remy lawson | eight ; fin

Remy Lawson was born with an innate need to be what her mother called 'difficult.' Her older sister played the part well, wearing dresses they couldn't afford to parties full of people who would not have cared for them if they all knew the truth of the Lawson estate. Or, rather, lack thereof.

Cassie was a natural at it; she did her best to teach Remy:

'Stop fidgeting. Smile. Chin up, Remy!
You've got the posture of a limp-necked goose!

Ah, the Lancasters have arrived;
Go and greet them, silly.'

She hadn't been successful thus far. Remy thought she was plenty proper. It was other people who had the problem, and she figured it had little to do with how impressive her posture was or was not, and more to do with the fact that Remy enjoyed asking questions others would've avoided. She always had. She'd given her mother plenty of motherhood war stories over the years, but perhaps her favorite to tell was of the time when Remy was barely half-sized and she'd interrupted her mother to ask the man she was speaking to- a man who happened to be fabulously wealthy and famous among Eight's elite- why his teeth were so yellow.

Remy enjoyed asking questions so much, her family regularly entertained the idea of her making a career of it some day: 'A journalist, no doubt. The finest in all of Panem.' She thought it was a joke that she was grateful to be included in at first, and so she'd taken a pen and paper from her mother's desk and fashioned interview questions to ask all the members of her family. Somehow, over time, that morphed into a real love of the written word. She wrote plays and she and her sisters would practice for months, building props and going over rehearsals, and they would perform for the neighborhood once per season, so close to clockwork that people came to expect it.

Her father wasn't home much, though she couldn't truly blame him for his absence. He'd been one of Eight's finest healers, but once the Panem Work Permits became available, he'd been given permission to study in Six, get himself some proper training. Once that was finished, he became a medic for the peacekeepers. Not his choice, he said. He swore. Of course, Remy believed him because she knew with every ounce of her soul that he would never, he wouldn't dare, even if it were an opportunity to restore the wealth that had been taken from them, work with the very oppressors who'd put them in this very predicament.

But it meant a lot of time in the Capitol, healing their soldiers. Sending them back to the front lines to beat the districts down a little further. A lot of time away.

She tried not to be bitter about it, but she also did little to hide what bitterness remained when he came around:

"You'd sooner heal a wounded snake than keep your distance!"

"I certainly would, young lady! Snakes, beneath the scale, are flesh and blood, same as you or I," he snarked. She scoffed.

"And teeth. You forget the big, evil, venomous teeth!"

She knew, deep down, he was doing whatever he could to keep them afloat. Raising four girls wasn't an easy thing to do, even without the Capitol dipping its greedy little paws into your funds until you're left with scraps and the burden of figuring out another way. They'd all made sacrifices. Cassie had to sell her old dresses, Ginny cleaned houses on weekends, Remy tutored every day after school. Even little Katie offered piano lessons to the neighborhood children. Whatever they could do to put food on the table without anyone realizing they had almost gone hungry.

There was also the other thing that no one, not even Remy, liked to talk about. It wasn't that she thought pretending it wasn't there would somehow make it cease to exist; she was fully aware of it. She thought of it each morning when she woke up. It was what worried her enough at night to keep her from sleeping. When Katie was little, maybe five or so, she'd gotten sick. The circumstances were such that their father was away to study. Wasn't that ironic? The healer isn't around when his own daughter needs healing.

They all expected her to die, except Remy. Call it proof of her innate need to be difficult, but she refused to accept that fate for her youngest sister. And maybe it was just luck. Maybe it had always been destined that Katie would eventually get better. But neither she nor Remy believed that; they both spoke about Katie's sickness like it was its own entity, like Remy had somehow located its precise location and pulled it away.

Of course, Katie got better, but she was never healed. She had bouts of it, good days and bad. Many trips to healing shelters, many sleepless nights, many unlucky twists in the story as it unfolded around them. The thing that worried the Lawson family least in regards to Katie was the money, but it was still something worth worrying about in a harshly realistic and detached sort of way.

Katie was old enough now to know she needed help she wouldn't ever find in District Eight; Remy somehow got it into her head that, so long as she kept them afloat long enough for Katie to travel, she'd bring her to Six where she could get better. Or, if things were looking bad too soon for that, she'd break them into the Capitol itself. Whatever it took. But between the meds their father sent them and the favors from their Lancaster neighbors, things were looking mostly better for the Lawson family. At least for the foreseeable future.