we all float down here (vera/junie)

Junie St. James

She can almost believe she's not here, if she closes her eyes. 

She thinks of it like a spell, cast by the water faeries. Take me home. In the real world, Junie St. James is floating in the rooftop pool of the training center. The real world, however, is not Junie's favourite place to be right now, so instead she pretends that she is swimming in the creek in the forest behind her house, in the deep, rocky part, that is full to the brim and icy cold even in high summer. 

That was the place she learned to swim. Her brother, four years her senior, taught her the spring she turned five. She had been afraid, at first, as all children are. She hadn't liked putting her face under the water, because it was an unknown, a place in which she was blind and deaf and alone. Even so, she took to it quickly, found solace in the stillness.

She wasn't supposed to swim alone, but as soon as she could, she did. She'd sneak in the back door to hide her sodden clothes and dripping hair from her fathers, to avoid the lecture. The faeries would keep her safe; after all, it was the only explanation for why her body - so solid, so real - would float atop something so transient as the surface of the water. It was like flying. There simply must be magic involved. 

Junie is relieved to find that this magic has followed her past the perimeter of District Seven, all the way here to the Captiol, where there seem to be no faeries at all. She is glad that they are watching her. She searched the pockets of all of her clothing, just in case she could catch one, but they are far too good at hiding. Instead, she found only lint and candies wrapped in crinkly paper. 

It takes Junie a while to realise what unnerves her about the pool. Nothing is alive here. Not the water itself - it does not move or flow. There are no birds singing in the trees, no slow inhale and exhale of the forest. Even Junie herself is only dubiously alive, living now on borrowed time, a clock tick-tocking in place of the thing that was once her beating heart.

Junie has always suspected she is not human. She decides that now is as good a time as any to test her theory. Will the faeries catch her, if she falls? Will there be hands, holding hers? And, if you are not a real person, does death even want to dance with you? Impulsively, she squeezes her eyes tightly closed, pulls her limbs close to her, and sinks like a rock to the bottom of the pool. 

The tiles are smooth and cold and unnatural. The chlorine permeates her. She can taste it, even though her lips are closed tight. She tries to ignore it, and thinks of the forest.

She thinks she will stay down here for a long time.