Apologizes for not updating sooner, the weather in England is awful and affecting our internet. Thank you all so much for your commitment to this story so far; it makes me so happy every time I receive a review or a favourite, to think I might writing something for others to enjoy. If you have any constructive criticisms as well they would be so helpful, I only wish to improve, and I know this story is far from perfect.
As quickly as they commence, they end.
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XI. Drunk On Your Noble Deeds
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I dreamt we were together. He was laughing on my pretty belly as we charmed our selves younger.
I knew he was alive for there was breath that plumed like smoke from his throat. We were like two magnificent dragons, our home the currents of the breeze or the shoals of the seas.
We were free and passed where we pleased, flying through the districts; watching the little ant like people pile about each other, driving deep scars into the land beneath us.
Suddenly and together, we were the only ones alive.
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I awoke to news that none had died in the night; the stragglers from Districts 7 and 9 still out there somewhere. They would eventually succumb to the blades of each other.
Sleep evaded me like I had the plague. Days melded into nights, the rotations and contortions of the sun and her sister moon, once a light I relished in, passed by my bland eyes.
His movements orchestrated a cry within me; I could feel my vertebrae buckle and threat to break under the weight of such tension. With every hour past, I curled up tighter and tighter, my arms wrapped firmly around my knees, drawn up under my swallow chin, my skin only feeling the feeble light emitted from the projection.
I was on a precipice, an edge from which there was no return; I knew that now.
A feeling I was ready to deny sat between my shoulder blades and threatened to burst from me, just as I had seen that insect destroy Cron. I was mess, flaps of flesh sewn back together with a yarn made of Finnick's rough perseverance; only the emotion locked deep within keeping me together.
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Lieve should have been dead by now, but under some hidden gods watch, she clung onto life. With the stubborn brutality she had always conducted herself with, she refused to give up; so she bound up her stomach and lay in wake.
That's how Finnick found her, tied up some tree, her stomach still bleeding, it's gaping mouth gagged by soiled bandages. A pile of parachutes lay at the tree's basin, but in her weakened state she could not reach them. She had resolved to wait out the war, and confront the final battle when necessary.
Finnick wasn't one for climbing; more used to being beneath sea level; but he grappled with the tree and made his way up to her. She wasn't in a good condition, but through bared teeth declared otherwise.
With difficulty, he untied the thick mess of knots that bound her to the tree and slung her over his back, her knuckles white when gripping onto his broad shoulders. They made their way to the forest floor and he helped her settle down amongst the roots.
Her stomach was still a matted mess. Whatever had struck her wanted her to bleed. Though the wound had healed through the layers of muscles, the upper grafts of soft flesh still wept superficially, enough to require continual bandage changes.
Together they survived, lent on one another and gave more than just protection. They were the last vestiges of home. They were lost in a lonely sea, unfamiliar waves that bore only strife. But in each other they smelt salt and the sting of hot sand.
They made a pact, painfully sealed in a knucklebone grasp; that they would not be the other's end. Rather if they might be the last two, they would separate and let themselves succumb to the horrors of the island's mechanisms.
They were both lost and found in each other. They had both been the backdrop of each other's childhood; the familiar figure in the crowd. Lieve's family had owned a stall near Finnick's, and they'd grown up with each other in the distance. Once a peripheral spectator; Lieve was now Finnick's last claim to humanity, to the only thing that defined him now; the Games.
Her token was not dissimilar to his own. A small pearl, almost insignificant against the milky scars upon her chest. She'd earned them after contracting the pox as a child; still possessing the same stubborn mentality then as she did now; having picked her skin until it scared.
Such a gift though could not have been Lieve's own. Pearls were a trade in our district, but the gold chain it hung upon was surely sourced from elsewhere.
'I don't expect to win. I need to win,' she had murmured, 'He'd waiting for me.'
'He's been helping you out?'
'I wish he hadn't, we both know what has to be done,' her voice was almost inaudible; Finnick avoided her gaze as though he hadn't heard her, but a pain flashed about his eyes that only her words could have elicited.
She mumbled a man's name at night.
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They slept in the forest but both were prone to traipsing out to the water's edge. They went for days without seeing anyone else; from my own vantage point I could see that the Careers still stuck to the Cornucopia, fed on the riches of their blood spoils. Days past without sight of carnage, and a queasiness settled in my stomach, knowing that there was always a calm before a storm.
It came with white lighting teeth. It came from the water's edge.
She was only cleaning out her bandages, soaking her brutalized body. Her back was turned to the sea, only caring for what enemies the land might host.
The mouth emerged from the water without a sound. It caught Lieve from behind, saturated teeth biting down into flesh; it's jaw wide enough to encompass her entire waist. Her cry caught in her throat, as it's strangle paralyzed her body and she slumped into the tide. A plume of blood erupted under the water; Lieve's head surfacing for enough air to form a call. It had already sampled her soul.
