we have no heroes here
by lustergold
if you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow, and which will not, speak. (macbeth, shakespeare)
She knows her father has some sort of obsession with getting a child in the Games. She has known this for a long time, ever since she was five years old and her father would tell her stories of the Games and the glory to be won there, the fame, the pride. Her great-great grandmother on her father's side had been a Victor, or so he tells, but her mother quietly braids her hair when he's away and tells her that this great-great- grandmother and gambled away all the money and died penniless, leaving her descendants poor and low-classed. Ever since this she hasn't been able to look at her father the same way, because when she does, all she sees is a desperate man who thinks he still belongs there, up at the top with the families who have glory running in their blood. He's only a lowly stone mason, with a newly promoted position that makes him puff out whenever he mentions it. He's only a man who would use his children to move up in life. This would make her hate him, but she can't, because he is her father and she feels a pang of pity whenever he speaks.
He realizes her incompetency the same year, at five, when she finds a beetle in her room and runs up to him, sniffling about it. When her mother hears this she makes a motion to find the flyswatter, but her father grabs her mother's arm and stops her, with a fierce quality in his eyes.
"Where is it?" he asks her sweetly, with a smile that is twisted and wrong.
She points to her bedroom, a small thing she shares with her little sister, and her father leads her- drags her, almost- to the wall with the black beetle, its shell gleaming in the daylight. "Kill it," he tells her, but she can't. She's afraid of it, and she's afraid of the crush that will come if she squishes it, the few moments when it is still alive and twitching with feeble attempt to free itself. He pushes her forward, shoves her, and still she pushes back, crying.
"I've raised a coward!" he yells, flinging his hands in the air. "She can't even kill a bug! How is she going to- going to-"
Her mother cuts in, saying, "She's only five, you can't expect her to be-"
His fists cut off the words, and she says no more, demurred.
Later, when her father has stalked off to drink away his anger, her mother takes the bug and places it outside, and hugs her gently, quietly. When she looks back she thinks her mother must have been happy for one child to escape the Games.
…
Her little sister is entirely a different story.
Her father figures this out soon enough.
…
In retrospect she takes it as her fault, because she was the one who didn't stop Clove from poking at bugs with sticks and then squashing them when she got bored, the one who let their father find out. Once in a while she thinks maybe it was inevitable, but she's the kind of girl where there needs to be something on her heart, holding her down. But she thought it was harmless. What child didn't play with insects, flip them over and watch them flail, and then turn them around and crush them? It was a sadistic kind of play that was in every District, whether Two or Twelve.
The only one who thought any different was her father, who took this as a sign that Clove had it in her to become a victor. He was already coming home drunk most of the time, and his words seem to be perpetually slurred and garbled. Then there was the afternoon she came inside to find her little sister on a stool, reaching for a knife that her mother had left out on the counter. Her reaction was delayed- that was for sure- but suddenly it hit that her little sister, her little sister who still had chubby fingers and ribbons, was going to play with a knife, and all her eight year old self could do was scream. Not really a scream- more of a yell, a rushed "No!" that drew her parents in like moths to a light.
Her father makes a delighted sound and rushes up to hold Clove. "Not yet, Clove," he coos. "We'll have plenty of time for that." Now he turns away from his oldest child, turns away from the failed one, and tells Clove stories of the Games, whispers victory like a lullaby in her sleep. Clove seems to take this in with a strange eagerness. Her mother does nothing to stop it. Her older sister does nothing either.
…
But she feels Clove grow cold and distant; a faraway star.
…
Later, she thinks she could stopped it, but later, it is too late.