Chapter Text
PART ONE: The Peacekeeper's Son
Chapter One
The morning of the Reaping of the 68th Hunger Games dawns bright and hot, like it always does.
Steve Harrington had been awake to greet it, as he always is since he got old enough for his name to be placed inside the bowl; and each year he does this: he climbs through his bedroom window to sit on the little slice of tin roof he is nearly too big to fit upon, and he watches the sun rise. He imagines, if anyone else does this, they are all wondering the same thing as he is, sitting there — will this be my last District Three sunrise?
Most folk probably don’t think Steve wonders these things. He imagines most don’t think he wonders much of anything at all. In a District peopled by the uniquely clever, Steve has been an anomaly in more ways than just not being even a little bit booksmart: his old man is the head of the Peacekeepers here in Three, and his mother is the daughter of the later Mayor — perhaps the only reason no one got weird about her, a District kid, marrying his old man, when they did. (It was almost sort of expected, class-wise, because there was no way Grandpa Otis was letting her marry some nobody like Scott Clarke from outside of town.) So most of the people around Steve don’t think much of him, he knows; there’d be a divide big as the District itself between them even if Steve did have the brains damn near everyone else in Three claims. Instead he’s just dumb Steve Harrington, who barely managed to light his potato back when he was eight, whose old man doles out all the worst punishments for everyone else’s friends and families when they have the audacity to step a toe out of the Capitol line, and who probably doesn’t even worry about getting his name pulled on Reaping Day.
Frankly, he thinks a lot of people assume his name isn’t in the bowl at all. Two of his only friends, Carol, the daughter of the current Mayor, and Tommy, bastard son of another Peacekeeper, joke about it all the time; but Steve knows the old man is the kind to follow the letter of the law, even if it means his son has the same odds as every other kid in the Districts have of getting their name read every Reaping. Maybe someone else has rigged it so the odds are a little more in his favor, but it certainly wasn’t the old man who did it, you know? So, yeah, he’s got his name in their once for every year, just like Tommy, just like Carol, just like Nancy —
“Nancy,” he says quietly into the morning air. “Shit.”
Nancy Wheeler probably doesn’t think much of him anymore, if she even did while they were dating. Are we still? he wonders. She’s so bright and pretty and clever and Steve had felt like he was on top of the world when someone like her, a whip-smart town girl, had given him the time of day — had said yes to a date, and then a second, and then a third. Only he’d gotten jealous of the company she keeps a week back, gotten mean and sharp with it like Mom does when the old man comes back ate and smelling like someone else’s soap, and he’d opened his big mouth, said some shit he shouldn’t’ve, and she’s been ignoring him ever since. He’s been licking his wounds, trying not to listen to Tommy and Carol’s advice (if you could even call it that), and if it had been any other day than the one it is, Steve would be hopping off this roof to go see her, and clear things up, because life is short in Panem, life is short in the Districts, and even if they’re over because Steve’s too hamfisted and stupid for a girl like Nancy, he doesn’t want to lose her as a friend, if it’s possible.
But he should’ve thought that yesterday, should’ve screwed his courage up then, because today there’s no time. Everyone knows you spend Reaping Day with your kin, those closest to you, and the old man might not care enough about Steve to break rules to keep him safe but he’s got appearances to keep up and Steve thinks maybe, maybe, somewhere deep within him he loves him in some small part, just has trouble showing it. (That’s what Mom always says, anyway.) Mainly, though — mainly Mom is a wreck every year: he can’t disappear on her, even if there was a chance in hell Mrs Wheeler would even let him in the front door to see Nancy on a morning like this one.
So Steve watches the sun come up and feels sorry for himself, feels stupid and too small for this District, wonders if maybe it would be best if his name got called and no one had to concert themselves with him much longer after that, before hauling himself back through his little bedroom window to go have breakfast.
His parents are, of course, waiting for him there. The old man is already finishing his toast and coffee and about to head off to make sure everything is prepared for the day, but most mornings he’s already gone by the time Mom is setting the table; so even if he tries to tell himself it’s just another morning, that gives the game away. That, and the nice spread Mom is just finishing laying out: real eggs and the good bread, with Steve’s favorite jam that even she has to trade good coin for, and holy shit, is that bacon?
