𝐂𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 [𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐤 - 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬]

1 | 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐳𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐤𝐞

Content warning at the end notes: please skip down and check if you feel like you should!

N E O

— MY PARENTS MANAGE TO KEEP ME AWAY FROM THE GAMES up until my twelfth June passes. Naturally, the Games are an occurrence I've been raised beside — children know of them in the same way we know our own heart beats — but I am otherwise very much kept in the dark. Adults town-wide always speak in indistinguishable mutters when the topic of the games arises, their heads bent together as if they are grieving in preparation, frightened for something that will likely never happen with the volunteer system in place.

Because Middle Canyon is so small, we hear even less of the victors and the vanquished. It is difficult to be afraid of something when one has never seen the reality of it — no fighting to be witnessed, no family wailing at their doorstep as the news reaches them. The only time I'd ever heard more than a whisper of the Games was when I overheard a conversation between my father and the neighbouring couple over our garden fences, one I suppose I wasn't meant to hear. They discussed the slipping status of the District 3 Tribute they had all initially been rooting for, and I drew up plans for the stick fort the boy and girl across the street wanted to build with me that summer.

Unknowingly, my blood chilled at the curdling fear in my father's voice, and I returned to my sticks and twine.

I didn't quite comprehend the terror in which my father spoke with, glancing down at me every so often. You don't ever really understand the fear of a parent until you become one, I think. Or maybe it is just loving someone. Either way, the two women next door quickly called their teenaged children in from the yard. I saw the way they held each other close and huddled around their small projected television and wondered why they were so afraid of a game.

Innocence can be truly blinding at times.

It's surprising, how oblivious we are kept — especially when I begin to hear of the other districts through the Games. The further out one goes, the clearer it becomes that children in the lower districts are raised in perpetual fear of the games — so much so it is their horror story and monster under the bed. Whereas for us out in 1, we thirst to know more in that way children want to know the meaning behind everything.

In the playground, there is always a group of children tailing Flint in the hopes that he knows more of the Games than the rest of us, considering that he is already slugging through his training as a Career. He swans about and never discloses a thing, maintaining a knowing smirk just to drive us all up the wall. I have never once thought he knows any more than the rest of us. This continues until our first Reaping.

The only difference between Flint and I is — and always will be — that he makes himself startlingly significant. Hair a shock of ashy blond, eyes cinder-brown, sharp and tall and long-limbed; although, that could be because he's gone through his first stretch of maturity before the rest of us. He has this demeanour that cries talent and success, even as a boy.