1/2 what is editing.
Natasha's talent for social niceties had begun slipping the day the Quell had been announced, and now that they'd arrived at the Tribute Parade, they'd deserted her entirely. "A sexy tree costume for District 7. Clever. Positively groundbreaking," she'd sneered at her very well-meaning stylist, who she knew had spent the days crying off and on at the idea of watching her die in the Arena. The unkindness in her voice had seem to serve as a slap across his face; he and his team had prepped her in silence, swept her hair up and adorned it with enormous bunches of lichen and moss, painted swirls of little green, purple, and gold flowers across her forehead and along one cheek, vines and leaves down her arms. The costume itself had been overlapping scales of bark, just enough of them to technically qualify as a dress, if the technical definition was that important bits were mostly covered. A sexy tree. It was an atrocity. And a parade that had seemed undignified when it consisted of children in costume had been made grotesque when it was adults. Natasha had no particular strong feelings about Trevor Slattery one way or the other, but for whatever reason, he had been the one tonight she couldn't take her eyes from, he had been the one to wrench at something deep inside of her that she hadn't want wrenched.
An old man who looked lifetimes older than the barely-past-70 she knew him to be, constantly trembling from decades of morphling abuse and unable to conceal it. Weathered and fragile, skin paper-thin and gaunt. And he'd been dressed up like a goddamn battery, costume sparkling and visible from his chariot with the rest of him sallow and limp and so utterly, utterly broken. They had broken him decades ago, but now they were trotting him out for this one final humiliation and she had internally burned on his behalf. A deep well of rage inside her and all on account of a man she barely even liked.
Slattery had no prayer, of course. Not even if District 13 did swoop in with the promised, well-timed rescue attempt. He wouldn't survive past the Cornucopia. Hope Schlottman probably wouldn't, either, or spunky little Angie Martinelli.
When the escort had brought Natasha back to her floor, she'd immediately dismissed her with the intention of grabbing a few minutes of quiet and privacy before Tony's inevitable descent. A shower, maybe, she'd scrub the green paint from her arms and change into a bathrobe and order something decadent to be sent up to eat; every meal was a potential last meal even if they did make it through the other side, and she'd been indulging in her own favorites. Things to be done, needs to be attended to, best to keep moving.
That had all been the intention, and instead, she had sat down on the edge of her bed, in the dark of the bedroom, and found that she was unable to move once she had done it. Unable to do anything but stare out the window, in fact, the bird's eye view from this same facility that she'd slept in when she was twelve, this same room. She could almost see the building her penthouse was in, barely three miles from here, the place she'd lived for the last handful of years and it had never been perfect, but it had been something close enough to a home. Her own bed, her own coffee cups, her own things, all of which she'd seen for the last time and the neat will she'd written out before she'd departed for District 7 and the reaping, just in case.