Canon Divergence: Chapter 5
A District Upside Down: The War (41174 words) by lorata
Chapters: 5/15
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, Coriolanus Snow
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 2 of My World's On Fire (How 'Bout Yours?): District 2 at War
Chapter Summary: Brutus and the ex-PK squad finally get the go-ahead to try to rescue the missing Victors. Meanwhile, it's finally Lyme's turn for a paradigm shift.
Brutus stares up at the ceiling, counting his breaths because it feels wrong to run through the deaths list when there are so many more now who never should’ve made it on. But he’s been having a recurring dream ever since he started field training with the rebels, of riding on the inter-district train, and Brutus can already feel it stirring. In the dream he’s always at the front of the train, in the engine room, and the driver is gone and the train is hurtling at top speed. It’s supposed to be taking him home to District 2 but instead the train is heading off in the opposite direction, far off into the deep wilds of the north. He can’t figure out the controls and he can’t stop it, and with every mile that passes the sense of dread grows around him as the sky outside turns dark.
Real subtle, you don’t need to have a fancy job in head-magic to figure that one out. Subtle, and also real stupid that he wakes up sweating given everything else that’s happened to him, but there’s brains for you. At least Brutus hasn’t regressed to having Arena dreams yet, like he sometimes does when he’s stressed and overworked even though it’s been over twenty-five years since the first one. He and Enobaria joked about it once, cast bets whether going through it all over again for real meant they’d finally kick the teenage nightmares to the hills or if they’d start having a whole new set.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if they mixed, though?” Enobaria had said, staring out at the jungle. “Like, you’re your age now and back in your Arena with all those kids in it. And oh, also, now you’re not wearing any pants.”
Brutus hadn’t laughed, and neither had she, and they’d gone back to hunting in silence.
He’s finally starting to doze when the door opens, and Brutus sits bolt upright, heart hammering in his chest as he flails for a weapon and comes up empty. “Shit,” he mutters, gathering himself under control. Not the Arena. Not under attack. Drag those reflexes back and don’t kill the help, son.
Except it’s not the help, it’s Rigel, his normally tanned face a pale smear in the darkness behind the sharp black outline of riot gear. “Sorry,” Rigel says immediately, and turns on the lights. “Sorry, I should’ve knocked, I wasn’t thinking, I just - Enobaria, we know where she is, and if we want to get her we need to move now. Are you in?”
Brutus nearly falls out of bed in his eagerness to stand, and he pulls on the uniform Rigel offers him while gesturing for him not to bother leaving. They’re all Careers here, and privacy is pretty pointless when just a few short weeks ago Brutus was standing there naked while a team of feathery Capitol interns waxed every inch of his body. They may as well not waste time. “What do we know?”
“We got intel from one of the resistance plants inside Thirteen,” Rigel says, bending down to steady Brutus’ boot so he doesn’t fall on his ass trying to balance. His brain is awake but the rest of him is still thinking about it. “Coin’s rebels found the location of the Victors who were in the Arena, and they’re making the extraction tonight. They sent their strike team without telling anyone, not even the Mockingjay, and there’s a diversion right now to keep the Capitol’s eyes off them and everything. Now or never.”
Rigel hands him a tactical vest and Brutus pulls it on, idly impressed that they managed to find one that fits him. He hesitates at the various fastenings and makes a helpless gesture, and Rigel steps in to help him with an expression of quiet relief. Brutus wonders whether Rigel expected him to bluster through it and waste time by refusing aid, which, granted, would not be an entirely unreasonable assumption to make given his persona.
“So why are we going?” Brutus asks, wincing as one of the straps pulled tight causes a brief spasm in his chest. “Do the other rebels have a shitty plan?”
“No, it’s a good plan,” Rigel says, his voice grim. “The problem is, Enobaria’s not part of it. Word is that Katniss Everdeen negotiated with Coin for her survival, which was nice of her - and unexpected. Unfortunately for us she didn’t think to specify her retrieval, and it looks like Coin is taking that deal to the letter rather than the spirit.”
Of fucking course.
Brutus is not a stranger to spin. He’s lived his whole life under some sort of propaganda or another - to the point that yes, it’s taken him forty years to use the word and almost as long to admit it to himself - and he knows, he’s not stupid, he knows that this could be the resistance creating a narrative for their own benefit. They want to paint this President Coin as a tyrant who needs to be stopped just as much as Snow, and so they’re going to tell him whatever suits that purpose, but. If a rebel group was going to risk its soldiers to rescue captured Victors, it would not be completely batshit to assume they’d leave the one from District 2 behind.
“It’s just the squad,” Rigel says as Brutus finishes suiting up. “The timing will be tight, but we can pull this off, and the fewer of us there are, the better. Let them do all the heavy hitting while we focus on the single extraction.” He pauses, gives Brutus a long, serious look that makes him seem much older for a moment. “I say this with all due respect, but -“
“You thought you’d have more time to train me, you’d rather not have me with you on this one, but you promised,” Brutus says, matter of fact. “I get it, and I appreciate it, and I won’t get in your way. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
Rigel nods, and he claps Brutus on the shoulder. “I promise I’m not going to give you pointless orders for the thrill of bossing around a Victor,” he says, flashing Brutus a decidedly unprofessional grin that reminds him - suddenly, painfully, like a hard kick to the chest - of Devon, even though he actually resembles a young Ronan. Then the smile falls and the soldier’s mask returns. “Let’s get going.”
Marius takes the pilot’s seat as usual, but this time Selene joins him in the cockpit. Brutus hasn’t seen much of Selene, not since the doctors cleared him for more than one visitor and the whole squad came by to visit and introduce themselves. He’d shaken their hands and memorized their names, and only later did he wonder if he should’ve asked their years.
The boy is professional and courteous enough, but there’s something off about him; he carries himself like a soldier but not quite like an ex-Centre kid, and his accent ain’t quite right. It’s not until one of the others cracks a joke about sand that Brutus gets it, and then everything falls into place. By then he’s almost even more impressed. Of all the districts who become Peacekeepers, Fours don’t usually cross the lines.
The girl, though, there’s something familiar about her, but Brutus can’t figure it out. Maybe he met her at some gala or other, maybe her initiation to the Corps was one of the ones he was invited to attend as commencement guest, but she doesn’t bring it up and he bets she ain’t gonna. The only people who can volunteer that they met a Victor somewhere are the ones old enough that it won’t look like political grasping, and that’s a long way off for Selene. But she’s young, she’s quiet, she’s polite, and she handles her rifle like Brutus holds a sword and that means Brutus trusts her.
Nobody talks in the hovercraft save to go over mission specs in quiet, businesslike tones. Except the more the silence grows the more Brutus’ mind hums, and it’s stupid but the thing is - he’s fresh out of the Arena all over again, and not the end part when he’d’ve spent the last ten days on his own fighting the elements and the Gamemakers’ inventions, no, but the beginning with a Pack. All the bickering and joking around and fake bonding to pass the time. Things were only silent when shit was really bad.
Dash has a bag of explosives strapped to his hip, and he catches Brutus’ gaze and grins a little, shifting the bag a little. “I’m the demolitions guy,” he says. Brutus is thrumming with so much energy he could probably power the whole hovercraft himself, but he can’t help but break out into a sharp burst of laughter. Of all of them Dash seems the most quiet, the most unassuming, the least likely to be into huge explosions. “I know, but what can I say, I like making things go boom.”
“He’s good at it,” Selene calls over her shoulder without turning around. “And not like me, I’d just blow up everything. Dash uses precision.”
“Okay, I like making things go boom neatly,” Dash amends, his grin turning proud and sheepish at the same time. “What can I say. If you need a way in or out without getting yourself buried in rubble in the process, I’m your guy.”
“What’s your thing, then?” Brutus asks, raising his voice a little so Selene knows he’s talking to her.
“Sniper,” Selene says, and leaves it at that.
“She’s really good,” Dash adds. There’s admiration in his voice and in his eyes as he glances up at the cockpit, both professional and something else, warmer and… aha. Ah, to be young again. Brutus keeps that thought to himself, but it is kinda nice to know that not everything goes by the wayside when the world falls apart. “She can - okay, well, I don’t know what the appropriate District 2 metaphor would be, but at home we’d say she can shoot the scales off an anchovy.”
“I’m sure that means somethin’,” Brutus says, and now it’s Dash’s turn to laugh.
And it’s probably dumb or something but just like that, now Brutus can make it through the rest of the trip without feeling like his brains are gonna eat through his ears. Whether the others got what was going on, or whether the kids are just friendly and filled the silence, it doesn’t matter, Brutus is grateful either way. He closes his eyes and lets the weight of the rifle across his lap ground him until Marius calls their arrival.
They don their field protective masks, and after that there’s no talking at all.
The ex-Peacekeepers communicate to each other using sharp military gestures and hand-signs, directing Brutus with fingers laid flat against his arm to attract his attention or exaggerated motions when the meaning of a particular signal escapes him. They make their way through empty corridors, long and twisting and absolutely devoid of guards, which sets Brutus’ alarm bells ringing. The lights are dim, but there are no scorch marks on the wall, no bullet holes, no sprays of blood, nothing to indicate Coin’s rebels were here at all.
Brutus likes this about as well as he’d like walking through a narrow chasm in the Arena without knowing who’s waiting on top ready to drop a rock on his head, but there’s no point flipping out. Years and years ago the Centre taught them about stress responses, how the body isn’t meant to carry that around for too long, and you have to be careful what you let it pickle in. Sure enough, after a while Brutus’ eyes start to go, everything seeming vaguely hazy, and at first he thinks he’s stressed, or exhausted - or hell, maybe he’s just getting old - until he looks down and sees a curl of white smoke around his feet.
In that moment Brutus is back in the jungle with the toxic gas crawling over him, eating at his skin and clawing at his lungs, tearing out wet chunks from inside him and forcing him to cough them out. He almost drops his gun, almost hightails it backwards away from the smoke and starts clawing at his skin to make sure it’s not burning - but the others don’t notice, they’re still moving, and Brutus can do this. He has to. He closes his eyes, forces air back into his lungs, and see it’s fine, he’s alive, and he has a job to do.
It means the rebels were here and they used smoke grenades to mask their presence, that’s all it is. It’s a good thing. Brutus swallows copper and idly wonders what happens if you puke while wearing an air filter.
Rigel nearly trips over the body of an unconscious guard when they turn the corner, and they come out into a long corridor lined with cells on both sides. There are more bodies crumpled on the floor further down, and several doors are hanging open. Rigel motions for them to split up and check the unopened cells, and they all branch off and head out.
Brutus gives himself a second, taking a few gulping breaths, almost dizzying within the mask, before moving out. The first room he checks is empty, a white, antiseptic space with nothing but a giant bathtub in the middle of it, strung with various wires and other apparatus hanging above it. The next looks like a parody of a hospital room, medical equipment and a stretcher and all manner of monitors, except that the stretches is splashed with dried blood that no one bothered to clean off.
The room after that -
He doesn’t mean to shout, he knows better than that, and thank the mountains and the earth it’s Marius who rounds the corner, eyes wide with alarm behind the thick goggle lenses. Brutus must look ridiculous, slammed back against the wall with his legs buckled, gasping like a kid who failed out of Residential because he couldn’t kill a kitten, but that’s not a kitten lying there on the slab in front of him. It’s not even a person, not anymore.
It used to be - and that bit there, and that over there, and those bits, shoved carelessly into a large tub and left to rot in the corner. And now the gorge rises and the pressure hits the underside of Brutus’ jaw and he really is going to throw up, and he rips off the mask so he doesn’t vomit inside it. Except that’s when the smell hits and now there’s no stopping him.
