Fic: Milk of Human Kindness (Sunrise on the Reaping)

[bookishwench]

Snow had almost grown used to how stupid the tributes usually were. A handful of them had some intelligence, enough to survive, particularly if it was paired with latent viciousness and cruelty. Others, though still very young, even showed signs of genius. Those handled the Games with cleverness, sometimes even succeeding in winning without drawing blood, like the girl from 3 a few years ago. However, most victors were merely strong and ruthless, which suited him fine.

What never ceased to amaze him, though, was how completely oblivious every one of them was to something that should have been obvious. Once they were in the arena, they were fully aware of cameras hidden in various places, but it never occurred to any of them that they themselves were the microphones. Those tiny trackers hidden deep beneath their skin did more than just provide their location to the Gamemakers. They also allowed President Snow to hear everything they said. He had never permitted this audio to be used for the public broadcasts, but he kept a tiny receiver in his ear during the Games so that he could eavesdrop on the tributes whenever he wished.

He should, have known that action would someday have a very high price.

Snow had been more interested than normal in this Quarter Quell even before the Reaping. The arena was remarkable, a true marvel with its Poison Paradise theme, and he had found some of the traps darkly humorous. Deadly butterflies, killer flamingos, homicidal squirrels? The designer must have been partaking of some ridiculously strong drugs to come up with those nasty surprises.

Then the “riot,” as that fool Drusilla called it, happened in 12. He had been watching the live feed, of course, from the privacy of his home when he had seen something that made him drop his glass of merlot, shattering the crystal on the floor.

It wasn’t any of the tributes who had caught his eye. It was a girl who had stepped in to protect what appeared to be the mother of a boy who had tried to run. He didn’t care about that. It happened from time to time, not that the populace ever saw it, and replacements were easy to find. But the brief glimpse of the girl, hardly more than a flash of dark hair and eyes that were snapping with fire, was enough to land like a blow to his chest. She was so like . . . her. He had not spoken her name for decades, not even in his mind. Dr. Gale had ordered all the recordings of her Games to be destroyed, or rather she thought she had. One copy had either escaped her notice or been spared without comment, one Snow kept in his possession but had never viewed, not once in all the intervening years. By now, she was dead and gone, whether on that day long ago when he had seen the truth through her lies or, if she had somehow escaped, by the passage of time and hardship.

The one thing Coriolanus Snow had not foreseen was a living image of Lucy Gray, as fierce and prideful as she had ever been, to suddenly appear on his living room television as he sat there in his pajamas.

Then the boy had tried to save her, been beaten, been roped into being the second male tribute from 12. Snow had known in an instant. The love in the boy’s eyes was obvious, and a very strange sensation happened. It took him a moment to identify it. Pity. Not for the Reaping. That was a necessity that didn’t warrant mourning. No, that boy really believed the Covey girl loved him, and there was no doubt what his own feelings were. Even if he hadn’t been sent out to most likely die, misery would have awaited him soon. Perhaps it was better this way: to die without ever knowing the treacherous heart of the girl he adored. Maybe it would have been better for Snow as well, for all of Panem, if he had suffered a similar fate. Or perhaps not. He would have died with clean hands, but then, the world was so much better under his watchful and wise guidance now, wasn’t it.

He should have known the boy would be trouble, that only someone equally wild and headstrong would have drawn the attention of a girl like that. The death of the rather pathetic girl from 12 had apparently unhinged him, and he made a ridiculous attempt at a public demonstration of Snow’s responsibility for the corpse that he placed at his feet. But Snow hadn’t been looking at the girl. He had been watching how the boy bowed as he presented her, the same elaborate performer’s bow he had seen before.

He had the girl replaced with a very close look-alike. Really, whoever had managed to find the child needed to be given a generous reward before they were killed to prevent anyone from finding out who she really was. Truthfully, she was no one, just the child of some District 11 saboteur who had caused a bit of unimaginative trouble. No one of note. He didn’t even know her name, not that it mattered.

Meanwhile, he had been keeping a close eye on the hidden cameras in the Covey girl’s cell. She had, of course, been arrested quickly, and she should have been executed already, but Snow had intervened. It wasn’t mercy. She could be extremely useful in any number of ways. So far, all she had done was weep and rage, but time alone in a cell took its toll. It was a form of torture, especially for the Covey, and torture, as Sun Tzu said, exposed the truth about a person. Oh, not the ridiculous lies they would undoubtedly spout in order to get the pain to stop. Those were almost universally useless. No, it was the slipping off of the mask all people wear, the one that covers the dark, weak, and cruel bits beneath a layer of manners or pretended civility. He watched and waited for it to fall away. Meanwhile, he had gone to present the look-alike to the tribute from 12.

