And that was the thing about her, she kept on surviving. With bullet holes in her lungs and knife marks etched in her back. She never let anything get in her way, resilient. A fighter, not by choice. But a warrior at heart.
| the hunger games |
| pr...
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I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air. My muscles are clentched tight against the cold. I should get up, move around, and wokr the stiffness from my limbs. But instead I sit, motionless as the rock beneath me, while the dawn begins to lighten the field. I can't fight the sun. I can only watch helplessly as it drags me into a day that I've been dreading for months.
By noon they will all be at my new house in the Victor's Village. The reporters, the camera crew, even Mica Blake, my old escort, will have made their way to Distroct 9 from the Capitol. I wonder if Mica will still be wearing that silly pink wig, or if she'll be sporting some other unnaurtal color especially for the Victory Tour. There will be others waiting, too. A staff to cater to my every need on the long train trip. A prep team to beautify me for public appearances. My stylist, Teak, who designed the gorgeous outfits that first mdade the audience take notice of me in the Hunger Games.
If it were up to me, I would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream. But the Victory tour makes that impossible. Strategically placed almost midway between the annual Games, it is the Capitol's way of keeping the horror freshers and immediate. Not only are we in the districts forced to remember the iron grip of the Captiol's power each year, we are forced to celebrate it. And this year, I am the star of the show. I will travel from district to district, to stand before the cheering crowds who secretly loathe me, to look down into the faces of the families whose children i have killed...
The sun persists in rising, so I make myself stand. All my joints complain and my left leg has been asleep for so long that it takes several minutes of pacing to bring feeling back into it. I've been on the porch of my house for three hours, but I've made no real attempt to go anywhere. My mother can now afford to buy butcher meat in town and she can buy us new clothes.
By the time I actually start moving, the sun is well up. We still get to keep our home becuase techinally it is still the designated dwelling of my mother. If I should drop dead right now, she would have to return to it. But at present, she is happily installed in the new house in the Victor's Village, and I'm the only one who uses the squat little place where I was raised. To me, it's my real home.
I go there now to swtch my clothes. Exchange my father's old leather jacket for a fine wool coat that always seems too tight in the shoulders. Leave my soft, worn boots for a parir of expensive machine-made shoes that my mother thinks are more appropriate for someone of my status. Although time is ticking away, I allow myself a few minutes to sit in the kitchen. It has an abandoned quality with no fire hearth, no cloth on the tables. I mourn my old life here. We barely scraped by, but I knew where I fit in, I knew what my place was in the tighly interwoven fabric tht was our life. I wish I could go back to it because, in retrospect, it seems so secure compared with now when I am so rich and so famous and so hated by the authorities in the Capitol.
