Fic: and your victor is ... [The Social Network/The Hunger Games][1/2]

Jun 09, 2012 03:26

Title: and your victor is ...
Fandom: The Social Network/The Hunger Games
Characters/Pairings: literally everybody from the TSN verse, Haymitch, Beetee, Portia
Summary: Sean Parker is the winner of the 26th Annual Hunger Games. Yeah, he wasn't expecting that, either.
Word Count: 12,700
Notes: So, a couple months ago, I did that 3 sentence meme on my LJ, and lady_amaunet (who doesn't even like TSN, YOU DON'T EVEN GO HERE) prompted me with, "YOU SHOULD WRITE SEAN PARKER AS A VICTOR IN THE GAMES," and I said, "no." and then I said, "... wait, what District would he be from." and then 12k happened.

Let me repeat that. THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THREE SENTENCES LONG.

I've had this finished for awhile, it's just REALLY INTIMIDATING, posting this, because I promise you, you will see TSN/THG done again, not by me, and it will be SO MUCH BETTER. Seriously, pay this entry no attention, I just want it off my computer.

Warnings: MASS CHARACTER DEATH ON A HUNGER GAMES SCALE.



Quick pictorial guide to the TSN minor characters to jog your memory before you continue, and let's face it, I can talk about the minor characters all day ♥____♥

KC - likes cats that look like Hitler
Bob and Stuart Singer - Bob chooses inopportune moments to forget his contacts
Alice - deserves a medal for going within ten feet of Mark Zuckerberg's dick
Amelia Ritter - really doesn't like snakes and is not a trombone major
Tori - can kill you with chopsticks
Sharon - does not appreciate beer bottles being thrown at her
Mackey - hits refresh
Ashleigh - enjoys sniffing cocaine off half-naked girls

-

As soon as they have a moment alone, Yass twists around in her seat and lowers her voice. "Do you know anything about his Games?"

He blinks at her, startled, because she hasn't even so much as looked at him since they were called up to the stage. Then he recovers. "They were only --"

She shakes her head. She has eyes as slim as falling helicopter seeds; the same light green shade, even, that has him thinking about autumn. "I was only four the last time District 3 won, remember?"

Beetee swallows. She's thirteen, wearing hand-me-down shoes with rusted buckles. "They replay them sometimes," he tries.

Her voice drops even further, eyes shifting left, then right. "I don't watch," she confesses, low. "I always look at the corner of the screen instead when they try to make me."

He blinks again. Not watching the mandatory Captiol broadcasts of the Games had never occurred to him. You watch and you learn, that's what you do.

He shifts closer in the armchair, looking over his shoulder in the direction Sean had gone. Sean is nervous, wired and twitchy, sure, but District 3 has paranoia down to an exact art, so that's not unusual, and as a mentor, he still has the muscle to flip Beetee and pin him if they get caught. Sean Parker is a hair trigger, and hates the sound of whispering, everyone knows that.

"It was the 26th Hunger Games," he says, low, and Yass makes an impatient noise in the back of her throat, because even she knows that much. "Things were different back then."

"Like the names," she says promptly. "They used to name their kids such weird things."

"Right," Beetee shares a helpless grin with her, because it's true. "But that was right after the Quarter Quell, see, and it was still the only thing people could talk about. You can't beat a Quarter Quell --" Yass blanches. In the Quarter Quell, they had to vote on who to send in as tribute; there wasn't anything less entertaining. "But the next year, the Gamemakers had to put extra effort in to keep the Capitol interested, following such an exciting Games."

Realization begins to dawn over her face. "That was the year with the labyrinth, wasn't it?" she goes.

"Yes," comes from right behind them, so sudden that Beetee and Yass jump as if touched by a live electrical wire.

Sean Parker braces his hands on the back of the streamlined sofa they're sitting on and regards them coolly, a little menacing, as ever. He has eyes the color of a thunderstorm sky, green and yellow and grey, and they flicker, watchful and wry.

"That was the year with the labyrinth."

-

"How old were they, Sean?" District 8 calls across the divide, taunting. "The girls?"

