Chapter Nine

If I Fell

Author's Note: It would appear I'm battling Writer's Lethargy - what I think of as something a few degrees less severe than Writer's Block. Nonetheless, I'll try and push through another update. Of course, you know what helps…yes, reviews! A few words is all I ask, which I'll return in a review to your story :^)

Dan

Normally my dreams involved running, whether it's through forests, over deserts or along waterfronts. But right now, all I feel is falling. My own body's weighing me down, and yet I'm weightless enough to keep on rushing through air and sky. It never runs out. Why haven't I hit any -

Okay. Now I'm still. There's something underneath me, and it's not falling. That's a good thing.

But where am I now? I remember a cliff…oh jeez. I got pushed off the cliff. The Careers are all the way up there, and I'm down here, and…surely I shouldn't be alive?

It occurs to me only now that opening my eyes might give me a better idea about where I've ended up. And when I do, and all I see is a clean, white space broken by two large lamps, I know the cliff is must be a million miles away from wherever I am.

"What..." I say in a croakier voice than I remember having.

"You're awake."

My face goes into a spasmodic convulsion at this delicate sound, which is coming from my right. I try to sit up, but can't for some worrying reason. Thankfully, I can move my head to the right, and when I do, I see the face of my district partner looking down at me. She's propped up in a clean bed, attached to machines and drips that leave no doubt in my mind that we're in a hospital.

"It's…it's you."

"Yeah," she says with a hint of a smile.

"That is not possible. I watched you die. Y-you got stabbed right through the heart."

"Well, not the first time. But they finished the job, after I begged. Still, medicine over here is really something. The doctors tell me I'll be up and walking by tomorrow, if I want."

"Over here? Where's here?"

"It's a long story. And I mean long. I'm talking pages of typed words long. You've just woken up, Dan. If I were you, I'd just try and get some rest. Everything'll be explained soon."

"Okay…right." I close my eyes again, trying not to let my mind crack like an egg. One thing at a time, one foot in front of the other, otherwise you'll trip over your own feet. That's pretty much my running mantra.

I look over her way again, and know I'm going to have to admit this sooner or later:

"I am so sorry, but I just cannot remember your name."

"That's okay - we've all been through a lot; stuff gets pushed out of your head easily, I guess. It's Meliss."

Meliss Meliss Meliss Meliss…I am so not forgetting this again, unless I want another awkward situation later.

"Can you tell me, Meliss, why I can't get up?"

Her expression becomes uneasy; it's not an answer I'm going to like.

"Well, when they brought you in here a couple of hours ago, I overheard the doctors talking about your condition. Considering you fell, like, seventy feet, it sounds like you're actually doing quite well. But…"

"But…?"

"Apparently you landed on your back, so your spine got broken in, well, a lot of places. But before you panic -" she adds, upon catching my wide eyes, " - I'll say it again: the resources this place has are beyond belief. Operations we couldn't even dream of in Panem are routine here. Which means you'll be…um, , but only for a couple of days."

"What?"

The minute the word escapes my mouth, my fears are confirmed, and I suddenly can't not notice that, hard as I try to will my limbs to move, I remain totally still. I start hyperventilating.

"Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh man I can't move, I can't move…"

"Dan?" says Meliss, putting a hand on my shoulder in an effort to calm me down. Unfortunately, it does the exact opposite because, although I can see her hand right there, my skin and bones can barely feel its presence.

"You say there're doctors in this place? Well someone needs to get one over here right now and I mean right now because I can't move - "

"Dan? Hey, Dan, look - you remember me, right? Look at me."

My head turns to the left, and in my rising state of anxiety, I can't place a name to the face I see.

"Come on, I used to wear glasses. I was the guy in the all-too-revealing toga during the chariot procession."

Oh…oh, that's a relief. For one horrifying moment I thought I'd been hit with memory loss.

"Logan, man…didn't recognise you. What are you doing here?"

He kneels, kind of awkwardly, by my bed, arms leaning against the rail.

"I'm here for the same reason you are, and the rest of us: to thank our lucky stars we're alive. And to complain incessantly about the aches and pains that are the price for it."

"Fair enough…wait, rest of us?"

"Yeah, you're on the main ward. There are about ten of us, and with you, eleven, although from where you're positioned, I'm guessing you can't see that."

"Hey Dan!"

"Good to see you're awake."

"Welcome to the club."

"Alright, Dan?"

Whoa. That's a lot of voices. So, at this point, I can deduce this much: the other tributes are here, in this hospital, alive but injured, like me. Cool - that's about all the information I can process right now.

"Feel better now?"

I let my head sink deeper into the pillow beneath me. There's a thin layer of sweat on my brow, but I definitely feel calmer.

"Yeah, I do. Thanks."

"Personally, I think distraction of any kind is the best thing to complement medicine. And while we're on the subject, with you being awake now, you might be interested to hear that Flint and Ash are here too, in a private room just on the floor above."

My eyes instantly take more notice of the ceiling.

"Seriously? Wow. I mean…Flint, she was…I…"

"Did you see it happen?" asks Meliss with a certain amount of caution.

"Yeah. Well, no, I didn't see it happen exactly, but I saw the aftermath. It was horrible. Imagine…actually, don't. I don't want to think about it." I try to mentally shake out the flashback of Flint's wounds. "How is she? And Ash? What happened to her?"

"In spite of everything I've heard…and seen…Flint seems fine. I was visiting her just now, and saw that Ash had joined her. Flint's scarred badly, and she can barely move. Makes me so sad to see her that way, I can't tell you. As for Ash, I don't even know what happened to her - she hasn't told us anything yet. All I can say is that her throat looks like it got slashed, because it's all bandaged up - like me - and she has to use a whiteboard to say anything."

"Jeez," is all I can respond with. Secretly I think to myself, selfish as it's going to sound, how strangely relieved I am that there are people with just as many physical issues as I've got right now. Logan looks like he got off easy in comparison. But I'm obviously not gonna say that out loud.

"Except you just did," he says, still kneeling, with a neutral expression.

"Oh, crap." Fifteen minutes awake and most of what I've been saying has been pretty damn stupid. "I'm sorry, man. I don't mean that -"

"It's fine, don't worry. Really, don't. You're right. I've been thinking the same thing ever since I woke up. To be honest, if I couldn't walk, I'd be a lot more miserable."

I can't tell whether he genuinely wasn't thinking when he said that, or whether he's getting his own back for what I said. Either way, it smarts, because more than anything right now I want to get out of this bed, out of this building, and run all the way back to District Eight, to find an empty space with lots of trees where I can yell until my lungs burst.

Author's Note: Fanfic trivia of the day - the title of this sequel comes from the opening lines of T.S Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', which, personally, I think have to be some of the best out there in poetry: "Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherised on a table". :^)