Hunger Games Canon Divergence AU: The War, Chapter 1
A District Upside Down: The War (7576 words) by lorata
Chapters: 1/15
Fandom: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Brutus (Hunger Games), Lyme (Hunger Games), Victors (Hunger Games), Alma Coin, Other Character Tags to Be Added
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, District 2, District 13, Careers (Hunger Games), Victors, Mentors, War, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Series: Part 3 of My World's On Fire (How 'Bout Yours?): District 2 at War
Summary:
When the Arena falls and Brutus dies, Lyme leaves for District 13. It's soon clear that Alma Coin is less than perfect, but with her best friend dead and no other options, Lyme vows to make the best of her decision. Meanwhile, Brutus' youngest Victor joins President Snow in the Capitol to be the symbol of loyalty and the voice of her people as District 2 prepares for war.
The twist: when Brutus fell, the hovercraft team who retrieved his corpse fought to resuscitate him, refusing to stand by and watch their hero die. A second rebellion - split off from District 13, fearing that Alma Coin had gone too far - saw their opportunity to gather fighters and a potentially valuable symbol, and recruit them to fight against both the Capitol and District 13.
The Victors of District 2 are now split along five fronts: Enobaria in custody in the Capitol; Lyme and Claudius in District 13; Petra, Ronan and Nero in the Capitol; Brutus and the Peacekeepers who turned traitor to save him in District 8; and the rest at home in District 2, mourning and waiting and fearing whatever is to come.
Some things will change, some will not, but one thing is true: District 2's Victors have the chance to make it out alive.
Brutus dies for his country like a good Two. He dies in the jungle, dies in the dirt and the leaves and the tangle of vines, dies with a snake slithering through the underbrush near his head. Dies with his limbs twitching and jerking and flailing, dies with his body failing around him, shutting down in pieces here and there like a broken machine. Dies with his hand on his heart and the eyes of his district watching him through the cameras.
Dies with the sour taste of regret in his mouth. Dies pricked with the sting of shame because he is Two and loyalty and honour and duty and passion and a hundred other things that dissolved like ashes on his tongue and in the end meant absolutely nothing because death is death is death and it means nothing, it all means nothing, and why, why, why him, he was supposed to be safe, they were supposed to love him back --
Brutus dies, exhausted and in pain and alone, leaking and spasming and broken, a tin soldier tossed into the fire and melted down.
He dies -
It’s the day before the start of the 75th Hunger Games. Most of the Capitol citizens are at Games-parties; they’ll cluster in bars and hotels and houses and drink and watch recaps and work themselves into a titter. Those in the Districts will be more careful; they’ll be watching the broadcast at home, maybe in the Reaping Squares if they’re keen, but they’ll be watching.
The tributes will be preparing for the interviews, or maybe trying to get some sleep after the final private training session; the mentors will be trying to work out last-minute strategies, cutting sponsorship deals, anything to give their kids an edge.
The Peacekeeper Scouts are prepping, too, but in an entirely different way.
Selene waits in the briefing room with her squadmates and the handful of other elite Scout teams that make up President Snow’s private, elite force, standing or sitting in tense silence. Most of the Scouts have known each other for years; the newer members, like Selene and her partner Dash, have less of a rapport outside their own squads, but even with that, Scout gatherings are a place of long-standing camaraderie and friendly teasing. Today, though, the room feels dark, almost oppressive.
The door bangs open and Captain Emin strides into the room. Her expression is tight and unhappy, just like it’s been for the last eternity since the 75th Games season started and all the Scouts were recalled to the Capitol.
At Selene’s side, Dash shifts uncomfortably. This is only their second Games as Peacekeepers, and maybe that means they lack perspective, but the atmosphere at last year’s briefing was … brisk, businesslike. Not like this. Selene glances sideways at Rigel and Marius, her team’s senior scouts; their expressions are similarly grim.
“Assignments for tomorrow,” Emin announces without preamble, which is also not like it was last year. No welcome, no pep talk, nothing about the honour and privilege of serving at such a grand event. Not that Selene really needed one, but that’s not the point. “First up, tribute duty.“
Emin taps the console and a display springs to life. Twenty-four light craft will go out tomorrow morning to take the Vic- -tributes, Selene reminds herself, they’re tributes - to the Arena, the biggest simultaneous undertaking of the year. Each craft has a number and letter designation marking the tribute it will carry: no names, not here, and especially not now in a room full of ex-Careers who have idolized the Victor-tributes their whole lives.
“Those of you with your name next to a craft, report in at oh-five-hundred tomorrow.”
Snapping back to attention, Selene registers that she and Dash are in one craft, Marius and Rigel in another. The four of them are usually sent up together, but for this transport duty - and given the number of Peacekeepers required to man each craft - they’ll be split up, at least for the first day. Later on, when they run cover duty, they’ll be working together again.
“First shift.” Emin taps another button, and another set of names flickers onto the screen. “Dag, Brin, Lena, Garen, your teams will be on standby for the start.” That’s deliberate too - those are the most experienced scout teams; there’s not a Peacekeeper with under ten years’ experience in any of those four-man teams.
Selene doesn’t envy them. They’ll be the ones pulling bodies out of the bloodbath. Familiar bodies.
Emin continues, “Given the … state of things, it is imperative that tomorrow goes off as smoothly as possible.” From the tightness in her expression, the wording isn’t her own. “Following that, we’ll rotate by shifts.” Everyone nods. “Report to your stations. And -“ Emin hesitates, then says, very softly. “I won’t pretend this is just another year. But - we have our duty. Do it, do it well. Let’s go, people.”
A few days later, the Games routine has settled into an uneasy rhythm. Selene and her team are back together, assigned to night duty -- “because we got the afternoon shift last year,” Marius says with a wry smile - and so far it’s been pretty boring. In most years the night shift is when the action happens, because that’s when the Careers hunt, but this time the main alliance has done most of its movement during the day.
But tonight --
“Something’s happening tonight,” Dash says, frowning at the scanner. It’s linked to the central console the Gamemakers use, showing where each tribute is currently located; it’s how the hovercraft teams know where to pick up tributes when they fall. “Look here --“ he taps the screen as Selene leans over, enlarging the view “- they’re on the move.”
“Back to the tree?” Selene asks.
At the hand-over, the afternoon shift had reported the Everdeen-and-friends alliance had gone haring off to the big tree nearest their station, but had returned to the beach in short order. Best guess is, they were scouting ... but for what, nobody knows.
Dash nods. “And B- the Twos are on the move, too. Intercept course, looks like.”
“Okay.” Rigel runs a hand through his hair. “Okay. Keep an eye out and be ready to go when something happens. They’re planning something tonight; we’ll need to respond fast.”
Marius nods, unhappily. So do Selene and Dash.
Despite that, a few hours pass without incident. They all abandon all pretence of waiting calmly and hover around the scanner, watching the dots move around. And then -
“Eleven Male is down.” Dash announces unnecessarily, as the cannon booms over the Arena. “Just inside our sector.“
“Call it in,” Rigel says instantly, snatching up his helmet. They don’t need to go yet - they usually wait for the dust to clear before going on a pickup - but honestly any excuse for being in the area is a good one, especially since the tag nearest 11M when it winked out was 2M.
“Yes sir,” Selene says, grabbing her own helmet.
They’re up in the air in under a minute, Rigel at the helm, and are halfway to Chaff when another cannon fires. Marius swears, loudly. “Fuck!”
Selene’s on her feet before she quite knows what’s going on. Marius - big, quiet Marius - almost never swears. Dash, surprised but not being possessed of Selene’s reflexes, merely looks startled. “What -” Selene begins.
“Brutus just went down,” Marius snaps. Selene’s world freezes. “Fuck! Go -“
The craft tilts abruptly and dives, Rigel throwing it onto a new course for their Victor - their tribute? - no, Brutus is and has always been their Victor. Selene grabs at the controls for the claw, spinning it up even before they swing into position -
Then Marius is unbuckling his restraints and lurching towards the hatch, Dash following wide-eyed at his heels. “Lene, grab the medkit, ” Marius orders as Brutus’ limp form comes up with the claw. Selene locks the claw and makes a grab for the kit, standard issue on all the hovercrafts in case they pick up the Victor in a bad way, and scrambles after them. The cannon fired - Brutus is dead, probably, that’s what the cannon means - but that doesn’t always mean it’s permanent.
“Are we really -“ Dash begins, but Selene silences him with a look. It’s not his fault; he’s an ex-Career too but he’s from Four, one of the rare non-Two Peacekeepers in the elite corps. He’s good, he wouldn’t be here as Selene’s partner otherwise, but he isn’t Two. He doesn’t understand why they have to try, because it’s their Victor lying limp in that claw, because it’s Brutus.
Selene has never been one of the die-hard patriots, not like Petra, but that is not the point.
To Dash’s credit, he swallows back any objections he might have had and helps Marius pull Brutus off the pickup claw.
And then it’s chaos:
“He’s not breathing!”
Marius throws his weight down in chest compresses. The big man left the Centre at eighteen over a decade ago, and he’s kept in shape; Brutus’ large chest visibly deforms under his weight. Selene stands back, knowing better than to hover uselessly but unwilling to stay too far back.
“- might have been poisoned too. Lene, give him the antidote, over there -“
Brutus is slippery with blood and has fragments of the jungle still stuck to him, Selene registers distantly, as she darts forward and plunges the hypo into his neck. It’s broad-spectrum, not targeted, so who knows if it’ll help but it’s better than nothing. Selene considers, then swaps hypos and gives him a shot of adrenaline too. Dash slaps on a breath mask and hooks the strap around Brutus’ head -
- and then, miraculously, Brutus spasms off the slippery deck, gasping for breath.
