Of District 13 and Refugees
Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to The Hunger Games.
Is she allowed to say that she is scared? She is not sure whether that would get her into trouble or not. She is unclear about a lot of things and whether or not they would get her into trouble or not. She does not quite know what to think about this strange District that came out of the oft repeated history lessons of why one did not disobey the Capitol to turn out to be not demolished after all.
She thought, at first, that it was just because it was so much so fast that she was having so much difficulty getting her bearings. There had, after all, been an awful lot to process what with her District being burned to ash and all that. She always said the words flippantly (even in her head) because saying them any other way was to invite a reason to sit herself down and cry (and she was very convinced that this was not the place for her to do that). She did not want to think about the fires or the smoke or the way that she had thought that they were all going to die. She did not want to think about the strange, hysterical laughter that had taken hold of her when she had latched on to the thought that she had prepared often enough to end up buried underneath the ground that she had been totally unprepared for her death to come falling out of the sky.
She was not dead. There was that. She had not suffocated or burned alive, and that was more than she could say for the majority of the people with whom she had shared a District for the entirety of her life. This new District was different. She had the distinct impression that she could live to be an old, old woman in the halls and chambers and stairways that were carved out of the earth and still be an outsider to the denizens of District 13.
She was not certain what it was. She could not quite put her finger on it. She knew that she should be thankful for the rescue that she had received. She was, in fact, thankful to be rescued from the chaos and confusion and the smell of burning things and the possibility of the Capitol sending hovercrafts to find their hiding places and the overwhelming sense of having no idea what it was that she should do. She was.
That did not mean that the whole of District 13 did not give her an unpleasant sort of chills. She thought that she might have felt that way if she ever found herself in a District not her own; she had, after all, never traveled to another one before. It might be that the different way of doing things would have rubbed her the wrong way no matter where it was that she had encountered it. She was not likely to ever be in a position to make a comparison (although there had been a time that she would have stated that finding herself in District 13 would have been an even less likely possibility).
She did not think that it was because they were underground. District 12 sort of revolved around being underground. She had spent plenty of her life shut away from the sun. There was the fundamental difference that when you were mining you still had going back out of the mines to be in the light again to look forward to, but it was equally true that the interior of 13 was a lot more well lit and a lot less rock about to fall on your head at any moment than the mines had ever been to counter that.
There were the schedules that took some getting used to, but she had followed a schedule of when to get to and when to leave at the mines and back at school and for viewings of the Games for as long as she could remember. District 13 took the scheduling a little further. There was not a moment of the day that did not have a defined purpose. Her not in the mines, not viewing required Capitol programming hours back in 12 had been her own. She usually spent them worrying about what she was going to eat or sinking exhausted into her bed, but they had still been her own. If she had felt up to making a trek to the Meadow on a Sunday afternoon to soak in the sunlight and observe a bit of prettiness in her otherwise fairly coal covered home, then there was no list printed on her arm to tell her that she had other places that she was supposed to be.
People were nice enough about the number of refugees that had crowded into their home (although it did not feel much like crowding when she stopped to compare the number of people that she actually saw with the amount of space that the underground District seemed to cover), but there was just something about the way the people of District 13 had of not reacting to things that made her stop and blink at them in surprise that always caught her off guard. It did not even make sense that she expected them to react - they had been living like this all their lives, but that did not change the way she felt about it.
The way they took in stride the fact that there was nothing in the whole place that anybody was really allowed to call their own was something that she could live out the rest of her days with and never quite find herself making peace. District 12 was hardly the best place to ever be, but there had, at least, been within it things that were hers because she had made or earned them - not because someone else had decided to grant her their use. It was as if the entire place was one giant circle of owing, and owing was not something for which she had ever much cared. The fact that it was some sort of nebulous "The District" that one presumed to owe did not help her feel any better about it. It reminded her at times of those speeches from the Capitol that they used to play that always talked about how the Districts had stepped out of line in the rebellion by challenging the ones they ought to have been grateful to for taking care of them.
Of course, she was not old enough (not by decades and decades) to know what it had been like in the days before the rebellion, so she should likely not try to draw comparisons about things that she did not understand. She was not dying of exposure somewhere in the woods that surrounded District 12, and she was not a pile of charred bone lying in what used to be the Seam. That, at the moment (and likely for a whole lot of moments to come), was what was important to remember.
Different places did things different ways had become a mantra that she repeated to herself more times in the course of the day than she bothered to count. She was safe enough. No one was trying to burn her alive in her bed. She had jobs to do that she could tell herself required more concentration than they actually did so she could stop using the time to think about the way things used to be and the people that she used to know and what the scent of burning flesh felt like in your nose.
She would get used to things or she would not, but she would live here just the same. She did not have much choice about that. She had never had much choice about where she did her living. It might be different, but it was not really anything so very different than what she had done before. She would keep telling herself that - the list on her arm told her she was supposed to be "reflecting" after all.