Perspective: {skylar}

The look that the girl gave her was one she was used to receiving. She believed it to be a mixture of awe, fear and respect; being a celebrity for violently killing people tended to have that effect. At a guess, she was almost free of the reaping and thoroughly enjoying the shrimp. Oh, to be that young and carefree again. Katelyn smiled wanly to herself. Then again, when she’d been eighteen, she’d spent every waking moment of the games trying to help Kirito. She’d been Kate the Great then. Had there ever been a time to be carefree?

Sixteen, maybe.

The days when she’d taken it upon herself to leave little gift baskets on the doorsteps of the unlucky families. She still did. But she used to too. There was one memory that stuck out to her, the taste of peaches on a warm summer day. Hell if she knew when it was exactly, or how old she’d been, but that moment, frozen in time, seemed more real to her than the room she was in. The old watering hole, awash in people shucking off their clothes and splashing each other. And her, scared stiff as a board by the thought of socializing.

There’d been an Izar there that day as well. Funny how there always seemed to be one. Levi had volunteered for Adonis Ackerman, and died when Lexi split his skull. Sampson had sought her out her first day back from the victory tour, thoughts of rebellion on his mind. Rebellion. She’d entertained the thought for a few years. Back when it felt like she was making a difference. She had no control over how people saw her, but deep down, she knew who she was. Katelyn wondered how many people remembered how she’d reacted to her name being called at the reaping.

Shocked into standing still. The peacekeepers had had to drag her to the stage, and once there, she had burst into tears in front of the entire district. Hard to believe it was going on thirteen years ago. Harder to believe that there were twelve year olds that had been born the year that Kirito came home. The tributes heading to the Capitol with her would have been two and six respectively when she took the crown. It was a whole new generation now, one to whom names like Stella Calloway and Potato Earnest held little meaning.

Katelyn regarded the girl as she chattered on; as she had suspected, one of the men in the room was her father, but Katelyn was still unable to put a name to the family. “You can call me Katelyn,” she said when the girl had finished her niceties. “There’ll be plenty of people calling me Ma’am in the Capitol, there’s no need for that here.” She laughed softly, shaking her head. Perhaps the girl was nervous, because she hadn’t actually introduced herself. It left Katelyn at a loss for what to talk about next. “And you are?”

There was a flash of something like surprise across Lorelei’s face as she introduced herself. “Irvin Bigsby’s my father…of Bigsby farms?” Ah, Katelyn thought, glancing at the men conversing elsewhere in the room. They grew greens if she remembered correctly, although there were likely other crops too. They were among the larger farms in the district, though not among the largest families.

Lorelei then switched gears, bringing up the games and the tributes she didn’t know. “Maybe we won’t lose… both of them.” Katelyn’s eyes swept over the girl, feeling a small prick of annoyance in her forehead. It wasn’t distaste; Katelyn could spot a liar or a fake from a mile away. No, it was more of a realization that Lorelei was naïve and sheltered.

Before her victory and the subsequent years, the Persimmon’s hadn’t been poor, but they hadn’t been close to being among the small circle of affluent families in the district either. After a decade though, she doubted that many people remembered where they had started. Katelyn never interacted with them much anyway. They didn’t tend to understand what it was like to work in the fields, to earn your bread by the strength in your back and the sweat on your brow.

“One can always hope,” she responded a little stiffly. “I’ve been to too many funerals in my life.” She was in danger of brooding, she knew, and so it was imperative that she prevented herself from doing so. Katelyn crossed her legs, right calf over left knee and sipped at her lemonade again. Lorelei had probably never known what it was like to go to bed hungry when the crops failed, or even known any of the tributes in the last decade. It was almost always the children that had to use tesserae.

“Does your family grow rhubarb by any chance? Or any fruits?” she wondered nonchalantly. “I—

She knew there were rumors about what she’d been up to for the past few years, but honestly, people could believe whatever they liked. It wouldn’t change who she was. “I spent a few years in the Capitol.” She admitted. “I’m afraid I’m not as up to date on everything in the district as I’d like to be. Care to fill me in?” she asked sweetly. She reminded herself that Lorelei was a child, and that offloading on  her about the tributes would be bad form.