So this is a bit of a weird one. I've been inspired by all the other awesome fanfics to experiment with a different writing style, but I don't really know if it's worked or not. You'll have to let me know what you think!
Written because Foxface is awesome. Mostly movieverse, though it doesn't make much difference either way. Really it's just the whole training centre scene with the plants thing.
~So Let's Pray These Lights Never Leave Us, Love~
The people of District Five are a quiet, careful lot. They generate power and follow the law and sacrifice their children with little fuss. In return they are given food, wealth, and the opportunity to fade forgotten into the background. Here the Peacekeepers are merely for show; obedience is a virtue in Five, mediocrity applauded. Even their appearances reflect this – they are as one grey and washed out, with few distinguishing features beyond the odd smattering of darker shades amongst the geologists.
But her, with her red hair and fox-like face, she is not one of them. A genetic mutation, yes, but there is more to it than that. Whilst the silence of the others is the mindless tread of cattle, it is clear that hers is one of thought and curiosity. She grows restless with quiet lives and unthinking devotion to a world that slaughters the young, her mind as quick as the finches that flit between the trees of their home. Elsewhere, being clever is a cause for celebration and pride. In Five it is nothing but dangerous. For fifteen years she manages to conceal it beneath carefully dull eyes and a quiet voice – no easy thing, with the lights always shining and the cameras always watching. She learns to disappear into herself, to be seen but not observed.
.
It is love that becomes her undoing.
(Of course it is.)
.
She is so unlike in so many ways, that it is no surprise to her when she falls for long wheat-blonde hair and pale blue eyes, a soft face with soft hands and soft smiles. She expects nothing in return but loves all the same, and in her desperation to connect she lets down her guard. One balmy night beneath a broken down communications tower lit by the ever-present glow of the generators, she shares stolen liquor (the only act of defiance the District allows) and drunkenly speaks of desire and change and the idiocy of it all. Her love's eyes are wide and shocked, and there is no kiss, no words of comfort or confirmation.
No surprise either when Reaping Day rolls round and the anomaly is called for sacrifice. (There is no place for secrets in a district without shadows.)
Things will change, she thinks as she stands on the platform, watching a boy she barely knows stagger forward, wide-eyed on coltish legs. She shakes his clammy hand and thinks, they must.
.
No one comes to see her in the small, orderly room off the Justice Building. No one says goodbye or makes her promise to come home.
So she promises it to herself instead.
(Later, alone in her room as the train speeds towards her almost-certain death, she cries. She may be intelligent but her heart is not, and she'd hoped that-
She'd hoped.)
.
When she observes her fellow tributes in the training centre, she sees scared children, yes, but she sees too opportunity, and something rallies to life inside the quiet girl. If one of them is to win, it should be to carry Panem into the future, to a place where love and life is free and the Games are but a half-remembered nightmare.
There are two others she singles out for this, two others who seem unwilling to play the Game. (Rather, there are many but only two who might actually win and carry on the rebellion afterwards. The thought of what that means for the tiny thing from Eleven is too painful to bear.) She wants to go over to them, wants to say something, but the memory of betrayal is still too strong. There are eyes watching, always watching, so she holds her tongue and watches back.
.
They give a 5 to the girl from Five, but she doesn't mind. It's the lowest score of them all, but that just means they'll all underestimate her.
.
Her district partner dies within the first five minutes as she's struggling to take a backpack from the girl from Twelve. It is not quick. It is not clean. It is horrible. She vomits when she's alone and prays it won't hurt when – no, if. She's smart and quick, and she promised herself she'd come home. No one else may ever know or care, but she will.
If.
.
She knows she is too small, too weak to fight, and so she flits from shadow to shadow, collecting the scraps left behind by the Careers pack, a fox to scavenge amongst wolves. Even so, for all her wit and cunning she strays too close one night and catches the eye of the Boy on Fire (others may never remember him for that, but she watched him burn with synthetic flames and desperate love, and will never forget it).It's a mistake driven by hunger – so well fed were they in Five that she's never known just how deeply it cuts.
The world narrows down to this single moment where she remains frozen, one foot in the light of the campfire, one hand stretched out to grasp some rolls of bread. She knows he is strong, knows he can kill. Knows too the way he breathes for silver eyes and an ebony braid.
She stares at him.
He stares at her.
And then.
His lips part.
He draws in a breath.
His body shifts.
And.
And Peeta does something at once so unthinkable yet completely expected. He mouths a single word. Run.
She takes the bread and slips away as quietly as she appeared.
.
She hides at night in dens concealed by foliage and bushes with sharp thorns. Sleep will not come to her though – the stars are too bright, and the night is too dark. A cacophony of insect song and wild animals rustling under fallen leaves leave her restless. Roots dig into her back. One bug chirps louder and louder, and she gives a quiet little groan and pulls her backpack over her head.
Odd. It doesn't sound much like a bug at all. More like the beeps from the factories than anything else. Frowning, she pokes her head out of the den and sees a little silver canister resting on a rock, the white parachute draped behind it. It pings. There's no one nearby, but she's cautious when she darts out to retrieve it, afraid someone might have heard the noise. What she finds inside astounds her.
Glow sticks. They sent her glow sticks.
She muffles her laughter with her sleeves even as her heart aches. There's nothing else she could want more in the whole world right now. With trembling fingers she snaps one and gives it a little shake, sighing as a soft glow spreads across her face. Tiredness overcomes her, and she curls up and drifts to sleep, shielding the light against her chest. It's stupid and dangerous, but this darkness is suffocating and she can't stay awake forever.
.
