The Bloodbath
As soon as Harry disappeared in the tube, Sirius left the preparation room.
The facility they were in was massive, enough rooms for each of the tributes to get ready in and rooms on the opposite end of the facility to accommodate the mentors. In one of the grand rooms would be dozens of monitors, mentors and avox’s mingling around while they coordinated gifts and campaigns.
Sirius spent the last thirteen games cowering in a corner, high and useless. As soon as his tributes died, Sirius boarded the next train back to District 12. The one time he had a tribute make it to the final eight, Sirius had to stay for the entirety of the games so he could be interviewed and talk about the girl he had.
Mary Macdonald, that had been her name.
Sirius still saw her when he was high. He saw the colorful beads she wore in her hair. He saw the blood on her teeth after she bit a boy’s ear off during a fight in the arena. Sirius saw her when she died in sixth place… her head dangling from two inches of skin, almost fully decapitated by the winner of that year, Tonks from District Five.
Mary didn’t blame Tonks for killing her, neither did Sirius. They both blamed Sirius.
There were no ghosts whispering in Sirius’s ear while he practically ran across the facility to get to the mentor area though. When Sirius was sober, there was no Mary. There was also no James or Regulus and that loss made him itch for morphling he couldn’t take.
Sirius could not get high. Not until Harry was dead. Sirius spent fourteen years of Harry’s life high, he could wait just a while longer to get back to his habits.
The hallways were quiet outside of Sirius’s boots clacking on the marble flooring. The other mentors were probably in the room, not having had any reason to stay with either of their tributes for as long as Sirius had. They would have split off after breakfast - the tributes straight to the arena, the mentor to the mentor rooms.
That was how Sirius treated Neville, how he treated all past tributes after his first year as mentor, but Harry was different.
Sirius found the mentor meeting room and was given a communicuff after signing in with a drop of his blood. The communicuff gave mentors the ability to track donations to their tributes, see their ranks in the game and the betting pools. There were options for how to give out gifts, the costs all listed beside images of the gift.
Never before did Sirius use one and he wasn’t sure how to even do so.
Sirius scanned the room quickly, taking note of the screens that showed the tributes lining the walls, until he found the one mentor he could talk to without wanting to be sick.
Remus Lupin stood in front of a monitor with Tonks and the mentor for seven, Hooch. They were all stiff as they watched the monitor where the initial countdown ticked in a corner and Sirius scampered to join them, ignoring the tray of booze offered up by an avox in a waiters uniform.
“Remus, I need to know how to use this,” Sirius muttered when he joined them, shouldering old Hooch over so Sirius could talk to Remus on his left and see the screen in front of them.
It only took Sirius a moment to find Harry, as his eyes went straight to the scrawny boy, and he felt faint when he saw Harry’s position giving away his thoughts. Harry had his knees bent, his fists clenched, and his body angled not toward (were they on the roof of a castle?) an exit, but to the cornucopia.
The cornucopia was a gambit, a trick. As filled as it was with weapons, and a check of one screen showed exactly what all filled it, it was made just to entice the tributes to start the games off with a bloody battle.
Sirius participated in the battle thirteen years ago, but Sirius had James by his side.
“When the gong sounds, you get us supplies and then watch my back,” Sirius told James before they entered the arena. Sirius had trained with the swords, axes, and tridents in the training center and he was good… damn good, really. It had scored him a solid nine in scores anyway, one number higher than James’s eight.
If Sirius could get a large weapon in his hands, he had no worries about walking away from the bloodbath. It was James who needed protecting… but carefully, because James would be pouty if he knew Sirius didn’t trust him to defend himself in the opening minutes of the game.
“I’ve always got your back, Sirius,” James said, gripping Sirius’s arm tightly. “Just in case you trip, fall off your plate, blow up before the game begins… I love you.”
Sirius laughed and then hugged James as tight as he could. The audience knew they were going in as brothers, it made them fan-favorites as the most tragic tributes did, so Sirius didn’t think it would be their last hug or anything. It was just instinct to grab James, hold him tight.
Their arena had been a forest filled with traps, mutts, and twenty-two other tributes who wanted them dead. When their gong sounded, Sirius sprinted for the golden cornucopia and snagged an axe before some kids had moved off their plates.
