The last thing I remembered was falling asleep during a Hunger Games movie marathon in my apartment. I'd crashed on my couch after baseball practice, a half-eaten pizza on the coffee table and the second movie playing in the background. I remembered thinking how unrealistic the whole premise was—kids fighting to the death while a nation watched. I remembered mumbling something about poor worldbuilding before drifting off.
I didn't remember dying. Maybe that's a mercy.
The first sensation was pain—a splitting headache that felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my skull. I groaned, my hand instinctively reaching for my forehead.
"Jake? Oh thank goodness, you're awake!"
The voice was unfamiliar—a woman's, filled with relief and something else. Love? Concern?
I forced my eyes open, then immediately regretted it as sunlight stabbed through my retinas. I squeezed them shut again.
"Not so fast, dear. You've been feverish for days."
Cool fingers brushed against my brow, and I felt a damp cloth being placed on my forehead. "Thomas! Lily! Come quick! Jake's awake!"
I tried again, more carefully this time, cracking my eyelids just enough to make out blurry shapes. A woman sat beside the bed I was lying in—a bed that definitely wasn't mine. She had blonde hair pulled back in a neat bun, kind eyes, and a face lined with exhaustion.
Not my mother. Not anyone I knew.
And the room around me was... wrong.
No posters of baseball players on the walls. No college pennants. No laptop or gaming console. Instead, rough wooden walls, a small window with actual curtains made of some homespun fabric, and furniture that looked handcrafted, not mass-produced.
"Where...?" My voice caught in my throat, coming out as a dry croak.
"Here, drink this." The woman held a cup to my lips. The liquid was herbal, slightly bitter, but soothing. "You gave us quite a scare. The fever came on so suddenly."
Fever? I didn't remember being sick.
Heavy footsteps approached, and a burly man with strong arms and a weathered face appeared in the doorway. Behind him peeked a young girl, maybe ten or eleven, with the same blonde hair as the woman.
"Son! You're back with us." The man's voice was gruff but warm, filled with genuine relief. He approached and placed a calloused hand on my shoulder. It was strange—the touch felt both foreign and somehow right, like my body recognized it even if my mind didn't.
The young girl darted around him and flung herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck.
"Jake! I was so scared! You wouldn't wake up, and Mom said you were talking nonsense, and—"
"Easy, Lily," the man said, gently pulling her back. "Your brother needs space to breathe."
Brother? These people thought I was... their family?
I looked down at myself and nearly gasped. These weren't my hands. My hands were always a bit small for a baseball player, with short fingers and perpetually bitten nails. These hands were larger, with long fingers and clean nails, the skin slightly roughened from what looked like manual labor.
I reached up to touch my face and felt unfamiliar contours—a stronger jaw, higher cheekbones. My heart began to race. What the hell was happening?
"Jake?" The woman—apparently "Mom"—looked concerned. "Are you alright? Should I get you more of the fever tonic?"
I needed to say something, to act normal until I could figure out what was happening.
"I'm... just a little confused," I managed. "The fever."
The man—"Dad"—nodded sagely. "Dr. Patterson said that might happen. Said the fever was high enough you might not remember the last few days clearly."
That was a lifeline. "Yeah, it's... fuzzy."
"You collapsed at the forge three days ago," he explained. "Right in the middle of working on Mrs. Undersee's garden gates. Scared the daylights out of me."
Forge? As in, blacksmithing?
When he said the words, something flickered in my mind—a memory that wasn't mine. The weight of a hammer in my hand. The heat of the forge against my face. The satisfaction of shaping metal into something beautiful and useful.
The image was so vivid I could almost smell the coal and hot iron. Then it faded, leaving me disoriented.
"You kept mumbling the strangest things," Lily piped up, her eyes wide. "About arenas and games and someone named Katniss."
I froze. Katniss. Katniss Everdeen. The Hunger Games.
No. No way. That's impossible.
"Lily, don't bother your brother with that now," the woman chided gently. "Jake, I'm going to get you some broth. You need to build your strength back up."
As she left the room, I tried to process what was happening. Either I was having the most vivid fever dream of my life, or somehow, in some fucked up way, I had been transported into the body of someone else. Someone with the same first name at least.
Jake. In what appeared to be...
"Dad," I said carefully, "what day is it?"
He raised an eyebrow but answered, "Tuesday, March 15th."
"And... the year?"
Now he looked concerned. "The year of the 74th Hunger Games, son. Are you sure you're feeling alright?"
The world tilted around me. The 74th Hunger Games. The first book. The first movie. Katniss and Peeta and the berries and everything that came after.
"Just checking," I said weakly. "The fever, you know."
He nodded, though he didn't look entirely convinced. "I'll let you rest. Come on, Lily, your brother needs quiet."
"But I want to—"
"Now, Lily."
She pouted but followed him out, turning to give me a little wave before closing the door.
Alone, I stared at the ceiling, trying not to panic.
This couldn't be real, right?
People don't just wake up in fictional worlds.
But everything felt solid, tangible. The rough blanket under my fingers. The scent of herbs and wood smoke in the air. The dull ache in my head and the unfamiliar weight of this new body.
I lifted my hands again, studying them. They were strong hands, capable-looking. The hands of someone who worked hard. I touched my face, my hair—blonde, not my usual dark brown—my chest. Everything felt wrong and yet responsive to my commands.
At that moment, I remembered a certain name.
"Thompson," I whispered. "Jake….Thompson," testing his last name further. But it wasn't his.
It was Carter. He was Jake Carter. Not Jake Thompson…
If this was the 74th Hunger Games year, and—what I assume was in District 12—then the Reaping hadn't happened yet.
