Canon Divergence: The Quarter Quell [8/9]
It's my one-year wedding anniversary tomorrow, and milady and I are going to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios Japan! Yay! Which means leaving the house at like 5:40 in the morning, not quite so yay! But that does mean I'm updating early! Yay!
Title: The End is the Beginning is the End
Rating: PG
Characters: Brutus, Lyme, Enobaria, D2 OCs (Claudius), Cashmere, Gloss, miscellaneous Victors
Summary: When the Victor Games are announced, District 2 must send its heroes along with the rest of them. Brutus hopes doing his duty will silence the voices telling him this is wrong; Enobaria wants to burn the traitor Mockingjay for bringing this on people who only ever followed orders. Lyme needs to make it through without stabbing President Snow in the eye. Katniss saw what Katniss saw because it's what the powers that be wanted her to see. This is the other side.
Chapter Summary: Within hours of the Games beginning, something is off. The problem is that none of the Careers can figure out what.
Brutus stands alone in the tube as the modulated voice announces ten seconds to launch, balanced on the balls of his feet and testing his weight, bending his legs to stretch out the muscles of his calves. The countdown takes up in his veins, flooding through him and shooting energy into his limbs. The final minutes are the worst part, trapped on the platforms and unable to move, unable to act, until the timer hits zero.
Lyme was right; it's the Hunger Games, there will only be one winner, and it's not just enough for Brutus to do his duty and go in to die. He has to win. Not just for Two, to restore their honour after last year's catastrophic failure; not just for the president and the Capitol and Panem, but for himself. For the three kids he pulled out of the Arena a decade apart each who will be watching and waiting for him to come home. For the mentor who sacrificed everything to get Brutus where he is and never demanded anything back but Brutus' love and obedience. For the friends willing to take a beating so that Brutus can get his head pounded on straight.
Brutus has killed before, and he'll kill again. At the end of the day it doesn't matter; they're all going to die save one, and if the years of mentoring have taught Brutus anything -- with Mags withdrawing from the alliance underscoring it more than ever -- it's that at the end of the day, you do what you have to do to survive because everyone around you is doing the same. What happens in the Arena stays in the Arena; every crime is forgiven, washed away in blood and the Capitol's mercy. The only thing Brutus owes the others is a quick death, and he will give them that.
Not a single one of his 'friends' would hesitate to kill him, if they had the strength to do it; it's only their physical limitations that will stop them, and it won't keep them from trying, either. It would be weakness for Brutus to hesitate to do the same. Why privilege their lives over his own when his people -- his Victors -- depend on him?
The nice thing about the Arena is that it strips everything down to the barest essentials, ripping away all delusions and attempts at heroics or mental gymnastics: Brutus will survive. The end.
The platform rises. Brutus drops into a half-crouch, lowering his centre of gravity in case the Arena is unstable when he gets there. He narrows his eyes against potential glare and prepares for a long swim; if his contacts hadn't warned him to expect water, the flotation material in his belt would have tipped him off.
It's water, all right, with jungle around behind them and the Cornucopia in the middle, and as soon as the countdown ends, Brutus flings himself into it. He's not Two's best swimmer by a long shot but it will do, and instead of fighting the waves Brutus angles himself toward the thin stretch of land nearest him and heaves himself up with a few short jerks of his arms. His feet slip on the wet sand but he finds his footing, just in time to avoid crashing into Katniss Everdeen as she tears toward the Cornucopia.
Brutus takes a few steps after her, but then he stops: Finnick Odair's arms rip through the water, pulling him up even with Everdeen as she runs; he should reach the middle a few seconds after she does. A few spokes over Gloss runs at full-tilt toward them, but Brutus narrows his eyes and takes it at a slow jog instead. None of the others will bother crossing the water to get to him on his strip of sand just yet, and the cameras will want to see the moment where Twelve will show their colours.
Let everyone see that the darling of the revolution is just as quick to bloody her hands as the rest of them. Brutus slips back down into the water when he reaches arrow range and closes the distance with a few strokes, treading water and staying just out of hearing but close enough to read lips. Once Twelve and Four have their showdown Brutus will slip in and finish the rest; if Odair takes out Everdeen then Brutus will have to deal with Enobaria being pissed and sulky until the end of time, but he's not interfering. Everdeen made her bed; let her lie in it.
Except instead of a fight, Brutus takes a slap of water to the mouth and nearly chokes as Odair waves his wrist in Everdeen's face and reminds her that they have an alliance. An alliance, the very thing that Haymitch swore they didn't want, and that Mags had thrown Brutus and Enobaria over to avoid.
Odair's glance flicks over the water, and he meets Brutus' eyes for two whole seconds before his mouth twitches up in a smirk and he looks away. "Don't trust One and Two," he shoots at Katniss before barking out the rest of their attack strategy, and oh he fucking did not.
Brutus' trademark cool determination is no match for the hot wash of rage, and he shouldn't take it personally when they're all in it to win except i>fuck District Four. Fuck them and straddling the Career-outlier line, reaping all the benefits from the Capitol while still making nice with the others, playing the cuddly Careers while painting One and Two off as the real villains. And fuck Odair for rubbing it in -- Everdeen made it clear as an avalanche that she doesn't trust One and Two as far as she can spit, so there's no reason why he'd have to waste precious breath saying it again.
Maybe he's worried that if Brutus has half the chance, he'll tell Everdeen that her new ally is a backstabbing son of a bitch.
Under cover of the water, Brutus pries his belt loose; floating is no good when diving down will protect him from anything they can throw at him. Gloss and Enobaria reach the Cornucopia first, and Brutus pulls himself back up onto the sandbar just in time to fling himself back off when Everdeen fires at him. The belt stops the arrow, splattering him in the face, and Brutus rolls into the water and scrubs himself clean of the blinding gunk before climbing back up, this time directly onto the central platform itself.
The Twelve-Four alliance takes off down another spoke, running toward Mellark, and Brutus puts them out of his mind. His allies are here; the Careers have the Cornucopia, and that's all that matters. "Food?" he demands, wiping the last of the purple goo from his face.
"Nothing. Looks like they're counting on us putting our popularity to good use." Cashmere's hair sticks to her neck, and she pushes it out of her face with a careless gesture. "Shouldn't be a problem for us, anyway." She shades her eyes and peers out over the water, the heads bobbing above the waves. She picks up a wicked pair of throwing knives and tosses one to Gloss, then hefts a mace and twirls it with as much ease as if it were made of foam. "Looks like they're getting close. Here we go."
Brutus takes a sideways leap over Caleb's corpse, slowly bleeding out onto the sand with Odair's trident stuck through his chest; he whirls in the direction of footfalls and heaves his sword around, where it cuts through skin and stops hard against the spine, jarring Brutus' arm. Charley, from Ten, gurgles and scrabbles at Brutus' chest with his bare hands. Brutus wrenches his sword free and swings again, finishing the job -- sloppy, sloppy, one blow each should do it -- and Charley collapses onto the sand and rolls halfway down toward the water.
The clash of metal sounds from the far side of the Cornucopia followed by Enobaria's sharp shout of triumph; Brutus turns away, focusing on the figure running up the sandbar to his left. Dark hair, slim build -- Cecelia, running toward the Cornucopia instead of swimming away toward the jungle, hoping for what -- food, water, a quick death?
Brutus backs up, grabs a spear from the pile of weapons and tests its heft and balance, still leaning backward. Then he flings his weight forward onto his left foot, brings his right arm up, and lets the weapon fly.
The spear hits her straight in the chest; the cannon fires as her body hits the water.
Lyme exhales as Brutus turns away; behind him Cecelia's body bobs gently in the waves. The hovercrafts won't bother in this chaos, not until the initial frenzy dies down, and her blood spreads out in a dark red cloud, her hair fanning around her head.
"Bastard," Diana snarls under her breath, fingers tight on the console. "He didn't even hesitate. You'd think someone so obsessed with honour would at least have second thoughts. Fucking Twos."
"She's only dead because you were too much of a coward to volunteer for her," Lyme says in a mild tone that belies the spark of fury, and normally she wouldn't get involved in mentor spats -- that's for newbies and angry outliers -- but enough is enough. "There's a mirror in the bathroom if you want to start pointing fingers."
