#AND THAT IS RAINDUO AVOX HUNGER GAMES AU.

[faebriel]

brrrr rainduo hunger games au

mad shoutouts to bee, beans, daisy and cherry for hopping on the rainduo hunger games bandwagon kdhkdjd

okay so nonnie i have a bit of hunger games knowledge (have watched the first two movies with some pals in the last month, various clips on youtube, etc) so i decided to take this one to my friends in clout farm to bounce some ideas around. niki and wil as tributes? niki as a tribute and wil as an estranged old friend who won the games five years ago and then was swallowed up by the capitol? two coworkers in the world's worst subminimum wage job? then bee comes in with the sledgehammer

for everyone else who also thought oh god i need to google that: avoxes are rebels, traitors or deserters who had their tongues cut out as punishment, and are forced into servitude by the capitol.

alright so. wilbur and niki are two kids in district 12 in the midst of a potential regime change - and they're kids, around ten and fourteen each. to-be-president schlatt is shoving around president dream and it almost seems like this might be a window for change, something wilbur is so passionate about

and then that wrong person overhears, and wilbur is gone.

niki assumes that wilbur is dead. (and tries not to think about how he got taken, because of nothing more than sheer bad luck, and she didn't.) it's awful, but seven years pass and she does her best to cope with it. and then her name is called at the reaping, when she is seventeen years old.

niki has absolutely zero intention of playing along with the games - she thinks they're horrible, just another way for the capitol to terrorise the people of the districts, even if she's learned by now the consequences of actually saying that out loud. she meets her mentor, jack - a year younger than she is, district 12's only remaining victor. he came out of the coal pits at thirteen, with just enough charisma and confidence to win over the sponsors and just enough grit to outlive every other tribute in his games, despite his age.

unfortunately for jack, niki is stubborn as hell when she makes her choices, and she's chosen not to play. fuck the capitol - fuck acting as their entertainment while they burn her entire fucking world down. fuck smiling how they want her to and acting sweet. why should she? she should she, when they've ripped her away from everything she had to lose? niki can hold her own, but not like this - and if she is going to go to her death, she refuses to act pretty about it.

and then she encounters wilbur.

it's one of the dinners for the tributes - one of the early ones, right after they're paired off with their stylists (niki doesn't entirely know what to make of hbomb, who asks her what colour hair dye she'd prefer in one breath and then lays out the most cynical, how-to-get-ahead guide to the games in the second, and then exalts the benefits of a kitty ear motif in the third) but before the interviews and grading. they're eating the fanciest food niki has seen in what is probably her entire life, although it tastes like nothing more than ash in her mouth, and pouring the tributes and their mentors glasses of expensive wine - never mind that almost all the tributes are underage, because when else will they get the chance to drink, hey? niki is still silently fuming, pushing her food around her plate and refusing the sixth damn offer to refill her wine glass and she finally looks up and behind the mask he's wearing, behind the unrecognisable silence, behind seven years of thinking one of her best friends had been horribly killed (and being entirely unable to process that fact) - she sees wilbur.

she immediately asks, wilbur? - not that he responds, and now hbomb and jack are giving her weird looks as hbomb informs her it's just an avox and jack goes oh, yeah, they don't have them in the districts, but -

none of their words matter, because half of niki is solidly trapped in this space between reality and dreams and her worst nightmare - she's only able to pull her shit together once jack has dragged them all back to the district 12 tribute spaces, and gives her the whole spiel about what an avox is, and by extension, what happened to wilbur.

niki is horrified. to think she mourned for all those years, and wilbur was alive - not just alive, but mutilated and tortured at the hands of the capitol. niki didn't think she could become more furious, more enraged with them. she was wrong.

the problem now, then - if niki wants to help wilbur, actually help him, she has to play. she has to win.

(and yes, she does set the forest on fire. she has to win, after all, doesn't she?)

this post is getting so so long so i am putting some more miscellaneous thoughts about The World and more details about niki's games under the cut ⚔️

okay so dream WAS president but was overthrown by schlatt in a "peaceful transfer of power". this was around when niki and wil were 10/14 each - and naturally uprising resulted in a peacekeeper crackdown in the districts, leading to wilbur's capture and arrest :(

2. haven't really nailed down other tributes in niki's reaping (i'm already handwaving the guy from district 12. he doesn't exist to me he is stock image steve) besides uhh ranboo who niki makes brief friends/allies with and then dies horribly. i was thinking aimsey and guqqie because from what i've seen of their content they love a tragedy? but yeah idk

3. sam is the gamemaker for this arena! he was a former victor and has decided to use this knowledge in the worst way possible.

quackity is Also a gamemaker (young upstart with no experience yet in the arena or out of it) and they have terrible workplace drama. is he hooking up with the president? i will not say yea or nay.

