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When Josh Allen grows up he is going to be a commander. This lisped confession is delivered to the dinner table on his seventh birthday. With but a hint of the admirable poise Josh will have one day, his father sets down the birthday cake before his hands start shaking. He is glad that his son has a plan, but he voices his worries about the danger of a military position. These concerns are not even slightly relevant to anyone and he gives up quickly.
When Josh Allen grows up adults are going to listen to him. At present, pointing out that the family's comfortable financial situation relies entirely on their back-breaking work in the mines elicits from his parents only a weak groan. Such matters are not for little boys to worry themselves with, his mother murmurs with kindly furrows lining her eyes. He sighs. After the most well-rehearsed hour of speech in his life she agrees to call the Careers' programme people in the morning, albeit with a rather dazed expression.
When Josh Allen grows up he will never be underestimated this way again. The recruitment agent eyes him with the kind of contemptuous pity reserved for politicians' Avoxes and dying animals. Since he can still talk and breathe, he puts her indifference to rest by explaining exactly how a very determined little boy with wide eyes can get just about anywhere he wants. The heavily restricted library attached to the Careers' compound, for example. By now he has mastered the art of stillness, of truly giving nothing away by taking nothing to hide. Still. There is a very short window of time in which he is certain she will arrest him. Instead, she throws an empty duffel bag at him. He catches it without looking.
When Josh Allen grows up, his parents will not be scared of the intellect they gave him. They will live in a grand house, the first three bricks of which they will lay together in the kind of tradition beloved by the old, and see him rarely, and love him very dearly. After his twenty-year contract with the Peacekeepers is over, he will not come home. From the way they talk about him now he suspects that may be for the best. The emotional verve that has made them the best parents he could ask for has lost its charm, now he can no longer quite replicate it. That's okay. Love is more than that inscrutable language of faces and gestures that he need never comprehend. Love would be setting them free, and they are too old for that to be a reasonable goal. He will settle for making them proud.
When Josh Allen grows up, he will have manipulated his Career education so very thoroughly that he will have been the best student the programme has ever seen on...on nearly every count. And they will never even know, because mediocrity among the exceptional is anonymity enough to do whatever he likes.
When Josh Allen grows up he will remember his classmates with grudging sympathy. The really smart ones will have hidden themselves among normal children, he's sure. But for his purposes he needs to know the Careers' truncated mindset from the inside. He eats their food and trains his body and answers only to 'Jawsh' until all suspicion wavers and peters out. It's pronounced almost exactly like his real name; this small defiance reminds him that he is more than the well-muscled rich teenagers around him. Apparently they are motivated by things like glory and honour.
When Josh Allen grows up he will remember this moment in sickening clarity. For the fourth year in a row he has decided that he will not volunteer, consequences be damned. One of his peers will take up the slack, and he will turn seventeen, and then he will fail again next year, and then once more, and he will grow up. Not once in his entire life has the word "rebellion" crossed his mind to describe the coup he will surely spark. It just is what will be. If he believes - no, if he knows that - then it will be so.
But.
When Josh Allen grows up he will never again sleep without seeing the face of that whimpering little child onstage.
When Josh Allen grows up he will command a squadron so inimitably loyal to him that they could and would take down a nation!
When Josh Allen grows up he will force himself to ignore the guilt of leaving the Reaped boy's life up to chance. Yes. That is what he will do.
When Josh Allen grows up he will reforge and rule the world from its sidelines, not as a pretty face but as the faceless. His fellow Careers, like the Capitol, are strong - and greedy, and misguided. He will fix it all. He will make it fair and, and logical. He will rebuild Panem with an army behind him, if he has to tear it apart brick by brick beforehand to do it!
When Josh Allen grows up, into a better world that he has hewn from the most solid rock in Panem, he will never make eye contact with a weeping child and order them to smile in the face of certain death. He will not be silent. He will not be complicit. He will not-
If Josh Allen is to grow up at all he will not, cannot intervene, he cannot volunteer-
When Josh Allen grows up this will have been a necessary sacrifice, but nobody else is volunteering, they all look to him, they suspect, perhaps, they are all honed as sharply as he is or sharper-
When Jawsh Allen grows up-
When Jawsh stands up-