Diana's nostrils flare as she glares in Lyme's peripheral vision, but even if she had the chops to back her up in a physical fight, she's not fool enough to start one. Not when Lyme rolled into mentor central with bruises that not even Remake could clear in time, only to answer her fellow mentors' horrified stares with a sharp grin and the offhand remark that Brutus had wanted to practice against someone worth his time.
Claudius is down in the sponsor ring with an earpiece in case Lyme needs to relay information, and there he'll stay for the remainder of the Games if Lyme has anything to say about it. It's been hard enough reining him in without him watching the Victors die, whether he wants Brutus to come home or not; one wrong word and he'll end up with his knife in someone's eye.
The initial bloodbath is short and ultimately -- in terms of ratings -- boring. Six deaths start to finish: the only outlying tributes to rush the Cornucopia are the ones presumably on a suicide run; the others stay on their platforms or hide half-submerged in the water, waiting for the Pack to leave, or don't bother with the weapons at all and take off for the jungle. Eventually Brutus rolls his eyes and orders the Pack to abandon the post and make for the trees; there's no strategic advantage to holding a rock full of weapons in the middle of nowhere, and so they load up and head off.
Lyme takes the Cornucopia feed and minimizes it down to a small square in the corner of her screen, keeping half an eye on it while she tracks the Pack. Only once does anything interesting happen -- Seven and Three team up against the pair from Nine, which ends with the Nines dead and Blight hauling a half-conscious and wounded Beetee away down the spokes -- and while Lyme notes the oddity of the alliance, it's not her problem right now.
Cora drops her headset and buries her face in her hands, and for a second Lyme can't figure out why because she's always been more matter-of-fact about her tributes' deaths than some of the others. Except that this isn't just a tribute, it's her husband, and Johanna Mason hurled an axe into his chest and now it's over, and he'll never see that grandchild he was telling Caesar about. Lyme swallows and looks away; no one notices because they're all doing the same thing, avoiding the grief rolling off Cora in waves.
Focus.
The readouts of the Arena worry Lyme far more than the deaths, anyway; no fresh water anywhere on the island, no atmospheric indicators of rain, and with his bulk Brutus will succumb to dehydration fast. Lyme touches her earpiece, tapping twice to bring up Claudius' frequency. "D, any chance they did enough to get us some water?"
A pause -- Lyme drums her fingers against the desk, chest tight -- then Claudius comes back, his voice flat. "No dice, boss. Sponsors say they made a disappointing start. They want to see a few more kills before they'll fork over anything for food or water."
"Shit," Lyme mutters, rubbing her forehead, but it's not like she didn't see that coming. "Okay, thanks, keep me posted."
"That's a no?" Dexter asks when Lyme pushes her microphone out of the way. Lyme nods. "Well this one's going to hell straight from the platforms, then. Did they say why? What do they want us to do?"
"Kill more." Lyme rolls her eyes, because it's either exasperation or blinding rage and she has to keep her focus. "Sponsors are bored."
Dexter curses under his breath. "Shit, they're changing the rules already, that's just great. We've never had to earn food on the first day. Fuck! They made their bloodbath kills and everyone else was hanging back so they left to hunt. What were they supposed to do?"
"Hold the Cornucopia, I guess," Lyme says, but it's not a strategic position like in other years. There's no food, no cover, and even a Career Pack entirely made up of Victors can only use so many weapons each. The four of them huddling on a slippery rock surrounded by piles of swords and knives until the others gave up and swam for the beach wouldn't make any more of a good show. Maybe they should have run down the sand bars back toward the platforms and tried to pick off as many as they could from a distance, except that just would've meant the loss of all their range weapons pretty quickly.
"This is a fucking mess," Dexter mutters, jamming his headset firmly into place and turning back to his screen. Lyme isn't going to argue.
"Okaaaay," Cashmere says slowly, barely repressing the venom in her voice, when instead of the water she asked for they get oil and rags and whetstones to keep their weapons sharp. "Anyone want to venture a guess here? What are we supposed to do with this?"
She has to know because they all know. No gifts until they kill more, but there's no surer way to die than to force themselves through the jungle on a wild goose chase in this heat without any water. Already Brutus has a headache behind his skull, dull and throbbing, and his mouth sticks dry and his tongue feels swollen in his mouth. Brutus wipes the sweat out of his eyes and glares at the ground, weighing his options, but finally he shakes his head. "E, gimme a knife."
Enobaria bares her teeth. "Get your own."
Brutus rolls his eyes. "Cash?" She produces one from her cleavage and flips it over to him. Brutus stalks over to the nearest tree and drives the knife into the trunk, digging upwards through the bark to the wood beneath and sawing back and forth to make a hole. "Somebody get me a hollow stick and sharpen the end for me," he says, jamming the blade to the side and twisting it, widening the gap. A minute later Gloss hands him a thin branch with a newly-sharpened end, and Brutus works it inside and hammers it in with the handle of the knife.
He waits, and sure enough, moments later water trickles out from the makeshift spile. Cashmere claps her hands in delight and Gloss punches him in the arm. "So now you're, what, a bushwhacker in your spare time, mountain man?" Cashmere asks.
"I like surviving," Brutus says simply. He lowers his hands beneath the stream of water and splashes it onto his face, then ducks down and swallows a few mouthfuls. "Take your fill and then we'll move. No point carrying it, the sugar in the sap will sour pretty quick in this heat."
Cashmere lowers herself to her knees and tips her head back, and Brutus turns away. She'll make it sexy for the sponsors -- already Gloss stands behind her, hands on her shoulders -- and if there's one thing Brutus can't deal with on top of being back in the fucking Arena, it's watching the siblings play their creepy incest game. He'll take the gifts it gets them, sure, but that doesn't mean he has to stand there and watch.
"Move over, sickos, we're not filming a porno," Enobaria snaps a few minutes later, and Cashmere gives a throaty laugh and asks her if she's jealous. Brutus picks up one of the cloths and starts scrubbing the blade of his sword.
It's a good fucking thing that none of them have forgotten their survival training, because a whole day goes by and nothing. No other tributes, no more fights, no showdowns, zilch. They even head back to the beach around sunset to see if anyone will risk it, but the thin strip of land at the base of the tree line is too open and exposed for any of the others to try making it down.
No kills means no food, and Brutus' stomach growls as they work their way through the jungle in a methodical fashion. Finally the kids make a game of spearing the tree rats with their knives, and they roast those over a fire for a not overly disappointing supper. (Normally Brutus would rather starve than risk it, but these aren't city rats and were likely cloned by the Gamemakers a few days ago so they shouldn't -- he hopes -- be crawling with parasites.)
That night Enobaria jeers as the faces float in the sky, and Brutus knows he should join her -- good for their image, bloodthirsty and brutal and vicious -- but he's tired and doesn't have the heart for it. Cecelia's face is solemn as she stares down over the Arena, and her eyes stay with him even after Brutus closes his.
They don't get any food, but they do get a pack of cards, and Brutus shoves down a wash of irritation. "Strip poker it is," Cashmere says, giving them a suggestive grin and waggling her eyebrows. She's good, Brutus will give her that; she actually sells it, makes it look like she really wants to spend her last days alive taking off her clothes with her brother and a couple of Twos.
Brutus loses almost every hand when he's up against Cashmere even though he's the better player, and the sponsors will whine about their luck but too fucking bad. Better him sitting there in his underwear than her, and so he throws away a pair of aces and a three-set of tens and yanks off his shirt to Gloss' convincingly enthusiastic wolf whistle.
He is way, way too old for this shit.
Late that night Brutus jerks awake as twelve loud gongs wrest him from uneasy dreams. Enobaria's on watch, and she shrugs at him when Brutus asks what the hell is going on. "Dunno. There was lightning a little while ago, but this is the first time there's been any noises. Must be midnight."
Cashmere makes a disgruntled noise and tucks herself in closer against her brother's chest. Gloss grunts and settles back down with his head in the crook of his elbow, his other arm draped over Cashmere's back. "They'd better not be doing that every hour or I'm gonna be pissed," Gloss mutters, and Brutus isn't going to bitch about the Arena where the Gamemakers can hear him but he's inclined to agree. Messing with the tributes' sleep is a pretty standard tactic to keep things interesting, but every hour seems a bit excessive.
