** Haven't updated in a while due to being extremely busy, but here it is. The second half of this chapter will follow shortly afterwards. It was a little lengthy so I broke it into two sections.**
Chapter 8
Rosa Part 1
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them - George Eliot
Training today was equal parts good and bad. The good being that my muscles were generally back to normal and I could run and squat without biting my lip in pain. However, things were still a bit awkward between Peeta and me. He came to apologize for shutting me out, probably hoping that we could regain some sort of normalcy between us, only for me to hurt him by ripping my arm out of his grasp as if he's diseased. I know now I can no longer avoid the discussion about Gale. He expects me to tell him something and before the day is out he'll know exactly what it is.
When we head back into our mentor's house Peeta leads us over to the television set up on a black stand in the living room. He told us two days back that he received the Victor's tapes from Effie, but didn't suggest that we watch them. Perhaps he wasn't ready to face the Games again so soon.
I know the moment he had said the tapes were within his reach my stomach plummeted to my knees and I felt as if I might keel over from the anxiety. I understand what we are able to gain from watching the other Victor's of Panem outlast their Games, but I don't care to have any more faces of the dead visiting my dreams at night.
Today, I guess, it's time for us to face our fears.
I plop down apprehensively on Haymitch's worn leather couch facing the large black screen and drum my fingers against my thigh. Peeta walks into the room with a small clear case in his hands. He slides it open and pops out a circular silver disc slightly larger than my Mockingjay pin and inserts it into a slit at the side of the television. I marvel at this discovery. Even though the same television exists within my house, I don't watch it unless there are mandatory screenings in which case it's hard to avoid. I would have never known about the groove in the side of the black casing otherwise.
"So, whose slaughter fest are we going to watch," Haymitch's sadistic humour spews forth full-force as he slumps down in the armchair to the right of me.
"The Victor for the Sixty Fourth Hunger Games," Peeta says, focused on retrieving the remote from the side of the tube. "He's from District 6; I think his name is Kezzy Erwin."
Haymitch gives a very unflattering snort upon hearing the name of the Victor. "I don't know how much use this will be to you," he gripes. "He's hooked on morphling now."
I keep my mouth shut. I don't want to know what happened to Kezzy Erwin that made him prefer to live within a trance-like state of illusion and not reality. If President Snow had anything to do with it, I can guess it was pretty bad.
A blue flicker illuminates the black screen and then the recording starts to play. Peeta walks over to the couch and sits down on the other end, leaving enough space for another person between us. I bring my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them to stop myself from asking him to sit closer so we can face the terror of recorded Games together. If ever there was a time for a braver and stronger Katniss, that time is now.
The very first thing that we see is the expanse of the arena, which isn't anything like the one I experienced. It's a vast savanna; tall wheat-gold grass springs up and surrounds the green patch that houses the Cornucopia. The grass extends as far as the eye can see, offering shelter from blood-thirsty tributes, but also hiding many other dangers—one being a lioness, thirsty for the feel of the hunt. The camera shows her prowling through the grass in a low crouch scoping out her surroundings and I know the slow pan away from her is an act of foreboding.
The camera zooms out to display all the tributes poised on their pods listening to the booming voice of the head Gamemaker count down from 20. The District 6 morphling looks thin, but eager. Determination lines his face and strengthens his limbs. Further down I notice someone vaguely familiar. The curly ponytail that runs down her back, the deep caramel skin...
"...is that?" I start.
"Rosa? Yeah," Peeta finishes with a solemn look in his eyes.
Rosa Deene, District 12's reaped tribute. Daughter of Marla and Huey Deene, the previous owners of the flower shop, and the twin sister to Lavi Deene, who is now married to Peeta's eldest brother Saff.
I remember Peeta mentioning to me, one of the nights we shared a bed to shelter each other from the onslaught of nightmares during the Victory Tour, that his older brother got married while he was in the Games.
"Oh," is all I can say. I don't know why, but I feel a tinge of irritation wash over me. While Peeta was in an arena fighting for his life, his family was toasting to the union between the bakery and the flower shop.
Peeta picks up on my irritation. "It's not like that Katniss," he tells me, pulling the blankets higher up on his chest as he lies on his back next to me, sharing the comfort of my plush bed on the Capitol train.
"They weren't planning to get married until next year. But then with me being placed into the Games, they realized how..." Peeta falters searching for the right word. "Unexpected...life can be. You know Lavi lost her sister to the Games."
I nod and the image of the dark-skinned girl with an infectious smile and welcoming honey eyes blooms into memory.
"So they just did it, the day after I left District 12. Had a small toasting, just my family and what's left of Lavi's and moved in together. My mom was against it at first, she doesn't like the Deene's, but she couldn't resist the merger," Peeta scoffs.
Lavi's tale is a tragic one. She lost both her mother and father to a crippling sickness that masqueraded as just a fever until it was too late to heal them. Then her sister received a death sentence at the age of 14. Her only living relative is her grandfather who helps her run the flower shop.
I've always felt a blind connection to the Deene's. I admired their strength. It was no secret that the family counted on the tesserae rations almost as much as the family's in the Seam. The flower shop had been in their family for years, but it couldn't bring in the revenue needed to feed five mouths. So each year, since they turned twelve, the twins with the black curls would walk hand-in-hand to wait in line for their rations. If it wasn't such a dismal reminder of the impoverished surroundings of the district, the image of the two caramel-skinned girls with their hands tightly clasped and their hair bouncing lightly against their shoulders as they walked would have been a picturesque sight.