He's too far away for Sean to get a clear shot with his darts, and they all know it. He tightens his fingers around the blowgun, just in case. The girl from 12 is laughing, canted as high as birdcall on the wind, and he glances at her only long enough to gauge that she's too far away, too.

The Gamemakers don't want anyone to die right now, seems to be the message. They're too entertaining as they are.

Sean bares his teeth in the facsimile of a smile. District 8 scored abysmally low in training. He was never supposed to survive past the Cornucopia, much less down to the final four. He's not the one to watch, so Sean scarcely remembers anything about him, except his name.

"When I get my hands on you, Eduardo Saverin," he shouts back, cheerful. "I'm going to hook your spleen out through your nose."

District 8's teeth flash in a dazzling smile. "How old was the girl from your District, Sean?" he continues, undaunted. "Twelve? Thirteen?"

Sean grinds his teeth. Sharon had been as small and brown-haired as a dormouse, and twice as timid. She and Sean grew up in houses so close together that sometimes her mother would throw open her window and ask Sean to hand her some sugar, if they had any to spare. Sean remembers holding a rag to Sharon's mouth after she lost her two front teeth, walking her home as she cussed and spat blood, tiny and all of six years old.

"Was it hard?" calls Eduardo, so sweetly. "Was it hard, killing her? Or do you just really like little girls?"

Fury makes Sean's vision flash away white. He breathes out hard through his nose, trying to get a grip on it, and for a moment, he can't see anything except sunlight, piercingly bright on the backs of his eyelids. The girl from District 12 has stopped laughing, at least.

"How are your feet, Wardo?" she calls across the distance, sparing Sean from having to fake a witty rejoinder he doesn't feel. "Are you ready to run?"

Mark touches Eduardo's elbow before he can reply, and below them, the ground of the labyrinth continues to bubble, unstable and hot as lava, trapping them high up on the walls. District 8's bare feet are blistered, torn bloody, and he's begun to leave footprints outlined in red with every step. There's only four of them left, however, so Sean doesn't think he's particularly worried about being tracked anymore, and if they wait long enough, blood poisoning will get him.

Really, though, Sean doesn't think Eduardo is particularly worried about surviving, and yet, it's the best he's managed to do so far.

It's very odd.

In the labyrinth, you don't drink the water unless it's green. Sean watched both tributes from District 9 die in order to learn that. The glasses they have to drink from are exquisitely-wrought glass, more suited to the grand parties in the heart of the Capitol. What a picture they must make: dirty, terrified children drinking out of martini glasses.

That night, the four of them toast each other with glasses as green as summer apples, smiling and grim, and they wait for the labyrinth to settle and for the games to start again.

The Capitol loves it, so it keeps them alive for another day.

-

District 3 is the smallest of all the Districts, and the most carefully watched. The Capitol keeps them tucked tight in its shadow, in the dismal, scrubby prairies where the summer sunlight bakes the earth into fissures and nothing grows except for thorny toads and weeds ("and straight from the moist, sweaty armpit of the Capitol, it's District 3!" says the chirpy boy from 6 when he sees them in the training house, which neither Sean nor Sharon know what to do with because it's true.) Sean grew up knowing even the faucets, the fences, the trees had ears: there's no such thing as private conversation in District 3.

Unlike 1, 2, and even 4, 3 never had a prayer of becoming a Career District, because the Capitol wouldn't dare train up the smartest children in the country for laboratory research and then give them weapons, too.

-

Sean is the oldest tribute in this year's Games. The Reaping came two months before his nineteenth birthday, and while the unfairness of this makes him grind his teeth, he goes in knowing he has a real chance of coming back out again.

Sharon takes his hand while they sit and wait for the kids from 1 and 2 to go in and strut their stuff in front of the Gamemakers, turning it over in hers so she can run her thumb over his knuckles. She's polite enough not to comment on how sweaty his hands are, and instead brings up something that doesn't hurt his pride as much. "You didn't have anybody to say good-bye to you after the Reaping, did you?"

"No," he answers. His parents went into the laboratories as soon as he could sign up for tessarae and fend for himself.

