shenevermisses | 11th Throw

11th Throw - [ written ]

[There are too many nightmares. Too many nights spent thrashing herself awake. Sometimes she fully wakes Cato, sometimes she just has to assure him she's okay before he fall back asleep. She's tried to run, she's tried to just go as far as she can, she's tried to roll over and go back to sleep. She can't ignore it, she can't escape it, she can't get over it.

So, late at night or early in the morning, she opens her journal.

She's tired but wide awake. It's a kind of exhaustion, really. She doesn't know how many people will see this, but she wants to ask.]

The Malnosso are always fighting their war, right? There's always battles and killing.

Is there any way to volunteer? To join them? I want to. There has to be a way, so I want to know.

As long as I'm fighting, I don't have nightmares.

[After about two hours, she'll strike out the entire last sentence. It's too private, too personal. It was stupid to ever write it, but at least it will be gone. Some of them have seen it, but she can deny it later. Sort of.]

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Let me ask you something - do you feel compelled to offer favors to everyone who imprisons you without asking first, or is this kind of a one-time deal?

If someone else gave me everything I get here when I had nowhere else to go, yes, I would consider myself in their debt.

You're not hard to please.

No, I'm not.

I like it here. I'd like to get out of the enclosure, see more of the world, but I like it here, and I want to be useful to the people who brought me here.

Even though they use you? Experiment on you? Force children to fight?

[Katniss has told much of the story. Maybe he didn't see it, but it's been said, and she's never shied away from telling anyone. So she'll tell it again.

She doesn't write it. She turns on the recording function. There's something about hearing it.]

What was once "North America" was savaged by disasters. Economic, natural. Bit by bit, it fell apart. A new nation rose from the ashes-- Panem. The Capitol and thirteen districts supported one another. The Capitol oversaw the districts, who provided vital supplies to the Capitol and each other.

District Thirteen rose up, and its citizens incited the rest of Panem into rebellion against the Capitol. For years, the war left people without food, homes, divided and killed families.

The Capitol destroyed Thirteen, and the rest of the districts laid down their arms. They wrote and signed the Treaty of Treason, to ensure that the Dark Days would never return, that they would never try and strike again at the Capitol, who had protected them and now forgave them.

Part of the Treaty was the Hunger Games. Every year, each district offers one young man and one young woman between the ages of twelve and eighteen to go to the Capitol, be trained, and enter an arena. They are armed, given supplies, and can gain sponsors, who can send them more of either once in the arena. These twenty-four young people are the pride and honor of their districts, and they compete in the arena to be the lone victor, the one survivor. The victor wants for nothing the rest of his or her life, bathed in riches and the attention of the Capitol. Their district has food and luxuries for the year, until the next Games, and they still have their Victor, whose money supports the district. The Games remind us what war can do, the hardships that it can entail, and the Victor reminds us of the ability to survive and the mercy of the Capitol.

This is how we remember our past, this is how we safeguard our future.

[She pauses a moment for the familiar line... then she continues. She has to keep talking. She can't stop now. If he's tired of listening to her, he can stop. But she will finish.]

I was chosen to represent District Two in the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games. I was proud and eager to go. That year, the Capitol showed even more mercy: They agreed to crown two victors if they came from the same district. Out of twenty-four tributes, I was the nineteenth to die.

[There is no emotional reaction there, not from her. It doesn't matter. She can't let it matter.]

To be armed in the Games, you had to win the race to the Cornucopia. Survive the initial onslaught while other people tried to claim supplies and weapons there. It was always a bloodbath.

Here, they give us weapons before we even start.

In the Games, only one person lived. Alliances were all temporary; you always knew you'd break them because you had to be the one to survive to go home.

Here, you can protect someone else. You have to go if they tell you to, but you don't have to fight.

I like it better here.

