I.

He wakes from a dream of the sound of cannons. He wakes from a nightmare of crimson blood in crimson hair.

Arthur wakes with a knife in his hand. There is blood on the floor, walls, and ceiling; on his jewels of District One pride; on the white sheets he sleeps on; and on the pillow he cries in during the nights in which he is strongest. There is blood all over inside his head.

The cannons fire, and Arthur swallows red.

II.

When Anita runs through the Victor's Village of District Seven, she is not running between the beautiful houses that keep all the other madmen and the demons they brought from the Arena in. She is running through dark, foreboding trees with snow-white leaves that scald your skin. She is running on snow and frozen grass. She is running over thin ice on a lake that kills as many Tibutes as any monster. She is running from a boy who is just as scared as her and just as determined to go home. She is running from snarling wolves with fur spun from the stars, and fire-breathing reindeer with bright red noses splashed with fresh blood.

Sometimes reality shifts and lets her in on those nights, and she sees not ice but glass in windowpanes. Sometimes she sees the other Victors, breaking down and blowing up.

But always, Anita runs until the sun comes up and the ice disappears under the warmth.

III.

Timo mentors them patiently.

He is the only District Two Victor who smiles warmly at his charges and brings them sundae for dinner. Most of the children he gets to teach are hot-tempered, skillful, and eager to kill, and make remarks about Timo behind his back. They don't dare do it to his face, though. They've heard rumors, most of which are true, and they need him to win.

Timo knows how to use knives, swords, and nothing at all, and they stop sneering then. He knows a hundred and one ways to kill you using the clothes on your back. Timo teaches them to do all this, to win. He teaches them to be as he was, and sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't.

Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't. Timo likes it better when they don't. Of all the children Timo's taught, only the dead ones stop screaming in the dark.

(Someones the ones he never taught scream too, but they only hear it when they are alone.)

Only the Victors know this, of course. District Two has its own vicious image to uphold.

IV.

Ludwig Beillschmidt doesn't drink a drop of alcohol.

He does not drink, except for when he joins his brother Gilbert in trying to drink away the Arena, from Sunday to Sunday, from dawn til dawn.

V.

You shouldn't be doing this anymore.

Alfred had said that.

He had no right to say that, and Francis told him so. Alfred then yelled that Francis had nothing left to lose.

That's true, of course, so Francis exits the Victor's Lounge with a bitter taste in his mouth.

It was the eighth of March when he saw the news report on the president's daughter's TV. They'd burned his sister for starting a revolt. She died because she proved the impossible was possible, that District One would rise against the city that fed it with a silver spoon but held it blind in the darkness. Francis remembers running and vomiting into the expensive toilet, the one that Jeanne always joked about; you're rich now, how about buying a nice automatic toilet? He threw up again when he remembered the sound of her voice. When the president's daughter stood in the doorway to ask him what was wrong he told her that he had an upset stomach and maybe it was something he ate before he came here, bye bye you were wonderful darling. And then Francis vomited again in the street.

Unlike Alfred and Natalia, the Capitol can't do anything to hurt him anymore, but he lets them continue to sell him. He is beautiful, experienced, and only twenty-six, so they continue marketing him to rich women sick of their husbands and rich men sick of their wives.

The District Six Victors have morphling, and Francis has sex.

This is his addiction. It's the only reason why Francis isn't with his sister yet, and why he can't escape anywhere else but into the arms of the city that torments him so.

Francis doesn't allow himself to be alone, or to be left untouched. When he is alone, he is a wretched thing, and he knows this.

VI.

They'd sell Antonio too, of course, if they weren't scared that he would behead his clients before they even got to finish.

VII.

Roderich wakes to the sound of pots and pans clanging on the floor, falling from the tables and protesting as they hit the walls. He sits up and rubs the sleep from his eyes.

"Erszebet?"

No answer. More clanging, and he wonders why the noise hasn't woken all the other Victors yet, or why they haven't made any cracks in the walls. He then remembers that like his girlfriend, they're all probably awake already.

Roderich sighs and pulls on a shirt and a pair of pants. He then spends a good fifteen minutes searching for his glasses, which he finally finds lying a good distance away from the bed. He puts on his bunny slippers and takes slow steps to the kitchen, anticipating whatever Erszebet might throw at him when he gets there.

In the kitchen, he sees about five pots on the floor, upturned, rolling on the side—but Erszebet is constantly kicking them up into another hurricane of cooking utensils. She holds a frying pan in her hand, swatting away spatulas and spoons and whisks. The noise is unbearable; in the morning she'd probably say something along the lines of "What I did last night didn't render you tone deaf, did it?" and Roderich would stifle the urge to cry.

She doesn't throw anything at him when he arrives, although the noise was probably distracting her. Her eyes are aflame with the heat of battle, and her movements, though sure and strong, are fearful.

"Erszebet," he says quietly, walking towards her. "Erszebet. It's Roderich. Come back, Erszebet. You're home. You're safe." She looks around wildly and trains her eyes on him, and then prepares to fling a measuring cup she has in her other hand. Roderich ducks—

Erszebet throws half-heartedly, covers her face with her hands, and sinks to the ground, sobbing. The clanging almost stops around them as he kneels to hold her in his arms. Her sobs are quick, rasping, and angry, and he knows she's not sad.

"They killed him," she says. "He was twelve and she ran her knife through his stomach and they killed him." Her fingernails dig into his skin, and Roderich winces. Erszebet gasps like she's been submerged in water for a long, long time.

