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So much of the Games is a matter of hurry up and wait. Wait for the tributes to be chosen, for the actual game to start, for the next horrible and gruesome death to grace the TV screens. For mentors, it’s even worse. There are so many parts of the preparation process they’re not allowed to be involved in, so Jimmy and Lizzie are frequently at loose ends while they wait for their tributes to meet with their stylists or finish their interview or go to training or whatever other nonsense the Capitol can cook up.
Jimmy doesn’t like having to fill that empty time, but it’s better than having to stand in front of his former schoolmates and pretend he’s enough of an expert in anything to keep one of them alive. They’re only a year younger than him; they know him, and how very little respect he’s due. Despite his victory, he’s kind of an embarrassment as a Career, the only tribute from their district in recent memory who performed badly enough in training to be kicked out of the traditional pack.
(And yet all the tributes from his year who looked down on him are dead, and he’s still here. More’s the pity.)
There’s probably stuff he should be doing, but Jimmy ends up in one of the common spaces set aside for mentors instead. The TV is already on when he walks in, stuck like all the others in the building on the channel that broadcasts the Hunger Games. It’s showing some kind of retrospective on the mentors for this year, he thinks; the sound is muted, so it’s hard to tell, but it’s showing pictures and clips he vaguely recognizes from past Games.
As he watches, a clip of a prim girl with flowers tucked into her dark hair fades into a still from what he thinks is one of Scott’s pre-Games interviews. In it, he’s caught mid-laugh, with wisps of brown hair from his artfully messy braid framing a face still round with baby fat. He looks very young, and every inch the earnest, loveable tribute that won so many Capitol hearts even before his dramatic Games played out.
Movement from one of the couches draws Jimmy’s attention from the smiling boy on the screen to the real Scott, who’s sitting with his legs crossed and an embroidery hoop in his lap, looking back at him with an expression of cool curiosity. He couldn’t look less like his photo; if Jimmy didn’t already know they were the same person, he would have taken them for cousins, maybe. Half brothers at most. The hair color is part of it, but the biggest part is that the arena has aged Scott far past his years. It’s nearly impossible to picture him laughing like that now.
Jimmy realizes a little too late that he’s staring and clears his throat awkwardly. “Sorry, am I interrupting? I didn’t realize you were in here.”
“You’re fine. Jimmy, right? You gave me your jacket the other day.”
“That’s right.”
Scott gestures at the other side of the couch. “Go ahead and sit down if you like. Katherine and I were supposed to be having a nice sewing meet, but one of our tributes had some kind of emergency and was asking for her, so I’ve been left all by myself.”
“Were you watching this?” Jimmy asks as he sits. There aren’t any subtitles, so it seems unlikely.
“Not really. We were making a drinking game out of the escorts’ fascinating fashion choices earlier, but Katherine took the wine with her when she left. I just didn’t think to turn it off. I’d say you can change the channel if you want, but …” Scott rolls his eyes.
“Katherine is, uh-” Jimmy drums his fingers against his knee, trying to place the name. She’s obviously a victor, but he’s struggling to recall any of the details from her Games. “The one from twelve years ago?”
“Ten,” Scott corrects. “Her arena had those flowers, remember?”
“Right! She was the one with all the allies.” That’s why that name seemed familiar. It’s been long enough that Jimmy doesn’t remember much, but he knows she famously convinced what seemed like every single one of the other tributes that she was their friend, then set them at each other's throats with such efficiency that she only had to kill one of them herself, right at the very end. “I forgot you were from the same district. Was she one of your mentors?”
Scott’s expression shutters, and he looks back down at his embroidery. “No. My mentor’s name was Alinor.”
Was, Jimmy notes, wincing. And only one name, even though he knows District 8 has several living victors and must have had two mentors.