He tested higher than they did, and everyone knows what happens to the people in District 3 who don't test well.

She nods, and buries her face behind his shoulder when the girl from 4 -- Ashleigh, with the legs like a stairway to heaven that Sean can't stop staring at -- shoots her a vicious look, because their muttering is only making the others more nervous, and Sharon cringes away from everything. "So you don't have anybody to get yourself home to?"

"No," he replies, and gives her hand a squeeze. "I gotta go in there to win for myself. It's much harder."

They don't mention that in order for him to go home, she has to die. They look up when the voice calls for KC Kirring, who straightens her spine self-consciously and walks through the doors, the 2 on her back the last thing they see before the door closes again. Sean's next.

Sharon, conversely, is the youngest tribute, by a margin of about seven weeks. She's thirteen, and so is Dustin Moskowitz, the bird-thin boy from 6, who plasters on a grinning veneer to cover the way he shakes and trembles with terror, pretty much constantly.

They both make for very, very tragic figures when they die, because that's how the Capitol wants it.

(This was before they projected the images into the night sky; back then, they only had a simple roll call at the end of the day. Sean heard Dustin's name on the second night, but it isn't until the recap that he sees how he dies; the puzzled tilt of his head, the way his mouth forms the beginning of a question, "what's he talking ab--" seconds before he steps on the wrong tile and blades shoot from the walls, deadly curving scimitars whistling sharp and beheading him in a single clean movement. His sister, three paces behind him, side-by-side with the boy from District 7, screams and screams and screams, and they show every second of her breakdown.)

(Sharon dies in a section of the labyrinth that's nothing but fifteen-foot rose bushes, winding trellises of blood-red star jasmine, and a kissing gate. It smells sweet and she falls asleep in the sunlight, exhausted from maze-running, trusting him to guard her. Sean waits until she's smiling and then puts his hand over her nose and mouth. She wakes too late to do anything but flail out, fingers closing around his forearm, and it's over quickly. Sean collects her things and moves on. Better a merciful killing at Sean's hands than a less merciful one at Mark's or Divya's.

He doesn't think about her family: they'll make more kids if they need to replace her, he assumes, since that's what families tend to do.)

-

The kids in 3 are meager, scrawny and underfed, yellow-tinged from too little sun, which in terms of brute strength means they're slaughtered in the Games almost every time, but the only District that could possibly rival them in intelligence is 5. District 3 is on the cutting edge of Capitol technology; their people grown into scientists, technicians, analysts, programmers, and then run into the ground from the crack of dawn until even the insects go quiet in the dead of night, and nothing is ever enough to sate the bigwigs that come in to monitor their progress.

So they may be the Capitol's brain, but District 5 is what powers its beating heart; great, wide fields of churning wind turbines, massive roaring dams frothed in white, black-belching smokestacks of burning coal. It never sleeps.

In the atrium cage of 5, they raise their children to be efficient to the point of cruelty. They take up as little space, little food, little sleep as possible. It's how they survive.

This year, both tributes from 5 make it to the final eight.

Erica Albright is fifteen. She isn't as smart and doesn't score as high as her District partner. It makes her a cutting and surly individual because she knows all support from sponsors will automatically go to him, but she's the one who locks Alice Moskowitz in the never-ending staircase and turns it into an airless deathtrap, a stunt that leaves the announcers whistling with admiration.

Mark Zuckerberg is fourteen. He doesn't favor traps as much as Erica does, nor did he attempt to mislead any of the other tributes into thinking he's not going to kill them the second he set eyes on them, the way Sean and Christy tried at first. His specialty is stabbing people in the back.

Up until the second he dies, Sean still expects Mark to be the one who goes home.

-

The goal of the labyrinth isn't to find your way out -- because there is no way out, not out of the labyrinth, not out of the arena, not out of the Games or even out of Panem, they're very clear on that point and have been since the first time the Districts tried that stunt -- or to find the heart of it. Rather, the best any of them can do is to outrun each other and not get cornered at a dead end, where there will always inevitably be some nasty Gamemaker trap waiting for them.

