A/N: Though other chapters have arguably required trigger warnings (I'm looking at you, Thalia, Rose, and Blair), this is the first one where I'm going to spell it out: Wisteria is a monster, and there's some gross/creepy stuff in this chapter. If you want to avoid the worst of it, stop reading when she says that Nanette doesn't know the origin of her ring, and return to the story when she picks up the top book from her pile. If you just want to be prepared, well... there's nothing explicitly gory, but it gets close.

Short chapter, as Wisteria doesn't really have anyone that wants to talk to her, for obvious reasons. Enjoy the story, and credit to Wisteria's creator. She's a monster, as I said, but one that I find fascinating. There's more there than mere bloodlust.

Wisteria Evans; 17; D11

I was sitting in a corner, reading, when they called the names that night. The others had gathered hunched around the TV, or stayed far away, standing in the kitchen with the sisters- helping prepare dinner so that they could block out the noise of the TV in case it called their name. But it didn't.

There's a few cohome names called each year, but this year, there had been only one. 'Evans.'

At first, after the final name was called, the matron said, "I don't think we've lost anyone," before I glanced up at her in confusion. She had reeled away, a little horrified to be acknowledged by me, and said, "Ah. Wisteria."

I kept gazing at her, with my wide black eyes that I know unnerve everyone, just to scare her. I think she knows how much I hate her, and she knows how I terrify the other children, though why she does not completely know. I wanted her to think I would hurt her, and she tore her eyes from me quickly, though I kept them upon her the rest of the night.

This morning, technically, a sister is supposed to accompany me to the Reaping square for my 'big day,' but I will leave her here. I do not require a babysitter.

I get up from my bed, a bottom bunk whose top belongs to a girl named Nanette Palmer, and step to the mirror. I care little for appearance, but Nanette, who's shallow and hopes to marry into a merchant family, keeps our mirror, which is orange and blackened around the edges with age, as clear as she can.

My hair has been braided, a while ago, so I don't bother with it; it's kept well through the days. I scrub my face with a harsh white soap that the matrons provide us with. Soft, buttery black soap is more common, even among poor families, but all of our belongings are given to us by the Capitol in the cohome, and that means white soap that hurts my skin, and I know, the others'.

I then dress in the midnight-blue faded hand-me-down dress that has been allotted to me for holidays, Reaping days, Victory Tours, and other events; it was given to me at fourteen, after I outgrew my childish pink dress, and I was told not to wear it except when instructed, lest I be seen as trying to rise pettily above my station. Though I doubt how any Peacekeeper or merchant could see a tall, thin cohome girl in a dress so full of holes it barely covers her, let alone keeps her warm, as a threat to their station. Regardless, I have not worn it except when instructed; other days, I wear the ancient gray skirts and working shorts that have populated my drawers for as long as I can remember and dusty blouses, short- and long-sleeved, for different working conditions.

I then pick up the golden band up off the counter. The only item of jewelry on this counter that's mine (and then only by technicality), and the only item of jewelry with any real worth. It came from the Peacekeeper, Romulus. I suspect, given its make, it once served as a wedding ring, before I took it from his body.

Nanette does not know of the origin, nor am I sure that she knows it exists. It blends in with her faux jewels painted yellowy-bronze with the cheapest tarnish money can buy.

I wear it as a wedding ring, and none have ever questioned it, though of course, rarely does anyone question anything I do. Of course, given what had happened while he was alive between us, it may seem strange for me to feel so attached to Romulus and his golden ring, but in some ways, he feels like a husband of mine, though perhaps more of an innocent husband of childhood that the younger girls sometimes have, than a true one. Though I had felt fury at his savagery, in some ways it resonated with something humming, sleepy, and dark inside of me. Something that awoke at the sound of his taunting and boasting about how he had whipped a boy to death. Something that drove me to repeat the savagery later at his expense.

That night, I had returned to the cohome hair dripping with his blood and spit and tears and sweat, clothes spattered with gore that had been on the inside of his skin less than twenty-four hours before. The matron had gone home, the sisters to bed or up in their rooms or about town, if they were bold, and I had burst in and ordered three older boys that had been sitting mindlessly and uselessly in front of the TV to boil me a few kettles of water for a bath.

Nanette and the two girls she and I share a bathroom with delivered the water and stood in their doors, watching in what must have been either awe or abject horror, as the debris of Romulus's death turned my bath water bright red. I drained it out the window in the other girls' room, and they stood aside and allowed me to. Then, I had gone to bed, ignoring their whispers.

No one had blabbed to the matron, for the fear of my replicating whatever-their-minds-thought-I-had-done upon them. But she learned, anyways, through rumors, through the littlest childrens' nightmares, through everyone else's hesitation to ever come near to me- I could handle a hatchet against a human head as well as any Career. My hands were stained and dripping with invisible, intimate blood.

