happy is a thing in my head {patricia&hernani}

It doesn’t seem possible that the districts should exist. That they are true places, not just figments flashing across telescreens or words in people’s mouths. Ideas, and nothing more. The Capitol always felt like a bubble, the only “true” thing that could exist, skimming over the surface of a sea of unrealities and nonentities that someone, somewhere, some time conjured up for the sake of convenient explanation.

There’s a legend of this man from very long ago that strolled across the moon. It’s said that he climbed into the little cockpit of this great rocket, heavy with blasters powerful enough to spear him through the sky and into space, where he floated around for quite some time before descending onto the lunar surface. His boot-print is still there. A myth, of course, with about as much depth and truth as a passing daydream. One might as well suggest that District Thirteen survived the Dark Days. But Hernani feels a special kinship with that odd little Moon Man now, as he watches Panem’s wild-lands sweep past the train, as he recalls the shrinking image of the Capitol seen through the window about a day ago.

Of course, the analogy is not wholly fitting. The Moon Man watched the Earth slip away from his feet as he ascended into a dark abyss. Witnessed its ascension over the horizon of the silver-gray Moon. Saw that the Earth is a sapphire sphere, its blues shining in the sun’s radiance. Meanwhile, Hernani is watching Panem’s “spare closets” and “back-rooms” pass by. Spaces that Panem doesn’t bother using, for whatever reason. They’re only wonderful because of his own ignorance, he knows. He’s surprised to see so much unused real estate, really. How far are the districts and the Capitol from each other? Or is that the point?

He leans on the windowsill, peering down at the world beneath the train-bridge. Beneath is a view unlike anything the Capitol ever offered, except through holograms. A beautiful green-blue snake spined with morphed clay-colored islands – no larger than stepping stones, really – winding through ridges of caramel and amber rock, fractured and carved oddly, appearing more like a set of ginormous torn bones and flesh than actual cliff-faces. Dry, scrubby plant life still cling to the rocks where they could, and deer still stroll idly on the banks of the reservoir. Suggesting that the trauma perhaps occurred years ago. Or maybe that was just Hernani’s whimsy.

A ten-foot tall fence manifests, springing into existence as the train rockets over its bridge, leaving the fence to sail off into the horizon and slip out of view. “Are we here?” Hernani pipes up.

Hernani’s traveling companion is a brooding-faced Peacekeeper shaped like a pill-box. His white uniform looks like the chitin of an insect. He specializes in protecting and supervising MVPs like Hernani, or at least that was what Hernani was told. He doesn’t even know the man’s name. The Peacekeeper rouses and glances at his computer-watch. “Yeah, uh-huh,” he grunts, and then sinks back into his idle reverie.

Welcome to the Moon, Hernani thinks, watching sunlight ripple over the back of the reservoir.

His heart stops.

His spine grows rigid. He straightens up like a meerkat sentry, head perked up, eyes widening as though to see more. Then he flings open the window, jabbing his head out, hair a wild flurry in the gusting wind, leaning out farther and farther to stare.

“HEY!” the Peacekeeper barks. “You’ll fall!”

Hernani senses the Peacekeeper rushing up to him and ducks his head back in. The Peacekeeper slams the window shut.

In his mind, Hernani can still see it. The clinging machinery guts spurting from the rock-face, the color of rust. The body itself is rather like a serrated blade – smooth at first, then ending in a jagged pattern, yet originally a symmetrical shape, clean-lined. Manmade. Emerging from the water like the head of a great strange creature, emerging from the cliff-wall like a specter peering into the present day.

He turns to ask the Peacekeeper what was that, but looks into his eyes and knows it’s best not to.

Hernani leans against the car door and peers into his own reflection. The windows are tinted to the point of blackness; it is impossible to see the little civilization outside the car. There is a screen between himself and the Peacekeeper (now temporary chauffeur). The Peacekeeper explained that the purpose of the blinds aren’t so much to keep Hernani away from District Five, but to keep District Five away from Hernani. Hernani only has a glimmer of understanding as to what that means, nor does he have the headspace to dwell on it.

Rubble, he thinks idly. Huge. You can climb it…And the machinery sticking out of it…

One of the Dark Days’ war-machines? No – it seemed older than less than a century, surely, with that state of decay…

He rouses himself. Of course, this was all rather silly. Hernani had work ahead of him, and yet his head felt so clouded over. He had to focus.

