What's The Point in Life? (Hunger Games FanFic)

[jess]

The sun beams through the small gap between the curtains, and I wake up in a small room. My bed is hard at the bottom, on the mattress. My little sister Amy is curled up next to me, even though it’s only a single bed. I remember, last night, that I sang her to sleep and ran my fingers through her gorgeous blonde hair. She is only twelve and today is the day of the reaping. Her very first reaping. I had refused to let her take the tesserae we needed to survive; instead, I took hers, willing to protect her life with my own.
The fence in the Meadow is welcoming me into it as I dress myself, and I run towards the fence. I listen for the buzz that means the electricity is on; it never comes. It’s rare in District Ten for us to get electricity, when we’re quite poor. I’m a hunter by heart, and I don’t let the warnings from the Peacekeepers get in the way of me hunting to feed my family.
“Hey there, Blondie,” my best friend Erick says as he meets me by the old oak tree in the woods. I never actually told him my real name. I may have mentioned it once or twice, but Blondie became his official nickname for me. “Out hunting on reaping day?”
I nod. Sometimes Erick is a little crazy but he’s good company and a fellow hunting partner. “If I end up going to the Capitol I want my last few moments spent in the district in the woods.” I ponder for a moment. “If I was reaped, I would rather kill myself. The only person who would take my life would be myself.”
Erick nods. “Wise thinking,” he replies, and he gets out his knife. He aims it at something that’s moving. As soon as he throws, I throw too. I have two knives and they cross each other. One skewers its chest, the other skewers its heart.
Erick cleans up the kill and we tuck it in our game bag as we move on. I gather berries by the spring whilst Erick hunts any game around it. Animals need to drink, and the spring is possibly the only source of water for miles.
“I caught another one. We have five now. One more then we can split it evenly,” Erick says, and I nod, picking another blueberry from the bush. “No!” Erick cries. “That’s not a blueberry. It’s nightlock, it can kill you in a minute.”
I hastily pop all the nightlock berries under the bush and I stand up, brushing the dirt off my tracksuit trousers. Erick smiles at me in relief. “Thanks,” I tell him, and he nods in return, and I begin to collect water from the spring. “We can purify this when we get home, my mum has plenty of spare iodine she could lend us.”
“Mm, she’s always been handing out iodine tablets to the poor people in our district,” Erick says thoughtfully, and begins to gather water with me. I stare at him. He realizes he’s supposed to be hunting, so he walks off and throws a knife at a rabbit. It’s a perfect shot in the eye. “We can go now. It’s almost time,” Erick says and we walk off back home.