After The Storm (A Hunger Games Fanfic)

District Eleven Reapings

District Eleven do reapings a little differently to the other districts. It has taken them a while to perfect the method, and there are still improvements to be made, but on the whole the system works and nobody complains. Much.

As many other tributes have noticed before, District Eleven is very big. The population are spread out over a large area, and some design fault back before the Games were even anticipated means that even if you were to take all the children and try and fit them into the crumbling square, they wouldn't fit.

So there are several stages that can lead to being reaped in Eleven.

It starts with the previous year's Victory Tour. Almost as soon as the victor is seen off, the names of every child in the district is written down once and put into bowls according to age. It is a complex operation, and requires a few days of work from the Mayor's family. As far as the Capitol is concerned the Mayor's family deal with most of the administrative side of the district, but as 'administrative' is basically the reaping draws, tesserae and making sure that people fulfil their required quota of goods, they spend much of their time in the fields like anyone else.

A prearranged number of names are drawn from each age group, and this is where tesserae comes into play. For tesserae, you can apply for you child to be definitely in the final draw. Then, for extra tesserae, their names will go in more than once. But at least there's enough people in the square. Only the families of those in the pens are allowed into the square. Everybody else must work. The Capitol likes this arrangement; if there's one thing more demoralising than the reapings, it's having to work like a dog through them. Most of District Eleven will only hear who their tributes are through the Grapevine, a way of getting information from one side of the district to the other just by word of mouth, the mockingjays flying ahead to warn of a coming message. It is surprisingly efficient, but then again, District Eleven usually are, in a worn and beaten way.

The families are thin and haggard, most of them propping themselves up on others as they stand in the sweltering heat. The mentor stands and looks down on them, remembering the day that he was in there. He stood out a mile with his pale skin, like some of the children he can see today. There's a boy in the oldest pen, his skin blistering red in the heat. By District Eleven standards he's fairly handsome, with even features, a strong build and kind blue eyes. He doesn't know his first name, but he's one of the Seame family. They lost a boy a few years ago, but it hasn't crushed them. Give one of the Seames a job to do and they'll do it until they're told to stop. Not the brightest of people, but you don't need brains in Eleven. You just need to work hard and respect the rules. Garth didn't, and look where that got him.

In the sixteen year old girls' pen, a girl with huge dark eyes and long reddish hair fiddles nervously with a kind of token; he can pick out her parents, or at least her father, in the crowd behind the pens. The only red-heads in the district, Peony and her father. There's a story back there, something to do with Peacekeepers. Perhaps Peony's paleness and build is a clue to that; he's heard rumours that she was born in Two. One of the younger girls has a squirrel perched on her shoulder, and he smiles to himself. Ever Greenmore. The poor girl is only fourteen and has been in the pens every year so far, always with the squirrel. He wonders what the Capitol ruling on live animals as tokens is. Probably not allowed. They even tried to stop anything with a point on it a few years ago.

Even though he's the mentor and doesn't have to work, he still does. But it's days like this when he wishes he didn't, because he knows the faces in the crowd, the people he works with. Thyme, the niece of the now infamous Rue. Everybody treats her family with a kind of awed respect and she's surrounded by a bunch of loyal best friends, all holding onto each other's hands. Thyme looks up at the stage, her slim build and her stance - like a bird about to take off - immediately reminiscent of her auntie. Or of what he's been told of her auntie.