The Ninth: a Hunger Games fanfic
Title: The Ninth
Author: Iodinemoon
Rating: PG-13 (dark, death)
Word Count: ~3300
Disclaimer: I don't own the Hunger Games world, I just play there recreationally.
Summary: District Nine has produced only two victors in the history of the Hunger Games. The average Ninth citizen probably could not name them both. District Nine has its own form of rebellion and its own form of betrayal. This is the story of its victors.
...To those of the Ninth District is given stewardship of the fields.
Panem Charter, Amend. VI
* * *
To the first settlers of District Nine, the veterans of the uprising, the rich fields of wheat are hypnotizing.
Their Capitol escort abandons them abruptly to the flat arid land. There is no need for a wall or violence. The enemy they have struggled against can be found nowhere on the horizon. There are just the brilliant shining fields, the empty earth, and the swaying motion of the grain in the wind.
It looks like an endless golden sea, and they are left to drown themselves.
* * *
The first competition is announced the third year after the rebel capituation.
The Capitol directive frames it as entertainment, a spectacle for the ages. A chance for the Districts to have a champion again. The retired rebels are no more fooled by the propoganda than by the extra Capitol troops deployed to guard against renewed resistance.
The Districts, that first time round, are tasked to choose their offerings.
And unlike District Five where the Capitol station burns to the ground, or District Eleven where sixteen people are gunned down, District Nine voices no outrage. They see guns in the hands of the troops and the wide expanse of the fields and remember too much of massacres witnessed and performed.
There are volunteers. Wounded veterans fall over themselves for a chance to even the odds in the Capitol, the older teens join them, but they are too old, or too valued. The Ninth argues half-heartedly until the sun breaks over the horizon. That first light finally gives permission to voice what had already been decided by battle-hardened soldiers only three years removed.
The Ninth district offerings that year are a thirteen year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old idiot.
District Nine counts them among the casualties of the Uprising.
* * *
The Capitol brings viewscreens in to watch the competition. They invite people to find spectacle in the bloodbath. Every sane, able, humane citizen finds some reason to toil in the fields, or the kitchens, for as long as the viewscreen plays.
It is the only rebellion they have left.
* * *
The Reapings are implemented after the first decade of the Hunger Games, once the Capitol trades blantant intimidation for the abstract fear of random chance.
District Nine gets a Reaping Ceremony and a security escort and a Registry. It is flooded with Capitol agents and forced through the same procedures as the other outlying Districts. The element of chance lifts the responsibility of choice from parents' shoulders and puts it instead into a lottery.
The Ninth Reapings are notable only in two ways: the first is that random chance seems to align perfectly with the whims of the District, and the second is that every Ninth citizen has noticed.
No one has ever proved anything, and with the exception of the Kole Five no one has ever tried. The Peacekeepers are spread too thinly along the borders of the Ninth to guard the Hub year-round. As far as the Capitol is concerned, as long as the tributes drawn come forward the mechanics behind the Reaping bear no closer scrutiny.
So no one knows, but everyone suspects.
If you're a slack worker, or a criminal, or a little slow your name is drawn. If you lose your hand in an accident you need to work extra hard to prove that you can still work as well as everyone else. Single parents are universally overprotective on an instinct they dare not acknowledge.
There is reprieve as well. No citizen of District Nine wants for grain or oil as tradition dictates tesserae are given to all. No Reaping has ever touched the same familial generation. No leave restrictions are placed on tribute family members.
If the Reapings aren't rigged, then Nine has been quite lucky indeed. It operates at peak efficiency, hard work is valued, courtesy is the norm, and it is the most functional of the Districts.
And if - if - the Reapings are rigged then there's the idea that every tribute was chosen for a reason.
So get back to work and don't give them one.
* * *
For most District Nine children, their knowledge of the Games begins with the Reaping and ends with the tributes boarding the sleek Capitol train. The teenagers are told more about the twisted competition, but the finer details - the brutality - cannot be adequately conveyed in oral history alone.
