Colgate O'Leary, District Nine [Resubmission/WIP]

They called him Soap because they said he needed it.

That was the problem, you know, about being a teenager and supporting his family. The O’Learys numbered eight mouths to feed when Col reached 18, and there wasn’t much to be done about it except work. So he stopped attending school and started putting in time at the refineries, making soap and any other materials the District decided to prioritize. He didn’t have much choice in what he did or who he spent his days with; when the boss ordered him to do a do a job, he did it.

It was a monotonous kind of work, the kind of tasks that made it hard to keep his mind from wandering. It didn’t help that all the other working men liked to spit on him, both literally and metaphorically. They called him Soap and they called him Ugly, but Col was never the kind to take that stuff to heart, not at first. It’s easy to let the bad stuff roll off your shoulders when you’re young, so that’s what he did. There never was a smile so wide as his, and he went to work every day with the kind of optimism that only came from knowing that he was doing something with a purpose, in spite of the dark things and cruel people that haunted his days. In a fight between the taunts of his colleagues and the love of his family, the love won out every day.

Every night he’d come home to warm smiles and big hugs from his family. Looking back, he thinks they might have been so kind because they saw how much he was doing. How the work weighed on him, how the malicious words slowly etched their way into his consciousness. Though he did his best to ignore the worst of it, nobody could deny that Col was hurt by the people who just wanted to joke about him. After a while, all the bad stuff became too difficult to ignore.

They called him Soap and they called him Ugly because he was an 18-year-old boy who spent so much time taking care of his family that he didn’t have much time left over to take care of himself. His teeth were crooked and yellow because they didn’t have the money to get all that fixed up, and they’d stained from all the coffee he drank trying to stay awake through those long mornings. He didn’t brush them so often because he would come home from work some nights and collapse into a corner of the bed he shared with his siblings.

Taking care of himself was a tiring job, nearly impossible when he was trying to make the world okay for everyone else around him. Prioritizing himself wasn’t on the agenda, so things went awry. His sandy brown hair could have been washed better, and the color was just light enough to show the grease. Residue from soap and refined chemicals always stuck to his skin, leaving behind acne that he incessantly picked at. His face is still pecked with scars here and there, but he doesn’t mind much. He never really minded about his appearance because there were worse things weighing on his shoulders. Col just didn’t like the way people treated him because of it.

In the few years he worked at the refineries, his family kept him stable. There was this unwavering love between his parents that always gave him hope, but he never understood it much. His Mom and Dad met in the weirdest way; his Dad was out hunting in the woods one day, back when there was more forest in District Nine than asphalt, and his Dad mistook his Mom for something worth hunting and shot her in the arm a little too quick.

To this day, Col still doesn’t understand how that turned into a love so deep. There’s all kinds of muddled words and vague stories after that, and Col mostly felt gross about the cooties and such involved when he was younger. But his parents were (and are) the wholesome type, always holding hands or hovering next to each other, a constant force of comfort in a world that works so hard to tear them down. They suffered through poverty for years, bearing six children together despite the lack of financial means to support them, and there’s a certain glory in their persisting despite insurmountable odds.

That’s what Colgate learned, when he was young: to love deeply and to keep going.

It helped that he had decent role models. His Mom has always been kind, calm, resilient; she’s the kind of person who lifts the spirits of everyone around her without even trying. That unrelenting kindness always seemed revolutionary to Colgate, but he never thought he’d inherited it. Maybe none of them did. Colgate, Scope, Katerina, Crest, Hannah, Marvis. There was always warmth in their household, but there was the difficulty too, the hunger in their bellies, and it was something that none of them really talked about.

To talk about it was to make it real, so they didn’t.

The summer after he turned 18, it wasn’t so easy to ignore anymore. The boys were growing way too fast for anyone’s liking, shooting up past the already-abnormally-tall height of their dad. Colgate himself stood at 6’7”, though he’d stopped growing by then. None of the hand-me-downs from other family members really fit, not even the ones from his Dad, so nothing really hung correctly over his already awkward limbs.

(He never really knew what to do with his arms. He was always curling into something, a sweater, a dark corner, himself-- all to make himself smaller. He didn’t know what to do with the stature he'd inherited)

When their dad got injured for a bit, once the repetition of the work started wearing at his joints, hunger became a constant companion. There had to be more days off, had to be less pain. None of them said anything because none of them wanted to make him feel like it was his fault. It wasn’t. They muttered complaints about the Capitol a lot more those days.

That was the summer of the 66th Hunger Games.

-------

Hannah was extra nervous, that morning of the Reaping.

"Think of it like you're in school, right? And the teacher just asked a monster of a question that nobody in the class understands. Nobody except for, well, you know the one. That one kid who always seems to know what to say, always seems to be kissing the teacher's ass?"

She smiles at the word ass, but it's more of the nervous type. "Don't say that! Mom doesn't like it when you say bad words," she whispers, gaze flying towards the door just to check and see if anyone might be listening in.

"Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. What matters is this: you know how the teacher almost never calls on the annoying know-it-all kid? Noooo, she's always looking at the ones who don't know the answer, the ones who look like they're kinda squirming in their seats a little. Today, you have to be the one with all the answers. You gotta make yourself big and tall, hold your chin up, and make it so no one on this earth would ever dare pick on you. You got that?"

That day at the Reaping, Colgate saw their sullen faces and he made a choice.

"I'm so tired, dad. I'm so tired. I can't do this anymore, I can't - I can't watch you guys starve when I can do so much better for you. If there's even a chance, I need to take it."

So he did. He marched to the podium and announced himself to the world, knowing deep in his heart that he would either win and bring his family back the life they deserved, or he would die one less mouth to feed.

It broke his parents’ hearts to see him go, their first child, the one with all the toothy smiles.

Once he volunteered, there was no stopping it. The Capitol’s fancy train whisked him away to the end of that version of himself, and they cleaned his teeth and scrubbed his skin raw and washed his hair and put him up in a nice suit. They made him presentable to the world, not the ragged dying boy from the Reaping video.

When he observed the Capitolites, the Careers, the Gamemakers, he saw faces that spit at the warmth he held in his heart.

All that warmth, all that fire, and the world he met was so cold.

ooc: I forgot to table. I'm tired and don't want to table rn. I'm still working on this.