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Ben threw himself at his mother the second he saw her.
Sammy hung cautiously in the background, trying to give Ben space, both from himself and the two Peacekeepers that had let the two of them off the train. He couldn’t see Ben’s face, but his mother was absolutely sobbing, cradling Ben’s face in her hands and stroking his hair, saying I can’t believe you’re here, I can’t believe it’s really you.
There was another woman next to Ben’s mother, a teenage girl with dark hair and a heart-shaped face who’s staring at Ben like he hung the moon and Sammy was sure this had to be Emily Potter.
That was confirmed for him when Ben broke apart from his mother after a full five minutes of just holding her, and he lifted a hand almost shyly in Emily’s direction before she jumped into his arms, her own face red and blotchy as they held on for dear life.
Sammy almost turned around and heads back on the train he feels so sick – Jack curled up asleep in Sammy’s bed in the early hours of the morning before he had to sneak away, Jack with an arm around Lily and grinning over at Sammy like it’s all a joke, Jack’s face the last night Sammy ever saw him alive with the glint of the Capitol lights giving him an almost unearthly glow, and God, Sammy’s never going to see him again, never have this reunion – but he forced himself to stay rooted to the spot.
He was glad he did, because the second Ben and Emily broke apart after a long and painful hug, he turned back to Sammy, half-smiling, very anxious, and blinked rapidly at Sammy as if to say please, please help.
Sammy stepped forward, giving Ben’s mother his own anxious smile. Mothers probably didn’t want their sons mentored by old Shotgun Sammy Stevens, but Betty Arnold smiled back with no reservation.
“This is Sammy,” Ben said, taking a hold of Sammy’s elbow, presumably so Sammy can’t cut and run. “He was my mentor, since there was no one – no one else from Twelve who could do it. He’s….the only reason I’m alive.”
“Ben,” Sammy started, fond but he didn’t want Ben to sell himself short. He didn’t have much time to think on that, however, because in the next second, Betty Arnold is hugging him, too, holding on tighter than Sammy can take right now.
It had been so long since someone hugged him like that.
“Thank you,” Betty whispered in his ear with the fervor Sammy was sure only a mother could have. “Thank you, thank you, I can’t repay you enough.”
“I just helped,” Sammy said awkwardly, patting Betty’s shoulder. “Ben did the hard work.”
“Are you Sammy Stevens?” Emily asked when Betty finally let Sammy go. There isn’t judgment in her voice, just curiosity, but Sammy knew why she was asking and it made his stomach hurt.
“That’s me,” Sammy said, reaching forward to shake her hand. “Nice to meet you, Emily.”
“You don’t look like your pictures,” Emily said slowly, and Ben butted in before she could say anything else.
“He’s not like that,” Ben said quickly. “Not like that at all. He’s – the best.”
Sammy felt a rush of affection for Ben the weight of which was only matched by how much Sammy disagreed with Ben’s assessment of his character. Sammy Stevens might not be as unstable and unhinged as Shotgun Sammy, but he was far from the best.
“Mr. Arnold,” one of the Peacekeepers stepped forward and Sammy’s muscles tensed, waiting to have to jump into a fight to keep them off Ben. But no, of course not, they were just ushering Ben forward into his new life as a Victor, that was all, they were just here to keep a watchful eye – for now. “We need to get to the city’s center for the ceremonies.”
“Right,” Ben says, his face paling by several degrees, and Sammy thought for a second before patting Ben’s arm.
“C’mon,” Sammy said softly. “It’s gonna be alright. It’ll be over soon.”
Ben palpably swallowed, looked up at Sammy and seemed to find whatever he was looking for when he stared. “Okay. Let’s go.”
-
Sammy found Ben throwing up in the bathroom fifteen minutes after the ceremonies ended. Ben was led back to his new home in Victor’s Village as the last step in the process, a huge and cavernous home meant as a reward just as much as it was meant as a punishment. Sammy remembered how everything would echo in his house in Five, how that made him feel more alone in the world than ever, especially after Jack –
“Do you need water?” Sammy asked, hanging awkwardly in the bathroom’s door. Ben’s mom was downstairs, gaping at all of the room she’d have now that she’d never had in their house before. Sammy’s heard Ben talk about it, knows it’s a shack on the outskirts of the town that barely had running water or heat in the winters.
Ben nodded from where he was crouched over the toilet, and Sammy grabbed a glass from the cabinet above the sink – all brand new, all crystalline and expensive – and filled it with the probably expensive water from the sink before handing it down to Ben, who drank it in a thirsty gulp.
Ben didn’t talk, even though he seemed to be done vomiting. He somehow looked smaller right now than Sammy had ever seen him, and Sammy waited for him to talk.
“Honoring me,” Ben finally said, a sardonic twist to his mouth. “They’re fucking honoring me, Sammy. For what? For managing to survive when twenty-three people are now dead? Twenty-three kids? There was a twelve-year-old in that arena. Alice. Alice Vaughn. She’s dead and I’m alive, why the fuck do I need honor on top of it?”
