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    THERE WAS A reason the other tributes were called allies when Jupiter was training at the academy, when she entered the Games as a kid, when it was plastered across her Victory Tour that she had returned home to because she had killed her allies before they could kill her. It made it easier to kill them. They weren't friends, just a means to an end. But the 75th Hunger Games was different.

    It didn't matter how many times Brutus told her it wasn't any different, there were still methods to the madness and there were still practices that made them like any other Games. Because every day Jupiter went down for training, it was stepping into a room of people she had known for years, whether as friends or fellow survivors. Some she had even watched turn from kids into killers, and watched as the light left their eyes as they realised they were not free, and their new life may have been worse than death.

    Jupiter felt that Brutus did not understand how conflicted she felt in that training room, or when they all continued to eat together as one group. She got the distinct feeling that most of the Victors had flipped the script, and saw each other as in the same boat– people who had been deceived by the Capitol and were repeating something they had been told would never happen again. While this was true, Jupiter, and the other Career Districts, seemed to agree on one thing.

    The camaraderie would end the moment they were in the arena. It was a nice sentiment, but Jupiter was still an Academy graduate whether she liked it or not, as Brutus had told her. The conditioning was still there from years spent training and living just for the chance to volunteer and be chosen as a tribute for her District. It was the same conditioning that had helped her survive– everyone was an enemy at some point.

    It was a haunting thought on their second day of training, as Jupiter and Brutus arrived to a slightly more full room this time. The instructor did not send them off this time, they were more than familiar with the room and stations now, splitting off into groups. Peeta seemed to have taken a proper liking to Chaff and Seeder, the District 11 Victor-tributes, and he was introducing them to Katniss, it seemed. She looked wary, as she often did, but slightly more open than the day before.

    Her stunt at the archery station seemed to have gained her some form of respect amongst the other Victors, none of which had that sort of skill set. Finnick had the most ranged weapon specialisation, his trident and netting technique. After him, Johanna had small axes she used like tomahawks, and Jupiter had her throwing knives. None of the other tributes could throw knives like she could– even those that had been through the Academies.

    She briefly wondered if Clove had been smarter if she could have won the previous year. She had talked too much.

    "Nice weapon," Jupiter commented at the combat station. It was one of the largest in the gym, laden with different weapons, and had been where Jupiter had properly met Katniss the day before.

    Fawn glanced at her, the square, cleave-like knife balanced in her hand, before suddenly swiping. Jupiter darted back, catching the knife thrown her way by the supervising instructor, just before Fawn lunged again. Jupiter deflected the blow with her own knife, the sounds of the weapons against each other reverberating across the gym.

    The pair held their weapons very differently– Jupiter balanced the handle between her fingers, spinning and delicately slashing it. Fawn struck to kill, her entire hand gripping the handle as she cut down and stabbed. A butcher's daughter, she was.

    It was odd to be treating a spar with Fawn as a way of testing her strength, as they had only ever been friends, but Jupiter knew that was the reality now.

    After they had finished trying to stab each other, Johanna approached, an axe in one of her hands and swinging by her side as she walked over. "The girl on fire wants Nuts and Volts," Johanna sneered, referring to the District 3 tribute-Victors.

    "Think that's just who she is," Jupiter said with a shrug. "She chose the little girl from District 11 last year."

    Johanna scoffed, but said nothing else in retaliation. "Since when are they so chummy?" she asked instead, gesturing with her head to where Brutus, Chaff and the District 10 and 7 males were chatting at the trap-making station.

    "Men," Fawn scoffed. "Axle isn't good for anything," she said of her District partner, who was slightly younger than Brutus, but just as muscled. Jupiter didn't know him very well, Fawn had always said he was quite reserved and hid, alone, in the Victor's Village in District 10.

    "Better than Nuts and Volts," Johanna told her simply, looking at her District partner, Blight.

    "Better than you?" Fawn teased.

    Johanna spun the axe in her hand. "I can prove it."

    Jupiter suddenly felt as if she were interrupting something as the two girls began to practise combat, and stepped back, placing her knife back on the table, giving the instructor a polite nod.

    Someone grabbed her wrist, and Jupiter jumped, hand raised, only to see it was Finnick, grinning down at her. "Bored yet?" he asked.

    "A bit," she relented, shrugging his hand off.

    "Girl on fire showed me archery," Finnick told her. "In exchange for trident lessons, of course."

    "I pity her," Jupiter teased.

    "You loved it," Finnick snipped back. Jupiter shrugged dramatically. "Who's Brutus having you seduce?" He continued, speaking against her ear. Jupiter didn't push him away, only shot him a look out the corner of her eye.

    "You, obviously," she said. Finnick didn't seem to be able to tell if she was teasing back, or being serious. "He wants the usual Career pack," she added, more serious.

    "Minus Mags." It wasn't a question.

    Jupiter nodded. "He's treating this like it's normal," she whispered in exasperation, as if Brutus would hear her from across the room and throw her out of his alliance. She knew her old mentor appreciated her skillset too much to do that. "Like it's just a normal Hunger Games when it's not."

