I. Anne Carson, H of H Playbook / II. Aeschylus, Aeschylus: The Oresteia / III. Richard Siken, War of the Foxes / IV. Sainticide, ??? / V. Hans Christian Andersen, The Snail & The Rosebush / VI. Jenny Slate, Little Weirds / VII. Euripides, ??? / VIII. Isaac Marion, Warm Blood / IX. Unknown

❦

FINNICK: I'll take care of you.
ELLIOT: It's rough work.
FINNICK: Not to me. Not if it's you.

Stage One: Denial

          Love is sacrifice. It's the Sinner kneeling at God's altar, split open and staining the sacred grounds with its begging. It's the Son on the crucifix, teeth bared to the heavens as he offers himself up, to save the people from the Father's wrath. It's the mother that grabs the knife, firsthand, fist around the blade, so that the child sleeping is left unscathed.

There is always someone kneeling when you think of sacrifice— wanting, waning, ripped open like fruit in God's hand. There is always surrender in sacrifice, always desperation. You would not give everything if you didn't have everything to lose. Does that make sense? The irony is almost impossible to ignore.

Love is sacrifice. Sacrifice is the words: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm doing this because I love you. & the words I'm sorry you had to do this for me. It's violence and apology, love and death, the two sides of Aphrodite's blade hand in hand. It's the knife that you plunge right into your heart, the part where you spare someone else the burden of having to rid you of your existence. It's the girl that rips out her own heart to keep her sister's safe, the one who offers herself up to the heavens to satiate their hunger for another year.

ELLIOT: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I promise I'll come back.

Promises mean nothing when love is sacrifice. You always lose something— your heart, your soul, you mind. It doesn't matter, of course, not when it's the Hunger Games. Not when it's Rain Kalomiri's life on the line. Not when there is nothing Elliot would not give to save her sister. (Seventeen is too young to die, but ten more so. Again, it's her sister.)

If God doesn't reply, does that make the sky empty? President Snow, a half-dead man more Sinner than Saint, has always been Panem's God, and to sacrifice to anyone other than him would be blasphemy. This is where Elliot finds herself— kneeling at the foot of the Capitol as the Districts have all these years. And when she looks upon the face of God, it's more of the Devil's than anything, the man in the slaughterhouse that watches the sacrifices line up at the mouth of the furnace.

Love is sacrifice. A punishment, if you will. You would not have to sacrifice if you could love without consequences. This is Elliot's punishment for daring to challenge God's will— heart in one hand and a knife in the other, she is sent into the Arena with nothing more than the ghost of a promise, lodged in her throat like a rotting plague.

Bring glory to your district, the Capitol says. Smile for the cameras.

Stage Two: Anger

          Love is sacrifice. And yet it is the most selfish of all passions. It's not so much of a paradox as it is a tragedy— you would give everything for love, and you would kill everyone for love. Promises mean nothing when love is sacrifice, until the furnace in the slaughterhouse roars to life and the first tribute is one that dies at her hand.

ELLIOT: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm doing this because I love my sister.

It is not enough, of course, and it means nothing because District 6's tribute has a knife protruding from one ear to the other, and therefore cannot hear Elliot.

Love is sacrifice, the fallen tributes rotting away on the battle grounds as the man running the furnace smiles. (If you focus, you can smell burning flesh.) Love is both the knife and the hand that holds it, Elliot's repeated whispering of I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you don't understand—

JESS: But I do.

The knife by her side goes silent in its begging to be held, as does the rest of the world. 

Love is tragedy. Love is the words: Show me your scars, and I'll show you mine. Love is the boy, sacrifice personified, that finds her bleeding at the height of her massacre, and begs the sky for help. Enter Jess Bonteri— Elliot's wretched mirror, District 11's male tribute, a boy just as desperate to return to his brother as she is to her sister.

Love is tragedy. Love is the noose that braids itself around your throat, the hand that bends your head before the axe. Slowly, gently, sickly-sweet. Love is what ruins you. It's the boy who is your mirror, your awakening— either Jess is not as merciful as Elliot or they are both equally monstrous. When District 6's other tribute comes charging forth to avenge his fallen companion, Elliot's knife twists, violently, in Jess' hand, and together they count the stab wounds after the light has faded from his eyes.

The Games are cruel; Jess is nothing less. He promises her he can save her— he's done it once, he can do it again. He thinks they can make it out alive, together.  

Love is not enough to save you. It never will be. The thing is that this is a very old story, and out of two people, it's always someone that dies. The thing is that this is a very old story, and there is always one Victor. There is no other ending that the Capitol will have. One Victor, or nothing. This is another part of Elliot's punishment— to take your sister's place in the slaughterhouse is to become the killer itself, the one who holds the knife by the end instead of by the blade.

