The Execution of a Traitor

[gamemakers]

Who| Everyone.
What| Ariadne's public execution.
Where| Execution is in the public square, threads in the Districts
When| Mid-morning the day before the new arena.
Warnings/Notes| Within the first cut is an execution with nerve-attacking toxins, as well and gore and gun violence. Everyone is still locked into their districts.

Starting at 9:30, in every bedroom in the training center, an alarm has started. Everyone is to wake up, everyone is to see this, and anyone who hasn't wandered out by 9:45 is awoken by an Avox and escort into the suites common area.

The TV's turn on exactly at 10.


The morning is crisp, cool, even this close to the start of summer. Even being so early there is of course a crowd gathered. A small live audience, all Capitol citizens, all thoroughly checked for security, is shown entering by the cameras, gathering before the empty stage. Peacekeepers can be seen, en mass, around the edges.

Finally Cruentus walks out, barely containing her excitement. She tries to keep on a serious mask, but looks more like a child trying to behave so she isn't take away from the Santa greeting line.

"My father, unfortunately, has business to attend to, and couldn't be here. But as the head of the Tribute program, I am here for you instead. As you all know, on the night of the crowning ceremony, one of our guests tried to assassinate our beloved head Gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee." She pauses, giving the crowd time to discuss that, waiting patiently for them to settle.

"Ariadne was one of our guests, one of our victors. She was someone we welcomed here, with open arms. And we will not stand for this disrespect. Her act of rebellion, though sloppy and easy to unwind, was unacceptable!"

Another pause, longer, the crowd working themselves up more.

"We will not stand for this. We will not stand for people we welcome into our city, into our homes, to injure our kin. No more!"

With a quick gesture, she summons the two avoxes, Shepard and Holly, both former mentors themselves, to bring Ariadne out to the center of the stage, bound in chains.

For everything that went wrong, Ariadne is absolutely unapologetic. She knows full well that she got sloppy, and that she shouldn't have trusted Eva as far as she could throw her - that's the only explanation, she thinks; she's blissfully oblivious to Eva's public betrayal, but she knows something went wrong somewhere down the line. She's not sorry that she got caught, nor is she sorry that she's in this position now. She caused a stir; she got things going. That's better than the waiting game that everyone else is playing. She can respect it, but it wasn't for her.

Her back still stings from the shrapnel that hit her during the blast: the way that Shepard and Holly hold her makes it impossible to ignore as she stumbles out to the stage, eyes hardened as she looks up to stare at Cruentus over anyone else. She welcomes whatever punishment she's begotten; she's not afraid.

The crowd goes wild for a long time. Booing, loud, raucous - they seem just barely controlled. Hatred comes off in waves towards Ariadne, the first true target of a growing, seething hatred that still hasn't found its purpose yet.

Cruentus lets it go on, draws it out, encourages it. Then, finally, she holds up another arm.

"For such a vile crime, we have cooked up a special little potion for our traitor. Something any of those feeling a touch rebellious might keep in mind."

Glancing back, she gestures for Penny Hsiang to come forward, flashing the other woman the smile she had been struggling to keep in.

Penny steps forward and pulls a syringe out of her wide sleeves like a magician revealing a rabbit from a hat. She holds it up high, bearing a grin that could make someone queasy if it were aimed in their direction. For a brilliant, brief moment, she is the center of attention, and even the crowd hushes slightly.

"This is a poison fit for a traitor," she announces. "It's rapid-onset, degenerative. It strips away the parts of the brain that take the oomph out of bad memories. Then it disables the part of your brain that dampens pain signals. Then it kills you."

She takes a step towards Ariadne. A Peacekeeper presents Ariadne's vein.

"Special order," Penny says as she leans in and whispers in Ariadne's ear, giggling as if she were a teenager girl discussing cute classmates and not a torturer sinking a needle into Ariadne's arm. "Just for you."

Still, the crowd's response to her makes no difference. Cruentus' words don't make any difference, and Penny's barely concealed venom doesn't either. Ariadne is unflappable in the face of her own execution, for she saw that coming; Cobb's words come back to her in that moment - dying was how you got out of a dream, dying was how he and Mal got out of Limbo - and a strange sort of calm comes to her in waves, counteracting the hatred of the crowd and all of those around her.

