A/N- A big thank you to Laeve for betaing this for me, and to Suzanne Collins, whose characters I so love to play around with. This was written for the Starvation prompt "Perfection". You should write for the prompts too! The more the merrier.
I look at the sky as Cornix stirs behind me. My hands are folded in my lap, pale and plain now. I lift them up to the level of my eyes, wondering at the faint rosy blush the morning sun stains into the edges, one not caused by being dyed pink. I've never looked like this before. Well, I suppose I have, but I don't remember it.
My parents gave me my first dye job when I was only a week old. Baby pink. They said they were "traditional" and wanted to choose a lovely girl's color for their little daughter. Since then I'd been in and out of several different colors of skin. But once I figured out it would be easier to find clothes that looked nice without having to worry about whether or not it matched my skin, I'd dyed myself back to a normal color. Now I was sure all dye, skin colored or not, was gone. Whatever hadn't been washed away as new layers of skin grew and the old ones were rubbed off I'd had lasered away, just like my tattoos.
Even though it's been weeks now, I can't stop marveling at how pure my skin looks without a green tinge or whirling technicolor tattoos. My hands don't look as perfect as they did the day they were really and finally my hands again. We've been traveling for weeks now and dirt is crusted under the nails, which have grown out and broken. I've had much bigger things to focus on than the state of my fingernails.
"Lavinia?" Cornix mutters, rubbing his head. Maybe it was a little hasty getting married to him. Probably. I'd say it was more like a lot hasty. I don't think I'm in love with him, but at the same time I can't ever imagine being away from him. And he loves me, so why not? Besides, I do care a lot for him. He's my friend, I respect him, and he has always inspired me. He's the only one who opened my eyes so that I could be here today. I owe him. If he wants me as his wife, he can have me. Still, it's been so long. Shouldn't I have learned to love him by now if I was meant to be married to him? I shove the thought away. It doesn't matter.
"Yes?" I mutter dreamily, running the fingers of one hand over the supple flesh where my wrist merges with my palm.
"What are you doing?" he asks as he forces himself into a higher position, propped up on his elbows. One of his eyes is still shut and I can't help laughing at him, earning myself a sleepy scowl.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's just…" I crack up again before collecting myself, "Sorry. Anyway, I was just looking at my hands. They look so different without the tattoos."
His eyes soften. It took him a long time to make me understand. I know it did, and I know I owe him for opening my eyes. It took him a long time to make me see how feeling sick for weeks from the chemicals I was inundating my body with wasn't worth feeling beautiful until the trends changed. He worked for a long time to convince me that I was more than what kind of implants I could afford. The tails, the gems embedded in my skin. None of that was me. I hadn't been me for years.
I remember meeting him in the park for the first time that day. He was lucky, but I didn't see it that way when I was little. I thought it was weird that Cornix's mommy never took him to get his hair dyed, or to get tattoos. I'd never even seen him with fake eyelashes, although everybody wore them back then. Cornix looked me over once and announced that he thought my hair was ugly. I was a little shocked, but I'd been thinking the same thing. The lemon yellow with black streaks had definitely been a mistake. But still, he'd insulted me; so I pushed him over. After that we were inseparable. We were five years old.
Cornix always stuck out like a sore thumb. It was embarrassing to be around him a lot of the time. But I couldn't stay away; he was like a drug to me. Whenever I was around him I had this fluttery feeling in my stomach. I didn't understand the way Cornix thought, but I wanted to. I always wished I wasn't his friend when he'd get that dreamy look on his face and start talking about things I didn't really understand. Saying how fake Capitol people were. How cruel the Hunger Games seemed. Actually, that one was even scarier than it was embarrassing.
Everyone loved the Hunger Games. Everyone. Just not Cornix. I didn't understand it. I remember when we were up on the roof of my apartment building watching the post-interview fireworks; he'd grit his teeth. I would ask him what was wrong and his answer would always be the same, "They're like us. They're just like us, Vini."
I was always scared for him. Cornix didn't know when to be quiet. The few times I tried to talk him down he got mad. I hated it when he was mad, but not for the reasons I should have. I was just as vapid as any other Capitol girl. I didn't like my friend shouting at me. I didn't like feeling like I'd done something wrong. My words had nothing to do with my feelings on the Games.
