96th Reaping [District Three]

Max is high again. 

Or - let her rephrase. It's a little unfair to assume what she thinks is most likely reality actually is reality, no matter how high the odds.

Max is probably high again.

Can one be high again if you never really stop being high? For all that drugs have destroyed Charlotte's family, she's surprised how much her brother depends on them. They've had this argument time and time again, and at some point she realised she'd be better off trying to convince a brick wall that the sky wasn't blue, so she dropped it.

But god damn it, give her one fucking day where she looked into her brother's eyes and saw something clear staring back at her. No red-streaked whites, no glassiness, no tears formed from staring and staring and staring as he tumbled into somewhere else.

The sky is blue and Max is probably high again. Reaping day is usually the one day she lets him off but Charlotte woke up in a particularly foul mood, in which to say she woke up in a relatively normal state, but the half-ruined house she grew up in fucking stinks of it.

"Maxen!" she hollers at his bedroom door - fucksakes, she can smell it through the wood. It's probably in the wood now, the walls, the ceiling and the floor. Like asbestos. Like mould - though they've got plenty of that already.

"Get your lazy-ass up before I get the Keepers outside to drag you down the stairs themselves."

This is Charlotte's way of saying to her little brother that she loves him. A gentler morning than most, given the circumstances. She leaves him to his own devices and gets ready herself, sighing at the exhausted girl in the mirror. The tear troughs underneath her eyes look more sunken than usual, bruised to match those all over her body. A raggedy, rough-and-tumble girl; she brushes her hair with their mother's old comb, notes the heat today will bring and thinks about tying it up. The result in her reflection looks like shit, so she gives up and leaves it down. Sweat be damned, she'll take a cold shower when they get home.

Not like they can take a warm one. The hot water was shut off months ago.

Finally she takes a pair of sunglasses and covers those big, bright eyes. Since crawling out of juvi Charlotte has taken to hiding anything about herself that could catch attention, prefering to blend into a crowd as a survival instinct. When you make it out of the Detention Centre alive you tend to not want to go back in, unless you have a death wish.

Or maybe a life wish. Kept her name out of the reaping for another year, didn't it?

Death wish or otherwise, it doesn't stop the eldest Royce from prowling the streets at night, surveying the Prescotts and the Belgraves like it's the only thing she's good for these days. Mostly she's there to make sure Max isn't up to no good, run a few errands, earn just enough to keep them fed and the lights on. Inside their home, as decrepid as it is these days, she can at least control what happens in those boundary lines. What she and her brother gets up to is their business and their business alone. But out there? She doesn't trust the outside. Not anymore.

Inside her home she's safe. Inside her home she's Charlotte. Out there - or, out here, she supposed, standing in the crowd with a frown on her face and thinking far too existentially, she's Harley.

"Charlotte Royce-" no, wait-

Oh for fucks sake.

"Fucking rigged," a hiss from the corner of her mouth, clenched teeth, that palpable anger she usually saves for the dark. Was it Hugo? That fuckin' bastard, probably. The Belgraves think themselves all too fuckin' clever. She crosses her arms and her eyes shrink to a squint, concentrating, piecing this all together in her mind. The Prescotts is an easy out, with their old money and even older connections - but that feels too... simple.

Or maybe it's just straight up bad fuckin' luck.

District Three's latest tribute buys enough time for the Keepers get just out of reach before she shoves the lucky sods next to her out of the way and makes a beeline for the stage. She's been pushed around by white gloves far too much in her short little life and she's not about to restart that now.

Charlotte Royce dies in that house that morning.

And in her place, Harley takes the stage.