ash
'adventure may hurt you; but monotony will kill you' – unknown
The one thing Clove remembered about her family – before they were murdered – was her grandmother talking fondly of the dark days, with an animated smile plastered on her lips, pulling and stretching the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. She leant forward, which Clove understood was hard for her to do in her frail state, and she looked Clove in the eyes, and said, softly, "You might never get to see the light at the end of this tunnel, in fact you probably won't. You and your brother, both too caught up in the ways of the Capitol and the fickle people in it, you don't understand how the 'dark days' were.
"Because, Clove, they weren't dark at all. I mean, to the Capitol folk, sure, they were as bad as not having a roast to eat on a Sunday, but to the people who wanted the light that the dark shed, the supposed dark days were forthcoming."
Her grandmother said this, and then her mother shushed her harshly, telling her to stop filling her daughter's head with rubbish fairy-tales, because the Hunger Games were a willing and noble sacrifice and the old woman should be grateful of having two willing grandchildren.
But Clove still went to bed that night with a burning curiosity. It lit up her nerves, because maybe this meant there was a way out of fighting this year. First, she had to fight to be the first to volunteer, and then she had to fight to survive. She hoped, severely, that she would lack speed when it came to volunteering. She hoped, softly, that the dark days were as bad as everyone but her grandmother said they were, because she was tired of believing the things fed to her.
Now, with about four hours until her escort would come to get her up, she looked in the mirror. She saw no one she recognised. Maybe, in the glint of the girl's eye, she saw an inclination of familiarity, but it was gone – BOOM – and Clove was left staring at a lonely, lost, and wild in a feral way, young girl. She was just seventeen, and she remembered two years ago, when she still had her whole entire family, when her grandmother would whisper her secrets in the dead of night, and Clove would grasp them with two hands and hoped bloomed and blossomed like a brilliantly coloured flower.
Now, with less than twelve hours until her life would in strangers' hands, she stared at the lost and lonely girl in the mirror, and she mourned in a dry and quiet way for her dead grandmother – apparently hoping out loud is prohibited now – and she mourned for the girl who would listen eagerly to tales of days when freedom the was norm.
She stared at the girl with big hair and scared eyes, and she let the darkness envelop her, until she was with her grandmother, and she got to see firsthand the brilliance of dark days that had the most startlingly bright colours.
a/n; for once, i have nothing to say.