every ship is equal, and no one is more powerful than the sea.

[derogatory]

FIVE THINGS MEME

HOW TO PLAY
- Give me as many "five things" prompt for any characters or fandom that you know I'm into
- I will try to write it
- no promises.


COMPLETE
five moments of gay panic for victor
four times victor missed nathan before finding him again (and one time he really didn't)
five disastrous toasts from victor and nathan's big gay wedding
five things about avenger victor and supervillain karolina
five times chase and victor were not friends
five ways victor's bad end could've gone
four successful missions nathan and victor went on (and one that could have gone a lot better)
five moments inside the mentor's lounge
five times victor regretted letting nathan move in

Comments

[derogatory]

Five moments inside the Mentors' Lounge

THIS WAS ALREADY WRITTEN AND I WANNA POST IT

[derogatory]

i.
It started about four years after Haymitch won, he thinks. Around then things start to get hazy, because the bottle got more appealing and the room was more crowded with people who'd known each other long enough to be friendly. There was an older crowd, along with Mags, that gave way for younger mentors, a fresh face each year while someone happily (or in the first few District's case, not so happily) stayed home for the ceremonies.

They were younger and drunker or at least Haymitch had been.

"Fifteen credits on your boy biting it in the next hour," Haymitch slurs, hand on Chaff's shoulder. He swat the kid away with his good hand, but pays up when it came true.

"You don't think that's a little distasteful?" Saura sniffs, District Five, wound up with all the meds to keep her body moving after the night terrors.

"Lady," Haymitch mutters, sinking as deep into the couch as he could manage, smothering the sound of his own Tributes being slaughtered. "I think we make our own tastefulness from now on."

Twenty credits on Enobaria, was the next bet. It was a solid win, not that any of them needed the money.






ii.
One of the Careers has a baby.

It's not new or anything, Careers take to the Games as easily as breathing, so finding someone to spend the rest of their hard-won lives with isn't as difficult as it is for the outlying regions. They just usually don't coach other kids to kill when they're bouncing one of their own on their knee.

It's like looking at an alien, passing the picture of a baby between them while Devon brags to the air about the boy's weight, his firm grip.

"He'll be in here with us in no time, huh?" someone says, someone who ends up with no teeth for the rest of the night. They were lucky, Devon crushed skulls in his Games, and teeth are easier to replace than brain matter. Still, the message is clear; Even for a Career, this isn't exactly the honor you go to night hoping to bestow on your children.

Cecelia is pregnant, but there weren't any other female champions in 11 to mentor in her place. The other mentors give her a couch to herself, let her put her feet up. It's naturally more foreign to them than the photo of the baby, that there is a live person in her belly, that in twelve short years the kid could be in front of them on that screen. It's a threat nobody raises, not just to save their teeth. You can't let the kids from another district be real, they can't be flesh and blood to you when you're not the one spilling it.

[derogatory]

iii.
Mags puts an end to the fighting a year before her stroke.

"The Games are out there," she says, her voice as clear as the breaking tide. "We don't have to fight in here too."

"Why?" Johanna Mason rasped between bloody lips. She'd been enjoying the part where the mentors tossed punches and chairs, wrung necks and took the loss of a few credits harder than the loss of lives. "Because we already won?"

"I don't mean the arena."






iv.
No matter what, there's no sympathy. It doesn't matter if after the parade you saw Wiress press foreheads to the boy she's mentoring, or that Gloss's hands lingered on their younger sister's shoulders two days before she was poisoned on live TV. You can't tell anyone you're sorry for their loss. They're Games for a reason, you don't want to be a bad sport.

"It has to," Annie pleads, lucid enough to be miserable. "Please tell me it gets easier."

Finnick stands over her in the hallway outside the lounge, in the spaces he knows better than home now, suddenly impossibly lost. You get used to it, he tries to say, but you don't. You can't get past the games. Being a mentor is the sport for killers.






v.
"It looks like she's doing math," Johanna hisses, arms crossed over her chest. Finnick shushes her. The girl on fire and the baker's boy kiss. "She's thinking too much! That's obviously not real!" Johanna shrieks, like a poor call, like an out of line ref. She rocks back in forth on the balls of her heels before turning accusingly at Haymitch. "How'd you get them to do that?"

"He got them soup," the woman from 11 says.

"Soup is expensive," Beetee warns.

"It was worth it, see!" Haymitch waves an uncharacteristically steady hand to the screen. "The people are eating it up, I barely had to ask for it."

"Since when do you want to win the Games?" Finnick asks, the same tone he uses to wheedle out Panem's secrets.

"Is nobody gonna take my bet on Kato or what?" Brutus snaps, trying to talk over the room, the changing Games.