion isn't a byproduct.

He'll be the one dying. He knows. When Katniss spins, becoming The Mockingjay on national TV. But. That is Real Power. As it should be. Soaring free.

Chapter 8: Genius

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Eight
Title: His Missing Piece
Summary: He knows the things he can't build, the problems he can't solve.
Perspective: 3rd person, Beetee. Post Mocking-Jay, before the prequel.
Prompt: (froggyfun365) Beetee, genius

Given the proper tools, Beetee can make anything. He is a Genius.

It was true during his first game, and his second. It's still true. (But not the same.) They say it's infrastructure. Parts break down. Snow's stampede. Coin's assassination. The Mockingjay's Fall. (Which might grant Katniss a life, but took Prim's. He did.)

Accidents. Ripples. Beetee knows about that. Because the Third Quarter Quell took that, too. (She did.) He used to be of Nuts and Volts. (A team. A duo. One half of a whole.) But he is only Volts now.

And Electricity is nothing without a Conductor.

Chapter 9: Silence

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Nine
Title: Breakdown in the Process
Summary: Katniss breaks them all down with her acts
Perspective: 3rd person, Tresh. Book One, the first game.
Prompt: (froggyfun365) Thresh, silence

Threshing is a wheat process. After harvesting, before winnowing. Loosening chaff from edible grain by beating it. Having animals and carts walk over it. It's a metaphor for District 11.

They plant and pick food all year, but they never eat it. Standing in the feast, never attending. To take a bite might kill your whole family. Actions weren't free, but thoughts were.

Silence is rebellion. Holding ground. Letting no one in. His tactic in life and The 74th Games.

Until Katniss defended – revenged and honored - Rue. His tribute mate.

Breaking through barriers with actions more dangerous than death.

Chapter 10: Easy

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Ten
Title: Freedom isn't always Easy
Summary: The price of living, is something living with what it took.
Perspective: 3rd person, Finnick & Annie's Son. After Mockingjay.
Prompt: (sugaraddict316) Finnick and Annie's son

He is Finnick and Annie's Son. It is like a title on certain day's. A life of its very own. Finnick and Annie's Son. Finnick. And. Annie's. Son. They both went through the Games. One more than once. They both were tortured by the Capital. More than once.

The things they made his father do. The thing they put his mother through.

Their collective sanity was more than questionable. Just like everyone else's.

But they were heroes. Ordinary people pushed to the brink.

Every freedom earned in their blood, their friends.

It is a hard legacy being loved. Being free.

Chapter 11: Sweetheart

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Eleven
Title: The Sweetheart of District 12
Summary: The woman she was once upon a time.
Perspective: 3rd person, Ms. Everdeen. Pre-Canon.
Prompt: (Solaryllis) Previous Generation, Katniss' mom

She was the kindest of all the children in the Merchants area, of District 12. Young and knowing. Their dedicated, sympathetic healer. A mind full of recipes, and hands of silk, that soothed as one together. As beautiful as she was sweet.

The Everdeen boy passed her almost every time she went into the Seam for rare supplies. He would tip his head lightly and say, "Miss."

Polite. Kind. A generic acknowledgement.

So much more generic than her focus on him.

She would hum the music he'd been singing, before he even saw her, for the rest of each day.

Chapter 12: Before

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Eleven
Title: ...And it Will All Happen Again
Summary: This is not the first time she has stood before the doors.
Perspective: 3rd person, Ms. Undersee. During Hunger Games book one.
Prompt: (Solaryllis) Previous Generation, Maysilee

It was an effort not to faint as she watched her daughter, Madge, calm and quiet, with such determination, march into the room where Katniss said all her goodbyes.

Reminding her, regardless of her husband's hand, of twenty-four years earlier. Of the not yet-then-Ms. Everdeen, striding into that room, her eyes red with tears, to her clutch the other girl waiting in that room.

Maysilee. The aunt Madge never knew. The twin-sister Ms. Undersee never forget. The best friend of the Merchant's Healer. None of them come back from the brink unscathed. Not even those who have been left behind.

Chapter 13: Real

Notes:

I'm pretty sure after adding one more tonight, I'll be caught up to where I should be after last weeks' sudden unexpected pause of a few days there. Requests are completely welcome! Especially as I am almost out of them now.

Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Thirteen
Title: Real
Summary: Sometimes reality is the harder of the two to take.
Perspective: 3rd person, Peeta. Post Mockingjay.
Prompt: Peeta, Real

Sometimes the very best part about Not Real, is the gasp of relief when Peeta realizes it hasn't or couldn't have happened. It's all been a warped, twisted fabrication. Especially when compared with the dead, aching weight of Real.

Real contains Katniss's ever spiky, but never wavering, love for him. The miracle existence of their children. Even the strong and steady rebuild of District 12, but it also contains a lot more.

