I
…
It just happened.
It was bound to happen, there were only two choices that the Games offered:
die or give in
My soul - it just slipped away from me and I… I gave in.
I don't know exactly when it left me, but it did. I made my choice, I gave in and my soul was the price.
Maybe it was after the first kill or the eighth. It could have been the eleventh one, too.
It could have been at any time that I let go of it. And now I was too lost to tell when. My humanity, morality, personality was long gone in the woods which surrounded me.
I was thirteen kills deep and only one from leaving this forsaken beauty.
Left in the black shirt, brown cargos, and boots they dressed me in, I trudged through the brush. My clothes were torn, skin coated in dirt, and hands dyed maroon. The bow I had killed to get in the beginning of these games was slung over my back beside the quiver. I had a knife in my right boot and another in the waist band of my pants.
I continue through the woods till I make it to the clearing, the Cornucopia. This was where this hell began and was where it would end.
I stand there, I'm not sure for how long, but I stand there waiting till he is there.
In that moment I heard him step through the brush into the clearing everything seems to happen in just a matter of seconds.
I turn around, pulling the bow from over my head and swinging it at him like a sword. I slice him from the chest up to the hairline along his forehead. It's barely a flesh wound, but it's enough to draw blood. He smirks at my flawed attempt to harm him and takes a swing with his axe at my midsection.
I react fast enough, jumping back and in the process launch an arrow at him. It punchers him in the opposing collarbone causing him flinch. Yet it's not enough to stop him. This boy was trained to kill, to embrace pain, to rip the heads from bodies… an arrow to the shoulder was nothing, but a scrape on the knee.
He comes back swinging. Out of the four shots he takes though, only one hits. It's as I jolt away from a swing to the head that he too quickly for my mind to register brings the axe down, slicing me across the side of my stomach – deep.
Skin opens and blood seeks it way out. A sharp pain jolts through me as I move, but it's an unfelt agony.
I have been stung, burned, and sliced. I have killed and watched killings. Emotion, agony had left me.
Reaching back, I pull out the last of my arrows from the quiver. I pull back the string, launching them out. One pierces him right under his dominant arm causing him to drop the axe, another drives into his knee, and the last follows the second arrow to the knee, so precisely that it splits the arrow down the middle, driving its head deeper into his flesh.
And then he falls.
I tug at the quiver's string, allowing it to fall off my back. I drop the bow and pull the knife from boot. Then I'm on top of him. I jab the knife into his side as I grind my boot into his already injured knee. He grinds his teeth, a scream strains on his lips, but doesn't let the pain other take him.
As I reach for the knife in my waist, he makes his move. His one hand wraps around my neck while the other grabs at the flesh where he had cut me across the side. I grind my teeth and like him fight the urge to scream. Yet I don't let him have the upper hand. I put my free hand around as much of his neck that my hand will allow me, applying enough pressure to shorten his breaths, while the other hovers with the knife at his chest.
There we lay at a stalemate.
It's after a long moment that he smiles up at me, unnoticeably loosening his grip on me. "Do it."
I don't do anything.
"Do it!" He screams.
Yet I still don't do anything.
"Kill me," he spits, "Let me die with dignity, let me die free."
His words catch me off guard.
Let me die free.
Ironic.
None of us were free. We were all ants under a magnify glass. We all burned alive under the Capitol: hunger, poverty, the Games.
He smiles at me, a snide like smile. His eyebrows waggle at me, tempting me. His fingers drum along my neck and dig deeper into the flesh at my side.
And then without knowing, without thinking I jab the knife into his heart.
The cannon goes off.
It's over.
There's blood on my hands. It's scarlet and bends with the other's which dyed my skin.
Someone is shouting, congratulating me.
The wind picks up, blowing strands of hair into my face and the boy's blood across my chest and out to the woods.
The body below me still bleeds and I realize my hands are still wrapped around his neck, suffocating and plundering him to death as if I hadn't already done the job.
A craft comes through the force field. Its door open and Haymitch stands there looking to me with a thin expression. He lets out a breath, before stepping off. Two Peacekeepers follow.
"Let's go, sweetheart."
And like that, they escort me out of the hell they had put me in as easily as they did when they lead me here weeks ago. Yet it's all different now, Panem, the Games, me… but in reality as I look back at the brush, the body, the bow, the blood, the brutality I know I'm never escaping this hell.