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31_days2012-09-29 02:25 pm
seta-suzume.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2012-09-29 02:25 pm
[Sept. 29] [The Hunger Games] This Way Go Victors
Title: This Way Go Victors
Day/Theme: Sept. 29, 2012 "sing to the death rattle"
Series: The Hunger Games
Character/Pairing: Mags, OC victors
Rating: PG-13
Author's comment: This one's a real downer. Also, ha ha, I feel like this is sort of spoiler-filled regarding the continuity of my fics about Mags, so if you don't want to hear what happens to those other victors yet, here's your warning. ^^;
After Silk, it became another cold, hard fact of life. Winning the Hunger Games extended your life beyond that of the other tributes, but didn't necessarily even grant the longevity of an average citizen of your home district. Victors lived. They were not victorious.
***
2's Teejay Atticus is next. But unlike with Silk, it is no surprise. We knew him for a walking ghost. The drug he used to stifle his mind from the horrific intrusions of the outside world finally suffocated him. There was a little smile on his face when he died, according to Sunny, who had visited him in the hospital back in 6 that they both frequented (Sunny as a volunteer nurse; Teejay as an addict illegally buying his next fix). He was happy to die, we collectively imagine. He had been easing himself for years toward that dark night.
***
"How many more victors do you think will die young?" I ask Pal on the first night of the Nineteenth Hunger Games.
"Who knows?" he sighs. "In part it depends on how long the Games continue."
Oh. I wasn't thinking of it that way- of all the victors to come. I was thinking of the victors now, the victors I know. Already the idea of 'victorhood' is changing from what it was when I won. Some of the younger victors, maybe Calla, for instance, are starting to live a life of celebrity. Not Jack's sort of celebrity. They seem to like it.
"...That came out wrong," I try to correct myself, "I meant out of the victors now. ...Us."
That strikes Pal differently. I think he has basically the same idea as I do as to what constitutes "us." There are variations of attitude based on personality, as well as from district to district, but Jack Umber through Silk Sachet. That's a certain set of victors. Maybe because of the introductions of the sponsorships and all you could count the group as Jack to me, but, I don't know, Reinhold and then Calla seemed more different. Silk was one of us.
To Pal, her mentor, in particular. Pal who believed he bought her life (and while that wasn't the only thing that let her win, it's true that Silk had the most sponsors out of all the bunch- Silk was beautiful and Pal knew how to play that game) and, subsequently, that he was the one to blame when she died for letting others believe they could buy her in the first place.
"It depends on what you consider young," Pal decides upon his answer.
That answer makes me very uncomfortable. I worry about Pal. He's just shy of twenty-four.
It isn't wrong to worry, but Pal survives that year. Not only that, his tribute wins. Woof isn't very much like Silk at all. I think that helps. I'm not sure Pal could ever successfully mentor a girl after all that. But Woof is new. Woof is hopeful. He'll be happy, he says, to take charge of the girls. It makes all of us- the usual us- smile. I would say "laugh," but some of us, Beto, in particular, come as close to never laughing as a person can.
Woof doesn't become one of those popular celebrity victors. I'm glad.
***
Beto Ernst, from 3, leaves our company later. Like Teejay, he never fit into our group quite as well as others. That might have hurried it some. After his Games, he didn't trust anyone. Someone was going to get him- someone from the Capitol, a ghost out of his past, maybe even one of us.
He does it by his own hand. The Capitol calls it an accident, but Beto was too good with machines for that, and the one he used to zap himself was his own. They'd guarded against the use of conventional weapons; Beto built his own.
The only thing we can say about Beto's chosen time of demise is, "At least he reached thirty." He was thirty-two. Still, it's cold comfort, even in regard to a victor who was too nervous and paranoid to befriend any of us. Still, Beto lived half of his life before his Games.
Whatever he did to kill himself, the new victor from District 3 says she saw from her home. Light streamed out, wild and brilliant and white, from every window in Beto's house, for one strange, blinding second before they all went out at once, the place completely black.
***
Gerik Rinsai, from District 2, a great mentor to three victors who came after him, dies in what is, to the best of my knowledge, a real, honest-to-goodness accident. He's visiting the quarry where his brother-in-law works and helping out a bit with things, just for the fun of it.
