pyrrhic victory (or the best you can hope for)

by geicogecko

Summary:

Stephanie Lauter, reluctant Victor of the 71st Hunger Games, and the shiniest new toy on the market (at least, until the 72nd wraps up, and the Capitol's got a new traumatized kid to latch onto) isn't having a good time at her first Games as a mentor.
Obviously.
But it's fine. She's fine. Everything is too loud, and candy coated, and bloody, and so fucking fine.

Peter Spankoffski, walking statistical improbability, astoundingly controversial talking point, and Victor of the 68th Games, isn't having a good time either.
Obviously.
The only real difference between the two of them is he's just grown out of pretending anything about this whole nightmare is even remotely in the realm of 'fine' anymore. Because it's not and he's not.

But, hey, that's just the nature of the Games, though. Isn't it?

Stephanie Lauter’s first Hunger Games as a mentor dawns bright and sparkly and bloody.

Almost half the tributes are dead by the time they ring the bloodbath cannons. It’s standard for a Bliklotep arena, where there isn’t anywhere much to run to. Both her tributes made it through though, so she’s fine. Real fucking fine. Exactly as goddamn fine as a person helping facilitate a fucking death game, completely helpless to do anything but sit back and watch as kids murder other kids fucking can be. So, yeah. Fine. 

One of her tributes, Brooke, grins, on the large, floating screens taking up half the wall space of the stupid-fancy event space the rest of the mentors and Capitol fuck heads have been placed in, swinging a shiny, glass-clear knife down-- 

She turns her face away to stare into the yellow, bubbly surface of her drink, instead of watching to see if she hits her target or not. She should be paying attention. She should be taking mental notes so she can sell her tribute to sponsors and help her win, so someone Steph isn’t in charge of doesn’t die, and, selfishly, so Steph doesn’t have to do this again next year. 

But she just… can’t. Every fucking inch of her is on edge and doing it’s best not to freak out, and if she watches every time a member of the Career alliance butchers someone smaller and more scared then them, she’s going to explode.

“At least the weapons are pretty.” A voice next to her pouts, high-pitched and put upon as all hell. She just barely restrains her flinch as the stranger the voice belongs to rests their chin on her shoulder.

“Mmm?” She manages, tightly. 

A pastel nightmare of mint green and bubblegum pink Capitol citizen bounces his way around to smile at her with all his teeth. (Every other one of which has been replaced with shiny, square cut rose quartz. It’s unnerving. It’s stupid looking. It’s just an objectively bad decision, because quartz can’t be wet for prolonged periods of time without getting damaged, idiot.)

“I mean, Blinky’s a genius, but his Arenas are always so ugly, don’t you think?” He wrinkles his nose, so barely she wouldn’t even notice if he wasn’t standing so close to her, “Not like yours. Oh, really, really, really I could not positively stop talking about your Arena for weeks. My friends all got so terribly bored of me, really they did.” 

Steph’s Arena. Right.

A candy coated nightmare of lollipop trees and cute little piglets snuffling from the streaming chocolate river and big eyed puppies nibbling on bubblegum grass. It’d been a Nibblenephim year, so the same twee fucking baby animals had grown rows of razor sharp teeth to tear them all apart if they didn’t do it fast enough themselves. The whole thing had been a goddamn fucked up, certified hit, if ratings are anything to go by.

It’d gone on for two weeks, so by the time she’d won, the whole world smelled of rotting chocolate and rancid, synthetic strawberry.  

(She’d been dragged out covered in blood, with dissolving cotton candy in her hair, and now half the Capitol is parading around in puffy, spun-sugar style wigs.)

“Right.” She says, instead of trying to pull together any actual response.

“It’s just so simple. Too much… blood all over the place and nothing else to look at. And let me tell you, red is not my color. Really, really it isn’t.”

Steph considers punching this stupid, nauseating man in front of her so hard his sparkly rose quartz teeth go scattering across the sparkly Capitol tile. Everything about him just sets all her nerves on end. 

(She doesn’t. Because she’s trying not to get her tributes targeted or her ass murdered before this whole nightmare is finished. Blinky arenas go quickly, she won’t be here too much longer.)

Instead, she takes a too-fast sip of her drink, lemon sour and so fizzy it’s bitter. Good. Grounding. Not sweet. And repeats, “Well, at least the weapons are pretty!”

“Oh, exactly! You know, you would never believe me, but I was really, really, just thinking that! Really! I was!”

She fake gasps, happy that sarcasm doesn’t read well through an inhale or when targeted to the incredibly drunk, “No! Really?”

“Really! Oh, Stephanie Lauter. What a Victor, really, what a Victor.”

(What a Victor is right. What a fucking dumb, pathetic, piece of shit Victor who shouldn’t even be here.)

“Thanks.”

He grins, leaning in to kiss her cheek and not seeming to notice when she dodges out of his way, head swiveling around to stare at a screen like that’s what he thought he’d meant to do the entire time.

His nose barely-wrinkles again in distaste, “Oh, it’s just so… minimalist.”

Steph takes the distraction to side step him, crossing around a table full of appetizers to hide behind a massive, fuck-ugly centerpiece. She takes another sour-buzzy sip from her glass, half-watching as a smaller feed pan over sweeping drone footage of the Arena. 

Admittedly, Bliklotep Arenas are usually kinda lame. Her District likes them, so she assumes they’re pretty popular across the board with the Career Districts. They’re the kind of Game that’s easy to win when you’re well-trained at slaughter. No way to be eventually killed off by the elements or outsmarted with bullshit when ninety percent of your playing field is the Cornucopia. Just an open field to watch everyone kill each other in.

But the Capitol, as she’s picked up through broadcasts of previous Games and how grumpy the prep teams had been about their work ‘barely mattering’ when people will ‘not even bother tuning in to watch and Stupid-Teeth-Capitol-Dude’s pouting, finds them boring. 

Not enough sparkle and intrigue with their kid murder, apparently. Too much blood when red isn’t their fucking color. It pisses her off, but so does everything, so it doesn’t really make enough of a difference for her to care.

Stephanie has existed as walking, talking rage for the past year now. What’s a little bit more?

Despite his lack of popularity, they always slot Bliklotep into the lineup after particularly… rowdy Games. Ones with shitty victors like Steph who openly take a dump on their whole stupid system in front of the entire country. 

(So, this is her fault.)

Sure, her edit hadn’t been generous for what she’d been trying to do. More of her back-to-back brutality with all the nice, soft, rebellious parts cut for time. Most of the Capitol left her reruns thinking of her as this fucking silly, little rascal. But the Districts could pick up her message of ‘fuck this’ well enough. The tiny pool of smart-ish, semi-decent Capitol people, if they even fucking exist, might have tilted their heads at it. And that’s not something the Lords, or President Cross, appreciate.

Bliklotep Games are direct warnings that the Capitol is watching. 

Always.

So, don’t be stupid.

(Unfortunately for them, Stephanie is really fucking good at being stupid. The only thing stopping her from burning all this shit to the ground this very second is that she doesn’t know how.)

This arena, despite what Stupid-Teeth-Capitol-Dude thinks, is actually sort of pretty, though. It’s the Blinky-classic empty field, a zoom out at the start of the Games revealed that it's, obnoxiously obviously, eye shaped, but there are these sloping, glass structures corded throughout the whole thing. Towers and tunnels and many-branched-trees that would normally make an arena a little more survivable, all made of sparkling, crystal clear glass. 

She can feel, right next to her anger, a deep and profound annoyance that (unless the Victor has a really distinct style) glass is about to be the next thing about to come into the vomit-worthy, creatively fucking void tastes of Capitol fashion. She’s already exhausted by the influx of requests for glittery, color-stained bullcrap, and it’ll barely even be her problem anymore. 

One of the tributes screams, loud and desperate, and throws a crystal javelin. It misses its mark so wide that the room around her erupts in ear-splitting, high pitched laughter. She wants to punch something. Instead, she twists her necklace around her fingers, letting the stones and metal dig into the sides of her knuckles. Also sort of grounding. Like her cocktail. 

In the back of her head, someone Kyle-sounding and far away yells, all excitement and energy, none of the bloodlust, propaganda bullshit that had died with him. The kind of noise that used to be matched with him loudly slamming his fist into his own chest and motivationally grabbing her shoulders too hard. ‘Come on. You GOT this, Lauter!’

She twists the necklace harder. She doesn’t actually think she does got this, Kyle, sorry, man. (The beads digging into her hand are a little less helpful this time.)

Remembrance jewelry is an old District One tradition, the kind everyone sort of knows about, because their grandparents had kept up with it, but didn’t do it themselves. At least, not in the same way.

They used to use precious gemstones, as far as she’s aware. An heirloom diamond the deceased had worn, or sapphire to match their eyes, soldered to gold and worn like pendants or rings or earrings, to honor someone you’ve lost. But they don’t really have fucking access to precious gemstones anymore. At least, not ones they’re allowed to keep. That shit gets sent to the Capitol.

Maybe, that’s part of why the tradition died. Because colored glass and pretty rocks and beads didn’t feel as meaningful.

Steph’s pretty sure it’s more, just like everything goddamn else, the fucking Hunger Games fault. Too many dead kids. Too many disgraced parents furious that the kid they’d trained to bring honor to their family failed, and got murdered instead. Too ugly to keep up with District One’s obsession with mimicking Capitol fashion five years too late.

Steph had always liked it, though. Both because her dad thought it was tacky, and she likes pissing him off, and just because she liked the idea of keeping someone close, no matter what happened.

