unforgivable ➸ finnick odair

T W E N T Y E I G H T

Unlike District 12, District 11 was massive. From my view in the train, most of the land was covered with orchards and crop-growing areas, as well as numerous patches of trees that undoubtedly contained fruits of some kind. But like District 12, it was excruciatingly obvious that the citizens of 11 were just as impoverished and poor. The houses that I could see from the stage looked like they could fall apart at any moment - plants of wood out of place and worn roofs near-collapsing. It was yet another painful reminder that not everyone was as 'well off' as those in 5. 

The dress Titania had given me today had a short nude underdress of sorts that reached around mid-thigh, up to my shoulders. But the real show-stopper of the outfit was the translucent long-sleeved outer layer, which reached all the way to my ankles and had a faint blue tint that gradually faded towards the tips of the cool fabric, giving it an almost watery look. Flowers of all kinds decorated the clear outer layer - thin green vines that climbed up the dress, with red roses and violets and bright yellow sunflowers sprouting off of the sides.

May, I thought sadly as I cleared my constricting throat and prepared to address the solemn, waiting crowd, would've loved to wear this.

Like in 12 and all the other coming districts, the families of the fallen tributes stood on elevated pedestals in front of me, a picture of their deceased son or daughter hanging above their heads on a screen, taken before the games had begun, when they were still content and intact and alive. 

A hauntingly large group of people stood below May's smiling face, her dark skin and hair illuminated by the glaring sunlight. A man with wild black curls was staring straight at me with his mouth pressed into a thin line, his arm tightly encircling who I presumed to be his wife, a lovely woman with long dark hair tumbling down her shoulders, whose face was buried into her husband's shoulder.  Five frail children stood at their parents' sides, and from looking at them I realized with a pang in my heart that May had been the oldest of the kids. Two boys who looked around the same age and three girls of varying ages stared at me with large, grieving eyes, the youngest girl clinging to her sisters like they were her lifelines. It was so devastatingly obvious that a piece of the broken family had been permanently torn away from them, never to be seen again except as a corpse in a stiff, wooden coffin.

In stark contrast to May's big family, the male tribute from 11 - Ark, his picture said - had no such family. Just two grieving parents who shared the district's dark skin and hair. His mother stared at me with hollow eyes, thin black hair messily framing her gaunt, sunken face. His father, on the other hand, stared at the stone floor below him, still and unmoving, never tearing his gaze away from the ground. Their hands were joined tightly, knuckles paling as their hands trembled in unshed tears and pure, unaltered grief.

Ark's parents reminded me of a similar scene three years ago, when Finnick Odair, the 14-year-old victor of the 65th games (the youngest victor ever, as the tabloids and magazines constantly reminded us) had stopped by Five during his Victory Tour. While my mother (my dead mother, killed in a fire that Snow had started, in a fire that had been lit because of me) had refused to even spare a glance for the scarred boy from Four, instead stubbornly gazing at the floor as photo-Breeze smiled serenely above us, I had pinned him with the most vicious death gare I could muster up, pouring all of my grief and tears and hatred into the one gaze that I directed at him, standing up there and speaking about the girl that he had killed. 

Now I was the one on the stage, talking about two people who could've been in my place.

"I didn't know Ark," I began, and the crowd fell silent almost immediately. "But he was young. He was young and he deserved so much better. I don't want to try and say that I know anything at all about him because I don't. But he had a future in front of him and two parents who obviously loved him with all of their hearts, and I'm sorry that the games took that away from him. Took him away from you." The people of 11 listen attentively to my words as they ring out to the packed square through the microphone. His father has lifted his gaze from the floor to look at me, eyes just as hollow and empty as his wife's, who has tears streaming down her face by the end of my short speech.

The easiest part had been completed, but the hardest part had only just begun.

"I - " I cut myself off immediately, choking back a sob as tears began to gather in my eyes. "I had the privilege to know May before the games," I said, voice hoarse from grief. "She was... she was amazing. She was amazing and she was beautiful and she was kind and she was May. And I couldn't protect her. I couldn't save her and I couldn't save Bolt and she died and I'm sorry." 

I drew in a heaving breath as tears began to flow down my face, my hands instinctively going to furiously wipe the makeup-infused liquid away, though only succeeding in smudging it across my face further in a strange, messy mixture of black mascara and bright pastel eyeshadow, all baby blues and pale pinks and bright, sunshine yellows.

I always knew it would be hard, but I hadn't quite realized just how hard. Now I knew.

The ceremony ends quickly after that. The mayor presents me with a bouquet of flowers that starts off the waterworks again, and then I am quickly rushed back to the train after a thankfully brief meeting with two of 11's three victors. Both Seeder and Chaff are both sympathetic - they have, after all, been through this before. And as the train departs from District 11, the sky already darkening as the crescent moon glistens brightly above, I fall into an endless depth of nightmares, of screaming and arrows and dead bodies and blood.

I fall back into the Games.

this is probably really bad but welp #yolo