“Shit,” Selene says, with feeling, collapsing back onto the deck.
Marius only nods and moves to scrub his face, then reconsiders, considering the state of his hands.
"He's alive," Dash whispers.
Marius fixes Dash with a steady look and rumbles, "Imagine if it were Finnick."
"True," the boy from Four sighs. And to be fair, it’s not his District's Victor on the deck, but he's behaved as if it were. Dash looks a bit green and looks like he wants to collapse, but he's holding the oxygen mask in place with one hand and is monitoring Brutus' pulse with the other. Brutus, after that burst of energy, has subsided back into unconsciousness, deathly still and pale.
But he's not dead. He should be dead, but he's not, because - because they saved him. They saved him even though they weren't supposed to. Selene goes cold just thinking about it. What is the punishment for resuscitating a tribute who died in the Arena? It’s not like that’s in the standard procedures manual.
The hovercraft goes silent, and Selene bets everyone is thinking the same thing: What now?
In the midst of it all, their comm crackles to life.
For a long moment, nobody moves.
Then Marius abruptly heaves himself up. “Watch him,” he says, nodding to Brutus, and goes back to the copilot seat.
Selene only nods, staring at Brutus. This is, come to think of it, the first time she’s actually seen him up close in person - sure, she’s seen him on TV and in passing last year when he was Clove’s mentor, but this year Emin had made sure all juniors were assigned to the “easy” tributes. Selene and Dash spent most of their time walking around after the morphlings from Six.
He’s bigger than she thought, in a way the cameras never seem to capture. Selene always thought Marius was large, since he left the Program at eighteen and they juiced him pretty good, but he’s still around five or so centimetres shorter than Brutus and a good deal less muscular. And this is, what, Brutus over twenty years after his victory. He must’ve been even bigger as an eighteen-year-old tribute.
He’s also Petra’s mentor - could have been Selene’s, might have been in a different life, though she can’t imagine that working out too well. Selene wonders, not for the first time, how her old classmate is handling this whole mess. If it’s bad for the Peacekeepers, it must be a nightmare for the other Victors… Odin and Nero were able come back with their old tributes and Lyme somehow talked her way in too, but they’re the only ones with that option. Petra and the rest of them had to watch. On television. Just like the rest of the Districts.
Just like the Peacekeepers were supposed to watch.
Dash breaks the silence first. He’s still pumping the oxygen bag by hand, making sure Brutus’s chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm, but his eyes are still wide and cautious. “What do we do now?” he whispers.
“I don’t know,” Selene says, her throat tight. “He was dead when we pulled him out - or at least they thought he was, I dunno - and now he’s not, because we saved him, but he’s supposed to be dead. If we bring him back alive - I don’t know.”
The hovercraft changes course. Selene looks up, frowning - she can’t see Rigel from this angle but Marius is hunched over the comm, his body language ratcheted tighter than she’s ever seen. Out the window, the ground is receding at a brisk rate: they’re going up - but where are they going?
Not the Capitol, that’s for sure. This isn’t the way they came.
Marius returns, a new tension in his frame.
“Where are we going?” Selene demands, before he can say a word.
“We have,” Marius says heavily, “been issued an … invitation. As I’m sure you two have figured out, we can’t just fly back to the Capitol and demand medical attention for Vee-Four-Nine.” Meaning Brutus, Victor #49 - they’ve officially dispensed with the fiction of calling him Tribute 2M, then. “They’ll just kill him all over again.”
“Well, we can’t have that.” Dash attempts a smile; it comes out pained. “After all this effort?”
Marius just grimaces. “Yes, well. Instead, we’re taking him to … I don’t even know, just coordinates, but they’ve promised us safe harbour.”
Selene swallows. Safe harbour was for traitors, defectors from the enemy. “Marius - are you sure?” As a girl Selene might have teased Petra for being a rules-following robot, but defecting is something else entirely.
“Who’s they?” Dash adds, ever wary. “How do you know we can trust them?”
“We don’t have a choice,” Marius says, bluntly. “Brutus needs medical attention or all of this will be for nothing, and we are fugitives now, ourselves, by saving him. We need them. And I think they need us, too. They were quite … happy … to hear from us.”
Selene swallows hard. Just this morning, they were Peacekeepers - perhaps not happy with their current duties, but that would have passed. It’s not too late to go back, Selene wants to say. Find a discreet doctor, drop off Brutus, and then … what?
When Selene was thirteen, she swore an oath to serve the Capitol until the day she died. When she was formally inducted into the Peacekeepers, she repeated that oath, this time to protect as well as to serve. Selene might rail against orders and bend the rules whenever she can, but even in her most frustrated and rebellious days she’d never thought of defying the Capitol.
To just - betray it, like this, even if the Capitol betrayed the people first by sending Brutus and Enobaria back into the Arena - it was -
Marius gazed steadily at her and Dash. “You’re both new,” he says, and Selene winces because was she that obvious? “You haven’t seen what Rigel and I have seen. I’ll explain more later, but I need you both to trust us now that this is the right way forward. The only way forward.”
A long moment, and then Dash nods. Marius nods back, gravely, and switches his gaze. “Selene?”
The only way forward.
“I trust you,” Selene says, at last. And just like that, something loosens in her chest - a tightness she hadn’t realized was there. Because it’s the right decision. Maybe the only decision. In a way, it's the decision they made when they saved Brutus ten minutes and a lifetime ago. Or really, not even that.
It had been a choice between their district and the Capitol, and they'd chosen their district.
“Good.” Marius exhales, some of the tension leaving his frame. “Good. Okay. Here’s what we have to do …”
They trade around a little during the flight: Selene takes her turn on oxygen duty, Marius and Dash have gone up to take over piloting, and Rigel is methodically going around the craft pulling out small bits of circuitry out of their equipment and smashing them.
“Trackers,” Rigel explains, when Selene asks. “There’s one on every weapon, every helmet … they’re useful bits of kit, lets Central track where you are in the field and coordinate. You know how we have everyone’s location up on our HUD in the helmets? Not so useful if you’re trying to get away.”
Selene frowns. “How d’you know about them?”
“We had a man from Three in the Scouts, a few years back.” Rigel pries open the butt of his rifle, pulls out a tiny bug, and stomps on it. “Retired now … he was a bit nuts, but a whiz with weapons, taught me and Marius a lot about our tech. Give me your pistol.”
Bemused, Selene pulls it out and passes it over. Rigel pulls a bug out of its barrel and tosses it onto the growing pile, passes the pistol back. “They’re not as sophisticated as that thing -“ he nods towards the smear of electronics that used to be Brutus’s tribute tracker, still smeared with his blood “- but they’ll lead the Capitol straight to us, if we leave them.”
Selene thinks this over. “Is there one on the hovercraft?”
Rigel flashes her a faint, approving smile. “There’s a transponder in the cockpit. Or was, anyway.”
It feels like it takes an eternity, but it’s probably only a few hours until the hovercraft starts to descend. There’s a soft thump of their landing gear unlocking. They must be close…
For a few breaths - measured in oxygen bag pumps, Selene thinks with dark humour - there’s silence in the little cabin. Finally Selene voices the question that’s been gnawing at her since they boosted away. “What do you think happened to the other Victors? Enobaria, Finnick … ”
Rigel grimaces. “You saw how the Arena scanner lit up like fireworks, just as we boosted out? Whatever Beetee was planning with that tree, it worked. And - well. Just after we got called by our new friends, Control issued the order to scramble and pick up the rest of the Victors. Alive or dead. Immediately.”
“Shit.”
“Yes,” Rigel agrees. “I wouldn’t want to be the Gamemakers, this year. Someone somewhere has made some very big mistakes.” He shakes his head. “We weren’t the only ones in the air, either. There was another craft, closer to the tree - but not one of ours.”
Ours meaning the Scouts; old habits, Selene supposes. “So …”
Rigel spreads his hands. “So, as to what happened to the others, your guess is as good as mine.”
There’s another thump, harder this time. Rigel straightens, his expression smoothing into a professional mask. “We’re here.”
Their - benefactors, whoever they are - are on the ball, at least. As soon as the hatch opens, a trauma team swarms up and whisks Brutus off their hands. Selene hands the oxygen bag over to an intense-looking woman with flyaway hair, and almost gives in to the urge to trail after them to make sure they don’t kill him. As if reading her mind, Marius stills her with a gesture.
Then it's their turn.
Automatically, Rigel and Marius array themselves in front of the two juniors - Selene grits her teeth, it’s a bit belated for protectiveness, honestly - and the four of them stand together as a man approaches them dressed in civilian gear but with the bearing of a soldier.
Time to find out what they've really gotten themselves into.
He'll die when the Games-damned beeping stops. Brutus can't concentrate on dying with that stupid noise in his ear. Every time he sinks down, every time the water closes over his head, there it is again: beeeeeeeeep, the sound drilling through his skull and jerking him back, back to the light and the fire in his chest and the lava in his veins.
Maybe this time. Maybe this time. He falls, and it's dark and cool and calm and quiet, so blessed quiet, and maybe he'll finally get to rest, he hasn't had a good rest in years, decades, his whole life maybe, and wouldn't it be nice to finally get some --
BEEEEEEEEEEP.
Of fucking course.
Either this is the most boring afterlife that anyone could possibly dream up or Brutus isn't dead after all. His eyes won't open and his body won't move and even his breathing isn't his -- his chest rises and falls on its own, sucking in fire and oxygen whether he wants it to or not -- and everything itches, too, a maddening tickle in his nose and on his hands that he can't scratch. Death shouldn't feel like this.
