Archive of Our Own

There are people suffering in District Two.

Sejanus Plinth knows it with every breath that he takes of the strangely thick and cloying Capitol air. Theoretically, everyone else here knows it too. But for the others - his classmates, his professors, the endless parade of people who sneer when they hear his District accent - the idea of what that means is all askew. They think the Districts are hungry, and most of them remember hunger so they believe they comprehend. They took in their old torn clothes, sold their heirlooms; in some cases they sold themselves. And so they think they know what poverty is, what suffering entails. Whether they rejoice in what they see as the just punishment of the rebel Districts or they allow themselves a secret twinge of sympathy, none of them doubt that they at least understand.

But Sejanus knows better. Suffering, true suffering, is not an absence of food, or fine clothes, or your great grandmother's silver. It's not the ugliness of a bombed-out neighborhood or the chill of a threadbare blanket. It is akin, perhaps, to knowing that you are surrounded on all sides by people who absolutely loathe you, but even that misses the mark a bit.

Suffering, Sejanus knows, is an absolute dearth of hope. It is the feeling that things can never get better, will never improve. It is the sense of having lost -a physical thing, a heavy and thick cloud of defeat - that permeates everything you see and touch and taste. Suffering doesn't lift with a satisfyingly meal or a new suit. Suffering is permanent, and that's the point of it.

At night, Sejanus lies in his soft new bed, his stomach full of his mother's truly excellent baking, a world away from what his old friends and classmates are experiencing in a place he knows he'll never see again. They are far, far away, in every sense of the term. And yet he suffers alongside them.

She is the mother of a dead child, and she has no idea what to do with that.

In a way, she was born when Sejanus was, because all she had ever truly wanted to be was a mother. She still remembers when they first put him in her arms, still wet and bloody from her womb. Those hazy infant eyes had widened in surprise, staring in wonder at the newness of the world. And she had thought Yes, little one. Me too.

He called for her when he died.

Sometimes she thinks of her old friends and neighbors from District Two. Horrifically, she truly thinks many of them would still consider her lucky. She lives in this beautiful home; anything that money can buy, she can have. Yes, she has lost her child, but so have so many of them. And even those that have not still have to live in constant fear of it, the idea that disease or hunger or violence or this brutal new Capitol game will steal their children away. Her experience is not unique. It's not even as bad as things can get.

It's an agony she doubts she can survive.

All of Sejanus's life, she tried to give to him. She gave him her blood, and then her milk. Cookies and cakes that she baked herself, a bag of gumdrops to share in the futile hope that he'd make friends. She and her husband gave him an education, at a huge cost. They tried so hard to give him a future.

He hadn't wanted to come here. And in time, she'd agreed with him. She had missed her old life, her family and friends back in Two. But she'd made herself believe that this was the best thing for Sejanus, that this was the way to build him a decent life. It was the thing that made all the luxury tolerable.

She hears it all the time, the screaming Ma! echoing in the air. She thinks she'll always hear it, like a baby's heart beating beneath her own.

Tigris knows what she is becoming.

It was easy, at first. At times, it was even fun.

She grew up with so little, after all. She made sacrifices, to make sure her grandmother and Coryo didn't go hungry. She worked hard; she did things. It was frightening and degrading, and once she could afford consistent hot water, luxurious soaps and fine fragranced oils, she did everything that she could to scrub that dirt and stink off her skin. She made things, beautiful things; she created looks. She did her best to bring a little beauty into this world.

So many of the children whom she had washed and curled and styled had ended up bloodstained. So many of the beautiful clothes she designed for them are lying abandoned in cupboards because their owners died in tatters and no one here wants anything second-hand anymore.

She is somewhat amazed when she talks to the surgeons. There seems to be no limits to what her money can buy. If she wants new eyes, eyes with slitted pupils that can see in the dark, they will build them for her and install them in her face. They will stripe her skin, sharpen her teeth, remake her fingernails into claws. She wonders if there are no restrictions on how far they will go. If she asked them to, if she offered them enough money, would they cut out her heart and replace it with one of Coryo's roses? Does she live in a world where she could have thorns in her veins, for the right price?

