Disclaimed.
Note: HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BAY-VERSE. AT ALL. ...You may now continue.
commence
Their daughter is Reaped at the age of fourteen.
She is their oldest, meaning that she has no older sisters to step forward and take her place, that can't bear the thought of their little sister being slaughtered on screen.
She has only two shocked parents and three confused little siblings that run forward to grab onto her, only to be pulled back by other mothers and fathers in the crowd that refuse to see little children beaten senseless for not understanding the rules.
She walks forward slowly, deliberately pacing her steps as to give her something else to focus on other than the beating of her heart or the wailing of her sister, her baby sister who she's so glad will never remember this moment. It takes two hundred and thirty six breaths to walk to the stage, though she is hyperventilating.
The escort, a brand new one, straight from the Capitol, it seems, smiles and trills something that she pays no mind to, and ushers her to her spot in front of the cameras and the crowd.
A boy's name is pulled, and a Career volunteers.
She swallows, hard, unable to focus on anything more than keeping upright, keeping conscious, and even that is proving difficult. Faces swim in and out of her vision, blending together as she stares out at the crowd.
And she knows-
this is the beginning of her end.
...
It is hard to focus on training when one's parents are mentors.
She decides this rather quickly, only ten minutes into the train ride to the Capitol, as she sits across from her mother, who is avoiding looking at her, and diagonal from her father, who, if he ever looks at her, has a pained look on his face. They are already grieving, and this shoots what little hope she has left out of the sky.
They are trying to coach them on survival tactics, on winning sponsors, on giving a good interview, but they have to stop, finally, and just leave the car.
The Career boy smirks at her unkindly and hisses, "It's gonna be worse when they watch you die."
She decides that he will be her first kill, if possible.
...
Most nights, she can't sleep.
She dreams of death and blood and her little siblings running from Career boy, and, god, she just can't save them.
When she wakes, she'll wrap herself in the Capitol's robe and pad out of her room, tiptoe into the living area. There, she does nothing but watch the crowds below, watches them chant her name, her partner's name, the girl from Five's name.
They all have their favorites, and she can't help but wonder if being someone's favorite will be enough to keep her alive.
...
Her stylist decides to play up the prodigal daughter image she seems to have going, and dresses her in a flowing lilac dress, with lace and pearls, and she feels beautiful, but sick. She sits patiently as her prep team buzzes around her, perfecting her hair (low, loose pigtails) and her makeup (pinks and shimmering things that she doesn't pay attention to).
When she is gestured onto the stage, she does not hesitate in tugging at Panem's heart strings.
She does a little skip on the way over, smiling and waving and giggling, twirling her hair this way, her dress that way, being as sweet as pie with the host.
Her three minutes are up quickly, but she is sure she saw a flicker of human emotion, raw and real, behind the host's carefully constructed façade.
...
In training, she is laughed at.
Short and small, she is weak, unthreatening, and most likely a fun kill.
She fails terribly at knife throwing, causing disappointment for her mother, she's sure. Swords are too heavy for her small arms to support. Archery is a bust, and she ends up lodging an arrow in the wall to the far left of her intended target.
She is no good at camouflage, as she has no artistic abilities. Spears are too long, and she can't start a fire with anything less than a match. Hand-to-hand combat is the only thing she shows any aptitude for, but she does not know if she can stand watching the light go out.
She is going to die.
Horribly.
...
Ten.
...
She looks around, surveying her opponents, and deciding that the safest thing for her is to run like a bat out of hell into the woods behind them.
But her parents told her never to turn her back on the competition. Running in the opposite direction will leave her with an axe lodged in her skull, she's sure.
...
Nine.
...
She glances at her district partner, who, upon further investigation, was not as much of a sadistic asshole as he had seemed on the train. They exchange a nod, and she knows that she will be safe with him, for a while, at least.
He respects her parents too much to let her die in the initial bloodbath.
...
Eight.
...
Her heart races, her breath shortens.
She squirms in her skin tight, bright green jumpsuit.
The heat is unbearable.
...
Seven.
...
She eyes the knives at the mouth of the Cornucopia.
In two weeks, she picked up knife throwing with relative ease.
She thanks genetics for that.
...
Six.
...
The swords draw her attention next. She bites her lip in indecision. With it, she could defend herself relatively well. She could not go on the offensive, however, as the heavy metal weapon weighed her down, far too much.
...
Five.
...
Arrows, no.
Spears, no.
Matches?
She scans the area for survival kits.
There are twelve, all together, enough for how many will be left after the bloodbath, more or less.
She shudders at the thought.
...
Four.
...
The boy from Four that had been flirting rather aggressively with her in the training center catches her eye and he flashes her a smile.
She does not reciprocate.
He is just another person that she will have to kill. She cannot afford to think of him like anything more than a piece of meat.
...
Three.
...
God, this is really happening to her.
She debates, briefly, stepping off her pedestal and ending it right then, no fuss, no muss. But no, she craves her parents' pride more than a quick death.
She stares at the Cornucopia again.
...
Two.
...
She assumes the position of a runner, her muscles tensing in preparation.
If there was one thing she was good at, it was running, and she'd be damned if she didn't show it.
...
One.
...