She’d gone into the Games with one of her Mother’s rings as her token, a built in remembrance. After Kyle died, she’d taken his token. A bracelet with clever little knots between each blue, shiny bead, so none of the others fell off when she stole one before tying it back around his wrist. The kind of knots she knew that his girlfriend was known for being particularly good at. (Brenda still hasn’t talked to her yet, not since she came back.)

She’d woven the bead next to her mother’s ring using the thin cord she’d gotten out of her Cornucopia backpack. Remembrance. Later, her Dad lectured her about ‘wasting resources’. Steph doesn't regret it. 

There’s twenty four things folded into the threads of her necklace now. Twenty two pieces of the other eleven Districts hanging together over her chest, while Kyle’s bead and her mom’s ring sit on the top loop, right at her throat. 

It helps. Barely. But she’s okay with barely right now. Barely is better than not. 

(But, really, even barely isn’t quite cutting it right now. Not with the constant thought that, maybe, in the next couple of days, she’ll have to add two more memories. And the next year, two more. And two more. And two more-- fuck, she really hopes Brooke wins.)

‘Come on, Lauter! Let’s GO!’ 

She really wishes she could match fake-brain-Kyle’s energy, right now. But she can’t. So, instead, she sucks it up, and downs the rest of her drink, and fakes it. 

“Stephie!” A woman with too massive eyes presses another drink into her hands, sparkly and fuchsia and smelling so much like alcohol and sugar she almost stops breathing. She drops it into a crystalline bowl full of plastic-pastel plants the second she steps away.

“I’m sure you’re tired of me saying so,” a person she’s pretty sure she’s never seen before giggles, “But congratulations! This Game has quite big shoes to fill!”

A cannon goes off. A kid is dead. Not hers, though, so she’s fine. Isn’t she?

“Stephanie, get your ass over here! These pretty ladies need some persuading to send our tributes the good shit!” Her mentor partner Max hisses, grabbing her wrist too hard and dragging her over to a group of primary colored, stupid looking, rich fucks, who stare at both their chests too long and hand them new drinks before they can finish their old ones. 

An older man, his skin stretched back scary-far to try and make him look younger, cups his hand under her chin, squeezing both cheeks between his middle finger and thumb, “How is your father? You know, don’t tell your little mentor friends, but the two of you are my favorite Victors we’ve ever had.” 

Cannon. District Four’s girl. She’d been expected to at least make it to the last two. And now she’s dead. But, she’s not from Steph’s career District. So, she’s fucking fine. Obviously. 

“Congrats, kid. You ‘enjoying’ your first year as a mentor?” Another mentor she can’t recognize asks, dripping with infuriating sympathy. They slide her a drink. She slides it back and goes to get her own. She doesn't know why. Maybe it’s because the other mentors are the only people she’s allowed to be rude to. 

“You’ll always be our Victor! We got engaged at your ceremony!” A couple with matching cotton candy hair grab her from either side, “Oh, darling, come sit with us!”

Cannon. Cannon. Both the tributes from District Nine. One of their mentors downs three shots of something golden and presumably dangerous two feet from where Steph is trying not to cry. Because why would she cry? One of her tributes fucking killed both of them. She’s fine. She’s fine. She can’t do this. She’s fine. She can’t do this. She can’t, she can’t, she can’t. It’s loud, and Steph is fucked up, and everyone keeps congratulating her with varying levels of fucking pity and kid’s keep dying, and she can’t do this-- 

Someone is staring at her.

Obviously, no shit. Yeah. Everyone is staring at her. Other than the running feed of the bloodbath across every flat surface, she’s the star of the fucking show. But this guy isn’t making his way up to her grinning with too many teeth or holding matching, plastic-pink drinks. This guy isn’t checking her out or opening his mouth to ask a stupid question. This guy doesn’t have hair done up like cotton fucking candy and earrings shaped like gumdrops. 

This guy is just… looking at her, almost clinically, from far back in the room, and just for a second; before snapping his gaze back up to the Game footage in front of him, twisting his hair between his fingers in a nervous tangle of unstyled, refreshingly natural colored orange-red. 

It’s almost an impressive hiding spot, snooping from one of the least brightly colored couches, tucked towards the back of the room and slunk down like he’s trying to not be spotted. Probably because he is.

Steph gets the feeling. And because she gets the feeling, she’s totally not sure why the fuck she starts making her way over to him. 

She doesn’t personally know this kid, she doesn’t care about him. She knows who he is, sure. Everyone in Panem knows who he is and either hates him, or loves him, in equal, obnoxious measure. (Or, no, really everyone except Steph. She’s, at best, aggressively neutral.) Either way, it's not really a valid enough reason to decide to be the kind of dickhead who notices someone probably wants to be alone, and barges in anyway.

But, Peter Spankoffski has somehow found somewhere quiet, or, as quiet as this echoey, horrible room gets, and that’s really all she cares about right now. She’s too drunk and upset to give much more of a shit about courtesy. 

“Hey.” She kicks at his feet, just trying to get his attention, but her foot rocks into his own much harder than she means it to.

“Jesus Christ,” he startles, splashing whatever is in his cup over the knees of his shorts. 

She should probably apologize. Instead, she snorts. She’s a little too fucked up to try and be fucking tactful right now. He looks back up at her, with a baffled expression he’s not even bothering to school into a smile, which Steph sorta appreciates, “Hey?”

She plops down next to him before he can tell her not to, tilting her head sideways against the couch back andlooking him over. He looks about as impressive as she’d expected, which isn’t, pretty much, at all. All big, worried eyes and long hair in his face and hunched shoulders. Like a gangly, ginger fawn.

“You’re the Baby Butcher.” 

His face drops, so horrified that something in Stephanie’s drunk, drunk, drunk brain wants to laugh at him. Not even in a mean way. Just in a that’s so fucking funny way.

“Oh fuck, no. They don’t call me that in the other Districts do they?”

“Not… really,” She settles the laugh-urge into a slightly less objectively bitchy smirk, “Mostly they just call you lucky.”

He laughs then, and it’s… a nice sound. Soft and warm and the realest thing she’s heard all night.

“Yeah, well,” He gestures at her with his mug, half a cheers, “That is significantly more accurate.”

The movement of his mug sends the wafting scent of Capitol-Rich chocolate between the two of them. And suddenly Steph’s whole body tenses. Embarrassingly, ridiculously, stupidly. Stomach flipping inside out of itself as all her embarrassing, ridiculous, stupid muscles coil back, like they’re preparing for a fight.

She blinks hard, shaking herself out of it with what she thinks it’s pretty impressive speed, fucking thanks, but the panic must have shown across her face, even a little bit because Peter’s eyes go all squinty. It’s a sort of look she’s gotten used to, the past year. People studying her, trying to figure out why she’s acting like a stupid little freak for no reason. 

After a second, his eyes blow wide. A realization she’s also gotten incredibly used to, “Oh, yeah, shit, sorry--” 

He awkwardly twists around, trying to tuck his cup over the arm of the couch and onto the floor without spilling. His arms are almost long enough to make it work without looking totally ridiculous. 

“You don’t…” She tries, as he drops his cup, and then swears, like he hadn’t managed to set it down as carefully as he’d have liked to, “I’m fine, really--”

She’s not. Or, maybe, she is. She’s not really sure. It’s one of those especially dumb things that comes with her Victorhood, something other Victors, from Districts outside of hers, had warned her was coming. Trauma from your Games was weird and came from where you least expected it and was, above all else, a complete given. 

Unless, of course, you asked her Dad. In which case Stephanie is being fucking ridiculous and childish and pathetic. And as much as she likes to pretend she doesn’t care what Solomon fucking Lauter thinks, it’s hard not to feel just as stupid as he thinks she is when she left the murder game scared of candy. 

“No, no that was dumb, sorry,” he says, words too fast, like he’s not breathing in between them. He presses his lips together for a beat, “I mean, I’m sure that--”

“I’m good, man.” It comes out sharper than she means for it to. Defensive in a different way than she’d felt when the air had smelled like chocolate and her mouth had, just for a second, tasted like blood, “Really.”

Before she can do something dumb like feel bad about it, he just nods, “Yeah. Okay.”

She slumps back into the cushions, fingernails ringing awkwardly against the sides of her own glass. For some reason, she feels like she should apologize. She doesn’t.

Next to her, Pete shifts so one of his knees is curled against his chest, chin resting up on top of it as he watches the live feed across from them. It’s not showing his tribute, as far as she can tell, so she’s not really sure what the fuck he’s looking for. Probably something Steph is too stupid and inexperienced to understand. (Something that could get her tributes killed because she doesn’t know what she’s doing here.)

After a couple seconds, right before Steph decides to try her luck finding someone else in this fucking room she can stand, Pete says, “After my Games, multiples of nine used to make me vomit.” 

He’s not even looking away from the Games footage when he says it. It’s so unexpected that she can’t even manage the normal annoyance that comes with people telling her how things were ‘after their Games’. 

“What?”

“Nine, eighteen, twenty seven… you know. Anytime I saw one, it made me actually, physically puke. I ruined so many people’s shoes.” He explains, cheek smushing on his knee cap a little as he looks over to her, almost smiling, “The maze was set to change ‘randomly’, but it was really a repeating pattern of multiples of nine. Nine minutes, forty five minutes, twenty seven minutes, eighteen, eighteen, eighteen, seventy two minutes, and then it’d start over. I got so used to counting them out that the numbers got associated in my brain somehow.”

“Oh.”

Part of her wants to ask why the hell he’s telling her this, just to be an asshole. For some reason, though, she doesn’t feel like being an asshole to this guy. 

“Yeah.” He says, instead of, ‘so, basically, everyone’s Games fuck them up, and you can stop being a weirdo now about how yours fucked you up.’ Which is kind of him.