By the time Finnick made it to the shore, another shark had converged on her. Intent on preserving whatever life she might have left, Finnick grappled at her arms, pulling her clean of the water, and clean of her lower half.
Her right leg was a blood pulp, her left completely severed along with the large part of her young hips. Their meal removed, the pair of sharks, monstrosities in their size vanished as quickly and as silently as they came, the froth of their attack dying down in the placid waves.
A whimper began between her teeth and shook down the length of her spine, its hilt jutting out from where her crushed hip once was. Adrenaline and the ebb of death stilled her severed body, her shoulders now cradled in Finnick's lap, his blood soaked hands soothing back her hair, pulling it from the slip of her wet lips.
Her voice hitched, and broke forth.
'You'll win this right?'
'Lieve,' Finnick keened, his face contorted with the pain she no longer felt.
'No, promise -' a spew of blood trickled out from the brim of her mouth, the last of her words coming clean, '- you need to tell him. It was always him.'
Her fingertips, light and slick with her own blood, dappled about his cheek, pulling him closer.
A word, delicate as a bubble formed on her lips, burst forth for only Finnick to hear.
A name, lost now to the bloody tides.
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The final parachute came that night and the Games immediately changed.
The trident was deadly in any hand, but in Finnick's it was brutal. His still stained hands clasped about it's shaft, Lieve's blood imprinting upon it's golden skin, her final grasp onto her lost district; the lost love that now urged him onwards.
He sat with her body all day, not caring that he might be sighted. He sat there until the craft came; her face saturated with tears and caked blood, the moisture rising up from her pores, just as her body did as it was awkwardly lifted away.
He cried for her, for the reality of it all, for the impending death that might await him. How would he approach such a foe; an empty handed child, shivering and alone?
Such a match was equalled with the trident. Glowing against the night's sky, it floated downward, languid in the breeze, as though weightless and without need to be anywhere. He caught it in one hand, and instantly his eyes changed.
And for the first time, I had hope, lodged in my throat, lodged in my stomach. A hope that my boy might finally come back to me.
He kissed her dead forehead and let his tears mingle with her own. He took the token from around her neck, and let it hang with his own; two teeth bared against his heart.
He bid her empty grave farewell and receded into the forest.
He emerged much later, a net in hand, finely woven and made of a forest offered twine. He'd barbed it too and had left a hold for weights about its edges. He'd find stones later to aid his catch, and so now, with it pressing his trident to his back, he silently slid into the sea, disappearing from sight.
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Was it so wrong to now possess some hope? It was feeble and faint, but burnt softly.
Selfishly I wanted him alive for my own. I missed his mannerisms and the way he made me feel, but also because the thought of his lifeless body seemed utterly incomprehensible.
But it was unthinkable though now for a new reason. I couldn't imagine my life without him. I was so entwined with him; I thought of him as another, far better half of my being. If he died, surely I'd cease to be as well. He no longer retained the status of brother or friend, but of something far less defined, but far stronger.
It was something I did not want to admit; out of fear it would not only never be reciprocated, but never come to fruition.
Finnick had to survive, indefinitely. I didn't care for what state he might come out as, mauled like Lieve or blind like that little boy. I needed only the faintest touch of him, but the thought was not enough.
He had changed before my eyes. He'd gone in a boy, but now through rites of blood had aged.
I was watching him become a man.
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He emerged from the water, a dark form against the sand, looming up behind her as she sharpened sticks. He was noiseless and poised, the lapping of the waves covering his tracks, the sun aiding his attempt by throwing his shadow behind him. Wren was completely unaware as the heavy net fell upon her head. The weights drew down to bury themselves in the sand and the barbs caught in her hair and ripped at her exposed skin.
She struggled like an animal under his net, screamed out like a pinned bird, her hoarse cry broken, already defeated.
She expected her fate, looked him square in the eye as she kicked and lunged about under the twine trap. With a set jaw and tensed arms she embraced the trident.
It hit her in the heart, blood arcing up to touch his face, caressing his cheek with its dappled fingers. Her face turned puce as she struggled beneath the net, writhing about in the tainted sand. Her silent contortions were a sickening dance, but there was nothing left to do but wait, wait for the blood to fill her lungs and drown her still beating heart. Her hair sprawled out, a black mass in the sand, speckled with the blood as it bloomed from her chest, an unfurling flower, bloody in its fresh petals.
She went out with a gurgle, blood filling her mouth as she spat out at him. The convulsions ceased and at last she was still.
She died with open eyes, watching him as he lifted the net up from her tangled form. He closed them softly and touched her hands to move them from their angles, back to embrace her bloodied chest. He straightened her legs too, relaxed her limbs before the stiffness of rigamortis set in and forever framed her in such a chaotic pose.
