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As soon as they have a moment alone, Yass twists around in her seat and lowers her voice. "Do you know anything about his Games?"
He blinks at her, startled, because she hasn't even so much as looked at him since they were called up to the stage. Then he recovers. "They were only --"
She shakes her head. She has eyes as slim as falling helicopter seeds; the same light green shade, even, that has him thinking about autumn. "I was only four the last time District 3 won, remember?"
Beetee swallows. She's thirteen, wearing hand-me-down shoes with rusted buckles. "They replay them sometimes," he tries.
Her voice drops even further, eyes shifting left, then right. "I don't watch," she confesses, low. "I always look at the corner of the screen instead when they try to make me."
He blinks again. Not watching the mandatory Captiol broadcasts of the Games had never occurred to him. You watch and you learn, that's what you do.
He shifts closer in the armchair, looking over his shoulder in the direction Sean had gone. Sean is nervous, wired and twitchy, sure, but District 3 has paranoia down to an exact art, so that's not unusual, and as a mentor, he still has the muscle to flip Beetee and pin him if they get caught. Sean Parker is a hair trigger, and hates the sound of whispering, everyone knows that.
"It was the 26th Hunger Games," he says, low, and Yass makes an impatient noise in the back of her throat, because even she knows that much. "Things were different back then."
"Like the names," she says promptly. "They used to name their kids such weird things."
"Right," Beetee shares a helpless grin with her, because it's true. "But that was right after the Quarter Quell, see, and it was still the only thing people could talk about. You can't beat a Quarter Quell --" Yass blanches. In the Quarter Quell, they had to vote on who to send in as tribute; there wasn't anything less entertaining. "But the next year, the Gamemakers had to put extra effort in to keep the Capitol interested, following such an exciting Games."
Realization begins to dawn over her face. "That was the year with the labyrinth, wasn't it?" she goes.
"Yes," comes from right behind them, so sudden that Beetee and Yass jump as if touched by a live electrical wire.
Sean Parker braces his hands on the back of the streamlined sofa they're sitting on and regards them coolly, a little menacing, as ever. He has eyes the color of a thunderstorm sky, green and yellow and grey, and they flicker, watchful and wry.
"That was the year with the labyrinth."
-
"How old were they, Sean?" District 8 calls across the divide, taunting. "The girls?"
He's too far away for Sean to get a clear shot with his darts, and they all know it. He tightens his fingers around the blowgun, just in case. The girl from 12 is laughing, canted as high as birdcall on the wind, and he glances at her only long enough to gauge that she's too far away, too.
The Gamemakers don't want anyone to die right now, seems to be the message. They're too entertaining as they are.
Sean bares his teeth in the facsimile of a smile. District 8 scored abysmally low in training. He was never supposed to survive past the Cornucopia, much less down to the final four. He's not the one to watch, so Sean scarcely remembers anything about him, except his name.
"When I get my hands on you, Eduardo Saverin," he shouts back, cheerful. "I'm going to hook your spleen out through your nose."
District 8's teeth flash in a dazzling smile. "How old was the girl from your District, Sean?" he continues, undaunted. "Twelve? Thirteen?"
Sean grinds his teeth. Sharon had been as small and brown-haired as a dormouse, and twice as timid. She and Sean grew up in houses so close together that sometimes her mother would throw open her window and ask Sean to hand her some sugar, if they had any to spare. Sean remembers holding a rag to Sharon's mouth after she lost her two front teeth, walking her home as she cussed and spat blood, tiny and all of six years old.
"Was it hard?" calls Eduardo, so sweetly. "Was it hard, killing her? Or do you just really like little girls?"
Fury makes Sean's vision flash away white. He breathes out hard through his nose, trying to get a grip on it, and for a moment, he can't see anything except sunlight, piercingly bright on the backs of his eyelids. The girl from District 12 has stopped laughing, at least.
"How are your feet, Wardo?" she calls across the distance, sparing Sean from having to fake a witty rejoinder he doesn't feel. "Are you ready to run?"
Mark touches Eduardo's elbow before he can reply, and below them, the ground of the labyrinth continues to bubble, unstable and hot as lava, trapping them high up on the walls. District 8's bare feet are blistered, torn bloody, and he's begun to leave footprints outlined in red with every step. There's only four of them left, however, so Sean doesn't think he's particularly worried about being tracked anymore, and if they wait long enough, blood poisoning will get him.
Really, though, Sean doesn't think Eduardo is particularly worried about surviving, and yet, it's the best he's managed to do so far.
It's very odd.
In the labyrinth, you don't drink the water unless it's green. Sean watched both tributes from District 9 die in order to learn that. The glasses they have to drink from are exquisitely-wrought glass, more suited to the grand parties in the heart of the Capitol. What a picture they must make: dirty, terrified children drinking out of martini glasses.
That night, the four of them toast each other with glasses as green as summer apples, smiling and grim, and they wait for the labyrinth to settle and for the games to start again.
The Capitol loves it, so it keeps them alive for another day.
-
District 3 is the smallest of all the Districts, and the most carefully watched. The Capitol keeps them tucked tight in its shadow, in the dismal, scrubby prairies where the summer sunlight bakes the earth into fissures and nothing grows except for thorny toads and weeds ("and straight from the moist, sweaty armpit of the Capitol, it's District 3!" says the chirpy boy from 6 when he sees them in the training house, which neither Sean nor Sharon know what to do with because it's true.) Sean grew up knowing even the faucets, the fences, the trees had ears: there's no such thing as private conversation in District 3.
Unlike 1, 2, and even 4, 3 never had a prayer of becoming a Career District, because the Capitol wouldn't dare train up the smartest children in the country for laboratory research and then give them weapons, too.
-
Sean is the oldest tribute in this year's Games. The Reaping came two months before his nineteenth birthday, and while the unfairness of this makes him grind his teeth, he goes in knowing he has a real chance of coming back out again.
Sharon takes his hand while they sit and wait for the kids from 1 and 2 to go in and strut their stuff in front of the Gamemakers, turning it over in hers so she can run her thumb over his knuckles. She's polite enough not to comment on how sweaty his hands are, and instead brings up something that doesn't hurt his pride as much. "You didn't have anybody to say good-bye to you after the Reaping, did you?"
"No," he answers. His parents went into the laboratories as soon as he could sign up for tessarae and fend for himself.
He tested higher than they did, and everyone knows what happens to the people in District 3 who don't test well.
She nods, and buries her face behind his shoulder when the girl from 4 -- Ashleigh, with the legs like a stairway to heaven that Sean can't stop staring at -- shoots her a vicious look, because their muttering is only making the others more nervous, and Sharon cringes away from everything. "So you don't have anybody to get yourself home to?"
"No," he replies, and gives her hand a squeeze. "I gotta go in there to win for myself. It's much harder."
They don't mention that in order for him to go home, she has to die. They look up when the voice calls for KC Kirring, who straightens her spine self-consciously and walks through the doors, the 2 on her back the last thing they see before the door closes again. Sean's next.
Sharon, conversely, is the youngest tribute, by a margin of about seven weeks. She's thirteen, and so is Dustin Moskowitz, the bird-thin boy from 6, who plasters on a grinning veneer to cover the way he shakes and trembles with terror, pretty much constantly.
