liability

A smile spread across her face at the encouragement. Usually if a fight broke out in Seven, that was the first place a punch tended to be thrown. The fights were usually over something stupid, one of the lumberjacks getting into a heated argument with another or someone not liking how high they were being charged for something in the markets. Mostly it was just a drunken quarrel, other times, it was just heat of the moment. 

“Nose, too, okay,” she nodded. When a kill was mentioned, the smile faltered slightly from her face. She knew what she was in for as soon as her name was called, knew what she had to do when it came down to it. But Ashten still found it hard to stomach that reality: she was going to have to kill someone if she wanted to go home. She couldn’t run forever. “Is there… um, how would I…” she let out a breath, frustrated at herself for struggling with the question, “Say I can’t get my hands on a weapon. What would be the… best way to go for the kill?”

“It’s okay,” Stellina said gently. “This can’t be easy. I doubt you expected to be standing here a week ago.” That was one of the differences that she’d come to learn between the career districts and the other nine. Usually, they didn’t plan to volunteer. They didn’t hope for it. They didn’t train. It was all just a matter of luck.

“The throat is always good, if you can get to it,” she advised. “If you have the upper hand in a fight, you can really put all your body-weight behind strangling someone. It’ll help.” She chewed her lip thoughtfully, before bringing her hands up to rest on her abdomen. “Here is also good. If you aim slightly up, you have a chance of hitting either the liver or the diaphragm. Both will work in your favour. You can actually knock someone unconscious if you hit their liver hard enough, which will make it easier for you to go in and strangle them.”

Task 004 // Welcome to Starbucks

Stellina’s Starbucks order has to be to-go. She hates to stay sitting down doing nothing for too long, and usually she’ll pop into a cafe when she’s on her way somewhere else. Her usual order would be a doubleshot protein caramel. Not only does this drink come in a can, making it more convenient for her, but it contains caramel (to satisfy her sweet tooth) and protein (so she feels like she’s being healthy).

She nodded, lifting up her own fists and glancing toward her knuckles. She never realized how much actually went into a punch, but then again, last time she threw one was when she was eleven and Birk was being a jerk. As much of a jerk as someone could be in the eyes of an eleven year old. 

“Um.. the face?” she asked, “like, the eye or jaw or somewhere.” Way to be confident in that answer, Ashten. She offered a small shrug for good measure.

“Good job,” she said, a small, proud smile crossing her features. “The jaw is one of the best places to punch, if you can get to it and put enough power behind your movement. You might even be able to knock your opponent out with that one, but it’ll have to be a really good punch.” Luckily, Stellina mused, she wasn’t too tiny. Hopefully she’d be able to reach the faces of most of the tributes in the arena with her.

“The nose is also good. It doesn’t take much pressure to break a nose, and most people will be so caught up with all the blood that it’ll give you time to run away.” She shrugged. “Or go in for the kill, if that’s what you want.”

“Oh.” She watched the woman and then unfurled her fist to do the same, stretching her thumb across her clenched fingers. “Yeah, wanna avoid that,” she murmured with a small chuckle. “I haven’t broken any fingers yet, but I’ve seen it happen to Birk. My older brother.” It had been an accident of course, and all Ashten remembered of that moment was trying not to let herself throw up at the sight.

She nodded, watching her fist and then held her own up, this time, with her thumb outside of her fingers. “Okay, think I got it.”

She smiled, a hint of pride creeping into her voice as she said, “Good job.”

Keeping her own fist tight, she brought her other hand round to point to the first two knuckles with her finger. “You’ll want to hit your opponent with these two,” she explained. “Trust me, it’ll hurt you less and your opponent more.” She relaxed her hands.

“Okay, where do you think you should aim a punch on another person?” she asked.

Solar frowned and looked out at the open area. His eyes flicked to the knives, but he quickly moved his eyes over to another station to avoid suspicion. His fingers were twitching to hold a knife, but he feared that if he did, it would garner too many eyes on him. That girl from Nine already had plenty of suspicions of her own – a really brilliant girl that he knew that he had to keep an eye out for. An alliance might not be a horrible thing in that instance. 