When he comes back Marius is crouched beside him, waiting, and Brutus would be ashamed of himself except he can’t find anything left within him except a deep, raw horror. Someone did this, people did this, actual human beings took this kid - whoever he is, whatever he did - and chopped him into bits. This boy who looks like he might have only been a few years older than Petra and now he’s in pieces and Snow only knows why.
Brutus wants to ask the question yet at the same time he can’t bring himself to do it. Marius answers it anyway. “We didn’t do anything like that,” he says. His voice is muffled by the mask but tight, laced with fury. “We were on interrogation duty. Nobody who cuts somebody into pieces is after information, they do it because they feel like it. But we have to go.”
“I know.” Brutus pushes himself to his feet, shaky, but then he finds his footing. He spits out one last mouthful of sour bile, drags a hand across the front of his face to wipe away any remaining mess, then pulls the mask back into place.
Three more empty cells, one more body - this one electrocuted, burn marks in the shape of electrodes with jagged dark lightning bolts arcing along her skin toward her heart, but otherwise untouched - and then, finally, Enobaria.
She’s tucked away in a back room away from the others, and she would make no end of fun of him if she were conscious but Brutus damn near bursts into tears at the sight of her. Compared to the others she looks like a miracle: all her limbs in place, no burn marks, no cuts or slashes or any other horrifying things Brutus’ long-disused imagination had come up with in the last few minutes. All Enobaria has is a few bruises, the showy kind that look worse than they are, which makes Marius and Rigel exchange looks and Brutus wonder if maybe whoever was in charge of her was Two and took it easy on her.
Marius goes to lift her, but Brutus stops him. “I can carry her,” he says. Rigel and Marius glance at each other again, and Brutus glares. “Look, you’re the better shots, and I know I’ve been in the hospital and everything but she’s half my size. Try to tell me I can’t do this and I’ll throw you out the window.”
They don’t have time to argue with him, and everyone knows it. Rigel nods, Marius steps aside, and Brutus bends and gathers Enobaria into his arms. She’s always been lean but now she’s lost a lot of weight, and it doesn’t take much to lift her up and hold her against his chest. She groans a little at the movement, her head tipping back and mouth falling open - and that’s when Brutus spots the bloody gaps where the gold-tipped fangs used to be.
“I don’t think that was one of ours,” Rigel says into the silence. “But at this point I don’t think it makes a difference.”
Brutus shakes his head, his heart leaden in his chest. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Almost there. A few more minutes and Marius will actually be able to breathe again - physically and metaphorically. This has been one hell of an op.
Dash guides them back toward their entry point, leading them through the maze of back passages and side corridors so they don’t take a wrong turn and end up waltzing into the guard break room or something. He squints at the readout in his palm, gas mask pushed up onto his forehead, sweaty strands of sandy hair sticking out in all directions. He gestures for them to turn this way or that and only has to double back once.
To be honest, Marius already has the way back memorized and so does Rigel, but it’s good to give the kid something to do, to keep his brain from spinning about what they saw back there. Dash had nightmares for weeks after they shot down those runaways from One, and that was distant and clean. Dash will make it through this mission because he has to, because he’s a soldier and a Scout and they’re here to save Enobaria, but as soon as they’re clear Rigel will have to watch him. Dash is the sensitive one, always has been, and there was a kid around his age hacked to pieces and left to rot back there like he was nothing. That would shake anybody.
Selene, of course, didn’t flinch, didn’t pause, didn’t let on there was anything out of the ordinary in any of the rooms at all. She still has her mask on but if she didn’t, Marius is sure he’d see her face impassive and professional, not a hint of hesitation in her expression no matter what she’s thinking. Her chest plate is still scorched from that homemade bomb weeks back.
Marius is more worried about Selene than Dash. Once they get back he’ll talk to her, see if he can get her to tell him anything, but with Selene there’s a good bet she’ll just turn up the professionalism and try to snow him.
They turn the last corner and run right into a squad of armed Peacekeepers.
Both sides immediately leap back and find cover around their respective corners, and Marius puts Brutus behind him. He’s the only one with a hope of blocking the Victor’s bulk and protecting Enobaria in the process, and if Brutus doesn’t like it then he can yell at Marius over breakfast tomorrow once they’re all home safe and sound.
Adrenaline floods Marius in a hard wave, kicking in strong and almost shocking after the slow burn of the mission beforehand. He hears the soft click across the hall as Selene sets her rifle to the sniper configuration, waiting for Rigel to give her the go-ahead to take out the other squad’s leader. Dash has one hand on his grenade belt, ready to blow them a new escape route in case they’re cut off.
Except nothing happens. Marius’ heart pounds, but instead of ordering a volley of gunfire or flash bombs, the squad leader barks, “Hold! Hold your fire!”
No.
Maybe he’s wrong. She has her helmet on and it makes her voice sound tinny, it could be the distortion, or perhaps Marius’ ears are playing tricks on him after all that time walking through the smoke. Maybe his mind is conjuring up ghosts because he was thinking about the Scouts earlier, maybe seeing the dead bodies spooked him.
“I’m coming out,” she calls, and oh fuck this, fuck everything, it isn’t Marius’ imagination after all. “My squad will hold so I’d appreciate the same.”
Selene has her mask off now, the rifle sitting comfortable in position. “Sir,” she says, cool and professional and utterly detached.
“Selene, for the love of Snow, don’t fire,” Rigel says before Marius can panic. Then Rigel swears under his breath and rips off his gas mask, and at this point there’s no sense in Marius being the only one so he does too. They’re all bare-faced except Brutus when the squad leader walks slowly around the corner, crossing foot over foot in long, deliberate sideways steps until she reaches the middle of the corridor.
She pushes back her visor, and Marius gets a good, long look at the woman he’s secretly had feelings for since they were assigned as junior cadets together years ago. An invisible giant punches him in the chest.
“Hello Brin,” says Rigel, rising to his feet and meeting her halfway.
“Hello Rigel,” says Brin. “What are you doing?”
“We’re rescuing our Victor,” Rigel says. “What are you doing?”
“My job,” Brin shoots back, of course she does. She’s younger than Marius by a few years but has already made squad leader because she’s brilliant, smart and charismatic and capable of absolutely anything. Once she singlehandedly talked down a crazed gunman with twenty hostages and convinced him to turn himself in using nothing more than persuasion.
She also kissed Marius once, at a bar the night they got their assignments rotating them to different squads, and he could have - he should have - but Marius has never been good at that sort of thing and he’d frozen. He’d waited too long, or made the wrong expression, because after a minute Brin gave him a small smile, patted him on the shoulder and disappeared into the crowd.
She’s dating Troy now. He’s twice her age, on his second twenty in the Capitol, and they’re very happy and that is not relevant to anything except that Marius has frozen all over again because his brain has apparently decided it’s just going to give up on working altogether.
“This isn’t your job,” Rigel says, calm and reassuring but there’s an edge to it now beneath the exhausted resignation. “They took her teeth, did you see that? Is that what you signed up for, is that the world you want to build? She’s our Victor, Brin. She’s my Victor. I’m not going to leave her here.”
Brin’s face twitches, and behind him Marius hears Brutus’ sharp intake of breath. Enobaria is Rigel’s Victor more than any other, because it was supposed to be Rigel onstage for the 62nd Hunger Games. He was the top of his class, in line for Volunteer when he took a spear to the leg two weeks before the decision and spent the next two and a half months in recovery. Instead of standing by her side he watched Enobaria’s Games from a bed in the recovery ward.
Enobaria is Rigel’s Victor the way Petra is connected to Selene, like Annie is to Dash. Marius and Brin, on the other hand, both their years the Victors went home to other districts and their classmates came back in coffins.
“You know you’re all reported dead,” Brin says finally, her voice tinged with faint exasperation. “Your hovercraft was one of the ones that never reported back after the Arena exploded. We assumed the rebels got you.”
Rigel chuckles, as though at a joke that only he understands. “They did. Just not the way you think.”
The silence stretches on. Brin finally looks at Marius for the first time, and the eye contact hits him hard and nearly knocks him reeling. He’s a soldier, the best of the best, even better because he’s better at following orders than giving them, but that means that now he’s stuck, breath rasping in his skull.
“Fuck this,” Brutus mutters. He strides forward, Enobaria still cradled awkwardly in his arms, and pulls off his mask. It takes a few tries without dropping her, and then he loses his hold on it and it bounces to the ground, but that doesn’t take away from the effect. If anything it adds to it, as by now a few of Brin’s squad have poked their heads around the corner to see what the noise was all about and are now gawking by the wall.
Brin opens her mouth, closes it, swallows, and wets her lips. “You were dead,” she says. It comes out accusing, and despite it all Marius almost laughs. “You were dead.”
“Yeah,” Brutus says. “Your friends saved me. And now I’m asking you to step aside so we can save Enobaria.”
“You know, if you’d just left your fucking mask on this would’ve made my life so much easier,” Brin says dryly, and that’s so perfectly Brin that this time Marius does actually laugh, even as his chest aches and Brutus rears back in umbrage. “No, I mean - that was great, I’m very moved and yes you win and I’ll get out of your way, but there are cameras in this facility, lots of them. Now I have to go make sure that every one of them is wiped so that nobody knows you were here. Bunch of rebels in masks, that’s one thing. Capitol-beloved confirmed-dead Victor alive and working for the rebels, not so much.”
Marius’ brief bout of good humour flees. Being caught on camera letting them go would be one thing - Brin could argue they’d fooled her, told her they were under orders from President Snow to take Enobaria to a safer facility following the rebel attack - but erasing security footage will put Brin solidly into collusion territory, even treason. Letting them go would mean losing her post, maybe a suspension, maybe worse if the president was in a bad mood, but this?
“If you get caught now we’re all fucked,” Brin snaps. She knows as well as Marius the cost of what she’s offering. So must her squad - but no one says a word in protest. “Get out of here!”
“Let’s go,” Rigel says. “Squad, move out.”
And that’s that, and it’s not any easier but suddenly it’s - simple, and that’s almost the same. Now Marius is not a man wrestling a decade’s worth of emotions and conflicting feelings and a sudden, staggering sense of loss. Now Brin is not the blindingly charming, blisteringly funny woman whom Marius blew his chance with years ago. Now they’re soldiers with a mission to complete and that’s all that matters. Marius’ commanding officer has given him an order, and Brin is staying back to cover their escape and make sure they see it through. That’s all it is.
He doesn’t look at her on the way past. He can’t.
They make it back to the hovercraft, and Marius slips past everyone into the cockpit to take the helm without speaking while Dash and Rigel stay behind to help Brutus with Enobaria. Selene joins him, kicking off her boots and resting her feet against a bare stretch of dashboard, and she turns her head and stares out the window without saying a word. She does reach into her pocket, fish out a ration bar and pass it over to Marius, and when he tries to brush her off she pokes him in the ribs with increasing insistence until he relents. It tastes like cardboard but his stomach growls, so apparently he needed it.
She doesn’t try to talk to Marius while they’re flying back to Eight, and for that Marius is grateful. Sometimes there’s nothing to say.
Enobaria is still unconscious in the hospital when the call comes that the resistance have found the facility with the remaining missing Victors, but this time Brutus is ready. This time there’s no other mission to piggyback, no secret messages from the Mockingjay to hold the Capitol’s attention while they sneak in on somebody else’s coattails. This time it’s all them, and Brutus joins Rigel and his squad as well as a full complement of other grey-uniformed resistance soldiers for their biggest operation yet.
