Chapter Text
Sebastian made a point of sleeping in on the morning of the reaping. The hours of waiting, biting his nails down to the quick were no good for him. He would rather rush through the motions of getting ready, barely making it to the Justice Building in time with his shirt still untucked and his hair unruly from his pillow. If he was being honest, he was hiding. It was easier to lie to his sister when his shirt wasn’t already soaked through with sweat, his palms clammy from clenching and unclenching his fists.
The air in his room was already hot and heavy as he lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying desperately not to listen to the growing swell of voices passing outside of his window. He longed to slip past everyone, to dart into the forest where nobody could see him and lose himself in the familiarity of the berries, the leaves, the shrubs. He felt more at home out there surrounded by the brilliant greens of the trees and grasses than he ever did inside the fences of District Twelve, where the scant grass was bleached a sad yellow and trampled underfoot.
He knew it would be impossible to sneak away today, with so many peacekeepers crawling over the district. They would catch him before he even made it through the fence. Still, he itched for the woods. Tonight, he promised himself. After the reaping, long after Anne and Solomon had gone to bed, he would let his legs carry him as far into the dense woodland as they could. Already he ached for the burn of his lungs, the cushioned sound of his footsteps as he ran.
It was going to be a long day.
He glanced at the clock with a groan, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. Anne had probably already been up for hours if she had managed to sleep the night before at all. He couldn’t hear her moving around in the kitchen below him, her tell-tale humming noticeably missing.
If he knew his sister (and Sebastian knew his sister like he knew his own mind), there was only one place he would find her, as predictable as clockwork.
Anne was exactly where he had expected her to be, perched on the roof in the same spot they had sat in since they were twelve and getting ready for their first reaping. Despite the heat, she had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, her knees drawn up to her chest. Something panged inside Sebastian at the sight of his sister, somehow looking smaller and more fragile now than she had five years ago when they were knocking on the door of adolescence.
He couldn’t remember how they figured out how to get up here, how they determined which branches on the tree next to the house would support their weight as they climbed, but it had become as familiar to them as their own names. The roof was their safe space, a place only for them, holding them safe above the dangers of the world below.
“You know Solomon would kill you if he saw you up here?”
She turned to smile up at him, reaching a hand out to tug at his sleeve and encourage him to sit on the warm tiles next to her.
“The climb near enough did the job for him. I almost blacked out climbing over that last ledge”
Sebastian raised an eyebrow at her to show his disapproval, nudging her shoulder with his as he sat down. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out a couple of rolls that he had nabbed from the kitchen, dropping one into her lap. She grinned, scooping it up so she could turn it in her hands, picking at the crust.
“It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think?” She asked, watching a pair of birds as they pinwheeled overhead.
She was right. There wasn’t a single cloud to be seen, the sky an unbroken stretch of blue that seemed to go on forever. The heat in District Twelve was usually so sticky, but there was a light, refreshing breeze that danced through the leaves of the trees that made it entirely more bearable. It felt impossible that on a day like this two people they knew, that they had grown up with, would be sent to fight for their lives.
“Absolutely,” Sebastian replied, leaning back on his elbows to join his sister in looking skyward. “Fantastic weather for sacrificing children.”
“Sebastian!” Anne snickered, shoving him with both hands and trying to hide the smile that was tugging at the corner of her lips. “That’s not funny! Not today.”
A moment of silence passed, and suddenly the bread in her lap was the most interesting thing, her eyes fixed on it as she peeled away chunks and laid them to rest on the roof next to her. He had known that she wouldn’t eat it - she never ate before the reaping - but it had been worth a shot. When his sister spoke again her voice was tiny, as if she had shrunk into herself next to him.
“How many times is your name in the bowl today?”
Sebastian paused, but he didn’t need to count, not really. He was distinctly aware of how many slips of paper bearing his name would be waiting for him outside of the Justice Building this afternoon.
“Twenty-four.”
Anne heaved a sigh next to him, shaking her head. “You don’t need to do this, Sebastian. If you would just let me take the tesserae next year-”
He cut her off with a snort. “That’s not going to happen.”