Again, promises mean nothing when love is sacrifice. It's always someone that dies. One of the two, take your pick. Which promise will you honor, the one you made to your sister or the one you made to the boy? One is your life and you owe the other the rest of it.

The Games are cruel; Elliot is nothing less. Love is sacrifice, tragedy, and punishment all in one. The most selfish of all passions. The bleeding heart and the hand closed around the knife. Here, the sky burns, and Elliot has said I'm sorry so many times that the words have lost their meaning.

At the crossroads, Jess Bonteri dies. He begs her to make it merciful, so he will not suffer, and to cover his face so his brother will not have to see him crying when Elliot's knife splits his heart in two. Here, Jess, love is a choice— your brother, or the girl you love? And Elliot— your sister, or the boy who loves you?

JESS: Tell my brother I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, Elliot wants to say. The words get caught in her throat, and then in her heart, hanging onto her ribs like the truth of a slaughterhouse. Love can't save you, and there is no such thing as a mercy kill. It hurts, now, and it always will.

Congratulations, Elliot Kalomiri. The Capitol smiles at its new doll. You won the Games.

It's a tragedy. No one wins the Games. No one makes it out alive, really.

Stage Three: Bargaining

         Love is sacrifice. It's the man that conforms to God's demand and splits his son open at the altar, weeping, the regret that makes a home in your heart that same way a knife does in its victims. It's the question: Was it worth it? Did you sacrifice the right thing? Elliot exits the 68th Hunger Games with a wound for a heart, knife gone blunt in one hand and Jess' blood still dripping from the other, rust staining the Capitol grounds.

There is always regret when it comes to sacrifice. You don't sacrifice unless you're desperate, unless it's your only choice— and still, regret comes knocking to your front door in the dead of night, spins the universe into two words: What if?

Love is a punishment, and an endless one at that. Grief is nothing but the perseverance of love, the gravestone that buries itself in the terrible aching hell of Elliot's heart. It's the knife pressed flat against her throat, rust chipping off the hilt, the executioner's jawbone sharp and torn out against the skin stretched across his skull. It's the needle pressing down, down, down into her throat, the blood filling up the vast dark chambers of her lungs, the half-dead stare of Jess' brother as he watches her from the crowd on her Victory Tour.

It's the question: Could it have been different? Elliot turns the knife over and over again in her hand in the dead of night and every side is stained with the blood of the fallen tributes. Sacrifice is more of an unfair exchange than anything, but it was for love, love, love, always for love. Nothing else matters except for love and love changes nothing. Wash, rinse, repeat. The blood stays rotting under her fingernails and her hands are red no matter how many times she runs them under the sink.

When the world stops spinning and you fall off of it, what do you have if not your heart? The Capitol asks her to give a speech to honor all the people who died in the Games. As if they weren't the perpetrators, as if Elliot hadn't killed them all to win.

ELLIOT: I'm sorry. I wish things could've been different.

If you play the Games, are you really any better than the ones who herded you into the Arena? The Capitol and the will of its God is not something you can walk away from, but you always have the choice to die instead— blood is spilled regardless. Your choice is where it falls, what it stains— blood in the water, or blood on your hands? You'll never get away from the sound of the people who died for you. It is your life at the expense of others, forever.

Love is grief, or the predecessor of it. It's the high color of Rain's cheeks as she tells her classmates at school that her sister won the Games, the light in her eyes as Elliot spins her around in the empty halls of their new home in Victor's Village. It's Rain's life at the expense of Elliot's, because no one makes it out of the Games without being half-dead. There is no Victor that is not a soldier returning half its weight, no sacrifice that did not have to cut off its own skin to appease God.

ELLIOT: Jess. . . Jess deserved better. He should've lived.

The words rot like poison on the killer's tongue, cyanide sinking its claws into peach pits. There are a million things Elliot could say right now, and there are not enough words in the entire world to string it into sentences, the ugly feeling of this grief. It is shaped like a grave, like an apology, and it leaves her chest like one.

Elliot is sorry, but it means nothing any more. Sorry will not bring Jess back. Sorry will not rip her heart out and put it back in his chest. Sorry will not bring air back to his lungs, nor will it undo his suffering.

Love is tragedy. Love is the words: There is no forgiveness for you. Not here, not there, not in this life or the next. Love is the boy screaming for his brother as she stands on the stage, a vessel carved in the shape of the Capitol's daughter, the boy whose skull is split open at the front steps of District 11's Justice Building as punishment.

Grief is the final act of love, the aftermath that picks up the splintered pieces of the Capitol's new doll and welds it back together into something different, something unrecognizable. In the hollowed-out cavity of her chest, Elliot's heart hangs from her ribs, a permanent wound.

Love is grief. Grief is a final translation of it, an endless cycle of I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I wish things were different. You go round and round in circles orbiting the sun only to end up where you started, head bent and kneeling before the slaughtered.