She remembers the things she was once willing to do for money, when she needed it, and decides it's better not to ask.

A tiger will kill one of its own kind, if it feels that it has to. Tigris knows this. Even a member of its own family. If a tiger believes that it's necessary, it will spill shared blood.

Some humans will too, Tigris has discovered, but she has never been like that. Therefore, all of these changes are necessary.

She will ask them to make sure her new eyes cannot cry.

She'd managed to stay clean for so long.

Lucy Gray Baird has never been a fool. From birth, she'd known the world is filthy. But she'd tried her very best to keep herself clean, and for nearly twenty years she'd somehow made it work. She'd watched the snakes, animals who slithered over filth and debris like it wasn't even there. Clever creatures who swallowed messes of fur and claws and bone whole, taking what they needed but never getting one stray droplet on themselves. And she'd joined them, modelled herself on them, used their skills as her own. And then her stupid, traitorous, human heart had got mixed up in things, and now she'll never be clean again.

It isn't just that she'd played their game. She hadn't had any choice in the matter, and lying down and waiting to die would have served their purposes just as much as playing to survive. It's what had come after.

The Covey had taken her back; that was their way. They'd tried to let her disappear back into their cloud of sound and color. But they'd felt the difference in her, the thin coat of grime clinging to her skin and her soul. She'd seen it in their eyes, and recoiled instinctively from the reflected filth.

It's easier in the Seam, with the miners. They spend their lives covered in coal dust; they draw it into their lungs and let it settle there. The dark and blackened Seam is her home now, and since it's no place for rainbow-hued ruffles she gives the dress to Barb Ivory and clads herself in her namesake gray.

The Covey think she's hiding. From the Peacekeepers, from them, on a certain level from herself. But they're wrong. She can't even begin to hide, because he is everywhere now.

The man who got her dirty.

Coriolanus Snow, the rising star of the Capitol. He's on all the news broadcasts, which are now compulsory to watch. He accumulates honors bestowed by people with no honor; he climbs an ever-growing pile of bodies like there could ever be anything worthwhile at the top.

Hate is stronger than love, Lucy Gray now knows. Because love can be complicated with other things. It can be tinged with lust or clouded by doubt. But hate burns with a pure, undiluted flame. Who knows how long she would have loved him, if they hadn't found the guns? It likely wouldn't have lasted long, up against the reality of his uselessness in the wilderness and his eager young dick poking artlessly inside of her. But she will hate him forever.

There are some snakes that kill and eat their mates. It's not common, but Lucy Gray has seen it happen. Trapped in their breeding balls, the males are devoured alive. But the snakes have withdrawn their kinship from her. There can be no relief.

Coriolanus Snow's dead follow him around.

Not just the children of the games, though he does remember all of them. In a way, he thinks, he is the only one who truly honors them. The rest of the Capitol forgets them as long as they die; they are so in love with victors and only victors. Their own Districts may remember them, but what does it matter? The Districts are populated by the irrelevant, and their memories mean nothing. Coriolanus is the only person of worth who remembers the Hunger Games dead, and in doing so he elevates them. By taking up space in the mind of the president of Panem, they are more important in death than the ever would have been in life.

But they are not the only dead who keep him company. There is a long and populous chain, political rivals, inconvenient mistresses, underlings who failed him. There are those he had executed in public, their agony broadcasted nationwide. There are those he had killed privately, with poison in their food or a needle in their backs. He has inflicted illnesses that rotted people from the inside out; he has strangled friends in their sleep with his own blood-flecked handkerchief.

He wrote a letter that ensured a frightened boy died at the end of a rope, calling for his mother. He riddled bushes with bullets, murdering his love even if he failed to murder the girl who inspired it. And they are all with him, always.

This delights him.

The living cannot reach him. He is above the living, beyond them. The more of his enemies that he cannot avoid, the more foes who are with him always, mean that more and more people who he needs to be dead are indeed dead. When they move themselves into his mind, he welcomes them avidly. They cannot drive him mad, after all. He is already there. It is far, far too late for them to corrupt his soul. His dead are ever-present, but they are neutered and harmless.

He smiles at their faces when he closes his eyes at night. Their sobs and screams soothe him to sleep.