She reached across to him, laying a pallid hand on one of his knees. “It’s my fault that we have to take it in the first place. We both know that if I wasn’t ill, if our money wasn’t being spent on medicine for me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s only fair that I bear some of the weight. Next year-”
“Next year I’ll have twenty-eight entries, and you will have seven, and then we’ll both be out of the reaping pool and we won’t ever have to worry about it again.” His voice was probably harsher than the conversation warranted, but it wasn’t a topic open for debate.
Anne took a deep breath and pulled her hand back, shaking her head. “You’re insufferable sometimes, do you know that?”
Sebastian chuckled, offering her an apologetic smile. “It took you seventeen years to notice? I’m your big brother, it’s in the job description.”
She scoffed, eyebrows disappearing beneath her fringe. “Last time I checked, we were twins.”
“Technically true,” he started, raising a finger, “but I have it on good authority that I got a good two-minute head start on you. Really, Anne, it’s like you don’t even know me.”
Anne rolled her eyes, but the tentative smile had crawled back across her face, all talk of tesserae dropped for the time being. He knew that she would bring it up again at some point after the games, when everything had blown over, and they would come to the exact same conclusion. Sebastian found no shame in the fact that when he wanted to be, he could be incredibly stubborn. If anything, it was something he was proud of.
“We really should be getting down before Solomon spots us up here,” he muttered, eyes following a group he recognised from the year above him at school as they passed by. “Besides, some of us take longer than others to make ourselves pretty for the Capitol.”
She swatted at his shoulder playfully, and under the warmth of the sun, Sebastian pretended that this was the most important part of his day. That there was no illness, no reaping, no swarm of peacekeepers waiting to take his blood and funnel him into a holding pen. Just in case, he thought. Let me enjoy this, just in case.
There had been a time when the two of them got ready together, finding comfort in the long stretches of silence as Anne brushed her hair, and Sebastian ironed the wrinkles out of his one good shirt. As they had gotten older and the number of times his name appeared in the bowl increased it became harder for him to hide the slight tremor of his hands, the way his fingers fumbled the buttons as he tried to get dressed. Eventually, he had made his excuses, and now Sebastian spent the minutes before they left for the reaping in solitude, pacing the length of his room and polishing his shoes within an inch of their lives.
If his sister suspected that at least half an hour of that time was spent sitting on the edge of his bed, telling himself over and over again that they were going to be okay as if he could convince himself it was the truth, she never brought it up.
As expected, Anne had taken longer to get ready. The climb to the roof earlier had exhausted her and her movements had become clumsy with the fatigue, the plait that she could usually throw up in a few minutes taking multiple attempts before she could get the hair to sit right. Sebastian wished desperately that he could remember the way his mother had done it, her fingers almost a blur as they had twisted Anne’s hair into intricate braids.
Solomon was somewhere in the house - they could hear him moving around, muttering things under his breath, but always just out of sight. He hadn’t walked them to the reaping since their first year when they had been so young and scared that he had to practically drag them both there. He would follow them at a distance a little while later, but he wouldn’t stand around the prospective tributes like the rest of the parents and guardians, choosing instead to hang back in the densest part of the rest of the crowd.
Anne was already out of the door, stepping out into the sunlight when a harsh voice broke the quiet in their home.
“Sebastian.”
His uncle had appeared in the doorway behind them, and Sebastian’s hand paused on the doorknob. Solomon’s eyes were empty as he stared his nephew down, holding Sebastian fixed in place with a look that bored into him, glueing him to the floor.
“Make sure you bring her back safe.”
There was a second meaning held in his words that neither of them needed to mention, an unspoken contract that had never been brought up in conversation. It wasn’t the sort of thing that they needed to talk about. If Solomon truly thought that he would let his sister get hurt, whatever happened at the reaping, he was vastly underestimating him. No matter whose name was called, he would protect her.
Sebastian gave his uncle a stiff nod.
“You already know that I will.”
Solomon returned the gesture, the closest thing to affection that passed between them, and Sebastian immediately excused himself, joining Anne out on the porch. She shot him a questioning look, but he shook his head, offering her his arm for the journey.
