Chapter Text
Static - Voltaea
Every day now for Voltaea Amprole starts with static.
It’s a buzzing, soft sort of static – stronger by a bit in the left ear. Most sounds are different to her now – sharper, clearer, richer – she noticed it the first day she woke up after her fall. It was like she could hear every fluorescent light in the hospital coming together to form a strange, buzzing, electrical chorus.
It’s something to do with the accident – that was what District Five’s medical team had said while her parents sat limply and avoided eye contact with her in the days following. Brain injuries can cause issues with auditory processing, they said. There’s some nerve damage, it looks like, in the affected arm. She seems distant – flat affect – distracted. Voltaea didn’t feel distracted. She felt wired. Like her brain had tuned to every beep from a monitor, every word from a doctor, every rustle of the leaves in the big tree outside of her hospital window. Like a song only she could hear – a terrible, overwhelming chorus at times and a peaceful, warm melody at others.
They had told her that sleep would be essential for recovery, which began to feel like a cruel joke after only the third day of fitful, restless nights. All she could think about when she closed her eyes was what happened – the fall from the high-tension tower, her harness pulling taut, her body working before her mind could stop it to reach out for the nearest thing on instinct. What she ended up grabbing was a live, uninsulated power cable. Her vision had gone white hot and her ears started to buzz, then she remembered nothing until she woke up two weeks later in the District Five hospital with a very excited nurse – voice like glass clinking against itself – alerting every medical staff in the building to her return to the land of the living.
The first thing she noticed was the noise. The second was the burning, the buzzing in her arm - the scar from where she was shocked. It branched from its searing center in her palm to strike out up her forearm like a lightning bolt captured in flesh – red and angry. She couldn’t quite flex her fingers the same way in her left hand, but it was never her strong one. The scar still itches sometimes, still glows a paler version of that red, but it doesn’t have that same feral, clawing, burn that it used to carry. The scar reminds her of falling – of failing, she doesn't let herself fail like that anymore. No more grasping at live wires for Voltaea .
They’d tried to pull her father from work the day she woke up – he told them he would wait until his shift finished and then come with the rest of his family. Her parents couldn’t look at her – they still can’t. They were the ones who pushed her up there in the first place, forcing her to leave school early to take a job with one of the crews that traveled around District to fix the arteries of Panem’s power distribution grid. She had always been a strong climber, always been a quick study with circuitry, always preferred work that took her places away from others. Wirework was a good fit for her, in spite of her youth and inexperience. She wished she could have stuck around in school a few more years, maybe then she could have done something more technical – less dangerous – but her parents had told her that paying for her youngest brother’s specialized schooling would take priority. When they’d rise up, she’d drown those thoughts within herself before they could cause her pain.
The guilt never left her parents' eyes once. Not from her first reaping day onward – when they clung to each other tighter than Voltaea had ever seen them and whispered to how it was okay, they hadn’t made her take that many tesserae, surely she won’t be chosen, will she?
She’ll never forget their faces when the Peacekeepers came to the hospital that first night to hand down her penalty for having missed the Reaping last year. They’d doubled her entries. Voltaea did the math. She took 5 tesserae a year, 20 total at her fifteen years of age last reaping – which became 40 overnight, then another 10 tesserae this year to have enough food to make up for the medical costs and soften the blow of her loss of work for the family. 50 entries.
She laughs then – a sharp, short, shrill thing like microphone feedback. “May the odds be ever in my favor” she mutters, mostly to herself. No one else laughs. Her sister weeps. Her parents leave the room without a word to tend to her brother. This is how things have been with them ever since. The distance of her parents, the melancholy and concern from Ohma, her sister. Her brother Davo, he’s six, has his whole life ahead of him - of course that’s where their focus is now, not with the dead girl walking . That’s what Voltaea thinks when she needs to drown the part that starts feeling sorry for herself in static.
She’d started putting her hair up then - not in the usual, practical ponytail she’d sometimes have on for work - but a pristine, high, severe bun that pulled the corners of her face tight - slightly painful at first. It took her practice to get it down right. The rhythm calmed her, the tightness was a veneer of control amid chaos. Every schk of the brush through her hair in the morning, a promise to herself to live her life by her design not her instincts - no more unplanned accidents - no more failures.