This can't be it. He died but he didn't, he's dead but he's not, and this isn't death, something else is going on and all he has to do is trust the Capitol and everything will be okay.
Trust the Capitol. Trust the Capitol. Trust the Capitol trust them trust them trust them because if Brutus isn't dead there's only one reason, the Capitol saved him. The Capitol is just and wise and fair and they reward their loyal servants and all he has to do is trust them and maybe they'll shut the muttfucking beeping off and let him get some fucking sleep.
There are no windows on the rebel hovercraft, and so Brutus’ death plays across the blank walls in Lyme’s mind instead. The engines whirr beneath them, vibrating through the floor and into her boots, and the buzz sets up in Lyme’s clenched teeth and drills through her skull and Brutus falls choking, gasping, clutching at his throat in the desaturated nighttime jungle. His vitals flatline on the screen as the hovercraft turns, pushing Lyme sideways against her seat, and she closes her eyes against the nausea from her memories or the motion sickness or both.
“Boss,” Claudius says in a low voice, and his fingers close over hers.
Lyme’s eyes snap open (Brutus’ eyes are open, wide and blue and bloodshot and unseeing), and she looks down at her hands. There’s blood on her fingertips, caked under her broken, bitten-off nails just like the Arena, except it’s been twenty years since Lyme walked out of that blazing savannah and into a life she’d asked for and not asked for at the same time, and what -
Oh.
Long, red weals break the skin of her wrist, blood oozing from the gashes she carved herself without noticing. “Shit,” Lyme mutters, and she reaches into her bag for an extra shirt and tears off a strip of fabric, wrapping it around and around and pulling it tight.
“I don’t like the flying either,” Claudius says, thunking the back of his head against his seat. He’s pale in the dim interior lighting, and he gives her a thin-lipped smile. He’s flying off to who knows where with her, leaving behind everything and everyone on the promise of a single sentence splashed across the bottom of Lyme’s mentor console, but he doesn’t say any of that. “I wish we could see out, I wouldn’t feel so trapped.”
“Classified, probably,” Lyme says. The words taste strange and sour in her mouth, and she has to force her tongue to cooperate but she’s a Victor and a mentor and she knows how to speak even when rage and grief close her throat and put a stranglehold on her brain. “I definitely am not good enough at aerial navigating to lead the Capitol to a rebel base by flying over unfamiliar terrain.”
Claudius huffs a quiet laugh, and he drops his hands into his lap, twisting his fingers together between his knees and bending forward with elbows resting on his thighs. “Do you think it’s really them? District 13, I mean. I’m just saying, after all this I’m going to be disappointed if we land on some ranch in Ten.”
“Maybe they’ll teach you to ride a horse and you’ll go full native,” Lyme says, nudging Claudius with her knee. “But no, I think we’ve been flying too long for that.” Wherever they’re going District 2 will be far behind by now, even the mighty mountains long disappeared behind the curve of the horizon. On the train into the Capitol twenty years ago Lyme had gawked at the long, flat stretches of nothing through the middle districts, unable to comprehend so much land without trees or mountains to break up the line of sight.
Claudius glances over, grey eyes searching. “You want to sleep for a bit?” he asks. “You were in the chair all night, and I got some rest before you came to find me.”
Exhaustion burns behind her eyes and turns her lids to sandpaper, but Lyme will not sleep now no matter how much the heaviness drags down her limbs. On nights like these years ago her mentor would appear with a glass of water and a small white pill and watch her drink it down, but Lyme is not a child anymore and her mentor is back home in Two, waiting for a Victor who will never come home.
(Brutus raises one fist to his chest, arm jerking and shaking as his muscles spasm and his nerves betray him; blood trickles from the corner of his mouth, wet with spit, and oozes thicker and darker from his nostrils)
“No,” Lyme says, sharper than she meant to, but Claudius doesn’t flinch. “No, I - not yet.”
It’s tempting to sleep, to dream that this never happened, but it won’t help her on waking, and anyway there’s no point in denying it. Lyme is a traitor who’s made her choice, and it started long before yesterday. Brutus’ death might have gotten Lyme the in but it’s not about him, and never has been. It’s not just twenty-four people who were promised eternity in exchange for sacrifice tossed back in without another thought. It’s not just eighteen years of sitting in the mentor chair watching bright, beautiful children bleed out onto the rocks. It’s not just the twenty-two others besides her own who die every year.
It’s starvation in Twelve turned into fashion inspiration for whisper-thin Capitol women, it’s the faces of the dead projected above their families every January, it’s Chaff’s furious stories of children whipped to death for slipping a few sweet plums into their mouths during harvest time. It’s cameras in every home and a president who stinks of blood and roses and Finnick Odair’s blank eyes and razor smile as he nuzzles the neck of a woman who simpers and slides her hand up his thigh in full view of everyone at the party so they know he’s hers for tonight.
It’s quotas being raised while fishermen drag empty nets in increasing desperation and children slave in factories until their lungs turn black with dust and grime and a thousand other things that Lyme has heard whispered over the years. Heard and pushed away because she and hers are safe, safe in a district that she and children like her sold their souls to protect.
But Brutus is dead in the Arena and no one is safe, not really. Not until the Capitol burns.
“Boss,” Claudius says again, and Lyme pries her fingers loose and rubs her thumb over her fingertips until the blood dries and flakes away.
Despite everything Lyme ends up dozing after all, though she’s only aware she fell asleep after jerking awake, mouth gummed and tasting foul and heart pounding from a dream that slips away when she tries to chase it. “I think we’re coming down for a landing,” Claudius says. “The engine sounds changed.”
Lyme knuckles her eyes and runs her tongue over her teeth. Napping only made everything worse, and Lyme can’t even imagine what sort of picture she’ll present to the rebels when they meet her. District 2’s first Victor-traitor, present and accounted for with dark-rimmed eyes and slept-in clothes and a tattoo oozing fresh blood. At least Claudius looks better, tired but not haggard, and his eyes are sharp and keen and alert as he trains his stare on the door, fingers tapping an uneven rhythm against his knees.
Sure enough Lyme’s stomach swoops as the hovercraft drops down, and who knows where they are with wind shears like this but it’s definitely not the plains of Ten. Claudius lets out a bitten-off squawk and squeezes his eyes shut so hard his entire face screws up around it, knuckles whitening as he clenches his fists. Lyme reaches over and puts a hand over his, and Claudius grips back so hard her fingers ache in moments.
Finally the craft settles down with a reverberating thunk, and Lyme combs her fingers through Claudius’ hair. After that several long minutes of sitting and waiting with her spine so tense Lyme is surprised it hasn’t telescoped, nothing but the sound of their breathing and Claudius’ boot tapping against the floor until Lyme finally steps on his toes to make him stop.
“Sorry, boss,” Claudius says, and then the door hisses open.
A tall, dark man stands in the entryway as Lyme blinks against the sudden brightness. “This way,” he says, gesturing with his chin because his hands are too busy pointing a giant assault rifle at the two of them.
Fair enough, that; Lyme’s not sure she could trust a rebel organization that let two strangers walk in without a little caution, and if Lyme had rushed off the platforms back in her Arena she would have been blown to bits. She stands and grabs her bag, Claudius somewhat twitchier at her side, and they follow the man down the ramp and into a large metal compound. Lyme’s not surprised when a handful of armed guards falls into place behind them, and they walk through long corridors lit with harsh white lights along the ceiling.
Claudius’ breaths hiss in her ears, and the longer they walk the faster they come. “Are we underground?” he asks finally, breaking the silence. No one answers, and so he keeps walking. Lyme won’t embarrass him by taking his hand, not in front of soldiers with guns, but she can’t help noticing that he’s using the old Centre trick of reducing sweaty hands by splaying out his fingers instead of wiping his palms.
They’re led to a small room that’s professional and utilitarian and manages to say cell without anything actively unpleasant to spell it outright. There’s a small door in the back that presumably leads to some kind of bathroom, given the lack of drains or holes in the main floor, and Lyme swallows. “Wait here,” the man says, ushering them in. “Command has to talk. Someone will find you after.”
Lyme nods and turns away as the door shuts. Claudius tosses his bag into the corner, then drops down onto the bench; Lyme sits beside him, resting her hand on the back of his neck and digging her thumb into the tense knot of muscle. “Well,” she says. “No turning back now.”
(Cashmere and Gloss bleeding out into the sand. Gloss goes down right away but Cashmere's still there for a few seconds, eyes wide and panicked, and she's too far away for Brutus to reach her --
The lovebirds and their friends sit on the beach with their bounty of food in front of them, laughing and flinging empty shrimp skins at each other's heads. Brutus holds Enobaria down with one hand and brings the torch close to her skin with the other, and at last the gigantic tick-mutt trying to burrow into her shoulder pulls itself out while she spits curses like acid --
"She's as good as dead. Come on, Enobaria!"
chaos screaming thunder -- cannons? -- salt spray jungle vines blood running down his leg shouting running running tripping --)
"Brutus." Not in his head this time, at least, he thinks not. “Brutus, wake up.”
Turns out their benefactors are a group calling themselves the Second Rebellion.
That there is even a rebellion, let alone two, is news to Selene. The first one - led by Alma Coin of District 13, whose existence is also news to Selene - is apparently exactly what all Selene’s teachers used to warn them about. Power-mad, tyrannical, more concerned with victory and carving themselves a place at the head of a new regime than saving the people they’re supposedly fighting for. This group claims to be better, but who the hell knows really. It’s not as though they’d admit it if they were. Selene carefully keeps skepticism off her face.
