VI.
Armina Fontes, 17
District Two Female
The train felt like another world.
It felt cliche to say it, but it was the truth. Most kids her age had been outside of Two at some point, but her parents weren't the travelling type. For their entire lives her and her sister had been reprimanded for even being out a minute past curfew. Leaving the District was out of the question.
Now it was just her, though, and she was gone. Far away from her parents and her sister's grave and everything else that had been tainting her for the past few months.
Here she could just be Armina. Simple, kind-hearted Armina and her foolish desire to volunteer. These people didn't know any better.
Blair had been fair enough to them both, if not a bit rambunctious. Almost like a lost puppy, unsure of what to do now that he was here, but one with a little bit too much bite. She could appreciate that. It's not like Seren knew much better. She had mentored one year before they broke the system entirely and had just been lucky enough to get one of her own out.
It felt like they were all on the same playing field.
Except for Milo, that is.
It's not that he scares her. If she was to be successful in all of these little games, she couldn't be scared of anyone.
He had come in later to their little training group and quickly blew past everyone, much to the chagrin of those who had been working at it longer. He was just better than them—faster, stronger, more willing to do what had to be done. Better yet, he was more than willing to face the music when he proved everyone wrong by getting on that stage.
The second she had heard his name something in her had known. When Armina Fontes! had rang out across the square, the surprise in her was forced.
Milo drops himself down onto the couch next to her with sudden force, sprawling out until one of his feet nearly lands in her lap. "So, who vouched for the connected story idea?" he asks.
Apparently she's not the only one who thought so.
Blair's the only one in the room actually watching the television—old Career roots, and all that. Seren is too busy watching him, Milo is staring at her now, and she's still wondering how she ended up here at all. Even the day she found out, when she thought back to it, was a blur. Too many bad things at once overloading her mind until it had shut down.
"What?" Blair asks.
"Y'know, the whole my dead parents and her dead twin sister in the same factory accident thing. Don't tell me that's a coincidence."
It comes out so caustic, so blunted, that she struggles to keep her face blank. Still, her mouth turns down into a frown regardless.
She likes to think she's handled things in the appropriate way. Most of them, anyway. Save for the fact that she's devoted almost all of the time she should have spent grieving to navigating this new way of life without her sister, things have gone as good as they possibly could have. Armina herself could have handled it better, at least from the details she's been holding onto.
Yeah, that was what Donatella had been like.
But Donatella wasn't here anymore.
It was just her.
She's missed any of the responses, too busy lost in her own thoughts, but is knocked out of them by Milo's foot nudging hard against her leg.
"So, partner," he says. "Allies, or no?"
This was inevitable. She knew it would come to this eventually, but it still feels so soon. Yes, she spent months in a makeshift training group that seemed loyal to each other through thick and thin, but this is reality.
She's actually here.
Everyone is waiting anxiously for her response. Well, none of them look anxious. Blair and Seren both look genuinely curious, while Milo looks challenging. The look in his stare is obvious—he's just waiting for her to say no. Armina before today would say no. She wouldn't get close to him because that's dangerous. Everything is now. One wrong move and it's over.
But that Armina is no more.
"Why not?" she says, straightening her shoulders. There's no reason to look weak; she's not Milo, but she's not going to crumble either. She's had months of practice, after all.
"Well, that makes my life easier," Blair announces.
"Wonder what that's like," Seren tosses at him, and he grins. It feels like her and Milo, in a more put together way—if you could consider them put together. It felt more like they were just charading around, trying to convince others and possibly themselves of various truths. Whatever the illusion was, it wasn't particularly grand. Try as they may, they weren't meant for this.
Or at least Armina wasn't.
When Blair turns his attention back to the television she tries her damnedest to focus on it as well. There's no telling what these people could be like, what secrets they could have. She knows all about that, after all. Still, it's worrying to know there are others out there like her. At least Milo is simple in his chaos; understandable, almost.
Unsurprisingly his attention doesn't last as long as hers does before he gets up and beelines for the tray of food across the car. When he returns, though, she finds herself more astounded than she thought possible. He leans over the back of the couch to her left and deposits something on her knee—could be a cookie, could be anything, knowing the Capitol.
