Disclaimer: I don't own the Hunger Games, but if I did Wiress would live on!
A/N: I love all my readers! I love my reviewers more! JK, but I do enjoy reading reviews. I hope this is worth your time! Love you guys!
Before her games, Wiress was a brilliant young girl with a wonderful personality. She could make you laugh without even trying. She was always happy, even when the occasion didn't call for happiness. Wiress loved the technology center, and she followed her parents there whenever she could. She was always working on something, whether it be a computer system or a garden. When she got back from the games, so much changed. She tried to be herself, tried to still be that girl who could make you laugh despite what you were feeling. Wiress couldn't. She stayed herself enough to be okay for about ten years. Long enough to be my student and mentee. Long enough for me to know her and know how she really wasn't herself like the rest of the district thought. She was always beautiful to me, even as I watched her fight for her life in the games. Although she was never quite herself, we became so much closer after her Games.
Long nights in the tech center had us becoming closer and closer. And even though I had seen everything she did in the Arena, she couldn't help telling me sometimes about how hard it had been for her. She wanted to know how I had made it through so unscathed.
I just smiled lightly at her, "I have no clue. It's luck I guess."
Wiress would narrow her eyes and smile mischievously, punching my arm lightly, "There's no such thing as luck, silly."
That's how our relationship began; her being curious about my sanity on lonely nights at the tech center. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't in love with her or anything; I just thought she was a really awesome girl. She was still a girl at that point, only seventeen. I was twenty-four. She could technically still be in the Reaping if she hadn't already become a Victor, but none the less I still thought she was a really pretty, really cool, brilliant girl.
A few months later, after the third Victory Tour since her Games, we were working late again. This time, she snapped.
"W-why did this happen?" she said, crying. I was taken aback. We had just finished a new blueprint for some machine the Capitol forced us to make and were about to take a break.
I furrowed my eyebrows, "What? What do you mean, Wiress?"
"How come the Games... Why did they make me... This isn't..." she said, unable to finish the statements or questions.
"This isn't you. I know. I remember you. The real you," I said, placing a hand on her shoulder to comfort her. She smiled and hugged me, although I was still seated, resting her head on my chest. She really seemed to trust that I knew her. I was totally shocked. I had never been one to be loved, only admired.
We grew closer and closer until she only spoke in partial sentences that I never ceased to finish. I don't know if she ever loved me as anything more than a mentor or a teacher, but she will always be my other half. Others called us Nuts and Volts, but it didn't ever make sense. Nuts and volts don't go together; nuts and bolts maybe, and Nuts and Volts, but not nuts and volts.
"Why do they call us that? Why do they call us... what they call us?" Wiress asked me one night we were watching our respective tributes in the games; they had both made it past the Bloodbath.
I smiled at her and laughed a bit, "They don't know what they're talking about."
"But, they think I'm crazy. I-is it really that... that..." she said, trailing off.
"Obvious?" I asked. She nodded. "You aren't crazy. Just different, that's all." Wiress smiled thankfully.
When the two of us were reaped for the Third Quarter Quell, she cried. She didn't want either of us to die.
"Wiress," I said, holding her face in my hands, "you saw what happened last year. And even if I don't get out alive, I'll make sure you do."
She trusted me so much, and I let her down. I was there, and she died. I could have done something! I could have done something! She wasn't supposed to die! When the others told me what had happened to her, something inside of me ripped. Must have been my heart. I loved that woman, absolutely loved her. And she was gone. Gone. And I was only the end. But it just makes sense, doesn't it? It just makes sense that the beginning would go before the end.