They both make for very, very tragic figures when they die, because that's how the Capitol wants it.
(This was before they projected the images into the night sky; back then, they only had a simple roll call at the end of the day. Sean heard Dustin's name on the second night, but it isn't until the recap that he sees how he dies; the puzzled tilt of his head, the way his mouth forms the beginning of a question, "what's he talking ab--" seconds before he steps on the wrong tile and blades shoot from the walls, deadly curving scimitars whistling sharp and beheading him in a single clean movement. His sister, three paces behind him, side-by-side with the boy from District 7, screams and screams and screams, and they show every second of her breakdown.)
(Sharon dies in a section of the labyrinth that's nothing but fifteen-foot rose bushes, winding trellises of blood-red star jasmine, and a kissing gate. It smells sweet and she falls asleep in the sunlight, exhausted from maze-running, trusting him to guard her. Sean waits until she's smiling and then puts his hand over her nose and mouth. She wakes too late to do anything but flail out, fingers closing around his forearm, and it's over quickly. Sean collects her things and moves on. Better a merciful killing at Sean's hands than a less merciful one at Mark's or Divya's.
He doesn't think about her family: they'll make more kids if they need to replace her, he assumes, since that's what families tend to do.)
-
The kids in 3 are meager, scrawny and underfed, yellow-tinged from too little sun, which in terms of brute strength means they're slaughtered in the Games almost every time, but the only District that could possibly rival them in intelligence is 5. District 3 is on the cutting edge of Capitol technology; their people grown into scientists, technicians, analysts, programmers, and then run into the ground from the crack of dawn until even the insects go quiet in the dead of night, and nothing is ever enough to sate the bigwigs that come in to monitor their progress.
So they may be the Capitol's brain, but District 5 is what powers its beating heart; great, wide fields of churning wind turbines, massive roaring dams frothed in white, black-belching smokestacks of burning coal. It never sleeps.
In the atrium cage of 5, they raise their children to be efficient to the point of cruelty. They take up as little space, little food, little sleep as possible. It's how they survive.
This year, both tributes from 5 make it to the final eight.
Erica Albright is fifteen. She isn't as smart and doesn't score as high as her District partner. It makes her a cutting and surly individual because she knows all support from sponsors will automatically go to him, but she's the one who locks Alice Moskowitz in the never-ending staircase and turns it into an airless deathtrap, a stunt that leaves the announcers whistling with admiration.
Mark Zuckerberg is fourteen. He doesn't favor traps as much as Erica does, nor did he attempt to mislead any of the other tributes into thinking he's not going to kill them the second he set eyes on them, the way Sean and Christy tried at first. His specialty is stabbing people in the back.
Up until the second he dies, Sean still expects Mark to be the one who goes home.
-
The goal of the labyrinth isn't to find your way out -- because there is no way out, not out of the labyrinth, not out of the arena, not out of the Games or even out of Panem, they're very clear on that point and have been since the first time the Districts tried that stunt -- or to find the heart of it. Rather, the best any of them can do is to outrun each other and not get cornered at a dead end, where there will always inevitably be some nasty Gamemaker trap waiting for them.
All twenty-four tributes are lifted to the very center of the maze, paired on plates around the Cornucopia. The first time Sean looks at the vast sprawl of labyrinth, spreading as far as he can see and terraced into layers to give it a dramatic sense of depth, each section different from the next, he feels the thrill of it go down to the very center of his bones, because nothing ever feels like a game up until you realize you can win.
On the plate directly beside him, Divya breathes out, very quiet, "shit."
This arena isn't for District 2, and they both know it. It's not for the aggression and the brute strength of the Career Districts, not for the hardy tenacity of 10, 11, or 12. This arena is built for the cunning, the problem-solvers.
This is an arena for 3 and 5.
The gong sounds, and Sean dives away from Divya, throwing himself head-first towards the lip of the Cornucopia. There's a fountain, softly burbling, and several statues of famously recognizable Capitol citizens littered about as obtstacles, benevolent and smiling with their green oxidized faces lifted towards the sunlight. His best bet of determining the maze's layout is to get a bird's eye view from the Cornucopia's horn, and to do that, he needs a weapon.
The very first tribute to die is the boy from District 12.
His name is Bob, and he wears spindly wire glasses because his vision is so horrible without them that the committee had to let them through. The only thing he could talk about in his interview was a girl back home, the one he wanted to get back to, who used to mimic birdsong on the way to school, fluty cardinals and robins and the metronome call of a chickadee, and within a minute of stepping off his plate, Mark Zuckerberg gets his hand on a knife and slits Bob's throat end to end.
After, the statues go on smiling passively, blood a thick, dark spray across their faces.
-
Let's be honest, Sean's been killing people since he was eleven years old, and some Capitol supervisor put a hand on his shoulder for the first time, his nails painted the color of endless blue sky from the last time he was in the Capitol, chipping a little by the cuticles now, and asked him, "what do you think, Parker? Should we terminate?"
The subject had been a family friend, because they always are, and Sean had looked at her heaving chest, the blue veins straining in a web across her sawed-open sternum, did the calculations, and nodded.
He knew how to kill before, but it isn't until he's put into the Hunger Games that he's ever had to be violent.
Tori gets him pinned to the ground at the Cornucopia, the thick muscles in her shoulders bulging, and Sean has just a single moment to appreciate the training they put the Career Districts through to get those stunning physiques, before he sees his opening and takes it. He flips them over and dashes her head against the ground, again and again. It feels no different than breaking walnut shells, if a little wetter.
She's from District 1, and didn't really have a prayer of winning anyway. The winner of the Quarter Quell, the year previous, had been a girl from District 1, and you know there's nothing the Capitol hates worse than being predictable.
He meets Amelia, after, when he's throwing up in the wings following the recap. Peter Thiel, the Head Gamemaker in those days, had just shook his hand, and Sean had barely made it here before he was violently sick.
She places a hand on his back, rubbing a slow circle in his spine with her thumb.
"You'll learn to live with their faces," she tells him. "Eventually."
She's a strawberry blonde with a winsome smile, and in the Quarter Quell, she'd been voted in by her District because she was the daughter of a rebel-turned-drunk and a real estate clerk, and District 1 is a very tiny, crowded place with no room for the potentially useless. And look at that, folks, said the announcers, when she showed them all up by winning. What a shining beacon of hope, for all District children looking to outgrow the mistakes of their parents!
She knew Tori, she had to have, because District 1 isn't that much bigger than District 3, but her name never comes between them, in all the years they know each other.
-
Sharon is his second kill.
Ashleigh is third, although technically, Sean would call it an accident. Later, after he wins, they add it to his tally nonetheless.
She almost drowns him in a section of the labyrinth that's entirely underwater. There are no large bodies of water in District 3, not in the leeward rain shadow of the Capitol mountains, and she's from District 4. She can hold her breath longer than any of them -- sparing perhaps her monster of a District partner with the iron lungs -- and she's so busy toying with Sean as he thrashes blindly that she doesn't notice the dead end until she's in it. The water's green and her blood is red, and he feels the boom of her cannon in his bones.