It, also, contains the inability to look away from things that actually did happen.

To him and his wife. To their friends, family, every district, and the world.

Chapter 14: Finnick's Death

Summary:

Number Fourteen
Title: Deep Water and Annie
Summary: We knew it was a suicide mission.
Perspective: 1st Person, Finnick. Mockingjay.
Prompt: (Sononhell666) Finnincks, death scene, 1st pov

We knew it was a suicide mission. Everyone except, maybe, Katniss.

She is The Mocking Jay, but she's just a girl. She should be allowed to crawl into a closet and cry, to wish she could die. But she can't. She knows what it means. What it's costing all of us.

I can hear her crying out above me. Trying to turn back. Her heart still as soft as my skin being ripped apart. As the chains of my life scatter like dust before theses winds.

Leaving only friends, triumphs, jokes.

And first, last and always: deep water and Annie.

Chapter 15: Heartless

Summary:

Number Fifteen
Title: Heartless Arts
Summary: She can't forgive him for Prim.
Perspective: 1st Gale. Post-Mockingjay by only maybe six months.
Prompt: (Velma627) Gale, Heartless

She can't forgive him for Prim.

Not won't. Even if she did say the words; thought she could. He'd see it in her eyes. That brittle broken part of Katniss with his name on it. He'd had a hand in taking from her what two rounds of The Games could not.

It's part of why he doesn't return home. There is so little left in this world to heal her. That cat. And Peeta. And Haymitch. But there's a glass wall for him now. He knows. But his choices couldn't be less about not having a heart if he tried.

Chapter 16: Poached Meat

Summary:

Number Sixteen
Title: No Loyalty Like It
Summary: He ought to know better already.
Perspective: 3rd Pov, Greasy Sae. During Book One, amid the games.
Prompt: (gwenniekate) Greasy Sae, poached meat

Greasy Sae has always had a soft spot for them. The eldest Hawthorn boy. The Everdeen girl.

They are forces of such focus, hardness, and yet they never forgot those like them. Never held out on them, overcharged them. It doesn't hurt her none they fill her pots with illegal meats. Some is better than none. Fills stomachs all the same.

But when she watches Gale's jaw tighten (every time the District 12 tributes come on the countrywide broadcasts) she thinks he ought to know better already. About Poaching. About Lies.

And about how Love knows no loyalty like Survival.

Chapter 17: Love

Summary:

Number Seventeen
Title: Love is a Poison, a Burden
Summary: A strangling vine around sensibility.
Perspective: 3rd Pov, Joanna. During the torture in Mockingjay.
Prompt: (Velma627) Joanna, love

Love is a burden. A weakness to exploit. It will always be easier to bury an axe handle-deep into a chest than to listen to anyone say anything that warrants itself emotional. It is a disease. A crawling vermin.

It steals inside you, all of you. A strangling vine around sensibility. Gives you names to call out even once your throat is choking and retching up water. Lives to be taken from you, from the vast untouchable places inside of you to be razed.

It is the greatest weapon man ever invented to kill another with. Slowly. Breath by breath.

Chapter 18: Nursing

Summary:

Number Eighteen
Title: To Heal
Summary: Memorizing each name, shape, symptom, cure.
Perspective: 3rd Pov, Prim
Prompt: (gwenniekate) Prim, nursing

Katniss left her in the house, to keep her safe when she went hunting. (To watch over their mother, she never said.) Someone had to watch, someone had to hunt. There were only two of them. Since their father left.

The house was not big. It had so few things. Most sold before the hunting started. But not their mother's books. The designs Prim traced with slow, sure fingers. Memorizing each name, shape, symptom, cure.

To heal was to pay back a great wrong caused by her name.

(But it was the first thing she'd ever wanted to do, too.)

Chapter 19: Wolf Mutt's

Summary:

Number Nineteen
Title: What is The Soul?
Summary: But they were all just stories. Weren't they?
Perspective: 3rd Pov, The Wolves-Mutts. Book one, the moment they are released.
Prompt: (flapjack97) The 74th Hunger Games Mutts, Third Person, All of them

What is a soul? And can it be bartered? Begged? Stolen? Sold? In the old world fables they say the eyes have something to do with it. And windows. But they were all just stories. Weren't they?

There is only the redness, anger, pain. The thought almost outside of thought that says evisceration, hunt, chase, kill, will dull the ache. Will obliterate the light, the life. The wrongness somehow pervading everything.

The flickers of memory. Of faces, textures, places, voices, thoughts. What is the soul?

Is it a name? A number? A fierce howl, challenging, begging to be put down?