“They… still freak you out?” She says instead of ‘okay, well, am I gonna be fucked up forever over something so goddamn stupid?’ Which is cowardly of her.

“Not as often, anymore.” He shrugs, “Every once in a while, but that’s usually when I’m already upset about something else.”

“Right. Cool.”

His ‘usually' hits her a little harder than she expects it to. The implied ‘yeah, you're sort of stuck with this shit. It just won’t be all the time. Whoo fucking hoo.’ It’s not exactly the answer she was hoping for. (But, hey, the past year has just been a shit ton of things that she wasn’t hoping for. She’s gotten okay with dealing with it. Or, at least, pretending to.)

Steph remembers Peter Spankoffski’s Games. How the fuck could she not? He killed four Careers, both of the ones from her District. Blew half the goddamn arena up. At twelve. 

It was controversial as all fuck, for reasons she can’t actually remember right now, something about using a piece of the arena he wasn’t supposed to have access to. (It’d always confused Steph, even when she was small enough to just get pissed about things because her dad was pissed about them. She wasn’t sure what people wanted them to do. Everyone else who could have won if they took the title away from Peter Spankoffski was fucking dead.)

“Can I ask you a fucking question, dude.” It comes out harsher than she actually means for it to.

Pete just blinks at her, not looking particularly offended; just surprised, which actually makes it more embarrassing, “... yeah?”

“How did you get everyone to leave you alone?” 

Peter is famous, even by Victor standards. If she spent even half a second of her life outside of the couple clips of rerun footage that play leading up to every Game thinking about Peter Spankoffski, she would have just sort of assumed he’d been constantly lost in a swarm of Capitol losers. She probably would have pitied him a little over it, in the exact same way she hates other people doing to her, before figuring a pretty resounding ‘not my fucking problem’, and leaving him to the expensively dressed sharks.

“Oh,” He scoffs, shifting a little uncomfortably, “Well, you’re new meat. Don’t worry, they’ll care less about you once they get their hands on this year's Victor.”

“See, I don’t actually believe you.”

“That’s fair, you shouldn’t.”

“What the fuck dude?” She laughs, unexpected and only half as annoyed as she’d meant to be.

Pete laughs too, seeming to also be entirely surprised by it, “Hey! I’m sorry! But the rest of my avoidance tactics are pretty dependent on the entire Capitol perpetually considering me a tall toddler that they’d rather pinch the cheeks of than fuck.”

Her whole face scrunches in disgust. Somehow, she’s not really sure which option pisses her off more, “Gross. Yeah, I’m good.” 

“Excellent call, really. And… also your only option, since you won your Games at the ancient age of fifteen.”

“Why the fuck do you just know how old I was when I won?” She snaps, suddenly on the defensive. She doesn’t like when people talk about her age like that. Too familiar in a way she hasn’t, necessarily, been warned about, but Steph’s not a fucking idiot. She gets the implications. They’re more than fucking clear.

“Because it was last year?” Pete says, rolling his eyes and not even bothering to hide it, “And we’re the same age?”

“Right.” She slumps back, all the tension dropping out of her body at once to make room for embarrassment. But, honestly, fuck that. She doesn’t have to be embarrassed. This entire room is chock fucking full of reasons to be on edge. If Pete is judging her for it, he can go fuck himself.

… but, still, it’s sort of weird to consider. She’d just sorta always thought Peter was younger than her, even though she knows he isn’t. It’s just something that happens; you get frozen in time right when you win your Games. 

(The embarrassment gives way itself then, for a tiny, obnoxious sort of guilt. That’s how the Capitol thinks about Victors, and thinking anything at all like how the Capitol does makes her feel fucking gross.)

“And, to be fair,” He continues, absently, and it takes her a second to remember what they’d actually been talking about, “Schaffer-- District Three’s other mentor. She’s better at selling the tributes to sponsors than I am.” He nods across the room, where a tall, familiar looking woman is talking to a group of older Capitol citizens. 

Steph can’t place her specifically, doesn’t remember anything about her Games, but she thinks she must have won around the same time as her Dad. One of the old guard Victors who volunteers to be a mentor, because no one else wants the job. 

District Three has a decent pool of winners, but as far as she’s been told, they don’t always… handle it as well as Careers do. There’s a reason Peter Spankoffski has been a mentor since was thirteen, and it’s not because there weren't any other alive male Victors.

“So, while she’s doing that, I just get to hide and hope people forget I’m here.”.

“That’s… lucky.” She says, trying and failing to keep the mountain of jealousy welling up inside of her out of her voice. 

“Gotta catch a break somewhere, right?” He shrugs, tugging at his hair again and turning back up to the Games.

“Not in my experience.” She grumbles, well aware of how childish she sounds. The bratty new kid pretending she has any clue what she’s talking about.

If he thinks she’s being ridiculous, though, he doesn’t know it. Just tilts his head in her direction and scoffs. She shifts, sprawling her legs unfolded out in front of her so they take up the majority of the couch space that Pete hasn’t bothered to. If he cares, he should have moved over earlier. 

She tilts her head up on the arm, looking between him and the footage for a second, “What are you even watching?”

“The… Games?”

“Yeah, no shit. Are your tributes even still in?” It’s one of those questions that doesn’t sound fucked up until she asks it. Like, maybe she should already know that. Like, maybe there's an unspoken rule about not asking specifically that she just broke because she got most of her mentor etiquette from Max or her Dad.

Pete’s jaw tightens, “One of them is.”

“Ah.” 

She’s got another weird instinct to apologize. She doesn’t. That’s, at least, one unspoken rule she’s picked up all on her own. ‘Sorry’s have no place when it comes to the Games, whether you're in them or not, “Are they… who you’re watching?”

He side eyes her for a second, without turning his head, and Steph gets the distinct feeling she’s being evaluated for something she cannot possibly understand. She does her best not to show how hard that shit rubs her the wrong way, and it must work, because eventually Pete relaxes the tiniest possible amount and tilts his head back towards her.

“Yeah. Well, sort of? I’m more… not watching her?” He says, half apologetic. She appreciates any level of acknowledgement that what he just said made no goddamn sense.

“Okay. Actually what the fuck does that mean?”

He huffs something kind of like a laugh, but it’s more strained sounding than anything, “She’s… hiding.”

“What?”

Bliklotep arenas pointedly don’t allow hiding. That’s the whole thing. They don’t even leave the bodies for any longer than a minute or two, not even during the fucking blood bath when it’s almost impossible to intervene, just in case someone tries to blend in with them.

“She’s hiding. I don’t know how, but she is.” He leans forward a little, strain twisting to something faster, pride and confusion and panic all tangled together, “The drones haven’t even picked up on her yet.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. I…” He glances back over at her again, that quick, obvious evaluation kind of look from earlier, before he points up to the far left corner of the screen, “Look: I think she’s hiding at the base of that one tree there. See, where the roots meet the ground is more layered than the rest of it, so there’s a couple thicker sections of glass that just reflect up from the dirt. And I’d bet you anything there’s some sort of divot where they were inserted into the ground.”

Steph tries to follow his finger, but she can’t differentiate any of the identical, crystalline trunks from each other. She can see, just a little, what he means about the roots reflecting the ground, but that’s about it. 

She refuses to feel stupid about it, though. This is fucking crazy.

Instead, she scrounges around in the back of her head, scrambling to try and find something about the District Three girl, so she doesn’t sound like a total asshole. She hadn’t really been paying attention earlier, during all the interviews. Too focused on making sure her tributes did well and not breaking something. 

She thinks she remembers her being good at statistics. Problem solving and odds-making that Dan and Donna had done a big show of spinning to be about her ‘seeing all the angles’. Fuck. She hopes she doesn't have her confused with another tribute. It’s so insanely possible.

“... Patricia? Right?”

Pete looks over at her, clearly surprised, but she can’t really tell if it’s in a good way or not, “... yeah. PJ.”

“But… but how has no one found her yet? Isn’t she just, like, a sitting duck?” 

Staying in one place isn’t usually a good move in any Games, let alone a well contained massacre.

“That’s the genius part,” Pete says, with half a smile, “She must have broken off a branch or something, I think she’s-- wait, look! Yeah, that glinting on the far side over there…” He points vaguely, and it takes a second for Steph to catch what he’s talking about. 

But then, there it is. A tribute she doesn’t recognize (and doesn’t have the brain space to bother wasting on figuring out what non-Career District has tributes who haven't died yet) is running right through the glass orchard, when a blinking flash of light wipes across the trees opposite to him. Far, far from where PJ, apparently, is. 

The kid’s head whips around, heels skidding on the grass as he sprints after it. 

“She’s tricking them.” She whispers, stretching out her legs to prod his ankle with her shoe. It’s just a light, and, honestly, the move is risky as all hell if someone is able to catch on and try to follow where it’s coming from, but in person, under the adrenaline and panic that comes with trying not to die, you aren’t really thinking clearly enough to tell the difference between movement trying to trick you and movement that’ll get you killed. Holy shit.

“Yeah.”

“They’re probably not even looking for her.” No one would bother. She’s not supposed to be able to do this.

“It’s the only upside to a Bliklotep Game,” Pete cracks, half-smile smaller, but still sticking around. She doesn't mind it. It’s nicer to look at than most of the artificial, eye-meltingly-stupid shit in the Capitol, “Too many people die too fast, so everyone forgets who's still alive until tonight’s recap.”

Fuck. That’s… that’s insane. This arena is essentially an open field, and somehow, Peter’s tribute has managed to not only find a hiding spot, but break the Game just enough that no one is even trying to hunt her down.

As much as Steph doesn’t want her tributes to die in this boring, beautiful arena, she can’t help but be a little bit impressed. 

