(flashing lights and we took a wrong turn and we)
The Capitol is like nothing she's ever seen before. Forests of towers, spearing the fabric of the sky that never grows dark, glittering lights in every window, people dancing in the streets, close together, hair all shades of an oil spill with light flickering across their bodies. She watches from the upstairs window of her father's mansion, at the cut and parry of the skirts and the way people cling together, pressing closer and closer as though they could defy mortality and find their place among the stars.
Her father's important, they say. Severe men in severe suits with severe beards chuck her under the chin and say How lucky you are that your father found you when he did, and she nods and manages a small smile. The butterfly-women are different. As she gets older, they coo over her wildfire hair and titter about her mother behind her back. All she knows is that her mother is buried in a hole somewhere back home in District Five, and that she's not allowed to speak of her or even think of her. So she doesn't. And that's just how it is - parties and food and skirts of swirling cream and roses - until, all of a sudden, it's not.
(fell down a rabbit hole)
The Peacekeepers come in the dead of night, when she's just home from a party, and when she sees who it is, her hands fly to her mouth with a perfect flutter, young Capitol socialite the world over.
(When they kick her out, she takes her airs and graces with her. Even the daughter of the dead and disgraced Head Gamemaker has to have something to remind her of the old times when she wasn't scavenging in the dustbins to find something to eat.)
...
She eventually finds work in a little café, serving lukewarm food and bottles of brightly coloured concoctions to people who don't care for her apart from a brief, uninterested flitter of coloured contacts when she brings them their orders. But it's where she meets him.
He's reserved, for a Capitol boy, black and white, trousers and a shirt and blue eyes that pierce her like a thousand red-hot needles. At first, it's nothing but a silly crush - she carries his order to the table by the stained-glass window and he thanks her in a quiet, sure voice from behind the printed shield of his newspaper - but as the months flip-flop over each other, she starts to bring his usual before he even asks, and he starts to lower whichever headline has his attention grasped between its claws to talk to her, slowly, softly. Then it's a little smile, and on her day off, he appears outside her bare box of a flat with a bunch of flowers and an invitation to dinner at a smart restaurant near the centre of town.
"I don't have anything to wear," she says, but he just smiles.
"It doesn't matter."
"It does."
"Come on, please."
She relents. "Okay, I'm coming."
People give her strange looks as she passes their tables on his arm in her faded, frayed-at-the-seams, too small black dress that is the one thing she owns that she doesn't work in, and inwardly, she's cringing, remembering the days of silk tulle and layers of velvet. But once they're seated, a candle burning warmly between them, she finds she doesn't care because his eyes stay on hers the entire evening, even though painted ladies with hungry expressions are glancing over from behind their fans and masks of propriety.
(When they eventually stumble back to her flat, she doesn't push him away because it's been so long since she was held close and called beautiful - and after that, there's no hope left. She doesn't care. When it comes to him, she doesn't want hope, anyway.)
(haven't you heard what becomes of curious minds?)
It's several weeks of kisses, and nights spent curled up together under her thin blanket that he eventually asks what she thinks of the Games with a guarded expression in his eyes. She looks at him blankly for a second, feeling the warmth of his hand on her waist burn through her skin. "Well, aren't they useful for keeping the Districts in line?"
"You were born a District girl," he reminds her. "How would you feel if there was a chance you could have ended up in the arena?"
She thinks about it. "Well, of course I wouldn't like it. But it's penance, isn't it?"
"That's what they want you to think," he says, and then changes the subject to fire and passion and anything but the children called up to die.
But the weeks pass, and slowly, he starts to tell her things. About the starving people in the Districts. The mining accidents, the Peacekeepers, who here, are the comforting face of safety and security, but there mean nothing but oppression, the beatings, the hangings, the you-put-one-toe-out-of-line-and-we'll-kill-your-children-so-brutally-you'll-never-think-of-rebellion-again. And she starts to think for herself, to see past all of the things she's been spoon-fed since she was six years old, to realise that the Capitol isn't as perfect as the President and the authorities want them to think, to realise that injustice isn't just in the districts, that it's just all one great pretence that they're a great nation, when in all truthfulness, they're anything but.
And then, it's a bright, warm day in late August, and they're walking in the outskirts of the city.
"Where are you taking me?"
"Somewhere," is his enigmatic response, swinging their linked hands.
"Are you going to tell me?"
"No." He smiles to take the bite out of his refusal. "Patience."
They end up near the mountains which separate them from District Two, climbing down stairs past a maze of locked doors and codes until they're in a sort of bunker with maps and plans stuck to the walls, red circles and scribbles glowering crossly from the concrete.
"Welcome," he says, "to the revolution."
"There aren't any people here," she replies, the first thing that comes to mind.
"I know. They're out."
"Doing what?"
"Can't tell you. Need to know basis only."
He takes her around, shows her pictures and coded letters and a plan, and finally, she understands what he's been doing, telling her about the plight of the people in the districts and watching her, eagle-intent to see how she'd respond. A thrill sparks through her veins, and she turns to him, rising lightly onto her tiptoes to press her forehead against his. His hands press against her back. "Why are you showing me this?"
"Because I trust you. And I need you."
"I already knew that."
He smiles, and whispers in her ear. And when he's done, she smiles too.
...
It didn't work. That's all she knows - that it didn't work and for the past few days they've been running through a woodland, thorns scolding and ripping into their clothes and birds mocking from the trees. They managed to hitch a ride on a train, but jumped before they reached District Six. All he'll tell her - in between running, walking, looking for food and spending a few hotchpotch hours here and there, huddled down in the long, cold shadows of the trees, trying to catch snatches of ragged, tattered sleep and holding each other tightly in a knot of arms and legs - is that a link in a chain was broken and that the authorities know about their cell in the Anti-Capitol Underground Movement. The badly-disguised fear in his voice when he told her sent chills running taunting fingers down her spine. Every cracking twig is a Peacekeeper, every breath of wind is a hovercraft descending.
It is inevitable. And it happens.
They're just near the outskirts of District Twelve, stopping to share a little water and some hazelnuts that she'd found when they hear the low, distinctive roar of a hovercraft. They look at each other, rabbits frozen in headlights, and then begin to run, crashing through the undergrowth with no thought of being quiet, stealthy, sneaky, hidden. Terror boils in her throat, and before they know it, the shadow falls over them, and there's a click. He stumbles, falls with a spear lodged between his shoulder-blades, and a net has fallen around her, wires biting into the rips in her clothes. She screams his name, thrashing wildly, the sound searing at her mouth, and just before the net pulls her into the hold of the hovercraft, she sees two pairs of eyes looking up at her from underneath a rock ten yards away, a girl and a boy armed with bows and arrows, staring in horror, and then there's a sharp jab of a needle slipping into her neck. The world floats away.
(she never speaks again)
end.
A/N This oneshot is based off 'Wonderland' by Taylor Swift, as part of the 1989 short story anthology I'm attempting to write. I don't own any of the lyrics, and I don't own The Hunger Games, much as I wish I did. The little café was inspired by a story by Estoma. For Zoe, Christmas 2014.