The Beasts of Us [A Hunger Games Fanfic]

FENCES IX. Vivian.

"We should go," Reverie muttered.

Vivian ignored him, even when he dug his claws into her leg. She knew he wouldn't grip hard enough to actually hurt and she was focused - as much as she ever was on anything - on adding the detail to the distant fences. They were quite small. It took a lot of concentration. "I'm nearly done."

She'd been up in the tree for hours. Her feet were going numb; the only branch that would take her weight for any length of time was an odd shape and her knees were almost higher than her shoulders. She'd hung the canvas around them to stop it from falling and had her battered old paintbox nestled in her lap, where Reverie was tucked up in a little ball. He was grumpier than she was - most people were, actually - and tended to curl up like this when he was irritated with her as well as when he was feeling threatened. It made it easier to paint around him.

She'd painted his scales once. He hadn't liked that much, but she thought he'd been objecting less to the actual painting and more to the alarming shade of orange. They'd ended up collapsed on the floor, laughing so much they were crying, and unable to hear Mother shouting from the front room. The orange had been quite expensive, even for them. But it had been completely worth it.

"Hurry up, then," he urged. "Father will worry if we're not back by dark."

She cast a critical eye to the horizon. It had the faintest tinges of purple. "We've got an hour and a bit. We'll be fine. Nobody else is even going home yet."

By 'nobody else' she meant the workers. There were a lot of them in the fields. She'd been watching them all day, one by one making steady progress up one row and down another, while Peacekeepers strode between them and prodded anybody who wasn't working fast enough. Apparently the Capitol had announced that the tesserae rations were being increased. To Vivian, who didn't take tesserae and knew she'd never be touched by the Games, it was merely a curiosity. But it explained the hurry in the fields, and the fact that some of the shapes trawling up and down the rows were much, much smaller than usual. Their daemons flickered alongside them, changing shape to keep up with whatever needed doing. She'd tried to capture it on one of the figures on her picture; a young boy in the foreground with a scythe, while next to him his daemon was mid-change. She'd spent a while trying to keep her eyes open and not blink when daemons changed in front of her, but she was starting to suspect it was impossible and the change was so fast that by the end of the blink it was done, so she'd made it up. A few threads of purple and blue twisted in on each other in a space no bigger than one of Reverie's scales. It looked convincing.

Someone shouted up at her.

She knew the accent even if she didn't know the voice. District Two. Older. Not one of the Capitol-wrongdoer Peacekeepers, who had a streak of bitterness that she hated, and not one of these zealous green ones fresh from the Training Center that they were all supposed to pretend didn't exist. Those ones were too keen on the rules they'd been told rather than the ones that actually worked.

She wondered if, if District Nine could just...settle down a little more, they would get a Training Center too, and then they might stand a chance in the Games.

This Peacekeeper wasn't Capitol and was old enough to know the ropes, so she didn't move and waited for him to shout up again, which he duly did. "You! Get down!"

"My name's Vivian Hyacinth," she shouted back.

His dog-daemon stopped howling and the pair of them had a brief conversation that she couldn't overhear, even though she tried. If she'd been younger, Reverie would have changed into a bat or an owl or something, but as an armadillo he didn't hear so well. She had to wait again. While she did, she daubed a few more wisps of cloud onto her paper. The fields didn't look too good but she was pleased with the sky. The colours weren't bad, considering that she was stuck with the dregs of her paintbox. There would be a new one when she survived the reaping. Until then she was having to use this one. She'd had it almost two years.