Edison Grieve, District Five [1st Hunger Games]

Edison Grieve
District Five
Eighteen
fc: Keilan Ivan

Flesh and salt and grief, that’s all he ever knew.

Maybe there was a time before all that, but he didn’t feel like it. The war’d been raging on since he was young, and the chaos went on and on and on until there was nothing left of his memory but worry and spite.

He was tired of it. The worry, mostly. Edison wasn’t one for spite, not in any particular direction. Worry existed in all directions at once, ripping at the tender parts of his heart, putting holes in ‘em like sugar in teeth. The bad ebbed away at the good, and sooner or later even the sweetest moments twinged a nerve down deep.

Mom said things would get better. After days spent with knives twisting through cattle flesh and blood draining into buckets and meat rations salted and preserved for the rebellion, there wasn’t much left but hope. Ripred knew there wasn’t enough to feed them, not when all the rations got sent away. The rebellion brought with it the first time Edison had ever known true hunger, as well as the first time he’d ever woken up in a home without his Dad.

Dresden Grieve died early on.

A line of Peacekeepers. Single gunshot wound to the head. A message, more than anything:

if you do not obey, this will be you.

Suffice it to say, the message didn’t get through like the bullet did.

Flesh and salt and grief, buckets and buckets full.

His mother urged him not to fight, of course. Becoming a fighter seemed like a silly idea when she said it, and nothing’d changed since then. Edison might have been tall and well-built and filled with a desire to do right by this world he loved so much, but he wasn’t any kind of fighter. He was a “provide for the poor” kind of helper. A “house the displaced” strain of do-gooder.

In short: a rebel, sort of.

If you do not obey…

War didn’t necessarily look like fighting. Sometimes it looked like a young boy of just 18, a boy with dark hair and dark eyes and a kind smile, hugging his Mom and remembering the days when he could hug his Dad, too. Those days were full of brighter feelings: sunshine without smoke, cattle without blood staining the earth, breakfasts without lingering memories.

He didn’t even have time to see his friends anymore, or tease his baby brother, or roam around in the sunshine. Those were among his favorite things to do, but stuff happened.

Gil died not long after Dad did. Brin might have died, might have lived, might have run away. No one was too sure about them. Dawn was always the fighter of the lot, but so was the Peacekeeper who took her down, or so he’d heard. Their rag-tag family of friends had dwindled to almost nothing, and Edison didn’t like to admit that he threw himself into his work lest he hear that someone else had been shot or starved or beaten.

His brother Frankie survived, of course, being nothing but a seven-year-old pile of innocent smiles and dreams. Edison liked to think they were a lot alike, but then he’d just get sad when he thought about how he used to smile that big and mean it.

Maybe it stopped being about hope for himself. Maybe somewhere along the line, all the toil and grief added up to something equal to Frankie’s future. His mother’s future. The future for the poor and the displaced and all the people that Eddie needed to believe in. For the rebellion.

Hoping for his own future never seemed worth it, not after Dad. Not after Gil, not after Brin, and certainly not after Dawn. Edison saw how fast life could be snuffed out.

What did his life mean, in the grand scheme of things? His sunshine, his heart, his hope long gone?

In the face of flesh and salt and grief:

Nothing at all.