Beretta Hanlon-Scarborugh

[/i]

The voice of my trainer is constantly echoing in my head, no matter how hard I try to think for myself. There is only one thing that can allow me to be myself in this Training Center, but I’ll get to that later.

Pulling my hair back really shows off my face. It’s long, coming down just past my breasts. It usually frames my face, covering my features. The tangles that my hair is prone to acquire don’t help the situation much. It doesn’t matter what I do to it, or what I’m doing. If I leave the house with my hair curled, straightened, or any other form that doesn’t involved it being tied back, braided or pinned up, I come back into the house with at least one rat’s nest forming in my brown locks. That’s the main reason I keep it up most of the time. The other is to show off my face, high cheek bones that fade into a square jaw. My nose is small, but long starting between my eyes and falling just barely above my lips. My nostrils are entirely too large, giant holes at the end of such a petite nose. They constantly appear as if they are flared, almost like I’m in a perpetual state of lying. It’s fitting when I think about it. I have plump lips, lips that are prone to chapping, and usually covered in scars. This is my own fault, however. I have a bad habit of digging my teeth into my lips until the skin comes loose and I can taste the sharp, metallic taste of blood on my tongue. This usually happens when I’m too nervous to speak or trying my hardest to hold my tongue. My eyes are close set, lying entirely too close to my nose. Sometimes, when I allow myself to stare ahead for too long, I swear I start seeing my nose protruding out before me. The point is, I have my flaws, but I know that I’m attractive, and I use that to my advantage entirely too often.

Once my hair is securely in place, I stretch my arms high above my head, beginning my stretches before I take the floor in the training center. My body is slender from my years of training. The Scarboroughs have always made sure that we’re well fed in that house. What kind of Career family lets their “children” go hungry? What kind of monsters would they turn out to be if they were underfed? How would they be able to train if they were malnourished? Because of this fact alone, I’m not bony. My body is toned, my abdominals and my thighs especially so. Of course, this might have more to do with my hobbies rather than with my training. My arms are toned, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that I could probably arm wrestle against the biggest guy at the training center and take him down in a minute flat. Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I’m strong, a lot stronger than I look.

When I think about it? Why do looks really matter? Are appearances supposed to say something about you? Whatever happened to that old phrase, coined before the Dark Days, “never judge a book by its cover.” [/i] I think that’s true, but I also think it applies more to people than it does to books. It especially applies to me, because the person that I see in the mirror, is nothing like the person that I really am.



When I finally can’t stand looking at myself in the row of glass, I bend down, raising my arms out in front of me before catapulting myself backwards, flipping onto the mat behind me before allowing myself to fall into a spin of handsprings until I reach the end of the training wall. Being a gymnast is something that my family[/i] call a hobby but it is so much more than that. When I’m in the gym, everything else fades away. When I’m in the Training Center, there is no opportunity to get lost, to let my guard down, to let the rest of the world fade to black. I have to concentrate. That’s something I learned the hard way my first weeks in the Center.

Focus, Scarborough. Do you think you have time to be distracted in the arena?[/i]

The trainers weren’t afraid to hit us. They said it made us stronger. Their favorite thing to do though was to toss us into hand-to-hand combat with someone much bigger, much stronger than us. The end of my first week, I came home every day bloody, aching and with tears dried to my cheeks. My skin was a canvas for black and blue. Some of my bruises were so bad the first few days that they tinted over a sickly greenish color and the others were yellow, reminding me of pus oozing out of an infected wound.

It wasn’t just the distractions that got me into trouble at first. I may not have been raised as a Hanlon for long, but their nature runs through my blood, thriving like the cells that give me life. From the beginning, it was no secret that I was stubborn. If the amount of days I came home covered in bruises for the first few weeks of living with the Scarboroughs wasn’t enough proof, the refusal to accept the last name of my adoptive family cocked the gun and pulled the trigger.

For the longest time, every event that we went through, I would make no acknowledgment to the fact that my name had been changed. My surrogate family[/i] tried to burn it into my brain that my last name was legally no longer "Hanlon"[/i], that any legal documents that I would acquire from there on out would have the name Beretta Scarborough[/i] on them. That didn’t stop me from trying to convince everyone to call me by my name, my real name. My head is harder than a bullet, that’s always been true. Introducing myself as Beretta Hanlon[/i] in training didn’t go over well. It usually involved extra laps until I literally couldn’t stand up straight anymore, my legs turning to jelly underneath me. When we went to dinners with the other Career families, however, introducing myself as a Hanlon got me a free more bruises, but these ones didn’t come from the Training Center. The Scarboroughs aren’t prone to abuse unless we are threatening everything they had built themselves up to be.[/i] Apparently holding claim to my original last name was one of them.