They carried the grain and oil in their arms like it was nothing; just another day in District 12. Rosa would take the lead, cradling the rations in her arms like a child and looking back at her sister now and then to remind her to keep her head held high. They knew what it meant to lug the sack of tesserae grain and the barrel of oil back home, but they didn't let it define them. It was something they did to keep their family alive and they would continue to do it for as long as they needed to. It didn't crush their spirit. Yes they were poor, yes they struggled, but they still wanted to experience life.
Out of all the merchant families in District 12, I consider theirs the most genuine. When I was younger I would go with my father to trade herbs and stories with grandfather Kale. He'd beam at me with magical black eyes and weave fables out of his words laced with wisdom too clever for me to understand.
Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of the twins when they came in from school. They were ten years older than me so I would only watch them from afar. Lavi was always quiet, with delicate doll-like features and a shy smile. She would pull her hair into a low ponytail and look more at the ground than she would at your face. Rosa was the brazen one of the twins, always eager to make a new friend. I used to marvel at her hair, the way her dark curls hung in thick waves down her back. When she ran the wind would catch them and her spirals would flail out behind her in soft coils.
Looking at her now, standing on the pod with one foot in front of the other and her eyes trained on a blue backpack a few feet away from her, I can still see a trace of the affable girl with the curls and my heart aches for her. I was only six when Effie trinket placed a slim, expertly manicured hand into the glass bowl for the Sixty-Fourth Hunger Games and drew a folded slip with Rosa's name delicately inscribed in black. Before completing the forlorn march to the stage she enveloped her twin sister in the most heartfelt embrace I had ever seen in my life and I contemplated whether they were speaking to each other, saying things that only they would understand without having to open their mouths because they shared the same DNA.
And now we've resurrected her so that we can watch her die all over again.
You're not watching this video for her, I tell myself. But I know that throughout the entire screening, my eyes will always be searching for her. My only consolation is that the cameras focus more on the victors of the recorded Games than the other tributes that participated in them.
The horn sounds and the tributes take off. Rosa scurries for the blue backpack, swiping it up with her left hand and continues to run towards the tall grass in front of her. The morphling from District 6 doesn't make a beeline for the concealing yellow grassland like I thought he would. He heads straight for the center of the Cornucopia and my mouth drops. My memory fails me, I can only remember imperative pieces of these Games and this part is not one of them. How on earth did this frail, wonton young man fare against the beefy brutes from the more dominant districts?
And then I see that he's quick, unbelievably so. His legs extend like a grasshopper and he reaches the metallic horn ten seconds before the first Career tribute, snatching up a spear and a woven brown sack then bolting for the tall grass to the right.
The next couple minutes of footage show him running with legs that seem to hover above the ground; leaping over sunken holes in the dirt in thunderous bounds. His ability to hurl himself several feet forward in a single leap like a metal spring is what he must have shown the Gamemakers to earn him a seven. It isn't until the second day that something eventually catches up to him—the skulking lioness from the first glimpse of the arena.
She's already had the pleasure of pouncing on a little girl from District 8 and severely wounding a boy from District 10. When she encounters District 6, she's riding on a predatory high and doesn't hesitate to attack him.
He doesn't have time to run, only dodge the ferocious snap of her snarling teeth. The claws of her left paw scrape against his left calve and he yelps in pain, crashing to his knee. She leaps to deliver a deathly blow to his back, but he turns and plunges his spear into her shoulder. The cry from the lioness is a throaty whelp of pain that makes me wince from where I sit. In the next second the morphling tugs his blood sodden spear from where it impaled the beast's flesh and runs off using the trees as a rubber band to propel him forward.
Much of the Games pass with the morphling evading danger and gorging himself on mushrooms and the crackers that lined his pack. Every now and then he'd stop to sip from a reservoir of water, his head pivoting from one direction to the other. Somehow I don't believe it's the other tributes he's worried about, but the lioness who still lurks in the grass despite her injury.
For the most part, the District 6 tribute does very little killing of his own. His ability to camouflage with the grass is astounding and his speed helps him outrun the others. The Capitol camera's begin to tire of him and flash to some of the other tributes: a strapping young man from 2 scoring fish in the watering hole near the Cornucopia; a tall blonde-haired girl from 4 ingesting a handful of poisonous Oleander bulbs and convulsing minutes after to the sound of a canon; then to Rosa.
She no longer carries the blue backpack, instead there's a dagger in her right hand and a bunch of the same Oleander leaves in her belt. I know Rosa intends to use the flowers as a weapon. Her experience in the flower shop would make her aware of the deadly properties of the pointy flowers.
I wonder why the cameras linger on her.
They watch her trek through the tall golden grass towards a small pool of murky water that I know is brimming with bacteria. Rosa kneels down inspecting the water, using her dagger to create swirls in the foggy surface. Her nose wrinkles and I guess the pungent smell of decay has reached her nostrils.
She suddenly rises from the pool and I start at her swiftness, unknowingly leaning in towards the TV screen, but I don't see or hear anything out of the ordinary.
It isn't until a slight ruffle of grass moves to the right of her that I realize what she's noticed and why the Capitol has chosen to disregard the antics of District 6 for the exploits of District 12.
