Final Moments
He staggers through the woods, gasping for air. The entire world spins around him, and he holds in a moan of pain as he dodges trees and crashes through the undergrowth. Holding one ripped shirt sleeve over his mouth, the dark-haired teenager releases a hoarse cough, and when he pulls his arm back there is a deep red stain across the fabric.
Every step hurts him. He tries to cover his badly torn stomach with one arm, but it does nothing to prevent the blood and mess from soaking through, dripping onto the forest floor, leaving a trail of crimson in his wake. His head is spinning, throbbing, pounding. The pain is unbearable, and he very nearly passes out, but he must go on. He has to keep moving; his life depends on it.
He has seen so many others die these past few days. He is not going to join them.
And she is after him. He can hear her footsteps hot on his trail, gaining ever closer. The girl is injured just as he is, one hand held over the remains of her left eye, from which bright scarlet blood is steadily flowing, seeping through her fingers and trickling down her forearm in thin streams.
But in her other hand she wields an axe, a large, lethal weapon with a cruel, sharp-edged blade, already stained red with the blood of its previous victims. She is desperate, just as he is, but there is enough strength and determination left in her to go on until she is announced victorious.
She is bigger than him, more powerful than him. And she wants to live, just as he does.
He has no weapon left, no defense against this girl and her heavy, bloodstained axe. If he cannot escape just this once, it will be the end for him.
The boy stumbles along blindly through the trees. His injuries slow him down, draining his life away by the second, but pure adrenaline propels him forward. He almost trips over a fallen branch in his haste to get away, but quickly steadies himself and continues onward.
He knows he cannot stop. If he stops, he will be killed for sure. If he keeps going, however much it hurts, he may still stand a chance.
A very slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.
He shoves his way through a collection of bushes and reaches a familiar cliff, the steep rock wall plummeting down into an endless abyss, and realizes that he cannot move any further. Animalistic survival instincts kicking in, he drops to the ground just as his opponent quickly takes aim and throws the axe directly at him.
He had ducked just in time, as the axe sails over his head and down into the abyss beyond.
Her fingers cannot staunch the heavy flow of blood draining from her empty eye socket, staining her skin red. She is now weaponless, but she can still outlast him, for he has begun to writhe and convulse on the ground, his face scrunched up in pain. His stomach was torn almost completely open, the intestines nearly visible through the slashed material of his clothing; there was no way he could last much longer.
The disturbed ghost of a smile crosses her face as she realizes this. All she needed to do was wait for the cannon…
But she doesn't know what he knows.
So when the axe returns, ricocheting off the force field and back over the edge of the cliff, she is vastly unprepared. The axe blade lands in her skull with a sickening crunch, her face frozen in an expression of eternal horror at the unexpected betrayal of her once-faithful weapon.
The boom of a cannon echoes through the treetops. Within moments, her body is collected in the whirr of a hovercraft overhead, and he struggles to keep his eyes open. To not lose consciousness.
Trumpets begin to blare in heartless fanfare from a place beyond the forest, and a bodiless voice excitedly makes the announcement, one that even he can hear in his near-comatose state.
"…And now, ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present to you… the Victor of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, and Panem's second Quarter Quell… District Twelve tribute Haymitch Abernathy!"
With a click, the television set turns off, the image on the screen fading to black.
A/N: Recognize the scene? Oh, I'm sure you did. This was just my take on it, in oneshot form.
This was originally written as a prologue for my other fanfic, "Under the Harvest Moon," but in the end I decided to upload it to this site as a separate story. After some significant edits, it just didn't fit in well enough with the rest of the fanfic.
Eitehr way, thank you for reading! Reviews would be greatly appreciated, as this was my first ever Hunger Games fanfiction!
-Cotton Candy Mareep