Her mother had told her it made her face look even more gaunt than it already did, but Voltaea didn’t listen much to her mother anyways. She’d tell her lots of things about herself - too tall, too pale, too skinny, too calloused, “Oh Voltaea where did you get such a long face from?”. Some new ones since the accident too - too scarred, too sleepless, too dull, too strange, “You know you used to smile once, don’t you?”. Voltaea listened even less these days, and kept the small part of her that did listen in a tightly locked container at the corner of her mind. So that it couldn't escape to cause her trouble.
When she was finally cleared to go back to work, it was freedom. At first, an overwhelming sort of freedom - overstimulating, loud, a cacophony of wind and whizzing wires. Just having something to focus on other than the nightmares and the cold and the putting-on-a-brave-face for Ohma and the Reaping…
The first day back she found a problem with a fusebox that no one else had even thought to check. She told her foreman, Markus, that she heard the wires screaming - a faint, high-pitched whine like pain. He’d looked at her like she had three heads, but after the second time it happened, he realized she wasn’t nutty - she was just tuned in to something he couldn’t quite hear. He started having her scout out problems along the lines - it kept her away from people, it kept the crews moving, it won her respect and her coworkers finally saw her as something valuable - it was perfect.
The air in the high-voltage towers was cleaner than it was below. The smell is more in line with burning ozone than choking smog. Not a good smell, but crisper, more open, less cloying. At first, the buzzing up here overwhelmed her. Shriek, hiss, buzz, sizzle, schk . As she readjusted, the noise became a melody - something to hum along with to pass the time - to hear when a note was out of place and correct it. She was good at her job. Her right hand was plenty deft enough to use her toolkit with the limited use of her left, and her mind was twice as quick as half of the older crewmen - Markus had told her this bit more than once and she had to fight a smile each time he did. He was one of the only people who paid her any mind - even before the accident she had been quiet, awkward, a bit too intense to approach. People around five often ignored her, or mocked her, or made her out to be something she wasn’t. Hell, half the time she felt like her own family did too. The linemen didn't really care if you were odd, just that you worked hard. She could work with that. It made sense to her.
Everything was perfect, until today, when the whistle blew in that brief discordant blast that hits Voltaea straight in the base of the skull where it aches in her teeth and tells her it’s time to climb down from the sky and face the world once more. When she sees Markus’s face, stern and furrowed beyond even his advanced years, she remembers what day it is. “Amprole.” His voice always sounded like he had a throat full of gravel - probably the cigars. She didn’t hate it, it had its own gruff musicality.
“Old man.” She stiffens- that look of concern on his face makes her stomach ache. She wants for anything but those looks of pity and sadness that her sister carries to follow her here - but here they were, on Markus’s face.
“You… ah…” Markus pauses when he sees the pained expression flicker across Voltaea’s face. “Just come back after tomorrow, alright?” Reaping day. Of course. Always looming, she had almost forgotten. When sleep wouldn’t come, or would come fitfully, she’d fall into this state where days start running together. “Go see your sister.” He waves her off with a massive, calloused hand before he ruins his reputation as a man of few words. She nods, turning on her heel to make the long trek back to her family’s apartment on the edge of District Five’s coal burning sector.
The Coal Burning sector is where the messiest power plants in the district are located - where they ship in the coal mined in District Twelve to burn. Voltaea’s corner of District Five is among the poorest - kids here generally have to pick up at least a few tesserae for their families to squeeze by. The smog from the coal plants chokes the sky, an omnipotent grey-black cloud hanging overhead. On a sunny day, with the coal plants in full swing, it almost looks like dusk out here even at noontime. Her home is on the bottom floor of a four-story concrete apartment block whose outer walls are so caked in coal soot from the power plants that it looks like it’s been painted black.
She pushes open the door and is greeted by the awful, atonal shrieks of her laughing brother - perched on her father’s lap watching some Capitol-made television program for children. All bright colors and hideous melodies, she hated them. She hated that the fact that Five always had power meant she could always hear the blaring Capitolian accents billowing through the screen in their living room. The scraping of her mother’s wooden spoon on the bottom of the stewpot signifies that dinner was likely still a while off - her mom likes to take her time cooking. She slips out of her harness and jumpsuit quietly and hangs them, careful not to disturb the music of her home just yet, and slinks off to the room she shares with her sister.