Brutus stays awake and counts the next hour off in his head, but nothing happens at one a.m. Who knows what they were thinking, but Brutus has long learned that you don't stay alive by trying to second-guess the Gamemakers. Better just to take the lumps as they come and ignore it if there's nothing. He rolls over and drops off again, grateful that the ability to sleep on command isn't one that fades with time.
He wakes again when a cannon fires in the middle of the night. "Shit," Brutus mutters. If someone else is being exciting and doing the killing then they're all in trouble. They pack up and move out but once again find absolutely no one, and by the time a second cannon goes off an hour later Brutus has all but given up on finding anything but more tree rats.
"I'm going back to sleep," Enobaria says finally, flinging a knife into a tree and skewering a rat to the trunk. "This is stupid. If Nero wants me to be up and hunting he can at least send me ice cream."
"I'll take watch," Brutus says instead of bothering to argue. So far the Arena has been boring as shit; no traps, no tricks, no nothing, just the trees. Hopefully something happens soon or he's afraid that Cashmere will start trying to feel him up for lack of anything better to do.
Claudius keeps the smile on his face; whenever it starts to slip, he imagines taking his pencil and driving it through a sponsor's skull. That gives him a jolt of pleasure like an epinephrine jab, enough to keep him going through the conversation. "I promise they're doing their very best to make this exciting," Claudius says, leaving the channel open, and Lyme lets out a disgusted snort in his ear. "They've been hunting all morning; if you have any complaints about the lack of deaths, you might want to bring your concerns to the Gamemakers. The way the Arena is set up this year makes running into each other very difficult."
That's a nice way of putting it, when the truth is that every time the Pack tries to make it down to the beach, a forcefield at the edge of the tree line stops them and forces them back into the jungle. It's like someone doesn't want them out in the open where it's easy to catch the others, though for the life of him Claudius can't figure out why. They're demanding the Pack murder more tributes but making it impossible to find them, forcing them to sweep the entire jungle piece by piece while the ever-widening group of allies waltzes around and survives a host of Arena traps and nets themselves all of the airtime.
"I'm just not sure if they're worth the investment this year," the sponsor says, her mouth turned down in a disappointed pout. "Have you seen what the others have been doing? Fighting monkeys and poison fog and all kinds of exciting things! It seems like your group is playing it safe."
Pencil through the eye, Claudius reminds himself, and stretches his mouth into a grim parody of a grin by imagining the spurt of blood.
Mid-morning the Arena goes completely dark. Brutus closes his eyes, presses a hand hard over his lids, and counts to twenty before opening them again, but it makes no difference. "Well, this is fun," Gloss drawls from beside him, and Brutus turns toward the sound but makes out absolutely nothing, not even a smear of movement against the thick blackness surrounding them. "Now what?"
"Now nothing," Brutus says, and he shuts his eyes again just because it's less of a head trip that way. His heart hammers in his chest against his will; he's not afraid of the dark or anything stupid, all the trainees had to deal with that when they were thirteen and he survived that just fine, but it's still nothing he'd do for fun. "We sit tight and wait for it to go away. No point crashing around and tripping over roots and breaking our skulls on tree branches."
"Sounds good to me," Cashmere says, and the leaves rustle as she drops. "I'm sick of this already. Let the meat run around and trip and fall to their deaths. I hope half of them drown in the mud.'
"Have I mentioned how much I hate this Arena?" Enobaria asks, hissing the words and punctuating her t's with loud clicks of her tongue against her fangs. "Because I really hate this Arena. What's the point of the dark? We couldn't even find them in the daytime!"
Brutus has no answer for that, but a minute later the air fills with screams. Not human screams, and not animal ones, either; they're high-pitched and screeching, tearing through Brutus' skull and drilling through his teeth, and he grunts in pain before the first bat flies into his face.
He can't see them any more than he can see anything else, but Brutus recognizes the shriek of batt muttations anywhere. His Arena had them, the time he sought to hide from the blistering sun in a low-lying cave and really should have known better. The air fills with the mad flapping of their wings, and between that and their hunting cries the entire jungle is a cacophony of noise.
"What the fuck?" Gloss yelps, and it takes a lot to genuinely unsettle a Career but even they have limits. "What the -- get off!"
Brutus forces himself to breathe slowly, and he backs up one step at a time until he hits a tree, bracing himself against the trunk with one foot planted on the far side of a large root to ground him. "Move back, find a tree and grab on!" he yells over the din. "Sound off so we know where we all are, we don't want to hit each other!"
"This is the worst Arena ever!" Cashmere shouts as she moves a little way off, cursing and stumbling in the pitch blackness. And maybe he's wrong, maybe they're not the same mutts that attacked him all those years ago, except that first Cashmere lets out a shriek, and a few moments later Enobaria and Gloss explode into fits of swearing.
The first bat sinks its teeth into Brutus' arm, sharp points of pain piercing his skin, and he beats it off with his free hand. "They'll drink you dry if you let them," he calls out, and he abandons proper form to grip his sword like a bat, swinging it with no regard for technique or style but just to connect and keep them away. "Keep them off any way you can but don't throw any fucking knives, E! I don't want to get skewered."
"I'm not going to waste my pretty knives in the dark," Enobaria snaps back, but her voice is tight with determination and fury and that's a good thing. "Come on, you little bloodsuckers, you think you can fight me? Bring it on!"
What makes the most sense would be to crawl into a ball to make himself the smallest possible target and try to hide beneath the roots or cover himself with leaves, but that ain't Brutus' style and it's not what the sponsors will want to see, either. They've finally been given the chance to do something interesting, and he can't waste it being practical. So instead of hunkering down and waiting for it to end, Brutus attacks the howling bats with his sword, grunting with satisfaction every time he connects.
It's Gloss' idea to start the count. "I'm at three!" he yells at one point. "I bet you I get more than all of you."
"What?" Enobaria bursts out. "Nobody told me we were counting! That's not fair!"
"It's not a contest," Cashmere challenges.
"That's just because you're losing," Gloss shoots back.
And the thing is, it's not a bad plan. Brutus grins, manic and more than a little mad, but let them see it; they'll be watching this with special cameras anyway. Let them see that Careers won't be taken out by a little darkness and some flying rats. "That's what you think," he shouts. "I'm already at four."
"Fuck you, old man!" Gloss yells again, and Brutus barks out a laugh.
Brutus doesn't bother to count the minutes, not when his concentration is focused on not bashing himself in the face or getting his sword stuck in a tree or letting enough of the mutts past his guard to leech away his lifeblood, but he guesses they keep at it for about an hour. The lights come back on out of nowhere without warning, and Brutus flings an arm over his eyes to shut out the blinding sunlight. He keeps his sword hand free to fend off the bats, but their cries die off just as sharply and instead the air whistles with the sound of their wings as they fly away and disappear into the trees.
Brutus opens his eyes, blinking against the stab of pain in his eye sockets, and takes stock of the others. They're all bleeding -- Cashmere, the smallest and lightest of them, weaves a little, looking woozy, and Gloss darts over to wrap an arm around her waist and hold her steady -- but other than that they're fine. A few puncture wounds, a little blood loss, but nothing they can't fix. Black, winged corpses litter the ground around them.
"Count the bodies in your zone," Enobaria says, breaking the silence. "I want to make sure none of you fuckers cheated."
They count, and Brutus wins. "Age before beauty," he sneers at Enobaria when she shows her fangs at him.
"Just one more and I would've tied you," Cashmere complains, kicking at one of the bodies with the toe of her boot. "They couldn't have given me ten more seconds?"
"Besides, you're so huge, you probably just had to stand there and they ran into you like a wall," Gloss adds, and Brutus takes the ribbing because it looks good. Yeah, they just survived an hour in the dark with killer mutts, and they turned it into a game and now they're laughing about it. Surely that at least is worth some fucking breakfast.