Oddly sincere. Huh. She takes note of that one for later. She also notes that he has three of his own, all in one hand, but Milo focusing on himself over others is not so earth-shattering.
Every-time she spoke to someone in the last two months she's felt a second away from falling apart. Milo turning inward, fixating on no one but himself… that's what she should have done.
But that's not the way Armina is.
"Anyone pique your interest?" Milo asks. She's fairly certain he scatters crumbs over her shoulder, but that's something she'll learn to live with. They are allies, apparently.
She shakes her head. With this lot there's no telling what messes are going to come crawling out of it.
Armina would be far away from those things before they exploded.
"Well, you've got me, if nothing else," Milo says with a grin. Oh, how comforting that is. For added emphasis he shoves the rest of his cookie thing into his mouth, making it almost impossible to make out his next words. "You got my back, I got yours. Right?"
"Right," she agrees, holding his gaze. Given enough time she thinks she could read him well enough, but for now…
For now she just has to believe him, and that's scarier than she thought it could be.
On top of everything else, she has to trust herself. Trust herself when she hardly knew who she was, anymore.
And she didn't know which one was worse.
Penelope Priestly, 17
District Eight Female
The nightmares were not gone, but they were calmer.
Being nightmare-free did not come with the territory of having the name Penelope Priestly. That's just how things were.
Still, it felt nice to wake up relatively well-rested, tangled among luxurious blankets that felt like silk against her skin. Their own things were nice enough back home—they had done well in their business these past few years. They still had nothing on the Capitol.
Penny could help but wonder if this was why her father had always wanted to take their little circus to the Capitol one day.
For now, though, they were stuck travelling the Districts. Stuck without her.
And they would have to manage.
There's only a single short hour until they're due to arrive, enough time to dress and scarf down yet another piping hot meal. Best not to waste it. These few little train cars felt like more of a home than her own. With a framed portrait of her mother on the mantle over-looking her father bringing in the occasional, too-young hook-up, nothing ever felt right. Food went down as if Penny was swallowing stones. The fluffy pillows of her bed were not comforting. There was no relief in waking, in performing day in and day out on her father's whims.
Now she was finally free. Free from her father and the circus and the twisted, bloody memory of her mother's corpse strewn out across the ground like some sort of prop dummy.
Was this alternative any better? Some would say not.
But Penny had a choice to make, and so she did.
She receives nothing but friendly smiles when she enters the dining car and Micah is still smiling pleasantly when she finishes piling up her plate and takes a seat next to him at the table. Vance is nice. Kalysa is nice too.
Everyone is just so damn nice it almost hurts, but Penny won't even allow the thought of her eyes welling up. Not here, not now. She's exactly where she wanted to be—away from that hellish big top and all the awful memories that her father continuously forced her into confronting. Penny is finally her own person, choosing to be on display for a vastly different reason. At least in this she wasn't forced.
She'd rather die free than caged in her father's grasp, her mother's dying screams echoing about her ears every hour of the day.
"How did you sleep?" Micah asks. He always asks her questions first, she's noticing. All sorts of innocent, genuine questions that make them seem like the best of friends; Penny soon found herself trailing off before she could ask any back.
He was just so normal. Almost too normal. Smaller than her and breakable, like china. Breakable like her mother was.
It's not a kind association to have.
"Better than usual," Penny responds, because it would be rude not to, and he's not the type of person you can simply ignore. She'd feel like an ass if she even tried—Penny knows she can be pig-headed and underhanded at times, but there's no use in doing it to someone who doesn't deserve it.
Micah is still smiling, evidently satisfied with her response, and doesn't even flinch when she scoops up her first bite and says nothing else. It's an odd thing to watch. For once Penny feels like the observer, a visitor to a zoo with unfamiliar creatures behind its bars. She's so used to being the center of attention, to have people cheering and applauding as she tumbles across the floor or pulls the hilt of a sword free from her mouth.
Yet he's ducked down. Quiet again. Not quiet all the time, but just enough to show his care for others and less so for himself. Her mother always did say she was quick to learn.