All twenty-four tributes are lifted to the very center of the maze, paired on plates around the Cornucopia. The first time Sean looks at the vast sprawl of labyrinth, spreading as far as he can see and terraced into layers to give it a dramatic sense of depth, each section different from the next, he feels the thrill of it go down to the very center of his bones, because nothing ever feels like a game up until you realize you can win.

On the plate directly beside him, Divya breathes out, very quiet, "shit."

This arena isn't for District 2, and they both know it. It's not for the aggression and the brute strength of the Career Districts, not for the hardy tenacity of 10, 11, or 12. This arena is built for the cunning, the problem-solvers.

This is an arena for 3 and 5.

The gong sounds, and Sean dives away from Divya, throwing himself head-first towards the lip of the Cornucopia. There's a fountain, softly burbling, and several statues of famously recognizable Capitol citizens littered about as obtstacles, benevolent and smiling with their green oxidized faces lifted towards the sunlight. His best bet of determining the maze's layout is to get a bird's eye view from the Cornucopia's horn, and to do that, he needs a weapon.

The very first tribute to die is the boy from District 12.

His name is Bob, and he wears spindly wire glasses because his vision is so horrible without them that the committee had to let them through. The only thing he could talk about in his interview was a girl back home, the one he wanted to get back to, who used to mimic birdsong on the way to school, fluty cardinals and robins and the metronome call of a chickadee, and within a minute of stepping off his plate, Mark Zuckerberg gets his hand on a knife and slits Bob's throat end to end.

After, the statues go on smiling passively, blood a thick, dark spray across their faces.

-

Let's be honest, Sean's been killing people since he was eleven years old, and some Capitol supervisor put a hand on his shoulder for the first time, his nails painted the color of endless blue sky from the last time he was in the Capitol, chipping a little by the cuticles now, and asked him, "what do you think, Parker? Should we terminate?"

The subject had been a family friend, because they always are, and Sean had looked at her heaving chest, the blue veins straining in a web across her sawed-open sternum, did the calculations, and nodded.

He knew how to kill before, but it isn't until he's put into the Hunger Games that he's ever had to be violent.

Tori gets him pinned to the ground at the Cornucopia, the thick muscles in her shoulders bulging, and Sean has just a single moment to appreciate the training they put the Career Districts through to get those stunning physiques, before he sees his opening and takes it. He flips them over and dashes her head against the ground, again and again. It feels no different than breaking walnut shells, if a little wetter.

She's from District 1, and didn't really have a prayer of winning anyway. The winner of the Quarter Quell, the year previous, had been a girl from District 1, and you know there's nothing the Capitol hates worse than being predictable.

He meets Amelia, after, when he's throwing up in the wings following the recap. Peter Thiel, the Head Gamemaker in those days, had just shook his hand, and Sean had barely made it here before he was violently sick.

She places a hand on his back, rubbing a slow circle in his spine with her thumb.

"You'll learn to live with their faces," she tells him. "Eventually."

She's a strawberry blonde with a winsome smile, and in the Quarter Quell, she'd been voted in by her District because she was the daughter of a rebel-turned-drunk and a real estate clerk, and District 1 is a very tiny, crowded place with no room for the potentially useless. And look at that, folks, said the announcers, when she showed them all up by winning. What a shining beacon of hope, for all District children looking to outgrow the mistakes of their parents!

She knew Tori, she had to have, because District 1 isn't that much bigger than District 3, but her name never comes between them, in all the years they know each other.

-

Sharon is his second kill.

Ashleigh is third, although technically, Sean would call it an accident. Later, after he wins, they add it to his tally nonetheless.

She almost drowns him in a section of the labyrinth that's entirely underwater. There are no large bodies of water in District 3, not in the leeward rain shadow of the Capitol mountains, and she's from District 4. She can hold her breath longer than any of them -- sparing perhaps her monster of a District partner with the iron lungs -- and she's so busy toying with Sean as he thrashes blindly that she doesn't notice the dead end until she's in it. The water's green and her blood is red, and he feels the boom of her cannon in his bones.