She can hear Ohma humming some winding, careful tune while she lays on her stomach fiddling with a nest of colorful wires. She likes to turn them into little accessories - like those ladies have in the Capitol fashion shows she watches with their mom. Voltaea tried to hate this too, like the television - frivolous Capitol nonsense to waste wiring like that - but the second her sister had provided her with a tiny bent lightning-bolt necklace she had caved and told Ohma she loved it. Earnestly and truly. She has worn it every day since, and while the guys at work give her a little flak for trying to clean herself up for the cables, she knows a lot of them carry home with them too. A pocket watch for Markus - it was his fathers, he told her once. The harness rigger, Jakobi, has this little woven bracelet that his youngest daughter made him - Voltaea tried to tell him that she likes the pink color, but he was embarrassed to show the others lest they think him less of a man.
Ohma doesn’t hear her sister come in. Instead, Voltaea winds her way onto the bed behind her and immediately takes two hands and makes a mess out of the younger girl’s hair. Her sister feigns a terrified scream and giggles. Voltaea, ever measured, clasps a hand over her mouth and says “Oh gods, Ohma, what happened! Your hair looks like you got electrocuted!” Voltaea’s voice was deadpan, but she slipped a small, closed mouth grin at her own teasing. Ohma rolled her eyes and smoothed her hair back. “Jerk. Ugh. You’re worse than Davo.” There’s that softness in her sister’s voice in spite of her words that makes Voltaea feel like home. It’s why she teases her - it seems to be the only time the poor thing isn’t trying to worry herself to death about Voltaea and can just laugh a little.
“Whatcha makin’ anyways?“ Voltaea huddles over Ohma’s shoulder, leaning into the casual affectation she tries to put on for work still. It’s practiced. Controlled. Deliberate. People like casual, or ignore it. Voltaea thinks to herself. That’s for the best . Her sister wilts at her words, Voltaea braces.
“It’s for you, V, but I’m so far from finishing I don’t know if I can in time…” Ohma’s voice trails off and takes on that lower, quieter tone that Voltaea knows means she’s gone and made the poor thing worry for her again. She vows to stop doing that later. “You’re going to the Reaping again tomorrow, and… oh Voltaea, there’s so many entries!” Tears. Damnit. Voltaea quickly scoops the younger girl into her arms and pulls her into a tight hug as Ohma chokes back a short, sharp, sob.
“Stop.” It’s less a comfort than it is a demand. “You’ll be fine, Ohma. If I get reaped, I go, and you find a way to take care of yourself.” Ohma smacks her shoulder through her tears. It’s a light smack, but jarring from the usually soft girl in her arms.
“You have to win!” Her sister’s voice, choked with tears, gurgles in Voltaea’s ear and makes her lean away a bit, uncomfortably. “If they take you you have to win so you can come back and be my sister again!” Voltaea smooths the girls hair out again and pulls out of the hug, even attempting a smile.
“Go have dinner, okay?” Voltaea grabs the corner of a sheet from the bed and uses it to wipe the tears from her sister’s eyes. “We can talk all about winning if I get picked, but I need to lay down for a minute before I go out there and face Davo’s awful laugh.”
She waits until after the door has closed and she hears her sister stop lingering just outside. Counting each footfall as she walks away. When Ohma is out of earshot, Voltaea buries her face into the pillow, and screams. She doesn’t stop until her throat is raw and burning - just enough feedback from her body to know she’s still alive and feeling. She buries her nails into the scar on her left hand to center herself - letting the burning creep up her arm like a warm hug. After a moment, she stills, and slowly pulls herself up from the mattress to face herself in the floor-length mirror placed in the corner of her room.
Her hair is a disaster, she takes to smoothing that out first. The schk, schk, schk of her hairbrush serves to center her in the present again. Then she has to do something about her face - the red, puffy, sunken look of a girl who just tried not to cry and failed at it. She drags herself to the single bathroom in the home to splash cold water on her face and try to wash the pathetic look from her eyes before she faces her parents and her siblings at dinner. When she’s satisfied, she nods to herself once in the mirror - calm, collected, controlled. Despite her preparations, dinner is a quiet affair. Her parents do not speak to her, except to tell Voltaea that her mother will be late to the Reaping as she wants to keep Davo home until the last minute - wouldn’t do to stress the boy out, would it, Voltaea?
When she retreats with Ohma to the comfort of their shared room, the younger girl breaks down again. Voltaea silently bundles her into her arms and pulls them both under a blanket - humming a soft, melodic, not-quite tune into her ear. She tries to shut out the sharpness of the sobs with her own sound, a calming sound - one she pulled from the wires while she worked and made a mantra from. Her sister’s sobs dull into the drone of Voltaea’s humming, then eventually, she sniffles and stops.
