Injured Creed: Parts 1-3
Thank you to mmailliw for pointing out I actually never posted Parts 1-3 of Injured Creed here on LJ. Whoops!
Creed was born for this.
He heard his teachers say once, standing together on the playground, talking low in that way they do when they think the kids are too busy playing to pay attention, that it’s like he has one foot in the Arena already. It’s not just how they can’t ask him to write anything about the future or his plans for when he grows up, because he’ll write ‘victor’ or else sit there staring at a blank page for the whole class. It’s the way he always seems a little far away, like he’s older than he should be - not wise, or mature, saying things beyond his years, but old, like sometimes his eyes unfocus when the rest of the kids are playing and you know he isn’t thinking about tag or pyramid or races but sand-blasted vistas and stockpiles of shiny weapons. Like he’s lost in a memory of something that hasn’t happened yet.
He knows they worry. Knows they try to draw him out, make him care about the game everyone is playing or the book they’re reading in language class or factoring. He tries to care, because he likes them, but it’s so easy to look out the window and feel his mind slip sideways to the clash of steel and the burn of sun on the back of his neck.
(Mrs. Keen actually does make factoring click, after keeping him in during recess: if there is an average of twelve bloodbath kills, what are the different ways the Careers could divide them out? Each person could get two, or three people could get four, or four people could get three, or three people could get two and two people could get three - And if on Day Seven the sponsors send four water bottles, six apples, and ten protein bars ...)
After Residential there really is nothing else. They don’t learn math in Residential, and they don’t read books. The only history is Games history, and the history of Two and why they fight. Creed drinks it in like water. Every day the trainers tell him: this is his purpose, this is why his parents made him, this is why they raised him and gave him up. Not with words, maybe, but with each new test, each high pass, each new bead and black strand around his wrist.
Everyone knows, but Creed hasn’t mentioned his parents since he was seven, because Dad said family and privilege are gifts, not weapons, and you don’t get to use them to get your way. They probably hate him for it underneath, but in the Arena they need to work together and then kill each other so this is nothing. Are they friends? No, but no one in Residential is. That’s not what they’re here for. It’s not hard to get them to like him, or at least forget for a little while that they wish he’d fall and crack his skull open on the ropes course and give someone else a shot.
And then they post the pair of Volunteers, and Creed gets a gold bead to match the others on his wrist, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. He will be the volunteer, he will go too the Arena, and he will fulfill the destiny he has chased since he was old enough to understand.
And then -
There is a pop, and a tear, and a flash of blinding pain that shoots out from his knee. For a horrible second it whites out everything else - but that can’t matter, the Arena will be worse, there will be swords in his gut and blades slashing his limbs and he can’t, he can’t let one little twist the wrong way stop him - and he thinks of the trumpets and blood on his hands and pushes himself up -
And then Paxton’s foot hits his knee and shoves, hard, and there’s the pain again, sharper and stronger, and an awful grinding sound, and Creed is on the mats, biting hard on his tongue so he won’t scream. He can’t, because if he screams then he can’t take the pain and if he can’t take the pain them they won’t choose him. (“Excessive force,” calls a trainer. Paxton shouts back that he didn’t do anything, and she says that’s worse, at least if it was on purpose she could give him points for technique.)
“Creed,” the trainer says. She sounds far away.
He swallows blood. “Yeah,” he spits out. “Yeah, I’m good.”
“Go to medical, get that checked out,” she says, but it’s disinterested, automatic. “When you get back we’ll work on your footing, that twist was sloppy.”
“Yes sir.”
He stands - the leg buckles, but he shifts his weight in time - and manages to limp out of the training room without making sound.
(He doesn’t go to medical. He stops in long enough to ask for a compression bandage, wraps it around his knee and hobbles back. He gives himself half an hour in the bathroom to rest and cover for skipping the actual examination, then slips into the training room. It’s fine. It will be fine.)
“Good, you’re back.” The trainer eyes him, but he must not look that green. “Let me check your footwork again. Show me what you were trying to do at the end there.”
He’d been trying to fall into a sweep, but his foot had caught on the edge of the mats, keeping his leg in place when the rest of him spun around to the side and dropped. Creed nods, swallows the nausea and matches her stance. His knee feels wobbly, like the pudding they serve in medical when you really take a pounding without crying. Maybe if he’d gone in he would have gotten one, but he can’t risk it. Not with the Arena so close.
“Okay, let’s see it,” the trainer says.
This time, he screams.
“I don’t need it,” Creed insists the whole way to medical. “I’m fine. I just need to walk it off.”
The trainer glares at him. “Creed, if you don’t shut up and let the doctors do their job, we’re going to have to sedate you.”
He shuts his mouth. He wonders if she’s scared for her job, if she’ll get in trouble for not checking on him when it first happened. Except it’s fine, it’s just his knee, he’s tweaked it before. All he needs to do is push it back into place, brace it and keep going. The faster he lets the doctors check him out, the faster they’ll see everything is fine.
(He has to go away into his head for the exam, it hurts so much, all that holding his leg down and moving his knee around in different directions, but it’s fine. It’s fine. The Arena will be worse.)
“So,” he says when they let him sit up - sort of, he’s still in the bed, but he’s allowed to scooch himself up with his hands until his back hits the pillows. “Can I go?”
The doctor trades looks with the trainer, and no. No, no, no no no no -
Surgery. Bed rest. Crutches. Six months of gruelling physical rehabilitation. For what, a little sprain? Creed twists his hands in the plain white sheets until he feels the fabric tear beneath his fingers. “No,” he says.
The doctor shakes her head. “The good news is, you have plenty of time now.”
“No.” Panic scrabbles hard in his chest. “The Reaping is in two weeks. Just - put a walking brace on it. Give me painkillers. I can do it!” They say nothing, only stare at him, and for the first time in eleven years - for the first time in his entire life - Creed says the words “My father -“
“- would love it if we sent you into the Arena on a severed ACL,” the doctor says, relentless but not unkind. A memory stirs, absurd and unwanted: dark eyes and gentle hands, the quirk of a smile at the edges of a no-nonsense stare as he’s scolded for letting Selene goad him into something stupid. “You fought well. Now you’re done.”
It’s all a dream, he tells himself through the haze of painkillers. Except the painkillers mean it’s not - they don’t drug trainees outside of recovery from the Field Exam, getting the good stuff for a training injury means you’re out, everyone knows that. But then the doctor injects him with something that makes the world soft and shiny and sparkly around the edges and it’s real, it’s really happening, the world has turned sideways and dumped him over the edge and there’s no going back.
He wakes up to a thick, hinged brace from halfway up his thigh to midway down his calf. A box sits on the chair next to the bed: his belongings, gathered from the dorm room. A handful of photographs, a rock he and Alec found that looks like the president’s nose, his baby blanket. Stupid things. They’ve folded a fresh uniform on top, ready for him.
The head trainer walks him out, the box of Creed’s things under his arm. Creed hates the crutches, hates the way they dig in under his arms, hates the moment of instability every time he swings forward. Hates knowing that if he tried to walk without them he’d collapse to the floor.
They’re sending him home, not to the detox dorms. He asked, they said he had a choice. Creed tried to imagine healing with hundreds of washouts around him, thinking they’re the same, and the thought nearly made him throw up. His parents might think he’s a failure but they have to take him, don’t they, even if they only promised until eighteen? It’s better than strangers, anyway. Maybe then he’ll figure out how he’s supposed to pay them back, not only for the first thirteen years of his life but for every day going forward.
“Wait.” He stops. Pryor frowns but waits as Creed cranes his head backwards. “Where’s Alec?”
Pryor raises an eyebrow. “You washed out, not your brother.”
It hits him like - well, like Paxton’s foot to his knee. Like the awful shock of ice water for their winter swim test as the cold hits his lungs. His parents promised a Seward for the Arena: they can’t have Creed, and now - “No,” Creed says. Again. How many times can he ask them not to? How many times will they refuse? “No, he’s coming with me. He’s going to be a Peacekeeper, he’s supposed to go when I go -“
“You’re not a package deal,” Pryor says, calm and inexorable like an ice storm. “You go. Your brother stays. Whether he graduates is on his own merit, like everyone else.”
“No!” It tears loose in a shout that echoes down the hallway. Voices in the nearest gym fall silent. “No, you can’t have him, he’s not yours, you don’t get to keep him, you can’t have him, you can’t have him -“
He really is out of the running. Creed the Volunteer would have heard the doctors’ shoes slapping against the floor, would have seen the arm come up behind him. The syringe slides into his neck and he falls limp.
“I’m sorry.” The words slur, his tongue thick with sedatives. Maybe he’s not saying anything out loud but the words are sharp in his mind, sharp and burning, the pressure to release them pushing hard in his chest like drowning. The car window, cool against his forehead. Sometimes the car turns a corner and his head thumps the glass. He doesn’t feel it. Wool coats his brain. “I’m sorry, I failed, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry -“
A voice, more distant rumble than words. “You don’t need to apologize.”
It strikes a memory deep inside and pulls it loose. He laughs. It hurts. “I know. I need to do better.”
Silence. A short, sharp sound, like a sudden hiss. “No,” the voice says, sounding shocked. And okay, that’s funny. He’d laugh if he had the breath. “No, I - you have nothing to be sorry about. That’s all.”
Well, that’s not true, but he’s too tired to argue. He lets the drugs pull him back under as the engine hums.
His mother hugs him. That’s how he knows the world has really ended. He lets her, because some long-dormant part of his brain knows it’s rude to shove your parents the same way image training hammered in that you don’t sass the prep team, but when she asks him what he needs he says he wants to sleep.
They help him up the stairs, and then they leave him be.
(It’s not until later, after he’s slept, that it hits him what’s so weird: they’ve redone the room, his and Alec’s. The bunk bed is gone, the double dresser, the twin desks. The toy shelf. It’s a young man’s room now, done up in local wood and blue trim, waiting politely for that young man to come back. No, not any young man: Alec. Because they gave Creed up when he turned thirteen, and whether he lived or died in the Arena, he wasn’t coming back. It was the grave or the Village for him, not his childhood home. Not ever again.
Their faith in him is … touching, really.
He leans over the bed and vomits into the solid new trash can.)
They all eat dinner in his room, and the sky keeps falling.
Creed tries to argue: dinner at the table has always been sacred ever since he can remember. Even during the Games, his parents scheduled the evening meal so they could all eat together and send the boys to bed before the nightly recap. Other kids, he knew, took food up to their rooms and ate while doing their homework, or reading, or hanging out with friends; some families even ate while watching entertainment broadcasts, a habit that Creed’s father found absolutely abhorrent and forbade at all costs. In any case, Creed can’t remember a single night in his childhood where dinner wasn’t spent around the table, either at his house or the Valents’.
“Think of it like a picnic,” Dad says as Creed gapes at him, and wonders if maybe the Capitol Gamemakers haven’t come and replaced him with some kind of super-muttation. His father has pulled up a chair next to the bed and is eating his meal off a tray balanced in his lap as if that’s perfectly normal and not the strangest thing Creed has ever seen in his life. When Creed keeps staring he finally snorts and shakes his head. “A good, home-cooked meal in my lap is hardly an emergency. Your mother and I spent a solid year arguing over the best field rations while on assignment out in the wilderness beyond the district boundary.”
“Casserole,” Mom says with finality.
“Stew,” Dad argues immediately. “Higher meat ratio. You need the protein if you’re out on the field.”
“Only because you’re afraid of a little vegetable,” Mom shoots back. “Married a whole year before I could get this man to eat a salad. ‘Inefficient caloric intake’. What are you supposed to do in the field if you get scurvy?”
Creed knows what scurvy is, the trainers tell them it’s a mild Arena risk because most mentors will prioritize meat over fruit in late-game sponsor gifts but nothing to worry about because no Games have ever lasted longer than a month. It’s bizarre to hear his parents talk about Peacekeeping assignments like he and the other candidates compared notes on their field exams, or ration packs in the same way they used to debate Arena meals. To hear his parents joking at all, not an unknown phenomenon but rare enough that he and Alec always sat up and took notice.
They never would have done this before. Even if he’d been sick enough to stay in bed for dinner, they would have eaten without him and come up to check on him later. This - he really is out. The weight presses on his chest again. “What do I do now?” Creed bursts out.
