61st Hunger Games Victor Presentation Ceremony

I have been free from the arena for three days. Three days of luxury; three days of hell. Seventy-two hours, four thousand three hundred and twenty minutes, over two and a half hundred seconds of what can only be described as hollow. Watching faces dart backward and forwards around me, their eyes wide and the colour of a thousand rainbows. Feeling long fingernails caress my features. These people, they try to put me back together again. Shining lights trying to erase my scars. I protest, but nobody hears my cries. I want to keep every bruise and every bloodstain, count my cuts one by one. Because it's not fair that they are all taken away by magic while the others bled out into the sand. I am ignored, for three days. It was an assumption of mine that being a Victor meant power over other people. Victors were fierce and horrific and they stuck terror in my eyes. It took until that very last moment in the arena to realise that Victors, they are people, too. Not superhuman. Not free from the binds of humanity, no more powerful than the rest of us. Lethe and Mace and Julian and Arbor and Heron, Topaz and Aranica and the others - they are like me. I am like them. And we are nothing but lucky. When I look out the window and children look at me, sometimes as though I am a monster and sometimes as though I am a hero, I force myself to smile. I am neither of these things, for I am Klaus Goravich, the scared little boy who was unfortunate enough to find himself torn away from his family, and lucky enough to be heading home to see them once more. My life was easy, truly. My father did everything he could to provide for us what we needed.In a way, I had no parents at all, but I did have Hopper. We were rich with information and love and knowledge and memories, rich with hope and naivety and joy. It mattered not that some nights the food was just a little too sparse to go around, that when Jamarion wore a hole in every pair of trousers he owned we couldn't manage to provide another pair. There were nights when there was no wood to go on the fire. But never again, because all my pain has taken something rich and beautiful and filled in the gaps and given us the gift of a father we never had. He will never have to work again.

These three days have passed like no others before them. Most of the time I was barely conscious, sometimes all I could see was impenetrable blackness. I haven't cried. It is as if there is no night and no day, for the city is always bright when I cast my eyes to the sky. My mind has nothing to distract it from the horrors of the past days, so I spend hours lying still and thinking of nothing but all the terrible things that have happened. I don't pity myself, although I know that it will hurt forever.Mahlah's face is burned in my mind, Fitz Ripley will not stop haunting me in the place between awake and sleeping. I feel constantly as though they are watching me - as though perhaps I must make the most of every moment of my life from now on, because it is not fair if they could have lived better. I have been given - I have stolen life from these twenty-three people, and wasting it would be a greater sin than anything else I have done so far. They tried to take the starfish from me. And I let them, because my mind was so filled with other horrors. But when it came to taking the very last star from my forehead, the one that made me think that perhaps I could keep fighting,I lashed out in fear. This creature held me together, it was my shining star in the darkest of places. It took them moments to pin my arms and legs to the table, and at once I was helpless again. In reality, I have always been that way. "No! Leave it, please!" I say, but the room fills with people and a button is jammed and I can feel sleep leaking into my system. When I awaken, I call for a mirror. I am not alone, as I thought I would be - the starfish still clings to my skin, a reminder of the sanity that perhaps I still possess after all.

And now I wait to be called. I am to be presented to the district and I am afraid. More afraid now than I was on the very first day of the Games. It is one thing to be afraid of death, because that keeps you fighting, keeps you living. It is quite another to fear people. Especially when that fear is justified. I shake because when my name is called the crowd could stay silent. Panem may hate me for everything I have done. My family, my district, the Capitol and the rest of them. When I looked at Destiny, at Fitz, and told them who was waiting for them, I smiled. What if these people had seen that as a twisted smile of cruelty rather than the honest plea for acceptance it was? Surely this is hard enough already without the world hating me? And yet it is their choice, for if I had watched myself commit the terrible crimes I committed, kill the innocents I killed, then perhaps I would hate me, too. My name is called and I realise that I haven't been listening once more. So easily these days I can become wrapped in my own thoughts and sufferings, oblivious to the world moving on around me. The platform I am standing on begins to rise, slowly. Light floods me like the oceanthat carried me to my final fate. And there is a roar not unlike the roars that have greeted every other Victor since the very first Games I watched. They don't care about my sins. They've forgiven my mistakes. It's a shame that I will never be able to do the same.

They play the recap video, as they do every year. It begins as my journey began - with the Bloodbath. I do not see myself. I just see fear and cries and merciless murder. That day was brutal. We hunted Abri down. She was alone and we stole away her life. I watch myself as the boy I once was, walking alone along the beach to share with the world something I thought I wouldn't live to be. Day Two is clearer, and I am able to comprehend how it looks when we attacked the girl, Fawn.Her allies did nothing to stop us. Penelope's face is clear and beautiful, and as I watch Destiny interact with Pandora, I can see why she went crazy. How could I blame her? She loved him. Haff, the boy from five, was killed instantly by a tiny creature I do not know the name of. Unlucky for him, but just another face in the sky for me. On the third day, Fitz and I are children. For the last time, we smile without tears and we explore and we play and although we bleed it does not matter. The days pass as I watch others being slaughtered, Destiny, Fitz, Penelope and myself somehow passing by almost without injury. How was that fair? And on the fifth day, the feast. I never wanted to see Penelope Libertine falling to the ground again, and yet I watch with wide eyes.She was so beautiful. The great monster kills another, while Jana manages to take it down. Fitz kills Elon before my very eyes, I kiss him, we flee. The others fight beasts. I watch again as we three remaining splinter. Fitz walking away to hunt down Stark Harper, him killing her easily. I stroke Destiny's hair upon the screen, and I promise her I will swim. Mahlah kiss her brother, speaking almost the same words I uttered to Fitz before he died. It feels as though we were all running around in circles, mirroring each other until the mirror broke and our luck ran out. I close my eyes from the moment I am swept away. The arena has taken enough from me, and I refuse to let it steal away whatever I have left.

As the sound dies away and the people clap enthusiastically, I pretend not to be disgusted. They don't know what it is like, how could they? Let them live, in all their naivety, and be thankful that this fate exactly has happened to nobody but me. This is all I can think as I smile and wave. The starfish that was clinging to me, holding me together, falls from my forehead into my lap. Dead. Has it fallen because it can no longer keep me sane keep me moving forward? Is this the end of rationality and clear thoughts and organised minds? Or is it leaving me because I no longer need a bright star to guide me home? I will get there myself, now, whatever it takes.