Juniper Hawthorne || District 7 || FIN

He never wanted the life he was given.

Born into a family of woodworkers, Juniper had always been taught to work with rough hands. From a young age, an axe was always in his hand, and even though the blade might have weighed two-fold, his parents pushed him to hold it over his head, because Hawthorne’s didn’t know what it meant to be weak.

It was a constant struggle growing up in a household where he was the only boy amongst a group of women. However, when his father passed in an untimely matter, his mother did not bat an eyelash. She didn’t show her vulnerability to the public, because she didn’t want to be perceived as weak. Business as usual to the naked eye and a tragic story when the doors were closed.

It was just how she coped with the loss of him.

Juni on the other hand was a little too emotional for his own good. So much so that his mother would openly chastise him in front of the district for shedding tears over what couldn’t be fixed. He tried to conceal himself, his emotions, but it never worked. The act of chopping a tree was enough to make him emotional, and he always looked like a fool when he was put to work by his mother.

---

She became a tycoon of sorts in the wood mills. She was relentless when it came to securing what she needed in order to support her family. It wasn’t a huge one. Juni, Branche, and Oak, all varying in ages. Each one was old enough to take care of the other, but far enough apart in age to be their own person.

Juni was no different, sometimes being told to stay home in order to make sure that both of the young ones were taken care of. Sometimes he would direct Branche to look after Oak just so he could go out and get away from the solitude of the home they lived in. After all, it was still a shrine to their father, and while he wished he could have destroyed it, he wouldn’t dare do so.

His mother grieved here. Just like the rest of them.

Sometimes he wished he was Oak, a baby literally. She would never know who their father was. A hard-working man who made sure his family would be taken care of if anything happened to him.

Well, something did, and they all paid the price in tears and sadness. And they would never get those back.

---

Time passed, but that didn’t mean it was easier. It was the opposite.

Time passing did not lessen the blow of losing someone they loved, and nothing seemed to change over the years. His mother still tried to keep a stone face, his sisters grew older, and so did he. They tried to make it seem like they were a normal family, but a normal family would have moved on. They would have celebrated his life, not mourned his death in the years to come. They still held onto everything that he owned like it would bring him back. Like holding onto empty heirlooms meant anything here in Panem.

Like he was still there when it was very clear that he wasn’t.

Juni didn’t go through the ringer like some people thought he would. People question him and his train of thought on multiple occasions but he found his way through most of the craziness that ensued in the district. After all, growing up in a place like seven, it was tight knit and dangerous for no reason.

He didn’t have to hide things often from people, except when it came to matters personal or of the heart. Then it had to disappear into the ether because then it became too much to handle. Juni tried to show that he could handle it, screamed and clawed at the idea of being able to thrive off of it even, made it very clear that this was him. He was a boy made of sturdy wood, but behind that bark was flesh filled with termites.

He could snap at any moment.

---

Things got easier as time went on. His mother made it very clear that he had no business carrying any sort of resentment towards the family for what had happen. That the death of their father was not something to resent, because at the end of the day, they were going to be stronger because of it. Loss makes the heart grow fonder, and it should motivate them to keep going instead of stopping them from achieving things they want to reach.

His mother lived by this, and that’s why she built her mill from the ground up. She branched off and created separate ones around the district, and while the wood mills were abundant in a place like seven, she made sure that hers ran the best. She showed her children the ropes of the business as they grew older, and by the time Juniper was seventeen, he was entrusted with one himself.

His mother was sure that he wasn’t going to be reaped the next year.

She was right.

She always was.

---

Family was always important to the Hawthornes, and that did not change as Juniper aged out of the reaping. His siblings were young, still not old enough to be in the reaping themselves, which he thought they were lucky because that was something that no one wanted to think about. Losing another family member to something like the games would have crushed them.

Branche was coming up on reaping age though, and Juniper spent a lot of time preparing her for the correct procedures during the ceremony. He knew that if she didn’t know, someone would have found a way to make it known, and the last thing that Hawthorne’s needed was a scandal that could ruin them. Juni always took care of his siblings anyway, and Oak was already learning so much for a young child. His mother was always busy, and while Juni had his own wood mill to run, he knew that most of it would run itself because his mother made sure of that.

