Living Lies ✜ Hunger Games x Reader

Double Threat

(A/N: So I'm going to put my author's note here, so as not to disrupt the suspense ending *dun dun DUNNNNN* (just kidding), but I feel as if I should get my apology done now. School is starting back up and, ugh, I don't even want to think about that. But with more structure should come scheduled updates, so whoo hoo!  I hope you enjoy this long time coming update, and stick around for more. 

You may proceed.

-Jay

*****

Lavinia might not have been able to talk, granted, but she was better company than you've have in weeks. Ever since Haymitch left to "put in a few appearances back home in District 12 so people don't get suspicious" your day to day life has been filled with the blank stares of motionless hall monitors and the cold deadpans of Miss Frost Hair of District 13. Being around somebody who genuinely seems to care about your well being—and, well, being completely honest, doesn't just see you as a pawn on a chess board—is a crisp breath of fresh air.

Lavinia liked to communicate. Not speak, obviously, but she enjoyed (as she had described it during one of your earlier paper talks), "the capability to exchange words and meanings and information with another person."

As a person who had been starved of that kind of connection with people, Lavinia understood the beauty of such a simple privilege. She believed it was one of the many reasons the Capitol did what they did.

"It is one thing to take away a person's ability to speak—their freedom to do so. But it is another to put them among others as slaves, where they are so close to another person but have the knowledge that they can't be with them. It's like looking through a two way mirror. Cut off from somebody, everybody, like you don't exist, but you're still there, and you can see everything, like a ghost. It's torture."

District 13's land coverage is quite expansive, or at least it is from what you'd learned. The flight from the compound headquarters to the Capitol was long and tedious, causing you to alternate between sleeping and striking up a "conversation with Lavinia". When the paper supply ran low between the two of you, she decided it would be easier to simply teach you some basic hand symbols from the sign language she knew for little talking.

These signs often meant many things. Only one might mean "I am hungry and I wish to eat". Or another important one means "there is danger, we must be quiet and leave", expressed through bumping a two fingered fist on top of the other clenched hand. Lavinia stressed the importance of that one in particular.

Learning her language slowly passed time effectively and you were soon able to communicate in broken gestures without getting odd looks from other avoxes onboard.

Not that you minded conversing with the redheaded avox, and quite frankly there wasn't much else to do. The only idea to pass the time that came to mind was singing, and that was absolutely out of the question, as you have to maintain a cover and can't talk let alone sing. So when Lavinia got tired, and signed that she was "tired and I am going to sleep, good –night", you would try and practice the new language as much as you could, but soon it too would bore you or you would start to worry that you were somehow practicing it wrong and wait for her assistance. It was during one of these times in which you resorted to tapping out an old District 12 folk song on your knees. Or the chair. Or the elbow rest. It didn't matter where, you would tap the tune.

You had been a fairly musically inclined child, to put it, in a way. Your father had always been wholly committed to teaching his only daughter how to play the cithara—or at least that's what he called it. He said there was another name for it, seldom used now, the guitar, for it was an old kind of instrument that has seen years that he couldn't even dream of existing.