Worth it | F.O.

IX

The moment Nivea stepped from the room confining her for the last who-knew-how-long that felt, in truth, like an eternity, she received more attention than she ever had in her life.

It was funny, bitterly so, she thought. All of her life she had known she had been blessed with good looks, or at least wasn't too terribly ugly, but she still had received little to no attention. But the second someone slathered makeup on her skin to cover every little imperfection and she wore the, quite frankly most revealing thing she had ever worn, it was as if she suddenly did exist. 

How infuriating. 

Harsh fluorescent lights passed by with each step she took down the hall in the direction Laetitia had instructed her to go after having finally escaped the crowd of oohing and aahing prep teams. Nivea's skin pricked from the harsh cold of the metal that surrounded her, along with the smell that tainted everything around and worsened her current mood with an impenetrable darkness. Her clicking velvety forest green heels remained the only thing that truly anchored her to reality in a hall as empty, silent, and lonely as this. She was simply silent in nearly every aspect along with it and had found a kind of angry peace in it, if that made sense (which it didn't). 

In her trek she kept her head high, missing the way her hair had once covered her neck and prevented the goosebumps that now sprung forth, and instead attempted to focus on enjoying the unbearable pain of having her hair pulled so tightly into the way it was now. It seemed to take forever to reach the door at the end and, in that forever, since she had not particularly been preparing to walk so much, her ankles wobbled more with each step than the last and her fingers even began to ache with how she had to keep her overly unnecessary skirt from getting caught underfoot. 

A taxing task it was for the section of skirt she could reach did not at all billow like the bottom. The Capitol typically prefered to sexualize their tributes during this grand first event and she was no different. The dress she wore clung as much as it possibly could given the amount of fabric and skin contact it was given to work with. That meant it made it even harder to walk than it would have with simply the dastardly shoes to deal with alone. 

But it was only there that it did cling as it did. With every step the one leg that remained mostly hidden behind golden lace became exposed with the highlighted muscles that she believed needed no highlighting considering how rigorous her training schedule was. 

Her entire dress was made of fabrics she hadn't ever heard of before let alone seen, expertly crafted by some child or adult in a factory of District 8. It was an ensemble of yellow and gold complementing her very skin tone and going along flawlessly with the ribbon woven into the surprisingly casual bun arranged neatly beyond her range of vision, silks and laces respectively. 

She hadn't before seen how it had anything to do with agriculture but, after being urged by Laetitia to pay more attention as if she didn't already too much, she noticed how the patterns of the lace resembled that of the many produce she and District 11 worked all year long to harvest, season after season. But when asked about the yellow and gold, her stylist had shrugged and mentioned again the beauty in simplicity, suggesting it was to work with the ribbon she had worn at the reaping. And, Nivea had been told, if anyone were to question it she could say it was meant to represent a lemon as the jewelry sending further shivers down her arms would help to enforce that excuse. It was also a color they figured would go wonderfully with her darker skinned district partner's complexion. 

When Nivea finally did reach the door that had begun to seem like a mirage, finger scratching under the small lace choker around the base of her neck in an attempt to deal with it before she had to do so publicly, she rested the other hand on the cold metal. A deep breath filled both her lungs and confidence to full capacity and, with the slightest pressure of her hand, it creaked open into the space in which she would meet her victims for the first time.