This group has no one unified headquarters, but rather pockets throughout Panem, including spies in Thirteen. The operative in the Capitol that contacted their hovercraft had directed them to a hidden base in District 8, which had been hit particularly hard by Capitol reprisals following the Victory Tour revolts. So far the most promising part of the whole ordeal is that no one confiscated any of their weapons or gear, and the man who came to meet them was unarmed.
The good news is, they’re free to go if they want.
“If you prefer, you can leave,” the Rebellion man says. “After you left, our man spoofed a distress call from your vehicle to the Games complex; the hovercraft has been presumed destroyed in the Arena explosion. It’s not the only one that got caught in the blast, so no one will try looking for you. We can have new identities made up for all of you, sneak you into the outskirts of Two, and we all go our separate ways. You can go to ground and live out the rest of your lives in peace.”
“And Brutus?” Marius asks, expression carefully guarded. His forearms are still smeared with Brutus’ blood, giving an extra layer of gravity to the question.
“We would prefer to keep him here,” the man says. Selene can’t say she’s surprised. “We can’t risk moving him yet, not in his condition, and he could be useful. There’s no better opportunity to bring District 2 to our side than to have Brutus with us. If you choose to leave, I promise he will be protected.”
Rigel smiles tightly. It’s not a happy expression. “Of course, the Capitol could still get wind of us and execute us for treason. New identities are useful and everything, but they know our faces. And if you’re telling the truth, there isn’t going to be much peace to be had in the near future.”
“Yes.” The man nods. “It is, however, on the cards. We would like very much for you to join us - but not against your will. We aren’t the Capitol, we're not Coin, and that means you get to say no.”
Rigel exhales. “I need a moment to confer with my people.”
“Certainly.”
When they’re alone, Rigel drops the mask and scrubs a hand over his face. “Here’s the deal, people,” he says, and Selene is abruptly struck by how tired he looks. He’s only ten years older than Selene, but in that moment the gap seems wider. “You heard the man. We can either join them, or go to ground and evade the Capitol. Your choice.”
Dash frowns. “What do you mean?”
Even Selene, whose files from the Centre and the Peacekeeping Academy are peppered with incidents of insubordination and backtalk against her superiors, shifts a little. It would be easier if Rigel told her what to do; he’s their commander, he’s supposed to make the tough calls.
“I mean exactly that,” Rigel says, holding firm. “Look, this is so far out of standard operating protocol that I can’t make the decision for all of us, legally or ethically. This is something we should all choose for ourselves.”
“Going is only an option if we trust their forgery,” Selene points out. She’s seen the official Capitol documents, trained how to recognize fakes - she’s even arrested people who attempted to create their own. Any Peacekeeper worth their uniform knows how to tell the difference unless it’s a very skilled copy.
“Which we don’t, not necessarily,” Rigel agrees.
“I say we join them,” Dash says. They all look at him. He’s always been the idealistic one, and his expression is determined. “This is our chance to make a better world. And - I won’t live the rest of my life on the run, looking over my shoulder waiting for the Capitol to find me.”
Rigel and Marius look at each other. Marius tilts his head forward, just a fraction, and says, “I agree. Joining is our best option. Selene?”
Selene crosses her arms, defensive. Certainly the Capitol isn’t good, exactly, she’s seen enough to know that much. But it’s not really bad, either. The Capitol just is, and as long as the Capitol’s existed there have been Peacekeepers to serve it. Selene’s family has served the Capitol since the Dark Days; she comes from a line of Peacekeepers going back generations, all the way to the war and beyond. Serving the Capitol brings honour to your District and bringing honour to your District is the best way to serve it, and serving your District was what everyone should aspire to do. Selene learned that truth from her parents and her aunt and uncle as soon as she was old enough to understand, and when she didn’t earn the tribute spot, Selene went on to do the next best thing.
Except when serving your District - saving Brutus - meant going against the Capitol, and they can’t exactly take that back.
Even so, it’s one thing to save Brutus, it’s one thing to hand Brutus over to the rebels … it’s quite another to take up arms against the Capitol in service of said rebels.
Or is it? The Capitol won’t see it that way. Selene has seen people turned into Avoxes, even executed, for less.
Maybe if they’re dead anyway, they might as well go down fighting.
“I agree,” Selene says, and tries to ignore the unease churning in her gut.
"Brutus. Brutus, wake up.”
Brutus groans, and this time he actually manages a hoarse, rattling gasp. There's no more tickling in his nose and the back of his throat, just scratchy pain like the sand digging into his eyeballs. Light burns red through his eyelids but his head stays still when he tries to move it, Games damn it all.
"Brutus, do you know where you are?"
It's not his mentor -- too high a voice for Odin, this is a young man's tenor not Odin's rumbling baritone -- but they wouldn't bring Odin in to question Brutus after the Arena went to hell anyway. Probably one of the Gamemakers, or maybe just a doctor with a checklist -- except the accent is wrong, there's no Capitol here, flat vowels and a dragged-out A sound -- but either way, Brutus needs to pull himself together and answer the questions.
Brutus doubted, so many doubts, it burns at him with the shame of it, so unworthy when he should have known it was a test, should have known they'd save him. Now they have, and now it's time to try to prove he's worth their faith. A worthy servant doesn't make them ask twice.
He starts with the pain. Pain is a tool, it's a way to focus when the brain does its best to scatter, and Brutus finds each part of himself that hurts and sends all his attention there, one at a time. This time his body responds, sort of; Brutus tries to rub his eyes and ends up smacking himself full in the face with a hand that feels twice as heavy as it should be.
He growls, but his tongue is thick and stupid and won't make words. Brutus twitches his hand, pinches his thumb and fingers together in something that maybe might resemble trying to hold a pen. "Ah, one minute," the voice says, and Brutus drifts and sends his attention to his fist, curling it in hard so the nails dig in.
"Here." The man presses something into Brutus' hand. It's not a pen, it's a thick plastic tube, and the sharp scent of a marker stings his nose. Brutus flops his hand to the side and finds a smooth plastic rectangle, likely a dry erase board, and eh, good enough. "Let me know if you need help. For now, let's try again. Do you know where you are?"
Brutus scrawls the letters for 'Capitol', though he runs out of manual dexterity somewhere halfway through and ends the word on a scribble.
"Ah," the man says quietly. "No, you're not in the Capitol."
Brutus manages a frown, and he drags the marker over the whiteboard in a long line underscoring where he thinks he wrote the word, pressing so hard it squeaks.
"No," the man says again. "You're in District 8."
It's probably a test, and so Brutus does not scrawl 'what the fuck'. Instead he smears his hand across the whiteboard's surface and draws a question mark.
"You died in the Arena," the man says, and Brutus goes cold. "Nerve gas, very nasty, but luckily it can cause the life monitor to detect a false negative. The hovercraft crew managed to revive you after they picked you up, and once we realized your life signs were still active, we contacted them and had them bring you here."
The cold only spreads. 'We?' Brutus writes, the muscles in his wrist and forearm protesting, or maybe it's just the creeping dread.
"An alternative," he says.
Well, that's just fucking great and not vague at all.
A hundred questions flood his mind, pressing up against the front of his mind like the painted Capitol citizens when the trains pull in, but then one thought sparks through the ache and confusion and (very likely) heavy sedation and everything burns away. Brutus' hand shakes as he swipes the board clean and writes one word: 'Enobaria'.
Silence. Maybe he didn't write it right; Brutus clears the board and starts over, making the letters with deliberate strokes, and the man sucks in a breath of air so yeah, no, he gets it, so why the fuck isn't he answering? Brutus slams his fist down against the blankets, hitting the edge of the board and sending the marker clattering.
"Enobaria is -- with the Capitol," the man says finally, slowly, carefully, like he thinks that Brutus will somehow yank himself out of his stupor an manage to kill him when he can't even open his eyes. Then again, depending on the next sentence, Brutus damn well might try. "She and Peeta Mellark and Johanna Mason were taken by Capitol hovercrafts after the Arena exploded."
After the Arena what?
"The others -- Katniss Everdeen, Finnick Odair, Beetee Latier -- were picked up by Coin's Rebellion and taken to the base in District 13." (What?) "We assumed Enobaria would be with them, since she was with Finnick at the tree when Plutarch's hovercraft came to get the others, but apparently someone had other ideas because they left her behind. We didn't realize."
Brutus' breath sits ragged in his chest, digging claws into his lungs, but he forces the air through. He directs all his energy to his eyes, but as hard as he tries to pry them open, the best he gets is a slight flutter before the headache spikes in again. 'Safe?' he writes.
"We don't know," the man says slowly. "The mentors from One and Two were sent back to their districts. Everyone else was taken into custody. The outlying Villages were raided the next morning and the remaining Victors taken as well. Since then none of our sources have been able to get a read on where they are." He takes a breath. "I feel like we're going about this backwards. There's so much more that needs to be explained --"
Brutus heaves the whiteboard off the bed in the direction of the voice. It makes contact with a dull thud but it's far too low -- knee, probably, maybe even shin, Brutus can't fucking use his limbs properly right now so he wouldn't be surprised -- and it's not enough, nowhere near enough. Not when the fury swirls up inside him and all he can do is lie there like a helpless fucking baby while the whole world has gone to pieces, Victors being rounded up left and right and disappearing. At least Enobaria is safe in the Capitol, and his kids might be okay in the Village, but if there’s war that’s not a guarantee -
"I'll let you rest," the man says, and Brutus thinks about crushing his skull to powder in his hands because he may as well, he can't do a Games-damned thing. The man pushes a button, and Brutus has a second to feel wonderfully pain-free and floating before realizing that he's just been dosed with morphling, the bastard, and then it drags him under.
