After The Storm (A Hunger Games Fanfic)

District Eight Reapings

The sun is shining in District Eight, but everything is still grey and black. Grass is unheard of in the narrow, cobbled streets. The buildings crowd together, leaning on each other for support and blotting out the sky. Houses and factories fill every available space in the district, right up to the constantly wired fence. Greenery is rare here, although one optimistic soul has attempted to plant a few small shrubs outside the grubby Justice Building. They wilt in the stifling air.

The factories continue to chunter away in the background until the last possible minute. Cloth is one of the most in-demand commodities in the Capitol, and District Eight works through the night just to stay on quota. Immediately after the reaping everybody will return to work without even changing out of their clothes. Peacekeepers will whip everybody they find not at work. In short, it will be just like a normal day.

District Eight children don't go to school. Most can't read or write, unless their parents take a few hours out of their precious nights to teach them. Many suffer from deformities, caused by harsh working conditions or being trapped by machinery. Some will be dead before they reach eighteen, before they're safe from reaping, killed off by lung disease picked up breathing in particulates. Every year each pen loses a few inhabitants. Despite these drawbacks, it takes a lot to crush the spirit of District Eight tributes. Maybe because they've been through so much already.

Everyone is ushered out of the factories at the same times, to allow for those having to take the tram in from the loom mills at the far side of the district. The square in District Eight is bordered on three sides by cramped shops and the tall, wonky Justice Building, and on the fourth by the electric fence, twelve feet high and topped with spikes of barbed wire. Beyond it, the plain seems barren and empty, not worth escaping into. It's almost like the Capitol have done it on purpose.

Parents don't have time to meet up with children, especially if they work at different places. All they can do is clutch whatever pitiful items they have to remind them of their children; a scrap of the blanket they were born on, their hospital bracelet if they were lucky enough to have a bed spare when the woman went into labour, a lock of hair.

Older siblings lean over pens to adjust the hair or brust a speck of dust off their younger siblings. Seedy bookies slide through the crowd, taking bets in hushed voices. Both tributes over sixteen at five to one. Female tribute cries at three to one. They aren't picky. They will work through the Games, determined to squeeze money out of anybody that they can. People pretend to shun them, but many will sneak back later, just on the offchance that they can win enough to put milk instead of water on the table that night.

The District Eight mentor glides, nearly invisible, through it all. His black hair, slicked back from his head like it was at his reaping, is fading, but his brain and his movements are as sharp as ever. Even after he won he has never been popular and nobody talks to him as he passes. However, many people will admit that their children couldn't be in safer hands. Sebastian is a thinker, a strategist. If anybody can manipulate the flickers and fancies of the Capitol, it's him.

Still, some people remember the cold and unsentimenal boy with the poisoned darts who took out the Careers without batting an eyelid, and not without a shiver of unease. He won, he made his district proud. But still, he's a killer. District Eight haven't had a winner in so long that they've forgotten the baggage that comes with it.

The speech is directed at Eight with particular venom. Several years, there have been riots here, although this year there probably won't be. An increased Peacekeeper presence has essentially quashed that. There are as many Peacekeepers in the already crowded District Eight as there are in the other districts put together, and they're twice as free with the whips. It doesn't stop the vindictive rep from spitting the speech out as if each and every word is personal. Though many hands itch to strangle him, the people stand and take it in patience. Many have the scars.