Dad, fork halfway to his mouth, sets it down again. He misses the end of his plate and smears sauce against his pant leg. “Anything you want,” he says, too brightly. “I’m sure you could get a job at Eagle Pass. Or as a trainer, or working in recruitment for the Program. Or there are plenty of other jobs around town -“
Creed can’t breathe, everything is too much, too big, like all the walls have disappeared, everything that kept him safe and protected and on the right path, and now it’s him and a web of ropes stretched out along an endless chasm and he’s trying to balance but the ropes keep shifting and there’s a blinding light in his eyes and he can’t see his feet -
“Joseph.” Mom gives him a look. “Rest. What you need to do is rest.“
“But -“
“What happens after the Arena?” Mom asks. Creed falls quiet, brain spinning into confusion. “You don’t worry about that, because that’s not your job, your job is to get there. You have knee surgery coming up. Your job is to rest and work with the doctor on your therapy so you can be ready for the procedure. Nothing else. Can you do that?”
No, he wants to say, no, that’s ridiculous, she can’t pretend that’s anywhere near the same thing, the Arena is a goal that makes sense and he was worthy when he chased it, this is a stupid goal for babies and failures and she can’t pretend there’s any honour in it. Except she doesn’t take it back, and when he looks at Dad, Dad only lets out a quiet breath and nods. And it’s stupid, it makes no sense, but the blinding light fades and the ropes fall away and there’s a path before him, steady and solid.
Rest. Therapy. Surgery. Everything else can wait.
He sucks in a hard breath, hears it rattle wet and messy with a horror that tears out his ribcage. Dad glances over, looks away fast and stands up, brisk and businesslike. “May as well start now,” he says, gathering up the dishes. “Let’s let the boy have his rest.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Creed keeps his eyes squeezed shut against the burning until the door closes softly behind them.
July rolls around and Creed straps on his brace with the mindless proficiency he once reserved for machetes, struggles into his old uniform, and makes the long journey downstairs. At the front door he hears the floor creak, and his father’s voice from behind him, dry as paint thinner: “And where exactly are you going?”
That voice used to make Alec start babbling and confessing to crimes real and imagined, but Creed only tenses. “I’m going to the Reaping. I’m still eligible, I should be there.”
Long pause. “I see. And how are you getting there?”
They’ve always driven to the Reaping square, him and Alec respectfully silent in the backseat of the car in their best suits, playing finger games across the middle seat and snatching their hands back when Mom shoots a sharp warning glance back. Had Creed ever gone to the Justice Building on his own from home? He knows the way from the Centre, he knows the way to the Centre from home. He could figure it out. It might take him a little longer, that’s all. Already the muscles in his thigh tremble from standing so long.
“Hm,” Dad says. “What are you going to do when you get there?”
Stand there, with the other eighteen-year-olds, and watch as one of his classmates - maybe even Paxton - stood up on that stage and took the honour that belonged to Creed, the only thing that made his life worth meaning. Creed grips the door handle until his fingers cramped. The crutch digs in under his armpit.
“Stand there in the square like a good citizen and let the chosen volunteer do his duty, will you?” Dad’s voice is relentless, driving into his back like spear thrusts. “You aren’t thinking of speaking out and going in his place?”
Creed hisses sharp enough he bites his tongue. “You did this to me!” The Creed who left this house would never speak to his father like this. The Creed who left this house had never killed three men and two women and let their blood dry on his hands. Had never practiced taunts with image trainers saying again, sharper, meaner, try it with your eyebrow raised, don’t look at me like you’re sorry after, a victor is never sorry. “I would have been a victor for you, I would have died for you, and now I’m nothing, because of you! I’m going to go to the Reaping and you can’t stop me.”
Dad works under the mountain now but he was a field officer once, and before that he was a tribute candidate like all the rest of them. Creed doesn’t even hear him move. One second Dad’s behind him, the next the door is shut and Dad has one hand around his wrist and his eyes hold him pinned in place harder than any trainer’s lock. “I can,” Dad says, slow and final, “And I will. We are watching from home. Stand. Down.”
“But -“ His next breath is a hiccup, the one after that a shudder, and he can’t, the trainers will fail him and he’ll never get to volunteer -
Dad’s hand on the back of his neck, solid and steady. “Okay,” he says, and Creed is so grateful he can’t breathe. “Let’s get you set up on the couch.”
Creed watches Paxton volunteer from his living room sofa, Mom at the far end massaging his leg.
Three weeks later, Paxton chokes on his own blood on the dusty concrete of the ruined city as Creed takes his daily walk up the path through the neighbourhood and back. Dad doesn’t call him in to watch. Creed says he’ll catch it on the recap, but both Mom and Dad say no; he argues long enough for Dad to shut him down, then lets it go.
There’s a stream in the forest out behind the house where he, Selene and Alec played tributes, and he eases his legs over the side and lets the water run over his calves. The stream is cool and cuts the ache in his joints, at least for a little while.
Cicadas scream in the trees above, and Creed is alive.
[END PART 1]
Creed’s year passes in a blur of physical therapy, emotional therapy and - worst of all - homeschool. “Why do I need to finish school?” he demands when his mother informs him of his new assignment. “I can read, I can write, I can do math. I know my history. What else is there?”
“You can read and write like a ten-year-old, and not a very dedicated one.” Mom says. Creed jerks back, cheeks burning hot. He left school at thirteen and they both know it, she should at least give him that much. “You left at Residential but you checked out at Transition, and we let you, because you were meant for greater things. And now you’re going to learn everything you missed because you’re meant for great things again.”
“What happened to ‘all you need to do is rest’,” Creed shoots back, nasty and sarcastic. He’s never spoken to his mother that way in his life. He half expects her to smack him across the face except he’s not four years old, he’s eighteen and taller than she is and he’ll fight back, he will, even with his leg iced and elevated. He stares at her, wild and with a flutter of panic trapped between his ribs. He’s sure she wishes he’d gone to the Arena now, either dead or someone else’s problem, rather than stuck here useless and mouthing off like a stupid, surly child.
Mom narrows her eyes. “Why does your therapist make you ride the stationary bicycle at the hospital? Do you go anywhere?”
Creed scowls. He hates rhetorical questions. His parents love them, because if they’re asking one they’ve already won. But since he’d just snapped at her like a little whining baby, he’ll give her this. “It makes my knee stronger.”
“Rest isn’t always about lying in bed and doing nothing and never challenging yourself. It’s about doing what your body needs so that when it’s time, you’re ready.” She rests her hand on his ankle. “You didn’t win the Games, fine. You have a long life on this side of the Village fence, and when you are deciding what to do with it, you’ll be happy you prepared your brain as well as your muscles.”
He glares at her a little longer, then groans and flops back, dropping his arm over his eyes. “I don’t like it when you’re right.”
“Oh, my sweet boy. I’m so happy you came back just in time for me to catch the asshole teen years. I would have been sad to miss this formative experience.” Mom pats him on the knee. The bed creaks as she stands to leave, and as he whips his arm off to gawk she winks and closes the door behind her.
Each month the stipend envelope arrives, fat with food vouchers and cash tokens. Alec is a Senior now, and the payment is substantial. Each month his mother takes the envelope without a word and comes back empty; when Creed asks, she tells him they don’t need the money, not with a second-twenty officer and a retired Peacekeeper on her next career. She exchanges the vouchers and takes the goods to the nearest Peacehome, as she’s always done.
She would have done that if Creed died, he thinks. Five years of consolation vouchers after a tribute dies in gratitude of their offering. He’s here now, and will never lie in glory in the field of sacrifice, but he likes to imagine that even after death he could have been of use to his district.
Alec doesn’t want this, Creed tells himself. He never did. They might keep him there but they won’t waste the Arena on an unwilling Volunteer. It’s easy enough to wash out at the end, all you really need to do is not try as hard as the person next to you. But as the months tick on, still no Alec.
Still no Selene, either.
She has a baby brother now, a rambunctious two-year-old with the same eyes and same mischief and same absolute disregard for consequences. The first time Creed met him, a few months into his recovery, he thought he’d seen a ghost. Then Kit came back with two rulers taped to his leg in a makeshift brace and declared them twins and Creed knew right then he’d be charmed forever.
He doesn’t know about his sister yet, not until. As the months and weeks and days draw near to the one-year anniversary of Creed’s injury, there’s a drumbeat in the back of his mind. He hasn’t seen Selene since they were children, but even then they knew: it would come down to her and her greatest rival. She and Petra have scrapped bruised and bloody since they were ten years old and neither could come out on top more than two times running. He can’t imagine time and close scrutiny would shave the edges off their competition.
Selene wants this more than anything. He tries to imagine her in civilian life, nails and sleeves scrubbed free of blood, and instead his mind turns over helplessly like an engine in the winter cold.
Reaping Day.
Creed stands back in the square with his parents, with Paul and Julia - little Kit stayed behind with Uncle Raoul - and fixes his gaze ahead. He can’t look at the line of Seniors in their beautiful clothes, studying Selene and Petra to analyze their expressions and see which one is hiding victory or fury under their carefully constructed public masks, or picking apart their makeup and hair for the telltale flourishes that mark the volunteer style. The gold bead would be no help, of course, not when all the Seniors hold their hands over their wrists to avoid giving it away.
Dinners have been quiet at the Valents’ lately, tension settling over the table and suppressing any attempt at casual conversation like a thick blanket of humidity on a summer’s day. Soon the Games will break it like the first crack of thunder right before the rain falls in sheets.
In a month they’ll finally know what to tell Kit about his sister.
They call for the girls and Creed has been memorizing what to tell Selene in the Justice Building for weeks, encouraging but not condescending, just the right amount of familiar but not so much he reminds her that she’s human and fallible because of course a tribute can’t be, and -
Aunt Julia makes a small noise in the back of her throat, drowned out by the applause. Uncle Paul takes her hand and squeezes, tight, but their faces hold steady because of course they do, that’s what you have to do when you’re here and everyone is watching, the little camera drones buzzing overhead, and the President could be there watching Creed fighting to breathe and keep his face neutral because it’s not Selene who takes the stage after all. It’s the girl she can’t stand, all shining red hair and short, compact muscles and eyes that flash triumph as she flings one last, secret, vengeful grin toward the Seniors cluster and pumps her fist into the air and screams a victory that no one in the crowd will understand.
Creed watches the mace slam into Petra’s hip and feels his knee tear all over again. The nausea rises and he scrabbles to the side but by the time Mom rushes in with the bucket the wave has passed.
For the first time in his life he’s glad that the Victor is someone else. That it’s not the girl who used to stuff tadpoles down his shirt making that sacrifice. And he knows that’s what the Program is for, so no one’s loved ones ever have to suffer, but it was never supposed to be him. He was never meant to be the one who’s grateful. Creed knew he would lose his chance at glory. He never thought he would feel the cost year after year.
Petra’s scream echoes in his skull long after he tries to sleep.
He can walk now. Run, even, if he’s careful. He has a brace for difficult days, but there are days when he doesn’t need it, when he can leave the house and stroll around the neighbourhood or the forest trails with nothing but the shoes on his feet the injury never happened. He can almost believe that, as long as he keeps himself oriented away from the mountains, as long as he doesn’t think about the cluster of houses nestled at their feet and imagine the one that would have been built for him. There are crayon drawings of it in the bottom of the cardboard box he took with him to Residential: him and Selene, holding shiny swords, houses side by side. Alec beside him in Peacekeeper white. He wants to throw them away but can’t bear to dig them out.
The stipend envelopes keep coming.
Selene comes to see him at the rehabilitation hospital and Creed falls flat on his face.
It’s not her fault. It’s his final checkup and they have him doing balance and coordination exercises, really test his torsion and lateral movement, and it takes a lot of concentration because if he doesn’t pass this then they might schedule him for another followup and he wants to be done with all this. And so he’s not really paying attention to the person who walks in the door until she calls his name, and then he looks up and the face and the hair and closed-off posture all hit his brain at the same time as the delayed response to the voice and everything tangles up with the signals his brain was trying to send his limbs and he winds up in a heap on the ground.
“You good?” his doctor asks as Creed scrambles back to his feet, ears burning. “I’m going to go check on Elsie. I’ll be back.”
Selene’s still in the doorway, thankfully, looking like she can’t decide between laughing at him or fleeing to the hills. “Elsie is eighty-five, she had her hip replaced earlier this year,” Creed blurts out. “They used to have us do walking races.”
She stares at him for a long second, then snorts, and whatever happens at least he knows she won’t run. “Of course they did. Did you let her win?”
