A True Tribute [Hunger Games Fanfic]

Chapter One...

Chapter One:

I wake early, and after hours of deliberation I blame the sea for my early rise. I’m grateful to it as it woke me up more than on time, but brought forth the reason for me having to wake so early, and probably the real reason why, even though I choose to ignore it. The Reaping. I force this thought to the very back of my conscious mind, and lie in bed,  for another half an hour, listening to the steady crash and roar of the waves not a hundred yards away from our small house. You can never really escape the sound here in District Four, no matter how far you are away from the sea. The smell of the salt and the fish is everywhere too, lingering in the air and on your clothes. The smell’s so familiar you only notice it when it’s gone.

Other Districts may say that Four is one of the better off Districts but there are still plenty of people without enough to eat. We own two chickens, they may seem expensive but here in Four there relatively cheap to look after and it’s considered normal to own them, in fact it’s weird if you don’t.

I stumble out of bed and into the living and dining area of our small house, located in the Harbour area of Four. The Harbour area’s occupied mainly by the sailors and fishermen of Four, with the exception of a few people, like my mother, who work in the factories where they prepare the fish for it to sent off to the blind and indifferent Capitol citizens.

Our house in particular is near the sea, on the main road that leads to the harbour, so there’s always a constant flow of people passing by and on dull days after school I will sit at our window and create stories much more interesting than what they would truly be doing. Because of this occasional hobby I know the faces of many of District Four’s working class.

On this day in particular the constant flow of people has stopped and the harbour closed, for this warm day, is the day of the reaping. In District Four the time our Reaping starts is eleven thirty in the morning and in the words of The Capitol ‘Attendance is Mandatory.’ There is no way out, unless you’re on your sickbed.

I wander out into the dinning room, take a seat at the table and my mother shoves breakfast under my nose. It takes me about a minute to realise the stuff that I’m shovelling into my is not the normal, fried or scrambled eggs from our chickens, but porridge, with bacon. I frown up at my mother and almost reading my thoughts she replies with “I thought you needed a treat given what day it is.”

“Oh” I grunt half to my porridge, not exactly reading my thoughts then, I realise the porridge is made with cheaper grain than I originally thought, maybe it was the sudden change in taste, from eggs, that lead me to believe it was otherwise.

‘A treat’ though? Sometimes I think she’s as bad as The Capitol lot with their stupid accents, although I don’t really blame her.

District Four is what’s known, by other Districts, as a ‘Career District’. This means that we have people who choose to be trained their whole lives for their moment in the limelight; being a tribute, being tossed into the arena to fight to their death. Being trained beforehand gives them a better chance at coming out the other end alive, and not in a wooden box like so many of the other competitors.

Training your tributes before their reaped is technically against the law, but we in four, along with those people in Districts One and Two, feel the need to give our children a better chance at survival, so find this an acceptable excuse, for breaking the it.

Here in my District ‘we’ choose who is going to volunteer, in place of the ‘poor unfortunate’ person whose name is picked out of the reaping bowl beforehand, so as to avoid bloodshed before the Games even begin. This District rule was introduced after the twenty sixth games when male and female Volunteers clamoured to volunteer to enter the arena, resulting in the deaths of three of them and forcing the two, who managed to succeed the struggle, to enter the arena with limb injuries. Well that’s what my Grandfather says.