The few times that the Scarboroughs did hit me is probably part of the reason that I hate[/i] being touched by people that I don’t know. If you lay a finger on me without my permission, I will make sure that it’s the last damn time that you use your fingers without assistance. The other part of it has to do with how I even ended up with the family that I’m living with now, but again, that’s another story.

Once I got past my idiocy with distraction and learning to hold my tongue by biting on my lip until it bled, training wasn’t a daily nightmare. I actually learned to use the skills that have been hidden within me for so long. I’m brilliant in hand-to-hand combat, decent with throwing knives, a master a climbing and moving without being heard. I can barely wield a sword without having the entire training center laugh at me so I avoid it at all costs. I’m not sure why, but I’ve taken a liking to kill studies. I probably know far too many ways to kill a person with my bare hands, homemade objects, and weapons. The worst part is that I take pride in my ability to do all of these things, and I’m not afraid to use them.

I also learned how to use my intelligence. I have never been book-smart. I was never going to go get a job in a big, tall, bustling building, pushing papers for the Capitol and I never had any desire to. I knew that I was smart though and the trainers, despite what assholes they might usually be, are really good at helping you find your intellectual niche. I’m what they call an impulsive thinker[/i]. If a situation arises quickly, unexpectedly, basically out of fucking thin air, I can easily and efficiently work it out in a matter of minutes. I can be a strategist if I have to be. I can sit down, plan something out and make it work. I’m street-smart and I’m proud of it.

Another thing I love about being a gymnast is that I don’t have to rely on anyone but myself. There is no one but me to count on myself to land. There is no one but me to screw things up. That’s just the way that I like it. Trusting other people has always led me into a deep, dark bottomless pit. I don’t believe in trust anymore. I was always weary of people. Growing up in the world that I did, it wasn’t logical to get close to anyone. I never knew when I was going to be snatched away from someone like I was plucked away from my family in the middle of the night, but I’ll get to that later.

There was one time, one goddamn time[/i] I thought it would be okay to let my guard down. His name was Troy Forester and he was one of the few people from the Training Center that I could stand. He didn’t constantly ridicule me because my sword play wasn’t up to par, or that when it came to stringing a bow I might as well be blind, but I know now that was all a ploy, all I game he played to get me on my back, bare and looking up at him in his bed in the depths of the night. He did just that too. How many times did I find my way into his bed, allow him into mine? Too many to count, too many for me to want to admit, and some stupid, pathetic part of me[/i]
believed that he loved me. Of course, that wasn’t the case. No one loves Beretta Hanlon, not even my own parents, but I’m getting off track. Troy was a monster in the end. He did nothing but emotionally bruise me in the moments we got alone that weren’t spent with him taking full advantage of a stupid, teenage girl, but I later found out I wasn’t the only girl and needless to say, Troy Forester wasn’t able to train for a few weeks.

It wasn’t that easy to move on after that, however. I’m not the kind of person who just lets things go. After having sent my entire life starved for affection, not that I’d had a taste of it, I wanted more. I didn’t bother getting attached. There was no good in that. The only thing that was going to do was going to get me hurt again, just as bad, or worse as the bullet that Forester shot through my heart. Whenever I have the time, there’s a boy in my bed. Sometimes he’s been there before, sometimes he’s new, but I have no shortage for admirers and men to quell my need for affection. I know that doing this is wrong, but detaching myself from them, just enjoying the physical,[/i] never bothering with the emotional is easier on the both of us. I get what I want and so do they. I don’t even bother to make friends here. No one is kind and there is no use in attachments in Panem anyway when we’re all being raised like pigs for slaughter. They should just make it easier on us, raise a gun to our head’s and shoot us all one by one. We’re all born to die in Panem. . But, as I’ve mentioned with Troy, sometimes I do manage to slip up and my feelings get out, wrap themselves around someone and before I know it, I’m feeling. If I do happen to let my guard down enough to care for you, consider yourself lucky because it doesn’t happen often and I will protect you more than I will my own life.