That could have been about the gymnastics, though.
What she does know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that life is supposed to be enjoyable through and through; that was something that was instilled at Penny at a very young age, even before the circus business really took off. It looks less like Micah is enjoying it and more just getting through the motions of daily life. She knows Micah and Vance have talked about ally-ship. Penny's thought about it just as much, trying to keep it internalized.
She's not a bad person—Penny knows this. She feels sick to her stomach at the thought of leaving him, and even more sick at the thought that she'll suffer if she stays.
Isn't that exactly what Penny was trying to avoid by sticking around Eight any longer?
She's not Penny the circus girl, Penny the puppet, Penny the trapped. Not any longer. She is her own person and she needs to start acting like it. That means making her own decisions. Vance can't tell her what to do, nor Micah.
She is not playing anyone else's sick game.
Only her own.
"On a scale of one to ten, how ready do you think you are?" Vance asks. Micah continues mulling over his food, glancing quickly out the window as if expecting the Capitol to appear out of thin air. There's something startled in his eyes, the very same look Penny knows she had just last year. Has it really been a year? Her mother's blood splattered all over the dirt floor, the broken cage, the still-cheering audience just beyond the curtains...
She needs to stop thinking about it. No, she needs to be better.
And she needs to start making her own decisions.
"Ten," she answers quickly, before anyone can make a decision otherwise. Penny feels the truth of it nestle deep into her bones; she's ready for this. A part of her always has been. Putting on a show is only second nature this point, after all. It's like she was born for this, no different than walking a tightrope or trusting a free-fall or watching fire spin around her head.
Death was always there, and she keeps escaping it. She has to.
For her mother. For all of the other trapped people out there in the world looking for a way out, for the ones quiet and struggling like Micah, for everyone she has and will leave behind.
But most of all, for herself.
Ren Mantau, 16,
District Nine Male
He knows he should be getting all the sleep he can, but it seems impossible.
He did, for a while, and even took the longest bath he's ever had in his entire life to try and lull himself back into a sense of security when that began to fail. A bathtub such as the one in his room, with fizzing bubbles and pulsating jets, would have done him wonders back home.
Even a bath can't save him from that feeling, though, the one that always creeps back in.
Loneliness.
That's wrong of him, right? Marigold likes him. Shari likes him, though their escort seems seemingly more disinterested as time goes on. Perhaps she's just wondering why, like all of them, they've ended up here yet again. It's not either of them that end up with him just after five in the morning, though, sitting on a window seat and watching the forest race by. It looks a lot like what he's imagined Seven to be, but there's no one to ask.
No one save for Rooke, that is.
His mentor is an unassuming sort of fellow, the type that very obviously got through the majority of his Games using a lot of luck, but most of all he's just nice. Nice in a way that's genuinely undeniable—it doesn't matter what he says or does because you know he means it. Even for Ren, one of the most skeptical people in the universe, he believes it.
Rooke doesn't ask him any of the obvious questions about why he's not sleeping, only takes a seat next to him and glances out the window as well.
"Is that Seven?" Ren asks.
"Think so. Looks just like it."
He's never seen so many trees in his life, but something about it unnerves him. You could get lost so easily in there. It's not the wide open fields of Nine, easily seen and easily escapable, that's for sure. It would be dark in there. Dark and quite and lonely. He feels that well enough at home, sometimes, that Ren doesn't have any desire to feel it out here.
"Can I ask you a question, or are you not in the mood to talk?" Rooke wonders.
"Shoot." As if Ren is never not in the mood to talk.
"Marigold seems to have adjusted to you. You've been talking a lot."
"And?"
"And you two aren't allies."
No, they aren't. Partially because Marigold hasn't directly asked, but mostly because Ren doesn't know if she's a girl worth trusting. Nice enough, yes, but should he bother getting attached? Every person he's known like Marigold in the past has either left him or used him; time and time again Ren will put himself out there and get the very same result. He's living proof that things just don't always work.
"I'm not sure we'll be good together," Ren says pointedly. "That's all."
