Gale Turing | D3 | Fin

The world functions with gears, blood, and oil. Machines live at the center of our world, built by the hands of the brilliant to demand for control and power. Humanity built machines to feed us, to fix us, to run us, and to break us. Technology is at the center of Panem. We are the center of Panem. That has been my belief since the day I built gears and magnetic forces with my own hands. Singed the hair on my arms with miscalculations and hard work, taught my children how to build the machines that keeps the capitol running and leaves our names from their disgusting mouths.

I can remember the days when the streets were a mix of adults who had fought in a war bitching about how far Panem has fallen. Days spent watching kids fight on a screen while bitter men and women call it mercy. Mercy didn't exist in our world, we've been surrounded by the corrupt, the power hungry, and the weak. Broken boys and girls on the streets of Panem doing what they must to survive. Panem when I was a little girl was finishing up the rebuilding of a war long passed, but I can remember the days where my own father and mother held me with tears in their eyes. Keepers on the streets from the capitol looking down upon us and I knew what it was like to be seen as nothing more than a girl who could die in their mercy.

I was not going to die by their mercy.

And I didn't. I broke through the lines of naïve teenagerhood and watched the blood of Three run in the ashes of violence. The gears not quite connecting up right in a way that made sense, but surviving mercy had been the best feeling in all of Panem. Tears of relief on the day where a halfway decent cake made by her father's hands had nineteen single candles along the frosting where mercy bleeds from the sugar coated words. The first time I felt strong was on that day, above the world with a creative intelligence beyond the Capitol's own dreams. Gears settling into place with a clanking of metallic words as the world gives way to a new journey of my own.

Panem doesn't hand out freedom or easy methods to the top without struggle. Creative intelligence can only get a girl so far in the eyes of Panem. In a male centric field, I had to push through the crap of toxic male masculinity that bleeds through the market. Struggling to stay afloat in a field where women are sabotaged on the daily, but I managed it. I managed to push through for a long time as a young adult, finding the love of my life and building up a steady job in a place where I wasn't supposed to have one.

Three was my priority back then. My hands built machines for home, wanting to create a utopia with my own hands, create for the idea of peace and progress, but I can still remember the anger beneath the surface. The looks of the people in Three who stare with hunger panged faces and broken hearts as my hands continue to grow calloused under my own mind. Happiness in my veins back then where the love of my life and I continued to build and grow for a purpose bigger than ourselves, but youth fades over the years.

Dreams of something more burn with the failure of sparks flying along the screech of metal. Singed hairs and frustrated slams of annoyance at the failure of experiments that don't quite work well. It's then that my husband and I decided to start our family, build the one thing that I would always be proud of no matter how my times I fail at placing gears or checking magnetic fields or measuring bolts and scrap metal right. The gift of life gave me more than I bargained for.

The day my first child was born, I can still remember the moment as if it were as clear as any other day. Life was a beautiful thing, even if it were so flawed in every way. I understood then what type of mother I was going to be with my baby curled up in the palms of my hands. Soothing a baby who wasn't even fussing and then it comes crashing down within a week. The fear beneath my heart when the capitol's so called mercy plays upon another big screen across the center of the district. It's a feeling that I still have never gotten over.

Blood and machines and humanity destroying life with the capitol's so called mercy. All of it made her blood boil, but I knew there would always be some necessary evils in the world. I grew up surrounded by them. Tearing them down did nothing more than sprout five more heads like a hydra. Cut one down and there's still eight more waiting. I had spent a few years trying to find a way to break my children from the curse of the games, but nothing had worked in my mind.

I was a genius by word of mouth, but the games were the one thing I never figured out how to bust into and break. An inevitable evil that resides across Panem, but all of her work leads to only one place. A place where a younger version of a dead man with white roses and a determination for ruling over everything resided. The only way to solve my anxiety as my children grow was to no longer fight against the system, but to become the biggest gear in all of the system.

Sold upon a deal behind closed doors and broken tears, I had given away the only thing I had left for myself. The creative ingenuity that resides between my eyes in order to keep my kids safe from all of this. Years spent building machines and inventions in the name of mercy in order to keep my children and their children safe from it all. A deal with the man who wore white and was a devil. A capitalistic bastard who knew where to strike when the need arrived, but I still took to my workshop to build for my family. Years spent being harder and harder around them.

I grew older and more strict with every day. Burned through the kindness I once carried along my heart until the desire to survive was the only thing left behind. Soon enough my children had children and I became a grandma. The head of the Turing Family Business and all of the inventions sent to the capitol under our name. Strict upon my grandchildren and children in order to keep the inventions coming into the capitol, but everything changed upon the day where three shut down.

Communications and curfews thrown into effect.

Silence so deafening that I didn't know what to think of it.

Experienced enough life for multiple other people, watched too many mercy games where my own creations helped kill the kids inside the arena, and then Snow dies in the one way I never could have expected. Silent. Pathetic. Alone. And after that day, I knew that we would never be safe again.

Panem is made from blood, gears, and oil.

I'm made from blood, gears, and oil.

Even with Snow's death, nothing gets in my way.

If it takes a thousand years, I'll make sure the Capitol never gets their greedy hands upon a single one of the Turing Family's heads.

That's a fucking promise.