Fanfic / We Must Be Killers

We Must be Killers: Tales from District 2 is a The Hunger Games fanfiction series by Lorata (whose link is here and whose Archive of Our Own page for the series is here). The series contains dozens of vignettes and full-length stories, most of which are character-focused and centered on the District 2 victors, Career tributes, or their loved ones. The powerful Family of Choice dynamics between the victors is the main focus of the stories, with them being portrayed as damaged people looking for a purpose in all the wrong places (albeit with logical rationales) and clinging hard to the belief they have found it, which sometimes has Blue-and-Orange Morality or Lack of Empathy results. Given that most of the characters are Doomed by Canon, the final story is an Alternate Universe Fix Fic offering a happier ending for the District 2 victors and Panem as a whole.

Tropes:

• Actually Pretty Funny: After Snow asks the Quell mentors for one reason not to kill them and their tributes for defying him during the interviews, he actually laughs before resuming his threats when Ronan says "You'd waste one hell of an arena."
• Anti-Hero: Almost every District 2 character has committed brutal murders in the arena in the service of an evil regime, can be very judgmental to people in other districts and even the ones who go against the Capitol have mixed motives, but they also truly care about each other and the people of their district? and do have somewhat understandable reasons to believe in the greater purpose of their actions. Even the nicer and better-adjusted victors often have Kick the Dog or Obliviously Evil moments, such as Brutus's mentor Odin refusing to let his mother see him and help repair his life after he becomes a victor.
• Beneath the Mask:
  • Most of the District 2 victors put on masks of being happy or indifferent about their many kills as long as it entertains their revered Capitol and keeps their kids safe, but many have occasional pangs of conscience when the world isn't watching.
  • Brutus's first victor Emory is seen as one of the most firmly loyal tributes, and when Misha thinks that she'd rather Lyme be a Rebel than dead in Shadows Fall (despite her dislike of the Rebellion), she feels certain that the inverse is true for Emory after Brutus died in the Quell. However, Lorata has said Misha is wrong, and Emory is indeed willing to fight the Capitol without much fuss after accepting their betrayal of District 2's victors in the Fix Fic Grand Finale.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Fix Fic ends with a version of Panem with many more people surviving (including almost every named character who dies in Mockingjay, around thirty additional victors who died in the non-AU installments of the fanfiction series, and the peacekeeper Selene) and the country moving forward from the war, but the scars of such a long dystopian reign and a violent rebellion are healing slowly, and six District 2 victors are still dead, including Emory, Odin, and Callista.
• Blood Knight: Most of the District 2 Victors (especially Devon, Misha, Lyme, Odin, and Enobaria) enjoy fighting each other for fun now and then, but Callista surpasses them in that regard. She is one of the most approachable and good-humored members of the Victors Village in District 2, but is also one who enjoys killing and only stopped after the Games because of a promise to her mentor. In the A District Upside Down: The War Fix Fic, she keeps a Kill Tally during the final battle and is initially exhilarated, then guilty about killing people when she understands the cause they are fighting for, and then half-seriously annoyed with herself for moralizing during her first opportunity to commit "unlimited murder" in decades.
  • During the Christmas season, whenever any two of the District 2 Victors get caught under the mistletoe, rather than kiss, they are obligated to have a brawl, and most of them view this as a nice bit of fun.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: In The District Upside Down: The War, after the District 2 victors are finally convinced that Snow has betrayed and abused their loyalty too often and that the Renegade Splinter Faction of the rebellion will respect their voices, opinions, and concerns about District 2, all of them besides Callista agree to fight the Capitol. However, Callista shows up for the final battle anyway and says that food has been tasting funnier lately, she has been forced to think about awful things the Capitol has done that she's long ignored, and it will at least be an outlet for her Blood Knight tendencies.
