Well, here it is! ...Haha, only a few people know what this is for. This fic is for a fic exchange at a Hunger Games forum called Caesar's Palace. The prompts I wrote for were: Friendship, humor, colors, empathy. This fic is a gift for C-Mufflebuns. Also known as Kay, Grey, and General Dauntless/Kay. ;)
As you can tell *points in general direction of the summary and characters under said summary* This is a Christina/Will fic! I ship them too, lol.
*also: femslash shipping in this fic. So I'm giving my gay/bi/lesbian talk:
I really don't have a problem with gay people/bi people/lesbians. Like, at all. So please don't give me the "prejudice" talk.
Hope you like it! :)
She felt her vision blur as she hits the ground hard. She felt the cold floor under her wrinkled chocolate brown hands.
This is stupid! Christina wanted to scream. I can't die like this! There's supposed to be grandchildren circled around my bed sobbing into handkerchiefs! Why, oh why, couldn't this happen during the day?
But like anyone her age, she knew it was time for her to leave this world.
She wanted her grandchildren to be there. She wanted little Tommy and Lisa to hold her hands as she died. But they weren't- it was the dead of night in the hospital and no one was awake but her.
It was her time to go.
She pretended that her dear, beloved Will was holding her hand and caressing her wise old face as she relaxed her tense body.
Christina woke up breathing hard.
She felt like she'd been having a terrible vivid dream, or that she had just gone through her fear landscape fifty times. Come to think of it- maybe she was in her fear landscape. She was standing in the Merciless Mart, after all, and that's where her typical moth attack happened in her landscape.
Christina blinked as she looked around. Was she alive, after all? Did she not grow old like she thought she had? Died of natural causes in a hospital at fifty-five?
Yes, she was in the Merciless Mart- but it was totally empty, devoid of the single moth that started out the attack. It was also so much cleaner. Christina wondered why no one had told her that they cleaned and organized it.
She heard a sound by the door and whirled around. She noticed, startled, that her hands weren't wrinkled when she blocked her face with her arms.
"Calm down," said a very familiar voice. Christina shook her head, lowering her hands. This couldn't be. It just... couldn't. She must be hallucinating. She tried to accept what she was seeing and couldn't- which pretty much convinced her that she was imagining this.
"Will someone just slap me?" Christina said, sighing. "Or get me off the meds?" Surprisingly, she heard another sigh answering hers.
"Well, if you insist on it," said the familiar voice. The vision- it must be a hallucination- walked over to her with a familiar stride and slapped Christina across the face.
"What the fuck?" Christina let slip. She realized then that her voice didn't sound frail and quavery. "Where am I?"
The vision stepped in front of her, smiling widely. He ran a hand through his tousled blond hair. "I don't know. Where do you think you are?"
Christina felt very foolish. She could just picture herself lying in a random hospital bed talking to thin air.
"Um..." she said. "The Merciless Mart?"
"Did you know it was originally called the Merchandise Mart? And that it was a cheap tourist shop?" asks the boy standing in front of her. He raised his eyebrows. "I bet you didn't." He chuckled. "What're you staring at.
Christina's eyes were fixated on the crease between his eyebrows.
"Will?" she asked tentatively. "Is that you?"
A grin spread across the boy's face, and he spread his arms wide. Christina took a step forward and launched herself into his waiting arms.
"Oh my God, Will," she said, sniffling. She felt like a wimpy little girl, but she couldn't help it. She felt his large, calloused, but tender hands caressing her thick black hair. "I missed you."
"Like I said before," Will said quietly. "Cotton balls. That's about how tough you are." Christina laughed. Even after all those years, she remembered.
"I've gotten better at fighting," she said a bit indignantly. Then she hesitated, remembering. "Then I got worse." She thought about how at thirty, because of a leg injury, she was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Then at fifty she had a stroke. At eighty she had another- and she was still in the hospital for it. Or was she?
"But where are you?" Will said, almost if he's reading her mind. "I guess you could call it heaven." Christina looked a bit shocked.
"Isn't it only the Amity and the Abnegation that are Christian?" she asked.
"No, not heaven in that way," said. Will. "It's more like... paradise."
Christina had a moment of doubt. What if this only lasted for a little bit of time? What if in a few hours she would be damned to hell? And wait a second- what if she was just imagining all of this and she wasn't even dead?
"Is this real?" she asked Will aloud. He laughed, and Christina's dark skin turned slightly red. She always felt like she had to impress Will a lot so she wouldn't be blown out of the water by -you guessed it- Tris. Christina was like Tris's sister they were so close, but Tris was just so easily outshining her sometimes Christina worried that Will was cheating on her for Tris.
"'Course it is," Will said.
That's when Christina decided not to question it- she was dead. And oddly, she didn't really care. This was certainly better than living out her days unable to walk.
"Come on," Will told her, grinning. "You want to come see Lynn?" he offered. "She's been worried about you." Christina's eyes tear up at the mention of Lynn. She remembered about Lynn telling Uriah that she loved Marlene. She remembered talking to Lynn during those cold, depressed nights at the Dauntless headquarters. She remembered about how she convinced Lynn to tell Marlene about her feelings for her- and how Christina and Lynn didn't talk for a week because Marlene rejected her.
