TRIPLE UPDATE! Chapters 127-129
Chapter One-Hundred-and-Twenty-Eight; Changes
As soon as Stephanie swallowed the first mouthful of whatever was on her plate it crashed upon her…again. She distractedly decided whatever she had just ingested was delicious before she realised: she was having lunch…with Seneca Crane; Head-Gamemaker and President Snow's son.
Granted Seneca wasn't eating anything but…Stephanie slowly placed her fork down.
She really needed to stop doing…that, Stephanie thought.
The situation she was in was undoubtedly abnormal, but the more she thought about it was only going to drive her to distraction.
Wirin eyed her curiously across the table at her pause, and she sent a glare of ice in his direction. Wirin dropped his eyes to his plate once more in response.
Stephanie sighed as she absently massaged her temples with her fingers.
A thought was bubbling, a dangerous one that she didn't want to acknowledge but couldn't help to.
The only way she was going to get through this was if she pretended that Seneca Crane; Head Gamemaker and President Snow's son was just…Seneca.
"So those are a common piece of technology in District 3?"
Stephanie looked up, as Wirin gestured vaguely with his fork in the general direction of the food-serving station and the silver trays.
Stephanie felt herself arch a brow in contained surprise. So she was expected to engage in polite table conversation now?
"No," she answered, "just in the factories." She wanted to add that the Capitol would only allow such resources to feed the people who might actually work for them. The school and the poor excuse of a hospital they had weren't allowed such basic technology that would give cleaner food for the children and the sick.
But she couldn't bear to voice the words knowing the look of puzzlement that would cross Wirin's face at her words. Wirin would agree of course with the Capitol reasoning; why waste technology on those who were giving nothing back to them? And Stephanie didn't know if she would be able to restrain herself from lunging across the table to physically wipe the hateful look from his face.
"So you work in a factory?" Wirin continued casually.
Stephanie swallowed another mouthful of food, "yes."
Wirin pushed some food around on his plate as he made a faint noise of contemplation, "how many factories are there in District 3?"
Stephanie frowned lightly, confused and suspicious in equal measures of Wirin's seemingly innocuous curiousity.
"Twenty-three," Stephanie answered out of habit, effortlessly recalling the lessons that had been hammered into her at school.
"And what do you make in your factory?"
Stephanie's frown deepened as she shovelled more food into her mouth.
She could remember a tirade of product names stencilled onto the top of the instruction sheets she would collect each morning with countless others. She never bothered to find out what the end products may possibly be. She didn't have her brother Fen's insatiable curiousity.
Fen had said to her once though, when she had asked him why he was so curious; that to defeat their enemy they had to know them. That was why he spent so many hours fiddling and taking apart the inventions that would go to the Capitol.
Stephanie's small act of rebellion was rather more childish. She and her sister Weisna would deliberately solder things on crookedly or accidentally misread one instruction.
However they were careful not to be caught or let it be a too common occurrence, but it still made Stephanie smirk satisfied; to think that some Capitolite somewhere would be left staring uselessly, wondering why their fancy new toy wasn't working.
Stephanie glanced up, coughing slightly as she flushed, realising she hadn't answered Wirin.
"Why - are you looking for an instant hair braider?" Stephanie shot sarcastically, quickly dredging up from her memory an invention she had made from scratch in the factory.
Wirin looked up, and Stephanie had a split second to glower at that infuriatingly familiar smile of barely holding back laughter on Wirin's face.
"No, not at all," Wirin said laughingly and Stephanie rolled her eyes slightly. "However I did hear a rumour once - that when our own Capitol production factories were stretched, District 3 would step in to shoulder some of the load as it were, you know with…"
"Wirin!"
Seneca's sharp voice cut across Wirin's prattling tone like splintering ice and Stephanie swallowed hard as she saw the look of complete feral anger on Seneca's face.
Wirin looked to Seneca, blinking vacantly as he shrugged in bafflement. "I was just asking if she had ever helped make any of the…"
"Wirin I swear if you don't shut your mouth now you'll regret it," Seneca warned in a dangerous low tone that made a shiver run down Stephanie's spine.