• Child Hater: Lyme loathes the idea of motherhood and being around kids. She has a Freudian Excuse, as her mother was groomed and impregnated at the age of fourteen and eventually abandoned Lyme after years of an abusive relationship that also saw Lyme get beat up and neglected. This causes Lyme to have No Sympathy for a tribute with a pregnant girlfriend and to disagree with the idea that Cecelia deserves special consideration in the Quell for being one of the few victors to have kids.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Despite being District 6's youngest victor until a few years before the 3rd Quarter Quell, Phillips acts as their spokesperson, primary mentor, and babysitter for the other victors due to being the only one of the three older District 6 victors who never uses drugs. He has been doing this since his teens, when he came out of the arena due to managing an Improbable Weapon User kill with the glitter and rolling pin his drugged-up mentor sent him as sponsor gifts.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Middle-aged victor Callista adopts dozens of stray cats that she loves knitting sweaters for her, partially as a way of coping with her Murder Makes You Crazy instability.
• A Day in the Limelight: Caius and Hera, two of the oldest District 2 victors, are barely mentioned at all until they become prominent characters in the second half of the Fix Fic. This is also A Death in the Limelight for them.
• Deal with the Devil: After the uproar following the 3rd Quarter Quell interviews, Snow confronts and threatens the mentors, mockingly dares them to name alternatives (like canceling the games altogether or doing a reaping with normal tributes) and hints that he can cancel the games if he chooses to, but they will have to offer him something that it will cost them very dearly to lose (whether personally or for their whole districts) and that will leave him feeling like he came out on top. The mentors back down and vote to let the Quell continue (although some of them are rebels already planning to sabotage it).
• Executive Meddling: One of President Snow's worst Kick the Dog moments to punish unrest in the districts is rigging the 67th Hunger Games reaping so that every tribute reaped is twelve years old (with the Career districts being the only places where a volunteer steps up).
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Despite the heavy tension between Career and outlier victors, they do occasionally fraternize, such as when many of them end up watching a cheesy chick flick loosely based on Brutus's life (to his mortification) in Bring Us Together.
• Gentle Giant: Odin is one of the burliest Victors, but since his Games, he mostly just gardens and acts like a grandfather to everyone in his Master-Apprentice Chain (although he does still enjoy the occasional good-natured fight).
• Heroism Motive Speech: Claudius gets a preemptive motive speech in Fixed to a Star, almost a decade before he officially becomes a rebel. He tells Lyme that the Capitol does nothing but evilly exploit them and that someday they will do something to destroy even Lyme's My Country, Right or Wrong sense of loyalty, and once they go that far, he wants to be with Lyme when she retaliates.
  Claudius: They ask, we give, and they take, that's the way it goes. But they just keep asking and just keep taking, and one day they'll take something you didn't want to give. Something so bad it's worse than marching kids to their deaths every year. One day you're going to walk away. Take me with you.
• Hypocrite: In Follow the Leader, Joseph Seward coldly takes part in the brutal execution of a presumptive volunteer who lost his nerve during the reaping and let an untrained younger boy become the tribute while making excuses about how he didn't volunteer either (and without much more of a reason) despite being the next-highest ranked trainee in the class of potential volunteers.
• Let Them Die Happy: In The Price of Celebrity, Ronan tells Odin that there is an escape passage that Petra, the mentee of his mentee, can escape out of before the approaching Rebels (who want to execute them) arrive. However, they need Odin to Hold the Line and buy time. Odin eagerly commits to this Heroic Sacrifice to save his surrogate granddaughter, but once he leaves the room, Ronan admits there is no tunnel, and instead he and Petra need to commit suicide, but he wanted to let Odin die with a sense of hope rather than despair.
• Life Saving Misfortune: Near the end of Make Us Proud, Alec talks to a former Peacekeeper who was injured early in the Mockingjay Rebellion. She came out of a coma to learn that everyone else in her graduating class died on the front lines.
• Mama Bear: While every female District 2 mentor is fiercely protective of anyone they mentor (and the men are little different), a few stand out in that regard.
