flint-and-fire

[flint-and-fire]

beginnings

Jonas ran wild these days.

Wasn't much order to be found in Six, anyway, outside of the factories. Machines had more of a home here than people did. Abandoned engine shops with "For Sale" signs in broken windows, cheaply priced, but not having much chance of getting picked up by a brilliant young entrepreneur, given that such things as entrepreneurs were an oxymoron outside of the Capitol. President Wren might make the trains run on time down to the minute, but out in the Districts, things went down different. A slower way of life for farmlands, no grain in their silos while their workers feed the rest of Panem. A long, slow death. A starving death, with that little niggling reminder in the back of the brain and the atoms of the body - that, to survive, you need something, and you won't get it.

Six was like that, too, for Jonas. For a lot of people. Only difference being that there was always more morphling. A simple matter of supply and demand. There would never not be demand, and so the streets would supply. Jonas - well. Jonas partook in the great Panem drug trade like the rest of them. Bought what he could afford, hawked anything he could hold. Feeding the machine, so to speak. Every little vial passed between hands, every little drop on a dry, extended tongue. Everything needs some fuel to get by.

"Whatever gets you through the night," Jonas would say about it, a line from a song that he only knew the chorus of. "It's alright."

It wasn't alright right now.

Holes in his canvas shoes made the rain-soaked streets worse. Jonas plodded with the rest of his coworkers out into the dusk. He plodded a while longer, as the rest of the seething mass split ways and the crowd dissolved. Solitude wasn't usually his kind of friend, but he moved with a careless indifference, natural as breeze. He moved, he wandered, he rambled and he aimed until he stopped at Isaac Spark's door, and there he stood for awhile, waiting for the rain to pass.

He didn't want Isaac to see him like this in the pouring rain. Bad enough Isaac was going to see him at all. Jonas wanted atmosphere, and "Victor Spark" opening his front door to find an old friend soaked and pelted with rain was just not going to do it. So he waited. He stood beneath the rain until it stopped, until the night air was musky and the streetlights lit up the fog.

And he knocked.

Isaac had never felt welcome in Six, not since his victory.

He had spent the years since stowed away in his home, spending hours passing with Travel. He'd had all the time in the world to learn sign language so that he could communicate with her, and so a majority of his days went by in complete silence even when he had the company. He had been gifted with access to the Capitol's internet, as limited as it was, and had quickly fallen into their vast music collection. He had honed and perfected his own talent, and was sitting on the floor of his living room playing with his guitar and humming quietly when he heard the knock on his door.

Isaac laid the guitar to the side as he pulled himself up to his feet. The only person who knocked on his doors these days was Travel, so he wasn't put off by the fact that he was opening the door in a pair of thin pajama bottoms and a bare chest. Not until he opened the door and spotted who was on the other side, and Isaac was left standing there blinking.

Did he even remember this one's name? It had been so many years, a decade of isolation and silence and a life now entirely dictated by the Games, by the gifts that the Capitol continued to offer to him.

Isaac reached out and grabbed a sweater that was hanging by his door and shrugged it on to cover himself the best he could, "Hey."

[flint-and-fire]

so here's the thing

my wife and I are working on a fanfiction alternate universe of The Hunger Games that I am 100% is fair use and transformative

featuring adult characters and situations

a Quarter Quell full of Victors' loved ones

and Revolution in the form of a culture war

Think the high octane political action of Mad Max: Fury Road plus the tender queerness of Call Me By Your Name plus the tension of C. S. Pacat in The Captive Prince and Dark Heir trilogies with a lot of original spins on tired tropes. And very queer, very well-done smut, from experienced authors.

Like frenemies to lovers. Or just plain enemies to lovers. Redemption arcs that are earned. Villains who turn out to have something to say. Dystopia not for the sake of dystopia, but for the sake of juxtaposing with Utopia. That which cannot be.

And lots of polyamory.

Not "why choose." Just polyamory. Written by poly, sapphic, genderqueer people.

we'd like to film it. Or turn it into a book series. Or something. We're playing around with that part.

For now?

Yall should consider following along.