The Beasts of Us [A Hunger Games Fanfic]

LIGHTS I. Phoebe.

She'd never been on a train before. Not a moving one, anyway; before Darmon had settled she'd been out to the Tracks, where families lived on old carriages left out for the rust, and the experience had been enough to convince her to do anything to avoid living there. Some of the carriages were neat and tidy, and a few even had mismatched curtains and little pots of flowers trying to grow out front and thin coats of paint with the family names daubed proudly on them, but she hadn't been inside any of those. The classmates she'd been hanging around with - a group she'd later fallen out with and no longer spoke to - had led her past those pretty little homes and onto railings that were red with rust. The carriages themselves had looked one strong gust of wind away from falling apart, propped up with logs of wood or bits and pieces of spare metal; windows missing; sheets of corrugated iron for doors. Inside her then-friend Cassie's carriage there were seats still in place, rows and rows of them belonging to a time when people could just get on a train and go somewhere else in their hundreds. Some of them were moldy. The walls had felt as if they were pressing in on her and the ceiling was even lower, wires dangling from where the electrics had been gutted. There had been no beds, so to speak, only rows of seats covered in patchy blankets. The whole thing had smelled of urine and sweat and something sweet and musty that she had recognised immediately as pure morphleaf. There had been three families - twelve people! - living in that one carriage. She'd been happy to leave and had never gone again. There was a bleakness to the Tracks that made her family's little one-floor hut in the shadows of the morphling factories seem the very height of comfort, and that night she'd dreamed of walls squeezing her and Darmon's claws tearing strips from her arms and legs.

The tribute train was more luxurious by far, but somehow that made it worse.

The central carriage was all muted, stylish greys lined with black and white, elegant furnishings, a screen that showed a picture of the District Six Justice Building when it wasn't turned on. An Avox stood in the corner, blending in with the background - the escort had warned her not to talk to him and his daemon had explained why, and so she hadn't. She had a room of her own that was bigger than the whole of Cassie's carriage. There was a bed that was the softest thing she'd ever seen in her life, great wide windows that had been dulled overnight and which were now showing her the inside of the mountain tunnel, a golden tray containing shelves of pastries and little cups of juice that tasted somehow sweet and bitter at the same time. She'd got the feeling that if she didn't eat the food nobody would and it looked much tastier than anything she'd ever seen in Six; she'd spent most of the night alternately sobbing into her pillow and eating, trying to distract herself from the fact that she was further from home than she'd ever thought, that she was going to the Capitol, and the Games, the Games, the Games. It had worked. Now she was mostly thinking about the way the train's motion was affecting her stomach and cursing the rich food. She shouldn't have gobbled so much of it.

Somewhere the Six team were waiting for her. The mentor was Cafrin, a morphling who couldn't remember her own Games and spent most of her time in a corner cradling her rabbit-daemon and crooning softly to herself, who was generally assumed to be harmless but also useless too. The escort was a man with lurid pink tattoos and a beaky nose whose crow daemon spoke more than he did and who looked at them with obvious distaste. Neither of them had said much last night and she'd been hoping to avoid them as long as possible, despite the crow's request that she join them in the main carriage when she felt ready. It was hard enough putting on a brave face for herself. So she'd stayed in her room, feeling uncomfortable and ill and fidgeting with fear, trying to find anything else to think about.

She was running out of things.

"It still hasn't sunk in yet," she told Darmon. She was sprawled on the bed staring at the ceiling, with him curled up on the pillow by her head and pretending to be trying to sleep. Despite their bad night, neither of them were sleepy.