The Reaping looms large in all these little gestures, every bit of nicety gathered on this table and under their roof for one day out of the year. They don’t talk about it, ever — “Not good for your mother’s nerves,” the old man says whenever Steve even obliquely brings it up — but it hangs over them like a shadow or a storm cloud, thick and electric with the promise of disaster hidden just out of sight. It sits with them at this very table right now, waiting, waiting, waiting.
They don’t, in fact, talk much of anything. The old man lingers with his coffee and claps a hand on Steve’s shoulder, his fingers digging in briefly enough that Steve can choose to either imagine it or read care and fear in equal measure into it, but then he’s gone. And Mom is like a moth in the room, fluttering this way or that, sitting for barely a second as she chokes a bit of scrambled egg down before peeling off to grab something else from the kitchen or putter around upstairs, her footsteps echoing through the wood beams of the ceiling. She drinks about three cups of coffee, doesn’t clear her plate, while Steve eats his eggs and bacon and three servings of jam on toast.
He wants to reach out to her, grab her by the wrist and pull her down to sit next to him. He wants to make her still just for a fucking second. He wants to feel the heat of her against his side, wants to tell her a dumb joke to make her laugh, which she hates doing, because she hates her laugh. She says it sounds uncultured, rough, but Steve likes it. He wants to ask her to give him a hug, to hold him, to rock him back and forth and hum a lullaby in his ear, like she used to do when he was small and she hadn’t yet realized that she couldn’t save him from the Games by virtue of neither her name or her marriage.
He doesn’t do any of that. He just eats, and watches her from the corner of his eye, and tries to be the thoughtless boy everyone in the District thinks he is. It’d probably be so nice, to be that way.
When he’s done, Mom tells him to go wash up — the old man arranged extra hot water today — and that she’ll be up in a minute to help him get dressed. He tries not to think while he’s in the shower too, focuses on scrubbing himself pink and raw and clean. He spends a little extra time on his hair, in case he ends up on camera somehow, true bad luck or just a passing frame, and then he goes to grab the outfit Mom has laid out on his bed in between her fitful sips of coffee and bites of egg. On a normal day, he wears the same school uniform as everyone else, though maybe the fabric of his is a little finer compared to some, and good boots. Today he dons starched light blue dress pants and a brown belt, a crisp white pullover tee, with a collar that’s got red piping on it and little buttons at the neck that stop just below his collarbone and he doesn’t unbutton, and everything is new, and spotless, because it usually was — Mom always said they had appearances to keep up — though it also always looked like more of the same — because Mom also always said they shouldn’t flaunt what they have, just show that they have it.
Even his shoes are new this year, since his winter growth spurt had also seen him outgrow each and every pair of his shoes. These ones are brown and shiny to match his belt, with good cord laces and slick on the bottom — as if he’d get any farther on boots with a decent tread if he was suicidal enough to run.
Mom stops him at the bottom of the stairs to look him over. There’s something tight about her eyes as she reaches out to brush imaginary lint off his left shoulder with the backs of her fingers with their cleanly manicured nails, and Steve takes a minute to try to memorize her face, like he does every year. He looks just like the old man, though he’s got Mom’s spots and freckles and her laugh; he always wishes he had a little something more of her in him, when he looks in the mirror, maybe her ski-slope nose or her lips’ lack of a cupid’s bow, the shade of her eyes.
She straightens his collar next and then sprays a little of the old man’s cologne on his neck, the soft, vulnerable skin of his wrists, before stepping back to smile at him. She doesn’t hug him, and the skin around her eyes is still tight, drawn. She says, “Happy birthday, bubba,” even though his birthday’s not for another eight days. She says it anyway, just in case.
They leave the house together after that, but move in very different directions. Mom goes to meet up with Carol’s mom and watch the Reaping with a few other town mothers from a private balcony on the Justice Building that overlooks the square; Steve goes to report to the center of town, just like all the other kids between twelve and eighteen. He gets hustled through in-take, just like every year: a finger prick for the usual blood sample, to prove he wasn’t trying to bribe his way out of the Reaping with some joe schmo or something, and then directions to the veritable cattle chute they all go down by dint of their ages and sex. Tommy finds him almost immediately, of course, and they exchange nods, clasp hands, but don’t say anything else — Tommy’s been pissed about him moping about Nancy, and Nancy in general for longer than that, he knows, but also there’s not a lot to say in the crush of kids all waiting to see if their name is about to get called.
