A/N: A short story in honor of my most recent fallen tribute, Kerry Selmosa. He recently died a second time, placing an astounding 5th out of 74. My soul is hurting. I loved him so much. So I needed to write out how I conjured up the storyline in my head so he would win. It's heart breaking for me to do this and tamper with his character, but I don't know if I'm going to submit him back to the All Stars stories anymore. Watching him survive so long just to be axed at the end by a character who doesn't even have motivation made me simmer and want to explode. Here he is, claiming the title of Victory in his original arena. I'll be calm by the time I'm done with this. Sorry if I seem volatile right now. I sort of am.
Note: Inky has been extracted from this Games because I can't bear to kill her off. In her place is a girl named Franny who dies in the Bloodbath.
Note II: This is Titus's Games, just like in LCS's story. Beware.
Note III: All other tributes excepting Kerry and Franny belong to their respective creators.
My fingers scrabbled across the pockmarked orange red-rock wall I was climbing across. I was happy Vextrix had been smart enough to hand me some rope to climb with after the Bloodbath. Safety, she said. I was fast paced, oblivious, energetic she said. I needed to slow down and think sometimes. So I took her advice and climbed with the rope. It was the only thing that would save me.
Darkness was falling, and what I thought was a handhold really was shadows. The Careers jeered from below as I slipped and fell two feet, but the rope saved me, as it was hooked around a piece of rock jutting from the ridge I was climbing. Climbing was my pastime, my sport, my exercise, my world. In the sprawl of Five, giant jagged orange mountains and arches rose from the ground. It was very similar to what I was climbing now. I'd climbed since I could remember. I didn't need any help. The rope was just a simple precaution. I'd never climbed in the dark, however. Sometimes new things were useful.
I kept going, passing the point from where I'd slipped. I kept climbing and climbing until the top of the spire of rock leveled out. I sat down with a huff, and tied my rope tightly around a jutting piece of rock in the middle of the flat top of the jagged mountain. The Careers' angry shouting voices echoed far below. None of them were agile enough to climb up all the way here without major help from sponsors, and even if they did try to climb up here, there were rocks around me. This spire of rock was stories high. One thrown rock, and their heads would be mush. I had pretty good aim.
They waited at the base of the spire. I knew they could wait for days until I finally slipped up from dehydration or hunger, but I felt nothing but bliss sitting atop the highest spire I'd ever climbed, looking out at the streaking sunset that was barely visible as the sky turned velvety black. The black sky melded with the orange ridges and all was beautiful, and that was all I could process. I could also tell that when it was light out, I'd be able to see almost the entire arena, including the Cornucopia. I would be able to see everyone. That would be an advantage.
Hoban's face interrupted the cool black night sky. My ally. I'd seen him die, an arrow from the Careers sprouting out of his body, his cannon shattering the crisp evening air as I hauled myself higher and higher, out of the reach of the Careers. Hoban was the only one to die today. His District Partner and our other ally, Vextrix, was also still alive. I wondered how she was faring. She and Hoban had been from Eleven, so they were decent enough with survival skills. I had a feeling Vextrix would be able to preserve herself for a while longer. I recited the tributes in my head as I prepared to sleep on the rough rocky surface of the spire top. This was another skill Vextrix had drilled into my brain. There was Karyssa from One, Valerie and Theo from Two, Electra and DeMarcus from Three, Careen and Angelo from Four, myself from Five, Titus from Six, Desiree from Seven, Granja from Nine, Vextrix from Eleven, and Peach from Twelve. I then thought back to the others that had been lost. Seven at the Bloodbath. The cocky Career boy from One who somehow died, probably via his female allies who despised him. The others to go: Addie from Six, Ash from Seven, Franny and Blaise from Eight, Diggory from Nine, and Chase from Twelve. Then the boy from Ten was gone the next day, and a couple of days later my younger District partner was in the sky. Quiola was always crying and hiding and worrying, but she'd somehow gotten a 10. I felt like she'd only gotten that not because she was strong, but because the Gamemakers wanted to target her for something the poor girl had done. The day after that, the little spitfire girl from Ten, Zinnia, was dead. And now it was the present day, the end of the sixth day of these Games, with Hoban dead. How did I know all this? I wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. I didn't really care about the other tributes' names when there was so much to climb around me. But there had been the long, sullen hours lying awake keeping hidden from the Careers, and I got bored. Vextrix drilled the names into our heads as a game to keep away the boredom. She was a smart girl. If anyone was going to make it out other than me, I wanted it to be her.
I feel asleep with thoughts of climbing picks and orange ridges dancing in my head.
