The Desert's Edge ➣ Gloss/OC

Then shall I paint a picture of my love,

Chapter Thirty Three | Then shall I paint a picture of my love,

"Farewell. Thou canst not teach me to forget."

1.1, 236 Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

It's raining outside – pattering droplets that glisten in the late afternoon sun. They hit the windows in small torrents and makes the atmosphere of the room seem turbulent and profound; two things that always seem to exist in some capacity in Elara's life.

Amelia is off somewhere, doing God knows what. She attracts trouble as if she's a magnet, and at this point, Elara has resigned herself to the fact that her younger sister is probably not going to change. She's still young and wild. Though she's not as innocent in the same way she'd been before, back when Elara was not plagued with nightmares and their parents were still alive, Amelia still had a youthful sort of passion that Elara is sometimes a little jealous of. Her time for such lighthearted sentiments has long since passed, and there is no way of getting them back now.

She sits in the window seat of the living room and stares out at the grey sky, recalling the bright and vibrant days when she used to spend hours away from home, playing with old friends down by the lake that surrounds District 5. In the summer months, the water would be warm enough to swim in, and she would fearlessly jump off the shabby little dock that's been slowly decaying for decades now, long before she remembers.

She has many happy memories of that lake. She almost had her first kiss there when she was seven. Almost, because she had been too nervous to go through with it even at that tender age, when kisses were exchanged with far less solemnity. She'd ended up pushing the boy into the lake instead, and bursting out into wild laughter before jumping in after him. He hadn't been upset with her. In fact, he was probably relieved – he had been eight at the time, and kissing a girl was widely known by all his friends to be something dangerous, because cooties were hard to get rid of.

A slow smile curves over her mouth as she remembers the way her friends had teased her about it for weeks afterwards. Most of those friends were in the same year as her in school. As they grew older, they shared many a late night studying for their difficult exams. To succeed in District 5 and get out of a life of poverty, grading high on those exams is imperative. Her younger self had been utterly enraptured in the thought of what sort of life she could build for herself if she could just get a job at the Grid like her parents. She had thrown herself into her studies with a singular intent back then.

Long days of studying had quickly replaced those summer hours spent at the lake. By the time she was a teenager, Elara Winston was far more focused on the silly dreams she had of becoming one of the best hydroelectrical engineers District 5 had ever seen. They weren't silly dreams back then, though. They didn't become silly until she was Reaped for the Hunger Games.

Everything faded after that. Not only was she a different person when she returned to District 5 after the Games, but her entire path in life was irreparably altered.

She was eighteen when she was Reaped, and at that age, she should have taken her final tests and examinations that would allow her to apply for jobs. But when she returned home, she was far too swept up in the horrors that she had witnessed to focus on anything else. Her studies were left to the wayside. She no longer felt qualified to apply for that pristine job at the Grid, even though she had scored higher than her friends on all the preliminary exams – friends that she ended up losing.

One by one, they stopped coming around to see her. Maybe they were frightened at the alteration in her personality or the darkness in her eyes. Maybe they were just driven away by the rumors that began to creep through the district after Elara's parents died and she began to go to the Capitol more often.