Public Training Sessions

[d6a georgie cham 🍓🐢 frankel]

”I have no talents.” Other than telling the truth. I have nothing more to display, only Ripred is fit to judge me right now. Not the self-proclaimed gods up in their make-shift heaven watching down on me. ”I could build you something, but if you have really been watching…I have been building trinkets and survival tools all week.” I empty the pockets of the long grey jacket that I am wearing, outside and inside pockets. Even one on my sleeve. Metal clings and clangs against the floor as an array of hand-made wound stitching needles and water carriers fall on it.

I am not even looking up at them right now, just clinging onto the chain I weaved together during my well spent time in the training centre. I am standing alone, an eye sore in the middle of such an expanse of a demonstration room filled with apparatus that waits to be used. But not during the minutes that are assigned to me in here.

”I am a guard at home. It is all I do…just stand there.” There are not many Rasoio treasures left to guard anymore. Everything has been hoovered up and nobody bothers to pick at the dry bones that have been left behind in the rotting factory stores. It is all history, nothing I truly witnessed with my own eyes but just heard second hand from the tales of others. ”You bled the talent dry from my family long ago.”

Slowly, I shuffle away from my position in the centre of the room, moving closer to the door, still not looking up at those that may not even be listening to me right now. ”I can stand and guard this door for the next fifteen minutes in silence as a display, or I can save everyone’s time and leave…”

I don’t leave. I bleed them dry of every second of their life that I share with them in the next quarter of an hour.

kaitlin

rosie fay

In all the years he's spent rubbing shoulders with Capitol elites Melrose has learned one, inextricable truth.

They are terrified of their own humanity.

So much so they spend most of their lives running from it. Blowing millions on cosmetic procedures and implanting experimental tech beneath their skin in the name of innovation. If that is not enough, there's a plethora of substances available that promise to make one feel enough like a God that it doesn't matter anyway.

That's why he loves his tributes so. They've never been afforded he luxury of erasing every errant flaw. Instead they fester, a constant reminder the agony that accompanies inadequacy. He's fond of their antics, as proud as any father would be watching a toddler take their first steps.

Nicoli Rasoio is a particularly funny one. Rosie is well aware of the little trinkets he keeps in his pockets and the time he spend making them. It's a skill that will prove useful in the arena but unfortunately lacks the flair someone from the lower districts would need to grab a Gamemaker's attention. There's a dry humor to his diatribe that seems lost on his coworkers, whose eyes have long since glazed over.

Gloria makes a snide remark about monologues, Elysium calls him pathetic.

Rosie, for his part, tries to keep an encouraging smile on his face during the boy's speech which stretches wider each time nothing happens.

"...or I can save everyone's time and leave."

He laughs, a little uncomfortable chuckle that might not even reach Nicoli's ears.

The minutes tick away and Rosie finds his patience waning as his cheeks begin to ache, "I'm so bored!" He says through grit teeth, eyes still locked on the little guardian from eight.

"I liked his toys, that should bump him up." Rose says after the longest fifteen minutes of his life is finally over.

The others agree, perhaps only to be done with this.

Rosie adds a smiley face next to the 2 by Nicoli's name.

[gamemaker kelsier]

Not everyone is a forest fire.

And he gets that, but he can't help the jealousy that comes with understanding. Fingers steepled over the back of his neck, bent in half over his knees, Akira Uchis waits for his name to be called outside of the training room. His thoughts run aimlessly over Avriel's advice over breakfast this morning, "Do whatever you do best but do it good."

Simple, easy enough to understand. He turns the sentence over again in his head, shakes it a few times. He's still got nothing. All the things that Akira does well don't have much to do with fighting. He's gotten in fights before but only the clumsy kind, boys with fists that don't close properly, that end in a split lip and a bruise on his side but not much past that.

He's unremarkable, he knows that.

And it doesn't surprise him but it does piss him off.

"AKIRA UCHIS, DISTRICT NINE."

He raises his head. There's not many people waiting now, Jack is long gone from his side, though he never noticed her leave. He probably should have told her good odds. Oh well.

The room is reset when he enters, the only thing that remains from the sessions before his is the scent of a chemical cleaner. Somehow that's almost more haunting than the smell of blood itself.

He stops in the middle of the room and looks towards the stage. It's his first time seeing the gamemakers in person. Some part of him had built them up in his head, othered them. He thought they'd be more vibrant than everyone else, have a heavier contrast against the background, something that makes them more.

But they just look like anyone else, dead-eyed and decaying from the inside out. Disappointing.

He wonders what they see when they look at him.

If they see him beneath the mask he wears.

Storm and Avriel are too kind. Akira noticed it right away, but everyone's seen their games and the way they played them. Avriel's a boy scout, Storm's still a kid and just by watching them, Akira could tell that they were loved. It's always been a secret skill, because he knows what a kid who isn't looks like, he looks at one in the mirror every day.

All that fighting they both did, to protect the people they cared about, to get back home to their families, Akira couldn't fathom that. It all seemed so pointlessly hard.

Things are different when you have no one, when the people who were meant to love you only ever hurt you.

You learn how to hurt them back.

He walks over to a table full of weapons and picks up a knife. The handle is cool against his palm.

This past week the trainers gave Akira a knife and pointed out the spots that would be the most fatal to hit on his own body. He felt the edge of a blade against his neck, the cold metal of the point on his chest, over his heart. It's hard to forget when they teach you like that.

Do whatever you do best but do it good.

He barely pauses between picking the knife up and moving, but everything somehow feels slow. He turns towards a dummy, fingers curled over the top edge of the knife handle. The lights feel a little brighter, the room warmer but not in a bad way.

He's so used to living in a fog but in this moment, everything is crystal clear.

Do whatever you do best but do it good.

He's always been good at destruction.

Akira brings the knife down on the Dummy's shoulder, through carefully designed and crafted sinew and synthetic muscle. The body gives slightly, the skin closing around the blade, as if trying to suck it in but Akira pulls it out. It isn't like in the movies, red doesn't spurt out like a fountain, just bubbles up out of the wound, viscous, heady, like wine.

He pulls his arm back and stabs the knife in again, this time on the chest. Then he pulls the blade and brings it down again, through the upper left arm, then again into the stomach, then again into the shoulder, then again into the stomach, then again into the side, then again into the cheek, then the dummy is on the floor and akira is on top of it and he plunges the knife down again, this time into the neck and blood is on his sleeves, on his shirt, on his cheek but he doesn't stop, he brings the knife down again and again and again and again into the thigh, the hand, the mouth, the chest, the chest, the chest, the chest, the chest, the chest, the chest, the chest, the chest–

where he leaves it.

He sits back, breathing hard.

He can't think.

His hands are bloody but they're drying fast, blood cakes his nail beds and settles into the lines of his hands. That clear feeling has faded, there's just the dullness again, the medication trying to balance him back out like always.

The dummy is a mess beneath him, the torso so torn up that it's no longer recognizable as human. Akira looks down at it for a moment, it wasn't as satisfying as he thought it was going to be but then again, nothing ever is. In the end, destruction's, just destruction whether it's through words or through actions, it all feels the same.

He pulls the knife out of the body and tosses it to the side, where it clatters against the floor. The tip broke off at some point but Akira didn't notice. The timer is still going. He's only used four minutes but there's not really much else he can do.

He turns on the torso of the dummy to face the gamemakers again. Then he pulls a worn carton out of his back pocket and counts. Just three left. Akira gets the cigarette lit on the first try and just sits there, savouring it as blood pools steadily out around him.

"Do you believe in hell?" he asks.