It’s not the sort of thing he can ask about. His dad warned him about that before he boarded the train a few days ago, as if Jimmy hasn’t spent a lifetime watching him shut down at the slightest mention of his Games. Some victors like to brag, but just as many of them don’t want to talk about their experiences. Or if they do, they don’t want to be asked. The polite thing to do is to stay quiet and let them volunteer what they want to share.
Jimmy understands that better now than he did as a child. He doesn’t know how he could ever put the arena into words, even for his dad, who knows exactly what it’s like in there. He doesn’t want to try; better to let it all fade into one long, bloody haze, and never have to think about it except in the very dead of night when the memories try to follow him out of his nightmares.
They sit in awkward silence for a while - Scott stabbing his needle through the fabric like he’s got a grudge against it, Jimmy half-watching the silent TV and trying to figure out if it would be weirder to apologize or just get up and leave.
It’s playing a clip from Scott’s first post-Games interview now, though Jimmy hasn’t been paying enough attention to even guess at why. The Scott in the recording looks like a ghost, his eyes glassy and blank and his hair still in the ragged bob he’d given himself in the arena. Rumor has it he’d bitten the stylist who tried to fix it for him.
“I always hated having short hair, you know,” Scott says, like he’s picking up the thread of a previous conversation. Jimmy hadn’t even realized he’d looked up from his embroidery. “Even after I knew I was a boy, I’d kick up such a fuss whenever my parents tried to cut it that they gave up pretty quickly.”
“Why’d you do it, then?” Jimmy asks.
“There was a girl in my Games … I don’t remember what district, but I remember she had long hair, like me. She was running away from the Cornucopia when another tribute grabbed her by her ponytail, reeled her in like a fish, and just - slit her throat, just like that.” Scott makes a sharp gesture with his needle. “That was the first death I saw. As soon as I got somewhere safe, I took my knife and cut my hair as short as I could get it.”
“It’s not short now, though?” Jimmy says. He’s not sure if that’s an appropriate response, but then again, there doesn’t really seem to be one at all.
“No. I started growing it out, after. It’s a reminder.”
“Of what?”
“That I’m not ever going to have to worry about someone grabbing it again. And if they do …” Scott’s needle plunges into the fabric again, trailing a line of red thread behind it. “It’ll be their mistake.”
Jimmy’s not even in the arena this time, and he still feels like he’s going to throw up when the countdown begins. Lizzie’s hand, gripping his under the table with bruising force, is the only thing keeping him present in his body.
There’s nothing they can do at this stage except hope. Later, they can talk gifts and strategies, but there’s no interfering in the bloodbath. Their tributes will make it or they won’t; that’s all there is to it.
Thirty seconds.
Both of their tributes are strong and well-trained - the best their district has to offer. They’ve been preparing half their lives for this. Right now, when the main danger is the other tributes, that has to be enough. Jimmy calls to mind their high training scores, their determination, the older memories of watching them spar back at home, and tries to make himself believe they’ll be okay.
It’s not the tributes you really have to worry about, says a mental voice that sounds a lot like his dad’s perpetual nervous tremor. You can escape them, but the arena itself is a death trap, and you can’t fight that.
He shakes off the thought. There’s nothing they can do about that either. The Gamemakers don’t usually throw out anything really crazy until things start getting boring, so they still have time to size up the space and figure out what to do about it.
Ten seconds.
On two dozen or more screens scattered around the mentors’ room, the tributes stand tense on their platforms. Some are still looking around at the arena; others are staring at the weapons piled around the Cornucopia.
Five.
One of the District 4 tributes catches her partner’s eye and flicks her gaze toward something on the ground, and they exchange a quick nod.
Zero.
The gong sounds; the tributes take off. Lizzie’s nails bite into the back of Jimmy’s hand.
The violence is too quick and chaotic to track. Jimmy keeps his eyes locked on the sea-green uniforms that mark their tributes and ignores everything else, even as screens around the room start to go dark. They’ll find out soon enough who died, and if anything else important happens, he’s sure it’ll show up on a recap later.
