straight to hell, [ three suite ].

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

felicity carrow
🛠️ district three.

I don't think I've ever been in a stranger place.

That should be less surprising, I guess, the fact that the Capitol that's lorded over all of us for so long is as strange as it is audacious, and that everything here looms in ways the districts have never been able to emulate in my lifetime. Trumpets announce our arrival as we pass through their streets, led down cobblestone cleared of the other Capitol citizens. The flash of camera lenses and blinking red dots capturing our faces in real time as we arrive and react to their home, the attention makes my stomach roll and I grimace at every photographer I see.

"Fuck you, cocksucker," I say when one tries to break through the blockade and gets too close to Harley and I. We can't even see his face behind his lens. I shove a middle finger in front of the glass. "Get a load of this."

Not sure our mentors like that, but it's too late to stop me now.

By the time dinner rolls around on our first night, I think I've successfully gotten my grubby claws under everyone's skin. Not sure what came over me, but I just about overturned everything in the place. Removed all the cushions on the couches and chairs, opened every cabinet, pull open drawers and rummage through the ugly clothes they've provided us with. I found a bottle of hooch in one of the rooms I think is meant for the mentors and eventually wander back into the main living area while I crack it open. I take a long slug from the neck of the bottle, then splutter just a little bit when it burns something behind my eyes.

"When do we meet Shae and Orland?" I ask the room. I'm a little ashamed when I see one of our two avoxes trailing around the space, picking up the mess I left in my wake. I hadn't really realized the disaster I was leaving in my wake; I just wanted to know where they were listening from, how they were keeping eyes on us in here. I make awkward eye contact with the avox girl as I shovel some things I'd taken out into a still-open drawer then close it with my hip; all I can offer is a vague grimace and a mouthed sorry before turning away to look where the other avox is setting the table with more piles of food. "There's way too much fuckin' satin in those drawers."

I collapse in one of the chairs at the dining table, tip it back and kick my boots up and rest them on the chair next to me.

"I don't suppose one of you has a joint you'd give me, huh?"

[florentine, d4b ❁]

---

Klaus Goravich

---

Since Penelope had turned nineteen, over a decade ago now, Klaus had moved through reapings mechanically. He was freed, in a way, from the true weight of it all, with his own two children having navigated those dangerous years successfully and reached sanctuary on the other side. He approached the town square with his eyes half-closed and his lips pressed tightly together, an animatronic monkey performing his tricks, wound up by the strong hand of the Capitol and let go, smashing his symbols together in a perfectly rehearsed performance. He became a functioning part of the highly orchestrated process. They are reaped - nameless children, any one equally as innocent as another, and none of them his own. Then, they die. Klaus reads his script to the families, so practised it flows easily. They would never know it was the same speech every time, the same hollow apologies. He was powerless, so bound to the process that it was almost easy. They lived, and then they died, those children - strangers, names learned and forgotten and learned again, faces flashing from one to the next, year after year.

This year was different. Klaus attended the reaping with a heart weighed down by the people he is responsible for. To have children is a promise to care from them, to protect them from harm - to keep them safe. To walk them to the centre of District Three and line them up in their corresponding rows is to give them up. He let them down, the children, adoption papers signed just months before. He handed them over to fate just as he had with Daisy and Penelope. He prayed, pleaded, begged a God he hadn’t believed in since he was sixteen and stupid, for their names to remain unspoken. Klaus rescinded his charges and hoped that they would come back. The names were called: Felicity Carrow, then Charlotte Royce and the jolt of relief was far less painful than the shame that followed it. It was not the kind of man Klaus was to feel glad to watch these girls climb up onto the stage. And yet he tucked the children of his own household into bed with a sickening feeling of thanks, a twisting, churning pit-of-the-stomach repose that he hated and yet couldn’t resist indulging. He kissed the smallest boy on the forehead, and told them, “I will be home before you know it.” 

In the Capitol, his failings sought repentance. His tributes; not of his own flesh and blood, not his by rite or promise, but his nonetheless, deserved his attention. He attempted to bury his guilt in devotion. They impressed him, these two, the gaul of them. Both of them had a forthright certainty to them, a confidence and self-assuredness he was unsure how to handle. Eighteen years old and more self-assured than Klaus could ever imagine being. They knew more expletives, too. He was wary of them. He sought Atticus’ counsel, whispered to his fellow mentor on the train as though their company were conspiring to listen in. How can we help them? It was a question Klaus had been asking himself for thirty-five years. 

His thirty-sixth trip to the training centre, was, like last year, unsettling for Klaus in that his accommodation had once again changed. He was a creature of habit, and although the new training centre was very similar to the last one, there were subtle differences Klaus couldn’t help but notice. He followed a wrong corridor and ended up in a laundry room, hurriedly ushered back out by startled Avoxes. He sat on the rooftop staring at the mountain ranges in the distance, reminiscing the inner-city views, although he had always hated it anyway. He tossed and turned in bed at night, certain that they had chosen harder mattresses for this rendition of the accommodation. Anything to focus on other than the real problem: the problem of two evidently fierce tributes, the hope of District Three resting on their shoulders, their shoulders propped up by his and Atticus’ historically shaky hands.

