Hey everyone, Paradigm of Writing here with a brand new chapter of Vermillion Shorelines, Chapter #9: Die by the Sword. Today, ladies and gents, is the District 2 reaping! It's been a long time away from this story, as per my usual line (something about SYOT's man, there's something about them). Then, I can thank a hurricane coming through for 11 days and wrecking that entire schedule up. My 18th birthday was in that time and now I am officially an adult who's a senior and high school and getting ready for the great step beyond. Keeping up with my studies these last two weeks since the hurricane has been the main reason why I haven't been on, plus the debate on which stories I need to update first and when and things like that. But, thanks to those who reviewed the D8 reaping, as I feel ya'll 7 or so will be the only ones to even give me a review which shows something out of the other 17 that committed... even if they never did *smiles sheepishly* There is a lot to get through, and I am being downright hard on the fact I am writing one of these chapters every single week, so we'll be at Chapter #13 by the end of the month if I prevail. Enjoy Chapter #9: Die by the Sword.
Pomona Blair: District 2 Female P.O.V (18)
Sunshine spills onto the end tails of the girl's dress. She laughs along the banter of the wind, teeth glistening and eyes shining brightly. Daises mill around the flower designs of her overcoat, blades of grass poking out like ground stalactites with ladybugs and dew drops decorating the tips. The light shines up her tanned arms, moles and freckles appearing underneath the glare of harsh rays and harsher words.
She's not alone, as she's currently giggling and carrying on with two other girls her age who smirk and laugh alongside her as well, but their facial expressions seem fake. Eyes that give off a feeling of not exactly wanting to be here, or a flash of a grin that is so full of cheese, a mouse would have a play day inside all the crevices and teeth croppings.
Eighteen year-old Pomona Blair runs a hand through her long dark chestnut hair that sits in one long fishtail braid against her back, accentuating the paleness and starkness of her white dress and gray shawl thrown over it. She giggles at her two best friends, Victoria and Amber, before collapsing back onto the hillside with another airy laugh. She's unable to control her laughing, and slowly Amber's equally ambivalent face turns dour as if she smelled sour milk; Pomona does not care what her friends are possibly smelling as she's unable to believe that the time is finally here. Finally here.
"I don't know why we couldn't go and train one last time before the reaping is to start," Victoria says offhandedly, looking out past the overlook that their hill towers over, and into the glen of trees beyond where birds chirp and the sweet aroma of roses linger. Victoria Henrik's bright ruby red hair is a telltale sign amid the yellow and oranges of the daisy laden field, but her constant serious expression sharply contrasts the bubbliness of the hill on a much higher note.
Pomona rolls over onto her stomach, smirking. "I've been training nonstop since I was fifteen, Vicky. I think I can give myself the morning off."
"Won't your mother care that you got your dress dirty?" Amber sniffs. She sticks her nose up in the air defiantly, and Pomona rolls her eyes. The girl is just upset that Pomona got chosen to volunteer for the Quarter Quell and not her, as both girls when they were fifteen had been in the running, until Blair edges herself slightly above the competition to get that top spot.
"I don't particularly care what my mother thinks at this point," Pomona smirks again. "Either I come back from the games as a winner and I distance myself away from my family forever from that point on..."
"Or you die."
"Or I die," she agrees. "Which means, either way, I'm out of their hair and they are out of mine."
Pomona flips back over so now the hem of her dress rides up the dirt, and that her boots flatten the daisy spotted hill. She looks up at the sky and rests a hand on her stomach. Protectively.
Even though she is in a warm and sunny environment, on a beautiful hillside away from the drab and dreary gray of District 2, Pomona shudders and dark thoughts lace her consciousness. Pomona is two months pregnant, a slight bump starting to show, ever so gradually. She's feeling tired more often after an excruciating exercise; paying for second and third meals at the District School's lunch line, and most of all, she's avoiding one man. A sickening leech of a human being.
His smile reminds her of when they were younger. Leopold Duoal, spry and two years older than her, fails to become the lead volunteer when he turns eighteen and thus turns to try and become the Head Trainer of the facilities offered to the teenagers interested in becoming Careers. She's known him, with his great looks, and moonbeam silver hair to be quite the charmer, and she falls under his spell.