And Haymitch Abernathy had tried to kill him. That was before he even saw her.

It wasn’t the first or even the fifty-first time someone had attempted murdering Snow. He’d lost count of the number of enemies and rivals who had attempted as much, but it was rarely from one so young, and never before by using milk as a weapon. Snow had really been very ill at the time, but he was still fully aware of the boy finding the milk and then drinking every drop. It had all been there in his peripheral vision, which was, admittedly, extraordinarily good. The boy couldn’t have known that. It wasn’t his fault, Snow supposed, that the boy didn’t know enough to protect himself, not from him, not from the girl.

He recognized the workmanship of the flint striker at once, but the inscription! A lie, of course, but such a cruelly beautiful lie. L.D. His mind raced through an endless list of possibilities, but finding the name was Lenore Dove? A shade of gray. Perhaps the shade of another Gray was present. Snow didn’t believe in ghosts, of course. That was nonsense. But his heartbeat may have gone out of rhythm for a moment. He had his proof. Forty years had passed, enough time for her to have bred and died and her child to have bred and died and that child to have reached sixteen. But even if she had managed to escaped, he had still killed her. Intent was everything.

He had presented the replacement girl as almost an afterthought. Snow’s mind was whirling, and he felt sick again. He told himself it was the oysters, but he knew that was a convenient excuse. He went home, vomited two more times, then watched the live feed from Lucy Gray’s cell.

No. Not Lucy Gray. Lenore Dove.

The girl was asleep in the Peacekeeper’s base, but he still watched her. He zoomed in close on her sleeping face, expecting to see only the relaxed features of unconsciousness, but hers wasn’t a peaceful expression. She flinched. A nightmare, probably. He wondered what was running through her mind. Some things even he couldn’t know.

It became a pastime for him to watch her, even during the Games, and eventually he realized it was bordering on an obsession. He kept a small window open on his television to keep an eye on her at all times as the Games rolled forward on their bloody path. In his ear, however, he was usually listening to her devoted lover. This Haymitch—a ridiculous name—was an interesting fellow. After their little conversation, it was obvious he had no intention of coming out of the Games alive. Good boy. He would die believing his girl’s lies, his loved ones would live, and within a year, everyone would forget him. Fine. There were much worse ways to die. Snow had invented some of them.

Then two mistakes happened.

The first was the reckless plan to bomb the water tank, and oh, the sheer headache of having to figure out who needed to be executed for that was already starting to form behind Snow’s eyes. The water had been intended for another bit of drama involving the volcano, but the original searing hot lava that would have turned into poison steam when the tanks were emptied had to be changed at the last moment to that inferior lava that merely caused chemical burns and then melted away. More of a disaster than that, though, was Haymitch had somehow managed to survive the blast. Snow was relatively sure that hadn’t been his intention. Had he died, his loved ones would have been safe. But he hadn’t managed it.

The second problem had been the death of two Capitol citizens who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, namely trying to repair the malfunctioning arena when they ran into armed tributes. Fools. All of them, really, tributes and workers. Someone should have checked the remaining trackers before sending them in. But they hadn’t, and then they were dead. That would have been a little inconvenient on its own, but the cameras were, obviously, not going to broadcast that. However, one of them had an older brother who worked in the control room and had seen the whole thing. He was, understandably, enraged, and he had programed the mutts to attack the two girls in spite of Snow’s order that one of the District 2 tributes was to be the victor. One of them killers was slaughtered by a pack of those ludicrous golden squirrels, the other by genetically altered flamingoes. Neither was a pretty death, but then the death of the young man from the control room had been far worse. Snow had seen to that.

That left one from 12, one from 2, and the small child from 6 who had managed to survive by hiding for several days. He didn’t like the odds. While 6 would probably be a docile enough victor, her tracker showed her vital signs were far from good. She might well die of natural causes even if she survived the arena, and that was always a bother. He doubted they would have the luck to find two good replacements in such a short time, and this one would have to fool her own family, well, if he didn’t eliminate them. That might be more merciful, he supposed. Still, the best outcome was 2 as the victor.

Snow watched as Haymitch found the child, and some soft-hearted citizen sent them a king’s ransom in the form of chocolate and custard. She was able to eat it with the other’s help, so perhaps there was still some hope for her. Fine. But Haymitch still needed to die.

He was pondering which group of mutts to set on him when his gaze was drawn back to the Covey girl’s holding cell. She was asleep. All concept of time must have ebbed away for her in the windowless room, and she slept a good deal of the time. That was normal. Many of his prisoners kept in solitary confinement passed the time through sleep when that was an option. Often enough, he made sure it wasn’t.

His eyes narrowed, looking at the girl’s face. She was wincing again, but he also saw her lips move. She was talking in her sleep, but it was so faint that he couldn’t hear any words.