Apologies mean nothing when love is sacrifice. Elliot is sorry, but she'd do everything again if it were Rain's life on the line. It's always love. It always comes down to love.

Stage Four: Depression

        Love is sacrifice. It's the girl that gives everything until she has nothing left, the one who takes a knife and pries out all the broken bones in her body, laying them at the altar and begging God for atonement.

It's a burden you never get relieved of, the weight of the world that never leaves your shoulders. The Hunger Games are a very old story, and in this story there is no other ending. One Victor exits the Arena. One Victor boards the train. They never get off. The world spins on, uncaring.

God does not respond to her pleas for forgiveness. (What is there to forgive?) Enter Isaac Herondale, the continuation of Elliot's punishment. Tribute of the 72nd Hunger Games, during Elliot's first year as a lone mentor after the last one shuts himself behind closed doors and attempts to suffocate to death.

Here, the burden of love takes on a different face. Here, Elliot boards the train again. The road before her seems to stretch on forever, going on and on and on, and Elliot finds that she cannot see the end. (There is no end. Not here. You never walk away from the Capitol.)

ISAAC: I don't want to die.

Has she not given enough? Love is sacrifice. This is the problem; this is what makes love a punishment. Elliot has given everything to keep her sister away from the Capitol, so much so that the girl she'd take a knife for has become the hand holding it, so much so that there is no way out of this. Not when it's her sister. Not when President Snow would slaughter her if Elliot ever tried to get off the train.

Elliot doesn't have the heart to tell him that death would be a preferable fate. That even if she does everything she can to save him, he will end up wishing she hadn't. He clings onto her hand, then and there on the train, and begs for her to help him live.

This is the part, of course, where she apologizes. Sorry for the blood on my hands. Sorry it'll end up on yours, too. Sorry you won't die. Sorry you'll become a survivor.

Love is avarice. It's the desperation rotting in your bones, the bared teeth exchanged between District 8's two tributes, the hands clawing their way out of the grave. Which is worse: to be the survivor, or to be the slaughterer? You cannot win the Games without being one or both.

The difference between Elliot and Isaac is that where Elliot is desperate to save her sister, Isaac is desperate to save himself. I have a whole life ahead of me, he tells her, I can't have it end this way. (Silly boy. You enter the Arena and your life is lost, one way or another.)

The Games are cruel; Isaac changes to mirror it. He walks into the Arena, spear in hand and his humanity in the other. He is young, and he does not understand that love is avarice, endless, extreme, all consuming. It demands everything from you and you give everything to satiate it. Another form of sacrifice. 

He does not understand that to love anything is to have it ruin you. It swallows every bone in his body, the ignorance, and spits him out of the Arena bloodied and bruised, a brutal, wretched thing.

(Welcome back to the life you fought for, Isaac Herondale. It'll never be yours again.)

Did she really save him? He never says it out loud, but Elliot knows he wishes she'd left him to die. I'm sorry, she wants to say. The words die in her throat because it'll never be enough.

As always, apologies mean nothing when love is sacrifice.

Stage Five: Acceptance

         Love is sacrifice. It's always someone kneeling at the altar of God. It's always someone that dies with their heart in hand, always a knife and a fist; always love and death, two halves of a terrible whole. There is always some form of surrender in sacrifice, some inescapable complacency where you learn to live with your fate. Compromise, except you are the only one who has to settle with your loss.

Here in Panem, it doesn't matter what you defied God out of. It doesn't matter if it's love, nor does it matter that you were trying to save your sister/brother/best friend/lover. What matters is that you tried to snap the leash off, tried to walk the other way instead of the path they'd laid out for you. To walk the other direction is to turn your back on the Capitol and its God. Defiance is defiance and you will bear the punishment with either your body or with your heart.

When the 75th Hunger Games come knocking on the door, strangers at the verge of a home that no longer welcomes them, Isaac Herondale turns from the Capitol and walks the other way.

District 8, he tells Elliot, will not have a male tribute. I will not be the one to kill you. 

In that moment, the blades around his throat uncross like scissors. Nothing falls, because he is gone already, because they cannot touch him in death. So the knife turns onto Elliot Kalomiri— his best friend, his mentor during the Games, what remains of Isaac's legacy. It's a declaration, a promise— there is no escaping the Capitol. Not in life, not in death.

It is a very old story. It ends the same way every time. This is the continuation, the final act of Elliot's punishment: during the 75th Hunger Games, the lack of a District 8 male Victor forces the Capitol's hand into that bowl of names— the bowl with all civilians instead of just boys, because the rules are different this time— and draws Rain Kalomiri out to the slaughterhouse.

The thing about the Hunger Games is that it is a very old story. Half of the story is that there is only one ending, only one Victor. (Correction: only one person that makes it out of the Arena. Only one survivor.) The other half of this story is that Elliot, in any universe, in any lifetime, would do anything for her sister.