Now it’s Creed’s turn to scoff as he leads her to a pair of chairs by the window. “Have you ever tried to race an eighty-five-year-old retired Peacekeeper from Falcon Heights? There was no ‘let’, she trounced me every time and laughed in my face.”
“Of course she did,” Selene says again, and her smile edges into a grin.
She’s cleared detox, she tells him. She’ll be starting the Peacekeeping Academy next week. “There’s a blackout during training,” Selene says, shrugging. “I won’t be allowed out to see anybody until I pass. I wanted to see you, though. Before.”
She doesn’t say it. Creed doesn’t either. It feels weird, after years of planning back-to-back victories and neighbouring plots in the Victors’ Village and a whole future together, that now the heavy weight of a jinx hangs in the air. “Yeah,” Creed says. “No, yeah, no, that’s - good. I’m glad you did.”
They don’t talk about Petra. They don’t talk about the thin strip of paler skin around her right wrist, or the matching one on Creed’s that has finally faded. But maybe because of Petra, and the missing bracelets, and the thick envelopes that never stop, Creed asks her if she’s stopped by home.
She hasn’t, and isn’t planning to. It’s - he remembers what it was like, toward the end, everything strained and awkward, all her happy childhood memories painted over with a grey watercolour wash of tension and disappointment. Creed knows better than to tell Selene she should - knows better than to tell her she should anything - and even they miss you skews dangerously toward obligation, and so he tells her about Kit instead. Tells her about the little brother who’s finally old enough to learn he has a sister, and spends every day badgering Creed for another story, more details, is she really cool?
(“I said yes, obviously,” Creed says, grave and sincere. “The very coolest. The ultimate in cool. Coolness incarnate.”
“Oh my goddddd.” Selene peels a magazine from the rack and throws it at him, even though the cover falls open and the pages flap harmlessly to the ground. He’s flustered her: a Selene who really hated it would have rolled it up and nailed him in the head like a missile.)
“Maybe,” Selene says. The tips of her ears have flushed dark red. “I’ll think about it.”
Creed smiles at her. “You’re going to make a kick-ass Peacekeeper.”
“Ugh, I hate you.” She aims a kick at him that misses, barely, but she’s grinning too. “See if I come back here again.”
He keeps her secret, like he promised. Like he used to when they were kids and she slipped away to practice for her Residential exam and came back with her shirt cuffs dripping wet, the promise sealed with grass-stained knees and dappled light beneath waving leaves. Or when the death list disappeared from his bedroom and he had to ask the trainers for a new copy and got scolded for losing something so important, the weight of their disappointment laid heavy on his shoulders.
She never asked him then, and she doesn’t ask now. She used to threaten Alec with all number of horrible disfigurements (beheadings, missing toes, feeding him his own eyeballs) for breaking sacred vows, making Alec groan and shove her. Like he’d ever, he’d say, and of course Selene would challenge him: what if a grown-up asked him to? What if three grown-ups asked him to and they frowned at him - and then Creed would have to distract her before the conflict of loyalty and duty upset Alec. But she never bothered with Creed: he understood, and so did she. Some things never needed saying.
Selene will find them when it’s time, or she won’t. And until then, Creed will keep their meeting safe with the dirt and the blood and the names of thousands of dead teenagers stuffed under her pillow.
Creed likes to get the mail. It’s probably stupid, two years out, his injury long healed, but it’s a little freedom that makes him remember the early days: the first trip he could make by himself, out to the mailbox, those twenty steps out the door to the gate and back again. Every time he makes it he remembers his progress, the good days and the bad, the days when he made it without stumbling, the days when every step ached, the days when his knee buckled and he collapsed in a heap and had to make his way to his feet one agonizing movement at a time.
And now he’s here, and he can walk to get the mail. Just like that. He wonders if Petra can, by now.
Most days there’s nothing special. Dad and Mom get their work mail sent to Eagle Pass or to the school because it’s important to separate work and home - one thing to bring back a bit of extra paperwork or marking, another to have them send it to you direct - and the stipend only comes once a month. And so the index card is interesting; it’s new, and even better, there’s no address. Nothing but a single line of text hand-written.
You should be there
Creed blinks. “Dad?” He carries the card inside, turning it over and holding it up to the light, trying to find any clue he missed. It’s a fun mystery; Selene would have liked it. He should find a candle, he thinks with a twinge of nostalgia, remembering the summer Mom introduced them to cabbage-water ink and they left both houses littered in singed scraps of paper.
Dad is getting ready for work; Mom’s already gone. He glances at Creed with a distracted smile and holds out his hand for the mail. Creed waits for his reaction instead of leaving, the distant ten-year-old inside of him awakened by the idea of a mystery.
Dad freezes. Creed waits, but he only stares at the card, fingers loosening on his work bag until it falls from his hand and thuds to the ground. “Dad?” Creed says finally, and his head snaps up.
He’s never seen his father’s Career face. Dad and Mom left the Program at sixteen, they told him, and joined the Peacekeeper Academy, and he never really thought about his dad as a tribute candidate learning how to hold a sword or break a grapple hold - or act.
For a second he slips, face slack and open in a way Creed’s never seen, a wildness in the eyes that belongs nowhere on his father’s face, nowhere at the Centre or near the cameras, anywhere the sponsors might have eyes, judging and evaluating. It hits him then that Dad really is a Career, has never stopped being one. Has never stopped living like the cameras are watching.
And then he’s back. The mask slips back into place, calm and smooth and just a little bit of rugged charm, though now that Creed knows what to look for he can see the charm is loose around the edges, like hastily applied makeup or a sword belt slapped on crooked. “We’ll talk at dinner,” he says. “Study hard, son.”
He’d never seen his father’s Career face. Until he realized that no, he’d never seen Dad’s Career face break.
By the time they sit down for dinner, Creed has already worked it out.
They don’t think Alec can do it.
For the first time in months - since the last time he tripped on a routine walk and the spectre of weeks of bedrest flashed in his mind like horrible slow-motion Games replay footage - Creed’s temper boils over. His whole childhood, nothing but congratulations for a game he would never get to play, filling his head with certainty and inevitable victory while Alec straggled behind him - but he failed, didn’t he, and Selene in the end, and here is Alec, one foot in front of the other until he reached the goal no one ever asked him to achieve. They should be proud, they should be ecstatic, they should be shouting from the rooftops - but instead the house is quiet, the air thick and heavy, his parents hardly speaking and the sound of clinking plates like thunderclaps in the silence.
They don’t say so, of course, but they are already mourning. They’re like every other parent across the districts, saying goodbye before the cannon fires, and the Reaping hasn’t even started yet. Creed stares at them across the table and feels the fury bubble up inside him, hears the trainers in his head saying good, dig deep, find it, use it, channel it, pick up the sword, finish the arc and he wants to shout, scream, smash the plates and kick the chairs and heave the table until it topples sideways and the dishes crash to the floor and demand why, why don’t they believe in Alec when all he’s done his whole life is try, but all he can do is ask his mother to pass the potatoes.
Well, fine. Creed is a statement of faith. He will believe in Alec enough for all of them.
[END OF PART 2]
The noise in his head is like a dull background roar he can mostly ignore, like sitting in his tree as a kid and trying to read while Mom cut the lawn. Constant, but mostly fine, until she’d pass right by his tree and the sound of that sputtering engine and the chopping blades and the weird gas smell mixed with the odd, sharp freshness of newly-murdered grass stalks slapped him in the face and he had to place his book face-down on his knee until she left again.
Creed is the Volunteer. Creed will fight in the Arena. A lifetime of destiny coalescing and closing in around them in a matter of weeks, a pinhole so bright it’s blinding. Buzzing, buzzing, but mostly in the back of his head, until he’s walking past a knot of boys in the common room and who do you think his mentor will be, or I wonder what Arena they’ll get or he better win, I heard they give us ice cream and there’s the lawnmower, flinging bits of grass into his eyes and drowning out the rhythm of his thoughts.
If only he could fling himself at them, knock their teeth out, cave their noses in until the shock and blood shoves the words back down their throats - but he can’t, only fear does that, and Alec can’t show fear, not here. And so he squares his shoulders and lets his feet fall a little louder on the mats and at least they stop when they see him. Kids raised as gods aren’t scared of much, but the power of the jinx hovers in dark corners. Nobody wants to be the one to call it down and look Alec in the eye once it strikes.
Have faith, Alec tells himself at night, muffling hysterical laughter into the thin pillow. He can only have faith.
Two weeks out he’s heading to dinner and Grant slams into him from around the corner. “Hey!” Kevin’s eyes bug out wide, and he grips Alec’s arms hard enough to hurt. Alec wrenches back but he holds on, fingers digging in. “Your brother’s out.”
He may as well have opened his mouth and spat out marbles. “What?”
“He’s out, man. Training injury. They’re saying no way will he heal in time.”
No sound but the rasp of air in his chest, coming faster and faster. His vision swims and his knees buckle and he’s going down, he’s going to faint, but Kevin slams him into the wall, one arm across his chest like they’re arguing, two kids having a minor scrap on the way to the commissary, nothing to see here. Alec gulps in hard breaths and Kevin keeps him pinned there, eyes dark and watchful, fist steady over Alec’s heart. “Breathe, dude. You’re fine.”
Kevin hates everyone and everything but he’s never hated Alec. The perennial youngest brother and the smallest candidate from cheapside, both with something to prove. Kevin twists his knife into the training dummies with vicious glee and knew a dozen ways to slit a throat even before Residential, but those same hands are gentle in the dark. Alec gasps and blinks until the burning recedes, and Kevin flashes him a sharp grin. “You got this. Let’s go get some pudding.”
He finds a trainer after dinner. “Can I see him?”
She doesn’t ask who he means or how he knows. It’s Residential, secrets fly like Arena drones and no one bothers to pretend otherwise. “That’s not a good idea,” she says. “He’s not in the best headspace right now.”
Well that - makes sense, Creed just had his whole life’s goal ripped out from under him, but that’s exactly why Alec wants to see him. He feels the protest rising inside him, actually considers trying to form an argument, but the trainer folds her arms and stares him down. In the end it’s not even a contest.
If he’d known they’d send Creed home without warning, he might have tried it anyway.
“I heard he had a huge fucking freak out and scared the babies,” Nathan scoffs, sprawling across the sofa. “If I got cut - not that I’m going to get cut, but if I did - I wouldn’t be a huge baby about it. You injured out, suck it up.”
Alec also heard the rumours. Rumours that Creed hadn’t been protesting this removal, but that Alec hadn’t been cut with him, that he’d demanded the trainers let him take his brother home. It could be bullshit; Residential loves gossip, but no one really cares about accuracy as long as they get an interesting story out of it.
Nathan, prime example. Alec never really understood what he did to get on Nathan’s radar, except maybe exist and have a father who knew his name, but he spends way too much time trying to get Alec to crack. He used to try to ignore him, until it finally clicked that you don’t get points for playing nice. Now he tries to shut it down fast. Sometimes Kevin needles Nathan for fun, or plays him and Grant off each other to watch the sparks. Felix plays peacemaker but even his miracle skills only work so far.
“Maybe he cracked,” Nathan continues. He’s filched a handful of walnuts from the commissary and cracks them, flicking shards of shell out of his lap onto the far side of the sofa. One of them pingpongs off a cushion and hits Alec on the shoulder. “You know, all that pressure, countdown’s ticking, maybe he couldn’t handle it. Took himself out of play so he wouldn’t choke on the big day.”
Let it go, Alec tells himself. Be the bigger person. Rise above, Creed used to say in that haughty voice of his, incongruous now when Alec looks back at sixteen and imagines it coming from a twelve-year-old, but good advice, and useful for infuriating Nathan. Dad used to tell him that certain people would always seek reactions, and the only way to win meant not giving it to them. If he looks up, he knows what he’ll see: Nathan grinning at him, waiting to see if the barbs landed. Better to get up and hit the weight room before bed.
A small movement at his side. Kevin slips him a knife no bigger than his thumb, stolen from a brace meant for target practice, all without looking up from the book he’s studiously pretending to read. Alec considers it - weighs his options, samples the unseasoned chicken breast of the moral high ground - and drives the blade into the webbing of Nathan’s foot.
