That was all that Enobaria knew. How to be brutal. It's how she had been brought up to be. It's the skill that training taught her.
It's all that she had known since she was just a little child. Little and naïve and innocent - but not for long.
In 2 you begin to train when you are young. By the time Enobaria was eight, she knew how to end a life in eight different ways. A way for every year of her life until that point, perfectly practiced so it was almost effortless.
Her parents were proud people. They knew their daughter excelled. They also knew she revelled in the notion of killing.
She was going to volunteer at seventeen but another girl beat her to it. She was almost grateful in the end. The girl from 8 was surprisingly skillful, and she wouldn't have thought to look out for her.
When the following year came around, Enobaria knew she had to be the first to shout out those two words. At age eighteen, the 62nd Hunger Games were her final opportunity.
When she arrived in the Capitol she was sure to not form attatchments to those who she was going to be killing. No, Enobaria made sure that they all knew she would be in the career pack but then she went about training on her own.
Her training score was the second highest - a nine. How annoyed the girl from 4 made her feel right then...
In her interview she worked the brutal angle to her advantage. It worked, the sponsors were eager to back her. Even more so than for the girl who had beaten her with her training score. The girl had messed up in her interview and she was no longer memorable like Enobaria was.
Once in the arena, Enobaria checked her surroundings. All forest as far as the eye could see - a typical arena. She was sure there would be hidden dangers lurking between the trees though, or that the forest eventually ended and there was a plain at the end. Not a plain, but she was right about the forest ending. It was surrounded by cliffs.
She had managed to cause very few deaths and it hadn't satisfied her bloodlust in the slightest. She made a silent promise to herself that she was going to get that one brutal kill. She wanted it so badly.
She thought that she had found her chance with the girl from 9. It turned out that she was brighter than she looked. She dodged and managed to disarm her before running as far as she could. It didn't occur to her about the cliff face. All it took was one push. Enobaria knew she had to look elsewhere for her brutal kill.
It came down to the final two, her and the boy from 1. He had quite a childish way of thinking - he believed he was going home. Enobaria was unarmed, after all, and he had his sword.
He didn't consider that you can win without a weapon. When she lunged at him he didn't dodge, instead preferring to stay put. It was, after all, the easiest way to win. In theory, at least. He planned to attack once she had attacked him first - a good show for the audience at home. What a fatal mistake that was...
Instinct led to her digging her teeth in to his throat. In shock, he dropped his weapon. But rather than taking the weapon she dug her teeth in further, him sqealing and getting paler and paler as both of them became soaked in his blood. The blood that was pouring out from her mouth. When his cannon sounded it actually seemed a disappointment but she made sure to coat her lips in the thick red substance (as though it were lipgloss) and proceeded to blow a kiss to the camera. It was the idea of giving the Capitol a good show which caused her to paint the boy's lips also. She knew that the Hunger Games were over - they had already made the announcement that she was victor. They couldn't make her leave the arena until she wanted to though and at that point she was having fun, messing with the minds of the audience.
She didn't do it out of desperation, rather out of curiousity. She wanted to taste her victory more literally than others did. They say curiousity killed the cat, but Enobaria was not a cat. She was a creature far more brutal.
Recovery was useless. They tried to make her less damaged by the games, less eager to murder on first sight. Little did the doctors know that this wasn't an after effect of the Hunger Games. No, she had always been that way. Ever since she was a little girl, when she began to train.
Usually a victor's appearance isn't tampered with initially, but for Enobaria an exception was made. The Capitol citizens loved her "clever thinking" and they wanted to celebrate it permanantly. With fangs like a vampire's.
Snow tried to sell her and she obliged, but even in the Capitol most people didn't want to kiss a mouth which concealed a lethal weapon. Her teeth not only made her a popular person, but they also freed her from slavery.
Her victory tour had a few... complications in certain districts. Like District 1, where the people were still angry about how the boy died. Apparently the body was so badly damaged that even with all the Capitol treatments to remove traces of the Hunger Games there was still a distinctive tooth-shaped mark on his neck.
They were in a hurry to leave the place once she had made her speech. The party was cut short by the victor's sudden departure. Her team were happy to be gone, but Enobaria always wished that she could have had a little bit longer to memorise the looks of disgust on the citizens' faces.
When the theme of the Quarter Quell was announced, Enobaria's feelings were mixed. On one hand she was angry at the duo from 12, whose fault this twist most likely was. On the other hand, however, she was excited. She had loved the thrill of killing the first time, thirteen years before. She saw no reason why she couldn't fall in love with that feeling once again. She wanted to fall in love with ending lives again.
She thought that killing them would be easy, but once she arrived in the Capitol she realised it wouldn't be so. As soon as she saw Gloss she realised. He had won one year after Enobaria and he was only one year younger. Cashmere was a few years younger than Enobaria, but seeing her made it worse. She had forgotten how close she had become to some of the other victors through mentoring tributes.
She couldn't kill these people. This time, it was different.