“Control,” he said firmly, knowing he was immediately connected with the Peacekeeper who was handling the feed. “Increase the volume in the prisoner’s cell. Five times should do.”

He was aware this would probably cause the power in the district houses to go out, but that was an acceptable sacrifice.

Almost at once, the static from her feed increased, then leveled out as the computers adjusted. He stared at her, straining to hear.

“Haymitch.”

The word was said so tenderly even in sleep that he knew there was no deception even as much as he tried to convince himself otherwise.

“Love you like all fire.”

Snow pursed his lips in consideration, having to deal with the incontestable evidence in front of him. She had no reason to lie. In fact, it would have been impossible. The only logical conclusion was the girl genuinely loved this Haymitch.

Snorting, he turned off the feed from the cell for the first time in days, but her image had burned itself into his mind’s eye. He had comforted himself many times in the last forty years with the certainty that Lucy Gray had played him for a fool, had never cared for him and merely used him to survive. She had deserved her fate. But even Snow had moments in the darkest nights, when his idiotic wife was sound asleep and snoring or after her long-desired death when he stared into the shadows on the ceiling of his bedroom and wondered if perhaps, just perhaps, he had erred. What if he had killed the only living thing that he had ever loved since the death of his mother? The light of day swept that uncertainty aside, but in the depths of what passed for his heart, the question still sank its teeth into him, a wound that refused to ever fully close. Hating her was so much easier.

Snow turned his attention back to Haymitch, now snatching a few precious hours of rest up in a tree beside 6. His tracker showed he was deeply asleep, but that wouldn’t last. He watched him, fully aware this was probably the last time he would sleep unless he became the victor. Haymitch’s breathing was slow, steady, but then his eyes began to move beneath their lids, and his own lips formed words that Snow didn’t need to strain to hear.

“Love you like all fire.”

Snow raised his eyes to the ceiling in a show of disgust that he was finding it harder to pretend was real, but his mind was already moving. The child might make it, but it wasn’t likely. The possibility of Haymitch’s victory was too strong to ignore any longer. If he survived, the girl would have to die, along with various others. Snow never made a threat without following through with it. Being weak enough to grant absolution was how one lost power.

But perhaps, he reasoned, he might show the smallest bit of mercy. Not to Haymitch. Not even to the girl. To himself.

The gift arrived the next morning, its chiming parachute drifting down like a present from the gods. In this case, the basket was a gift from the god of death, Snow himself. It offered Haymitch a choice, but there was no doubt in his mind what the good-hearted idiot would do. He was smart enough to know it was poison. The shape of the pitcher was less a hint and more a sign with letters ten feet high. Now all he had to do was drink it. Never had a gift been poisoned before, and he supposed there would be some fuss about that. It wasn’t really acceptable according to the rules and might even set a dangerous precedent of allowing citizens to change the outcome of the Games in the future by killing tributes who were challenging their favorites.

Snow didn’t care. All that mattered was that if Haymitch drank it, he wouldn’t have to kill Lucy Gray a second time.

He saw the moment of decision on the boy’s face, the acceptance of his death as a way to save his girl, his mother, his brother, and anyone else Snow hadn’t tracked down yet. He was even saving Snow, though he didn’t know it.

“Drink it,” he whispered. “Damn you, drink it.”

The ear-splitting scream of the child was almost too much for even Snow’s jaded sensibilities. He watched as one of the grizzliest scenes ever in the Games spilled itself across his screen in blood red. Haymitch dropped the pitcher as he ran, shattering it, the pristine emerald grass withering where it splashed. And in that moment, Snow realized he had failed. He had seen it often enough in the Games: rage could turn the weakest, frailest tribute into an unstoppable force. If ever any death could provoke that outcome, this was the one. He knew what would happen, and as usual, he was right.

Haymitch won. The girl from 2 was dead, and that was the end.

Snow kept Lenore Dove alive while the boy tried so very hard to behave through the interminable victory parties. It didn’t matter. Her death was inevitable now. She breathed and spoke and slept and moved, but she was already dead, and each time that he was horrified to find he was feeling traces of grief, he poured another punishment on Haymitch’s head. It was the boy’s fault. He should have died. There were thousands of opportunities in the arena, and the coward hadn’t taken them. It was on his head.

Eventually, Snow couldn’t prolong it anymore, and the plans were set in motion: the housefire, the poisoned candy. The cameras that dotted District 12 were trained on the meadow that morning, and he watched her die, watched the boy’s pitiful efforts to save her, watched his world fall apart as the life left her eyes.

Snow’s face was impassive, a mask. Not a drop of humanity remained behind that stony expression. He had finally murdered himself.