flop from the top / open!

[andromache s. ⚔️ [d1b] sucy]

andromache stewart

In the Stewart household, books served no purpose unless they were instructional. From as early on as I can remember, my mother only ever read to me from picture books that doubled as first aid manuals and diagrams of essential arteries. Enrichment and training were one in the same for me. They were supposed to be, anyway. 

The main floor of the training centre is driving me nuts. So much clattering -- from the clash of steel on steel to the clanging of lower district's clumsy untrained hands dropping their weapons every two seconds -- I couldn't think in there. That's the issue. The noise. The noise is the issue. The noise and the chaos and the fact that nothing I do seems to be working for me. My hands and eyes may as well be on different sides of Panem with how impossible it seems to coordinate them these days.

I just have to trust that this is a blip. A minor issue. I'm somewhere unfamiliar for the first time in my life. Everybody's nervous, even Eulalie I bet, underneath all the beauty and grandeur. Those things, too, I find crowding my mind. The elevation of aesthetics here isn't dissimilar to how we treat our own celebrities and heroes in One, and when I first arrived, I even found it comforting. I understood instantly what we in One simultaneously were emulating and constructing via the entertainment industry's output. But now, days in, I'm finding it overwhelming on the eyes, on the little stomped out remains of my heart. 

I miss my home. I miss my bed. I miss my wallpaper and my sword and all of it, even if all of the equivalents I've been given here outrank them in some form of quality. That doesn't matter. They aren't mine. The only things that are are the tiny disc resting between my collarbones and the chain it's attached to. So small, the same as I am.

Screw it. I'm going to read a book for fun, and it's going to be relaxing. 

I stomp my way up one of the library ladders to get something from the top shelf, where I can only assume the most scandalous of what made it through their filtration systems are stored and slide out the first book I find with an interesting title. 

Except it slides off the shelf... and straight out of my hands. 

Of course it does. 

ELEGANT

[d6a georgie cham 🍓🐢 frankel]

                                                                                      

G E O R G I E
C H A M

                                                                                      

These stories all seem so predictable. Georgie has a few paperback picture books pilled up on the desk she is sat at – thanks to Umber for showing her that there are desks in here! The District Six crew aren’t going to be happy as now she can get comfortable here, unlike to Training Center. She’s getting bored of the fiction, there’s not enough time to read a whole trilogy or series but there is time to read a manual. A guide to…whatever. She’ll find it and she will burn time in this library reading it.

Georgie looks at the messy desk she is about to leave behind, someone else will tidy it up. There’s libraries back home, in the universities and in the school she used to attend. A bookshelf even fills half a wall in the mayor’s office. Most of the books are inherited from the previous mayor but Georgie and her dad have added their own. She used to consider the librarian at her school as one of her best friends. She has yet to find any librarian amongst all these shelves – maybe it is a robot that comes out when everyone is asleep. It hoovers up all the misplaced books and puts out new titles. It is not something out of science fiction, even the hospitals have robots back home now.

It is easy to just stroll along the shelves, letting her allocated time in the training center dwindle. Sometimes she can hear her mentors shouting her furiously to get her ass on a training mat or maybe it is just her imagination.

Anyway, she’ll get hurt in the training center, there is no way she will get hurt in the library…

”OUGH!” Something blunt and heavy smacks her right on the top of her head. Georgie immediately rubs the top of her hair with her hand and looks down at what hit her. A book – a deadly book! Then she looks up at where it came from and there’s a girl with striking red hair on one of the ladders.

”You’re not supposed to try and kill me right now!” Georgie bends down to pick up the book, her head is throbbing and there is a little dizziness obscuring her orientation. ”Here, try and catch it!” Georgie lobs the book in the air, if she must practice target throwing, she will do it in here!

Dars.

[andromache s. ⚔️ [d1b] sucy]

andromache stewart

Uh oh. My face scrunches up, a shiver of cringe shooting up my spine as below me somebody yelps. Of course. Of fucking double course. I iron out my face, draw on a smile for whoever it is I've dropped it on. I look down, slowly and intentionally turning my head to reveal... Georgie Cham. The mayor's kid from Six. One of the two little girls from the district this year. The less cute one, if you ask me. I've hardly seen her since we were all let loose in the training centre a couple of days back. I guess this is where she's been hiding all this time. I squint my eyes to get a better look at our resident bookworm.