He finds a blowgun on the fourth day, and slinks back through the labyrinth to collect the poisons for the darts. He's on his way to the Cornucopia, feet and calves aching with the exertion, when he comes across Erica Albright building a pyre high as the walls of the maze, her long hair strung up at the back of her neck, her face wane, as pale and bleached out as bone.

He throws himself flat against the wall, heart pounding and loose rubble skittering out from under his feet, but she hasn't seen him. She's building up tinder, her movements clean and quick as the snapping of glass.

Sean remains there for one heart-stopping moment, still expecting her to spot him and come after him, before it dawns on him that this is the perfect opportunity to show the Capitol what he can do.

He crouches low, settling into stance, and with ginger fingers, he loads the dart gun with a needle-thin weapon, coated with the toxins from toadstools and powder off the wings of the candy-corn butterflies that Sharon had admired despite her better judgement. Sean's a quick learner with anything, but he's an asthmatic from District 3 -- years of training with an inhaler means he's got the perfect lung control for this. He wonders if he's the reason there was even a blowgun in the arena in the first place.

From a distance, he sees Erica clap a hand to her neck when the dart stings her, like she's squashing a mosquito flat. She peels the dart away, blood blossoming down her neck, and stares at it for a long moment.

He sees the moment it dawns on her what happened, because her fingers splay and the dart falls into the tinder.

"No," she says, voice high and crystalline and carrying. "No, that's not fair."

It's too late, of course, and Sean watches with a mixture of morbid fascination and pride as an inky pattern of blue etches itself into her skin, radiating outwards from the impact point, as all the veins in her body rise to the surface, swelling and bursting. For years and years and years after he gets out of the arena, Sean won't write a single thing in ink without thinking of her and this moment; her choking and coughing and checkered with blue lines.

"No," she gets out, again, and stumbles to her knees not far from her pyre. "I did everything I was supposed to. I always did everything I was supposed to. I -- I followed the rules, I did what they told me, I -- I --" she looks up at the blue sky. She is perfectly lucid, words coming ticker-fast as bullets. "This isn't fair, I did everything you asked, and I still have to die?"

Suddenly embarrassed for a reason he can't quite put his finger on, Sean reorganizes his kit of poisons and straps the blowgun to his back like a bow. When he looks again, she's curled on her side and still, hair a bramble-colored spill around her head. It's a little while longer before the cannon booms.

The fourth day is a quiet day, relatively -- just Erica and the boy from District 7, who had been the Moskowitzs' ally.

The recap, for all that it's supposed to show Sean's meteoric rise to fame and victory, focuses a lot on the fumbling attempts of the boys from the Career Districts to figure out the labyrinth, because Sean's steady, cheery plotting and his ability to walk around the labyrinth like he always belonged gets boring pretty quickly, apparently, so all they show from the fourth day is a quick montage of him collecting poisons, and instead zeroes in on District 7's (Hugh Chris? Chris Hughes? He forgets the name, because it's as everyman as his own) attempts to outsmart and overpower Divya: the bunching masonry of District 2's hammer blows versus the blonde-haired woodland lumberer might of District 7.

(Divya dies the next day: it's cinematic, stunning, more breathtaking than if the Gamemakers had choreographed it, the way Divya flashes across the screen, hammer loose and sure in his grip and his eyes set, eerie black and shining, ignoring even Cameron's shouts of "Div -- Div -- Div no he's not alone!" Eduardo careens around hairpin curves, barefoot and faun-colored, sprinting through the winding bends of the maze, cutting looks over his shoulder as Divya closes the distance.

Everybody has seen what Divya can do by this point, because the death of his District partner, the girl KC, unhinged him in a way you don't easily forget.

Sean can't help the way his heart pounds, watching the recap, even though he feels sick.

Eduardo stops in the middle of the Square, turns, and smiles at the ground. Divya realizes his mistake a second too late, almost pitching forward onto his face as he tries to skid to a halt.

Mark Zuckerberg drops from above, soundless, and buries his knife to the hilt in between Divya's ribs while he's still trying to recover. The cannon boom is instantaneous, and Eduardo keeps smiling.)

