A Part to Play // Hunger Games

17 // Making Friends, Yay!

"I think the saddest people always try to make people happy because they know what it's like to feel absolutely worthless and they don't want anyone else to feel like that" - Gang, Meet Freak (AnotherComicNerd)

***

The Victory Tour was absolutely exhausting. And it wasn't just for the youngest Victor. The president also had a hard time, together with all of the people who were close to the young girl, especially Josh, Layon and Fae.

Going on to District Twelve to start off the tour, the girl was given a strict speech, elaborated by the monarch himself, not trusting the twelve year old to improvise and her escort to create something he deemed 'good enough'.

It only took her one glance at the speech for the Victor to dismiss it though. It was way too 'Capitol-y' for her liking, as she had politely put to Fae when denying to say it. According to the young girl, that paper was full of bullshit and lies about how the Capitol is great and the Games are honorable and necessary. So, it didn't come as a shock to anyone when she refused to say the pre-made speech out loud and instead, decided it was a great idea to simply improvise and tell the Districts a piece of her mind.

That was how each of the twelve Districts of Panem ended up receiving a different speech from the Victor that year, and one that nothing resembled the previous years, for that matter.

Needless to say that the president was absolutely furious and threatened to kill the girl himself. He however, knew as well as the youngest Victor, that he couldn't afford to kill the girl. She was way too liked within the Districts, it would cause complete mayhem, and maybe even a rebellion. That way, Aria Mayfield had practically a free reign on the Districts, openly avoiding the Capitol, for they didn't like her very much around there.

The tour was also when Josh introduced his newest friend - who was almost like a sister to him by the time, having built a close relationship during the weeks in between her last interview and the start of the tour - to his best friends ever, Finnick Odair and Johanna Mason, the Victors of the 66th and 71st Hunger Games respectively.

The three of them really hit it off, finding out that they were a lot more similar than one would've thought just by looking at the Victors. Johanna was eighteen years old, having won the Games the previous year, sympathizing with the young girl and coaching her through the rest of the tour, after their stop in District Seven, where the two had met, deciding to hop on and do the rest of the journey with the youngest Victor.

Finnick, however cautious of the girl, was nothing short of polite towards her, happy that Josh now had someone else to count on when he was home, just like he himself had Annie Cresta and Mags Flanagan - two fellow Victors, of the 70th and 11th Games respectively - for the young man deserved to be happy after everything he went through during his own Games.

To be honest, they had all suffered, and any fellow Victor could attest to that, none being completely free from the trauma, that haunted their daily lives, whether it was in secret, like Finnick and Josh's or out in the open, like Annie's. PTSD was just as normal to them as waking up.

The one thing all Victors - no matter how old, drunk or mentally disabled they were - had in common, was their hatred for the Capitol and everything that it had done to them. Aria was a living proof that the Capitol could be defied, and unknowingly and unintentionally, she had given them all hope. Hope in a better future, hope in a rebellion, in a possible end to these awful Games they had all been through and didn't wish upon anybody.

To try and contain the situation, the president had payed the youngest Victor a little visit and tried to threaten her, to which the girl simply laughed and sassed him endlessly. So, he had taken to prohibit her to mentor on the next Games.