He finds a blowgun on the fourth day, and slinks back through the labyrinth to collect the poisons for the darts. He's on his way to the Cornucopia, feet and calves aching with the exertion, when he comes across Erica Albright building a pyre high as the walls of the maze, her long hair strung up at the back of her neck, her face wane, as pale and bleached out as bone.
He throws himself flat against the wall, heart pounding and loose rubble skittering out from under his feet, but she hasn't seen him. She's building up tinder, her movements clean and quick as the snapping of glass.
Sean remains there for one heart-stopping moment, still expecting her to spot him and come after him, before it dawns on him that this is the perfect opportunity to show the Capitol what he can do.
He crouches low, settling into stance, and with ginger fingers, he loads the dart gun with a needle-thin weapon, coated with the toxins from toadstools and powder off the wings of the candy-corn butterflies that Sharon had admired despite her better judgement. Sean's a quick learner with anything, but he's an asthmatic from District 3 -- years of training with an inhaler means he's got the perfect lung control for this. He wonders if he's the reason there was even a blowgun in the arena in the first place.
From a distance, he sees Erica clap a hand to her neck when the dart stings her, like she's squashing a mosquito flat. She peels the dart away, blood blossoming down her neck, and stares at it for a long moment.
He sees the moment it dawns on her what happened, because her fingers splay and the dart falls into the tinder.
"No," she says, voice high and crystalline and carrying. "No, that's not fair."
It's too late, of course, and Sean watches with a mixture of morbid fascination and pride as an inky pattern of blue etches itself into her skin, radiating outwards from the impact point, as all the veins in her body rise to the surface, swelling and bursting. For years and years and years after he gets out of the arena, Sean won't write a single thing in ink without thinking of her and this moment; her choking and coughing and checkered with blue lines.
"No," she gets out, again, and stumbles to her knees not far from her pyre. "I did everything I was supposed to. I always did everything I was supposed to. I -- I followed the rules, I did what they told me, I -- I --" she looks up at the blue sky. She is perfectly lucid, words coming ticker-fast as bullets. "This isn't fair, I did everything you asked, and I still have to die?"
Suddenly embarrassed for a reason he can't quite put his finger on, Sean reorganizes his kit of poisons and straps the blowgun to his back like a bow. When he looks again, she's curled on her side and still, hair a bramble-colored spill around her head. It's a little while longer before the cannon booms.
The fourth day is a quiet day, relatively -- just Erica and the boy from District 7, who had been the Moskowitzs' ally.
The recap, for all that it's supposed to show Sean's meteoric rise to fame and victory, focuses a lot on the fumbling attempts of the boys from the Career Districts to figure out the labyrinth, because Sean's steady, cheery plotting and his ability to walk around the labyrinth like he always belonged gets boring pretty quickly, apparently, so all they show from the fourth day is a quick montage of him collecting poisons, and instead zeroes in on District 7's (Hugh Chris? Chris Hughes? He forgets the name, because it's as everyman as his own) attempts to outsmart and overpower Divya: the bunching masonry of District 2's hammer blows versus the blonde-haired woodland lumberer might of District 7.
(Divya dies the next day: it's cinematic, stunning, more breathtaking than if the Gamemakers had choreographed it, the way Divya flashes across the screen, hammer loose and sure in his grip and his eyes set, eerie black and shining, ignoring even Cameron's shouts of "Div -- Div -- Div no he's not alone!" Eduardo careens around hairpin curves, barefoot and faun-colored, sprinting through the winding bends of the maze, cutting looks over his shoulder as Divya closes the distance.
Everybody has seen what Divya can do by this point, because the death of his District partner, the girl KC, unhinged him in a way you don't easily forget.
Sean can't help the way his heart pounds, watching the recap, even though he feels sick.
Eduardo stops in the middle of the Square, turns, and smiles at the ground. Divya realizes his mistake a second too late, almost pitching forward onto his face as he tries to skid to a halt.
Mark Zuckerberg drops from above, soundless, and buries his knife to the hilt in between Divya's ribs while he's still trying to recover. The cannon boom is instantaneous, and Eduardo keeps smiling.)
But, very briefly, they show Erica's death, and what Sean never heard as she lay there, fingers curling in the dry grasses she used for her pyre, blue-stained blood leaking out of her eyes and mouth and from under her nails.
Erica Albright, who always said what everyone was thinking:
"I don't want to die," she whispers, again and again, voice so terribly small and young. "Why do we have to die? It's not fair, I don't want to die, I don't want to die. I don't -- I don't --"
The Capitol lets her keep her last words, lets everybody listen, and Sean hears it for the taunt it is.
-
Sean's mother was born and raised in District 8, and she came west to District 3 when she was seventeen, wearing a crown of braids woven with swamp flowers and talking about finding a job, because the most prestigious computer lab in Panem was in District 3 and she typed faster than anyone in her school. Sean's father fell in love with her over the course of a summer, baked-hot, and married her on a day a thunderstorm rolled in from the east, dry lightning flashing typewriter-quick across a sky the color of topaz.
That was before there were fences, when people could go where they wished: it wasn't ever entirely free, but nobody lived in cages, either, and that was still when people were taught to respect the other Districts by meeting the people from them.
Sean's parents were quiet, plain folk with as much vibrancy as drying paint, and when the Uprising happened, they minded their own business.
When they lost, when the fences went up, when President Summers started restricting the kind of work each District could do, they shuttered their windows and lowered their voices. Sean was born, and his mother kept him on her hip so she could murmur in his ear and not be overheard; his earliest memories are of holding onto the sailboat pattern along the collar of her favorite dress, and her stories about District 8 -- a place she believed he would never see.
Sean assumes his parents are dead now (and if they aren't, he hopes they will be soon -- life in the labs is no sort of life at all,) but it doesn't stop him, every Hunger Games, from paying attention to the Reaping in District 8, like something inside of him would suddenly recognize its own roots.
It was safer that way, from a distance: seeing a hairstyle he knows in a shot of the crowd, or listening to a tribute talk about the textile factories in their interview. Sean tucks those glimpses away, like they mean something only to him.
In his own Games, though, the first time he looks over and thinks, those are my mother's people, it stabs him, hard, in some soft spot underneath his sternum, and he turns away to stop thinking about them. It's bad enough that he's going into the arena with Sharon, his next-door neighbor, who's only thirteen.
Even now, years later, he doesn't remember the name of the girl. Eduardo's District partner.
Nobody saw much of her. She wasn't at meals and she wasn't at any of the training stations. Sean doesn't mark her absence until he notices Mark and Eduardo sitting together at a corner table, hunched around their trays of food and talking lowly. They're putting enough away to put Cameron Winklevoss to shame, huge stacks of pasta and sandwiches that barely fit in their mouths, bleeding dressing down their wrists, and Sean remembers blinking some, because tributes don't talk to tributes not from their District. You just don't.
But Eduardo didn't want to sit alone. It takes Sean years, years, and years of maudlin discussions with Amy, Beetee, Haymitch, before he comes to terms with it: the strangest and most loyal friendship Sean's ever witnessed, and it was for one simple reason.
Knowing he only had days left to live, Eduardo Saverin refused to sit alone.
The girl from his District had to show up for scoring, of course, and Sean remembers the gut-wrenching shock of seeing her for the first time, really seeing her, standing with her arms folded under her breasts, a big full-moon curve of a pregnant belly stretching out the front of her uniform in a very obvious way.
