A True Tribute [Hunger Games Fanfic]

Chapter Four...

Chapter Four:

Snip, snip, snip. Each snip of the scissors is complemented with a tut or sigh from, Felix the, orange skinned, member of my Prep Team entrusted to cut my hair. Judging by the amount of tuts, sighs and snips he must have cut my hair to almost bald by now. The only evidence against this is the long damp curtain of hair obscuring my vision into the mirror opposite.

The moment I arrived in the re-make centre my prep team practically threw me into a bath of strong smelling soapy water, washed my hair then proceeded to painfully remover every last strand of it from my body, by a process known as waxing. My legs are still tingling now.

Violet and Petunia the other two members of my team, are chatting animatedly to Felix whilst buffing and polishing both sets of my nails, well what’s left of them, I picked up the irritating trait of biting them from my mother. The talk has recently turned, now my hair was drying, to the natural blondness of it, and how they wished it was their own. I didn’t mind, even in District Four blond hair’s hard to come by. The same can’t be said for either of their hair colours, Felix’s is green and together with his skin makes him look like a carrot, but that’s just the view from my eyes, blind to the ways of The Capitol, because according to the conversations of my prep team, dressing up as fruit and vegetables is considered the new trend here.

Suddenly the curtain of hair is removed from my face, I don’t think I look much different at the moment, but Petunia assures me that not all is finished. She’s not kidding, as Violet, pulls from a drawer a fancy looking brush, knocks Felix aside and starts to part my hair letting it fall where necessary. The resulting effect is very different to my old trim, Felix has cut it so that my oval face is framed just right, making me look older, more sophisticated. My nails look impossibly longer, and I wiggle them to check, they’re defiantly not fake.

There’s a knock at the door and Petunia removes the thick robe I’ve been wrapped in, stating that Heaven will want to see all of me, I would cringe if I were somewhere other than this room full of mad people, who in a few days time will enjoy watching me get brutally killed. The thought makes my stomach churn. I don’t recognise the name of the stylist so I assume he must be new.

A man resembling a puffer fish with a large belly and spiked multicoloured hair steps through the door. He’s not new, he was stylist last year, to Finnick, I recognise him from his large belly. He must have changed his name, got bored of it and changed it to something even more eccentric. Many of the stylists tended to do this, District Eight’s changed hers every year.

Heaven looked at me, his eyes flitting all over my body, until all of a sudden they stopped and showed an expression of extreme disgust. “Aaargh! What is that?” He said with a squeal of revulsion.

“A bruise?” I said bluntly.

“And how has it come to be on your leg?”

“I tripped over on the train.” I lied. Fighting between tributes before they entered the arena was strictly prohibited. Where Alex had kicked me the night before, was a large, greeny blue bruise. It was incredibly painful, but I hadn’t let my pain be known to Alex. After dinner when I got down from the table, I’d had to stop my instincts, that would cause me to hobble and walk as if nothing had happened, I cursed Alex all the way to my room.

Heaven looked at me disbelievingly for a moment before, Felix interrupted timidly. “We were thinking a foundation to cover it?”

“Oh yes that should cover it nicely, but it would have to be a different shade to her face…” I stopped listening as they stared to use words and phrases that were way over my level of expertise. Mine only included the words, soap and hairbrush. I hear Violet moan as she’s demoted to ‘massaging it’, to remove scar tissue, but she recovered herself by squealing how much she loved Heaven new hair.