The whole way over, Brutus prepares himself for what he’s about to see. The mentors were arrested when the Arena fell, and those back home followed suit not long after, and unlike Peeta Mellark and a few of the others, most of the Victors have not appeared on television for an interview or a propo. Coin’s rebels ain’t mentioned them either, nothing since the rescue of Annie, Johanna and Peeta that she hailed as a glorious victory. If she’s planning another attempt for the rest, she hasn’t said so, not to anyone that the second rebellion’s spies have managed to overhear.
That’s a whole lot of Victors left over who weren’t in that first facility, but it seems like both sides are content to forget about them - or at least hope everyone else does. If anything was going to convince Brutus that the group he fell in with is at least better than the others, it’s that they, at least, remember, and they’re the only ones doing anything about it.
Brutus tries to imagine what it must be like for the others in Thirteen, listening to President Coin say things like we have rescued the Victors as though that’s it, full stop. Katniss is young, sure, and the only other Victors she knew are either dead or in the 75th Arena with her, but she’s not the only one in Thirteen. Haymitch Abernathy lost most of his friends in that second Arena, but he’s been around almost as long as Brutus, and not everyone he chummed around with found themselves on the Reaping stage. Is he too drunk to care? What about Beetee, he still has his mentor and one girl yet living. Does he think they’re dead, or did he agree in some backdoor meeting that they’re not worth the cost of a second extraction, that the rebellion needs to move on? Or for Finnick Odair, was getting Annie back all that mattered? Does everyone else in the Village who raised him, did their best by him for the last ten years, mean nothing?
That can’t be. Brutus won’t believe it, he can’t. The only answer that makes sense is that Coin lied and told them the other Victors are dead, that the Capitol killed them, and there’s no way for any of them to disprove it and no way for them to do anything about it either way.
But Brutus can, and the resistance can, and now they’re on their way.
Brutus spends most of the flight there steeling himself for it. This time he knows what to expect going in, this time he won’t be blindsided. Of course, that’s what he thought about the second Arena and look how that turned out, but there was no helping it then and no point whining about it now. They have their mission, they even have backup this time, and they’re not leaving until every single Victor in that facility is out - one way or another.
They planned the op for a shift change, to box in as many of the guards in the break room as they can. Whether this works isn’t Brutus’ concern; he’s on extraction duty, not combat, and once they’re in he makes for his assigned corridor and lets the others worry about keeping them clear.
At least there’s nobody chopped up into pieces this time. That’s about the best Brutus can say for the whole mess, because while they might have started out asking the Victors questions about the Arena breakout, it’s clear that hasn’t been anybody’s priority for a while. The cells all stink of days-old blood and shit and urine, and they have those tubs with the wires and the medical tables laid out with scary-looking equipment and floors with grooves so that the blood can get hosed down easily.
The first Victor Brutus finds is Diana from Eight, and she’s a few days dead. She’s strapped to her back on a gurney, staring up at the ceiling with wide eyes, and her mouth is a mess of red that’s run down from the corners of her mouth and her face a twisted mask but he thinks - as far as he can tell, anyway - that there’s defiance there. Her hands are balled into fists and her jaw is clenched and Brutus is no doctor but he’s seen Arena suicides and if he had to guess he’d say she bit through her own tongue.
She bit through her tongue and choked on her own blood and they just left her there, turned down the temperature of the room to make it into a makeshift morgue until her skin turned blue and frost rimmed her hair. Still, Brutus gets the strangest feeling that whatever happened, she came out the winner. Whatever they wanted from her, Brutus bets they didn’t get it.
(Later it hits him that Cecelia’s husband, her three children, are not here. Maybe that’s what they were after.)
Brutus swallows hard, calls it in for the body squad, and moves on.
If nothing else, Brutus will hand it to the combat team, because he never sees a single guard. He hears the fighting, distantly, but he and the others on the extraction squad round up the captured Victors without facing any trouble. Most of the Victors are unconscious, though a couple wake up when they’re jostled, and not a few mistake Brutus for a hallucination.
“If this is the afterlife, I want my money back,” slurs Angus when Brutus hauls him over his shoulder. His eyes are glassy, but he manages to focus after a few tries and jabs one finger in Brutus’ cheek. “You ain’t half so pretty an angel as my mama taught me to believe.”
“You just keep praying then,” Brutus says, careful not to jostle him. Angus doesn’t look too bad but that doesn’t mean anything. Not all torture leaves marks, and indeed, some of the worst kinds don’t. “I get prettier when people are nice to me.”
But then Angus grips his arm, or at least as much as he can with his fingers spasming like that. (And there, see, that’s nerve damage right there or Brutus is an Arena monkey, damn them to hell and back.) “Listen, just in case I’m not dead and this is real, you gotta go back and look for Phillips. They took him away when he wouldn’t tell them where his girl is.”
Brutus goes cold twice over. “Rokia?” She’s a slip of a thing, a mechanic from Six who won the year before Petra. She’d given the Two boy a mercy kill after hours of suffering from a botched attempt by another tribute. Lyme took a shine to her, used to like to keep an eye on her when they were both in the Capitol. “What do you mean, he wouldn’t tell them? Where is she?”
Angus blinks slowly, takes a few breaths to steady himself. “She weren’t there, when it all came down. Got out right before they picked us up, I guess. Don’t know if she was in on it or what but they went right for him, been questioning him the whole time. Convinced he knows something. He wasn’t gonna give his girl over, and they weren’t gonna let him off easy. I haven’t seen him in a few days. He might be dead.” He frowns then, gives Brutus an accusing look. “Like how you’re dead.”
“I got time off for good behaviour,” Brutus tells him. They make it back to the hovercraft, and Brutus hands him off to the medical team. “Status?” Brutus asks.
“Three Victors dead so far,” says one of the soldiers, brisk. “One from Three,” (Shit, Brutus thinks, Beetee…) “Four, and of course Eight.”
“Not Six?” Brutus asks.
“Not yet,” she confirms. “We’re still missing both the Victors from Six and Eibhlin from Three, but we’re looking. We have a team bringing in the other Fours now.”
Brutus nods. “Right. Listen, Angus here says that Rokia - the girl, from Six - she ain’t here, says she got out when the Arena exploded. So if we don’t find her -“
She nods. “I’ll pass that on,” she says. She starts to head back, but then she gives Brutus a quick once-over and stops. “We have our teams on this,” she says, her voice gentling a little. “You’ve already done more than enough. If you want to sit this out -“
“I’m fine,” Brutus interrupts, only stopping himself from snapping at the last second. Not her fault, she’s military and he’s not, and he can feel his one hand trembling even as he presses it flat against his thigh. “I can do one more. Just tell me where we haven’t checked yet.”
He doesn’t find Phillips. Instead he finds Eibhlin, Beetee’s girl, curled up on a table in the corner as much as the restraints will allow her. She’s naked, skin pale and mottled with bruises and oozing sores, and they’ve shaved her head and stuck her full of IVs that he’s pretty sure are not there to help her with the pain. She’s not unconscious but she sure ain’t all there, eyes open and glassy and unseeing, voice gurgling in her throat in what might be words.
(At least, he thinks he hears a few, mostly no and don’t and please, and oh fuck, fuck, fucking fuck.)
Brutus doesn’t try to get her attention until he’s finished sliding the needles out of her skin and undoing the restraints. This is Beetee’s girl, the only one he’s got left, and Brutus watched Gloss slit Wiress’ throat and he helped him plan the attack that did it, but this is not the Arena anymore and nobody else is going to die. Eibhlin weighs basically nothing, and Brutus wraps her up in his jacket to give her a shred of fucking privacy before he gets her up into his arms.
“This is Brutus, I’ve got Eibhlin. Coming in now,” he says, and waits for the confirmation before heading out.
He makes it nearly all the way back to the hovercraft before she wakes up, but then it’s a doozy. She writhes in his grip, twisting and kicking, but with her swaddled in his jacket there’s little she can do about it so Brutus has to wrestle a bit but he doesn’t actually drop her. She screams but her voice is gone, nothing coming out but a raw, hoarse gasp, and it gets Brutus right in the gut but he can’t stop to reassure her. She might be panicked now but it will be much worse if they get caught.
They do make it back, though, and Brutus tries to had her over to the medics except it starts all over again, even worse. This time the screams are staggered, broken by sobs, and she fights her way out of the jacket enough to grip Brutus in the arms. “Please no,” she says, begging him, and she thinks he’s one of the guards but it’s the sight of the doctors that break her. “No, no, not again. Not again, please, I don’t know anything else, Please, you can - I’ll let you - you can do whatever you want, please, anything, I know lots of things -“
Oh, fuck.
Brutus knew, or at least suspected, that Eibhlin had been one of the Victors that the Capitol sold. She must have been terrified at her Reaping, like any untrained fifteen-year-old, but she’d marched onstage and torn the escort a new one for mispronouncing her name. In her victory interview she’d been pale and shaky but defiant, and the commentators made all kinds of ridiculous puns about her red hair and fiery personality.
Then the Victory Tour, and the next time Brutus saw Eibhlin she was a different person, pulled in on herself and quiet, startling away from touch. He knew what that meant. They all did.
To hear her say it, though - to hear her use it as currency with the guards, to get herself out of further torture - Brutus has to stop himself from grabbing a rifle and storming in there to do something stupid and get himself killed.
“That’s not happening,” Brutus tells her, fighting to keep the anger out of his voice because that sure can’t help. “We’re not going to hurt you, Eibhlin, nobody’s - we’re gonna make sure you’re okay.”
Eibhlin laughs a little, hoarse and ragged. “Not okay. Nothing’s okay. Lumina is dead. Wiress is dead. Beetee’s probably dead too.”
“Beetee’s not dead,” Brutus says firmly. He really, really hopes nothing changed in the last few days, but it’s not likely. All the intel says Beetee has been staying safe in District 13 and not running around on the front lines. “And neither are you.”
He brings her through the hovercraft to a small room with an examination table and a small, low tub. Eibhlin screams when he tries to lay her down on the table. She screams again -- nearly chokes on it, gibbering and pleading and scrabbling at his arms with nails torn down to the quick -- when he lowers her into the shallow bathing basin instead. And that's how Brutus ends up fully clothed and crouched in the tub with her, holding her while the medics sponge off the blood and pus, scrubbing away the caked waste from her thighs. Vomit rises in his throat, but Brutus pushes it back. This is not about him.
Eibhlin struggles at first, but at least it looks like none of them ever managed to turn a sponge bath into torture, and eventually she subsides. Brutus talks to her but she doesn't answer, just lies there with her head against his arm, breathing shallowly. “Hey,” Brutus says, thinking back to one of the nights when Beetee actually allowed himself a few drinks. Drinking games from Three apparently involve a lot of math. “Let’s play that number game. I’ll start. 1, 2, 3, 5 …”
That’s all he can do, unfortunately, but Beetee said there are number patterns that any Three can do the same as Twos and the death list, and sure enough Eibhlin picks it right up. “8,” she says, twitching. “13, 21, 34, 55 …”
By the time Brutus gets her cleaned off, Eibhlin is rattling off numbers bigger than his brain can even register, and she might still be dead-eyed but at least she's not catatonic. He lifts her out of the tub (he thinks, a hard lump in his throat, of Petra, after her recovery) and dresses her in a set of soft blue pyjamas handed to him by the medics, then he takes her hand and strokes it down the fabric over her arm to let her feel it. "There, see," Brutus reassures her. "Feel that, feel how soft. You're safe now. No such thing as dangerous places with soft clothes."
He hopes that's the only lie he ever has to tell her.