Steve takes the opportunity to look around, same as everyone else. He imagines they’re all trying to see who it might be. Someone takes odds on the outskirts of town, he knows: town kid, rural kid, big family, only child. But there’s no way of knowing, not until it’s happening. Still, he imagines it’s natural for them to wonder, to pray it’s not your own name. He sees Patrick McKinney, whose name is in there more than most on account of his dad dying a few years back and his mom struggling with him and his three little siblings. He sees Fred Benson, who looks like a stiff wind would blow him over. He sees Jason Carver, who’s never been quite right since Chrissy Cunningham didn’t come home two years ago. There’s bets on him, in particular, he knows, has heard the whispers even among his own peers: whether or not he’ll someday volunteer himself, just so he doesn’t have to live with whatever pain he’s in, the anger that makes him spit vitriol not at the Capitol, who Nancy whispered to him once was really to blame, but instead at the Victor who did come home. He’s sixteen now, Carver, same as Steve; they both have three years left.
He sees little Dustin Henderson with his friends, off with all the younger kids, and it hits him like a punch to the solar plexus. He knows Dustin decently well: his mother is a nurse at the Peacekeeper’s barracks and, well, the District might whisper about Jason Carver but not nearly as much as they like to whisper about Claudia Henderson’s dead husband, the alleged rebel sympathizer. But he tries not to pay much mind to that, because Dustin’s a rude little shit but he’s sweet in his own way, maybe one of the smartest kids this District has ever produced, and for some reason he’s taken to following Steve around the barracks when they’re both around — Dustin there because it's just him and his mom and if he’s not in the barracks, he’d probably be setting half the town ablaze, and Steve because the old man like to use him as a gopher when school’s not in session. (Probably has half a mind to send him off to some other District as a Peacekeeper like he did, if Steve’s being honest when he thinks on it.) Dustin’s taken a shine to him, for some reason he can’t fathom. Like he said, he doesn’t really share the brains most people in Three have, doesn’t have an aptitude for the technical shit, and that seems to be where Dustin thrives.
“You’re good with your hands,” the kid had observed once when Steve was trying to help out the mechanics one afternoon when the old man wasn’t hollering for him to run a comm somewhere. The kid had sounded grudgingly impressed, which was an unusual tone — the impressed part, that is; the grudging thing was very common. “You could probably test into some of the physical science cohorts and do mostly decent. I’d tutor you in the math, if you wanted.”
Steve hadn’t particularly wanted, because he was aware that there was nothing so embarrassing as getting tutored by an actual infant on math because he was a normal guy born into a District of brainiacs. But it was sort of touching — see: that sweetness in his own way — so he’d only rolled his eyes, said, “I’ll think about it,” and made him pass him a wrench.
He’d forgotten that this would be Dustin’s first Reaping, is the thing. Had been so caught up in the drama of his own life he hadn’t even checked in with the kid in the past few days, and now here he was, him and his little friends all in a circle. Four little boys in a crowd of other little boys, all trying to talk tall to one another, keep a brave face and straight shoulders and not look like they’re about to piss themselves with fear. Steve remembered being in those circles, that first year and the year after. He almost bites through his tongue.
Looking away quickly, he keeps scanning the clusters and rows of District kids, haphazardly clumped together in neat and efficient lines. They’ll all straighten out soon enough, when the anthem starts playing.
He spies Nancy as he continues to look idly around, ignoring the thrumming of his heart in his chest. She’s with the girls of her age group, her friend Barb’s hair the thing that caught his eye more than anything, the sun glinting hotly off the red curls. She’s looking in his direction but he imagines it’s more of a coincidence than anything, doesn’t even know if she actually sees him when he smiles at her. She looks back at Barb pretty quickly, anyway, grimacing her own smile.
There’s no time to dwell. There’s never any time to dwell, not here in the Districts, he thinks. There’s a clatter at the stage before them, and he looks up at the noise. Larry Kline, their District Capitol envoy, is teetering up the stairs. He’s always looked surprisingly normal, for someone from the Capitol; sure, he’s clearly had a ton of work done, his face puffy with various injections to try to keep the facsimile of youth fresh, but he’s mostly a natural color, his skin and his hair, and he doesn’t have many obvious mods. Mainly, it’s the strict adherence to Capitol fashions that give him away as other when he’s among them. This year he’s in an eye searingly magenta suit with shoulders cut so wide Steve’s shocked he can fit through a doorway, his hair coiffed to nearly a foot above the dome of his skull, and a jaunty little hat giving another few inches on top of that. He’s got big, mirrored sunglasses sliding down his nose, white gloves on his hands, and boots with a four inch heel to make him veritably tower over the Victor that ascends the stairs much more competently behind him, pulling her much younger peer along in her wake as she clearly fights to not roll her eyes as Kline begins to prance and wave on the stage for cameras that probably aren’t even rolling yet.
