Fiona / District 9 / Ready

Fiona

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Fire was burning.

Everywhere I looked, the yellow hue of the flames licked the walls. My lungs screamed for fresh, clean air, but all the would enter was smoke. Dark air tainted my lungs and no amount of screaming for help would make the flames go away. No amount of blowing the dirty air away from my lungs would keep it away. I was constantly doing a push and pull of death into my own body; of my own free will.

Forced.

I was unable to withstand it much longer and as my eyes started to feel heavy, the heat overtaking my body, making sweat pores drip across my angelic face, I felt the flickering flames kiss my arms. The heat sizzled against my skin and my shirt caught on fire. Baby flames united upon my cloth shirt and slowly ate away at the fibers of my hand me down clothes. I could hear screaming all around me of my little sisters and older brother. My parent's voices couldn't be heard, but there was so much loud popping noises that I can't hear anything.

Droplets of sweat bead down my face, dropping from my nose and my chin but dissipating before it could touch the ground and pain erupted throughout my body as I fell to the ground, daring the deathly reaper to take me where I was subjected to this torture. Only, the dark creature that broke through the door threw something heavy against my body, smothering me. I felt the scream leave my lungs one last time before I faded off into the nothing that is the unconscious mind of my own. Where my memories of my parents danced in front of me and my sister's pulled at my arms. They were begging me to come with them.

They wanted me to follow them into the light where it looked like fresh trees stood tall and a fountain of cold, running water spouted from the ground, dousing the ground freely with a waterfall of fun. I couldn't help but to grin amongst the uncertainty.

"Come on, sis! Let's go play. This place isn't so bad." I nodded my head to them and took one look back and then the ground fell from beneath me. The earth swallowed me up, pushing me back into another world where faint beeps woke me up.

The beeps were that of some heart monitor sitting beside my head and the device looked ancient like an old piece of a radio system, but the two numbers on it read eighty-four. Another number read ninety-one. My lungs screamed from beneath my chest and I felt the heavy blanket on my body keeping me from moving, but my arms were exposed with bandages wrapped around them so heavily that I could barely move my fingers or wrist.

A grumble of list escaped me and my sights fell upon my grandpa whose head lay on the edge of the bed, propped up on his own palms. "Grandpa?" I question him and he seems to stir among the heavy atmosphere around us both. At first, groggy, he sits up uneasy, grimacing as he stretches then looks to the girl laying in bed and his eyes convey the message in which I had feared all along. That someone was dead.

Question was, who?

"Oh, Fi. I'm so glad that you're awake finally. You've had me so worried. You are so brave." His voice wobbles and I shake my head as much as I possibly can. He halts me by putting his hand up and signaling me to stop moving.

Promptly I do. I carefully let my eyes gaze around the room and I wonder how long I'd been here in the hospital of district nine. How long he had been sitting there by my bedside as I healed slowly from whatever it was that put me here.

"You know, you are such a fighter." He tells me and I nod to justify his words. I am a fighter, that much has always been true. I have been beating up the neighborhood kids since I was allowed to walk to school on my own. At first it wasn't that easy, as tiny as I used to be. They would pull my dark, dingy blonde hair and tease me for the dresses that didn't match. I had such a unique style to myself that I made sure that I stood out among the crowd. I never worried about how my hair was styled much, come to think of it, but If I wanted perfect curls I would get up early to do so. If I just wanted to go to school looking unkempt, then I did that as well. I never seemed to care about what others thought about how my image pleased them, but it was rather the opposite. I only needed to please myself.

Same goes for makeup as I never let it touch my face unless I just want to feel a little something extra and by no means would it be for the sake of another. In my family, we were well to do enough that the money for clothing and food wasn't a problem. We had meals on the table and our clothes were as up to date as possible, but I still preferred the hand me down look and dirt stained clothes. It helped me to fit in better with the peers that I were to graduate with some day sans the threat of the games, of course.

Never bothered with the thought that one that night, some idiot kid would set our place alight accidently and nor did I think to kiss my parents before letting my eyes fall under the spell of the sandman. I just listened to my little sister tell me a story about some fantasy character that her busy mind made up and l was always the volunteer to rate her homemade tales on a scale of awful to imaginative and cool. Just to keep her occupied, I found that I would keep her guessing just by telling her it was more mediocre than good, but in all honestly, I loved her stories and as I would fall asleep at night, I would dream about them just to have an encore. That always seemed to make the stories stick and the names she would come up with were so inventive and fun that it was hard to forget.

