The Stars
Title: Light
Characters: Syarnark, Sche, mentions of the others
Word Count: 670
Warnings: Near death situations
Disclaimer: I do not own the Hunger Games and the inspiration for these characters comes from another series entirely.
Notes: No Pyro this time. Not really satisfied with this one but I can never think of anything for the prompt "light".
003: Light
District 3 was a foggy, grey, and dank place to live. The District's escort complained every year about the smog that never seemed to lift even with the machines in the factory silent and still. The residue made the air heavy and cloying, suffocating to outsiders unaccustomed to it.
The smog extended into the sky, creating an impenetrable grey blanket that even the sun could barely pierce. On the clearest of nights, they could see a faint silver shimmer from the moon.
The further out you traveled from the blocks of factories and the closer you got to the junkyard, the less intense the smog. The grit still managed to cling to the air, dampening the light of the sun, regardless.
It was a well known fact that there was never a truly clear day in District 3. The day of his first Reaping was the same.
All the others had been older, a few years past their eighteen birthdays, and they no longer had to worry about anything except for showing up to the Reaping on time. They placed a few bets amongst the crowd, looking to make something out of an unproductive few hours.
Syarnark, for the first time in nearly two years, was alone.
They almost always operated in pairs or groups of three, usually with a comfortable level of backup, but this was the first time that Syarnark no longer had any of them watching out for him.
To say that he was exceedingly nervous was a lie. Sche had given him an encouraging talk about the matter earlier, but he wasn't as concerned as his peers.
Before Cuan and Penka caught him, there had been a time when the orphanage had little food and its residents were left to scrounge up whatever they could find from the trash heaps. It was a harsh, barren winter, the paved ground of District 3 unforgivingly cold.
A misstep and he found himself laying on a copse of debris, the ground where he'd just been standing far above his head, and the remains of what had once been a table beneath him soaked in blood.
It had been a throbbing pain, like the constant presence of hunger gnawing at his stomach. When he tried to push himself up his limbs gave in and all he could do was lay there, trembling and immobile.
He counted out the seconds in his head, little puffs of white breath escaping his lips as he concentrated solely on breathing. It had been a long time since he'd slipped up that badly, he mused with a wet chuckle.
His friends were all off in a different area of the junkyard and it was too dangerous to just start shouting for help in the middle of it all.
Somehow he'd found the strength to pull himself up and crawl back to the orphanage where the overworked nurse hastily knitted him back together, shoving him on a cot in the hopes that he would wake in the morning.
Even though Syarnark shrugged it off the next day, for some brief and indefinable moment he knew exactly what had transpired, at how close to death he had been. And he'd danced along that same line before, and he would continue to do so until the real end of his life, and so when the Reaping came along he shook off the last vestiges of whatever worries he might have had.
"If you're not strong enough to deal with it, don't bother coming back at all," Sche had told him the day before.
District 3's escort stepped up to the stage, all bright colors and hues that were shocking to the eye, almost like the vivid pixels of a computer screen. It was noon, easily the brightest time of the day, and the sun was shining through the smog.
Syarnark turned his head up at it and smiled. Then he turned back to the stage and schooled his face into an expressionless mask to await the decision.