Sharon tugs hard on his sleeve.
"I know," he mutters out the side of his mouth, trying not to stare. She knows her anatomy lessons as well as he: the girl is five, maybe six months along.
Wondering how the hell they managed to miss that, they go through the recaps when they get back to their rooms. But in all the broadcasts released so far, they never show a shot of her that reveals anything below her face: not at her Reaping, not at the presentation of the tributes. They were very careful with their camera angles, even when the announcers brought the District 8 tributes to attention for the fact they wore their reaping clothes during their chariot ride, in a deliberate snub to their stylist.
"Please," Eduardo scoffs in his interview, forgetting his nervousness and widening his eyes in affront. "We're District 8. We make your clothes. We know bad fashion when we see it."
"This is so much better," his partner agrees, standing with only minor difficulty to show off her dress -- a baggy, loose, colorful drapery that deliberately smudges out the gravid curve of her.
There's no way that trick would fly in the Games, of course, and Sean remembers how sick he felt, even then.
The next time he sees her, dazed and pale-eyed on the opposite side of the Cornucopia, the girl from District 8 isn't pregnant anymore.
-
By the time they're down to the final five tributes, Sean's been watching and studying, and he thinks he knows his competition pretty well.
It's a stupid thing to assume, of course, which is why Cameron Winklevoss almost skewers him with a sword while he's sleeping.
He wakes himself up and rolls sideways at the last second, feeling the breeze from its passing and the singing sound of sword meeting the stone where his head was just lying. He flings himself across the ground on his hands and knees before he gets proper leverage to swing himself up into a standing position, just in time to limbo himself backwards to avoid another blow.
He doesn't have his blowgun, and it would be useless at such short range anyway, and all his poisons are in a pouch by his makeshift bed. He has no other weapons except for his bare hands, and he highly doubts he's going to outwrestle Cameron.
Cameron Winklevoss is the last of the Careers. He's District 4, with the long, lean muscles of a rower.
There's an earnestness to the wide back-and-forth flick of his eyes that's hard to fake, easy to trust.
As a child, he said, he and his brother piloted little boats as slim as minnows through the narrow, forked waterways around his town (he says, and Sean blinks and double-takes and then has to remember that, compared to 3, the peninsula District of 4 is huge and probably has more than one settlement in it.) When they grew, that's what they did -- nobody knew the tributaries that lead out to sea quite like the Winklevoss twins, the powerful rowers who could nimbly get messages from village to village and to the boats out to sea.
They used to organize rowboat races, too, once they got too big and fast to compete fairly, Cameron tells them with a wistful kind of enthusiasm, and the announcer turns to the crowd and says something along the lines of, "Aren't these country folk so quaint?"
He's the color of sunshine, with a face flawlessly carved, and his mentor -- a very pretty woman in her mid-thirties named Mags -- didn't even have to try very hard to sell him to sponsors. He's handsome, he's well-fed, and he has a twin brother who doesn't need to watch him die, which is a pretty powerful motive for winning.
And then they dropped him into the arena.
These Games are for the clever, not for the brave and the strong or even the just. Cameron strives to be all of those things -- Sean remembers how he'd been in the interview, sitting straight-backed and forward in his seat and responding so politely that the announcer laughed, turning to the audience to ask them if they felt like he was trying to sell them cookies or reparation bonds. Even President Summers had a sarcastic comment to make about the boy from District 4.
He remembers the Cornucopia, too, Bob's throat a splayed-open red grimace and Cameron getting his hands on the sword he now wields, spinning around and then checking his momentum when he saw who it was he had in front of him.
Maybe he didn't think anything of it, but Sean certainly noticed that Cameron let the sibling pair from 6 escape and slip away into the labyrinth. He won't take Alice from her brother, Dustin from his sister.
"Oh, hold still, District 3," he snarls, each word carefully bitten out. "So I can gut you belly to nose."
On the other hand, killing Sean doesn't seem to be a problem.
"Yeah, no thanks," Sean replies, and launches himself under the swing of the sword, trying to scramble across to his poisons, but his reflexes aren't fast enough.
Cameron cold-cocks him with the hilt, sending him crashing nose-first into the ground, and kicks -- but not at him, Sean realizes even as he curls up to protect his head. He hears the tinkling sound of breaking glass as his vials scatter across the stone, spilling from the pouch. He cranes his neck around: the gelatinous toxins sink into the rock, hissing, and the powders are picked up uselessly by the wind.
Sean has less than a heartbeat to absorb this, face throbbing and blood streaking all down his front and the whole world gone a little bit gauze-colored around the edges, tilting as dizzily as stained glass.
Then, screaming in rage, he flings himself back onto his feet. He blocks Cameron's blow, sword wobbling in an incredibly close swing by his face, and strikes hard at the soft spot of his wrist. Sean had been lucky to find that glass at all -- who's to say he could do it again? Who's to say the Gamemakers will let him do it again?
"Careers," he gets out, spitting and vicious, and rains down blows everywhere on Cameron's body he can conceivably reach, keeping in too close for the sword to be helpful.
More of his shots are blocked than land, because while Sean knows human anatomy like the back of his hand, Cameron grew up with all the reflexive training of a Career, and Sean has no words for how much he hates him in this moment, hates everything he stands for.
"Fuck you. I want that down on the record. Sean Parker says fuck you."
Cameron gets him with an elbow to the side of the skull, a wet, dull impact that makes Sean groan and stagger away, vision swimming. His head feels soggy and heavy, like his neck is too spongy to hold it.
District 4 pants, keeping his distance and shaking out his sword arm -- numb, Sean acknowledges. Good. It doesn't mean he's not just as deadly with his other arm, but good.
"How does it feel, huh?" Sean wants to know, raising his voice and spreading his arms in a come at me gesture. "To knowingly be part of a fucking system of violence? Every District plays its part, but you. You treat the Hunger Games like they're a game that you can win. How can you stand it, playing right into the Capitol's hands like that, to jump on their rodeo and beg for rewards? Fucking lapdogs, fuck the Careers," he spits at the ground.
Cameron actually looks gobsmacked by this outburst, his mouth working fishily.
The tip of his sword dips, a moment that Sean, surprised by his surprise, forgets to take advantage of.
"Is that really what you think we do?" he goes, incredulous, and then an expression of such utter distaste crosses his face that Sean's hatred flags a little bit. "No. No, please don't tell me the other Districts can't see -- look. We train as Careers so that somebody will always be available and ready to Volunteer if a child is Reaped. We train ourselves so we aren't sending little children into the arena, we would never --"
He shakes his head back and forth, like a junkyard dog worrying at a ragdoll. He sounds like he's never had to explain this before, like it's something that's always just been understood.
Sean shifts his weight uneasily. Every second of this conversation is being recorded.
"We train as Careers because somebody has to be prepared for these Games. The more prepared you are, the less you lose, the less they are capable of taking from you. We lose so much to these Games every year, don't you think that's enough? These stupid, stupid Games!" For a moment, his whole face blazes, fierce and furious and raw, and then he swings around, a terrible roar escaping out from his chest like his bones are coming undone, and he brings the butt of his sword down onto the nearest wall.