After that the medics take over, and Brutus changes out of his soaked, stained uniform into a fresh set of clothing. He should get back out there, look for Phillips. If this is what they did to Eibhlin because Beetee is unaccounted for, they’ll have done the same or worse to Phillips on account of his girl. But just as Brutus is trying to psych himself up to go, a team of rebel soldiers comes back, dragging Phillips between them.
He looks about as well off as Eibhlin, bruised and bloodied and marked all over with spots where the rebels have removed IVs or electrodes, but at least he’s wearing actual clothes. His eyes are vacant, and his feet slide on the ground as he tries to walk but can’t manage the coordination. Brutus runs over as the medics swarm, and Phillips rolls his head around and stares at him, blinking slowly with wide, drugged pupils.
“I can’t believe they’re giving me shitty hallucinations,” Phillips says, trying to wave everyone off. “Everybody knows you’re dead.”
“Angus made the same fuckin’ joke,” Brutus informs him. He goes to punch Phillips in the arm but stops himself just in time. “Did you guys trade notes back there?”
Phillips starts to say something as the medics continue their initial assessment, but instead - in a horrifying, startling break that reminds Brutus of the dam in the 70th - he collapses into tears. “Do you know what those bastards did?” he demands, choking out the words even as the tears drip down his face, tracing the hollows of his gaunt cheeks. “They made me a morphling. Twenty-eight fucking years since I won I never touched the stuff and that’s the first thing they did. They’ve been cycling me in and out of withdrawal ever since.”
He cries, and Brutus sits in silence. He’s known Phillips since his own victory, and in all those years the man has never touched anything stronger than coffee. Whoever did this had access to his files. Unlike the people who pulled Enobaria’s teeth, or chopped that boy’s limbs off, or stuck Eibhlin in a bathtub and jolted her full of electricity, this was tactical, and targeted.
This, Brutus thinks - remembering Rigel’s detached manner in the hovercraft, Marius’ low anger in the first Capitol facility - probably was the Scouts. Personalized, psychological, and ultimately reversible, but absolutely devastating to the target. Nothing wasted here.
One of the medics pauses, holds a hand to Phillips’ forehead. “Hey,” she says, firm but not sharp. “There’s no such thing as an incurable drug addiction, not with the right environment. Not with help. We’ll get you right again.”
But Phillips keeps crying, exhausted and broken, and after everything he’s been through Brutus isn’t going to sit and gawk. He picks himself up and heads inside, bypassing the medical corridor to wait for the rest of the combat teams to come back. Occasionally sounds filter through as the rest of the captured Victors start waking, cries and shouts and protests while the medics do their best to reassure them.
Brutus sighs, lets his head fall back against the wall and lets his eyes fall closed. It’s been a long fucking day.
Lyme stands beneath the shadow of the mountains, breathing in the sharp, pine-scented air, and has never felt so humbled.
It’s been non-stop since she arrived in District 2, but right now Lyme has a few minutes to herself and she’s grateful. She rests one hand against the rough bark of a pine tree, imagines the strength running down the trunk and through her arm, grounding her in the soil until she’s rooted in the very bedrock. It’s been years since she’s been out this far, years since Lyme went anywhere in Two except the Village and the main town at the heart of the district, and every time a Two rebel looks at her with a startled grin Lyme feels an odd, twisting stab of guilt and pride.
These are the people Lyme promised Coin would never turn, the ones who swallow the Capitol’s promises like water until they breathe in loyalty with the mountain air. They give their children to the Program willingly, take tesserae to feed their families without a second thought because the slips in the Reaping bowl mean nothing when a bright, strong Volunteer will take the stage. They cheered for Cato and booed Katniss Everdeen; loved him for loving Clove and fighting for his district, hated her for loving Peeta and fighting for her sister, and never saw the hypocrisy.
It’s not like Lyme was out of her mind to think they wouldn’t turn. Lyme wasn’t going to make Coin any promises on the district that created Brutus.
“Nice night,” calls a young Two rebel, pressing one hand to his chest on the way past. He says it in a rush, like he had to dare himself to do it, and when Lyme nods at him he nearly trips over his own feet.
“You think you’re better than them and it shows,” Emory said to Lyme once, when all the Victors since the last Quarter Quell were invited to the opening of a new quarry. Lyme had turned down a brave young man’s offer of a dance, clearly egged on by his giggling friends off to the side, and he’d gone on to waltz with a grinning Misha instead. Emory had found Lyme in a corner, taking small sips of her beer and trying not to grimace at the taste. “You think you’re smarter than them because you found a way out and they didn’t, because you talk proper and they don’t, because you’re cynical and mean and you think that makes you clever. You think when people don’t agree with you it’s just because nobody else could possibly have been smart enough to think of your idea first. You look down on hardworking people who make do with a simple life because you think they just don’t know any better, and you sneer at loyalty because you can’t imagine giving yourself to anything or anyone.”
Lyme had stared at her, unable to formulate a response because her brain was too busy trying to remember the last time she’d heard Emory have a bad thing to say about anyone, ever. “They’re good people and they don’t deserve your disrespect,” Emory had said finally, then left without giving Lyme the chance to retort.
That night Lyme had gone home to the Village in a foul mood. She’d woken Nero up at ass o’clock in the morning to spar because otherwise she might have chewed her own arm off, but - while Emory had been right, that didn’t make Lyme wrong. Two was a district of automatons and perfect soldiers, people who lived their entire lives in poverty, working fifteen-hour days for the lowest of wages while praising the Capitol for every scrap of food. Was it her fault they didn’t know any better? Was it her fault that they’d been brainwashed so thoroughly that nothing would ever change their minds?
And then she came here. Lyme can’t remember the last time she’d been so completely wrong about something - about everything.
They’ve been making rounds of the outer villages, the poorest mining towns hit hardest by recession as the quarries ran out of stone and no new industries moved in to pick up the slack. Lyme warned the soldiers on the way in, told them to expect a rude welcome at best and an impromptu militia at worst, and had steeled herself for everything that Nero warned in his propo and more.
Instead she found people with lined faces and cinched belts who stiffened at the sight of the weapons and Lyme’s face, but broke into relieved smiles as soon as she began to talk. “It means so much to see you out here, Ms. Lyme,” says one woman, gripping Lyme’s wrist with startlingly strong hands. “I know you keep our children safe, and I don’t mean no disrespect to you and your Victors, but it ain’t just about the Games, you know. There are no jobs out here, there’s nothing for us and nothing for them. The only thing we can do for our babies is to put them in your Program and hope they get a good job in town somewhere and don’t look back. That’s the best we can ask for, and do you know what that feels like? To hope you never see your children again?”
The woman swipes at her eyes and looks up at Lyme, defiant through the tears. “Out here, we do what we gotta do because it’s the only way we know how. Nobody remembers us out here, not the Capitol and certainly not them rebels - least, that’s what we thought until you showed up. If you show people there’s another way, they will follow.”
Lyme has years of media training and experience but she has nothing to say to that. It’s too much naked emotion, open and unashamed, all of Brutus’ pride and endurance but none of his forced stoicism, and Lyme can’t deal with it. She wants to flee from it, from that stare, afraid that this woman can see as much in Lyme as she’s showing her - but she pulls herself together.
“Thank you for your words,” Lyme says finally. What would Brutus say? Nothing fancy, nothing grandiose. “And for your pain. I will use it, and I won’t forget it.”
When they leave the village, one or two rebel soldiers stay behind in secret to secure the town, and a handful of townsfolk come with them instead. It’s a mix of young and not so young, men and women both, and they don’t make speeches or plead their cases but they fall in with stubborn faces and clenched jaws that say there will be arguments if anyone tries to make them go. But the soldiers from Thirteen, whatever they might think of Two, have orders to recruit where possible, and so they accept the newcomers without comment.
So it goes in every village. Each town brings more stories, more proud people who ask for nothing but the chance to fight. Lyme learns more about her district than she ever thought there was to know, and with each meeting Lyme’s shame at her ignorance and the limits of her own perception continues to grow. She still feels an outsider, almost alien, like she’s a visitor in her own district; they don’t feel like her people but strangers who have invited her into their house. At the same time, this is as close as Lyme has ever come to feeling like she might belong here.
In one town Lyme meets a couple who could have been Brutus’ parents, tall and strong and quarry-proud, and it’s been days since Lyme thought of Brutus in anything but idle memory but now the grief slams right back into her. She gets through the conversation, though, and she deserves a Games-damned medal for it because they actually talk about him: “We gave them everything,” says the man, his blue eyes blazing, jaw set at an angle that reminds Lyme so much of Brutus that she can’t breathe. “And it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough. They took our Victors back and killed them. If they’re not safe, who is? If the Capitol don’t care about them, they sure as shit don’t care about the rest of us.” Their town is more divided than some of the others, but Lyme still leaves with more people than stay behind.
It’s not all hugs and teary eyes and heartwarming stories, of course. Not everyone is comfortable with the rebels leaving soldiers, for one. In some of the areas where the mines are active and profitable they’re met with suspicion bordering hostility - and, when they recognize Lyme, disappointment. Nobody calls the Peacekeepers or turns them in, not with their Victor there, but the implication is clear: they can leave undisturbed, but come back here again and no one will make them any promises. It’s still better than Lyme expected going in, and regardless of it all, there’s not one outer village where at least one stubborn kid doesn’t break with the others and follow them on the way out.
They avoid the Academy towns, and the main city with its ex-Career borough, but somewhere along the line the word spreads to the right people. Lyme never finds out who said what or where, but here and there, one or two at a time, Peacekeepers show up. Never in a village, always on the road or at camp in between, but they come. Unlike the villagers these ones are usually older, grey at the temples and all of them with shadows behind their eyes regardless of age. Lyme doesn’t ask them for their stories, and they don’t tell her, but they bring their own weapons and take to training the new recruits without any urging.
Now, with the recruiting largely behind them, the focus will soon turn to combat. Other teams will handle the precision strikes Lyme recommended while in Thirteen; Coin has already said she wants Lyme at the front, attacking the main facility carved into the mountain at Eagle Pass. The Nut, they call it in Thirteen, a name that Lyme now uses despite its ridiculousness because it’s easier that way, for compartmentalizing’s sake.
Once the combat starts the real war begins, and the rebellion will stop being an intellectual exercise for these people and start taking real lives. Lyme doesn’t want that responsibility on top of everything else, but she can’t run from it, can’t deny these people the opportunity to fight even if it means most of them might not make it home.
And so instead she leans against the tree and breathes in deep. It feels strange and a little bit like she’s pretending, or putting on a costume that doesn’t quite fit her, but the mountains and earth were enough for Brutus and maybe Lyme shouldn’t be above that sort of thing after all.
Lyme will never be Brutus, and if the people need her to be for this rebellion to succeed, well, they may as well all lie down and wait for the Capitol to fly in on their hovercrafts and bomb them into rubble right now. But if people are looking to Lyme for hope, there’s a chance she might be able to do something with that. A chance she might be able to do what she joined this absolute shitstorm of an organization for in the first place.
“Commander?” says one of the rebels, approaching her and stopping at a respectful distance. They gave her the title when she left Thirteen, and it’s all for show, so she sounds important and has the proper authority to a people used to hierarchy and rules, but the soldiers at least pretend to take it seriously. “We’re due for the transmission from Thirteen in five.”
“Coming,” Lyme says with a short nod. She takes a deep breath, and she can’t salute to the mountains in any seriousness, not without feeling at once ridiculous and a complete fraud, but she does let her gaze linger for a long moment. Then she turns, squares her shoulders, and heads back to the command tent.