The walk from their house wasn’t particularly long, their home nestled amongst the neat rows of wooden houses that surrounded the edge of town. They stepped into the stream of people coming in from the Seam, allowing themselves to be swept forwards, away from the warm wood and grass and towards the cold stone of the town centre. Sebastian recognised a few of the people around them from school and the market as they shuffled past, looking deeply uncomfortable in their pressed shirts and neatly hemmed dresses.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Anne moaned, fanning herself weakly with the hand that wasn’t gripping Sebastian as they stepped into the town square.
Directly opposite them the Justice Building was dressed in banners and surrounded by pop-up screens, the squat grey stone unnaturally ugly against the swathes of blue sky. The stage, empty for now, ran the length of the hall entrance, a single microphone sitting squarely in its centre.
“Do try not to, I’m not entirely sure I’m keen on holding your hair back.”
Surrounded by the dense crowd steadily gathering in the town square, the breeze that had seemed so soothing earlier was smothered, and the heat was stifling.
Anne kicked lightly at his ankle, trying to smile.
“I really don’t know how you’re never worried about this.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Sebastian shrugged. Somewhere under the blanket of anxiety, there was a strange mix of pride and guilt at having convinced his sister that this didn’t concern him, that the nausea sweeping over her wasn’t twisting his stomach into knots too. “It’s not going to be us.”
Anne sighed, her eyes fixed firmly on the floor. “You don’t know that.”
He spun her around, holding her face between his hands and smiling in a way that he hoped was reassuring. “Hey, I’m not going to let anything happen to you. In a few hours we’ll be out of here and heading back home, and I’ll see if I can snag us a few strawberries. I know I saw a few bushes when I was out there the other day.” A weak smile spread across Anne’s face - she had always had a sweet tooth. “By the time we go to bed, this will all seem like a bad dream.”
Her eyes had drifted away, so he shook her lightly, snapping her attention back to him. “You’re going to be okay, I promise. I would do anything to protect you.”
The flash of sadness that crossed her face caught him off guard.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He couldn’t fathom what she had meant, but before he had a chance to ask her she was pulling him towards her with a strength that he hadn’t expected, burying her face into his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her as tight as he dared and resting his cheek on top of her head. It somehow felt like an age and a millisecond that they stood there like that, clinging to one another. He wasn’t ready to let go when she stepped away, giving his hand one final squeeze.
“I’ll see you soon, Sebastian.”
He smiled, letting her hand slip out of his as she began to turn away.
“Before you even have a chance to miss me.”
She nodded once, taking a deep breath before she shuffled off to join the queue of girls having their fingers pricked, leaving Sebastian standing alone. He watched and waited for her to get checked in, making a mental note of where she stood amongst the other girls before he went and joined the queue himself. For a reason that he couldn’t quite place, she felt further away than usual. By the time he had found his own place in the town square, a few grim nods exchanged with the boys in his year as he squeezed in next to them, he had completely lost track of her.
Cutting it traditionally close, he had barely slid in amongst his classmates when the door to the Justice Building swung open and the district officials walked out to take their seats on stage.
Ignatia Wildsmith had been the district’s escort for as long as he could remember. Before he was old enough to understand what the reaping really meant, her wild outfits and accent had drawn him to her like a moth to a flame - now he stood surrounded by his peers, the executioner’s axe hanging invisible above all of their heads, it repulsed him.
This year she was covered head to toe in green, thin strips of a delicate material he didn’t recognise running from her ankles up into her hair, streaking through the dark curls that had been left to run down her back in tight ringlets. The wind brushing up against her made the fabric ripple, and the way it shifted made her look like she had been engulfed in brilliant green flames. As she took her position centre stage, Sebastian couldn’t help but think that it was fitting that as they suffocated under the glare of the sun, the Capitol’s representative was laved with the cool kiss of the air.
At the back of the pack came District Twelve’s only victor. Ominis Gaunt’s lips were pressed into a hard line as he took his seat at the back of the stage, leaning his walking stick up against the empty seat beside him. He was almost unrecognisable from the first time they had spoken, nearly four years ago.
Ignatia grinned down at them all, clearing her throat and waving with a wide sweeping gesture that sent an uneasy quiet over the crowd.
