A/N: Squee! My first Hunger Games story. Thanks to my indisposable best friend, Charlie, for reading over it. Luhve ya Charrzzz, you idiot ;)

Sterling Silver

oOo

I used to know her as silver, from her porcelain skin, her icy eyes, and the snowy dress she wore that day.

Silver, shining and colorless, seemed to me to lack humanity. After all, what was humanity if not experience and equality and the ability to sympathize with others? Silver was the same color as the gleaming Capitol. Distant, cold, and heartless. Or at least ignorant, not knowing true pain. Not capable of true emotion. Only a pretty, shimmering picture.

Pretty but loathsome, she was a plain and silver portrait.

I'd bought a pair of sterling-silver earrings for my mother one year. They were elegant and lovely, but highly luxurious and impractical. I hated those earrings, and I hated the fact that they had disappeared within a week. We were living in the Seam, after all. Silver was highly prized: a rarity.

Silver was so different from copper.

Copper, dull copper, weathered and rugged to the point where you could barely make out its shine. Copper like our matching dark eyes, like the dull coins that meant supper, and like the color our hands were stained at the end of every day from the mix of dirt and blood.

Copper had been through hell and made it out with attitude. Copper was common as sparrows and worthless as shit, comparatively. Compared to silver, which floated aloof, barely cognizant of an unhappy reality.

I snapped at her, jabbed at her dress, and, with a mere hint of sensitivity, let her know exactly what I was thinking. Sterling was silver, perhaps no better than the rest of them, but certainly better than us. My imaginary figment of myself stomped right up to my imaginary figment of her, scoffed, and spat on those shiny new shoes.

My real self opted for maturity, and I ended up being only slightly condescending. It felt good, but it wasn't nice, and it turned out to be unfortunately mortifying.

Because, as it turned out, there was a lot I didn't know about Sterling.

oOo

Verging on tears, I shut the door in their faces with a simple wish of luck to only one of them.

Just the way it is, as if he knew everything. The arrogant boy from the Seam, making me feel inferior.

Because he had taken tesserae (who gives a damn about the actually getting picked part?), he considered himself to have worlds of experience more than me. Worlds smarter than me. Worlds more deserving than me. Worlds better than me.

I fiddle with my pin, thinking of my aunt. We're all together in District Twelve, at the very least. The most deprived of all the Districts to begin with. Hell, all of the Districts are in it together, sending our children and friends and siblings away, never to return from the lair of our enemy.

There's never a good excuse to turn your nose up at potential friends, but this strikes me as a particularly bad one. Districts One and Two? Maybe; they've made it clear where their loyalties lie.

But a girl in your own District, in your own dire straits? A girl who's offered nothing but friendship to you and the girl that you love? A girl whose family buys your ridiculously-priced strawberries with the excuse of a sweet tooth, because they know your family needs the money more? However minutely more fortunate she may be than you, she's still in for a hell of a ride with you. Especially now.

I overheard something from my father's office the other day, hush, whisper, hush.

I'm terrified even to think about it, because they could be anywhere. I'm terrified that it's inside my own house, that my father knows about it, but I'm too terrified to even tell him how terrified I am.

Something beginning with a man named Cinna, and ending with a hell of a fight.

It might be in your nature, Seam boy, but this is the wrong time to turn away friends. You never know when you might need them.

oOo

A/N: Please review, especially if you have critique! I'm serious when I say it totally makes my day.

~KaleidoscopeKate