A/N: Thanks to everyone who submitted to Four! This was a hard choice. :)
Trigger Warning: profanity and excessive pranking/flirting
I been hanging on threads
I been playing it straight
Now I've just got to cut loose
Before it gets late
So I am going
I am going
I am gone.
Cordelia Nile, 17
Resident of District 4
Docks Worker and Private Trainee
"What do we do?" my father barks, his face dripping with sweat, his brow creased in angst and passion.
"We train," myself and my younger siblings Dylan and Rosemary shout in unison.
"Why do we train?!" he calls.
"We train to protect ourselves," we yell.
"Why do we train to protect ourselves?!" he howls.
"Because of the past," the three of us yell. I never really understand this part of the mantra, but then again this is just something my father uses to pump us up. I take a deep breath as my father straightens, wiping the sweat from his face.
"Weapons for twenty minutes. Rosemary, you're on throwing knives. Dylan, Cordelia, grab the tridents. We're sparring today."
My sister Rosemary quickly grabs a couple of throwing knives and strides over to the targets lined up on the back wall of the garage, where she assumes the throwing stance and begins to throw. Dylan and I grab the two tridents off of the rack on one of the other walls where they hang, motionless. The light of the garage flickers as Dylan and I climb onto the mat, sending clusters of shadows across our forms.
My brother dwarfs me in size, standing at a respectable 5'10'' at age 15. He is already rippling with muscles at his younger age, and quite a few girls are already smitten. Dylan takes after our father, same as Rosemary. Then there's me. I stand at 5'1'', the exact same height as my mother. Dylan towers over me, smirking a bit. He always takes pride in his height. I don't care about my shortness. It just means I'm faster and more agile than him.
We put on the worn, dirty padding that my father has for us. All of our equipment is second hand and crappy. Our father trains us because he doesn't trust the Academy. In Four, it's still not fully operational, and they only hold classes for half of the week. My father thinks he can train us better, and maybe he can. And, anyway, the Academy trains volunteers, Careers. My father trains us on the off chance that we're Reaped. He thinks we'll be Reaped for some reason. None of us take tesserae, but I guess he wants to be better safe than sorry. He's also instilled a deep dislike of the Games in us, especially towards Careers. He's told us that if any of us dare pull a Cephas Gold on him and volunteer after being trained just in case, he will personally come into the arena and slit our throats.
"Start," my father instructs calmly, and I'm startled from my thoughts. We start circling each other, jabbing our tridents from time to time. Dylan has the advantage of strength and weight, but I'm faster and more agile, and also more practiced with the weapon. Dylan isn't that skilled with tridents, and he sometimes swings it almost like a baseball bat. He prefers swords, but we only have one of those, so we rarely spar with them. In two minutes I've disarmed him, and he rolls his eyes and mumbles some excuses as I grin and hand him back his trident.
The rest of training passes quickly. After sparring thrice more with Dylan, he starts working on hand-to-hand combat while Rosemary and I start working on survival skills. Dad salvaged stacks of old survival manuals, magazines, and pamphlets from an old library on the edge of the District soon after the Dark Days, and stockpiled them here. I've always been fond of one green hardcover. It's well worn by my fingers. The title, in gold, is mostly rubbed away, but I think it says Rudimentary Poisons, by Aidan Conrad. It's a thick, immersive book about all types of poisons and things like that. It's more interesting than the dry book about finding water that Rosemary is currently skimming, and I've always wanted to try out some of the poisons I've memorized. My father doesn't like the poison book, and Dylan tells me that poisons are for cowards, not people like us. He can be a bit full of himself sometimes, and I won't be surprised if he tries to volunteer.
Dad lets us go early today, since it's the weekend, Saturday to be exact. He opens the garage door, and it creaks open. Sunlight streams through the opening, and we duck under the garage door as it opens. Rosemary heads back inside the house to eat lunch, Dylan following her. I don't feel too hungry, so I just sit in the front yard, looking at the blue sky and going through some simple stretches to stretch my sore body.
Soon enough my siblings come out the door and hand me a sandwich. I munch on it as the three of us head down to the docks. We all work there to earn a little bit of extra spending money. My father Sebastian works on the docks all day during the week, and my mother Nanami works as a waitress part time at a nearby restaurant. We're not a rich family but we're not poor, either. We never go hungry and we have some spending money, but our parents want us to develop work ethics and to earn our own money, so we have to work for it. Dylan loves working on the docks. If he could, which he can, he would be a fisherman. Rosemary's impartial to the docks, as am I. They're fun sometimes, but most of the time our four hour shifts on the docks are just time to get through until I get to see my friends and my boyfriend.
