rest on your laurels || patricia & beck VT blitz

.: patricia valfierno :.

The remains of a three-egg omelette stubbornly cling to the side of an old, black frying pan - the shells discarded lazily into a stone-cold, half-drunk mug of coffee nearby on the marble counter. I dump a ketchup stained ceramic plate into the metal basin of my kitchen sink and make a mental note to maybe attempt to wash it up at some point before passing out on the sofa again. Given that it's not the only plate in there, chances are slim.

My tongue slides across my lower lip as I try to roll tobacco into paper, my forehead a creased expression of inward concentration and focus. I lick the paper again and roll it back and forwards until it sticks. You think I'd be good at this, but it's been a while since I rolled my own, dipping in and out of periods where I managed to convince myself to quit.

I twist the gas and pressing the black button to ignite the hob, leaning down at the stove, cigarette placed between my lips, and use the flame to light it. I turn off the gas just as quick as I turned it on, and enjoy the first few drags alone in my kitchen. At least I managed to get dressed today. I should write that in the damn therapy book.

I'm experimenting with brighter colours - a loud yellow shirt clad with pink triangles, and vibrant denim dungarees that make me look like a farmer. I've started tying back my bleach white hair too, as since I've started wearing glasses it's just been getting in the way. Maybe I should just cut out the middleman and shave it all off? No, I feel good lately, I don't want to change anything about myself, except maybe the nicotine dependency.

It's Victory Tour day, and Four's latest Career Victor is here to visit. Leon would have something wry to say about that, I'm sure. Shame I've not seen the guy in years, I miss his wits quicker than mine and the mischievous glimmer in his blue eyes - back when mischief was allowed and not punished with dehumanisation or public execution.

I didn't go to the speech, I have a doctor's note on behalf of the Capitol - let's me stay inside and generally not cause problems, not that I want to these days. I listened from here - they have giant speakers that echo and ring for miles. It was what it always is, humble, safe, and not-at-all his own words. I was the same.

As I step into my garden to smoke, I smell some kind of roast beef wafting out of Lethe's kitchen. Fuck, is it evening? I flick ash onto the marble and look out at the low sun. I guess it is. I need to get a better sleep schedule if I'm going to fix my broken, weary brain.

There's a crash, a yelp, and then a defeated "Fuck" to my left.

I look over at where my garden fence has caved in under the minor body weight of Beck Hailsham. I stare at him for a few seconds, then up at his entourage who are occupied at Lethe's, then back to the crumbled mess in the mud. He looks just like Barney.

"Last time I saw you, you were on that bridge, driving an axe into that Walter kids gut." I say, walking over until my shadow casts over him, "Now you're face-down in my petunias."

I take a slow drag of my cigarette, looking down at the victor of the eighty-fourth games. They always look so much smaller in real life.

"Funny how life works out." I extend my synthetic arm out to drag him to his feet.

.: patricia valfierno :.

They make heroes of us all, so that we never forget that we are complicit. Do I say that to young Beck Hailsham? Do I break his spirit? Green behind the ears and eyes full of curiosity, I remind myself that this is all still new to him, as it was to me all those years ago. Which Victors told me the truth, and which tried to maintain the illusion?

When he bows, I shift my weight from one foot to the other, looking the boy up and down. I almost laugh. To be disappointed I’d have to have some kind of expectation, and I’m old enough now to know that victors are never the people that they showed you on television. They’re never the picture they painted.

"The only thing you’ve ruined is my fence." I sigh, looking at the mess of white splintered wood and uprooted flowers. I suppose it’s something different to do tomorrow.

I look over the boy’s shoulder again, to his entourage, who still haven’t noticed he has slipped away, "They’re driving you crazy already, huh?"

I take one last drag of my cigarette before dropping it on the marble stone pathway that leads to my front door, stamping out any last burning tobacco with my heel. I glance to the path that leads away from the entrance to victor’s village, a rear exit through a patch of woodland.

"Come on, let’s go for a walk." I tell him that’s what we’re doing, because I don’t know him, and if he’s going to dither then eventually someone will look over and see us. I walk up the garden, towards the main path, giving Beck a pat on the shoulder as I pass.

.: patricia valfierno :.

We walk down the pathway, passing Samiyuq's moss-covered statue to where the marble tiles fade into dirt and the untamed grass sprouts wildly. The white ash trees force the dirt track to twist and weave through the woodland, between taller birches and broad maples. We walk beneath the evening chorus of warblers and redpolls, chickadees and mockingjays, pressing on away from the village as swiftly as we can.

I look to the boy, seventeen years my younger. He is tense, uncertain in my company, but he follows me through this strange forest all the same - because although we've never met, and although we've never spoken, we are bound by blood now. He's cursed, just like the rest of us, and no doubt he feels that maybe he wants someone to understand some of what he's going through.

I did too.

