What's this? Two updates in one week and the promise of another this weekend? What is this world coming to?
Exciting news of the day is I finally got a new laptop! This one's all fancy and even has letters on its keys (not worn off, and with a full alphabet. The poor Mac I wrote LYGB on had no B so it took three tries every time to type "by")! Insert Snoopy dance here... And I now have a huge, almost completely empty file in my Documents labeled "Among the Damned." And I thoroughly plan on filling it.
I don't know if I have any horse people readers, but I'd say using a new computer is a lot like riding a new horse. At first you're super frustrated that it refuses to respond in exactly the same way, but slowly you figure out what makes it tick, what it likes, what it hates, how to hold your wrists, how best to communicate, etc. I'm in a metaphorical mood.
As always, a huge thank you goes out to Writting2StayHalfSane, my super-fantabulous beta reader. Who I adore and couldn't live (or at least write) without.
This chapter is Scrim, the last of the focus tributes that you haven't yet seen. I like this one.
"You're quite impatient… did you know that?"
"I'm not impatient! I just… Need to be doing something, you know, all this sitting just… creeps me out…"
My District partner took one last huff of irritated air and plopped grandly down on a bench that looked about ready to collapse in a stiff wind. It whined noisily as she leaned against the back.
"I don't like this arena, Scrim," she said thoughtfully after a moment.
I ran my tongue over the front of my teeth, momentarily enjoying the tang of Capitol mint toothpaste. "We could be in the arctic right now," I offered lightly. "Or in the middle of a desert. All things considered, I think this is a pretty nice place." I glanced idly around the bakery we'd finally decided to crash in—or at least I thought it was a bakery. The front of the small shop had glass windows that had since been shattered, plastered over and vandalized. Hanging over the sidewalk outside the single-hinged door was a sweet wooden sign with a carving of warm bread. Melanie had said the simple image was more like a burning pig, but I liked my idea better.
And the floor was much nicer than the other shops we'd ducked into on our walk from the main square. Most of them were bare concrete, or cracked open like an egg to reveal the building's foundation underneath, but our place had nice, only slightly splintered hardwood.
And curtains. Lovely little green curtains, still dangling from the tormented rods.
Melanie caught the line of my gaze and got heavily to her feet. "At least in the desert we'd have a mission to get water… or in the arctic, I'd be trying to make a fire right now."
"You can still make a fire if you want," I pointed out, watching my breath drift up to the raw ceiling.
She sighed at me in a mix of exasperation and sympathy. "We're in a wooden building, Scrim."
She talked to me like I was a young child sometimes; it was something she'd picked up in the Training Center and hadn't shaken since. I didn't particularly mind it most of the time, seeing as she was so far an excellent ally and a really nice person. It was actually kind of sweet, as long as it didn't mess up the balance of our partnership.
"Right." I stretched my arms out over my head with a huge yawn, annoyed at how the leather of my jacket tried to restrain the motion. "Well there's probably a fire place around here somewhere. Shall we have a look?"
Melanie hesitated a moment before shouldering our sole pack and extending a hand to help me to my feet.
What had immediately struck me about this city wasn't the fact that it looked like it had been abandoned for a hundred years, but rather that it didn't seem like it could decide which century it wanted to exist in. I'd watched the skyscrapers surrounding the Cornucopia slowly taper off into modest two-story buildings as we had made our way from the square. The once-shiny new technology stood side by side with shops like this one, made entirely from wood and with display cases that looked hand-crafted and never fitted for light bulbs. But just across the street was a spiffy white clothing boutique, whose graffiti and broken windows couldn't hide the fact that it would look right at home along Main Street back home.
Slick, black asphalt streets ran into cobblestones that met at roundabouts with country dirt lanes lined with wooden walkways; then you'd turn a corner and be on an uneven brick lane winding in narrow currents between tall, foreign buildings strung together by laundry lines. Some of the buildings had no right angles; others seemed to have their skeletons on their outsides. We'd even passed what looked like a cottage straight out of one of our history books, thatched roof and all.
But every piece of the city shared the same monochromatic theme, slurred together under a thin layer of ruin and abuse. Despite its quirks, it was a sad place… it gave me the distinct feeling of a home that had just been deserted very suddenly one day, as if every citizen had just put down what they were doing and disappeared.