The tributes themselves think of their impending deaths in abstract terms; the distant, the inevitable... never in the immediate, violent now of the death that awaits them. Many cry harder when they board the train than when they die in the arena, unseen.
There's a viewscreen in every District Nine house nowdays, never tuned to the Games. It's considered obscene.
* * *
When the Victor's tour visits they always leave disappointed.
District Nine shows none of the awe of poorer districts, the hatred of favored ones, or the unbridled joy of a homecoming. Instead the people shake their heads at the fine specimen of strength and perserverence, made hansome through artificial means, as if to say: such a shame.
The Ninth knows better than to give their best to the Capitol. They reap only the vulnerable, the unloved and the different. They have never encountered a victor they liked, no matter how personable or unobtrusive. The closest they allow themselves to come is pity, and distain for the District that let them go.
With the statistically-unlikely tendency to select the least capable, District Nine has the lowest number of victorious tributes among all Districts. They have produced only only two victors in the seventy-five Hunger Games held to date.
The average Ninth citizen probably could not name them both.
* * *
Ogden Fernett is the first. At the time he thinks he will be the last.
Technically he's a refugee from District Ten though, along with his father and two sisters, he's conditionally granted legal status from the Ninth.
Their amnesty granted, the Fernetts have a troubled time in the sprawl the makes up the Hub. They are gifted baked goods and woven baskets, deep sea-green curtains and the use of a rusty, albeit effective, lawn cutter. Despite this apparent goodwill, barely a glance is directed their way when they venture outside. Their attempts to reciprocate with choice cuts of meat or services are all quickly rebuffed. For six weeks Ogden finds their eccentric strangeness puzzling.
At the beginning of the seventh week, he wakes up dazed on a train speeding towards the Capitol.
* * *
His name is not in the official District Nine registry, so the one they give him is Quint Marche.
He tries repeatedly telling the Peacekeepers his name isn't Quint but they either igore him or, more likely, were given express orders to disregard such pleas. His district partner, found in the next car, is an eighteen-year-old beauty who has her looks and not much else. She's crying. Not nearly hard enough in Ogden's opinion. In District Ten they had let him watch the Games.
They have no mentor. Neither of them has the wherewithall to request one.
Here is how a victor is born: sitting next to a sobbing girl whose name he does not know or care to find out, Ogden decides he's going to win.
He'll win because he'll have something the others tributes won't. Something hotter than survival, deeper than greed, better anchored than desperation. He hates the Capitol for their games, District Ten for their accusations, hates the illness that took his mother, but he hates the Ninth more. The Ninth for offering with one hand while it takes with the other. Not for taking the most from them, but for taking the last thing left.
And in the Ninth, being a good little tribute means not coming back.
* * *
It's Ogden who pioneers the caricature of the District Nine tribute. The interviews are not as glitzy as they'll be in thirty years, so much of his costume is putting on a laughable Ninth accent and making outrageous claims about the weather, the cattle, and other tributes mothers. An echo of Quint Marche persists in Panem memory for years afterwards.
The 45th Hunger Games are best known as the year the Capitol introduced its sponsorship angle. For an exorbidant amount of money YOU could change the course of the Games. There are no pre-evaluations or campaigns, the only time tributes can impress sponsors is in the arena.
What Quint Marche masked so well in Ogden comes out once he steps into the forested dome. What he lacks in skill or strength is made up for in hatred. His first kill is his district partner. It's a knife wound, under the sternum, through the heart and then quickly across the throat. He would prefer to go straight through the spinal chord but he doesn't think the knife is sharp enough. Ogden was raised in livestock country, he knows where to cut for a quick death.
The Alliance turns in on itself once is becomes known there's another contender for the Victor's crown. The favored tributes literally at each other's throats, Quint Marche becomes the beloved underdog and the audience shows their appreciation accordingly. After his second night a green utilitarian parachute delivers a scythe. A strong wooden handle with a slim, sharp blade.
It is meant as a joke. Odgen doesn't care.