It's a few days later before she sees him again, and can't help the way her heart lifts and sings alive, alive, alive! when she discovers him stumbling along by the stream. His leg is bleeding heavily and his face and arms are swollen and red from some kind of insect bite, but the relief is so great that she forgets for a moment that if he lives then she may have to kill him later. The realisation sits heavy in her stomach, and she's just turning to leave when Peeta collapses on the bank and starts to smear mud all over his face. It's so utterly bizarre that she can't help but watch.
But oh. Oh. Of course. The training centre, the paints. He smothers his hair in grey and sticks moss to his shirt, and she thinks she might laugh at how strange it is. Instinct screams at her to either kill him now whilst he's weak and distracted, or lead another to do her dirty work for her. She scouts instead (always so susceptible to her idiot heart), ready to distract any potential threats away from him. By the time her third patrol is finished, she returns to a seemingly empty clearing. A new pile of rocks and shrubbery has appeared by the water; if she stares long enough she sees the faint shifting of leaves. Bushes don't breathe but dying boys do, and she hopes that the arena will finish him off because she knows she can't.
.
It's almost too easy to steal from the Careers' food supply. She skips lightly over the mines (Father always said she was fleet footed, and she's been dancing since she could walk) and takes just enough to not be noticed. She notices plenty, though. The way the boy from District 3 never sleeps. The way the brute Cato bristles and softens all at once when his district partner spins the knife between her fingers. The way the trees rustle gently as a tiny dark figure leaps between them, never touching ground.
Katniss, for all her silence and grace, is no match for such sharp eyes. For what seems like hours the girl does nothing but hide and watch. Does she want to raid their supplies? Does she know about the mines? Does she want to destroy them? It's curiosity that rallies the fox in the end. For the second time she ignores her survival instincts and leaps into harm's way, showing the path through the explosives and hoping hoping hoping that Katniss will be able to figure it out.
(The pair from Twelve will be the end of her, she can feel it.)
Moments later, an explosion shakes the forest. It rains chunks of burnt apple and dried meat, and she cannot stop the laughter that overtakes her even as she mourns the loss of food. The Careers have no idea how to survive, wasted all of their time showing off their fighting skills in training. It's perfect.
But such perfection comes at a price.
She's close enough to hear the soft sound of flesh yielding to steel, close enough to hear the little sigh that escapes Rue as she crumples to the ground. Is close enough to hear every hitch in Katniss' breath as she sings. It's a blessing that the girl is dead, she knows this. Of the three she wants to win, who would kill such a tiny thing barely twelve years old?
It's a mercy.
It feels like anything but.
.
When she hears the announcement that two can win, she knows that can mean only one thing; Peeta is still alive. Of all of them, his rebellion will be the greatest. He will weave words of heartbreak and injustice, and even the Capitol will march beside him as he leads Panem to a life without suffering. Katniss may have fire and fury, but a new world under her would be no different to what it is now.
.
Later, when she's picking through the remnants of her supplies, she wonders. What would her rebellion be?
.
There's no food left. She starves.
.
Quiet. Her rebellion would be quiet. A secret thing that would turn the Capitol against itself. President Snow would die choking on his supper, and she'd show up afterwards and gorge herself on the spoils. The thought sends a thrill up her spine. Can the cameras read her thoughts? Do they know? She stifles a giggle, half mad from hunger.
.
She stumbles across Katniss' pack entirely by accident, and it takes all her willpower to not eat everything in sight. Must be careful, must be quiet, mustn't be seen. Katniss will not be as forgiving as Peeta, will not hesitate to shoot her on sight.
.
A finch perches on the bush she's hiding in, watching her with tiny black eyes. Homesickness hits her like a punch to the gut. It's not that she wants to go back to the gilded prison of Five or the robots with loved one's faces. (She'd thought she caught a glimpse of humanity, but perhaps it was just the way the light had danced across freckles on bare shoulders.) But she misses it all the same, misses the towers that brushed the clouds and the eternal shine of the lights that kept the darkness at bay. In the arena the sky sparkles at night, and it makes her feel too small to imagine how vast the distance is between her and the stars.
She activates her last glow stick and dreams of a district where night never comes.
It is a stunningly simple choice, in the end. She's shadowing Peeta as he collects berries, careful this time to not be spotted. He was kind once, but there are five of them left and there can only be one (the Games may say two now, but she's clever enough to see the lie for what it is). For days she's left clear tracks, trying to guide Cato to them so that he might do what she cannot, but he is no wolf but an unthinking boar, and Katniss is too careful to light a fire.
She sees Peeta pick some berries that stain his fingers purple with juice. Sees him pile them carefully on his jacket laid out in the sunlight. Sees him raise one to his lips.
Nightlock.
She recognises it instantly of course – they'd shown them in training but no one had cared to listen but her. A single berry is all it will take to kill him. It will be quick, painless. Katniss will be reckless with grief, will all but throw herself at Cato's sword, and after the fight with Thresh she can sneak up to whoever's left and slit their throat or poison their water. She can go home, can...
Can what? Start a rebellion? Five is too placid, too fat and content with their shackles to think to break them. They do not have Twelve's stubbornness or Eleven's desperation or Eight's fury. If she tried anything, there would be no need for Peacekeepers – the people would end it themselves.
(Besides, she can't let him die. He is the first to ever keep a secret safe, and she will always owe him for that.)
It's so very simple in the end. A rock thrown to startle Peeta, a few branches broken to draw him away from the pile. The berry she takes is full and ripe, the dark skin split slightly to reveal the blood-red flesh beneath. Unbidden, thoughts of long, soft hair and softer smiles rise to the surface. She wonders if there are a pair of pale blue eyes watching. Wonders if any tears will fall. Wonders why she even cares.
She's dead before she hits the floor.
.
Worlds away, a girl flees the town square and hides away beneath a broken down communications tower. As the lights falter and flicker for the first time in decades, she cries.