Not exactly a tag today, but this is a cool prompt I really wanted to do, so I figured, “Hey, it's close enough!” Prompt:   ...

Tag Week: TWNP Prompt

Alexa Mintah

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Not exactly a tag today, but this is a cool prompt I really wanted to do, so I figured, “Hey, it's close enough!”

Prompt: 

Pick any character (or several characters) you've created or read about and place them in either a) the midst of a well- known historical event or b) in the setting of a popular dystopia.  

With that in mind, Rebecca and I decided to an HG fanfic featuring our characters from Becoming Brave. If you haven’t read the first part of the fanfic, you can check it out over on Rebecca’s blog, Random Fandom Fanatics and then continue with this bit here. :)

Fedora

You’d think getting reaped would be the worst part. It wasn’t.

The worst part was that I got reaped with Carmen, my adopted sister. She was decent under most circumstances, but put her in something life-threatening, and she crumbled like those cookies that somehow have to do with the suckiness of life.

Her parents came to see us off, which only made her sobbing fits worse, and the keening wails didn’t stop, not the whole train ride to the capitol. Only once we actually got there and it seemed she must’ve completely dehydrated herself did her waterworks finally quit.

“Do you... do you think we could win, Fedora?” she asked me just before bed that first night in the capitol. We, she said, like there was an option where we could both come out on top.

I thought about telling her the truth; I thought about telling her a lie. In the end, I decided she might as well learn now: “No, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give it all we’ve got.”

***

And she did. All through training, all through the Games, down to the moment I ditched her so I wouldn’t have to kill her myself, I’m sure down to the late-night moment the cannon boomed and I saw her picture in the sky.

I ripped at some grass, but didn’t let my pain spread any farther. I had to conserve my energy and give winning all I had.

***

They found me the next morning, the Pembroke brothers. I still don’t know why they didn’t kill me immediately. Especially considering that I certainly tried to kill one of them.

I’d gone to a stream to refill my water bottle and bumped into the younger brother as I turned to leave. We both froze for a moment and then he lurched away from me as I lunged towards him, fingers scrabbling for my only weapon.

“Vil!” the boy screeched, somehow making himself heard over our massive amount of splashing.

Vil--?

Shoot. His brother.

I lunged again--this time to get away--only to have something crash into my middle and send me flying back into the stream. An arm wound around my neck, but before he could pin me in place, I threw my elbow back, clobbering him in the face. I then shot forwards, my movements a mixture of wild lurching, splashing, and tripping.

When I felt like I had enough distance between us, I pivoted, using the loose pebbles on the streambed to turn, knees slightly bent and arms out so I wouldn’t lose my balance, and looked my opponent over. Average height, average build, not particularly muscular. But he looked determined and ready to kill.

I stared him down, prepared as he was. My eyes darted to the other one, but he seemed like he’d just... stopped where he was, frozen and watching us.

Well, that would make him easier to take care of.

The not-useless brother and I had taken our next steps towards each other, when the coward boy’s voice rang over us, “Vil!”

Vil whipped around to look at his brother, but I didn’t take the opportunity to jump him--because just then a knife flew between us, inches from me, a centimeter from him, exactly where Vil’s face had been a second before.

We sprang back from each other, causing another round of splashing, and turned to face the group of five that had come through the trees on the opposite bank while our backs were turned. They were all stocky and muscular, carrying several weapons each, with stupid sadistic grins plastered across their faces.

Careers.

Vil shot me a look I interpreted to mean, “We’ll finish this when we’re other people aren’t trying to kill us.” I gave him a quick nod to show I understood, and just like that, we rushed out of the water and turned to face our mutual enemies: me with a self-made slingshot and a sack of sharp rocks, and Vil with the first thing he saw on the bank, which happened to be a half-branch that had broken off a tree.

We were badly outnumbered, but we managed to hold them off until Vil’s brother had unfrozen and run out of range, then we charged forward with his club and my homemade slingshot. Not the best battle plan ever, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do if you’d rather not die immediately.

I think that, at first, the careers were too shocked to react since we had the courage (or the insanity, depends on your view of life) to actually charge them. But as Vil whacked one in the head with the large end of his club and I clocked another with a sharp shard of rock, surprise cost those two their lives and the remaining were shaken awake from their slumber. They watched us warily as we danced backwards, their assortment of knives versus a glorified stick and a sack of pebbles.

As if reading my thoughts, Vil shot me a quick smirk. “You know,” he said, “I always loved underdog stories.”

And with that, he swung his stick and I shot a volley of stones, all while retreating since we could no longer handle close combat. We were going to be beaten, I could tell. There was no way our crude weapons could stand against their Capitol-provided knives.

Then I had an idea.

I started to shrink behind Vil. He didn’t have time to look back at me, but I could hear the anger in his tone as I edged out of fighting range. “What are you doing?”

“Knock out their weapons!” I replied, hoping the careers wouldn’t hear me and that if they did, they wouldn’t get what my actual plan was.

“Ah.” Understanding overtook his tone, and he started swinging again, this time, not trying to connect with bodies, but with weapons alone. Once the District One boy’s knife was sent flying from his hands, and he was nursing a hurt fist, I stepped out from behind Vil and shot a quick two stones at the career boy’s face.

And then we were exactly even.

Vil nodded at me, and we repeated that strategy with the next; but by the time we came down to the last, a District Two girl, she’d caught on and was avoiding Vil, going for me or attempting cheap shots at him instead of taking his club head on. True, there was only one of her and two of us, but her weapons were far sharper and far more precise.

And I was out of ideas.

A knife flew out of the trees. It glanced off the guard strapped to the District Two girl’s arm, but it distracted her long enough for Vil and I to dispatch her together. We whirled around to see who had saved us this time--and saw none other than Vil’s useless younger brother, frozen behind us again, looking like someone ought to restart his heart or something.

“Cec...” Vil trailed off, “how did you...” He stopped as we both remembered the knife thrown at Vil when this whole fight against the careers began.

As Vil ran up to make sure his brother was okay (and didn’t have permanent brain damage from being in shock), I assessed the younger Pembroke. So he’d thrown a knife and distracted our opponent long enough for us to not die. Maybe he wasn’t entirely useless after all.

Only, you know, mostly useless.

After a moment, Vil turned back to me. The companionship that had been in his eyes earlier was gone; he now watched me with the wariness that came from knowing better than to trust someone, but still offering them the benefit of the doubt.

He approached me, and I knew with one swing of that club, he could take me out.

Instead, he held out his right hand. “Viliam Pembroke.”

“Fedora.” I shook, ignoring his raised eyebrows and the questions I knew he wanted to ask about my name. “You’re not going to kill me?”

“Not yet.” He smirked. “Fortunately for you, we make too good of a team for that.”

***

So what’d you think? Hope you guys are enjoying the story!

If I’m not mistaken, Rebecca intends to post the whole story on her blog, so you could check it regularly (or follow her, wink wink) for updates on that. Also, it’ll go up on my fanfiction.net and her wattpad. Hope to see you all over there!

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