Chapters: 1/15
Fandom: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Brutus (Hunger Games), Lyme (Hunger Games), Victors (Hunger Games), Alma Coin, Other Character Tags to Be Added
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, District 2, District 13, Careers (Hunger Games), Victors, Mentors, War, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Series: Part 3 of My World's On Fire (How 'Bout Yours?): District 2 at War
Summary:
When the Arena falls and Brutus dies, Lyme leaves for District 13. It's soon clear that Alma Coin is less than perfect, but with her best friend dead and no other options, Lyme vows to make the best of her decision. Meanwhile, Brutus' youngest Victor joins President Snow in the Capitol to be the symbol of loyalty and the voice of her people as District 2 prepares for war.
The twist: when Brutus fell, the hovercraft team who retrieved his corpse fought to resuscitate him, refusing to stand by and watch their hero die. A second rebellion - split off from District 13, fearing that Alma Coin had gone too far - saw their opportunity to gather fighters and a potentially valuable symbol, and recruit them to fight against both the Capitol and District 13.
The Victors of District 2 are now split along five fronts: Enobaria in custody in the Capitol; Lyme and Claudius in District 13; Petra, Ronan and Nero in the Capitol; Brutus and the Peacekeepers who turned traitor to save him in District 8; and the rest at home in District 2, mourning and waiting and fearing whatever is to come.
Some things will change, some will not, but one thing is true: District 2's Victors have the chance to make it out alive.
Brutus dies for his country like a good Two. He dies in the jungle, dies in the dirt and the leaves and the tangle of vines, dies with a snake slithering through the underbrush near his head. Dies with his limbs twitching and jerking and flailing, dies with his body failing around him, shutting down in pieces here and there like a broken machine. Dies with his hand on his heart and the eyes of his district watching him through the cameras.
Dies with the sour taste of regret in his mouth. Dies pricked with the sting of shame because he is Two and loyalty and honour and duty and passion and a hundred other things that dissolved like ashes on his tongue and in the end meant absolutely nothing because death is death is death and it means nothing, it all means nothing, and why, why, why him, he was supposed to be safe, they were supposed to love him back --
Brutus dies, exhausted and in pain and alone, leaking and spasming and broken, a tin soldier tossed into the fire and melted down.
He dies -
It’s the day before the start of the 75th Hunger Games. Most of the Capitol citizens are at Games-parties; they’ll cluster in bars and hotels and houses and drink and watch recaps and work themselves into a titter. Those in the Districts will be more careful; they’ll be watching the broadcast at home, maybe in the Reaping Squares if they’re keen, but they’ll be watching.
The tributes will be preparing for the interviews, or maybe trying to get some sleep after the final private training session; the mentors will be trying to work out last-minute strategies, cutting sponsorship deals, anything to give their kids an edge.
The Peacekeeper Scouts are prepping, too, but in an entirely different way.
Selene waits in the briefing room with her squadmates and the handful of other elite Scout teams that make up President Snow’s private, elite force, standing or sitting in tense silence. Most of the Scouts have known each other for years; the newer members, like Selene and her partner Dash, have less of a rapport outside their own squads, but even with that, Scout gatherings are a place of long-standing camaraderie and friendly teasing. Today, though, the room feels dark, almost oppressive.
The door bangs open and Captain Emin strides into the room. Her expression is tight and unhappy, just like it’s been for the last eternity since the 75th Games season started and all the Scouts were recalled to the Capitol.
At Selene’s side, Dash shifts uncomfortably. This is only their second Games as Peacekeepers, and maybe that means they lack perspective, but the atmosphere at last year’s briefing was … brisk, businesslike. Not like this. Selene glances sideways at Rigel and Marius, her team’s senior scouts; their expressions are similarly grim.
“Assignments for tomorrow,” Emin announces without preamble, which is also not like it was last year. No welcome, no pep talk, nothing about the honour and privilege of serving at such a grand event. Not that Selene really needed one, but that’s not the point. “First up, tribute duty.“
Emin taps the console and a display springs to life. Twenty-four light craft will go out tomorrow morning to take the Vic- -tributes, Selene reminds herself, they’re tributes - to the Arena, the biggest simultaneous undertaking of the year. Each craft has a number and letter designation marking the tribute it will carry: no names, not here, and especially not now in a room full of ex-Careers who have idolized the Victor-tributes their whole lives.
“Those of you with your name next to a craft, report in at oh-five-hundred tomorrow.”
Snapping back to attention, Selene registers that she and Dash are in one craft, Marius and Rigel in another. The four of them are usually sent up together, but for this transport duty - and given the number of Peacekeepers required to man each craft - they’ll be split up, at least for the first day. Later on, when they run cover duty, they’ll be working together again.
“First shift.” Emin taps another button, and another set of names flickers onto the screen. “Dag, Brin, Lena, Garen, your teams will be on standby for the start.” That’s deliberate too - those are the most experienced scout teams; there’s not a Peacekeeper with under ten years’ experience in any of those four-man teams.
Selene doesn’t envy them. They’ll be the ones pulling bodies out of the bloodbath. Familiar bodies.
Emin continues, “Given the … state of things, it is imperative that tomorrow goes off as smoothly as possible.” From the tightness in her expression, the wording isn’t her own. “Following that, we’ll rotate by shifts.” Everyone nods. “Report to your stations. And -“ Emin hesitates, then says, very softly. “I won’t pretend this is just another year. But - we have our duty. Do it, do it well. Let’s go, people.”
A few days later, the Games routine has settled into an uneasy rhythm. Selene and her team are back together, assigned to night duty -- “because we got the afternoon shift last year,” Marius says with a wry smile - and so far it’s been pretty boring. In most years the night shift is when the action happens, because that’s when the Careers hunt, but this time the main alliance has done most of its movement during the day.
But tonight --
“Something’s happening tonight,” Dash says, frowning at the scanner. It’s linked to the central console the Gamemakers use, showing where each tribute is currently located; it’s how the hovercraft teams know where to pick up tributes when they fall. “Look here --“ he taps the screen as Selene leans over, enlarging the view “- they’re on the move.”
“Back to the tree?” Selene asks.
At the hand-over, the afternoon shift had reported the Everdeen-and-friends alliance had gone haring off to the big tree nearest their station, but had returned to the beach in short order. Best guess is, they were scouting ... but for what, nobody knows.
Dash nods. “And B- the Twos are on the move, too. Intercept course, looks like.”
“Okay.” Rigel runs a hand through his hair. “Okay. Keep an eye out and be ready to go when something happens. They’re planning something tonight; we’ll need to respond fast.”
Marius nods, unhappily. So do Selene and Dash.
Despite that, a few hours pass without incident. They all abandon all pretence of waiting calmly and hover around the scanner, watching the dots move around. And then -
“Eleven Male is down.” Dash announces unnecessarily, as the cannon booms over the Arena. “Just inside our sector.“
“Call it in,” Rigel says instantly, snatching up his helmet. They don’t need to go yet - they usually wait for the dust to clear before going on a pickup - but honestly any excuse for being in the area is a good one, especially since the tag nearest 11M when it winked out was 2M.
“Yes sir,” Selene says, grabbing her own helmet.
They’re up in the air in under a minute, Rigel at the helm, and are halfway to Chaff when another cannon fires. Marius swears, loudly. “Fuck!”
Selene’s on her feet before she quite knows what’s going on. Marius - big, quiet Marius - almost never swears. Dash, surprised but not being possessed of Selene’s reflexes, merely looks startled. “What -” Selene begins.
“Brutus just went down,” Marius snaps. Selene’s world freezes. “Fuck! Go -“
The craft tilts abruptly and dives, Rigel throwing it onto a new course for their Victor - their tribute? - no, Brutus is and has always been their Victor. Selene grabs at the controls for the claw, spinning it up even before they swing into position -
Then Marius is unbuckling his restraints and lurching towards the hatch, Dash following wide-eyed at his heels. “Lene, grab the medkit, ” Marius orders as Brutus’ limp form comes up with the claw. Selene locks the claw and makes a grab for the kit, standard issue on all the hovercrafts in case they pick up the Victor in a bad way, and scrambles after them. The cannon fired - Brutus is dead, probably, that’s what the cannon means - but that doesn’t always mean it’s permanent.
“Are we really -“ Dash begins, but Selene silences him with a look. It’s not his fault; he’s an ex-Career too but he’s from Four, one of the rare non-Two Peacekeepers in the elite corps. He’s good, he wouldn’t be here as Selene’s partner otherwise, but he isn’t Two. He doesn’t understand why they have to try, because it’s their Victor lying limp in that claw, because it’s Brutus.
Selene has never been one of the die-hard patriots, not like Petra, but that is not the point.
To Dash’s credit, he swallows back any objections he might have had and helps Marius pull Brutus off the pickup claw.
And then it’s chaos:
“He’s not breathing!”
Marius throws his weight down in chest compresses. The big man left the Centre at eighteen over a decade ago, and he’s kept in shape; Brutus’ large chest visibly deforms under his weight. Selene stands back, knowing better than to hover uselessly but unwilling to stay too far back.
“- might have been poisoned too. Lene, give him the antidote, over there -“
Brutus is slippery with blood and has fragments of the jungle still stuck to him, Selene registers distantly, as she darts forward and plunges the hypo into his neck. It’s broad-spectrum, not targeted, so who knows if it’ll help but it’s better than nothing. Selene considers, then swaps hypos and gives him a shot of adrenaline too. Dash slaps on a breath mask and hooks the strap around Brutus’ head -
- and then, miraculously, Brutus spasms off the slippery deck, gasping for breath.