When he asks me about my story, about how the media painted me to the Capitol and the rest of Panem, I hesitate. It's never that black and white - everyone's hero is someone's villain, and I expect that Beck Hailsham is as hated in District Six as I am.

Beck's eyes hold a sympathy behind them, the very same that everyone saw on television. He was sorry for every single tribute that he had to kill, you could see the pain in his face, you could pinpoint the moment where his soul tore in two at having to take another life. He killed with dignity and some form of compassion, at least.

When I watch myself back sprinting through the darkness in night-vision goggles, leaping into the air and stabbing Cha Leviane through the eye, I don't see compassion. When I watch myself drowning Crusader Rhodes in a pool of mercury, I don't see empathy. When my sword pierced through Galaxy's chest and came out the other side, and she coughed up blood, I only see my wild, ruthless expression.

Beck's more of a hero than most of us.

I don't like telling my story, not when it's televised on repeats all year round, taught in history classes, and written all over my scarred neck, severed arm, aching back, and weary expression.

But I do tell him.

"Neither," I say after a short while, "They painted me as more of an anti-hero. Vengeful spirit bullshit."

After Pearl died, that's the angle they went with. A street-rat girl hell-bent on revenge, which of course led to me coming face-to-face with her killer. Such bullshit. My fists clench a little when I think of how something so deeply personal to me was transmitted for every soul in Panem to see. I felt something with Pearl that I don't think I'd ever felt before, which seems totally fucking stupid to admit when I only knew her for a few weeks.

But when you kill for each-other, when someone saves your life, when someone sees you at your absolute lowest point and does everything they can to make you laugh, or make you smile, yes that is different. I'm certain now that I was in love with her.

And they took that, and make it television drama, and everyone saw it.

But that's all in the terms and conditions, isn't it? That's the cost of winning.

Roots seem to twist and reach over the dry dirt pathway, and like to hide underneath the long shadows of twilight. The mossy bank veers and then drops slightly as we anchor left, and approach a longer downward slope, scarred with angled rocks and more roots.

I glance at Beck, remembering his artificial leg and warn him to be careful as we trek downhill for a little while and follow the avenue of pale white tree trunks.

"So, how are you doing?" I ask him, which is a genuine attempt to be empathetic - but it isn't in my nature, and I feel awkward asking him it. He's barely finished showering Walter Blake's blood off his skin, and here I am asking how he's doing. Fucking idiot, Trish.

.: patricia valfierno :.

It is lonely at the top, I get what Beck means. You're put on a pedestal for everyone to see. People talk about you like you're an asset rather than a person. Everyone wants to know you, but no one wants to be your friend.

They'll be there for the photoshoots and the champagne galas, but when you're crying alone in your eggshell painted bedroom on cold winter nights, the only people that are there for you are the ghosts of the people you killed in cold blood - the ones who's bodies you used as ladders to climb your way to glory.

Sometimes I cling to their company, because the horror of it is the only part of any of this that feels real.

There are nights where I want to reach out and grab one of them, make them switch places with me, because I feel like I'm wasting this. I don't enjoy being a Victor. I'm not grateful for the opportunity, or happy that I get to live this new fantastic life - I feel like I'm taking this spot away from someone who would actually have gotten something out of this.

And I feel like no one else gets that. And I'm not saying that I'd rather be dead, because ever since our parents disowned us and we had to fend for ourselves, every part of my instinct has screamed survive, and that's etched into every fibre of my being.

But no one can be that strong for that long. And I'm not strong.

This kid - and he is just a kid, really - now looks to me with fear in his eyes. Genuine fear. And he asks me what he should do next, like I have all the answers. Like I can make it really simple for him and tell him how to live his life now he's won the Hunger Games like every boy from Four dreams, and the sad truth is I've got nothing for him. Nothing.

"I dunno, it was different for me. They took my life from me - I had to win it back." I say, thinking of how hollow I felt when they called my name. How Rose's screams made my blood run cold and how everything I knew turned on it's head. In Career districts it's very different, it's part of their culture to prepare for the Games, they even put themselves forwards.

The earth flattens out a bit as we bend round, the trees thinning a little as I spot the lake in the distance, between the pines. We stick to the trail, following the clusters of lavender and wild garlic sprouting from the side of the path. The smells here are sweet and strong, almost overpowering.

"You volunteered yourself for this. Surely you must have had some idea of what to expect?" I ask, looking over at the young boy who reminds me so much of my ally from the caves, "Or do they not prepare you for that over at Murder School?"

Maybe that was a bit insensitive, but in the end he's trained to endure worse. And he has.

.: patricia valfierno :.

Guilt bleeds in my chest as he tells me about his friend. I've never lost anyone to the Games - maybe Eden, but I must have spoken to the girl about twice in the eight years I knew her. I can't relate to his pain, even more so given the whole Career culture.