“I know,” Sammy said quietly, because he did. “But you can’t go back and change that. And I wouldn’t want you to. And neither would your mom, or Emily. The survivor’s guilt is a fucking nightmare, Ben, and you can’t always stay alive for yourself. It has to be for other people.”
Ben nodded, though he quivered and quaked where he sat, still looking like he could break any second.
Sammy shifted slightly, leaned up against the same wall as Ben so their knees knocked together.
“Do you want to know what I was doing on my Victory Tour?” Sammy asked and Ben nodded without saying anything. “Blackout drunk. Every fucking day.”
“You offering me booze?” Ben asked, his voice still a little croaky, but he sounded a little more stable.
“Not yet,” Sammy said. “We still have eleven more districts to go.”
“Don’t remind me,” Ben said, folding his knees up to his chest with a miserable, tight expression on his face. Sammy wished that Ben was anywhere but here, he didn’t deserve this.
“It won’t be as rough for you,” Sammy decided to say after a moment. “You don’t have….a Shotgun Sammy persona. You won’t have to fake it. You can just focus on getting through the days.”
“Was it all an act? From the very start?” Ben asked, and he sounded genuinely curious instead of miserable. Sammy swallowed his own misery and regret in order to distract Ben with the answering of the question.
“Yeah,” Sammy said quietly. “From the first fucking day. Specially enforced by our favorite Gamemakers.”
Ben blinked over at him. Sammy had forgotten that Ben wasn’t well-versed in Capitol politics, and wished he didn’t have to explain this twisted mess they lived in – but Sammy wouldn’t stop being Ben’s mentor just because the Games were over. Sammy could keep teaching Ben how to survive.
“The Games are the easy part,” Sammy admitted, not able to even look at Ben to gauge his reaction. “Now you have the rest of your life. A life of the Capitol breathing down your neck. They decide who they want you to be, and if you step out of line – you can’t step out of line, Ben. You can’t. If you do as you’re told, you can survive.”
“Is that all life is?” Ben whispered, and he started to shake again. Sammy put a hand on his shoulder, hoping he’d calm him down.
“No,” Sammy said, firmly, so Ben would believe it. “There’s your mother who loves you. And Emily Potter. And….and me. It’s not going to be amazing, but it’s going to be livable. It’s going to be okay, Ben.”
Sammy knew Ben had started crying, and he looked at the floor to give Ben at least a modicum of privacy. They sat like that for a long time.
Sammy had never been to District Eleven before, and didn’t need to come back anytime soon, the endless fields of wheat and grain speaking for themselves on how interesting the District was.
If he and Jack had been less recognizable, maybe they could’ve taken a train here, changed their names, started farming off in a piece of land at the edge of the world. But that would’ve been impossible. Everyone knew the wicked grin of Shotgun Sammy and the dangerous energy that Jack Wright had in spades. The Capitol would’ve caught them in days.
Tim Jensen introduced Ben for the ceremonies, and he and Sammy had shared a sympathetic look as Ben struggled to get a hold of himself, clearing his throat and trying to stop himself from shaking too much.
Tim put an arm around Ben and whispered something Sammy didn’t hear, but it seemed to calm Ben down enough to walk onstage with confidence ten minutes later and deliver a nicely timed and punctuated speech without too many stumbles.
It was after they had left District Eleven and their train was barreling toward District Ten that Sammy heard the screams.
They woke him up out of his own nightmare – he could see Jack from the corner of his eye, something horrible was happening to him, but Sammy couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, the weight on top of him so heavy that all he could do was see Jack from his periphery – and Sammy immediately bolted out of bed, heading down the corridor to slide open the door to Ben’s compartment.
Ben was clearly still not entirely conscious, but his body was practically writhing as he screamed, his voice growing hoarser by the second. Fearing what the Peackeepers would do if they heard him scream like that, Sammy rushed over to the bed to roughly shake Ben away.
“Ben, Benny, you have to be quiet,” Sammy said, panic growing in his chest as Ben kept not responding, his eyes still closed, twitching. “You have to stop screaming or someone will hear and they’ll say you’re mentally unfit and they’ll take you away, and I won’t let that happen. You gotta block it out, or keep it quiet, okay? Shh.”
Sammy realized a second too late that he’d pulled Ben upwards and into his chest and that he was crying himself as he tried to figure out how to get Ben up.
He thought he’d run out of tears a long time ago.
Ben’s stopped screaming at the very least, but Sammy didn’t know if he was awake or not, and it’s only when he felt the wetness on his shirt that he realized that Ben was awake and sniffling.
“Is that true?” Ben asked with a broken voice, and Sammy reached a hand up to stroke Ben’s hair like his mother had done without even thinking about it twice. “Will they really take me away?”
A lump grew in Sammy’s throat.
“Yeah,” Sammy admitted. “If you can prove you’re still sound, they’ll let you come back. Tim? Tim Jensen who you met in Eleven? It’s happened to him…three times now. That I know of. Maybe more. Every time, he’s come back a little more…off.”
“Are they doing things to him?” Ben whispered. “Things to – to make him worse?”
“I think so,” Sammy said, a horrible dull ache in his chest at the idea of whatever they could do to Jack for six whole months without reprieve or any sign of return. “I can’t prove it, though.”
