"Check my vital signs

To know I'm still alive and I walk alone…

My shadow's the only thing that walks beside me

My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating

Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me…"

Laura West - 18

Victor of 115th Hunger Games

District 12 Mentor

Laura West didn't like crowds, and she hated publicity. Laura was, instead, a small girl who existed in small spaces. She was never going to break five feet, and even then you could see every bone in her body.

She'd always thought it was because they didn't have much food in the house, but the last few years had taught her that it was more of a metabolic issue. She just couldn't gain weight.

However, that suited her just fine. She didn't need to be big, because with the money she'd earned winning the games no one in her family would have to work for years.

She was happy to be small, to sit and read inside of window benches where no one could find her. Laura had always loved hiding, had won every game of hide-and-seek with the neighbourhood kids when she was little.

They had been a sort of gang, all of them scrawny, looking after each other while their parents worked. Almost all of them had gone down the same path: got desperate enough to start stealing things when they were 13 or 14, most in prison before they were old enough to work.

That had been Laura's future as well until she'd been reaped. She'd soon discovered that she could hide in the Games as well. Nobody had even seen her between the bloodbath and the endgame, when she stood alone against the boy from District 2.

He was big, trained, he'd killed at least 6 tributes already. What on Earth was going to stop him from killing her too?

It was that moment that she knew she was going to die. She realized that until then, she'd always had some semblance of hope, some thought that she might make it, but at that moment there were no more options.

Even if she hadn't revealed herself, the boy would have won. She didn't have as much food and water left, and that was what it would have come down to. Her only choice was to walk out into plain sight and hope for a miracle.

The miracle announced itself with the loudest roar Laura had ever heard. As she dropped to the ground, hands clapped over her ears, the mutt soared over her. It missed her head by less than a second, ripping Henri Lipher's clean off instead. Just like that, without doing anything at all, she'd won.

She didn't run, just stared at the boy's empty neck; the creature couldn't hurt her now. She'd been counting; she was the only one left. She couldn't bring herself to look at the head, but her eyes never left his body, even as she was pulled out of the arena, clinging to the rope ladder as it swung in the wind.

She couldn't shake from her head that he'd only been 18- only three years older than her. All of them had just been kids.

Laura had made a better recovery than a lot of Victors. Everyone else who lived on her new street was an addict or psychotic. Laura was just removed.

She'd always liked to be alone, but this was different. There was no reason for her to hang around in the seam anymore, to look after knob-kneed little kids. Her gang had disowned her; there was no place in a family like that for someone who had the option to be anywhere else.

Thus, Laura had no place at all, so she just stayed where they put her: Victors' Village, House Number 8. She had only left once or twice, not counting her Victory Tour and preparing two kids a year for the fact that they were going to die.

She spent most of her days inside of a window bench. A lot of days she'd read- it didn't matter what, she was too distracted to care what it was or how many times she'd read it- but sometimes she just sat and thought, and very occasionally she tried to remember.

Today was one of those days, when she decided it was only fair that someone think about what had happened in that arena. Laura knew it was all on film, but she felt that it was her duty as the only survivor to really remember it, to really remember everyone that had been there with her.

She'd made herself watch the tapes so she would know what was missing. She'd seen or heard almost everything herself: creeping around the arena every few nights to steal more supplies made one a frequent witness to private events.

She knew things that the public didn't; she knew the names that Marina Hollace had called her District partner. She'd seen two 13-year-olds kiss because they were afraid not to get to at least once before they died. She'd heard the District 9 boy vomiting intermittently into the river for almost seven hours, right near her hiding spot so she couldn't move, before the cameras had finally arrived to watch him finish the death he'd started a day before.

She'd committed everything to memory, and most of it to paper, because she didn't want it to disappear forever. As happy as she was that she had been the one to make it out alive, she didn't think anyone deserved to have the last things they did forgotten forever, so she made herself live in the past sometimes. It was the only selfless thing she ever tried to do, was just living in the past for a few hours when she could concentrate hard enough to do it.

A/N: Thank you so much to everyone who's submitted: we've almost reached halfway! I'm at 11 Tributes right now, so if just a few more people could take a few moments to fill out the form on my profile and PM me a tribute, that would be amazing.

I appreciate everyone who's read this and commented; thank you guys so much for your support! Please feel free to leave constructive criticism, or just to say Hi.

Thank you,

Mae