ratmas tables for pogûe

✁

Billie unlearned what it meant to be comfortable. 

The fight for her life began two years ago and Avriel won his, brought more money back home than she & Duke would ever know what to waste it on. He hasn't been quite the same since - she didn't expect him to be, but she watches as her brother lives in his head for the few months that he's home for. She reads his letters over twice, a third, just to make sure it's really him who wrote it but she can't be sure. 

For once, things are supposed to be going right, unbelievably so. She's been here before; difference circumstance, same gut feeling. The second day her parents were missing she knew they weren't coming back, not in Panem. 

Not with her luck. 

And so before she met Ken, she'd come out after school and sell whatever she could get her hands on to afford soap and toothpaste. Avriel would work his odd ends to feed the three of them, and somehow she trusted the world more when it was just the three of them against it. It's hard to reintegrate, to make friends at the new prep school the wicked bitch from the capitol forced her in. It's hard to pretend she doesn't know what it's like to be a street rat, to be the trash kid kicked and spat at for trying to make it through. 

Ken told her she couldn't work as a nurse anymore. She was too high profile, a collateral risk. 

Somehow, in her seventeen year old brain, she felt lower than she ever had before. It was the first time in her life she'd been discarded by something close to family, a new pain she hid behind a clenched jaw. Ken kicked her out of the only work she had and Billie left her pride behind. "What?" But she would say, "Ken, that doesn't even make sense. You know I can do this and it's not like they're taking my goddamn ID. They won't even know-"

"Just... stay in school. You don't need this anymore, you know that, right Billie?"

"Please, I-" 

"You need to leave. I have work to do." 

Billie was holding onto a thread she hadn't even realized she grabbed ahold to, "c'mon!" She says, slamming her fist onto the counter she leaned on prior, "you know you need me, Ken, shit! What- what about Eon, huh? He would have bled out if I wasn't there!" 

"You mean when you came back-"

"Yeah!"

"-with the supplies you stole?"

 

The conversation didn't last much longer. All the fight she had building up in her got caught in her throat -- Billie left without saying sorry. What she regrets more is she didn't leave empty handed. Something about old habits, Billie may have money but she hasn't learned how to trust that it'll stay. 

She skips school to set up a booth down past the Victor Village, dragging a wagon of knick knacks, stolen goods and a single foldable table. All she's got in her wallet is change and 1's, all she's got on her mind is a bitter rage. To the world, to Ken, to herself. To whoever she can blame for an anger she doesn't understand; all she can concentrate on is getting rid of everything making her guilty. 

Meds from Ken, books from school, movies she'd stuff one by one down her tank top from the corner store. Things from classmates - old and new, pots and a windchime she took from her neighbors' porches. 

At this point, the only thing Billie can't sell is the lie that she doesn't care.