The scythe is sloppy and if he were any shorter, practically unuseable. It maims more than it kills, but there are plenty of tributes with a taste for blood so Ogden leaves the cleanup to them. He kills the last after an inelegant chase that lasts the better part of an hour. The killing stroke is quick, though a mark of efficiency as opposed to mercy. He doesn't see her die, he's already headed towards the clearing to wait for the airlift out.
This is the District Nine Victor that the Ninth couldn't be bothered to watch: medium height and average features currently covered in blood, sweat and mud, the hands gripping his scythe are shaking, dark eyes searching the sky.
But above all he looks impatient.
* * *
The revenge fantasies Odgen dreams up on the way back to Nine put his performance in the Games to shame. And if the atrocities committed by the Ninth in these daydreams are exaggerated then rest assured they come crashing down with everything else when reality hits.
Inside his father's house there's a sidetable is littered with casseroles and cakes of various ages and wholeness. There's a kettle that isn't his on the stove and a woman Ogden doesn't know drinking tea in the kitchen. His father tells him she's Haven's mother and that they watched the Games together.
Ogden asks who Haven is and the woman in the kitchen bursts into tears.
* * *
There is a decent sized gathering outside City Hall when the mayor directs Ogden to the podium. The assembled crowd is wide-eyed and bewildered. He can see the cogs in their brains turning as they process this new fact. Tributes can come back.
He prepares to unleash his wrath, his hate, the rage that kept him alive and unbeatable. He reaches down deep into the coals he's stoked for weeks and finds himself completely, utterly, bottomlessly, hollowed out.
It hits him all at once, as he stands in front of the entire district. Frozen like a deer in the headlights, or a seventeen year old killer, or like Haven Collington, District Nine, at the edge of the cornucopia. And Ogden would do anything, go back into the arena if he had to, anything, to have that righteous, intolerable, burning anger back.
But he feels it slipping away, feels himself slipping away, as Ogden Fernett, Victor of the 45th Hunger Games, disappears into Quint Marche forever.
* * *
If Quint Marche is lost among the flashier, riskier Victors of history, Reneer Julip barely registers at all.
The 66th Hunger Games take place in a lean year. Fires ravish the North-West and any and all of the able-bodied are needed to save the harvest. The Reapings are left to pick at the bones left behind. Tributes are generally taken from large families, in the hope that surviving children will make the loss of one less intolerable.
(Every family secretly hopes that the Games will take a girl, not a boy. Pound for pound, boys are worth more.)
(Every family also despises themselves for wishing this.).
Reneer Julip is fourteen, the only girl for six brothers when she is selected. She has watery blue eyes and mousy brown hair, and works as the (mostly useless) apprentice to her mother, the local midwife. All of her family is currently fighting fires in the Highlands.
Some other facts about the youngest Julip: when she grows up she wants to be a Healer, she has a school-girl crush on a boy named Fergus, she walks herself down to the train station, she does not cry as she boards.
There is no one to see her off.
* * *
Reneers's District partner is a tall farmer's boy, also a youngest child.
They talk with Quint Marche over the train viewscreen. The boy (Macht perhaps?) keeps asking question about survival, about killing, about winning. They are good questions, thorough and probing, and so obviously voiced by someone who has never seen the Games that Quint almost regrets answering honestly:
Survival is difficult. Allegiences are difficult. Killing is difficult. And winning? Is luck and determination. There is no secret formula, no master equation. You don't know what it'll take but it'll be hard.
Reneer stares out the window as she tells her Mentor she doesn't want to know about any of those things. She wants to help people, or at least, to do no harm.
Quint tells her that'll be easy.
* * *
In the Capitol they eat sparingly of rich food and learn to ignore the claustrophobic feeling of being hemmed in by buildings.
Macht spars every day and runs every night in addition to training. Reneer spends the days being intimidated and the nights wondering why Quint looks at them sometimes like he hates them.
Reneer scores a measly 5 on her evaluation and that's only because she has basic endurance. Her interview is shaky and her stylist has to put her in a masquerade ball gown and mask just so he can hide her tear-filled eyes that, for all her shaking, she does not let spill over.
The last night before the Games she celebrates her fifteenth birthday and makes a promise to Macht not to get in his way.
