Fiore Sieversii [District Eleven]

Fiore Sieversii -- eighteen -- District Eleven

Bees look after themselves, for the most part, but good beekeeping still requires some things. Attentiveness. Patience. Calm.

You don't really have any of that.

This is the family business, though, and what else are you going to do, work in the orchards? The fields? No thanks. Long days checking one panel after another until your hands cramp and your eyes glaze over, keeping still when the bees land on you only through sheer force of will, still beat breaking your back. At least the suit keeps the sun off, even if it manages that by suffocating you.

You're supposed to sell all the honey to the Capitol, and buy back whatever you want to keep. A few times a year some combination of Peacekeepers and city assholes swoop in, load up their trucks, whine at you about how they think hives should work, and find an excuse to leave behind a smaller pittance than they did the visit before. Monotonous as the rest of it is, collection time is the worst part of your job. Capitolites are the only ones who appreciate your job less than the bees do, without—supposedly—the excuse of brains the size of sesame seeds. It would serve them right if your whole family ditched one day—if you let the hives swarm and collapse when they wound up too small to support themselves, let varroa take care of whatever survived, and took bets on how many of District Eleven's farms would collapse before anyone noticed.

Too bad you live in District Eleven. It already sucks enough when everything's running properly.

The point is: Ripred knows what the Capitol does with the money they aren't spending on swanky replacement pollinator mutts, because it's sure not going toward a fair price for the harvest. Fortunately for you, they only think they get the whole yield. For every crate a driver in white carries away, a bottle sits tucked away in the storehouses, and as good as you are at hiding them, you're better at fencing them.

When you started doing this two years ago, you never expected to get more than pocket change, and you don't think anyone meeting you—a slip of a thing especially then, more hair than kid, eyes barely visible behind your cloud of curls—expected you to stick it out. But people desperate enough for a little sweetness in their lives will cough up a surprising amount, and once you figured that out, you took to the black market like you never took to the hives. Little by little you built a network of contacts. You listened to how people tried to haggle with you, turned their lines on people you wanted to buy from, and stole their responses for the next time someone tried to pull your heartstrings, reveling in the cutthroat competitiveness of it all. You graduated from insisting on money to learning, through trial and error, when to accept trades and how to upsell whatever you got from them.

It's all a tricky business, and not as lucrative as it could be for the amount of effort you put in, but you're small potatoes. Honey doesn't spark the kind of fights that moonshine and weapons might. Besides, you wouldn't say so to your family, but danger—distant as the potential for any trouble is, at your level—is part of the appeal. Bees swarm in the thousands, and if you try to fight back you'll only pass through the cloud. All you can do to protect yourself is suit up and try to act like part of the landscape. Humans? They start a fight, you can give as good as you get, or at least try. Humans, you can make bleed.

Your mother is the quintessential beekeeper, ever-tranquil and sweet as the honey she collects, and she always shakes her head when you toss money onto the table. Gouging, she calls it, as though you're forcing people to pay at knifepoint—not that she's above taking the money, or asking you to rake through your contacts for supplies when equipment breaks. The world isn't as pretty as her morals, and you always deliver.

When she says you would have made a good Career, you can never tell whether she means it as a compliment. You choose to hear one anyway.



this does nothing for Mission: Have a Character in Each District and I know I just wrote a bug kid but. hmm. here we are. turns out I like bugs.

shoutout to "Honey and Bone" by Mads Alvey; this beekeeper isn't much at all like that beekeeper, but that story is a) definitely the reason I have bees on the brain and b) very good.