Ariadne doesn't even turn when Penny whispers in her ear; she's never been much for gossip or chatting idly about cute classmates. She doesn't blink when the needle sinks into her vein, though it sends a shiver down her spine that she can't control. For a moment, she wonders just how good the Capitol is at capital punishment, and how long it's going to take for this to happen. Ariadne might theoretically have all the time in the world, but that doesn't mean she wants to drag it out.

It hits the moment after her mind goes blank again, after her last thought is fully formed; her mind is forced to go blank, simply because of the level of sheer pain that wracks her body. It comes to her in spasms, in seizing that is only contained by the fact that her hands are still bound, and she's still held by the Avoxes she once knew. She doesn't scream. Instead, Ariadne bites the inside of her cheek, the inside of her lip; her teeth go through the flesh - she tastes blood - and it's still not enough to detract from the poison running through her veins. She seizes violently for all to see, every inch of her body trembling and shaking and contorting in a fashion that would make anyone cringe.

Biology had never been her strong suit, and most of Penny's explanation of it went over her head; still, she can tell when the second part of the poison starts to kick in, when the pain almost fades away, leaving her numb and still shaking where she's held, a trickle of her blood spilling down her chin from where she'd bitten her mouth to shreds. And still, she doesn't scream; still, she doesn't tear her eyes away from Cruentus.

Holly and Shepard hold her high and as still as possible as the toxin causes her to twitch, jerk in their grasp. It looks better on TV, of course, but possibly, somewhere in their reprogramming, it is also a way to give Ariadne her last bit of dignity.

When her body finally stops convulsing, when her head drops to her chest and she goes still, the crowd cheers. And Cruentus smiles, knowing her message was sent loud and clear.

Penny steps back to the corpse. A gun materializes from the wide sleeves into her hands, and she places it straight to Ariadne's cold temple and pulls the trigger. She doesn't flinch when there's a bang, nor when the blood and bits of bone and brain and gunpowder spray over Holly's Avox robes, nor when the crowd celebrates even more uproariously.

"Can never be too sure," she says quietly, then to Holly, "go clean yourself up."

It's the last bit of this particular section of footage in the broadcast.


When the viewing is over, a Peacekeeeper appears to sets a box on a table set up just for this. Opening it, within each box are several wrist cuffs, the names of Tributes carved on the inside, one for each named Tribute, a simple motif relating to the District on the outside. A neat hand-written note from Cruentus sits in the white satin in the middle of the box.

A gift, for those among us who need to remember where they are.

It is clear the Peacekeeper is there for anyone who objects to putting their cuff on. After receiving the cuff, the Tributes are permitted to wander, although those with cuffs are given 'special attention' by their Escorts.

Comments

[deadthenred]

Bucky's trying to put on an easy demeanor— or fake it good enough he can fool himself. He's seen people shot before, up close. It was how the Russians dealt with traitors. But he hadn't liked it then, either. Bucky sees this other kid, turned white as a sheet, and uses that to keep himself steady.

"You alright?" he asks, the concern in his voice unstunted.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine jerks just a bit at the question only because he hadn't been expecting to be spoken too.

"Me? Oh... Oh, yes. I'll be okay." His voice sounded a little too high, as if he was trying to convince himself as much as this stranger.

[deadthenred]

"You will be, you know," says Bucky back, almost before he realized he was saying. "You won't see… you won't see it forever."

He was never much good at this comforting crap.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine wasn't sure what to say to that for a moment. He just looked at Bucky as if he wasn't sure what to say.

"I'm Blaine," he settled on finally. He reached out and offered his hand to shake. At least introducing yourself was normal and had nothing at all to do with position and death.

[deadthenred]

"Bucky Barnes," he said, returning the handshake, eagerly embracing the spectre of familiarity.

"I'd say it's a pleasure, but, y'know," he finished up lamely.

[mediumdrip]

"I keep saying that to people, you know. 'It's nice to meet you, even given the circumstances' and things like that. I think I'm sick of it. I think I'd rather just be happy to meet someone who understands what I'm going through," he said carefully, so that Bucky knew that it wasn't a direct criticism. "So it's nice to meet you, Bucky. Thank you for trying to make me feel better. It means a lot that you came up to a complete stranger because you thought he should know that he will be okay."

