Swallowtail.

I've torn the good wing off myself

             Here's a lesson about games...
        
            A: Mercy is a child's rule.

            There is no clemency for a young woman with blood on her palms, a girl who embeds her sharpest edges into the softest things. There is a girl who is not a girl, a girl who knows that love is not so much a state of being as it is the act of surrendering. When she was born in District Four her name was about the water gods, about her gilded hair, being a cherished daughter but now, in the Capitol, as an imposter among the game-makers and spectators — it is simply strife. The whole of Panem knows this spectacle made flesh as the incomparable Eris Snow.

It's not enough that, publicly, she is the peach of the president's eye; yet all that cyanide at her core is not lost on her grandfather. Capitol residents don't blink an eye at the tranquillizing amount of liquor that the Capitol Gem forces down her throat or the extravagant clothes that she wears like a soldier wears chainmail. Neither does her grandfather. Because Coriolanus Snow knows who he looks at when he looks at the bearer of the name Eris — it is not the true Eris, his daughter's darling dearest dead golden girl, but the other one. The result of Sulpicia Snow and her dalliance with a man from District Four. The one named for water gods and golden hair who's entire existence made the President wroth enough to ensure the punishment was to bury whoever Seanán Odair was and let Eris Snow be all that will come out on top...

The punishment doesn't end there. Her mother might be kept away in the mansion delirious from Morphling, but her half-brother is her most grievous sin. It is Finnick's face that Eris cannot bear to look at most times — not when Snow killed the father they shared, calculated the reaping of her brother at fourteen, made it so he won, only to force him into a life that makes Eris recognize she will never know what it is to forgive her own existence.

She refuses however, to believe mercy, in all its forms, is too out of reach for her. Eris might be a puppet now, tangled in the president's strings for his vilest biddings but one day all that poison he spews is going to kill him in the way years of mithridatic tendencies won't allow it to hurt her. Because hope has risen where it usually goes to die. It starts like some goddamn tragedy that the spectators just devour — a voluntary lamb and carnivorous boy walk into the spotlight and the shift is so palpable, Eris can taste it. Who ever forgets the taste of blood in their mouth? 

      This is how rebellion begets revolution.

      Because now, right before them all, is a young woman called Eris who leaves bodies behind on an order, but perhaps more wickedly, breaks twice as many hearts. There is a girl who is no longer idle; a girl who toys, frighteningly, with the notion of growing fond of Peeta Mellark to the point where it becomes an irreversible problem. There is a girl who morphs with the silhouette she's given — for the better, sometimes for the worse. (It is always for the worse...)

       This, you proclaim to Panem, is Seanán Odair.

       It's time they pay for knowing it.

OR: Armor, and when to put it on.