The End
Harry James Potter
Tribute
Tribute, that was it.
They were only calling him a tribute, nothing else. Harry wasn’t being remembered as a rebel or a son, not a godson or a lover. There was no mark of the game Harry had played or how hard he fought for his prize of freedom.
Tribute.
Sirius stared down at the wooden grave marker and wondered who made it, who had been the liar to carve that single word in the simple cross.
To call Harry a tribute only was foolish, ridiculous. It was a way to show that as brightly as he burned, the Capitol had crushed him. It was a lie though, a filthy lie.
The Capitol didn’t win, they lost. Harry won the Hunger Games, Harry did it with his speeches and his fire, his determination to play and finish the games only on his terms.
“There will never be another tribute like our Harry,” James murmured, his hand on Sirius’s shoulder. “Nobody will ever forget his performance.”
“It wasn’t a fucking performance.” Harry stepped forward and kneeled on his own grave, his fingers ghosting over the cross with his name. “It was all I had.”
All he had.
The three of them stayed in place for as long as they could, taking in the neat row of Potters, each one dead and gone. Only Harry and James came back for Sirius, they came back the second Sirius made it home.
For as long as Sirius lived, they would never leave him again.
“Is it time now?” James asked, one hand on his son’s shoulder and one on Sirius’s. “We don’t want to be late.”
“Why?” Harry stood up and he was shorter than his father, unblemished by the Games, completely free. “What will they do? Kill us?”
Sirius laughed with them, he laughed at the threat that carried no weight. For anyone else, it might. But what did a death threat mean to three dead men? There might have been air in Sirius’s lungs, but he was as gone as James and Harry were.
They still walked back toward the town together, eternally together. There were banners hung with Panem’s seal and Harry liked the lightning bolts that had been painted on them.
“The tent kids,” he said knowingly, tracing the red paint with his fingers.
“Or the girl,” Sirius said, nodding to another banner that had been covered with Neville Longbottom’s name. Sirius didn’t know her name, but he saw her at his house sometimes. She brought bread, water. It was the girl who Longbottom volunteered for, the one who found her spirit after his death.
“Blaise will like it,” James told Harry, patting his back to get him back on track. “If they let him see the District.”
Sirius doubted that they would. As much as he had seen after Blaise’s win in the arena, the Districts were being flooded with peacekeepers and rebels were being killed on television. Viewing was mandatory for their executions and Sirius had seen men and women, children, all hung from a noose.
When Remus Lupin had been hung in Eleven, Sirius waited to see if he would show up. Another failed Victor, another Capitol defect. Sirius would be next, surely, but maybe they knew that he couldn’t be hurt.
The entire District filled the town square, all of them tense and strained under the guns aimed out in the crowds. Sirius should have made his way to the stage, but a small hand - solid, real - stopped him.
“You can stay with us, Mister Black.”
Sirius looked down in mild amusement while James laughed his ass off. The girl, the girl with the blonde hair and the silver eyes, gazed up evenly at him. Over her shoulder were Longbottom’s parents, both of them old and grey before they should be.
“We’re having dinner after,” the man said, his face round like his son’s had been. “If you’d like, we have a spot for you.”
“Awfully nice of them considering you let their son die,” Harry pointed out. And it was, Sirius nodded even though he knew he’d never go.
Sirius let their son die to try and save James’s son and then he lost them both.
All of the air in the square filled with tension as the microphone on stage staticed into life. Sirius squinted at the stage and saw Snape standing stiffly, surely melting under all the black clothes he wore.
“What is this? A funeral?” James whispered, grinning and winking at Sirius.
“Shut up,” Harry hissed, straightening up when Snape announced the winner of the seventy-fourth Hunger Games.
The others clapped, sporadic, muted, while a golden victor joined Snape on stage.
Sirius didn’t clap, he only stared at the stage at a boy as dead as Harry, as lifeless and dull. The Capitol dressed him up in a golden suit, they put a grotesque crown on his head, but Blaise Zabini was dead and gone.
