mila breukelen | d12 | fin

The twins are the best worst decision she's ever made.

A drunken one-afternoon-stand behind the Hob with a boy whose name she doesn't want to remember, who walked around afterwards bragging to his friends and sneering down his nose at her, and when her belly started growing rounder the boys jeered and the girls looked at her with pity. (It's not like she doesn't see those same girls emerging from behind bushes with glowing faces and messed-up clothes; bad luck to her for doing it with the wrong guy, and bad luck to her for having a grown woman's body at fifteen, but it's still her fault, isn't it?)

It would be much easier, she thinks, to bear their judging glances if her own brother didn't say the same things at home as her peers said at school. How can she teach her children right from wrong if she is filled with sin herself, they say, better marry a merchant man of good stock oh wait no man worth having will take used goods, and with two children too at that. (Bad luck having to fit two babies in one belly, good thing she ain't got pretty hips to spoil anyway or they could have killed her, and why didn't she just take a coat hanger and she might have pretended it didn't happen?)

They tell her it's lucky her parents didn't disown her, that she's not gonna starve to death like the poor Seam kids begging in the streets even if she can't keep her legs closed, can't control herself just like those stupid coal miners having more children than they can afford. Merchant girls should know better, they say. Merchant girls don't act like that.

She can't really agree with them that she's ruined her life when the twins - one boy, one girl, two years old now, with bright eyes like her and so full of energy - are her life.

And it's one thing for the three of them to be staying in her old bedroom above her parents' shop, to listen to their advice as she helps out where she can, it's quite another for her brother to tell her they need tough love so they won't turn out like their mother, spare the rod and spoil the child after all, and what right did she have to criticize his words, isn't she ashamed of herself?

It could be worse, she snaps at him. They could turn out like you.

She would rather her children grow up to be kindhearted and gullible than cold and cynical, and in his eyes that makes her a bad mother because how dare she not put her own children above the rest of the world, how dare she not teach them to be ambitious and take every possible advantage from others. Don't teach them to play fair, he says, teach them to win.

How can you be so remorselessly selfish? she hisses at him.
No, how can you be so selfish, he responds, putting your own morals above your children's well-being? You are spoiling them. They will be unprepared for the real world.

Ripred, if there's one thing she regrets about getting pregnant it's the rift she's formed with him; they would talk about everything together as children but now each looks at the other and wonders, where did you go so wrong?

They had been born a year apart, both with silver spoons in their mouths, or as close to silver spoons as one could get in an impoverished district like Twelve. A well-maintained home, plenty of food, and the blessing of good health was more than most families in the district had to their name.

And yet, there is little else a child needs, other than their parents' love, which was provided in abundance to the two children, and they grew up climbing the old gnarled apple tree in their yard, to sit in its top branches and talk, and dream, and occasionally fantasize about becoming the mayor.

When I'm Mayor, I'll give people lots of holidays. Then they won't have to work!
No, I'll be Mayor. An' instead of giving them holidays I'll tell them the hardest worker gets a prize of eleven zillion rations! Everyone loves prizes!

Her own children remind her of that innocence. The boy so down-to-earth, the girl so headstrong. She wishes that they will never have to learn otherwise.

In a place like Panem, that wish is all but impossible.