Nathan yelps, throws himself to his feet, howling. The others dance back, ringing them off from onlookers, energy spiked and ready for a fight. And Nathan fights mean, he nearly killed a boy in training their first year in Residential and he let everyone know it, but today Alec’s temper blazes white and furious. Before Nathan can charge him he darts in, flings himself on his back and gets one arm around his throat, jammed in below his jaw. Nathan whirls, snarling, fist slamming back into Alec’s skull, his eye, flinging his head back to crack Alec’s nose - but soon he staggers, knee hitting the floor in a loud crash, breath wheezing in plaintive gasps.
“Alec,” a trainer warns.
Alec lets go. Nathan slumps sideways, coughing, hand clutching at his neck. Bees buzz under his skin but he backs off, hands raised in exaggerated compliance. “Shut the fuck up about my brother,” Alec hisses. The knife has already disappeared, presumably back into Kevin’s sleeve. The trainer nods and turns back to a group of fourteens wrestling across the room.
Alec pushes himself to his feet, chest pounding. Everyone else returns to their conversations; Felix offers Nathan a hand up, gets a mouthful of curses spat in his face for his trouble. Alec turns, and across the room his gaze snags: Selene in the middle of a game of Bullshit, a hand of cards splayed between her fingers. They stare at each other, caught, for several seconds, until one of her game partners slaps her arm and snaps her out of it. She flips him off and tosses down a card, taking the hand - he groans, she grins, sharp and wolfish - and Alec turns away.
It’s after light’s out, too late to sneak back to his room without getting caught. Alec steals a pillow and bunks down on the floor, sweat drying chill against his skin. He wonders, sometimes, what it would feel like to fall asleep right after, crammed together on the tiny bunk, knees jammed in to fit and arms tangled around each other’s waists, but they don’t do that here. Too much like something real, and the Centre is no place for real.
“You know,” Kevin says from above him, “he’s probably gonna be a Peacekeeper.”
Alec frowns. Kevin is a grey blur in the darkness, the only light a faint crack from under the door. “What? Who.”
“You know who.” The bed creaks. Kevin leans over the side, incongruous, like they’re kids at a sleepover and not candidates training for a death match less than two years away. “That was your whole thing, right, he’s the Volunteer and you’re on the Peacekeeper track. But he didn’t volunteer, did he. So what does that make you?”
Kevin has no interest in the Arena, not that he’d ever tell the trainers. He’s happy to let the others slug it out for number one, and he fights to keep his scores precision-high because he wants the Peacekeepers. He wants out of this dump, he says, he wants the rifle and the uniform and the respect that comes with it, a free pass to see the world - and he’ll do whatever he has to do to get it.
Alec asked him once, why he cares what Alec does. Why he’s always pushing, needling him to fight harder, do better. I don’t, he said, shrugging expansively. But sometimes you really piss me off.
Alec exhales toward the ceiling. “It’s not gonna be me. No way.” Kevin makes a noncommittal humming noise, not arguing, and for some absolutely stupid reason that drives a spike of anger through Alec’s spine. Selene used to argue, she would argue about the dumbest, most inconsequential things, sometimes she would disagree with Alec about the weather when they were outside right now just to see him sputter.
But sometimes - sometimes she’d agree with him, and that drove him even crazier. He imagines her here, in the dark, propped up on one elbow, yawning in exaggerated boredom.
It’s not gonna be me.
Okay.
But what if I wanted to?
Then you should do it.
But they won’t ever pick me!
Then don’t bother.
But -
Whenever they reached a loop, there was only ever one way through.
“Oh, you asshole,” Alec says aloud - to Kevin, to the ghost of Selene, it doesn’t really matter, does it. “I have to do it, don’t I.”
“Way I see it, you don’t have to do anything.” Kevin’s jaw cracks in a yawn, and for a moment Alec almost hears Selene here with him, tossing her knife into the air and catching it between two fingers. “But if you did, it would be badass.”
Since Residential the trainers have been steering Alec toward spears: solid weapons, clean kills, good for his build as he finally starts filling out those long arms and broad shoulders his mother promised he’d grow into. It isn’t until his kill test, when he chokes the life from a woman’s throat with his bare fingers against her throat, that he realizes how much distance they give him. That the trainers have been giving him that distance, letting him have those extra feet of space, that mental space. He was grateful for it, until now.
Creed fought with kukri, twin machetes the length of his forearm, whirling in close to land a flurry of strikes and darting back before his opponent could regroup. He got his fighting style from Callista: close, deadly, efficient and ruthless.
The weapons racks have a whole row of wicked-looking polearms: long blades with a sharp, deliberate curve, handles long enough to give reach but not enough to throw the bearer out of melee range. Normally during free choice hour Alec takes his spear and practices on long-distance targets, the dummies moving along the tracks in all directions, but today Alec walks past the spears and plucks out a polearm he thinks matches his reach; the blade glints in the bright light. He can almost see the blood.
A line of dummies, various heights and sizes, stands in the corner. Alec faces off, bracing his feet and hefting the weapon’s weight. He’s used spears. He’s used swords. A spear-sword can’t be that much different.
“It’s a naginata,” the trainer says, amused. She steps in and corrects his stance, shifting his foot there, his arm there, and oh, yeah, okay, now he feels a lot less like he’s about to slice his own leg off by accident. “Watch your feet, don’t lock your grip. Switch it up if you need to, she’s a versatile one. If you like the feel we can work some drills.”
He’s heard some of the kids say that weapons sing. It’s not that Alec doesn’t believe them - he’s seen enough victories to know what it looks like when a tribute is born to the sword, or spear, or trident, when a clear-eyed outlier with ropy muscles and remade palms picks up a scythe or axe - but he’s certainly never felt it. It’s like love, or making father proud, Alec with his confused pencil sketches of what he thought it might be like while others forged on with the power of their conviction.
He swings the naginata and slices through a dummy, and a trumpet looses in his chest.
Still distant, but - purposeful, and even more important, active. No moments when the blade leaves his hands and fate takes over. Alec turns to face the trainer, who watches him with a small smile and a calculating expression he’s seen reserved for others, but not for him - until now. He pushes sweat back from his face and it’s so stupid, these are just dummies, they’re dummies but they’re real people, in the Arena they will be people, there will be blood and guts all over but for right now they’re only training dummies and the trainer is giving him a smile she never has before.
Kevin’s voice in the darkness, Selene’s an echo underneath: If you did, it would be badass.
Alec swipes an arm across his forehead, tosses damp curls out of his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “Show me the drills.”
He’s not sure what makes him do it, but that night he fishes out the wristwatch his parents gave him on his seventh birthday, buried at the bottom of the cardboard box shoved at the end of his bed. He slips it over his wrist - or tries. It gaps, the teeth of the clasp an inch away from meeting.
Each year he grew, his parents took him to the smith, bought another link for the watch to fit it. Here in Residential he’s kept growing, muscles filling out through the years of drills and practice fights.
It felt so heavy, once. Now, compared to a spear, it feels like it could float away.
He spends hours, in the weeks before the decision, planning what to say to Selene when they pick her. His memory slides back to the girl in the woods with the glint in her eyes and the blood on her fingers but the terror has faded now, years of training dulled to - if not acceptance, then inevitability. They won’t let him in the Justice Building, he can’t visit her in the Tribute Suite, and they’ve spent five long years ignoring each other but he can’t let her go with nothing. In the end he thinks he has it, something to let her know he sees her, he remembers, that he still keeps faith.
But they don’t pick Selene.
He sees her only for a second, blank-faced and unreadable with every inch of her power. The chosen girl is giddy, too drunk on victory to taunt, and she offers Selene a kiss. Selene turns away and slips into the crowd, inscrutable. Alec should follow her - he can’t follow her, this is still the Centre and they are still candidates, and anyway she would not welcome him - and a strange, disloyal thought worms his way into his brain.
No Creed. No Selene. No Arena for the favourites. Creed is at home, learning how to be a boy again. Selene will join the Academy and learn to forge her disappointment into newer, sharper weapons. And Alec -
He stands in the sun for the first time in his life. No grand shadows block his path.
It is not, Alec thinks, a kind thought. Not when her best friend has had her dreams upended. When his brother’s entire life has been a lie. But he could, if he tried, get used to it.
The funniest part about practicing what to say to Selene before she leaves is that he never actually has to do it. The trainers pull the Seniors from the Reaping and take them straight to the detox dorms, and that’s that.
“It’s harder for them than for us,” Felix when Alec points it out. “Any one of them could have been up there, if things were different. I’m sure they don’t want to sit here, watching us pause every five minutes and listening to the commentary.”
It makes sense, he just never had cause to pay attention before. Selene disappearing feels like missing the last stair and jarring his ankle on the hard ground, or maybe reaching into the jar for one last, long-anticipated cookie and swiping nothing but cold, empty porcelain. Five long years of nothing, dutifully acting like they never even knew each other, the one rule Selene chose to follow to the letter, and now she’s gone.
Did she know, or did the trainers whisk them out before they could say any goodbyes? Not that it matters, in the end.
District Two wins. Petra staggers to the hovercraft with a broken knee and shattered pelvis, bleeding out and screaming at the sky as a wild and ragged cheer rises from the candidates in the training room. Felix hasn’t moved since the start of the fight, transfixed. Alec’s nails have broken through the skin of his palms as Kevin lets out a long, slow whistle. Grant has backed himself into the wall, hands pressed flat to the floor, eyes bugged wide. Even Nathan, who refuses to let anything impress him, drops a low, “Fuck!” under his breath.
A handful of trainers enter from the side door, balancing trays laden with ice cream bowls as the thirteens burst into excited babble. “Well,” Kevin says. “That’s gonna be a tough one to follow.”
Alec turns eighteen a few days after the Closing Ceremony. By now he’s finished out the big ones - the Field Exam and final kill beads are building up a patina like the others, wearing down after so much blood, so many hand washings - and for once the milestone calls for no late-night excursions into a hovercraft, dropped into the pitch-black woods. Instead it’s a white-walled room and critical attendants who strip him down and call out every imperfection they can find. He can see how Selene might have scoffed at it the first time, and others might have lashed out. But for Alec, who can’t smile without his father’s voice ringing in his head (Teeth, son!), there’s nothing they can say to him he hasn’t heard a thousand times before.
“High pass,” a trainer says afterward, tossing Alec his uniform. “Ask the commissary for extra fruit at breakfast.”
The days narrow: the next fight, the next test, next, next, next. The glaive and naginata sing like an extension of his arm. At night he collapses, exhausted and triumphant all at once, the eyes of the trainers burned into the back of his neck. They call him out for excessive force more often now, and sometimes he doesn’t even need to calculate when to make that extra push for maximum impact. Sometimes Nathan sneers at him wrong, or Felix gives him a look that’s too knowing, too sympathetic. Some days it’s even Kevin, digging under his skin because he can. The anger flares, hot and white and more familiar now than foreign, like a whisper in the dark, and then there’s blood on his fingers and a trainer at his arm and a boy retching on the floor.
Is he really winning, asks the Alec whose wrist still fits the birthday watch tucked away in the box on his dresser, or losing something bigger? Alec shoves the box deep underneath his bed and paints a fresh coat of liquid bandage across his knuckles.
Alec is sprawled on the couch in the lounge, a book draped across his face to block out the fluorescents, when Cato, the up-and-coming favourite from the year below, bursts in through the door. “Yo, they posted the list!” Alec sits up, the book falling to the floor with a loud thunk as the younger boy grins at him across the room. “You’re gonna want to see it.”
“Dude!” his year-mate socks him in the arm. “Spoilers!”
“Uh, no, everybody wants to see it, obviously.” And then they’re gone, leaving Alec, one leg hanging over the side of the sofa, heart pounding. Serves him right for napping, but his cohort passed the sleep deprivation test last week and his brain still hasn’t caught up.
He doesn’t actually get to the list, is the funny part. Everyone attacks him first, hollering and jumping on his shoulders, catching him in a headlock and driving knuckles into his ribs. “Holy shit, back off,” Alec barks out, laughing and shoving them away. “Let me read it myself, Snow’s balls.”
They’ve pinned the paper to the wall by the head trainer’s office like always. Mara wears a grin like she already has the crown, one fist pumped in the air. Sloane’s already gone, but she was never the frontrunner and they all know it. She’ll throw a few daggers, murder some training dummies, maybe get a knife in Nathan’s side if he starts something, and move on. Alec touches his fingers to the letters, stark black on white -
VOLUNTEER, FEMALE: MARA
VOLUNTEER, MALE: ALEC
“Who’s a statement of faith now, Dad,” he sings, too low for anyone else to hear. He spins and holds out his arm, and Mara grins and knocks their fists together.