Chapters: 5/15
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, Coriolanus Snow
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 2 of My World's On Fire (How 'Bout Yours?): District 2 at War
Chapter Summary: Brutus and the ex-PK squad finally get the go-ahead to try to rescue the missing Victors. Meanwhile, it's finally Lyme's turn for a paradigm shift.
Brutus stares up at the ceiling, counting his breaths because it feels wrong to run through the deaths list when there are so many more now who never should’ve made it on. But he’s been having a recurring dream ever since he started field training with the rebels, of riding on the inter-district train, and Brutus can already feel it stirring. In the dream he’s always at the front of the train, in the engine room, and the driver is gone and the train is hurtling at top speed. It’s supposed to be taking him home to District 2 but instead the train is heading off in the opposite direction, far off into the deep wilds of the north. He can’t figure out the controls and he can’t stop it, and with every mile that passes the sense of dread grows around him as the sky outside turns dark.
Real subtle, you don’t need to have a fancy job in head-magic to figure that one out. Subtle, and also real stupid that he wakes up sweating given everything else that’s happened to him, but there’s brains for you. At least Brutus hasn’t regressed to having Arena dreams yet, like he sometimes does when he’s stressed and overworked even though it’s been over twenty-five years since the first one. He and Enobaria joked about it once, cast bets whether going through it all over again for real meant they’d finally kick the teenage nightmares to the hills or if they’d start having a whole new set.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if they mixed, though?” Enobaria had said, staring out at the jungle. “Like, you’re your age now and back in your Arena with all those kids in it. And oh, also, now you’re not wearing any pants.”
Brutus hadn’t laughed, and neither had she, and they’d gone back to hunting in silence.
He’s finally starting to doze when the door opens, and Brutus sits bolt upright, heart hammering in his chest as he flails for a weapon and comes up empty. “Shit,” he mutters, gathering himself under control. Not the Arena. Not under attack. Drag those reflexes back and don’t kill the help, son.
Except it’s not the help, it’s Rigel, his normally tanned face a pale smear in the darkness behind the sharp black outline of riot gear. “Sorry,” Rigel says immediately, and turns on the lights. “Sorry, I should’ve knocked, I wasn’t thinking, I just - Enobaria, we know where she is, and if we want to get her we need to move now. Are you in?”
Brutus nearly falls out of bed in his eagerness to stand, and he pulls on the uniform Rigel offers him while gesturing for him not to bother leaving. They’re all Careers here, and privacy is pretty pointless when just a few short weeks ago Brutus was standing there naked while a team of feathery Capitol interns waxed every inch of his body. They may as well not waste time. “What do we know?”
“We got intel from one of the resistance plants inside Thirteen,” Rigel says, bending down to steady Brutus’ boot so he doesn’t fall on his ass trying to balance. His brain is awake but the rest of him is still thinking about it. “Coin’s rebels found the location of the Victors who were in the Arena, and they’re making the extraction tonight. They sent their strike team without telling anyone, not even the Mockingjay, and there’s a diversion right now to keep the Capitol’s eyes off them and everything. Now or never.”
Rigel hands him a tactical vest and Brutus pulls it on, idly impressed that they managed to find one that fits him. He hesitates at the various fastenings and makes a helpless gesture, and Rigel steps in to help him with an expression of quiet relief. Brutus wonders whether Rigel expected him to bluster through it and waste time by refusing aid, which, granted, would not be an entirely unreasonable assumption to make given his persona.
“So why are we going?” Brutus asks, wincing as one of the straps pulled tight causes a brief spasm in his chest. “Do the other rebels have a shitty plan?”
“No, it’s a good plan,” Rigel says, his voice grim. “The problem is, Enobaria’s not part of it. Word is that Katniss Everdeen negotiated with Coin for her survival, which was nice of her - and unexpected. Unfortunately for us she didn’t think to specify her retrieval, and it looks like Coin is taking that deal to the letter rather than the spirit.”
Of fucking course.
Brutus is not a stranger to spin. He’s lived his whole life under some sort of propaganda or another - to the point that yes, it’s taken him forty years to use the word and almost as long to admit it to himself - and he knows, he’s not stupid, he knows that this could be the resistance creating a narrative for their own benefit. They want to paint this President Coin as a tyrant who needs to be stopped just as much as Snow, and so they’re going to tell him whatever suits that purpose, but. If a rebel group was going to risk its soldiers to rescue captured Victors, it would not be completely batshit to assume they’d leave the one from District 2 behind.
“It’s just the squad,” Rigel says as Brutus finishes suiting up. “The timing will be tight, but we can pull this off, and the fewer of us there are, the better. Let them do all the heavy hitting while we focus on the single extraction.” He pauses, gives Brutus a long, serious look that makes him seem much older for a moment. “I say this with all due respect, but -“
“You thought you’d have more time to train me, you’d rather not have me with you on this one, but you promised,” Brutus says, matter of fact. “I get it, and I appreciate it, and I won’t get in your way. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
Rigel nods, and he claps Brutus on the shoulder. “I promise I’m not going to give you pointless orders for the thrill of bossing around a Victor,” he says, flashing Brutus a decidedly unprofessional grin that reminds him - suddenly, painfully, like a hard kick to the chest - of Devon, even though he actually resembles a young Ronan. Then the smile falls and the soldier’s mask returns. “Let’s get going.”
Marius takes the pilot’s seat as usual, but this time Selene joins him in the cockpit. Brutus hasn’t seen much of Selene, not since the doctors cleared him for more than one visitor and the whole squad came by to visit and introduce themselves. He’d shaken their hands and memorized their names, and only later did he wonder if he should’ve asked their years.
The boy is professional and courteous enough, but there’s something off about him; he carries himself like a soldier but not quite like an ex-Centre kid, and his accent ain’t quite right. It’s not until one of the others cracks a joke about sand that Brutus gets it, and then everything falls into place. By then he’s almost even more impressed. Of all the districts who become Peacekeepers, Fours don’t usually cross the lines.
The girl, though, there’s something familiar about her, but Brutus can’t figure it out. Maybe he met her at some gala or other, maybe her initiation to the Corps was one of the ones he was invited to attend as commencement guest, but she doesn’t bring it up and he bets she ain’t gonna. The only people who can volunteer that they met a Victor somewhere are the ones old enough that it won’t look like political grasping, and that’s a long way off for Selene. But she’s young, she’s quiet, she’s polite, and she handles her rifle like Brutus holds a sword and that means Brutus trusts her.
Nobody talks in the hovercraft save to go over mission specs in quiet, businesslike tones. Except the more the silence grows the more Brutus’ mind hums, and it’s stupid but the thing is - he’s fresh out of the Arena all over again, and not the end part when he’d’ve spent the last ten days on his own fighting the elements and the Gamemakers’ inventions, no, but the beginning with a Pack. All the bickering and joking around and fake bonding to pass the time. Things were only silent when shit was really bad.
Dash has a bag of explosives strapped to his hip, and he catches Brutus’ gaze and grins a little, shifting the bag a little. “I’m the demolitions guy,” he says. Brutus is thrumming with so much energy he could probably power the whole hovercraft himself, but he can’t help but break out into a sharp burst of laughter. Of all of them Dash seems the most quiet, the most unassuming, the least likely to be into huge explosions. “I know, but what can I say, I like making things go boom.”
“He’s good at it,” Selene calls over her shoulder without turning around. “And not like me, I’d just blow up everything. Dash uses precision.”
“Okay, I like making things go boom neatly,” Dash amends, his grin turning proud and sheepish at the same time. “What can I say. If you need a way in or out without getting yourself buried in rubble in the process, I’m your guy.”
“What’s your thing, then?” Brutus asks, raising his voice a little so Selene knows he’s talking to her.
“Sniper,” Selene says, and leaves it at that.
“She’s really good,” Dash adds. There’s admiration in his voice and in his eyes as he glances up at the cockpit, both professional and something else, warmer and… aha. Ah, to be young again. Brutus keeps that thought to himself, but it is kinda nice to know that not everything goes by the wayside when the world falls apart. “She can - okay, well, I don’t know what the appropriate District 2 metaphor would be, but at home we’d say she can shoot the scales off an anchovy.”
“I’m sure that means somethin’,” Brutus says, and now it’s Dash’s turn to laugh.
And it’s probably dumb or something but just like that, now Brutus can make it through the rest of the trip without feeling like his brains are gonna eat through his ears. Whether the others got what was going on, or whether the kids are just friendly and filled the silence, it doesn’t matter, Brutus is grateful either way. He closes his eyes and lets the weight of the rifle across his lap ground him until Marius calls their arrival.
They don their field protective masks, and after that there’s no talking at all.
The ex-Peacekeepers communicate to each other using sharp military gestures and hand-signs, directing Brutus with fingers laid flat against his arm to attract his attention or exaggerated motions when the meaning of a particular signal escapes him. They make their way through empty corridors, long and twisting and absolutely devoid of guards, which sets Brutus’ alarm bells ringing. The lights are dim, but there are no scorch marks on the wall, no bullet holes, no sprays of blood, nothing to indicate Coin’s rebels were here at all.
Brutus likes this about as well as he’d like walking through a narrow chasm in the Arena without knowing who’s waiting on top ready to drop a rock on his head, but there’s no point flipping out. Years and years ago the Centre taught them about stress responses, how the body isn’t meant to carry that around for too long, and you have to be careful what you let it pickle in. Sure enough, after a while Brutus’ eyes start to go, everything seeming vaguely hazy, and at first he thinks he’s stressed, or exhausted - or hell, maybe he’s just getting old - until he looks down and sees a curl of white smoke around his feet.
In that moment Brutus is back in the jungle with the toxic gas crawling over him, eating at his skin and clawing at his lungs, tearing out wet chunks from inside him and forcing him to cough them out. He almost drops his gun, almost hightails it backwards away from the smoke and starts clawing at his skin to make sure it’s not burning - but the others don’t notice, they’re still moving, and Brutus can do this. He has to. He closes his eyes, forces air back into his lungs, and see it’s fine, he’s alive, and he has a job to do.
It means the rebels were here and they used smoke grenades to mask their presence, that’s all it is. It’s a good thing. Brutus swallows copper and idly wonders what happens if you puke while wearing an air filter.
Rigel nearly trips over the body of an unconscious guard when they turn the corner, and they come out into a long corridor lined with cells on both sides. There are more bodies crumpled on the floor further down, and several doors are hanging open. Rigel motions for them to split up and check the unopened cells, and they all branch off and head out.
Brutus gives himself a second, taking a few gulping breaths, almost dizzying within the mask, before moving out. The first room he checks is empty, a white, antiseptic space with nothing but a giant bathtub in the middle of it, strung with various wires and other apparatus hanging above it. The next looks like a parody of a hospital room, medical equipment and a stretcher and all manner of monitors, except that the stretches is splashed with dried blood that no one bothered to clean off.
The room after that -
He doesn’t mean to shout, he knows better than that, and thank the mountains and the earth it’s Marius who rounds the corner, eyes wide with alarm behind the thick goggle lenses. Brutus must look ridiculous, slammed back against the wall with his legs buckled, gasping like a kid who failed out of Residential because he couldn’t kill a kitten, but that’s not a kitten lying there on the slab in front of him. It’s not even a person, not anymore.
It used to be - and that bit there, and that over there, and those bits, shoved carelessly into a large tub and left to rot in the corner. And now the gorge rises and the pressure hits the underside of Brutus’ jaw and he really is going to throw up, and he rips off the mask so he doesn’t vomit inside it. Except that’s when the smell hits and now there’s no stopping him.