And they're off.
Let the Games begin.
...
Three are dead by her hands.
She killed them, two older and one two years younger, and god damn it, she can't see anything but their eyes and blood and broken, lifeless bodies. She is forced to wonder whether this is how her parents feel every minute of every day, because, shit, it just doesn't end, does it? The terrifying fact, though, is she doubts that it is.
She curls in on herself tighter and waits until the other Career's breathing evens out.
Then, and only then, does she let her eyes slide closed.
...
Two days in, the boy from One offers to look for food. Seeing as she was the only one that spent any time in the survival training section, she is paired with him for the food search, ostensibly for her to identify edible plants and berries and such.
She grabs one of the knives from the kit she had managed to grab after the blood bath, and follows One (Drusim? Drysden? Something with a 'dr', she knows).
He walks next to her, and for a while, they wander in silence, scanning the underbrush for food/future victims. Maybe a half-mile out, he stops.
She stumbles slightly in surprise and turns to him, mouth opening to ask something along the lines of, "Um, what the fuck?"
But suddenly, her knife is wrenched from her grip and, as it falls to the forest floor, she is pressed up against the nearest tree.
She sputters, "Wh-what are you–? Why did you–?"
He rasps into the shell of her ear, "Shh, shhh. Wouldn't want to attract attention, would we?"
And then, on live television, the world watches her being raped.
...
She assumes the entire thing was caught by a camera and shown, unedited, every last disgusting second of it, as she is bombarded with an influx of parachutes. They arrive when everyone is sleeping, when she is down by a stream, a quarter of a mile away from camp, washing herself off, trying to rid herself of the feel of his fingers on her hips, her breasts, her waist, the sensation of his lips traveling down her neck.
The minute the first one lands next to her pile of clothes, she is overcome with shame and disgust.
These people watched.
She doubts that they averted their eyes for a second, doubts that they felt a modicum of anything as they watched her being pinned down, watched her fight uselessly, watched her cry out in pain as he forced himself into her.
She gets out quickly, pulling her clothes on with surprising ease, seeing as her hands are shaking, and she scrambles for it.
There is a note, one she assumes is from her mother, as it reads, "He will die." In the canister, there is a box of little white pills, devoid of a label, but she can guess.
She does not hesitate in swallowing one.
Twelve more parachutes follow, containing various things like soup or water or, in one that she thinks must be from Enobaria, the scary Victor from years before her parents, a flask of white liquor, with the note, "Win."
She shoves her gifts into her backpack, and makes her way back to camp, still revolted by the Capitol's willingness to broadcast such a sickening act throughout the country.
...
When she wakes the next morning, the boy from One is dead, and the boy from her district, a boy named Divitias, nods slightly in her direction and holds up his own parachute.
Later, once the confusion dies down about One's death, he shows her his note, short and to the point.
She mouths a thank you as they walk to their new campsite.
His eyes flash with something she doesn't recognize.
...
The girl from One goes mad; apparently she loved Drusim, and now that he's dead, she has nothing to live for (been there, done that. Honey, didn't you watch the seventy-fourth games' tape?).
She kills herself.
The boy from Four is killed by the girl from Ten, in a scuffle over food. Apparently, she really wanted that rabbit.
Then the girl from Four wanders off one night and just never returns.
Other Tributes are slowly picked off, and she has the personal 'pleasure' of killing the female from Five and the male from Seven; her biggest competition. Neither put up much of a fight, and she realizes later it is because they did not enter the arena expecting to come out alive.
It boils down to her, Divitias, the Tributes from Eleven, and the girl from Twelve.
She and Divitias split up, finally, neither really wanting to kill each other.
After he killed One, she found he was not such a dick. He gave her more food when they had to ration, gave her his blanket when the temperature dipped below twenty degrees, and shoved her behind him in battle.
Best of all, he didn't expect anything in return.
You could say they had become rather attached to each other.
She kills the girl from Eleven the day after they split.
He kills the boy.
The girl from Twelve cannot be found.
Hours tick by.
...
They are driven together by fires, sending them into the clearing with the Cornucopia. Twelve aims her gun at her, causing her to freeze in fear.
But then a sword tip appears in Twelve's abdomen, and blood is everywhere, and then she's dead.
Gone.
And she is left facing the shell that once was Divitias.
She drops her knife, knows that she is going to die.
He cocks his head, as if studying her, and smiles eerily.
His sword is in his own chest before she can scream for him to stop.
...
"Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the winner of the ninety-ninth Hunger Games!"
...
Those words have never seemed so untrue. There is never truly a winner of these Games, she decides, Divitias's last smile burned into her mind.
...
On the hovercraft, she is treated for malnourishment, dehydration, shock, and is evaluated by a doctor, who then declares that she has something called post-traumatic stress disorder.
She doesn't care, really.
She doesn't care when the various doctors and nurses poke her with needles, take vials of her blood away, rip open wounds to re-stitch them.
It is only when the hovercraft lands, and her parents force their way on to gather her in their arms that she even opens her eyes.
...
Two weeks later, her heart gives out. The doctors bring her back twice to lose her again, and finally, her parents just shake their heads through their tears.
...
They know she wasn't meant for their world.
fin
Review?