Cage me like an animal • F Odair¹ •

XXI

"this country doesn't work the way I thought it did"

•∘♛∘•

Athena Maris had been to Victor's Village before. When Athena was very young, the instructors at the academy would take her and the other trainees her age on a field trip of sorts to the Village. They would walk down the lane between the tall, elegant marble houses, with the instructors telling them with a put-on sort of flourish that this could be all theirs if they brought pride to the district in the arena. They even got a tour of one of the unoccupied houses, able to get a better look at how beautiful the houses were on the inside as well as the outside. The house felt cold and unfeeling and indifferent to Athena then, and it felt the same way to her years later, even after living in it for over a month now. She didn't know how she remembered that her new house was the exact same one they went inside during those trips, but she was certain of it. They had tried to move her, her mother, and her sister into a house which had been abandoned when its old inhabitant had died several years before, but she had flat-out refused. Athena Maris had enough ghosts to be getting on with without having to worry about the ghost of the old victor who had lived there once.

Maybe it came from living in the same, relatively small house for seventeen years, but she didn't like how big this house was at all. She, her mother, and Calypso all had their own bedroom, and there were still three bedrooms that went unused. The rooms were all big, wide and spacious, even when they had brought in all their old furniture and bought new ones depending on what needed to be replaced, and she had no idea what she was supposed to do with all the extra space. And somehow, even with how much bigger and more spacious this house was, she felt like she was suffocating more than she ever had in her old house. She had begun doing more housework than she had ever willingly done before. It was a way for her to keep busy, and Athena liked keeping busy.

Now, Athena sat on the foot of her bed in her bedroom (another strange thing was that she got the master bedroom; she had tried to tell the Peacekeepers who helped with the move to put her mother's stuff there instead, but they had just looked at her and said, "It's your house, not hers." Athena had meant to switch their stuff, but when it came to it, she found that none of them cared much at all; none of the rooms felt like home anyway), staring blankly ahead of her. She was in a plain, long-sleeved black dress that fell just past her knees and shoes to match. Today was the day of her father's funeral. Everything had been accommodated for; she had paid for everything, planned everything (Calypso was too young, her mother too heartbroken, and the rest of her father's family had died long ago, leaving only her), painstakingly carved out the path. Today they would walk it.

She supposed it was quite an accomplishment that she had managed to plan and arrange the funeral in a little over a month, considering all the other responsibilities she had had to attend to as soon as she was back. There had been the obligatory celebrations. A banquet for the victor to which only the highest ranking officials had been invited. A holiday for the whole district with free food and entertainment sent in from the Capitol. Parcel Day, the first of twelve, in which food packages were delivered to every single person in the district. Parcel Day was easily one of Athena's favourite parts of being a victor. She had always felt rather isolated in this rich district by her need to apply for Tesserae to support her family, but she knew she wasn't the only one in Four who needed the help. After all, District Four might have been rich in comparison to other districts in Panem, but it was the poorest of the Career districts, and any luxury District Four knew was nothing in comparison to the luxury they lived in in the Capitol. Knowing that the people who needed it would be guaranteed a little extra food twelve times throughout the year, would have cans of applesauce, tins of meat, bags of grain, cans of oil, and even candy for them to eat was something about which Athena could actually feel good.