Title: Fun
Characters: Cuan, Amaya/Penka
Word Count: 1,010
Warnings: Creepy child!Cuan, implied child abuse
Disclaimer: I do not own the Hunger Games and the inspiration for these characters comes from another series entirely.
Notes: More Cuan being a disturbing child? Yep. Amaya mellows out when she gets older, but she was a high-strung eight-year-old.
"That looks fun," Cuan said. A small moment of absolute horror and an impending sense of doom overtook everyone in the immediate vicinity, but the five-year-old boy holding Amaya's hand was completely oblivious to the panic he just caused.
Amaya yanked as hard as her spindly eight-year-old arms could manage, ignoring the boy's small utterance of pain. She leaned down to grasp Cuan's tiny shoulders, blunt fingernails digging into his threadbare shirt until she was sure the skin beneath would bruise.
"Don't," she hissed before he protested, "ever say that again."
Thinking back on those few tense seconds, Amaya was the only one who acted, and not because she was the one holding Cuan's hand. Many years down the line she would remember this as she was dying, and she would laugh bitterly at her ignorance.
In that moment, in those few seconds in which the blood pounding in her ears managed to overcome the sounds of the District 12 tribute dying on the screen, Amaya had yet to realize just how much she was different from the others.
Cuan was not a child who whined for anything, for any reason. He was quiet even now, even though any other five-year-old would be whimpering in pain or screaming in frightened rage. It was no mystery why - the bruises against his jawline and wrapped around his arms and torso meant just as much as his silence.
"Why?" he demanded. His voice was quiet, as usual, and boyishly high. But it was as hard as a child could make himself sound, and Cuan was dead serious. Amaya's grip on him tightened and she hardened her own resolve - even if he hated her afterwards, she would at least be saving him some pain, the pain of standing out in a world that would accept no one foolish enough to defy its rules.
She leaned down until she could speak into his ear. Her words were as harsh as Hakon's, as sharp as Sche's, and trembled with no small amount of hatred, misplaced as it was in this situation.
"Because they are killing each other. They're being forced to kill each other," she said, shaking the boy for good measure. Someone else should have been doing this in her stead, she realized as she stared the younger child in the eyes. His parents should have been the ones to explain to him why the people who went into the Games were not having fun, even if some of them did volunteer. The staff from the orphanage should have been the ones to explain it to him - not Amaya, a mere eight-year-old girl.
"Did they do something bad?"
It would have concerned an adult more to hear those words out of a child's mouth, but at the time Amaya merely shook her head, angry instead of stunned, disgusted instead of frightened.
"They didn't do anything! That's why it's bad, horrible, and definitely not fun!"
"But…" Cuan's words were never plentiful. He had been abandoned at the orphanage since he was a baby, so Amaya could clearly remember that his first words had come late. She remembered because she heard the staff wishing that he would be mute just days before he spoke for the first time.
"But what?"
Cuan turned to the big screen hanging in the town square where the kids from the orphanage had to watch the Hunger Games every year. They had no TVs in the orphanage and viewing was mandatory, so they were forced to come to the square to watch it.
Amaya reached for his chin and jerked it around until he was facing her again. She would have felt bad for pressing on the bruise there any other time, but at the moment she wasn't feeling so charitable.
"Isn't that what happened to Marcie last week?"
Amaya froze. Her heart fluttered in her chest, all of the words she wanted to blurt out suddenly gone. Marcie was twelve this year. Her parents had died when she was ten or so, and she never got used to living in the orphanage, but she was a decent person to talk to when she wasn't flipping out.
"Marcie didn't do anything wrong. You told me that. But she got hurt and died anyway."
All of a sudden, Amaya wished that this boy had never learned to talk, too. He saw and said too much. He sounded too old for five, too old for eight or even ten.
"What happened to her was sad," Amaya finally said. "And unfair. You're right. But why do you think it's fun?"
"I…I don't know. I just do," Cuan said quietly. He lowered his eyes to the dusty concrete beneath their feet. His voice was low and he sounded like a child again as he tried to work through his own thought process. "You can win the Games, though."
The strength fled from Amaya's fingers at his statement. It made sense. She let her fingers slip off Cuan's shoulders.
It made sense. That was the scariest part of this whole ordeal, she would later realize. Cuan, with the little knowledge he possessed of the world at that time, was not wrong.
"I'm sorry for hurting you," Amaya said numbly, through a mouth filled with cotton so thick she wanted to choke.
She felt a tug at the edge of her shirt. When she looked down, Cuan was smiling in earnest. "It's okay, Ama. It's okay."
She wanted to hug him, but she never did. Not when she was five, not when she was eight, or sixteen, or twenty-seven.
It would be years later when Amaya breathed her last breath. The only regret she would have at that time would be as simple as a hug. It probably wouldn't have made a difference to Cuan's life, nor her own, but as she bled out from a gunshot wound to the thigh, she would think back to that hazy day in her memories and she would regret having not hugged the boy she helped raise.