It is. The parachutes drop soon after, and Enobaria snatches the one painted 'E' out of the air and cradles it to her chest, screwing off the cap and cheering when Nero sent her the fucking ice cream after all. Brutus and the others get regular food -- some bread and dried meat and fruit, easy to carry on them once they move -- and a pack of bandages and salve to split between them.
"Fuckin' finally," Gloss mutters under his breath, too low for the microphones to catch, because they all know better than to act entitled. Out loud he tilts his face up and gives the cameras a bright, commercial-ready smile. "My thanks," he says, raising the cap of his canister, which he's using as a makeshift cup for his lukewarm sap-water.
"Bon appetit," Cashmere says, and Brutus rolls his eyes. They're always using pretty nonsense words like that in One.
"Cheers," Brutus says instead like a normal person, and doesn't bother to cut off a slice, just tears into the bread with his teeth.
That afternoon it's blood rain, pouring down thick and hot and choking, and this time Brutus doesn't even bother to play it up for the sponsors. He grabs the nearest person -- Enobaria, she sinks her fangs into his wrist before she realizes he's not trying to throttle her -- and pulls her close, then keeps his head down and yells for Cashmere and Gloss until they find them. They huddle together, turned inward in a circle, and they lower themselves down to their knees.
Brutus peels off his jacket and drapes it over Enobaria's head, and instead of snarling at him she pulls it closer. Now would be the perfect time to stab each other in the gut if they wanted to break the alliance and improve their odds but none of them do. They cling to each other in grim silence with their heads pointed toward the ground and shoulders pressed close.
The rain stops as suddenly as it began an hour later. Brutus rears back, wiping the blood away and heaving in gasps of humid, moisture-filled air, spitting mouthfuls of blood onto the ground. Beside him Enobaria shudders, scrubbing at her face with her arms, and Brutus winces; the last time she swallowed that much blood would've been in her Arena, but he can't comfort her. It would weaken their image and she wouldn't accept it anyway.
"I take it back, what I said about it being boring," Cashmere says, slumping back in exhaustion and letting her head fall against Gloss' shoulder. He works his fingers through her hair, separating out the clumped, matted strands. "I'll lie around braiding flowers in my hair if it means I never have to do that again."
"We're going to smell," Enobaria complains, and she's not wrong, not in this heat. Her voice shakes, too subtle for the audience to notice but obvious enough to a fellow Career, and this time Brutus has to bite back a curse. Enobaria hates being dirty, hates it more than almost anything else. It reminds her of the Arena, not the fun parts where she got to flay open a girl's throat or jump into a melee with her sword flashing, but the low, slogging bits in the middle where the food ran dry and the tributes too thin to make it fun.
Brutus tilts his head up to the sky. "Any chance for a bit of help here?" he asks. The only good thing about this is that Nero is in the mentor's seat, and Enobaria's mentor knows her better than anyone. He'll be cussing his head off and scrambling for a way to get her clean, because he loves his girl and wants to keep her sane.
It takes a minute -- Brutus slices into a tree and opens up as big a spigot as he can, letting Enobaria sit beneath the stream and scrub at her face -- but finally Nero answers. The skies open up, but this time instead of blood, the clouds let loose a cooling torrent of water. It's only five minutes but after the gunk and the stickiness and the stench it feels like an hour, and they strip off their clothes and let the rain sluice away the blood.
Brutus doesn't bother with his shirt; Enobaria chewed a hole through it while waiting for the blood to stop, and he pulls on the bottom half of his uniform and leaves it at that. Gloss and Enobaria follow suit -- at this point there's hardly any point, they're hot and confining and Brutus swears the material keeps shrinking -- but Cashmere clenches her jaw and zips her uniform straight up to her throat. Brutus ain't gonna touch that.
"Let's move out," Brutus says instead. The alliance still has the beach, and there's no point even bothering trying to head down when they'll just get another fucking forcefield keeping them back. "See if we can find Chaff."
They don't find Chaff, and by the time another hour or so slides by they're all feeling it. "I want to kill someone," Cashmere says, eyes hard and flashing. "I'm sick of this. I don't even care anymore, I'm sick of this jungle and these trees and traps. Why are we even here if we don't get to murder anyone? What is the point? Are we supposed to stand around while the Arena picks everybody off one by one or what? What kind of a Victor Games is this?"
The alliance is huddled at the centre of the Arena, gesturing over the Cornucopia. Even Brutus is feeling it now, the hot surge of impatience and frustration, and so he makes a gambit. "Let us out and I guarantee a kill," he says to the air. "We know how to give a good show, just give us the chance."
The air in front of them shimmers, and the forcefield disappears. Brutus grins and salutes up toward the sky. "You won't regret it," he tells the Gamemakers; Enobaria cackles, and to the side Cashmere and Gloss share a private glance.
The Cornucopia spins, throwing the corpses of Wiress, Gloss and Cashmere into the water and knocking Brutus and Enobaria flying. The others cling to the rocks and to each other, and Brutus and Enobaria take the hint and swim away before the whole thing stops moving and the rest of the alliance regains their bearings.
"What," Lyme grits out between her teeth, "was that?"
She doesn't let herself think of Wiress, floating in the water as Katniss Everdeen flounders out and untangles the coil of wire from her body, as anything more than a statistic, because there's no time for that. Cashmere and Gloss bob in the waves, blood spreading out in dark clouds.
Dexter rips off his headset and throws it so hard against the wall it explodes. "Well that's that," he says, exhaling through his nose. "Looks like I'm coming out of retirement."
He's not talking about mentoring, and Lyme doesn't comment because he wouldn't want her to, not when District Two privilege means Lyme's body is hers and hers alone until the day she dies. With Gloss and Cashmere dead, the remaining Ones will be making up the difference from their furious, desperate clientele.
No time, no time. Lyme brushes the thought aside to focus on what's important: namely that Brutus and Enobaria could have taken out at least two more if the Gamemakers hadn't spun the island.
Between that and the forcefields that have been keeping the Pack from hitting the beach when the allies hold it, Lyme can't shake the feeling that this Arena was not meant for the Careers to win. Except that after the disaster of last year -- not just the Games but the whole mess of uprisings in the months following -- she would've thought it would be the other way around.
The other mentors stare at their consoles in silence, and it could be respect for the newly dead except Lyme isn't stupid and it really, really fucking isn't. The longer she sits there, the more she glances at their faces and catches the furtive looks they shoot each other, the more it feels like the alliance is about something much, much larger than who walks out of the Arena.
"I told them." Brutus stabs his sword into a tree and digs it sideways, relishing the jolt against his wrist as the blade catches in the heart-meat because it gives him something else to think about. "I fucking told them. Go for Odair or Mason. We could take the Threes out any time. The fuck were they doing?"
"They've always been like that," Enobaria says, combing the last of the saltwater tangles from her hair and pulling it back. They're not allowed to talk about Cashmere and Gloss suiciding out -- which is what the siblings most definitely just did -- but Brutus knows what she means. "It's not like we didn't know it was coming."
Not on day fucking two, they didn't.
"It still doesn't make any fucking sense for them to go for Three," Brutus grits out. He yanks his his sword free from the trunk; a few moments later, water trickles out from the gash, and Brutus cups his hand underneath and scoops it up to his mouth because waste not want not. "You wanna fight, you go for the ones who are gonna fight you."
If they really were looking for a chance to commit suicide, afraid that the Arena would slowly pick off the other tributes until there was no one left strong enough to do it, why choose Wiress? Why not run right for the middle and take out one of the ones worth fighting? Cashmere never liked Mason -- the two of them got on like wet cats trapped in a paper bag -- and Gloss thought Mellark was a stuck-up little prissy boy with his idiotic notions of love and noble sacrifice. Neither of them had any problems with the half-crazed woman who sang to herself and made them little trinkets of wire and bits of glass.
"Fuck if I know what crazy people think," Enobaria scoffs, and Brutus doesn't laugh even though she set him up for that one. He should at least shoot her a grin until she glares at him but he's not in the fucking mood.
"Well it's done now," Brutus says darkly. Two days in and half the Pack is gone; it's him and Enobaria versus the rest of the Games-damned Arena, apparently, since all but two of the remaining tributes are down there on the beach having a grand old time.