I don't remember much of Bell Hailsham. I was hooked up on morphine in a hospital bed when Ridley Le Roux stood the lone victor in the snow, claiming a thorny crown from the cold hands of three other Tributes. All I know is that she was one of the frozen corpses. She didn't get to go home.

But Beck did.

I feel bad that I don't have the answers he's looking for. I'm the worst person to be asking about what to do after winning, given all my failures, mistakes, the people I've left behind, the people I fought who I should have befriended. Hmph. Maybe that makes me the best person to ask.

But a Career? They're half-brainwashed to want to enter the Games and fight for glory. Well, he's got his glory. All the glory he could ever want.

"Good," I finally say in response, "You cling to that."

Beck tries to move on from the topic quickly, his surprise audible as he spots a flower he likes. This boy was murdering people barely a month ago.

I take the dandelion between two fingers, the stem feels wet. From the seeds grey umbrellas sprout, ready to hook onto a gust of wind and travel across the District, to land in soil and germinate far away from the mother plant.

"They kicked us out, Rose. They don't want us anymore."

Something I want.

What do I want? If I knew the answer to that then I'd be halfway to moving on with whatever is left of my life.

We reach the lake. It's not a natural lake, curving at a semicircle before abruptly stopping against a mechanical structure, half brick and half metal, that leans and drops suddenly down the edge of a huge cliff. The hydro-electric dam. It's one of many that power the Capitol and, if we're lucky, District Five. The lake is open access, so long as you don't go to near the dam there are never any issues with loitering on the dirt beach by the edge of the woodland.

As we arrive on the part-mud, part-sand bay, I pause and think for a second, before blowing on the head of the dandelion. The seeds scatter and drift out across the lake, a faint grey cloud dissipating in the breeze.

I want peace.

There's a dullness behind my eyes, because I know I'll never find it.

I sit down on a hand-carved wooden bench, and leave space enough for my companion. The view looks out perfectly on the lake, and there's enough quiet here to forget about the rest of the District, spare the low humming of the dam.

"If you didn't know what you wanted to do after winning, then why did you volunteer?" I ask him openly, "What did you kill those people for - glory?"

I look him carefully in the eye, because I like to think I can spot a liar in the act.

.: patricia valfierno :.

The answer for me is simple, I killed to survive. I killed because I had no choice. Actively volunteering is on a whole different level to being reaped. Choosing to put yourself in that situation either means you revel in killing others and find sport in chasing that glory, or it means that your life is so bad you'd rather throw it all away for a shot of a new one.

The reality, it seems for Beck, is not that simple. An orphan raised maybe not in the best conditions. An existence he felt was slipping from his grasp. I can understand his motive a little better now, but it's still part of that Career District culture to be raised and trained for it. I could see that Beck was no stranger to wielding a weapon. It's not as black and white as I'd made it seem, and his answer is grey, but fair.

I could see how much he hated killing. I knew he didn't revel in it. I guess I was just curious as to why he'd put himself forward for the Games if that were the case. Now I know.

Fuck, it must have been rough in that orphanage to put himself through hell tand come out the other side, just to get out of it.

Maybe he didn't want to come out the other side. Maybe he wanted to close the curtains and call it a day.

"But I'd rather all of them be dead than me."

I don't believe him.

The stillness of the lake should calm me, but being here with Beck, talking about the Games - it unsettles me for some reason. Like there's a great mass above me pushing down on my chest, some sickly dread of a spider crawling across me, and my stomach drops in the brief moments where I forget that I killed five people to have the privilege of sitting here on this bench - alive.

I want to smoke, but I don't. I exhale all at once, exhausted by the weight of it all. Tired of carrying it around with me everywhere, never getting used to it even after sixteen years. My back hurts. Maybe one day I'll just collapse and that'll be it. I won't have to worry about it anymore. One day.

"Can I give you some advice, kid?" I say, looking out across the water. The trees stand upright like brushes painting the mountains on the horizon, and their inky reflections in the water blot and dance as the wind ripples their forms.

"Drop the act. You're a terrible liar." I say, turning to look him in the eyes. Ripred, he's still so young.

When you spend most your life wearing different masks, you start to see other people wearing the same ones you once did.

I don't buy the tough guy routine - the hardened killer, the swagger of someone who volunteered from a career district. He stinks of fresh blood and he still has the terror in his eyes of someone who was forced to murder other children - it hasn't left his face yet, not even remotely. He's like a young buck in the headlights and when I look at this little kid next to me I see exactly what he doesn't want me to see: a frightened teenager.

You can't con a con-artist.

"You're ashamed of what you did," I say to him, "Just accept it. I'm ashamed of what I had to do - We all are."

I lean back against the bench and admire the view, thinking of all the horrible things they made me do just so I could be lucky enough to enjoy such a simple pleasure as breathing woodland air on a brisk morning.

"The sooner you accept that it's part of the deal, the easier this will all be for you."