{we're just waiting} ★ lulu's cast

It was when the music from the locket that had been Takeba's token died down that Topaz heard the approaching hovercraft at long last. The sky seemed to split open as it descended, a ladder slowly being let down beneath it. She moved towards it as if in a trance, and was about to latch onto one of its rungs for dear life before she caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye. The sleeping bag; it lay off to the side where she had left it, untouched by the blood and grime that had been a product of the final battle of the Hunger Games. Involuntarily she shuddered at the thought of leaving it behind; it was the one connection she had left to her lost ally. It had to come back with her, back to wherever it was she had been before this mess.

The former tribute forced her expression to be as apathetic as possible as she clenched her fists and stoically walked away from the ladder over to the rolled up sleeping bag. Once it was snugly fitted under her arm as it had been so many times before, she turned around and retraced her steps, reaching out to grab a rung on the ladder as if nothing had happened. An electric current froze her in place at once and she began to ascent, away from the place that had changed her so drastically.

The floor of the craft was cold and hard, and she was deposited unceremoniously onto it a few moments later. She hadn't noticed that her eyes were squeezed shut until they opened, catching one last glimpse of the flaming arena as the door began to slide shut behind her. There...there was the Cornucopia, still shining even despite the lack of sunlight and the ashy atmosphere. There was the lake, covered with a foggy sheen... the brightly colored trees that so resembled a painted landscape... the creek, where so much tragedy had occurred... the pillars...

"No... no, wait, Nash!" Still clinging to the bedroll, Topaz rose swiftly to her feet and threw her body against the dense metal door as it slid shut, separating her from the only place she felt she belonged forever. "Nash is still there! Nash! She's there... I have to help her... I have to..." The tears were back, worse than before; she was only vaguely aware that there were doctors in white lab coats swarming around her, muttering things about her injuries and her health and that she had won, and it was all over now. But it wasn't over. It was far from over. "She needs me...I need her... I love her!" They were pulling her now, pulling her away from the wall of the hovercraft as it zoomed away from the arena and towards the unknown. But she refused to go with them. Instead she collapsed to the ground once more, pressing her face into the sleeping bag and muttering the same words over and over and over. "I love you. I love you. I love you." On the floor of the Capitol hovercraft, the champion remained in the same position until someone came and pried her most prized possession from her grasp.

The kitchen was always a nice place to be when Mum was cooking, full of tantalizing aromas and the comforting sounds of pots and pans clanging and just overall contentment. That night she was baking; in the oven was a cake she had whipped up in order to "celebrate your last first day of school, Pongo dear!" As usual, Pongo sat in his favorite kitchen chair with a book in his hand while she threw together the ingredients and blended them in a large yellow mixing bowl. He preferred not to assist her in her cooking endeavors, because he had a tendency to unintentionally make a mess of things. But she liked it when he was there to keep her company, "quality time", she called it. And for the most part, Pongo didn't mind either; he loved his mother, as long as she wasn't being too overbearing. So spending time in the kitchen was fine... as long as there wasn't something else on his mind.

The gang was having one of their parties tonight, sort of a final bash before they would all be trapped in the educational world comprised of irritating teachers, difficult classes, and the typical gossip that went along with being a teenager in Panem. Pongo liked school fine; it was just the students that were... well, they were the downside to the whole experience. In District Two, you had a mixture of pretty much every type of person; the burly Careers made up the majority of the student body, hailing from both the richer, well-to-do families families as well as the poorer mining ones, who sent off their strong children to train for the Games in hopes that he or she would be Reaped, win, and change their lives for the better. Then there were the smart kids, the ones who had parents that had been doctors before the announced change in industry. There were the burnouts, who cared about little else but their drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and cutting class whenever possible. Then there were the normal kids, who didn't train for the Games and didn't spend all their time studying, but didn't indulge in substance abuse, either. They were just... there. Where did Pongo fit in with all of those? He wasn't sure, and that was why he had such a tough time.

But he did have his group. Somehow, for some reason, they had accepted him. Whether it was because he would try virtually anything to fit in or because he was just good for a laugh he didn't care; they were friends, real friends. Friends who didn't point and laugh at him behind his back, even if they sometimes did it to his face in a joking way. They cared, didn't they? Pongo couldn't remember how long it had been since someone (besides Mum, of course) really cared. And that was why he wanted - no, needed - to go to this party; he didn't know what he would do if they ever excluded him.

