valentin akselsen || district two || cbd #1 || fin

Your time ran out five years ago.

You had had it all planned out. You would volunteer during your final reaping, while your mind was quick and your body toned and strong from hundreds of hours spent in the training center. You would fight your way through whatever hellscape that the Gamemakers would toss at you, cut your way through rival tributes and muttations alike, and put on a show that would prove that now, even years after your home had last brought back a champion, Two was still a force to reckon with.

The plan was either for you to return home with the Victor's crown on your head, or for you to go out in a blaze of glory that wouldn't be forgotten for years to come.

But then the Hammerfell boy was reaped, and the cry of "I volunteer!" died in your throat.

It was a mistake that you would regret to the present day.

You were not from a large Career family, and yet you had spent your entire life in the center training for that very day. Your parents had invested everything in you, to the point where the future for Valentin Akselsen had been one hundred percent focused on the Hunger Games and nothing else.

Except then your inaction had cost you that very goal, without so much as a backup plan in place to repay the unspoken debt you owed your parents.

You work as a trainer now, teaching everything you ever had learned to a new generation of Careers. The Hammerfell boy that had stolen your spot, meanwhile, had perished, along with two of his kin who had attempted to regain honor for his family.

Sometimes, you wonder who was truly regarded as the lucky one in that situation.