Katniss and Peeta weren't tributes yet. The Girl on Fire didn't exist yet.
I sat up slowly, fighting a wave of dizziness. There was a small mirror on the wall, and I needed to see myself. I needed to know who I was now.
Standing was harder than I expected. This body might be stronger in some ways, but it had been through a fever, and my legs wobbled like a new fawn as I crossed the small room.
The face that looked back at me from the mirror belonged to a stranger.
Blonde hair, slightly long, a bit wavy and tousled. Green eyes instead of my brown ones. Defined cheekbones, a straight nose, and a strong jaw.
I was... handsome. Really handsome, in a way I never had been before. And tall. Like I was some kind of Calvin Klein model.
"Holy shit," I whispered, reaching up to touch the reflection, as if it might ripple and return to my real face.
Another flash of not-my-memory hit me—standing before this same mirror, adjusting a collar before heading out to some town event. A sense of confidence in my appearance, of knowing eyes followed me when I walked through the square. It was disorienting, feeling both like me and not-me at the same time.
But nothing changed. I was Jake Thompson now.
Am I only just remembering my past life as Jake Carter? Or am I just possessing someone else's body?
My assumptions are landing on the latter rather than the former idea.
I sank back onto the bed, my mind racing with everything I knew about this world. Which is not a lot or detailed.
I've only watched the first two movies. I never read the books. That was why I started the movie marathon in the first place.
Who would've thought that I'd somehow possess someone in Panem after falling asleep without even finishing the rest of the series! Fuck.
The Hunger Games weren't just a brutal contest—they were a calculated tool of oppression. A way for the Capitol to remind the districts of their absolute powerlessness, to pit them against each other and prevent unity. Twenty-four kids thrown into an arena, only one survivor, and the whole thing broadcast as entertainment.
It was sick. It had always bothered me as a viewer, how the books and movies tried to make us complicit in the spectacle even as they critiqued it. We were meant to root for certain tributes to survive, which meant rooting for others to die. The whole premise was a condemnation of reality television and our appetite for violence taken to its logical extreme. It took me a while to decide I wanted to watch the rest of the movies just for a conclusion. I wanted to see the rebellion. The justice. The end of the physical and mental torture, parading as a 'game'.
And now I was living in it.
This wasn't fiction anymore. These were real people with real lives who would be sacrificed for the Capitol's sadistic game.
Including, potentially, me.
Another memory surfaced—standing in the town square during a previous Reaping, watching as two terrified kids were selected. The boy had been from my class. I'd—no, Jake Thompson had—played with him when they were younger. He'd died on the second day, speared through the chest by a Career tribute. The memory came with emotions attached—helplessness, fear, quiet rage that had to be suppressed.
I shuddered. The real horror of the Hunger Games wasn't just the deaths. It was the way it forced everyone to participate—to watch their friends and neighbors die, to celebrate the rare victor who emerged broken and haunted, to accept it all as normal and unchangeable.
A new memory surfaced again—Jake Thompson standing stiffly in his best clothes, watching the mandatory broadcast of the previous year's Games. His father's hand gripping his shoulder painfully tight when he started to turn away from a particularly brutal death. The whispered warning: "Eyes forward. They're watching." The simmering hatred in the room that could never be spoken aloud.
This was the true evil of the Games—not just the murder of children, but the way it poisoned everyone, made them complicit. The Capitol didn't just want obedience; it wanted participation in its cruelty. It wanted the districts divided, suspicious of each other, too broken and fearful to unite. And it worked—Panem had been under Capitol control for over seventy-five years.
Outside my window, I could hear the sounds of what must be District 12—people talking, the distant clang of metal that might be coming from "my" father's forge, a child laughing. Normal life in an abnormal world, where in a few months, children would be selected to die for entertainment.
I closed my eyes, trying to organize my thoughts. I knew how this story went. From the first two movies, and media spoilers. I knew about the berries, about Katniss becoming the Mockingjay, about the rebellion. I knew about President Snow's ruthlessness and President Coin's calculated ambition. I knew about the Quarter Quell and District 13 and all the death that would come before any hope of freedom.
Knowledge was power. But it was also dangerous. If anyone discovered what I knew...
Another memory flickered—Jake's mother, the woman who'd just left the room, whisper-teaching him and Lily about herbs that could heal and herbs that could harm, making them promise never to speak of certain plants outside their home. "Knowledge must be guarded," she'd said softly. "What you know can save you, but it can also mark you for death."
A dizzying collage of other memories began to surface—running through the town square with other children, the taste of a rare sugar candy on a birthday, the weight of tools in my hands, the constant gnawing fear of the Reaping each year.
Jake Thompson's life was flowing into me in disconnected fragments, experiences that felt both weird and familiar.
I lay back down, staring at the rough wooden ceiling.
Jake Carter had never particularly enjoyed the Hunger Games series—too brutal, too contrived, I'd always thought. The "message" felt heavy-handed—power corrupts, resist tyranny, don't become what you hate, two sides of the same coin. I'd criticized how on-the-nose it was, how unrealistically evil the Capitol seemed. How reality was somewhat the same.
Now I was living in it, and those themes didn't seem so simplistic anymore. The true message wasn't just about standing up to tyranny—it was about how easy it is for people to accept atrocity when it's normalized, how systems of oppression sustain themselves by making everyone complicit, how hope and pent up rage can be the most radical act of rebellion.
These weren't literary themes anymore; they were the difference between life and death.
"Well," I muttered to the empty room, "this is going to be interesting."
And by interesting, I meant terrifying.