He made it. This time they’ll get to watch him shine.
Creed was born for this.
He heard his teachers say once, standing together on the playground, talking low in that way they do when they think the kids are too busy playing to pay attention, that it’s like he has one foot in the Arena already. It’s not just how they can’t ask him to write anything about the future or his plans for when he grows up, because he’ll write ‘victor’ or else sit there staring at a blank page for the whole class. It’s the way he always seems a little far away, like he’s older than he should be - not wise, or mature, saying things beyond his years, but old, like sometimes his eyes unfocus when the rest of the kids are playing and you know he isn’t thinking about tag or pyramid or races but sand-blasted vistas and stockpiles of shiny weapons. Like he’s lost in a memory of something that hasn’t happened yet.
He knows they worry. Knows they try to draw him out, make him care about the game everyone is playing or the book they’re reading in language class or factoring. He tries to care, because he likes them, but it’s so easy to look out the window and feel his mind slip sideways to the clash of steel and the burn of sun on the back of his neck.
(Mrs. Keen actually does make factoring click, after keeping him in during recess: if there is an average of twelve bloodbath kills, what are the different ways the Careers could divide them out? Each person could get two, or three people could get four, or four people could get three, or three people could get two and two people could get three - And if on Day Seven the sponsors send four water bottles, six apples, and ten protein bars ...)
After Residential there really is nothing else. They don’t learn math in Residential, and they don’t read books. The only history is Games history, and the history of Two and why they fight. Creed drinks it in like water. Every day the trainers tell him: this is his purpose, this is why his parents made him, this is why they raised him and gave him up. Not with words, maybe, but with each new test, each high pass, each new bead and black strand around his wrist.
Everyone knows, but Creed hasn’t mentioned his parents since he was seven, because Dad said family and privilege are gifts, not weapons, and you don’t get to use them to get your way. They probably hate him for it underneath, but in the Arena they need to work together and then kill each other so this is nothing. Are they friends? No, but no one in Residential is. That’s not what they’re here for. It’s not hard to get them to like him, or at least forget for a little while that they wish he’d fall and crack his skull open on the ropes course and give someone else a shot.
And then they post the pair of Volunteers, and Creed gets a gold bead to match the others on his wrist, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. He will be the volunteer, he will go too the Arena, and he will fulfill the destiny he has chased since he was old enough to understand.
And then -
There is a pop, and a tear, and a flash of blinding pain that shoots out from his knee. For a horrible second it whites out everything else - but that can’t matter, the Arena will be worse, there will be swords in his gut and blades slashing his limbs and he can’t, he can’t let one little twist the wrong way stop him - and he thinks of the trumpets and blood on his hands and pushes himself up -
And then Paxton’s foot hits his knee and shoves, hard, and there’s the pain again, sharper and stronger, and an awful grinding sound, and Creed is on the mats, biting hard on his tongue so he won’t scream. He can’t, because if he screams then he can’t take the pain and if he can’t take the pain them they won’t choose him. (“Excessive force,” calls a trainer. Paxton shouts back that he didn’t do anything, and she says that’s worse, at least if it was on purpose she could give him points for technique.)
“Creed,” the trainer says. She sounds far away.
He swallows blood. “Yeah,” he spits out. “Yeah, I’m good.”
“Go to medical, get that checked out,” she says, but it’s disinterested, automatic. “When you get back we’ll work on your footing, that twist was sloppy.”
“Yes sir.”
He stands - the leg buckles, but he shifts his weight in time - and manages to limp out of the training room without making sound.
(He doesn’t go to medical. He stops in long enough to ask for a compression bandage, wraps it around his knee and hobbles back. He gives himself half an hour in the bathroom to rest and cover for skipping the actual examination, then slips into the training room. It’s fine. It will be fine.)
“Good, you’re back.” The trainer eyes him, but he must not look that green. “Let me check your footwork again. Show me what you were trying to do at the end there.”
He’d been trying to fall into a sweep, but his foot had caught on the edge of the mats, keeping his leg in place when the rest of him spun around to the side and dropped. Creed nods, swallows the nausea and matches her stance. His knee feels wobbly, like the pudding they serve in medical when you really take a pounding without crying. Maybe if he’d gone in he would have gotten one, but he can’t risk it. Not with the Arena so close.
“Okay, let’s see it,” the trainer says.
This time, he screams.
“I don’t need it,” Creed insists the whole way to medical. “I’m fine. I just need to walk it off.”
The trainer glares at him. “Creed, if you don’t shut up and let the doctors do their job, we’re going to have to sedate you.”
He shuts his mouth. He wonders if she’s scared for her job, if she’ll get in trouble for not checking on him when it first happened. Except it’s fine, it’s just his knee, he’s tweaked it before. All he needs to do is push it back into place, brace it and keep going. The faster he lets the doctors check him out, the faster they’ll see everything is fine.
(He has to go away into his head for the exam, it hurts so much, all that holding his leg down and moving his knee around in different directions, but it’s fine. It’s fine. The Arena will be worse.)
“So,” he says when they let him sit up - sort of, he’s still in the bed, but he’s allowed to scooch himself up with his hands until his back hits the pillows. “Can I go?”
The doctor trades looks with the trainer, and no. No, no, no no no no -
Surgery. Bed rest. Crutches. Six months of gruelling physical rehabilitation. For what, a little sprain? Creed twists his hands in the plain white sheets until he feels the fabric tear beneath his fingers. “No,” he says.
The doctor shakes her head. “The good news is, you have plenty of time now.”
“No.” Panic scrabbles hard in his chest. “The Reaping is in two weeks. Just - put a walking brace on it. Give me painkillers. I can do it!” They say nothing, only stare at him, and for the first time in eleven years - for the first time in his entire life - Creed says the words “My father -“
“- would love it if we sent you into the Arena on a severed ACL,” the doctor says, relentless but not unkind. A memory stirs, absurd and unwanted: dark eyes and gentle hands, the quirk of a smile at the edges of a no-nonsense stare as he’s scolded for letting Selene goad him into something stupid. “You fought well. Now you’re done.”
It’s all a dream, he tells himself through the haze of painkillers. Except the painkillers mean it’s not - they don’t drug trainees outside of recovery from the Field Exam, getting the good stuff for a training injury means you’re out, everyone knows that. But then the doctor injects him with something that makes the world soft and shiny and sparkly around the edges and it’s real, it’s really happening, the world has turned sideways and dumped him over the edge and there’s no going back.
He wakes up to a thick, hinged brace from halfway up his thigh to midway down his calf. A box sits on the chair next to the bed: his belongings, gathered from the dorm room. A handful of photographs, a rock he and Alec found that looks like the president’s nose, his baby blanket. Stupid things. They’ve folded a fresh uniform on top, ready for him.
The head trainer walks him out, the box of Creed’s things under his arm. Creed hates the crutches, hates the way they dig in under his arms, hates the moment of instability every time he swings forward. Hates knowing that if he tried to walk without them he’d collapse to the floor.
They’re sending him home, not to the detox dorms. He asked, they said he had a choice. Creed tried to imagine healing with hundreds of washouts around him, thinking they’re the same, and the thought nearly made him throw up. His parents might think he’s a failure but they have to take him, don’t they, even if they only promised until eighteen? It’s better than strangers, anyway. Maybe then he’ll figure out how he’s supposed to pay them back, not only for the first thirteen years of his life but for every day going forward.
“Wait.” He stops. Pryor frowns but waits as Creed cranes his head backwards. “Where’s Alec?”
Pryor raises an eyebrow. “You washed out, not your brother.”
It hits him like - well, like Paxton’s foot to his knee. Like the awful shock of ice water for their winter swim test as the cold hits his lungs. His parents promised a Seward for the Arena: they can’t have Creed, and now - “No,” Creed says. Again. How many times can he ask them not to? How many times will they refuse? “No, he’s coming with me. He’s going to be a Peacekeeper, he’s supposed to go when I go -“
“You’re not a package deal,” Pryor says, calm and inexorable like an ice storm. “You go. Your brother stays. Whether he graduates is on his own merit, like everyone else.”
“No!” It tears loose in a shout that echoes down the hallway. Voices in the nearest gym fall silent. “No, you can’t have him, he’s not yours, you don’t get to keep him, you can’t have him, you can’t have him -“
He really is out of the running. Creed the Volunteer would have heard the doctors’ shoes slapping against the floor, would have seen the arm come up behind him. The syringe slides into his neck and he falls limp.
“I’m sorry.” The words slur, his tongue thick with sedatives. Maybe he’s not saying anything out loud but the words are sharp in his mind, sharp and burning, the pressure to release them pushing hard in his chest like drowning. The car window, cool against his forehead. Sometimes the car turns a corner and his head thumps the glass. He doesn’t feel it. Wool coats his brain. “I’m sorry, I failed, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry -“
A voice, more distant rumble than words. “You don’t need to apologize.”
It strikes a memory deep inside and pulls it loose. He laughs. It hurts. “I know. I need to do better.”
Silence. A short, sharp sound, like a sudden hiss. “No,” the voice says, sounding shocked. And okay, that’s funny. He’d laugh if he had the breath. “No, I - you have nothing to be sorry about. That’s all.”
Well, that’s not true, but he’s too tired to argue. He lets the drugs pull him back under as the engine hums.
His mother hugs him. That’s how he knows the world has really ended. He lets her, because some long-dormant part of his brain knows it’s rude to shove your parents the same way image training hammered in that you don’t sass the prep team, but when she asks him what he needs he says he wants to sleep.
They help him up the stairs, and then they leave him be.
(It’s not until later, after he’s slept, that it hits him what’s so weird: they’ve redone the room, his and Alec’s. The bunk bed is gone, the double dresser, the twin desks. The toy shelf. It’s a young man’s room now, done up in local wood and blue trim, waiting politely for that young man to come back. No, not any young man: Alec. Because they gave Creed up when he turned thirteen, and whether he lived or died in the Arena, he wasn’t coming back. It was the grave or the Village for him, not his childhood home. Not ever again.
Their faith in him is … touching, really.
He leans over the bed and vomits into the solid new trash can.)
They all eat dinner in his room, and the sky keeps falling.
Creed tries to argue: dinner at the table has always been sacred ever since he can remember. Even during the Games, his parents scheduled the evening meal so they could all eat together and send the boys to bed before the nightly recap. Other kids, he knew, took food up to their rooms and ate while doing their homework, or reading, or hanging out with friends; some families even ate while watching entertainment broadcasts, a habit that Creed’s father found absolutely abhorrent and forbade at all costs. In any case, Creed can’t remember a single night in his childhood where dinner wasn’t spent around the table, either at his house or the Valents’.
“Think of it like a picnic,” Dad says as Creed gapes at him, and wonders if maybe the Capitol Gamemakers haven’t come and replaced him with some kind of super-muttation. His father has pulled up a chair next to the bed and is eating his meal off a tray balanced in his lap as if that’s perfectly normal and not the strangest thing Creed has ever seen in his life. When Creed keeps staring he finally snorts and shakes his head. “A good, home-cooked meal in my lap is hardly an emergency. Your mother and I spent a solid year arguing over the best field rations while on assignment out in the wilderness beyond the district boundary.”
“Casserole,” Mom says with finality.
“Stew,” Dad argues immediately. “Higher meat ratio. You need the protein if you’re out on the field.”
“Only because you’re afraid of a little vegetable,” Mom shoots back. “Married a whole year before I could get this man to eat a salad. ‘Inefficient caloric intake’. What are you supposed to do in the field if you get scurvy?”
Creed knows what scurvy is, the trainers tell them it’s a mild Arena risk because most mentors will prioritize meat over fruit in late-game sponsor gifts but nothing to worry about because no Games have ever lasted longer than a month. It’s bizarre to hear his parents talk about Peacekeeping assignments like he and the other candidates compared notes on their field exams, or ration packs in the same way they used to debate Arena meals. To hear his parents joking at all, not an unknown phenomenon but rare enough that he and Alec always sat up and took notice.
They never would have done this before. Even if he’d been sick enough to stay in bed for dinner, they would have eaten without him and come up to check on him later. This - he really is out. The weight presses on his chest again. “What do I do now?” Creed bursts out.