“Welcome!” She cried, her voice so shrill Sebastian winced. “Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favour!”
She paused the same way she did each year as if expecting someone to cheer. As was always the case, she was met with only silence.
Her smile wavered for just a moment before she continued. “Well then, before we begin, we have a very special film to watch together, all the way from the Capitol!”
Behind her, Ominis shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and as the film rolled Sebastian found himself paying more attention to the man sitting on the stage than the images that flashed across the screens.
The Sallow twins had been thirteen when Sebastian first met Ominis.
Late one summer evening Sebastian had been poking around the edges of the fence, searching for a lavender bush to help Anne with her sleep. The book he had been buried in suggested that dried sprigs of the flower could help improve sleep quality and duration, so without thinking Sebastian had thrown on his boots, grabbed a herbology pouch and headed out of the door.
He had been searching for a good hour or two when he finally came across a bush bursting with the light purple flowers, the only issue being that it was a good couple of metres on the wrong side of the fence, frustratingly out of reach. He thought of his sister, the sound of her coughing late into the night, and without a moment of doubt he squeezed himself between a few of the loose wires and out of the district boundary.
Sebastian’s pouch was nearly full when a hand had grabbed his collar and pulled him back onto District Twelve ground, yanking him back through the fence and sending him flying.
Solomon’s eyes had burned with a fury Sebastian had only seen on a handful of occasions, and each time it made his blood run cold. The sharp wires of the fence had left thin slices on his forearm from where his sleeves had been rolled up, trickles of blood starting to run down to his fingers. Either Solomon didn’t see it, or he didn’t care to mention it.
“Do you realise how stupid you’ve just been?” He seethed, hands balled up into fists at his sides. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are that I found you first?”
Sebastian was scrambling backwards away from his uncle, scraping his hands on the dry, sharp plants that ran alongside the fence. Solomon was stepping towards him, each stride slow and measured as he followed his nephew, and Sebastian was scared. He was sure that his uncle was about to strike him when a voice reached them from the dark, smooth as silk.
“Mr. Sallow? Please, sir, you must forgive my friend. He was just trying to do me a favour.”
Neither of them had heard Ominis approach, the usual clack of his walking stick muffled by the grass. Solomon slowly turned to face him, eyes lingering on Sebastian until the last possible moment.
“Sebastian was doing you a favour? Outside of the fence?” Solomon’s voice was thick with accusation.
“I’m sorry sir, truly. I begged Sebastian to fetch those flowers for me, I didn’t realise they were on the other side on account of my blindness.” Solomon shuffled his feet awkwardly, turning his gaze to the ground, and Sebastian felt like he had been sent a guardian angel. “Don’t be too harsh on him Mr. Sallow, please. It’s my fault.”
Sebastian’s uncle looked from one boy to the other for a moment, before huffing a sigh and rubbing his face with his hands.
“Don’t let me catch either of you out here again. Sebastian, we will continue this discussion later.”
The two boys waited in silence for him to disappear from view, Ominis’ head tilted slightly as he listened to Solomon’s retreating footsteps.
“You didn’t have to do that, you know?” Sebastian’s voice was small as he stared into the darkness, still sprawled on the floor where his uncle had left him. Behind him Ominis laughed, and the sound made him jump, eyes snapping up to his face.
“You’re most welcome.”
Backlit by the moon, Sebastian wasn’t sure if maybe he hadn’t been sent a guardian angel after all. Ominis’ hair almost seemed to glow, burning a pure white in the cool light, and his eyes. Now he was closer, Sebastian could see that Ominis’ eyes were a milky shade of pale blue that reminded him of the moonstone paper weights that used to sit on his parent’s desks.
He looked amused, but when Sebastian had finally stammered out his thanks Ominis shook his head with a soft smile. Sebastian wasn’t sure that he had ever met anybody as kind, as gentle.
Less than a week later, he was on the train to the Capitol.
As the film drew to a close he searched Ominis’ face for any trace of what he had seen that night, any sign that the person he met four years ago still existed. He came back empty handed.
The last notes of music barely had time to die out in the square before Ignatia was back, expectant eyes sweeping over the groups of children in front of her.
