mohamed al-amin || district five || 4th retro games || fin

In the beginning, there were seven of you. Mama and Papa and Khaled and Amira and Fatima and you and Ahmed, in that order. A proud family, living in the fifth district of Panem, with successful careers to the family names and a life of comfort by local standards. Your earliest memories were happy ones, of bustling bodies and warm smiles and pinched cheeks, of soothing voices and ruffled hair and bone-crushing hugs.

But these were only your earliest memories. The next set belongs to stuff you'd rather forget but find are seared in your memory regardless, of bursts of orange and red and loud noises and frantic whispers, of forced grins and bloodshot eyes and embraces that tremble with each passing second.

You didn't understand. Not then. The Dark Days began when you were still a child, when your days should have been filled with laughter and sunshine instead of screams and smoke. But lessons as tough as that one had a way of sinking through the skin even without receiving comprehension's consent. Even if you didn't understand specifics, even if you were never told the true reasoning as to what was going on, the puzzle still existed, still was able to be created. Enough pieces were salvageable amongst the rubble, and the rest you created yourself.

When Mama disappeared when you were six, you were never told that she had met her end sacrificing himself for her comrades-in-arms on a battlefront on the outskirts of the livestock fields. When Papa followed her a year later, you were never told that he'd been incinerated by a bomb while treating wounded soldiers in a hospital. When Amira vanished into thin air only to be followed by Khaled a scant month later, you were never told that the former had lost her life to the hands of a turncoat, and that the latter been pumped with a dozen rounds of lead in a futile attempt at revenge.

But when Fatima hid with you and Ahmed in the ruins of what had once been your home scant months before the war's end, she had told you everything with a sad smile on her face. You were about to turn twelve years old, and as the next in line to protect the family name, as the second oldest of the al-Amin name, you deserved to know the truth.

You learned the truth, and so much more. How your family had been working to overthrow the Capitol since the time of your grandparents behind the scenes. How they had numbered amongst the most important of the District Five rebels at the outbreak of war - your mother a general, your father a chief medic - and how when they had fallen, your older siblings had stepped up to take their place. How they had all met their end to Capitolite sympathizers.

How the Capitol had ensured that you'd never again feel the pinch of Mama's fingers on your cheeks, never again hear Papa's deep belly laughs, never again wrestle with Khaled and never again groan at the awful jokes that Amira made.

And when Fatima met her end to invading Capitolite forces months later, her kind smiles dying in a spray of blood, you realized that there was no one left to take care of and nurture you. No one left to protect you and your younger brother from the forces of evil.

That would have to fall upon you. At twelve years old, you felt like you'd already suffered enough for ten lifetimes - an orphan left behind in the aftermath of civil war, a kid who had to step up to ensure that he and his younger brother wouldn't starve in the aftermath.

It was daunting. Terrifying. But the legacy of your family had passed down from the shoulders of your parents, your siblings, onto you. Their blood ran through your veins, and their legacy lay on you now.

And at least you had Ahmed. At least you could keep him from being truly alone in a world that hated him.

And you had your family's contingency plan. A list of names that were trustworthy, that would keep you safe in the event of a catastrophe. Fatima had taken you to some, never lingering for very long - she had been eighteen in her own right at the time of her death, an adult in all but name, and knew much more than you in terms of caring for younger siblings - but you and Ahmed found shelter in others - an old woman who played the fool to avoid scrutiny but was the smartest person you had met aside from your family, a gruff bearded man with a potbelly who kept you in the back of his bar and gifted you two sweets, a severe woman and her doting wife who treated you two like her own children whenever you stopped by, and more.

Effectively, you were ghosts. Never staying in one place too long, never allowing the Capitol pursuers, whomever they might be, catch and find you and finish the job of exterminating your family down to the last man. And for three years, three Hunger Games, it worked to perfection.

But just because you were invisible to the public eye did not mean that you were exempt from personal records. There was no way around that - they couldn't know where you existed but the mere fact that you did was more than enough - and as the dawn of the fourth Games approached, you had a hunch. A gut feeling. Something that you had learned to trust ever since Fatima had sacrificed herself to save you two.

So the night before the Reaping, you sat your brother, twelve years old in his own right, down. And you passed along the story to him. The story of your family, of Mama and Papa and Khaled and Amira and Fatima, who had all bravely given their lives resisting the tyrannical might of the Capitol. Of the family legacy, of the good alongside the bad.

It was almost a goodbye. And even at Twelve, Ahmed could tell. You fell asleep that night with him in your clutches and tears staining your cheeks and wetting your shirt sleeves alike.

When your name was called the very next morning, it wasn't so much a surprise as a confirmation of your own gut feeling. You'd seen three years of kids brought up, seen one year of a kid coming back, and you knew that tears were expected and fear would run rampant.

But instead of submitting, instead of crumbling beneath the pressure, you simply set your jaw into stone and stepped up to the stage to meet your destiny.

At fifteen, you would be the youngest martyr for the al-Amin family yet.

But at fifteen, you would not allow your courage to crack, the tendrils of fear to strangle you. You would endure. You would fight to survive.

And you would die the same way your family had - protecting your blood in the name of freedom for your home.