“That’s gotta be… good for sponsors, right?” She hums, glancing over to where he’d pointed out the other District Three mentor, but she’s no longer where she had been. 

“You’d think.”

“What d'you mean?”

He folds himself a little smaller behind his knee, somehow, “Can’t exactly drop a parachute down on someone trying not to get spotted. Right?”

Oh. Oh. She can almost picture it. Dropping down a sponsor gift to PJ right now would be about as deadly as dropping a fucking bomb. A sparkly, silver sign blinking in big, bold letters ‘Here she is! Come kill them!’

“Fuck. That sucks, dude.”

“Oh, does it?” He looks back to her, one eyebrow arched high on his forehead, and smile suddenly sarcastic in a way she hadn’t expected him to be able to pull off, if she’s being totally fucking honest, “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Asshole.” She scoffs, kicking his ankle again, as gently as humanly possible.

“Well, that’s just the nature of the Games, isn’t it?” He huffs, slapping at her shoe.

“Hey, you know, somethin’?” Steph says, realizing it as it comes out of her mouth. She tucks her legs back and shoves her feet under the cushion he’s sat on, levering Pete over just enough that he slides into the arm of the couch, “You’re the first person here to not compliment me on my ‘good game’.”

“Well,” he says, simply, before glancing over his shoulder like he’s trying to make sure no one is listening. She doesn’t like knowing that, no matter what, someone definitely is, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I wasn’t under the impression that’s what you were trying to play.”

And despite every single thing and person in this room sucking as hard as humanly possible, despite the nightmare happening around her, not only for the past year, but for much, much longer than that, Steph grins. And Peter Spankoffski grins back.

A cannon goes off. Both of them go stiff, Pete’s eyes squeezing shut as he shutters through a weak approximation of a deep breath. Please no-- They turn to look with an unsettlingly sort of matched speed. Too fast to really be as reluctant as they’re both pretending to be.

The District Two boy stares back at them from every single wall, eyes vacant and mouth cracked open in a scream. His head detached entirely from the rest of his body. 

And just as quickly as he appeared, the cameras cut away, probably so they can take his body out. A whole person, gone and edited neatly around so the Capitol can forget about him. Cheer or boo about how it affects their betting for this year's Games, and then move on with their stupid fucking parties. 

A mean part of Steph that has no right to still exist inside of her almost wants to ask him if those three seconds of fame were worth volunteering for. If the kids he killed were worth everyone's last quickly fading memory of him being split in half and alone.

But that’s not fair. Not when she’s sitting here rooting for two volunteers from her own District. Not when Kyle had been just as thrilled at the prospect of stabbing his way to victory when he’d volunteered last year.

Not when Steph herself had fucking volunteered. She hadn’t meant to win, but that doesn’t fucking matter. She’d volunteered. She’d killed people. She’d won anyway. Sitting here judging dead kids just makes her a dick.

“Does it ever stop being this… this…”

“Fucked up?” Pete says, lips pressing together to make one, thin line.

“I was gonna say ‘difficult’, but yeah, yours is better.”

“Sure is.” He huffs, with an awkward kind of point, almost like he’d tried to cheers her with the cup he wasn’t holding anymore, “And, no, for the record. It’s pretty fucked up the whole way through.”

“Good. Great.”

“Sorry.” And it does sound like he genuinely is, which is nice, even if he doesn’t actually have anything personally to be sorry for.

Out of all the people in this room who are to blame for the shit going on, Peter Spankoffski, Panem’s sole twelve year old, babyfaced winner of the Hunger Games, is very, very low on that list. At least, as far as she knows.

Before she can say anything about it, though, an interruption cuts her off in the form of a frothy, lavender-and-gold woman wearing a wig that transforms halfway up into a nicely structured, eye shaped hat that actually blinks. (It’s too on the nose. It pisses her off.) “Stephanie! Oh, good!”

Oh, Steph thinks, miserably, Good.

“Hey,” She manages, with a tight smile that doesn’t come as easily now that she’s stopped doing it for the past couple minutes. 

The woman responds with a shriek, high pitched and fucking piercing, “Oh! And Petey, hello, darling! I didn’t even see you there. I honestly didn’t!”

“Hello.” Pete says stiffly, after doing a bad job of hiding his back-to-back flinches at the shriek and the 'Petey’. She doesn’t seem to notice, reaching out to ruffle at his hair, like he’s a small dog or something. 

“Are you… having fun tonight?” Steph asks, awkwardly, before she can think better of drawing this woman’s attention back on her. She’s not thrilled about it, but, at least she doesn’t look five seconds away from using a baby voice on Steph. (And, god, she better not start, because it’d be so, so incredibly bad for everyone involved.)

She gasps, quieter than her shriek, but not by nearly enough, “Oh, oh! I almost forgot! Maxie told me I could come get you! We’re talking about your brilliant little tributes!”

“Right.” She sits up a little, trying to catch a glimpse of where the woman is fluttering her arms nonspecifically. From his sea of Capitol-buddies, Max catches her eye across the room and glares. Fuck. Fine. Funs over, she guesses, “Lead the way.

(Though, she isn’t totally sure when she started thinking of this as fun. But, maybe, just based on his competition, she guesses Pete’s pretty good company. At least he hasn’t tried to get her drunk or spent their entire conversation talking about her Game.)

Eye-lady giggles, pivoting on her heel and teeter-tottering her way back to her friends without even looking back to make sure Steph is following. Part of her considers just staying here and hoping she won’t remember she was supposed to come with.

Max won’t forget, though. And Brooke and Trevor can’t afford it. With a sigh a little too dramatic, just enough to feel sort-of-barely better, she heaves herself up, yanking her skirt down lower than it really wants to go, “Thanks for the company, Baby Butcher.”

Pete grimaces his way, somehow into a smirk, “Right back ‘atcha, Slaughter Jr.”

“Fuck that. No, please tell me that hasn’t caught on--”

Slaughter had been her dad’s nickname, when he won his Games. A stupid pun off their last name that the Capitol clearly thinks is terribly goddamn clever. It’d gotten thrown around a little, during the interviews beforehand, but if someone had called it after the fact, she’d been either too pissed off or too dissociative to notice. 

She guesses it makes sense. Doesn’t mean she doesn’t fucking hate it. Ew.

He hisses through his teeth, almost comical in how blatantly unapologetic he is about it, raising his open palms in a shrug, “Sorry to break it to you.”

“I take it back, fuck you for the company.”

And he just laughs and flips her off in a way Steph is sure would have sent Eye-Lady shriek-gasping all over again if she stuck around. So, Steph flips him off right back, and trails after her to sell some more kids based on how well they fucking kill people.

God. This sucks. 

(But, even if it’s definitely fucked, it sucks, like, half an ounce less now. Maybe. A little.)

(Or maybe she’s just drunk.)

(Probably both.)

---

 

[The 68th Hunger Games is, honestly, a little scary. At least, when things are actually happening.

Not that Steph would admit that, obviously. Her Dad and his other Victor buddies have been making fun of it for the past seventeen days, mocking the tributes who get crushed between the moving walls and complaining about it being bullshit when the Careers get stuck in a closed off cavern where they can’t kill anyone but each other.

It’s a T’noy Karaxis year, which always means a maze of some kind, but this one is ugly. Big and multilayered and mechanical. Hundreds of ways to die and none of them pretty. 

She shifts to sit cross-legged up on their kitchen table, picking a cookie into crumbs in her lap, and then eating the pieces out of the hammock of her skirt. She’s only sorta half-trying to watch the Games above the heads of the adults. She’s technically allowed to sit in the living room during her Dad’s nightly viewing parties (mostly because he has to let her legally, as ordered by the Capitol or something) but she hates it. 

At this point, she’s given up even trying, after almost three weeks of everyone being too goddamn loud, and mean, and laughing at her when she flinches at particularly ugly deaths. But still. It’s the Games. Obviously she likes the Games, because her Dad won the Games, and one day, Steph probably will too.

Probably. 

They’re the Games, she can’t just not watch them, even if she doesn’t totally like watching them… with her Dad’s friends. That’s all. Obviously. 

She’s rooting for the District One girl, Caitlin. (And not only, maybe, a little bit, because she’s, like, very, very pretty.) All the adults seem to have placed their bets on their boy, for no particular reason Steph can tell, their two tributes scored pretty much the same this year. So, her rooting for Caitlin is mostly on principle. 

It’s more fun when girls win, anyway. Plus, it always seems to surprise her Dad, even if he really tries to hide it, and those kinds of things are rare. Things Steph expects and her Dad isn’t prepared for. 

But it’s not showing Caitlin right now, or any of the Careers, or anything interesting.

The only thing on screen right now, is a tiny kid, who looks smaller than she is, even though she knows he can’t be, because Steph is twelve, and anyone younger isn’t eligible. He’s hunched over his knees, crammed into a corner and sobbing, the half of his face not covered by his arms covered by a messy tangle of red hair. She can’t actually remember who he is though. He must not get a lot of screen time, or, at least, not while she’s watching.

That happens sometimes, especially in drawn out Games like this one. They save all the good what-happed-while-you-were-gone footage and more interesting live feeds for the most viewed hours of the day, and show all the boring, but alive, tributes late at night or while people are at work or school.

“Whose that?” She asks, and is resolutely ignored, so she asks again, louder, “Whose that?”

Her Dad flaps his hand back at her, a silent but very clear dismissal.

Steph’s not great at those.

“HEY!” 

He finally looks back at her, eyes sharp, “Stephanie.”

It’s a warning, not even a subtle one, which probably means she should stop. But, Steph gets those kinds of warnings a lot, and she knows that what it actually means is that she’s got a very, very short time frame before she’s too busy getting in trouble to ask her question.

