mercy lyon { two } fin

She is not the youngest Lyon, but she is arguably the smallest.

Her frame is bird-like, delicately slender and short. She has very little muscle, as she doesn't take her training as seriously as her siblings. Her father tries to encourage her to get better, so she can be strong like Jaime and be fierce like Circe, her two model siblings who fell in the Arena. But she has never wanted to be like Jaime or Circe. She likes being Myrcella, weak and untalented and all.

She may be different from the Lyons at heart, but not on the outside. On the outside, she is the very definition of Lyon — locks of blonde hair, fair skin, blue-gray eyes. Her father will tell her, with an encouraging smile, that she looks like Circe, perhaps urging her to act like her late sister, too.

Her father has always, will always, push her to fight, no matter if it is to no avail or not. He had never yelled at her, though, or berated her for being a disappointment. Not even that day in the training center when she was pitted against a younger boy for practice and couldn't bring herself to so much as shove him to the ground.

No, he had only gently chided her.

"Why won't you fight, Myrcella? You can hit targets just fine, I've seen you do it. But why can't you put your skills to use like everyone else? You don't want to be like Tyler, do you?"

(She flinched at the mention of Tyler, her misfit brother who was looked down on in her family. He is barely a Lyon, her father says.)

"It just doesn't interest me — you know I don't like violence."

"Violence is a part of being a Career. It's a part of Panem, too."

"Maybe it shouldn't be."

"Don't say things like that, not even in the privacy of our house."

"It's just — I don't want to be in the Games. I loved Circe, but I don't want to follow in her footsteps. Death is no legacy. Circe and Jaime died in the Games, and you still want us to train for them?"

"Myrcella, that's enough."

"That's enough" — her father always says that when she goes too far with her arguments on the rare occasions that she speaks her mind. And she knows better than to push him any further.

Sometimes she wonders how different her life would be if her mother had lived. Her father never talks about her, just says that she was beautiful and that she shouldn't have died. She's never known her father to be a loving man, but maybe he did love her mother. And perhaps his heart, or a part of it, died with her — or at least, that is Mercy's theory.

If her mother was alive, Mercy thinks that she would have read her stories before bedtime, dressed her for school, and taught her how to bake cookies. Maybe her childhood wouldn't have been all steel swords and trying to be something she's not.

But it's all what if's — and Myrcella Lyon isn't much of a dreamer and more of a realist. Still, sometimes it's nice to dwell on what if's.