Title: Different

Characters: Fahren, Syarnark, Pyro, Cuan

Word Count: 1,059

Warnings: Implied prostitution of children and human trafficking

Disclaimer: I do not own the Hunger Games and the inspiration for these characters comes from another series entirely.

Notes: This is a new character that I added to the 'verse recently. His name is pronounced exactly like the word 'fahrenheit' without the '-heit'.

Fahren was a boy with warm brown skin and dim eyes that sometimes stared into the sky like he wanted to look at the sun and never see anything but the heat of its rays again. His words rose and fell in all the wrong places and when he was paying attention to you, he drifted too close, until you could feel his breath on your cheek.

Fahren himself was simply wrong. He was cut from different cloth, a boy with no name and no past, a person who sunk into the receding shadows of tall office buildings and at night retreated, not to the orphanage, but the depths of District 3's underbelly.

Cuan met him there, on some warm night a long time ago. Syarnark picked him up from there, every night since he was recruited to the day he died.

Fahren was different. Even his role, his contribution to the group, was different from everyone else.

He paid for things, for one, and he hated to see people die, for another.

Syarnark sees Fahren when he looks at Pyro. None of their features are the same, not even their eyes. Pyro's eyes are green and clear, a mass of warmth and anguish, practically edged at times. Fahren's eyes were vacant and brown, and hollow sadness, which even he did not understand, shone out of them when he thought no one was looking.

For all of the warm smiles Fahren gave Syarnark but Pyro never reciprocates, Syarnark is inclined to believe that Pyro is still the more genuine of the two.

Fahren was different. He had no purpose - he drifted back and forth between Cuan's side and the glowing, golden apartments where Capitol businessmen and the wealthy from Three lose themselves in pleasurable dreams to stave off the sleet colored drab of their District.

He would never let Syarnark hold his hand on the way home. Not even when his limbs trembled and his breathing came in such harsh spurts that Syarnark was convinced it was a heart attack. Cuan's books never said what to do about heart attacks, only how to know the signs of one.

During those moments, the words he would let slip from his tongue all at once, as if afraid of forgetting or dying before he could deliver them, were almost more precious than Fahren's life itself.

Syarnark misses following that ghost of a person around the District. He doesn't know why, not really, because Fahren never spoke of anything exciting. He never ventured into town, perhaps aware that he was different and to show his face was to acknowledge something dangerous, and he almost always vomited when Faiz or Hakon were torturing someone for information.

"Why don't you quit that job, if you hate it so much?" Syarnark asked him. He was truly curious. Money was no issue even back then. Cuan would have found some other job for Fahren if he decided not to sell his body anymore.

"No one has to suffer this way," Fahren said with the thinnest smile and a set of eyes that roamed over the horizon as if he could see to the end of the continent. As always, the inflection embedded in his voice was present. It was nothing like the Capitol's accent, but it struck Syarnark's ears as wrong and strange every time he heard it.

Syarnark didn't bother responding. They looked at the sunrise for a time, watching it crawl above stacks of scrap metal that twisted and bent the violent red light at harsh angles.

"Do you remember them? Think about them?" he finally asked. Maybe it was the dream Syarnark had just woken up from that inspired such an odd question. He could remember the claws of fear that punctuated his dream, mingled with the warmth of affection that only a child could have towards a caregiver that threw glass bottles at his head.

"Who?"

"Your family."

Fahren never spoke about it. He drifted in and out of lives like a specter, never staying around long enough for anyone to begin asking such questions. No one had asked him before, but he thought about it for no longer than two seconds and his voice was light, airy, not at all thick and pained.

"I don't remember anything from back then. I don't even really remember being brought here, or by whom, or how. Just why."

"You don't remember where you're from?" Syarnark pressed. Everyone has wondered at least once. Fahren was not one of them. Everyone knew this.

The older boy shook his head. "No. I don't. There isn't even a point in knowing."

That was right. Even if he knew, there would be no possibility of returning.

"It doesn't bother you?"

Fahren looked into Syarnark's eyes. "No. Does it bother you?"

"No," Syarnark said immediately. He let his left hand drift to his right shoulder where a thin, white scar had once marred his skin. "It doesn't. I wish that I didn't remember sometimes, though."

Fahren nodded.

He was quiet. A quiet person stood in stark contrast to Syarnark, who speaks even when there is nothing to say. It's entirely too loud with Pyro around nowadays - too much energy and scathing words that cloud the space between them like smog.

But Fahren is gone. He, and whatever past he did or did not remember, are lost forever. Syarnark won't ever know which District he came from. He won't ever know if Fahren was stolen from his home or sold by his caregivers.

There was nothing to do but cry in his immediate absence. And after Syarnark was done crying, he and Faiz tracked down the rebel informants responsible for his death, and there was nothing left of those men to identify them when they were done.

It made him feel better - whoever says that vengeance doesn't bring satisfaction is wrong - but it didn't bring Fahren back. And then, eventually, Pyro had replaced him and that spot wasn't so empty anymore.

Syarnark is over it, now. He doesn't think about Fahren much anymore. He spends his thoughts on the people still alive, on people who he wants to keep alive no matter what. If he fails them, then they'll just fade into his memories like Fahren and his parents - and that's probably the scariest thing of all.

In case you didn't catch it (the warning gave it away though), Fahren isn't from District 3. He was brought there as a child to be a prostitute.

I really dislike the division of the Districts and how a single district is populated solely by the people who were born there. I mean, it's kind of...unrealistic. Canon seems to imply that there is no more than one town to each district too so? Fahren is my answer to that.