“Whose that?” She points to the screen, where the kid is still sniffling.

“Peter Spankoffski. District Three.” He answers, clipped and fast, “Now, either pay attention, or shut up.”

Asking any follow up questions is going to be impossible, so she shoves a handful of cookie crumbs into her mouth and tries to remember literally anything about Peter Spankoffski from District Three. 

He is her age, she knows, then, because there’s only two twelve year olds this year and the District Twelve one is already very dead. And Three’s girl just died, she thinks, though she can't remember her name. Just that the District One guy had snapped her neck, and that she was one of the older tributes. (They really played with the age difference between her and Peter in the interviews. Her Dad’s friend Miss Tessburger has said that meant they ‘didn’t have much else to offer’.)

“How in the hell…” She hears someone mutter while she's mulling her very few facts about Peter Spankoffski from District Three's existence over in her head, and the energy of the whole room shifts hard to the left; everyone leaning forward in their seats and hissing things she can’t quite make out. 

“What?” She asks, looking back to the TV set, but whatever they reacted to must be out of frame, because now it’s just showing Peter Spankoffski from District Three lifting his head. His eyes are bloodshot, and he sort of looks like he’s about to start puking, but she doesn’t think that really qualifies this kind of reaction.

“I mean, it-- no, that’s fucking absurd.”

“What?”

Her Dad scoffs, but it’s strained in a way that makes her nervous, “District Three’s mentors must be pushing the pity angle particularly hard this year. Bullshit.”

Steph scoots forward, leaning as far forward as she can over her knees without toppling off the front edge of the table, “What is?”

“No, exactly.” Tessburger sniffs, approvingly, “Just because his teen slut Mother died in the Games and made his teen slut Father go psycho, all the bleeding hearts in the Capitol just can’t help themselves. Hmmph!”

“It’s pathetic.” Her Dad says, clipped, and decisive, and everyone nods in agreement over the bullshit, pathetic-ness of the entire situation. Steph nods too, like she understands, even though no one is looking at her and she doesn’t. 

The camera finally pans down shows what they’d been talking about again; scrabbling across the dented, metal floor of the maze is one of the gleaming, golden sponsorship gift robots that have been built specifically for this years Games, since this maze has a closed ceiling and the parachutes wouldn’t make it through.

That… is weird. Sponsorship gifts, especially this far into the Games, are rare. And twelve year olds, specifically, don’t ever get them. Not even capable looking ones, and full offense to Peter Spankoffski of District Three, but he doesn’t look particularly capable. He looks sick.

“HA! Good luck winning with that shit, brat.”

“What a fuckin’ waste of good Sponsorship money, I mean, really?”

“It’s these goddamned Tinky Games. They make people insane!”

“What?” She asks, tilting up on her knees. She can’t tell what’s inside the bag for a second, it just looks like a bunch of tiny, rainbow-metallic balls, until he unwraps one and shoves it into his mouth.

Chocolate. Oh. Yeah, everyone else is right, that’s totally useless.

But, regardless of how pointless his sponsor gift is, in that moment, Peter Spankoffski from District Three stops crying, looks up to a camera he probably shouldn’t know is there, and beams. 

Huh. 

It makes Steph’s stomach go weird and flip-floppy. She shoves the rest of her cookie unceremoniously off her lap and onto the floor.

He looks too much like a person like that. Smiling, with chocolate in his teeth. Like he could be one of her classmates or something. She’s never… really thought about it like that before. Sure, she’s met some of the District One tributes, her dad is a Victor, but still. They’re all old. 

Peter is her age.

The sponsor gift robot starts to scrabble away, satisfied that it’s done its job of delivering something that, as far as Steph can tell, literally won’t help at all. Before it can actually veer back into its hidden compartment, though, he scrunches his face small and pins it back between his knees. 

“What on Earth does he think he’s doing?” Tessburger huffs, crossing every part of her body, like an annoyingly judgemental human-pretzel. 

(Steph doesn’t like Tessburger, so she pretends, just to herself, ‘cause no one is looking at her, that she’s not also really confused.)

Peter Spankoffski from District Three struggles pretty obviously to scoop the bot up, its shiny gold legs wriggling and scrambling uselessly in the air. And, then, Peter Spankoffski from District Three launches the entire thing hard into the metal wall of the maze.

“Holy shit.”

“Language, Stephanie!” Her Dad snaps, but he’s sitting up too. They all are. Every adult Victor in her living room is suddenly very, very focused on what’s happening in front of them, and Steph's got enough experience watching Games with them to know that means something.

“But what is he doing?” She tilts up on her knees, trying to see.

Peter Spankoffski of District​​ Three tilts his head at the wreckage of mechanical parts like a tiny dog or something, shoves another one of the chocolates into his mouth, and turns around to stick both his middle fingers up right into the camera. 

(This is something that, in every future broadcast, will be cleanly cut out. Forcibly forgotten.) 

Steph can’t help the laugh it startles right out of her, even as half the room whips their heads around to glare at her.

What? It was funny.

The camera cuts away then, to another section of the maze, and her Dad scoffs, ignoring her outburst in favor of relaxing lazily back into his seat and swirling his glass towards the screen, “And that, my friends, is a wrap on Peter Spankoffski! I will put money on the table right now, if anyone is willing to take a bet against his only remaining screen time being that kid’s pathetic, boring little death.”

No one takes the bet. All of them just clap him on the shoulder or cheers their own drinks and laugh like he’d said something much funnier than what Steph heard. Steph laughs too, just so it doesn’t sound like she didn’t understand the joke.

(Later, though, she’ll wonder if anyone regrets not taking her Dad up on his bet. 

After Peter Spankoffski from District Three clumsily baits the remaining Career alliance into chasing him, before launching a freaking bomb made out of a sponsor gift robot parts and grinded up, multicolored aluminum wrappers, and ducks behind a perfectly timed change in the maze walls less than a second before the whole thing explodes. 

She doesn’t actually ask. Everyone is too angry about the whole thing and Steph isn’t that dumb. But she still wonders. 

Well.. wonders, and pretends to be angry. too. Or, angrier than she actually is. 

Because Peter Spankoffski blew up Caitlin. And Caitlin is-- would have made way cooler Victor than he’s going to. Even if a tiny part of her is glad the kid her age who smiled over getting chocolates didn’t die, Caitlin shouldn’t have died either. Or… instead. Whatever. 

Either way, it’s still total bullshit. Her Dad nods approvingly when she says so, and everything, he doesn’t even go ‘language, Stephanie!’, so she’s gotta be right about it.

Right?)]

 

---

 

Peter Spankoffski’s fourth year as a mentor dawned bright and sparkly and bloody. 

And then, about sixty-three seconds in, one of Peter Spankoffski’s tributes died.

Gabe had been sort of a creepy son of a bitch, but he’d also been two years younger than Pete, and stupid, and got excited about being served pancakes for breakfast every morning. He hadn’t deserved what he got. An almost perfectly transparent glass axe through the center of his forehead, skull cleaved neatly in two before it’d been unceremoniously yanked out by the same Career who’d brought it down so he could use it to slaughter someone else.

Fourteen year olds shouldn’t die like that. Fourteen year olds shouldn’t die at all.

But that’s the nature of the Games, isn't it? Pete really shouldn’t be surprised at this point. 

And maybe he isn’t. Just… really fucking nauseous, even hours later. 

Here’s the thing: Peter’s a bad mentor, and everyone knows it. He won his Games in a way that was literally, physically impossible anymore, because after he did what he did, they took precautions to guarantee it. It’s not like he knows from experience what the fuck they should do. It’s not like he can give advice better than ‘have your District partner pretty music single handedly keep you alive for three fucking weeks, get her killed in the process, and then build an explosive’.

At least this year, none of his tributes are fucking older than him.

“Come on, PJ.” 

There’s not much rooting for her is going to do, she can’t hear him and he can’t do anything about it, but it loosens something infinitesimally small in his chest to try. 

Fuck, she’s so goddamn smart, and he’s so proud of her, even if it sorta-kinda feels condescending to be. Pete’s her age, ‘pride’ feels like something designated into the more experienced hands of actual adults who know what the fuck they’re doing. But, still. He’s proud of her for making it this far. He’s so, so proud it’s practically smashing it’s through his ribcage. Or maybe that’s just how tightly he’s hugging his knees to his chest while he watches and occasionally remembers to breathe and pointlessly says ‘come on, PJ’ up into the air.

She’s smart, he’s proud. Simple and good and something. But neither of those things really erase the very real actuality that it’s dark now. Her reflection trick won’t work as well in the moonlight (he’s seen her try it, seen the way she decided it was too risky and didn’t give it another go) and, worse, in a few hours they’re going to project the dead tributes into the sky and someone is bound to be paying enough attention to realize she isn’t there. 

She’s fucked. But, maybe, if he pretends she isn’t, un-logics himself of the most forgone conclusion possible, she isn’t. 

“Come on, come on, come on.”

He and PJ aren’t, like, friends. Not really. But they were classmates, before she got old enough to start going to actual work, and Pete got old enough to start going to the kind of bullshit work that they trust kids who made a bomb that one time to do. They weren’t close, but they were friendly.

Are friendly. 

No past tense. Because PJ is still alive, and it’s fucked up to jinx that shit because Pete’s terrified she won’t be for long. 

Schaffer comes around his self-imposed viewing station, giving his shoulder one sharp, pointed squeeze. It’s about as far as she goes, touchy-feely-wise and he appreciates it for what it is, “I’m going to go get some rest. You can wake me up when-- if.” 

She doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn't need her to. They both pointedly do not look back at any of the screens. Schaffer stares directly into where his eyes would be if he wasn’t expressly avoiding it by focusing all of his attention on the golden grout-lines between the tile underneath her feet.