The next morning I heard bawling and screaming. It echoed throughout the arena. I almost expected to see something to indicate where the fighting was coming from, but all I heard were insistent screams that couldn't be too far off. It was bright and sunny, already around noon. I was tired and thirsty, and the Careers were long gone. They must have decided to go hunting instead of waiting out for me, the sneaky agile boy from Five who they could never, ever catch.
I climbed down the spire. It took me half an hour to reach where we'd originally camped out near the base. I crawled into the small passage where we'd been hiding. There was still some remnants of the puddle we'd been drinking from to keep us alive. I slurped up the rest of the water; it was already purified, at least that's what Vextrix had said I think. I really had relied on her, hadn't I?
All the while, the screaming didn't stop. It was irking me, and I started twitching. I climbed down the rest of the way, and started heading towards the noise. Every fiber inside of me told me it was a bad idea to head this way, but I needed to make the screaming stop. The pain, the carrying on, the desperation in the loud feminine squeals for help were driving me bonkers. I headed towards the noise, and soon I found its source.
I clambered up a jut of rock about a story above the ground. The screams were so loud, I knew whatever was happening was on the other side of the huge boulder. I scaled it, pulling myself all the way up. I peered over the edge, and then spit up some bile.
The cannon boomed after a threw up. The boy from Six, Titus, who'd seemed to quiet and introspective, was grinning with manic glee. One of the girls, either the one from Three or Nine, was underneath him, her body bruised and bloodied. He hadn't raped her, but he'd beat her to death. And then...and then he'd started to eat her. More bile was regurgitated from my mouth as I watched Titus nibble on her fingers before using a sharp piece of rock to cut open her skull and stomach. The rest was too graphic to ever recount. This was the brutal Hunger Games, but they had the be censoring this. They just had to be.
After that, I resolved to follow this boy. I didn't want to clean up his scraps or anything, but if I had the chance I would take him out. I whispered that to the cameras that night as I laid looking at the sky atop another tall spire of rock. The cannibal was slumbering nearby. The girl from Nine's face had been in the sky that night. Granja. I wasn't surprised. That girl was one of the weakest tributes left.
The next morning, my throat was itchy and dry. So was Titus's, because he kept moaning about water as he trudged around, his eyes glinting like a predator's. He was a true monster. I found a small waterfall and let Titus wander away from me. Erwin must've gotten over his annoyance with my "ADHD" or whatever they called my extroverted-ness in the Capitol, since he sent me a large metal water bottle and some iodine. It must've cost a fortune, and I thanked sponsors profusely as I filled the water bottle up to the brim and inserted one of my four iodine tablets into it. I held it in my hands as I jogged forward across the uneven terrain to catch up with Titus. I needed to keep track of this boy.
The next day, another cannon sounded, but Titus still had found no water and no food. It was risky following him. He'd almost seen me once, and if he saw me, I doubted I'd be able to face him. He was weak from hunger and dehydration, but he was off his rocker, mindless and animalistic and primal. He had more pure fury and power than any of us. I was genuinely scared of him. I wondered whose cannon had fired.
It seemed that Titus liked male meat just as much as he liked female meat. When DeMarcus, the strapping 15 year old from Three, wandered into our view, Titus went ballistic. He rushed at DeMarcus, and while DeMarcus punched and kicked hard and good, it wasn't enough. The boy folded underneath Titus's gnashing jaws, and before I knew it I was averting my eyes as the sounds of wet, ripping flesh and disgusting slurping filled my ears. Absolutely revolting.
That night, as I camped out in a cavity indented in a boulder nearby Titus's sleeping hole in the rocky dirt, I sipped some water and then watched the dead play. Both the boy and girl from Three, DeMarcus and...Electra was it? Yes, Electra. I repeated the tributes in my head again to refresh my memory. The skills I'd perfected with Vextrix and Hoban were dulling. I didn't tie my rope as tight sometimes, and I'd stopped repeating the names of the remaining tributes.
"Karyssa, Valerie, Theo, Careen, Angelo, Kerry, Titus, Desiree, Vextrix, Peach." There were so many Careers left. Something needed to happen to stop them.
A couple of days later, something did stop them.
I'd been tracking Titus relentlessly, and apparently that was enough to keep the Capitol entertained. They pestered Titus with crows and insects and sudden holes opening up in the dirt to trip him, but they never bothered me. They liked me, I hoped. They had to like me, or maybe they were tricking me so they could hit me the hardest with mutts later on. That would just suck.
Hunger was a constant pain. I rarely ate, sometimes finding scraps of meat, not human meat, but real animal meat, left behind from the Careers or some other careless tribute. There were also the few and far between edible plants that Vextrix had taught me to recognize. My stomach still hurt. But it would never hurt so bad that I would attack my fellow tributes and literally devour them in desperation. I'd kill myself before it got that bad.