The four hours pass slowly. Today we're cleaning the docks with power washers. Or, more correctly, Dylan and Rosemary get to clean the docks with power washers, while I have to man the storefront of the bait and tackle shop on the front of the docks while the boss, Mr. Ryndell, helps Dylan and Rosemary. No one comes into the bait and tackle shop as expected. I sit behind the counter in a stifling, small shop with stinking fish bait for four hours, and then I am free, enough money to buy my friends movie tickets in my back pocket as the three of us wave goodbye to Mr. Ryndell as he closes up the docks for the day.
Night falls soon enough, and I find myself wandering through the small-town-esque center of Four down to the fountain at the very center of the city. The Justice Building, the mayor's home, and a few other prominent buildings loom around this area, and a beautiful marble fountain spurts water into the air there. A mother watches her two young daughters frolic in the cool waters, and I spot my friends waiting and laughing uproariously by the fountain in the humid, buzzing summer night. I jog over to them, smiling and waving, and they stroll over to meet me.
"Cordelia!" Kailani, the other girl of the group, squeals. She's 16 and still taller than me by half a foot. I hug her tight. Her boyfriend, Jordan, waves shyly, and then I feel Beck's strong barrel arms folding around me and I squeak as he pulls me close to his chest and kisses me.
"Ready for a great night?" Beck asks with a great big smile, and all I can think is that I love my life.
Rule number one, is that you gotta have fun
But baby when you're done, you gotta be the first to run
Rule number two, just don't get attached to
Somebody you could lose
So le-let me tell you
This is how to be a heartbreaker
Boys they like a little danger
We'll get him falling for a stranger
A player, singing I lo-lo-love you
Chavez Belasco, 18
Resident of District 4
Chosen Volunteer and Academy Graduate
I wake up early, before the sun is even past the horizon. A crafty, grim smile creeps onto my face as I pull on some random clothes and crack my knuckles. Ah, damn, this will be perfect. They will not have a single clue about what hit them.
I ease open my bedroom door, hopping out into the hallway with the bag slung over my shoulder. Inside is a tube of red paint, a sharp kitchen knife, and a crystal kitchen glass. I step into the bathroom and fill up the glass of water, and then I creep out back into the hallway. The open door of my brother Cisco's room is at the end of the hall, the shadowy depths of his room beckoning, tantalizing. I chuckle quietly to myself as I walk over to his door and crouch down by the threshold. I set down the glass of water, and then pull out of the tube of paint. I smear it across my right forearm, and then across the blade of the knife. I shuffle into the room carefully and place the paint covered knife right next to my sleeping brother's hand. Then I scream as loud as I can and throw down the glass of water with my left hand, giggling quietly as the glass shatters and wakes up everyone in the household.
"You asshole!" I scream as Cisco looks at me, tired and confused. I bite my lip and feign a pained expression as my father storms into the room.
"WHAT THE FUCKING HELL?!" my father screams, his deep, bassy voice reverberating through the room.
"Cisco fuckin' knifed me!" I shout, holding up my arm, which drips with red paint. I hiss in pain.
"Congrats, Cisco. You stabbed your brother. You can't always work out arguments with words; fists and weapons are useful, aren't they, boys? Help your brother clean up that..." he takes a closer look at the wound and notices that it is paint. He is disgusted. "Clean up that paint. Chavez, why do you have paint all over your arm, and why did you put a knife in your brother's bed and break a crystal glass?"
I don't answer, and I don't need to. I live in a dog-eat-dog household. Me and my two older brothers, Francisco and Lando, are always competing to be the favorite son, to frame each other and blame everything on one another. I thought this prank would tip the scales in my favor, but then again, I forgot that it is my father. He is the epitome of masculinity, and expects us to be the same. Not that there's anything wrong with that. That is what every father expects of his sons, isn't it?
My father sneers at me. Of course, the outdoing each other is only accepting when it's subterfuge, when it's successful, when everyone "buys" it. It is not accepted when it is painfully obvious that I've squeezed a tube of red paint across my arm, placed a knife in my brother's bed, and broken an expensive glass. Not that my father cares about the glass; we're as rich as a Capitol family. That's really what me and my brothers compete for. His riches, his inheritance, more so than his approval and his love. Whoever outdoes the others will get the most money when my father dies or retires or is feeling generous. Knowing the man that is my father, the only time he will hand over his enormous heaps of money will be when he's cold and six weeks gone in a casket, deep underneath the ground.