To be honest, I have no idea what he ever saw in me. His family agreed.I remember how nervous I was the first time he took me home to meet them. Despite how long I'd been his friend, I'd never met his parents or his six sisters and brothers. I'd never asked him about them. So, I was a little surprised when he told me quite abruptly one day that he was going to introduce me to them. I made sure I looked nice. By that time he'd convinced me to dye my hair back to more or less its natural shade until the color could grow back in on its own. The only alterations I'd had in my hair were strands dyed gold; individually enough to give my hair a sheen. I dressed nicely with my tight purple dress and black six-inch heels. I got new rhinestones implanted into my irises for the occasion. And when Cornix saw me, his face fell.
"Oh," he said sourly, crossing his arms.
"What?" I asked defensively. I looked nice! Right?
"Couldn't you have worn something a little less…flashy?" he said. I didn't know if he meant literally or not. The dress was covered in glitter. Either way I knew he meant he didn't like how I looked. Before I had a chance to say anything he shook his head.
"Oh, well. Let's go."
I huffed indignantly, but I couldn't bring myself to stay mad at him for long. I never could. He meant well, he was just a little odd. That was all.
We rode on the old-fashioned train to his house. It was loud and bumpy and I'd never liked it, but Cornix got sick on the monorail, so I put up with it.
His house was in an old suburb on one of those streets that were lined with houses so old and imposing they looked like they had to be haunted. I felt out of place in my modern heels and glitter. Everything looked so old-fashioned. Cornix, for once, fit right in while I looked like the freak.
Cornix marched right in with me trailing unsurely behind him.
"Mom! I'm home," he shouted. Everything in his house was wood. It was odd compared with the plastic, marble, glass and metal of the capitol. I began to get a bad feeling about this. If Cornix looked like someone straight out of the Districts and his house was just the same, what would his family be like?
I got my answer almost immediately. His mother hurried down the staircase, her blue dress fluttering around her knees. We surveyed each other with raised eyebrows. She looked just as strange as Cornix, with only light makeup and hair an ugly shade of brown.
"Oh," she said shortly, sounding just like Cornix had when we met up that morning. "Well, I didn't know your friend was one of those people, Cornix."
I felt my cheeks burn a little. What did she mean, "those people"? Cornix's family was the strange one.
"Mom, please. She doesn't know any better," he sighed. For the first time in a long time, I really hated him. I never asked to meet his family and he dragged me here for…what, to stand here and be insulted?
"Maybe I should go home, Cornix," I said coldly, lifting my chin just a little.
"No, no. Any friend of Cornix's is welcome in our home," she said with a sigh. I was not convinced, but Cornix took my hand and pulled me up the stairs to show me his room and I decided not to argue.
The hall was just as bizarre. A little girl with black hair still mussed from sleeping in on Saturday morning poked her head through a plain door and stuck her tongue out at me.
There were six of Cornix's brothers and sisters. None of them had any implants or fashionable clothing, or even streaked hair. The place was just as plain as they were, all wood and pre-Panem architecture. That was the first time I'd really imagined a place like that could exist, untouched by the Capitol culture of bright colors, loud sounds and parties where no one was really himself. For years Cornix's home was always a changing sort of place in my mind.
At first it was a place where I was not welcome, where Cornix's family looked at me with disgust.Then it was a place of interest. Not necessarily a place I looked forward to, but his family was no longer openly hostile. And it always piqued my interest to be there. For the first time, I looked at myself in the morning and really thought about if I liked what I saw. Slowly, I began to decide that I didn't. The rhinestones in my irises, fingernails and tongue went first. Next followed my tattoos. Before long I'd realized I looked almost like one of them: I was becoming an outsider, a freak. And I think I liked it.
I liked the way people looked at me out of the corner of their eyes. I liked how the soft, natural textiles felt against my skin, and the way the dull and matching colors looked. The only nod to Capitol trends I retained was the soft pink of my skin. It wasn't the tan of real skin, but baby pink coming from dye. That I kept.
Cornix and I stuck out with our natural looks. If we were anywhere else in Panem we would have blended in. But in the capitol we were the bizarre ones, and sometimes that was dangerous.
I didn't want to go to the rally. They didn't do any good. Even throughout the Capitol they were hushed up. They'd kill all the protesters if the other Capitol citizens wouldn't raise a fuss about it. As it was, it was only our hypocritical peers that kept Cornix safe when he attended; and, by extension, me.
"Please, Cornix. Let's go!" I whispered.
"Vini, do you think the Hunger Games are right?" he hissed bluntly.
I was frozen inside. All those years of watching children die, what did they mean to me? The blood, the gore, all of it had never left an impression on me. Why should it? It was a yearly occurrence. Not only that, but it was celebrated.