The worst part is, it feels like half a lie. Him and Marigold got along great. They talked like they've been friends for years, bouncing off of each other's conversations like they were well-practiced at it. He gravitated towards her immediately and she stayed just as close. They were joking and laughing over dinner, telling each stories.
It felt like just another day. He gets along with people like this all the time.
"You can get to the point with me, you know," Rooke offers. "I'll hear you out."
What point is there to get to, though? Ren wants someone—really, truly wants someone, but it's not going to be easy, and he can't just attach himself to the first vaguely nice person he finds. For all he knows Marigold is just like Elodie, another girl who just wants him to cater to her every whim and conversate with no one but her at any waking moment. Maybe the look in her eyes is different, but he hasn't yet pinned it down.
He wants to believe she's good. He hadn't thought otherwise for the longest time. It was only several hours into their newfound bond that he began to hesitate, wondering if it was too much too soon.
"I just want you to know that being in there alone... it isn't easy," Rooke says. "Way harder than you think. Even if you can find one person, that one person may just be the thing you need."
"How do I do that?"
"Up to you. You know how you operate better than I do."
Ren knows exactly how he operates. He smiles a lot and people flock to him but he never really knows them, not beyond a surface level. They don't know anything about him, either. They know that he mumbled once in class when he introduced himself and still gets called Ramen to this day. They know that he'll always be there, because Ren has a tough time walking away.
Of everyone here, Rooke seems like the one person who is undoubtedly on his side. He doesn't want to argue with him.
That's not worth it either.
Ren shrugs. "I guess I'll figure it out."
"You will. And I'm here to help you, if you need it."
"Are you sure?"
Rooke blinks. "Of course I am."
As it it's obvious. As if Ren is someone to be listened to, believed. Not many people have done that for him before; he's always the one checking in, being the shoulder to cry on. Even though it's hard to believe Ren finds himself nodding along anyway, choosing to believe, no matter how foolish the decision may be, that someone in this really cares about him.
Sometimes he felt like the sun, like everyone was just trying desperately to orbit around him and retain some warmth.
Ren doesn't need anyone else's warmth, though. If he can find it and trust it, that's one thing. If not, he figures it out on his own. That was what he was so desperate to prove in the first place, wasn't it?
Elodie will see. Everyone will.
"Try and get a bit more sleep," Rooke requests. "You'll feel better if you do."
Listening feels like a betrayal, like he's back under Elodie's spell and obeying her every beck and call, but he knows Rooke is only looking out for him. That's a first. Thankfully he's still warm and calm from his bath, able to get to his feet and slip off the bench with his ease. "Night," he murmurs. "Thanks."
"No worries. And hey—Ren?"
"Hm?"
"You don't have to smile for everybody," Rooke says. "Just remember that."
For once, he doesn't. Ren is so used to putting it on, to just have it there easy as breathing. For some reason's Rooke's words resonate so deeply that it hurts. He doesn't have to always smile. Okay. He can work on that. And then, maybe, he can work on it reaching his eyes as well, have it be an authentic thing directed towards someone who really matters.
But for now, he just needs to get some more sleep.
Rex Bascom, 13
District Five Male
Rex can't shake the feeling that he's done something wrong.
They're not far off from pulling into the station at the Capitol—the actual station, the real deal, the one with all of the cheering crowds and adoring fans...
He can't wait to see all of it.
Rex isn't sure anyone else shares this sentiment except for Terryl, but that could be said about any old escort. Besides, Terryl seems to appreciate him. He laughs at his jokes, letting his eyes crinkle so that Rex knows he really means it. Everyone else isn't so easy, but he got there with a lot of his old friends, didn't he? It doesn't matter how those relationships ended.
So far he gets mixed reactions from Soran and Icarus both no matter what he says, no matter what dumb joke he comes up with or what foul word he makes up off the top of his head. Soran seems amused, sometimes. Icarus just mostly seems perplexed.
The troubling bit is Inara, who hasn't really spoken to him at all. Not since their initial conversation, anyway. Much to his surprise it had been her that initiated it—she seemed curious enough about his life, that is until he had spoken about his mother's death in such an informal way. Rex had to, though. He couldn't think of it any other way or else his father's actions would start to look brutal, careless, like that of a cold-blooded killer...
