katya lane ▴ D10 ▴ fin!

Orphans aren’t a rarity.

In fact, there’s probably thousands of orphans in the Districts. Orphans who live in foster homes with parents that can be compared to the villains of fairytales, ones who have found corners of alleys where they live in constant fear, ones who have forgotten even their own names, just because they don’t think it matters anymore. Maybe some of them are right. Maybe when everyone else has forgotten who you are, there’s no sense in trying to remember yourself. You’re just one person, after all. But then there’s the orphans who think that they must be able to do something better, who think they’ll have a story in rags to riches.

Kai isn’t one of those orphans. She has no disillusionment towards the future. She know how the world works. She know who controls incomes, who has money to spend and who has to save up, day after day, just for a slice of bread. She’s known her entire life. In fact, she knows more than most children, certainly more than any child should. It wasn’t from school, though she attended as often as she had to in order to get by the Peacekeepers. Most of the time she was given hints by other students so that they could tell her when the important lessons were: the ones that instilled an early fear of the Capitol. There wasn’t anything to be learned from those lectures, nothing that she didn’t already know. Don’t start an uprising or you’ll die, and if you’re not lucky enough to be dead, you’ll be punished. Then your children will be, and your children’s children, and their children after that.

So what do you do with a little girl with gingery hair who refuses to go to school, who doesn’t need anyone to take care of her and as such always finds herself out on the streets? There’s not much you really can do. You could torture her, flog her, send her away to have her tongue ripped out, but what good would any of that do in the end? People didn’t like seeing little kids get hurt; they saw it enough on an annual basis, flashing right down on them from dozens of screens. Besides, if you destroyed every delinquent in Panem, you wouldn’t have anyone left to play the Games.

In the end, they did nothing. They left this feline girl to her devices.

Now, let me tell you a story. I’m sure you’ve never heard it before, so sit down, and pay close attention. Don’t let your eyelids hang, don’t let your mind wander. You don’t want to miss the details, because that’s all this tale is. Everything that’s to be told will be forgotten someday, probably someday soon. This story will be buried with blue eyes and a pointed chin, slender thighs and smaller wrists. It’s not Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, it isn’t even Rose Red and Snow White. This isn’t a myth to be passed down generation to generation, it’s a blip in time. A tiny, itty, bitty blip.

But I’ll tell you anyways, because someone ought to know.

Here’s how the world works, how it’s always worked. People are born, people live, and people die. Sometimes this all happens over the course of decades, sometimes only a heartbeat. Sometimes they don’t even get a chance to live, whether they’re breathing for a hundred years or a hundredth of a seconds. Sometimes they pack more into a few short years than you could ever dream. I won’t tell you who’s luckier or who has more to bear; that’s your decision to make, your lesson to be learned.

Life is a funny, fickle thing. Sometimes it’s easier to forget about it entirely, and sometimes it’s just more fun to meet it with an uproar. Sometimes you can get by with silent footsteps on falling apart streets. That’s what she did, what she’s always done. When you go unnoticed, there’s no one to tell you what to do. That was the better way. Then she didn’t have to worry, not about her next meal, her next dime, the next time she’d have a warm place to sleep. She didn’t have to worry because she already knew that her next meal would come when she passed by an open window with a cooling shepherd’s pie, and then she’d take just enough to make it seem like a dog had popped his head in and taken a great bite. The next time her pockets would jingle with metal would be the exact moment a stranger’s wallet went missing from his coat. She’d sleep in a warm bed whenever she made it to the little inn that would always welcome her, if only because she kept their kitchens well stocked with silverware and mismatched cups alike.

Does this sound like a familiar story? I’m sure that it does. Haven’t you heard of the thieves that take away your life’s work, the doe-eyed maidens that steal away your heart in the midst of the night? Don’t worry, she won’t take much. Not enough to leave you wanting. After all, that would be sloppy. She can’t afford to make mistakes, can’t get caught. She may not be much, not in the grand scheme of things, but that doesn’t mean she wants to die. Really, who wants to just die without leaving a mark on the world? Who wants to just take, take, take, and never be remembered? She needs her secrets to survive, but her secrets don’t need her. They’ll live on in another pick-pocket, another con-artist, another cute little angel who shouts for mommy until you come to wipe away her tears, only to find dry eyes.

You see, this creature, as she can hardly be called a normal girl, has never cried. Maybe she did, just once, as she swallowed her first gasp of air and with it the cruelty of the world. Maybe then the salt water ran down her face in streams, drying on the bow of her lips to leave behind a faint memory for the years to come. Never was that vulnerable act repeated though, not for a lack of reasons. Just a lack of desire. Wailing would get her more than the actual act of silent weeps. No one would come to the rescue of the quiet thing sitting on the park bench, her head down and the back of her hand wiping furiously at her eyes. She was a very sensible thing, and as such, she learned not to expend energy on things that wouldn’t get her what she wanted.

So what did she want?

Besides the cream that floated to the tops of buckets of cow’s milk, the kind that left your mouth coated in a thin layer of fat. Besides the sweetest apples in a barrel, or the most finely decorated tarts in a storefront window. Besides the honey and ginger that kept her throat from getting sore as the weather got cold, or the fur-lined boots that made her feet warm and silent. She wanted a lot of things that she didn’t need, not really, but they were simple wants.

She didn’t really dream, this strange little girl. She found no solace in the stars or the moon, only a greater risk of getting caught. She had a deal with the night, but it didn’t involve characters inside of her mind or made up worlds. It involved the here and the now, the necessities and the luxuries. There was no thought for the future past when she’d next be needing to pick up a meal.

When you can have anything that anyone else has, you don’t often find yourself wanting for anything.

Not such a hard life after all, huh?

I’d tell you to try it sometime, but she’d tell you this: You have no business living like this. You’re not a puzzle-maker, you’re not even a puzzle-solver. You see the world for how it is, not what it’s made of, and it’s made of torn trousers and careless hearts. You’ll get caught because you don’t know any better.

Encouraging little thing, isn’t she?