𝐂𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 [𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐤 - 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬]

5 | 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐒𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭

Known ~ FINNICK 'FIN' ODAIR

"And we're made new creatures."

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

            — MY MOTHER IS DIFFERENT from the women that live on our side of the bay. A familiar line, isn't it? The sentiment that our beloved ones are different, unique, special. And yet, my mother felt so different to me when I was small.

            She came from the northernmost lands of District 4, where the coasts are powdery cliffs of chalk and the trees are nothing but skeletal towers of branch and bone. She travels with what she calls a tribe — they're superstitious, warm-hearted, and ancient, with skin that is tan from birth instead of exposure, and hair of black and copper, with beautiful, androgynous faces. Noticeable even now, in a time where race has become nothing more than a suggestion in the hairline, or a wrinkle in the brow.

            She meets my father on her travels, and tells him of their misfortune — how the rivers flooded and the lands collapsed into deadly mudslides. That they seek refuge. They seek and seek until they have no choice but to split apart. My mother finds Haling Sound, guided by my father, who is nothing but a travelling youth at the time. Her culture is lost to this new land, and lost once more when her children do not look like her, or sound like her.

            We are all born disappointments, I think. When I'm six I begin to understand this; seeing through my mother's tired love and down to the hate. And oh, how she hates. Hates the way my older sisters cower from nature — hates how they cover themselves in the shame of adolescence, how they grow fond of useless boys and needlessly complicated machinery, how they recite Panem's Song so dutifully, all blond-headed and sky-eyed, one hand over their matching hearts. They wear flowered dresses cinched at the waist and shirk scaling fish to bathe themselves in the sun of New Cali, leaving my mother alone on the bleached dock — bleached like their shining hair.

            They leave her with me — her lone son. Her youngest, her strangest. So from a young age I learn to fill the gaps, to not say but do. I have no need for words yet, capable of mimicking her every move until I become familiar in a bone-deep way, until she grows to love me more than my sisters. I don't become myself until much later, not until she's taken from me.