BLURB: She will survive this world. She will survive and thrive, and grow strong enough to burn it all down. She doesn't owe this world anything, after all. Not anymore. (Olva Dimond is picked as District 12's Tribute for the 72nd Hunger Games along with her younger brother. Everything changes, and only Olva knows. But who the fuck cares? Olva doesn't.) (OC/Self insert) (M for a reason)

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ONE

For Your Entertainment

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She is digging with her bare hands - the only tool she has to spare at the time. Daggers are hardly digging tools, after all. Besides, she'd need the daggers, she knows. Soon, and for something other than digging graves. And by then they will have to be sharp as can be, not dulled by rock and earth.

They will have to be sharp enough to easily pierce skin and flesh through polyester shirts. Sharp enough to maim and kill. But that's for later.

Next to her, a certain boy's skin has long lost the flush and heat of life, a cool and eerie pallor setting and sinking in like the painful talons of inevitable rot. The brisk air of dawn is thick and pregnant with the overwhelming presence of his absence, stifling and choking, resigned and in denial all at once. The sky is aptly dark, the forest filled with an impenetrable hush that is too silent to be soothing. It is early in the day, far too early to be doing anything, really, but at the same time it is far too late for anything to be done anymore.

Oliver - her sweet little brother Oliver - is dead and gone. Murdered at eleven years old. Olva would have done anything, anything at all, to keep him alive. She starved for him, nearly died several times over for him, and had killed children for him. Olva Dimond would have done anything and everything for her little brother, but now there is nothing left for her to do but try to bury him. Have those game-master bastards actually work to dig him up from his grave, and show the world how truly callous and heartless they are. Murder. Abuse. Grave-digging would just be another one in this government's miles-long list of crimes. So let them show their true colors. Let them show the world how a young girl has just lost her younger brother to what basically amounts to a reality TV show.

Monsters. Monsters, all of them! Fuck them all!

It isn't fair! Olva had known that on some level, of course, since the moment she had finished reading a series of novels in her first life. She figured she even understood Panem's suffering and perils quite well, diminished though they were through mere text on flat paper. Life just isn't fair, post-apocalyptic dystopian young adult novel world or not. Some things are just universal.

But children, she thinks to herself bitterly through furious tears and bleeding fingers, children should never have to be killed by the design of the very elders that should be protecting them.

Children should never have to die on live broadcast, as a means of national entertainment.

What kind of fucked up world is this? Who would want to imagine - or even write about - a world like this? An entire country populated as it is by these dimensionless caricatures that call themselves "people," who at one moment would shed tears over a Tribute's sob story, and would at another moment do absolutely nothing at all to prevent children from being killed. "People" that would, upon seeing their favorite child Tribute die gruesomely, do nothing else besides fucking complain about lost wagers.

Seriously, what pure, undiluted liquid insanity was Suzanne Collins drunk on when she came up with this?

A sharp pain stabs through her wounded fingers and she reluctantly gives up Oliver's burial as a lost cause. Instead she finds rocks to lay over him, flowers to pepper his resting place. Oliver... Oliver deserves the best, he always did, and Olva's so sorry, but this is the best she can do. She sings Danny Boy to him through loud and ugly sobs and steady streams of tears, except in her verses "Danny boy" becomes "Oliver," but she can't rightly know why it should matter at all that she changed an Irish folk song to suit her purposes, when these uncultured swine "people" obviously have fucked up tastes in entertainment.

Fuck these monsters. Damn them. Damn them all.

As the last note escapes Olva's parched throat and fades through the air, she observes the camera she knows is now focused on her because this is a "pivotal" and "dramatic" moment for the Game, full of the "suspense" that is sure to gain more viewers. She can feel in her bones than whatever she does within the next few seconds would be broadcast all over Panem and really, there's only one thing she can do.

She stares at the camera, facing it with an expression of all-encompassing and yawning emptiness that she knows unnerves most people. Because she has died before, and though most times she can forget that, since her first life ended Death has always been at the background. An abiding and ever-patient shadow that never really goes away. She died before, but she has never been truly as dead as she now feels.

She twitches her lips into a broken facsimile of a smile and asks the world:

"Are you not entertained?"

A/N: Welp, I had a random HG brain fart of a plot bunny, and this happened. As a newly minted doctor, I feel like I should post something dark and gritty, because, well, my new job does get a bit dark and gritty, so there. Anyway, expect Updates with my other fics, because holy crap, it's been a WHILE since I last updated most of them, so I should get started on that, I think. As always, comments and suggestions are ALWAYS welcome! Also, if you see any typos or grammatical errors in any of my fics, I'd appreciate it if you pointed them out, as I'm a bit OC that way and typos can get a bit sneaky.