[81st] The Reaping — District Twelve

I'm wasting my young years
It doesn't matter here
I'm chasing more ideas
It doesn't matter here

I volunteer as tribute. 

It's what you've been training yourself for the past year, everything that you've been trying to convince yourself to say since finding out that your maker has abandoned you to the coot before you can get the chance to right the wrongs that have been done upon  you  and  your  blood. You've  never  been able to understand why people loved your mother, never been able to understand what it was about her that made people want to love her, but there's something in her that makes it such that you cannot just leave her, such that you wake this morning and cannot just kiss her and go like every morning. Your entire life, you have been surrounded by those that love her, by those that wanted nothing more, inexplicably, than to follow her. It used to make you... not angry, not exactly, but frustrated. 

Confused. 

It didn't feel real.

Today feels anything but. 

But that has always been the way of your life, you'd suppose. Nothing, not really, has ever felt real to you, has ever felt like something that can truly be happening. You bring the strawberries you pluck from just beyond the border fence to the Hob and trade for yeast to make bread, and people remember that is it her son that brings the fruit. You bring from the mines a strong spirit, and it is her strength of spirit that lives in you. Even today, even on this morning, you are your mother's son, your father's child.

As much as you resent it, it's part of who you are. 

You don't know how to deny it any more than you know how to live with it, any more than you know how to accept it. 

I volunteer as tribute, you think, and wonder what part of yourself people will remember. I volunteer as tribute, you want to say, and can't help but wonder if it will be you who is remembered, or if it will be your mother, with her beautiful blonde hair and her light eyes who will be remembered for her sons bravery. 

Threw himself into the ring to save the others, they could say. Not for the glory, but to save a child.

You know that this is what they might say when the words finally leave your lips, the words that you have been preparing for the last year, the words you have accepted as your fate since the very day that your father's killer left district Twelve and found himself a new job somewhere in the Capitol.

You're going to win these games just to get  to him, going to find your way into the very heart of this god-forsaken nation and turn it into your very own hunter if it will only mean you finally find the man that turned your mother into the hollow shell of a mother she is today. A part of you knows that this, your volunteering, is for the glory, knows that you could possibly find the man that ruined everything without winning the games, but what they don't know them won't hurt them, and you vow in the morning that your mother will never suspect that you're going to volunteer just for the sake of volunteering, that you have every intention of abandoning her just as she abandoned you so many years ago, when a knife was slipped between your fathers fourth and fifth ribs and he had no choice but to bleed out all over you boots. 

I volunteer as tribute.

You hear the words over and over in his head, wake morning after morning before the reaping with the words echoing through your skull, memorizing the feel of each syllable on your tongue as you relish in the taste of the sound. The syllables reverberate through you each day, each and every dawn coming more easily than every streak of color that you have ever been able to imagine.

I volunteer as tribute, you think as you step into the crowd, squaring your shoulders the way your father taught you to so many years ago. 

I volunteer as tribute.

You force yourself to remember the words, think about every time you stood at the frays of this very same crowd and watched on as boys and girls older than you were forced into the bloodbath, were tossed into carnage with neither hope nor prayer to guide them through.

I volunteer as tribute You whisper it to yourself as you kiss your mother goodbye.

You can hear the words ringing in your head every morning, can hear them reverberating through your skull come every dawn, think about them every time you see the color of the sun streaking across the sky as the clouds roll across the horizon. Morning after morning, you sat at that old wooden table, carved little designs into the rotting wood and marked it as your own, made your mark upon the world in the form of your name etched into wood before going out into the mines and claiming those barren lands as your own as well. You remember sitting there this very morning, your mother across the table from you, putting bread between your lips and smiling at the woman across the table, showing her warmth and kindness even though she can barely stand to look at you anymore, heart too heavy with memory to stand the sight of you for too long before crumbling. You can’t remember the man that your father once was, can’t hardly remember a time before it was just you and your mother, her with her darkness and you with your own to match. You can’t remember a time where you held her up as well as you held yourself, but that’s not the end of the world, it’s only the beginning, but this is the beginning of the end.

This much you’re sure of. 

Before walking to the district square, you kiss her on her temple, take her by the crook of the elbow and link her arm and arm with the kind woman from down the street, the one that is half as fiery but twice as kind, with a daughter that you’ve never been able to bring yourself to pay attention to for fear that you might love her, for fear that you might not be able to let her go. You walk the pair of them into the crowd, show them where they are supposed to stand and pray that somehow the pair of them will find her way, will show your mother where she is supposed to stand, that she will understand after all these years that to lose a son is not half so bad as you think losing herself must have been. 

I volunteer as tribute, you think to yourself again as you press your lips to your mothers temple, smile at her softly before walking away to stand with the other boys your age. 

I volunteer as tribute, you think on repeat, saying it to yourself time and time again, vowing that for whatever name is called in the reaping, you will save them from this hell Panem has created, that you will save them and forge yourself a legacy anew, that you will fight against the system that killed your father in the only way you know how; by winning. 

You might not have been born to win, but you know you were born to die, and as much you have learned to live with. 

Is it truly such a stretch to think maybe,
just this once, that someone
born to die might live?

I volunteer as tribute, you think, standing in the crowd, with shoulders pressed against your own, the air feeling like you might just suffocate if you continue to breath.

I volunteer as tribute.

I volunteer as tribute.

I volunteer as tribute.

You think it time and again, vow it to yourself with every passing second, promise to this world that you will save whatever soul gets condemned to the arena. There is no one in this district that you can protect from themself, no one that can protect you from the ring, but you have had enough of this this life as a government pawn, this life of being turned into something that can be slaughtered, this thing that can't be missed.

"Nico Thorne!" they call. 

You father blessed you with the iron.
You vow to not forget.

song: wasting my young years 
by london grammar