My father leaves the room, and Cisco looks up at me smugly. I squirt the rest of the paint tube in his face and then punch him in the nose. He hisses and tries to hit me back, but I am already out of his room, effectively jamming his door shut. He slams his fists against the door and tries to get out while I push against it to keep it closed. When I'm satisfied, I let go and step out of the way. Cisco goes flying out into the hallway, landing with a loud thump on top of my father. I chuckle quietly as my father raises more hell than Satan controls, screaming and cursing at my brother. I sneak back into my room and laugh, listening to my father's verbal assault on Cisco continue as I put on some nice khakis and a cornflower blue dress shirt. I have to look good. I check my hair, step out of my room, and leap down the stairs. My father is still berating Cisco and looks like he wants to slap him. Hah!
Most of the rest of the day passes in a blur. I jog downtown, to the square. The fountain squirts its clear beams of water into the heavens, and little shops cluster the avenues in the center of Four's small central city. Four really is one of the smaller Districts in population and size, at least land size. I window shop, flirt with the clusters of boys and girls doing the same, and have breakfast with whatever girl or boy I can swindle into paying for my meal. I always leave them with a kiss or a little something more in the back before heading over to the training center. The day there whirls past even quicker. I meet up with Julian Almieda, the other prospective volunteer for our year. Almieda and I are both so good, they don't really know which one of us should volunteer. We're both 18, and this is our last year. I'm determined to beat him to the stage, however, and have told him I will punch his lights out if he also tries to volunteer. He train and train, eating lunch at the center, and then I find myself at the Sea Biscuit Diner, and time slows down again.
Almieda and I come her every night for dinner. With Almieda is some girl he met over the weekend at a night club (he actually holds onto some of the girls he gets for more than a day, unlike me). Her name starts with a V, I think. Probably Vickie, that sounds like a slut's name. Just me? Okay. Sitting next to me is this smoking hot 16 year old named Brielle Tyde from the Academy. When I say hot I mean HOT. Muscles, nice face, blonde hair, blue eyes, suntanned skin, Academy trainee, rich girl, the entire effing package! I would like to get a bite of her, and I think I might soon enough.
Our waitress comes over, and she's blushing. Her's name is Rachelle, and she's been our waitress before, that much is obvious. Almieda and I tend to have a tendency to flirt with anyone in sight, as long as it's leading to free stuff or mouth to mouth connection. With Rachelle and everyone else at the diner, they can give us free stuff in the form of free meals. So Almieda and I put out all the stops to seduce her.
"Damn, Rachelle, lookin' fine! I love you new red hair!" I start off. The girls laugh, they know our routine, and Almieda's warming up to take whatever she next says and serve it back to her in a hotter, more sultry style.
"Well, it's always been red, but thanks!" she says in a high pitched voice. "What would you guys like for your meal?"
"You," Almieda hisses, and then mouths Belasco, you're up!. Rachelle looks at Almieda, stunned, and I swoop in for the rescue.
"We'd like you to feed it to us!" I hurriedly say.
"Really? I'd LOVE to!" Rachelle blurbs, grinning to wide. She scurries off to go fetch probably the most expensive meals in the building, and the four of us burst out laughing. God, why isn't it good to be me?
A/N: Thanks to Mistycharming and CelticGames4 for Cordelia and Chavez! This chapter is almost the exact same length, just a little off, as the previous one, incidentally. XD
Holy crap! We have a staggering 99 reviews, and we're not even halfway through the Reapings yet! With this update I'm sure to surpass 100, and I sincerely cannot thank you guys enough. You're all so amazing. On the last SYOT, Oceanside, I hit 100 reviews in the first couple of days of the Games! xD Again, thank you guys and gals so much. You're all wonderful people.
To clear up one question some readers had from the last chapter: Fuji's sister Adata is partially paralyzed, so it is hard for her to care for herself without the help of her sister, and she also would find it nearly impossible to work in the factories without help. :)
Who did you like better, Cordelia or Chavez? Overall thoughts on this pair? Predicted placements? Thoughts on the writing?
Until Next Time,
Tracee