Justin Monaghan || District 12 || FIN

The little lion boy is what they called him.

A young flower, grown from a garden tarnished in rot and turmoil.

A sweet boy who was blind to what happened in his district. Soft and supple, a leaf could fall in his direction and he would pick it up and try to put it back where it came from.

Some people said he had a weak heart, but they didn’t know anything about him, Justin, the person. No. They knew who he was, or thought they knew who he was because of his last name. The litany that followed him wherever he went.

Monaghan.

It was like the boil that he couldn’t chop off, a disease that was incurable in some aspects. It would follow him in the forests, to school, and even through the town that he felt like he knew like the back of his hands.

Everyone knew who he was, and there was nothing that he could do about it. A constant barrage of doubts and secrets that he never cared to pay attention too because he did not deal with whatever others claimed to know about him.

Or what they thought to know about him.

---

He had always had a soft heart.

He didn’t try to fight people too much, only when he thought he was being attacked. He tried his hardest to keep himself at bay, he knew that most people knew nothing about who he was, but when it came to his family, he was willing to protect them. Others did not know who the Monaghans were except for the people that lived in that house. The ones that shared the same name.

The same blood.

Justin had a twin, and they had always been the type of person to never back down from anything. While twelve had been known as one of the poorer districts of Panem, they didn’t let that stop them from learning. Justin was always envious of how well-spoken they were, and if he was honest with himself, he wished he could have been that good at it as well.

He had always been more of the type to fight or flight, leaning more towards the flight. They called him little lion boy, not because he was courageous, or proud, or anything of the sort.

They called him that because he was the first to roar out of the bunch.

Always quick to jump into things because he couldn’t stand people walking all over him. Sometimes he did talk with his fists, but only when it was absolutely necessary. He tried to keep himself out of most other business, because that way he wouldn’t experience the backlash of finding out things that he didn’t want to know about.

Blissful ignorance is what he strived for, and he would be damned if he didn’t fall somewhere in that realm.

Even if he came from rotten soil, that didn’t mean he had to be rotten himself. Right?

---

He didn’t know, and sometimes he would stumble into family meetings that he had no business being apart of. He would hear mentions of what went on behind the scenes and he would simply take himself out of the room. Sometimes he would do it quietly, or so loudly that Jules or Jaime had to physically throw him out of the room. It really depended on how much he went through that day.

He liked to base a lot of things on his mood, and sometimes that worked in his favor, and sometimes it blew up in his face. He was okay with that though, because at the end of the day, he still knew very little of what this family was up to behind closed doors.

Whether or not that would last was always up in the air, and realistically, he knew he could have done so much more to keep himself from discovering why this family lived in rotten soil.

He could have ran, told people that he didn’t love his family, he could have lied and made up stories about them to just get away.

The possibilities were always endless, but that was not Justin Monaghan.

This little lion boy knew exactly who he was.

A flower from rotten soil.

A boy that wanted to hold the world on his shoulders.

A Monaghan.

Through and through.