[D7] 75th Hunger Games Volunteering Thread

To describe the feeling of dread is easy. Imagine your very worst nightmare, the thing that keeps you awake at night, and then envision it happening before your eyes, with you absolutely powerless to stop it. The floor is kicked out from beneath you, and you're hung by the neck, your legs flailing, your mouth agape desperately gasping for air. You choke on the inevitability of it, your face turns blue as the last fragments of hope fade away into nothing. The whys and the whats fill your stomach, pouring into your very core and flooding you with a thick black bile. You try to inhale but your lungs don't work anymore, you try to move but you are numb, you are falling into a wormhole.

But you're not. You're alive. It's the sensation of dying, of something close to you dying, of something significant in your life dying, only it doesn't end, it keeps going, and going, and going, until you're empty inside. Hope has abandoned you.

Dread crawls up my abdomen, an eight legged uneasiness that constricts around my chest, and in a split second I feel that drop in my stomach when speculation becomes a horrendous reality. It starts as nothing more than a faint scent. I smell burning, foul and sour, intertwining with the scent of pine. My conscience tries to erase the apprehension in my head, dismiss it as nothing more than a basic paranoia. It's nothing. A campfire in the woods, perhaps. Maybe someone is making charcoal. I tell myself that I am imagining things, that I am overtired, that I need rest, but my mouth is suddenly dry and my eyes are heavy, and I can see the first few wisps of grey smoke snaking between the tree trunks. I sink again, this is real. This is very real.

I look to Castor, to my sister, some faint hope grasping onto the possibility that I am going mad, that I am imagining this flood of smoke, and that she will smile at me and tell me I'm being ridiculous. She doesn't. She is making panicked noises alongside me, urgency in her stride. I let out a shaky breath. Fuck.

It's quite unbelievable that after everything that me and my sister have been through, I still take normality for granted. A split second and it is all gone, falling in on itself, and we're back to square one. How stupid and complacent I am.

I'm running now, my heart swelling in my throat, my teeth clenched, my vision nothing more than a blur in this smog. I feel panic bleeding inside of me, staining my insides. It can't be, it can't be true. This fire, whatever it is, it won't be anything to do with us. I'll run around this corner, and it will be there - our sanctuary, our home, it will still be there, hanging in the treetops like it has since the day I built it two years ago. It will be perfectly fine, and all this smoke will be from something else.

A glimpse of orange light and it is all over. My mouth opens, but I cannot make any noise. I do not slow, the burning frame of our treehouse home getting closer and closer as I sprint over damp leaves and mud, scrambling forwards towards the blaze. Our sanctuary is engulfed in flames, and it's only when I cannot get any closer to the heat that I stop running, and fall to my knees, my head in my hands.

This is how it ends.

It's all gone. Absolutely everything that I have worked on for the past two years of my life is literally going up in smoke. They've ruined it, those fucking bastards, they burned it all to the ground. Every last bit. Their fucking oppressive agenda refusing to let even the slightest thing slide, and this is the result - arson. I feel sick, a storm of anger brewing in my lungs as I let out an inhuman scream.

Fuck them, fuck them all. Again and again and again they find ways to hurt me, or hurt my sister, or hurt people I am close to. It never ends. Ever.

Oh and the dread has by now evaporated, replaced by this dry rawness inside of me. This absolute loathing. Hours of studying, writing down timelines, events, calculating possibilities, gathering quotes from witnesses, recording stories from people who had suffered similar injustices, articles on the continued oppression of our people in this corrupt nation, stacked, piled, organised, and primed for war.

Nothing in this world is more dangerous than words.

That's why there's censorship to bleach out any potential symbolism for people to rally around, and they knew exactly what I was doing here, they knew that I was pushing boundaries. My constant meddling has ended in this: the end of everything we have worked so hard to build. This is all on me. Fucking hell, I am shaking so much. I can't calm myself, I can't feel myself. The shaking turns to light-headedness, an uneasy stomach, dry-retching and groaning. I am helpless but to watch as our safehaven burns to the ground.

This is the definition of dread.

We are all a byproduct of all the things that we have done. How horrendous a person must I be in that the result of my actions is an inferno? I must be a parasite at the bedrock of society.

Ash falls slowly in the air around us, coating the floor with a thin layer of grey snow. I shift my weight onto my side and lie down defeated in the dirt, thinking about how none of this would have happened if I had just stopped digging, if I had just accepted the way things were. Our names were clear, we had suffered our punishments, but I had to keep going. If not for me, then Castor would still have a roof over her head. I've let her down, again. I feel like there nothing inside of me anymore, nothing but a thick heavy regret.

The evening tips over into twilight, and the sky turns from fading pale blue to a haunting orange. Everything is on fire, even this planet. I move my hands over my face, unable to absorb anything more than I already have. I am emotionally drained, dripping with guilt, dread, pain, anger. My eyes sting, my heart is aching, my jaw is stiff, and my chest feels so heavy that I fear I might be swallowed up by the very ground beneath me. Would that be such a bad thing to happen?

Something else is falling from the sky, not ash this time. I sit up slowly, mesmerised by the scraps of half burned paper that twirl around in the air as they slowly descend to the forest floor. The anger has all but drained from me, and now my face is pale with acceptance. This has happened, and now I am watching the remnants of my hard work die. A stray newspaper article, a half-written up report on a witness, a photograph.

