Calliope Pershil {D1}

It's cold.

Not just the air, though it's got a bite to it that she's not used to. The whole room just feels cold. Maybe it's the colors. Everything is white-- it's clinical, detached, immaculate. Maybe it's the blinding nothingness that the white has to offer her. She doesn't see light fixtures, but she knows that they must be there. The room is flooded with harsh, even light. There's one table, placed in the center of the room and under her folded hands. Two chairs, placed on either side of the table.

Her back doesn't touch it. This room is a test, she knows. Everything has been a test for a long, long time now. She could lie and say that she didn't know when it started, the constant eyes turning from hopeful to asinine assessment, but she made it a rule: lie to anyone else, but never to herself. 17. She was deadline dripping down through age-weighted strainer, piling up like sand at the bottom of her hourglass. Her back cannot touch it or she would be slouching.

Legs crossed, back straight, shoulders squared.

Her eyes are reserved, focused more of a 'what' than a 'who'. It's the gap right between his eyes, where his nose draws back into forty-five degree lines before fading into eyebrow. The lights are not flattering. His face is flat before her, more so than normal. His eyes are flat, as per normal. It's easy to think of him like she's supposed to in this light, where there are no shadows to give life to the planes of his face. Blond hair, gray eyes, white suit. He is part of the room.

She mirrors him in her sitting as in most things, but she cannot emulate his colors. She is too dark in too many ways. Skin on the wrong side of tan. Hair wrestled into what should be a tidy bun. It's always too curly, refuses to submit to labor of straightener. Now it waves against the straight lines of this cold room. Even her eyes are too loud; they sing a countermelody of brownskin-greeneyes-brownskin-greeneyes louder than her heartbeat, pounding its own drum against her ribcage.

They do not stir. They sit. She watches without seeing.

She is being tested. They both know it. Days in a training room, regimens regulated only by the limits of human endurance, bruises and sprains and broken bones-- they all mean nothing under the glaring white lights. Just because he is her trainer, has been for years, it does not mean that she'll be given an easier test. They both know it.

"Calliope." His bass is as smooth as the surface on which they rest their hands. It's not many things, his voice. Calm, collected, untelling. The list of what it is not, what is missing from it, spans longer than her patience to list. It is not warm, friendly, proud, pleased, content, list ad nauseam.

She blinks.

"You're of an important age for a career, I'm sure you know." She wants to tell him to skip the formalities. She doesn't care for background, just the problem. What is the problem? She knows that she is the problem. Her hands clasp each other a little more tightly. They are calloused, strong hands. She's worked too hard to be the problem. "Determining."

She does not shift her gaze, though she is shaking. The cold raises a thousand man jury calling a condemnation, that she has not overcome the environment. It's partially the cold's fault that her legs are tense and quivering. It's mostly the fear that she should not feel, pulling her skin tight against her muscles and sending her breath in stutters.

Guilty. Hands sweating. Guilty. Her eyes waver, flick down to his. He is the judge, sitting high behind a wall of white table. It divides them in every way, reminds her of what she must achieve. It's all the same-- failing, death sentence. Both end in a disintegration, disassembly or who she is. If she can't be a career she is emptier than this room, she is lost in a cloud of loss. At this point, no one would look for her. Who looks for the girl who can't find herself?

"I am aware." Her voice manages not to crack. It's a feat. She must hold, because if she doesn't, nothing will. The centre is weak. She should be is strong.

Every movement is a landslide on their mountain, their tilted land against whose stilted odds she runs. When the set of his jaw relaxes and he leans back, the mountain crumbles. She is left standing in rubble of expectation, a cloud of dust-doubt flying into the air. It's all she can do not to start. Her eyebrows jerk up, the only evidence of her surprise.

For once, she does not mirror.

"So, Calliope Pershil," he drawls in a voice so uncharacteristic that once more she is taken back, aftershocks to his earthquake. "You're at an impasse."

She hopes he will continue so that she will not have to ask what it is. They both know it.

"Tell me about your scores, training wise." Like there are any other kinds of scores that matter. "Or I can, if you'd like."

It's not an offer. She is sitting straight but her jaw is locked and tension hints at every hard edge of her body, devoid of the soft curves that girls her age should have.