Hasn't there been riots and things in Six this last year or so? Disgruntled hospital workers, afraid of progress or something. I can't help but wonder if she's been roped into all of this to punish her father for failing to keep the peace. There's always been rumours of rigged Reapings. This is the first time I actually believe it. Poor kid -- nobody even bothered to volunteer for her. 

"Oops," I say. I shrug my shoulders, still hanging onto the ladder. A smirk pulls at the corners of my mouth; I have to bite back a laugh. "Sorry, kid. Not right now, my bad." 

Good thing I'm still hanging on. Georgie Cham fights back and flings the book back at me, and to my surprise, she actually manages to catch some good height. I catch it with one of my hands, gripping it by the spine, keeping hold of my perch with the other.

"That wasn't actually a bad throw," I concede. Poor kid. What's the harm in throwing her a bone? I hop down the ladder. From close up, her head looks fine. The hair on top of her head is a little mussed, but otherwise she's okay... for now. "You tried that arm on any throwing knives yet? Or have you just been holed up in here?"

ELEGANT

[d6a georgie cham 🍓🐢 frankel]

                                                                                      

G E O R G I E
C H A M

                                                                                      

”Great you caught it, now put it back and not on my head!” A disgruntled look hangs on Georgie’s face as she rubs her head one last time. The pain is only temporary, nothing to throw a fuss about. She’s good at sucking up the hurt. Something about being brought up by a man, one who particularly dislikes crying babies. She’s good at tantrums but they come from not getting her own way. Not from a graze on her knee or a bump on her head. Every little injury has its treatments and tantrums are her treatment for being spoiled!

Her arms cross over her head as she steps back from the ladder, letting the other girl climb down. It is one of those from the fancy career Districts, Andromache is not the first one Georgie has met. The first encounter with another went better than this.

"That wasn't actually a bad throw,”

And she’s hit with the same old careersplaining but she’ll take it onboard. Georgie has learnt more from other tributes than she has the trainers. Maybe this is some real good strategy. Act like the helpless naïve little girl and they’re all cuddle her with knowledge and advice. It may well play in her favour when the time comes.

”Yeah I have been in and out of the training room.” Georgie says as she unfolds her arms, opting to rest them on her hips as she tries to make herself look serious. ”No I have not thrown anything yet. Just swung a few heavy glaives and fired some bows.” The latter she has done, not to some great success but she’s done it. The first thing, yeah that’s a lie.

”Are you really clumsy or do you hate that book?”

Dars.

[andromache s. ⚔️ [d1b] sucy]

a n d r o m a c h e    s t e w a r t 

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I don't put the book back, of course. I roll my eyes at her and take it down the ladder with me. Translation: I already told you it was my bad. Calm down. 

"Oh? You've swung a glaive, have you?" I raise an eyebrow, then turn my attention from Georgie Cham's face to the book in my hand. I turn it back and forth to examine it as I speak. I'm not sure I believe her on the glaive -- I've been camped out in the training centre this whole time, and I think that little Georgie Cham swinging a glaive around, probably taking herself with it, is something I would have noticed. "I'd like to see that. It makes sense you're focused on the offense though. I figure you kids from Six are going to skip all the first aid training, right?" I glance back up at her, tuck my book under my arm. This will do for this evening's entertainment, once I'm finished with the absolute bundle of fun in front of me. 

"Let's go with clumsy," I say, because I have been, ever since my foot nearly fell through the gap between my train carriage and the platform on arrival in the Capitol. "The book's just random. I'm not much of a reader. I'm more of a... hands on learner, I suppose. Hands on the hilt of my sword, that is." I flip my hair back over my shoulder and laugh. The joke is bad, really bad. I'd never tell it in front of Eulalie or Florentine. "Book learning didn't count for much where I went to school. Besides, I don't have to hate something to fling it around. I don't hate you, after all." 

She's standing there, doing her best to exemplify dictionary defined confidence with her hands on her hips, and I can't help smiling despite myself. A spark of recognition in her performance. I can only hope my charade is more convincing.

"How about your dad, huh? Did he give you any politician pointers for winning sponsorships?" Not that I think she'd need the help, to be honest. She's a charming enough girl, and at least confident enough to hold her own with the worst of us in conversation. Capitolites will probably eat up the idea of a loyal mayor's little doomed daughter too. She's going to have grey parcels flying out of her ears by the end of the first day.

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