The very next thing Sirius did was lunge for a girl who had grabbed a bow and arrow set and tried to shoot an arrow in James’s chest. A swipe of the axe and Sirius was the first killer of the game.
“Don’t do it,” Sirius breathed at the screen, momentarily forgetting his concerns about the communicuff. Neville was about seven kids to Harry’s left and Sirius saw him shaking his head at Harry too, trying to catch his attention.
The boy beside Harry, one of Remus’s, was clearly going to go for the cornucopia. That boy was older, stronger, Sirius didn’t care if he died.
“The twins are going for the quick grab-and-go,” Tonks mumbled. She was leaning toward the screen slightly, eyes locked on the two identical red-headed boys. “A freaking castle though? What was Riddle thinking?”
Maybe it was because it was the first year Sirius was stone cold sober on the opening day of the games, but Sirius kind of liked the castle arena. It was new, it was properly haunting, and Sirius imagined that the crumbling exterior was some obscure reference to the Dark Days of the wars that caused the games to begin.
Riddle probably felt like a genius for it. Sirius could just picture his smug - annoyingly handsome - face inside the locked rooms where they ran the games… smirking while the President praised him for the ingenuity. Capitol citizens would be oohing and awwing at the new idea, a fresh take on the same outdoor arena.
“Give me your cuff,” Remus told Sirius, elbowing him when Sirius could only see Harry with the blinking numbers above him. Sirius passed it over absently. Remus was soft, he wouldn’t screw Sirius over. Remus actually reminded Sirius of James when he won the year before Sirius did.
Even James had unintentionally commented on the similarities…
“If I were in the games, I’d want to be like him,” James said. Sirius, James, Lily, and Regulus were watching the games together at James’s house. It would be the last day for them, they were all sure.
With only three tributes left, it would end that day.
Remus Lupin was one of them and the four of them were cheering for him. Not only was he from District Eleven, a district as poor as Twelve, but he had made it to the finals without killing a single person.
“If you were in the games you’d die in five minutes,” Lily teased James, tugging on one of his curls. “You’re just too sweet to win, love. Remus won’t win either, poor baby.”
Lily had been wrong twice. Remus won that day when he killed the final tribute and James lasted eight days the following year.
There were eight seconds left before the gong sounded and Sirius couldn’t breathe. When Harry saw Neville shaking his head at him, his feet shifted to angle just a degree to the left and a small bit of air flowed back in Sirius’s lungs.
The room went silent, all mentors fully focused on their two tributes. Sirius was lucky, in a very infinitesimally small way, that he only had to focus on one tribute.
“Three… two…”
I wish you were here, Sirius thought to James. The urge to get high was overwhelming. Sirius wanted to have James with him so much… it was selfish beyond belief, but Sirius just wanted James.
“BEGIN!”
Sirius watched as Harry immediately, without hesitation, begun sprinting to the left. Harry grabbed the sleeve of Neville’s jacket and they disappeared quickly in one of the corner towers.
“Good job,” Sirius told them, relaxing for only a moment.
Harry was gone, disappeared with his ally, but then the bloodbath began and Sirius had to watch it for the first time in years… really watch it.
There were a dozen monitors on the walls of the mentor room. The mentors were able to watch every second, every angle, of the games while the rest of Panem would only see what was pieced together for them, cuts of different scenes.
The mentors had to watch it all.
There was a monitor somewhere that showed Harry and Neville running down dark stairs, never stumbling or hesitating, as they truly entered the arena. On another monitor, a little boy with big eyes ran with a small black bag on his back, clever boy. A girl with red curls proved to be the quickest tribute while she went deeper and deeper in the castle that had been designed for the game.
Sirius watched the blood bath, unable to look away.
The six tributes from districts one, two, and three had teamed up, as usual, and went straight for the weapons. The dark skinned girl from four pulled off a spectacular roll to take a duffel bag that would have some sort of supplies in it. She caught a knife in the side from the blonde boy in one, but managed to escape when the other girl in four flew at the blonde boy and kicked him hard in the groin.
While the two girls from four disappeared as quickly as they could, the blonde with a bow and arrow set, the other with her duffel, the others were fighting.