But, very briefly, they show Erica's death, and what Sean never heard as she lay there, fingers curling in the dry grasses she used for her pyre, blue-stained blood leaking out of her eyes and mouth and from under her nails.

Erica Albright, who always said what everyone was thinking:

"I don't want to die," she whispers, again and again, voice so terribly small and young. "Why do we have to die? It's not fair, I don't want to die, I don't want to die. I don't -- I don't --"

The Capitol lets her keep her last words, lets everybody listen, and Sean hears it for the taunt it is.

-

Sean's mother was born and raised in District 8, and she came west to District 3 when she was seventeen, wearing a crown of braids woven with swamp flowers and talking about finding a job, because the most prestigious computer lab in Panem was in District 3 and she typed faster than anyone in her school. Sean's father fell in love with her over the course of a summer, baked-hot, and married her on a day a thunderstorm rolled in from the east, dry lightning flashing typewriter-quick across a sky the color of topaz.

That was before there were fences, when people could go where they wished: it wasn't ever entirely free, but nobody lived in cages, either, and that was still when people were taught to respect the other Districts by meeting the people from them.

Sean's parents were quiet, plain folk with as much vibrancy as drying paint, and when the Uprising happened, they minded their own business.

When they lost, when the fences went up, when President Summers started restricting the kind of work each District could do, they shuttered their windows and lowered their voices. Sean was born, and his mother kept him on her hip so she could murmur in his ear and not be overheard; his earliest memories are of holding onto the sailboat pattern along the collar of her favorite dress, and her stories about District 8 -- a place she believed he would never see.

Sean assumes his parents are dead now (and if they aren't, he hopes they will be soon -- life in the labs is no sort of life at all,) but it doesn't stop him, every Hunger Games, from paying attention to the Reaping in District 8, like something inside of him would suddenly recognize its own roots.

It was safer that way, from a distance: seeing a hairstyle he knows in a shot of the crowd, or listening to a tribute talk about the textile factories in their interview. Sean tucks those glimpses away, like they mean something only to him.

In his own Games, though, the first time he looks over and thinks, those are my mother's people, it stabs him, hard, in some soft spot underneath his sternum, and he turns away to stop thinking about them. It's bad enough that he's going into the arena with Sharon, his next-door neighbor, who's only thirteen.

Even now, years later, he doesn't remember the name of the girl. Eduardo's District partner.

Nobody saw much of her. She wasn't at meals and she wasn't at any of the training stations. Sean doesn't mark her absence until he notices Mark and Eduardo sitting together at a corner table, hunched around their trays of food and talking lowly. They're putting enough away to put Cameron Winklevoss to shame, huge stacks of pasta and sandwiches that barely fit in their mouths, bleeding dressing down their wrists, and Sean remembers blinking some, because tributes don't talk to tributes not from their District. You just don't.

But Eduardo didn't want to sit alone. It takes Sean years, years, and years of maudlin discussions with Amy, Beetee, Haymitch, before he comes to terms with it: the strangest and most loyal friendship Sean's ever witnessed, and it was for one simple reason.

Knowing he only had days left to live, Eduardo Saverin refused to sit alone.

The girl from his District had to show up for scoring, of course, and Sean remembers the gut-wrenching shock of seeing her for the first time, really seeing her, standing with her arms folded under her breasts, a big full-moon curve of a pregnant belly stretching out the front of her uniform in a very obvious way.

Sharon tugs hard on his sleeve.

"I know," he mutters out the side of his mouth, trying not to stare. She knows her anatomy lessons as well as he: the girl is five, maybe six months along.

Wondering how the hell they managed to miss that, they go through the recaps when they get back to their rooms. But in all the broadcasts released so far, they never show a shot of her that reveals anything below her face: not at her Reaping, not at the presentation of the tributes. They were very careful with their camera angles, even when the announcers brought the District 8 tributes to attention for the fact they wore their reaping clothes during their chariot ride, in a deliberate snub to their stylist.