Quint's last words to them are neither hopeful nor useful. They are the same ones he has told every pair of walking-dead Nine kids and they are worth saying only because they are true.
His advice is this: Just find something to hang onto. Anything. Just make sure it's solid and viceral, and that you can live without it when the time comes.
* *
Reneer's win is almost single-handedly orchestrated by the female tribute from District 4.
She recognizes that she's the weakest of the Careers and in lieu of sticking around until they kill her later, opts to take them all out the first night. Three grenades and suddenly it's anybody's game. There's a flurry of killing for a while afterwards but Reneer witness none of it. The remaining sixteen tributes slink into the dark forest, darting forward at intervals.
The arena is different than previous years, it's dark, for starters, with densely packed trees and undergrowth. A wide variety of colorful flora can barely be seen in the dim light. There are three deep pools of freshwater at the center of the Cornicopia, that only later will they realize are meant to draw tributes out in the open from thirst.
Her Games are exceptionally boring, Reneer is told afterwards. That's what happens when the Careers are eliminated too quickly and the hunting game becomes a starvation game. No one even makes a move to control the pool until the fifth day, and his spear aim is so poor he's probably doing more harm than good by making himself a target. They release muttations every now and again but Reneer, through no skill of her own, has not run into any.
There are a few edible plants in the underbrush that Reneer's medical knowledge can detect but by the eighth day starvation mode has kicked in. They don't send Muttations in anymore. There's no joy in watching a tribute too weak to move be devored. The Gamemakers veto a natural disaster as well, the remaining 12 tributes are too densely clustered around their only water source.
On the tenth morning, Reneer picks out Redlock, Deary bark, and Hawl berries, and mashes them into a paste and leaves them in the damp air to dry slowly. The resulting whitish powder is known to induce paralysis on its way to quick, painless death. She sits in the tree that has been her home for the past five days and stares at the white powder, not quite remembering why she made it. For herself?
Then she looks at the pools and feels a horrible sinking feeling in her gut.
* * *
Technically Reneer Julip holds the record for most deaths caused by a tribute in any Hunger Games. It still stands.
She sidles up to the nearest pool, dips her water pouch, and drops a leaf wrapped around white powder into its depths. Diffusion takes over from there and no power in Panem can undo it.
Here's the rub - the three pools are connected.
What is a quick death in high concentrations is a slow paralysis in low concentrations. The tributes drink multiple times from the pools, sometimes stumbling back for more as they try to clear their systems. Some manage to get so far away from the water source that by the time paralysis sets in they physically can't make it back and die of dehydration.
The last victim is the female tribute from District Four, falling, dizzy, into the second pool as paralysis climbs up her legs. It takes her eighteen minutes to drown.
When Reneer Julip is declared Victor of the 66th Hunger Games she's dry heaving on the other side of the arena well aware the sickness she's feeling will be a part of her always.
* * *
When the Third Quarter Quell is announced the residents of District Nine let out a discreet collective sigh of relief. The selection is easy.
Ogden Fernett is thirty-four. He has not set foot in District Nine, or answered to anything other than Quint Marche in seventeen years. He did not know it, but he has spent his days in the Capitol waiting for this day to come.
Reneer Hauser is tweny-four. She is an accountant in the Highlands. She married Fergus Hauser when she was nineteen. They have no children.
Ogden doesn't rage at the injustice, Reneer doesn't cry. No one asks them to form an alliance, or what their plans are, or whispers good luck.
The platforms supporting the 24 Victors reads like a fantasy duel. Ogden recognizes a few contenders; Finnick Odair, Enobaria, Cormes, the Girl on Fire. Reneer recognizes no one.
They cannot win. They have nothing left to lose.
* * *
Reneer's brothers defy Nine protocol and watch the Games.
They tune in just in time to see their sister impaled by a spear thrown by a hansome blond man. They do not recognize Ogden, who dies under his assumed name after a knife to the chest, three minutes later.
The Julip siblings drift outside afterwards, look eastward to the endless, rolling, open fields, and the storm on the horizon.