The girl from one earned first kill in the arena when she swung a butterfly knife around and jammed it in the forehead of the boy from nine. The boy fell to the ground where he was immediately trampled by other tributes and a canon sounded in the distance.
Sirius felt sick. That boy should never have been reaped. Maybe he had a girl back home, a family. Maybe he had a little brother who would have to see him lying in the ground, dark red blood covering his face, his body stepped on as if it didn’t matter.
As if he didn’t matter.
“Look at them,” Tonks said, voice rough with emotion, eyes locked on her tributes.
Sirius had to tear his eyes from the first death of the games to see that Tonks’s tributes were fighting the older of the two boys from eleven. The twins were deadly, quick and inventive as they dodged the other boy’s knife.
“His name’s Anderson,” Remus said quietly, watching his tribute fight for his life against the red-heads. Anderson might have been outnumbered, but he more than made up for it in raw power. Anderson swung a knife at the twins and caught one in the ear, slicing a chunk of it off.
Sirius could just hear the jokes that Lockhart would be making…
“We can tell them apart now!”
As soon as he could, Anderson pushed the other twin hard, sending him stumbling, then took the heavy looking bag they had been fighting over and took off.
The second death of the games would be awarded to the dark-skinned boy from three, even if his district partner helped. When the red-headed boy from seven tried to run from the fight with a single small bag clenched in his hand, the brunette from three jumped on his back and the dark-skinned boy drove a sword through his neck.
That boy hit the floor and gurgled red blood through the hole until his eyes went glassy and a cannon sounded. Hooch, the mentor for that district, made a pained sound and Tonks grabbed her hand to hold it tightly.
Being a mentor was a punishment for daring to win the games just as Reggie’s death was a punishment for Sirius trying to lose them.
The two boys from two took up defensive positions in the mouth of the cornucopia and the careers seemed to add two more members when the pretty couple from eight started kicking supplies inside the cornucopia while the others made short work of the tributes left on the rooftop.
The petite blonde with the short cropped hair from nine was killed by the boy from one. She had went out with someone’s blood and a look of shock on her young face.
With both her tributes dead, sweet Pomona Sprout, the second oldest mentor present, left the room without showing any desire to watch the rest of the games.
The only tribute left that didn’t align himself with the career pack was the boy from six. He had been so close to escaping… nearly to one of the corner towers where he could flee…
The sword of the boy from three cut him in the back. The blade went clear through, proving it was sharp and the boy powerful, showing them all the pointed end protruding through his stomach.
The boy from six looked down at the blade and whimpered just once before his body went slack.
Sirius looked at the red clock that tracked the time since the game began.
It took seven minutes for four kids to die.
And it wasn’t over.
“What do we do with them?” The girl from one twirled a long-handled knife between her fingers and glared at the pair from eight.
Old ‘Mad-Eye’, the mentor for eight, could be heard grunting, “Kill the girl and the boy’ll be done with you.”
“They’re a pair then?” Kingsley asked, his voice deep and slow.
“They were together before the reaping. The boy asked her to marry him on the train ride,” Mad-Eye said.
James would have thought that was romantic. Sirius thought it was stupid.
They couldn’t both win the games, why make a painful situation even worse? But Sirius could see the proof of Mad-Eye’s words in the simple wooden ring the girl wore on her left hand.
“We want to team up,” the pretty boy with bronzed hair and broad shoulders told the pair from one. The boy had his arm around the girl’s waist and her eyes were fearful while she watched the girl from one twirl the knife.
“I’m sure you do,” the boy from one drawled with a cruel smirk. “Why should we let you?”
“Tell them, Draco,” Bellatrix cackled.
“There is safety in numbers,” Mad-Eye snapped.
“Says the mad man that killed thirty-nine kids single-handed,” Tonks whispered to their small group.
Mad-Eye did hold the record for most kills in the arena. It had been the 50th year of games and - as they did every twenty-five years - the gamemakers added a twist to the game.
Double tributes.
Mad-Eye went in the arena against forty-seven other tributes and still won.
Even after a kid got him in the left eye with a knife, Mad-Eye cleaned the area out with strategic plots that none of the others have imagined. He earned his nickname after the game when his damaged eye was replaced by a fake one that glowed a blue light.