Brutus lost one spear in the attack and didn't have the chance to grab any more, but that's fine. The alliance won't hold the beach forever, and once they're back in the jungle he and Enobaria can slip out and restock. It's only Day Two. There's plenty of time.
Title: The End is the Beginning is the End
Rating: PG
Characters: Brutus, Lyme, Enobaria, D2 OCs (Claudius), Cashmere, Gloss, miscellaneous Victors
Summary: When the Victor Games are announced, District 2 must send its heroes along with the rest of them. Brutus hopes doing his duty will silence the voices telling him this is wrong; Enobaria wants to burn the traitor Mockingjay for bringing this on people who only ever followed orders. Lyme needs to make it through without stabbing President Snow in the eye. Katniss saw what Katniss saw because it's what the powers that be wanted her to see. This is the other side.
Chapter Summary: Within hours of the Games beginning, something is off. The problem is that none of the Careers can figure out what.
Brutus stands alone in the tube as the modulated voice announces ten seconds to launch, balanced on the balls of his feet and testing his weight, bending his legs to stretch out the muscles of his calves. The countdown takes up in his veins, flooding through him and shooting energy into his limbs. The final minutes are the worst part, trapped on the platforms and unable to move, unable to act, until the timer hits zero.
Lyme was right; it's the Hunger Games, there will only be one winner, and it's not just enough for Brutus to do his duty and go in to die. He has to win. Not just for Two, to restore their honour after last year's catastrophic failure; not just for the president and the Capitol and Panem, but for himself. For the three kids he pulled out of the Arena a decade apart each who will be watching and waiting for him to come home. For the mentor who sacrificed everything to get Brutus where he is and never demanded anything back but Brutus' love and obedience. For the friends willing to take a beating so that Brutus can get his head pounded on straight.
Brutus has killed before, and he'll kill again. At the end of the day it doesn't matter; they're all going to die save one, and if the years of mentoring have taught Brutus anything -- with Mags withdrawing from the alliance underscoring it more than ever -- it's that at the end of the day, you do what you have to do to survive because everyone around you is doing the same. What happens in the Arena stays in the Arena; every crime is forgiven, washed away in blood and the Capitol's mercy. The only thing Brutus owes the others is a quick death, and he will give them that.
Not a single one of his 'friends' would hesitate to kill him, if they had the strength to do it; it's only their physical limitations that will stop them, and it won't keep them from trying, either. It would be weakness for Brutus to hesitate to do the same. Why privilege their lives over his own when his people -- his Victors -- depend on him?
The nice thing about the Arena is that it strips everything down to the barest essentials, ripping away all delusions and attempts at heroics or mental gymnastics: Brutus will survive. The end.
The platform rises. Brutus drops into a half-crouch, lowering his centre of gravity in case the Arena is unstable when he gets there. He narrows his eyes against potential glare and prepares for a long swim; if his contacts hadn't warned him to expect water, the flotation material in his belt would have tipped him off.
It's water, all right, with jungle around behind them and the Cornucopia in the middle, and as soon as the countdown ends, Brutus flings himself into it. He's not Two's best swimmer by a long shot but it will do, and instead of fighting the waves Brutus angles himself toward the thin stretch of land nearest him and heaves himself up with a few short jerks of his arms. His feet slip on the wet sand but he finds his footing, just in time to avoid crashing into Katniss Everdeen as she tears toward the Cornucopia.
Brutus takes a few steps after her, but then he stops: Finnick Odair's arms rip through the water, pulling him up even with Everdeen as she runs; he should reach the middle a few seconds after she does. A few spokes over Gloss runs at full-tilt toward them, but Brutus narrows his eyes and takes it at a slow jog instead. None of the others will bother crossing the water to get to him on his strip of sand just yet, and the cameras will want to see the moment where Twelve will show their colours.
Let everyone see that the darling of the revolution is just as quick to bloody her hands as the rest of them. Brutus slips back down into the water when he reaches arrow range and closes the distance with a few strokes, treading water and staying just out of hearing but close enough to read lips. Once Twelve and Four have their showdown Brutus will slip in and finish the rest; if Odair takes out Everdeen then Brutus will have to deal with Enobaria being pissed and sulky until the end of time, but he's not interfering. Everdeen made her bed; let her lie in it.
Except instead of a fight, Brutus takes a slap of water to the mouth and nearly chokes as Odair waves his wrist in Everdeen's face and reminds her that they have an alliance. An alliance, the very thing that Haymitch swore they didn't want, and that Mags had thrown Brutus and Enobaria over to avoid.
Odair's glance flicks over the water, and he meets Brutus' eyes for two whole seconds before his mouth twitches up in a smirk and he looks away. "Don't trust One and Two," he shoots at Katniss before barking out the rest of their attack strategy, and oh he fucking did not.
Brutus' trademark cool determination is no match for the hot wash of rage, and he shouldn't take it personally when they're all in it to win except i>fuck District Four. Fuck them and straddling the Career-outlier line, reaping all the benefits from the Capitol while still making nice with the others, playing the cuddly Careers while painting One and Two off as the real villains. And fuck Odair for rubbing it in -- Everdeen made it clear as an avalanche that she doesn't trust One and Two as far as she can spit, so there's no reason why he'd have to waste precious breath saying it again.
Maybe he's worried that if Brutus has half the chance, he'll tell Everdeen that her new ally is a backstabbing son of a bitch.
Under cover of the water, Brutus pries his belt loose; floating is no good when diving down will protect him from anything they can throw at him. Gloss and Enobaria reach the Cornucopia first, and Brutus pulls himself back up onto the sandbar just in time to fling himself back off when Everdeen fires at him. The belt stops the arrow, splattering him in the face, and Brutus rolls into the water and scrubs himself clean of the blinding gunk before climbing back up, this time directly onto the central platform itself.
The Twelve-Four alliance takes off down another spoke, running toward Mellark, and Brutus puts them out of his mind. His allies are here; the Careers have the Cornucopia, and that's all that matters. "Food?" he demands, wiping the last of the purple goo from his face.
"Nothing. Looks like they're counting on us putting our popularity to good use." Cashmere's hair sticks to her neck, and she pushes it out of her face with a careless gesture. "Shouldn't be a problem for us, anyway." She shades her eyes and peers out over the water, the heads bobbing above the waves. She picks up a wicked pair of throwing knives and tosses one to Gloss, then hefts a mace and twirls it with as much ease as if it were made of foam. "Looks like they're getting close. Here we go."
Brutus takes a sideways leap over Caleb's corpse, slowly bleeding out onto the sand with Odair's trident stuck through his chest; he whirls in the direction of footfalls and heaves his sword around, where it cuts through skin and stops hard against the spine, jarring Brutus' arm. Charley, from Ten, gurgles and scrabbles at Brutus' chest with his bare hands. Brutus wrenches his sword free and swings again, finishing the job -- sloppy, sloppy, one blow each should do it -- and Charley collapses onto the sand and rolls halfway down toward the water.
The clash of metal sounds from the far side of the Cornucopia followed by Enobaria's sharp shout of triumph; Brutus turns away, focusing on the figure running up the sandbar to his left. Dark hair, slim build -- Cecelia, running toward the Cornucopia instead of swimming away toward the jungle, hoping for what -- food, water, a quick death?
Brutus backs up, grabs a spear from the pile of weapons and tests its heft and balance, still leaning backward. Then he flings his weight forward onto his left foot, brings his right arm up, and lets the weapon fly.
The spear hits her straight in the chest; the cannon fires as her body hits the water.
Lyme exhales as Brutus turns away; behind him Cecelia's body bobs gently in the waves. The hovercrafts won't bother in this chaos, not until the initial frenzy dies down, and her blood spreads out in a dark red cloud, her hair fanning around her head.
"Bastard," Diana snarls under her breath, fingers tight on the console. "He didn't even hesitate. You'd think someone so obsessed with honour would at least have second thoughts. Fucking Twos."
"She's only dead because you were too much of a coward to volunteer for her," Lyme says in a mild tone that belies the spark of fury, and normally she wouldn't get involved in mentor spats -- that's for newbies and angry outliers -- but enough is enough. "There's a mirror in the bathroom if you want to start pointing fingers."