Edited 2012-11-11 06:06 (UTC)

[The details of her world aren't completely foreign to him - he's heard bits and pieces of this story, assumed things from what he'd witnessed in Katniss' paranoia. But there's something about the way she owns it, the way that she doesn't even hesitate over mentioning her own death that gives him pause. It's like she welcomed it as a fact of life, something unavoidable - and maybe in a world like that, it wasn't. But he wouldn't accept that as right. Or a good reason to want to thank the Malnosso for what they'd done. He could never see it that way. But he does understand, a little. Why it would seem that way coming from her perspective. It isn't easy to accept, but it maybe makes sense.]

Yeah, well - you're one of the few. But it sounds like you already know that.

If I didn't, I'd have learned pretty quick.

Ever considered thinking outside the box? Not just picking one path or the other, but making your own? You might try it. It's a lot more fun than doing someone else's dirty work, I guarantee you that.

So, "don't think like you do, think like I do."

Think like yourself. You might be surprised how that works out for you.

[She's obviously strong-willed. She'd pick an interesting future, if this place lets her have one.]

But not the way I'm thinking now.

Because there's no way I'm thinking for myself because I like it here and want to help the Malnosso. Who've given me a lot. More than the people in charge at my world would.

That's definitely not thinking like myself, even though everyone seems to disagree. Has to be an opinion I got from somewhere else, not myself. Right. I'll work on that.

[She's not the girl she was in her interview at the Capitol. She's not sweet with a touch of sass. She's angry, hurt, confused, and looking for something to strike out against. She can't stab anything with her knives, can't rip into flesh and sever spinal cords. She can't fight physically, so she has to fight verbally.

She's a seventeen-year-old girl who died at sixteen. Who was forced to fight to the death. Who almost went home but died instead. Who has to -- like someone mentioned on the draft -- figure out what to do with a second chance. Who has to learn how to live a life without the Games.

And that's where the fighting comes in. She's good at it. And she owes the Malnosso. This is what she knows, what she wants. And like hell she's letting anyone take it away from her. Especially a hypocrite, telling her in one breath that she's wrong to want to help the Malnosso and in the next that she has to think for herself.

She is. This is what she wants. And since she can't fight for it with blades, she will lash out. Ineffective as it is. It's something. It's more than she could do in Panem.]

[This gives him pause, because he realizes what he's walked into, how contradictory his words might sound. And they did. He was a walking contradiction - that was nothing new. He thrived on that, on being unpredictable, on relying on a variety of dependent variables to act and react.

But she doesn't have the benefit of knowing him, and he knows how it must sound. Think like me and think like yourself. A straight-up contradiction.]

I know how it sounds. Maybe what you should be asking yourself is what you want. [Which is a little too personal for him to ask right out. They'd only talked, what - once before? He wasn't going to take a personal risk on someone he barely knew, much as he didn't get her apparent devotion to the Malnosso. He didn't get that one bit.] After everything they do, all the people they willfully hurt here - you still want to be on their side?

Because no one who doesn't like them hurts people? Then you're not going to be very effective, are you?

[She thinks of all the people on the draft. The ones who protected the infected draftees but let the cultists die or actively killed them. Intentional harm.

She thinks of what she knows about the Dark Days. The ones who rose against the Capitol and fought a bloody war for probably the same ideas he's talking about. Intentional harm.]

So. I shouldn't want to hurt anyone ever. I should just sit around and do nothing for either side. Because if you don't want to side with people who've intentionally hurt other people and who would do it again? You don't want me on your side.

I like it here. They've given me everything.

So. Yeah. I want to be on their side.

That isn't what I said.

[People got hurt all the time, and he knew as well as anyone that there were plenty who hated the Malnosso who had also hurt - killed - other people. But there was a difference.]

Sometimes you have to make that call. [But. When it was right to hurt someone was a whole other can of worms he didn't want to get into. Too personal.] War isn't the only answer. We have more options here than to fight with them or against them. Food for thought.

I don't care about other options. I know what I want to do. I know what makes me feel useful.

We'll see how well that works out for you then, won't we.

We will.

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11th Throw - [ written ]

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