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Jute Torres
The first ten Victors in the history of the Hunger Games were often forgotten, some by design, most by happenstance.
Jute Torres did not appreciate being forgotten.
He’d had enough of that by the age of fifteen, mostly from living in Five’s crowded community home with all the other war orphans. When he stood out to anyone there, it was usually not for any positive reason. His fits of temper made even older kids retreat, hoping to avoid confrontation with him. Besides his reputation, he also grew fast, appearing much older than his age by his mid-teens.
His anger got him through an Arena full of kids either less eager for a fight than him, or not as strong. He came out of the Eighth Hunger Games badly wounded but screaming in rage at anyone and anything that crossed him in the smallest way.
He was kicked out of the community home within a month of his return. The amount of incidents and injuries among the home’s children spiraled out of control that quickly.
After a few years of going between the streets and jail, Jute was given a house in Five’s new Victor’s Village, where he could drink and rage the days away without consequence. At night, he fought off the nightmares that replayed both his Games and the deaths of his entire family during the war. All the while, the Capitol proceeded to forget about him, and his own people avoided him.
More abandonment fueled even more fury. If it had been physically possible for him to break his house down from the inside, he probably would have within a year or two.
After the establishment of a Victor mentoring system, it took almost two decades of watching the children he was supposed to be helping die without fail for Jute to get himself even somewhat under control. It took that long for the rage to despair, the despair into guilt, and the guilt into purpose. It took that long for him to become a mentor. And when he actually tried, it turned out to be exactly the right year for him to do so.
The drinking never stopped, and it did kill him in his early fifties. But when he lay in his deathbed then, he was able to tell Porter, “Saving you was the only good thing I ever did.”
Porter Millicent Tripp
Porter Millicent was a lot of things.
She was a Downriver, with the dark hair and eyes that helped distinguish the majority of people from that part of Five. She was good at fishing and rock-climbing, a bit less talented at but just as enthusiastic about dancing, singing, and swimming. She was a middle child in a large pack of siblings and cousins. In her neighborhood, she was known as the girl who always had a smile on her face, a kind word for a stranger, and a warm hug for a friend.
“Life is hard enough without wallowing in the vulture poop that comes along,” she would often joke.
When she was Reaped at eighteen, she put on a brave face for the cameras. It didn’t fool her family or her friends.
Her familiar positive attitude didn’t fool her, either. She knew what she was up against.
Porter was a lot of things, but naive wasn’t one of them. She knew that being strong and quick for a Five girl wouldn’t usually mean much against trained, well-fed tributes with weapons. Having a raging alcoholic for a mentor didn’t sound helpful, either.
She got lucky in that regard. T hat year, exactly t hree decades after his own v ictory, Jute finally got his act together.
The Thirty-Eighth Hunger Games was held in an abandoned coastal resort, complete with a large sandy beach, palm trees, dozens of dusty yet still- luxurious hotel rooms, and giant crab mutts.
The mutts turned out to be the real stars of that year, and Porter’s ability to scale almost any wall or tree within a minute ended up helping her far more than she had believed it would.
She won by having her final opponent be the already-injured girl from One. It was still a close thing, and she was so shocked when one of her failing knife blows had succeeded that she stumbling backwards and fell out of the nearest window. She landed head-first, three stories down.
Porter was a lot of things, and the first...and last...Victor to attend her Victor Tour in a halo brace was one of them.
After her injury, she soon came to realize that the brain damage she’d suffered along with the spinal injury had left her with some deficits. Most resolved themselves fairly soon, but it took years for her to regain the ability to read. Once she did, however, she became a far more voracious reader than she had ever been before, and a collector of books and magazines. She never got back into climbing, but fishing and swimming were still on the table. A swimming competition in Five’s main reservoir was how she met Nox Tripp. She became a wife soon after, and a while after that, a mother, more than once. During Games season, every year, she acted as a mentor, through many failures.
And occasional victory.
Yet, to the Capitol, Porter Millicent-Tripp would always be the girl who fell out of a window after the Games were already won.
“Oh, well, there are worse things to be remembered for!” she’d laugh whenever Percy Jules teased her about it, which was often.
Percy Jules
Unlike his district’s first Victor, Percy didn’t mind being ignored and forgotten by most people.
He was used to being the quiet kid at the back of the class who liked school enough to get good grades but not so much that he didn’t have time to daydream. He rarely wanted to socialize; any friends he had were more or less the same way, content with just a couple meetups a week. He was used to being alone.
He was an only child, with parents who worked in Solar Sector Two at the southern end of District Five. Once he was old enough, his mother and father began taking more shifts and spending more nights in employee dorms in their work sector, leaving him to manage himself more often than not. He missed them while they were gone, sure, but he knew that all their work would eventually allow them to live more comfortably. They weren’t Downriver poor, but they were poor enough to need him to take out tesserae, at least for the first four years he was eligible.
The year he turned seventeen, his parents told him, they would have earned the right promotions and would be earning enough that he wouldn’t have to risk extra slips in the Reaping bowl.
Unfortunately, perhaps because of those extra slips, Five’s tribute escort read out his name when he was still sixteen.
Jute was already dead, so it was just Porter who spoke to him and his trembling thirteen-year-old district partner over dinner. “Do either of you have any special skills? Abilities?”
Noting that poor Elena looked to terrified to speak, Percy said, “Well, I can go an entire week without saying a word to anyone; does that count?”
Their mentor looked startled, but her expression relaxed into a smile when he grinned and added, “That was a joke. Kind of.”
Being introverted didn’t mean he didn’t have a sense of humor.
Porter shook her head, now smiling ruefully. “Well, being quiet most likely won’t hurt.”