Most people don’t know this much about me. To them, I’m a pretty face with a biting knack for sarcasm, and someone that you don’t want to go up against in hand-to-hand unless you want to go home painted in red. If they only knew me, if they only knew about the past that I had that led me here, that turned me into the person that I am today, then maybe they wouldn’t whisper about me when they think that I can’t hear them. But, how could they know the real me? That’s something I only ever let myself think about in this gym, letting go as I flip across the floor.



The person that is the cartwheeling her way across the training center is only here because of the things that she’s been through. If any single[/color] part of my life had been different I’m positive that someone else entirely would be here today. I may not have had the best life, but I like who I am. I am comfortable[/color] with my personality. There are some things that I would change about my past, however, even if it would mean that I wouldn’t be such a cold-hearted bitch.

The reason I’m so distrusting isn’t simply because of some idiot career boy with an incredible ego to compensate for what he didn’t have between his legs. I blame my parents for that and I will never stop blaming them. If they had simply gotten their shit together[/color], maybe I wouldn’t even be in this training center right now.

Like some people, I haven’t lived this life from the day that I clawed my way out of my mother’s womb, and like most, I didn’t come out alone. I share a birthdate, and nearly the time with my twin brother Colt, and we were born to a family of fun owners. My mom and dad owned a gun shop in District Three. It sounds like a decent, merchant job, but it really isn’t. The only business that you get at a guns shop is from the people that can afford them and in Panem, there aren’t many people that can shell out the dough to be able to pull the trigger instead of wielding something else.

That’s where my name comes from. Beretta. Berretta is an Italian gun company that has been around way before the Dark Days even happened, before Panem even existed. Before the storms, the war and the famine that some caused out country to become what it is today. Berretta was the first gun company ever basically. They aren’t pun little BB guns either, they are badass guns. They were mostly used for military purposes and by law enforcement. They are known for their power and agility. In fewer words, berettas fuck shit up[/color]. It’s kind of ironic when I think about it. If my parents made one good decision about me, it was my name. All three Hanlon kids have gun related names. Colt and our older brother Gage are named after parts of a gun and I am named after an Italian beauty.

For the most part, our parents were good to us. Gage seemed well off and was like another parental figure for Colt and I. He ever took care of us when he wasn’t at school and mom and dad were busy with the shop. Mom and dad were good about helping us learn and develop, even before we started school, even giving Colt the extra help that he needed.

Besides our parents, I was one of the first people to notice that Colt was different. Of course I would be we were never apart. We were always at each other’s side almost like we were still trapped inside, unable to be separated. I remember vague comments that our parents would make about Colt learning to walk and talk a little later than most kids his age, myself included. Once Colt did learn to talk, it wasn’t as clear and smooth as most people would expect it to be. Not that a young child is known for speaking clearly, but it was even out of the ordinary for a child our age. It was like Colt knew what he wanted to say, he could describe it, but he couldn’t find the word that he wanted to use. Everyone thought that he was slow, or stupid, but I knew better.

Even though mom and dad were good to us, fed us, and I guess, loved us, around the time I turned five, I noticed them pulling away from us, especially Colt. Most of the responsibilities for taking care of us went to Gage. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. I was a child and mom and dad said they were busy. After a while, Colt and I even stopped asking Gage why mommy and daddy didn’t play with us anymore because either Gage didn’t know, or we wasn’t telling us.

That year we started school. I knew how hard it was going to be for Colt before we even went. We could communicate just fine with each other but when it came to the other kids at school, they were just like everyone else, they thought that Colt was slow and they didn’t hesitate to voice it either. For that reason alone, I wasn’t afraid to rough them up during recess either. For a five year old, I sure had to come up with a lot of excuses as to why I was sitting in an empty classroom for thirty minutes after school at least one day out of the week. I never told anyone the truth, not even Colt, even though I suspect that he knew. I didn’t want him to think I was fighting his battles for him. But I had too. If I didn’t, who else was going to?

Not only did Colt have problems with speech, he had trouble with coordination as well. He fell down more times in one day then I did in the span of a couple of months. I always assumed that it had to do with his speech and just accepted it. Colt accepted me and I accepted him. If we didn’t have anyone else, we always had each other. We always had a friend regardless of what we did and we could really use all of the support that the other could give. But just like anything else good in my life, this was yanked away from me. In fact, this was when the pattern started.