It bows under the blow, raining rubble down and exposing the corridor of the labyrinth on the other side. Cameron looks at it, and then does it again.
Abandoning his things, Sean grabs only the blowgun and runs.
The Gamemakers are going to kill Cameron, for his words as much as his destruction of their arena, and Sean wants to be as far away from him as possible when that happens.
They can't do it directly, of course, because any deliberate action taken upon Cameron within the Games would be as good as admitting that they were bothered by the accusation, and they can't have people thinking about it.
So the weather changes, and then certain parts of the labyrinth start to collapse, the floor going as hot and liquid as lava, shifting and rearranging so that Cameron has nowhere to go but out into the Square, where the walls are high and made of red brick, ivy climbing up into the sky. The floor is chrome-plated, fit together like a geometric puzzle piece. The Square is what the boys from District 5 and 8 call their own.
Maybe, individually, Cameron could have taken them. But together, Mark and Eduardo had single-handedly wiped the board of most of the other players.
The ensuing fight is epic, classic brains vs. brawn. Sean misses most of it, run through the maze until he was lost, swimming in and out of consciousness with a head that was swollen and hurting, but they make sure he sees it, afterwards, makes sure he understands the message: Sean may not have been their first choice in Victor, but even in the Games, the Capitol can still get the Districts to do whatever they want.
-
When Sean is tipped onto the wrong side of forty, silver begins to come through at the hairs on his temples. He gets teased for it, and when he arrives in the Capitol, Mackey pulls him aside and offers to dye it out for him, but Sean just shakes his head. He is still District, whatever anybody says, and in the Districts, few people live long enough to get grey hair. Sean has earned this distinction.
"Good," mumbles Mackey in his quiet way, pushing his wiry glasses further up his nose and tilting up a rare smile. "I like it, but it's protocol, you know ..."
Sean nods at him. He's so used to the other stylists that he isn't sure what to make of Mackey, who everybody thinks is a bit dumb because he never says much, but he designed the outfits for District 3's last Victor, so he's around a lot, accepting praise in a self-deprecating way, because he knows as much as the next person that Wiress's victory had nothing to do with her clothes and everything to do with who she was.
That year, the winner of the Hunger Games is a boy named Haymitch Abernathy from, bizarrely, District 12.
It's the Second Quarter Quell.
Amelia Ritter, who won in the First Quarter Quell, is in the limelight again, a whirlwind of media attention and speculation that she's mostly managed to deflect for the past twenty-five years. Everyone wants to hear about her experiences, wants to know if she has any advice for the 48 tributes going in this year.
Sean sticks close by her side through it all, even though he's not really doing her any favors, not when she is famously unattached and settled well into a stately, middle-aged beauty -- Sean isn't very good at staying anonymous, so they gossip about him, too, and he watches the lines tighten in the corners around Amy's eyes and endures it.
The following year, the 51st Hunger Games is unremarkable, the typical bloodshed, and Sean loses both his tributes at the Cornucopia. The only thing worth note about that year is that, while she's in the Capitol for the party held in her Victor's honor, Amy gives birth to a little girl. She puts on a good show, her apple cheeks going red and her eyes dropping, laughing off all inquires as to paternal identity, demure and cryptic enough that it has men across the Capitol nervously fetching up their accounts.
When Sean gets a chance to see her, she's a tiny thing, mottled red and mewling sleepily. He can't look away.
Amy kisses her right underneath her cap -- a gift from Tyler, he later learns, the yarn rough as seasalt but warm, the way they make it in District 4 -- before she hands her daughter off, and Sean, who after a lifetime of fashioning childkillers has no idea how to handle something so breakable and precious, cradles her as close as if she's his own pounding heart.
"She doesn't look much like me," he manages to get out.
Amy rests her head against his shoulder and says, "She might, someday."
"What did you name her?"
"Portia."
When she's still an infant, Amy leaves Portia in the care of friends of hers in the Capitol, and when she is five, signs her over to be adopted officially. Baffled and slightly perturbed when he hears about it, Sean doesn't understand why for the longest time -- it's not that Amy can't afford to raise her child, because she is a Victor and she is District 1, and he knows she'll be a good parent, because the thing about Victors is that they tend to overachieve when it comes to their own offspring, their minds crowded and guilty with the memories of the other children who had to die in order for them to live.
But Amy just levels him a look like she thinks he's a moron and deliberately trying to annoy her, and she says, "if she's a Capitol citizen, she won't be Reaped," and Sean blinks at her, realizing she's right.
Portia was born in the Capitol and raised in the Capitol, and the Capitol thrives on violence unless it's one of their own.
Their daughter is safe.
"Yeah," says Amy slowly, seeing this play out on his face, and presses a gentle kiss to his slackened mouth.
She is six when Haymitch finds them, sitting together in an art gallery full of oil paintings, their colors bold and glossy behind their protective holographic sheaths. They're sharing a bag of roasted walnuts, crunchy and caramelized, and Portia grins at him and brushes grains of sugar off on her trousers. Sean tells her how walnuts are a delicacy in District 8, where her grandmother used to steal them to bake them into honey-glazed croissants when she was a little girl, and then a shadow falls over them.
"Parker," goes Haymitch, an unhappy growl of a sound. "I need to talk to you about your Games."
Haymitch won by using the Gamemaker's arena against them. "Yeah," says Sean. "Okay."
Sean doesn't see Portia more than once a year. He does this on purpose, not wanting to draw a connection between them any more than necessary. The older he gets, the less the Capitol cares what he does, which is how he's managed to keep his friendships in other Districts -- Mags and Tyler in 4, Amy in 1, the sisters in 5 -- because the Capitol doesn't care about the movements of one older, paranoid Victor from District 3, too busy trying to rein in the younger Victors, the hotheaded and angry.
It backfires on him, of course; because she sees him so rarely, Portia cherishes every encounter, and takes him to heart.
Despite her parents' best effort, Portia never forgets that she is District. She never forgets that her parents came from a time when the Capitol deliberately picked off the most innocent, most promising children of the Uprising and killed them for sport.
-
As for the girl from District 12, Sean has seen so little of her, no matter how many times he runs the labyrinth, that it's easy for him to forget she exists, that somehow the only challenge standing between him and victory is the duo that inhabits the Square.
She'd faked shy, he remembers, simpering sweetly through her interview even when she'd been painted and made to glitter, starkly attractive and young, and she'd fled from the Cornucopia as soon as the gong sounded.
And, after a week of watching from a distance as Eduardo taunts, beguiles, and lures other tributes into the Square, Christy finally overpowers him, straps him to Erica's pyre, and sets him ablaze.
Sean is nearby, trying to replenish at least some of the poisons for his darts -- it's hard to do without the vials, and he knows that glass would be too expensive for a sponsor to send him at this stage, not with only four tributes left -- when he hears the screaming and looks up, sees the smoke smudging the sky. He knows instantly what's happened, because there's no way they would have just let Erica's darkly ominous creation go to waste. Well, the Gamemakers might have, but not a child of the Districts.
He runs the maze backwards, counting turns. He slows when he thinks he's nearing the right place.