When he comes back Marius is crouched beside him, waiting, and Brutus would be ashamed of himself except he can’t find anything left within him except a deep, raw horror. Someone did this, people did this, actual human beings took this kid - whoever he is, whatever he did - and chopped him into bits. This boy who looks like he might have only been a few years older than Petra and now he’s in pieces and Snow only knows why.
Brutus wants to ask the question yet at the same time he can’t bring himself to do it. Marius answers it anyway. “We didn’t do anything like that,” he says. His voice is muffled by the mask but tight, laced with fury. “We were on interrogation duty. Nobody who cuts somebody into pieces is after information, they do it because they feel like it. But we have to go.”
“I know.” Brutus pushes himself to his feet, shaky, but then he finds his footing. He spits out one last mouthful of sour bile, drags a hand across the front of his face to wipe away any remaining mess, then pulls the mask back into place.
Three more empty cells, one more body - this one electrocuted, burn marks in the shape of electrodes with jagged dark lightning bolts arcing along her skin toward her heart, but otherwise untouched - and then, finally, Enobaria.
She’s tucked away in a back room away from the others, and she would make no end of fun of him if she were conscious but Brutus damn near bursts into tears at the sight of her. Compared to the others she looks like a miracle: all her limbs in place, no burn marks, no cuts or slashes or any other horrifying things Brutus’ long-disused imagination had come up with in the last few minutes. All Enobaria has is a few bruises, the showy kind that look worse than they are, which makes Marius and Rigel exchange looks and Brutus wonder if maybe whoever was in charge of her was Two and took it easy on her.
Marius goes to lift her, but Brutus stops him. “I can carry her,” he says. Rigel and Marius glance at each other again, and Brutus glares. “Look, you’re the better shots, and I know I’ve been in the hospital and everything but she’s half my size. Try to tell me I can’t do this and I’ll throw you out the window.”
They don’t have time to argue with him, and everyone knows it. Rigel nods, Marius steps aside, and Brutus bends and gathers Enobaria into his arms. She’s always been lean but now she’s lost a lot of weight, and it doesn’t take much to lift her up and hold her against his chest. She groans a little at the movement, her head tipping back and mouth falling open - and that’s when Brutus spots the bloody gaps where the gold-tipped fangs used to be.
“I don’t think that was one of ours,” Rigel says into the silence. “But at this point I don’t think it makes a difference.”
Brutus shakes his head, his heart leaden in his chest. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Almost there. A few more minutes and Marius will actually be able to breathe again - physically and metaphorically. This has been one hell of an op.
Dash guides them back toward their entry point, leading them through the maze of back passages and side corridors so they don’t take a wrong turn and end up waltzing into the guard break room or something. He squints at the readout in his palm, gas mask pushed up onto his forehead, sweaty strands of sandy hair sticking out in all directions. He gestures for them to turn this way or that and only has to double back once.
To be honest, Marius already has the way back memorized and so does Rigel, but it’s good to give the kid something to do, to keep his brain from spinning about what they saw back there. Dash had nightmares for weeks after they shot down those runaways from One, and that was distant and clean. Dash will make it through this mission because he has to, because he’s a soldier and a Scout and they’re here to save Enobaria, but as soon as they’re clear Rigel will have to watch him. Dash is the sensitive one, always has been, and there was a kid around his age hacked to pieces and left to rot back there like he was nothing. That would shake anybody.
Selene, of course, didn’t flinch, didn’t pause, didn’t let on there was anything out of the ordinary in any of the rooms at all. She still has her mask on but if she didn’t, Marius is sure he’d see her face impassive and professional, not a hint of hesitation in her expression no matter what she’s thinking. Her chest plate is still scorched from that homemade bomb weeks back.
Marius is more worried about Selene than Dash. Once they get back he’ll talk to her, see if he can get her to tell him anything, but with Selene there’s a good bet she’ll just turn up the professionalism and try to snow him.
They turn the last corner and run right into a squad of armed Peacekeepers.
Both sides immediately leap back and find cover around their respective corners, and Marius puts Brutus behind him. He’s the only one with a hope of blocking the Victor’s bulk and protecting Enobaria in the process, and if Brutus doesn’t like it then he can yell at Marius over breakfast tomorrow once they’re all home safe and sound.
Adrenaline floods Marius in a hard wave, kicking in strong and almost shocking after the slow burn of the mission beforehand. He hears the soft click across the hall as Selene sets her rifle to the sniper configuration, waiting for Rigel to give her the go-ahead to take out the other squad’s leader. Dash has one hand on his grenade belt, ready to blow them a new escape route in case they’re cut off.
Except nothing happens. Marius’ heart pounds, but instead of ordering a volley of gunfire or flash bombs, the squad leader barks, “Hold! Hold your fire!”
No.
Maybe he’s wrong. She has her helmet on and it makes her voice sound tinny, it could be the distortion, or perhaps Marius’ ears are playing tricks on him after all that time walking through the smoke. Maybe his mind is conjuring up ghosts because he was thinking about the Scouts earlier, maybe seeing the dead bodies spooked him.
“I’m coming out,” she calls, and oh fuck this, fuck everything, it isn’t Marius’ imagination after all. “My squad will hold so I’d appreciate the same.”
Selene has her mask off now, the rifle sitting comfortable in position. “Sir,” she says, cool and professional and utterly detached.
“Selene, for the love of Snow, don’t fire,” Rigel says before Marius can panic. Then Rigel swears under his breath and rips off his gas mask, and at this point there’s no sense in Marius being the only one so he does too. They’re all bare-faced except Brutus when the squad leader walks slowly around the corner, crossing foot over foot in long, deliberate sideways steps until she reaches the middle of the corridor.
She pushes back her visor, and Marius gets a good, long look at the woman he’s secretly had feelings for since they were assigned as junior cadets together years ago. An invisible giant punches him in the chest.
“Hello Brin,” says Rigel, rising to his feet and meeting her halfway.
“Hello Rigel,” says Brin. “What are you doing?”
“We’re rescuing our Victor,” Rigel says. “What are you doing?”
“My job,” Brin shoots back, of course she does. She’s younger than Marius by a few years but has already made squad leader because she’s brilliant, smart and charismatic and capable of absolutely anything. Once she singlehandedly talked down a crazed gunman with twenty hostages and convinced him to turn himself in using nothing more than persuasion.
She also kissed Marius once, at a bar the night they got their assignments rotating them to different squads, and he could have - he should have - but Marius has never been good at that sort of thing and he’d frozen. He’d waited too long, or made the wrong expression, because after a minute Brin gave him a small smile, patted him on the shoulder and disappeared into the crowd.
She’s dating Troy now. He’s twice her age, on his second twenty in the Capitol, and they’re very happy and that is not relevant to anything except that Marius has frozen all over again because his brain has apparently decided it’s just going to give up on working altogether.
“This isn’t your job,” Rigel says, calm and reassuring but there’s an edge to it now beneath the exhausted resignation. “They took her teeth, did you see that? Is that what you signed up for, is that the world you want to build? She’s our Victor, Brin. She’s my Victor. I’m not going to leave her here.”
Brin’s face twitches, and behind him Marius hears Brutus’ sharp intake of breath. Enobaria is Rigel’s Victor more than any other, because it was supposed to be Rigel onstage for the 62nd Hunger Games. He was the top of his class, in line for Volunteer when he took a spear to the leg two weeks before the decision and spent the next two and a half months in recovery. Instead of standing by her side he watched Enobaria’s Games from a bed in the recovery ward.
Enobaria is Rigel’s Victor the way Petra is connected to Selene, like Annie is to Dash. Marius and Brin, on the other hand, both their years the Victors went home to other districts and their classmates came back in coffins.
“You know you’re all reported dead,” Brin says finally, her voice tinged with faint exasperation. “Your hovercraft was one of the ones that never reported back after the Arena exploded. We assumed the rebels got you.”
Rigel chuckles, as though at a joke that only he understands. “They did. Just not the way you think.”
The silence stretches on. Brin finally looks at Marius for the first time, and the eye contact hits him hard and nearly knocks him reeling. He’s a soldier, the best of the best, even better because he’s better at following orders than giving them, but that means that now he’s stuck, breath rasping in his skull.
“Fuck this,” Brutus mutters. He strides forward, Enobaria still cradled awkwardly in his arms, and pulls off his mask. It takes a few tries without dropping her, and then he loses his hold on it and it bounces to the ground, but that doesn’t take away from the effect. If anything it adds to it, as by now a few of Brin’s squad have poked their heads around the corner to see what the noise was all about and are now gawking by the wall.
Brin opens her mouth, closes it, swallows, and wets her lips. “You were dead,” she says. It comes out accusing, and despite it all Marius almost laughs. “You were dead.”
“Yeah,” Brutus says. “Your friends saved me. And now I’m asking you to step aside so we can save Enobaria.”
“You know, if you’d just left your fucking mask on this would’ve made my life so much easier,” Brin says dryly, and that’s so perfectly Brin that this time Marius does actually laugh, even as his chest aches and Brutus rears back in umbrage. “No, I mean - that was great, I’m very moved and yes you win and I’ll get out of your way, but there are cameras in this facility, lots of them. Now I have to go make sure that every one of them is wiped so that nobody knows you were here. Bunch of rebels in masks, that’s one thing. Capitol-beloved confirmed-dead Victor alive and working for the rebels, not so much.”
Marius’ brief bout of good humour flees. Being caught on camera letting them go would be one thing - Brin could argue they’d fooled her, told her they were under orders from President Snow to take Enobaria to a safer facility following the rebel attack - but erasing security footage will put Brin solidly into collusion territory, even treason. Letting them go would mean losing her post, maybe a suspension, maybe worse if the president was in a bad mood, but this?
“If you get caught now we’re all fucked,” Brin snaps. She knows as well as Marius the cost of what she’s offering. So must her squad - but no one says a word in protest. “Get out of here!”
“Let’s go,” Rigel says. “Squad, move out.”
And that’s that, and it’s not any easier but suddenly it’s - simple, and that’s almost the same. Now Marius is not a man wrestling a decade’s worth of emotions and conflicting feelings and a sudden, staggering sense of loss. Now Brin is not the blindingly charming, blisteringly funny woman whom Marius blew his chance with years ago. Now they’re soldiers with a mission to complete and that’s all that matters. Marius’ commanding officer has given him an order, and Brin is staying back to cover their escape and make sure they see it through. That’s all it is.
He doesn’t look at her on the way past. He can’t.
They make it back to the hovercraft, and Marius slips past everyone into the cockpit to take the helm without speaking while Dash and Rigel stay behind to help Brutus with Enobaria. Selene joins him, kicking off her boots and resting her feet against a bare stretch of dashboard, and she turns her head and stares out the window without saying a word. She does reach into her pocket, fish out a ration bar and pass it over to Marius, and when he tries to brush her off she pokes him in the ribs with increasing insistence until he relents. It tastes like cardboard but his stomach growls, so apparently he needed it.
She doesn’t try to talk to Marius while they’re flying back to Eight, and for that Marius is grateful. Sometimes there’s nothing to say.
Enobaria is still unconscious in the hospital when the call comes that the resistance have found the facility with the remaining missing Victors, but this time Brutus is ready. This time there’s no other mission to piggyback, no secret messages from the Mockingjay to hold the Capitol’s attention while they sneak in on somebody else’s coattails. This time it’s all them, and Brutus joins Rigel and his squad as well as a full complement of other grey-uniformed resistance soldiers for their biggest operation yet.
