Elver Darlin, District Four (18)
Everyone wants to be different. A lot of us go through a phase in middle or high school where we pick up some hobby or characteristic that we think makes us "unique". We make it our entire personality and get angry at anyone else who tries to join, since if there was anyone else who did it we wouldn't be "unique". Usually it's something laughably stupid and not even strange, in retrospect- wearing only black clothes, liking some band or book that was famous enough to be published, having a disease we don't even have because we read about it in some medical book and it said it was rare. Joining the Hunger Games was my attempt to be different. Sure 24 people went into the Games every year, but that was out of the entire population of Panem. Pretty special, right?
I learned something about "unique" in the Bloodbath. When the Games started I threw an axe at Elena Cortes and she fell down dead. It was at that moment I learned what "unique" meant. A human life was unique. People shared so many things but that combination of everything that went into a human, every interest and dislike and characteristic, was unique. No one else was entirely like anyone else. Elena Cortes was the only Elena Cortes on the planet and I destroyed her.
The other Careers thought I was betraying them when I ran away at the Bloodbath. I sort of was, though I didn't mean to harm them. I ran away precisely because I didn't want to hurt anyone. Training in the Academy hadn't prepared me at all. Throwing an axe at a target wasn't the same as throwing one at a person's face. I knew then and there that I never wanted to kill anyone ever again and I also knew what my allies would do to me if they found out. So I ran.
It was selfishness, really. It had never been actually about being unique. The entire concept was selfish. I had prided myself on the egocentric idea that I was the only freethinking, fully sentient human. Everyone else was a drone- a nonplayer character in the background of my life. Of course I wanted to be unique. It would be an insult to be lumped in with the mindless masses. But of course they weren't mindless at all. Everyone else had an inner dialogue just like I did and wanted to stand out just like I did and secretly most of them felt the exact same way- that they were the only ones who really thought and everyone else was just background noise. I only regretted that it took killing someone for me to learn that.
Careers do one thing: they kill people. I hadn't trained in survival things and it was a nightmare living on my own without the supplies from the Cornucopia and assistance from the sponsors. If it hadn't been for the edible grass in the Arena I would have starved. I chewed on grass and drank out of dank puddles and at night I curled up on the ground and shivered. And all the while I hoped my former friends wouldn't find me.
I didn't win the Games. The fire won the Games. The Gamemakers were bored or else they just wanted a piece of the action, because when I saw the replay the fire started spontaneously. A bit of grass smoldered and then ignited and in seconds sheets of flame were peeling off in every direction. The death order hardly indicated the strength of the Tributes. Olivine and Troy were both right by the fire and their bodies were ash before the Games were over. One of the last to die was Alice. They found her in a shallow pond and it turned out the cause of death was drowning. She'd huddled in the water trying to escape the flames until she passed out from smoke inhalation and drowned in eight inches of water. Me? I was the farthest away, so I was the one who lived.
I joined the Games to stand out. To be unique. From that day I looked at "common" workers with yearning instead of derision. I was unique, all right. I was one of three dozen murderers adored by an entire nation.