augustus 'gus' farr ✯ d2, fin.

Ma, I’m a star!

They chose him as the face to grace the front page of the academy’s newspaper, one out of a hundred faces, and that, in layman terms, meant he was a hundred times more famous than all the other students.

A Farr cast in the gleam of the limelight, there is no real surprise there, but trust- his autographs will cost a penny and a time in the distant future, Gus with a cursive loop. Bejeweled eyes, diamond eyes, he is nothing but a success story in the making, sizzling hot from the press. Boys like him could never be picked up in Shear Hill. The Farrs now lived not under the shadow of the mountain but rather at the peak of it in the highlands—a family of silver tongues, polite handshakes, and bronze ambition, the kind that outlives a war.

They came from a faded and rain-dragged tenant in the bowels of Two, Gus remembered ceiling stains and black molds, but look at them now on the other side: masters of the city’s news and media, entrusted by the Capitol’s elite. They said a Farr was a mink, a jaguar, and a songbird, all wrapped up into one creature of magnificence, and he wouldn’t shy away from such praise. They could weasel, prowl, and sing in any desired order.

To be a Farr is to always find a way to shine, even in the darkest of nights.

His Ma was born under napalm skies, told him tales of days when the gunfire was so endless it almost became rain-like, but now she is invited to all the highland inner circles and their grand dinner parties, a starlet who is asked to perform at every soiree. And his father, once a junior writer in a newspaper firm, now runs an entertainment house alongside his mother that has the masses of the highland swarming the gates every night, there for all the pleasures it could offer, whether it be a drink, a pretty face to share one with, or a show to lose themselves in. Layali, they called it—a midnight haven for the downtrodden. And as the entertainment house became popular, the rumors accosting his parents as turncoats also began to fade, thankfully so, because they could never be such vile things! The Farrs worked honestly and hard, and of course, the world rewarded them for it in equal measure.

The newspaper was his reward. There may have been sway from his father to the academy, correct, and Gus may have spread awful rumors of another boy who was competing with him, one including a story of how his natural hair wasn’t even blonde, but wasn’t that how you dealt with a world that rewarded the ruthless and tortured the soft-hearted?

The folk in Shear Hill resented them for not looking back on their roots, for brown-nosing the rich and breaking bread with them, but what they could not understand was that everything can be a means to an end. And if a bright smile and a rehearsed compliment made you win over someone influential, well, Gus would gladly do it. That was how his parents got him and his siblings out.

Whenever he closed his eyes at night, he still remembered the rubble dogpiled in front of their old house and the actual rabid dogs that roamed Thorn Street, starved, ribs as pronounced as furrows in a field, and eyes a sickly pus-yellow, and he swore to never go back or let anything drag him back to that cesspool. He was a flower pushing through the concrete, a signboard flickering past its due date, and a comet trailing brighter than the sun, leaving stardust in its wake. When he burns, he leaves no ashes, only heat and light, and yes, the brighter a star burns, the quicker it dies, but he’s gonna be the first one to defy that.

He’s gonna be the first Farr to burn for eternity.

They picked his name a day before the photoshoot, reading it aloud in its entirety from a piece of paper: Augustus Imran Farr. Gus rolled his shoulder blades back, took a deep intake of air, and finally, with his posture drawn back with an arrow’s tension, smiled.

It looked like the photo op would be a state-wide affair now.

“Gus,” he told them with a wink. “Call me Gus, ladies and gentlemen.”