Chapter Text
The Capitol was a city of gleaming towers, a place where the sky was always clouded by the weight of its own wealth and power. Beneath the polished marble streets, amidst the bustle of haughty nobility and their endless games of politics, lived the forgotten. The ones whose names never made it into the grand speeches, the ones whose faces would be wiped from history. Tum had been one of them. But it had not always been this way.
He had once been a boy, a quiet child of District Three, born of parents who had fought in the shadow of the Capitol's sprawling empire. His memories of them were fading—just flashes of laughter and love before the fire. The rebellion had been fierce in his home district, and his parents had died for their beliefs, for the faint hope of a future that didn't kneel before the Capitol. Tum had been just a boy, too young to understand the gravity of it all. He had only understood that his parents' love was endless, and they had always told him that his life was worth living, no matter what the Capitol threw at him.
When the fire had come, it had consumed everything. Their home, their lives, their dreams—all of it vanished in a single night. And Tum was left alone. An orphan, discarded by a world that had no room for the weak or the lost.
He was placed in an orphanage, a gray and drab place where children learned to forget who they were. There, Tum learned quickly that survival wasn't just about food or warmth. It was about silence, about fading into the background and staying out of the way. The walls of the orphanage were tall and cold, and even the air seemed to be a little thinner, as if the weight of a thousand unspoken tragedies pressed down upon it. Tum never spoke of the life he had lost, and no one asked. He simply became one more shadow among many, living in a place where names had no meaning.
But fate was strange. Tum was adopted when he was still a boy, taken in by a couple who were poor, but filled with a kindness that no one in the orphanage had ever shown. They weren't much, but they gave him something he had not thought he could ever have again: family. His new mother had soft, calloused hands from years of hard work, and his father had the easy laughter of a man who had learned not to take life too seriously. They made sure he was fed, clothed, and, most importantly, loved.
Yet, the Capitol was never far from his thoughts. As Tum grew older, he understood the city's reach. He saw the flickering lights of the Capitol on the horizon at night and felt the weight of its looming presence. It wasn't just the Capitol's shining towers that drew people to its pull; it was the way its very air tasted like power. For someone like Tum, someone from the districts, it felt suffocating. But the Capitol also promised something else—a life, a future that stretched beyond the dreary existence of the Districts. A man could dream in the Capitol, even if it was just for a moment.
And so, with little more than a handful of coins and his skill as a mechanic, Tum left District Three, the only home he had know to work in the Capitol. It was a decision that had haunted him in quiet moments, but there was little other choice. His adoptive parents, for all their love, were poor. The Capitol, with its endless opportunities for those who could stomach its brutal system, seemed like the only place to make something of himself.
He found work at a mechanic shop in one of the lower districts of the Capitol. The work was long, and the hours stretched into the endless night. The machines he worked on were complex, foreign to him, but he learned. He had always been good with his hands, a skill passed down to him by his father, who had been a craftsman in his own right. But the Capitol's machines were not the ones he had learned about in the Districts. These were designed to maintain the luxury of the elite, and Tum's place in that world was as small as it had ever been.
At night, when the long hours of work were finally over, Tum wandered into a small bar that sat on the edge of the district. It was a place where the forgotten people gathered, the ones who had made their way to the Capitol only to find themselves lost in its overwhelming shine. Musicians often played there, strumming guitars and violins, their songs a mix of sorrow and longing. There was something about the music that drew Tum in, a thread of familiarity in the sound that reminded him of home, of warmth he had once known but could never quite name. The rhythm of the music felt like the pulse of life itself, and Tum found solace in it.
The bar wasn't much—a small, dimly lit room with cracked walls and dust on the rafters—but for Tum, it was a sanctuary. The performers, they played their folk songs and stories of rebellion, of love lost and found, of the struggles of life beyond the Capitol's gilded cages. They spoke a language Tum understood, a language that was free from the rules and constraints of the Capitol. And in the music, Tum could feel his heart stir for the first time in years, something ancient and painful stirring deep within him.
It was here, in the shadows of that little bar, where Tum's life began to change. The music became his escape, his brief respite from a world that never stopped demanding. It wasn't much, but it was his.
Little did he know, the Capitol, in all its grandeur and its cruelty, had already marked his path. A single letter, an innocent errand, would soon lead him to an encounter that would forever change the course of his life. But that, Tum would not know yet. For now, his world was filled with the sound of music, the only thing that made him feel something other than the weight of survival.
And so, Tum lived, as all men do in the Capitol, trapped between the fading memories of his past and the unforgiving present. He survived, as best he could, hoping that maybe there would be more than this. More than being nothing in a city that forgot the names of its people. He liked to believe that somewhere, in the distant future, he could find a place where he would finally hear a song dedicated to him.