Eduardo is bound up with ropes, twisting his shoulders and trying to find any give. The wood of the pyre creaks, a hodge-podge of labyrinthine materials, but sturdy.
Christy stands below him, a great blazing torch lofted up in her hand, catching in the bright coal color of her eyes.
She says something that Sean can't hear, and Eduardo throws his head back, shouts Mark's name again with panic cracking through it.
Christy flashes a smile, a quicksilver gleam, and swings the torch carelessly close to the tinder. Eduardo tries to yank his feet up, heels thudding against the wood, his eyes terrified.
The smoke curls around them both, wet and thick. Sean watches, fascinated, and then he sees movement -- a figure, thin-limbed and bony as a lizard, perches itself up on the wall across the way, following Sean's example and using the maze's curves to give him a vantage point where nobody will think to look. You clever bastard, Sean thinks, and before he can move, Mark's eyes meet his own.
Sean tightens his fingers around his blowgun, shifting so that it's held out in front of him like a flute.
It's not intentional, because not even Sean knows what he's going to do at this juncture, but Mark tenses all over, clearly reading it as a threat.
Sean could easily kill them all from right there, before they even knew what had hit them.
In the next heartbeat, there is a knife in his hand, bird-boned fingers on a hilt and a flash of sunlight on steel Sean's only warning, before Mark Zuckerberg sends it flying.
It all happens too fast for Sean to react -- he twitches, shifting backwards and drawing in a startled inhale, preparing for impact, but it doesn't come.
The knife buries itself in wood with a nailed thump, and the ropes slither free from Eduardo's arms, sliced clean through. The restraint gone, Eduardo staggers, knees buckling as his injured feet support his weight again and Christy shouts. His eyes roll up into his head, shocked with the pain of it, and he stumbles, which is when Mark flings the second knife.
For as long as he lives, Sean never figures out if Mark meant to do it.
If what happened next was part of Mark's plan.
He doesn't know, and he'll never be able to ask.
At the time, he must have assumed that it was. That's certainly how the Capitol presents it, the announcers whistling low and approving when the moment comes up on recap, the whole audience poised and breathless. You could have heard a pin drop. It's only natural, murmurs one, blinking his green-tipped eyelashes. Surely Eduardo must have known all along that Mark was going to betray him, and was only waiting for the right moment. You can't have two Victors, after all.
Later, though, Sean isn't so sure. It's easy to build somebody up in your memory, giving them more power than they really had, and it takes effort to remember that Mark was just fourteen, a hungry son of District 5, cruel and efficient and capable of killing even giants like Divya and Cameron, but still a boy on the edge of puberty, not trained in throwing knives.
Later, Sean thinks, you missed.
Because the one thing he becomes very certain of -- Mark would have never hurt Eduardo. Not on purpose.
In the Games, though, Sean doesn't have time to think of motives or schemes or loyalty. He only has time to register what happens as it happens: the empty curl of Mark's fingers around the place the knife used to be; the bend of Eduardo's body; the airless gasp of his mouth, head thrown back.
The knife, buried in his back, inches to the left of his spine.
He falls.
Some things are just instinctive, no matter the person or the circumstances, and Christy reacts jerkily as if she is on strings, dropping the torch and catching Eduardo before he can hit the ground. She collapses under their weight, gathering him up in her arms so that he doesn't touch the dirt, her eyes enormous with fright.
Like she hadn't just been about to burn him alive, she pushes his hair back from his forehead, using her sleeve to wipe ineffectually at his mouth even as he garbles blood, dripping down his cheeks and chin and staining the front of her clothes.
"Hey, hey now, hey," she says, high and sweet as the call of a chickadee, and he fixes his eyes up at her face. "Hey, it's okay, breathe, Wardo, breathe."
For a moment, Sean wonders what life is like in District 12, that she holds him and talks to him as if she has comforted the dying before. She maintains that stunned look, and high up the wall, Mark stays where he is poised, a horrible expression on his face, as if he is a creature made of paper, crumpled and barely held together. Sean can't bring himself to leave, either, gaze moving from one to the other until the tinder blazes up, obscuring them from view, and Eduardo's cannon booms.
He does slip away, then, not wanting to see what Mark and Christy will do to each other, but it turns out that Mark wants nothing to do with her.
She dies from complications with her burns, a death so unremarkable and quiet that, after everything, it's a little boring.
As if embarrassed by it, the Gamemakers do their best to strike Christy Lee from the record entirely.
She scarcely features in the recap, except for the moments when she seems angriest and most unhinged. It's very clever, how strategically they erase her, so that the audience comes away only with the impression of a crazy girl: somebody not even District 12 can be proud of, as if she didn't learn the labyrinth, as if she didn't outsmart everyone to stay alive, as if she didn't stay to be burned just so that Eduardo didn't die alone.
He hears Erica's voice. It's not fair.
-
Here is the story they tell:
On the first day in the labyrinth, Mark Zuckerberg, already a murderer twice over by that point, gets caught in one of the melting, rearranging parts of the maze as he's cleaning Bob and Stuart's blood off his knives. He loses his shoes in his escape, scraping them off as they burned and scrambling to climb the walls.
They show him hiding himself away in the Square as night fell, nursing his blistered feet and cursing the fact that having no shoes will slow him down, which is how Eduardo sneaks up on him.
Mark spins around at the sound of his footsteps, knives flashing and teeth bared.
Then, slowly, he lowers them.
The next you see them, Eduardo is mincing barefoot and Mark is wearing his boots. Together, ever clever, they make it to the final four. It's an interesting alliance (friendship, almost,) but ultimately doomed to failure. After all, nothing good comes of the Districts allying themselves with each other, right? Even children should have known that.
And this is the story that will never be told, not even by Sean, because the only people who remember it are dead:
Mark lowers the knives, watchful, and when Eduardo doesn't make a move, he demands, "How did you know? About the weather and the floor changing like that? How?"
Eduardo sits down where he is, crossing his legs and digging out a pouch from one of his pockets, opening it up. There are walnuts inside, cracked and salted, and he starts eating them, his fingers trembling with leftover adrenaline. Mark had lost sight of him the instant the gong sounded, had no idea which way he went, had to stop himself from scanning the faces littered around the Cornucopia carefully in case they might be him.
"The only thing the Gamemakers expect me to be good at are math and fashion," Eduardo says eventually, with a wry lilt to his voice. "So I did some logic puzzles for scoring. It was worth the 2 they gave me, though, because I heard them discussing tactics. They're still perfecting the climate control, but they wanted to roll it out for these Games, being the 26th and all."
"And all," Mark echoes. They need to impress the Capitol after all the excitement of the Quarter Quell, and what better way than to create and control the weather in the arena, to truly make themselves masters over the District's children, the direct descendants of the Uprising?
Somewhere, the trumpets blare, and Mark and Eduardo turn their heads sightlessly, listening to the steady roll call of the first day's dead: both tributes from 1, the girl from 3, the girl from 8 (Eduardo closes his eyes, hurt), the boy from 9, Stuart from 10, both from 11, and Bob from 12.
Nine dead, then, and fifteen left alive. Mark nods, satisfied, and looks back at Eduardo, who's smiling up at him.