"Please," Eduardo scoffs in his interview, forgetting his nervousness and widening his eyes in affront. "We're District 8. We make your clothes. We know bad fashion when we see it."

"This is so much better," his partner agrees, standing with only minor difficulty to show off her dress -- a baggy, loose, colorful drapery that deliberately smudges out the gravid curve of her.

There's no way that trick would fly in the Games, of course, and Sean remembers how sick he felt, even then.

The next time he sees her, dazed and pale-eyed on the opposite side of the Cornucopia, the girl from District 8 isn't pregnant anymore.

-

By the time they're down to the final five tributes, Sean's been watching and studying, and he thinks he knows his competition pretty well.

It's a stupid thing to assume, of course, which is why Cameron Winklevoss almost skewers him with a sword while he's sleeping.

He wakes himself up and rolls sideways at the last second, feeling the breeze from its passing and the singing sound of sword meeting the stone where his head was just lying. He flings himself across the ground on his hands and knees before he gets proper leverage to swing himself up into a standing position, just in time to limbo himself backwards to avoid another blow.

He doesn't have his blowgun, and it would be useless at such short range anyway, and all his poisons are in a pouch by his makeshift bed. He has no other weapons except for his bare hands, and he highly doubts he's going to outwrestle Cameron.

Cameron Winklevoss is the last of the Careers. He's District 4, with the long, lean muscles of a rower.

There's an earnestness to the wide back-and-forth flick of his eyes that's hard to fake, easy to trust.

As a child, he said, he and his brother piloted little boats as slim as minnows through the narrow, forked waterways around his town (he says, and Sean blinks and double-takes and then has to remember that, compared to 3, the peninsula District of 4 is huge and probably has more than one settlement in it.) When they grew, that's what they did -- nobody knew the tributaries that lead out to sea quite like the Winklevoss twins, the powerful rowers who could nimbly get messages from village to village and to the boats out to sea.

They used to organize rowboat races, too, once they got too big and fast to compete fairly, Cameron tells them with a wistful kind of enthusiasm, and the announcer turns to the crowd and says something along the lines of, "Aren't these country folk so quaint?"

He's the color of sunshine, with a face flawlessly carved, and his mentor -- a very pretty woman in her mid-thirties named Mags -- didn't even have to try very hard to sell him to sponsors. He's handsome, he's well-fed, and he has a twin brother who doesn't need to watch him die, which is a pretty powerful motive for winning.

And then they dropped him into the arena.

These Games are for the clever, not for the brave and the strong or even the just. Cameron strives to be all of those things -- Sean remembers how he'd been in the interview, sitting straight-backed and forward in his seat and responding so politely that the announcer laughed, turning to the audience to ask them if they felt like he was trying to sell them cookies or reparation bonds. Even President Summers had a sarcastic comment to make about the boy from District 4.

He remembers the Cornucopia, too, Bob's throat a splayed-open red grimace and Cameron getting his hands on the sword he now wields, spinning around and then checking his momentum when he saw who it was he had in front of him.

Maybe he didn't think anything of it, but Sean certainly noticed that Cameron let the sibling pair from 6 escape and slip away into the labyrinth. He won't take Alice from her brother, Dustin from his sister.

"Oh, hold still, District 3," he snarls, each word carefully bitten out. "So I can gut you belly to nose."

On the other hand, killing Sean doesn't seem to be a problem.

"Yeah, no thanks," Sean replies, and launches himself under the swing of the sword, trying to scramble across to his poisons, but his reflexes aren't fast enough.

Cameron cold-cocks him with the hilt, sending him crashing nose-first into the ground, and kicks -- but not at him, Sean realizes even as he curls up to protect his head. He hears the tinkling sound of breaking glass as his vials scatter across the stone, spilling from the pouch. He cranes his neck around: the gelatinous toxins sink into the rock, hissing, and the powders are picked up uselessly by the wind.

Sean has less than a heartbeat to absorb this, face throbbing and blood streaking all down his front and the whole world gone a little bit gauze-colored around the edges, tilting as dizzily as stained glass.