The District 4 pair sticks together, following the plan they worked out over the past few days. The girl sprints for a spear, the thing she’d pointed out earlier, and uses it to keep the other tributes at bay while the boy snatches up as many supplies as he can carry.
Another tribute runs by with a knife in one hand and a backpack in the other, clearly more focused on escaping than anything else. The girl spears her neatly through the throat and yanks the backpack from her hand as she falls, slinging it over her own shoulder without bothering to look at it. She darts off after her partner, leaving the dying tribute to twitch and writhe on the ground, red spit bubbling up from her lips.
Slowly, the chaos begins to sort itself out. One by one, the weaker tributes cut their losses and scatter, leaving the Careers to bunch up around the Cornucopia and sort through their supplies. They’ve all made it through the bloodbath, though not unscathed; one is limping slightly, and another has a deep gash on her arm that her district partner quickly wraps in some bandages from one of their bags.
“Well!” Lizzie says, and Jimmy blinks for what feels like the first time in hours, finally remembering that there’s a room outside of the screen. “Not a bad start at all. Looks like these two can actually follow instructions.”
He tries to answer with something equally flippant, and finds out that he’s shaking when he nearly bites his tongue in the process.
It wasn’t that bad, for an opening bloodbath, and he was nowhere near the action. It’s just pixels on a screen. So why …?
Lizzie squeezes his hand again. “Jimmy, are you with me?”
He can’t seem to speak. When he tries, the only thing that comes out is a strangled gasp.
“Jimmy,” Lizzie says again, this time in her sharp, commanding mentor voice. “Take five. Go grab some water or something, alright?”
“No, we should - we should plan,” Jimmy manages finally, gesturing vaguely at the screen.
“Nothing is going to change in the next couple minutes, and you’re useless to me if you’re in the arena, too. Go pull yourself together.”
Jimmy gives her a thin attempt at a smile and gets up. He’s had a lot of practice lately acting normal even when his head is a screaming mess of blood and dark water, so he manages to make it to the door without stumbling, despite fWhip’s attempt at tripping him on the way there.
The room next door has fairly basic sandwiches and bottled drinks laid out for the mentors. None of it is wildly exciting, but it’s all easy to eat while working and won’t go bad sitting out for a few hours. Jimmy grabs two water bottles, but when he tries to head back to the main room, his body just won’t cooperate. Every time he tries to imagine going back in there and sitting down to watch the upcoming hours and days of slow, awful death, it’s like his mind completely shuts down.
It’s stupid. He’s never enjoyed the Hunger Games - who does? - but even the bloodiest years didn’t affect him like this, and he’s safer than he was when his name was still on the list of potential tributes. He did his time in the arena. The Capitol can’t exactly put him back. All he has to do now is watch.
Maybe that’s the problem. Jimmy knows how to kill someone who’s trying to kill him; he’s been training for it for years, and when push came to shove, he turned out to be quite good at it. But he can’t kill the things threatening his tributes, nor the ghosts flickering behind his own eyes. He’s helpless, as he never was in the arena, and it terrifies him.
It takes him a long time to force everything back down far enough to function again.
When he finally makes his way back into the main room, fWhip leans back in his seat and says cheerfully, “Oh, there you are! We all thought you got lost.”
Sausage giggles next to him. Jimmy determinedly ignores them both, hurrying toward his own table with his head ducked down.
“You didn’t miss much,” Lizzie says, accepting the water bottle he hands her with a nod. “It looks like this is going to be a warm one, but there are some ponds around. I can’t tell if any of them got purification tablets, but if not, I think that should be our first priority.”
Talking about strategy is far preferable to thinking about what they just saw. Jimmy tries to focus. “Do you think the ponds are any kind of trap?”
“Everything’s a trap, Jimmy,” Lizzie says cheerfully. “Never close your eyes for a second! But if you mean whether they’re poisoned or something, I haven’t seen any sign of that yet.”