Except District 12. She didn't know them. She didn't want to know them. The girl, Katniss Everdeen, had killed her tribute last year. Cato was meant to win, he was meant to return home. But he didn't. Because of District 12, of all people! she thought.
She decided right then that she didn't want to kill anybody other than the pair from District 12. But she knew, deep down in her heart, that if it came down to it her natural instincts would take control and she would just kill whoever was in her way. Which was everybody.
The victors couldn't stop the games - the efforts some of them had made were useless. They all ended up in the arena and during the countdown, when she should have been looking at either her surroundings or eyeing up a specific weapon, she was just looking at her oppone- no, her fellow victors. Her companions since she had won. The only people who fully understood her.
When the countdown finished she forgot all of her thoughts from the previous minute. Friend became enemy and the bloodthirsty rage she had managed to conceal for as long as she could returned. She was going to make sure she won this.
In the bloodbath it was bloody. People who had been friends for over a decade just... turned on each other, stabbed them like they meant nothing. People tried to kill Enobaria, and she in turn tried to kill them. She nearly died twice. But she got a thrill out of danger.
The battle was short but it was manic.
Afterwards she met up with Brutus, Gloss and Cashmere. The very people she previously didn't want to kill. The very people she could no longer care any less about. So long as they take another person down with them, she thought.
They didn't get many kills to their names for several reasons. One was that they could never seem to trace down the other victors. Another would be that the arena was constantly throwing obstacles at them. Like monkeys that wanted to eat them, and poisonous fog. Enobaria never figured out why she was being targeted with these demonic challenges. She concluded that maybe the Capitol no longer liked her as much as she had previously believed to be the case.
When they finally found some tributes they were all together. They weren't paying any attention (nobody appeared to be on watch) but, unlike Gloss, Enobaria was bright enough to not class Finnick and his little alliance as being able to be written off just yet. After all, she knew how fast Johanna and Katniss' reactions were. Unfortunately for the siblings, the crazy woman ceasing to sing got Gloss noticed and Katniss shot him. Cashmere tried to save him but Johanna was just too accurate with an axe for her to get out of there alive.
The alliance, which only lost one member as opposed to their two, tried to get Enobaria and Brutus killed also. They failed. Brutus later died from a fight with the boy from 12, Peeta. It was just minutes before the end and so it could have gotten her sad. But she had always claimed to never particularly like him anyway. Instead, her determination kept her fully alert as Katniss went to shoot at her. Enobaria didn't want to move to the other world yet but she waited expectantly for her to release an arrow - she didn't. Katniss instead broke the arena.
A first hovercraft took everyone that it could but it turned and fled when it saw the other nearing. Enobaria was taken from the arena by the second one. The Capitol one.
Enobaria was released from the Capitol fairly immediately. But not quite soon enough to avoid hearing the screams of the other captured tributes - the rebel ones who were staying captured, the ones who weren't too be released like she was. Good. Let them suffer... was all that crossed her mind. She disliked Peeta and she had always despised Johanna Mason.
They killed all the victors as part of the rebellion but Enobaria was spared. Some sort of agreement, they said. She wasn't going to complain.
She didn't do much to rebel. Pretty much all she did was cast a vote for keeping the Hunger Games, by putting the Capitol children through it. Enobaria claimed she wanted them to see what they had done for themselves - and she indeed did want to give them a taste of their own medicine. She had recently begun to wonder about what her life would have been like if she wasn't in such a messed up world. Maybe she would have hidden her killer instinct. Maybe she would have never discovered it in the first place.
Most of all though, Enobaria didn't want to lose her annual dose of legal bloodshed. It was what she lived for. Without the Hunger Games, she would have had no purpose.
Katniss chose to kill the person who was going to organise these final, special games. So Enobaria never got to say goodbye to her purpose for living.
She tried to move on from her vicious and violent past but she couldn't. She just kept dreaming about it. About being back in a land where she had the Hunger Games to keep her grounded.
Without the games, she was being driven insane.
Enobaria couldn't take it any longer. She had been struggling for a while, but it had finally all gotten too much to bear.
She stood in front of the cracked mirror and kept her eyes wide open as she dragged the knife across her throat. She flinched at the pain, and rather than trying to bare it she let it run through her body, to control her. It hurt, she had never felt pain before - not really.
There she stood, and saw in her reflection as the blood slowly trickled down her neck, staining her collar. It seemed like a mirage, a strange hallucination. It was real.
She saw the life fade from her own eyes. It was chilling. Not only could she feel herself slipping away, she could see it also. It was scary. It was exciting.
Finally she fell to the ground and there, in a crumpled heap, did she breathe her last breath. Alone, away from anybody else.
Her body wasn't found for days. The person who found it never recovered from the sight of her wide eyes and the smile that was on her throat rather than her mouth. Seeing the bloody knife tightly gripped in Enobaria's hand scarred her the most.
Her death couldn't have been more brutal.
How fitting.
