Reaping Day.
Birdsong filters through the high trees that conceal the sky. The morning is misty and heavy on the lungs, and little light reaches the forest floor. What there is comes in blue-grays and sugary purple-oranges, splitting through the leaves to trace veined patterns from the sun.
Under the canopy, Amber's knees are buried in thick, springy moss of a green so deep it's bluish. Her fingers curl into it gently. She kneads it while she pays remembrance to the brightest spots of color in the mist.
There's a funny myth about District Seven and their funeral practices.
Simply put, much of the Capitol is under the impression that a Seven family will burn their loved one to ashes on a pyre of lumber. That would be an outrageous use of so much lumber. If Peacekeepers got the wind of it, the family might by all means find themselves preparing for a follow-up funeral. A nastier addendum to the myth is that Sevens will burn the body to a certain point, and eat it. Waste not, want not. Of course, this is not factual at all. Amber would have had to char and eat her four tributes. She's sown them with flowers instead.
You choose your own flowers in Seven. Tributes tell their mentors what to use in case the worst thing happens. Aged parents tell their families, and pray that their children will lead long, long lives before they have to decide. Flip through the old, reverently unstained pages of pictures, even if anyone in the district could name you off any natural thing from the forest. They like to use the book anyway. It's a Seven tradition. When babies die before their speaking age, they're given daisies. Sometimes when there's a sickness around, the fields bloom with daisies as far as the crest of the copse.
Amber was fifteen when she quietly asked her mentor for white heather. The seeds he bought are still in his cooler. That's the other thing — a Victor buries their own mentor. She has a duty to cover Harmon in snapdragons when his liver finally turns over. But her four tributes are all patches under the moss, and she picked up the bottle quicker than the old man did.
"Silas," she whispers, running her hand through the thickly-tangled blue violets, as though he might feel it in his hair. Her first tribute. She'd sat up with him for the final night, cradling his head in her lap, like she wasn't all of two years his senior and nearly catatonic with fear. He never had time to grow, but he's growing now. "It's going to be okay."
Linnea, with spurs of foxglove. She fought so hard. She and her partner died unbowed to Kaito Ebihara, who dared to play the golden, honorable boy of that hellscape, as if he were better than her. Defensive wounds maimed her face and rendered her hands useless before he struck for her throat. When the golden boy came for his Victory Tour, he called her noble. Amber could have ripped off his remaining arm. He never had the right to speak her name. He never knew that her favorite treat was apples and she'd taught her dog to do twenty different tricks; Amber can't forget.
With tired, fatal humor, Oskar asked for bloodroot, and she planted it, sticky orange-red, a haunting mirror to his gut wound and reaching wet fingers. She'll never know what he would've chosen if he had the luxury of a longer life. She knows he wanted a family. He had the girl picked out already, and a ten-year contract in the logging crews, and a jar of coins to save for a ring. All for nothing. He knew as well as Amber that the Pack would target a lumberjack with a story to come home for, but he couldn't have foreseen them dragging it out for three hours while she muted the feed and sobbed.
"Piper." Her voice cracks. It wasn't fair, it was never going to be fair. They had loved her sweetness on interview night, as much as they loved the artistic spray of her blood in night vision when scrawny Easton Watts cracked her head open with a rock. Amber smooths the blanket of her cardinal flowers to tuck her into bed. She's taken a few years off after Piper. No, it's not decent to the others, who've all borne more years of this. She has no justification. All she has is Piper's calm face, Piper who apologized to Amber for not being enough, who had accepted that she couldn't be saved. And how do you live with that failure buried in your chest like a barbed arrowhead?
There will be another this year. She's been gone long enough. Amber doesn't have her co-mentor's ruthless pragmatism or her under-the-table research contracts, but she's always had the better end of the sponsorships. She'll work the angles, and she'll take Decius Fring's appointments, and she'll do anything she has to, and she won't break her heart this time, because maybe. Maybe four children have been enough to pay. Maybe the garden will not grow.
She'll collect the seeds, all the same. It's the Seven tradition.
Kazimir's back is stuck to her seat with sweat. While the mayor waxes on the history of Panem and the Dark Days, she sips demurely from the mineral water Luke passed her when he wheeled her up the ramp. In summer, the morning mist burns off quickly, and the dew turns into humidity that screws with her hair, which isn't ideal on live television. She's got a shampoo endorsement in the waiting with her platinum bangs on it.
A brave front they make, the five Sevens. Lisle's three left fingers stiffened around his cane, Luke's dark red keloids stretching past the cuffs of his sleeves, Harmon sleepless and bloodshot and razor-nicked. Kazimir frail and shy like something that could shatter to the touch, and finally Amber hollow-eyed, limping on the imperfect curve of her metallic foot. Their youngest plays to her ritual every Reaping Day, coming back to the Village with a smell like wet moss. Kazimir can't afford to drown on the past. There is only enough time to breathe in the present.
She's referenced the polls and run the stats this year until her eyes blurred. She's been at work for the Gamemakers in the botanical garden, sending designs over the holos, crossbreeding monsters. Oh, she's the fragile, distractible one, and it's easiest if that's all the others remember. She should've been a Three. Outgunned in her year by Volunteers and vibrant personalities, and still the weak one out at home. If the Capitol remembers the seven kills on her credit, they remember four perfect Careers tumbling from the trapped ledges, and they know they could've had it better.
It's not her fault she's too damaged to fuck. It's not her fault she was gangling and awkward and the only thing she could do was cheat. It's not her fault she was smart enough to come home. And if anyone remembers her strategy best, it's the Career trainers. Most years her tributes are slaughtered right out of the gate. There's no need to pretend that's coincidence.