“Shall we start with the gentlemen?” The way she spoke suggested that there was some sort of one-sided joke that everyone else wasn’t in on.
The click of her heels echoed off of the smooth grey stone of the Justice Building as she made her way to one of the glass bowls, filled half-way to the brim with slips of crisp white paper. Her hand paused over it for a second, as if she were in deliberation, before she dove in and swirled the names around, finally grasping one and pulling it out for everyone to see. She beamed at it as she stepped back to the microphone. Everyone around Sebastian held their breath.
The light ‘pop’ of the black tape breaking free of the card as Ignatia unfolded it could have been a gunshot, from the way the boys all flinched.
“Sebastian Sallow!”
For a split second, the world around him stopped moving.
At any other time he would have laughed at the way his voice sounded with her strange accent, lilting and full of emphasis in places there should have been none. Today it sounded entirely foreign to him, and he wondered if his brain was playing tricks on him, hoping he could escape his fate if the name just stopped sounding like it was his.
The boys he stood shoulder to shoulder with heaved a sigh of relief, stepping out of his way to clear a path to the stage. A boy from his class clapped him on the shoulder as he shuffled past, giving him an apologetic half-smile. Sebastian wanted to be angry, to lash out at the people who were able to breathe now that he was being sent off to die, but everything felt so far away, so distant that it was impossible to get a grip on. It took every ounce of his energy to put one foot in front of another, to keep himself moving in the direction of the stage.
Somewhere off to his right there was muffled sobbing. He didn’t let himself turn in the direction of his sister, the last rational part of him left screaming that having a breakdown with the collective eyes of Panem on him probably wasn’t a good idea, to save it for somewhere nobody could see him.
Sebastian paused at the bottom of the stairs, his hand resting on the rail. Ignatia looked down at him, implausibly cheery as she motioned for him to join her. Her lips were moving, and Sebastian realised that she was talking to him, but he couldn’t make out a word she said, her mouth moving faster than his mind could keep up. As he stepped onto the stage, she went to guide him into place, hands hovering over his shoulders as close as they could without actually making contact. If it was because she was disgusted by him, he hoped she knew the feeling was mutual.
She continued to go through the motions as Sebastian stood there, his eyes drifting over the faces of everyone he had ever known, trying to commit as many of them to memory as he could before he left. As he took them all in he ran through the names of his friends, friends of friends, trying to figure out who he would tell Anne to go to, placing bets on who would be the most likely to look after her with him out of the picture.
The list was short, but he was confident that he had come up with one or two ideas as Ignatia made her selection from the other bowl. He was still lost in thought when she called out the only name that could have mattered.
“Oh my - Anne Sallow!”
If the world had stopped moving earlier, now all the air had been sucked away from him and Sebastian couldn’t breathe.
No, this was impossible. Sebastian had made sure of it. He had done everything, made every sacrifice he could to make sure that she would be safe, that the groping fingers of the Capitol wouldn’t find her.
It hadn’t been enough.
Ignatia turned to him, her eyes wide and bright. She was watching him drown, and she was grinning as his head went under the waves.
Sebastian wanted to run to his sister as she stepped into the aisle, looking closer to the twelve year olds at the back of the crowd then the seventeen year olds that surrounded her. Even from where he stood on the stage he could hear her breath rattling as she fought for oxygen, the wheeze as she tried to suck in air as she made her way towards him. She was trying so hard to not appear frail. He wanted to take her hand, to apologise, to hide her away from the hungry eyes that were watching them.
The anger finally flared up as she stumbled, a peacekeeper grabbing her arm and dragging her forward as she doubled over, reaching for her handkerchief. It was all so wrong.
After everything they had given, all that had been stolen from them over 17 short years, the world was still finding cruel new ways to toy with the Sallows. First their parents, then Anne’s health, and now it wanted both of their lives. It would never be enough.
Sebastian was done.
He watched as his sister reached the bottom of the stairs, knuckles white as she gripped onto the bannister for support.
If they wanted to play their games, fine, he would play. He would set the world on fire to keep her safe, and the Capitol had better be prepared to burn along with it.