Voltaea listens for her sister’s breaths, keeping track of the rhythm as she slows into sleep. Once she’s certain Ohma is out cold, she slips from under the blanket to prepare for tomorrow. First, she lays out her Reaping Day outfit. Nothing fancy, just clean enough for the Peacekeepers not to beat her for showing up unprepared. A plain, crisp, white button-down shirt with slightly-too-short sleeves, a pair of coal-grey slacks, a slightly nicer pair of boots than the ones she shed in the entryway covered in grease and coal dust. She takes an extra moment to smooth each piece of clothing out as she lays them on the dresser - calm and controlled - and then slumps onto the floor beside the bed where Ohma has begun snoring in a low, grumbling rhythm.
She slides a hand under the bed and feels around for a moment before pulling out a locked metal box, flipping the combination in like second nature and clicking it open - quietly, so as not to disturb the rhythm of Ohma’s snoring. Inside, her secret weapon. She has never told her sister what sits inside the box, it would concern her to know Voltaea has thought about this in such detail. She should never, ever have to think about the Games, because she should never have a chance to go. Not if I can help it. She pulls out the two leather-bound notebooks - one to copy, one to create.
The first notebook contains every relevant detail Voltaea could find at District 5’s library about past Hunger Games - the arenas, the victors, the reactions of Capitol media, the historic events surrounding them. She had first begun the catalogue after her accident, a project to pass the time at first, then a lifeline as she realized just how close she was to being chosen to step into the arena herself.
The second notebook was her thoughts, unfettered, disorganized, and strewn through the pages in a stream of consciousness that it hurt Voltaea to look at. Half-chewed ideas about strategy, victor's to learn from, arena patterns, designs for traps made of scavenged materials. She had even practiced a few of those with begrudging help from Markus when she told him about her project. She confessed to him one day while hanging upside down from a pole fiddling with a hard-to-reach fusebox that she knew in her gut she’d be the next one at Reaping Day. There was no talking her out of it - she wasn’t emotional about it with him. No, it was just a statement of fact. She spent the rest of the afternoon talking about everything she had learned at the library, her ideas, her plans, her fears. Markus didn’t say a word, just let her go on like that for the rest of her shift with a raised eyebrow and a listening ear.
The next day, he and the guys had scrambled together some materials that she mentioned during the hour or so where she rambled extensively about the merits of electrical traps in an arena setting so that she could practice her designs in her own time. It was the most overwhelmingly kind thing anyone had ever done for her, at that point. She closed her eyes as they spoke in a chorus, so she could tell who was speaking without the added loudness of the sunlight. Suddenly louder in the face of her emotion. “In exchange for never putting us through another lecture like that again” Gravelly. Thundering. Markus. “We like you when you’re quiet, Voltaea, no offense” Nasally. Pitchy. Jakobi. “Shut up, She’s fine! And if she gets called up, she’ll knock ‘em all dead, that’s our girl!” Booming. Fiery. Lorelai. In that moment she was wrapped in the voices of her comrades and felt cared for. Not quite a family, but people who care for her in their own way.
She wraps the memory around her like a security blanket as she plunges into her notes. There would be no rest tonight. Tomorrow was Reaping Day, her chances of being called were closing in on 4%. There would be plenty of time for rest on the train to the Capitol, but there wouldn’t be any way to take all of this with her, not by the rules of the games. One district token - that’s all you get to take with you. She fumbles the lightning-bolt necklace absentmindedly.
Tonight would have to count - she begins with the sections she marked with stuck bits of electrical tape with scrawled labels. Voltaea has always thought the clever victors were the more interesting ones, strategically speaking. She’s tall, a fantastic climber, agile even, but she’s thin from years of living on the edge of fed. She has no weapon skills to speak of, no hand-to-hand fight experience, I suppose if they handed me a screwdriver I might feel familiar enough to stab someone with it. There were always ways around this from what she had seen though - the Gamemakers adore a clever killer. Voltaea flips to the section labeled “Victors to learn from”. There was a streak in the 30’s where most of the victors were unconventional or clever in some way - this was her favorite era of games to study and it showed in her notes.
She shudders at the visible disorder on the page - her mind was still too full of static back when she had started taking her notes to think of doing any organizing with them. Hair-down Voltaea wrote these notes. Her eyes narrow as she runs a finger down the page.