Then, screaming in rage, he flings himself back onto his feet. He blocks Cameron's blow, sword wobbling in an incredibly close swing by his face, and strikes hard at the soft spot of his wrist. Sean had been lucky to find that glass at all -- who's to say he could do it again? Who's to say the Gamemakers will let him do it again?

"Careers," he gets out, spitting and vicious, and rains down blows everywhere on Cameron's body he can conceivably reach, keeping in too close for the sword to be helpful.

More of his shots are blocked than land, because while Sean knows human anatomy like the back of his hand, Cameron grew up with all the reflexive training of a Career, and Sean has no words for how much he hates him in this moment, hates everything he stands for.

"Fuck you. I want that down on the record. Sean Parker says fuck you."

Cameron gets him with an elbow to the side of the skull, a wet, dull impact that makes Sean groan and stagger away, vision swimming. His head feels soggy and heavy, like his neck is too spongy to hold it.

District 4 pants, keeping his distance and shaking out his sword arm -- numb, Sean acknowledges. Good. It doesn't mean he's not just as deadly with his other arm, but good.

"How does it feel, huh?" Sean wants to know, raising his voice and spreading his arms in a come at me gesture. "To knowingly be part of a fucking system of violence? Every District plays its part, but you. You treat the Hunger Games like they're a game that you can win. How can you stand it, playing right into the Capitol's hands like that, to jump on their rodeo and beg for rewards? Fucking lapdogs, fuck the Careers," he spits at the ground.

Cameron actually looks gobsmacked by this outburst, his mouth working fishily.

The tip of his sword dips, a moment that Sean, surprised by his surprise, forgets to take advantage of.

"Is that really what you think we do?" he goes, incredulous, and then an expression of such utter distaste crosses his face that Sean's hatred flags a little bit. "No. No, please don't tell me the other Districts can't see -- look. We train as Careers so that somebody will always be available and ready to Volunteer if a child is Reaped. We train ourselves so we aren't sending little children into the arena, we would never --"

He shakes his head back and forth, like a junkyard dog worrying at a ragdoll. He sounds like he's never had to explain this before, like it's something that's always just been understood.

Sean shifts his weight uneasily. Every second of this conversation is being recorded.

"We train as Careers because somebody has to be prepared for these Games. The more prepared you are, the less you lose, the less they are capable of taking from you. We lose so much to these Games every year, don't you think that's enough? These stupid, stupid Games!" For a moment, his whole face blazes, fierce and furious and raw, and then he swings around, a terrible roar escaping out from his chest like his bones are coming undone, and he brings the butt of his sword down onto the nearest wall.

It bows under the blow, raining rubble down and exposing the corridor of the labyrinth on the other side. Cameron looks at it, and then does it again.

Abandoning his things, Sean grabs only the blowgun and runs.

The Gamemakers are going to kill Cameron, for his words as much as his destruction of their arena, and Sean wants to be as far away from him as possible when that happens.

They can't do it directly, of course, because any deliberate action taken upon Cameron within the Games would be as good as admitting that they were bothered by the accusation, and they can't have people thinking about it.

So the weather changes, and then certain parts of the labyrinth start to collapse, the floor going as hot and liquid as lava, shifting and rearranging so that Cameron has nowhere to go but out into the Square, where the walls are high and made of red brick, ivy climbing up into the sky. The floor is chrome-plated, fit together like a geometric puzzle piece. The Square is what the boys from District 5 and 8 call their own.

Maybe, individually, Cameron could have taken them. But together, Mark and Eduardo had single-handedly wiped the board of most of the other players.

The ensuing fight is epic, classic brains vs. brawn. Sean misses most of it, run through the maze until he was lost, swimming in and out of consciousness with a head that was swollen and hurting, but they make sure he sees it, afterwards, makes sure he understands the message: Sean may not have been their first choice in Victor, but even in the Games, the Capitol can still get the Districts to do whatever they want.

next part -->

pairing: sean/amy, character: sean parker, character: mark zuckerberg, fandom: the social network, character: eduardo saverin, fandom: the hunger games, rating: pg-13

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