District Nine is beautiful in the summer.
Author: Iodinemoon
Rating: PG-13 (dark, death)
Word Count: ~3300
Disclaimer: I don't own the Hunger Games world, I just play there recreationally.
Summary: District Nine has produced only two victors in the history of the Hunger Games. The average Ninth citizen probably could not name them both. District Nine has its own form of rebellion and its own form of betrayal. This is the story of its victors.
...To those of the Ninth District is given stewardship of the fields.
Panem Charter, Amend. VI
* * *
To the first settlers of District Nine, the veterans of the uprising, the rich fields of wheat are hypnotizing.
Their Capitol escort abandons them abruptly to the flat arid land. There is no need for a wall or violence. The enemy they have struggled against can be found nowhere on the horizon. There are just the brilliant shining fields, the empty earth, and the swaying motion of the grain in the wind.
It looks like an endless golden sea, and they are left to drown themselves.
* * *
The first competition is announced the third year after the rebel capituation.
The Capitol directive frames it as entertainment, a spectacle for the ages. A chance for the Districts to have a champion again. The retired rebels are no more fooled by the propoganda than by the extra Capitol troops deployed to guard against renewed resistance.
The Districts, that first time round, are tasked to choose their offerings.
And unlike District Five where the Capitol station burns to the ground, or District Eleven where sixteen people are gunned down, District Nine voices no outrage. They see guns in the hands of the troops and the wide expanse of the fields and remember too much of massacres witnessed and performed.
There are volunteers. Wounded veterans fall over themselves for a chance to even the odds in the Capitol, the older teens join them, but they are too old, or too valued. The Ninth argues half-heartedly until the sun breaks over the horizon. That first light finally gives permission to voice what had already been decided by battle-hardened soldiers only three years removed.
The Ninth district offerings that year are a thirteen year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old idiot.
District Nine counts them among the casualties of the Uprising.
* * *
The Capitol brings viewscreens in to watch the competition. They invite people to find spectacle in the bloodbath. Every sane, able, humane citizen finds some reason to toil in the fields, or the kitchens, for as long as the viewscreen plays.
It is the only rebellion they have left.
* * *
The Reapings are implemented after the first decade of the Hunger Games, once the Capitol trades blantant intimidation for the abstract fear of random chance.
District Nine gets a Reaping Ceremony and a security escort and a Registry. It is flooded with Capitol agents and forced through the same procedures as the other outlying Districts. The element of chance lifts the responsibility of choice from parents' shoulders and puts it instead into a lottery.
The Ninth Reapings are notable only in two ways: the first is that random chance seems to align perfectly with the whims of the District, and the second is that every Ninth citizen has noticed.
No one has ever proved anything, and with the exception of the Kole Five no one has ever tried. The Peacekeepers are spread too thinly along the borders of the Ninth to guard the Hub year-round. As far as the Capitol is concerned, as long as the tributes drawn come forward the mechanics behind the Reaping bear no closer scrutiny.
So no one knows, but everyone suspects.
If you're a slack worker, or a criminal, or a little slow your name is drawn. If you lose your hand in an accident you need to work extra hard to prove that you can still work as well as everyone else. Single parents are universally overprotective on an instinct they dare not acknowledge.
There is reprieve as well. No citizen of District Nine wants for grain or oil as tradition dictates tesserae are given to all. No Reaping has ever touched the same familial generation. No leave restrictions are placed on tribute family members.
If the Reapings aren't rigged, then Nine has been quite lucky indeed. It operates at peak efficiency, hard work is valued, courtesy is the norm, and it is the most functional of the Districts.
And if - if - the Reapings are rigged then there's the idea that every tribute was chosen for a reason.
So get back to work and don't give them one.
* * *
For most District Nine children, their knowledge of the Games begins with the Reaping and ends with the tributes boarding the sleek Capitol train. The teenagers are told more about the twisted competition, but the finer details - the brutality - cannot be adequately conveyed in oral history alone.
The tributes themselves think of their impending deaths in abstract terms; the distant, the inevitable... never in the immediate, violent now of the death that awaits them. Many cry harder when they board the train than when they die in the arena, unseen.
