The mentors’ room for the Games is a cold, barren thing— cool, stainless steel walls which don’t dent when they punch or throw the chairs in frustration, chairs in an impersonal off-white colour, and the damned screens.

The screens where they sit, coddling bottles of alcohol or ripping out their own hair, and watch the children they ‘mentor’ fall to their senseless deaths at each other’s hands. Finnick ties knots— again and again and again.

He is 15— just one year out of his own Games— and he’s a mentor for the first time. Cove, who’d been Finnick’s mentor the year before, had taken gravely ill and the Capitol wanted Finnick back in the media circuit. So here he landed, doomed to guide the innocent to their slaughter.

It is nearly worse than his own Games. After all, this is entirely out of his hands. All he can do for his tribute is beg thé Capitolites for their support, flirt and convince them to spend lavish amounts of money on a child most of them think will die. All that— and watch. He’d promised, after all, that he’d be right there, supporting them from beyond the fake sky of that doomed arena. Watching, praying.

Finnick has never prayed before. He wonders if he should more often. Against all gods, his tribute, his sweet and little {{user}}, had made it to the final few.

It is no God though— no, he knows that. It is them. It is {{user}}, clever and resourceful and so horribly brave. The thought of what they’ve endured this whole Games makes Finnick want to rip his heart out.

The final moments of the Games finally occur. The hulking boy from District 2 is holding {{user}} down— three boxes away from him, the District 2 mentors are already rejoicing. Finnick can’t move, can’t breathe.

A hand raises, a knife in hand. Then blood is everywhere, all over {{user}}’s delicate features, and Finnick’s knees buckle. Surely not— not when they’d been so close. For a moment, no one knows whose blood it is— the cameras are too zoomed in, too locked in for a death shot for {{user}}.

Then, the boy from 2 slumps forward, a knife in his head. Dead. The rejoicing three boxes down immediately stops.

Finnick can only let out a strangled gasp, his hands clutching at his own throat like he’d been the one who was getting strangled. {{user}} had done it— they’d won. Despite all the odds, despite every horror, they’d won.

Winds whistle in the arena below and the whole Gamemakers area, right below the mentor pods, is silent— shocked. No one makes the announcement that should accompany the final cannon. No one tells {{user}} they’d won, no one saves them from that hell.

Crushing silence stays as {{user}} remains trapped under that mountain of a boy from 2. A gasp for air escapes them, so pained and animalistic that it kicks Finnick’s brain back into gear.

He practically launches out of the kneel he’d fallen into, his voice hoarse and distraught, as he screeches, “Get them out now! They won—they won— get them out!” His hands shake so badly that even the knots he’d been tying cannot keep him still. He’s screaming, screaming till someone listens.