These days, there were only two living Victors from Three. They had a total of six, on record, over the years — more than most Districts in Panem but less than the Careers ones — but three of them were from much earlier in the history of the Games, the 11th and 19th and 23rd Games, all lost for several years now to the damage done to them by surviving. Bob Newby had been the most recent to pass; he’d fifteen when he’d won the 39th Games by electrocuting the final four Tributes, himself included, and they say his heart had never quite been the same after, so no one had quite been surprised when he’d slipped away quietly in his sleep just before the Games a few years back.
Joyce Byers had won two years after Newby had, the two of them childhood friends in fact, and the only female Victor their District had ever produced. Even then she’d been a tiny slip of a thing, which had probably been to her advantage in her arena: a maze made entirely of lights, blinding bright for every hour of the day. Still, she’d managed to stay hidden until the final moment when she’d killed the girl from Two with that axe. People said she went a little mad, after, and gave her a wide berth; but Steve thinks the Games would do that to anyone, and, anyway, that deadbeat husband of hers who drank himself to death a few years back on her Victor’s winnings probably didn’t help the twitchiness.
Then there’s Eddie Munson, who Joyce does her best to settle into a chair and then collapses into her own. She keeps an arm around his shoulders as she does, the only thing seemingly keeping the Victor of the 66th Hunger Games in his seat. He’d had a nasty descent into oblivion in the last two years since he’d won — though, of course, most people in Three don’t think of him as a true Victor. Neither does the Capitol, from what Steve can glean from the scant bit of news he sees when he’s among the Peacekeepers or keeping Carol company at her house: he’d spent most of his Games in hiding, after all, especially after poor Chrissy Cunningham met her end. People speculated they’d sent in those bat mutts mainly to flush Munson out, and it had been pure dumb luck that he’d managed to outlive the tributes from Four and Eleven, just bled out slower. The Capitol, in a fit of pique, Carol had speculated meanly, had seen fit to leave Munson with the scars too, his face split from lip to temple on the left side, and now he spent most of his days holed up in his house in the Victor’s Village while his uncle kept up his factory job to bring food home to their table. Far as Steve could see, and rumor could spread, Munson only emerged himself to spend his winnings on black market hooch and monthly deliveries of Capitol quality morphling.
Looking at Joyce and Munson, her trembling hands and shocky eyes as they stare into the crowd looking for her two own two kids and his slack mouth and glassy demeanor, Steve sort of thinks maybe surviving the Games is worse than dying in them.
After the Victors take their seats, a handful of Peacekeepers trudge up the stairs behind them. Steve’s old man is the first, good old Colonel Dan Harrington, and then his second in command, Major Jim Hopper, follows behind, looking near to as glassy as Munson. The old man stands at Kline’s shoulder — or he would, if Kline stood still long enough for it; mostly he hangs out where he will be standing, just to the left of the microphone and the glass bowls of kids’ names. Hopper goes to stand just behind Joyce and some other grunt of a Peacekeeper stands behind Munson.
Mayor Perkins ascends the stage next, and he gives the customary mayoral speech about the Reaping, a pat little number that’s been the same probably since Steve’s grandpa was giving it: duty and honor and respect, all shit Kline will hit even harder in his own endlessly rehearsed and Capitol sanctioned spiel. He tunes it out, keeps glancing around himself as other Peacekeepers filter into the square among them kids and start herding them into neater groupings. Steve gets separated from Tommy in the process, and Patrick McKinney ends up at his right elbow instead. They exchange nods as Kline steps up to the microphone and says, “Welcome, welcome! Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor! Now, before we begin, we have a very special film, brought to you all the way from the Capitol!” Then, the Anthem starts playing.
It goes on for forever, it feels like, and then transitions into the promised film projected onto the screens surrounding the District Three’s town center, the same one they play every year: there’s a wretched battlefield, crying women and children, bombs exploding. The president is giving a neat speech overtop of it: “War, terrible war — widows, orphans, a motherless child. This was the uprising that rocked our land: Thirteen Districts rebelled against the country that fed them, loved them, protected them. Brother turned on brother until nothing remained. And then came the peace: hard fought, sorely won. A people rose up from the ashes and a new era was born.”