But it isn't her fault. If she let herself believe that, she would be the same as Amber and Harmon chasing their demons with hangovers. She would be Luke who still can't keep straight razors in his house. They expect guilt from her and they call it Seven tradition. They did so much to survive, all of them, and now they don't allow themselves to live.
She swirls the fabric of her skirt into ripples and maelstroms, and scratches the back of her neck as she breathes shallowly, lifting the damp hair for a moment of relief. The heat stifles like skintight latex. She's seriously starting to consider fainting when the escort breaks into a spiel about how proud she is to get transferred here from Twelve, and how grateful she is to her viewers' support for making it possible, and how Seven is almost as prestigious as an inner district. Just smell those fresh pine leaves in the air!
"Pine leaves. I'm going to throw myself off the train if she asks how we grow the ornaments on them for Winter's Day," Kazimir says from the side of her mouth. "Twelve must be devastated to let go of this one."
Luke's cheek twitches, but he doesn't look down. This is what she has to deal with in the Village. Amber is only watching the crowd with a hand locked around her wrist, bruising.
Kazimir straightens herself up with the rest of them when it comes to the drawing. Some things are sacred. Surprisingly straightforward when she gets around to it, the escort calls her boy out first. Taliesin. He's seventeen.
He's handsome. Seven turns out tanned and muscular most of the time, with some honest competition for Four, even if nothing can touch One on sheer aesthetics. But if Four sends anyone who can beat this, Kazimir will eat pine leaves. Dark brown hair curls to Taliesin's collar, falling over wide green-hazel eyes. The cameras eagerly magnify the strong edge of his nose, the shine on his cupid's bow, and the roughly-shaved stubble. Perfect skin. When he seems to realize he's the focus of every screen in the country — and he can't yet be imagining the nature of that attention — he swallows, and holds himself together. The silence in the square makes him magnetic. It's impossible to look at anything but the boy, his shoulders and long legs. The camera crews pan down for the full view.
Kazimir's mobile starts a long, stuttering buzz in her pocket. The sponsors are shameless. Taliesin has no idea of the promises she will have to make them.
Even after the escort overcomes her elation, nearly tripping over her own feet while she gets to the girls' drawing, cameras linger on the boy, tracing him closely as fingers. His purity is as much a part of the appeal. There's no pride to him, and that's a mark over any One, no matter how they spin their angles. Tall, bright-eyed, and achingly artless. A lump grows in Kazimir's throat. It'll be a long time before she goes short on support for this one, but Taliesin could never be a Victor so safely forgotten.
Ramona isn't beautiful. Even 'nice-looking' would be an overstatement. She's bullish, with a snarl of rust-colored hair, combating her shock with a curled lip and hands shoved deep in her clean overall pockets. Snub-nosed and flat as a newspaper, and tiny, so tiny that the crews can't find her until the children around her part, leaving her the shattering at the center of a crater. She's thirteen.
Amber's nails dig into her sweaty wrist, tearing. It'll be Piper all over again.
But Ramona doesn't accept it that easily.
She doesn't move. Every eye is on her, it's clear enough, and her heels are still rooted. Could a bed of flowers suit her? She's like old-growth oak. Her fists are balled up in her pockets, blown thirty feet tall on screen. She doesn't twitch.
As if awakening from transfixion, four Peacekeepers detach from the sidelines and move to bring the girl forward. She wipes a line of dirt off her cheek with her thumb, barely acknowledging their presence. Until one of them grips her shoulder.
Ramona twists him off her, and a sharp voice rings across the square. "Bitch, don't push me." On currents of gasps and swallowed nervous laughter, she marches herself unceremoniously to the stage.
Something is happening within the crowd. The tension is turning.
Taliesin and Ramona up there, facing each other. Big and gentle, he has to bend down to shake her hand, but she's never cowed. Amber thinks she might slap him away. Instead, a look is passing between them. They don't let go.
"What a showing from District Seven!" The escort grasps for the threads of her big event. "If you could all join me in a round of-"
Taliesin and Ramona lift their hands into the air, white-knuckled. He has to bend at the elbow. He's flushed radiant with the heat and the ecstatic terror and everything is spoken on his face: what the hell do I have to lose? And the fierceness in the girl could boil the sea. They don't pump their fists or celebrate. They present something unbroken.
"Shit," Harmon rasps behind her, hardly audible. Amber's eyes are wet.
District Seven is actually cheering. In Piper's year, in every year, it's dry and canned. Disengagement is as much resistance as they can give.
This year, it sounds like a fuck you. If you can't terrify our children, what can you do to us?
Kazimir at her other side, gripping her sleeve. The woman is unsettled. "There'll be reprisal for this somewhere. The city won't understand it, but Snow will. They'll already be targets."
"Look at them." Taliesin feeding from Ramona's arrogance to keep himself standing. Ramona made beautiful by his innocence. "They know that. They're doing it anyway."
Stranger seeds than funeral gardens are growing in Seven this year.
(I admit now that this is one of my weaker, more disjointed chapters, and perhaps I can blame that dread wraith, the Semester. I hope it is still acceptable — I will assuredly be revising it in future. Feedback would be more appreciated than ever! Thank you so much for your attention. Three intros to go, and a long and bumpy ride is ahead for the cast.)
((Chapter 9 trivia answer: Dante's Circles of Hell. The air-conditioned final room is the realm of ice. This truly is the highest point my major will ever earn me c':))
