No One // [Ale & Nil]

No one.
No one.
No one…
Your hero I am.

It was a dark and pleasant song, and Nilima found the words playing over in her head as the last of the training sessions ended. Picking up her cup of hot cocoa from the table, she found herself pacing idly as the other Gamemakers filed out of the room, on to more important things.

Her mind was swimming with the tributes’ presentations. Some felt genuine, but some felt positively gaudy. The problem with gaudy presentation is it’s not real. Nilima had spent enough time with her mother to know what goes in to making an authentic show, and this… deception, this exaggeration, this proving yourself.. it’s often a lie. There’s a certain skill involved in pretending that you’re going to be okay, and none of the tributes had it. When faced with fear, when faced with their demise, that facade would inevitably crumble. She expected them all to die miserably, and the last sad sop left alive would just be the lucky one who managed to die last.

Last, meaning… decades from now. Miserable and old, but still alive until the boring and bitter end.

So perhaps it was no surprise that the last private training session of the day left Nilima feeling shaken. Not bothered by the song and its brutal edge, but torn from her daydreaming by something that actually felt real for the first time that day.

While everyone else went off to do their work, Nilima wandered down the training room hallway and found the District Twelve male lingering.

Nil strode up to him, hot cocoa in hand.

“That was quite a song back there,” she said, looking back at the training room door. “But why that song in particular, out of all the others?”

She wasn’t there to chastise him for having a book he shouldn’t have. She was simply curious.