Aurora Delphine | d5 | 2ndhg | WIP

She has never known what it was like to struggle in her life. Her father had been nothing but shady in most of his dealings, but she found a way to stay out of most of it. Livestock had always been abundant in five, and her father knew how to move cattle better than anyone else.

Of course, he wasn’t always moving cattle, especially during the rebellion that had ravaged most of the world they lived in. He went from livestock to firearms in the blink of an eye, but he always found an interesting way conceal his intentions. He was a master of it, and Aurora had to learn to deal with it herself. 

Sometimes it involved delivering baskets of food to someone that she didn’t know, or sometimes it involved dropping a note in a specific spot in town. Aurora was always the person sent because her father thought she was just plain enough to pass by detection. No one would suspect someone so innocent to be doing anything nefarious? Right? 

That’s what her father thought at the least, and for a while, she would concur. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, she knew that she was always good at flying under the radar. She kept herself oblivious because at the end of the day, she didn’t want to be involved in whatever he was really doing. She was good at doing what she was told. She was smart to do so.

She didn’t want to end up like the people who didn’t listen to her father after all.

However, she wasn’t called on often to do tasks like that, only when the package was of upmost importance was when she was harkened forward, and while her father might have been a crooked man, she was not. She wouldn’t stoop to his level as long as she could. 

---

She was nothing like him.

She spent a lot of time in her room reading books that her father had obtained for her through various transactions. While they might have been obtained in ways that she didn’t completely agree with, she would not turn them down because she had an insatiable need to learn that could not be quelled by what was available to her at the ready. Her mother had taught her to read and write before she made the decision to leave this life behind. Aurora saw her from time to time, but they could only share a brief moment before she had to go. Aurora knew that she was being watched by her father wherever she had gone.

It was something that she hated more than anything if she was being honest.

Its why she opted to leave the house only every once in a while. At least there, she could be watched doing nothing but reading and learning like she had always loved to do. Her father told her multiple times that she should have been married and having kids already, but she did not want that type of life for herself. Not yet at the least. She wanted to live in a world where she was self-reliant and that was all. No extra pressure, no expectations to live up too, just her, and her books, and the knowledge that she had gain thanks to her mother.

---

The rebellion had come and gone and Aurora knew that her father had to have played a part in it somehow. It was way too large of a scale for her father to not want to try to make a profit out of it. He had always been a resourceful man after all, and that part made Aurora weary of ever acting out of line with him.

She never asked questions because she knew that was how she would get in deeper then she wanted, and jumping out of the shallow end was the last thing that she wanted. 

She kept to herself as she heard stories of people being blown up before their eyes. Instead of making a comment, she simply flipped a page in the book she was reading, because she didn’t want to comment on the validity of whatever story was being told. She did however, want to know if her father had supplied any of the weapons that had been used in the war.

She would laugh to herself as she realized she already knew the answer to that question.

Of course he fucking did. 

He was a fucking crook.

---

Her father had started to attempt to rip the band aid off his wounds many a time after the rebellion had been quelled. He knew that he might have been in the clear, simply because he thought that he had always been careful. 

Aurora was always impressed with how much he was trying to become an honest man, even though she knew that wasn’t going to be possible for him. Even when the littlest of hope was offered, Aurora would watch it crumble right before her eyes. 

He tried to start with their relationship, and Aurora truly didn’t want any part of it. She was much more reserved then he would ever be, and whoever said opposites attract must have never met the Delphines, because they always pushed apart at the instance they came in proximity. Aurora didn’t mind it too much, because that meant she got lots of opportunity to just be by herself, and at the end of the day, that is what she wanted.

She wanted nothing to do with her father.

---

The first games had passed and Aurora had never seen her father so worried in his life. He clammed up anytime someone had mentioned anything about it, to the point where he often shut himself into a room in the house and avoided contact for multiple days, only coming out for dinner and maybe a quick drink. 

It had been so long since Aurora had seen him so worried, and that in turn, did worry her as well. She was still so young, seventeen. She had a whole life ahead of her, but in an instance she could be ripped away from everything she had known and thrown into something that she didn’t. That was scary in and of itself.

The day of the reaping, she, along with the other children of the district, had been told to show up at the town square during the summer in the finest clothes they had owned. And when she did, she realized that they had now turned this into the lottery, however, the prize was nothing no one wanted. 

And she stood there for what seemed like an eternity as they read the treaty of treason for everyone to hear. They had everyone’s names in a bowl, and Aurora couldn’t help but worry for a moment, that maybe they found a way to punish her father without even harming him physically. 

That maybe all of those slips had her name on them instead.

After all, there was no way they couldn’t have guessed that he had a part in the rebellion. He was a sloppy man that took joy in that notion. Just because Aurora had been careful didn’t meant other people had been, and of course, he always had enemies that he was worrying about.

He just didn’t know what to expect out of all of this, and neither did Aurora.

Until finally they pulled out a name.

Aurora Delphine.

And she realized that life would always be cruel, regardless of how much you kept youself out of it.