“He looks miserable,” Harry said mournfully. “All that spirit and fight, gone.”
“He’s a shell with his heart gone,” James murmured sadly. “The Games changed him, you changed him.”
“Nobody ever wins,” Sirius whispered to them. Harry won and James won, they were free. The rest of them? The tributes who were crowned at the end? They weren’t winners.
“Hello.” Blaise’s voice filled the square and Sirius could hear his pain, his longing. It was echoed in Harry’s eyes, all of the want that died with him.
“I am here today to talk about my victory in the arena,” Blaise lied, his mentor lying in his silence beside him. “I was told to tell you all how grateful I am to the Capitol for allowing me to live and talk about the riches and glory I’ve earned as a Victor.”
“Tell ‘em,” Harry breathed, his eyes locked on the stage. “Tell them the truth, Blaise.”
The wind blew and Blaise breathed it in as his spine straightened and the cold Capitol boy inhaled Harry’s spirit.
“I’m not grateful to the Capitol,” Blaise said, stepping away from Snape and becoming his own man before them. Blaise found the Longbottom’s in the crowd, “The Capitol took your child.” He looked at Sirius and they shared the loss, the pain.
“The Capitol took Harry from us,” Blaise told Sirius. “They took him, but they never broke him.”
They didn’t. They tried, they tried to use him and bend him and break him, and they failed. Harry went into the Games on his own and he left on his own.
At Blaise’s mention of Harry, there was a shout from the crowd. Sirius looked for the sound and there were a group of kids - dirty, starving, desperate - that raised their hands. Every one of them had a middle finger raised as they began throwing stones at the peacekeepers, screaming Harry’s name.
“HARRY WON!” they yelled, their stones bouncing off the shields of the peacekeepers and inciting the others to throw their stones. “FOR HARRY!”
The girl beside Sirius dropped his hand and found her own stone to throw. “FOR NEVILLE!”
It became chaotic and Sirius was pushed away, pushed into bodies of desperate citizens who wanted to see their champion avenged. They stayed quiet until Blaise was before them and he was all of the reminder they needed of who was missing.
Everyone could see Blaise and know that there was something missing beside him, someone who should have been there.
There were gunshots and Sirius screamed for James, screamed for him when James was only chanting with Harry.
“BLAISE!” Harry screamed, his body straining while James kept him back. “BLAISE!”
“WHEN THE CAPITOL TELLS YOU TO BE GRATEFUL, REMEMBER HARRY!” Blaise yelled from the stage. “REMEMBER HARRY JUST AS HE REMEMBERED EVERY CHILD IN THE ARENA! REMEMBER HIM AND REMEMBER HOW HE KNEW WHO THE ENEMY WAS, WHO THE ENEMY WILL BE UNTIL WE CHANGE IT!”
The crowd was screaming, all of them knew pain and loss and they knew Blaise. They knew what it felt like to lose someone they loved and how that wound never healed.
Someone knocked Sirius’s shoulder as they ran with the others to charge at the barricades protecting the peacekeepers. They were walls, walls creating a different arena than the one Harry escaped from.
Sirius landed hard on his back and clenched his eyes shut, too far gone to feel any pain or humiliation. Everyone around him ran away, nobody wanted to be the one to help the District Embarrassment back on his feet. Maybe nobody noticed, nobody except for Harry and James as they watched Sirius decide if it was worth even standing back up.
Harry would stand, but Harry was dead. James would stand, but James was dead. All that was left was Sirius and he had never been the one who stood.
Sirius wasn’t the one to lead armies of rebels, he was too high to throw a single stone. Sirius was an embarrassment and he was alone on the inside. Sirius lost James, he lost Harry.
And they were never really going to return to him.
When Sirius finally opened his eyes and gazed up in the dim purple light of twilight, he had the perfect view to see the planes that flew above their district, each one emblazoned with the Seal of Panem.
Harry and James disappeared, fading away into the nothing where Sirius’s sick mind pulled them from.
The sudden silence in the square was deafening.
Heartbreaking.
Oppressive.