  • Any Capitolite who gets plastic surgery to resemble a tribute Callista failed to save finds their life being sabotaged in all kinds of ugly ways that never quite trace back to Callista but are clearly her furious handiwork.
  • In the Fix Fic, Adessa spends the final battle of the Capitol seeking out and brutally killing every Capitol woman who ever bought a night with her tribute Nero (the only District 2 victor who wasn't immune to the Sex Slave ring, even if the nights for him were worded as An Offer You Can't Refuse requests rather than the outright threats everyone else was subjected to).
• Master-Apprentice Chain: There is no secret involved, but there are long chains of mentors and Victors in District 2. Ronan, their eldest Victor, personally mentored at least three Victors, including Luna and Caius, but it is unclear if the next steps in some of the chains below were mentored by Ronan or one of the other earlier victors.
  • Iris → Adessa → Nero → Enobaria (who never mentors) and Lyme → Misha and Claudius → at least one fallen tribute Misha mentors.
  • Odin → Brutus → Emory, Devon, and Petra → at least six fallen tributes Emory or Devon mentor.
  • Hera → Callista → many fallen tributes Callista mentors.
• Morton's Fork: District 1 potential tributes who wash out of the Career Academy are enslaved and pimped out or made to work in the mines, but any who do well enough are sent into the Hunger Games and either die or live to become a Sex Slave. As a result, District 1 victors who wanted to lose the games but failed to find a plausible way to do so (which is almost all of them) tend to be depressed and caustic.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Brutus and Lyme love hanging out together and confiding in each other, and their loyalty to each other surpasses the binds of almost anyone else in their circle of friends. However, there is no chemistry between them, although in It’s Either that or Malaria, they pretend to be in a Secret Relationship as a prank.
• Rape Leads to Insanity: Eibhlin, District 3's youngest victor, was a "cocky genius" before being raped in a particularly traumatic fashion, apparently as the result of District 3 trying to make demands of the Capitol. Whatever happened to her was bad enough that she has been depressed and easily frightened since, doesn't like to be near men, has a similar erratic speech pattern and mental process to Wiress, and is implicitly viewed as a suicide risk if left alone.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: "On The Bloody Morning After" is a one-shot What If? story set in a different timeline than either the main series (where just about everyone who isn't Saved by Canon gradually dies) or the Fix Fic A District Upside Down: The War, with its Bittersweet Ending. In it, the 3rd Quarter Quell arena escape fails, with Katniss, Peeta, Finnick, Johanna, Enobaria, and Beetee all dying while Brutus wins the Games, the Rebellion never happens, every rebel who wasn't in the arena is exposed, and either executed or sent to a Black Site, and the Games continue with more and more dead or mentally scarred children. However, District 12 isn't bombed, District 13 is still presumably out there, there is an Underground Railroad in the districts, and one final Cynicism Catalyst finally makes Brutus and Lyme decide to rebel and hope they can bring down the Capitol.
• Red Baron: Devon is called "The Kissing Killer" after seducing four of his companions as part of his strategy (he drew the line at doing this with his district partner) and killing two of them during makeout sessions.
• Retired Badass: The oldest victors (Ronan, Odin, Caius, Hera, Adessa, and Luna) won just as brutal games as their younger counterparts and do well during the mistletoe fighting competition, but rarely deliberately seek fights anymore and enjoy quiet pastimes like gardening and going on walks with dogs.
• The Scapegoat: In this story, Peeta killing Brutus is just the official cover story to keep the District 2 victors (save Lyme and Ronan, who saw it happen) from knowing that Snow killed Brutus with nerve gas on a Stupid Evil whim to make it clear that he wouldn't let anyone dictate to him who the Quell victor should be. Both the District 2 victors and Eibhlin from District 3 view this cover-up as ridiculous (although they don't guess the truth), with Eibhlin commenting that it seems "physically improbable" unless Peeta had plenty of time to prepare and some kind of lever.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • The first time Brutus loses a tribute, it is mentioned that the remaining contenders are from District 5 and District 7 and that either Blight or Caleb (the drunken District 5 man from Catching Fire) will soon have his first victor with Caleb's hammer-wielding tribute being the one Brutus favors. However, later stories never give any indication that either District has any post-2nd Quarter Quell victors besides Johanna, and a District 10 victor named Angus, who won with hammers, seems to be retroactively established as the victor of those Games.
