Saffron & Eye Spend a Day

The walls here are too high.

I have decided this, upon my return to the Capitol. I haven't grown much taller but the walls have, or perhaps my memory had shrunk everything down to a disorientated height after spending days (weeks? months?) in a world fit for giants. This place is fit for giants too, not little girls who get awfully lost in their extravagant world.

(I'd walked for hours and hours when I first arrived, loosing my step, step, steps back to my room. Around and around I walked, then jogged, then desperately ran. It became too much like the hedge maze, I thought I saw Lucy and Ivana and Cerise in the corners of my eyes - and they were real, not just ghosts. Eventually an Avox found me screaming for help, the walls overgrowing with suffocating ivy that was sucking the oxygen from my lungs - it was too much, too tall, too familiar. The floods were going to chase me away.)

Everything is too large, too big. Not fit for me, not fit for someone so small and silent. With no navigator to guide me home (I guide the others with every step I take, but when I am lost they're nowhere to be found but in my nightmares) I become frightfully scared. I thought I was coming home to a kingdom, but I was not meant to rule this place - nobody is. It's fit for people raised up in glory and riches and wealth pouring from their ears. (In times like these I miss my little house with the red oak tree in our fields of gold. Even the Victors Village is too empty, too vast.)

Glitzy, bright figures walk past like foreign beings, beaming "Hello, Saffron!" and "Why good morning Miss Lowe!" and "Can we help at all? Can we fetch you anything?" - but I don't want their company or their things. There's something comforting about finding my own steps through this nightmare - I've done it once before, surely I can do it again. Take my hand, I think to my 23 souls. Guide me home.

Lucy, I think - the door number is familiar. 14B. Ivana - the light that twitches, not quite screwed in properly, is to the left. Cerise - a clattering of voices that have not moved, I recognize their bold laughter and forced interaction. And-

"Oi! Ewe!"

I turn to see a familiar face, but he's no ghost in my head. No, he's-

"Eye!"

-my friend, and I run at him and we collide like the questions in my mind that need answering, but I don't want to answer them. I jump, and cling to his shoulders, feeling my feet lift off of the ground (Look, I think to them all, I'm one of you. Weightless.) I know why he's here. I know how. They can wait for another day.

"I missed you!"

And you missed Ewe.

I have always felt bitter about the Capitol taking away my chidhood. Sure, I was 14 and should of learnt that life is not a farytale by then, but the arena scrapes away what little happiness you still clung to and fills you up with hate instead. I think they got to Paige, too, because when I came home she had aged far beyond even I. She blew out 13 candles and I 15, but all I could think was that there weren't enough to fill three tiers of sickly Capitol batter for us both. (They love her, a miniature Saffron - she hates them, of course. I wonder if she hates me too.)

All these months leading up to now I had prepared myself for the worst. That I would arrive and it would begin all over again, scraping back what I had started to regrow, painting me a pretty little Victor instead of just Saffron. (When I look in the mirror I try to see myself, but I see the girl on the posters and tshirts glistening in their eyes. Foreign to my reflection, and yet still somehow completely human. Even the hand they gave me bleeds real blood and I can move my fingers slowly, inch by inch. Fake, but full of life.) I craved for life to be given back to me and to the other 23 corpses shipped back to their homes. I forgot how to smile, how to laugh - not for the cameras, not for the mirror. For me.

And then Eye lifts me up into the sky and for the first time in forever I feel human again. His voice thunders through the halls - he's not afraid of anything or anyone. He's brave, like Ewe. He's brave like I try to be. I squeal with delight and clutch his shoulders, off on a great adventure I have craved for so long.

"TO THE TRAINING CENTRE!" I yell, weightless and filled with joy. (This is the world I wanted to rule. Filled with life, filled with air.) "TO FIGHT OFF MONSTERS IN SUITS AND SAVE THE DAY!"

We are unstoppable.

A calamity of life, screaming and laughing and destroying the norm. I know what it feels like to be one of 24 miserable kids in these halls, to traipse around the training centre feeling as if you'll be grey forever, with no colour to ever grace your soul again. For a long time, my life has slowly dulled from the oranges and golds of before to the grey-green existing of after. But now I see a mural of colour painted before me like in the in-between of the arena, but I am not scared or hurt or afraid. I am everything that that place was not. We are everything that the Capitol tries to keep us from being. We are not petrified or trembling or half dead already. Not today - today, we cancel our impending doom and show them all that there is still life in those sentenced for execution. We are alive, in this moment, and that's all that matters.

If I were myself before all of this I would know that I would be in a lot of trouble right now. That my Mother would scold me and tell me not to be so foolish, so childish, so irresponsible. But I am not who I was before and for the first time in this new forever I am glad of that. I am Saffron, and I'm also a Victor, and sometimes that makes me untouchable.

"BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY!" Eye screams back and his words echo in my voice. "YEAH!" I yell blindly, "FUCK YOU! THAT'S WHY! FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU!" (I am 5 years old again, blaring out words I don't understand, on top of the world and with my whole future ahead of me. But most of all I feel, and it is wonderful.)

At his request I kick the door shut with a slam and it feels good. (I think one of my Stylists or whomever was supposed to be looking after me might have fainted in the corner of my eyes - but I don't care.) I'm 5 years old and I'm stubborn as hell, just like I used to be. Just like I always will be, if I want to.

Whispering in Eye's ear as we race down the corridors, I ask "What does 'fuck you' mean, anyway?"

I would like everyone in this place to live a really nice life but far away from me please. Except Eye - he can live a really nice life but I'd like him to live as close as he can to me. And Opal and Klaus, too. Mace lives next door so I suppose he doesn't come into the equation. I wish that these new tributes could go and live somewhere far away from all of this, that all the Capitolites could go and live far, far away from the rest of this world we live in. I suppose they should have a nice life, but we deserve nicer. (All of them did - all 65 years worth.)

Clinging to my new best friend with all of my energy we parade into the dining halls and paint the room the colours of their lunch. As one of them screams I hoot with laughter, ecstatic excitement shivering in my limbs and flavours dancing against my tongue - flavours like fire and heat and it's "Hot hot hot!" and I need a drink, quick.

There's a sparkling liquid in a tall glass that tastes awful but cools my insides and then there's another one in my hand and then it's shattering against the wall and someone's screamed "FOOD FIGHT!" and another has spotted me and is shrieking "SAFFRON KIRA LOWE!" that could be my Mother if their voice wasn't coated in their prissy Capitol accent and I've burst at the seams, shedding the skeleton of a Victor they wanted me to become and I'm human again, I'm a kid with her head in the clouds and her feet on the ground all at once and everything is a rush of life and-

"SAFFRON LOWE YOU GET RIGHT OVER HERE IMMEDIATELY!"

- my giggling stops, the only silence amongst a baffle of commotion. "Quick!" I yell, pointing at a new door as I steal away a tray of sandwiches with fingers that still have the knack after all this time. "Onwards!"

And as we bolt towards my freedom, I turn back and yell "FUCK YOU!" for good measure.