❝𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐎𝐒❞ | k. everdeen

chapter 2: lamb to the slaughter

Nola hadn't always liked the Capitol, but she had started to get used to it three years earlier. After winning the Hunger Games, a very different girl emerged from the arena than the one who had entered. Before, Nola liked to go unnoticed, she didn't like the attention, she preferred to stay in the shadows; but after dazzling the spectators and receiving support in large amounts of gifts in the arena, Nola had learned to make the most of herself, showing off, recognizing her worth and feeling that, if so many people liked her, it was for a reason.

It had taken her a while at first. She was sixteen years old, she had just killed three or four people —or even more, the first few days she had been so distracted she didn't even remember it— she had won the Hunger Games without ever having trained in her life, and, after that, she had been brutally thrown onto the stage, into the spotlight, into the flashbulbs of photographs, the leading questions of journalists, the interviews, the speeches on the Winners' Tour; and her life, having been turned into a constant spectacle, had been completely changed, thereby changing Nola herself.

Visits to the Capitol had been more frequent since her seventeenth birthday. Wealthier Districts always had an easier time catching a train and traveling directly to the Capitol, and Nola had been no exception. No one had warned her about what it meant to win being from District 2, pretty and young; maybe because no one had had the heart to tell her that her life was going to fall apart by the minute, that maybe she would have been better off dying in that arena.

The first time had been strange. Thank God her first companion had been a young man, somewhat strange, but nice to her. Nola didn't know what was supposed to happen, but seeing the suggestive gestures of the boy, with tan skin that looked fake, she understood that she was going to be used as a toy by Snow. There were times when it was better, and also worse, because Nola didn't feel like being there and yet she had to or everything she had would be affected; and alone as she lived, she couldn't allow herself to be thrown back into a life full of misfortune like the one she had before the Games.

So she had begun to take advantage of it. Despite being loaded to the gills and having a huge mansion to herself, she was attending dinners with exquisite and expensive menus in the Capitol, drinking bottles of champagne as if it were water, dazzling her companions to buy her exquisite, fine and tremendously elegant pieces of clothing, jewelry, shoes, accessories, even paying for some aesthetic treatments that, to tell the truth, the young Nola did not need. However, she had become so accustomed to the glittering makeup of the Capitol inhabitants that she sometimes caught herself wearing it.

It was late winter when she was returning from her latest excursion to the Capitol. She returned with two bags full of designer clothes, and this time she didn't return by train, but rather her latest flirt had hired a private plane just for her, which dropped her off at her own home plot. She waved to some of the victors who were in their gardens, taking advantage of the fact that the sun was beginning to melt the snow to enjoy the incipient warmth of March. Some of them understood where she was coming from, and without wanting to meddle in her affairs, simply nodded.

—The kids came home from school saying that there was a mandatory program on TV tonight— one of her neighbors, Dros she thought his name was, warned her—. With all this talk about District 12, they probably want to quell the rumors with messages of peace and unity.

Nola thanked him for the warning with a nod, but thought that the last thing Snow would do would be to encourage unity, but rather start with small warnings that would turn into terrible threats. The act of rebellion, conscious or unconscious on Katniss's part, had fanned a flame in the population that would be difficult to extinguish. The Victors of all the Districts had a privileged position, set apart from the rest of the citizens, and even so, they knew that Katniss Everdeen's gesture had provoked uprisings, strikes and other scandals in some Districts.