Author Games: Return To Seasons

Task Eight: Seasons Change/F - MagmaKepner [3]

District 12 Female - NEVE OPHANIM [3]

The metallic taste of blood filled her mouth. She was young. She was armed. Since the dawn of time, Neve thought that adults always tried to get the younger, stronger, ones, to do the work that they did not want to do. It was no different now. Her gun itched her side just like the gun at her head made the blood in her mouth taste like the bullets that were loaded in it. They wanted a show was what they said; they wanted to spark hope in the citizens by showing them that their own Victor was helping the cause of the rebellion. A complete overthrow was what Rudy had told her. She didn’t want to participate. Quite frankly, she wanted to curl up and mourn the loss of her friends and family and life and youth. She did not, in fact, want to kill the head Gamemaker. But the metal was cold against her head, and with cameras flickering between her young face and the shocked people at the table, she felt herself raise the gun. She did what they wanted. They promised her safety in exchange. But promises were always broken.

She was old now. Aged and greying with nothing but a thin line between her and death. She was back home, and had been since the end of the rebellion, since the end of her youth, but home was just a word. Home was where one’s heart was, and Neve’s heart had slowly shrivelled into numbing invisibility over the years. Neve Ophanim, once bright-eyed with the hope for the future and no moroseness for the past, was now a shell of who she formerly was. Fleeting images of the day that changed everything flickered through her mind continuously. There was no escaping her past, of her shattered dreams and hopeless existence. Nothing had changed, since then. The Head Gamemaker was dead, but life goes on. Panem could not survive without the blood of children each year. 

Now, Neve felt herself slipping even further away. People had tried to get to stop drinking, to stop crying or lying in bed or drawing stars on the walls for years. She had stopped drinking though, now spending her midlife years stuck in her home. There was barely a sound in the house now. Alone, Neve wished things could have been different. Her flings had never lasted. When she got home she had tried finding something that would be able to fix herself, but no one ever stayed. She was left more broken than before, and her former, dreamy, self had been gone for a long while. And just like herself, her home was no better.

Living on the outskirts of town, her house had not seen pruning or repainting since she had moved in. No one had bothered to come by her house, and so it was left to fall apart, to become decrepit and forgotten like her. The kitchen table at which she sat was old, and her wrinkled hands reached out to trace the engravings of stars that she had made when she was upset. Carvings dug deep into the wood that would never be repaired. It was comforting to Neve, as she stared down at the table, to know that even if the wood was scarred and damaged that it still retained its use, that it still was needed.

She was needed once, but Neve didn’t like to recall. She was needed by her family, back when she was young. When she got back home, though, they had all gone. They didn’t actually need her, in the end. The rebellion had caused them to be six feet under the cold, hard, earth. She wondered what they would say if they could see her. Sometimes, in the darkest of nights, Neve thought she could see them, floating near her and telling her how they never did anything to deserve their deaths. Of course they didn’t. No one deserved to die. Those were the nights she regretted the most. Her friends in the Games, they never needed her. She needed them, and because she relied on them, they had died. They had promised to be friends forever, but Neve wished that forever didn’t mean she had to live forever knowing they had kept their promises, and she didn’t. 

Neve knew what today was. Memories flooded her mind each year, and this year was no different. She held her head in her hands as her elbows rested on the table. She had been exempt from mentoring, ever since she had come back. She had never been promised that, but she was granted the chance to not have to see children who would have to die each year. For that, she was grateful, she supposed. She didn’t have anyone, and they didn’t give the chance to anyway.