Title: mad girl's love song
Summary: Words never stop flowing out of her head. Original!Tribute
Author's Note: Didn't bother naming anybody because I'm lazy. Originally, this wasn't supposed to be romantic, but screw it, I felt like it.
Don't hate if you hate it because I needd to get rid of this.
/
She writes all over the Capitol sheets. It's in poor taste, but the words never stop flowing out of her head, and the Hunger Games will never change that. She writes about everything but death, writes free writes on her pillow cases and ends her sonnets with rhyming couplets. She's detested the Capitol since the day she was born – not for the typical reason, not for the thousands of men and women who disappear, or the lack of freedom, or even the gruesome Hunger Games.
It is not these reasons at all, in fact. She could live with the pain of losing her mother, being trapped in some government controlled wasteland – she can even live with the nerves that come with Reaping Day. She has lived through being chosen, obviously. However, the reason she hates the Capitol is because they have taken all the books away. They have taken Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, Harper Lee – to prove a ridiculous point. The Capitol is right. All the stories they had taught Before are not true.
She writes poems to make up for the brilliant authors, for the artists of Before, for the true losses. She sings praises of Plath, of Dickinson, of Fitzgerald in an A-B-A-B rhyme scheme. She tells them all of her dirtiest secrets, of the things she sees behind closed doors, of the Capitol's cruel world. She tells her treasured friends about the boy who came with her, who seems to be all muscle and no brain, of the competition who sneers at her as she skips training to write something down. She gets the lowest of scores and is pitied by no one. She prefers it this way. She notices, however, how the boys in training will watch her as she writes, eyes caressing her soft body. She tells this to Edgar with similes and alteration, how it makes her feel that soon, every one of them will be dead.
She notices how the Avoxes scrub every last trace of her prose from the sheets, and she writes them note after note and poem after poem telling them what it's like to be able to speak what you want to say. She notices many things. She notices how the boy who came with her often walks out of their mentor's room with rumpled hair and bedroom eyes, and he'll wink at her every single time. In his mind, he has already won, so he rejoices.
He is good looking and he is dumb, and yet, she kisses him one day when he exits their mentor's room. His tongue feels nice against hers, and she can taste the traces of something he is dying to say. She is delightfully surprised by the taste, and as he pulls her closer into him, she realizes that perhaps he could win. When they finally pull away from each other, his breath is ragged. Hers is even and measured, just like the verses of her poems. He touches his lips and she notices the dreamy tint in his eyes. She does not feel anything but words popping into her mind.
He takes her hands and asks her if she wants to go to his bedroom. She nods, because she does not feel anything. He kisses her again, and she wonders, faintly, if their mentor will hate her for this. But she finds she does not care. Instinctively, she presses her soft body against his muscular one and he sighs happily into her mouth. She wonders if he loves her already. She gets lost in kisses, thinking of all of the love poems written about this: about love, about sex, about the things that she cannot seem to feel.
He pushes into her, and she feels bliss for a minute – utter bliss that tickles her stomach. For a second, she does not hear poetry. She does not even hear a peep. But then, it disappears as soon as it comes, and she hears the slow trudge of words fly into her head. She kisses him then, a deep, long kiss that makes his heart beat accelerate. She pities him then, more than she has ever pitied anyone in her entire life – more than all the poets and all of the authors, and all of the people who have lost the luxury of beautiful literature. He finishes, and he smiles at her – an honest smile that is not just two muscles moving upward, but something real. A smile.
She kisses his smile and leaves his room, with the rumpled bedspread and the confused boy laying on top of dirty sheets. She returns to her room and writes him a poem. She has never written anyone a poem before – not anyone who was still alive, at least. It is a wonderful poem, perhaps one of the best she has ever written. And yet, she is too afraid to give it to him. It is written on her pillowcase, and it is beautiful and she is afraid to let him read it. No one has ever read one of her poems, to her knowledge.
She does not take it with her to breakfast, where she sees him looking directly at his empty plate. Their mentor strokes his arm thoughtfully, asks him where his appetite has gone, and he stares at his plate, silent. She does not say a word, just scribbles a free verse on her napkin. She hates it after she has read it over. It is a poem of jealousy, of rage, of hate. She has never hated something she has written.
The boy pulls her aside after breakfast, after the mentor has excused herself, and She sees the dreamy look in his eyes return. He is in love with her. She knows this more than anything else. He reaches out and touches her lips, sending a slight ripple through her thoughts. She shivers. He doesn't need to say it, but he does, and it jolts her thoughts this time. Her rhyme scheme goes off balance, her similes shrivel, her irony weakens, and her fingers stop moving for a minute. She shivers once more, and he touches her arms to feel the goosebumps that have risen on them.