This way he could be freed up if something that pertained to family members came up.

Branche was scared, but eventually, she made it through her first reaping. She didn’t have to worry as much as some of the other children, because she came from an affluent family, which meant that her name was only in the bowl once. Some of the children weren’t lucky in seven after all. It was sad to think about, but it was a reality that they had to be thankful for. Their mother provided that for them, even though she wasn’t around as much as she wanted to be. It was a type of love that the children grew to understand and appreciate with time.

---

As Juniper got older, he found himself thrown into work more often, so much so that he ignored a lot of outside forces that usually would come with life. Friendship, love, and even death didn’t matter unless it had to do with the work place. Soon enough, Branche was able to take care of Oak by herself, which meant that he could place himself in other situations that gave his mother a chance to take a break from time to time.

He was, by no means, ready to take up such matters, but it was nice for him to at least get the experience of doing so. Something to get his mind off the reoccurring sadness that would hit him from time to time. Throwing himself into the work kept his mind off of it, but he didn’t realize that it didn’t help him.

It only made his sadness intensify.

It got to the point where his mother had to force him to take some time away. She had always been the selfless one, putting her children before her well being because she knew that’s what mothers had to do. Nothing mattered more than making sure your children lived a happy life, and Juniper was nothing more than sadness incarnated.

He was always told to enjoy the little things as he got older.

---

And soon enough he found himself at odds with most of the outside factors that mattered with a thing like life. It wouldn’t stop either.

People tried to flirt with him; He wasn’t responsive.

People tried to hang out with him; He would ghost.

People tried to talk to him; he would just ignore and ignore and ignore.

It got to the point where if it didn’t involve work, he didn’t care. He threw himself into end of the lake where there was no guard rails, it was sink or swim and he didn’t know how to swim. He didn’t even know how to tread water.

He almost drowned multiple times, barely receiving a life raft from people as they witnessed him floundering. The water tasted acrid, like soot or sawdust.

And he couldn’t get the taste out of his mouth.

---

But it didn’t last forever. Soon enough he found a way to turn pain into something more. Even though he claimed he was too busy, he did eventually find a groove that involved him finding things out about himself.

His hobbies outside of running a business or taking care of a family.

What he wanted out of the rest of his life.

Who he wanted to love.

Things didn’t change right away, and he even needed to be forced into taking time away just to focus on such things. He found pleasure in walking around the forest, climbing trees and sitting on tall branches so he could draw beautiful landscapes of his home district. He never knew if they looked good, because the only people that actually saw them were his family.

Realistically, they couldn’t be mean to him, but Juni had a feeling that they might have just been nice to him to make sure that he didn’t sink again.

It was all about keeping him afloat at this point.

---

His mother got sick, sick enough to the point where she couldn’t run the business at full capacity anymore. Lucky for her, Juni was able to slide in seamlessly. His work had to become his life once again, but this time he was confident in what he was doing. Time passed, a lot of it. He already had children of his own, but turmoil struck before he could have anymore than two. She claimed it was because she never loved him, but he had a feeling it was because she caught him with another person.

Juni was not the type of person that believed love was a simple thing, and if he felt it in the moment, he just did it. He just happened to be caught, and even at the age of 31 now, he didn’t have the fight in him to keep things together. His children would just have to understand it.

He was also lucky that he had his job to fall back on, and he threw himself into it.

Right around the same time, there had been a new mayor announced in seven, and Juni wasn’t sure how much he liked this man. He recognized the name, Sayer. A boy of the same name threw himself into the games in order to save the Collins boy, and then another girl with an S at the end of it had also threw her hat into the ring years before. Both of them almost came home too.

Almost

This new mayor claimed that Family and its value were important to him, but Juni begged to differ. There just wasn’t anything honest about him. His words dripped with confidence that didn’t belong to him. It was like he was stealing it from other people, leeching it as he went and claiming it to be his own.

Juni had learned a lot of things over the years, and one of them was people were willing to claim truths that weren’t theirs to do so. His mother taught him how to see through that.

It was the greatest gift that she could have ever given him.