There's a viewscreen in every District Nine house nowdays, never tuned to the Games. It's considered obscene.
* * *
When the Victor's tour visits they always leave disappointed.
District Nine shows none of the awe of poorer districts, the hatred of favored ones, or the unbridled joy of a homecoming. Instead the people shake their heads at the fine specimen of strength and perserverence, made hansome through artificial means, as if to say: such a shame.
The Ninth knows better than to give their best to the Capitol. They reap only the vulnerable, the unloved and the different. They have never encountered a victor they liked, no matter how personable or unobtrusive. The closest they allow themselves to come is pity, and distain for the District that let them go.
With the statistically-unlikely tendency to select the least capable, District Nine has the lowest number of victorious tributes among all Districts. They have produced only only two victors in the seventy-five Hunger Games held to date.
The average Ninth citizen probably could not name them both.
* * *
Ogden Fernett is the first. At the time he thinks he will be the last.
Technically he's a refugee from District Ten though, along with his father and two sisters, he's conditionally granted legal status from the Ninth.
Their amnesty granted, the Fernetts have a troubled time in the sprawl the makes up the Hub. They are gifted baked goods and woven baskets, deep sea-green curtains and the use of a rusty, albeit effective, lawn cutter. Despite this apparent goodwill, barely a glance is directed their way when they venture outside. Their attempts to reciprocate with choice cuts of meat or services are all quickly rebuffed. For six weeks Ogden finds their eccentric strangeness puzzling.
At the beginning of the seventh week, he wakes up dazed on a train speeding towards the Capitol.
* * *
His name is not in the official District Nine registry, so the one they give him is Quint Marche.
He tries repeatedly telling the Peacekeepers his name isn't Quint but they either igore him or, more likely, were given express orders to disregard such pleas. His district partner, found in the next car, is an eighteen-year-old beauty who has her looks and not much else. She's crying. Not nearly hard enough in Ogden's opinion. In District Ten they had let him watch the Games.
They have no mentor. Neither of them has the wherewithall to request one.
Here is how a victor is born: sitting next to a sobbing girl whose name he does not know or care to find out, Ogden decides he's going to win.
He'll win because he'll have something the others tributes won't. Something hotter than survival, deeper than greed, better anchored than desperation. He hates the Capitol for their games, District Ten for their accusations, hates the illness that took his mother, but he hates the Ninth more. The Ninth for offering with one hand while it takes with the other. Not for taking the most from them, but for taking the last thing left.
And in the Ninth, being a good little tribute means not coming back.
* * *
It's Ogden who pioneers the caricature of the District Nine tribute. The interviews are not as glitzy as they'll be in thirty years, so much of his costume is putting on a laughable Ninth accent and making outrageous claims about the weather, the cattle, and other tributes mothers. An echo of Quint Marche persists in Panem memory for years afterwards.
The 45th Hunger Games are best known as the year the Capitol introduced its sponsorship angle. For an exorbidant amount of money YOU could change the course of the Games. There are no pre-evaluations or campaigns, the only time tributes can impress sponsors is in the arena.
What Quint Marche masked so well in Ogden comes out once he steps into the forested dome. What he lacks in skill or strength is made up for in hatred. His first kill is his district partner. It's a knife wound, under the sternum, through the heart and then quickly across the throat. He would prefer to go straight through the spinal chord but he doesn't think the knife is sharp enough. Ogden was raised in livestock country, he knows where to cut for a quick death.
The Alliance turns in on itself once is becomes known there's another contender for the Victor's crown. The favored tributes literally at each other's throats, Quint Marche becomes the beloved underdog and the audience shows their appreciation accordingly. After his second night a green utilitarian parachute delivers a scythe. A strong wooden handle with a slim, sharp blade.
It is meant as a joke. Odgen doesn't care.