“I will.” He informs the grout. 

“Get some sleep.” She says firmly, like an order. 

“I will.” He repeats, like he’s taking it as one.

He won’t, actually, and she knows that. It’s a game they’ve been playing for the past five years. Pete went into his own Game stupidly sleep deprived, and he hasn’t experienced one differently since. But it’s nice of her to at least try. 

That’s really the only thing that gets anyone through the Games, Pete thinks. Even Career District bootlicking assholes. You just have to fucking try, and nothing works because it was never within your control in the first place, but it at least makes everything feel a little less pointless. Sometimes.

So he tries. He watches the Games footage interspersed with late night recaps of all the gory, bloody murders from the past eighteen hours, and tries not to think about Gabe or PJ or Ted back home or Deb or mazes-- or anything. 

Pete’s really not good at not thinking about anything. In fact, most of the time, when he tries, he ends up thinking about far too many things all at once, none of which help whatsoever.

But, hey. He’s trying. 

He yanks his hair back from where it’s fallen over his shoulder, pulling it hard between his fingers until it aches a little against his scalp. It’s uncomfortable, not just the pulling, but his hair itself. He’s spent the last week trying as hard as he could to rub the squeaky-dry ‘freshness’ out of each individual follicle, even though he knows by now that’s not how it works. His hair will feel like actual hair again by September. He’s just gotta fucking cope until then.

It’s not the worst part of the Games, not by a long shot, and Pete would be a total asshole if he even pretended otherwise, but fuck if it’s not annoying.

Because, really, if he’s being honest, Peter’s fourth Hunger Games as a mentor didn’t even start bright and sparkly and bloody. It didn’t start with Gabe dying, or the first day of training when his two tributes really came to terms with how little he could help them, or even the Reaping.

It started the way it always starts. With a shiny, yellow package hand delivered to his doorstep on June 30th, packed neatly with two glass bottles and a plastic hood, along with a mile long list of instructions on how to ‘refresh his color’, complete with pictures and big letters, y’know, just incase he gets confused.

Like Pete doesn’t know how to do it by now.

It’s not even particularly difficult. They had a specialist come to teach him that first year, when they were redyeing it and testing different shades for ‘the most attractive temperature for his coloring, of course, while still aiming for realism.’ 

He just has to work the chemical, Capitol-innovation-that-they-probably-actually-made-in-One shit into his scalp, leave it on for two horrible, terrible days under the stupid, plastic hat, before washing it out. If he just ignores the way it fucking burns the whole time, and doesn’t mess with it, boom. Pete is once again just as ginger as the day he wasn’t born and Ted is t-minus ten minutes from a breakdown about it.

(At least it’s a little funny when all the Capitol fucks pout over how lucky he is for that to be his ‘natural color’.)

The cushion next to him dips down a little, and he startles, preparing himself to force a smile and get lectured about bed times, as though staying up too late would be the most inappropriate thing going on in this room right now. 

The lecture doesn’t happen. Because the person sitting down right next to him is Stephanie Lauter.

Ah. Interesting. Terrifying, actually. Maybe. 

Honestly, he just doesn't know how to proceed here. Which makes it both interesting and terrifying, so really he’d be correct the whole time. Their conversation earlier had gone… about as well as he could have ever expected it to, but he’d kind of thought that was it. A one and done kind of okay interaction he’d try not to overthink later with a Career who couldn’t be bothered to remember his name after. Even if Stephanie is weird. From a Career standpoint. 

“PJ still hiding?” She asks, casually, like it’s not insane she remembered Pete’s tribute’s preferred nickname or how she’s doing. 

“... yeah.”

He thinks, if anyone else from a Career District asked, he’d be more wary to answer. And there’s still a part of him a little convinced that she’s about to stand up, and go somehow send some fucking signal to her tributes that his is still kicking, along with coordinates to where they can go find and kill her. 

But, somehow, Stephanie Lauter is different. He doesn’t trust her, but he doesn’t… not trust her either. Which is probably stupid. But he’s also 99.9% sure that there’s no way to get that kind of information to your tribute anyways without literally breaking the Game, so it’s probably okay.

“Fuckin’ wild.”

“Yeah.”

Because, admittedly, it is. 

She crosses one leg over the other, yanking her skirt low over her knees, so the dark red of the fabric stretches out, warping the well planned lay out of tiny black dots patterned across the whole thing.

“I, uh, like your dress,” he says, hyperaware of how awkwardly it plops its way out of his mouth and onto the floor in front of him.

He does. It’s nice. Long, slightly billowed out sleeves, and a swishy, short skirt. Simple-ish in a way that’s aggressively refreshing. 

“It’s way better than you were wearing for your Victory Tour.” He adds, a second too late for it to do anything but make him sound like more of a dickhead. Even if it’s incredibly true.

She turns her head fully over to glare at him, but the general effect of it is sort of ruined by the fact that her smirk keeps wobbling into an actual smile, “Fuck you?”

(They’d dressed her, generally, like a walking candy store. Bright colors, structured frills, a nightmare of bold, but juvenilely simple, patterns. For her District Three stop, she’d been completely decked out in pastel pink and mint green diagonal stripes, like a walking candy cane.

It’d been bad. And that’s coming from Pete, whose general look-book had been ‘rosy cheeked wind-up doll’.)

“I mean, you looked nice in them.” 

She raises her eyebrows at him. Both actually arc pretty impressively high on her forehead.

“Or. I mean, just, like--” Pete very seriously considers what actions he would have to take to melt himself into the navy blue crushed velvet of the couch cushions and disappear forever. “It was just the outfits that were… like. You know. I’ll. I’m… I’m going to stop now.”

He buries his semi-burning face into the dip between his knees. It’s no spontaneous liquefaction and subsequent evaporation into nonexistence, but it’s better than nothing. 

“No, you’re right, they were fucking awful.” Steph’s voice audibly settles on the smile, “And those were the ones I could stand. You literally can’t even imagine the shit they were trying to pull towards the beginning. I had to start making threats. ”

He manages to drag his head up, as reluctantly as possible, “Oh, I can imagine.”

She squints up at him, twisting her necklace between her fingers absently, “I mean, at least I’m not stuck wearing bow ties.”

“Hey! I actually like the bow ties!” He tries, weakly, to defend himself. It just ends up coming out more genuinely offended than he wants it to. 

(Since his Games, the, admittedly, annoyingly brightly colored bow ties that his stylists have pushed over-enthusiastically into his outfits have been literally the only part he can stand. They’re nice. He likes being able to tie them himself. Sure, it’s the most pathetic possible level of control a person can have over their lives, but it’s control.)

“Come on, dude,” She laughs, eyes about as wide as if he’d just told her his favorite pastime was watching the tributes murder each other, “I’m trying to give you some credit here.”

“Steph,” He informs her, very flatly, “I don’t know what you're trying to convey to me right now.”

He thinks he’s being bullied. He’s actually not sure though. And if he is, there’s not really anything he can do about it.

“I dunno either, man,” She shrugs, “I’m not really sure on how to deal with a non Capitol prick voluntarily wearing that shit.”

“Ow?” Yeah, yes, okay. He is being bullied right now. He survived the fucking Hunger Games only to be bullied by a girl who stabbed the other final tribute to death with a giant lollipop. 

“Sorry.” She says, not actually sounding particularly sorry at all.

“Are you?”

She nods, "Absolutely not”

“Great. Good.” He snorts, nodding back in a way that knocks his chin into his knees just a little each time.

Steph groans, suddenly, slumping back and half-hiding her face behind her arms, “Max literally just disappeared somewhere.”

“Ah.” He manages, not bothering to put any energy into trying to connect that sentence to the conversation they’d been having. Both because he genuinely doesn’t think he’s capable of it, and because the answer to the question she didn’t actually ask makes him a little uncomfortable to contemplate. 

(Pete knows just as well as most other people here, where, and with whom Max Jägerman probably left this specific party with. But, even if Max is a massive fucking dickhead, it’s not his place to say. Stephanie Lauter is clever, if she doesn’t know already, she will soon.)

“How… how have your first Games as a mentor been so far?” He asks, and then immediately thinks better of it, “Actually no. That’s a shitty question, sorry. I hated when people asked me that.”

“Yeah, god. I mean, like, what answer are they expecting?”

“From you? Probably, like, ‘fuck yeah, violence’.”

“From me?” She scoffs, crossing her arms and squinting at him, like she can’t decide whether to be offended or not.

“Hey, man, you’re from District One. I truly do not know with you guys.”

Max Jägerman had won two years after Pete, and barreled his way hard into his whole mentorship with the kind of bullheaded, self centeredness that only works in the Capitol. He’d relished visibly in his replay tapes, the attention, and shattered a punch bowl when his second tribute died. 

(Something all the Capitolites present found incredibly sexy, for some fucking reason.)

District Two’s mentors were usually a little more stoic, than One, proud and willing to show it, but less theatrical. District Four’s were really a shot in the dark. Careers were just strange, and probably more nuanced than Pete tended to be willing to give them credit for, but still. If they didn’t enjoy this on some level, they were at least good at hiding it.

Other than Stephanie Lauter. Who is strange, but she’s strange for a Career, not the other way around.

“Wow. Fucked up thing to say, Pete.”

“I mean… is it?”

“Oh, yeah.” She rolls her eyes, smirking over at him, and it takes him far too long to realize she’s messing with him on purpose, “That’s my Dad you're talking about.”

“Hey, so, I don’t know if you actually want me to apologize?”

“No, don’t. My Dad sucks shit.”

“Ah. Okay.” He nods, and then, for no actual reason he can possibly fathom, the next thing that comes out of his mouth is; “Mines dead.”