Eight people die in that accident. One lives specifically because Gerik protected him. 2's second victor leaves behind a widow and two children.
I hear about all of this while out on the Victory Tour with the boy who saved himself twelve years after me. I cry and Tyde watches.
***
Another unfortunate development is soon to follow. Emmy Pollack's beloved Ferdinand, the escort for her district, is going to be replaced. He just doesn't have "it" anymore. Not even for a district held in as low regard as 10.
If we'd had prior knowledge of this development, all of us "originals" who remain would have seen it coming. Being able to see Ferdinand when she visits the Capitol could not nearly be enough for Emmy. A million white lies have brought him out to her side in District 10 for all these years. If it hadn't been for Ferdinand, there's no doubt that Emmy would have died one way or another a long time ago.
Well, Ferdinand leaves the Capitol when he gets the news. He does this unofficially. He meets up with Emmy and tells her what's happening. I don't know exactly what happens between this part and the end of their story (nobody knows but Ferdinand and Emmy), but I imagine it goes something like this: Ferdinand tells Emmy what's happening, Emmy thinks Ferdinand can come stay with her permanently then, Ferdinand knows the Capitol would never let him.
What I do know is that Ferdinand shoots her and then himself in a field outside of District 10's central town. People in the Capitol think it's a pretty freaky story. It is a pretty freaky story. It's a love story.
And, with that, the victors on both "sides" of me are gone. I start trying to see the future, which is a completely useless endeavor. I make Tyde promise to at least talk to me if he's ever thinking about killing himself, which I think does more to make him thinking I'm slowly losing it than anything else, but he does promise.
Silk, Teejay, Beto, Gerik, Emmy. (Jack)
***
(What about Jack? I think about him always, but without a good reason, I don't talk about Jack.)
Nothing happens to the second half of our set for a while after that. Our "career tribute" program in 4 finally yields fruit, years after the similar(?) tracks in 1 and 2 have done so. I think Tyde is better at training and inspiring kids than I am. The things I did and said moved people in 4 once. Now I'm just that strange victor who likes to fish.
'Lito answers the phone to receive the news about Sunny Lightfoot.
"Good or bad or something else?" I quiz him when he approaches me and my net-mending.
"Es malo."
Well, I should've known, shouldn't I? When have I ever gotten good news over the telephone.
I take a deep breath. "Tell me about it."
'Lito sits down beside me. "Sunny was sick. She died."
It was something they could've cured in the Capitol, no doubt. But I've (we've) known for years what the ordinary people in the Capitol don't. The real Sunny Lightfoot didn't survive her Games in good enough mental condition to ever be on television again. The Sunny Lightfoot we knew was a fake.
Her real name was Rae Proudfeather and she played her part well.
But just because she'd played the Capitol's game (no Games for Rae Proudfeather, but games of another sort) didn't mean they'd go to any lengths to save her. Were they certain of the solidity of their deception? Or did they secretly hope that soon enough they would lose the fake Sunny and no longer have to worry about publicly pretending?
Sunny thought something like that.
"She was better than the rest of us," I tell 'Lito.
"No," he argues.
"Yes." I'm stubborn. "She never played."
***
Remaining victors who I consider my compatriots from the early days in order (chronological by date of Games): Hector Auric (District 2), Kayta Hiro (District 7), Shy Evert (District 5), Luna Vetiver (District 9), Pal Fields (District 8). (I have other, additional "compatriots" now, Woof and Tyde and others, but in some ways, the old group is still a group, even if Hector and Luna think of themselves as apart from us, with their own concerns and their own circles).
'Lito teases me that I should invite them all over for a party sometime. It's a dumb idea. I laugh.
***
There's some kind of unrest in 9 and Luna Vetiver may not be the cause of it, but she's no doubt that she's part of it. This kind of thing is not publicized.
Out of all of us, Luna was always the one I believed was most ready to rebel. So she was. Some people are hard to read. Some people are exactly who you think they are. Luna was one of the later.
I can only learn what happened in fragmented whispered, but every member of what had seemed to me to be the ever-expanding Vetiver family is dead.