One afternoon, after a rigorous workout, she's bent over, taking a sip from the water fountain when he approaches her. She's fifteen to his seventeen, and he whispers the idea. You should train to be the Quarter Quell volunteer for the 200th Hunger Games. Something clicks in her head - Pomona Blair is destined to be great one way or another - and day in/day out until then she's training with him for five to seven hours a day, every day, every week for the next three years.
Then two months ago happened.
Pomona just turns eighteen the evening prior. She's exhausted and has the day off from training. Leopold comes to her door with flowers and a goofy grin that she has found to be utterly delightful - it's Leopold, he'll never hurt me - and that is when her day is whisked away into something whimsical and fantastical now. He buys her lunch and dinner, they go to the library and read on old classics that their parents read to them as children, and then Leopold invites her to a bar with some of his friends.
She sits there, quite afraid actually as she's never been in quite an establishment such as a bar, where she witnesses Leopold change. His eyes become filled with lust, an amber haze that settles over his half lidded eyes till there's nothing but a coursing darkness flowing through them; his silver hair sticks around everywhere like a sea urchin, and then he kisses her. Pomona is caught completely off guard, having never been kissed before, so she struggles on how to kiss back.
Leopold, drunk as President Jade Dermure, walks her home... until he gets other ideas. Pomona is unable to conceptualize what is happening next. He backhands her, throws her against a wall, and all the while her throat burns raw with the screams full of paralyzed fear. "NO!" she howls, over and over again, hands clawing, trying to push him off, until there's pain, a blistering and coursing pain. Blood. Why is there so much blood, oh my god I'm going to faint, there's blood and he's-
Pomona falls asleep sometime that evening during the ordeal and finds herself back in her bed under the covers, with a nasty bruise on the left side of her head. She passes it off as a bad dream, because they are no other telltale signs that she had even been slightly injured, which Pomona is uncertain to find as either being lucky or horribly misfortunate.
Then her period doesn't come.
And that's when Pomona Blair knows.
She is pregnant.
With Leopold's child. And she had been selected to be District 2's volunteer. Once something like that is set in stone, unless she dies prematurely beforehand, there is nothing releasing her from this binding contract. A vow that cannot be broken. She has to go in, she must, and there is nothing she can do about it.
Pomona has stayed silent, afraid of Leopold and the repercussions that can come out of this... which there are plenty of. Part of her wanted to cut the life form growing inside her via a sword and end everything - Leopold will not get his shining moment in the sun, she's sure of it - but then something causes her to pause. Something hits her, and even though there is no physical bundle of joy in her arms with a red wailing face, she's motherly and protective, and couldn't bear steal away a life of joy for her should she win.
So she trains harder, and the last two months have been perhaps more difficult - let alone the fact she's carrying a child nonetheless - than the three years prior to that when she begun the regiment. Pomona skirts away from Leopold every day, opting to train under Victoria and her father who would much rather help her than have some academy fruitlessly throw her life away.
And although Pomona does not know whether or not she is carrying a boy or girl, she has named her child. Whether or not she births a male warrior or a female apothecary, or a male apothecary or a female warrior, their name shall be Justice. A reminder to her that justice will be served to the man who did her wrong. And that thought fills her with a delight almost as sweet as honey suckle.
Suddenly, Amber gives a hard shove against Pomona's shoulder, and it causes the girl to blink.
"What?" she asks, quite angrily, as the thought of her unborn child brought back once again a motherly happiness only a newborn could bring.
Her best friend gives her a 'cuckoo' expression, quite unsure of where the sudden hostility is coming from. "Victoria and I were wondering if you were planning on getting married once you come back from the Games."
"Do you see me wanting to get married?"
"You've always been quite independent," Amber sniffs again, and Pomona wants to buckle over in hearty laughter. She has never seen someone filled with such vitriol and disgust at the fact there's someone else focused in the spotlight. Pomona sees it this way though, Victoria and Amber will get to live. Pomona and her Justice can go down in a heap of ashes and flames.