The film begins to show snapshots of various Games, now, as the president’s voice drones on. “But freedom has a cost. When the traitors were defeated, we swore as a nation we would never know this treason again. And so it was decreed that, each year, the various districts of Panem would offer up, in tribute, one young man and woman to fight to the death in a pageant of honor, courage and sacrifice.”
On screen, there’s a montage of the Victors in their final moments in the Games. Joyce is shown in it, tiny and seventeen and backlit, but Munson isn’t; it skips from the 65th Victor to the 67th, and most people probably don’t notice. Munson sure as shit doesn’t, his head lolled back over his chair and staring sightlessly up to the perfect blue July sky, high as a kite.
“The lone victor, bathed in riches,” the president intones as the camera lingers on the boy from Two last year, raising a spear in victory, “would serve as a reminder of our generosity and our forgiveness. This is how we remember our past. This is how we safeguard our future.”
The screens cut to black and Kline, having fallen into stupefied stillness while he listened to the president speak with his hands pressed over his heart, leans into the mic and says, “Chills! Every year, chills! Oh, do you feel it?”
He says that every year too; no one ever replies back.
Of course, that’s never stopped Kline before, and he jumps into his own Reaping Day speech. He’s got little cards with his words that he digs out of the folds of his magenta jacket; Steve had endured much teasing over the years that Kline is as dumb as him, if he needs those cards to give the same damn speech since before they were all born.
“Now, the time has come for us to select that courageous young man and young woman who will have the utmost honor to represent District Three in the 68th Annual Hunger Games! And you know, as usual, ladies first!”
Kline totters half a foot over to the bowls and makes a big show of swirling his hands over the bowl and then diving in. He rummages about, glancing between the audience, the camera, and the screens around them showing him at work; he adjusts his hat twice as it begins to slide down the shellacked cloud of his hair. At last, he emerges with a slip of paper with some poor girl’s name on it and totters the half foot back to the microphone. He makes a meal of opening the folded paper, grinning all the while in excitement.
“Ahem,” he coughs into the microphone. He grins wider. “Barbara Holland!”
There’s the usual bit of silence, after a name is announced. Everyone looks around at each other, trying to make sure relief isn’t on your face that it’s not someone you know well, that it’s not someone you love. Steve looks directly for Nancy, who is already embracing Barb hard and fast, whispering something into her ear. Barb squeezes her back just as tight and then pushes her away into the arms of other girls, who are already wordlessly trying to comfort the silently crying Nancy. Barb does not look back at her as she marches forward, her face a shocky, bloodless white, her hair shining even brighter because of it. Light glints off the rim of her glasses as she pushes through the crowd, moves to the center walk-way, and ascends the stairs of the stage. Kline extends his hand to her; she ignores it.
When Barb is at last behind him, standing near Steve’s old man with her hands clenched into trembling fists and her eyes blinking rapidly — good, thinks Steve indistinctly, don’t let them see you cry — Kline grins broadly once more. He totters over to the bowl of boys’ names now and the whole song and dance begins anew. His hat is askew; he fixes it; he waves his hand; he paws through the bowl; his hat is askew again; he fixes it; his glasses start to slip and he fixes those too; he grabs a name; he returns to the mic; he calls out a name.
“Will Byers!”
It’s worse than it was when Barb’s name was called, he thinks. Now, it’s as if all the sound in the world is abruptly cut off; there isn’t even birdsong, or the hum of wires, which never stops here, as constant as a heartbeat. He wonders if it’s his own ears, his own mind stopping outside stimuli from being processed. On stage, Joyce goes sheet white and visibly staggers in her seat, one hand reaching thoughtless forward. Munson has finally sat up in his chair; he looks shell-shocked and reaches out now to grip Joyce’s wrist hard, presumably to keep her from diving off the stage. Even Major Hopper takes a step forward before he remembers himself. Barb has bitten her own lip so hard she’s drawn blood; Steve can see it from here.
In the crowd, at the back of the boys where all the smallest, youngest kids are grouped, little Will just stands there. Dustin is at his right; Nancy’s little brother Mike is at his left. They’re all friends, he knows. The three of them, and the other boy, Lucas he thinks, the son of the town bakers — they’re all friends. They’re just staring at Will, in shock like the rest of them, and how? How? His name is in only once, he’s twelve, he’s just turned twelve —
On stage, Kline is beckoning him up. “Come now, don’t be shy! Will Byers, Will Byers — oh! Oh my, now, unless I miss my mark, you’re the son of our very own Joyce, the Victor of the 41st Annual Hunger Games! Oh, how exciting this is! Oh, wow! Come now, son, come now! Up you get!”