Titus was getting uncomfortably close to the Cornucopia, and I tailed him reluctantly. I finally settled on a tall pillar of rock, clambering to the top and resting there. I watched Titus stumble around, and the golden Horn was well in sight. Thankfully the color of my jacket and hair blended well with the rock, disguising me. I watched as Titus got closer and closer to the Cornucopia. He was almost out in the open. He turned a corner and started heading back towards my direction, heading away from the Cornucopia, whose mouth faced me. He disappeared behind a boulder, and a cannon fired. Titus emerged from behind the boulder, and I heard shouts and a scuffle at the Cornucopia. My eyes locked there as a second cannon fired soon after the first. I had a clear view of what was going on.
The boy from Two and the girl from Four, Theo and Careen, were dead on the ground, metal cups in their hands. They must have been poisoned. The boy from Four, Angelo, had seemed sneaky and slimy. He must have done it. He lashed out, and his sword landed in the rib cage of the girl from Two, Valerie. She fell, spasming and screaming and making a racket. It was just Karyssa and Angelo, and Karyssa emptied an arrow into Angelo's chest as he tried to duck. Karyssa gathered as many supplies as she could before running from the scene. A cannon boomed as Karyssa disappeared; Valerie had stopped twitching. Angelo rolled around, moaning and groaning and trying to keep the blood in. As night fell, his cannon finally fired.
That night, the face of Theo, Valerie, Angelo, and Careen filled the sky, and I couldn't believe my luck. How many tributes were left? Only six including myself, and only one of them was a Career. I smiled as I curled up on top of a new boulder, watching Titus diligently as he curled up to sleep. Karyssa, Kerry, Titus, Desiree, Vextrix, Peach. It was easy enough now with so few of us left. They'd be interviewing Mom and Dad right now.
I grinned even wider as I fell asleep.
The twelfth day. A cannon woke me up. I grinned more. I was smiling so much these days, but that was because I was alive, and I was another step closer to Victory. Soon enough I'd be home. And if I died, at least I'd gotten to climb some of the most precarious and daring cliffs in all of Panem. Not many others could say they'd climbed the Badlands ridges of the Fortieth Hunger Games arena.
Titus seemed to catch scent of blood on the wind, because he broke out in a mad sprint north. I followed him at a light jog. My water bottle was almost empty, and I was tempted to drown the dregs of the bottle when we both stopped, but I waited a little longer. I heard a mangled cry, and looked around a boulder to see electrical pulses pushing Titus away from the corpse of the girl from Twelve, Peach. A big hatchet was lying next to her body, and I could see an extremely tall girl on the horizon staring intently at Titus, Peach, and the hatchet. Desiree had killed Peach. Titus wanted to eat Peach. I was just a simple observer.
The next morning turned out to be the day of reckoning for me. Titus and I traveled into the most treacherous parts of the arena. He stumbled and cut open his arms and legs and lapped up his own blood eagerly. I rolled my eyes. By now, I was getting used to his cannibalistic antics, no matter how vile they were. Erwin sent me a climbing pick. The point was sharp, sharp enough to slice through flesh, sharp enough to kill. It helped me climb amazingly fast.
It helped me kill Titus.
I was lounging on a spire when I heard the skirmish. I peered over the edge and saw Titus pushing Vextrix to the ground. She had a big machete in her hands, and she swung wide at him. It cut off two of Titus's fingers on his right hand, but he ignored the blood pumping out of his hand, instead using his left hand to throttle her. She squirmed and gasped out a raspy plea for help as Titus gnashed his teeth together.
I leaped down from my pillar and raced towards Titus and Vextrix. He lifted her head and banged it against a rock. She moaned loudly as he removed his hand from her throat. Ugly red marks were wrapped around it. He used both hands to bang her head against the ground again, and his blood from his cut off fingers drizzled across her face. I sneaked up behind them as they tussled weakly on the ground. They were both weak and tired from dehydration. I lofted the climbing pick into the air as Titus slammed Vextrix's head down on the rock a third time. Vextrix saw me, and rasped out weakly, "Kerry, run!"
With one slash of my pick I severed Titus's spinal cord. He flopped off of Vextrix, and a cannon boomed ominously.
I knelt beside my former ally and friend and cradled her bleeding head in my lap. Her skull was misshapen and bloody, and her eyes were already unfocused. Blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth, and she tried to say something but failed. I just held her and caressed her hair until she finally slipped away a couple dozen minutes later. Her cannon shattered the silence, and my first thought was this:
There's only three of us left.