"It'd be nice," Pomona admits, hugging her knees to her chest. "To be married. I am told that Victor life is quite luxurious, as you're set off for life, but there's an emptiness to it. Am I really going to enjoy watching people die for fifty plus years? Kids that I've trained? Kids that my fellow victor partners have trained?"
"You don't have to be so morbid," Victoria whispers, the girl having stood up to stretch.
Pomona shrugs, not responding to Victoria's blank statement. The world that they live in is morbid, where a new generation crumbles to the wayside and is like a rotting piece of fruit under the blazing sun. A single thought places itself in her head, though, whenever she gets stuck on the idea of perhaps becoming a victor and seeing future generations of children all collapse to the dirt with blood spilling out of their orifices. If she lives, and if her Justice comes out to the world, would her child still love her knowing that people were killed on their behalf so they could be born?
Half of her wants to laugh the thought away. Of course her child would still love her. That idea would be preposterous to think... but then the rationale of her actions hits her full force. Would her child see another Leopold where Pomona stands, just under a different light? Performed a travesty, several travesties rather, that hurt others around them... and now has multiple sets of eyes, everywhere, at all times, staring at them till their breath has come to pass.
She stands up with that happy thought. Amber and Victoria peer up at her, shading their eyes from the sunlight.
"Do you want to go back into town?" Victoria asks, immediately hopping up with her.
Pomona's stomach growls slightly, and she clutches it in embarrassment. She's been feeling a little woozy the past few days, where the room begins to spin, and where her stomach begins to make mating calls as if it has come alive and moans for it to be fed. She ate an amply light breakfast, not having felt quite hungry due to the queasiness below.
"I'm kinda hungry."
"Do you want to come with us, Amber?"
Her other best friend shakes her head in dissent. "I'm going to stay right here. When they ring the bells, I'll get up. It's quite peaceful out here, all alone."
Pomona rolls her eyes. She knows that Amber is just staying behind because she can't stand being with her for one more moment, so caught up and so infuriated on the fact she doesn't get a chance to go and die. Victoria grabs Pomona by the hand, pulling her along so the two can rush off the hill outcropping and make their way back to the town square. The reaping will start soon, Pomona can feel it bristle on her skin as she walks.
Both girls stroll side by side as their feet shift over dirt and daises to weathered concrete and stone, designs and initials etched into the stonework to mark which particular worker made said piece. Pomona thinks of it as this person's impact on history. She wonders what hers will be.
Victoria doesn't say anything as they walk, and the clamoring noises collide like a discordant symphony in the sky. Pomona hates loud noises almost as much as she hates being stressed out. Something about the way sharpness and noise can be turned into pain frightens her, and she always brings it back around to the child in her womb. Hasn't what she's already gone through, with the combat and everything, prepared Justice to perhaps be born with problems? The loud noises could inherently fright her unborn child and so they'll turn into a version of cowering imbecile that scatters for a quiet place once those days are come to pass.
Pomona cannot stop thinking about her child.
She just hopes that her Justice ends up not falling short, and that this amazing baby of hers does not end up giving her an early tomb.
Minos Falzon: District 2 Male P.O.V (18)
Bells. Whenever there's an important wedding in the district, the officials ring the bells. When a death happens in the family, the officials ring the bells. A fire? Bells. A war? Bells. The reaping? A constant harping of the instrument as if it is President Jade's birthday. So much ringing in fact that eighteen year-old Minos Falzon is starting to train and sharpen his weapons to the beat of the ringing. Persistently, he's bent over with a sharp stick and bone handled knife that goes up down, up down against the tree limb till it is sharper than his glare at the tip.
"I wonder if the District realizes that none of us give a shit about the bells," he wonders aloud. "Do they think that we do not know it's Reaping day?"
