▎. . . In which Noelle Lochheart is reaped for the 70th Annual Hunger Games, and her mentor Finnick Odair makes a promise to bring her home.
70th hunger games au
...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Chapter One ✶ Judgement Day
▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂
✶
Noelle Lochheart knew quite a lot about killing.
From a young age, she had known the sinful feeling of a sharp knife meeting flesh, slicing into the easy skin of a carcass and peeling back to reveal the ugly, bare bones of it all. She knew how to separate herself from the violence, how to differentiate murder from survival, choice from necessity. She knew how to hold death in her hands, but not in the way a victor did. About that, she knew nothing at all, and she never would.
"Gotcha," she whispered into the crisp morning air, hearing the seawater slosh around her legs. Her spear swiftly drove itself into the centre of her latest catch ── only a herring, not her finest work ── which had finally stilled beneath the ripples. She had been at this game of cat and mouse for over an hour now, and she was beginning to think that the fish were finally getting the memo.
The blazing Panem sunrise melted over the faraway hills, coating the horizon of District 4 in a tangy, amber hue. Hardly anybody else was awake yet, which granted her a crystal clear earful of the chirping birds and the ruffling of the evergreens against a soft breeze. This was her favourite time of day: perfect for thinking. If she wasn't always so acutely aware of the world around her, Noelle might have assumed that she was the only person in it.
Well, and her father.
"These things are getting too smart," she heard him claim drolly before she turned to see him effortlessly swinging his spear over his shoulders. He let his arms hang over it and peacefully watched the last of the fish scramble away from the giant hunter in their territory. In his whisky-coloured eyes, between the deep burgundy weight of hard work and the bright citrusy glints of sunlight, Noelle found what looked like satisfaction ── a feeling she knew didn't come easily to him.
Justice Lochheart was a generously built man, with rich muscles and a thick-set frame that spurred comparisons to a Herculean hero or a fighting bull; she faintly recalled trying to curl her entire hand around his wrist as a child, and still seeing the gap where her fingers were supposed to meet even as she grew into her teens. Noelle, of course, liked to remind him of the grey curls mixing into his dark hair, or the slight slouch he leaned into whenever he thought that nobody was watching ── to keep him young, she said ── but she had always been alert to his growing stress, especially when she had first began to dodge her way through her teenage years as if they were minefields.
