Worth it | F.O.

I

Something other than pride pierced her heart with a kind of chill that burned so deep she could feel it down to her toes as she sat before the Capitol for her interview, Caesar across from her. Like an invisible prick. A twinge in her side that felt like ice and fire all at once. Especially as the crowd's screams echoed in the darkest parts of her mind - flinching from their lights and gesturing hands - that of Nine, Seven, Five, One, Three, the Ten's. 

So many voices and so many screams. So many scars lacing her smooth, perfect skin. So many that hung off her shoulders with a dead weight as she smiled and laughed as though she hadn't slaughtered them in cold blood. 

But there she was. They were necessary evils. For there she was, fulfilling her purpose. 

And joy filled her heart. 

“I must say, Nivea,” chuckled Caesar, hair as horridly green as she remembered. Her heart tightened at his use of her name as, for but a moment, she had forgotten how much she truly despised the Capitol and its godforsaken people. “It's been quite awhile since we've seen a game quite like yours.”

Nivea shifted and as a smile squinted her eyes, her left eyelid went aflutter. “Good,” she cheered. She allowed a smirk to break through and she tilted her head, missing how long locks had once tumbled and cascaded. “That was the intention.”

“Then congratulations are in order! Truly, you deserve a hearty round of applause, Sunshine.” He turned as his long legs in sparkling green slacks unfurled to carry him in a dance a few feet away in a show of excitement before he called to the audience, “What do you say?”

In a crashing wave of sound, they cheered for her. They hopped to their feet in a smattering of towering hair and rainbow skin, hands raised in claps of thunder. For a reason unbeknownst to her, her following grin was not one of falsity. Nor was it honest in any way. Instead it was a pretty bow to cover the tugging of strings on her every muscle in their pitiful attempt to slink away. To sink into the cushion of the chair she sat upon and disappear from their eyes and that giant screen above as if the dress she wore wasn't a beacon in of itself. 

For beneath the dazzling gold dusting her bare shoulders and the elegant mustard dress with its petal sleeves tickling the inside of her elbows, her stomach dropped with a weight of acid. To think they were cheering for all those children she had murdered. And to think they'd be doing the same if someone else had murdered her. 

It was only a matter of who survived to kill them all. For, to them, that was all the animals of the districts were worth. All they were worth. 

Above all, it made her hands itch for the trident she had weld so well just days before. She could just see the blood pouring from their bodies to drown the stadium and the entirety of the Capital beneath the sins written through their generations. But alas they still clapped and she still smiled and she had to prove how much she loved them for the gifts forced upon her. 

So she placed her hands on the armrests and gently vaulted herself out of the chair, her heels fading from yellow down to red as a mimic to the ribbon snaked around her forearm silencing the thunder shaking her bones. Stepping forward as they settled back into their seats, she wound a careful arm around Caesar's shoulders in a friendly embrace. 

“I'd thank you,” she began. She really would rather be doing anything else. “but you've already done too much. I mean-” She smirked and turned to Caesar. “-have you seen this eye?”

The tip of her finger rested below her left eye. She had no doubt the cameras had focused in when an awed kind of hushed whisper rippled through the crowd. Because in that arena they had not only taken her pride and her surety but they had also carved her eye from her skull, almost. Then the Capitol had replaced what had once been all hers with a piece of them she was forced to carry wherever she went.