a woman's wrongs / maryn's speech

Maryn Hale’s smile is like a knife.

Shining, sharp — ready to slice through your skin at a moment’s notice. She approaches the podium with confident strides, resting her stiletto nails against the polished wood, unconcerned about the potential to leave behind scratch marks. Maryn is a woman who likes to live brutally. If she has the ability to cause harm, she will do so. If a thing is not meant to burn, then why is it flammable?

And if the human body isn’t meant to be broken, then why is it so fragile?

To her, the logic is sound. And while she is satisfied with her place in the world — a higher being with the ability to make the vermin of her great nation suffer — this does not mean that she does not crave more. Throughout the six years following her debut as a Gamemaker, she has planted the seeds for a glorious future. It is a high honour to play a hand in the annual tradition of twenty-three lives being sentenced to death for the crimes of their forefathers, but it’s limiting. And it’s hardly bloody enough.

“I will keep this brief and to the point.” She will not beg her peers to vote for her, she will not demand their loyalty or understanding. The simple truth is that she is reaching for power, more than she already wields, and she will prove that she is deserving of it. That, and she's grown fond of playing with Hades Lochlan's toys. “I have noticed in recent years that the quality of life in the Districts is… perhaps too steadily on an incline. It has now reached the point where citizens have begun attempting to run for office in our great Capitol.” She does not mask her laughter. “There is something to be said about seeing to the wellbeing of all people in our nation, as is the responsibility of politicians, but we are approaching a dangerous ultimatum: what becomes of us when we start to view the district citizens as more than what they truly are? Tell me, would any of you want a man from Eleven running the country that his ancestors so desperately attempted to tear apart?”

She allows this to sink in, like teeth into meat. There should always be blood. Her lover, Odette, watches from the audience, sitting exactly where Maryn told her to. “We need to remind ourselves of our place the same way we remind them of theirs. We are the citizens of the Capitol, we are the privileged few who have always been on the correct side of the divide. We are not criminals, we are not vagrants, we have committed no crime to be punished for. They are the traitors, the rebels, the monsters in our oldest stories. Allowing them to forget the truth of their identity is perhaps our cruelest act. A dog has the right to know that it is, in fact, a dog.”

Holding her jaw high, she looks out at the audience with a domineering stare. “My proposition is a simple one, but one I vow to uphold: elect me to office, and I will see that both halves of our nation return to their intended roles. No more charity, no more easing the blow, no more allowing fools to believe they can crawl out of the hole they dug for themselves. Vote Hale, and I’ll give our enemies Hell.”