shenevermisses | 22nd Throw

There are some things you just can't teach. Not after a certain point.

[She doesn't sound frustrated or upset. Just... interested, in a way.]

It's weird, in a way. Trying to teach someone to be like me and finding out that's not possible. I mean, we're doing good. Great student.

[For Rue's sake more than anything, she's not going to name her over the journals, not going to divulge what they're doing.]

But there's just something different. How we were brought up. You can't teach that.

Which I guess is why they start us young. Start training us when we're five, where I'm from. Parents who think their kids have potential agree to send them off to the Academy, where they'll only see them maybe every weekend.

Usually less than that.

From there, they weed out the undesirable. The weak, the emotional, the nervous. Every year, there are fewer students your age. By the time we're sixteen or seventeen, there's only the best left.

At that point, only the girls who are stupid enough to get pregnant get sent away.

I guess I never really thought about it, but trying to teach someone else what I grew up with? You realize that some things just can't be taught. Not after a certain point.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You don't think there's anything more important than that? What about family or friends?

[Maybe she did have all that. But considering how competitive it all sounded, he doubts that.]

Family and friends come and go. Survival is what matters where I'm from. You live or you die.

You think your world's special that way, kid? A real family's what makes survival worth it.

People here really like to assume, don't they?

What'd I assume?

[More than a few things, but he doesn't even stop to consider it.]

That I think there's anything special about my world.

If I'm rememberin' correctly, you said that survival's important "where you're from". Like that's not the case everywhere else.

...Do you think there's anything special about it?

It's not the case everywhere. Talk to people around here. Some of them are from worlds where every day's about survival. Some of them aren't.

...I'll give you that.

But I still don't see why you'd be okay going without family. Didn't you miss 'em?

Not really.

Even when I'd go home on weekends, I usually missed the Academy. Not the other way around.

Seriously? They don't sound like the best people, you know. Takin' little kids from their parents and all that. ...Though I guess the parents are to blame, too. You said they sent you there?

Our parents pay a pretty good amount of tuition for us to enroll, and it continues every year we're there. The school doesn't take us.

[Another assumption on his part. He hates losing arguments, but he supposes he should be glad that it doesn't seem as bad as he thought.]

They paid? What exactly were you there for, anyway?

To train.

We become strong, learn to use weapons and also do non-armed combat.

You pay for that? There's cheaper ways to learn that stuff.

The entire athletic program in the Academy is based around making us as deadly as we can be by seventeen or eighteen. We get our first weapons at ten, specialize at thirteen.

[...Okay, that sounds a lot more intense than what the Martillos taught him.]

Deadly? What the hell was that, hitman school?

They trained tributes for the Hunger Games -- twenty-four people went in, one came out alive.

[That shuts him up for a long moment.]

Are you fucking kidding me?

Nope. Two tributes from each district -- boy and girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Only one lives.

Twelve? And your parents sent you to that school?

In District Two, it's an honor to go to the Games. To be good enough.

I've seen some screwed up shit in my life, but that tops it all. Why the hell would you send kids off to die?

The Capitol holds the Games every year, it was part of the Treaty that ended the war.

Must've been a special sick bastard who came up with that.

voice

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