Captain Hook // Peacekeeper D7

My parents had a real sense of humor, naming me Captain in District Seven. I probably wouldn't have stuck out so much in an upper district. Well, that's a lie. I've always had this huge schnoz, a blunted chin, a dinner plate for a face and wimpy dark hair. As I got older, moles sprung up like chocolate chips all over my body, just to add insults to serious injury. I started to find wispy chin hairs when I was fourteen but it's only in the last few years that I've been able to grow a goatee. It helps, I think.

Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

My Peacekeeper Academy admission form incorrectly lists my eye color as brown, and it pisses me off. The only halfway decent part of my looks are my eyes, and they're fucking hazel. HAZEL. I thought about getting that tattooed beneath each of them, just to remind people to look up, look in, admire the very small pieces of me that are beautiful. I'll admit that I've swiped some mascara and eyeliner from time to time. It's really not so bad, once you get the trick of it.

The training helped. I've never - in my entire life - been an ounce overweight, but I was a skinny fuck for most of it. Now I've put one some lean muscle and the white uniform looks a little better. Pretty sure I'd absolutely slay in black, but that's not the current aesthetic. I try to wear as many dark colors as I can when I'm off duty, but since I'm still low on the totem pole, that isn't too often. Plus I don't even know how to begin to go shopping. James and I really needed a third sibling, someone with any sort of market savvy. We can barely even open a can of beans between the two of us.

You might think some of that played into my desire to become a Peacekeeper. Wimpy, ugly kid who can't feed himself has to want structure, right? No, ma'am. I was pretty happy fending for myself, coordinating with Jack when we weren't at each other's throats. I actually like my kid brother; it's his friends that piss me off. But we'll get to that. Anyhow, I didn't sign up for the Academy because I was starving for foods or for friends. I signed up because it was the right thing to do. You get that? Because a lot of people don't. It was the right thing to do.

Yeah a lot of the glory in our country goes to the Capitol and to the Victors. But that structure provides for us, shelters us from war and famine. So when the Academy recruits came around one fall, after my final Reaping, I signed up. Not in a fit of pique or rebellion. I signed up, because I realized I was an adult, and I had a duty to all of Panem to protect it.

Course the upside is that I get to snots like Peter Bell behind bars.

The Academy intake lieutenant didn't even bat an eye when I said, "yeah, I'd like to go back to District Seven and clean the place up. There's some street urchins that need to be leashed." So, I figured I'd definitely come to the right place. The rest of that first year is kind of a blur. Lots of marching, lots of obstacle courses, lots of endurance tests. I must have been in a classroom some of the time too but I don't know what we learned. When I was twenty - after I'd passed all of the physical exams - then I started living inside of a box. Every day was a different lecture, sometimes history, sometimes geography, sometimes war tactics. I didn't really understand why I needed to know about war strategy since I was just going back to my home district to round up Bell and his orphans, but whatever. It was better than having someone spit on me after two hundred push-ups.

I graduated that spring in my crisp white uniform, ready to head back to Seven. I'd written Jack some letters but it wasn't like I could call him up. Seemed like the kid did okay - he's resourceful.

I never thought he'd join up with Peter in my absence.

I found out during my first rotation, in District Nine. That was my first real taste of life in another district. The Academy is so contained, but in Nine I was working the Mayor's house. I saw half the District wander through the front doors that first year. Let me tell you, there are some big, certifiably insane families in District Nine. Anyhow, about halfway through my posting there I got a letter - not from James, but from one of our neighbors growing up. She said she'd seen my kid brother running around with Bells and orphans and had written to me because she was worried I'd died.

Lady, why bother sending a letter to someone who's dead?

I tried to transfer right then but that so wasn't happening. I mean I knew the protocol by then. You do your training rotations, then you get your actual placement. I still had at least one more rotation to go, depending on how well I did. So, I wrote James a couple of fucking angry letters and then knuckled down. If he wrote back, I didn't get them. I cycled through Nine, Twelve and Three before I was finally promoted to lieutenant and assigned to District Seven.

Funny, how it took an assignment to get me back home. I arrived on my twenty-fourth birthday, not that I had any candles or cake or anything. I guess I expected James to show up at the train station (somehow, not that I'd told him I was coming) with a banner and balloons. That didn't happen either, in case you were wondering. I arrived in my home district and checked into the Peacekeeper barracks. I couldn't even go back to our little ramshackle house, except on official assignment. Which I did, about a week after I'd arrived.

I guess I delayed it so long because I'd been hoping our old neighbor was wrong. I'd been hoping that James had shared enough cans of beans with me to be a smart, healthy kid, someone who would avoid petty thieves and pranksters.

I fucking hate being wrong.