Her so breathing is torn and ragged that Roderich wonders how is it that her lungs haven't torn themselves up inside her and found their way out through her windpipe and up her throat and out of her mouth. "All I wanted to do was go home, but I can't really-I mean, you're here, Gilbert's here, Ludwig's here, but I still have the nightmares, and sometimes it's the night Albrecht died all over again. I'm still half in the Arena. Gilbert says he and Ludwig—"

She doesn't continue the sentence, and instead grabs a fistful of Roderich's shirt and stuffs it in her mouth to mute her screaming. She screams until she stops, and then she stops making any noise at all.

Roderich doesn't want to be the one to make her stop screaming; he wants to help her stop hurting. But what he wants to do isn't always what he can do, he's learned that the first time his mother played Chopin in front of him. He was four and he tried to imitate her and failed miserably. The feeling of inferiority and helplessness never left him.

"I promised myself that I'd bring him back home. I don't break my promises," she says with a growl. He runs his fingers through her hair and listens to her angry mutterings until she falls asleep again, and then he carries her to the bed and holds her, tighter than before.

Erszebet is home. She doesn't need to be reminded of that. Roderich just needs to keep her there.

VIII.

When Natalia was allowed to go home, she rushed straight into the arms of her older siblings. When they hugged her and twirled her around and tickled her, she did not mind. She doesn't, still.

She laughs when they laugh, the sound starting like a bubble in her throat and exploding into the air. It's more of a cackle than a laugh, really, but when she's with her siblings she doesn't have to sound sexy or pretty or cute when she laughs. She lets herself be Natalia around them; cold, clammy, awkward Natalia who loves her family more than life itself.

She was sixteen when she refused to sleep with a Gamemaker. A week later, her brother was reaped. Natalia haunted the television like a spirit with a grudge. When he won, she laughed with pride and triumph, and with despair and anguish. It sent all the other Victors out of the lounge.

They met on the train home. When she saw the way he smiled, she laughed again. And she kept laughing, and never ever stopped.

IX.

Sakura hunts foxes.

It's an urge that's embedded itself inside her like a knife.

Kill.

One time, she stopped hunting. It lasted two weeks until a man was found dead, a sword having slashed his stomach in a horizontal line. They never suspected Sakura. She didn't even know him.

His face was covered with snow when the postman found him.

In Sakura's arena, there was no snow. She didn't cover the faces of the victims, and when the demons come to visit her they wear masks ripped from the faces of the tributes, their hollow eye sockets dripping ink-like blackness onto her hair.

Sakura hunts foxes. She is no demon-killer.

X.

Alfred came from a happy home in District Twelve. His parents had been merchants who were far too disapproving of the Capitol's ways. After he won, Arthur had told him that he was Reaped as punishment to his parents.

Alfred hated violence, and was forced to kill his last opponent, a girl from District Four, because all he wanted to do was go home to his mom and pop. He only had two kills to his name, and that was two too many for Alfred.

He left his Arena, a city maze with long winding underground tunnels and muttations looking like yellow cabs, looking forward to the warm welcome (and apple pie!) he would no doubt receive.

When he got home, the Peacekeepers told him his parents had died because they were surveying a coalmine during an accident. Arthur told him that it wasn't, it wasn't an accident, they hate you but they can't kill you.

Alfred became a brother of the orphans and a savior of the poor, giving them money and food and telling the Capitol that it was all so that the poor would think of the Capitol as their only lifeline. They buy it. Alfred's not as dumb as some people make him out to be.

The only way the Capitol could harm him is by hurting the orphans. Arthur told him once that even when he doesn't have a family anymore Alfred is constantly giving the Capitol strings to pull him with. Alfred had shrugged it off.

(Why do you let them touch you? The things you think you fight for died long ago with a world we've never known and will never know. If you think you can bring it back by doing this to yourself, then you're wrong. Dead wrong.)

Not one orphan knows that the last time a man tried to mug him, Alfred had beaten his brains out with his bare hands, because that was not a man, that was a mutt and it had eaten partner like a human sandwich, had eaten three other children before that, and would go on to take eight more.

And not one orphan knows that the two missing girls who looked like Piscea, that last girl from District Four, had their blood smeared all over beloved Alfred's hands.

(It's not your fault and you're not the monster. It's not your fault and you are not—

You're wrong, Artie. Dead wrong.)

XI.

Matthew never expected to win.

His strategy could have been summed up in one word: hide.

He was so good at doing it that once everyone else was dead except for him and the girl from Nine, she had delivered a speech to the cameras about the Capitol's barbaric ways and how Panem needs to open their eyes and protect their children. They would not have a Victor this time, she had told them with a grin. She then pulled out her knife and stabbed it into her own throat. As she bled out, the cannon sounded.

And then they announced Matthew as the winner.

Every night, as he showers to cleanse himself of mud he used to disguise himself, Matthew thinks.

Had I died, could she have sparked something?

Had I died, could something—a revolution, an assassination, anything...

And then he goes to bed in soft cotton pajamas and thinks:

If only I had died before she did. I wish I had died first.

The voice said, "Matthew Williams!" and he'd started crying because finally, someone could see him, and he didn't even spare a second glance at the girl, who looked frighteningly triumphant. She was wasted, but no more than the others. He didn't even think about the truth in her words; he could finally live now, properly, without the fear of not seeing the next sunrise.

Indeed, he lives without that particular terror, for it has become a wish.

It's too late now.

XII.

The president knows that when his Victors have nothing to lose, he loses control over them. He's careful not to kill all their loved ones off, unless he thinks they have a spark to keep them going.

He's had enough of his Peacekeepers finding broken dolls of Victors, hanging from lengths of rope. He dreads hearing of glassy eyes and gashes on their wrists. He doesn't like being told how many pills it took for them to die.

The only difference between the Victors and the other Tributes is that the Victors are still alive.

And when his Victors die, they win.