“Shit,” Selene says, with feeling, collapsing back onto the deck.
Marius only nods and moves to scrub his face, then reconsiders, considering the state of his hands.
"He's alive," Dash whispers.
Marius fixes Dash with a steady look and rumbles, "Imagine if it were Finnick."
"True," the boy from Four sighs. And to be fair, it’s not his District's Victor on the deck, but he's behaved as if it were. Dash looks a bit green and looks like he wants to collapse, but he's holding the oxygen mask in place with one hand and is monitoring Brutus' pulse with the other. Brutus, after that burst of energy, has subsided back into unconsciousness, deathly still and pale.
But he's not dead. He should be dead, but he's not, because - because they saved him. They saved him even though they weren't supposed to. Selene goes cold just thinking about it. What is the punishment for resuscitating a tribute who died in the Arena? It’s not like that’s in the standard procedures manual.
The hovercraft goes silent, and Selene bets everyone is thinking the same thing: What now?
In the midst of it all, their comm crackles to life.
For a long moment, nobody moves.
Then Marius abruptly heaves himself up. “Watch him,” he says, nodding to Brutus, and goes back to the copilot seat.
Selene only nods, staring at Brutus. This is, come to think of it, the first time she’s actually seen him up close in person - sure, she’s seen him on TV and in passing last year when he was Clove’s mentor, but this year Emin had made sure all juniors were assigned to the “easy” tributes. Selene and Dash spent most of their time walking around after the morphlings from Six.
He’s bigger than she thought, in a way the cameras never seem to capture. Selene always thought Marius was large, since he left the Program at eighteen and they juiced him pretty good, but he’s still around five or so centimetres shorter than Brutus and a good deal less muscular. And this is, what, Brutus over twenty years after his victory. He must’ve been even bigger as an eighteen-year-old tribute.
He’s also Petra’s mentor - could have been Selene’s, might have been in a different life, though she can’t imagine that working out too well. Selene wonders, not for the first time, how her old classmate is handling this whole mess. If it’s bad for the Peacekeepers, it must be a nightmare for the other Victors… Odin and Nero were able come back with their old tributes and Lyme somehow talked her way in too, but they’re the only ones with that option. Petra and the rest of them had to watch. On television. Just like the rest of the Districts.
Just like the Peacekeepers were supposed to watch.
Dash breaks the silence first. He’s still pumping the oxygen bag by hand, making sure Brutus’s chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm, but his eyes are still wide and cautious. “What do we do now?” he whispers.
“I don’t know,” Selene says, her throat tight. “He was dead when we pulled him out - or at least they thought he was, I dunno - and now he’s not, because we saved him, but he’s supposed to be dead. If we bring him back alive - I don’t know.”
The hovercraft changes course. Selene looks up, frowning - she can’t see Rigel from this angle but Marius is hunched over the comm, his body language ratcheted tighter than she’s ever seen. Out the window, the ground is receding at a brisk rate: they’re going up - but where are they going?
Not the Capitol, that’s for sure. This isn’t the way they came.
Marius returns, a new tension in his frame.
“Where are we going?” Selene demands, before he can say a word.
“We have,” Marius says heavily, “been issued an … invitation. As I’m sure you two have figured out, we can’t just fly back to the Capitol and demand medical attention for Vee-Four-Nine.” Meaning Brutus, Victor #49 - they’ve officially dispensed with the fiction of calling him Tribute 2M, then. “They’ll just kill him all over again.”
“Well, we can’t have that.” Dash attempts a smile; it comes out pained. “After all this effort?”
Marius just grimaces. “Yes, well. Instead, we’re taking him to … I don’t even know, just coordinates, but they’ve promised us safe harbour.”
Selene swallows. Safe harbour was for traitors, defectors from the enemy. “Marius - are you sure?” As a girl Selene might have teased Petra for being a rules-following robot, but defecting is something else entirely.
“Who’s they?” Dash adds, ever wary. “How do you know we can trust them?”
“We don’t have a choice,” Marius says, bluntly. “Brutus needs medical attention or all of this will be for nothing, and we are fugitives now, ourselves, by saving him. We need them. And I think they need us, too. They were quite … happy … to hear from us.”
Selene swallows hard. Just this morning, they were Peacekeepers - perhaps not happy with their current duties, but that would have passed. It’s not too late to go back, Selene wants to say. Find a discreet doctor, drop off Brutus, and then … what?
When Selene was thirteen, she swore an oath to serve the Capitol until the day she died. When she was formally inducted into the Peacekeepers, she repeated that oath, this time to protect as well as to serve. Selene might rail against orders and bend the rules whenever she can, but even in her most frustrated and rebellious days she’d never thought of defying the Capitol.
To just - betray it, like this, even if the Capitol betrayed the people first by sending Brutus and Enobaria back into the Arena - it was -
Marius gazed steadily at her and Dash. “You’re both new,” he says, and Selene winces because was she that obvious? “You haven’t seen what Rigel and I have seen. I’ll explain more later, but I need you both to trust us now that this is the right way forward. The only way forward.”
A long moment, and then Dash nods. Marius nods back, gravely, and switches his gaze. “Selene?”
The only way forward.
“I trust you,” Selene says, at last. And just like that, something loosens in her chest - a tightness she hadn’t realized was there. Because it’s the right decision. Maybe the only decision. In a way, it's the decision they made when they saved Brutus ten minutes and a lifetime ago. Or really, not even that.
It had been a choice between their district and the Capitol, and they'd chosen their district.
“Good.” Marius exhales, some of the tension leaving his frame. “Good. Okay. Here’s what we have to do …”
They trade around a little during the flight: Selene takes her turn on oxygen duty, Marius and Dash have gone up to take over piloting, and Rigel is methodically going around the craft pulling out small bits of circuitry out of their equipment and smashing them.
“Trackers,” Rigel explains, when Selene asks. “There’s one on every weapon, every helmet … they’re useful bits of kit, lets Central track where you are in the field and coordinate. You know how we have everyone’s location up on our HUD in the helmets? Not so useful if you’re trying to get away.”
Selene frowns. “How d’you know about them?”
“We had a man from Three in the Scouts, a few years back.” Rigel pries open the butt of his rifle, pulls out a tiny bug, and stomps on it. “Retired now … he was a bit nuts, but a whiz with weapons, taught me and Marius a lot about our tech. Give me your pistol.”
Bemused, Selene pulls it out and passes it over. Rigel pulls a bug out of its barrel and tosses it onto the growing pile, passes the pistol back. “They’re not as sophisticated as that thing -“ he nods towards the smear of electronics that used to be Brutus’s tribute tracker, still smeared with his blood “- but they’ll lead the Capitol straight to us, if we leave them.”
Selene thinks this over. “Is there one on the hovercraft?”
Rigel flashes her a faint, approving smile. “There’s a transponder in the cockpit. Or was, anyway.”
It feels like it takes an eternity, but it’s probably only a few hours until the hovercraft starts to descend. There’s a soft thump of their landing gear unlocking. They must be close…
For a few breaths - measured in oxygen bag pumps, Selene thinks with dark humour - there’s silence in the little cabin. Finally Selene voices the question that’s been gnawing at her since they boosted away. “What do you think happened to the other Victors? Enobaria, Finnick … ”
Rigel grimaces. “You saw how the Arena scanner lit up like fireworks, just as we boosted out? Whatever Beetee was planning with that tree, it worked. And - well. Just after we got called by our new friends, Control issued the order to scramble and pick up the rest of the Victors. Alive or dead. Immediately.”
“Shit.”
“Yes,” Rigel agrees. “I wouldn’t want to be the Gamemakers, this year. Someone somewhere has made some very big mistakes.” He shakes his head. “We weren’t the only ones in the air, either. There was another craft, closer to the tree - but not one of ours.”
Ours meaning the Scouts; old habits, Selene supposes. “So …”
Rigel spreads his hands. “So, as to what happened to the others, your guess is as good as mine.”
There’s another thump, harder this time. Rigel straightens, his expression smoothing into a professional mask. “We’re here.”
Their - benefactors, whoever they are - are on the ball, at least. As soon as the hatch opens, a trauma team swarms up and whisks Brutus off their hands. Selene hands the oxygen bag over to an intense-looking woman with flyaway hair, and almost gives in to the urge to trail after them to make sure they don’t kill him. As if reading her mind, Marius stills her with a gesture.
Then it's their turn.
Automatically, Rigel and Marius array themselves in front of the two juniors - Selene grits her teeth, it’s a bit belated for protectiveness, honestly - and the four of them stand together as a man approaches them dressed in civilian gear but with the bearing of a soldier.
Time to find out what they've really gotten themselves into.
He'll die when the Games-damned beeping stops. Brutus can't concentrate on dying with that stupid noise in his ear. Every time he sinks down, every time the water closes over his head, there it is again: beeeeeeeeep, the sound drilling through his skull and jerking him back, back to the light and the fire in his chest and the lava in his veins.
Maybe this time. Maybe this time. He falls, and it's dark and cool and calm and quiet, so blessed quiet, and maybe he'll finally get to rest, he hasn't had a good rest in years, decades, his whole life maybe, and wouldn't it be nice to finally get some --
BEEEEEEEEEEP.
Of fucking course.
Either this is the most boring afterlife that anyone could possibly dream up or Brutus isn't dead after all. His eyes won't open and his body won't move and even his breathing isn't his -- his chest rises and falls on its own, sucking in fire and oxygen whether he wants it to or not -- and everything itches, too, a maddening tickle in his nose and on his hands that he can't scratch. Death shouldn't feel like this.