The whole way over, Brutus prepares himself for what he’s about to see. The mentors were arrested when the Arena fell, and those back home followed suit not long after, and unlike Peeta Mellark and a few of the others, most of the Victors have not appeared on television for an interview or a propo. Coin’s rebels ain’t mentioned them either, nothing since the rescue of Annie, Johanna and Peeta that she hailed as a glorious victory. If she’s planning another attempt for the rest, she hasn’t said so, not to anyone that the second rebellion’s spies have managed to overhear.
That’s a whole lot of Victors left over who weren’t in that first facility, but it seems like both sides are content to forget about them - or at least hope everyone else does. If anything was going to convince Brutus that the group he fell in with is at least better than the others, it’s that they, at least, remember, and they’re the only ones doing anything about it.
Brutus tries to imagine what it must be like for the others in Thirteen, listening to President Coin say things like we have rescued the Victors as though that’s it, full stop. Katniss is young, sure, and the only other Victors she knew are either dead or in the 75th Arena with her, but she’s not the only one in Thirteen. Haymitch Abernathy lost most of his friends in that second Arena, but he’s been around almost as long as Brutus, and not everyone he chummed around with found themselves on the Reaping stage. Is he too drunk to care? What about Beetee, he still has his mentor and one girl yet living. Does he think they’re dead, or did he agree in some backdoor meeting that they’re not worth the cost of a second extraction, that the rebellion needs to move on? Or for Finnick Odair, was getting Annie back all that mattered? Does everyone else in the Village who raised him, did their best by him for the last ten years, mean nothing?
That can’t be. Brutus won’t believe it, he can’t. The only answer that makes sense is that Coin lied and told them the other Victors are dead, that the Capitol killed them, and there’s no way for any of them to disprove it and no way for them to do anything about it either way.
But Brutus can, and the resistance can, and now they’re on their way.
Brutus spends most of the flight there steeling himself for it. This time he knows what to expect going in, this time he won’t be blindsided. Of course, that’s what he thought about the second Arena and look how that turned out, but there was no helping it then and no point whining about it now. They have their mission, they even have backup this time, and they’re not leaving until every single Victor in that facility is out - one way or another.
They planned the op for a shift change, to box in as many of the guards in the break room as they can. Whether this works isn’t Brutus’ concern; he’s on extraction duty, not combat, and once they’re in he makes for his assigned corridor and lets the others worry about keeping them clear.
At least there’s nobody chopped up into pieces this time. That’s about the best Brutus can say for the whole mess, because while they might have started out asking the Victors questions about the Arena breakout, it’s clear that hasn’t been anybody’s priority for a while. The cells all stink of days-old blood and shit and urine, and they have those tubs with the wires and the medical tables laid out with scary-looking equipment and floors with grooves so that the blood can get hosed down easily.
The first Victor Brutus finds is Diana from Eight, and she’s a few days dead. She’s strapped to her back on a gurney, staring up at the ceiling with wide eyes, and her mouth is a mess of red that’s run down from the corners of her mouth and her face a twisted mask but he thinks - as far as he can tell, anyway - that there’s defiance there. Her hands are balled into fists and her jaw is clenched and Brutus is no doctor but he’s seen Arena suicides and if he had to guess he’d say she bit through her own tongue.
She bit through her tongue and choked on her own blood and they just left her there, turned down the temperature of the room to make it into a makeshift morgue until her skin turned blue and frost rimmed her hair. Still, Brutus gets the strangest feeling that whatever happened, she came out the winner. Whatever they wanted from her, Brutus bets they didn’t get it.
(Later it hits him that Cecelia’s husband, her three children, are not here. Maybe that’s what they were after.)
Brutus swallows hard, calls it in for the body squad, and moves on.
If nothing else, Brutus will hand it to the combat team, because he never sees a single guard. He hears the fighting, distantly, but he and the others on the extraction squad round up the captured Victors without facing any trouble. Most of the Victors are unconscious, though a couple wake up when they’re jostled, and not a few mistake Brutus for a hallucination.
“If this is the afterlife, I want my money back,” slurs Angus when Brutus hauls him over his shoulder. His eyes are glassy, but he manages to focus after a few tries and jabs one finger in Brutus’ cheek. “You ain’t half so pretty an angel as my mama taught me to believe.”
“You just keep praying then,” Brutus says, careful not to jostle him. Angus doesn’t look too bad but that doesn’t mean anything. Not all torture leaves marks, and indeed, some of the worst kinds don’t. “I get prettier when people are nice to me.”
But then Angus grips his arm, or at least as much as he can with his fingers spasming like that. (And there, see, that’s nerve damage right there or Brutus is an Arena monkey, damn them to hell and back.) “Listen, just in case I’m not dead and this is real, you gotta go back and look for Phillips. They took him away when he wouldn’t tell them where his girl is.”
Brutus goes cold twice over. “Rokia?” She’s a slip of a thing, a mechanic from Six who won the year before Petra. She’d given the Two boy a mercy kill after hours of suffering from a botched attempt by another tribute. Lyme took a shine to her, used to like to keep an eye on her when they were both in the Capitol. “What do you mean, he wouldn’t tell them? Where is she?”
Angus blinks slowly, takes a few breaths to steady himself. “She weren’t there, when it all came down. Got out right before they picked us up, I guess. Don’t know if she was in on it or what but they went right for him, been questioning him the whole time. Convinced he knows something. He wasn’t gonna give his girl over, and they weren’t gonna let him off easy. I haven’t seen him in a few days. He might be dead.” He frowns then, gives Brutus an accusing look. “Like how you’re dead.”
“I got time off for good behaviour,” Brutus tells him. They make it back to the hovercraft, and Brutus hands him off to the medical team. “Status?” Brutus asks.
“Three Victors dead so far,” says one of the soldiers, brisk. “One from Three,” (Shit, Brutus thinks, Beetee…) “Four, and of course Eight.”
“Not Six?” Brutus asks.
“Not yet,” she confirms. “We’re still missing both the Victors from Six and Eibhlin from Three, but we’re looking. We have a team bringing in the other Fours now.”
Brutus nods. “Right. Listen, Angus here says that Rokia - the girl, from Six - she ain’t here, says she got out when the Arena exploded. So if we don’t find her -“
She nods. “I’ll pass that on,” she says. She starts to head back, but then she gives Brutus a quick once-over and stops. “We have our teams on this,” she says, her voice gentling a little. “You’ve already done more than enough. If you want to sit this out -“
“I’m fine,” Brutus interrupts, only stopping himself from snapping at the last second. Not her fault, she’s military and he’s not, and he can feel his one hand trembling even as he presses it flat against his thigh. “I can do one more. Just tell me where we haven’t checked yet.”
He doesn’t find Phillips. Instead he finds Eibhlin, Beetee’s girl, curled up on a table in the corner as much as the restraints will allow her. She’s naked, skin pale and mottled with bruises and oozing sores, and they’ve shaved her head and stuck her full of IVs that he’s pretty sure are not there to help her with the pain. She’s not unconscious but she sure ain’t all there, eyes open and glassy and unseeing, voice gurgling in her throat in what might be words.
(At least, he thinks he hears a few, mostly no and don’t and please, and oh fuck, fuck, fucking fuck.)
Brutus doesn’t try to get her attention until he’s finished sliding the needles out of her skin and undoing the restraints. This is Beetee’s girl, the only one he’s got left, and Brutus watched Gloss slit Wiress’ throat and he helped him plan the attack that did it, but this is not the Arena anymore and nobody else is going to die. Eibhlin weighs basically nothing, and Brutus wraps her up in his jacket to give her a shred of fucking privacy before he gets her up into his arms.
“This is Brutus, I’ve got Eibhlin. Coming in now,” he says, and waits for the confirmation before heading out.
He makes it nearly all the way back to the hovercraft before she wakes up, but then it’s a doozy. She writhes in his grip, twisting and kicking, but with her swaddled in his jacket there’s little she can do about it so Brutus has to wrestle a bit but he doesn’t actually drop her. She screams but her voice is gone, nothing coming out but a raw, hoarse gasp, and it gets Brutus right in the gut but he can’t stop to reassure her. She might be panicked now but it will be much worse if they get caught.
They do make it back, though, and Brutus tries to had her over to the medics except it starts all over again, even worse. This time the screams are staggered, broken by sobs, and she fights her way out of the jacket enough to grip Brutus in the arms. “Please no,” she says, begging him, and she thinks he’s one of the guards but it’s the sight of the doctors that break her. “No, no, not again. Not again, please, I don’t know anything else, Please, you can - I’ll let you - you can do whatever you want, please, anything, I know lots of things -“
Oh, fuck.
Brutus knew, or at least suspected, that Eibhlin had been one of the Victors that the Capitol sold. She must have been terrified at her Reaping, like any untrained fifteen-year-old, but she’d marched onstage and torn the escort a new one for mispronouncing her name. In her victory interview she’d been pale and shaky but defiant, and the commentators made all kinds of ridiculous puns about her red hair and fiery personality.
Then the Victory Tour, and the next time Brutus saw Eibhlin she was a different person, pulled in on herself and quiet, startling away from touch. He knew what that meant. They all did.
To hear her say it, though - to hear her use it as currency with the guards, to get herself out of further torture - Brutus has to stop himself from grabbing a rifle and storming in there to do something stupid and get himself killed.
“That’s not happening,” Brutus tells her, fighting to keep the anger out of his voice because that sure can’t help. “We’re not going to hurt you, Eibhlin, nobody’s - we’re gonna make sure you’re okay.”
Eibhlin laughs a little, hoarse and ragged. “Not okay. Nothing’s okay. Lumina is dead. Wiress is dead. Beetee’s probably dead too.”
“Beetee’s not dead,” Brutus says firmly. He really, really hopes nothing changed in the last few days, but it’s not likely. All the intel says Beetee has been staying safe in District 13 and not running around on the front lines. “And neither are you.”
He brings her through the hovercraft to a small room with an examination table and a small, low tub. Eibhlin screams when he tries to lay her down on the table. She screams again -- nearly chokes on it, gibbering and pleading and scrabbling at his arms with nails torn down to the quick -- when he lowers her into the shallow bathing basin instead. And that's how Brutus ends up fully clothed and crouched in the tub with her, holding her while the medics sponge off the blood and pus, scrubbing away the caked waste from her thighs. Vomit rises in his throat, but Brutus pushes it back. This is not about him.
Eibhlin struggles at first, but at least it looks like none of them ever managed to turn a sponge bath into torture, and eventually she subsides. Brutus talks to her but she doesn't answer, just lies there with her head against his arm, breathing shallowly. “Hey,” Brutus says, thinking back to one of the nights when Beetee actually allowed himself a few drinks. Drinking games from Three apparently involve a lot of math. “Let’s play that number game. I’ll start. 1, 2, 3, 5 …”
That’s all he can do, unfortunately, but Beetee said there are number patterns that any Three can do the same as Twos and the death list, and sure enough Eibhlin picks it right up. “8,” she says, twitching. “13, 21, 34, 55 …”
By the time Brutus gets her cleaned off, Eibhlin is rattling off numbers bigger than his brain can even register, and she might still be dead-eyed but at least she's not catatonic. He lifts her out of the tub (he thinks, a hard lump in his throat, of Petra, after her recovery) and dresses her in a set of soft blue pyjamas handed to him by the medics, then he takes her hand and strokes it down the fabric over her arm to let her feel it. "There, see," Brutus reassures her. "Feel that, feel how soft. You're safe now. No such thing as dangerous places with soft clothes."
He hopes that's the only lie he ever has to tell her.