He also turned out to be good enough at stealth and recognizing edible plants to keep himself alive in the days after Elena died in the Bloodbath. The Forty-Ninth Hunger Games were overshadowed by the previous year's odd Career Victor and the following year’s Quarter Quell from the very beginning, leading indirectly to the Gamemakers “playing it safe.” The formula they followed was familiar to the audience and tributes alike: the Careers hunted, the mutts lurked, and the outliers were picked off one by one. The most intriguing thing about the fairly standard dry pine forest Arena was how much the temperature was cranked up during the last week.
Percy’s greatest advantage turned out to be his familiarity with dry heat. The final Careers he was up against weren’t used to it at all, and they didn’t expect him to put up the fight he did, either.
“People always underestimate the quiet kid!” he told Caesar during his final interview. The host’s well-practiced laugh thankfully covered how forced Percy’s own was. By that point, he was just desperate to get home to his parents. He knew that the silver lining to this whole thing was that his mother and father would never have to work again.
Most of Panem soon forgot about Percy, and he was grateful. In the end, that made it all the easier for him to help Porter organize and oversee Five’s underground resistance for decades.
He would die for that cause eventually. In a way, so would the best friend he ever had.
The greatest regret of his long life was never telling Sola Vesper the extent of his feelings for her. It had taken so long for them to develop, that he’d started to believe that he had forever to bring it up.
Sola Vesper
Sola grew up an Upper Town girl, but her heart was forever in the desert.
Being the child of a wealthy couple with important managerial positions meant she wanted for nothing growing up. Being the only sister of a much-older brother who doted on her meant that she surely never would. Being so privileged meant that she could do almost anything she wanted, including skipping school when the weather was particularly good for a hike.
By the age of fourteen, she had the entirety of the main reservoir's shoreline mapped out in her head. By the age of sixteen, she could have been dropped anywhere inside the border walls within a twenty-five mile radius of Five’s district center and would be able to find her way home in time for dinner without seeing or using any of the roads outside of town. By the age of seventeen, she could name almost every single plant and animals one could expect to see within the district’s borders.
Almost everyone, including her mentors, wrote her off as a potential Victor due to her small stature and spoiled background. The Downriver boy who was her district partner at least knew how to wrestle.
However, Porter and Percy and pretty much everyone else across Panem didn’t know understand or recognize one important fact.
The Fifty-Seventh Hunger Games Arena was as good as made for Sola.
And while she didn’t know it at the time, had it been allowed, she could have hiked from District Five’s border to that Arena’s edge well within a week.
Day after day during the Games, other tributes dropped from thirst, snakebites, and ingesting poisonous engineered plants that looked deceptively edible. Even the Careers struggled with the vicious flora and fauna, not to mention the heat.
But Sola knew where water was most likely to be hidden. She knew how to avoid snake dens, which plants were actually natural and edible. Like Percy before her, she hid and survived until everyone else was either dead or too weak to put up much of a fight.
Being so pretty, vivacious, and even strangely relatable made her a Capitol favorite for a while. It took a while for her to realize how useful that favor could be in the right context, how much it could help those couple individuals she came to care about more than anyone.
In the meantime, she managed to push back against the wrong people a few times, trying to fight their privilege with the illusion of her own.
Sometimes she wondered if, had she had wised up and humbled herself sooner, Five could have had more Victors.
She was both proud and pissed to die alongside its final one.
Darien Lopez
District Five was seldom considered a “high-risk” district by the Capitol.
It had a good-sized “elite” class and a large population of people who were neither wealthy nor desperate. The education system within the district was effective and efficient, its average lifespans decent for an “outlying” district, and its location both convenient for the Capitol and satisfactorily isolated from the rest of the country. The only remotely desperate group in Five could be easily silenced by a single severe “accident” with the main hydroelectric dam’s spillways.
But the Capitol neglected to notice or care about the considerable number of people in Five who were clever enough to realize that even the richest were being screwed over by the Capitol. Its rulers didn’t realize how much plotting was hidden under the polite smiles of the district’s three most prominent Victors. They failed to see how, behind closed doors, the heat of the power district helped brew more discontent every time the Games played across its screens.
Every single one of the three main populations of Five were represented in its most familiar and long-lived Victors. And yet, it could not be ignored that there were so few of them.
With every tribute’s death, another family began to whisper. With every passing year, the anger grew. First Downriver beneath the dam, then in the Main Town among the shops and residences, then in the Upper Town itself.
The Ninety-Fifth Games came along, and two of Five’s tiny, terrified children were brutally murdered within the first few minutes. The district watched and whispered as the only person who had even tried to protect them fought her way to the finale, ending the Games with the death of the same person who had killed those two innocent children.
By the time Darien Lopez volunteered for the Ninety-Ninth Games to find vengeance for his little brother, Five was primed to explode.
Like so many of Panem’s young people before him, Darien hardly had a chance to live before he died in the Fourth Quarter Quell.
Maybe it was worth mourning, the fact that Darien’s life was so consumed by his quest for rebellion that no one could remember much else about him after the old regime had fallen and the dust had settled at last. Some might think it sad, that someone so young had felt so strongly the need to sacrifice himself for a cause he would never see fulfilled. Others might think it worse to be forgotten altogether.
Regardless, District Five did remember.
After the rebellion ended, the district went back to normal in many ways. Its people went back to work under its rugged red-orange-brown hills and often-simmering skies. The desert around it remained virtually unchanged as its many facilities continued to produce and send power across thousands of miles of wilderness to all the other districts, and all the people that depended upon it.
So as long as District Five remembered Darien Lopez, the rest of Panem would as well.