Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to The Hunger Games.
Mrs. E. (Part One)
Once upon a time (in a place that you may have heard tell of in a story or two or three), there lived a little girl whose world was as brightly tinted as the golden hued hair on her head. Her life revolved in simplicity around the two people who mattered the most to her – the mother and father who taught and played with and patted and praised her. The three of them were always together, and the three of them were very happy. The three of them lived in a clean, snug little apartment that smelled like mint and was settled over the top of a small, crowded shop that smelled of more than the little girl had as yet learned to identify.
This shop under her home was a place where other people came and went taking the packets and bottles and jars that decorated the shelves with them. The little girl did not pay much mind to the people when they came, and she did not pay much mind to what they took with them when they went (except to notice that each item had its own particular scent that did not always blend into the most pleasant of combinations). Her mother, her father, and their little home (with shop attached) were all that were important to her. She was content to be with them within the clearly defined boundaries of all that needed to matter. She was loved, and she loved them. What else do young children ask to make them happy? She could think of nothing else. It was peaceful in her world. It was quiet in her world. It was safe in her world. It was all she knew. As far as she knew, it was all there was for her to know.
That is not to say that the girl in question had some sort of enchanted, unnatural childhood. That was not the case at all. It was, rather, comprised of all the things of which a normal childhood should be. There were grumpy days. There was the introduction of the word "no." There were the usual childish disappointments in her life, but none of those things were important when balanced with the usual pleasantness of her days. She did not miss the things that her parents could not provide for her because she did not know that such things existed. She did not realize it when her family struggled. She did not hear the whispered conversations when her parents were worried over something that she was too young to understand. Those were things that hovered on the edges of her world and never penetrated into the sanctity of its confines. There was, in fact, only one thing in her life that caused her to experience any real form of dismay.
It happened rarely, very rarely, that one of the nightmares that often come to plague young children for no discernible reason would come to visit her. Shadowed figures would form out of the darkness and reach out to touch her with their creeping, searching fingers. She was not certain what it was that would happen to her if the shadows succeeded in their attempts to touch her, but she knew it would be something too horrendous to be put into words. She would cower within the confines of her bed with the covers pulled up high to block the view of her room. Her actions were taken in the hope that if the darkness that she could not understand could not see her face, then the unknown would fade away and leave her be. It was her best effort, but it was not enough to protect her. The things crouching in the darkness on those occasions were more persistent than that; they were not so easily dissuaded. There were whispers that she could hear and could not comprehend that swirled in the stillness. She recognized that she could not hold them off on her own. She would leave the haven that she had attempted to create furrowed under the warmth of the fabric, and she would run for the one place that she was certain she would be defended. She raced through the darkness to escape the whispers and the searching touches by climbing into the bed that belonged to her parents. It was not very often that the nightmares came, and their sway over her never lasted for long. What chance did shadows in the darkness have when pitted against the security of the care of those who loved her? She would snuggle into the waiting arms of one of her parents and let the shadows retreat as they, in turn, recognized their own defeat.
The girl grew older (as is nearly always the case with little girls), and it seemed to her as if the world grew with her. The boundaries that had tied her safely to her home stretched to admit new places and new people for her perusal. She discovered that there were streets for her to run down. She learned that there existed a soft, green place called a meadow in which she could play. She found that there were two nearly identical little girls (just her age) with golden hair like her own who could often be found in that meadow. They felt each other out and cemented an alliance. The three little girls explored their new limits together. They learned to play tricks on the grownups who could not tell the difference between her two new friends. The laughed in each other's bedrooms over their cleverness in employing said tricks. They plaited chains of meadow flowers (they were not weeds like their mothers insisted) into each other's hair. This new experience was exciting – this having friends and playmates beyond her parents was an adventure the likes of which she had never before contemplated. Her world had changed, but the changes were not bad. She still had her home. She still had her parents. She still had her protection from the nightmares that still came to chase her upon occasion. Her changes were additions, and they required no exchange for their inclusion in her life. She kept the old components of her world, and she added the newly found. Her world remained a happy place, and she remained joyful in it. Thus, the early years of her childhood passed away, and the nightmares were always kept at bay. Those things that were pleasant overcame the temporary intrusions of darkness. Her life continued, and it continued as well as it could in a place where whispered fears of her parents joined in with whispered fears of others out in her expanded world to create a vague sense of unease in the background of her life that the nightmares liked to play upon, but her waking, daylight self never spent too much time considering.
The settled pace of her life continued on with its touch points of her parents, her home, her shop, and her friends. Whispered fears stayed whispered fears, and happy days in the meadow remained happy days in the meadow. Everything remained thus for years upon years until the day when the shadows and whispers and darkness of her nightmares began to reach their creeping, grasping fingers out into the daylight where she had always considered herself to be safe. The borders between the darkness from which she had always run and hidden and the light in which she spent the rest of her time were first breached on a day when the sun was brightly shining over the gathered crowd in the square of District 12 when the District Escort pulled a slip of paper from the glass ball on the podium and called the name of the golden haired girl who was clutching at her hand.