This is what he likes about Lizzie. The horrors of the Games never seem to touch her, and it’s easy to get caught up in her particular strange brand of enthusiasm. She doesn’t make him feel weak for being unable to cope as easily as she does; she just pulls him along in her wake, utterly unshakable in her insistence that they’re both going to be fine.
They spend a while strategizing, but then it’s back, once again, to waiting. A couple of non-Career tributes get in a scuffle far from the Career Pack, which Jimmy doesn’t pay much attention to except to note who dies. Camera crews float in and out of the room to catch footage of the mentors working or pull one of them aside for an interview. FWhip, always easily bored when no one is dying, starts folding paper airplanes and throwing them at people.
Toward lunchtime, Lizzie gets up to go stretch her legs, leaving Jimmy with strict instructions to come find her if anything major happens. He nods absently, wrapped up in struggling through some math to figure out what they might be able to afford with their current sponsorships.
When someone approaches his table a few minutes later, he looks up, expecting to find Lizzie returning. Instead, it’s Scott, who sets down a sandwich in front of him before leaning his hip against the edge of the table to start unwrapping a second one.
“What’s this?” Jimmy asks.
Scott raises an eyebrow in that condescending expression he’s pretty much perfected for the cameras. “It’s food, Jimmy. People typically consume some at least once or twice a day.”
“Yeah, I know that. Why are you giving it to me?”
“Figured you might be hungry.”
“We’re not even on the same team.”
“There aren’t any teams here,” Scott says. “Not anymore. That all goes away once you leave the arena.”
“Tell that to fWhip and Sausage,” Jimmy mutters. They sure seem excited about keeping the rivalry between their districts going.
“I’m telling it to you. You’re as bad as they are, sometimes.”
Jimmy averts his eyes and folds his arms, sulking. Sure, he’s not exactly doing anything to calm the situation, but they started it. What is he supposed to do, just roll over and let them win?
Scott sighs and shifts his weight, picking at the wrapping around his sandwich instead of taking a bite. “I didn’t come over here to fight you. I just thought it’d be a nice gesture. Call it repayment for the party.”
“Well, thank you,” Jimmy says, only somewhat begrudgingly. It is nice of him, even if he seems incapable of entirely dropping that condescending ice king attitude that’s become his brand.
It’s enhanced by the pale blue he’s chosen for his outfit today, presumably to match his tributes’ uniforms. Looking up at him, Jimmy is suddenly reminded of seeing that exact same color splattered with blood only a couple hours ago, courtesy of his own tribute. His gaze slides over to the board at the front of the room that tracks everyone’s status, and sure enough, he recognizes the greyed out face on District 8’s line as the girl from the bloodbath. He winces.
“Sorry for being rude,” he says, much more sincerely this time. “And, uh, sorry about Lacey.”
Scott blinks at him. “Who? … Oh, the girl. Why are you sorry?”
“Did you not see? One of my tributes was the one who killed her.”
“Eh,” Scott says, making a dismissive gesture. “What do I care? She was never going to make it through; her training score was abysmal.”
“So you wrote her off, just like that?” Jimmy’s voice rises with indignation, completely outside of his control.
“That’s how it works. Think of it as a mercy killing, if that helps you feel better.”
“But - she’s your tribute!”
Scott shakes his head. “Word of advice, Jimmy: getting attached like that every year will kill you.”
“And the alternative is - what, just give up? Stop caring, just like everyone else out there who’s watching this?” Jimmy flings a hand out toward the window, indicating their unseen Capitol audience.
“Yes,” Scott says simply. “You’re from a Career district, so you have a little more of a chance, but the rest of us get a win once a decade, if that. My tributes were dead as soon as their names were called. I can’t pretend otherwise, and you’ll be a lot happier if you don’t, either.”
“That’s horrible. You’re just - you’re letting them win!”
“Don’t be stupid. They already won decades ago.” Scott pushes off the table in preparation to leave. “Eat your sandwich, and keep your voice down. There’s no place for rebels here.”