Her eyes blow wide, head whipping all the way around to look at him, “Jesus, dude.” 

“Sorry.”

“That your Dad died?” She says, voice dripping with an incredibly fair level of skepticism.  

“I’m, like, fine about it.” He counters quickly, and, in his defense, it’s true. 

Actually, his parents are possibly the only thing that Pete is genuinely fine about. Which, if he doesn’t compartmentalize the shit out of his mental state, feels profoundly fucked up, but, usually, he thinks it’s probably okay. Too many other horrible things have happened since then that kind of took precedence over parental grief for people he didn’t actually know very long, “It was forever ago. I don’t… actually know why I said that.”

“Uh-huh.” She tilts her head at him, just kinda… looking. Which he is very much not a fan of, “You’re a weird guy, Pete.”

“Generally, yes. Correct.”

She then proceeds to slump somehow farther back, sliding down until she fully hits the floor, flopping her head back on the cushion to look up at him, "But, yeah. How's the rest of your night been?” 

“Oh, time of my freaking life.”

She snorts, “Oh, yeah, same.”

“Real barrel of laughs every year.” He says, and immediately regrets it. Barrel of laughs, Pete, really?

Steph just laughs though, not even directly at him for being weird or anything, just laughs and whirls her finger up into the air, “Whoop-dee-doo.”

Which, really, is not much more normal than barrel of laughs, as far as things to say right now goes. Despite himself, he relaxes a little, letting his hands slide down to loosely hold onto his ankles, instead of the vice grip they’d been maintaining around his shins.

Two Capitol people stroll right by them, arms linked and seemingly not noticing them even slightly.

“No, Sweetie, I know. It’s just, if he can’t see how gauche strawberries are right now, then I don’t know what to tell him!”

“I mean honestly. Nibbly was last year.”

This, for some reason Pete will never know because they’ve walked too far away to overhear much else, is apparently uproariously funny. Even after they’ve left, he can hear their shrill tittering echoing up from one of the stairwells.

Steph rolls her eyes, looking up at him and breathing out a laugh he knows from personal experience is mostly just bafflement. He smiles back, his own, less, or, at least differently baffled laugh puffing through his nose.

(Which is exactly Pete’s struck hard in the chest with the realization that, for half a fucking second, things actually feel almost normal.

Oh. Normal. That’s fucking new.

Like he and Steph just met at a normal party, and no one is killing anyone, and things are okay. He can’t tell if it’s disorienting or not. Or, no, actually, he can tell, it’s fucking disorienting. But, for some reason, he doesn’t know how he feels about it. Certainly better than he should.)

They sit in silence for a while afterwards, dodging eye contact from the few remaining, hammered Capitolites, and making the weird small talk that comes with two people waiting for the kids they're in charge of to kill or get killed. Pete, generally, thinks he does a pretty decent job of it, actually.

At some point Steph falls asleep. He doesn’t blame her, even though it’s a little bewildering that she stays on the floor to do it. 

Her tributes are sleeping too. Half of them are, at least. Both of the District One kids have been taking shifts with the other remaining Careers. They’ll turn on each other soon. Blinky arenas have a way of making alliances not matter, but for now they get to be rested in a way PJ doesn’t. In a way Pete can’t be right now.

He tries not to resent her for it. It’s not like it’s her fault.

Anyway, it’s late, and Pete’s only not sleeping because he’s annoying and neurotic and can’t manage it without laying with his eyes open for six hours, overthinking, before tumbling headfirst into five minutes of the least restful nightmare possible. He’s tried during previous Games. It’s just not worth it.

Eventually, the musical score that always accompanies the dead-tribute recap starts up from every running feed, each viewing screen just slightly overlapped and out of sync from the one next to it. He can’t even bother to care about the light auditory torture plunking its way out around him, too focused on the way his stomach is plummeting somewhere scrunched up and horrible around his hip bones. 

Gabe’s face is the second one to flash across the screen, warped in semi-translucent purple. They use the headshots that they’d taken at some point between the Reaping and the first day of training, before the stylists had cut layers into his hair or he’d managed to learn how to force a poker face; so he just looks tiny and scraggly and terrified. Pete’s throat constricts sharply, and he has to press his lips together before he does something humiliating like puke onto Stephanie Lauter.

They transition easily to the dead District Four girl. Her hair had already been styled and her confident smirk was clearly well practiced. It doesn’t matter, she’s dead all the same and that’s not the point. The point is that she’s not PJ. 

She’s not PJ and someone is going to fucking notice. The second this morbid, devoid of compassion in memoriam wraps up, they’ll be looking.

It feels selfish to be scared. He’s not the one who's going to die because of it. But, fuck, he’s so fucking scared. 

The music wakes Steph up, or, it must, because when he glances down to prevent himself from seeing the twelve year old from District Eight’s huge, perpetually teary eyes one last time, she’s staring at him.

“Hey.” He mumbles.

She snorts, humorlessly, and echoes back, “Hey.” 

He sort of expects her to leave now. He wasn’t really a good enough conversationalist before to justify hanging around a nervous, weird sad-sack for particularly long, and the pressing horror of his tribute’s imminent death certainly isn’t helping him in that department. But, for some reason, she doesn’t. She just sits there, spilled out on the floor in front of the couch, and watches with him.

Around Four in the morning, PJ dies. 

The District Six girl apologizes as she does it, and it’s as clean of a kill as an untrained fifteen year old can manage. Quick. All things considered, it’s probably one of the nicest deaths that one could have hoped for in a Bliklotep arena. 

But still. He’s going to be thinking about the blood splatter across glass tree bark for a while.

The cushion right next to him tilts, just slightly, and when he manages to drag his eyes away from the Games footage that isn’t even fucking showing his tribute anymore, Steph’s hand is uncurled up to him. Just sitting there, like a low pressure offer that shouldn’t make him want to cry as much as it does. 

Haltingly, he reaches down and takes it.

It’s… nice.

She’ll grow out of it next year, if this District One girl doesn’t win; the obvious sympathy, the open sort of kindness. But, for now, at least, it’s nice.

“She did really well.”

“Yeah,” He tries to say, but it comes out all broken, a mean little almost-laugh, “Doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

She did well. She died well. Better than Gabe did. He should be okay with it. But he’s not. He never is. How fucking could be?

“No.” Steph says, simply, in a way he appreciates, “It doesn’t.”

He should have expected this. He did. District Three has never once won a Blinky bloodbath, and Patricia Johnson, with her painfully average six in training, was never going to be the one to break that streak, no matter how badly Peter wanted her to be. 

He should go get Schaffer, she asked him to. He doesn’t. PJ is still gonna be dead, whether she’s awake or not. 

“God, this is such fucking bullshit, dude,” Steph mutters, under her breath in a way he’s not sure was meant for him to hear. Angry. Angry for him. Angry for PJ. Fuck. He doesn’t know what to do with that, so he doesn’t do anything.

There’s seven tributes left. This Game will be over soon. Small mercies, if that kind of shit exists during the Hunger Games.

“Aw, the two little Legacies. You two having an awesome time?”

He flinches at the sudden noise. District Six’s female mentor, Emma Perkins, does nothing to acknowledge it as she walks around the couch and stares down at him and Steph, appraisingly.

She’s drunk as all fuck, at least, though he’d be surprised if that was it. Emma Perkins has a very specific way of getting through Hunger Games and, as far as he’s figured out, it’s a really loose combination of any and all ‘illicit’ substances the Capitol elites have on offer. 

(Well, no. Not any and all. She doesn’t touch morphling. Not that she’s told him so. They don’t talk. But he knows. He knows because she can hold a fucking conversation, and he knows because she never looks more like a walking corpse than the rest of them do every July, and he knows because he just fucking knows. Okay?)

Her tolerance is impressive, actually. Concerning, but impressive. 

“Do you actually give a shit?” He sighs out all his air, completely unsure of whether or not he actually manages to roll his eyes or not.

“No,” She scoffs, into the mouth of her cup, “Not really. Don’t tell Ted I said hi.”

She ruffles his hair as she walks away, obnoxious and trying to be. It’s the closest he’s getting to sympathy right now, not an apology, because it’s generally understood she doesn’t owe him one. Her tribute was playing the Game, just like PJ is. (Was. Past tense for real now. Fuck.)

“Is she as much of a bitch as she seems?”

Steph glances back at him for half a second, before whipping her head back around to stare down Emma as she retreats across the hall, mouth pinched in something that’s either annoyance or amusement. Pete really can’t tell.

“Probably.”

In his experience, at least, the answer is a resounding yes. But he also only ever sees Emma Perkins mid-Hunger Games, which doesn’t feel like a fair time to assess anyone’s personality accurately. 

“Yeah, thought so.” Steph flops back again, apparently considering Emma sufficiently stared down, so she tilts her whole head onto the cushion to stare at him, “Legacy?”

“... what?”

“She called us both legacies.” She explains, gesturing her arm floppily towards the other side of the room. 

Oh. Right. Thanks, Perkins. 

“My brother. Ted. He won the 56th when he was eighteen.”

He sees the realization dawn on her all at once. The old Games play-back footage running through her brain until it lands on that guy all those years ago who got Reaped with his girlfriend and then lost it when she died. That guy who the Capitol loves to rewatch scaling the walls of his own T’noy Karaxis maze and ripping his way through his other tributes until there wasn’t anyone left. 

That guy who she now knows is Pete’s big brother. 

“Wait… But I thought he was your-- Didn’t you say he was dead?”

He yanks hard on the ends of hair before he even realizes he’s doing it, “No. That’s my dad. He’s my brother.”

She stares at him for a long second, like she doesn’t quite believe him, “Okay?”