The girl from one didn’t seem to agree with Mad-Eye because when the couple from eight didn’t make a quick enough argument, she struck.
Bellatrix, who lost her sanity in the arena probably, filled the mentor room with her insane laughter as her tribute slit the other girl’s throat.
That girl was lethal, almost snakelike, with her movements and the girl from eight didn’t stand a chance.
It took the boy from eight a second to process what happened and then he exploded.
“CHO!!”
The boy threw a fist at the girl from one then had to duck from the trident one of the boys from two tried to stab at him. When the cannon sounded for the fifth death in the game, the brunette from three shot an arrow in Mad-Eye’s boy’s side.
It took two more arrows for the boy to go down and the six careers watched with cold eyes as he dragged himself across the rooftop to reach his girl’s side. As his eyes fluttered and his chest stopped moving, his hand slid over and entangled in hers.
James would have called it romantic.
“Idiots,” Mad-Eye sighed, his disappointment heard loud and clear.
Sirius looked at the young couple on the ground with his heart lodged in his throat. They were both bloodied, broken. She wore his ring, he had a look of peace on his face.
It wasn’t romantic, but Sirius didn’t think they were idiots either… just two more children with hearts filled with love dead before they were even finished growing.
That couple from eight weren’t romantic, they weren’t idiots.
They were tragic.
When the six careers backed to the edge of the rooftop long enough for the helicopters to fly in and remove the dead bodies, Sirius checked on Harry. He had to move around the room to find the monitor that had Harry on screen and he turned down three trays of booze as he did.
Sirius found himself beside ‘Professor’ Filius. Professor was the oldest mentor, having won his game thirty-six years ago by turning the arena into traps.
Sirius doubted if the man with legs the size of Sirius’s forearm and oversized glasses had many sponsors when his games began. If Sirius bet, he wouldn’t have bet on Professor.
And Professor used that to his advantage just as he did his small size.
Professor got his nickname when the commenter for those games, Lockhart’s predecessor, said he had schooled the other children with his traps that involved using the arena’s electrical setup against them. Even with his hair going grey and the stooped slump of his shoulders, Filius still looked like a professor in his smart navy suit with the gold buttons.
“I didn’t expect the girls to get lucky, but it seems they have,” Professor said, his voice a permanent squeak. When Sirius glanced at the monitor that Professor watched he saw the two girls from four hidden away inside an empty room of the castle, gleefully pulling wires and a few tools from the bag they fought for.
Sirius nodded, unsure what to say (“Congrats. I hope they die soon so Harry’s odds increase”?), then watched his tribute.
The only one that mattered.
Harry and Neville seemed to be making good time as they ran. Sirius knew his communicuff could give him a holographic map of the arena with his tributes lighting up in their location - the other mentors with tributes on the run had theirs pulled up - but Sirius wasn’t wholly concerned with where Harry was.
Sirius just needed to see that he was still alive.
The boys ran through hallways that were filthy with dust, grime, and what Sirius thought was blood. Neither slowed until they had went down at least three flights of stairs and found themselves in a dark dungeon.
“I wish we had wood, for a fire,” Neville said when they stopped to wipe their sweat and catch their breath. “Some sort of torch we could use to see more than three feet in front of us.”
Harry peeled off his jacket and tied it around his waist while he made a scathing sound at Neville’s, admittedly, stupid comment.
“Cause you know what would really make these games easier? A fuckin’ light for everyone else to find us,” Harry bit out, echoing Sirius’s precise thought. “We need water.”
They did.
The boys avoided the blood bath, but they left with no supplies at all.
It reminded Sirius that he had passed his cuff to Remus and he needed to retrieve it. Possibly Neville had earned a sponsor or two, more when those who sponsored the dead kids would transfer their sponsorship to someone still alive. Sirius could send a bottle of water to tide them over and hope that Neville shared it.
With one last look at where Harry and Neville were looking for a place to turn into a hideout, Sirius crossed the room back to where Remus stood alone before a monitor.
The boy on the monitor wasn’t Anderson, the big and powerful boy who fought Tonks’s twins, but the small one. The small boy had found a giant room with exposed ceiling beams that he made a nest in with his jacket laid down like a pallet. The boy was crying silently while he picked through the supplies he managed to swipe in the beginning.
