joey/ash in the hunger games thx
I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR A DAY LIKE THIS
ash is from district 7 - come on, with a name like ash where else could he be from? - while joey grows up in the capitol amongst (fake) friends and family. they don’t talk about her birth mother, an avox who serves the president his dinner every night. they don’t talk about the way her heart tears and bleeds for the children she sees every year walking into the arena. what they do talk about is her burgeoning career as a stylist, a “whim”, as her father so kindly puts it, that she can’t help but follow. of course, she ends up as ash’s stylist in the 72nd games. she puts him in fitted suits and the dark autumnal colors of dying leaves, trying to press the idea of decay, of how wrong all this is.
his girlfriend breaks up with him in the five minutes he has in the waiting room before he’s shipped off to the capitol, and joey wants to scratch her eyes out when he tells her about it. she becomes more like a companion than a stylist - telling him what to eat when, how to talk to the careers from districts one and two, how to smirk at the cameras just so to get the sponsors hooked. the night before the games, they talk until they fall asleep together, and she gives him her silver bracelet to take into the arena with him. he’s soft and gentle in every way she isn’t, and for the first time she finds herself wishing she was the one going into the arena.
joey watches every hour of the games she can, eyes smarting and squinting at the screen. she watches him align himself with the tributes from three and eleven (idiot, she hisses, always go for the trained killers), and she watches as he cries every night when the tributes’ images light up the sky. her eyes tear and sting at 2am, when she curls up in bed and watches the male tribute from four slice clean through ash’s leg while he struggles away. the boy leaves ash to bleed out, a gaping wound in his calf, but ash limps after him and strangles him with his bare hands. a cannon sounds, and then the screen goes black once ash’s win is announced. while watching, she’s dug her nails so deep into the flesh of her palm that it’ll scar.
he comes back different, short a leg and his signature carefree grin, but she holds him close anyways. she stands at the wing of every single one of the interviews celebrating his triumph, because he won’t do them without her (read: without her hand to hold, he’s hopeless). she accompanies him on his victory tour, putting him in the lush greens of spring this time, and listening for his screams every night. she stands between him and the peacekeepers that don’t like his rhetoric, which verges on rebellion, and she uses what little power her father has to keep him from the president’s line of fire.
when the rebellion does come, he takes her to it. they want to kill her, at first, make her a sacrifice - a symbol of capitol greed gone wrong, of what’ll happen to the 1% - but he steps in front of the gun and tells them that without her, he would’ve been buried long ago. after that, the rebels step off, and they’re accepted into district thirteen, where she works in tactiles and battle armor design, and he joins up with the other victors on the frontlines. she waits for him during every mission; he always comes home.