In her defense, he’s not really making one hell of a case for himself. Everyone outside of a tiny, tiny pocket of people are under the very well rehearsed impression that Pete’s probably Ted’s kid who got his incredibly real and natural red hair from a dead woman they don’t talk about.

Normally he wouldn’t care enough to let it bother him. Or, no. It always fucking bothers him. But the instinct to try and explain it to someone else is new.

New, and probably dangerous, and kind of terrifying. Especially when Stephanie Lauter hasn’t really done anything to earn it. 

(It’s probably a little pathetic, actually. The first Career to be even slightly nice to him asks one incredibly non-probing question, and he’s ready to fall all over himself divulging a bunch of secrets he’s expressly not supposed to. But, hey. Pete’s never claimed to be anything less than profoundly pitiful by both nature and circumstance. He's not doing anything new, here.)

He unfolds off the couch, letting his legs swing down next to Steph’s shoulder, “I should go… I should go tell Schaffer that… yeah” 

Not that there is anything she can do about it, but she’d asked him to, and it feels a little less daunting now. Not entirely, but less. 

It’s not like he’ll have to even say anything, the second he steps into her room, she’s going to know why.

“Yeah,” She sits up slightly, folding her legs under her and wrapping her wrist in and out of the braided cord of her necklace, “Yeah, that’s fair. I should probably… I should probably find Max.”

Actually, Pete thinks, she probably shouldn’t.

“I think it’s okay if you just go to bed.”

The way she looks at him is a little too knowing for his taste for a person he basically just met, “That what you’re planning on doing after you tell your partner?”

“No.” He admits, “But you also shouldn’t be following my example. I dunno if you could tell, but I’m a really shit Victor.”

“Hey, we’ve got that in common!” She actually smiles up at him, knocking her elbow back at his shins, “Kind of a good thing, though, right?”

It's not, actually, at least, not in Pete’s experience. (Ted wasn’t a good Victor. In fact, Ted was a fucking dogshit Victor in every sense of the word. Case meet point.) But that's also not what she's saying and he knows it.

What she’s trying to say holds a little more water than Pete’s bad faith, comes-with-experience-probably interpretation.

The smile he aims back down at her comes easier than he expects it to, “Y'know, it just might be, yeah.”

---

 

[Peter Spankoffski remembers Stephanie Lauter’s reaping well.

Though that's not necessarily much of a statement, it was less than a week ago. But still. It stood out for more reasons than ‘this is a person I have to look out for’. 

He hadn’t experienced it live, obviously. She’s from two Districts away and he’d been too busy learning the two names of the people he’d be coaching to their deaths in the coming days. But, on the train ride over, he and Schaffer had sat down and watched the other District Reapings, the way they always did. After their tributes were ‘asleep’, or at least herded into their rooms, and they could begin to strategize.

(Pete could never sleep that first night, and he appreciated that Schaffer got that; that she never treated him like a little kid who couldn’t handle what he was, and has been very much a part of for the past several years.)

District One was usually just as boring to watch as Two and Four. He’s sure the organized chaos of kids eagerly volunteering to die made good Capitol television, but for Pete it was just distracting from the core of what he was looking for.

Odds. Strategies. Who does he have to look out for, later; during training, and then the Games.

But something about Stephanie Lauter had stuck out right away, when she planted herself at the stairs and volunteered as tribute. 

The Careers like to make out like they’re dangerous, and they are, but usually, in that split second as they shove into the spotlight and sign their theoretical death warrant there’s a sort of frenzy to it. Most of the time it gets chalked up as bloodlust, or something else Capitol-Level-Thrilling and dehumanizing, but really, all it is in that second is excitement, and desperation, and hope. 

Usually.

Stephanie Lauter had been calm. She’d smirked and raised her hand, the other settled on a cocked out hip, and hissed her volunteering like she was fucking seething.

And her whole District had gone silent.

District One liked to be rowdy, it was a Career thing. Even those disappointed to lose their spot in the Games would scream and cheer and clap. But for Stephanie Lauter, just for a second, there had been silence. Confused. Uncertain. And then, the standard explosion.

It could be nothing. Schaffer hadn’t understood it either, but neither of them are the most versed in how District One works. Maybe there’s just some sort of weird reverence when it’s an important figure’s kid, or she’d broken some weird, Career, volunteering rule.

Either way, he’s paying close attention to her interview. 

He… should be preparing his tributes. They’re only six interviews away, five if you don’t count Stephanie’s, but Schaffer has that more than handled. He’s done what he can, obviously, but both of District Three’s tributes this year are seventeen, and angry, and fucking hate him. He gets it. He hates it, but he does get it.

Giving them space and gathering intel on their opponents is really the best he can do for them right now. 

“Now, tell us. What will make Stephanie Lauter different from her father in the Games?” Donna asks on the monitor, with a bright, false sort of intensity.

“Oh, well,” Stephanie shakes her hair out, a theatrical approximation of a laugh, and Pete prepares himself for it: The Career-trained, District-mayor’s daughter answer about how and why she’s the best potential Victor that Panem has ever seen.

It doesn’t come.

Instead, Stephanie sits up abruptly, and says, “I’m not going to win.”

What. What? The entire waiting area of tributes and mentors who, up until this moment, had been completely focused on their own prep look over to the live feed.

“Wait, what did she just say?” Someone Pete isn’t looking at and therefore doesn’t recognize asks. The question hangs in the air around them. Unanswered because everyone is thinking it. 

Wait, wait, wait, what did she just say?

Dan and Donna themselves seem thoroughly unprepared for that as an answer. Donna forces a shrill, awkward laugh to fill the horrified moment of silence that’s stretched itself across the stage.

“No, no, don’t say that!” Dan smiles, just as forced as Donna’s laugh has been, plastered on and slightly crooked. He’s going for the kind of tone Pete’s heard a lot from him, a casual sort of redirection when the interview isn’t going the way it should. It’s not casual right now. It almost sounds like the direct, panicked order that it is. ‘Do not fucking say that. What are you doing?’

Either Stephanie hasn’t noticed their wide-eyed scrambling, or, Pete assumes is more likely, she just doesn’t care. She cocks her head to the side, and smiles too sweetly to match the way her face had been point-five seconds ago, “Why not?”

“I-- well, I think what Dan here means is that you don’t know that for sure, do you? And isn’t that what makes the Games so fun! Anyone could win, even if they aren't from District One.” Donna mugs down the stage, shooting an unsubtle and shitty wink that in turn sends a wave of uncertain laughter rippling out from the audience. Like this is all some weird, ill conceived joke that everyone has just missed the punchline of. 

Of course it is. Why else would a District One volunteer admit that there's even a possibility she won’t win. 

Stephanie’s mouth visibly tightens into a pinch before she smooths it out, and says, “Oh, no, you don’t get it. I don’t plan on winning. I’m going to die in that arena.”

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?

“Oh, come on, now! What with this quitters attitude?” Donna sits up awkwardly to put her hands on her hips, voice still a little pinched. It’s almost impressive. For all the years Pete’s been watching the two of them interview tributes, he’s seen very few manage to throw them this visibly.

“What do you say, folks? Don’t you all think that a little lady who scored a Nine in training, should have a little more faith in herself than that?” Dan rounds it out, doing an equally just-okay job of forcing his tone to sound more normal.

The crowd starts their overly exaggerated cheering in paper-thin, mostly obligatory ‘support’, but Stephanie herself cuts them off with a harsh snort, “Well, yeah. I mean, I’ve got District One training, obviously I scored high. But, I’m gonna use it to keep kids who don’t alive if I can, and then, later, I’ll let one of them kill me. Y’know, if it goes to plan. Probably won’t. Either way, someone’s gonna.” She slinks down in her seat, elbows up as she gnaws absently on her thumbnail, “Kill me, that is.”

Kid’s fuck their odds by admitting they’re going to die, or at least think they will, every year. Weepy, scrawny kids who never stood a chance in the first place. No one bats an eye. They also don’t send them Sponsor gifts, but it’s not notable.

But a fifteen year old, legacy volunteer from District One, openly admitting she’s going to let herself die in the Games, because they’re bullshit and she’s only concerned about keeping kids littler than her safe, regardless of District?

That’s new. That’s inflammatory. 

That’s… that’s pretty fucking clever. Actually. Because, now, no matter how Stephanie Lauter could be murdered in the arena, she’s won. She made a plan in direct opposition to the Capitol, just by openly stating her plan to die in the death game, even if she didn’t need to.

There’s no way to spin the rebellious bombshells dropped by a memorably dead girl, if she dies. Memorably or not.

“Well!” Dan laughs, so brightly through his teeth it comes out sounding like pure plastic, “That’s certainly a unique strategy!”

“Yeah,” Stephanie smirks, sitting up too far forward to make up for how she’d been slumped and leaning close into Dan and Donna’s side of the stage, like she’s planning on sharing a secret, “I guess the whole thing just sounds pretty stupid, huh?” 

That, that, is when Pete knows who is winning the 71st Hunger Games. 

For Stephanie Lauter’s sake, though, he really, really hopes he’s wrong.]

Notes:

heyyyyy is this anything? do we like this??? do we want more of this??? does Game no longer look like a word to you guys too??

i conceived of this au in 2023 apparently, and really did not think i was ever going to do anything with it but oh BOY have these little guys been existing in my brain lately. i love them so much they're having the worst time of all time in this universe i've conceived simply so much lore for.

(also everyone please forgive my specialist-little-boy-ism with sole twelve year old victor peter spankoffski, he just makes me so sad and, more importantly, ted spankoffski so so sad, so unfortunately you Will have to deal with this depressing, improbable little boy)

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 19 of Hatchet Town