“Yeah, but not well,” he lied. He did play soccer with his friends back home when he was younger, but once he got more into training with his Dad, those activities stopped. “I think I’m decent at building stuff. You know, things with my hands, I think.”

“Okay, um.” Stellina pulled her lower lip between her teeth as she considered their options. Harlow would probably be better suited to helping their tributes with the survival stations, but she wasn’t sure where she was just then. She was probably busy.

Solar sucked his lower lip in and bit down on it a little as she started to go down the line of things that he could use in the arena. Not that she’d know, but it was rather funny to watch a trainer, who was supposed to be good at these things, give off poor answers.

Or throwing knives, he thought, which was exactly the weapon he wanted to use.

“Which do you think would be better suited for me?” Solar asked, looking to her with as much of a hopeful expression as he could muster.

Stellina bit down a comment about not being psychic. It wouldn’t help anyone if she lost her temper- least of all Solar, it was her job to help him learn a few useful skills.

Task 003 // Paint Me Like One of your Capitol Girls

For Stellina, I knew I needed a Renaissance painting inspired by one of the more gruesome parts of the Bible. I went with Jael and Sisera by Jacopo Amigoni, although a piece of the same name and depicting the same scene by Artemisia Gentileschi came close.

In the Bible verse, Sisera flees the scene of a battle after his army loses. He seeks refuge in the tent of Jael, who gives him a jug of milk to drink from and wraps him in a blanket. He soon falls asleep. Jael, who knows that Sisera participated in the oppression of the Israelites and sympathises with their cause, reaches for a tent-peg and hammers his head into the floor.

Solar looked over at the woman who came to his left. A younger blonde woman who seemed very much not of District Five. She carried herself like she was from somewhere else. A Career, maybe. He tensed. Shit. If she was from the Career Districts, he could only hope that she didn’t suspect anything. So he had to play even more meek than he thought he needed to. This was getting harder and harder by the second. So he crossed his arms in an effort to hide the need to clench his fists.

“Well, most of this is completely new if I’m honest,” Solar said, his voice low and a little tense. His jaw was starting to ache. “People giving me advice and it doesn’t help. I know how to climb stuff and I know how to cook a little. That’s about it.”

“Climbing and cooking,” she repeated slowly. She felt as though she was watching Five’s chances at victory disappear over the horizon. Again.

“Explains a lot when I get in a fight with my older brother,” she quipped. But it was true; if Birk or sometimes even Huck made her mad enough, she would throw a punch at their shoulder or chest. Birk always laughed at her, her punches seemingly having little to no impact– figuratively and literally. 

The woman had walked over to her and she glanced down at her own hands. She made a fist, wrapping her fingers around her thumb. “Like that?” she asked, looking back toward the woman. She had to be a trainer, she had the look and seemed to have the know-how. She was young, definitely not a Mentor otherwise Ashten would have seen her face everywhere. 

Stellina looked down at the girl’s fist and frowned slightly. “Alright, you’re gonna want your thumb on the outside of your fingers there,” she advised, demonstrating by making a fist herself and showing it to her. “Otherwise you’re more likely to break your thumb. And trust me, you don’t want that.” She might not have broken her thumb before, but she’d broken a few fingers and she imagined it was similarly painful.

“Thumb curls round here, in front of your fingers,” she explained, twisting her first to give the girl a clearer view. “Now you try.”

As much as Ashten wanted to take up the axes, she had a feeling it was best to steer clear of them until the private training sessions. That was when her best skills would be put to the test, and she didn’t need to draw too much attention to herself just yet, especially from the competition. So she had wandered around the different stations– navigation, first aid, camouflage. Things that didn’t seem terribly important until the Tribute was dying because they didn’t know how to stitch up a wound or blend into their surroundings. 

But she knew she needed a back up in case she didn’t get an axe in the Arena. Something that would be a good substitute. So she found herself at the hand-to-hand combat station, stretching to warm herself up before she would find a sparring partner or a free trainer. Ashten started to head toward the mat when she spotted someone approaching. “Got any tips for throwing a decent punch?”

@ttwstarters

Stellina was heading towards the canteen to grab some lunch when she heard the question. She wasn’t sure whether or not it was directed at her, but she figured she was more than qualified to give this girl a few pointers.