"You showed remarkably improvement last year. In the last six months, though," he makes a noncommittal gesture with his hand. Shrugs his shoulders. Her heart is staccato, marcato, her breath is a fermata held. There is no conductor for her to look to. She has to release by herself, independent of her orchestra. "I've found myself rather disappointed. Your improvement has been marginal, at best, compared to the others."

She is poked, prodded, held up and measured against the other careers to see if she is quite good enough, if she was made of the stuff of champions: metal and mettle. The microscope was trained on her now in the form of someone she had seen every day for the last ten years, and yet she felt his eye as alien.

"So tell me why you're a career."

She had been expecting this question. Her tongue lays out the same planned line said to her mirror, said to her parents whose planned faces had reacted in the way that they always did.

"I want to prove myself in the Games and bring honor to my district."

He shakes his head. Her answer, thought out and mapped with precision to be as concise and correct as possible, didn't cut it. "Why are you a career?" He repeats the question, slowly, like she's stupid. Maybe she is.

"I don't understand." Her mind races, flying into a whirlwind of synapses and webs, one thought bleeding into the other seamlessly. A cycle of whatwhyhow, unpunctuated, unspaced, press against her skull with the pressure of a mounting headache.

"That's the problem, I'm afraid." He lets out a sigh and it adds debt onto her already negative balance. "You're conventional. You've hit a wall, because you can't think outside of the set parameters of situations you've been in before. So tell me, what makes you a career, other than your presence at practice?"

There's no time for her to think or overanalyze, and the words that come out of her mouth are hesitant. Her rhythm is thrown by the rush of words that comes and goes like a tide. Words are messy things. She likes her words measured, placed like figures onto a grid. Organic sentences are so much less than that.

"Being a career is part of who I am. I'm strong," she says it like it's a question. "I'm fast. I'm tough, and I don't like people who aren't. I'm willing to push on to the end, no matter what happens to me or anyone else, because the ultimate goal is worth it. I need to fight for it."

"Are you strong, or are you the strongest?"

She speaks after a pause that stretches like a rubber band. "...I don't know. I was." She says it with an air of expectation. Anticipation.

Snap.

"I'll tell you what you are," he says. He does. "You're blank. You're hard. You work with only what you're given and you don't assume-- information or responsibility. I don't think I've ever seen you approach someone of your own volition."

She doesn't deny it. Ten years in the training program and she didn't have a single friend that transcended the weight rooms. All she has is her trainer and a set of instincts that could save her life. She hopes that they will, one day. She thinks that she does, at least.

Being a career is everything. It always had been everything. She'd been raised on weaponry even before she officially enrolled. School was a pathway leading to career training. She was homeschooled as soon as the training started. It had been a straight course since then, of pushing and breaking and pushing again.

Now she swerves.

For the first time there is an out. Two roads. Straight and crooked, clear and obscured but both equally unreadable. Impassibility lurks in the shadows of the clear path and impossibility of the other.

"I can fight." She says it as a safety net. Her words cannot catch her as she falls, but she hopes that they will slow her descent. She has no wings to rise to where she needs to be, but she will claw at the air with every spark of energy in her body. Hard work was enough before, until it wasn't. Her thumbs press together and she tries to stop the dropping feeling in her stomach.

Everyone can fight, or they wouldn't have made it this far.

"Everyone can fight."

He's so relaxed that she knows that he is tense. The way he leans belies the coiled constriction of his arms, crossed across his chest to create yet another barrier. She knows that she cannot break it down, because she is not strong enough, not good enough to get past it. She sees the walls but not ways around them. Her world is one of walls, stretching higher and higher into the ceiling she has never been able to touch, let alone break; it is a maze of walk (stop) turn (stop) run (stop), Social, mental, physical (stop).

The chair is hard. How long has she been sitting there? How long has she been facing her future off in deadlock? Long enough for her legs to begin to ache and her hands to become clammy, despite the temperature.

"But, after significant evaluation, the board has elected to keep you on probationary terms, Calliope. If you can get past this, we're confident that you'll make a decent candidate for the next games." He narrows his eyes, slate slabs staring back at her. "You can be good. If you push yourself, maybe even more than that. It all depends on how you make up for your deficiencies."

The room is cold. She is cold. He is colder.

"You'll be staying as long as you can make significant progress in the next two months." Her back is straight, not touching the chair. This means that she will continue being tested. Is this a good thing? Is she happy? Is she excited, glad, ecstatic, fulfilled?

Mostly, she just feels cold.