I’m not sure what time what time of year it was. It wasn’t quite winter. It was that awkward transition between the two. It was cold enough for frost to appear on the windows overnight, leaving a beautiful sheet of white for us to find in the morning. It was chilly enough to kill the few plants that were growing around our house too, but it wasn’t the right temperature for snow. It was also the dead of night. Colt and I had an uneasy feeling from the time that Gage tucked us in, turned off the light and left us to fall into a night full of dreams. So we decided to crawl into bed with each other. (It’s not as if two five year old could fight off anyone or anything anyway[/color]). We didn’t sleep for the longest time. I was watching the door and Colt was watching the window. If there had been any traces of an intrusion before we fell asleep, we would have caught on. We tried to fight off sleep but after a while our little eyes just couldn’t stay open any longer.

That didn’t last long, however. Maybe an hour or so after we had finally fallen asleep, I awoke with a start as the door of our room slammed against the wall and it sounded like the loudest clap of thunder I had ever heard. The sound of Colt crying out reached my ears as well. The only light in the room was from the brightness of the moon that had managed to squeeze itself in through the crevices of the blinds. It took my eyes a few minutes to adjust but when they finally did, I saw them. Two men were hovering over Colt, one holding a rope, the other had too tight of a grip on a roll of duct tape. Even at my age, I had heard about the Corporation. We had always thought that the Sibling Snatchers was something invented by the parents to scare their children into being well behaved. At that time, I hadn’t met anyone who had someone come in the dead of the night and take one of their siblings because their parents had failed to repay some debt. Yet I knew without a shadow of a doubt, that was what was about to happen to Colt and me.

But Colt? Why were they taking Colt? He had enough problems as it was. He would never be able to make it in a Corporation home, or in the homes of one of those Careers families. Colt could hardly stand up straight. He would never be able to train. He would trip on his own feet and fall on his own sword and that would be the end of Colt Hanlon. I refused to let that happen.

"Stop!" I had allowed myself to cry out. This caused both men to stop in their tracks and look at me, stunned looks gracing the faces they hadn’t bothered to mask.

"Shut up, little girl or we’ll take you instead," the one with the rope snarled at me. He clearly thought that this was going to send me scrambling under the covers and hiding away until they had captured Colt and left the house. They had another thing coming.

"Good," I muttered, pushing the covers off of my body, ignoring the whimpers of Colt begging me to stop. I had to block them out because if I had listened, it might have stopped me from doing what I ended up doing. "That’s what I want. Take me instead."

They hesitated then. They exchanged a look of confusion. Apparently what I was doing had never happened before, and why would it have? Panem is a place where everyone is born making sacrifices. Why would someone chose to make more? But I wasn’t letting them take Colt. I could fend for myself and Colt could barely walk to school on his own. I wasn’t convincing them. They seemed to have been told by my parents which one of us to take, because it was all their fault one of us was getting taken anyway. I always knew that they weren’t expecting twins, that they had struggled to make ends meet because of us, but I never knew that they had borrowed money from the Corporation. Even if I had known they were borrowing money, I never would have guessed that they weren’t paying it back. That night, even at my young age, everything suddenly made sense. Why they had distanced themselves from Colt, why Gage was taking care of us instead. They couldn’t bear to look us in the eye without feeling guilty. They distanced themselves from Colt because he was “slow and they would rather have the kids that was learning at a normal rate.

"Please," I whispered to them. I wasn’t sure why I was trying so hard to be quiet. Our parents had to have known what was happening or they would have been in the room already. Either I was whispering out of habit, or didn’t want them to come in and try to stop me from taking my brother’s place. "He’d never make it. He’s clumsy and doesn’t learn so well. Take me instead. You’ll get better use out of me."

They exchanged a quick conversation, deciding that it didn’t matter which child they took. That just because they had a preference, didn’t mean they had to honor it. They should take what child would be the most beneficial to them, and just like that, they let me leave willingly and I got yanked away from the life I had always known.

I was thrown into the Corporation Home the next day and told I’d be there until or if a Career family decided they wanted me. The first few days, I spent my time hiding from the others, my heart hanging heavy in my chest as I thought of my family back in District Three. I felt my heart breaking at the thought of Colt and Gage, but I felt nothing but cold, icy hatred when it came to my parents. But after I couple of days, I stopped hiding, and stopped letting my tears fall in the middle of the day. That’s something I had to save for the night, in the depths of the girls sleeping quarters at two in the morning when no one else was awake. If they were awake, they never said anything about my sniveling, and that’s probably because they were doing the same.