Diana's nostrils flare as she glares in Lyme's peripheral vision, but even if she had the chops to back her up in a physical fight, she's not fool enough to start one. Not when Lyme rolled into mentor central with bruises that not even Remake could clear in time, only to answer her fellow mentors' horrified stares with a sharp grin and the offhand remark that Brutus had wanted to practice against someone worth his time.
Claudius is down in the sponsor ring with an earpiece in case Lyme needs to relay information, and there he'll stay for the remainder of the Games if Lyme has anything to say about it. It's been hard enough reining him in without him watching the Victors die, whether he wants Brutus to come home or not; one wrong word and he'll end up with his knife in someone's eye.
The initial bloodbath is short and ultimately -- in terms of ratings -- boring. Six deaths start to finish: the only outlying tributes to rush the Cornucopia are the ones presumably on a suicide run; the others stay on their platforms or hide half-submerged in the water, waiting for the Pack to leave, or don't bother with the weapons at all and take off for the jungle. Eventually Brutus rolls his eyes and orders the Pack to abandon the post and make for the trees; there's no strategic advantage to holding a rock full of weapons in the middle of nowhere, and so they load up and head off.
Lyme takes the Cornucopia feed and minimizes it down to a small square in the corner of her screen, keeping half an eye on it while she tracks the Pack. Only once does anything interesting happen -- Seven and Three team up against the pair from Nine, which ends with the Nines dead and Blight hauling a half-conscious and wounded Beetee away down the spokes -- and while Lyme notes the oddity of the alliance, it's not her problem right now.
Cora drops her headset and buries her face in her hands, and for a second Lyme can't figure out why because she's always been more matter-of-fact about her tributes' deaths than some of the others. Except that this isn't just a tribute, it's her husband, and Johanna Mason hurled an axe into his chest and now it's over, and he'll never see that grandchild he was telling Caesar about. Lyme swallows and looks away; no one notices because they're all doing the same thing, avoiding the grief rolling off Cora in waves.
Focus.
The readouts of the Arena worry Lyme far more than the deaths, anyway; no fresh water anywhere on the island, no atmospheric indicators of rain, and with his bulk Brutus will succumb to dehydration fast. Lyme touches her earpiece, tapping twice to bring up Claudius' frequency. "D, any chance they did enough to get us some water?"
A pause -- Lyme drums her fingers against the desk, chest tight -- then Claudius comes back, his voice flat. "No dice, boss. Sponsors say they made a disappointing start. They want to see a few more kills before they'll fork over anything for food or water."
"Shit," Lyme mutters, rubbing her forehead, but it's not like she didn't see that coming. "Okay, thanks, keep me posted."
"That's a no?" Dexter asks when Lyme pushes her microphone out of the way. Lyme nods. "Well this one's going to hell straight from the platforms, then. Did they say why? What do they want us to do?"
"Kill more." Lyme rolls her eyes, because it's either exasperation or blinding rage and she has to keep her focus. "Sponsors are bored."
Dexter curses under his breath. "Shit, they're changing the rules already, that's just great. We've never had to earn food on the first day. Fuck! They made their bloodbath kills and everyone else was hanging back so they left to hunt. What were they supposed to do?"
"Hold the Cornucopia, I guess," Lyme says, but it's not a strategic position like in other years. There's no food, no cover, and even a Career Pack entirely made up of Victors can only use so many weapons each. The four of them huddling on a slippery rock surrounded by piles of swords and knives until the others gave up and swam for the beach wouldn't make any more of a good show. Maybe they should have run down the sand bars back toward the platforms and tried to pick off as many as they could from a distance, except that just would've meant the loss of all their range weapons pretty quickly.
"This is a fucking mess," Dexter mutters, jamming his headset firmly into place and turning back to his screen. Lyme isn't going to argue.
"Okaaaay," Cashmere says slowly, barely repressing the venom in her voice, when instead of the water she asked for they get oil and rags and whetstones to keep their weapons sharp. "Anyone want to venture a guess here? What are we supposed to do with this?"
She has to know because they all know. No gifts until they kill more, but there's no surer way to die than to force themselves through the jungle on a wild goose chase in this heat without any water. Already Brutus has a headache behind his skull, dull and throbbing, and his mouth sticks dry and his tongue feels swollen in his mouth. Brutus wipes the sweat out of his eyes and glares at the ground, weighing his options, but finally he shakes his head. "E, gimme a knife."
Enobaria bares her teeth. "Get your own."
Brutus rolls his eyes. "Cash?" She produces one from her cleavage and flips it over to him. Brutus stalks over to the nearest tree and drives the knife into the trunk, digging upwards through the bark to the wood beneath and sawing back and forth to make a hole. "Somebody get me a hollow stick and sharpen the end for me," he says, jamming the blade to the side and twisting it, widening the gap. A minute later Gloss hands him a thin branch with a newly-sharpened end, and Brutus works it inside and hammers it in with the handle of the knife.
He waits, and sure enough, moments later water trickles out from the makeshift spile. Cashmere claps her hands in delight and Gloss punches him in the arm. "So now you're, what, a bushwhacker in your spare time, mountain man?" Cashmere asks.
"I like surviving," Brutus says simply. He lowers his hands beneath the stream of water and splashes it onto his face, then ducks down and swallows a few mouthfuls. "Take your fill and then we'll move. No point carrying it, the sugar in the sap will sour pretty quick in this heat."
Cashmere lowers herself to her knees and tips her head back, and Brutus turns away. She'll make it sexy for the sponsors -- already Gloss stands behind her, hands on her shoulders -- and if there's one thing Brutus can't deal with on top of being back in the fucking Arena, it's watching the siblings play their creepy incest game. He'll take the gifts it gets them, sure, but that doesn't mean he has to stand there and watch.
"Move over, sickos, we're not filming a porno," Enobaria snaps a few minutes later, and Cashmere gives a throaty laugh and asks her if she's jealous. Brutus picks up one of the cloths and starts scrubbing the blade of his sword.
It's a good fucking thing that none of them have forgotten their survival training, because a whole day goes by and nothing. No other tributes, no more fights, no showdowns, zilch. They even head back to the beach around sunset to see if anyone will risk it, but the thin strip of land at the base of the tree line is too open and exposed for any of the others to try making it down.
No kills means no food, and Brutus' stomach growls as they work their way through the jungle in a methodical fashion. Finally the kids make a game of spearing the tree rats with their knives, and they roast those over a fire for a not overly disappointing supper. (Normally Brutus would rather starve than risk it, but these aren't city rats and were likely cloned by the Gamemakers a few days ago so they shouldn't -- he hopes -- be crawling with parasites.)
That night Enobaria jeers as the faces float in the sky, and Brutus knows he should join her -- good for their image, bloodthirsty and brutal and vicious -- but he's tired and doesn't have the heart for it. Cecelia's face is solemn as she stares down over the Arena, and her eyes stay with him even after Brutus closes his.
They don't get any food, but they do get a pack of cards, and Brutus shoves down a wash of irritation. "Strip poker it is," Cashmere says, giving them a suggestive grin and waggling her eyebrows. She's good, Brutus will give her that; she actually sells it, makes it look like she really wants to spend her last days alive taking off her clothes with her brother and a couple of Twos.
Brutus loses almost every hand when he's up against Cashmere even though he's the better player, and the sponsors will whine about their luck but too fucking bad. Better him sitting there in his underwear than her, and so he throws away a pair of aces and a three-set of tens and yanks off his shirt to Gloss' convincingly enthusiastic wolf whistle.
He is way, way too old for this shit.
Late that night Brutus jerks awake as twelve loud gongs wrest him from uneasy dreams. Enobaria's on watch, and she shrugs at him when Brutus asks what the hell is going on. "Dunno. There was lightning a little while ago, but this is the first time there's been any noises. Must be midnight."
Cashmere makes a disgruntled noise and tucks herself in closer against her brother's chest. Gloss grunts and settles back down with his head in the crook of his elbow, his other arm draped over Cashmere's back. "They'd better not be doing that every hour or I'm gonna be pissed," Gloss mutters, and Brutus isn't going to bitch about the Arena where the Gamemakers can hear him but he's inclined to agree. Messing with the tributes' sleep is a pretty standard tactic to keep things interesting, but every hour seems a bit excessive.
