hey, dark eyes {cass/arx}

"All we can do is believe that we won't regret the choices we make."

When I first arrive in District One, everything I brought with me fit into one suitcase. Although I was as small then as I am now, slender and soft unlike the Careers I saw all around me, I had no trouble carrying it from the train station, through town, and to the plain apartment that would soon become my 'office'. The real burden was the weight of all the things I had left behind. I was always the sort of girl who was enamoured by beauty, and back then my definition of the word extended to all the faux and artifice that the Capitol put in front of me. The only dresses I could bring out of the City with me were the plainest ones, the rest would set me apart as an out-of-place for sure, and although my preference for scarlet lipsticks and painted fingernails wasn't so obscure in the District, I certainly had to tone down the glittery embellishments I decorated myself with in order to fit in. Material as I was, I was heartbroken to leave my baubles behind, and I thought of them naively often as I settled into my new life.

The lack of beauty, however, was never as great a burden as the lack of honesty. My mother had perfected the art of professional mystery without ever telling so much as a white lie, mostly through her air of pure superiority which made anyone too afraid or awestruck to ask her questions. I, on the other hand, had to use misdirection and evasion in those first few months to establish myself as a nickname. I certainly used her tricks: the knowing smile, the slight tilt of the head like you can't quite work out why anyone would ask you such an intimate question uninvited - yet still I found myself having to dance away from fact and spin fiction around myself like a spider in the middle of a web, in order to become The Woman and not just the Child, or the Runaway, or, worst of all, the Whore. Over time I managed to make myself undetectable, notorious but never revelatory. People came to me out of curiosity, and left just the same (although perhaps knowing a little better that I was someone to be afraid of), and only then was the load of the lies I had had to tell lighter to bear.

But worse, oh, so much worse, than both of those pains was the lack of love. When your trade is sex and your coinage is pleasure, there is no time for love. "Love" becomes just a word that people cry out in the peak of ecstasy, a word that you learn to ignore as you stop your sand-timer and retrieve your customer's clothes from a cupboard. In the Capitol, I had never known love myself - but at least it was all around me, visible at every turn, and notably in the Capitol's people's love for their leaders as much as their love for each other. In the District, love was a secret, dirty thing. As a teenager, it would only break your heart - your obligation to serve your District as a martyr came before any personal emotions. As an adult, it was secondary to producing the highest class of future tributes, and so the pattern of childhood to adulthood to childhood continued. Falling in love was never on my agenda. Perhaps I wish it had been.

Still, as I settled into a new home, a new persona and a new set of laws to live by, did I ever regret the choice I had made? Not even for a second. And so, as Opal urges me on with hopeful eyes and powerful words, will I look back on how I ended up here, speeding back towards the life I left behind me? Never.

"So you win, Renée." No - I don't need to win. All I need to do is what I've always done - damn well put on a show.