4. rest easy in the knowledge that, as a servant to the capitol, wilbur got to see on live television the moment niki was reaped :']

5. niki does, in fact, win the games - by the skin of her teeth. while she is so full of fury at the capitol, i feel like she'd Actually kill like, one career and then feel Extremely ill about it. unfortunately, she has too much on the line to lose. this isn't just about surviving, or going home - she needs to get herself and wilbur home in one piece. she Cannot Afford To Fail.

she ends up winning by setting the arena on fire with use of a match donated by jack and some sponsors he managed to twist the arm of, plus probably some clever digging around in the arena itself to find something flammable (maybe some kind of fuel to power the arena itself?) this fire ends up killing off the remaining few tributes at that point - at least one in front of niki herself - and damages the arena too. niki, already injured before the fire started and now barely clinging onto life past her burns, doesn't even hear the sound of the cannon shots as her victory is announced - she only realises that she's won once the hovercraft descends, perfect steel against a fiery, smoke-filled artificial sky.

she can't really stand the sight of flames after that. unfortunately, fire becomes her new branding.

6. district 13 Is a thing. Eventually. can't overlook niki's beloved anarchist friends :3c

and finally:

[bonesandthebees]

Hi bee!!! Trick or treat 🎃🎃 Hope you had a fun Halloween :)

aaaaa hi laurel!!! my halloween was eh but I celebrated on saturday so I don't mind. I hope you had a fun halloween :))

for your treat you get a snippet of a small bit i wrote of @faebriel 's rainduo hunger games au after the two of us brainstormed the idea of wilbur as an avox and niki as a tribute. don't consider it canon or anything to his au it's just something I wrote for my own self indulgence lol

Nausea rises in the back of Niki’s throat as she looks over the three avoxes still standing with their heads bowed, as if they were closer to statues than human beings. The girl on the left doesn’t look that much older than her. In contrast, the man in the center could be her father. And then the boy on the right- Wait. No. The Avox boy on the right is tall. Taller than anyone else in the room. He’s long-limbed and lanky in a way that gives Niki a sickening sense of deja vu. Although his face is partially obscured by his bowed head, his dark, curly hair is unmistakable.  “Niki?” Eret asks, furrowing their brows. “Are you alright?” Hearing her name, the Avox boy lifts his head the tiniest bit. Brown eyes the color of damp earth meet her own, and Niki stumbles back in shock. “Niki!” Jack exclaims, reaching out to grab her arm. “What’s wrong?” Niki can’t breathe. She’s sucking air into her lungs but it’s not doing anything as she stares in horror at the corpse standing on the opposite side of the room.  Because that’s what he’s supposed to be. A corpse.  Not here. Not in the Capitol. Not silent.  Wilbur.

happy halloween!

[faebriel]

when I first heard you had a hgs ask, I thought you were gonna go down the hijacked Wilbur route.. but oh is the Avox route just as interesting

i love that there's enough fucked up shit in the hunger games to hear the phrase 'hunger games au' and be able to ask oh is the the one with severe brainwashing or the one where someone gets their tongue cut out or do they simply fight each other to the death

niki as a tribute just Fits perfectly in my mind to start with but avox wilbur is so perf. like wilbur's voice is the vehicle that built and kind of that felled nations. it's his weapon. it's his shield. what happens when you take that away - physically, yes, but also putting him in an environment where communication is so rigidly controlled that it might as well be figuratively gone, too? wilbur and niki are both revolutionary spirits but they can't revolution their way out of this one until the damage has already been done. it's fucked up!!!

also i think the structure of the capitol and all the moving parts that make it work even when the system is so horrible is really interesting. like wooooo show me the stylists and the mentors and the sponsors and the avoxes!! i feel like wilbur would have embedded himself quite nicely into avox culture at the capitol. dangerous game to be playing, but i feel like he'd be privy to a lot of secrets. just because you lost your voice doesn't mean you stopped being charismatic entirely yk

[faebriel]

also i'm officially designating the woods by san fermin as the rainduo hunger games avox au theme song. because you see we walked the two of us into the little woods behind the school, two went in and one came home, but we didn't go in alone... the nights are lovely dark and sweet but i'll appear when you're sleep..... you'll wake up with sudden hurt with mouth and lungs all full of dirt