The scythe is sloppy and if he were any shorter, practically unuseable. It maims more than it kills, but there are plenty of tributes with a taste for blood so Ogden leaves the cleanup to them. He kills the last after an inelegant chase that lasts the better part of an hour. The killing stroke is quick, though a mark of efficiency as opposed to mercy. He doesn't see her die, he's already headed towards the clearing to wait for the airlift out.
This is the District Nine Victor that the Ninth couldn't be bothered to watch: medium height and average features currently covered in blood, sweat and mud, the hands gripping his scythe are shaking, dark eyes searching the sky.
But above all he looks impatient.
* * *
The revenge fantasies Odgen dreams up on the way back to Nine put his performance in the Games to shame. And if the atrocities committed by the Ninth in these daydreams are exaggerated then rest assured they come crashing down with everything else when reality hits.
Inside his father's house there's a sidetable is littered with casseroles and cakes of various ages and wholeness. There's a kettle that isn't his on the stove and a woman Ogden doesn't know drinking tea in the kitchen. His father tells him she's Haven's mother and that they watched the Games together.
Ogden asks who Haven is and the woman in the kitchen bursts into tears.
* * *
There is a decent sized gathering outside City Hall when the mayor directs Ogden to the podium. The assembled crowd is wide-eyed and bewildered. He can see the cogs in their brains turning as they process this new fact. Tributes can come back.
He prepares to unleash his wrath, his hate, the rage that kept him alive and unbeatable. He reaches down deep into the coals he's stoked for weeks and finds himself completely, utterly, bottomlessly, hollowed out.
It hits him all at once, as he stands in front of the entire district. Frozen like a deer in the headlights, or a seventeen year old killer, or like Haven Collington, District Nine, at the edge of the cornucopia. And Ogden would do anything, go back into the arena if he had to, anything, to have that righteous, intolerable, burning anger back.
But he feels it slipping away, feels himself slipping away, as Ogden Fernett, Victor of the 45th Hunger Games, disappears into Quint Marche forever.
* * *
If Quint Marche is lost among the flashier, riskier Victors of history, Reneer Julip barely registers at all.
The 66th Hunger Games take place in a lean year. Fires ravish the North-West and any and all of the able-bodied are needed to save the harvest. The Reapings are left to pick at the bones left behind. Tributes are generally taken from large families, in the hope that surviving children will make the loss of one less intolerable.
(Every family secretly hopes that the Games will take a girl, not a boy. Pound for pound, boys are worth more.)
(Every family also despises themselves for wishing this.).
Reneer Julip is fourteen, the only girl for six brothers when she is selected. She has watery blue eyes and mousy brown hair, and works as the (mostly useless) apprentice to her mother, the local midwife. All of her family is currently fighting fires in the Highlands.
Some other facts about the youngest Julip: when she grows up she wants to be a Healer, she has a school-girl crush on a boy named Fergus, she walks herself down to the train station, she does not cry as she boards.
There is no one to see her off.
* * *
Reneers's District partner is a tall farmer's boy, also a youngest child.
They talk with Quint Marche over the train viewscreen. The boy (Macht perhaps?) keeps asking question about survival, about killing, about winning. They are good questions, thorough and probing, and so obviously voiced by someone who has never seen the Games that Quint almost regrets answering honestly:
Survival is difficult. Allegiences are difficult. Killing is difficult. And winning? Is luck and determination. There is no secret formula, no master equation. You don't know what it'll take but it'll be hard.
Reneer stares out the window as she tells her Mentor she doesn't want to know about any of those things. She wants to help people, or at least, to do no harm.
Quint tells her that'll be easy.
* * *
In the Capitol they eat sparingly of rich food and learn to ignore the claustrophobic feeling of being hemmed in by buildings.
Macht spars every day and runs every night in addition to training. Reneer spends the days being intimidated and the nights wondering why Quint looks at them sometimes like he hates them.
Reneer scores a measly 5 on her evaluation and that's only because she has basic endurance. Her interview is shaky and her stylist has to put her in a masquerade ball gown and mask just so he can hide her tear-filled eyes that, for all her shaking, she does not let spill over.
The last night before the Games she celebrates her fifteenth birthday and makes a promise to Macht not to get in his way.
