Prompt 242--Chiaroscuro--Freedom--agent_south--Red vs Blue/The Hunger Games

[agent-south.livejournal.com]

Author: agent_south
Title: Freedom
Rating: PG
Fandom: Red vs Blue/The Hunger Games Crossover
Disclaimer: I don't own RvB or The Hunger Games.
Summary: On the outside, I am light. Underneath, I have been taught to be deadly. Until he showed me another way.
Prompt: 242, Chiaroscuro
Word count: 583

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A/N: Much thanks to agent_florida  for betaing this.

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I was trained to be a killer since I was ten years old.

Maybe kids in other Districts get to have normal childhoods, I don’t know. But when I get home from school every afternoon I have at least three hours of practice. Weapons, mostly.

I want to say that I am terrible at it. Hopeless, and my father gives up on me and lets me rot.

But I’m not.

I’m good at using his trident; better than some of the boys at my school. Boys who have been learning how to use it since they were toddlers, and look up at me with their jaws slack when I out-do them. Me, maybe a little tall for my age but still supposedly delicate. Innocent. Pure. The brunette angel with the golden eyes who could decapitate you in a split second.

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I want to say that I hate it. That I don’t want to learn how to kill an opponent in at least twenty-five different ways; that I don’t want to sit back and kill other children for entertainment.

But I don’t.

Because it’s what’s expected of me. Massachusetts, future tribute from District 4. Scratch that—future victor. Because if I keep going down the path I am on now, that’s where I will end up. Whether or not I want it is a question I stopped asking a long, long time ago.

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I want to say that I can stand strong alone.

But I can’t.

My parents don’t bother to say goodbye. When I am in the Justice Building, I see my fellow tribute surrounded by his family, his friends. I sit on a plush velvet couch and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

Until the hour passes, the escort comes to collect to us, and I am on my way to the Capitol with nothing but doubt and loneliness.

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I want to say that I will make them proud.

But I won’t.

My resolve breaks the second I see him. I had tuned out most of my fellow tributes. I can’t look them in the eye, begin to know them. That will only make everything more agonizing than it has to be. Get in, and get out. I can’t ask for anything more.

I see most of the others doing the same, avoiding each other except to make those tentative alliances that will shatter later in the Games. He, however, showers attention upon his partner, a wisp of a girl in a gold dress that looks like wheat sheaves. I can hear her laughter from across the room; see the radiant smile on her face, and I know that he isn’t putting up a false front. He’s genuinely kind.

It scares me, but it attracts me more. And so, for the first time in four years, I break my pattern. I push aside the shell of who I’m supposed to be—the light wrapped in darkness, the deception of the angelic killer—and I reach out, hoping to grasp what’s real.

“Hey,” I say quietly.

His wide green eyes light up, and even though it’s not much, I feel a warm glow in my chest. The start of something new, the sensation of his chapped, callused hand in mine. A promise that maybe things don’t have to be the way I was taught. That, finally, in the confines of the arena, I will have the one thing I have never allowed myself to long for.

Freedom.