jamieson bellisario, district two (fin)

jamieson bellisario
aged twenty-one



What's in a name?

If you ask Shakespeare, names hold no worth or meaning. That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, Juliet would say as she denounces her title as a Capulet in the name of her love for Romeo. Romeo and Juliet lived in a much different world from us. You see, in Panem, a name holds everything. Le Roux. Izar. Fray. Lumiere. All names that carry generations of wealth and power beneath them, hundreds of tributes sent to fight under the richness of their last names. 

Creating a legacy takes time, just like the most beautiful of diamonds takes a million lifetimes to create, under the most pristine and precise conditions. Even then, the chances of a diamond being molded perfectly into an octohedron are slim, and often requires the interference of a jeweler, whose steady and precise hands fill in all of the cracks and imperfections as if they never existed in the first place.

If the Bellisario family were diamonds, I was the jeweler. 

With great power comes great responsibility, and also great scandal. No family with a name as big as ours can escape the grasps of the public eye, and it's my job to ensure that any mistakes get covered. By any means possible. It's hard work, paying people to stay silent, threatening, sometimes even doing harm...

But with eight diamond encrusted tattoos lying on my back, I was the only one of our generation who cared enough to do it. 

And as I approached the familiar figure of a girl I once loved, at the fresh age of 18, I thought to myself that it had to be this way. That it was the right thing to do. And then I pressed a cheque, embellished with the Bellisario name, into her palm, pressing my two hands against hers.

"If you need more, let me know," I would tell her, biting my lip as I avoided eye contact, "and remember, the kids not mine."

And then I would walk away, never to see her again.