Illicit Affairs ☆ Sejanus Plinth

One ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

"The Tribute"

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

The smiling face of Dolon Craddel would normally provide Winter with a sense of relief but today it did not.

The second her eyes found him in the busy room her stomach dropped and she felt her knees grow weak. Good things did not follow when he was around, especially on Reaping Day. Despite graduating from the Academy last year, Dolon and Winter had managed to stay good friends, she continued with her last year of studies and he took up a job as the assistant of the infamous Dr. Volumnia Gaul. Him being here meant that she couldn't be far behind and that's what invoked the reaction from the girl.

In her eighteen years of life, she had yet to come across someone who unsettled her the way Dr. Gaul did. She was a twisted woman who took pleasure in the pain that the Hunger Games caused the people in the districts, spending the year between each plotting something more vile and heinous than before to throw at them.

She had sunk her venomous claws into Winters father and the man was too weak to resist, allowing himself to be controlled by her puppeteer-ing hands. She knew Gaul had been watching her, she knew that the woman wanted to have full control over her in the same way she did her father, collect them like sought after prizes to display on a shelf, but she put up a fight. She refused to be a part of such a monstrous thing, the Hunger Games destroyed people's lives, not only in the District's but here in the Capitol too. Her family was a shining example of that.

Her father, Casa Highbottom, the Dean of the Academy, had been the one to create the Games. It had been a mistake. A simple assignment given to him by Dr Gaul during his time at the university, it had never been intended to see the light of day. The betrayal of Crassus Snow had been his downfall, it saw his darkest thoughts be made reality, and he had only been declining since, relying on morphling to help shield himself from the true impact of his actions. He had become a joke to the students of the Academy who often called him 'High-as-a-Kite Bottom', a name Coriolanus Snow had cleverly coined. The board of the Academy were loosing patience with him, his health was declining and he was just pathetically waiting for the day his heart would give out.

Her mother, Gaia, had been a saint, a prominent rose in a bushel of thorns, and had once been a happy, loving woman, that was until the first Hunger Games. She had been told it was a game show, the content of which has not been disclosed to her until she watched as children were forced into an arena to fight for their lives. It had killed her. She became burdened with the grief of all the mothers forced to send their children to their deaths at the hands of the man she had loved. Haunted by thoughts of 'what if it had been Winter?'. Her home, a place she had once been proud of, had become a graveyard, and the thought of this continuing with her family's name at the forefront only made it worse. When she died Winter felt a part of her, the part that made her think being a Highbottom wasn't so bad, die, too.