I guess in the Corporation Home, it’s customary to weed out the weak, save the work for the Career families looking to adopt us. So if there were rivalries, or fights, they didn’t try to stop them. It was the slightly older girls and boys that were involved in these fights. The ones that won were usually gone within the next couple of days. So for three years, I watched every fight I could, examining the ones that came out victorious, practicing by myself, away from the others just so I could be prepared. I was determined not to spend the rest of my life in that house. I would never find my way back to my brothers if I did. It was about the time I was almost nine that I finally got my chance to fight my way out of that house.

There was a girl, her name was Brinley and I hated her almost as much as I hated my parents. She was the most stuck up, little pretentious thing that I still think I have ever had the misfortune of running into. I’m still not sure how she ended up in that place. The way she talked, it sounded like her family was well off. I had a hard time believing that they owed any debts to anyone, much less a black market loan company like the Corporation. I suspected that maybe her parents just couldn’t stand her attitude and paid them to take the little brat off their hands. She walked around that place like she owned it. She was eleven. She was older than me, but even I had more common sense then she did. She would brag about what a great place she had waiting for her back in District Two, which is where she came from, because her parents were going to get her back. They were a Career family. She didn’t listen to us, no matter how many times that we told her that we didn’t think it worked like that.

The main problem with Brinley wasn’t her attitude, it was the way that she treated me. I don’t think that I ever gave her a real[/color] reason to start hating me, one day she just decided that she did. She would push me, shove me and insult me when no one else was around. On top of that, she would sit around on her high horse all day and not bother to do any of the chores she was assigned, leaving me and a few others girls to take care of them. If someone didn’t do them, we would all get a hit with a switch, a belt or something of the sort, so we always did the extra work to avoid getting hit. One day, after about a month of this constant bullshit from her end, we were all outside, taking a break after we ate our lunch. It was a nice spring day. The flowers were just starting to bloom and the only disturbance in nature at all that day was her. She hadn’t even attempted to half-ass her chores like she usually did. She just sat around, watching all of us as we scrubbed the floor and God only knows what else. She was complaining to a bunch of older girls about how “pathetic” the younger girls were and how most of them were going to waste their lives away in this house. I had enough. I went up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder and before she could even ask me what I wanted, my fist had collided with her face, there was a sprinkling of red on my knuckles and a girl with a broken nose on the ground below me. That didn’t stop me from continuing my quest though. She needed be taught a lesson and merely breaking her nose wasn’t cutting it. I jumped down, nearly straddling the girl as I drove my first into any part of her body that I could reach. I’m not sure how long they allowed this to go on but when they finally pulled me off of her, the only injuries I had obtained were the ones I caused myself by hitting her so many times. She hadn’t even attempted to fight back.

The very next day, I came down to breakfast, my hands wrapped in white bandages so they could try and heal after the scuffle I had had with Brinley the day before. The girl was nowhere to be seen. I suspect I had bed ridden her for at least the day and that thought alone caused an almost devilish smirk to spread across my face. I had barely taken a seat at the table before the woman in charge of the Corporation Home came to fetch me and waiting for me in her office were the Scarboroughs. I didn’t expect for a family to want me so quickly. But apparently the Scaraboroughs had been on the waiting list for a new girl for months now and I was the only girl that had gotten into a good fight recently. They were pleased to see the bandages on my hands and to find out that I wasn’t using my injuries as an excuse not to work. They didn’t even ask me any questions before telling the woman that they were ready to sign the adoption papers right then and there.

That’s how I ended up living with them. That’s how I ended up in the training center. That’s how I became the cold, heartless bitch that I am on the inside. I mask that with my appearance. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. I am deceitful because that’s all I have ever known and it’s paid off for me so far. It takes a special person to see past my exterior, or to be able to break down the great wall I have put up to keep people out. My heart might as well be China. I am as strong as a bullet, stubborn as a mule, cold as ice, and about as kind as bee that has been swatted at. I am who I am because of what I’ve been through and I’m that as more and more bullshit swindles its way into my life, it will even reshape the person that I have come to know.


( F A C E C L A I M ) Minka Kelly

( S O N G ) Let Go - David Cook

( S P E E C H ) 729BF2
( E M P H A S I S ) 8088B0
( M A I N ) 856F83
( O T H E R ) 875454
( H E A R I N G ) 964242

( P L O T S )

In the Sibling Snatchers Plot. Twin sister of Colt Hanlon.

( C R E D I T S ) Coding, graphics, and template by South.

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