Volunteers
Katniss
Katniss is overwhelmed.
The day started out nicely enough, for a Reaping Day. She went fishing and gathering with Fred and George Weasley, did a brisk trade in the Hob, had a chat with Susan Bones, and got to wear her mother’s dress. She had an excellent breakfast, then lunch with the Weasleys, and has a stew waiting on the stove for supper. Then Ludo Bagman called out “Primrose Everdeen” and her world fell apart.
She was touched by the show of support, started by the boy she always noticed but never talked to, with the three-finger salute. She was grateful to Remus Lupin for taking the attention off her, disgusting as he may be. Now, she’s just overwhelmed, having gotten past the stage of yearning for escape.
Her eyes seek out the Weasleys, half of whom are scattered around the Reaping pens, easily spotted by their flaming red hair. The twins have delivered Prim to her mother. Molly is with her too. Katniss barely hears Bagman calling out “Dudley Dursley” and only vaguely registers the name as the kid of the bakery owners.
Then she does a double-take. The other boy, the scrawny one who always has bruises, he’s supposedly Dudley’s cousin and lives at the bakery with him and those foul people. Katniss never does any trade with them. They’re too full of themselves to participate in anything “unsavory” or “illegal”.
The boy is watching his cousin approach the stage with trepidation, shifting from foot to foot. Katniss scans the crowd, finding the nearly-fat Vernon Dursley easily where he stands next to his boney wife. Petunia is watching her son with tears in her eyes. Vernon is glaring at his nephew like it’s his fault.
Dudley is climbing the stage. He’s shaking, sweating. His eyes lock on his cousin as he stands next to Bagman at the podium.
“Let’s hear a round of applause for our young Dudley Dursley!” Bagman booms. This time there are a few scattered, subdued claps. “Now Dudley, I know how eager you must be to fight for the glory of District 12–” Dudley looks less eager, more nauseous “–but I must ask, are there any volunteers to take his place?”
“I volunteer as tribute.”
Maybe the people gathered had thought they were done with shocking events for the day, but clearly, Katniss volunteering was just the start of the snowball. The boy, the skeletal, battered boy who looks like a good gust of wind could do him in, has just volunteered to take the place of his boxing-champion cousin. He doesn’t look happy about it, or eager, or even afraid. He just looks resigned.
He makes his way toward the stage, his face completely blank and hands shoved in his pockets. Katniss flicks her eyes back to his relatives. They both look relieved. Petunia is still tearful, Vernon is still red-faced, but there’s no mistaking the undeniable relief on both their faces.
They don’t care about their nephew at all. They just care that their son won’t be competing.
The boy has taken the stage, moving into Dudley’s place by the podium while the heftier boy edges towards the stairs. He introduces himself as “Harry Potter” and his cousin is dismissed. There’s more to it, meaningless words and token applause, but Katniss can barely pay attention over the ringing in her ears.
This boy, Harry Potter, has been her silent shadow since her father died. Her comrade in starvation, her partner in neglect. They’ve never even had a conversation, but there’s no doubt they share a connection.
And now they’re going to be pitted against each other in an Arena where only one Victor will emerge alive.
The mayor is droning on in her annual reading of the Treaty of Treason, but Katniss’s mind is firmly in the past.
The rain is falling relentlessly in icy sheets. No one wants Prim’s baby clothes, the trash bins have just been emptied - there’s simply no money or food to be found. Katniss passes the baker’s and the smell of fresh bread is so potent she feels dizzy. She’s mesmerized by the warmth and the scents spilling out of the open kitchen door until the rain interrupts with icy fingers down her back. She checks their bin and finds it, like all the others, spotless.
Suddenly someone is screaming – the baker’s wife, threatening to call the Peacekeepers, ranting about Seam trash pawing through her garbage. Katniss has no defense against the ugly words. She backs away and notices him, peering out from behind his aunt’s back.
She’s seen him in school, he’s in her year, but she doesn't know his name. He lives with the bakers, his aunt and uncle, that much she knows, but he’s always quiet and keeps to himself. His cousin, Dudley, is loud enough for both of them. Where Dudley is beefy and as close to obese as anyone can get in this District, this boy has always been skinny, looking more like a Seam kid than a Town kid, except for his green eyes.
She’s seen Dudley and his boxing buddies use him as a punching bag a few times.
His aunt returns to the bakery, but his eyes follow Katniss as she makes her way behind the pigpen and leans against a gnarled apple tree. She’ll have nothing to take home. Her knees buckle, and she slides down the tree to sit at its roots, too sick and weak and oh, so tired to even care. She doesn’t care if the Peacekeepers come, or even if she dies right there in the rain.
She hears a clatter, then a screech, from the baker’s wife. She only vaguely wonders what’s going on at the sound of metal slapping flesh. Hearing feet sloshing in the mud, she spares a moment to think it’s probably the woman coming to drive her off, but it isn’t. It’s him.