[deadthenred]

"People shake hands 'cause it's comforting to say the same thing over'n over. That's what being polite really is, I figure." He says this with the sure wisdom that can only come from being very, very teenaged.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine nodded then. "Yeah. That makes sense."

[deadthenred]

"I've shaken a lot of hands, I guess."

All of a sudden, he felt uncomfortable. It wasn't this Blaine fella, but it wasn't their circumstances, either. Not entirely. It was what Blaine had just said: he'd tried to cheer a stranger up. And he was always crap at that. Kindness came slow to him, in jerks and stutters, like a muscle you left to rot. For a long time, he'd just wanted to seem tough, not kind. And those years caught up to him then, in this crowded moment, when everything added up on him at once.

"You reckon they're filming this?"

[mediumdrip]

"There's never been footage of the inside of Tribute Tower before," Blaine answered. At least there hadn't been in the tapes he had obsessed over when he first arrived. "But I wouldn't put it past them. They treat us differently than any other group of Tributes."

[deadthenred]

"You went back and watched the reels?" He hadn't thought about doing that. It was a good idea, and probably an awful one. But it did give him something to focus on.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine nodded. "I wanted to understand what I was face. It's... It's really brutal."

[deadthenred]

"You'd figure they'd try to dress it up real nice. Scrub all the… all the worst bits out." That's how they did it back home. You never see people with their bones poking out of their legs on the posters. They only paint in the glory.

Ugh. That should have been "facing" GDI Typos!

[mediumdrip]

"They don't because the violence is what the people here want," Blaine pointed out. "It's be like Bad Girls without all the alcohol getting thrown in women's faces."

No worries, it happens to everybody!

[deadthenred]

"Usually that stings real bad if you got any cuts." He has no idea what that last sentence meant, but he's not the type to admit that.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine smiled a bit. "Yeah, I bet it would," he said. "The point stands though. They don't edit out the brutal parts because that's what the people want to see. They enjoy it. The old Tributes though... Some of them are as young as 12."

[deadthenred]

"Yeah, well, 'scuse me for saying so, but that ain't how people usually work." Bucky's probably less worried about twelve year olds fighting than he ought to be.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine nods a bit. "It's how they work here."

[deadthenred]

Bucky winces, involuntary. "Even the Nazis know when to cover up."

[mediumdrip]

Blaine shifted a little uncomfortably, because he didn't feel as if he could actually comment on the Nazis.

"I think they still cover up here, just not what happens in the Arena."

[deadthenred]

He thinks it over: yeah, it makes sense. All governments had stuff to hide, in his experience, which in his own mind was considerable.

"But what kinda stuff would they need to cover up?" He frowns. "Gotta be something about how they're doing this. How their whole fancy set-up works. You don't gotta kill people to make a point when everything's going peachy."

Bucky realizes he probably shouldn't've said that, but not until after he does.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine shrugged in a non-committal sort of way. He didn't want to get them both in trouble by continuing the conversation. The fresh memory of what they had jut seen haunted him.

"Have you been in an Arena yet?"

[deadthenred]

"Yeah, I bit it tryin' to kill the dragon." There was even a note of misplaced, reckless pride in his voice. "Bet I could've done it, too, if they let me have a gun."

That was a better thing to talk about than the rest of the Arena. They probably wouldn't even get mad at him for saying it.

[mediumdrip]

"Oh yeah. I wasn't really around at that point, and I was so distracted by what was going on in my head that I didn't really watch. What was it like, fighting a dragon?"

[deadthenred]

"It was—" he said, taking a deep gulp of air. "Well, my sister wouldn't've liked it, I can tell you that much. Y'see, I had a plan, I though I could take out it's eyes first, but all that damn fire got in the way. I had the dyn-o-mite that I mugged from the tracks, but hang, all that dad-blamed fire…" His voice trails off, for a second, but then it's like he gets a second wind.

"If I had more than a couple of sticks and rocks I coulda swung something. I would've, even, I'm aces. But the real crazy thing is, I didn't care, not right then. I remember I was thinkin' like it didn't matter, like I didn't need to beat the dragon, I just needed to stop it. For a moment. For everyone. I remember thinkin' that'd be enough. And then I wasn't thinking much at all." He shakes his head. "But it was all just a set up. I figured that, after. It was pretty stupid that I didn't see it right then."