piper lacour. twelve.

It is the pride you have for your heritage, you realise on the long train ride to your death, that put you here.

Most don't remember their childhood, let alone the trauma. But you did. You remembered it as vivdly as you did the long journey away from the place you called home - how scared you were. How heartbroken you were to leave all that you knew and loved behind. How much you loved it there, even if the winters chilled you to the bone and Keepers littered the streets and the ground shook something violent at all times of the day. They told you it was an earthquake prone zone. That the shakes were nothing to worry about. That it was normal - that every district coped with its battle of the elements.

You remember how the train carriage shook like thunder. The flashes of light bright from underneath tarp and empty cardboard boxes that you hid under. The way your mother wept softly as the night sky turned back to dark.

And you remember the dull, empty ache that never quite left when you arrived in Twelve with a new last name and a kid on the playground at school told you Thirteen had been wiped from the face of the earth.

So you told the children about it. You weren't supposed to, not really. Dad had gotten you out of there in time, having seen the warning signs weeks prior from his desk in the Justice Building. But you were so proud of where you came from, and so heavily in mourning, so full of disbelief that it had simply disintegrated that you filled your life back up with home. You spoke of the tall buildings that seemed to touch the sky, the Keepers that waved back at you in their trucks, the diamond shape of the stones in the pathways to school. You told them about your friends, the games you played, the songs you sung - you even taught them some schoolyard nursery rhymes and slang words and slap-stick clapping games.

Most importantly you told them of the way the ground would roar below your feet, of a dragon that slept in the deepest parts of the earth, of how sometimes you could still hear him out here in Twelve if you closed your eyes and listened carefully.

One day, many months later, your parents took you aside and made you swear never to speak of Thirteen again. You didn't understand why - and you cried and screamed and spat fire like the dragon conjured up from your heart. So eager they were to stamp out who they used to be - as a child, as a teenager, you still couldn't comprehend it. Twelve eventually became the place you lived, who you were, what your papers and blood told you to be. But every day after school you would stand at the fences separating who you are from who you used to be and curl your fingers around the wires, yearning for a home that only existed in your memories. 

So when they call your name - the name you weren't born with, the name you were told to live with - to represent a place that never felt quite like home, you don't move. There had been a mistake. You're not from Twelve. Not really. You'd told everyone from the day you arrived.

And that, you realise on the long train ride to your end, is exactly why they picked you.