Karyssa and Des were both stronger than me, or at least that was how things seemed. That was really how things were, and I knew it deep down. Karyssa was the strong, able Career who was one of the leaders of the Career pack before it had been foiled by Angelo. Des was a staggeringly tall girl, nearly seven feet tall, with the skills to plant a hatchet a foot deep in my chest with ease. Neither of them would have trouble taking me out in normal combat.
I took a page out of Vextrix's book and made a plan. I took a page out of Vextrix's book and thought for once.
It was the sixteenth day of the Games. I was tired and weakened from hunger and dehydration. I hadn't eaten in two days, and I hadn't touched a drop of water in nearly 24 hours. I was ready for this to end, and I knew Karyssa and Desiree had to be feeling the same way.
I made a loud racket, screaming bloody murder, on Day Sixteen at around dawn. I screamed and screamed and screamed until I couldn't anymore, and then I hauled myself up the tall pillar of rock that I had hid from the Careers on a staggering ten days prior. It felt like a lifetime ago that Hoban had died and I'd been all alone up here. It felt like a lifetime ago that I hadn't been in this arena.
A cannon fired before my voice was fully gone. Karyssa and Desiree had met up. One of them was dead. It was just one of them and me left.
I had stockpiled the most jagged, heavy rocks I could find over the past couple of days atop this spire of rock. They were piled around me, and I picked up one the size of a softball as Karyssa pranced out into the open. She inspected the base of the spire, and then hauled herself up the cliff face. She hadn't seen me yet. She was heading towards the little corridor in the stone where we'd hidden originally. She probably thought I was still lying there, that I'd done nothing this entire Games. The foolish, foolish girl. As she neared her chosen destination, I hurled the rock down at her. Thank god I was strong enough to throw a sharp hunk of rock well enough to pierce a girl's temple.
Karyssa slid off of the spire, tumbling down a story and landing with a thud and a weak moan. I slid down the rock as quickly as possible, but it still took me fifteen minutes to reach the bottom. I unhooked the climbing pick from my belt and strolled over to Karyssa. She was lying on the ground in a tight ball, moaning softly, cradling her head, unable to move. This was it. This was the moment I became a Victor.
I buried the pick in the base of her neck, puncturing her spinal cord just like I had with Titus. In minutes she was dead, and the trumpets were blasting, and the announcers were cheering my name brazenly into the arena.
I just turned away from Karyssa's body and climbed back up the rock spire. I'd meet the hovercraft at the top.
24th: Franny Yaern, D8F - killed by Valerie, Bloodbath
23rd: Hiyas Tonto, D1M - killed by Valerie, Bloodbath
22nd: Ash Black, D7M - killed by Theo, Bloodbath
21st: Diggory Doe, D9M - killed by Karyssa, Bloodbath
20th: Blaise Wesley, D8M - killed by Theo, Bloodbath
19th: Adonia "Addie" Child, D6F - killed by Careen, Bloodbath
18th: Chase Strata, D12M - killed by Karyssa, Bloodbath
17th: Rory Harris, D10M - killed by Theo, Day 2
16th: Quiola Cassidy, D5F - killed by dehydration, Day 4
15th: Zinnia Fraser, D10F - killed by Karyssa, Day 5
14th: Hoban Tam, D11M - killed by Theo, Day 6
13th: Granja Valdez, D9F - killed by Titus, Day 7
12th: Electra Magneta, D3F - killed by dehydration, Day 9
11th: DeMarcus King, D3M - killed by Titus, Day 9
10th: Theo Kasius, D2M - killed by Angelo, Day 11
9th: Careen Ellis, D4F - killed by Angelo, Day 11
8th: Valerie Lenn, D2F - killed by Angelo, Day 11
7th: Angelo Tempest, D4M - killed by Karyssa, Day 11
6th: Peach Unk, D12F - killed by Desiree, Day 12
5th: Titus Gein, D6M - killed by Kerry, Day 13
4th: Vextrix Webb, D11F - killed by Titus, Day 13
3rd: Desiree Redwood, D7F - killed by Karyssa, Day 16
2nd: Karyssa Evans, D1F - killed by Kerry, Day 16
Victor: Kerry Selmosa, D5M - 2 kills (Titus & Karyssa), won on Day 16. Nickname: The Vanquisher Victor (for killing Titus)
A/N: Here we have something that I wrote up in one sitting because I love Kerry so much. This will most likely have more chapters in the future exploring his personality post-Games. This should be fun to play with, but it isn't my main focus at all. I hope you enjoyed this, and review with your thoughts if you would :) I would love to know what people think of this story, especially people who read the original story, Well All Fall Down: The Fortieth Hunger Games by LadyCordeliaStuart.
Until Next Time,
Tracee