The Beasts of Us [A Hunger Games Fanfic]

FENCES III. Dannie.

Grey eyes. Red hair, not red in the strictest sense but a sort of strawberry-blonde-cinnamon that she kept shaved down the sides and braided down the middle, tied at the base of her skull with a scrap of ribbon. Her eyebrows were so faint they were hardly there, giving her a look of wide-eyed surprise even when she was perfectly at ease. Her jaw curved in sharply once it passed her cheekbones. It didn't help. Her mother had the chin, but she'd had the neat narrow forehead to go with it. The eyes and hair had come from her father. She'd managed to avoid his nose, which she'd always been grateful for, and, unlike his, her hair went where she told it to.

Dannie Copperly gave her braid another tug and straightened her sleeves. There. Now she looked right. A little pale, perhaps, but with the Reaping looming that was only to be expected.

"Dannie!" Sister Sofey's face, eerily similar to hers only with a turned-up nose instead of a snub one, appeared around the bedroom curtain. "Mom says come on, you need to finish off Rosie Winbruff's dress or so she won't have anything to wear tomorrow. And nobody wants to see little Rosie naked."

"They might mistake her for a pig!" Sal shrieked from the other side of their bedroom.

Dannie tweaked her collar. Resting on the floor, Lyam tugged on her hem with his beak and made a noise of approval. His feathers were already glossy and preened to perfection. "Okay, okay, I'm coming."

Sofey disappeared and Dannie heard her thumping down the stairs; her older sister looked graceful, but the illusion disappeared the moment she started moving. Somehow all that languid beauty manifested itself in someone who could trip over her own feet while standing still. There was a bang as she flung open the door to the back room and shouted something. Their mother replied with a laugh.

With one last glance at her reflection, Dannie jumped downstairs after her.

There was a family picture, a proper photograph, hanging over the stairs; they'd had it done last year, all of them, with one of the old cameras thrown out or stolen from the factory. Their parents sat in the middle of the frame, Mom small and waif-like in her best dress with the lace sleeves, Pa in a proper shirt with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his hair actually combed until it was nearly tidy. She was the girl sitting to Mom's right, in a pale pink blouse and a skirt that showed the scrapes on her knees. Lyam had only been settled for a few weeks and they still hadn't decided how they were comfortable, so he was in her lap and she was peering around him. Her braid had been shorter then. Sally was on Pa's left with her hair tumbling over one shoulder and Sofey was behind them, beaming. As it always did, Dannie's mind added another figure; a young man with her face and Mom's hair, one arm around Sofey and one on Pa's shoulder. Paul. She'd never seen him in the flesh, but she'd heard him described enough. Out of habit, she touched the picture's frame as she passed, paused for a moment, and then followed the sound of Sofey's voice.

"...where's those sleeves? Mom, have you seen the sleeves? Dannie's coming, she said..."

At the bottom of the stairs there was a beaded curtain that led to the shop, currently closed. She turned the other way and headed down the hallway, then through a kitchen where a soup pot bubbled. "Dannie! Come on!" She groaned, not really that annoyed, and pushed into the final room in the house. They called it 'the back room', even though it was technically at the front of the house. Dannie loved it. All the furniture was tied with lengths of bright-coloured ribbon and scraps of fabric, with great walls of cotton and wool hanging in place of curtains and half-cut rolls dangling from chairs, while dresses hung from the ceiling like ghosts. Not a thread was ever wasted. What wasn't used was stitched together anyway to make underlayers and scarves and blankets for those who couldn't afford the main stock. That was Sal's job. Her sewing wasn't as neat as theirs. But Dannie had deft fingers and a keen eye and enjoyed the feeling of holding up a dress and knowing that it had only been pieces of fabric before she had got to it. In District Three, where the usual hubbub of the district featured the sounds of things inevitably going wrong in the factories and everybody seemed to understand numbers better than she did, it was the only thing she was really good at.