A knife, a bag of nuts, a bottle to put water in if he could find some.
“Trent’s going to break my heart, I just know it,” Remus said bleakly. “It’s sick.”
It was sick, Sirius never disputed that.
“How do you do it?” Sirius asked him. Remus had been a mentor one year longer than Sirius and Sirius never saw him even drinking at the games.
District eleven kids won just a touch more often than twelve did. Remus had to be carrying around the weight of those lives on his shoulders, on his soul, but he only shrugged.
“I do it because I must,” Remus said simply. He tore his eyes off his boy, Trent, and held out Sirius’s communicuff. “Come over here and I’ll show you how to use it.”
Sirius followed Remus to a quiet corner of the room where they passed a table covered in food and drinks. Remus made himself a small plate, Sirius took one roll.
If he ate anything more then he would be sick. If he ate nothing then he would be sick.
Sirius had to stay well long enough to see Harry through to the end… whatever that may be.
Remus picked at his food while he walked Sirius through the use of the cuff. Ludo Bagman arrived while Sirius was studying the holographic map - the castle had five floors, a dungeon, and hidden rooms in the four towers - to interview some of the mentors.
As none of their tributes had done anything particularly interesting aside from survive, Sirius and Remus were spared. Bellatrix from One, Barty from Two, and Snivellus from Three were recorded making a few comments about their tributes in the career pack. Tonks was asked about her tributes and even Karkaroff was asked about the beautiful girl from his district, though Sirius didn’t see her involved in any fighting at all.
“I hope she doesn’t win,” Remus confided to Sirius in a voice hardly more than a whisper. When Sirius only raised a mildly curious brow, more interested in finding the screen that showed any credits his tributes were gifted by sponsors, Remus explained.
“You know she’ll be another Bellatrix or Tonks, sold out to the highest bidder.”
Sirius’s blood went cold at the silent threat that all the victors faced. The attractive ones, the ones with loved ones to threaten, were often sold out to Capitol citizens who either paid for the pleasure or did something to earn it from the President.
Sirius couldn’t be forced to do anything like that, not with James, Lily, and Regulus all dead. They could have threatened baby Harry, but they never did.
Tonks though… Sirius subtly looked over at Tonks and her young body, clear skin, pretty pink hair. Bellatrix was pretty enough too, if someone didn’t mind the insanity that shined in her eyes.
“It’s sick,” Sirius said very quietly, repeating Remus’s prior statement. Sirius inspected Remus quickly and noted his decent looks. There were a few scars on Remus’s face, scars that someone decided he would keep from his games, and wondered if he had been forced on a similar path. “Did you…?”
“Me? No.” Remus laughed, bitter and jaded. “I’d have to care about my life for them to properly threaten me. I have no one at home and it will stay that way.”
Sirius nodded and then went back to his cuff. There were ‘star screens’ that could be toggled between the two boys. They showed their current ranking in the games, their fan favorite ranking, and a tally of credits that could be used on the gift shop screen.
Neville’s screen was the first one to show for Sirius. He was one out of eighteen, in fourteenth place for fan favorites, and had one single credit.
The transfer rate of money placed by sponsors to tribute credits changed as the game went on, Remus explained to Sirius. A large donation in the beginning could be fifty credits, when there were six tributes left it might only be worth five credits.
There was so much work into just sending gifts… Sirius had no idea.
When Sirius swapped the screen from Neville to Harry, he was sure there had been a mistake.
Harry was in dead last place for fan favorite, but he had already amassed twenty-nine credits.
Sirius’s head whipped around and locked on Harry. Even from across the room, Sirius could hear Harry’s mouth running with endless insults about the Capitol and the games.
The Capitol pets were offended and punished Harry by not choosing him as their favorite, which meant… which meant Harry was being sponsored by the people of Panem. While Sirius had stressed over Harry offending the richer citizens of their country, Harry had endeared himself to the true citizens with his fire and his hateful opinions.
Those in the districts that heavily outweighed the Capitol had chosen a champion to support.
Harry didn’t want the Capitol support anyway, but Sirius wondered if he would be pleased to know that with every insult he spewed, another half of a credit rolled in.
It might not be enough to get him through the game, but it was something.
And, for a tribute, something was better than nothing.