History is written by the victors, so Nastasia Caso became one.
She was 16 when she won the 68th hunger games. It had come as no surprise to the young girl. She was the career from district 2 with words that tangled knots around the throats of tribu...
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The victors ball seemed to linger in more ways than one as a snowstorm washed chillingly into district 2 the following week. Since it, Nastasia and Theseus had returned home. The peacekeeper regiment in 2 had called in a mandatory training period, doubtlessly as a response to the rising disturbances throughout the districts, and she had affairs to take order of.
The cold winter air had whipped harshly at her skin as she'd brushed off the snow and set flowers at her fathers grave. She hadn't cared, if harsh weather meant less prying eyes she'd welcome the blizzard to sweep the entire district.
It had been 6 years ago now that Marius Caso had died in a tragic accident. Most of district 2 knew the story. A training exercise at the peacekeeper barracks gone wrong after a unstable recruit had opened fire, killing an officer and themselves. Only, Nastasia knew that wasn't the whole story.
President Snow had come to her about a year after she won the games with a proposition. She'd already been working as a spy for him for a number of months but she wanted more, she wanted power and he recognised that. So he'd made her an offer. His right hand in exchange for one murder, a district 2 official he'd wanted dead for leaking secrets to a group of rebels. Nastasia had taken the job. It had been child's play to plant rumours of a mentally unstable cadet, sneak into a one-to-one training session and stage a murder come suicide. Only to find out hours later, the rebel sympathiser, he'd turned out to be her father.
Snow had known, obviously, exactly who the traitor had been. He'd tricked her into killing her father as a trap, baiting her to reveal her loyalties and at the same time creating an insurance against her. She'd been growing too influential for his liking and he needed to both test and have her in his pocket. Murder in all its forms, he had found to be the best blackmail.
Marius Caso had never been a loving parental figure, not in the ways that mattered. Her mother had been the cold, calculated one who Nastasia had hated with a burning passion, but her fathers absence, that had hurt worse than anything her mother had hurled at her.
So when it was revealed he was the traitor, the blow had been deadening. She'd killed a man who had abandoned her, forgotten her, left her to the mercy of a childhood in district two, destined to compete for her life in the hunger games. A shadow of a man who had turned traitor to everything he had ever once told her. But still, he had been her own father.
A feeling as close to guilt as Nastasia would dare admit had gnawed in her mind since then. The actions she had once rejoiced in and performed willingly for her president had twisted into one never-ending curse. She'd spent months, then years, searching to find out what had caused her father to turn sides. To no avail. In death he was just as vacant as ever.