Brutus stays awake and counts the next hour off in his head, but nothing happens at one a.m. Who knows what they were thinking, but Brutus has long learned that you don't stay alive by trying to second-guess the Gamemakers. Better just to take the lumps as they come and ignore it if there's nothing. He rolls over and drops off again, grateful that the ability to sleep on command isn't one that fades with time.
He wakes again when a cannon fires in the middle of the night. "Shit," Brutus mutters. If someone else is being exciting and doing the killing then they're all in trouble. They pack up and move out but once again find absolutely no one, and by the time a second cannon goes off an hour later Brutus has all but given up on finding anything but more tree rats.
"I'm going back to sleep," Enobaria says finally, flinging a knife into a tree and skewering a rat to the trunk. "This is stupid. If Nero wants me to be up and hunting he can at least send me ice cream."
"I'll take watch," Brutus says instead of bothering to argue. So far the Arena has been boring as shit; no traps, no tricks, no nothing, just the trees. Hopefully something happens soon or he's afraid that Cashmere will start trying to feel him up for lack of anything better to do.
Claudius keeps the smile on his face; whenever it starts to slip, he imagines taking his pencil and driving it through a sponsor's skull. That gives him a jolt of pleasure like an epinephrine jab, enough to keep him going through the conversation. "I promise they're doing their very best to make this exciting," Claudius says, leaving the channel open, and Lyme lets out a disgusted snort in his ear. "They've been hunting all morning; if you have any complaints about the lack of deaths, you might want to bring your concerns to the Gamemakers. The way the Arena is set up this year makes running into each other very difficult."
That's a nice way of putting it, when the truth is that every time the Pack tries to make it down to the beach, a forcefield at the edge of the tree line stops them and forces them back into the jungle. It's like someone doesn't want them out in the open where it's easy to catch the others, though for the life of him Claudius can't figure out why. They're demanding the Pack murder more tributes but making it impossible to find them, forcing them to sweep the entire jungle piece by piece while the ever-widening group of allies waltzes around and survives a host of Arena traps and nets themselves all of the airtime.
"I'm just not sure if they're worth the investment this year," the sponsor says, her mouth turned down in a disappointed pout. "Have you seen what the others have been doing? Fighting monkeys and poison fog and all kinds of exciting things! It seems like your group is playing it safe."
Pencil through the eye, Claudius reminds himself, and stretches his mouth into a grim parody of a grin by imagining the spurt of blood.
Mid-morning the Arena goes completely dark. Brutus closes his eyes, presses a hand hard over his lids, and counts to twenty before opening them again, but it makes no difference. "Well, this is fun," Gloss drawls from beside him, and Brutus turns toward the sound but makes out absolutely nothing, not even a smear of movement against the thick blackness surrounding them. "Now what?"
"Now nothing," Brutus says, and he shuts his eyes again just because it's less of a head trip that way. His heart hammers in his chest against his will; he's not afraid of the dark or anything stupid, all the trainees had to deal with that when they were thirteen and he survived that just fine, but it's still nothing he'd do for fun. "We sit tight and wait for it to go away. No point crashing around and tripping over roots and breaking our skulls on tree branches."
"Sounds good to me," Cashmere says, and the leaves rustle as she drops. "I'm sick of this already. Let the meat run around and trip and fall to their deaths. I hope half of them drown in the mud.'
"Have I mentioned how much I hate this Arena?" Enobaria asks, hissing the words and punctuating her t's with loud clicks of her tongue against her fangs. "Because I really hate this Arena. What's the point of the dark? We couldn't even find them in the daytime!"
Brutus has no answer for that, but a minute later the air fills with screams. Not human screams, and not animal ones, either; they're high-pitched and screeching, tearing through Brutus' skull and drilling through his teeth, and he grunts in pain before the first bat flies into his face.
He can't see them any more than he can see anything else, but Brutus recognizes the shriek of batt muttations anywhere. His Arena had them, the time he sought to hide from the blistering sun in a low-lying cave and really should have known better. The air fills with the mad flapping of their wings, and between that and their hunting cries the entire jungle is a cacophony of noise.
"What the fuck?" Gloss yelps, and it takes a lot to genuinely unsettle a Career but even they have limits. "What the -- get off!"
Brutus forces himself to breathe slowly, and he backs up one step at a time until he hits a tree, bracing himself against the trunk with one foot planted on the far side of a large root to ground him. "Move back, find a tree and grab on!" he yells over the din. "Sound off so we know where we all are, we don't want to hit each other!"
"This is the worst Arena ever!" Cashmere shouts as she moves a little way off, cursing and stumbling in the pitch blackness. And maybe he's wrong, maybe they're not the same mutts that attacked him all those years ago, except that first Cashmere lets out a shriek, and a few moments later Enobaria and Gloss explode into fits of swearing.
The first bat sinks its teeth into Brutus' arm, sharp points of pain piercing his skin, and he beats it off with his free hand. "They'll drink you dry if you let them," he calls out, and he abandons proper form to grip his sword like a bat, swinging it with no regard for technique or style but just to connect and keep them away. "Keep them off any way you can but don't throw any fucking knives, E! I don't want to get skewered."
"I'm not going to waste my pretty knives in the dark," Enobaria snaps back, but her voice is tight with determination and fury and that's a good thing. "Come on, you little bloodsuckers, you think you can fight me? Bring it on!"
What makes the most sense would be to crawl into a ball to make himself the smallest possible target and try to hide beneath the roots or cover himself with leaves, but that ain't Brutus' style and it's not what the sponsors will want to see, either. They've finally been given the chance to do something interesting, and he can't waste it being practical. So instead of hunkering down and waiting for it to end, Brutus attacks the howling bats with his sword, grunting with satisfaction every time he connects.
It's Gloss' idea to start the count. "I'm at three!" he yells at one point. "I bet you I get more than all of you."
"What?" Enobaria bursts out. "Nobody told me we were counting! That's not fair!"
"It's not a contest," Cashmere challenges.
"That's just because you're losing," Gloss shoots back.
And the thing is, it's not a bad plan. Brutus grins, manic and more than a little mad, but let them see it; they'll be watching this with special cameras anyway. Let them see that Careers won't be taken out by a little darkness and some flying rats. "That's what you think," he shouts. "I'm already at four."
"Fuck you, old man!" Gloss yells again, and Brutus barks out a laugh.
Brutus doesn't bother to count the minutes, not when his concentration is focused on not bashing himself in the face or getting his sword stuck in a tree or letting enough of the mutts past his guard to leech away his lifeblood, but he guesses they keep at it for about an hour. The lights come back on out of nowhere without warning, and Brutus flings an arm over his eyes to shut out the blinding sunlight. He keeps his sword hand free to fend off the bats, but their cries die off just as sharply and instead the air whistles with the sound of their wings as they fly away and disappear into the trees.
Brutus opens his eyes, blinking against the stab of pain in his eye sockets, and takes stock of the others. They're all bleeding -- Cashmere, the smallest and lightest of them, weaves a little, looking woozy, and Gloss darts over to wrap an arm around her waist and hold her steady -- but other than that they're fine. A few puncture wounds, a little blood loss, but nothing they can't fix. Black, winged corpses litter the ground around them.
"Count the bodies in your zone," Enobaria says, breaking the silence. "I want to make sure none of you fuckers cheated."
They count, and Brutus wins. "Age before beauty," he sneers at Enobaria when she shows her fangs at him.
"Just one more and I would've tied you," Cashmere complains, kicking at one of the bodies with the toe of her boot. "They couldn't have given me ten more seconds?"
"Besides, you're so huge, you probably just had to stand there and they ran into you like a wall," Gloss adds, and Brutus takes the ribbing because it looks good. Yeah, they just survived an hour in the dark with killer mutts, and they turned it into a game and now they're laughing about it. Surely that at least is worth some fucking breakfast.
It is. The parachutes drop soon after, and Enobaria snatches the one painted 'E' out of the air and cradles it to her chest, screwing off the cap and cheering when Nero sent her the fucking ice cream after all. Brutus and the others get regular food -- some bread and dried meat and fruit, easy to carry on them once they move -- and a pack of bandages and salve to split between them.