    "What do you mean?" Finnick asked quietly.

    "Just... with everything changing, this feels intentional," Jupiter told him her concerns. "What I saw in–" Finnick moved closer, effectively cutting her off.

    "Not here," he said firmly. Jupiter faltered, and he brushed a piece of hair behind her ear to disguise their closeness, before pulling away. "Let's see what the Morphlings are up to," Finnick told her brightly. Jupiter narrowed her eyes at the back of his head, but followed anyway.

    Finnick did not mention their discussion again, even as they again sat together at lunch. The mood was lighter that day, and Peeta and Katniss even joined in (though it was mostly Peeta). There seemed to be a mutual agreement between the older Victors that the pair were not as deeply in love as they played off. Jupiter didn't care– everyone had their own strategy, and it had kept them alive. Too bad the Quarter Quell had other plans.

    After lunch, Jupiter had made an effort to make more varied allies. She knew Brutus was going for strength, and that he was counting on her to bring Finnick along. But District 7 and 10 were not to be scoffed at. Johanna and Fawn obviously had their alliance down, but the male counterparts of their Districts were not to be ignored.

    Blight had not shown up the day before, and he didn't seem to be there for anything else other than to talk. Jupiter found him a bit annoying, but he was built from working in the lumber industry, and she didn't doubt the power he'd be able to put behind a weapon. Jupiter put on her most charming front, talking about her fondness for the mountains and woods, and watched the man get far away as he reminisced about his own District.

   She considered that a success, and moved onto Axle, who was at the same spear throwing station Jupiter had been the day before. He reminded her of Fawn, in that flighty, unhinged way. She found she knew entirely too much about him after only one day– he wanted to be a farmer, he had no family, and in his games he had impaled two people on the same sword.

    "Told you," Fawn said as they left training for the day.

    "Told her what?" Johanna interjected, as if she hadn't also been there for the conversation, as the pair traipsed off together. Jupiter chewed on her bottom lip, spotting Finnick at a different elevator, but she turned away.

    Aurelia talked far too long at dinner that night, and it was getting concerningly late when Brutus and Jupiter were able to slink off to bed. She considered going to visit Finnick, but found she was annoyed at being silenced, and with the pressure of the private sessions the next day, she stuck to pressing the pearl between her fingers and falling into bed.

    And, as if time was making a mockery of them, the third and final day of training arrived far too soon.

    "We have the advantage," Brutus had told her on the way to training.

    "God, all I did was throw knives in my Games," Jupiter said, pressing her hands to her temple.

    "That should still work," Brutus said approvingly. "We go third and fourth, they won't have gotten bored yet."

    "What will you do?" Jupiter asked. "Chuck a spear?"

    "Something like that," he told her.

    Jupiter spent the training before lunch sticking mostly to herself, going through the stations she felt she needed a revisit on. She knew how to handle a weapon, and how to sprint without getting tired– they were all things she had been bred into. Other things, such as survival skills, were more rusty, and she felt confident in leaving it to the last day.

    At lunch, Jupiter stayed quiet, reciting the knowledge over and over in her head. Around her, the other discussed what they would do for the private sessions. Most were said in jest, Mags said she would take a nap. Jupiter wondered what some of the smaller ones would do– Wiress and Beetee, the Morphlings.

    Finnick sent her an encouraging smile as they were escorted to the waiting area outside the gym, which was being prepared for their private sessions– fifteen minutes alone with the Gamemakers to show them what the tributes were made of. A score would be presented that night, as a way of ranking how dangerous each tribute was. The Career Districts always scored high, which made them both targets and a pack.

    Gloss went first, and then Cashmere. Jupiter had taken to playing with the pearl around her neck as she waited, glancing up when Brutus was called. Wiress was nervously twitching from beside Jupiter as they sat in District order. Brutus' fifteen minutes felt painstaking, before they called her name.

    Jupiter braced her hands against her thighs as she got to her feet, glancing over shoulder at the people she had spent the last three days training alongside, and some she had been friends with for years. She swallowed thickly and headed through the door, glancing up at the Gamemakers watching from above.

    "You have fifteen minutes," Plutarch Heavensbee, the new Head Gamemaker, told her over the speakers.

    Jupiter recalled as much as she could from the Academy, and even recalled her own mentor strategies she had been giving kids for the last seven years. She shot back to Clove, the small girl she had helped last year. She had liked to mouth off, but she also seemed to respect Jupiter, if only because they had a similar skillset.

    "You can't just throw knives," Jupiter would chastise the morning before. "Every Career can do that to some degree."

    She could hear her own words in her head as she gathered a collection of knives, holding them between her fingers in the way only someone who had been raised in violence would be able to. She had known how to slit someone's throat the most effective way before she had learnt how to cook.

    "You have to show them how good you are throwing knives," Jupiter would say. "Make them believe that you could hit anything."

