Dew of the Sea [Finnick Odair]

[01. The Mellark Siblings]

Rosemary

Bread and circuses.

Rosemary was fascinated by etymology. Words had meaning, they had weight, and they had emotion. They had the power to unite, to destroy, to inspire, and to harm. Words, language, human communication; it was one thing that every single person in Panem had in common.

Most importantly, words created knowledge and Rosemary had always, always had a thirst for knowledge.

She was three when her father taught her how to read. Sage Mellark always liked to brag on his daughter, how his middle child had begun to read before anyone else in her age group. She was three and all of a sudden, she knew the letters of the alphabet, knew how to string together the words she had picked up from her family's vocabulary, and knew how to keep going. She was three and she could read better than her brother, two years older, and was soon helping him stumble through short storybooks that they loaned from the small library on the square.

Rosemary was five when it was discovered by her first teacher that she could remember almost everything that she had ever read. She could remember a recipe from one of her father's cookbooks, she could remember how to subtract and add like her brother's textbook told her, she could remember every single word of her favorite book, The Discovery of Stars. She was five when her parents realized that Rosemary couldn't just hear something and remember it, but she had to physically read it in order for that information to stay permanently. She could forget where she set her toothbrush the night before (where it always was, settled next to her brothers' in the bathroom), but she couldn't forget the hundredth number of pi.

Throughout the years, she read her way through hundreds of books on various topics, even the boring manuals in the library that had to be at least a thousand years old. In fact, she had to slow down her reading by the time she was eligible for the Reaping, as it seemed that the modest amount of forbidden books kept in the basement under the family bakery had run out, and so had the library's selection of non-banned books. So, she focused on other things, other hobbies.

Rosemary was ten when she found the book in her basement that told her all about etymology, about how language was created and how it changed throughout time. Mostly, she loved the meaning behind names. Onomatology. Her name, her neighbor's name, one of the Victors from District 5's name, and even President Snow's name.

Coriolanus–A victorious battle named after an ancient general across the ocean.

This curiosity, her hobby, led her to the meaning of Panem's name. Bread and circuses.

She always thought the name fit, especially if one studied the last few decades that the Capitol called their "peaceful era". Each year, for the past seventy years, there would be Panem's circus, the Hunger Games. And each year, the Capitolites gorged themselves on the food that the Districts provided them, watching as Tributes (that the Districts provided them) became murderers or the murdered. Bread and circuses were certainly something that was familiar.