Ben’s silent for a few moments before he said “I don’t know how to stop them. The nightmares.”
“You don’t,” Sammy said, swallowing. “You don’t stop them because that’s impossible. What you can do is make sure you don’t make any noise. Especially on the train, okay? In your house in Twelve, it’ll be alright, you can scream as much as you want. But here? You can’t. You can’t or when the tour ends, you’ll go back to the Capitol and not to Twelve.”
“What do you think they’re gonna make me do?” Ben asked. “The role they’ll make me play?”
“You won’t have to be Shotgun,” Sammy said quickly, not being able to think of any fate worse than his when it came to playing roles. “You’re – you’re the only Victor from Twelve. You should be able to get away with just being a mentor.”
Ben pulled away from Sammy to blink up at him. “You won’t be?”
Sammy hesitated. “They might not let me anymore, since Twelve has a Victor now. But even if I could…I’ll quit while I’m ahead. One out of one is good odds as far as I’m concerned.”
Sammy didn’t say that the idea of losing Ben broke him all over again, shattered every piece of him, and Sammy couldn’t possibly find someone else to attach himself to. Not again. He already cursed himself for caring as much as he did about Ben.
Caring always got people hurt.
It was ironic, Jack pouring over all that research about District Thirteen so they could get out before anyone realized their affair, only to be taken away for that.
From someone else’s point of view, Sammy was lucky that it was the research and not the affair that brought Jack down, because Sammy didn’t go down with him.
Sammy wished it had been the affair every goddamn day. Then he’d be wherever Jack was – dead, strung up, on an operating table somewhere – Sammy just wanted to be where Jack was.
“I don’t know how to be a mentor,” Ben said quietly, insecurity leaking into his voice.
“You think I did?” Sammy said, trying to go for laughing, poking Ben in the side. “I had no fucking clue what I was doing – but here you are.”
“Yeah,” Ben said, his voice subdued, and Sammy hoped Ben wasn’t wishing he had died in the Arena. He wouldn’t blame Ben if he did, it was understandable, but if Ben had died, Sammy didn’t know if he would still be here or not. “I just – keep dreaming about when I was in that cave, starving to death. Dying all alone. I don’t ever want anyone to die alone. I can’t imagine watching, helpless, while someone died alone.”
“I can’t promise it’ll never happen to anyone else,” Sammy said after a beat. “But it won’t happen to you. Alright? You’re never, ever going to die alone. When this is over, you can go back to Twelve. Have a life there. You’ll have to spend too much time in the Capitol, deal with too many ceremonies and formalities, and follow some marching orders from Gunderson, but you can have a life outside of that, alright? You and your mom and Emily.”
“What about you?” Ben asked, no hesitation, his eyes wide and unguarded. Sammy’s chest hurt. “What are you going to do after the tour is over?”
Sammy swallowed to avoid answering. His throat felt like fire. For eight years, he and Jack had played their cat and mouse game in the Capitol. The idea of being there, in that apartment, without Jack there with him, felt like roasting on a pyre.
Not to mention the fact that Judd Gunderson was there with his lazy smile, saying now Stevens, I know you were pretty good friends with that Wright fellow – don’t try to lie to me, you know it’s true. So if you step a toe out of line, well – know that Mr. Wright will be the one feeling that pain for you.
But it wasn’t much worse than being a drunken stupor in his awful house in Five, a house more like a mausoleum for all the dead Sammy carried with him. Jack certainly, but mostly the pieces of himself that had died over the years. In his Games, in the Capitol, when Jack disappeared. So much of him was dead.
But not Ben. Ben was alive and staring at him like he didn’t want Sammy to go.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” Sammy started, tentative. “If I don’t have to be in the Capitol, I won’t be. But going back to Five….I don’t….”
“You can come to Twelve,” Ben said, too quickly and yet as if he’d thought about it for a years instead of a few minutes. “Victory Village is empty there, and that house – there’s so much space –”
Sammy knew what Ben was asking without him having to say it.
Please don’t leave me alone.
Sammy couldn’t help but think of all the years where he couldn’t go to Four, where Jack couldn’t go to Five, because of the suspicion that would draw. How every move they made was carefully constructed to make Gunderson and Beauregard look the other way.
But if Sammy didn’t take Ben up on his offer, he may as well just die now. Ben was the only thing left in the world that made him feel like he was worth anything.
Sammy didn’t care about what the Capitol thought anymore. They could know he cared about Ben. They could know that if they came for Ben, Sammy would be standing in the way.
Jack would be proud of him for that.
“Okay,” Sammy said, the word still surprising him even though he’d already made the decision. “Okay, I’ll – I’ll come back with you. I can help you…however you need me to.”
Ben’s face split into a wide grin. God, he was so young. All Sammy wanted to do was keep him safe where he’d failed with Jack, with Lily, with every other goddamn person he cared about. If Ben Arnold could live a real life, Sammy could cope with not even having half of one anymore.
Ben hugged him tightly, and Sammy’s arms didn’t know what to do for a second, but he ended up hugging Ben back, struggling to breathe with the weight of it all.