Here We Go.

When I woke up, the sun was just peaking over the mountains in the horizon to the right of me, and Mother was whispering. "Soyala, Soyala. today's the Reaping. Get up and get ready, sweety, I think today's your day." She was looking very pretty this morning, and I knew that what she said was true. Today was the Reaping, and I would be Reaped. I rubbed my eyes while nodding and yawning, and I arched my back off of the ground a couple inches. I needed to be ready if today was my day, right?

I rolled over on my right side and stared at the sun. It was beautiful. Mother said that she would have a pretty picture for me today, and this was obviously it. Oh how I loved my mother. Many of you might know her as the sky, but I know her as mom. She was the one that finally made me realize that my biological parents weren't really even my parents at all, and so she made me kill them. I remember it distinctly.

I was 9 at the time, and each day that I lived, I would become angrier at my parents. I would come to hate them even more. It was the one day that I couldn't take it anymore. It was the day, or night rather, that I ended their lives. I couldn't deal with any more of their shit, I mean crap. It was too much. They had tried to brainwash me. I was a 9 year old girl, and I wanted, and did, kill my parents.

Sky (my mother's name) had already started talking to me, and she had explained how my mother wasn't really my mother and how she actually was. I believed her too, because it was and is true. She led me to finally realizing that both my parents needed to die, and so I did what she told me to do.

As they were sleeping, I laid in my bedroom, staring into the deep blue ceiling that was encased in night. A long, cutting knife laid beside me, my hand strangling it as they both hid under my covers. I could here them both snoring, and that was when I made my move.

I moved from out my covers, and I can remember how heavy I thought the knife was. It was like the knife was a creature in itself, trying to pull me back to my room, trying to stop me from what I was going to do. But I didn't let it.

Their door was open, and both laid on their backs, snores erupting from their schnozes. And so I reached across my mom after approaching her side of the bed, and I brought the knife smoothly over her neck, creating an incision so perfect a surgeon could've created it. It was then that she began to gag, cough up blood, and the crimson red liquid begun to pour from her neck and meld into the sheets that she lay on.

Dad's turn.

He didn't seem at all interrupted by his wife's death, and I could already hear Sky talking to me. She was proud. I let out a small chuckle, and made my way around the bed, repeating the process that I had to my "mother".

The incision made it's way through the stubble on his neck and the liquid spilled again. And I didn't care. The blood stained knife lay on my dad's stomach, and my feet began to move towards my room. I gathered the things I have with me now, a pale yellow shirt, the green corduroy shorts, the tennis shoes, and the tennis shoes.

Shows you how much I've grown, yea?

I would find the bag I carry my things in later, and with a smile, a look up to Sky, and a few more steps, I exited the house and entered night.

That was what happened, and I'll never forget it. In fact, the thought of it makes me smile, now that I don't have to deal with them anymore.

I sighed and got up, picking up my bag with my tennis shoes and my dress in it while doing so. If today was my big day, I needed to look pretty for the cameras, and so I made sure to sleep near a small pond before today, just so I could get cleaned up some.

I splashed water on my face, my breath taken away from the pure boreal feel that it had. The water was so crystalline, sparkling like the jewelry that's made here. It shook me up, woke me up, and it made me realize why living outdoors was so much better than living in a confined space surrounded by walls. It was just the pure beauty of it, and how everything always intertwined with one another to form something extravagant in itself. It amazed me, and I'll never figure out a way to repay Sky for how she finally made me realize the beauty in it all. I loved her even more for that.

And so then, without taking a second guess, I stripped down to nothing. It didn't bother me, no one liked me anyway, so what would the difference be if they saw me naked. Besides, who said that certain parts of our body had to be private? They're just body parts, and I'm just a person. Sure I'm a little different, but a person all the same. I needed to look pretty, I needed to, and every part of me needed to be clean, especially if I was gonna be seen on TV. You would want to be clean, right?