Will starts to make his way out of the crowd as a Peacekeeper begins to reach for him. The other boys look like they’re having a hard time letting him go: hands on his shoulders, his arms, his back. But he slips away, smaller than even the rest of them, and walks forward as if in a daze. HIs eyes are huge; Steve’s not sure if it’s what’s happening or if it’s just his face: Joyce has big eyes too.
As Will slowly walks up the dirt and stone path to the stage, Steve emerges from the haze of anticipatory grief he feels for this poor boy, for Barb, for Joyce who has known unimaginable horrors and has now been given this new fresh hell, a grief for everyone that loves them, to realize three things in quick, bloodless succession.
The first and second are that Will’s older brother, just a few boys away from Steve himself, is taking a step forward at the same time as Mike Wheeler moves to follow Will, one hand reaching out. The third is that, still encircled in the arms of a handful of the girls around her since Barb’s name was called, Nancy’s red-rimmed eyes see exactly what Steve’s have and then, somehow, catch his from within the crowd. Everything that comes after feels like it lasts an eternity, though in reality it’s just a single split second, he knows. There’s barely enough time to gasp in air after a name has been called, let alone think a disastrous, suicidal thought full through to its end.
Split-second, he thinks: he’s only close enough to Jonathan to do anything, could grab him and hold him back, tell him to not make things worse for his mother — as if things could be worse than seeing her youngest be reaped — but then what about Mike? What about Nancy’s hotheaded, impulsive, protective little brother? He’s too far away to stop him from doing something frankly suicidal too, and then — then, Nancy loses her best friend and her brother to the Reaping, and her brother’s best friend has to live with that guilt the rest of his life, same as the rest of the Byers’ family. Could Nancy ever look at Jonathan again?
Will, now, is almost in line with him, unknowingly about to walk between Steve and Nancy’s locked, panicked eyes.
God, Jonathan was what him and Nancy had fought about, just last week. Steve thought him and his girlfriend were too close; Nancy had thought Steve was controlling. Even now, he wasn’t sure if they were together or not. Probably not, not anymore: she’d been so mad, and Steve had been too hurt to see beyond his own nose. So — so does he let Jonathan do whatever he’s thinking of? Is he thinking of that? It’s his little brother, he must be thinking of that. He’s just as protective as Mike, and would fare just as poorly — force his poor mother to watch that too. Nancy would never forgive any of them: Jonathan, Steve, the Capitol she already quietly, fully hates.
It’d be easier for everyone if it’s someone Joyce doesn’t care about, or Nancy. It’d be easier for everyone if it was someone not many people care about at all. Steve’s still looking at Nancy, hears her voice in his head, You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington, clear as a bell, a gunshot, even as his own voice leaves his mouth.
“I volunteer! I volunteer as Tribute!”
Steve’s alone for a long time after that.
Sure, he’s on stage for a bit, giving his name out and trying not to visibly react when Kline looks over his shoulder at Colonel Harrington, just as enthused for this development as he was for Will Byers to get called; the child of someone big in town is always interesting, he thinks, his mind at a very far distance from the rest of him. Kline doesn’t ask him why he volunteered, which is good because Steve isn’t certain he would have an answer for that. Will was so little — is so little — and Dustin was next to him, and Steve doesn’t want to be here but he wants a little fucking kid to be here even less and —
Anyway, there’s not really a protocol for when people volunteer, not in the Districts where it doesn’t ever happen. So Kline probably didn’t even think to ask, just wanted to get the show on the road because a volunteer is always a good one and Kline is probably salivating for the chance to get on the horn back to his own Capitol handlers and see how much of a spectacle they can make of this.
They get hustled off the stage and into the Justice Building, him and Barb, and then they get shuttled off to different rooms, and Steve is alone for a long time. He doesn’t think, just sits, just waits. Pops the buttons of his collar open, tries to breathe. He’s unsurprised when it comes out shaky. He picks at his cuticles until they bleed then sucks the wounded, trembling fingers into his mouth. He can hear Mom’s voice in his head scold him for it, uncouth, but who gives a shit. It’s fine. There are no cameras here, for the goodbyes. They like to film the reactions of people outside, live and messy and overwhelmed with unimaginable grief. No one wants the real personal details you get inside these rooms.