"Here," he says, holding up the pouch. "Want a walnut? They have them everywhere here, isn't it ridiculous? We used to grow them in 8, I think, except they're so rare now, we only ever use them in our cakes. They're building so many factories, I don't know if we'll have room for anything in the fields but cotton and silkpods." His mouth skews. "I guess that's the point."
After a beat, Mark folds himself down next to him, close because it's cold in the labyrinth with all the walls on every side. The cold doesn't bother Mark -- he is from District 5, where everyone is expected to produce their own heat, expend only their own energy.
Eduardo frowns. "Your feet --" he starts, and before Mark can explain, he's unlacing his boots, passing them over.
"You --"
A shake of his head. "It's fine. You need them more than I do."
Over the next couple of days, they're careful to edit out the things Eduardo says: he talks a lot about District 8, the southeastern-most swath of Panem, where the heat is sticky, swampy, and children as young as seven pick cotton with thin fingers. There are bayous where nothing grows and monsters live that not even the government can eradicate. Eduardo, who is useless in combat and can't wield any weapons, feeds Mark and keeps him company, so they can kill their way through the rest of the tributes.
On the fourth night, after hearing the names of his District partner and Chris Hughes new among the dead, Mark looks over at Eduardo and says, "Don't make me kill you."
He delivers it flat, expressionless, hard as a slap, but Eduardo just smiles at him and says, "Don't worry. I know you."
-
When it happens, as Sean knows it will, it happens in the Square.
"Sean Parker," says Mark. He is down to only one knife, as he left one embedded in the pyre and another embedded in Eduardo, and he grips it in hand, loose and easy. "You run the labyrinth. You know it better than anyone."
"It's not hard," Sean scoffs at the look on his face. "Don't be so impressed by all this, Mark, this arena was made for us. Districts 3 and 5, with children smarter than the rest of the Districts combined. It was always going to be us. These are our Games."
"Yes," Mark agrees, his smile animalistic, thin, his head held low like a dog about to start a fight. His voice is deadly quiet. "They're always very careful about orchestrating their wins, aren't they?"
Sean's eyes flare wide, because that's the kind of talk that gets you killed, everybody knows that, and sure enough, the geometric panels lining the floor begin to move underneath their feet. The light above changes, turning the colors of sunset and flicking, creating an eerie strobing effect of reds and purples across their faces, highlighting Mark's snarl in full color as he springs -- but of course the walls of the Square are too far away, the ivy-encrusted red brick, and the best Mark and Sean can do is leap from one rising column to another, as shapes grow and sink into the floor.
Look at us dance, he thinks. How the Capitol must be enjoying this.
The gears shriek as the floor changes direction again, bringing Mark within range. Sean doesn't have his blowgun, and he doesn't have his poisons, but he has a rock, a broken-off brick: the viewers can see it, but Mark cannot.
"You should have been from District 3, Mark," he calls. "Our laboratories could have used someone like you. Bad luck that you were born in another District, that your name was picked for the Reaping."
That, startlingly, makes Mark laugh, sharp and mocking.
"Luck," he echoes, staring down at Sean from his vantage point. "Of all the stupid things you could say! Don't pretend to be so dumb, you know full well what the Capitol is doing. Are you really naive enough to think that the Reapings are random?"
Some of Sean's confusion must show on his face, even with the chaotic coloring of the sky, because Mark's eyes go shockingly childlike for one moment, before he launches himself from his square, knife flashing like he's going straight for Sean's throat.
Sean flings himself sideways, trying to stay balanced on the heaving ground, but Mark's words follow him.
"You idiot. You stupid son of a -- open your eyes. We're being picked off!" Mark spreads his arms out. "Can't you see that? The smartest, the brightest, the bravest -- the children of the Uprising, our parents' hope that someday they'll raise a generation that can beat the Capitol. They kill 23 of us every year! What do you think's going to happen, given enough time? Fifty Games from now, the Reapings truly will be random, because there will be nobody left the Capitol wants to kill. They'll have what they want: a stupid, biddable, complacent population."
The squares under their feet shift abruptly, swinging another way, and the sound it makes is horrific and overwhelming. They both leap, and Mark keeps yelling.
"Don't you see? It's not about us, it has nothing to do with us! They're still punishing our parents." Sean's parents weren't rebels, but heaven knows that didn't stop the government from making them pay as much as those that were. "They take us, their children, born and nurtured on tales of rebellion and promises of retribution, and they make our parents watch as they kill off the brightest and most tragic of us!"
The colors swing wildly, crimson and magenta and a twilight violet, and Sean suddenly realizes that they're being herded.
With all the noise, the microphones can't pick up what they're saying. The last speeches of the remaining two tributes, and nobody can hear a thing.
Oh, somebody in the Control Room is getting the chewing out of a lifetime.
Mark realizes this in the same second, because he stops, and studies Sean for a long moment, eyes thinned as slim as a lizard's, scaly and calculating.
Then he says, "You're going to win," he says, and Sean blinks at him, caught completely off-guard. "You're going to win, you're going to survive, and you're going to remember every single one of our faces, and one day, you are going to make them pay. For us, for our families, for the things we never got to build, the places we never got to see, the people we --"
The squares move again, and they leap, drawn ever closer together. They have only moments left.
The look Mark casts Sean is completely unfathomable for the space of a heartbeat, dark and violent, before something gives around the corners of his eyes. He is fourteen years old.
"Please," he says, and Sean doesn't so much hear the words as see them form on Mark's lips, as he feels them, silvery and sharp and digging him in parts that are incredibly vital. "Please, you can't let me win, I was never supposed to -- I have sisters. Please, they'll --"
Click.
The squares settle. The roaring stops, the sky stops flashing. Everything is silent.
Mark and Sean are completely still. One second. Two.
Neither of them dare to breathe.
Mark's mouth parts, wobbles. His bravery is draining from him, here in these last moments.
Go home, Sean.
That line about his sisters. It's true, of course it's true, even Sean knows it's true. If Mark wins, something bad will happen to his family, because that's what always happens. It keeps the Capitol entertained, living vicariously through the publicized little miseries of the Victors, and it keeps the Victors in line. Sean has no family and no reason to win other than he kind of likes staying alive.
The remark about the sisters Mark has waiting for him in 5 is a barb, but not, Sean thinks, one that's meant for him.
Immediately, he thinks of Cameron, and knows he's right. Cameron's weakness is siblings: he spared the lives of Dustin and Alice, and talked about his twin brother all the time. Is that how Mark outsmarted him here in the Square? Talked about his sisters? How would he have even known to do that?
But of course.
Eduardo. It always came back to Eduardo.
They move in the same instant -- Mark, knife in hand, slim as a coin and just as bright.
Sean dodges easily, because Mark is making it so, and it's not hard at all, bringing that rock down. It's so simple, seamless, and Sean doesn't think to plan the trajectory, so blood sprays him from chin to the crown of his head. He strikes again, this time at the soft knot at the back of Mark's skull, feeling the bones rearrange, stave inwards. The body hits the ground.
Within moments, Mark Zuckerberg is dead.
A cannon fires.
It's only in that moment, with Mark's brains scattered in every direction --
-- that Sean Parker realizes he never intended to win. Sean never expected to walk out of these Games.
And nobody else intended him to win, either. Just Mark.
