Don't Mourn The Fallen {Clementine Oneshot}

If I were the next Shim to fall, would anyone so much as bat an eyelid at my death? Would anyone truly care if I were no longer in their lives because I'd gone into the Hunger Games and had my life torn away from me? Surely they wouldn't. Besides, ever since Atlas Shim volunteered for the Hunger Games, the other Shims seemed to have stopped caring about me, so I stopped visiting them in the Justice Building. I know they don't care about me anymore, so why should I care about them?

The last death of a Shim that even seemed to have remotely effected my in a negative way was my brother, Callixtus Shim, being killed in the 75th Annual Hunger Games. Even though he volunteered for the Games, I didn't feel that he deserved to die. Now, however, any Shim that goes into the Games, I have no hope for. A Shim who goes in never comes back out. It's like a curse our family has, never being able to win the Hunger Games. We won't ever make it far enough for one of us to return home to the mess that is known as District Five as a victor. I feel like, if any of us were to even remotely have a chance at winning the Games, it would be me, and that's only because I don't take the time to care about what other people think anymore.

I'm not afraid to risk my life in the Hunger Games, or really in any aspect of my everyday life. If I were in the Games, unless my District partner were Hayk, I don't think that there's anyone I'd care to try to protect. I'd be on my own, fighting by myself, because no one else would truly guard me until the end. When it all comes down to it, you'll have to fight your allies if someone else didn't kill them first. You'd really have no choice, if you wanted to come out on top as the victor and return home to your family alive.

Then again, would my family even care if I came home alive? I highly doubted that they would. I wouldn't let myself shed another tear for the loss of a Shim ever since Atlas volunteered. I didn't cry for him. I didn't cry for Demelza. I wouldn't cry for any other Shims in the future. None of them deserved my sympathy. None of them should be mourned by Clementine Shim. No, I'm too strong for that. I'm too smart to mourn the dead anymore.

If anything, I feel that now, we should just mourn the living. We're the ones in hell, after all. Panem is far from a paradise of any sort, no matter where you live. Even when I got the chance to visit the Capitol during President Snow's birthday party, it didn't look like any sort of paradise. Therefore, I know that nothing on Earth could ever be as satisfying as what we might find after death. You hear about heaven, and you hear about hell. Frankly, I'd take either of those places over the grungy, filthy District known as Five that I've been forced to live in for all of my life.

People tell me that the lower Districts have it much worse than we do. Then again, how would they truly know? Just like me, they've been trapped behind the fence of District Five their entire lives, never allowed to visit the other Districts and see what they're truly like. The only people that one could really say have it worse than us are those who are dead. Then again, who really says that being dead is worse than being alive? Personally, I don't care which side of it I'm on. Death doesn't scare me, and it shouldn't scare you either.