"Alright, watch your step. We don't know how strong these floors are," Melanie warned absent-mindedly as she lightly tread through the narrow doorway behind the shop's counter. Tatters of a cotton curtain hung limply in the empty door frame. My ally was short enough not to notice them, but I had to brush them aside to pass.
Even if the floorboards had been made of spider's web, I don't think Melanie needed to worry about falling through. She had a pretty, flowing way of moving that barely seemed to register on the ancient wood beneath her boots. In fact, the only noises in the painfully narrow hallway were that of my own shoes clashing against the floor.
I'd never really liked wearing shoes.
"This looks like an… office?" she mused quietly to herself, peering into one of the rooms splitting off from the hall. The quiet of the building would have been calming if I'd known the place; in the moment it just seemed distinctly sad. Black and white portraits of people in odd clothing decorated the peeling walls, hanging at awkward angles off bare nails. I took a moment to adjust one to hang straight again.
It took Melanie a second to notice I'd stopped. "Scrim?"
"Look at these people. Do you think they were real?"
I caught her fair brow crumple slightly out of the corner of my eye. "Real?"
"I mean, the Capitol could have just conjured up these pictures. They probably have some artist for making artifacts."
The rough wooden frame hosted the torsos and heads of two people; a man and a woman, judging by his broader shoulders and her tiny waist. One of her thin arms was draped around the back of his neck, and one of his rested on her side. But their faces were gone—scratched out by a fingernail or perhaps a shard of the glass that used to protect the photo.
Would they have been smiling? Were they a married couple, perhaps, newly wed and in love? Or maybe this was a portrait of a father and a daughter… Maybe they'd run this shop, a million years ago. Maybe Melanie and I were intruding in their place of business. Maybe this shop had been their livelihood. Maybe it had been passed down, father to son (or daughter) for generations, carefully taken care of by each owner with the knowledge that it would one day belong to their offspring…
"Of course they're fake," Melanie said gently, reaching for my hand but taking my wrist instead. "I don't think they even had cameras back then."
"Right." With one last glance at the bleached couple, I yielded to my ally's gentle tug and continued down the hall.
On our tour of the petite two-story building, we passed a large kitchen, what we thought was a bathroom, another study, a questionable spiral staircase leading to a row of tiny bedrooms, and a once-cozy living room with a gaping hole in the wall that we concluded had once been a grand window overlooking the street below.
"What I don't understand," Melanie piped up thoughtfully around her bite of jerky from the bottom of the pack, "is the point of having weapons at the Cornucopia at all. In this arena, I mean." She only occupied a quarter of the old couch she'd curled up on, her legs tucking neatly beneath her to fit nicely onto one cushion.
"What do you mean?" I asked lightly, barely catching the pack of jerky.
"Well," she swallowed, "if every building in this city is like this one, and looks like its owner just decided to randomly move out, then wouldn't the butcher's shop have all those massive knives just sitting around?"
She had a point. Even in this ancient little bakery, the kitchen had been lightly decorated with wooden spoons, rusted pots and books of rotting recipes. The desk in the office had a collection of feathers and little pots of ink, as well as many yellowed and wrinkled papers. Things like the rugs and blinds were removed, and many of the objects in the place were overturned and picked over, as if it had been looted, but the Capitol certainly didn't leave us empty-handed in the potential weapon department.
"Yeah, I guess so," I muttered, watching my fingers pick at the fraying floral silk covering the armchair I lounged on.
"Aren't you worried? I mean, what if the Careers find the butcher's first? Or maybe there's an armory around here? A blacksmith? A firearms shop?"
I glanced up, concerned by her frightened tone. "We can worry all we want. It's not going to help us much." The chair looked as if it had once been beautiful, sort of like an elderly woman who had once been the jewel of the town. Tattered, worn down, but still clearly pretty. "And besides, I think we're pretty darn set just the way we are." I tore off a bite of jerky with my best grin, and was rewarded with a small smile from her.
"Yup, in the middle of a sketchy city arena, with no idea where any other tributes are, with only one pack of jerky and some trail mix to last us for who knows how long." Her sarcasm was clear, but I liked that she was smiling.