Dad, fork halfway to his mouth, sets it down again. He misses the end of his plate and smears sauce against his pant leg. “Anything you want,” he says, too brightly. “I’m sure you could get a job at Eagle Pass. Or as a trainer, or working in recruitment for the Program. Or there are plenty of other jobs around town -“
Creed can’t breathe, everything is too much, too big, like all the walls have disappeared, everything that kept him safe and protected and on the right path, and now it’s him and a web of ropes stretched out along an endless chasm and he’s trying to balance but the ropes keep shifting and there’s a blinding light in his eyes and he can’t see his feet -
“Joseph.” Mom gives him a look. “Rest. What you need to do is rest.“
“But -“
“What happens after the Arena?” Mom asks. Creed falls quiet, brain spinning into confusion. “You don’t worry about that, because that’s not your job, your job is to get there. You have knee surgery coming up. Your job is to rest and work with the doctor on your therapy so you can be ready for the procedure. Nothing else. Can you do that?”
No, he wants to say, no, that’s ridiculous, she can’t pretend that’s anywhere near the same thing, the Arena is a goal that makes sense and he was worthy when he chased it, this is a stupid goal for babies and failures and she can’t pretend there’s any honour in it. Except she doesn’t take it back, and when he looks at Dad, Dad only lets out a quiet breath and nods. And it’s stupid, it makes no sense, but the blinding light fades and the ropes fall away and there’s a path before him, steady and solid.
Rest. Therapy. Surgery. Everything else can wait.
He sucks in a hard breath, hears it rattle wet and messy with a horror that tears out his ribcage. Dad glances over, looks away fast and stands up, brisk and businesslike. “May as well start now,” he says, gathering up the dishes. “Let’s let the boy have his rest.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Creed keeps his eyes squeezed shut against the burning until the door closes softly behind them.
July rolls around and Creed straps on his brace with the mindless proficiency he once reserved for machetes, struggles into his old uniform, and makes the long journey downstairs. At the front door he hears the floor creak, and his father’s voice from behind him, dry as paint thinner: “And where exactly are you going?”
That voice used to make Alec start babbling and confessing to crimes real and imagined, but Creed only tenses. “I’m going to the Reaping. I’m still eligible, I should be there.”
Long pause. “I see. And how are you getting there?”
They’ve always driven to the Reaping square, him and Alec respectfully silent in the backseat of the car in their best suits, playing finger games across the middle seat and snatching their hands back when Mom shoots a sharp warning glance back. Had Creed ever gone to the Justice Building on his own from home? He knows the way from the Centre, he knows the way to the Centre from home. He could figure it out. It might take him a little longer, that’s all. Already the muscles in his thigh tremble from standing so long.
“Hm,” Dad says. “What are you going to do when you get there?”
Stand there, with the other eighteen-year-olds, and watch as one of his classmates - maybe even Paxton - stood up on that stage and took the honour that belonged to Creed, the only thing that made his life worth meaning. Creed grips the door handle until his fingers cramped. The crutch digs in under his armpit.
“Stand there in the square like a good citizen and let the chosen volunteer do his duty, will you?” Dad’s voice is relentless, driving into his back like spear thrusts. “You aren’t thinking of speaking out and going in his place?”
Creed hisses sharp enough he bites his tongue. “You did this to me!” The Creed who left this house would never speak to his father like this. The Creed who left this house had never killed three men and two women and let their blood dry on his hands. Had never practiced taunts with image trainers saying again, sharper, meaner, try it with your eyebrow raised, don’t look at me like you’re sorry after, a victor is never sorry. “I would have been a victor for you, I would have died for you, and now I’m nothing, because of you! I’m going to go to the Reaping and you can’t stop me.”
Dad works under the mountain now but he was a field officer once, and before that he was a tribute candidate like all the rest of them. Creed doesn’t even hear him move. One second Dad’s behind him, the next the door is shut and Dad has one hand around his wrist and his eyes hold him pinned in place harder than any trainer’s lock. “I can,” Dad says, slow and final, “And I will. We are watching from home. Stand. Down.”
“But -“ His next breath is a hiccup, the one after that a shudder, and he can’t, the trainers will fail him and he’ll never get to volunteer -
Dad’s hand on the back of his neck, solid and steady. “Okay,” he says, and Creed is so grateful he can’t breathe. “Let’s get you set up on the couch.”
Creed watches Paxton volunteer from his living room sofa, Mom at the far end massaging his leg.
Three weeks later, Paxton chokes on his own blood on the dusty concrete of the ruined city as Creed takes his daily walk up the path through the neighbourhood and back. Dad doesn’t call him in to watch. Creed says he’ll catch it on the recap, but both Mom and Dad say no; he argues long enough for Dad to shut him down, then lets it go.
There’s a stream in the forest out behind the house where he, Selene and Alec played tributes, and he eases his legs over the side and lets the water run over his calves. The stream is cool and cuts the ache in his joints, at least for a little while.
Cicadas scream in the trees above, and Creed is alive.
[END PART 1]
Creed’s year passes in a blur of physical therapy, emotional therapy and - worst of all - homeschool. “Why do I need to finish school?” he demands when his mother informs him of his new assignment. “I can read, I can write, I can do math. I know my history. What else is there?”
“You can read and write like a ten-year-old, and not a very dedicated one.” Mom says. Creed jerks back, cheeks burning hot. He left school at thirteen and they both know it, she should at least give him that much. “You left at Residential but you checked out at Transition, and we let you, because you were meant for greater things. And now you’re going to learn everything you missed because you’re meant for great things again.”
“What happened to ‘all you need to do is rest’,” Creed shoots back, nasty and sarcastic. He’s never spoken to his mother that way in his life. He half expects her to smack him across the face except he’s not four years old, he’s eighteen and taller than she is and he’ll fight back, he will, even with his leg iced and elevated. He stares at her, wild and with a flutter of panic trapped between his ribs. He’s sure she wishes he’d gone to the Arena now, either dead or someone else’s problem, rather than stuck here useless and mouthing off like a stupid, surly child.
Mom narrows her eyes. “Why does your therapist make you ride the stationary bicycle at the hospital? Do you go anywhere?”
Creed scowls. He hates rhetorical questions. His parents love them, because if they’re asking one they’ve already won. But since he’d just snapped at her like a little whining baby, he’ll give her this. “It makes my knee stronger.”
“Rest isn’t always about lying in bed and doing nothing and never challenging yourself. It’s about doing what your body needs so that when it’s time, you’re ready.” She rests her hand on his ankle. “You didn’t win the Games, fine. You have a long life on this side of the Village fence, and when you are deciding what to do with it, you’ll be happy you prepared your brain as well as your muscles.”
He glares at her a little longer, then groans and flops back, dropping his arm over his eyes. “I don’t like it when you’re right.”
“Oh, my sweet boy. I’m so happy you came back just in time for me to catch the asshole teen years. I would have been sad to miss this formative experience.” Mom pats him on the knee. The bed creaks as she stands to leave, and as he whips his arm off to gawk she winks and closes the door behind her.
Each month the stipend envelope arrives, fat with food vouchers and cash tokens. Alec is a Senior now, and the payment is substantial. Each month his mother takes the envelope without a word and comes back empty; when Creed asks, she tells him they don’t need the money, not with a second-twenty officer and a retired Peacekeeper on her next career. She exchanges the vouchers and takes the goods to the nearest Peacehome, as she’s always done.
She would have done that if Creed died, he thinks. Five years of consolation vouchers after a tribute dies in gratitude of their offering. He’s here now, and will never lie in glory in the field of sacrifice, but he likes to imagine that even after death he could have been of use to his district.
Alec doesn’t want this, Creed tells himself. He never did. They might keep him there but they won’t waste the Arena on an unwilling Volunteer. It’s easy enough to wash out at the end, all you really need to do is not try as hard as the person next to you. But as the months tick on, still no Alec.
Still no Selene, either.
She has a baby brother now, a rambunctious two-year-old with the same eyes and same mischief and same absolute disregard for consequences. The first time Creed met him, a few months into his recovery, he thought he’d seen a ghost. Then Kit came back with two rulers taped to his leg in a makeshift brace and declared them twins and Creed knew right then he’d be charmed forever.
He doesn’t know about his sister yet, not until. As the months and weeks and days draw near to the one-year anniversary of Creed’s injury, there’s a drumbeat in the back of his mind. He hasn’t seen Selene since they were children, but even then they knew: it would come down to her and her greatest rival. She and Petra have scrapped bruised and bloody since they were ten years old and neither could come out on top more than two times running. He can’t imagine time and close scrutiny would shave the edges off their competition.
Selene wants this more than anything. He tries to imagine her in civilian life, nails and sleeves scrubbed free of blood, and instead his mind turns over helplessly like an engine in the winter cold.
Reaping Day.
Creed stands back in the square with his parents, with Paul and Julia - little Kit stayed behind with Uncle Raoul - and fixes his gaze ahead. He can’t look at the line of Seniors in their beautiful clothes, studying Selene and Petra to analyze their expressions and see which one is hiding victory or fury under their carefully constructed public masks, or picking apart their makeup and hair for the telltale flourishes that mark the volunteer style. The gold bead would be no help, of course, not when all the Seniors hold their hands over their wrists to avoid giving it away.
Dinners have been quiet at the Valents’ lately, tension settling over the table and suppressing any attempt at casual conversation like a thick blanket of humidity on a summer’s day. Soon the Games will break it like the first crack of thunder right before the rain falls in sheets.
In a month they’ll finally know what to tell Kit about his sister.
They call for the girls and Creed has been memorizing what to tell Selene in the Justice Building for weeks, encouraging but not condescending, just the right amount of familiar but not so much he reminds her that she’s human and fallible because of course a tribute can’t be, and -
Aunt Julia makes a small noise in the back of her throat, drowned out by the applause. Uncle Paul takes her hand and squeezes, tight, but their faces hold steady because of course they do, that’s what you have to do when you’re here and everyone is watching, the little camera drones buzzing overhead, and the President could be there watching Creed fighting to breathe and keep his face neutral because it’s not Selene who takes the stage after all. It’s the girl she can’t stand, all shining red hair and short, compact muscles and eyes that flash triumph as she flings one last, secret, vengeful grin toward the Seniors cluster and pumps her fist into the air and screams a victory that no one in the crowd will understand.
Creed watches the mace slam into Petra’s hip and feels his knee tear all over again. The nausea rises and he scrabbles to the side but by the time Mom rushes in with the bucket the wave has passed.
For the first time in his life he’s glad that the Victor is someone else. That it’s not the girl who used to stuff tadpoles down his shirt making that sacrifice. And he knows that’s what the Program is for, so no one’s loved ones ever have to suffer, but it was never supposed to be him. He was never meant to be the one who’s grateful. Creed knew he would lose his chance at glory. He never thought he would feel the cost year after year.
Petra’s scream echoes in his skull long after he tries to sleep.
He can walk now. Run, even, if he’s careful. He has a brace for difficult days, but there are days when he doesn’t need it, when he can leave the house and stroll around the neighbourhood or the forest trails with nothing but the shoes on his feet the injury never happened. He can almost believe that, as long as he keeps himself oriented away from the mountains, as long as he doesn’t think about the cluster of houses nestled at their feet and imagine the one that would have been built for him. There are crayon drawings of it in the bottom of the cardboard box he took with him to Residential: him and Selene, holding shiny swords, houses side by side. Alec beside him in Peacekeeper white. He wants to throw them away but can’t bear to dig them out.
The stipend envelopes keep coming.
Selene comes to see him at the rehabilitation hospital and Creed falls flat on his face.
It’s not her fault. It’s his final checkup and they have him doing balance and coordination exercises, really test his torsion and lateral movement, and it takes a lot of concentration because if he doesn’t pass this then they might schedule him for another followup and he wants to be done with all this. And so he’s not really paying attention to the person who walks in the door until she calls his name, and then he looks up and the face and the hair and closed-off posture all hit his brain at the same time as the delayed response to the voice and everything tangles up with the signals his brain was trying to send his limbs and he winds up in a heap on the ground.
“You good?” his doctor asks as Creed scrambles back to his feet, ears burning. “I’m going to go check on Elsie. I’ll be back.”
Selene’s still in the doorway, thankfully, looking like she can’t decide between laughing at him or fleeing to the hills. “Elsie is eighty-five, she had her hip replaced earlier this year,” Creed blurts out. “They used to have us do walking races.”
She stares at him for a long second, then snorts, and whatever happens at least he knows she won’t run. “Of course they did. Did you let her win?”