"Fuck."

I crawl to the black and white polaroid that has settled a few yards away, something breaking in my voice as I pick it up between two shaking fingers.

Happier times. My sister and I, smiling as we hold our infant sister in our arms. Two years ago we had everything. We were a family. I can't remember the last time I laughed. Those were such innocent days. Life wasn't perfect, but we had a future, we had each-other. Now it's all gone. One by one, piece by piece, we lost everything. Mother, Elise, even Father won't see us. I look over to Castor, she is the only constant in my life. The only thing that is truly real now.

She is steady as she always is, as she always was. Resolute in the face of absolute adversity.

I remember terrible cage of bodies, screams and shouts, gunshots, surges of movement that swallowed you up into a horrible crush that forced all of the air out of your lungs. Sheer terror bleeding into the forefront of my mind. Nowhere to go. To try and crawl out would see you trodden and stamped to death, and it was impossible to climb over other people. We were all dying in this horrendous calamity.

Gunshots parted the sea, but many died. There, in the middle of the murmuration was Castor holding the limp body of our baby sister. That was the very moment I lost all aspect of who I am.

"Just when you think you've already lost everything, you lose it all again," I muse aloud to myself, using it almost as a gateway to break the deafening white-noise that separates me and my sister. Please talk to me. It has been fifteen, maybe twenty minutes since we saw the blaze, and I am led on the floor, wishing I was six feet under.

"They won't let us live in peace," She replies after a few seconds of consideration. I nod. Peace. Such a fragile thing. Always temporary, never lasting. It's like it's human nature to destroy, moreso for the animals that control this society. They argue that violence controls people, and helps sustain the population. What is peace to them is chaos for us.

"They don't know the meaning of the word peace." I practically spit. Do I even know what peace is? All I've known since the day of that riot is how to fight back. I couldn't even accept the peace offering they gave us. Cas did her time, she lost an eye, I took my lashings. We paid our debts, they left us be. But fuck, I had to keep fighting them in the name of my own definition of peace.

Look where that has got us.

"What are we supposed to do now?" She turns to me, me for the answers. I suppose I have always been the one to come up with solutions, even if long-term they cause more problems. We have been in this situation so many times before that we may as well be permanent residents of square-one.

I look to the grocery bags. That's all we have now, a few days food and water. We could head back to the District, but they'd put us to work, make us live in a concrete box five-meters by five-meters. We would be cogs in a wheel, powering the same engine that oppresses us.

"We won't last three days out here. We either head back to the District and stand in line, or..." I stop, my mind moving to the only other alternative. I sigh.

"Or we make for the border."

Risk everything for freedom. I realise how unfair a thing that is to ask. I know that Cas would rather die than go back to the Detention Center. She still doesn't sleep like she used to, often I find her awake in those timeless hours between dusk and dawn. She has been through far more than I have, and I can't ask her to go through any more than she already has.

"We can go back tomorrow and figure something out," She is the voice of reason against my mad ideas, grounding me, making my rethink what is fair. We could make the border, but then what? Where would we go? Sure, we've lived in the woods for two years but we've always had the town within walking distance. Living in the wild, with nothing but our own initiative, with Peacekeepers hunting us every waking second? I'm not so sure.

But desperate times make animals of us all.

"Okay." I accept defeat, and lie back down, staring up at the stars. They say that the stars are the souls of all the loved ones that we have lost. I've always found comfort in that, I suppose, thinking that the light from these white giants has travelled trillions of miles over billions of years, only reaching the earth to say hello and console us. Maybe Elise is up there, smiling down at me. When she smiled, it was like all my worries melted. I could do with seeing that smile again now.

Morning smells like death. The charred remains of our treehouse lie smoking in the dirt. I don't feel any anger or sadness looking at it, just acceptance. What's done is done, we have to move on and figure out what's next. If you spend too long in the past, you'll get lost in it.

You're supposed to present yourself in formal dressing for the Reaping, but Castor and I turn up like we have walked through hell. To an extent, we have. We get several unsavoury looks from both citizens of the District and Peacekeepers, I really could care less at this point. No one can hurt me, I've already lost everything. Not everything.

"Who will volunteer as tribute, for the honor and glory of your District?"

This is new. The Quell twist, as it happens, is that the Games will consist entirely of volunteers. I feel somewhat relieved, even though I am never particularly worried about the Reaping because the odds are so slim. My mind is occupied on other matters today. Where do we go from here, how can we rebuild, what is our purpose? These are all questions I will figure out in time. We may be twins, but I'm a fraction older, so it's my responsibility to look after Castor, even if she refuses to accept that as the case.

"I volunteer."

And everything sinks again. Did she just say that? Did she actually just say those words without so much as a second's hesitation? The moment those two words have left her lips, she is a dead girl walking, surely she knows that. Surely she knows that she has just committed indirect suicide. My face folds into a scowl of denial as I turn to her.

And this is how it starts: With fire, with rage, with anger, with panic, with desperation. It turns even the best of us cruel.

"I volunteer also."

And the worst of us foul.