Good enough. I was glad to be free of the old cow. She skitters away from me just as the others do, now, like bugs, and I have more time to read.

I pick up the top book from my pile and head downstairs, for a breakfast which the sisters will have just begun cooking, let alone serving, on this day that will be a holiday for all but one.

I remember years when children popular in the cohome were chosen for the Reaping, and all of us were made to get up early and help cook and serve for them, and cry over them, dead-men-walking as they were with their years of tesserae the cohome forced them to take out for all the children. Since we are all raised by one matron, technically, that's legal.

This year, however, there will be no one to cry over my potential dead-ness, despite my having taken just as much tessera out to support my forced family as the rest of them. I'll be lucky to get a sister to look me in the eye as she hands me my tray.

This is why I have my books. I bury my head in the one I grabbed as I walk down the stairs.

I have read many histories of Panem and of Eleven, and as much of the nonfiction in the Panem Cultural Archives as I am legally allowed to access, being underage and a ward of the state and old enough to be married, to starve, and to be Reaped but not to be given precious knowledge.

This current book is the most controversial one that has ever been afforded to me, as a lifelong account and study of a man named Cripsin Cole, who was a childhood friend of the author before descending into madness, psychopathy, rebellion, and murder. It's quite easy to tell that the book has been changed from its original setting to fit in to Eleven, and that long stretches are modified or even replaced from the original manuscript, but the unmodified parts make for a precious treasure of an enrapturing read.

These books are my favorites. In some way, the men and women like Crispin Cole are my husbands and wives in spirit just as much as dear old dead Romulus. Their hunger- their fury- their urge that mirrors the one lingering and waiting somewhere deep in the pit of my gut, are both fascinatingly incomprehendible and as attractive and magnetic as a black hole. The invisible blood staining their hands- and mine- was taken intimately, lovingly even. I'm proud to wear their golden band.

As I enter the downstairs, where only the most enthused littles are gathered around the television for early-morning propoganda cartoons, the sisters all look at me, and then away. I think they feel bad for not really feeling bad about my likely fate.

As I walk up to retrieve my breakfast, they hand me what must be the first tray of the morning, with what looks to be a single scrambled egg, some slices of sugared yam, and a scattered handful of nuts. Sometimes on Reaping or Victory Tour mornings we're lucky enough to hope for some real meat, but I suppose I should be grateful enough for the egg.

I lie my book down just next to my plate on the table and ignore the rest of the world for a while as I read. I'm hardly aware of the seats around me left empty as the table quietly starts to fill up.

Before it gets too crowded, though, I have finished eating, and I close my book, return upstairs to place it back by my bedside, and leave the cohome, possibly never to return. Not that I mind so much. I'm not sure what or who I'll be when I'm an adult and away from this place, but certainly it must be better.

I begin down the meandering path through the buildings of town and to the square. Other districts were fairly well planned-out, even the poorer ones, but in Eleven everything is laid out strange. Building's doors don't face each other, paths are meandering and made of dirt, and the only place where anything is organized or laid out is the square, lined with whipping posts and the Justice Building and the mayor and the Peacekeepers' homes and apartments. People rarely go there except when they have to.

The cohome is in the poorer part of the merchant sector, because no one wants to live next to a lot of orphans; however, the merchant sector is on the very outskirts of the town, as near to the train station as we are allowed to build, and so I have to pass through the slummy outskirts of town where the poorest families live to make it to the square.

The homes here are typically one-room, bunched together, with an occasional long-abandoned community garden between them. It's not uncommon to see more than one person hunched under a lean-to that's been built against a more fortunate one's house. Technically the Justice Building is supposed to keep people housed, but those bastards make sure the process of building and reassigning homes takes longer than it has to, and so the streets are filled with the homeless.

There are several lying in the gutters of the street, or even the street itself if they're bold. I step around them. I despise their weakness. Someone smarter, someone harder, could find a way to make it through or at least not broadcast their weakness to the world. Of course, the unconscious bodies strewn in the street have at least one purpose: they serve to make our District escort very, very uncomfortable as she steps high-kneed through Eleven to the square.

A pebble sticks me in the foot and I realize I've forgotten to put on shoes. Not that it matters much now; I won't go back to the cohome until I'm either safe from the Reaping for a year, or dead.

(Or perhaps as a Victor. But that happened two years ago, when Farrow Buckwheat, a strong boy from the furthest reaches of the District, won. The odds are not nearly in favor of two Eleven victories in five years.)