There’s a red weal on his cheekbone, beneath his hollow eyes. He’s carrying two massive, burnt loaves of bread, and his aunt is yelling at him to feed them to the pigs. He starts tearing the burned bits off and dropping chunks into the trough. The bakery bell rings and his aunt disappears again.
The boy doesn’t even look at Katniss, but she’s staring at him, at the bread, at the mark on his face. She can’t even imagine having guardians who would hit her, let alone use something metal to hit her. He glances over his shoulder, then back at the trough. He’s still not looking at her, but he throws the loaves, one after the other – right at her feet.
She’s staring at them in disbelief while he sloshes back into the bakery and closes the door. Before anyone can notice, she shoves the precious bread under her shirt, scalding her stomach, and races home.
It isn’t until the next day that she realizes the boy might have burnt the loaves on purpose, knowing he’d be punished, just so he could give them to her. She can’t explain it, but when she’s studying his black-and-blue face at school, she just knows he understands how hungry she had been, and he’d tried to help. He doesn’t acknowledge her all day, right up until she’s about to walk home with Prim, and their eyes meet across the yard.
He turns away and shoves his hands in his pockets. Katniss drops her gaze and spots a dandelion. And suddenly she has hope again.
More than once since then, she’s noticed him watching her, and vice versa. She’s learned bits and pieces about him over the years. How his father died in the Games, leaving behind a pregnant, teenage girlfriend. How his mother died in childbirth. How the man who was supposed to be his godfather disappeared just months after he was born. How he was dumped off with his aunt and uncle because there was nowhere else for him to go.
She never thanked him. He never tried to talk to her. They just orbited around each other, like recognizing like but never interacting, like two magnetic norths pushing each other forward at a distance. How is she supposed to bring it up now? Somehow her thanks just won’t seem sincere if she’s trying to put an arrow in his skull.
The mayor has finished her recitation and motions for them to shake hands. Harry’s hands are rough but delicate, calloused and slender and just as warm as that bread. He looks her right in the eye and squeezes her hand in pointless reassurance. They turn back to the crowd as the Panem national anthem plays.
The odds are clearly not in her favor today, but she hopes someone else kills him before she has to.
***
The Peacekeeper has just ordered Prim and her mother out of the room, and Katniss is in the middle of trying to bury her problems, along with her head, in a pile of velvet pillows, when the door opens again and the entire Weasley clan enters the room.
The widow Molly, tears streaming down her face, clutching her only daughter Ginny in her arms even though the girl is really too big for it now. Bill and Charlie, sporting matching dark looks under the ever-present grime of the mines. Percy, lucky enough to have scored an unpaid internship in town so he’s usually clean, looking uncharacteristically snotty and tearful. Fred and George, her hunting partners, identical in both their appearances and their expressions of grief. And Ron, who just looks lost.
She looks up at them all, trying to keep her resolve to hold back tears so she doesn’t look weak on camera, and then suddenly eight bodies are piled and pressed around her and everyone is wailing and she can’t help letting one drop leak out of the corner of her eye, then another. That’s all she’ll allow; two tears, that’s her quota.
“Listen,” Fred sobs, “getting a knife will probably be easy–”
“–but you have to get your hands on a bow,” George continues. “That’s your best chance.”
“They don’t always have bows,” she says – one year there were only spiked maces provided for the tributes to bludgeon each other to death.
“Then make one,” snarls Fred.
“Even a shit bow is better than nothing,” says George.
“What if there isn’t any wood?” she points out – another year, the Arena was a desert, with nothing but sand and a few boulders hiding venomous creatures.
“Katniss Everdeen, you will show those Gamemakers how good you are with a bow, and they will provide one,” Molly says firmly, stern despite the tears still streaming freely down her cheeks. “Failing that, you will make one. Failing that, you will use whatever weapons are available to you and you will come home to us, is that understood?”
No one can say no when Molly Weasley uses that tone. “Yes ma’am,” Katniss agrees meekly.
“It’s just hunting, Catnip,” whispers George.
“You’re the best hunter we know,” breathes Fred.
“Yeah, just hunting armed humans capable of thought,” she snorts.
“You’re more capable than you know, Katniss,” says Bill, his calm maturity allowing her to take a deep breath. “You’ve had practice killing. You’ve been doing it for years to put food in your sister’s belly. You taught my brothers how to keep my family fed. You can do this.”
I can do this, she repeats to herself.
The twins are assuring her that they’ll keep her family fed, Ron is trying to lighten the mood, Ginny is sobbing in her lap, Molly is stroking her hair… She wishes she could just stay here, buried in a pile of Weasleys exchanging encouragements, but too soon, the Peacekeepers urge them out the door and replace them with Susan.