Minos is leaning back against an open window, the warm August air gusting against his exposed flesh. His shirt is discarded on the floor in a ball, unnecessary for training. The knife in his hand slips, and up the blade goes, catching itself on his hand, slicing downwards. He cusses to himself, suckling immediately on the open gash he created in his left hand. The lucid taste of copper fills the basin of his mouth as he swallows, letting the grimace and shudders slide down his spine. His warm brown eyes differ from his rugged and scarred body, primarily his arms and chest that are caked black with grime and sweat and other dusty things in the air.
He continues to suck on the wound for a few more seconds, before letting out a satisfying gasp, tossing his head back. His long, flowing locks of rich and dark chocolate black hair dance against the backside of his neck. Minos continues to whittle away, going slightly slower than before so another cut isn't inflicted. If he is to try and count the number of scars he's inflicted on his body since he began training, he'd get lost somewhere in the fifties.
They lace up and down, in jagged curves, or straight lines that point north, south, east and west. Sinew lines filled with coagulated blood and dried tar, the musk of death and the sour smell of hard work wafts off Minos's body. The ruggedness brings more attention to his chiseled face, clean shaven more often than not, with those warm eyes that suck you straight into his soul. His long, ragged hair takes away some of the charm, but then he opens his mouth and all that handsomeness either goes up several notches, or plummets depending on what he says.
"Are you ranting about the District bells again? When are you going to realize that they can't hear you, nor will they stop for you?" a voice smarmily replies back to him, causing Minos to look up from his work.
Oh. He forgot that he wasn't alone. Standing on the mats practicing their archery is one of his closest friends, Corry Jacobs. Built in a same manner like Minos, he's shirtless too, but Minos knows that's because he's trying to get him to watch him train. Corry is seventeen, a year younger than Minos, but chosen to be the 201st Hunger Games District 2 male volunteer. If Minos is anything to go by, he's got a good trainer.
Minos takes in the sight before him. He's never particularly liked being deemed one way or another, always liking to have a taste in both sides of whatever the topic may be. This would stretch over to his sexuality, and Minos learns recently that he's knowingly labeled as someone who's bisexual; to have a preference for both men and women. Although Minos leans to dating and enjoying his company with a girl, there's always an irresistibly charming young man to come and entertain him for a few seconds.
If only Corry Jacobs was irresistible and charming.
Corry goes to take another shot, his body glistening with sweat, Minos appreciating the rigidness in the other male's back as his shoulder blades drew together. "Relax your bow arm," Minos corrects, as Corry has his aim too high where the arrow will more than likely miss the target. His correction goes heard, the arrow is let loose, it flies, and it embeds a few inches off to the left of the bulls-eye, hitting somewhere in the arm.
His friend lets loose a string of cuss words.
Minos makes a tuttering noise with his tongue. "That wasn't very gentleman like."
"As if you are one to talk," Corry snorts.
Minos raises an eyebrow, leaning up from his spot up against the wall. He leaves his knife by the windowsill, taking the serrated stick with him, the tip a ferocious and exposed milky white of a tree branch. He pushes Corry aside and stands firmly on the mat. He clenches the spear with his right hand, guiding it around with the tip of his palm, a slight stabbing pain hitting the center of it.
"There are some things in my life I've always hated. I have had to make the best of my circumstances, you see," Minos begins to drawl, and Corry rolls his eyes, knowing exactly where this conversation is heading. "My mother had me, then got up and left because she didn't realize that sleeping with someone who you're not married to isn't exactly smart. My father raises me alone, and wants to give me a better future..." his grip tightens on the wooden spear, as if it is going to snap, but a lulling voice calms his veins that are suffused with fire. "The District sees me at eleven years old and thinks I'd be perfect for the Career program. I don't want to kill, I don't particularly like doing it, but I do it because it is the only other choice given to me besides death should I disobey. I don't understand why I get so angry at my current situation... emotions have never been an easy thing for me to figure out and perhaps they never will be," Minos picks up the spear now, resting it on his shoulder so the tip is pointed down towards the target with its red acrylic mark for bulls-eye. "I've been told to train on fighting so much that I can't tell what will kill me... on how to tell if I can trust someone... but once again, I make the best of my circumstances. If I die, at least I died fighting."