Besides, the police wrote it off as a robbery gone wrong, anyway.
The police your father has in his back pocket, his brain tells him, but he whisks those words away. Better not to think about it, or his father screaming, the hammer gleaming bloody in his hand.
He wanted a hammer in his own hand again.
"You seem eager," Icarus comments. Rex is just shy of having his face pressed against the glass, watching as the buildings race closer and closer. And why shouldn't he be eager? These are the people that are going to like him and support him, the ones who have to. Rex is good at making people like hi, so long as they don't start whispering things behind his back. As long as they don't do that, everything is peachy.
"I want them to like me," Rex replies. "They'll like me, right?"
"As long as you try."
Icarus doesn't sound quite so convinced, but he's made a very convincing attempt at a lie. Rex frowns, his lips cold against the glass.
Inara has expressed none of the same desire as him to see things as they roll in. She's still on the couch, Soran next to her. Maybe she has her own plans. It's not like Rex would know about them. Now that he thinks about it, really, they have been talking to Inara a lot more than they have him. Or have they? Maybe they just share more things in common. Easier bonding ground.
They share more with Rex than they know.
"I'll make them like me," he decides, trying not to shy away at the prospect of anything else. It could go horribly, terribly wrong. Just like it did with his mother, his friends. What if they boo him, or heckle him off the stage, or throw things at him while he's standing in the chariot, nasty things? He just wants them to see him in a good light.
"What've you got lined up for that?" Icarus questions. "More jokes?"
Rex definitely needs to come up with more. He should have done so before they got so close; he'll definitely have to work on that tonight. Perhaps Tarryl will help him. Tarryl likes his jokes, he reminds himself.
He thinks, anyway.
Even if the Capitol doesn't favor him here, he's sure they'll do a quick turn-around once he gets in the arena. All Rex needs to do is get his hands on a hammer again, a real nice one. Maybe one just like his father used.
He's gotten in enough fights to win a few. He's said enough words to not fear a single one. Rex knows exactly what he's doing.
He can't help but wonder if his mother thought the same way on that phone call, minutes before her body was lying on the cold tile floor. All she wanted to do was leave Five, leave him and his father behind... but she loved him, right? Apparently not. She had sounded so certain, then. If his father hadn't gotten to her, she likely would have long gone the next day.
So many people make grand attempts to leave him. So many do, in one way or another.
Though she's like to as well, Inara is silent as a mouse when she finally joins him at the window, mouth drawn into a flat line.
"You're not excited?" he asks.
"Not particularly."
So flat. Almost cold. Maybe because he made that rude comment about what her little kids at the orphanage would get up to in her absence. Rex, personally, thought that was a good one. Rex tries not to flinch away at the thought that she may hate him for it, but the thought worms into his brain like a parasite and digs around. Inara has already cast him aside.
He's not good enough.
And he can't do to her what his father did to his mother. What he's done since then to some of his friends. That hard hit of the hammer to the back of Kayden's head as he left out the back door of the school, skull cracked open and leaking fluid into the grass. The softer but no less effective swing as the head connected with Reno's breastbone, shattering it, and then his nose and his jaw. Face unrecognizable. A few days later, after one too many of Izaiah's jibes about how off-putting he was, how weird.
He stopped making those comments when Rex started cracking his spine apart.
He can't do that to Inara. Not yet.
At least in the Games they can't punish him for it. No prosecution, no trial, no imminent death. They'll all understand. It's just a method to the madness. A way to fix things. It quieted his mother, stopped her from leaving. It silenced his friends, made their wishes for his disappearance go away.
It was a means to an end. An end Rex knew he would see through.
All he had to do today was crack a few more jokes.
It was no different than what he did to their bones.
My apologies for the early (late?) update. I have quite the busy upcoming day and the popular vote seemed to lean towards me updating before that time rather than after, so here we are. The intros are officially done.
There is a poll up on my profile regarding your favorite tributes. Pick as many or as few as you like; it doesn't matter much to me.
As always thank you for your reviews, thoughts, comments, etc and I will see you next week for the beginning of our pre-Games!
Until next time.