"I didn't dream last night." I whisper out suddenly, wondering why of all the nights, nothing came to me in visions. Nothing happened at all and that alone made me wonder what truly happened. "Is everyone okay?"

My grandfather's face could tell me the entire story just by the look in his eyes when I asked that question and he didn't even have to tell me a single thing. Everything and everyone was gone. His clear blue eyes matched my own, even the iris where it seemed to grow bigger when remorse was there. "You are going to be fine. You're going to come live with me, Fiona. I'll take really good care of you. You need to heal first though."

His words spoke truth and for the first two days, the reality never sank in at all. I just kept my eyes near the door to the room, expecting my momma to come in or my father to peek in and throw a water dart at me. The annoying sounds of my sister's voices or my brother's deep baritone voice would come sooner o later, I figured once they healed enough as well, but they never came.

For years, I wondered when I would go on to the other side of the living to meet up with them and ask them why it was that I survived but every single one of them did not. I wondered why I was the one left to bare the scars of the fire's kiss all over my arms and on my stomach. My back looked like a sizzled slice of bacon, the kind where you could get it only if you were super rich or someone found it to be a little out of date and were too afraid to eat it. It was that kind of skin that I was left with in wake of the fire that took everything away from me except my one life and in turn, gave life to my ailing grandfather.

The years that I spent under his care, I watched him nurse me back to health and had to suffer the reverse with him. His age caught up to him in the matter of a single solitary night where his body shook violently and receded within a few minutes. It hindered his mind and hindered his gait. He couldn't walk as well as he used to and from that, I learned how to be a caregiver as well as he'd been my own. I taught him how to dress again, and speak clear sentences, although he's still a little bit slurred at times. It was the stroke that did that to him. I have to cook the meals now that I'm his caretaker and even though it's just the two of us, we are far better off then anyone else in the district. Money he's had saved for years was the sole income for us both and I invested it wisely to buy only what was needed and only the extra when we could afford it.

On the side, I found that babysitting was my forte, not to mention it put money back into the savings that my grandfather had been using. As it was, I love children and each day that I step into the house of a stranger, I see the eyes of those kids light up and they in turn fall in love with me. My smile would grace them so easily and my arms would wrap around each individual as if it were my own flesh and blood. My very own late siblings that followed me everyday to keep me safe and out of harms way. The children will often wonder why I have to leave and then I'll tell them the story of my own grandfather's slipping life. They seem to understand better and even offer to come tell him stories, but I wouldn't dare subject them to that torture of watching an old man waste away. I don't care who they are. I'm going to be the only one standing beside him when that moment comes and I want to see my family welcome him into that good place and hopefully steal a peek at my own family waiting on the other side. It's just a matter of time before I, myself, will get to that day where I will cross over to meet them once again. I long to bring them into my arms and feel the blanket of love I used to have.

The need for learning comes shortly after waking and before any babysitting can be done. My grandfather has been very adamant about my education and making sure that I know everything I can before he passes on. He believes that knowledge is the key to everything and he swears that speeches are always part of that. To be knowledgeable is one thing, but to convince someone's own opinion by the persuasion of the spoken work is much more powerful then either alone.

In order to further my education, I find as many people to teach as possible. I'm book smart from sun up to sun down but when it comes to being street smart, it all depends. I wasn't raised having to fear the keepers that walk down the streets nor do I fear them at all. They are humans just as I am and I see no need to think they hold a higher purpose then my own. I'm a strong, independent person and I'm going to be the first to argue my side to everything. While my reflexes aren't the greatest as I've come to learn that the common sense will always lead me to do the right thing in every situation. However, it's just the other idiots that I have to deal with that make the decisions I make clash.

I often wonder, the older I get, why people see fit to follow the rest of the world when they know that the games are wrong. What is it about the games that make them think that sending innocent children off to fight and kill each other is the right thing to do. I know better than to express my own thoughts, but if people mourn the loss of children and family lost in tragedy's like I lost my own, why do they not have the remorse of sending children in to fight?

Common sense is a super power, obviously, and I for one plan on doing something about it but at the right time only. I know how to play the game and I base my moves on strategy. My grandfather taught me to think first before you act. He made sure that I can correctly assess my situation, whatever it may be, to fulfill what is needed to ensure I don't make mistakes.

If it wasn't for my grandfather, I don't know what I would even do. He was my light in the darkness that night so many years ago. He had lost his wife not more than a few years prior, and my family had not really kept much in contact with him before that. Yet, who knew that together, we'd make the strongest team and I could never ask for anything better than him.