***
We hang there. Me, Hector, Kayta, Pal, and Shy. There have to be some old victors, right? Remnants of the old days, hanging in there and terrorizing the young folk or something? No one talks about those non-existent "good old days" even if we judge times now to be worse than they were back then.
Things are bad and things are also better. When the Gamemakers feel like it, things are more "humane." We are four people who won without sponsors. We are four people who won without victors to advise us.
We are lucky people, but only because we're alive.
And we start seeming older and older in comparison, because the newer victors are living shorter lives. They're chewed up and spit out by a Capitol happy to use and abuse them (most of them- there are unpopular ones too, who suffer the mixed blessing of being ignored). They burn out fast. Which doesn't always mean that they die young, but they disappear with a greater frequency into drugs or drink or other forms of self-destruction.
I do my best to keep the ones in 4 from that path. But I can't save them all. "You're lucky," Pal tells me, "If you can save anyone."
But "anyone" isn't good enough for me. It's never been good enough. I've been trying to save, if not everyone, as many as I can. I've been doing that for the greater part of my life. Everyday since the day I volunteered at the reaping for Faline Beaumont (who is still alive, who has married, who has two lovely children I can fear for instead).
There is a different president now than when my Games occured. This stands to reason. The president now laughs at me, I imagine. Mags, who wants to save them all.
***
What gets Kayta and Shy and Hector, in that order, can be considered old age, though sickness plays a part in it in Shy's case at least. They have all passed sixty by. Sixty-two was a marvelous thing for Shy Evert, I try and console myself at the news. The sickness the Capitol says she feigned during her Games was real. A girl who would probably have died at sixteen if she'd never left District 5 reached sixty-two because the Capitol took her away to kill.
...I think that way because of the world I've lived in. Shy should have been free to live her whole life in District 5 if she'd wanted to and still be cured and make it to sixty-two (or longer- maybe under a different government she would've lived longer).
There are victors living all around me now in 4 and, to a greater or lesser degree, I see all of them as mine.
The same holds true, I think for the only victor left who proceeded me, a man who is the same age as me: Pal Fields.
But Pal dies a quiet death as well. He deserves it.
I see six more ordinary Games after Pal's death. The Seventy-Fourth Games are not ordinary.
Even more so, the Third Quarter Quell.
Day/Theme: Sept. 29, 2012 "sing to the death rattle"
Series: The Hunger Games
Character/Pairing: Mags, OC victors
Rating: PG-13
Author's comment: This one's a real downer. Also, ha ha, I feel like this is sort of spoiler-filled regarding the continuity of my fics about Mags, so if you don't want to hear what happens to those other victors yet, here's your warning. ^^;
After Silk, it became another cold, hard fact of life. Winning the Hunger Games extended your life beyond that of the other tributes, but didn't necessarily even grant the longevity of an average citizen of your home district. Victors lived. They were not victorious.
***
2's Teejay Atticus is next. But unlike with Silk, it is no surprise. We knew him for a walking ghost. The drug he used to stifle his mind from the horrific intrusions of the outside world finally suffocated him. There was a little smile on his face when he died, according to Sunny, who had visited him in the hospital back in 6 that they both frequented (Sunny as a volunteer nurse; Teejay as an addict illegally buying his next fix). He was happy to die, we collectively imagine. He had been easing himself for years toward that dark night.
***
"How many more victors do you think will die young?" I ask Pal on the first night of the Nineteenth Hunger Games.
"Who knows?" he sighs. "In part it depends on how long the Games continue."
Oh. I wasn't thinking of it that way- of all the victors to come. I was thinking of the victors now, the victors I know. Already the idea of 'victorhood' is changing from what it was when I won. Some of the younger victors, maybe Calla, for instance, are starting to live a life of celebrity. Not Jack's sort of celebrity. They seem to like it.
"...That came out wrong," I try to correct myself, "I meant out of the victors now. ...Us."
That strikes Pal differently. I think he has basically the same idea as I do as to what constitutes "us." There are variations of attitude based on personality, as well as from district to district, but Jack Umber through Silk Sachet. That's a certain set of victors. Maybe because of the introductions of the sponsorships and all you could count the group as Jack to me, but, I don't know, Reinhold and then Calla seemed more different. Silk was one of us.