“Use your whole body,” she advised. “If you just throw your fist at someone, you’re not gonna have enough power behind it and they’re just gonna laugh at you.”

She started to head over towards the hand-to-hand station. “Make a fist for me,” she said as she grew closer.

@ttwstarters

This was the part he had been dreading. 

Every bit of him wanted to go over to the knives and start chucking them at the targets. Every ounce of his willpower wanted to go over to a trainer and lay him out. His father’s words played in his head like a skipped record, repeating over and over to eternity. Conceal your strengths. Reveal them later. Then kill them all.

Solar felt sick. 

He walked into the room when there were already several tributes training. He noticed and knew a few of them from before the chariots, but he didn’t feel like approaching them. He had to pretend to be meek and not understanding what was going on. Solar searched the room for the easiest one to goof up on purpose. As he stood there, he realized that his awkward standing around was probably making him seem even more inept, so he opted to stand there, looking as lost as possible, until someone finally approached him.

Solar looked up, confusion and apprehension etched on his face on purpose. 

“I… don’t know where to start,” Solar said quietly.

After Joule’s suicide the year before, Stellina was reluctant to return to training tributes for the Games. Part of her still blamed herself. She should have seen it coming, should have recognised Joule’s suicide as a possibility before she was ever even in the arena. But she hadn’t seen it, just like she hadn’t seen it in her sister years before.

She said at her quarterly meeting with the Capitol official responsible for giving her her position as a trainer that she wanted to leave. He had told her that, now that she was legally an adult, she would have to serve the rest of the sentence she was supposed to have served at the youth correction facility in service as an avox. 

She said she was more than happy to continue training tributes instead.

She was trying not to get too attached to Five’s tributes this year, but when Solar stood in the middle of the training centre looking so helpless, she couldn’t stop herself from going over.

“Well, it’s your lucky day, kid,” she said. “I don’t know if Harlow mentioned that Five gets its very own trainer? But you do, and it’s me.” 

“How thoughtful, thank you.” He went along with the teasing, giving a small smirk of his own before he settled in the spot next to her. The smirk quickly widened into a more genuine smile at the congratulations, giving a nod of his head, “Thanks, yeah.” Dorian tipped his head to the side slightly. Valor had been a very different case from all of the other Victors from District One, and honestly, Dorian was glad he wasn’t living back in One anymore because of that. 

“Yeah,” he replied, “well, kind of. Matching colors. My stylist thought it would be cute for the newlywed couple to have matching colored outfits.” Dorian rolled his eyes. “Guess it could have been worse.”

Stellina found herself smiling one of her rare genuine smiles. Dorian deserved happiness. He couldn’t be more than a few years younger than her own father, and he’d been married for over thirty years now.

“Oof. I’m sorry,” she said sympathetically. “At least it’s just suits, I guess. They didn’t try covering you both in diamonds or something.” It was a strange image, but honestly she had seen weirder inside the Presidential Mansion before taking her leave for a moment. 

“Have you met our latest victor yet?” Stellina was avoiding her, and she knew it- but she was also too stubborn to do anything about it. She was grateful that, if it couldn’t have been Joule or Gee, it was someone who had been friends with one of them. But she still couldn’t look at her face without remembering it streaked with tears while her own tribute lay dead on the forest floor.

Usually, Dorian hated the Capitol parties, but that time around, he was in higher spirits. Granted, he was a newly married man, sporting the wedding ring on his finger that gently pulsated with the heartbeat of his husband. And Valor was living with him in District Three. It happened so quickly, but it had also been long overdue, and it had been a long time since Dorian had been that happy.

Coming back to The Capitol had sort of brought him back down to Earth, remembering why they were there in the first place. They were Victors, after all, they had to attend the fancy parties and congratulate the newest Victor. Valor had gone to catch up with his team from One and Dorian had gone to try and find someone to talk to. Clarification: someone he wanted to talk to.

After chatting with some Capitol citizens, sponsors, and answering a few questions from a Capitol journalist, Dorian managed to sneak off to the terrace for some peace and quiet. Instead, he had noticed someone had beaten him to the spot. “Hard to find a quiet spot around here,” he murmured, making his way to one of the cushioned seats to sit down.