I walk through to the square and find, there, the twenty-nine other families that were chosen well and assembled in their places. They must have all come down at seven o'clock sharp; I'm nearly an hour and a half late in comparison. Up on the stage, the escort is tapping her foot at a couple of Peacekeepers setting up chairs for the Victors, who haven't come out yet, and a podium for the mayor and the escort herself.

I walk to the Peacekeeper in charge of checking us in, allow him to take a drop of blood from my finger. I shake the rest that comes out after it onto the counter until it scabs, which apparently disgusts him, but I care little for the feelings of this lily-white Peacekeeper whose only purpose is to keep our District's collective head down.

"Age?" he says, and I reply, "Seventeen," though I'm not completely sure. I've celebrated my birthday on the first day of the year for as long as I can remember, because I don't know my real birthday and it's much more convenient. Of course, 'celebrated' is a strong word when you live in the cohome and have no friends.

I walk through the other girls and they part for me. In my tattered dress, which blows slightly in the wind, and my bare feet, I feel almost like a ghost among them. The feeling is exacerbated by my lack of any guardian. All of them have come with their entire families, from the furthest reaches of Eleven.

I stand at the front. The escort glances behind me, to the Peacekeeper in charge of checking in, and he must tell her that I am the final arrival, because she smiles and primps and steps the microphone.

Her skin is as pale and white as the moon, and she's dressed entirely in a pale silver. Against the dark skins and the dark mud houses of the District, she looks like an alien. She introduces herself as 'Sylvia'.

"And now, the Treaty of Treason," Sylvia says, stepping back to allow our mayor to come forward.

As is traditional, the Victors come up the stairs and go to their chairs one by one as he speaks. The great TV above, in the square, lights up with each of their names as they walk. It starts with a respectful pause for the six Victors that have already died, their names flashed individually beginning with 'Orchus ?' and then continues on through to Farrow, who is not here but already in the Capitol, having been contracted out to some TV station for celebrity appearances.

Which means one of these others has signed up to cover mentoring for him. He tried to mentor last year, but had a breakdown mid-Games and old Chaff, the mentor in the 60s and 70s, flew out to replace him.

When the Treaty of Treason is finished with, Sylvia returns to the podium and grips it with her tiny, dainty fingers as though she might fall. Installed into the podium, where we can't see, are two spaces for tiny Reaping balls that only need to be big enough to accommodate thirty families and all their tesserae. "I'd say ladies first, but we don't need to bother with that today!" Sylvia chirps, and I suppose it might be meant as a joke, but no one laughs.

She pulls out one slip, effortlessly – it must have been at the very top of the pile – and reads –

"Wisteria Evans."

The dark thing that lives in the deepest pit of my gut roars up into my chest, snapping, ablaze. My vision turns red for a moment. No! How could they choose me, of all people? I don't deserve this- I'm not weak, nor am I one who breaks laws, except for that one single night with Romulus that no one ever saw. I want to bare my teeth and gnash them in fury, to destroy everyone here-

But instead I raise my head high, smile as much as I can bare it (just the barest of tugging at my lips) and walk up the stage to the escort, standing silently behind her.

She digs her hand into the bowl this time, I know because I can see it, and I watch older girls clutch the hands of their twelve-year-old sisters and pray, and-

"Soya Delon."

A big, tall girl standing dead center in the crowd gasps, and then seems to continue gasping for breath as she tries to make her way to the stage. It's taking her a very long time, and the Peacekeepers standing around the perimeter of the square are getting impatient. When she trips on the stairs, that's the last straw. They seize her roughly by the arms and toss her up onto stage, where she trips again, and then finally rights herself. I can already see dark purple bruises forming on her forearms where they grabbed her, and though I care not for this girl who's fifteen at the most, I want go after them on her behalf.

"Your tributes for the Hundredth Hunger Games!"

I get a really good look at Soya, with her hair in twin buns on top of her head, her muscles that are probably overdeveloped for her age. She's taller even than me, and I wonder if she's so big because it's natural or because of the Peacekeepers working her half to death. Her size mirrors our last three Victors: Farrow Buckwheat, Thresh Cooper, Icarus Emilleti. But she's young, too young to have a chance.

I wonder if I'll be the one to kill her, in the end. I wonder if I should mind the thought more.

I shake her hand.

A/N: I thought this chapter might be a little short, given that I cut it off at the end (Wisteria has no visitors) and Wisteria had no real interactions with anyone, nor even dialogue, other than that muttered "Seventeen." However, it hits that just-over-3000 mark that I wanted to get on each of these and actually outpaces several of the other chapters.

Only three girls left. I'm getting very apprehensive. BotG has existed in its current state so long I'm not sure whether it can stand on its own once we get into the pre-Games stuff.

As always, thanks for reading, lovelies, homies, and friends.

-Phannie