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tennessoui · 10 months

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more hunger games au anyone?

(first snippet) (1.6k) (dark. hunger games. canon typical violence for both sw and thg) The cannon rings out over the arena. It’s a sound Anakin has heard so many times before that he hardly even registers it now.

The Anakin on the television screen does not recognize the sound either nor does he seem to understand what it means. From an outsider’s perspective, he looks wild, eyes flashing, nostrils flared from his heavy breathing as he stabs the hunting knife again and again into the chest of the tribute from District Two, long past the time he has died.

So long in fact, that even members of the Capitol audience turn away during this replay, looking vaguely sick.

Anakin watches though. Anakin knows what’s coming.

Anakin had not lost his mind at all, but from an outsider’s perspective, he can see how this must have looked as though he had.

But everything had been calculated. Every stab had been with intent. Anakin had been in control the entire time.

He wonders if that would make the citizens of the Capitol more scared of him, if they knew that. If they knew how in control Anakin was then and is now.

On the screen, a girl screams for the fallen Tribute. Anakin makes sure to deaden his eyes, to straighten his posture, to flinch at the noise.

On the screen, the girl reaches out to clasp at Anakin’s shoulder. She probably thought she could out-manipulate him. She probably thought he would never kill her outright. After all, his entire strategy had been to convince everyone he was hopelessly in love with her. He couldn’t just kill her after weeks of loving her. Hell, maybe she even bought his act. Maybe she thought he really loved her.

She should have just stabbed him in the back.

On the stage, the couch, Anakin watches as the girl’s hand falls onto his shoulder. He watches as the Anakin in the Games turns around and stabs her in the throat.

The hunting knife goes clean through. She is dead in seconds.

The audience sobs as one. There are screams, though this is just a rerun. Anakin wonders about their reactions during the live showing. Did they faint? Did they care? Did they care so much they thought they would die? Was he a tragic character? Was he a villain?

After all, they just watched him kill the love of his life.

Obviously, he had not meant to. Anakin on the screen recoils in horror. He pulls out the knife and watchs his fellow district 4 tribute drop to the ground.

Dead.

The cannon goes off at the same time he begins to scream, eyes wide and mouth wider, bloody hands scrabbling useless at her open throat. He is still screaming, dry sobs leaving his parted lips as he tries to repair what can never be fixed.

Anakin on the victor’s couch watches his breakdown dispassionately. He should have cried, he decides. And right as he puts his face down to muzzle into her hair, the cameras pick up a hint of a smile.

Amateurish.

“Anakin,” the host says, as the screen fades to black. His tone is commiserating, sympathetic, pitying. He leans across the space between his seat and Anakin’s couch and puts a hand on his knee. Anakin does not have to pretend to flinch away. He is sick of people touching him. There is only one person in the entire world he wants touching him right now, and that man is in the audience watching.

Anakin wonders suddenly if Obi-Wan had screamed when he watched him kill the girl. If he had cried out. If he had been relieved.

Anakin had been relieved, but he makes sure to hide that relief now.

“Anakin,” the host says again. “I am so very sorry that I had to show that to you.”

Anakin turns his head away. He clenches and unclenches his jaw. He makes fists with his hands and then uncurls his fingers. “You watch it,” he says. “I have to live with it.”

The audience makes appropriate noises of sympathy. There are a few jeers, some boos. The girl from his district had been some people’s favorites to win. He knows this now.

He bites back the urge to call them all idiots. Every last one of them who thought she could win. She never could have. Not when Anakin was there. Not when Obi-Wan told him shakily, that last night before the arena, lips pressed to his forehead and face wet: come home to me.

“What was going through your mind, Anakin?” The host asks, still in that same sympathetic tone. “You’d just killed your sixteenth tribute. It was just you and Robin remaining as soon as Diamond died. We were all so worried for the pair of you, weren’t we?”

He turns to the audience and the audience screams back. Anakin sits there. Anakin thinks.

“I know more than a few of us were hoping the Gamemakers would create a rule change, just for the two of you. What I would have given, to see you and your beloved go home together.” The host shakes his head, hand on his chest. His eyes remind Anakin of the sea predators he pulled from the ocean in his district. He has shark eyes.

Anakin has killed and gutted a hundred sharks. Anakin is still in control.