"Is she still mad at me?" Christina asked nervously. Will chuckled and smiled at Christina.
"Well, a lot of things have changed here," Will said. "For the good, I mean." With that, he took her arm, and as they held hands, their surroundings changed.
Now around Christina and Will was the Dauntless headquarters. They were staring down an empty black hallway. Will tapped Christina's arm.
"This way," he said. "Third door to the left." Christina realized she was supposed to lead and not be lead. She walked ahead of Will. Her feet, clad in tightly laced black boots, clicked against the tiles of the floor. Unsure, she reached out an arm, and hesitantly knocked on the third door to the left.
"Who is it?" asked Lynn's sharp voice. Christina took in a breath. After hearing Will talk about Lynn she just thought they were visiting her grave or something. But was this really Lynn?
"It's me, Lynn," said Will. He winked at Christina. "And a newcomer." Christina heard the sound of someone's bare feet slapping against tile. The door started to swing open.
"If you're pranking me again, Will, I have a paintball gun here and I'm not afraid to-" Lynn's voice started. Then the door was fully open, revealing Christina's nervous face to the occupant of the room. Suddenly there as a loud explosion, and Christina felt something small and hard hit her in the forehead. Wet liquid dripped from it into in her eyes. When Christina rubbed her eyes, her hands came away bright blue. She blinked and saw Lynn standing in front of her. And shit, did she look different.
Lynn's former shaved head was covered in short golden brown hair. Her usually unhappy, grim face was replaced with a sheepish grin. The corners of her eyes showed slight smile wrinkles. She wore her usual loose baggy clothes, but somehow she wore them differently. Not like she used to wear them because she wished she was a boy. In Lynn's hands was a paintball gun. In surprise at seeing Christina, she had shot her.
"Christina!" Lynn said, dropping her paintball gun (which in turn splattered Christina and Will's feet in purple paint) and hugging her.
"Who are you and what have you done with Lynn?" joked Christina.
Lynn laughed. When she let Christina go, she turned around and yelled into her room, "Mar, Christina's here!"
Marlene ran out of the room with all her former childish innocence totally back. Christina blinked. Now, this just couldn't be real. They hated each other. And Marlene's skull wasn't dented in like when they found her body after she jumped off the roof-
"You're the last one!" Marlene said. "We were waiting for you!" Christina didn't even try to contemplate about how time passed in this paradise world.
Then, to Christina's ultimate surprise, she saw a glint on Marlene's hand as she shook hands with her. Christina's eyes widened as she saw an engagement ring on Marlene's hand.
"You're engaged to Uri-" Christina started, but then she stopped abruptly. There was an identical ring on Lynn's hand. "Oh my God-"
"I told you things had changed," Will said, grinning. "Now come on, let's go have some fun."
Christina stood across from Will, the Pit separating them. On his side was Marlene, Uriah, Tris, and Tobias. On Christina's side was Tris, Lynn, Al, and Peter. They all held paintball guns and wore Dauntless black.
"Ready?" asked Shauna, firing a few shots into the air mockingly.
"I was born ready!" Peter screamed jokingly back at her. "Three! Two! One! Zero!"
A paintball exploded in Christina's face, and she spit out purple paint on the ground and fired back at Will's team. Paint sprayed itself at their black clothes. Purple, yellow, blue, red, green, orange, white, and pink. No color restricted to a single faction. When the teams saw the color blue, they didn't think of Erudite. They weren't reminded of some of their stays at the Amity headquarters when they saw red and yellow. Tris and Tobias weren't angry when they realized there was no gray paint. When the white paint hit their black clothes, no one thought of Candor. It was like they were all Divergent.
At the end of their paintball war, they all collapsed on the side Will's team had been. Their black clothes were covered in wet paint. Tired but happy, Christina swirled the splotches of paint into hypnotic spirals.
"Had fun?" asked Will gently, sitting next to Christina and leaning against a wall. Christina's face broke into a wide smile.
"Of course I did," she said. She yawned and leaned against Will. His warm fingers flitted through her hair and smoothed it down, trying to get the paint out of it.
"Are you tired?" Forget tired, Christina was just about asleep already. She nodded dimly. "Okay, I'll find you a room. First, come with me." He got up and helped Christina to her feet. He picked up two paintball guns and walked over to the group. "Hey, guys, we're about to fire off." The rest of the group got to their feet and grabbed their paintball guns. They got in a circle. Christina joined the circle, followed by Will.
"Aim at the ceiling," Will explained. "Keep firing until your gun runs out." Christina didn't really understand the point of that, the ceiling was too high to hit. But they must be doing this for some reason, so she aimed. "One. Two... Three!" Will counted. Suddenly, everyone fires their guns in the air, pointing at the ceiling. Like Christina predicted, none of the paintballs hit the ceiling. Instead, they started to rain down on her and her friends' heads. Christina kept firing her gun, like Will said, until it ran out of paintballs.
A wave of color rained down on their shoulders. When Christina looked up with shielded eyes, it looked like it was raining color. The paintballs that had just been fired arched in the air and splattered on the group.
Christina knew it was paradise then- what was better than being with her friends, happy, under a rain of paintballs?