Ayane Pilayar-Kilera [District Seven | Resubmission]

Ayane Rosenfeld Pilayar-Kilera Hale
twenty-seven -- female -- District Seven

Anonymity suits you.

Once, that was impossible to even imagine. Capitol reporters who couldn't land an interview with the mayor or Games officials used to kill time in District Seven by hounding you instead; you hated it, and you hated that it helped more people recognize you, but you accepted it as a fact of life because—as in so much else—it wasn't like you had a choice. The reporters tapered off over the years, though, finally vanishing when you turned eighteen. No one ever told you that you were free, and you spent years watching over your shoulder every day the train sat in the station, but looking back on it, you should have realized that age had made you boring. A child orphaned twice over, the Capitol could point to and say look how sad that is, look what could become of your families, but Panem is chock full of grief-riddled adults.

In any case, now almost no one recognizes your face. You can buy groceries and trawl scrapyards in peace from what strangers think are subtle glances. At the paper mill, you're a nondescript worker in a nondescript green uniform guiding fibrous slurry over mesh, and your coworkers say nothing to you about the Games that they don't also say to each other. (The paper mill job was sort of an accident; a friend of an acquaintance heard about an opening, and you never meant it to be permanent. Still, it pays for your food and the occasional carving tool and you've held it down for three years, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say about any of the other jobs you hopped to and from after you left the orphanage.) At home, legs folded up on your favorite chair while you practice carving, you don't always feel like your own person, but you almost never feel like anyone else's. At night, in a group dressed in black, you're a tool again, but a tool for something of your own choosing.

Just because things are easier now doesn't mean they're easy, of course. But when it gets to be too much, you've learned to clasp your own hands and focus on the sensations from that: your pulse between your fingers, the slight tension in your knuckles, your own fingertips warm or cold against the back of each opposite hand. It's something easy you can do no matter where you are, and it's enough, usually, to remind you that the present is real and you live in it. Then you can try to deal with the actual problem.

Things hurt more often now, but less acutely. More to the point, you recognize when it starts and you do something about it. It's not always easy to make yourself face it, but it works out better in the long run than your old strategy of skating along on cold detachment until everything simmering under the surface erupted out, genuinely blindsiding you as though exactly that hadn't happened a hundred times before.

You nearly got shot like that once, throwing yourself too close to a truck in a fit of infuriated recklessness. The moment everyone got safely back inside, Mairead tore into you: You were going to get yourself killed. You were going to get someone else killed. No, Kilera—yes fine no, Pilayar-Kilera, this was not an isolated lapse in judgment. If you wanted to help the cause you could either unfuck your head or find someplace out of the way to die on your own time.

Then she slapped you companionably on the shoulder and packed you off to the woman who usually talks to people who get back from the Detention Center.

You didn't see the point, mostly because you had been trucking along on your own just fine for fourteen years, thank you, but also because you didn't think you had much to tell Kawehi anyway. Everything painful in your life, as far as you were concerned, happened before you were nine, and you didn't even remember your life with any sense of continuity before you were maybe thirteen. You still don't. All you have before that are lightning flashes in an impenetrable storm; at best, your parents are fleeting rolls of thunder. In some ways you know them better through recap clips, but you stopped watching even those after your third Reaping. Better to risk punishment for turning away than to punish yourself by watching Jana fall under an uncaring creature's tail, Dominic murmur in the sand, Roro bleed out in delirium, Mother—a child herself, an engagement ring on her finger because she couldn't marry yet—struggle through childbirth only to be cut down.

They loved you, and you lost them. That was neither your fault nor any of theirs; it was the Capitol's. That, you said firmly, was all you needed to know.

"Is that all you want to know?" Kawehi asked, then nodded slowly when you told her you weren't the kind of person who had strong feelings about what you'd left behind.

Turns out you were wrong, but it took a lot of stops and starts and a lot more support than you ever had as a teenager to figure that out.

The hands thing wasn't one of Kawehi's ideas, but she likes it. It works better for you than counting your breaths or cataloguing sights and sounds. When you feel sentimental, you like to think that's because your father lived and died by his own hands. (Jana told you that once, in one of those little inconsequential-seeming conversations you remember with unreasonable clarity. You can hear it in her voice, even: lived and died.) On the whole you take after your mother, with medium brown skin and loose reddish curls, but you're lanky like your dad and your hands are his: rough from the paper mill, but still deft. Artist's hands.

(You keep your old pieces, so you can watch yourself get better. Your home is full of fish and houses, cats and recently children—all kinds of things, except birds. You already have a little wooden bird, a quiet guardian in a place of honor next to your parents' rings.)

The truth is, you want to know a lot of things. You want, with grieving anguish that feels like it could well up out of your blood, to know what Mother sounded like singing; she never did it on camera, but Roro told Jana he fell in love with her voice first. You want to know that Dominic knew that you loved him, because he thought so little of himself sometimes and you can't bear fearing that he didn't. You want to know how Jana met your family. You want to know how Roro would have taught you to carve.

You can't have any of that. You do have a future, however baffling that idea still is, and you can do something to help other kids grow up without wondering the same kinds of things. Helping steal and redistribute Peacekeepers' food and medical supplies won't bring the Capitol to its knees, but it if it helps anyone in District Seven keep their heads above water a little while longer, it's worth your time. And if you take out a person now and again along the way, then, well—the Capitol stole enough of your tears a long time ago.


Resubmission of/enormous update to Ayane Pilayar-Kilera, who I last wrote a post for when she was three and who was last NPC'd on here when she was about six.

Wrote a lot of this listening to "Good Grief" by Dessa on loop, so. that's the mood.

Hale was added as a surname for legal purposes when Jana took her in; she had Rosenfeld added as a middle name herself when she turned eighteen, because fuck it, the other three were all there and not having it felt Bad. The bird was both Dominic's and Jana's token.