Chapter Text
Imagine starving while you're holding diamonds.
Beautiful, tiny rocks, cut into every shape, shining like fallen stars. This handful is worth more than your house. These rocks… could feed your whole family for a year or more. Just because they sparkle a little more than the others… Technically, they’re not rocks, they're gems… but that distinction doesn't make it any better.
Imagine… sapphires, slipping through your fingertips as the hunger pangs set in.
Hungry and delirious, you watch as blue stones drip out of your hands like you're holding a fistful of water. You imagine it's water from a faraway land, a place where food is abundant, and you don’t need to ration out whatever scraps you have.
Imagine the empty feeling in your stomach as you walk through the vineyards.
All of these grapes are perfect little purple spheres. Sweet, succulent, and most importantly, food. Nourishment is at your fingertips, but you just can’t reach for it. You debate whether to relieve the hunger and risk the Peacekeepers' wrath or walk away and lie awake from the pain of your empty belly. And as they cart the grapes away to make their poison with a pretty label, you wonder if you made the right choice.
Think of the things grown in the Fields of Glass. All of the fruits and vegetables that you can barely pronounce, and you're only able to wonder what the taste would be like. Plants stolen from lands you’re told no longer exist, but now it’s your responsibility to grow them for the capital's consumption. Food… half of which they let rot and toss aside regardless. Think of that and tell me you don’t hate them, but you’ll hate yourself more for not grabbing one of those gorgeous oranges or dark red pomegranates while you had the chance.
Imagine the walkways of the Capitol…
No, really, imagine staring into your reflection of the obsidian shards and gems the Capital loves to use in their decorative walkways. Thin, finely cut chips of these precious rocks that aren't meant to be admired, not meant to be fawned over, but meant to be tossed in a garden that is never used, shining amongst dirt, only there to be stepped on. You look in these shards of beauty that are so easily thrown into frivolous things, and you see your sunken cheeks and dark under eyes staring back at you, like looking in the face of a stranger.
You see all this wealth, all this beauty around you, and watch as someone tosses it aside after one use.
“Alexandrite is very in right now, it's nothing like that trashy emerald thing I got last time.” That snotty Capitol accent rings through your ears like nails on a chalkboard, and you have to fight the urge to strangle this disfigured creature in front of you, who only knows how to take and take and take, because that is the Capitol way.
… imagine starving while you're holding diamonds, and tell me, does it make you any less ravenous, or does it just make you mad?
I want you to think about this, remember it. And the next time you hear that District 1 was one of the first to side with the rebels, don’t shake your head in confusion. Don’t silently think;
“Those Capitol wannabes?”
“Those stupid district rats were so willing to bite the hand that feeds them?”
“The richest district fought against the people who kept them fed?”
Because yes. Yes, we did.
Yes.
Over and over again, yes.
We bit the hand of the Capitol as hard as we could.
For 75 years, the districts all suffered torment and abuse, but District 1? We saw all their money, we were used as test subjects for beauty products, slowly being poisoned, suffocating in collapsed mine shafts, all for the chance to have just barely enough to survive. You better believe that the second we heard that Mockingjay sing, we were ready. Ready for this all to end. Just because I got involved only after the 60th game doesn’t mean the history before doesn't exist.
We were their favourites, us and 2… 2 more than us, I guess, and no one beats the District 4 beauties, but we made their jewels, kept them pretty. Hard not to love the people who made you look as expensive as you were born to be. And 2? It'd just be plain stupid to have the district that makes your weapons hate you. But they took everything from us, not just our jewels.
Our land, our food, our lives.
While we may not be like the miners of District 12 or be stacked on top of each other like District 8 just waiting for an excuse to strike, we were far from free. Poverty comes in many forms, and 'the richest of all the districts' doesn't go far if all the districts are poor. While we make the capital’s luxuries, we never get to have them ourselves.
We are a district where wealth slips through our hands for work, and then we walk home on broken pavement. We go back to our old, creaky houses with paint peeling exteriors, back to appliances that break if you breathe on them wrong.You eat whatever scraps of food the Capital doesn’t want, and your fingers begin to ache. You wonder if this is the year that arthritis sets in. Is this your time? Our jobs consist of working with our hands and clever fingers. If you lose them- if it aches every time you go to pick up a fork… then you might as well see if you still garner any attention with the Peacekeepers. Use what’s left of your exhausted body for something profitable.
Look at us, watch our lives, see in the horizon the lights of the Capital that never seem to fade, and maybe don’t judge what we do to survive, and don’t question how we handle our rowdy neighbours.
District 1. The District of luxury. A volunteering District. The District where we humiliate ourselves for the Capital’s amusement. The District where we make all the Capital’s pretty little necessities. The District where no one really worries about being reaped because someone else always volunteers.
Until President Snow demands that no one does.
Tell me, little girl- hungry little district girl, who has one too many siblings to feed and uses tesserae like she has an unlimited amount of them; whose brother watched the Capital's greed, whose anger finally got the better of him, what will you do then? When Snow thinks your brother has gotten too big for his britches, when he sees that District 1 has grown a confidence that they shouldn’t have, when the routine you’d become so used to is thrown out the window, and every safety net fails to catch you as you fall into a grave dug by those who were supposed to protect you. What happens then?
What happens when your president uses your death as a lesson for others, a warning, a punishment? What happens when the girl who grew up holding you sends you to the gallows? What then, little girl, what then? When you find yourself alone for the first time in your life, what then?
Oh, well, go on then, like a lamb to slaughter, go on. Go and give them an entertaining show; everyone knows you're good for nothing else at this point. Be reasonable, like the rest of your district. Reasonable and practical, that’s how you’ve survived so far. Don’t just kick up a fuss now that the end is near. Just accept it, take this punishment like the lesson you're meant to be. No need to be a martyr, you've already done enough.
Reasonable, practical, compliant, like the good little District 1 girl you are.
Still fighting, I see? Still full of piss and vinegar? The Game Makers will have their way with you soon enough. I hope your death is swift and painless. May the river take you and your spark all the way to that blissful meadow of wildflowers and blue skies. May the rest of your days be easy and fulfilling. May the world never ask anything of you again, not even breath. And may the odds be ever in your favour.
Let the Capitol kill me, I've got the rest of eternity to live on in the meadows of the afterlife. Let's go out swinging.