they are who they are [Lucina oneshot]

[kap]

Lucina Luelle
A V O X

The time that the Hunger Games begin is the busiest time at the restaurant for me every year. I cook and clean all year long for the couple who owns the restaurant. During the time frame of the Hunger Games themselves, however, they have me serve the patrons of the restaurant much more frequently than usual, as they're much more busy than any other time of the year. The large, flat screen television sets in the restaurant broadcast every minute of the Games that they are open for.

Today was the very first day of the Eighty-Sixth Annual Hunger Games, and people were excited. Perhaps they weren't as excited as they were for the Quell last year, but the bloodbath at the Cornucopia was about to begin, and people were gathered in the restaurant, ordering their food about an hour before it was all set to begin.

To me, the Hunger Games were a terrible thing. Even though I grew up in the Capitol myself, I never really liked to watch them. Many people just saw it as a sport like any other, and other people held it up on its own high pedestal above any other thing that you could possibly see broadcast on the television. I, personally held it lower than anything else. It was the most gruesome, terrible, heartless thing you could ever watch, and it was overly glorified by the people of the Capitol.

The Hunger Games, after all, involved twenty-four children killing each other ruthlessly every year to see who would come out alive, and that was only allowed to be one of them. One tribute could live. The rest would all die. Every single one of the children had people bet on their lives. Some Capitol citizens would sponsor them things to try to make them live longer, but all in all, it was a completely cruel and maddening thing.

As the screen on the television switched from the pre-games program that had been playing with announcers explaining what was about to happen, a wintry landscape was them shown on the screen. An ice-sculpture cornucopia was in the center of it all, and the tributes were raised up on their platforms. There was incessant chatter within the restaurant as the countdown to the start of the Eighty-Sixth Annual Hunger Games began.

I was serving food to people who didn't bother to thank me as I brought it to their tables. It wasn't even really the fact that they were completely focused on the start of the Hunger Games. No, it wasn't just that, anyway. They didn't care about me. I was just a lowly avox. I didn't matter, despite the fact that I used to be a Capitol citizen myself.

As the countdown ended and the gong sounded, tributes ran in all different directions. People in the restaurant stood up from their tables and cheered at an unnecessarily high volume. I just didn't understand why these people enjoyed what they were seeing so much. I tried to train my eyes away from the television set screens. I didn't want to see the bloodshed, murder and gore. It wasn't appealing to me. In fact, it was rather gut-wrenching. It was repulsive, really.

I wondered how people could enjoy such a thing so much. They must have been completely and utterly sick-minded individuals. There's really no other explanation, other than perhaps some sort of brainwashing that I missed out on when I lived in the Capitol. Was it propaganda that convinced them that the Hunger Games were this amazing, brilliant idea? It must have been something like that, as it'd been going on for eighty-six years now. Eighty-six years of death and eighty-six years of the Capitol's people cheering it on.

They were all sick in my mind. The thing was, if there weren't so many people that enjoyed watching the Hunger Games in the Capitol, it's possible that they wouldn't exist anymore, or perhaps that they would exist, but that that the children of the Capitol would be involved in them too, rather than just the Districts' children.

I suppose no one will ever know what life would have been like without the Capitol loving the Hunger Games so much.

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696 words