At one point, when he was twelve years old and his father had gone out to personally meet with an elderly client who was bedridden for a week and couldn't manage to get to the parlor to discuss her late husband's funeral, Ciro had climbed into an open casket that sat waiting for a body to be deposited into it. He didn't know what possessed him to do it, he'd just always had an overpowering longing to understand what death felt like. So inside the padded mahogany coffin little Ciro Scope lay, stretching himself out so that the tips of his toes nearly touched the opposite end. It was too big for him - meant for a grown man, of course - but if Ciro closed his eyes and lay perfectly still, he could still manage to pretend that it was his and he was dead. He was nothing more than a dead body, a corpse, ready to be lowered into the ground never to resurface. Was this what death felt like? He remained inside the casket, having lost track of time, until his father returned home and screamed upon the site of his son, stiff as a board lying in a coffin. "Don't scare me like that, Ciro! Don't you ever do that again! But Ciro hadn't regretted it.

This body was lying just as still, just as stiff, eyelids down, looking very much like an living person sleeping as opposed to a corpse. A mortician's eye knew how to spot the telltale differences, though; the absence of the rise and fall of the chest that meant he was breathing and his heart was beating. The pale, insipid look of skin after the blood was drained from its veins. The rigid look that was a characteristic result of rigor mortis, one that couldn't be avoided no matter how much the muscles were massaged during the embalming process. All things Ciro could pinpoint, but to someone untrained in his field would just blend together and become the 'dead look'.

It had been quite hard for Shea Lovelace to grow accustomed to translating the mismatched jumble of stories and ideas and dreams that played out in her head on a daily basis into language, words that could be expressed clearly on paper. She'd never had a reason to before; her ideas had only been hers, and now that she was offering them up to someone else - a whole handful of someone elses - well, it was quite a bit to get used to. You should be happy to share them. Happy now that you actually have a place to fit in, for once. I am happy! Her first scripts had been nothing short of erratic messes, definitely not helped by the untidy scrawl she considered handwriting. But after some practice, she got a fair bit better. Not by much. Oh, hush!

It was still quite beyond Shea how any of this had come to pass, but she was grateful for it. It was only after she found friends in the puppetmasters that she realized how much she'd been craving the company of someone other than her toddler sister and the faeries that had dogged her ever since she - Dogged you? You love us, you need us, you always have! Okay, well, maybe not dogged. Maybe she'd enjoyed their company. Maybe she still did. Of course I still do, they're my best friends! But it was nice to immerse herself in human companions for once, and her faeries had, grudgingly, relinquished some of their hold on her attention and permitted her to associate with far more tangible and legitimate beings.

That wasn't to say she'd forgotten all about them, though. Quite the contrary, actually; her little faerie companions served as potent inspirations for the scripts she wrote, and even helped her along when she was stuck in a rough spot with an uncharacteristic vacancy of imagination. Often she based her scripts on real, true adventures she'd had with them in the past, exploring the woods and fluttering through the forest as if she had wings too when, in reality, they were the only ones. She'd never come out and told her newfound friends about the voices in her head - no, she had enough experience to know that oftentimes it made others judge her, because apparently faeries weren't normal things to have. But she didn't make a conscious effort to subdue them, either - she couldn't, so quite frequently she slipped and spoke to them aloud when she was with the group. She knew they must've assumed something, but, courteously, they never brought it to attention. And that's what friends should be.

What people don't understand is I don't do it for myself. Not once have I walked into a bar and gotten a guy to gamble a ton on a game of pool with me, a skinny blond guy who looked like he couldn't even pick up the stick but really had a dead-on eye for the game, hoping to walk away with money to spend on a couple of six packs or something. Never have I bluffed in a game of texas hold 'em knowing that once I won the pot I'd take all the cash to buy myself a hot prostitute for a real good time. I like to think that my morals are in the right place, even when I snatch a wallet from a lady's purse right under her nose. Cause I'm doing it to feed my family, see. My family's gotta have food, and medicine, and clothes on their backs, and I can't let 'em down when they're depending on me.

I didn't know where Hornet went when I went to the pub last night; I'd told her to scram, get out of here, cause a bar was no place for a pretty young girl like her - they'd eat her alive, all those drunk bastards - and I wasn't in any way going to put my little sister in more danger than necessary. She was already slinkin' the streets with me every afternoon, looking for something worthy of our five-finger discount, risking arrest by the Peacekeepers - or worse, because in the districts, stealing was punishable by death. But she was fast, fast on her feet, sneaky and swift; pretty sure that girl could snatch a diamond the size of an egg right off some unlucky aristocrat's neck without the old snoot noticing a damn thing. I needed her help, without a doubt, but no way in hell was she going into those bars with me. Not a chance.

I have to say, it was a pretty good night; I left the place with a hundred bucks in my fist, walking briskly in case any of those bozos held a grudge and decided to follow me and put me in my place. That happened sometimes; I either had to get the hell away fast or take a beating. But they never got the money back - I made sure of that. There was a little market nearby, and it was open till one in the morning; I knew all the kids would be asleep by now, their bellies rumbling desperately because all they'd eaten before bed was a meager cabbage soup old Batty had cooked up, but I could still surprise them with a feast for dinner the next day. They'd love that, and maybe little Birdie's eyes wouldn't look so damn hollow for once. That was what killed me most.