But the cold feeling suddenly flooding the pit of Stephanie's stomach had as much to do with Seneca's suddenly vicious look, as the inkling suspicion budding in her mind.
Stephanie looked to Wirin with narrowed eyes, "helped make what?" she breathed, feeling sick. The serum in her body began to pick up her heart rate again and Stephanie absently shoved her nearly full plate away from her.
Wirin smiled and Stephanie effortlessly saw the cruelty gleaming in his eyes just as he spoke.
"When Capitolite factories are over-stretched, the factories in District 3 are used to make some of the machinery used in the Games – without their knowledge of course."
Stephanie's chair screeched loudly against the floor as she pushed it back from the table. One shaking hand flew to her mouth as a caution as her whole stomach seemed to flip and twist painfully.
Her eyes stung with tears and her whole body trembled with countless volatile emotions.
She vaguely heard Seneca's murderous tone rise loudly, but she couldn't distinguish his actual words. She also vacantly recognised as Wirin hurriedly vacated his seat; to where Stephanie didn't care.
Stephanie shuddered, feeling like something vile was crawling across her skin as her throat tightened. She shut her eyes, barely aware of the fragile silence that had fallen around her with the blood pounding in her ears.
But she jerked away violently when she felt his hand gently brush back the curtain of her hair.
"Don't touch me!" Stephanie screamed as she leapt to her feet.
"Stephanie…" Seneca held out a hand towards her, almost placating, as he stood abruptly with her.
The sickening feeling roiled over Stephanie again, "y-you force us to make…" Stephanie wrapped an arm around her middle, as an almost physical pain burgeoned in her chest, and she closed her eyes for a brief moment. "You force us to make the very machinery used to kill us?" she whispered brokenly.
Stephanie stared at Seneca in horrified silence, her eyes trembling with disbelief even as they fast over-filled with tears.
She was right, Stephanie thought ruefully; Seneca could never just be Seneca. He always was and always would be a monster.
How many times had she blindly, uncomprehendingly followed instructions ignoring her brother Fen's teasing about her not even knowing what she was making? How many times had she unknowingly been creating something to kill another innocent tribute? Stephanie almost choked on her incredulity. Had she perhaps even been unwittingly soldering together the means for her own death these past weeks, in-between making her mother's new hairpin for her birthday?
"Have you Capitolites any damn consciences?!" Stephanie cried angrily as she threw her hands up in the air.
Seneca gritted his teeth before he reached out to grasp one of Stephanie's flailing wrists, pulling her closer to him.
"Get your hands off me," Stephanie seethed through gritted teeth, her nose almost brushing Seneca's.
"Listen to me," Seneca enforced with strained composure as his grip tightened.
Stephanie tried to snap her wrist out of his hold but Seneca held tighter. She reared back quickly as if to slap him then but he caught her other hand.
"Are we really going to devolve to you attacking me like a wild animal again?!" Seneca snarled sarcastically.
"Well I am afterall from the districts and that's all we district people are to you – animals!" Stephanie shot back.
"You're not - !" Seneca began, his blue eyes flashing like lightning. He looked to Stephanie almost desperately.
"I'm not what?!" Stephanie almost shouted.
"You're not an animal," Seneca replied immediately. He looked down at Stephanie's hands imprisoned within his and he made a conscious effort to lessen his grip. He swallowed and some of his cool collectedness returned to him, "you think, you make calculated decisions; that makes you human."
Stephanie scoffed and snapped her wrists free from Seneca's slack hold. "That's not what makes a person human," she answered bitterly as she held Seneca's gaze meaningfully, "making decisions doesn't make you human if they are the wrong ones."
Seneca dropped his eyes briefly to the empty stretch of ground between them feeling an odd sensation rising in him; one that he realised a little belatedly, had been building since a dinner date that felt a lifetime ago.