The first name, Selica Vireaux of District One, 35th Games, was crossed out in an angry red - it was half baked of her to think she could follow the act of a woman who talked half of her own alliance members into killing each other and poisoned the rest in increasingly elaborate ways. Voltaea’s mother had once told her “Voltaea, you have the charisma of coal dust” , so she wasn’t sure how that would work out for her.
To Voltaea, at least from what she had seen of Selica’s televised appearances, the woman had even less. She has the voice of a banshee and dresses like an ugly bird. For some reason beyond comprehension to her, people seem to love this. She would still definitely put Selica down as clever, though. The woman was extremely adept at reading people, shaping herself to meet their expectations, hiding the nasty parts of herself until exactly the right moment - and an encyclopedic knowledge of any substance that could kill someone under the sun. It’s clever. Just not replicable.
Haymitch Abernathy of Twelve, 50th Games. He managed to kill his final opponent by using a forcefield around the arena against her. He’d spent a while just working out the mechanics of the thing - throwing stuff over the edge of the arena and watching it bounce back up. When the final career tribute chucked an axe at his head and missed, he crumpled to the ground - the axe came back as expected, right into her skull. Most certainly clever, but relied on a certain amount of luck in figuring out the arena’s secrets, from what she could see. Voltaea wasn’t the strongest with luck-related challenges either, but she could see herself using the arena as a tool.
Beetee Latier of District Three, 34th Games, was a much clearer-cut victory of smarts. Six tributes ended up dying at once to one of his elaborate traps made of scavenged arena parts. Impressive. She had a high opinion of District Three in general, not that she’d met anyone from there - the technology she’d seen them use in the arena was always cutting edge. Voltaea thought she would definitely stand a chance of using electricity like Beetee did, given her skillset. She had taken notes on his trap designs to incorporate into her own.
She had been avoiding the last name on the page, because if she was chosen tomorrow, this was the woman who would be acting as her mentor, and Voltaea wasn’t sure she liked the prospect given what she knew about the woman’s post-games persona as a darling of the Capitol and television gossip queen. Alara Vox, District Five’s only living victor and winner of the 36th Games.
Disgust with her post-games life aside, to Voltaea, Alara Vox had all the makings of someone on the clever winners list. The arena that year was called in the Capitol Press Daily “Avante-Garde and Experimental” - a set of five islands atop an electrified lake, each with a set of shifting glass bridges that moved between them. Alara had figured out early on how to manipulate the environment of the arena - killing two tributes by triggering a bridge collapse (including her own district partner). She got another kill and caused a huge shift in arena dynamics by using a small makeshift fuse to blow up a hidden flamethrower trap that caused a fire which engulfed an entire one of the islands.
At the end of her games, it was down to her and the girl from District One - and when the career girl sitting above her had her pinned, gloating about how she was going to crush Alara’s pretty skull for the cameras, she reached up and clawed the girl’s eyes out. It gave her enough of an opening that she was able to seize the advantage and finish the job - entirely with her hands. She’s like a feral cat. Voltaea had noted.
When she had asked her mother what she knew about District Five’s mentor, given that they must be around the same age, she spit and called her a traitor. Her father had just told her not to bother him with such stupid questions while he was watching television. It was the librarian’s assistant - a young woman with a voice like soft rainfall who sometimes helped her dig up old articles for her research, that finally gave her slightly more of an answer - “Alara isn’t well liked around here because she’s seen as too Capitol . Rumor has it she’s never even lived in the Victor’s Village - she just moved straight out there to become one of them at the President’s request or something. Someone told me she keeps her nails long to remind everyone of that last kill she made. I think she does that gossip show during the games, the Crimson Cut? I dunno, I’ve always thought that was kind of a conflict of interest myself, given that she’s teaching the kids she’s cackling about the deaths of…” Voltaea tries to listen intently as the woman goes on with her opinions for a while, her words a calming summer storm, but they’re a little too thick to follow entirely. She tries to pick out the important bits from all the chatter. Assimilated to Capitol life. Untrustworthy? Definitely likes to gossip. Ethically conflicting. Voltaea shrugs at her notes about Alara, figuring she’ll have every chance to ask the woman herself if the odds are as stacked against her as she thinks they are.
After what seems like an eternity of reading she puts down her notes and finally falls asleep right there on the floor beside the bed. Not for long, but a few fitful hours before the sirens sound - that droning awful deathknell - to mark the beginning of today's ritual. She’s already dressed before Ohma rolls out of bed. Time to face the music.