@ttwstarters

Stellina looked up from her phone and, though she didn’t smile, relief flooded her features as she recognised Dorian Hawthorne. She’d come out here to get away from boring conversation. She trusted Dorian not to attempt to make terrible small-talk with her.

“Join me, why don’t you,” she said sarcastically, the corners of her lips lifting as she shifted along the seat to make more room. “I believe congratulations are in order? It’s not every day we lose one of our victors to a lower district.” One was a proud place, and nothing made it prouder than its victors. But then she supposed Valor had always been a bit different to the others, hadn’t he? 

“I haven’t seen Valor yet. Are you wearing matching suits?”

Ares laughed in time with her. He hadn’t planned on this being a competition, but given he was competitive by nature, this wasn’t going to end with him just stopping planking because he was done with it. He had been doing this almost thirty seconds longer than she had been doing and he could already hear the strain in her voice. 

“I wasn’t aware this was a competition,” Ares told her through gasped breaths, feeling sweat rolling down the center of his back, tickling his skin. “I’m just doing this to keep my muscles from cramping, but to each their own.”

“Everything’s a competition. What do they even teach in Two’s academy if you never learnt that?” Granted, Stellina had always been competitive by nature. The youngest of three sisters with big goals, it was necessary if she didn’t want to get lost in their achievements.

After a moment of trying to convince herself not to, she adjusted her grip on the bench and then kicked her legs up into a hand-stand.

Ares didn’t expect much out of the girl after her dismissive answer, not that he cared. If she was into another gender, he wasn’t going to waste his time. So he put his head down between his arms, holding the plank in silence as he felt his abdomen begin the tingles of strain. He closed his eyes, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, almost in a meditative state in order to hold it for as long as he could. 

Except he heard breathing next to him and it distracted him, causing him to open his eyes and look over, finding the girl doing the same thing he was doing. Stellina was her name, he recalled. Some girl from One that trained a lower District. He smirked a little as he continued to hold his position, listening to her words while also attempting to focus more. 

“I didn’t invite you over here, you can very well go ahead and continue that,” said Ares with a shaken strain in his voice, breathing through his mouth as he spoke. 

Stellina laughed, slightly breathless as the strain of the plank started to get to her.

“I can’t back out now,” she insisted stubbornly. “Besides, this is good. Means I don’t have to worry about how much popcorn I eat later.” One of the many benefits of keeping your abs toned.

“Of course, if you want to back out...” she trailed off.

It was strange, not having any work to do. Nolie had been so used to working right up to the end of the Games, but Josiah and Ingrid were dead. All there was to do was keep an eye on Misty (at least Lincoln had someone left) and just… exist in the Tower. 

And with no work to do, Nolie had nothing to distract her from thinking about how she’d failed as a mentor, yet again. She had Lincoln to distract her sometimes, sure (she still couldn’t believe that this was happening, that they were a thing), but Lincoln had a tribute still alive, and Nolie knew the work that involved. 

“Yes, I can book a class that day,” Nolie said, looking down at her planner as she lounged on one of the couches in the viewing room, her phone held to her ear. Charlie lounged on the floor beside the couch, keeping an eye on the door for her. With the extra time she now had, she opted to pick up a couple of dance teaching gigs. Maybe she could reduce the amount of Capitol trips she had to make. “Minis? Sure. I can be ready for mini groups. Yes. Two different combos? Sure. Okay. Yes. I’m looking forward to it too. Yes, the little ones are my favourites. Thank you.” She pressed the end call button and scribbled a few notes into her planner, looking up to realize someone else had entered while she’d been talking. 

“I’m off the phone now, thanks for letting me finish that,” she offered, still looking down at her calendar. “Did I miss anything good?” // @ttwstarters

Stellina didn’t mean to catch Nolie while she was busy. It had taken a lot of willpower to force herself into the elevator and head down to Two’s floor at all. She eyed Charlie cautiously, tiptoeing around him to sit on the sofa by Nolie’s feet.

“Well, your kids have died,” she said, unsure how much she had missed. And then, a few seconds later; “Sorry.” 

She gave Nolie what she hoped came across as a sympathetic smile.