To Pal, her mentor, in particular. Pal who believed he bought her life (and while that wasn't the only thing that let her win, it's true that Silk had the most sponsors out of all the bunch- Silk was beautiful and Pal knew how to play that game) and, subsequently, that he was the one to blame when she died for letting others believe they could buy her in the first place.
"It depends on what you consider young," Pal decides upon his answer.
That answer makes me very uncomfortable. I worry about Pal. He's just shy of twenty-four.
It isn't wrong to worry, but Pal survives that year. Not only that, his tribute wins. Woof isn't very much like Silk at all. I think that helps. I'm not sure Pal could ever successfully mentor a girl after all that. But Woof is new. Woof is hopeful. He'll be happy, he says, to take charge of the girls. It makes all of us- the usual us- smile. I would say "laugh," but some of us, Beto, in particular, come as close to never laughing as a person can.
Woof doesn't become one of those popular celebrity victors. I'm glad.
***
Beto Ernst, from 3, leaves our company later. Like Teejay, he never fit into our group quite as well as others. That might have hurried it some. After his Games, he didn't trust anyone. Someone was going to get him- someone from the Capitol, a ghost out of his past, maybe even one of us.
He does it by his own hand. The Capitol calls it an accident, but Beto was too good with machines for that, and the one he used to zap himself was his own. They'd guarded against the use of conventional weapons; Beto built his own.
The only thing we can say about Beto's chosen time of demise is, "At least he reached thirty." He was thirty-two. Still, it's cold comfort, even in regard to a victor who was too nervous and paranoid to befriend any of us. Still, Beto lived half of his life before his Games.
Whatever he did to kill himself, the new victor from District 3 says she saw from her home. Light streamed out, wild and brilliant and white, from every window in Beto's house, for one strange, blinding second before they all went out at once, the place completely black.
***
Gerik Rinsai, from District 2, a great mentor to three victors who came after him, dies in what is, to the best of my knowledge, a real, honest-to-goodness accident. He's visiting the quarry where his brother-in-law works and helping out a bit with things, just for the fun of it.
Eight people die in that accident. One lives specifically because Gerik protected him. 2's second victor leaves behind a widow and two children.
I hear about all of this while out on the Victory Tour with the boy who saved himself twelve years after me. I cry and Tyde watches.
***
Another unfortunate development is soon to follow. Emmy Pollack's beloved Ferdinand, the escort for her district, is going to be replaced. He just doesn't have "it" anymore. Not even for a district held in as low regard as 10.
If we'd had prior knowledge of this development, all of us "originals" who remain would have seen it coming. Being able to see Ferdinand when she visits the Capitol could not nearly be enough for Emmy. A million white lies have brought him out to her side in District 10 for all these years. If it hadn't been for Ferdinand, there's no doubt that Emmy would have died one way or another a long time ago.
Well, Ferdinand leaves the Capitol when he gets the news. He does this unofficially. He meets up with Emmy and tells her what's happening. I don't know exactly what happens between this part and the end of their story (nobody knows but Ferdinand and Emmy), but I imagine it goes something like this: Ferdinand tells Emmy what's happening, Emmy thinks Ferdinand can come stay with her permanently then, Ferdinand knows the Capitol would never let him.
What I do know is that Ferdinand shoots her and then himself in a field outside of District 10's central town. People in the Capitol think it's a pretty freaky story. It is a pretty freaky story. It's a love story.
And, with that, the victors on both "sides" of me are gone. I start trying to see the future, which is a completely useless endeavor. I make Tyde promise to at least talk to me if he's ever thinking about killing himself, which I think does more to make him thinking I'm slowly losing it than anything else, but he does promise.
Silk, Teejay, Beto, Gerik, Emmy. (Jack)
***
(What about Jack? I think about him always, but without a good reason, I don't talk about Jack.)
Nothing happens to the second half of our set for a while after that. Our "career tribute" program in 4 finally yields fruit, years after the similar(?) tracks in 1 and 2 have done so. I think Tyde is better at training and inspiring kids than I am. The things I did and said moved people in 4 once. Now I'm just that strange victor who likes to fish.
'Lito answers the phone to receive the news about Sunny Lightfoot.