  • Fixed to the Star is one of the earliest stories and has a lot of important characters and plot points that affect the rest of the series, but it has many continuity issues about the past victors.
    • Districts 3, 8, 9, and 10, all only have two victors (their Quell tributes) in that story, while later works like The End is the Beginning is the End: The Quarter Quell establish that each of those districts has at least one additional living victor during the Quell who is older than Claudius (Mauve Shirts Lumina, Diana, Cora, and Angus).
    • The only living female District 1 victors for Claudius to meet in Fixed to a Star are Cashmere and an old woman named Precious, while other works like Bring Us Together, Ambrosia, and The District Upside Down: The War feature several other living District 1 female victors older than Claudius.
  • One scene in the Fix Fic says Caius is the first Victor Ronan ever mentored, but another says Luna is.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Callista, the most voluptuous District 2 Victor, is often noted as wearing something like a short evening gown, low-cut sweater, or (during one particularly hot Christmas season) nothing but ribbons and relishes the stir it causes.
• Sibling Rivalry: Lyme and Enobaria view themselves as sisters due to having the same mentor (Nero) and having spent much of their lives away from their biological families. They also have wildly different temperaments and each resents any attention Nero gives the other.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Adessa is by far the most elegant and well-dressed Victor of District 2, but she is also willing to engage in the occasional scrap with the younger Victors and tends to do well. The A District Upside Down: The War Fix Fic reveals that she once told Snow to his face that he should retire or Panem would be doomed by his single-minded desire to protect his power and that she has her own private list of deplorable Capitolites she would happily kill for mistreating her mentee.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: During the last-minute negotiations between Snow and the Quell mentors, after Snow rejects the suggestions of Diana from District 8 and Angus from District 10 to either cancel the Games or do a regular reaping for kids to replace the Victor-tributes, Cora from District 9 bluntly suggests that he just kill Katniss rather than go through the charade of making everyone else collateral damage to take her with them. However, as Haymitch (who suggests that Snow just put her under de facto house arrest, which again is too lenient for Snow's ego) points out, this will just make her a martyr and give people even less reason to hold back from rebelling.
• Someone to Remember Him By: The male District 6 tribute in Nobody Decent leaves behind a pregnant girlfriend. Possibly subverted, as she kills herself at some point after his death in the arena, and it is never mentioned if she waited to have her baby first.
• Suicide by Cop: District 1 tributes (especially the girls) are well aware of the Sex Slave fate that awaits them if they win the Hunger Games, but before they are sent into the Games, they are given a last visit with any siblings they have and told those siblings will be murdered if they die and don’t try to win. However, a few of them (like Britta from Devon's Games and Petra's opponent Ambrosia subtly manage to let themselves be killed in non-obvious ways.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
  • As a show of dominance, President Snow enjoys serving Ronan poisoned cookies and biscuits that Ronan has to vomit up afterward on most of the occasions he invites him over for a game of chess or a political chat.
  • Callista tampers with the food of people who get plastic surgery to resemble her dead tributes to make them temporarily impotent or nauseous.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Ronan is deeply exasperated and concerned as he watches the victors defy and bait the Capitol throughout the Quell interviews, saying that Snow's vindictive pride won't let him show them any mercy now and the smart move would have been to play nice and hope he'd be magnanimous (although he grudgingly acknowledges that Lyme and the others are right to snark that "You can't blame them for not holding their breath on that one.").
  Ronan: (after the victors start holding hands) We're all dead.