cara / district 2

Has someone ever asked you who you are? Have you ever wanted to say nothing more than your worst nightmare? No? Hm. Just me, then? *shrugs* I don't know what to say, really. I can't talk to you then. Because you just don't get it.

There was a time where the Lipski name would strike fear in the hearts of anyone who heard it. And if it wasn't fear, then it was reverence. Respect. A name to be damn near worshipped. And why wouldn't they? Decadence oozed from every one of their calculated steps. Confidence in endless troves, swaying in the wind with their long dresses and tailored coats. And money. Fuck, did they have money. Good money. Old money, you know? The kind that's been around for longer than the Games themselves.

The kind you'd kill for.

But families grow. They fracture off, forge new alliances, and marry strangers in hopes they'll be able to emulate that first Lipski matriarch and patriarch. The ones who created it all, an entire empire. But division like that, the rivalry and the damage, the corruption and the forgotten loyalties... 

Thus began the downfall of the Lipski dynasty.


I've been told the stories all my life. How lavish the parties were, how expensive the clothes had been, how much luxury we had all been afforded. Once. A long time ago. But that's all I'd get. The distant family is as close-lipped as my father, and as elusive. Recluses, mostly. Living in separate towns, hundreds of miles apart. He's barely even around, really. Always working, apparently. You could fool me with how little is for dinner, how I have to beg for scraps of food at lunchtime during school - so fucking embarrassing. If I wasn't starved I wouldn't do it, though. 

Basically the Lipski name is now synonymous with 'aww' or 'poor thing'. It begets side-eyed glances, or a nose being turned up in the air at the first sight of us. As if we smell like literal shit. Which isn't always necessarily untrue. You see, my grandfather may have once owned a career training center, and an esteemed one at that - supposedly - but now, that was warehouse. Specifically one where they process Panem's  garbage. Nice, right? 

So, yeah. Sometimes we smell. But it's not for lack of trying not to, its just that my father comes home smelling like it. Despite taking off his clothes in the garage, and showering before dinner every night. It makes no difference. It's like it has seeped beneath his skin. Into his bloodstream. It was the nail in the coffin, really. And while it may have been the District as a whole that has failed the Capitol and left us victorless for so damn long, every day when I get up and am forced to go to one of the few remaining academies smelling like literal trash...

Some days it feels like karma just came for me, you know? 

It's not like I don't hear them all whispering about it. Those who retained their wealth were far better off than my family ever was, don't get me wrong. It's not like we were the Fenwicks or the Moreaus. We don't date back to before the dark days; we were new money. And it went as quick as it had come. Spent just trying to keep homes above our heads. They call me scholarship shit and trash twat. So imaginative, and alliterative for some reason? Even their insults are high brow. 

Gag me with a spoon, honestly.

But you know what? There has to be one, doesn't there? One of us still left in Two who can maybe rise above. Someone who can go into that arena and finally, after all this time, come home with a crown. Mostly, I'd just love to rub it in the Capitol's face. You wanna shove trash down my family's throat and punish us for something out of our control? Okay. I'll show you how much of a shit I can really be.