𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐒 ❦ The Hunger Games Third Book

E i g h t e e n

CHAPTER sixty-five|CAN'T ESCAPE

Bring me the horizon~ follow you
❝cross my heart and hope to die, promise you I'll never leave your side.❞

➳➳

I HAD HEARD the story of Pandora's box so much as a child, I believed it was real.

How could it not be? Who else was there to blame for the terrible things that I had seen before I turned six? What else could of caused such a rut of poverty and hate that only seemed to circle the outskirts of District 5 and the big city? There couldn't of possibly been an actual fault in humanity so severe that people got away with murder, and children had to starve so that their older generation could live in luxury and splendor. It had to have been Pandora, and that terrible terrible box.

I imagined it was a box coated in solid gold, with diamonds taking over every corner of it to weigh it down when the girl caught sight of it's expensive glimmer in the light. It would of whispered to her through the wind, only to silence itself the second that her perfectly manicured fingers actually touched it's cold surface. It might of made Pandora still with dread, or maybe it filled her with an euphoria that seemed foreign in her life.

Whatever it was, it must of been tempting enough to cost the world a fair sense of justice. I never changed how grand the box became in my mind as I grew, because it was supposed to be something that nobody could refuse, and even I wouldn't of refused enough gold to fuel my family's fire in the winter with warm bread and soup.

I guessed that was the point- Pandora wasn't ever to blame. She was just doing what the entireity of her kind would of done if they were given the chance, and in doing so she took the torment of releasing unspeakable pain on the rest of time.

I didn't have the heart to think that people could be monsters- not when all the humanity I knew at that time were my parents and siblings that were as good as unrefined diamonds in the middle of a coal mine. And then I grew up; my father killed himself so brutally that not even the monsters could of done a job to match it. Only he could have made himself hang so low, to bleed so deeply, that it stained the floors of our makeshift house to the point where we couldn't look at it the same. He was the sorrowful cause- not some fairytale.

That was when I realised that monsters weren't some fantasy animal that could never of been real, and that Pandora couldn't of changed the world with just one box. We were all monsters, which meant that none of us could really be pinned to the name without damning the whole of humanity.

I was a monster that pulsated on the floor by a single word. Peeta was a monster that was twisted from one strand of DNA into an entire other being. Katniss was a monster that stood her ground so much that the whole surface fell from her heavy weight, and Finnick clawed from desperation into a light like Heaven to escape his own darkness.