I thought of the faces; not just the children's, but also their families when they were interviewed. I recalled the fear in the crowds when the cameras panned over them on reaping days. I imagined my face in those crowds, Cornix's, my little brother's.
Fear clenched my stomach. Real, true fear of an event I was never likely to be subjected to. Then I imagined that fear about to come true. It could be ten times as worse to have that fear extend to everyone I cared about. The fear was one hundred times as bad. That imagined fear almost set me quaking. This was the fear I'd advocated every year.
"N-no," I whispered.Something stirred in Cornix's eyes.
"Then why won't you stay?" he pleaded.
Then something went wrong. There were Peacekeepers standing menacingly over the rally like there always were, but this time they opened fire. I don't know why. Maybe a small hand-to-hand scuffle broke out with one of the protesters. All I knew was there was a sudden shriek of weapons firing and people screaming in pain.
Another fear swept over me, but now this one was real. I gasped and froze, not knowing what do as the protesters pushed, screamed and panicked around me.
"Vini!" Cornix shouted, grabbing at my arm and just barely managing to snag my sleeve before we were separated by the crush of the crowd. I was pulled along with him, fighting every moment to stay up, to stop myself from curling up into a ball and just crying.
That was the day I first knew what death was. The Hunger Games had always seemed so impersonal. Now the bodies were here, either ripped open from the Peacekeepers' continued fire or crushed under the fleeing hordes. I have no doubt that without Cornix I would have joined their number: trampled to death at what should have been a peaceful protest.
We escaped from the square and kept running. Eventually we collapsed in an alley in part of the city I'd never seen before. I was sobbing. Cornix murmured in my ears soft words, rocking me back and forth as I cried into his chest, digging my fingers into the gray fabric of his shirt. Suddenly one of his hands found my chin and lifted it, and his mouth hit mine.
I jerked back from him and stumbled away: ignoring him as he called my name, trying to apologize. I don't know how I found my house that night, but I did. Barely.
I was so confused. I certainly didn't care for Cornix that way. And it was incomprehensible that he would feel that way about me. I dreaded seeing him the next day, but neither of us brought it up and soon things went more or less back to normal.
I was in my mid teens by then, and feeling more and more like an adult each day. Cornix thought so, too. He started getting deeper into his whole rebel "phase", as I thought it was. Instead of listening to speeches he was now making them. Slowly, his words began to pull at me. I was able to keep the way I felt quiet even while surrounded by people screaming their agreement. But not Cornix, he always needed more. Soon he found underground groups. I was dragged along, of course. Cornix and Lavinia. That was the way of things.
He rose in power until he was on the main council of the underground movement in the Capitol. I didn't get to tag along with him all the time anymore; just his arm slung over my shoulder didn't get me into the council, not that I would have wanted to come. They frightened me, to be honest. They were willing to do anything to get what they wanted. Cornix wasn't really as cruel as they were, was he? He wouldn't stoop to the very tactics he abhorred, right?
I didn't know what to say the day he asked me to marry him. I didn't want to, but how could I refuse him? Without Cornix I would be one of the stupid masses milling around with no thought in my head beside parties and the murder of innocent children. So, I said yes.
It was hard to regret it when he kissed me with love in his eyes, but at the same time I shrunk from it. Cornix was dearly important to me, but not like that. I was afraid both of hurting him and of his new "friends" among the council who would order someone to hurt me if I didn't at least try. So, I did.
His family all loved me now, though not as a person: I was his little charity case. I was a quaint little addition to their family, a pet. That was how everyone saw me. I was more a sweet little ornament on his arm than anything else.
He continued to rise in the ranks from the most amateur of the councilmen to a very powerful man. I was pregnant twice in that time, but in both cases I lost the baby very early on. Most likely a chemical I had used in my cosmetics and dyes or a substance I had abused at a party had permanently damaged my ability to have children. It was hard on both of us. While I didn't really love Cornix, I did want children.
As he became more powerful he was also more vulnerable. A nobody didn't garner any attention, but someone of his status was infamous in the way a crime lord was. They knew he was involved, but he was close to untouchable because of the power, the men and the money he had at his disposal. It didn't stop him from getting shot at more than once (the unfortunate Peacekeepers sent to dispatch him tended to disappear from their beds). It didn't stop him from being investigated by the Peacekeepers, though they never found any evidence. It had all been carefully destroyed, or one of the underground's agents would make sure that it pointed to some other explanation.
