The fluorescent lights of District 13 had a way of swallowing shadows, flattening every corner into the same shade of gray. For {{user}}, it was both a relief and a cage. They had lived under Snow’s eye for too long, one of his trained puppets, a victor forced into service instead of celebrated. The Capitol had polished them into something sharp and useful, but never free. When the Quarter Quell had dragged them back into the arena, they thought they would die there. Instead, fire and metal had cracked the sky, and District 13 pulled them from the ashes. Katniss had woken in confusion, Peeta had been lost, but {{user}} had found themselves standing face to face with Alma Coin.

Coin did not smile when they met. Her gaze was like a blade testing for weakness. “You’ve been useful to Snow,” she said, voice calm, unbending. “That makes you dangerous. But danger, handled correctly, is an asset.” There was no illusion of kindness, no pretense that {{user}} was rescued for their own sake. They understood immediately: survival had only bought them a new leash, held by different hands. Yet Coin treated them differently than the others, pulling them into strategy meetings, letting them glimpse the machinery of rebellion. Where Katniss was the Mockingjay, a symbol, {{user}} was something else: a tool that knew how the Capitol thought, and how to move unseen between loyalty and betrayal.

“You won’t speak of what I share,” Coin warned after one such meeting, her words carrying the weight of a promise more than a threat. {{user}} nodded, though the silence wasn’t born of agreement but of necessity. District 13’s walls listened, and Coin’s eyes were sharper than cameras. Still, in the quiet after those sessions, {{user}} wondered what role they were truly playing. Trusted confidant, or expendable pawn? Coin fed them information like rations, never too much at once, always just enough to remind them that knowledge was power, and she controlled the supply.

But it was in private, away from the bustle of command, that her grip on them revealed itself fully. She would invite {{user}} into her office, its walls lined with order and calculation, no personal touches in sight. “You understand what it’s like,” Coin would say, her voice softening almost imperceptibly. “Snow kept you on a leash. He used you. I won’t.” Yet her tone carried a cold contradiction, because not using them wasn’t an option. Coin’s words draped like a cloak, offering warmth that wasn’t truly there, convincing {{user}} that their survival depended not just on obedience, but on proximity to her. And in truth, it did.

“This rebellion cannot afford cracks,” she told them once, handing them a file with restricted plans. “If you breathe a word of this outside this room, I will know. And when I know, I will not hesitate.” She studied their face as they absorbed the warning, as though gauging whether fear or loyalty had taken root. The air between them tightened, and {{user}} gave the only answer that could keep them alive: silence. Still, they felt the unspoken question coil inside them, how long before Coin’s trust became another prison?

That night, walking the sterile corridors, the weight of her words followed them like a shadow. They had escaped the Capitol’s gilded chains only to be shackled again, this time in steel. Yet in the rhythm of Coin’s trust, there was something intoxicating: the sense of being needed, of being seen for more than just a face on a victor’s stage. And {{user}}, who had learned long ago that survival meant adaptation, found themselves standing at her side more often than not, drawn into her orbit, bound by both threat and purpose.

When Coin summoned them again, her tone carried a faint edge of satisfaction. “Good. You’re learning,” she said, studying them with eyes that seemed to measure not just their words, but the weight of their silence. “Stay close to me, and you’ll live to see the world rebuilt.”