    Knife after knife left her fingers, spinning end over end and lodging in the person-shaped target. Some of the Gamemakers had given her more of their attention, as she had lodged knives at the very edge of the target, as if drawing a line with the weapons, starting from the top of the forehead.

    Now with the attention on her, Jupiter felt more vindicated using the moving, holographic targets. It was the sort of thing only Careers would usually attempt, as success was very important when being judged in the private sessions. She knew she had a few minutes left, as she collected knives, holding multiple in both hands, not one blade slicing her skin.

    She counted along with the simulation's countdown, and moved before it finished. Each target that moved was struck down, and as she dwindled to her last two knives, three targets scrambled. Biting down on her tongue so hard she drew blood, Jupiter's wrist flung as she released the blades.

    One slashed the throat of a target, and flew by to get the second target in the chest, effectively downing both of them. The second knife had been released at a different point in the swing, and arced over both of them to catch the third target in the throat, and the simulation ended.

    "Thank you for your time," Jupiter said respectfully, looking up at the Gamemakers as they watched her like a lamb for slaughter.

    "You may go now, Miss Marrow," Plutarch told her.

    Jupiter took an elevator straight from the gym so as not to intersect with the tributes still waiting, and was met by Brutus on the Second Floor. "How did it go?" he asked immediately. Behind him, Aurelia and their two stylists sat chatting.

    "Let's just say I took my own advice," Jupiter told him.

    "Good," Brutus said, clapping her on the shoulder. "You alright, kid?"

    "Fine," she responded, because she wasn't sure what else to say.

    Dinner passed, which was filled with Lux and Brutus' stylist explaining their outfit ideas for the interview night. Even so, Lux was only giving Jupiter a ballpark, and she suspected her stylist was planning it to be some sort of surprise.

    A big send off.

    Jupiter was starting to feel like her mother, glued to the screen as they announced the individual scores after dinner, one through twelve. They started with Gloss and Cashmere's portraits, high numbers flashing beneath them, as expected. Similarly, Jupiter, Brutus and Finnick all got high numbers, broken up by Mags and District 3.

    The rest of the tributes had mid to low numbers, as expected, even in such an unusual Games. If anything, Jupiter was preparing to go to bed, or at least pretend to, when Brutus shouted from the other room.

    "That's impossible!" he cried.

    "What?" Jupiter said, turning the corner again.

    But her eyes widened at the scores beneath Peeta and Katniss' names– 12. A Hunger Games record. Brutus said something else, but Jupiter could only feel that everything was changing around her again. She pulled away from the screen and to her room, tugging on the pearl around her neck.

    She battled with going to Finnick's, her mind going to her mother. She would be watching the same screen she always did, seeing her child once again being presented to the world in numbers and pretty dresses. As if she wasn't a real person or someone's daughter sent to the slaughter. Cassia had always been numb to the reality of the Games– maybe it was a byproduct of being married to a Victor.

    Jupiter never knew how her parents had met. She'd never particularly bothered to ask.

    Once Jupiter was sure everyone had disappeared into their rooms, she left hers and made the small trip to the Fourth Floor. She had not made it the night before, and being met by Finnick's arms was very welcome.

    She had regretted not going to him as soon as she woke the next morning– now was not the time to let petty things take over. In a few days, it would all be over.

    "I see you scored well," Finnick commented as they lay together, staring at the ceiling. Finnick was absentmindedly playing with her hair, Jupiter was tracing circles on his arm.

    "Watching me?" she teased.

    "Always." He leaned down and kissed her on the nose.

    "How was that twelve?" she said, as if she hadn't really thought about it, but she moved her head to gauge Finnick's reaction.

    "It's making them a target," Finnick said simply.

    "What? You think so?" Jupiter asked, pushing herself to sit up. Finnick nodded, still lying down. "Why?"

    "Some people think she challenged the Capitol by winning," Finnick told her. Jupiter furrowed her brows. It was the first she had heard of this– perhaps outside of Fawn's odd comment months before.

    "Do you?" Jupiter asked. Finnick paused, but he also sat up, and looked at her carefully. And then he just shrugged, but Jupiter's mind was still reeling. "Is– is that why the Quarter Quell is happening?" she faltered. Suddenly she remembered the golden mockingjay in the bakery, and Fawn's golden drink.

    "I think so," Finnick responded, quietly. Jupiter's eyes widened.

    "A handful of berries undermined the Hunger Games," Fawn had said to her.

    "I undermined my games by winning."

    "You undermined your District's honour, not the Capitol."

    Jupiter fell asleep in Finnick's arms that night, but she was very far away. He didn't seem to want to talk anymore, and Jupiter found she felt the same. Her mind was still spinning, trying to figure out what everything meant.

    She knew things had shifted, but was it truthfully all because of Katniss Everdeen? She had no idea, and she wasn't sure if she'd find out before she became a casualty in the third Quarter Quell.

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if this chapter reads fillery, it's because it is, the two days of training is covered in ONE paragraph in the book so i really extended it for relationship purposes. i don't really like the ending but oh well, finnick keeping her in the dark to keep her safe <3