With that, Minos hefts the spear off of his shoulder, backs up a few lunges, and then runs forward. He takes a slight jump in the air to give him leverage, and then he releases, his throwing arm vaulting outwards. A whistle of air breaks the silence, and then the wooden spear impacts the target, breaking through the leather on the other side.
The spear flings back into the wall, stuck in the plaster that leaves a ghastly echo to clamor around the walls. Minos rights himself, standing up straight, boasting a slightly engorged level of confidence - he's been working at throwing a spear through the practice dummy for five months and he's finally got it - before Corry vaults himself onto Minos.
Both tumble down to the ground, and Corry is gasping praises and words of exultation, before leaning down and kissing him all over. Minos takes in the gorgeous sight of Corry's half-naked body, drinking in the curvaceous hip bones and the taut muscle of his chest. Minos presses his hands against Corry's abdomen, feeling the tightness and Minos is riding on cloud nine as his friend's hands lower and lower, ghosting his hips and then sliding down into his pant leg, palming-
Minos lets out a gasp, and then the damned bells ring again.
It is a thunderstorm outside of disrupting noise, and Corry is so startled by this that he jumps back, nearly ripping the button off of Minos's pants. Minos blushes a profuse scarlet, getting to his feet. Corry turns away in shame, getting his shirt and throwing it on, and the gorgeous view of his friend vanishes from Minos's eyes. He, likewise, grabs his own and dresses back up, still smirking and feeling Corry's hands ghost around the prime spot of flesh. They were so close and the damned District just had to interrupt them.
"I'm going to kill the mayor when I volunteer," Minos jokes half-heartedly, his mind still narrowed on how he nearly just had a sexual encounter in a training facility. "But it looks like I have something to look forward to when I come home, don't I?"
Corry nods, shaking hands with Minos before throwing his arms around him in a hug. "That you do, my friend. That you do."
The two guys part their separate ways. District 2 is a little different, like 1, than all the others in Panem for how their reapings work. Instead of having one long line for every child to be registered in the district, there are twenty-four lines presented; twelve are for the boys aged twelve to eighteen, and the other half for the girls aged twelve to eighteen so it makes registration and the drawing of blood much quicker. Minos has little time for patience, so he prefers the fast paced reality that is District 2's go, go, go mentality.
Because it is District 2, the training facility is placed adjacent to the Justice Hall and the town's square, where Minos never has to traipse for thirty minutes across the district to go and wait in lines like livestock. He wonders if his father will be in the crowd of parents, some who are still nervous for their own children as if they actually believe any of their children reaped will not have a prepositioned volunteer taking their place in a matter of milliseconds. He scans the crowd of the parents in the eighteen year-old section, and his face lights up when his eyes catch hold on a familiar profile.
His father, Gregory Falzon, stands slightly under average adult male height for the men in the district. However, unlike his son, there is no muscular bulk to his form. Instead, Gregory declines the volunteer position when his call comes around as a spry eighteen year-old, nearly thirty years ago. The life of a victor is not for him, with the extravagance and the fakeness he knows he cannot endure, but a heavy price is paid for his disobedience. Like Minos, there are the scars that are on his body from a savage, brutal attack other eighteen year-olds of the training academy give him when Gregory is jumped that evening after declining. It cements Gregory's belief further that the Hunger Games lifestyle is not for him, going to study in District 3 on medicinal practices, now a licensed practitioner of medicine in District 2.
When the leaders of the Training Academy approach him - Gregory, that is - about Minos's appealing future as a Career, for the Quarter Quell of all years to be had, it is an offer he cannot refuse because of the potential repercussions, and so Minos is swept into the spotlight as being the male Career for the 200th year of the Hunger Games... and Gregory cannot be more proud of his son.
Minos sees it in the way his father smiles at him when he'll come home from work to hear about a new milestone Minos made in training, and their conversations over dinner are never clouded by a fact that one day Minos will have to execute these skills against other tributes in an arena, but this is the day that both Falzon's - father and son - must face the music being played for both of them.