It was a foreign and completely new feeling, that if he was being honest frightened him a little. Because it challenged everything he ever believed, it called into question all that he had previously accepted without doubt.
It was nothing but a dull flicker to begin with; a stinging throb somewhere within him that he was able to push aside and ignore but the more he grew to love Stephanie the stronger it grew. He couldn't name it to begin with because he had never considered such a thing possible.
But having Stephanie stand there before him now, staring at him with her strange golden eyes filled with tears…Seneca felt guilty.
And from his guilt was springing other emotions and feelings that would have him tossing and turning at night; waking up haunted by nightmares like he had never been before.
The inkling beginnings of empathy, sympathy and other completely destructive feelings like that for a Gamemaker, were leaking into Seneca's usual ice-cold demeanour.
He had passed by overlooking the designs of his arena enough times that he could no longer pretend to himself that he was too busy.
The truth was he couldn't bear to look at any of the machinery he had helped create, that would inflict unimaginable pain on some unsuspecting tribute. Because the tribute he would inevitably envision would turn into Stephanie; the screams of agony would be her screams, it would be her life slipping away within the grasps of some nightmarish contraption and the thought made Seneca feel physically ill.
She…Stephanie Trindlesworth was changing him and at times it felt like he was going mad. An idea that made him smirk ruefully, as he recalled distantly his father warning him of something similar concerning 'love' causing madness.
Seneca had killed tributes; younger and more defenceless than Stephanie in far more brutal ways than he would care to admit now. He had done it all in the pursuit of torturing Haymitch without ever feeling even a sliver of remorse.
And yet now on the ending shrills of Stephanie's screams that fraught his now nightly horrors would come other screams. Screams from faces he couldn't recall because he had long forgotten their names and faces. They had been unimportant – only a means to hurt Haymitch.
And now years later because of her – because of Stephanie – he was beginning to feel guilty; questioning himself and who he essentially was. It unnerved him and unsettled him completely.
The source and the cure for his unease stood before him though in the form of a golden-eyed district girl who forced him to doubt everything he once so easily accepted about his life.
She forced him to face uncomfortable truths. She made him feel guilty – at first it had just been about her he had felt guilty; that she had to suffer so much because she was here in the Capitol, a tribute for his Games. But then he had begun to feel strange stirrings of guilt about other tributes; empathise with their fear and sorrow at leaving behind families to go to their deaths. It was then that he realised she was changing him, without his knowledge and most certainly without his consent.
His initial response had been to fight it. If he started to feel guilty now, where would it end? He could never take back all that he had done.
Yet somehow he found the answer in loving Stephanie.
She made him feel ashamed of who he was, and yet she also made him feel he had the will to be something better; someone who deserved to be loved by her.
Seneca looked up and saw the tears pearling Stephanie's golden eyes and he swallowed painfully.
"You think I'm an animal?" he murmured shrewdly with a sad half-smirk.
"No," Stephanie answered quietly. "Like you say, you can't be an animal – you make calculated decisions, you think...," Stephanie took a deep breath, "I think you're a monster."
Seneca inhaled sharply as his blue eyes burned intensely.
"What Wirin…mentioned; it hasn't happened in over eight years," Seneca said, "since before I became Head Gamemaker," he added quietly.
Stephanie felt guilty relief tremble through her. She had only been working at the factory for two years, so she couldn't have unknowingly created anything that killed another innocent tribute. It didn't make the truth any less brutally heinous, but it did comfort Stephanie greatly to know she hadn't actively been a part of it herself.
Stephanie nodded minutely then as she eyed Seneca searchingly, "and if today you had to make the decision to use District 3 factories to make machinery for the Games – would you?"
Stephanie didn't know what had made her ask the question but somehow a part of her was sure that the man – the one that showed compassion and humanity at fleeting times still existed in Seneca. She had to believe that, or just what in the hell was she standing here doing, trusting and believing the blue-eyed Gamemaker if he was a complete monster?
Seneca met her gaze frankly, "no," he answered clearly, as he looked to her meaningfully, "not anymore."