Love is violence. The sun spins, and Elliot Kalomiri is brought back to the beginning— on her knees in the Arena, a knife in one hand and her heart in the other. Deep in the slaughterhouse, the furnace roars back to life as the tributes line up to die. The sky is silent no matter how many times she curses God, but she knows he's there, laughing at this sick twist of fate he has woven with his rotten hands.

In every version of this story, no one wins the Games. Here, the evening splits in half. There is only God and his martyrs at the altar, begging to be saved even as smoke rises and fire devours their flesh like a starved animal.

RAIN: You'll save me, won't you?

Elliot has run out of promises. Out of apologies. This is where the train stops. You get off at the same place you started; the Capitol is the first and final grave. The road comes to the end and there is always only one Victor. District 12's victors broke that rule, now everyone bears the brunt of their punishment.

Is the final stage acceptance, or surrender? Love is sacrifice in every way that matters. This is the part where you give up your life. All of it.

Welcome back to the slaughterhouse, Elliot Kalomiri. You know the rules.

❦

As Described / Jenna Ortega

♰

ELLIOT KALOMIRI
The Heart, Victor of the 68th Hunger Games

Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.

Any fear, any memory will do . . .
&                            
if you've got a heart at all,
                        someday it will kill you.

As Described / Sam Claflin

♰

FINNICK ODAIR
The Hands, Victor of the 65th Hunger Games

Haven't I given enough? Always the fool with the slowest heart.

&

Taylor Russell / RAIN KALOMIRI

⠀⠀⠀⠀

Oscar Isaac / PIETRO LLERAS

Suki Waterhouse / KENNEDY NOTT

Maia Reficco / KATNISS EVERDEEN

WITH . . .

Charlie Bushnell / Jess Bonteri

Savannah Lee-Smith / Alaia Thylane-Saxon

Eddie Redmayne / Theodore "Teddy" James

Olivia Cooke / Annie Cresta

Isabela Merced / Primrose Everdeen

Harry Collett / Isaac Herondale

Cillian Murphy / Aeolus Snow

Sophie Thatcher / Talya Snow

Phoebe Dynevor / Judith Snow (I̶I̶)

Elijah Hewson / R̶a̶p̶h̶a̶e̶l̶ M̶o̶r̶i̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ Atlas Snow

& All Others, as described.

❦

CONTENT WARNINGS.

this fic contains themes that may be triggering for some readers. including but not limited to: war, major character death, religious imagery, violence, mentions of blood & graphic injury, mental health issues, alcoholism, self destructive behavior, mentions of suicide, substance abuse & references to prostitution and sexual trauma.

DISCLAIMER.

i do not own The Hunger Games series. all rights go to suzanne collins for the creation of the original series. i do, however, own all original characters and their respective plotlines featured in this story. my characters are NOT to be posted or featured anywhere else without my permission.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

★ FINNICK ODAIR i will always love you. welcome to Heart in Hand, the brainchild of my hunger games obsession & my desperate attempt to feature Elliot Kalomiri in at least one of my fics because i STILL haven't gotten around to publishing my bucky fic (it's been 2 years...) thank you to thena for inspiring elliot's last name!

★ this fic is an AU of the Hunger Games trilogy, where (1) the age of tributes are 10-18 instead of 12-18 (2) anything you don't recognize from canon is of my own creation. it follows the trajectory of elliot's games (68th), and then isaac's (72nd), and finally all the way to catching fire & mockingjay! i might also touch on katniss' games a bit, but i'm not sure yet.

★ if you can't tell from the extremely long summary that probably should've been a prelude, there will be numerous parallels & metaphors used through this story! there is the personification of snow as God/the man running the slaughterhouse & the tributes as sacrifices, which... is pretty self explanatory considering his rule of panem & the nature of the hunger games.

★ i will also be expanding on the snow family! aeolus (big thanks to charley for suggesting this name), cordelia, judith & atlas/raphael are all of my own creation and do not exist in canon. they are my babies & any plagiarism will not be tolerated! 

★ jess/elliot is meant to parallel finnick/elliot later on in the story— elliot didn't love jess the way he wanted her to, but the love was still there! and it still mattered! and jess still died! elliot/isaac also bears some resemblance to elliot/rain (my fav angsty sibling duo. rain kalomiri one day i will bring ur fic back i promise), who are the literal personifications of "older sister as the parent" & "younger sister as the child". elliot is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders & i js love her & her story so so much!!!

★ last but not least, Heart in Hand is dedicated to the loveliest kins char & lola as well as hope <3, & to belle jen astraea charley and everyone else reading this fic. i love you all ♥♥

STARTED: January 24th, 2024
ENDED: ???

© FRIVOLOUSE
PRE-THG — MOCKINGJAY