The eighteen year-old winces at the slight stinging of the needle drawing blood, and then smudges it slightly so that the Peacekeeper frowns at him and he spins away cackling. Minos waits patiently on his heels, bouncing up and down in the eighteen year-old section for guys, occasionally searching for his father or Corry's face once more.
Already on stage is the microphone and the two bowls with everyone's names to be drawn, but Minos rolls his eyes. All their escort has to do is call out the two volunteers and everything can go smooth as butter. Sitting in the corner together, obviously speaking to one another, are the two victor mentors for the year. There are seven victors for District 2 alive in recent years, and Jade draws them randomly. Minos cranes his neck to see who's being used this year.
Closer to him is the female victor, Wyvern Conran, the newest victor on the team. She won the 192nd Hunger Games, at fifteen, volunteering over the volunteer who had been selected for the females and breaking her nose. She's the fighter of the assembled victors for District 2, constantly getting in trouble whenever she goes to the Capitol because there is something new for Wyvern to be upset about. Her dark black cherry hair is long against her back, highlighted by piercing emerald green eyes that watch everyone's movements. She is described to be a snake, using the woman's weapon of poison until there's nothing left than a rotting carcass that never had any idea they had been played.
Next to her is someone laughable, a person that Minos will never understand how they became a victor, in District 2 of all the districts out there, but a victor all the same. Built with a wire-like frame, just like Gregory Falzon, is Lionel Grisald. Lionel won the 185th Hunger Games, reaped as a twelve year-old. That year had been one of those confusing years where the selected volunteer tribute had died to pneumonia earlier that month despite it being the sweltering August heat. President Dermure, with her vicious long nails, demands that District 2 reap a tribute and there be no volunteers just to see how interesting the game can get. Poor twelve year-old Lionel is picked, who's never even been introduced to the academy at his youthful age... and he outlives them all. When the only other remaining tribute, a girl from District 11 who can lug a wooden cart that size of Minos's body over her head, dies by eating a poisoned apple given to her at a feast a few days earlier... Lionel is declared the winner. He only killed one person, and that was an accident when he scared the girl from District 12 off the mountain she had been climbing up because he wanted to say hello to her in his cave that he had created.
Now, Lionel is twenty-seven and likes to play the guitar. Not exactly helpful in terms of training Careers to fight to the death.
As Minos wonders away at the mentors for this year, he realizes that another body has joined them on stage. The effervescent Robert Glass, a man in his mid-thirties who has been acting as escort for the District since the 189th Hunger Games. Minos admires his body as well, because, like the old Caesar Flickerman, he thinks of new ways to change his last name and wears clothes that resemble his last name for that year. Apparently Robert Glass is now Robert Frost, so he's wearing a white, almost lacy and extremely girly coat with snowflake imprints on them. Minos thinks he looks absolutely ridiculous, but there's a lithe body underneath there with some muscle and a fair face.
Minos wonders, offhandedly, when is the last time he's looked a girl the way he's looked at Corry, or even Robert in the past few weeks. He doesn't get long to think about it, as Robert is ready to get the whole shebang over with and get back on his comfy train to the Capitol, because the peasants in the Districts are nothing but the scum underneath his feet.
The escort taps the microphone, and everyone in the district covers their ears as there is sound interference, and the loudest ear-grating noise erupts from the speakers. Minos glares at the sound equipment piled on stage. Everything loud and noisy is currently ruining his morning, like some sort of Murphy's Law dealing with vibrations of the airwaves.
Robert smiles sheepishly. "So sorry about that!" he exclaims, his hair dyed a sickening and frail pale color to represent frost. "Greetings District 2! Welcome to the 200th year of the Hunger Games, our 8th Quarter Quell!" Unlike in other districts, many of those gathered in the reaping pens clap excitedly along with Robert, almost churning Minos's stomach to produce bile. "I do not like taking a long time for procedures, so we might as well get this show on the road. Ladies first!"
Minos has heard stories of other districts holding their tongues with bated breaths, to follow the escort's every movement like a trained killer until there's nothing but tension in the air. Here? Three of the guys behind Minos are having a conversation on what they're ordering for dinner out of a catalogue. Rich folk. Robert has grabbed a piece of paper, read a name, and then a girl from the eighteen year-old section volunteers.
