Haru Onaka - D5 - FIN

Haru never knew what it was like to be reaped. Simply because people didn’t talk about it much when it happened.

The only thing she every really knew was just how busy it got in the bar after a reaping day.

Her father told her that when she took over the bar, she would have to serve people who hated their lives because they weren’t able to save their children from meeting an end that they didn’t want for them.

That she would have to comfort people that didn’t understand why evil populated this world.

That she would have to tell people that it was okay when it clearly wasn’t.

---

Nothing was ever normal for Haru. She was the daughter of a grain farmer and a housewife who was agoraphobic. Her mother didn’t do much because of her agoraphobia, but she did manage to raise six kids while her father tended to the farm.

It was always her father who was the dreamer anyway.

Most of the time, her father was out in the field cultivating what he called hops for something known as beer, and her mother was in the kitchen cooking whatever he brought home for her to do so.

Sometimes Haru tried to take her mother out of the house, and one time, this was met with a swift hand across the face.

When Haru asked why she was treated in such a way, her mother told her to mind her own business and wash up for dinner.

Her agoraphobia was something that the family tried not to talk about.

---

Growing up, Haru didn’t have many friends because she was known as the weird girl with a mother who never left the house.

Most kids teased her, calling her mother a beast because she was afraid of coming out into the sunlight.

And she let them.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother, or that she was mistreated in any sort of way. It was because at the end of the day, she didn’t understand why her mother had such a hard time taking a leap and setting herself free.

She chained herself down when she could have had the world, and Haru would never understand that.

Then again, Haru and empathy did not go together, and that became even more apparent when it came to her brothers and sisters.

All of them didn’t know what it was like to have a person to care for them more than just the minimum.

It wasn’t that her parents didn’t care, it was more that she thought that her parents didn’t care.

Her father was too busy working in his grain fields and her mother was too scared to leave her room sometimes.

So Haru had to work that much harder to help where she could.

---

It started in the fields that her father had owned. And while she didn’t quite understand what his fascination was with grain was, she learned to put that beside her and focus on what she needed to do.

The job was simple, cut the grain when the crop looked like it was ready to be harvested, pull the remnants after and then replant the seeds and do it all over again.

For a while, it was simple, but then it grew boring, right up until she found a different plant growing alongside the wheat in the fields. When she asked her father what it was, he told her that it was hops.

And that was when her life had kind of changed.

---

You see, hops is a natural ingredient in beer, after fermenting it, it created the liquid that some people lived by here in five, and while Haru didn’t quite understand it, she learned quick that her fathers passion was not the wheat that he cultivated for a profit.

It was the art of making the perfect beer.

An admirable feat that Haru couldn’t believe was possible in a place like Panem. She had heard of bars before, but she never thought in this reality that there would be a chance for her to see one in person.

Mostly because she thought she would have been reaped before anything like that happened.

But at seventeen, she was close to the end of counting her days till death, so maybe there would be a chance for her to keep going to see her dream out.

---

Her father told her once that his dream would be to open a bar in the middle of the district that everyone could go too and live in a place where the games didn’t exist, and for once, Haru finally saw things from her fathers perspective.

However, she knew that he wouldn’t be able to run it by herself, and the fact that her mother pretty much didn’t leave the house, meant that there wouldn’t be anyone that really help him out unless one of his children weren’t reaped in the games.

So she made a promise to her father that on the day of her last reaping, that she would help him realize his dream if she wasn’t reaped.

That was something that they both could agree on.

---

And it came. The final reaping she was eligible for. She wore a black dress that complimented her hair.

She worked hard to make sure her siblings look primped and polished as well, and for once, she was able to get her mother out of the house.

To Haru, this was the most important day of her life, because she would either have to fight for her life, or start living for herself for the first time.

That was enough to get her mother out of bed.

And when the escort walked up to the mic and called the girls name, Haru did not hear hers, and that meant that she could finally breath for the first time in six years.

She looked back at her father, smiled and then watched him fall to the ground.

---

She lost her father that day, but it wasn’t all in vein, seeing as he taught her the ways of his craft and before she knew it, she was brewing semi decent batches of beer that could have been served to the public.

It took her a while to get the craft down but with the help of her brothers and sisters, they all started to work hard on making sure that her fathers dream became a reality.

Her mother started to get out of the house more, this time to help find a place for them to open up shop.

With the money that she saved up, her mother was able to purchase a small space at the end of the district square.

And before they knew it, Haru finally was ready to open a bar, just like her father had always wanted.