"But we're alive!" I got to my feet and bounced over to her couch. "And we each have an ally." I flopped grandly onto the cushion next to her, grabbing one of her ankles and drawing it across my lap, spurred by her childlike giggles. "And neither one of us are mortally wounded or ill."
"I don't know, Scrim, I twisted my ankle pretty badly getting us that jerky," she responded, trying not to smile as I caught her other leg and pulled it to rest by its partner.
"Which one was that again?"
All joking aside, I couldn't pretend I wasn't slightly concerned with her. Though the first few moments of the Games were still a blur to my groggy mind, I could distinctly remember drawing away from the chaos of tributes and being grabbed roughly by the arm. I'd swung around, not ready to hurt anyone but needing to face my attacker, and it'd somehow been my ally. With a pack. And a slight limp. We'd run in the opposite direction of another pack of tributes until the Cornucopia sounds were reassuringly faint. Then it had just been a matter of terribly slow time until we'd found this place. She'd been walking fine in the back half of the trip, but I could tell it still hurt her.
"My left," she informed me, watching the sky outside of the window darken.
I picked at the laces on that boot, then with her nod of reassurance slid it off. "You have tiny feet," I commented quietly.
"I know."
I peeled off her black sock and dropped it into the open mouth of her boot on the ground. The stink of sweaty feet wafted up to greet me, curling her lips into an apologetic smile, but I didn't mind. It wasn't as if I hadn't smelled dirty feet before.
"Here?" I prodded the outside of her ankle gingerly, rubbing the inside with my other thumb.
She winced. "Yeah."
We sat in silence for a few moments as the light in the room continued to gradually dim. Then she sighed.
"Do you really think we actually stand a chance in this arena, Scrim?"
I grinned at her, continuing to message her cold skin. "I think so. Why wouldn't we?"
"We're from Eight. Neither of us knows anything about weapons, or fighting, and I'm not entirely sure I could kill another kid."
"You don't have to, silly. At least for the time being, I don't think you're going to have to be killing anyone."
"Right," she breathed absentmindedly. There was another quiet moment before she took another breath and dropped her forehead unexpectedly on my shoulder.
"You have friends at home, right?" she asked my elbow."
"Yeah."
"And you miss them?"
"Of course."
"Well how are you going to… deal… with never seeing them again?"
I leaned my cheek against the top of her head, grateful for the human contact. One of the things I'd feared most coming into these Games was the idea that I would be trekking through an unknown arena all by myself, without any supplies or another person to keep me company. It'd been that thought that worried me most, not the fact that I could die at any moment, or that I was in a completely unpredictable environment with kids that wanted to kill me. I just couldn't bear being alone.
Luckily I didn't have to.
"Is this the sort of thing you've been thinking about? Never seeing your friends again?"
She hesitated, then nodded against the leather of my jacket.
"That's no way to make it in here. Jerky?"
"We need to save that, Scrim. We don't know how long it's going to last us."
"Right."
And oddly, in that moment I was quite sure that the small boyish girl who leaned against my shoulder and was draped across my lap was my friend. Not in the exact same way that people back in Eight were my friends, but she definitely fell into the category.
My thumb explored the groove around the bone in her ankle. "Melanie?"
She hummed sleepily.
"Would you consider me your friend?"
Another moment of hesitation. My heart sank the tiniest bit.
"Of course, Scrim. We need all the friends we can get in here."
She couldn't see, but I was grinning. Just happy not to be alone.
If you would review, I would be happy. Though the last chapter was a total wake-up call to me as to how review-spoiled I am... Me, so used to ten reviews per chapter and suddenly getting two. While any other of my stories might get one review a month. Or year.
While I earn back the trust (and Story Alerts) of my other once-readers (and maybe they are reading but are too fed up to review...), please do drop a comment. And if you have nothing to say about Scrim, or Melanie, then at least tell me that doorframe is one word. Or two. Word says it's one, Google Docs says it's two; my instinct is to follow Word like a fangirl, but what thinks you?
And is the format of this chapter mucho screwed up or is it just me?
It's your turn. Good luck.
Topsy