Now it’s Creed’s turn to scoff as he leads her to a pair of chairs by the window. “Have you ever tried to race an eighty-five-year-old retired Peacekeeper from Falcon Heights? There was no ‘let’, she trounced me every time and laughed in my face.”
“Of course she did,” Selene says again, and her smile edges into a grin.
She’s cleared detox, she tells him. She’ll be starting the Peacekeeping Academy next week. “There’s a blackout during training,” Selene says, shrugging. “I won’t be allowed out to see anybody until I pass. I wanted to see you, though. Before.”
She doesn’t say it. Creed doesn’t either. It feels weird, after years of planning back-to-back victories and neighbouring plots in the Victors’ Village and a whole future together, that now the heavy weight of a jinx hangs in the air. “Yeah,” Creed says. “No, yeah, no, that’s - good. I’m glad you did.”
They don’t talk about Petra. They don’t talk about the thin strip of paler skin around her right wrist, or the matching one on Creed’s that has finally faded. But maybe because of Petra, and the missing bracelets, and the thick envelopes that never stop, Creed asks her if she’s stopped by home.
She hasn’t, and isn’t planning to. It’s - he remembers what it was like, toward the end, everything strained and awkward, all her happy childhood memories painted over with a grey watercolour wash of tension and disappointment. Creed knows better than to tell Selene she should - knows better than to tell her she should anything - and even they miss you skews dangerously toward obligation, and so he tells her about Kit instead. Tells her about the little brother who’s finally old enough to learn he has a sister, and spends every day badgering Creed for another story, more details, is she really cool?
(“I said yes, obviously,” Creed says, grave and sincere. “The very coolest. The ultimate in cool. Coolness incarnate.”
“Oh my goddddd.” Selene peels a magazine from the rack and throws it at him, even though the cover falls open and the pages flap harmlessly to the ground. He’s flustered her: a Selene who really hated it would have rolled it up and nailed him in the head like a missile.)
“Maybe,” Selene says. The tips of her ears have flushed dark red. “I’ll think about it.”
Creed smiles at her. “You’re going to make a kick-ass Peacekeeper.”
“Ugh, I hate you.” She aims a kick at him that misses, barely, but she’s grinning too. “See if I come back here again.”
He keeps her secret, like he promised. Like he used to when they were kids and she slipped away to practice for her Residential exam and came back with her shirt cuffs dripping wet, the promise sealed with grass-stained knees and dappled light beneath waving leaves. Or when the death list disappeared from his bedroom and he had to ask the trainers for a new copy and got scolded for losing something so important, the weight of their disappointment laid heavy on his shoulders.
She never asked him then, and she doesn’t ask now. She used to threaten Alec with all number of horrible disfigurements (beheadings, missing toes, feeding him his own eyeballs) for breaking sacred vows, making Alec groan and shove her. Like he’d ever, he’d say, and of course Selene would challenge him: what if a grown-up asked him to? What if three grown-ups asked him to and they frowned at him - and then Creed would have to distract her before the conflict of loyalty and duty upset Alec. But she never bothered with Creed: he understood, and so did she. Some things never needed saying.
Selene will find them when it’s time, or she won’t. And until then, Creed will keep their meeting safe with the dirt and the blood and the names of thousands of dead teenagers stuffed under her pillow.
Creed likes to get the mail. It’s probably stupid, two years out, his injury long healed, but it’s a little freedom that makes him remember the early days: the first trip he could make by himself, out to the mailbox, those twenty steps out the door to the gate and back again. Every time he makes it he remembers his progress, the good days and the bad, the days when he made it without stumbling, the days when every step ached, the days when his knee buckled and he collapsed in a heap and had to make his way to his feet one agonizing movement at a time.
And now he’s here, and he can walk to get the mail. Just like that. He wonders if Petra can, by now.
Most days there’s nothing special. Dad and Mom get their work mail sent to Eagle Pass or to the school because it’s important to separate work and home - one thing to bring back a bit of extra paperwork or marking, another to have them send it to you direct - and the stipend only comes once a month. And so the index card is interesting; it’s new, and even better, there’s no address. Nothing but a single line of text hand-written.
You should be there
Creed blinks. “Dad?” He carries the card inside, turning it over and holding it up to the light, trying to find any clue he missed. It’s a fun mystery; Selene would have liked it. He should find a candle, he thinks with a twinge of nostalgia, remembering the summer Mom introduced them to cabbage-water ink and they left both houses littered in singed scraps of paper.
Dad is getting ready for work; Mom’s already gone. He glances at Creed with a distracted smile and holds out his hand for the mail. Creed waits for his reaction instead of leaving, the distant ten-year-old inside of him awakened by the idea of a mystery.
Dad freezes. Creed waits, but he only stares at the card, fingers loosening on his work bag until it falls from his hand and thuds to the ground. “Dad?” Creed says finally, and his head snaps up.
He’s never seen his father’s Career face. Dad and Mom left the Program at sixteen, they told him, and joined the Peacekeeper Academy, and he never really thought about his dad as a tribute candidate learning how to hold a sword or break a grapple hold - or act.
For a second he slips, face slack and open in a way Creed’s never seen, a wildness in the eyes that belongs nowhere on his father’s face, nowhere at the Centre or near the cameras, anywhere the sponsors might have eyes, judging and evaluating. It hits him then that Dad really is a Career, has never stopped being one. Has never stopped living like the cameras are watching.
And then he’s back. The mask slips back into place, calm and smooth and just a little bit of rugged charm, though now that Creed knows what to look for he can see the charm is loose around the edges, like hastily applied makeup or a sword belt slapped on crooked. “We’ll talk at dinner,” he says. “Study hard, son.”
He’d never seen his father’s Career face. Until he realized that no, he’d never seen Dad’s Career face break.
By the time they sit down for dinner, Creed has already worked it out.
They don’t think Alec can do it.
For the first time in months - since the last time he tripped on a routine walk and the spectre of weeks of bedrest flashed in his mind like horrible slow-motion Games replay footage - Creed’s temper boils over. His whole childhood, nothing but congratulations for a game he would never get to play, filling his head with certainty and inevitable victory while Alec straggled behind him - but he failed, didn’t he, and Selene in the end, and here is Alec, one foot in front of the other until he reached the goal no one ever asked him to achieve. They should be proud, they should be ecstatic, they should be shouting from the rooftops - but instead the house is quiet, the air thick and heavy, his parents hardly speaking and the sound of clinking plates like thunderclaps in the silence.
They don’t say so, of course, but they are already mourning. They’re like every other parent across the districts, saying goodbye before the cannon fires, and the Reaping hasn’t even started yet. Creed stares at them across the table and feels the fury bubble up inside him, hears the trainers in his head saying good, dig deep, find it, use it, channel it, pick up the sword, finish the arc and he wants to shout, scream, smash the plates and kick the chairs and heave the table until it topples sideways and the dishes crash to the floor and demand why, why don’t they believe in Alec when all he’s done his whole life is try, but all he can do is ask his mother to pass the potatoes.
Well, fine. Creed is a statement of faith. He will believe in Alec enough for all of them.
[END OF PART 2]
The noise in his head is like a dull background roar he can mostly ignore, like sitting in his tree as a kid and trying to read while Mom cut the lawn. Constant, but mostly fine, until she’d pass right by his tree and the sound of that sputtering engine and the chopping blades and the weird gas smell mixed with the odd, sharp freshness of newly-murdered grass stalks slapped him in the face and he had to place his book face-down on his knee until she left again.
Creed is the Volunteer. Creed will fight in the Arena. A lifetime of destiny coalescing and closing in around them in a matter of weeks, a pinhole so bright it’s blinding. Buzzing, buzzing, but mostly in the back of his head, until he’s walking past a knot of boys in the common room and who do you think his mentor will be, or I wonder what Arena they’ll get or he better win, I heard they give us ice cream and there’s the lawnmower, flinging bits of grass into his eyes and drowning out the rhythm of his thoughts.
If only he could fling himself at them, knock their teeth out, cave their noses in until the shock and blood shoves the words back down their throats - but he can’t, only fear does that, and Alec can’t show fear, not here. And so he squares his shoulders and lets his feet fall a little louder on the mats and at least they stop when they see him. Kids raised as gods aren’t scared of much, but the power of the jinx hovers in dark corners. Nobody wants to be the one to call it down and look Alec in the eye once it strikes.
Have faith, Alec tells himself at night, muffling hysterical laughter into the thin pillow. He can only have faith.
Two weeks out he’s heading to dinner and Grant slams into him from around the corner. “Hey!” Kevin’s eyes bug out wide, and he grips Alec’s arms hard enough to hurt. Alec wrenches back but he holds on, fingers digging in. “Your brother’s out.”
He may as well have opened his mouth and spat out marbles. “What?”
“He’s out, man. Training injury. They’re saying no way will he heal in time.”
No sound but the rasp of air in his chest, coming faster and faster. His vision swims and his knees buckle and he’s going down, he’s going to faint, but Kevin slams him into the wall, one arm across his chest like they’re arguing, two kids having a minor scrap on the way to the commissary, nothing to see here. Alec gulps in hard breaths and Kevin keeps him pinned there, eyes dark and watchful, fist steady over Alec’s heart. “Breathe, dude. You’re fine.”
Kevin hates everyone and everything but he’s never hated Alec. The perennial youngest brother and the smallest candidate from cheapside, both with something to prove. Kevin twists his knife into the training dummies with vicious glee and knew a dozen ways to slit a throat even before Residential, but those same hands are gentle in the dark. Alec gasps and blinks until the burning recedes, and Kevin flashes him a sharp grin. “You got this. Let’s go get some pudding.”
He finds a trainer after dinner. “Can I see him?”
She doesn’t ask who he means or how he knows. It’s Residential, secrets fly like Arena drones and no one bothers to pretend otherwise. “That’s not a good idea,” she says. “He’s not in the best headspace right now.”
Well that - makes sense, Creed just had his whole life’s goal ripped out from under him, but that’s exactly why Alec wants to see him. He feels the protest rising inside him, actually considers trying to form an argument, but the trainer folds her arms and stares him down. In the end it’s not even a contest.
If he’d known they’d send Creed home without warning, he might have tried it anyway.
“I heard he had a huge fucking freak out and scared the babies,” Nathan scoffs, sprawling across the sofa. “If I got cut - not that I’m going to get cut, but if I did - I wouldn’t be a huge baby about it. You injured out, suck it up.”
Alec also heard the rumours. Rumours that Creed hadn’t been protesting this removal, but that Alec hadn’t been cut with him, that he’d demanded the trainers let him take his brother home. It could be bullshit; Residential loves gossip, but no one really cares about accuracy as long as they get an interesting story out of it.
Nathan, prime example. Alec never really understood what he did to get on Nathan’s radar, except maybe exist and have a father who knew his name, but he spends way too much time trying to get Alec to crack. He used to try to ignore him, until it finally clicked that you don’t get points for playing nice. Now he tries to shut it down fast. Sometimes Kevin needles Nathan for fun, or plays him and Grant off each other to watch the sparks. Felix plays peacemaker but even his miracle skills only work so far.
“Maybe he cracked,” Nathan continues. He’s filched a handful of walnuts from the commissary and cracks them, flicking shards of shell out of his lap onto the far side of the sofa. One of them pingpongs off a cushion and hits Alec on the shoulder. “You know, all that pressure, countdown’s ticking, maybe he couldn’t handle it. Took himself out of play so he wouldn’t choke on the big day.”
Let it go, Alec tells himself. Be the bigger person. Rise above, Creed used to say in that haughty voice of his, incongruous now when Alec looks back at sixteen and imagines it coming from a twelve-year-old, but good advice, and useful for infuriating Nathan. Dad used to tell him that certain people would always seek reactions, and the only way to win meant not giving it to them. If he looks up, he knows what he’ll see: Nathan grinning at him, waiting to see if the barbs landed. Better to get up and hit the weight room before bed.
A small movement at his side. Kevin slips him a knife no bigger than his thumb, stolen from a brace meant for target practice, all without looking up from the book he’s studiously pretending to read. Alec considers it - weighs his options, samples the unseasoned chicken breast of the moral high ground - and drives the blade into the webbing of Nathan’s foot.
Nathan yelps, throws himself to his feet, howling. The others dance back, ringing them off from onlookers, energy spiked and ready for a fight. And Nathan fights mean, he nearly killed a boy in training their first year in Residential and he let everyone know it, but today Alec’s temper blazes white and furious. Before Nathan can charge him he darts in, flings himself on his back and gets one arm around his throat, jammed in below his jaw. Nathan whirls, snarling, fist slamming back into Alec’s skull, his eye, flinging his head back to crack Alec’s nose - but soon he staggers, knee hitting the floor in a loud crash, breath wheezing in plaintive gasps.