With a sun turned face, his eyes blinked and gaped, his mouth forming incoherent prayers that he might be delivered from such an act. He was sorry, I could see it in his face, but that was not enough. If he was to take her life, it must be for reason. He had to continue now, honour her death with his own survival. He was drunk on her blood, seeking out to kill her friends, kill them for his rite to return to a sickened reality.
He was now hard of sin, her blood marking his transformation. All that was Finnick had left him, to let forth a hidden nature, a will to survive on all counts and by any means.
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He found her next, a speck against the glaring sun. They found each other.
She ran and he dutifully followed, the barer of ill tidings.
Orchid hid within the Cornucopia, her bone white hair stained with dirt and grime.
He approached her slowly, already having noticed her limp state. Unlike Wren, the net didn't grace her form, instead held limply in his hand, still soaked in red.
Her hands were empty as she fumbled round in the corner, her splintered nails bleeding out as she clawed at the smooth walls, trying to find a purchase that might be her escape.
'You have a choice,' she cried, drawing in heavy breaths.
His shadow was upon her, the darkness grappling at his face, and hiding its contortions from view.
'I don't.'
She ran, ran out from the grasp of his shadow, past his three-pronged form in an attempt to break free of her fate. Her legs, once a length to be admired, now were as bent as a fawn's. She stumbled and broke, her ankles bruised and weakened in her flight.
She almost made it to the water's edge, almost.
The trident hit her square in the back, cracking through her spine with force, its barbs bursting out from between her breasts. As though time had been slowed; perhaps a cruel trick for the Capitol's delight, her body contorted in the air, her back arching forwards almost impossibly. Her hair caught about her neck, and she crumpled to the ground, faceless. Unlike Wren, she passed on like a snuffed out candle, a quick burst to deliver her on, only the curling plume of blood to give her still body motion.
He was careful in retrieving his weapon. He checked her pulse, and turned her over, staring her in the eye, contact with a dull glance. With wiped hands, he moved the hair from about her face and with two fingers, slowly closed her eyes. If it were not for the brutal triptych of puncture wound on her own perfect chest, you could have been fooled into thinking she was asleep.
The second cannon of the day rang out, but was yet to be met with a third.
The darkness descended in pearly tones; but as the sun's blind eye closed, only two of four lives had been taken.
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Grey would be the last to go, that was a predetermined indefinite. His bulk from the start had singled him out and already I knew he would be Finnick's last.
Whilst Grey was washed and well fed; Finnick was flagging, worn with his deeds.
They waited till morning, on opposite sides of the golden isle and as Finnick woke, the already moving form of Grey lurched towards him.
I had seen those knives gut children, and with arms wrapped about my middle I prayed that Finnick would not befall a similar fate.
Finnick rose, still groggy with sleep, determination breaching out from his confusion. With sloppy hands he grappled with the still slumbering trident. Grey approached with a manic grin splayed across his face, half his mouth drawn up in a grimace that could only be described as mad. They met as though play-fighting, weapons as though wooden, as they darted to and from one another, both weary in their arms as they sluggishly danced. Grey's knives were kicked from him hands, burying themselves deep into the isle's infinite skin.
The trident flew out, to dive between the waves. They were both unarmed now, two boys writhing about in the sand, hands at each other's necks, nails and teeth their only weapons.
Finnick made a break for it, to the freedom of the sea, his golden form disappearing into the water. Grey followed him without resignation and the two boys became hidden from sight.
All breath seemed to be held in; as though we too were submerged. I couldn't move, paralyzed, I felt the crush of tension around my ribs, as though a large hand was attempting to squeeze my innards out of my mouth.
A canon rang out, slow and forlorn, but revealed no aspect of the victor. Both boys remained beneath the waves.
Shoulders broke the surface, the face still hidden. I dared not breathe.
Slowly, with the tender undulation of the strangely calm water, the body turned; it's chest a sickening mess of punctures.
A barb had caught Grey's cheek, drawing up half a smile; even in death he still held that lopsided grin.
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Their winner was bloated with seawater, as though he had gulped it down.
Perhaps he had tried to drown himself; perhaps the sea had pushed in.
Either way his body was lifted up for all to see, crumpled and loose, like a broken doll.
His eyes were closed, in a bid perhaps to wake from this dream.
Fourteen years worn in fourteen marks upon his chest.
The Games had their champion.
The district had their winner.
The father had his son.
But I did not yet have my boy
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Did you like my version of Finnick's Games? I enjoyed writing it; a challenge to still convey the motions of the story line, but in a way that was more interesting to read.
It's my birthday tomorrow, and I would adore it if you've just read or favourited or alerted this, to gift me with a little comment, review or criticism. It would be a true delight.