This can't be it. He died but he didn't, he's dead but he's not, and this isn't death, something else is going on and all he has to do is trust the Capitol and everything will be okay.
Trust the Capitol. Trust the Capitol. Trust the Capitol trust them trust them trust them because if Brutus isn't dead there's only one reason, the Capitol saved him. The Capitol is just and wise and fair and they reward their loyal servants and all he has to do is trust them and maybe they'll shut the muttfucking beeping off and let him get some fucking sleep.
There are no windows on the rebel hovercraft, and so Brutus’ death plays across the blank walls in Lyme’s mind instead. The engines whirr beneath them, vibrating through the floor and into her boots, and the buzz sets up in Lyme’s clenched teeth and drills through her skull and Brutus falls choking, gasping, clutching at his throat in the desaturated nighttime jungle. His vitals flatline on the screen as the hovercraft turns, pushing Lyme sideways against her seat, and she closes her eyes against the nausea from her memories or the motion sickness or both.
“Boss,” Claudius says in a low voice, and his fingers close over hers.
Lyme’s eyes snap open (Brutus’ eyes are open, wide and blue and bloodshot and unseeing), and she looks down at her hands. There’s blood on her fingertips, caked under her broken, bitten-off nails just like the Arena, except it’s been twenty years since Lyme walked out of that blazing savannah and into a life she’d asked for and not asked for at the same time, and what -
Oh.
Long, red weals break the skin of her wrist, blood oozing from the gashes she carved herself without noticing. “Shit,” Lyme mutters, and she reaches into her bag for an extra shirt and tears off a strip of fabric, wrapping it around and around and pulling it tight.
“I don’t like the flying either,” Claudius says, thunking the back of his head against his seat. He’s pale in the dim interior lighting, and he gives her a thin-lipped smile. He’s flying off to who knows where with her, leaving behind everything and everyone on the promise of a single sentence splashed across the bottom of Lyme’s mentor console, but he doesn’t say any of that. “I wish we could see out, I wouldn’t feel so trapped.”
“Classified, probably,” Lyme says. The words taste strange and sour in her mouth, and she has to force her tongue to cooperate but she’s a Victor and a mentor and she knows how to speak even when rage and grief close her throat and put a stranglehold on her brain. “I definitely am not good enough at aerial navigating to lead the Capitol to a rebel base by flying over unfamiliar terrain.”
Claudius huffs a quiet laugh, and he drops his hands into his lap, twisting his fingers together between his knees and bending forward with elbows resting on his thighs. “Do you think it’s really them? District 13, I mean. I’m just saying, after all this I’m going to be disappointed if we land on some ranch in Ten.”
“Maybe they’ll teach you to ride a horse and you’ll go full native,” Lyme says, nudging Claudius with her knee. “But no, I think we’ve been flying too long for that.” Wherever they’re going District 2 will be far behind by now, even the mighty mountains long disappeared behind the curve of the horizon. On the train into the Capitol twenty years ago Lyme had gawked at the long, flat stretches of nothing through the middle districts, unable to comprehend so much land without trees or mountains to break up the line of sight.
Claudius glances over, grey eyes searching. “You want to sleep for a bit?” he asks. “You were in the chair all night, and I got some rest before you came to find me.”
Exhaustion burns behind her eyes and turns her lids to sandpaper, but Lyme will not sleep now no matter how much the heaviness drags down her limbs. On nights like these years ago her mentor would appear with a glass of water and a small white pill and watch her drink it down, but Lyme is not a child anymore and her mentor is back home in Two, waiting for a Victor who will never come home.
(Brutus raises one fist to his chest, arm jerking and shaking as his muscles spasm and his nerves betray him; blood trickles from the corner of his mouth, wet with spit, and oozes thicker and darker from his nostrils)
“No,” Lyme says, sharper than she meant to, but Claudius doesn’t flinch. “No, I - not yet.”
It’s tempting to sleep, to dream that this never happened, but it won’t help her on waking, and anyway there’s no point in denying it. Lyme is a traitor who’s made her choice, and it started long before yesterday. Brutus’ death might have gotten Lyme the in but it’s not about him, and never has been. It’s not just twenty-four people who were promised eternity in exchange for sacrifice tossed back in without another thought. It’s not just eighteen years of sitting in the mentor chair watching bright, beautiful children bleed out onto the rocks. It’s not just the twenty-two others besides her own who die every year.
It’s starvation in Twelve turned into fashion inspiration for whisper-thin Capitol women, it’s the faces of the dead projected above their families every January, it’s Chaff’s furious stories of children whipped to death for slipping a few sweet plums into their mouths during harvest time. It’s cameras in every home and a president who stinks of blood and roses and Finnick Odair’s blank eyes and razor smile as he nuzzles the neck of a woman who simpers and slides her hand up his thigh in full view of everyone at the party so they know he’s hers for tonight.
It’s quotas being raised while fishermen drag empty nets in increasing desperation and children slave in factories until their lungs turn black with dust and grime and a thousand other things that Lyme has heard whispered over the years. Heard and pushed away because she and hers are safe, safe in a district that she and children like her sold their souls to protect.
But Brutus is dead in the Arena and no one is safe, not really. Not until the Capitol burns.
“Boss,” Claudius says again, and Lyme pries her fingers loose and rubs her thumb over her fingertips until the blood dries and flakes away.
Despite everything Lyme ends up dozing after all, though she’s only aware she fell asleep after jerking awake, mouth gummed and tasting foul and heart pounding from a dream that slips away when she tries to chase it. “I think we’re coming down for a landing,” Claudius says. “The engine sounds changed.”
Lyme knuckles her eyes and runs her tongue over her teeth. Napping only made everything worse, and Lyme can’t even imagine what sort of picture she’ll present to the rebels when they meet her. District 2’s first Victor-traitor, present and accounted for with dark-rimmed eyes and slept-in clothes and a tattoo oozing fresh blood. At least Claudius looks better, tired but not haggard, and his eyes are sharp and keen and alert as he trains his stare on the door, fingers tapping an uneven rhythm against his knees.
Sure enough Lyme’s stomach swoops as the hovercraft drops down, and who knows where they are with wind shears like this but it’s definitely not the plains of Ten. Claudius lets out a bitten-off squawk and squeezes his eyes shut so hard his entire face screws up around it, knuckles whitening as he clenches his fists. Lyme reaches over and puts a hand over his, and Claudius grips back so hard her fingers ache in moments.
Finally the craft settles down with a reverberating thunk, and Lyme combs her fingers through Claudius’ hair. After that several long minutes of sitting and waiting with her spine so tense Lyme is surprised it hasn’t telescoped, nothing but the sound of their breathing and Claudius’ boot tapping against the floor until Lyme finally steps on his toes to make him stop.
“Sorry, boss,” Claudius says, and then the door hisses open.
A tall, dark man stands in the entryway as Lyme blinks against the sudden brightness. “This way,” he says, gesturing with his chin because his hands are too busy pointing a giant assault rifle at the two of them.
Fair enough, that; Lyme’s not sure she could trust a rebel organization that let two strangers walk in without a little caution, and if Lyme had rushed off the platforms back in her Arena she would have been blown to bits. She stands and grabs her bag, Claudius somewhat twitchier at her side, and they follow the man down the ramp and into a large metal compound. Lyme’s not surprised when a handful of armed guards falls into place behind them, and they walk through long corridors lit with harsh white lights along the ceiling.
Claudius’ breaths hiss in her ears, and the longer they walk the faster they come. “Are we underground?” he asks finally, breaking the silence. No one answers, and so he keeps walking. Lyme won’t embarrass him by taking his hand, not in front of soldiers with guns, but she can’t help noticing that he’s using the old Centre trick of reducing sweaty hands by splaying out his fingers instead of wiping his palms.
They’re led to a small room that’s professional and utilitarian and manages to say cell without anything actively unpleasant to spell it outright. There’s a small door in the back that presumably leads to some kind of bathroom, given the lack of drains or holes in the main floor, and Lyme swallows. “Wait here,” the man says, ushering them in. “Command has to talk. Someone will find you after.”
Lyme nods and turns away as the door shuts. Claudius tosses his bag into the corner, then drops down onto the bench; Lyme sits beside him, resting her hand on the back of his neck and digging her thumb into the tense knot of muscle. “Well,” she says. “No turning back now.”
(Cashmere and Gloss bleeding out into the sand. Gloss goes down right away but Cashmere's still there for a few seconds, eyes wide and panicked, and she's too far away for Brutus to reach her --
The lovebirds and their friends sit on the beach with their bounty of food in front of them, laughing and flinging empty shrimp skins at each other's heads. Brutus holds Enobaria down with one hand and brings the torch close to her skin with the other, and at last the gigantic tick-mutt trying to burrow into her shoulder pulls itself out while she spits curses like acid --
"She's as good as dead. Come on, Enobaria!"
chaos screaming thunder -- cannons? -- salt spray jungle vines blood running down his leg shouting running running tripping --)
"Brutus." Not in his head this time, at least, he thinks not. “Brutus, wake up.”
Turns out their benefactors are a group calling themselves the Second Rebellion.
That there is even a rebellion, let alone two, is news to Selene. The first one - led by Alma Coin of District 13, whose existence is also news to Selene - is apparently exactly what all Selene’s teachers used to warn them about. Power-mad, tyrannical, more concerned with victory and carving themselves a place at the head of a new regime than saving the people they’re supposedly fighting for. This group claims to be better, but who the hell knows really. It’s not as though they’d admit it if they were. Selene carefully keeps skepticism off her face.