“Alec,” a trainer warns.
Alec lets go. Nathan slumps sideways, coughing, hand clutching at his neck. Bees buzz under his skin but he backs off, hands raised in exaggerated compliance. “Shut the fuck up about my brother,” Alec hisses. The knife has already disappeared, presumably back into Kevin’s sleeve. The trainer nods and turns back to a group of fourteens wrestling across the room.
Alec pushes himself to his feet, chest pounding. Everyone else returns to their conversations; Felix offers Nathan a hand up, gets a mouthful of curses spat in his face for his trouble. Alec turns, and across the room his gaze snags: Selene in the middle of a game of Bullshit, a hand of cards splayed between her fingers. They stare at each other, caught, for several seconds, until one of her game partners slaps her arm and snaps her out of it. She flips him off and tosses down a card, taking the hand - he groans, she grins, sharp and wolfish - and Alec turns away.
It’s after light’s out, too late to sneak back to his room without getting caught. Alec steals a pillow and bunks down on the floor, sweat drying chill against his skin. He wonders, sometimes, what it would feel like to fall asleep right after, crammed together on the tiny bunk, knees jammed in to fit and arms tangled around each other’s waists, but they don’t do that here. Too much like something real, and the Centre is no place for real.
“You know,” Kevin says from above him, “he’s probably gonna be a Peacekeeper.”
Alec frowns. Kevin is a grey blur in the darkness, the only light a faint crack from under the door. “What? Who.”
“You know who.” The bed creaks. Kevin leans over the side, incongruous, like they’re kids at a sleepover and not candidates training for a death match less than two years away. “That was your whole thing, right, he’s the Volunteer and you’re on the Peacekeeper track. But he didn’t volunteer, did he. So what does that make you?”
Kevin has no interest in the Arena, not that he’d ever tell the trainers. He’s happy to let the others slug it out for number one, and he fights to keep his scores precision-high because he wants the Peacekeepers. He wants out of this dump, he says, he wants the rifle and the uniform and the respect that comes with it, a free pass to see the world - and he’ll do whatever he has to do to get it.
Alec asked him once, why he cares what Alec does. Why he’s always pushing, needling him to fight harder, do better. I don’t, he said, shrugging expansively. But sometimes you really piss me off.
Alec exhales toward the ceiling. “It’s not gonna be me. No way.” Kevin makes a noncommittal humming noise, not arguing, and for some absolutely stupid reason that drives a spike of anger through Alec’s spine. Selene used to argue, she would argue about the dumbest, most inconsequential things, sometimes she would disagree with Alec about the weather when they were outside right now just to see him sputter.
But sometimes - sometimes she’d agree with him, and that drove him even crazier. He imagines her here, in the dark, propped up on one elbow, yawning in exaggerated boredom.
It’s not gonna be me.
Okay.
But what if I wanted to?
Then you should do it.
But they won’t ever pick me!
Then don’t bother.
But -
Whenever they reached a loop, there was only ever one way through.
“Oh, you asshole,” Alec says aloud - to Kevin, to the ghost of Selene, it doesn’t really matter, does it. “I have to do it, don’t I.”
“Way I see it, you don’t have to do anything.” Kevin’s jaw cracks in a yawn, and for a moment Alec almost hears Selene here with him, tossing her knife into the air and catching it between two fingers. “But if you did, it would be badass.”
Since Residential the trainers have been steering Alec toward spears: solid weapons, clean kills, good for his build as he finally starts filling out those long arms and broad shoulders his mother promised he’d grow into. It isn’t until his kill test, when he chokes the life from a woman’s throat with his bare fingers against her throat, that he realizes how much distance they give him. That the trainers have been giving him that distance, letting him have those extra feet of space, that mental space. He was grateful for it, until now.
Creed fought with kukri, twin machetes the length of his forearm, whirling in close to land a flurry of strikes and darting back before his opponent could regroup. He got his fighting style from Callista: close, deadly, efficient and ruthless.
The weapons racks have a whole row of wicked-looking polearms: long blades with a sharp, deliberate curve, handles long enough to give reach but not enough to throw the bearer out of melee range. Normally during free choice hour Alec takes his spear and practices on long-distance targets, the dummies moving along the tracks in all directions, but today Alec walks past the spears and plucks out a polearm he thinks matches his reach; the blade glints in the bright light. He can almost see the blood.
A line of dummies, various heights and sizes, stands in the corner. Alec faces off, bracing his feet and hefting the weapon’s weight. He’s used spears. He’s used swords. A spear-sword can’t be that much different.
“It’s a naginata,” the trainer says, amused. She steps in and corrects his stance, shifting his foot there, his arm there, and oh, yeah, okay, now he feels a lot less like he’s about to slice his own leg off by accident. “Watch your feet, don’t lock your grip. Switch it up if you need to, she’s a versatile one. If you like the feel we can work some drills.”
He’s heard some of the kids say that weapons sing. It’s not that Alec doesn’t believe them - he’s seen enough victories to know what it looks like when a tribute is born to the sword, or spear, or trident, when a clear-eyed outlier with ropy muscles and remade palms picks up a scythe or axe - but he’s certainly never felt it. It’s like love, or making father proud, Alec with his confused pencil sketches of what he thought it might be like while others forged on with the power of their conviction.
He swings the naginata and slices through a dummy, and a trumpet looses in his chest.
Still distant, but - purposeful, and even more important, active. No moments when the blade leaves his hands and fate takes over. Alec turns to face the trainer, who watches him with a small smile and a calculating expression he’s seen reserved for others, but not for him - until now. He pushes sweat back from his face and it’s so stupid, these are just dummies, they’re dummies but they’re real people, in the Arena they will be people, there will be blood and guts all over but for right now they’re only training dummies and the trainer is giving him a smile she never has before.
Kevin’s voice in the darkness, Selene’s an echo underneath: If you did, it would be badass.
Alec swipes an arm across his forehead, tosses damp curls out of his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “Show me the drills.”
He’s not sure what makes him do it, but that night he fishes out the wristwatch his parents gave him on his seventh birthday, buried at the bottom of the cardboard box shoved at the end of his bed. He slips it over his wrist - or tries. It gaps, the teeth of the clasp an inch away from meeting.
Each year he grew, his parents took him to the smith, bought another link for the watch to fit it. Here in Residential he’s kept growing, muscles filling out through the years of drills and practice fights.
It felt so heavy, once. Now, compared to a spear, it feels like it could float away.
He spends hours, in the weeks before the decision, planning what to say to Selene when they pick her. His memory slides back to the girl in the woods with the glint in her eyes and the blood on her fingers but the terror has faded now, years of training dulled to - if not acceptance, then inevitability. They won’t let him in the Justice Building, he can’t visit her in the Tribute Suite, and they’ve spent five long years ignoring each other but he can’t let her go with nothing. In the end he thinks he has it, something to let her know he sees her, he remembers, that he still keeps faith.
But they don’t pick Selene.
He sees her only for a second, blank-faced and unreadable with every inch of her power. The chosen girl is giddy, too drunk on victory to taunt, and she offers Selene a kiss. Selene turns away and slips into the crowd, inscrutable. Alec should follow her - he can’t follow her, this is still the Centre and they are still candidates, and anyway she would not welcome him - and a strange, disloyal thought worms his way into his brain.
No Creed. No Selene. No Arena for the favourites. Creed is at home, learning how to be a boy again. Selene will join the Academy and learn to forge her disappointment into newer, sharper weapons. And Alec -
He stands in the sun for the first time in his life. No grand shadows block his path.
It is not, Alec thinks, a kind thought. Not when her best friend has had her dreams upended. When his brother’s entire life has been a lie. But he could, if he tried, get used to it.
The funniest part about practicing what to say to Selene before she leaves is that he never actually has to do it. The trainers pull the Seniors from the Reaping and take them straight to the detox dorms, and that’s that.
“It’s harder for them than for us,” Felix when Alec points it out. “Any one of them could have been up there, if things were different. I’m sure they don’t want to sit here, watching us pause every five minutes and listening to the commentary.”
It makes sense, he just never had cause to pay attention before. Selene disappearing feels like missing the last stair and jarring his ankle on the hard ground, or maybe reaching into the jar for one last, long-anticipated cookie and swiping nothing but cold, empty porcelain. Five long years of nothing, dutifully acting like they never even knew each other, the one rule Selene chose to follow to the letter, and now she’s gone.
Did she know, or did the trainers whisk them out before they could say any goodbyes? Not that it matters, in the end.
District Two wins. Petra staggers to the hovercraft with a broken knee and shattered pelvis, bleeding out and screaming at the sky as a wild and ragged cheer rises from the candidates in the training room. Felix hasn’t moved since the start of the fight, transfixed. Alec’s nails have broken through the skin of his palms as Kevin lets out a long, slow whistle. Grant has backed himself into the wall, hands pressed flat to the floor, eyes bugged wide. Even Nathan, who refuses to let anything impress him, drops a low, “Fuck!” under his breath.
A handful of trainers enter from the side door, balancing trays laden with ice cream bowls as the thirteens burst into excited babble. “Well,” Kevin says. “That’s gonna be a tough one to follow.”
Alec turns eighteen a few days after the Closing Ceremony. By now he’s finished out the big ones - the Field Exam and final kill beads are building up a patina like the others, wearing down after so much blood, so many hand washings - and for once the milestone calls for no late-night excursions into a hovercraft, dropped into the pitch-black woods. Instead it’s a white-walled room and critical attendants who strip him down and call out every imperfection they can find. He can see how Selene might have scoffed at it the first time, and others might have lashed out. But for Alec, who can’t smile without his father’s voice ringing in his head (Teeth, son!), there’s nothing they can say to him he hasn’t heard a thousand times before.
“High pass,” a trainer says afterward, tossing Alec his uniform. “Ask the commissary for extra fruit at breakfast.”
The days narrow: the next fight, the next test, next, next, next. The glaive and naginata sing like an extension of his arm. At night he collapses, exhausted and triumphant all at once, the eyes of the trainers burned into the back of his neck. They call him out for excessive force more often now, and sometimes he doesn’t even need to calculate when to make that extra push for maximum impact. Sometimes Nathan sneers at him wrong, or Felix gives him a look that’s too knowing, too sympathetic. Some days it’s even Kevin, digging under his skin because he can. The anger flares, hot and white and more familiar now than foreign, like a whisper in the dark, and then there’s blood on his fingers and a trainer at his arm and a boy retching on the floor.
Is he really winning, asks the Alec whose wrist still fits the birthday watch tucked away in the box on his dresser, or losing something bigger? Alec shoves the box deep underneath his bed and paints a fresh coat of liquid bandage across his knuckles.
Alec is sprawled on the couch in the lounge, a book draped across his face to block out the fluorescents, when Cato, the up-and-coming favourite from the year below, bursts in through the door. “Yo, they posted the list!” Alec sits up, the book falling to the floor with a loud thunk as the younger boy grins at him across the room. “You’re gonna want to see it.”
“Dude!” his year-mate socks him in the arm. “Spoilers!”
“Uh, no, everybody wants to see it, obviously.” And then they’re gone, leaving Alec, one leg hanging over the side of the sofa, heart pounding. Serves him right for napping, but his cohort passed the sleep deprivation test last week and his brain still hasn’t caught up.
He doesn’t actually get to the list, is the funny part. Everyone attacks him first, hollering and jumping on his shoulders, catching him in a headlock and driving knuckles into his ribs. “Holy shit, back off,” Alec barks out, laughing and shoving them away. “Let me read it myself, Snow’s balls.”
They’ve pinned the paper to the wall by the head trainer’s office like always. Mara wears a grin like she already has the crown, one fist pumped in the air. Sloane’s already gone, but she was never the frontrunner and they all know it. She’ll throw a few daggers, murder some training dummies, maybe get a knife in Nathan’s side if he starts something, and move on. Alec touches his fingers to the letters, stark black on white -
VOLUNTEER, FEMALE: MARA
VOLUNTEER, MALE: ALEC
“Who’s a statement of faith now, Dad,” he sings, too low for anyone else to hear. He spins and holds out his arm, and Mara grins and knocks their fists together.
He made it. This time they’ll get to watch him shine.