She is afraid of this feeling, afraid to lose the thing that makes her a writer, but she kisses him once more and revels in all of the unspoken words on his tongue. And then, she tells him that he will win the Hunger Games. His dreamy eyes clear, and she watches his love-struck smile fold over to a frown. He is remembering. He is afraid. He strokes his fingers across her arm once more, and then turns away and leaves her to stand alone in the hallway. When she returns to her bedroom, her pillowcase is immaculate. She does not cry, nor shiver. She does not feel a thing. She writes a short story on her comforter about something she is not feeling. She decides that she will only have this, the skill of writing, for the rest of her short life.
The next day is the last day before the Hunger Games. The tributes spend it training, or in her case, writing. She watches him though, from the corner of her eye. He is at the knife throwing area, one of his many talents, and he misses the target's heart by inches. She looks away and assures herself with another verse, that he will be okay after she dies.
However, she should have guessed the outcome of the Hunger Games. She always appreciated foreshadowing and irony of all of the literary elements. She should have used her wisdom. The Hunger Games makes the arena a library, of sorts, with tall bookshelves arranged into a maze. She feels scared for a thing she was certain would not raise any emotion. From the corner of her eye, she sees the boy. He is not the boy he was in his bedroom. He is muscle and brawn and she wonders what was the performance – this strong, dumb boy or the boy with words on his tongue.
When the starting noise is sounded, she runs deep into the maze. She notices that the other tributes stay around the Cornucopia, afraid to enter the library. She climbs up the bookshelves and avoids the rotting spots and the traps left on some. She reaches the top and watches the blood and gore, searches for him and hopes that he is not dead.
She moves on, when she sees him running into the maze after another tribute. She searches for books, even if they may be traps. She wants to read one last poem – see the Capitol make fools of themselves by filling their beloved Hunger Games with forbidden fruit. She wants to feel the feeling that poems give her, like she still has a chance. However, a conversation between a pack of tributes interrupts her search, and she runs in the opposite direction, hoping to avoid death for a bit longer.
It takes her all that she has, to stay alive. She does not know why she bothers. She hears countless shots from the cannon and wonders when hers will sound. Words are aching to be written down, every second it doesn't sound, but there is nothing to write things down. She runs often, relocating as to deter the game away from herself. She does not know why she wants to stay alive, just knows that she can, if she puts her heart into it. She could stay alive, if she keeps running.
She runs into him, eventually. He is lost and his hands are bloody. She tries not to look. He looks at her with eyes of steel, but she sees the cracks. She is itching to write about the cracks in his eyes, and her fingers shake. She tries to scratch the words into the bookshelf, but it won't budge to meet her words. Perhaps, the Capitol did this to see her suffer. He watches her as she attempts to write, her breath becoming heavy and burdened. And then, he asks her if she has ever written something about him.
She looks at him, hollow and filled with dread, and says yes. He nods slowly, registering it in his mind, and kisses her. He pushes her up against the bookcase she had been trying so desperately to write on, and the edges dig into her back. She kisses him hard and it numbs her thoughts for a few wondrous minutes. He is the one to pull away. He asks her to write him a victory poem, and when she asks him where, he tells her to write it on his body.
He hands her a knife. She understands. She does not watch his face as she writes, nor does she look at the words, which bubble with blood as she etches them into his skin. She closes her eyes and thinks of Plath, who stuck her head in the oven but stuck towels under the doors because she wanted to keep her children safe. She thinks about Virginia Woolf, who wrote her suicide letter to her husband and explained why. She thinks about all of her authors, and then, she thinks about him.
She kisses him when she is done, and lets his blood seep into her clothing. He asked for a victory poem, but she wrote him one about love instead. He kisses her back and gently touches her nimble fingers. She sees him wincing as the blood flows out of his muscular body and instead of kissing her again, he gives her a parting gift just as sweet. It takes him a few tries to get enough breath, and even so, he can only manage a few lines.
"I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart. I am never without it."
When his cannon fires, she is left against one other tribute. She kills him by pushing a book shelf on him. It takes all of her effort to do it, but then again, she doesn't feel a goddamn thing.
They announce her to be the winner of the Hunger Games and she does not feel anything. She does not feel the applause or feel the pride radiating in her District. She does not feel the handshake of the President or the eyes latched on her soft, curvy body as she takes her place in the Victor's Village.
She does not feel words aching to flow out of her head other than the last words he said.
She lays in bed, late one night, and carves them into her belly. And finally, as she's closing her eyes, she starts to hear all of the beautiful words again.