"Fuckin' finally," Gloss mutters under his breath, too low for the microphones to catch, because they all know better than to act entitled. Out loud he tilts his face up and gives the cameras a bright, commercial-ready smile. "My thanks," he says, raising the cap of his canister, which he's using as a makeshift cup for his lukewarm sap-water.
"Bon appetit," Cashmere says, and Brutus rolls his eyes. They're always using pretty nonsense words like that in One.
"Cheers," Brutus says instead like a normal person, and doesn't bother to cut off a slice, just tears into the bread with his teeth.
That afternoon it's blood rain, pouring down thick and hot and choking, and this time Brutus doesn't even bother to play it up for the sponsors. He grabs the nearest person -- Enobaria, she sinks her fangs into his wrist before she realizes he's not trying to throttle her -- and pulls her close, then keeps his head down and yells for Cashmere and Gloss until they find them. They huddle together, turned inward in a circle, and they lower themselves down to their knees.
Brutus peels off his jacket and drapes it over Enobaria's head, and instead of snarling at him she pulls it closer. Now would be the perfect time to stab each other in the gut if they wanted to break the alliance and improve their odds but none of them do. They cling to each other in grim silence with their heads pointed toward the ground and shoulders pressed close.
The rain stops as suddenly as it began an hour later. Brutus rears back, wiping the blood away and heaving in gasps of humid, moisture-filled air, spitting mouthfuls of blood onto the ground. Beside him Enobaria shudders, scrubbing at her face with her arms, and Brutus winces; the last time she swallowed that much blood would've been in her Arena, but he can't comfort her. It would weaken their image and she wouldn't accept it anyway.
"I take it back, what I said about it being boring," Cashmere says, slumping back in exhaustion and letting her head fall against Gloss' shoulder. He works his fingers through her hair, separating out the clumped, matted strands. "I'll lie around braiding flowers in my hair if it means I never have to do that again."
"We're going to smell," Enobaria complains, and she's not wrong, not in this heat. Her voice shakes, too subtle for the audience to notice but obvious enough to a fellow Career, and this time Brutus has to bite back a curse. Enobaria hates being dirty, hates it more than almost anything else. It reminds her of the Arena, not the fun parts where she got to flay open a girl's throat or jump into a melee with her sword flashing, but the low, slogging bits in the middle where the food ran dry and the tributes too thin to make it fun.
Brutus tilts his head up to the sky. "Any chance for a bit of help here?" he asks. The only good thing about this is that Nero is in the mentor's seat, and Enobaria's mentor knows her better than anyone. He'll be cussing his head off and scrambling for a way to get her clean, because he loves his girl and wants to keep her sane.
It takes a minute -- Brutus slices into a tree and opens up as big a spigot as he can, letting Enobaria sit beneath the stream and scrub at her face -- but finally Nero answers. The skies open up, but this time instead of blood, the clouds let loose a cooling torrent of water. It's only five minutes but after the gunk and the stickiness and the stench it feels like an hour, and they strip off their clothes and let the rain sluice away the blood.
Brutus doesn't bother with his shirt; Enobaria chewed a hole through it while waiting for the blood to stop, and he pulls on the bottom half of his uniform and leaves it at that. Gloss and Enobaria follow suit -- at this point there's hardly any point, they're hot and confining and Brutus swears the material keeps shrinking -- but Cashmere clenches her jaw and zips her uniform straight up to her throat. Brutus ain't gonna touch that.
"Let's move out," Brutus says instead. The alliance still has the beach, and there's no point even bothering trying to head down when they'll just get another fucking forcefield keeping them back. "See if we can find Chaff."
They don't find Chaff, and by the time another hour or so slides by they're all feeling it. "I want to kill someone," Cashmere says, eyes hard and flashing. "I'm sick of this. I don't even care anymore, I'm sick of this jungle and these trees and traps. Why are we even here if we don't get to murder anyone? What is the point? Are we supposed to stand around while the Arena picks everybody off one by one or what? What kind of a Victor Games is this?"
The alliance is huddled at the centre of the Arena, gesturing over the Cornucopia. Even Brutus is feeling it now, the hot surge of impatience and frustration, and so he makes a gambit. "Let us out and I guarantee a kill," he says to the air. "We know how to give a good show, just give us the chance."
The air in front of them shimmers, and the forcefield disappears. Brutus grins and salutes up toward the sky. "You won't regret it," he tells the Gamemakers; Enobaria cackles, and to the side Cashmere and Gloss share a private glance.
The Cornucopia spins, throwing the corpses of Wiress, Gloss and Cashmere into the water and knocking Brutus and Enobaria flying. The others cling to the rocks and to each other, and Brutus and Enobaria take the hint and swim away before the whole thing stops moving and the rest of the alliance regains their bearings.
"What," Lyme grits out between her teeth, "was that?"
She doesn't let herself think of Wiress, floating in the water as Katniss Everdeen flounders out and untangles the coil of wire from her body, as anything more than a statistic, because there's no time for that. Cashmere and Gloss bob in the waves, blood spreading out in dark clouds.
Dexter rips off his headset and throws it so hard against the wall it explodes. "Well that's that," he says, exhaling through his nose. "Looks like I'm coming out of retirement."
He's not talking about mentoring, and Lyme doesn't comment because he wouldn't want her to, not when District Two privilege means Lyme's body is hers and hers alone until the day she dies. With Gloss and Cashmere dead, the remaining Ones will be making up the difference from their furious, desperate clientele.
No time, no time. Lyme brushes the thought aside to focus on what's important: namely that Brutus and Enobaria could have taken out at least two more if the Gamemakers hadn't spun the island.
Between that and the forcefields that have been keeping the Pack from hitting the beach when the allies hold it, Lyme can't shake the feeling that this Arena was not meant for the Careers to win. Except that after the disaster of last year -- not just the Games but the whole mess of uprisings in the months following -- she would've thought it would be the other way around.
The other mentors stare at their consoles in silence, and it could be respect for the newly dead except Lyme isn't stupid and it really, really fucking isn't. The longer she sits there, the more she glances at their faces and catches the furtive looks they shoot each other, the more it feels like the alliance is about something much, much larger than who walks out of the Arena.
"I told them." Brutus stabs his sword into a tree and digs it sideways, relishing the jolt against his wrist as the blade catches in the heart-meat because it gives him something else to think about. "I fucking told them. Go for Odair or Mason. We could take the Threes out any time. The fuck were they doing?"
"They've always been like that," Enobaria says, combing the last of the saltwater tangles from her hair and pulling it back. They're not allowed to talk about Cashmere and Gloss suiciding out -- which is what the siblings most definitely just did -- but Brutus knows what she means. "It's not like we didn't know it was coming."
Not on day fucking two, they didn't.
"It still doesn't make any fucking sense for them to go for Three," Brutus grits out. He yanks his his sword free from the trunk; a few moments later, water trickles out from the gash, and Brutus cups his hand underneath and scoops it up to his mouth because waste not want not. "You wanna fight, you go for the ones who are gonna fight you."
If they really were looking for a chance to commit suicide, afraid that the Arena would slowly pick off the other tributes until there was no one left strong enough to do it, why choose Wiress? Why not run right for the middle and take out one of the ones worth fighting? Cashmere never liked Mason -- the two of them got on like wet cats trapped in a paper bag -- and Gloss thought Mellark was a stuck-up little prissy boy with his idiotic notions of love and noble sacrifice. Neither of them had any problems with the half-crazed woman who sang to herself and made them little trinkets of wire and bits of glass.
"Fuck if I know what crazy people think," Enobaria scoffs, and Brutus doesn't laugh even though she set him up for that one. He should at least shoot her a grin until she glares at him but he's not in the fucking mood.
"Well it's done now," Brutus says darkly. Two days in and half the Pack is gone; it's him and Enobaria versus the rest of the Games-damned Arena, apparently, since all but two of the remaining tributes are down there on the beach having a grand old time.
Brutus lost one spear in the attack and didn't have the chance to grab any more, but that's fine. The alliance won't hold the beach forever, and once they're back in the jungle he and Enobaria can slip out and restock. It's only Day Two. There's plenty of time.