A/N: For winter's cry, for being such an incredible sweetheart and a wonderful friend!
Her name was Eve. Her sin was pride. That is all you need to know about her.
Except it isn't, not really. Saying that she died because she was too smart for her own good doesn't tell you how she lived. It doesn't tell you that her favorite fruit was apples, that she had an older sister of nineteen years who cried when she was Reaped, that she wanted more than anything in the world to be free. It doesn't tell you that she smiled when she raised those berries to her lips. It doesn't tell you anything at all.
A boy- District Eleven, strong, protective of his partner- stands beside her in the buffet line. She watches him pluck an apple from a basket and stare at it, face darkening. "Bet it's one of them I picked," he mutters to his District partner. His massive hand tightens around it until it splits in two with an awful crunch, and for a moment, all Eve can think about is her neck caught in that grasp. Then the tiny girl giggles and steals one of the halves, and the boy chuckles and ruffles her hair.
Eve doesn't eat fruit that day.
Her life back in Five wasn't the best, but it was enough. She was never hungry, never overworked, and if sometimes it seemed like her red hair was the only burst of color against the gray of the District, well, no one ever died from boredom, did they? So she never complained about her simple life, smothered a vague sense of pity for the people who were unlucky enough to live in the outlying Districts, hid a far stronger contempt for the people who glittered like useless baubles in the Capitol, and kept her head down and her mouth shut.
She collides with something- too soft for a tree, too small for a Career, unless it's the little knife-girl with the wicked grin, and if it is, then she is very, very dead- and tumbles to the ground, scrambling for a hold. It's Katniss, eyes panicked as she clutches a pack to her chest, but she's not making a move for the knife glinting so close to her hand. Eve seizes the advantage and pushes herself to her feet, feinting to the side before running off in the opposite direction as the forest laughs around her: Run, little fox, run.
She wasn't a player in these Games, not really. She was too silent, too detached. She felt nothing but numbness when faces lit up the sky at night- her District partner, the crippled boy from Ten, sweet little Rue- not even a bit of relief that she wouldn't be the one to kill them. She found a knife in the rubble of the Careers' camp, but what use was it when her hands shook too badly to hold it? No, the best she ever could have hoped for was a quick death. That was her only wish that came true.
A smile splits her lips wide open. Red spills from the cracks, staining her teeth and her tongue with the taste of victory, and she laughs high and mocking and wet with blood, tilting her head back to let her throat gleam beneath the light of the sun. She laughs and laughs and laughs until she drowns in the laughter and laughs some more. Silly, silly Careers, arrogant to the last, thinking they're so clever, assuming that she wouldn't be smart enough to figure out their little trap. She'll make sure it's a mistake they pay for with their lives.
It wasn't an accident that she stole that nightlock. She hadn't studied the survival stations for no reason. Five is an urban District, devoid of life, but she'd always been good at memorizing things, and she knew she could never bring herself to kill someone with her own hands. Back in the Capitol, she'd shown the Gamemakers that she was smart, not that she was deadly.
The thing is, she knew exactly what she was doing when she ate those berries. She knew they would kill her. She knew they would kill her quickly. And really, that's all that mattered.
Starvation is the Capitol's favorite kind of beauty.
She's Capitol-pretty now, all bones and angles and hollows, so thin she could almost float away. She knows they're watching her right now, admiring the way her spine juts through her shirt when she leans over, measuring the span of her waist and wondering how many surgeries it'll take them to reach that. They're calling their surgeons and downing drinks to make them vomit up all the food they've wasted, and she's nibbling on pieces of tree bark to try to keep herself alive, but she'll never be this beautiful ever again.
She wanted to die on her own terms, Eve did. She didn't want Thresh with his resentment and his apple-crushing hands or Cato with his anger and his memories of the little knife-girl to find her first. She didn't want to beg for death or, worse, to never see it coming. She didn't want to waste away from starvation, clinging miserably to life even as her body failed. She didn't want to kill Peeta with his stories and his love of art or Katniss with her little sister and her sharp eyes.
Most of all, she didn't want to win.
Eve knows that she has to die.
It's better this way. She knows this. It'll look like an accident, that too-smart girl destroyed by her own tricks, a shame but not a rebellion. The Capitol won't hunt down her family and kill them slowly to show everyone that suicide is not tolerated in the Games. It won't even hurt.
But she still doesn't want to die.
She thinks of her parents, of her sister, of smog and windmills and home. She thinks of hunger, of darkness, of victory.
She raises the berries to her mouth. Her hand does not tremble.