Dinner.
“So - look.” It probably should have occurred to Tony not to sit at the head of the table; it had not. Neither was holding a knife (even if it was just to slather tapenade onto a piece of bread - over and over and over) the most tactful posture to adopt, given the circumstances. But in his moments of anxiety he resorted to the most ostentatious displays of nonchalance possible. Short of tossing grapes in the air, this was it. “I know some of us think we have a pretty good idea of who’s getting sent into the ring. Me, I’m not feeling all that sure.” It would have been nice to buy into the apparently widely-held opinion that he himself was safe, but he’d tried, and he’d failed. “And I’m not willing to make those assumptions. I’m not getting on a train to District Five without a plan that’s better than ‘gosh, I sure hope they don’t pick me.’”
The reasons, he felt, should have been obvious. First, he didn’t want to die. Second, he had a dependent to take care of - to whom he’d introduced the guests who didn’t know him before the meal got underway, because no one liked to sit down to a seditious meeting to find a surprise face. Third, the revolution needed firepower. … But you couldn’t trust people to see the obvious. “What I need - what we need - is a plan to make sure that whoever at this table gets put in, they have a way to get out. Whether it’s escaping the arena or bailing before they get a chance to drop us in, whatever, I’m light on specifics. We can work on that. I don’t care. And obviously, there’s risk in any operation. People might get lost in the execution, and that’s just a chance I have to take. But what I’m not doing is throwing my hat into some scheme that has ‘dying’ as an actual step.” He bit into his bread, chewing slowly (perhaps enjoying, just a little bit, the luxury of knowing he got to keep the floor), and decided that - less, in this case, was probably more. “Right. That’s it. That’s where we need to start. Keep the people with the motivation -" he gestured loosely with his knife around the table - “and the resources -" and flipped the blade around to point it squarely at his own chest - “safe, or you’ll never get a revolt going. We can worry about how to get that off the ground later.”
Frankly, he expected this to be a pretty popular suggestion. It was unimpeachably rational, and, really, who wanted to die? Still, he seemed to find his hands more engaging than the faces around him - he’d hardly looked up once during his entire speech, and he wasn’t starting now.