And then I jumped in. I jumped into the ever so cold water, and with each second, a little further into the water I dropped. Pressure was building on my chest, and it hurt. But I needed to be clean, and so I withstood it. The water was a deep blue, and even though from shore of the pond did it look clean, while I was under there, I could still feel the bacteria and germs that infested the water circling around me. It wouldn't make a difference, but I still needed, wanted to be clean. I could feel my body shutting down from the lack of air, and I frantically begun waving my arms up and down, making my way to the water's surface quicker than I thought I would, and as soon as my head hit the air again, instinct took over and air begun to enter through my nose. Nature was beautiful, and so was the air I was breathing. "Mom, thank you." I wasn't exactly sure of what I was saying, but I felt the need to thank her, and so I did. And I went without a reply, and that was alright.

The process repeated multiple times, me diving, running my fingers through my hair while under the liquid, and before I knew it, my feet were covered in dirt, as it attached to the watery soles of my foot. I walked over to the tree that I slept under, and slipped my dress on. The light purple thing with the pale yellow polka dots. It was my most prized possession, and if anything happened to it, something would happen to me, and that'd be a life of sadness. I wouldn't care that my mother would still be there, but it would be like losing the thing you loved most, and it would practically be the death of me.

The silky texture of it was ruined by the water droplets that danced across my skin, but I knew that I would be dry soon, and I didn't worry. I brushed the dirt off of my feet and slipped on my shoes. The tattered things that were on the verge of becoming unusable. They would hold through the day, though.

And so after realizing the Sun had moved high in the sky, I gathered up my things, well in reality it was just putting a shirt and a pair of shorts in a bag, and walked to the edge of the hill that I had climbed up the night before to sleep, and noticed that everyone, or at least the majority of the people that lived in District 1, which was a myriad of a number, were heading towards the town square on the east side of the town. And so I begun my way down the hill to travel with them.

The way my stomach felt as I was traveling down the heal was no different than it would be if it weren't the reaping. I had no butterflies, I had no nervousness. Instead, I had confidence that today was my day. That today would be the day that I got to be a Tribute. Sure, it was my first year to be eligible for the Reaping, but I still thought I'd make it. In fact, I was one of the very few amounts of people that signed up for Tesserae at the Court House. I didn't need the food, because I would usually find a way to eat anyway, but it was for the sole purpose of having my name written on a slip of paper more than once. The number of times my name would be in? Twenty two. Yeah, the grain and oil went to waste, most of the time being dumped in one of the many dumps that were scattered around District 1, but still, it made me happy that my name would be in there more than once. And yes, the people that sat at the table that held the sign up sheets looked at me like I was insane as I wrote down the number, but they didn't refuse. Ya' never know if your parents got busy enough to have like 30 kids Oh let's face it, that's practically not possible, but maybe your parents adopted tons of other kids? Yeah, that's probably what they thought. I didn't really care though.

As I moved one foot in front of the other, traveling down the hill, I smiled, giggled, laughed, and did all sorts of things that made me look like an idiot. It was all because of the thought that I would finally get to be in The Hunger Games. No, I'm not the type of Career that would travel to the Training Center (the one in District 1) to train, but rather, my mother, or otherwise knows as the sky or Sky, would teach me little things to do while I was sitting around all day. I didn't have a home, and most of the time, I had nothing to do. And when the birds didn't want to come visit me, (birds are like my family, like my brothers and sisters and friends and stuff), and when Mom didn't want to talk, I would do the small and simple things she'd told me to do to increase my chances of winning the Games. These things included sprints through the forest, which was better than just regular sprints, because you would have to dodge trees and stuff, which would make you more agile, and climbing buildings and trees and other climbable stuff. This would save me if I were to ever be in peril in the Arena. Yes, I told you it was simple, but it sure as hell helped. Or at least I thought it did. I wouldn't really know until I was in the Arena, which wouldn't be that far away.

As I walked among the crowds that were moving along towards the District Square just as I was, I wasn't surprised that the majority of them looked tired and weak, like they had just gotten out of bed, but some looked the opposite, like they'd been awake for hours. I could tell the tired ones were the ones who didn't want to go into the Arena, and the ones that look awake were the ones that did. I didn't like either of them, because who wouldn't want to go into the Arena other than the poor pieces of scum in the other poor Districts? And I didn't like the awake people because they obviously assumed that they'd be going into the Arena, which was wrong, because that position belonged to me.

Status;; 1/2 through. (Chapter Wise.)