a story is just a well-decorated lie (circe/junie)
Jun 6, 2024 3:07:40 GMT -5
Post by junie st. james d7 ❁ on Jun 6, 2024 3:07:40 GMT -5
Junie St. James.
Junie haunts the hallways like a ghost. She walks on tiptoes, hides behind curtains. She hates the training center. It smells like chemicals and closed doors. They keep putting food in front of her, but the food is not the sort of food Junie likes, and she spits it out. So far, Junie hasn't spoken to anyone.
You can tell from her face that she has been crying. That is, if you could catch sight of her face. It hides behind the long curtain of her hair, and she would rather you did not perceive her at all, so she emerges only reluctantly.
Everybody here speaks to loudly, moves too sharply, and speaks a language Junie does not understand. The words make her wince. They say: mentor, sponsor, training score. They say: audience. They say: victor. Junie hates this word most of all. She does not think that it is right, any of it. She wants to go home, but when she thinks about home, she cries, so she tries to distract herself.
That is why she is wandering through the hallways after midnight. She is skimming her fingertips along the wallpaper, tracing the patterns, their great sweeping swirls. She is fighting the rising surge of claustrophobia that tosses and turns in her gut, unsleeping. She wants to run away, but every time she has tried she has felt their hands on her shoulders, her arms, her legs, even, and she is returned to her rightful place, her abattoir. She does not think that it is fair, because they are big and she is small. Junie is too clever to try and explain this to them, because she knows that they won't care.
When she closes her eyes, Father is there, saying goodbye, so she keeps them wide open. She is good at watching, good at seeing, good at listening. Not much good at any of the other things they have tried to introduce her to: swords and rope and making fires. But observant. She has managed to swipe several things from the pockets of her fellow tributes already. The items are boring. What she finds in the pockets of the Capitolites is much better.
Junie is watching and listening, now, because she is afraid to be caught out of bed so late. It was just like sneaking to the kitchen for cookies after bedtime, evading Pa, only, instead of her warm kitchen it was a clinical, cold hotel, instead of cookies, it was a break from the ceaseless sound of her own sobs, and instead of Pa, the people who might catch her wanted her dead. In a round about way, at least. Because of this, when she hears footsteps, her whole body stiffens.
She is pressed up against the wall in an instant, peering around the corner. She tells herself to be brave - to step out, boldly, and say, Who's there? so that the other tributes think she is plucky and tough, but to be honest, Junie is not feeling like the best version of herself today.