He tries tracking who was picked to represent the females. His mind searches, and then he remembers. Pomona Blair. Minos notices that her hands are covering something near her stomach, standing at an angle where she's facing Robert and not the rest of the crowd. He frowns, wondering what she's trying to hide. Robert places the microphone in her face, Pomona recoiling slightly so it doesn't bust her lip.
"Are you excited for this year's games?"
"Yes," Pomona answers, and Minos appreciates that there isn't a huge sense of debonair around her to make it distasteful.
"Why is that?"
"Something has come up in my life," she says cryptically. "And now it is pushing me to go further beyond my normal limits."
"That's wonderful!" Robert exclaims.
Minos witnesses Pomona's cheery face turn incredibly upside down the moment Robert shifts his attention back to the microphone to announce he's going to pick the male name. He watches her take a step away from the escort, gravitating more towards Wyvern, as if the woman's extra presence is giving her comfort of some sort. Robert has a slip of paper in his hand, he's at the microphone, and then-
"I volunteer!" Minos calls out, his voice full of pride.
He's never been so sure of something in his entire life. Minos dispatches himself from the section of eighteen year-old males and jogs up the steps. Walking up them would take too much time, he feels, and there's time a wasting should he not hasten. Minos has not been dealt with such a shitty hand in life, from being ridiculed for having a single parent in the house instead of the norm, or getting forced expectations down on his shoulders to now not rise up to meet them given the chance.
Robert takes in Minos's appearance, but the eighteen year-old is staring directly into Corry's face, who's full of impasse and slightly void of emotion. Minos sees Corry biting his lower lip, and that causes a flush of heat to wash over his body. Why couldn't his friend be any more attractive? Robert asks Minos a few questions, but he doesn't answer them truthfully as he misses having his hands around Corry's hips, and he longs for Corry's hands to go back into his pants.
"Well there you have it folks! Our tributes for the 200th year of the Hunger Games! Miss Pomona Blair and Mr. Minos Falzon! Shake hands you two," Robert announces, and then orders to the two teens in front of him.
Minos heartily shakes Pomona's hand, but he catches a glimpse of darkness in her eyes. He nearly flinches at it, his smile wavering slightly. He looks at her stomach once more, Pomona's hand no longer covering it, and he catches it slightly being raised.
A lump forms in his throat.
No.
She couldn't be.
Minos's eyes widen. If what he is thinking is true... then this is an absolute abomination. His mind slightly shifts.
He's worked so hard to now take pride in appearing in the Hunger Games. Could he truthfully abandon it all for a girl he's never met, and a child he'll never see? Give all of his possible fame and glory for her?
If he is to live by the sword, Minos Falzon needs to be prepared to die by the sword too.
There we have it folks! That was the District 2 reaping, Chapter #9: Die by the Sword. Everything is poetic in this world, whether it be my chapter titles or the characters themselves. So here we have Pomona Blair and Minos Falzon of District 2! Our first 1/3rd of the Career pack has been presented to us. Something that I try doing, and I hope I do it well, is humanize the Careers a little bit. I don't want my SYOT to be like every other SYOT with the same archetype characters presented, but where you do absolutely feel for everyone to some capacity, even if you hate them because they're just plain dislikable. Minos is more humanized here than a typical D2 male would be, definitely because he sees through Pomona's half-assed attempts to hide her debilitating weakness... because do you think when it comes down to it, he'll protect her and give up his possibility at winning for her? Who was your favorite character of the two? I also couldn't help myself with naming a victor Wyvern, it is just too funny to me. Thank you all so much for reading and reviewing, it means a lot to those who stick with me despite always leaving this story to the wayside. The next reaping is for District 11, which shall be fun! I think I need to aim for having these reaping chapters done on the weekend to give me the longest room for typing. So, probably next Saturday will be Chapter #10: Pickings of Despair. Thank you again for reading! I love you all! Have an amazing day! Bye!
~ Paradigm
