a story is just a well-decorated lie (circe/junie)

[florentine, d4b ❁]

Junie St. James. 

Junie haunts the hallways like a ghost. She walks on tiptoes, hides behind curtains. She hates the training center. It smells like chemicals and closed doors. They keep putting food in front of her, but the food is not the sort of food Junie likes, and she spits it out. So far, Junie hasn't spoken to anyone. 

You can tell from her face that she has been crying. That is, if you could catch sight of her face. It hides behind the long curtain of her hair, and she would rather you did not perceive her at all, so she emerges only reluctantly. 

Everybody here speaks to loudly, moves too sharply, and speaks a language Junie does not understand. The words make her wince. They say: mentor, sponsor, training score. They say: audience. They say: victor. Junie hates this word most of all. She does not think that it is right, any of it. She wants to go home, but when she thinks about home, she cries, so she tries to distract herself. 

That is why she is wandering through the hallways after midnight. She is skimming her fingertips along the wallpaper, tracing the patterns, their great sweeping swirls. She is fighting the rising surge of claustrophobia that tosses and turns in her gut, unsleeping. She wants to run away, but every time she has tried she has felt their hands on her shoulders, her arms, her legs, even, and she is returned to her rightful place, her abattoir. She does not think that it is fair, because they are big and she is small. Junie is too clever to try and explain this to them, because she knows that they won't care. 

When she closes her eyes, Father is there, saying goodbye, so she keeps them wide open. She is good at watching, good at seeing, good at listening. Not much good at any of the other things they have tried to introduce her to: swords and rope and making fires. But observant. She has managed to swipe several things from the pockets of her fellow tributes already. The items are boring. What she finds in the pockets of the Capitolites is much better. 

Junie is watching and listening, now, because she is afraid to be caught out of bed so late. It was just like sneaking to the kitchen for cookies after bedtime, evading Pa, only, instead of her warm kitchen it was a clinical, cold hotel, instead of cookies, it was a break from the ceaseless sound of her own sobs, and instead of Pa, the people who might catch her wanted her dead. In a round about way, at least. Because of this, when she hears footsteps, her whole body stiffens. 

She is pressed up against the wall in an instant, peering around the corner. She tells herself to be brave - to step out, boldly, and say, Who's there? so that the other tributes think she is plucky and tough, but to be honest, Junie is not feeling like the best version of herself today. 

[minie]

Circe had a difficult time coming to terms with what she had learned at the viewing party. Unable to shake Hafen’s face as the mutt’s devoured her in the sewer, she had wandered the halls of the training center as if they were the glass halls of the Murdock mansion. The long corridors similar to the ones she knew at home, a familiar sense of depersonalization. Plain and simple, in the Captiol where individuality was often praised, Circe felt as plain as it gets. Her name meant next to nothing, the terrifying reputation she had built for herself back in four had been left tucked tightly under a pillow.

On the very first night, Circe believed she had lost herself. Robbed by the revelation of family ancestry she would never claim as her own. The untamed wild eye girl from all those years ago only aided in the constant growing resentment she felt for her mother. A family legacy of destruction was the only thing Adriana could offer her daughter and Circe would refuse to take it. It was her fault that she was taken from the abuse safety of her father, passing the blame onto her for everything that could go wrong in her life.

Watching her grandfather show the girl a sliver of kindness dug deep holes in the philosophy Circe had built on the foundation of black and white thinking. Good an evil always had been as backwards as the girl’s upbringing. For the propaganda of her own family had made it evident, none of the children really had a mind of their own. It only was when Circe would close her eyes and sing a tune with its roots in the lives of many before her, would she be open to a world outside the prison walls of her father’s house.

Like the story of Hafen Dieu-Le-Veut. Not the actual girl, but an ideal Circe had created from the words of those who came before and who came before them. She was an idea of strength and cunning wit, outsmarting the monsters down bellow with an old wife’s tales.

Golden poppy flowers, a gift from the old gods.

Circe felt sick.

She felt betrayed.

Her feet started running, footsteps echoing harshly against the plain walls. Her breath steady, unknowingly pushing through the night as the other tributes slept. Her hands untying the two braids keeping her hair together in unison with the flowers. She hated them, they made her hate herself….her mother…her father…her grandfather and whoever Hafen was to her. A trail of flowers falling behind the girl creating a pathway of orange. What she once believed to hold the luck of ferocious young girl, contained the legacy of one who died a death more horrible than anything else imaginable.

Her hands caught the last of the petals, part of her holding on to the song. There would always be a small part of Circe that had found herself in her mother’s stories and songs. Her own sweet voice repeating the tales as she lost herself in a world of fantasy only to hate herself that much more when she returned to reality. There was shame and guilt in the world of her own, a secret she had only shared before with Lore.

Her secret.

Their secret.

Nothing as it seemed.

Every tale leaving Circe more uncertain oh who she was. There were tears streaming down her face, creating a river of woes blurring out the world as her body collided with one much smaller than her own. Her hand with the last of the poppies, carefully placing it in her pocket, not ready to give up on the story of Hafen Dieu-Le-Veut just yet. They eyes of the younger girl puffed a bloodshot, she must have been crying herself. Circe had no time to comfort someone else, when her own world was falling apart (again).

“You shouldn’t be out here” she snarled wiping her face dry. Selfishly believing the night would belong to her and her secrets.

[florentine, d4b ❁]

Junie St. James. 

If Junie were bigger, she might not be so scared. 

Or, maybe, if she came from a Career district, where they grew children tough and strong, then she could be brave. 

If she was somebody else. Anybody else, other than Junie St. James. 

The other tributes perpetuated these lies, when she saw them. She saw stiff upper lips and strong brows. She saw slashing knives and flying arrows in the training center. She saw a parade of glistening, shining costumes, sparkling facades pasted over the truth. They are better than me, Junie had told herself. They can do this. 

Of course, Junie is blinded by the sweet, cloying grip of childhood. When a person is twelve, they do not realise that youth stretches before them, a long and winding road. They certainly cannot grasp the truth: that even grown ups do not hold the answers, that everybody feels as lost and unformed as they do. Twelve year olds are still clinging to the lie that children are fed about growing up. When you are grown up, you will be brave, and you will know things, and the world will not be able to hurt you. Junie believes this wholeheartedly. 

What she does not realise, when she looks at her fellow tributes, is that they, too, are children. To be fifteen, to be eighteen, even, provides none of the certainty she thinks it does. To her, they look powerful, tower over her in their freshly-evolved bodies, cocky with surges of adolescent petulance and hormones. 

She has no idea that behind their closed doors, they are crying too. She does not realise that, in the shadows, they also yearn for their fathers and weep for their brothers and sisters, or lie in the awful, comfortable Capitol beds and miss their own squeaky single mattresses.

Because of this, when the force of nature that is Circe turns the corner and stumbles headfirst into her view, she is surprised. Because Circe Murdock, from the wealthy and distant District Four, fifteen years old (so, ancient and wise) is looking just as distressed as Junie feels. She, like Junie, is tear-stricken and tangle-haired, fleeing through the hallways after midnight. 

Just like Junie. Junie steps out of the shadows, impulsively, to meet the girl. She is curious, immediately drawn to her. What could make such a fearsome girl so afraid? Junie wants to know. 

Circe snarls at her. "You shouldn't be out here!" she says. 

Junie plants her feet, boldened by their shared weakness, the human quality of the girl's obvious grief.

"And neither should you!" Junie crosses her arms. "Who said you own the hallway, anyway?" 

She wipes the tears from her cheeks, on the off-chance Circe hasn't noticed them yet.