Chapter 20: Siblings

Summary:

Number Twenty
Title: Hate from Love
Summary: His life has never been his own.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Gale POV. Previous to Book One.
Prompt: (For gwenniekate) Gale, siblings

Gale watches them sleep and his hate grows.

He hates that he only feels free, weightless, for half-seconds, when he's far beyond the fences. He wants to spend more time away. Out there, with the girl of flint-grey eyes, who makes him feel accomplished which he can wrest a smile from her.

But, when his brother shivers in his sleep, and he lays his own blanket over them, Gale knows his life has never been his. The Capitol saw to that. When it was lying, cheating, and rule-breaking just to survive, even with his name in the bowl every month.

Chapter 21: The Accident

Summary:

Number Twenty-One
Title: Gold From Coal Dust
Summary: There is little about this world that is swift, merciful and painless.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Mr. Everdeen POV. Previous to Book One.
Prompt: (For gwenniekate) Mr. Everdeen, the accident

Everyone hopes their death is swift, merciless, and painless. His is none of the above. But he never expected it would be. There is little about this world that is swift, merciless, and painless.

Precious little.

What seconds he has left he spends on that.

On his wife. The most beautiful song bird. The fragile-hearted healer. He prays she'll find the strength that he'd sworn (before all) he would always be for her.

On their daughters. As different as the sun and moon. Prim, young enough to be wide-eyed innocence still, and Katniss, his living shadow, with her steel will.

Chapter 22: Except

Summary:

Number Twenty-Two
Title: Except
Summary: Maysilee Donner was brilliant.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Haymitch POV. Previous to Book One.
Prompt: (For SonofHell666) Haymitch; Maysilee

Maysilee Donner was brilliant. Mad brilliant. A survivor.

The kind of girl whose mind was more a weapon than her dart gun. The kind of girl whose will laughed when you tried to tell her no. The kind of girl whose heart was fierce enough to turn and run rather than kill a partner, even if she'd abandon their troth.

It's what Haymitch wants to remember most about her when he wakes, still unable to see straight, from nightmares of watching her insides outside of her.

Maysille Donner was brilliant. Mad brilliant. A survivor.

(Except she didn't survive at all.)

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!

Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Chapter 23: For the very last one

Notes:

Number: Twenty-Three
Summary: Everything returns at once.
Perspective: Peeta; somewhere beyond the epilogue.
Prompt: (I can't remember who!) Peeta; Baker's Dozen

One, Katniss. Two, their children. spinning in the sunshine. Three, the way Haymitch laughs. Four, a paintbrushes’ first stroke. Five, the smell of bread rising. Six, children running through Twelve, laughing.

Seven, The Hunger Games are over. Eight, The Hunger Games were real. Nine, he was taken, tortured and broken. Ten, he was saved. Eleven, Panem was saved. Twelve, this tortured, broken, fragile world is theirs now.

Thirteen, when he wakes, fingers pressing, confused, against the skin of her stomach, and she twists in his arms, and whispers, warm against his chest, ‘Real,’ before he even remembers how to ask.

Chapter 24: Finding Purchase

Notes:

Number: Twenty-Four
Summary: He didn't come here to make friends.
Perspective: Thresh; early book one
Prompt: (Shinaka) Thresh-Rue; pre or post 74th Games

Like everyone else reaped, he didn’t come here to make friends.

But Rue proved constantly troublesome, no matter how far he held her at a distance, barely deigning to grunt answers to her or their Mentor. That it didn’t mean he missed it, either.

How small she was, young enough still for picking fruits in the orchards without snapping branches. The way her eyes brightened so easy with awe and fear. Digging in until you couldn’t shake her need, bird-song sharp.

 

Which he hardly seemed alone in, judging by the way the girl tribute from Twelve stared after her, too.

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!

Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Chapter 25: Brokenness, Wholeness

Notes:

Requests are completely welcome!
Leave a character and prompt word in a review and I'll do my best to try and fit it in.

Number Twenty-Five
Title: Brokenness, Wholeness
Summary: He’s more broken than her. And more whole.
Perspective: 3rd Person. Katniss POV. Post-Mocking Jay.
Prompt: Mine, Peeta, Brokeness, Wholenesss

He’s more broken than her. And more whole.
The damage to his mind as permanent as his missing leg.

Even now, even permanently part-broken, he paints. He bakes.
He believes in a better world. To love in. To live in. To raise children in.

She doesn’t know why he settles for her. He deserves better. Is. Better.

She reminds herself every day. Real. Real. Real. Her love for him. His love for her. The way he says every time, that she is—exactly as she is right now, in this moment, every moment before —still more than he ever dreamed.

Notes:

I'm feeling super inspired right now, so leave me some prompts pretty, pretty please?

Any canon pairing, any canon character, any moment in the stories, before them, after them, any theme. Fluff, horror, romance, family, drama, anything.