The Careers entered the Training Center together. Already, they were united in what would inevitably be a futile alliance. But for now they could pretend that they were their own select team, and in some ways they were. Eating lunch together, training at stations near one another, even coming up in the district lineup almost one after another.
But it was implicitly understood that they were not friends. It was fine to appear that way to the rest of the tributes, the rest of the world really, but they couldn't delude themselves enough to think that was true. Or so they told themselves.
The brunette was the shortest, her long dark hair falling down her back in no particular, with no particular grace. In fact, she wasn't short at all, but given her counterparts' close to, and in some cases, above, six feet tall frames, it was easy for her to appear that way.
Her nose ski-slope, and her eyes a brilliant emerald green, she might have been very pretty but for the fact that she had something in her eyes that made her look constantly on guard, constantly protecting herself. And there was something else there as well; a burning survival, letting all of the others in the room with her know that she would more than readily kill to live. She may have been smaller, and less obviously muscled than some of her companions but only the foolish would have underestimated her.
The girl she walked next to was starkly different in comparison. This girl was the perfect combination of curvy and tall, with blonde hair falling in perfect curls just below her shoulders. She stood straight, walking with the type of confidence you only gain when you've had a lifetime of being told how beautiful you are.
Her perfectly pink lips curved upward in a smile that told everyone she was used to playing games, that this was just another one she would win, that it was merely one more thing she would expect to have handed to her on a silver plate. Unlike her brunette companion, she expected to be able to win without even trying, she had none of the fight in her that could mean the difference between life and death.
A few feet behind them, was the member of the group that might be misconstrued as the least threatening. This wasn't neccessarily true of the tall boy with the brown hair, but he was the only one of the four who didn't appear to have the same confidence as the others around him, the only one with nothing discernable to be afraid of. While the brunette looked practically feral, and the blonde was beautiful and confident, this boy was one of those people who you looked at and then had no real reason to look at again.
He was muscular like the rest, and there was nothing wrong with his looks, but there wasn't any one memorable quality about him, at least at face value. But on the rare occasion that someone did look again, it was fairly easy to pick up on the way that he watched the blonde. He looked at her once, and then looked away around the room, as if trying to find something else to capture his attention, but then back to the blonde. Always back to the blonde, like she was a magnet for his vision.
And not a foot behind the brown haired boy, was the final member of the parade that the Careers put on every time they entered the room. It would only take one look at him for everyone in the room to realize that he was the unspoken leader.
Clearly he was the strongest, the tallest, the most handsome, the most everything. His walk or rather, swagger and his deep blue eyes both seemed to be saying, "I'm going to win". And it was easy to believe. It wasn't hard to see why he had the level of confidence (or arrogance) that he did. He was similar to the blonde girl in the way that he was sure he'd win, but different in that it took no more than a glance to see that he actually possessed the skills to do it.
All four were clearly more than capable of winning, something they were all too aware of. Because when it came down to it, only one of them would win. And the rest? The rest would end up as nothing more than a few more names to add to the list of dead tributes that would soon be forgotten.
They all knew it and though they all had their own motivations for fighting, that was certainly among every one of theirs. But it was something that they didn't allow themselves to dwell upon. After all it could easily be thought of as a fear, a weakness. And if there was one thing Careers were not, they were not weak.