"Good or bad or something else?" I quiz him when he approaches me and my net-mending.
"Es malo."
Well, I should've known, shouldn't I? When have I ever gotten good news over the telephone.
I take a deep breath. "Tell me about it."
'Lito sits down beside me. "Sunny was sick. She died."
It was something they could've cured in the Capitol, no doubt. But I've (we've) known for years what the ordinary people in the Capitol don't. The real Sunny Lightfoot didn't survive her Games in good enough mental condition to ever be on television again. The Sunny Lightfoot we knew was a fake.
Her real name was Rae Proudfeather and she played her part well.
But just because she'd played the Capitol's game (no Games for Rae Proudfeather, but games of another sort) didn't mean they'd go to any lengths to save her. Were they certain of the solidity of their deception? Or did they secretly hope that soon enough they would lose the fake Sunny and no longer have to worry about publicly pretending?
Sunny thought something like that.
"She was better than the rest of us," I tell 'Lito.
"No," he argues.
"Yes." I'm stubborn. "She never played."
***
Remaining victors who I consider my compatriots from the early days in order (chronological by date of Games): Hector Auric (District 2), Kayta Hiro (District 7), Shy Evert (District 5), Luna Vetiver (District 9), Pal Fields (District 8). (I have other, additional "compatriots" now, Woof and Tyde and others, but in some ways, the old group is still a group, even if Hector and Luna think of themselves as apart from us, with their own concerns and their own circles).
'Lito teases me that I should invite them all over for a party sometime. It's a dumb idea. I laugh.
***
There's some kind of unrest in 9 and Luna Vetiver may not be the cause of it, but she's no doubt that she's part of it. This kind of thing is not publicized.
Out of all of us, Luna was always the one I believed was most ready to rebel. So she was. Some people are hard to read. Some people are exactly who you think they are. Luna was one of the later.
I can only learn what happened in fragmented whispered, but every member of what had seemed to me to be the ever-expanding Vetiver family is dead.
***
We hang there. Me, Hector, Kayta, Pal, and Shy. There have to be some old victors, right? Remnants of the old days, hanging in there and terrorizing the young folk or something? No one talks about those non-existent "good old days" even if we judge times now to be worse than they were back then.
Things are bad and things are also better. When the Gamemakers feel like it, things are more "humane." We are four people who won without sponsors. We are four people who won without victors to advise us.
We are lucky people, but only because we're alive.
And we start seeming older and older in comparison, because the newer victors are living shorter lives. They're chewed up and spit out by a Capitol happy to use and abuse them (most of them- there are unpopular ones too, who suffer the mixed blessing of being ignored). They burn out fast. Which doesn't always mean that they die young, but they disappear with a greater frequency into drugs or drink or other forms of self-destruction.
I do my best to keep the ones in 4 from that path. But I can't save them all. "You're lucky," Pal tells me, "If you can save anyone."
But "anyone" isn't good enough for me. It's never been good enough. I've been trying to save, if not everyone, as many as I can. I've been doing that for the greater part of my life. Everyday since the day I volunteered at the reaping for Faline Beaumont (who is still alive, who has married, who has two lovely children I can fear for instead).
There is a different president now than when my Games occured. This stands to reason. The president now laughs at me, I imagine. Mags, who wants to save them all.
***
What gets Kayta and Shy and Hector, in that order, can be considered old age, though sickness plays a part in it in Shy's case at least. They have all passed sixty by. Sixty-two was a marvelous thing for Shy Evert, I try and console myself at the news. The sickness the Capitol says she feigned during her Games was real. A girl who would probably have died at sixteen if she'd never left District 5 reached sixty-two because the Capitol took her away to kill.
...I think that way because of the world I've lived in. Shy should have been free to live her whole life in District 5 if she'd wanted to and still be cured and make it to sixty-two (or longer- maybe under a different government she would've lived longer).
There are victors living all around me now in 4 and, to a greater or lesser degree, I see all of them as mine.
The same holds true, I think for the only victor left who proceeded me, a man who is the same age as me: Pal Fields.
But Pal dies a quiet death as well. He deserves it.
I see six more ordinary Games after Pal's death. The Seventy-Fourth Games are not ordinary.
Even more so, the Third Quarter Quell.