Worth it | F.O.

II

In a future not many of us would like to truly live, there existed a place known as Panem. It was truly futuristic, a true wonder made up of a number of districts and their master of sorts. Of course, in making such a place, they felt the need to round the number of those districts off to a traditional 12. However, if one wanted to get overly factual, that was not always the case.

Every person who lived there and supported the way the world worked pretended it had always been that way, that there had never been a District 13, but in truth there was one once. They just preferred to leave out the one that had been destroyed by their beloved home. The only time it was ever referenced was as a ghost town and message of to what measures the discipline would reach for disobedience. But that certainly wasn't all.

As most places as this with an abundance of extreme suffering and death, they had a ruler: the Capitol.

The people of the Capitol were an entirely different breed from that of the districts, both by preference and the ingrained perspective of how it was always supposed to be. They seemed to lack decent morals, with their dramatic hairdos and over the top makeup that had the uncanny potential to change the very color of their skin to something not even remotely natural nor pleasant to the eye. But the worst part of all of their ways was the Hunger Games. The games were brutal, bloody, and overall generally heartless despite how those people claimed to love the tributes so.

Teenagers were sent to die and they only lounged on their luxurious sofas with their warm blankets and bags of popcorn in their dyed hands, viewing the loss of innocence as as simple of a sport as soccer.

That, my friends, was what Nivea Vida knew she was getting into now.

She, a born rebel, took a step back on a stage viewed by all of those on their couches with their blankets, their popcorn, and their freedom. But there were others that watched as well, those people of the districts sitting huddled together beneath rags for the law that forbade them from missing a second of the mindless slaughter of their children and that very same committed by the ones that they had helped grow only to end with a fate such as this. Her hands were tightly clasped together behind her back and she didn't bother with diluting the intensity of her stare pinned on the cameras, tranquility somehow drifting through her veins.

She redirected her attention back onto their Capitol escort, a woman much worse than those at home, bright blue hair bobbing as Olethia lowered her head to speak into the mic. Her voice, Capitol and chirpy, echoed over the crowd that was District 11, "Now for the boys!"

Pity swirled in her stomach at the announcement whilst Olethia crossed the expansive stage over to a large glass bowl nearly filled to the brim with neatly folded slips of paper. Each slip contained letters that worked together in a sick kind of harmony to spell out their very deaths and there was simply no avoiding it. Nivea watched intently as her hand dove into all of the names of those young boys who had taken out countless tesseraes for their starving families. A perfectly manicured hand soon withdrew with a single slip of paper held between her thumb and index finger. As the woman born and raised in the ways of the Capitol crossed back to the microphone, she seemed determined to drag it out with an act as simple as unfolding a slip of paper.

The name of the boy Nivea would soon be required to kill rang out into thickening silence, "Crop Ilanis!"

A father cried out in the back. From her vantage point where she stood above them all, Nivea watched as he fell to his knees and enfolded who she assumed was Crop's little sister into a tight hug. There went another family, torn apart.

She waited for the boy himself to make his presence known and, as pressure-filled silence dragged on, it seemed Olethia's impatience was rising with hers. She leaned back down to the silver mic and repeated his name, chipper as could ever be but the slightest bit firmer in her beckoning. That was when the section of 16 year old boys stepped aside to reveal one amongst their midst with darker skin than her own, though most definitely not as dark as some, with his mouth hanging open.