It didn't stop me from worrying about him. I didn't really enjoy it when he kissed me goodbye in the mornings and went to "work", but I wasn't about to push him away. What if today was finally the day they managed to kill him? The idea was too painful. He was my best friend, even if he still believed he was more than that.
By that time they made me stay home. Well, let me. I was never very comfortable in the underground, anyway. His family had long since moved in with us since our house was big enough and they were having trouble affording their own. I started staying home after someone shot at me. I guess when they had trouble getting to Cornix they decided to hurt him by killing his wife instead. It didn't quite work, but no chances were to be taken. I was a damsel in distress to them. Even if the pink had long since worn off my skin, I was always going to be the slightly clueless Capitol girl in their eyes.
Before long, Cornix was important enough to be sent to District 13. We had received the communiqué several months before. Then, two weeks ago to the day, our hovercraft had gone down. This wasn't the way things were supposed to happen. Leaving the Capitol was meant to be the hard part; once we were out, our pilot wasn't supposed to betray us, almost succeed in assassinating us.
He'd put the small hovercraft on autopilot, joking and laughing as always. He said he was going to bathroom, but he whirled around and aimed at Cornix's head. He almost shot him, but Cornix's reaction was too quick. They fought and the gun was lost. I was useless in the hand-to-hand fight and I regretted now that I'd never taken the self-defense classes that the underground had offered. Fighting wasn't my thing, so I'd just brushed the idea that I might need it away. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Crunch.
The pilot's neck was bent sideways; too far sideways. Silence stretched for a long moment; I was too frightened to even close my mouth, so it hung open even wider than my eyes.
"Vini-" Cornix began, holding out his hand. All of a sudden a loud crunch sounded, and the hovercraft started to fall. I didn't know at the time, but we'd crashed into a tree. Really, we're lucky we were flying at low altitude. We survived the fall.
I couldn't even speak to him for a while. I jumped involuntarily whenever he touched my arm to steady me as we hiked. I knew it hurt him, but I couldn't get the way he grabbed the pilot's neck and snapped it out of my mind. He was so cold and confident.
It took me a few days to come to terms with it. It wasn't his fault, I knew. He had to do what he did or the pilot would have killed both of us. Now I didn't suck in my breath when he took my hands, looking at them. They had been natural for years now, but somehow they look different. I think it must be the surroundings, actually.
"Cornix, where do you think we are?" I asked.
"I'd say somewhere in the woods outside of District Twelve," he told me.
It's funny. They tell you a lot about the Districts in school - well, if you attend, which isn't compulsory. But they never mention much about all of this empty space between them. We always knew when we were passing over the boundary of a District, because the unbroken wilderness immediately became the bustle and grime of civilization.
There was something perfect about the forest, as the trees stood sentinel to guard the clean water and the soft blue sky. It wasn't the kind of perfect most people seemed to search for, it wasn't organized, strained perfection. It wasn't that there was nothing that could possibly be improved. It was that, somehow, 'improvements' wouldn't make it any better at all.
I realize that this is exactly what the Capitol's been missing all along. What I've been missing. Despite the fact that the people of the Capitol have everything they could ever want, they've never had this; or, at least, what it represented. What they want, all that anybody really wants is happiness. Perfect happiness. The capitol searches for that in all the wrong places: in mutilating themselves in the name of fashion, in gorging on food and throwing up to do it all over again, in killing children for their own entertainment. The sad thing is it's at their fingertips and they're pushing it away with all they've got.
I wonder if they'll ever understand this, how perfection, is there in front of them if they'll just close their eyes and leap. I know there's only one reason I'm here at this moment myself, and he's sitting behind me.
One thing I don't think anyone realizes is that those people back in the Capitol need us just as much as the children in the Districts do. I think of myself, wandering blind and miserable for all those years, afraid to admit even to myself how much I hated me. Cornix takes my hand again. He's doing the right thing. I think I can see that now. He's given me the most amazing gift, and I can't keep letting my own fear hold him back from giving it to the world.
"Cornix?" I ask abruptly, "Why do you love me?"
He looks taken aback. I guess after being married for six years it's an odd question, but now I want to know the answer.
"I guess, because you just had that potential that I needed to believe the world had. You were one of them, just as surely as anybody was. But at the same time, you weren't beyond help. I could save you. I wanted to save you. You were all the hope I ever had for the world. You still are."
I lay back against his chest, for once not shying away from a touch I know will mean something entirely different to him. He doesn't need to worry about me anymore. Right here, right now, I'm perfect. In this empty place, I feel like I've finally found what I'm looking for.