He was so little. God, he was so fucking little.
There are voices in the hall as people come and go. He thinks he hears Nancy, once, and footsteps by his door but she’s probably only here to say goodbye to Barb. They let best friends in with parents, family, if the family asks; Barb’s would ask Nancy for sure. If Steve’s parents asked Tommy and Carol, he thinks they’d turn him down.
Steve waits for someone he doesn’t really think will show, and is pleasantly surprised when the old man does —or, he’s as surprised as the shock lets him feel. It’s not much. His fingers are still bleeding.
Colonel Dan Harrington’s back is ramrod straight when he enters the room, his face stoic and blank. He’s exactly as Steve sees him every day, which is comforting, he supposes. He sits next to Steve, stiff and uncomfortable, with a few inches between them so they don’t touch. They never touch. Mom is the one always brushing up against him, never hugging any more but she’s there, here and there. She’s not, now. He vaguely remembers hearing gasps, seeing her grainy and washed out on the many screens around the square as the cameras sought out the sound of an overcome family member. She’d collapsed into the arms of the other mothers with her when his voice had rung out and he’d cut Will off before he could get close to the stage and Larry Kline’s outstretched, greedy, gloved hand.
His dad had looked at him like he’s looking at the wall now, that blank face, those shuttered eyes. Don’t let them see you cry, Steve had thought about Barb. It had been a thought that had come from his dad, years and years and a lifetime ago, the night before Steve’s first Reaping, the last night he remembered the old man as his dad. Don’t let them see you cry, he’d said when Steve had asked what he should do if his name was called. Don’t let them see you cry.
They sit in silence for a full five minutes before there is a knock on the door. Major Hopper cracks it open, looking glassier than ever. Steve has always been sort of impressed that the man can function as well as he does on the booze and pills he takes to tamp down on whatever it is that grieves him so much. The old man had said something about a daughter, once, back in his home District, but she wasn’t lost to the Games, just some illness or something. He wonders if that’s worse, somehow.
The old man gets up without looking at him or touching him, and stalks out of the room. Steve catches the Major’s eye but he looks away too, a grimace of something on his mouth, and the door shuts.
So that’s it then, Steve thinks. That’s it then. What was he supposed to do? Say he was sorry? He was so fucking little. Steve doesn’t think he can find it within him to be sorry for that. His parents will just have to learn to live with it, like Steve won’t. Maybe he should feel sorry for that, but he doesn’t.
Then the door opens again and for a split second he thinks it will be Mom. But it ends up being Claudia Henderson instead and he stares up at her in confusion before she drops to her knees and pulls him into her arms, fierce and fast. He leans into her, his head in the cradle of her neck and her hands fisted into the rough linen of her blouse, and bites hard at his lip.
“Major Hopper snuck me in,” says Nurse Henderson when she pulls back, before he can even ask how or why. It’s supposed to be for family only, he knows, these final moments. She’s saying, “So I don’t have long. I just wanted to say that I think you’re a very brave boy, and I’m proud of you, okay? The whole District is proud of you, do you know that?”
He stares at her. His head begins to shake, his hands.
She presses cookies into them, stilling them. She says, “These are for you. Dusty loves shortbread, and I had a little on me, in case — but he says you like it too, so. And this — he wanted you to have this, him and the boys.” Something hard and oddly shaped, now, against his palm, next to the cookies. “It’s from that game they play, so you have a token to take into the arena, if you don’t want whatever your father gave you.”
The old man didn’t give him anything but he can’t find the words to tell her that. She already looks upset enough as it is. For him? he thinks. He doesn’t deserve that. He only did a stupid, thoughtless thing, what he’s good at, and she’s proud of him? The whole District is proud of him? Not likely, he scoffs internally. He’s too numb to do it aloud and, anyway, she’s rising to her feet now and collecting herself together.
Nurse Henderson presses a kiss to his cheek and gives him a final nod before she bustles from the room like she was never there. Steve catches another glimpse of Major Hopper as she goes. He must be the one watching his door, to make sure he doesn’t make a break for it.
Alone again, he sits there for another eternity until Kline comes to collect him once more. The Capitol is the next stop on his journey, he knows, and the train to take him and Barb there is already waiting at the station.
Huh, he thinks. It was his last District Three sunrise after all.