He’d be meeting Patricia Valfierno very soon. That was the intention of this outing. Meet the victors, update their measurements, prepare them for the reaping, the prep week, et cetera. Get them out of the way so he can focus on the tributes when the time finally comes. Yet none of that feels real either! Patricia Valfierno shouldn’t be a real person, should she? In ways that were not entirely subconscious, he had always sensed that that strange savage girl on the telescreen wasn’t a person, but a character, just as the districts weren’t true places but another of the Capitol’s ideas. Someone who’d been scripted to win from the beginning, who had been created with the sole intention of playing out a story and emerging the “hero” (so to speak), but never to exist fully beyond a story.

He had been around ten when Valfierno won. All he remembered from that time was that she scared him. But back then, everything about the Games tended to scare him. Any given tribute, any given event or arena. Maybe that’s why they stopped feeling real to him. A more sensitive child can grow numb to the Games if you just imagine it as one of Mom and Dad’s stupid old dramas.

Yet, in some quantity or another, Valfierno has to be very real now, even if she wasn’t back then.

The car stops. Hernani blinks, gathering his supplies briskly. Beyond the screen, a car door slams, and then his door opens. The Peacekeeper jerks his head. Hernani steps out, setting his feet on proper District Five soil for only the first time today. The train platform had been such a mad rush to the car that he could hardly call it a landing.

“I’ll get her,” the Peacekeeper mutters, marching over to the door. Valfierno’s is a lovely house, but Hernani knows it’s not exactly District Five proper, either. A Victors’ Village may as well be an extension of the Capitol – the Capitol built them, the Capitol owns their mortgages...He drifts after the Peacekeeper, gazing around himself, turning his body around to take it all in. His eyes chance upon a sudden embellishment of green – appearing suddenly behind a fence of white, rising up from a soft crest of rich brown. He stops short.

As though caught in a gravitational pull, Hernani draws closer to the fence. No, not the fence, the little green shoot slipping gently up from the earth. He kneels down to set his burden against the fence – the makeup and fabric swatches, the kits, the portable sewing machine, the tablets. He unfurls himself. The little shoots look like stagnant sparks of green, reaching their thin fingers for the blue of the sky, their chlorophyll bright as they catch the light of spring. Bright with that life-giving color. Trembling in the soft creeping breeze, as though things given life, quaking with the energy of life and the need to grow. As a door knocks somewhere, Hernani gently pushes the gate open. The earth of the garden is soft and supple, yielding to his foot-falls, catching the prints of his shoes. He glances behind at them with a soft surprise, smiling as he wonders if there are footprints on the Moon too.

Somewhere, a Peacekeeper is grumbling: “Yeah, hey, I got your stylist right here for yah – wait…aw shit, where the hell did he–”

Hernani puts his hands in his pockets and wonders what plants these are. His mother used to grow orchids, but that became too much for her, they always died…

Somewhere, someone’s rushing around the house, stopping at a gate.

“Jesus Christ on a stick!” Hernani looks up. The Peacekeeper stands with his hands on his hips, his already brooding face practically black with disapproval. “First you almost jump outta window, and now you’re all over her turnip greens!”

Hernani checks his shoes to make sure he’s not stepping on any plants. He has no reason to think he is.

“What are you, a space cadet?” the Peacekeeper demands.

Hernani shrugs. “I guess so,” he states matter-of-factly. His gaze continues to wander over the shoots.

What alerts him to the fact that there’s a third person is what the Peacekeeper says as he shuffles off, having delivered his package, and now must commence the exciting task of waiting by a car for something to happen. “Yeah, good luck with him, lady.”

Hernani stiffens, assuming that iconic meerkat posture again as she emerges into his awareness.

Not a girl anymore. A woman, now. Of course – he knew that. He’d seen her on the telescreen enough times, as the years had gone by. But she was just a figment of someone else’s imagination then. Now she’s a person. Within the day or two, he’d have to turn her into a canvas, but that can come later. He drifts closer to her, though the nearness makes his stomach clench – old childhood fears and sentiments seizing up the muscle there to cramp it. He swallows to wet his mouth before he offers her his hand to shake.

“Hernani Hugo. Lovely garden.”

jay! <3