Author's Note

I do not own the Hunger Games.

Submissions are still open, but they will likely be closing soon, so please do submit!

Also, I have recently started posting another Hunger Games story called Nihil Novi, which is basically just snippets about life in the Districts. Feel free to check it out!


They had been working at the wall for four days when the peacekeepers found them – or rather, their large, hungry, vicious dogs did.

The two of them scrambled up a tree to avoid the canines, and that was where the peacekeepers found them when they arrived.

A neighbour had found their father's body when he failed to show up for work three days in a row. All fingers had been pointed to them, his wild, violent, unpredictable children.

"Feral," they called them.

They told them how two men they didn't know had broken into the house, how they had attacked them and started beating their father, how they had been so afraid that they bolted and fled for what they knew.

They ate it all up – and then countered with their theory that he had beaten their father to death in a fit of anger, taken his sister and then fled.

(they weren't far off)

She cried crocodile tears and backed up his story, but no trial in District Ten ever ended with an 'innocent' verdict and he was charged for murder (which seemed unfair, it had been manslaughter). They wanted to charge her too, she saw it in their eyes; they wanted to repeat it all over again by claiming she was an accessory to the murder of a citizen of Panem.

She stood there in her ill-fitting clothes and gazed up at the judge with her big pale eyes.

They didn't charge her.

They didn't even try.

She was declared a 'victim of circumstance' and sent home with the mother she hadn't seen in years.