raven barker | district seven | fin

. ♚RAVEN BARKER♚ .
I had a way then
losing it all on my own

My name is Raven Barker.

I am sixteen years old.

I live in District Seven.

My birth parents didn't want me.

My adoptive parents don't want me.

My brother is Gavin.

Wait, no.

My brother was Gavin.

It is supposed to help, facing my realities, but all it really does is remind me they are real. They are not fabricated dreams forged from my sleeping mind, but they are hard facts. My brother really is dead, and now I am not loved by anyone.

From the moment his words broke the silence, ("I volunteer,") my heart has not been beating the same. (I wish he hadn't done it. I wish he had let the boy who was supposed to die go instead of taking his place.) I didn't sleep for months and I still don't really eat as much as I should, but do you think anyone is close enough to notice?

I was so young when he died, when Leon's spear slid in one side of his head and out on the other, it was too gruesome at first for me to even believe it. No way could someone finish my big brother, my hero off in such a sudden movement. But he never got up, and there was a cannon soon after.

(My brother is dead.)

Everyone tells me how much they all valued his strength, how he was so brave and too nice for his own good, but they don't him. They don't know anything about him. They don't know what happened to him in our home, or what he did to himself in the woods by our house. I did. I was right next to him when our dad came home with spirits on his breath, when our mother looked the other way to save her own self some pain. When she would give us money to go into town and buy new clothes as payment for our punishment. I followed Gavin into the woods a few times, and seeing him claw and scream and kick and cry into the darkness is something I will never forget. I knew my brother, and for anyone else to say they did is an insult.

It was a few months after his death that I found his hiding place. Hatchets were stuck into trees left and right, targets drawn onto their trunks. Dead saplings wilted away in the neat piles he placed them in after chopping them down. His boot prints littered the ground, as well as a few slides and hand prints, and there was a very small burn pile, which means he probably only ever went out there in the dark. On the biggest tree, right in the middle of the madness, the initials "GB" were carved deep into the wood. I didn't understand at first. Honestly, it seemed my brother had been mad his entire life and I never even knew.

I left with tears in my eyes, afraid I had ruined the memory of my deceased brother, but when I was trying to sleep later that night I finally realized what it all meant. All of the plant books he read, supposedly for fun, all of the disappearing in the middle of the night, all of it.

He was training for the games.

I noticed the shameful glimmer he always had in his eyes when we would watch them in the square, or when we would snuggle into a pile of blankets in our living room and watch together as we sipped some of Dad's alcohol without his permission. He loved the idea of the games, and he was teaching himself how to win them.

And I decided there, in my bed, that I was going to do the same.

He would have laughed at me when I first started. Honestly, until I chose to, I had never even picked up an ax. Holding them felt awkward and I felt ridiculous prancing around and swinging them at thin air. It would take me several swipes before i could cut down the tiny saplings, and it took me weeks to finally learn how to actually hit the same spot twice on purpose with the heavy weapon. At the end of the first day, my pathetically weak hands were blistered. I can still picture him standing there with his arms crossed, his face red from holding in his laughter at me, but I think he would be proud of how far I have come. I am still not nearly as good as he was in the games, sleighing the girl from Twelve and that gigantic two-headed serpent, but I am no longer helpless.

Mom actually took notice in my change. Suddenly, I was always dashing off instead of sulking in my room, I always returned with dirt kicked under my nails and my dark hair messy with sweat, honestly I would have guessed it would have taken me setting off a bomb in our home for her to even offer me or my siblings a second glance. "What are you up to, Raven?" she asked one morning while dad was still upstairs getting ready for work. "You seem... better, in a way. Like you are moving on." It hurts me when she talks to me like that, like she actually cares. Sometimes I thought that maybe she does.

Hell, maybe she really does care, at least when Dad isn't around barking orders at all of us. But I can never say that the feeling is mutual. No mother that stands by and watches her family get torn apart is allowed to have the right to say she loves anyone in it.

Sometimes it is hard to even look at her. Mostly because of what she has done to us, but also because we all inherited her looks. Olive skin, dark hair, a cheeky grin, we all look like we are at least slightly malnourished when really, feeding us is one of the only things my parents actually do. The most heart-wrenching thing about her is her eyes, though. Gavin got them, and all of the little ones got them. The same haunting shade of green, like the pine forest around our home, whose scent sometimes drives me mad. I am the only one that got stuck with Dad's dark brown eyes. When I look at her, I see Gavin, and it kills me, because he was so much better than her. He still is. He always will be.

Besides well, just me now, none of the Barker children are old enough to be reaped yet. It is good that the games aren't something they have to worry themselves over just yet, because they have already dealt with far too much shit in their short lifetimes to have this added to their already crowded plates. I think I am going to start bringing them into the woods with me soon, though. The sense of maybe having a chance if I am ever reaped is explainable. And knowing my brothers and sister have those same abilities would mean worlds to me. I have even thought about sharing some of Gavin's books with them once they are old enough to not just stare at the pages, blankly reading random words until they can say they have finished its pages, but a part of me feels like they are too private. They are the thing I get to keep from him. They are the only thing, I might add, besides a lot of memories that are too painful to keep around much.

It is getting better, I must say. When I look in the mirror, my features are starting to get some of their color back. I have started dressing nicely again, trying not to skip school as much, I'm even trying to do my homework. I guess life really does go on, and someday Gavin will be a distant memory of a really, really good friend I once had. Some day I'll move on, and I'll be able to call myself happy gain, but until then, I am going to fake it until I make it, just like my mother has always taught me.

After all, I can almost hear my mother's annoyingly clear voice: "Nothing can break the Barker family. Not even death. We are stronger than that, aren't we? So, let's put a smile on our faces and prove to the world just how strong we are!" She has always cared for appearances a bit too much.

Me?

I guess I don't care about them enough.

Because if I am missing someone, I think it's okay to admit it.

I think it is okay to be broken every now and again.

I had a heart then
but the queen has been over-thrown