Sean stands there, rock in hand, breathing hard. He thinks, as instructed, about the people they could have been. Mark and Eduardo, what they could have accomplished together if they'd been born in a Panem without fences. Erica, who never saw any reason to break a Capitol rule and always followed the ones they laid out for her, believing it would make her life easier. Christy, who will be painted as crazy when she was nothing of the sort. Eduardo's District partner and her baby. Tori and Ashleigh, Divya and Bob, little Sharon with her mousey face and the Moskowitz siblings, all of them sent home to their parents in pine boxes that will be bolted shut.
And then he straightens his shoulders and lifts his head.
With as much dignity as he can muster, standing there in blood, he says, "I thank the people of District 5 for a truly formidable opponent."
With that, the 26th Hunger Games are over.
-
"But here's something I still have never figured out," Sean says, years later, after his own daughter is grown and safe, fashioned into a true Capitol citizen. "He said it himself, he never intended to win, but why, then, was he such a ruthless killer? Why pick off the rest of us, if he was just going to let someone else be Victor?"
Haymitch swills the ice around in his glass for a moment, a soft crystalline sound, letting Sean gesture himself into silence.
Then he says, "You know why. You've always known."
Yes. But it's still so strange to think. Sean doesn't have anything to compare it to. "Eduardo," he says.
Haymitch tilts the glass towards him. "Got it in one. You said it yourself, the labyrinth was built for you, for him. In the beginning, I think, those early years -- everything about the Hunger Games was built in a careful web of control like that. Every year, the Capitol hand-picks the tributes under the guise of the lottery and the odds of tessarae, sends them into an arena where just one is meant to come out."
"Mark was meant to win ours." Short of coming in there to stay Sean's hand themselves, the Capitol did everything they could to help Mark win. "Because he'd be so easy to manipulate after that. He was fourteen, he had younger sisters they could threaten, he ..."
He should have been from District 3. Maybe in a different world, he would have, like Sean's mother, crossed the border and found himself a job programming in the computer labs, and he wouldn't be dead.
"None of them deserved to die," he mutters.
Because it's a blatantly obvious statement, Haymitch doesn't address it. He takes a swig from his glass, grimacing preemptively before the alcohol hits his throat.
There's a Zuckerberg in the arena this year, a niece of Mark's, grown-up, slim-faced and clever. There's a real chance she'll win. So far, nobody has mentioned the uncle she lost without ever knowing him, because everybody has somebody who went into the Games and never came out, and it's not even remarkable anymore.
"Your Games were over in just seven days, weren't they?"
"Yes." Sean looks over at him, curious. Over fifteen years of mentoring District 12 tributes who die young and fast has cut something permanent into Haymitch's face, darkened something in his eyes, and Sean, a veteran, is mostly used to it, and hates it just as much.
"Hmm. Quick, for the Hunger Games. He was clearing the way, don't you think?"
"How do you mean?"
"He took Eduardo's shoes and let Eduardo feed him because he believed he could end it quick enough, and quicker still if he was healthy. He could clear the way for Eduardo to win without Eduardo having to suffer or spill a drop of blood. After all," Haymitch tilts his head back, musing. "For all Mark's cunning, Eduardo still got under his defenses. And if he could win Mark over, who's to say he couldn't do the same to the Capitol? Win them all, like he's just making friends. Mark wanted Eduardo to be Victor. Don't we all want our best friends to survive us?"
He looks seriously thoughtful now. "Maybe that's what we need," he murmurs, more to himself than to Sean, throwing back another swallow of liquor. "Not a Victor, a best friend. An orator."
Sean smiles, leaning back in his seat and letting Haymitch plot. He thinks of Mark's words to him, make them pay, and thinks that maybe they're getting somewhere on that one. It was easier for Mark, who could win against the Capitol by refusing to win, but Sean has to win against the Capitol by living, and that's much harder.
-
In the 71st Hunger Games, the tributes from District 3 bust out a dam in the arena.
They die instantly, and a girl from 4 floats her way to victory.
Sean watches the announcers scramble to cover for the blatant arena malfunction, and triumphantly swallows the last of his drink. He toasts Haymitch from across the room. The look Haymitch gives him is grim, knowing, and there's a solemnity to the way he returns the toast, the way someone might at a funeral. He and Sean will never see each other again.
As he leaves, stepping out into the brisk bustle of the Capitol streets, Sean considers his options.
He won't have time to see Beetee, who will be in the control room, pinned as a mentor and interrogated there about the actions of his tributes, but Sean isn't afraid. Beetee is District 3, through and through: they know how to play by the rules until it's time not to.
He does have time for one visit, though, so he goes to see Portia. She's dyed her hair and her skin again, he notes the instant she opens the door, her eyes flaring wide and her mouth falling open. He decides that's good -- just looking at her, you can't even see Amy or Sean in her features, and that'll keep her safe in the years yet to come.
"Daddy?" she says, confused, and her voice is younger than her twenty years.
He kisses her cheek, and asks after her schooling.
He has his memories, and they're sweet ones: Sharon walking beside him on the way home from the laboratories, smiling at him with a gap where her front teeth used to be; Amy's home in District 1, where the snow piled up to the eaves in the winter and the Capitol's white-peaked mountains were always visible out the window, where Amy shrieked and shouted and stood on a chair until Sean convinced a harmless garter snake to slither out of the house before he returned to her, pulling her into his arms and listening to her mutter about how much she hates snakes, teased her about it until she laughed into his mouth, kissed him with affection; watching Portia toddle back and forth across the shore, District 4's fishing boats bobbing out to sea under a perfect cloudless sky, and beside him, Tyler said, "whatever it takes to protect our children," and he looked so like Cameron in that moment that Sean said, "Spoken like a true Career," and Tyler smiled, his eyes shining bright and proud.
Three days later, Sean Parker disappears unobtrusively and without comment from his home in District 3.
For awhile, nobody notices. Amy died a couple years previous, after one of her tributes sat down in the middle of the arena and refused to have anything to do with the violence, which would have been laughable, except for the fact that thirteen of the other tributes joined him, making a majority that had people shifting uneasily. A lot of mentors met mysterious accidents after that one.
Eventually, Beetee and Wiress arrive to take care of his things, which aren't many, and Tyler Winklevoss sends Portia a condolences card, which is the only thing he can get out of District 4.
At the next year's Games, Sarai Zuckerberg mentions demurely in an interview that, as one mentor to another, she rather misses Sean Parker, does anyone know what happened to him? (She, of course, is not surprised when she is Reaped to represent District 5 for the Third Quarter Quell. She doesn't sleep for nightmares, and goes back into the arena with her chin up, eyes thin and calculating.)
As Sean is not one of the surviving Victors, the 26th Hunger Games are not among those that Effie sends to Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, so no one sees them.
At her work station, Portia has a headshot of Christy Lee pinned up among the early-stage sketches of flaming suits, and sometimes Haymitch wakes up from dreams of curly-haired boys with cutting smiles and boys with bloody feet, stuck in a never-ending maze and trading walnuts back-and-forth, and then he hauls himself out of bed to yell at the geese.
Other than that, nobody really remembers the kids from the 26th.
Two dozen children died each year for three quarters of a century. You don't really expect every single one to be remembered, do you?
Come on.
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fin