steady // { adder | 2nd games }

There is little difference between you and the teens they have selected this year to join you. Not in terms of age. Not in terms of how you are handled. Even with the public reaping in contrast to your private arrest — you, stuck up on the steps of the Justice Building, in the sights of at least half a dozen peacekeepers at all times, in the sights of the crowd and hating everything that you're meant to stand for up here: all at once you are exalted, you are a pariah, you are a warning and a threat and a reminder of why this is happening and a reminder of who the Capitol wants to blame, to envy, to hate. A rebel soldier who escaped every consequence. Look at her. Isn't it her fault that all of this is happening? What does she have to show for it?

Left hand in your pocket, you trace the last remaining knuckle of your thumb. You'd've given so much more — every other digit, your life a hundred times over — for a true victory, for something like freedom, every bit as real as it is intangible. You suppose, then, that it's fitting. Only stupid prizes are to be won from stupid games, even if you had no choice in the matter but to play.

They never replaced the crown that you'd sent clattering into the crowd in District Three. You're only disappointed that they didn't give you another piece of their gold to redistribute back to the populace from which it was taken; you've never wanted power for yourself, only for the people. You are no monarch. You do not reign. You do not subjugate.

Instead, you tattooed your title on the back of your neck: a shotgun, a coronet, a snake. If they intend to take that from you, they'll need to really mean it. It is not brave to be so bold, not when there is safety in your status for as long as they don't know what to do with you.

Still, you're not without shackles: they've kept your captured comrades as collateral for your cooperation. One per year, released back to your district following the Hunger Games, in exchange for your silence. Their terms shift under your feet, like loose gravel on the mountainside where you froze to death trying to destroy their entire institution. Months are added arbitrarily, your public image slips from bad to worse, directions conflict, you've begun to take bets with your youngest sister about how many weeks each new handler assigned to you will last. Shouldn't they know that about adders by now?

This year, your train ride is different from your last. The boy has boot polish breath every bit as nauseating as Dmitri Kostas's had been, but this year lacks the time pressure of your imminent death. And so, when you are brought past one another, you do not spit in his face, and so you do not draw the ire of peacekeeper batons, and so you do not taunt him for how little his loyalty earned him if he was riding this train anyway. He will die, and you don't feel sorry for him. Maybe the girl will be the one to do it. Slash his femoral artery, gut him for good measure like the pig that he is.

This year, you are not brought to a makeshift holding cell in a half-ruined stadium. You are not shoved out under blinding lights on a pitch of artificial turf. You are hardly shoved anywhere at all. Instead you are escorted. Tributes in cells are elevated onto the sand; they're the ones fighting, and yet you are the only one surrounded by peacekeepers.

You aren't sure what the point is, making you watch. Is it guilt? Down to your core, you know this isn't your doing. Their lives are not your responsibility. Their deaths will not stain your conscience. Is it trauma? You have seen worse. Every day of your life for six years and plenty days before that too, you have seen worse. Comrades blown to bits. Comrades only blown half to bits, the ones who needed the same sort of field medicine you gave to Yejide Jonquil a year ago on this day. Civilians, children: starving, crying, screaming, bombed and broken.

Is it helplessness?

There is nothing else you can do but steel your jaw when the heavy iron gates drop open.