After that the medics take over, and Brutus changes out of his soaked, stained uniform into a fresh set of clothing. He should get back out there, look for Phillips. If this is what they did to Eibhlin because Beetee is unaccounted for, they’ll have done the same or worse to Phillips on account of his girl. But just as Brutus is trying to psych himself up to go, a team of rebel soldiers comes back, dragging Phillips between them.
He looks about as well off as Eibhlin, bruised and bloodied and marked all over with spots where the rebels have removed IVs or electrodes, but at least he’s wearing actual clothes. His eyes are vacant, and his feet slide on the ground as he tries to walk but can’t manage the coordination. Brutus runs over as the medics swarm, and Phillips rolls his head around and stares at him, blinking slowly with wide, drugged pupils.
“I can’t believe they’re giving me shitty hallucinations,” Phillips says, trying to wave everyone off. “Everybody knows you’re dead.”
“Angus made the same fuckin’ joke,” Brutus informs him. He goes to punch Phillips in the arm but stops himself just in time. “Did you guys trade notes back there?”
Phillips starts to say something as the medics continue their initial assessment, but instead - in a horrifying, startling break that reminds Brutus of the dam in the 70th - he collapses into tears. “Do you know what those bastards did?” he demands, choking out the words even as the tears drip down his face, tracing the hollows of his gaunt cheeks. “They made me a morphling. Twenty-eight fucking years since I won I never touched the stuff and that’s the first thing they did. They’ve been cycling me in and out of withdrawal ever since.”
He cries, and Brutus sits in silence. He’s known Phillips since his own victory, and in all those years the man has never touched anything stronger than coffee. Whoever did this had access to his files. Unlike the people who pulled Enobaria’s teeth, or chopped that boy’s limbs off, or stuck Eibhlin in a bathtub and jolted her full of electricity, this was tactical, and targeted.
This, Brutus thinks - remembering Rigel’s detached manner in the hovercraft, Marius’ low anger in the first Capitol facility - probably was the Scouts. Personalized, psychological, and ultimately reversible, but absolutely devastating to the target. Nothing wasted here.
One of the medics pauses, holds a hand to Phillips’ forehead. “Hey,” she says, firm but not sharp. “There’s no such thing as an incurable drug addiction, not with the right environment. Not with help. We’ll get you right again.”
But Phillips keeps crying, exhausted and broken, and after everything he’s been through Brutus isn’t going to sit and gawk. He picks himself up and heads inside, bypassing the medical corridor to wait for the rest of the combat teams to come back. Occasionally sounds filter through as the rest of the captured Victors start waking, cries and shouts and protests while the medics do their best to reassure them.
Brutus sighs, lets his head fall back against the wall and lets his eyes fall closed. It’s been a long fucking day.
Lyme stands beneath the shadow of the mountains, breathing in the sharp, pine-scented air, and has never felt so humbled.
It’s been non-stop since she arrived in District 2, but right now Lyme has a few minutes to herself and she’s grateful. She rests one hand against the rough bark of a pine tree, imagines the strength running down the trunk and through her arm, grounding her in the soil until she’s rooted in the very bedrock. It’s been years since she’s been out this far, years since Lyme went anywhere in Two except the Village and the main town at the heart of the district, and every time a Two rebel looks at her with a startled grin Lyme feels an odd, twisting stab of guilt and pride.
These are the people Lyme promised Coin would never turn, the ones who swallow the Capitol’s promises like water until they breathe in loyalty with the mountain air. They give their children to the Program willingly, take tesserae to feed their families without a second thought because the slips in the Reaping bowl mean nothing when a bright, strong Volunteer will take the stage. They cheered for Cato and booed Katniss Everdeen; loved him for loving Clove and fighting for his district, hated her for loving Peeta and fighting for her sister, and never saw the hypocrisy.
It’s not like Lyme was out of her mind to think they wouldn’t turn. Lyme wasn’t going to make Coin any promises on the district that created Brutus.
“Nice night,” calls a young Two rebel, pressing one hand to his chest on the way past. He says it in a rush, like he had to dare himself to do it, and when Lyme nods at him he nearly trips over his own feet.
“You think you’re better than them and it shows,” Emory said to Lyme once, when all the Victors since the last Quarter Quell were invited to the opening of a new quarry. Lyme had turned down a brave young man’s offer of a dance, clearly egged on by his giggling friends off to the side, and he’d gone on to waltz with a grinning Misha instead. Emory had found Lyme in a corner, taking small sips of her beer and trying not to grimace at the taste. “You think you’re smarter than them because you found a way out and they didn’t, because you talk proper and they don’t, because you’re cynical and mean and you think that makes you clever. You think when people don’t agree with you it’s just because nobody else could possibly have been smart enough to think of your idea first. You look down on hardworking people who make do with a simple life because you think they just don’t know any better, and you sneer at loyalty because you can’t imagine giving yourself to anything or anyone.”
Lyme had stared at her, unable to formulate a response because her brain was too busy trying to remember the last time she’d heard Emory have a bad thing to say about anyone, ever. “They’re good people and they don’t deserve your disrespect,” Emory had said finally, then left without giving Lyme the chance to retort.
That night Lyme had gone home to the Village in a foul mood. She’d woken Nero up at ass o’clock in the morning to spar because otherwise she might have chewed her own arm off, but - while Emory had been right, that didn’t make Lyme wrong. Two was a district of automatons and perfect soldiers, people who lived their entire lives in poverty, working fifteen-hour days for the lowest of wages while praising the Capitol for every scrap of food. Was it her fault they didn’t know any better? Was it her fault that they’d been brainwashed so thoroughly that nothing would ever change their minds?
And then she came here. Lyme can’t remember the last time she’d been so completely wrong about something - about everything.
They’ve been making rounds of the outer villages, the poorest mining towns hit hardest by recession as the quarries ran out of stone and no new industries moved in to pick up the slack. Lyme warned the soldiers on the way in, told them to expect a rude welcome at best and an impromptu militia at worst, and had steeled herself for everything that Nero warned in his propo and more.
Instead she found people with lined faces and cinched belts who stiffened at the sight of the weapons and Lyme’s face, but broke into relieved smiles as soon as she began to talk. “It means so much to see you out here, Ms. Lyme,” says one woman, gripping Lyme’s wrist with startlingly strong hands. “I know you keep our children safe, and I don’t mean no disrespect to you and your Victors, but it ain’t just about the Games, you know. There are no jobs out here, there’s nothing for us and nothing for them. The only thing we can do for our babies is to put them in your Program and hope they get a good job in town somewhere and don’t look back. That’s the best we can ask for, and do you know what that feels like? To hope you never see your children again?”
The woman swipes at her eyes and looks up at Lyme, defiant through the tears. “Out here, we do what we gotta do because it’s the only way we know how. Nobody remembers us out here, not the Capitol and certainly not them rebels - least, that’s what we thought until you showed up. If you show people there’s another way, they will follow.”
Lyme has years of media training and experience but she has nothing to say to that. It’s too much naked emotion, open and unashamed, all of Brutus’ pride and endurance but none of his forced stoicism, and Lyme can’t deal with it. She wants to flee from it, from that stare, afraid that this woman can see as much in Lyme as she’s showing her - but she pulls herself together.
“Thank you for your words,” Lyme says finally. What would Brutus say? Nothing fancy, nothing grandiose. “And for your pain. I will use it, and I won’t forget it.”
When they leave the village, one or two rebel soldiers stay behind in secret to secure the town, and a handful of townsfolk come with them instead. It’s a mix of young and not so young, men and women both, and they don’t make speeches or plead their cases but they fall in with stubborn faces and clenched jaws that say there will be arguments if anyone tries to make them go. But the soldiers from Thirteen, whatever they might think of Two, have orders to recruit where possible, and so they accept the newcomers without comment.
So it goes in every village. Each town brings more stories, more proud people who ask for nothing but the chance to fight. Lyme learns more about her district than she ever thought there was to know, and with each meeting Lyme’s shame at her ignorance and the limits of her own perception continues to grow. She still feels an outsider, almost alien, like she’s a visitor in her own district; they don’t feel like her people but strangers who have invited her into their house. At the same time, this is as close as Lyme has ever come to feeling like she might belong here.
In one town Lyme meets a couple who could have been Brutus’ parents, tall and strong and quarry-proud, and it’s been days since Lyme thought of Brutus in anything but idle memory but now the grief slams right back into her. She gets through the conversation, though, and she deserves a Games-damned medal for it because they actually talk about him: “We gave them everything,” says the man, his blue eyes blazing, jaw set at an angle that reminds Lyme so much of Brutus that she can’t breathe. “And it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough. They took our Victors back and killed them. If they’re not safe, who is? If the Capitol don’t care about them, they sure as shit don’t care about the rest of us.” Their town is more divided than some of the others, but Lyme still leaves with more people than stay behind.
It’s not all hugs and teary eyes and heartwarming stories, of course. Not everyone is comfortable with the rebels leaving soldiers, for one. In some of the areas where the mines are active and profitable they’re met with suspicion bordering hostility - and, when they recognize Lyme, disappointment. Nobody calls the Peacekeepers or turns them in, not with their Victor there, but the implication is clear: they can leave undisturbed, but come back here again and no one will make them any promises. It’s still better than Lyme expected going in, and regardless of it all, there’s not one outer village where at least one stubborn kid doesn’t break with the others and follow them on the way out.
They avoid the Academy towns, and the main city with its ex-Career borough, but somewhere along the line the word spreads to the right people. Lyme never finds out who said what or where, but here and there, one or two at a time, Peacekeepers show up. Never in a village, always on the road or at camp in between, but they come. Unlike the villagers these ones are usually older, grey at the temples and all of them with shadows behind their eyes regardless of age. Lyme doesn’t ask them for their stories, and they don’t tell her, but they bring their own weapons and take to training the new recruits without any urging.
Now, with the recruiting largely behind them, the focus will soon turn to combat. Other teams will handle the precision strikes Lyme recommended while in Thirteen; Coin has already said she wants Lyme at the front, attacking the main facility carved into the mountain at Eagle Pass. The Nut, they call it in Thirteen, a name that Lyme now uses despite its ridiculousness because it’s easier that way, for compartmentalizing’s sake.
Once the combat starts the real war begins, and the rebellion will stop being an intellectual exercise for these people and start taking real lives. Lyme doesn’t want that responsibility on top of everything else, but she can’t run from it, can’t deny these people the opportunity to fight even if it means most of them might not make it home.
And so instead she leans against the tree and breathes in deep. It feels strange and a little bit like she’s pretending, or putting on a costume that doesn’t quite fit her, but the mountains and earth were enough for Brutus and maybe Lyme shouldn’t be above that sort of thing after all.
Lyme will never be Brutus, and if the people need her to be for this rebellion to succeed, well, they may as well all lie down and wait for the Capitol to fly in on their hovercrafts and bomb them into rubble right now. But if people are looking to Lyme for hope, there’s a chance she might be able to do something with that. A chance she might be able to do what she joined this absolute shitstorm of an organization for in the first place.
“Commander?” says one of the rebels, approaching her and stopping at a respectful distance. They gave her the title when she left Thirteen, and it’s all for show, so she sounds important and has the proper authority to a people used to hierarchy and rules, but the soldiers at least pretend to take it seriously. “We’re due for the transmission from Thirteen in five.”
“Coming,” Lyme says with a short nod. She takes a deep breath, and she can’t salute to the mountains in any seriousness, not without feeling at once ridiculous and a complete fraud, but she does let her gaze linger for a long moment. Then she turns, squares her shoulders, and heads back to the command tent.