This group has no one unified headquarters, but rather pockets throughout Panem, including spies in Thirteen. The operative in the Capitol that contacted their hovercraft had directed them to a hidden base in District 8, which had been hit particularly hard by Capitol reprisals following the Victory Tour revolts. So far the most promising part of the whole ordeal is that no one confiscated any of their weapons or gear, and the man who came to meet them was unarmed.
The good news is, they’re free to go if they want.
“If you prefer, you can leave,” the Rebellion man says. “After you left, our man spoofed a distress call from your vehicle to the Games complex; the hovercraft has been presumed destroyed in the Arena explosion. It’s not the only one that got caught in the blast, so no one will try looking for you. We can have new identities made up for all of you, sneak you into the outskirts of Two, and we all go our separate ways. You can go to ground and live out the rest of your lives in peace.”
“And Brutus?” Marius asks, expression carefully guarded. His forearms are still smeared with Brutus’ blood, giving an extra layer of gravity to the question.
“We would prefer to keep him here,” the man says. Selene can’t say she’s surprised. “We can’t risk moving him yet, not in his condition, and he could be useful. There’s no better opportunity to bring District 2 to our side than to have Brutus with us. If you choose to leave, I promise he will be protected.”
Rigel smiles tightly. It’s not a happy expression. “Of course, the Capitol could still get wind of us and execute us for treason. New identities are useful and everything, but they know our faces. And if you’re telling the truth, there isn’t going to be much peace to be had in the near future.”
“Yes.” The man nods. “It is, however, on the cards. We would like very much for you to join us - but not against your will. We aren’t the Capitol, we're not Coin, and that means you get to say no.”
Rigel exhales. “I need a moment to confer with my people.”
“Certainly.”
When they’re alone, Rigel drops the mask and scrubs a hand over his face. “Here’s the deal, people,” he says, and Selene is abruptly struck by how tired he looks. He’s only ten years older than Selene, but in that moment the gap seems wider. “You heard the man. We can either join them, or go to ground and evade the Capitol. Your choice.”
Dash frowns. “What do you mean?”
Even Selene, whose files from the Centre and the Peacekeeping Academy are peppered with incidents of insubordination and backtalk against her superiors, shifts a little. It would be easier if Rigel told her what to do; he’s their commander, he’s supposed to make the tough calls.
“I mean exactly that,” Rigel says, holding firm. “Look, this is so far out of standard operating protocol that I can’t make the decision for all of us, legally or ethically. This is something we should all choose for ourselves.”
“Going is only an option if we trust their forgery,” Selene points out. She’s seen the official Capitol documents, trained how to recognize fakes - she’s even arrested people who attempted to create their own. Any Peacekeeper worth their uniform knows how to tell the difference unless it’s a very skilled copy.
“Which we don’t, not necessarily,” Rigel agrees.
“I say we join them,” Dash says. They all look at him. He’s always been the idealistic one, and his expression is determined. “This is our chance to make a better world. And - I won’t live the rest of my life on the run, looking over my shoulder waiting for the Capitol to find me.”
Rigel and Marius look at each other. Marius tilts his head forward, just a fraction, and says, “I agree. Joining is our best option. Selene?”
Selene crosses her arms, defensive. Certainly the Capitol isn’t good, exactly, she’s seen enough to know that much. But it’s not really bad, either. The Capitol just is, and as long as the Capitol’s existed there have been Peacekeepers to serve it. Selene’s family has served the Capitol since the Dark Days; she comes from a line of Peacekeepers going back generations, all the way to the war and beyond. Serving the Capitol brings honour to your District and bringing honour to your District is the best way to serve it, and serving your District was what everyone should aspire to do. Selene learned that truth from her parents and her aunt and uncle as soon as she was old enough to understand, and when she didn’t earn the tribute spot, Selene went on to do the next best thing.
Except when serving your District - saving Brutus - meant going against the Capitol, and they can’t exactly take that back.
Even so, it’s one thing to save Brutus, it’s one thing to hand Brutus over to the rebels … it’s quite another to take up arms against the Capitol in service of said rebels.
Or is it? The Capitol won’t see it that way. Selene has seen people turned into Avoxes, even executed, for less.
Maybe if they’re dead anyway, they might as well go down fighting.
“I agree,” Selene says, and tries to ignore the unease churning in her gut.
"Brutus. Brutus, wake up.”
Brutus groans, and this time he actually manages a hoarse, rattling gasp. There's no more tickling in his nose and the back of his throat, just scratchy pain like the sand digging into his eyeballs. Light burns red through his eyelids but his head stays still when he tries to move it, Games damn it all.
"Brutus, do you know where you are?"
It's not his mentor -- too high a voice for Odin, this is a young man's tenor not Odin's rumbling baritone -- but they wouldn't bring Odin in to question Brutus after the Arena went to hell anyway. Probably one of the Gamemakers, or maybe just a doctor with a checklist -- except the accent is wrong, there's no Capitol here, flat vowels and a dragged-out A sound -- but either way, Brutus needs to pull himself together and answer the questions.
Brutus doubted, so many doubts, it burns at him with the shame of it, so unworthy when he should have known it was a test, should have known they'd save him. Now they have, and now it's time to try to prove he's worth their faith. A worthy servant doesn't make them ask twice.
He starts with the pain. Pain is a tool, it's a way to focus when the brain does its best to scatter, and Brutus finds each part of himself that hurts and sends all his attention there, one at a time. This time his body responds, sort of; Brutus tries to rub his eyes and ends up smacking himself full in the face with a hand that feels twice as heavy as it should be.
He growls, but his tongue is thick and stupid and won't make words. Brutus twitches his hand, pinches his thumb and fingers together in something that maybe might resemble trying to hold a pen. "Ah, one minute," the voice says, and Brutus drifts and sends his attention to his fist, curling it in hard so the nails dig in.
"Here." The man presses something into Brutus' hand. It's not a pen, it's a thick plastic tube, and the sharp scent of a marker stings his nose. Brutus flops his hand to the side and finds a smooth plastic rectangle, likely a dry erase board, and eh, good enough. "Let me know if you need help. For now, let's try again. Do you know where you are?"
Brutus scrawls the letters for 'Capitol', though he runs out of manual dexterity somewhere halfway through and ends the word on a scribble.
"Ah," the man says quietly. "No, you're not in the Capitol."
Brutus manages a frown, and he drags the marker over the whiteboard in a long line underscoring where he thinks he wrote the word, pressing so hard it squeaks.
"No," the man says again. "You're in District 8."
It's probably a test, and so Brutus does not scrawl 'what the fuck'. Instead he smears his hand across the whiteboard's surface and draws a question mark.
"You died in the Arena," the man says, and Brutus goes cold. "Nerve gas, very nasty, but luckily it can cause the life monitor to detect a false negative. The hovercraft crew managed to revive you after they picked you up, and once we realized your life signs were still active, we contacted them and had them bring you here."
The cold only spreads. 'We?' Brutus writes, the muscles in his wrist and forearm protesting, or maybe it's just the creeping dread.
"An alternative," he says.
Well, that's just fucking great and not vague at all.
A hundred questions flood his mind, pressing up against the front of his mind like the painted Capitol citizens when the trains pull in, but then one thought sparks through the ache and confusion and (very likely) heavy sedation and everything burns away. Brutus' hand shakes as he swipes the board clean and writes one word: 'Enobaria'.
Silence. Maybe he didn't write it right; Brutus clears the board and starts over, making the letters with deliberate strokes, and the man sucks in a breath of air so yeah, no, he gets it, so why the fuck isn't he answering? Brutus slams his fist down against the blankets, hitting the edge of the board and sending the marker clattering.
"Enobaria is -- with the Capitol," the man says finally, slowly, carefully, like he thinks that Brutus will somehow yank himself out of his stupor an manage to kill him when he can't even open his eyes. Then again, depending on the next sentence, Brutus damn well might try. "She and Peeta Mellark and Johanna Mason were taken by Capitol hovercrafts after the Arena exploded."
After the Arena what?
"The others -- Katniss Everdeen, Finnick Odair, Beetee Latier -- were picked up by Coin's Rebellion and taken to the base in District 13." (What?) "We assumed Enobaria would be with them, since she was with Finnick at the tree when Plutarch's hovercraft came to get the others, but apparently someone had other ideas because they left her behind. We didn't realize."
Brutus' breath sits ragged in his chest, digging claws into his lungs, but he forces the air through. He directs all his energy to his eyes, but as hard as he tries to pry them open, the best he gets is a slight flutter before the headache spikes in again. 'Safe?' he writes.
"We don't know," the man says slowly. "The mentors from One and Two were sent back to their districts. Everyone else was taken into custody. The outlying Villages were raided the next morning and the remaining Victors taken as well. Since then none of our sources have been able to get a read on where they are." He takes a breath. "I feel like we're going about this backwards. There's so much more that needs to be explained --"
Brutus heaves the whiteboard off the bed in the direction of the voice. It makes contact with a dull thud but it's far too low -- knee, probably, maybe even shin, Brutus can't fucking use his limbs properly right now so he wouldn't be surprised -- and it's not enough, nowhere near enough. Not when the fury swirls up inside him and all he can do is lie there like a helpless fucking baby while the whole world has gone to pieces, Victors being rounded up left and right and disappearing. At least Enobaria is safe in the Capitol, and his kids might be okay in the Village, but if there’s war that’s not a guarantee -
"I'll let you rest," the man says, and Brutus thinks about crushing his skull to powder in his hands because he may as well, he can't do a Games-damned thing. The man pushes a button, and Brutus has a second to feel wonderfully pain-free and floating before realizing that he's just been dosed with morphling, the bastard, and then it drags him under.