anubis marigold / d2 / fin

Stand tall, boy! Straighten up! Everybody's waiting!

The stairs in Anubis Marigold's house are long and winding, but he takes them two at a time with ease. At the top of them, there's a large mirror, an ancestral piece according to his grandfather, ornately framed and stretching from floor to ceiling. His figure cuts an impressive silhouette for fourteen. His gangly arms and legs are encased by fine tailoring that masks the knobbly joints throughout, the bow leggedness that no amount of training seems to fix, elevating him, transforming him from a cute stick insect to a handsome prince.

The party downstairs thrums beneath him, calling him down in the harmonic timbre of his parents' synchronised voices. 

But he's been down to the guests. He showed his face and demonstrated his ease amidst the decadence of their drawing and dining rooms. The metal masks worn by the Marigold family are well oiled machines at this point. The jaws hinge up and down noiselessly as they speak, each practiced phrase bleated out with appropriate believability and humility. In the mirror, his mask falls, clatters between his firmly planted feet. The real Anubis Marigold stares back. No smile or outstretched hand in sight. He greets his reflection with a hard stare, hands in his pockets, heart in his throat. 

Beyond the landing, the private rooms of the Marigold family are bare. Any items worth anything at all were moved long ago, when Anubis was still very small, somewhere that guests could admire them. The Marigold family were truly great once, rather than play acting at it the way they did today. For years after the citizens of District Two became Panem's garbage men, Anubis's ancestors had lived the way they'd become accustomed to. The realisation that they were living beyond their means crept up on them year by year, swept under the rug in pursuit of hedonism by patriarch after patriarch. Furniture and jewelry was pawned, sold, traded, but only little things, bits here and there where others might not notice it, accelerating until there was nothing left.

According to his parents, this mirror and the boy reflected in it are all they have left.

Anubis Marigold, the boy, stalks the streets of District Two after dark like a ghost. Back curved, feet dragging, unrecognisable as the boy he plays at being in the daytime. There's comfort to be found in the underground of District Two, when you're down so low you can't smell the garbage anymore. You're beneath all of it, untouchable. Nothing to live up to, nothing to worry about. Just a boy, one of many. Not the boy, one of one. 

Underground, Anubis makes his money. He boxes, mostly against other skinny guys because they're the only ones in his weight class, even though they're weedy, untrained upstarts who started somewhere even lower than the seedy basement club where they fight. Anubis has the benefit of being a tourist, being a career by day, and he shamelessly uses that dirty piece of hidden information to his advantage. Below here, he's Jackal: a masked and hooded fighter, silent and swift. The silence is born from necessity. His voice would give away his age, something his height and skill obscure. Being swift and light on his feet is just who he is. With all of his training stripped away, he'd still dance circles around most of the bozos they send in against him.

Just his opinion though.

Jackal takes another win, peels back the mouth of his mask to take a shot a fervent fan gives him. The cult following he's developed makes Anubis's head swell. The onlookers instill more career confidence into him with their cheers than his parents ever have. They've spent every last cent on him, their golden boy, developing his technique. But otherwise, they've raised him to be empty: a golden, hollow statue of a boy that casts a long shadow ahead of him. 

He spits up blood into the sink at home, washes out his mouth with water, calls it a night after slinking through the window he'd left propped open. The party is winding down downstairs. Anubis doesn't bother to go see guests off. After all, he's studying, as far as they know. He's used up the slim energy reserves he uses for socialising and they need replenishing. Even tomorrow morning, he'll be far away. His parents know something isn't right, but as long as he shows up for training, as long as he shows his face at their weekly game of charades, as long as his mask still fits... well, what do they care?

And why should they care? Anubis doesn't. He doesn't care about a damn thing save himself. Live? Die? Who cares? Everyone in Two is gonna end up in a dump at some stage. Anubis wants to stand on the top of that heap. King of the dead, king of all that rots beneath his feet. The smell won't bother him; he'll be too high up. Middling is not an option. It never has been. The Marigold family has been at the bottom of the ladder for too long -- no subtle rise, no incremental progress will do. Anubis will see himself atop the rest some day soon, atop the stairs he'll take in one great, big step.