Living Lies ✜ Hunger Games x Reader

Silence

"I'm just following directions, (Y/n). I can't just disregard whatever the President of District 13 is telling me."

"Since when are you practical?"

"Alright, that's it," Haymitch huffs in frustration, running a hand over his face. "You're impossible. I'll come talk to you whenever you've got your head back on right."

Flopping back onto your bed, you cover your eyes with your hands as the door clicks shut. Picking up the nearest pillow and sending it flying towards the wall next to the door, you let out a screech and rake a hand violently through your hair, feeling a hint of your anger satiated by the sound of glass breaking as it hits the floor. Relieved, you don't bother to look at the mess on the floor which you'll have to clean up, except this time, unlike after you found out Peeta wanted to be coached alone, you won't have a friendly avox to help clean it up.

You cling to the pillow still lying on your bed, crushing it against your chest like a lifeline and curling into a ball around it. You bury your face into the fabric, both relishing in and despising your solitude, sobs muffled by the only comfort you can find.

***

"Do I really have to watch this?" you mumble to yourself as you're led into the surveillance room where you were just a week prior, having a break down. President Coin has called for your presence at the publicly televised announcement of the theme for the Quarter Quell, and it's not as if Haymitch will let you turn her down. Even when he's all the way back in District 12 he dictates your life.

Today is the day when Katniss, Prim, Peeta, and the rest of District 12 and all of Panem will find out about it, just as you did a few days prior. But it hasn't even been that long—at least it seems that way to you—and now they're announcing it to the entire country. Yes, Prim is being reaped again. Yes, you failed to protect her.

Not like there's much you can do though, being dead and all.

It makes you sick. They're playing the Capitol's game. As much as you've come to like (or not completely despise) Effie Trinket, you can't help but still feel disgusted at the show they insist on putting on. They'll still put that one little lonely paper with the name Primrose Everdeen on it into the Reaping Ball and pull it out, and read it dramatically in front of the entirety of the dolled up district who will roll their eyes and sniffle. Maybe give a three finger salute or two.

Even District 13's playing the Capitol's game. To be completely honest, you have no clue what they're waiting for. An opportune time? They've been waiting 75 years. What more are they looking for? There might not ever be an opportune time to ignite a second rebellion.

But instead, they drag you kicking and screaming into their mess and force you to sit through the torture of knowing things that you don't want to before they happen, and then make you sit back and watch it burn.

If this were a normal Games, and you simply knew the Ball was rigged to draw Prim's name, you could take heart in one thing. There would be only one consolation—you know for a fact Prim wouldn't be going into that arena. Katniss wouldn't let her. But she would go herself.

However, it's not a normal games.

Prim's name will be drawn, the only one to be offered, and since only another tributes that have survived past the Reaping can volunteer, technically nobody can, and therefore nobody will. And quite frankly, you're not looking forward to having to explain the whole situation to your friends back home.

Why all of this sudden talk of returning back to District 12?

Simple. Easy. Because you are.

Not because Haymitch or Coin or Plutarch or anybody else said you could, but because you want to. Need to. Have to.  So tonight, you've decided, is when you make an attempt at escape.

In your mind, it's simply not a choice that had to be thought over to be made. It was a choice that was made as soon as Haymitch shut the door in your face, alone, frustrated, muttering about how impossible you are as he frolicked off to District 12. There was never a decision making process in the choice. And for the first time in a long time—it was a guilt free one.

Everybody in the restricted halls in District 13 is so stiff. Uptight. Formal. "Miss (Y/l/n," "Ma'am," "Miss". You haven't heard your actual name in a while. Everybody who addresses you, or rather, addressed you by your first name isn't around—or thinks that you're dead.

The members of the hall staff that helped escort you from your bedroom to the surveillance/monitor room have the eyes and ears of a hawk. There's no slipping past them. But maybe you don't have to. 

Your best considered plan right now, is possibly also the most reckless. As soon as the program starts, and President Snow's hideous face rolls onto the surveillance monitor, you will excuse yourself to use the restroom down the hall.

Surely no hall monitor will have a quarrel with that, right?

You hope not. As soon as you're sure the hall is devoid of any and all staff, you will enter through the door across the hall from the restroom and go down the staircase into a few levels below—where they don't quite know that you're currently alive and residing in their very own District 13 (conveniently).

Now, you've noticed that oddly, there seems to be quite a few avoxes that hang around the compound. From what you've gathered from common nosiness at its best via eavesdropping, apparently quite a few have made their way into District 13's neck of the woods, magically.

Whether they were aided in their escape or wondrously managed to pull it off on their own, you're not sure. But you do know that of the ones that don't stay within the sanction of the compound, some of the current members of District 13 will help with getting said avoxes back to their former home in one of the Districts.

So, who's going to say no to a teenage avox girl with pretty (e/c) eyes when she mutely explains (through writing on paper, of course) that she has to return to District 12 immediately to find her family—if they're still alive? 

You pat the tightly pulled (h/c) bun on the top of your head, poking in a few stray hairs, and press through a the small gathered crowd, heading for the doorway as soon as you hear the drone of Snow's voice.

It's either pretend to be silent so that you can help Prim, or stay silent for real, and do nothing at all.