Quint's last words to them are neither hopeful nor useful. They are the same ones he has told every pair of walking-dead Nine kids and they are worth saying only because they are true.
His advice is this: Just find something to hang onto. Anything. Just make sure it's solid and viceral, and that you can live without it when the time comes.
* *
Reneer's win is almost single-handedly orchestrated by the female tribute from District 4.
She recognizes that she's the weakest of the Careers and in lieu of sticking around until they kill her later, opts to take them all out the first night. Three grenades and suddenly it's anybody's game. There's a flurry of killing for a while afterwards but Reneer witness none of it. The remaining sixteen tributes slink into the dark forest, darting forward at intervals.
The arena is different than previous years, it's dark, for starters, with densely packed trees and undergrowth. A wide variety of colorful flora can barely be seen in the dim light. There are three deep pools of freshwater at the center of the Cornicopia, that only later will they realize are meant to draw tributes out in the open from thirst.
Her Games are exceptionally boring, Reneer is told afterwards. That's what happens when the Careers are eliminated too quickly and the hunting game becomes a starvation game. No one even makes a move to control the pool until the fifth day, and his spear aim is so poor he's probably doing more harm than good by making himself a target. They release muttations every now and again but Reneer, through no skill of her own, has not run into any.
There are a few edible plants in the underbrush that Reneer's medical knowledge can detect but by the eighth day starvation mode has kicked in. They don't send Muttations in anymore. There's no joy in watching a tribute too weak to move be devored. The Gamemakers veto a natural disaster as well, the remaining 12 tributes are too densely clustered around their only water source.
On the tenth morning, Reneer picks out Redlock, Deary bark, and Hawl berries, and mashes them into a paste and leaves them in the damp air to dry slowly. The resulting whitish powder is known to induce paralysis on its way to quick, painless death. She sits in the tree that has been her home for the past five days and stares at the white powder, not quite remembering why she made it. For herself?
Then she looks at the pools and feels a horrible sinking feeling in her gut.
* * *
Technically Reneer Julip holds the record for most deaths caused by a tribute in any Hunger Games. It still stands.
She sidles up to the nearest pool, dips her water pouch, and drops a leaf wrapped around white powder into its depths. Diffusion takes over from there and no power in Panem can undo it.
Here's the rub - the three pools are connected.
What is a quick death in high concentrations is a slow paralysis in low concentrations. The tributes drink multiple times from the pools, sometimes stumbling back for more as they try to clear their systems. Some manage to get so far away from the water source that by the time paralysis sets in they physically can't make it back and die of dehydration.
The last victim is the female tribute from District Four, falling, dizzy, into the second pool as paralysis climbs up her legs. It takes her eighteen minutes to drown.
When Reneer Julip is declared Victor of the 66th Hunger Games she's dry heaving on the other side of the arena well aware the sickness she's feeling will be a part of her always.
* * *
When the Third Quarter Quell is announced the residents of District Nine let out a discreet collective sigh of relief. The selection is easy.
Ogden Fernett is thirty-four. He has not set foot in District Nine, or answered to anything other than Quint Marche in seventeen years. He did not know it, but he has spent his days in the Capitol waiting for this day to come.
Reneer Hauser is tweny-four. She is an accountant in the Highlands. She married Fergus Hauser when she was nineteen. They have no children.
Ogden doesn't rage at the injustice, Reneer doesn't cry. No one asks them to form an alliance, or what their plans are, or whispers good luck.
The platforms supporting the 24 Victors reads like a fantasy duel. Ogden recognizes a few contenders; Finnick Odair, Enobaria, Cormes, the Girl on Fire. Reneer recognizes no one.
They cannot win. They have nothing left to lose.
* * *
Reneer's brothers defy Nine protocol and watch the Games.
They tune in just in time to see their sister impaled by a spear thrown by a hansome blond man. They do not recognize Ogden, who dies under his assumed name after a knife to the chest, three minutes later.
The Julip siblings drift outside afterwards, look eastward to the endless, rolling, open fields, and the storm on the horizon.
District Nine is beautiful in the summer.