when mountains crumble to the sea - [oberon olivia]

oberon fairbairn

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, kid.

Oh, he remembers throwing such a fit when Pa first told him, you gotta start pullin' your weight around here. He'd looked at the other kids and said, no fair, quit makin' me do everything. All Jimmy down the street has to do is mind the chickens, he don't have to get up before the sun an' spend his entire weekend slavin' away.

Pa had to give him a real ass-whoopin' to get him to stop whining. Jimmy down the street's gonna start takin' tesserae soon, and you don't wanna take tesserae, do you? You're almost twelve. You're a man, not a boy, and a man ain't gonna get anywhere in life without his head screwed on right and his shoulders willin' to carry all the work he's gotta do.

Pa always says, you just gotta push through. Ain't no better feeling than sittin' with your family after a long day of work. Those achin' muscles are what tells you you've earned the food on your plate right now, makes all the meat taste sweeter, don't it?

But what makes you wake up in the morning lookin' forward to doing all of it over again, day after day?

It gets easier, he'd reply, reaching over and shoveling meat towards him till his bowl was near overflowing. Eat up, my son, grow big and strong, one of these days you'll look back and wonder whyever you made such a fuss.

Yeah, more often than not, Pa's wisdom ends up bein' right.

He also says the Capitol don't like reaping the honest, hard-workin' folk. It ain't excitin' enough, they'd rather have some victor's family they can fawn over, or some troublemaker they're fixin' to get rid of.

"Hush, Olivia," Oberon said, ruffling his sister's hair. "Little sisters aren't supposed to be worryin' about their big brothers."

"There's nothing in life that ain't a risk, you know? Life could throw at us anything, our cows could get sick, we could have another drought, if you wanna worry there's a million things that could go wrong to worry about."

Most important, kid, is to keep a strong head on top of strong shoulders and not havin' it fly off from thinkin' a hundred miles an hour.

"All you gotta do is live life knowin' you're doing your best. You can't really change what other people are gonna do, what nature's gonna do. I can't change if I'm gonna get reaped or not, but I'd try my best to get home. There's far better things to do than waste energy worryin'."