a/n: First time I'm challenging myself with 100 prompts. Let's go. Drabbles, oneshots and perhaps a mini-series? And yes, title from Lupe Fiasco's "The Show Goes On".
we dream so long
prompt six: innocence
"perception"
(or when Mags realized she'd been living a fifty year lie)
.
Finnick accompanies her as a Mentor the year following his own victory. Not unprecedented, no; still, he is younger than both or this year's tributes- Careers- by at least two years.
He gives sparse advice to them, she notes during the days leading up to the arena, after they'd been plucked, picked and interviewed to perfection. His eyes dart around through dinners and as they watch the tributes receive their Gamemaker's scores.
Then Claudius Templesmith's voice soars over the loud speakers in the arena, the Games begin and Finnick all but disappears.
Each night- no, more every other- he returns. His eyes cast down and his shoulders slump and his eyes dartdartdart. He's quiet and one thing Mags knows for sure is that this is not the cocky, loud, perhaps obnoxious boy who won but a year ago. His eyes are dull; the sea is dead.
.
There are five tributes left when he sneaks into her room well past midnight. His hair is rumpled and so is his shirt; she sits up quickly to ask him what's wrong, what's happened when he plops down next to her, curls into her shoulder and bursts into tears.
She wraps her arms around him, far past protecting him from anything now.
"Finnick?" she whispers into the scattered light from the Capitol outside. He shakes his head, sobs subsiding. "What's wrong with my little guppy?" she asks, hoping, praying for a smile at the nickname.
He raises his head slightly and then pulls away, comforted by the soft words that hint at a lost language, dialect, something from long ago.
"They-" he pauses, afraid momentarily of the consequences. He spills the words, his secret to the venerable ears of his Mentor. And the entire world shifts under her feet.
.
She's a victor. Young, fit, and as happy as her conscious can let her be in this world. Her hair's grown back, long and blond and sea-worn as before (because no one- no one- touches it. Not even her prep team; they've seen what she can do with a couple fishhooks), her skin's shiny and her eyes gleam blue from yearly remakes at the Games.
Except this year's different. This year she doesn't go to the large showing room to watch her Mentorees fight to the death. This year a girl, a victor herself from District One (or maybe Three?) comes to drag her away to a small room with slightly ridiculous outfits and six people dressed identically.
The outfit is black and tight and far too revealing for her liking and the make-up is suffocating and heavy and-
she doesn't even know what goes into a shot.
She's a bartender now, because she doesn't have a choice, because she loves her family back in Four. She puts up with the vulgar remarks, the men (and women) who go just a touch too far, with the indignity of it all because she cares.
And because, well, she'd only imagined that this was as bad it could get.
Bartending for the socialites of the Capitol was innocent enough.
.
She worries the following year, when he's gone more, gone longer.
She cries the year after that when he's gone near ninety percent of the time and returns with a smirk jauntily perched on his maturing face and a infamous reputation growing.
.
She cries for the guppy who was fourteen and scared inside and wasn't supposed to beat out an ocean of sharks anyway.