What the host does not know is that he will go home with his beloved. And no one in the Capitol will ever bother them again.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Anakin says emotionlessly. “It was instinct. It—”

He swallows and shifts on the couch. From the pocket of his pants, he pulls out a thin slip of paper. It’s dotted in blood. It had come to him in a silver parachute, folded neatly within a thick blanket: his only gift from his mentor.

ROBIN. is all it says.

But it’s in Obi-Wan’s handwriting. And Anakin knows what it means. He’d pulled it out countless times during his days in the arena, rubbing his thumb over the ink. To an outsider, it must have looked like he was worrying over the girl’s name, a token of his affections, visible proof of who he was thinking about at night when he stared out into the manufactured desert instead of sleeping.

Only he and Obi-Wan knew who he was really thinking of. Only Obi-Wan knew he would forget the girl’s name without a concrete reminder in his hands.

He runs his thumb over the word in Obi-Wan’s handwriting once more. He must get this right. They are so close to being able to live forever happily undisturbed. He just needs to lie for another few hours. Then he will get his reward.

“It changes you, the arena,” he says quietly. “I felt…entirely like a different person. And I was always on my guard. I had no allies—” he had killed all his allies— “and I was alone. I cared only for one thing. One person.” This isn’t a lie. “And then—it’s so hard to keep count. When—” he glances down at the paper in his hand. “Robin touched me, I thought I had counted wrong. That there was another tribute, not her and not me. It was…instinct. I thought I was eliminating a threat.”

“I am so sorry,” the host says with his cold, dead eyes. “I cannot imagine killing the love of your life.” Neither can Anakin, of course. He’d chew off his own arm before he hurt Obi-Wan Kenobi. Instead of saying this, he looks down. He needs to cry, but the tears won’t come.

“It feels like it was someone else,” he mutters. The microphone attached to him will pick it up. “Someone else’s hands.” “But they were yours,” the host presses against the perceived bruise in what Anakin can only describe as restrained glee. “They were your hands.”

“Yes,” Anakin agrees. He looks out into the audience. He cannot see Obi-Wan, but he knows the man is there. He had been the first to hug him once he exited the arena. He had hardly been more than five steps away from him since then.

He keeps shooting Anakin looks, as if afraid that he will suddenly collapse into tears and shatter apart. After all, he just killed seventeen people in the span of one week. Obi-Wan had made it through his games with only three kills under his belt, and each one haunted him to this day.

But Anakin is fine. Anakin won. Anakin was back. Anakin had Obi-Wan, and so Anakin is fine.

His hands start to shake when he thinks about losing Obi-Wan, and tears of fury gather in the corners of his eyes. He would burn the world down if they were to try and take Obi-Wan away from him. Seventeen people would be nothing.

“And what do you have to say to the people who think you planned to always kill Robin?” the host asks. “That you never wanted her to win the Games?”

Anakin shakes his head and then rubs at his eyes, brushing the tears away. “I loved her,” he lies. His thumb rubs over Obi-Wan’s handwriting once more, the swoop of the ‘o’, the slant of the ‘b’. “When you love someone the way I loved her, you’d do anything for them. It makes you crazy. To love like that. You’d do anything for them.”

“Are you saying you thought that you would die in the arena so she could live?” the host prompts, hands folded neatly into his lap.

Anakin shakes his head and then nods. And then he shakes his head again. The host takes pity on him. “Now that you’ve won your Games, Anakin, what will you do?”

Anakin’s thumb swipes once more over the writing on the paper. “I just want to go home,” he says. And this time, it’s the truth.

#obikin #hunger games au #literally tho i love writing this anakin #he is so insane #so on brand tho #he's suitless vader this entire snippet #the host is like haha did you go insane and kill her by accident #and hes like i was already? insane?#anyway i do think that if 'catching fire' premise happened in this au #aka victors are made to go back into the game #obi-wan would literally tell anakin he would break up with him/maybe even kill himself #f anakin volunteered for obi-wan if hs name is drawn #and anakin grudgingly promises not to volunteer #only for anakin's name to be drawn #and obi-wan to volunteer in a heartbeat #so anakin has to be the mentor and watch obi-wan go through the arena again #singlehandedly starts a revolution to get him out

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