Klaus felt unsure of how to handle Felicity; like a wild animal, she was unpredictable and seemingly dangerous. She swore fluently; it made Klaus cringe. He tried to swallow it so she wouldn’t notice. At her age, he had killed three people. He did his best to look her in the eye. She made a show of the whole thing; throwing up her middle finger and declaring the Capitolites that sought a closer view of her cocksuckers. Klaus couldn’t make it if it was a facade or if her core was truly as rotted as the exterior she displayed. Either way he thought it couldn’t hurt. Everyone enjoys a show, after all, and an aggressive front might be a useful image, regardless of its authenticity.

“When do we meet Shae and Orland?” she demanded of Klaus, and he blinked at her for a moment, still taking in the wreckage of the room. He had arrived to dinner to find items scattered everywhere; pillow stuffing and clothing strewn across the furniture, draws half-open with their contents spilled about the place. He could feel the permeating anxiety of their assigned avox, hurriedly attempting to put things right. Felicity didn’t appear to care; she sat, boots up on the chair, bottle in hand, ready for dinner. “There’s way too much fuckin’ satin in those drawers.” Klaus did his best not to allow his shock to betray him. He dismissed the avox with his most apologetic smile. It wasn’t the same avox as last year, or the year before. He wondered where they went. Then he looked at Felicity. The bottle she was swigging from was undoubtedly the one set aside, annually, for the mentors to share. He and Atticus usually split it on their first evening in the Capitol, after their tributes had gone to bed. It was a numbing agent, ordered specially. Klaus supposed he didn’t need it this year. He didn’t want to be numb anymore. 

“I don’t suppose one of you has a joint you’d give me, huh?”

Klaus pulled out a chair directly across from Felicity and sat down. In front of him was a typical first-dinner meal; rich, glistening potatoes, fluffy bread rolls, dark gravy, thick-cut slices of meat with a generous layer of fat beneath the skin. He served himself a large spoonful of a fragrant stew. “Is that what you lost? I thought you must have been looking for something.” His spare hand gestured broadly to the state of the room. “I’m afraid not, although it seems to me you have your evening figured out.” He shot a pointed look at the bottle. Then he turned to his other tribute. “Mashed potato, Harley?”

[mat]

atticus manor

How can we help them?

It was the first question Klaus posed to Atticus on the train ride into the Capitol. And, as usual, his shoulders tensed in thought. What they spoke about last year, he supposed. Weaponize their biggest strengths and make them stronger than a spear through the chest.

The behavior of Felicity Carrow and Harley Royce made it hard to work with them on the train. And on the walk to the Training Center, Felicity's taunting of the cameras and crowds did not help. His and Klaus's combined efforts could not keep her at bay. The pair reminded Atticus of the Thefts and the Morgansterns. How was it that the personalities within District Three's pool consistently turned out to be troubled, traumatized, or tortured teens? Even before he was a tribute, the traumatic faces Atticus witnessed in the 67th's Future and Cadman made him wonder, what were they feeding ninety percent of the District? And how did Klaus and Atticus evade it?

From over two decades of experience, and two near death experiences, Atticus advised himself not to intervene in his tributes' angsty behaviors or confront them when they were at their lowest. He had a grip on the strategy: the physical and mental side of things. That was the Hunger Games at face value. The emotional side was for the tributes to come to terms with and approach him or Klaus for help.

Atticus sat rigidly at the dining table as Felicity moved around the floor. Pillows tossed, flowers plucked from their vases, and a bottle of liquor to go along with it. Klaus always kept a bottle handy. Atticus ordered the more sophisticated stuff to be delivered for pickup on the ground floor.

Klaus, thankfully, entertained her request for a joint. Again, over two decades of mentoring and it was the tributes that taught him something: hide everything you own well, or you won't own it for long. He remained silent, letting Klaus do his best: to make the kids comfortable. He was the hands-on victor in Three's orphanage for a reason. Atticus was of much more use behind the front desk with the paperwork, finances, and accounting. He had his own kids to take care of, and while he agreed to help Klaus with his vision, that was the extent of his role.

One of the avoxes moved the mashed potatoes in Harley's direction once Klaus mentioned it. "The first dinner in the Capitol is always… meh." Atticus cut through the medium-well steak on his plate. "If either of you would like, I can walk down the road and bring back some food from The Atlas. I have menus around here somewhere." He preferred their food, which felt real as opposed to the food here, which was delicately crafted for temporary satisfaction. Atticus dined there alone a few too many nights.

Now that Felicity was seated, he finished his bite of steak and leaned over. "Go to the plants station tomorrow. Learn some things, and then, roll one as a reward." He spoke, in reference to the joint she had asked for. Maybe mixing bad with good might help.