AN: I hope you all had a good week! I also hope you enjoy this weeks chapters, I don't really have much to say today.
Enjoy
Lily's breath was making a horrible rasping noise that had her thinking of random men who had died on her kitchen table back at home.
They'd get sick in the mines, or they would get blown up in the mines, and someone would think to bring them out to Rose Evans' house, because sometimes Rose could work miracles, and they would lay them down on top of the table that Lily sometimes eat off of, and then they would die there.
They would make sounds like the ones that she was making first.
She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the cool rocks at her side.
Too much had happened over the last twenty-four hours.
She'd killed at least three people, she'd lost James, she'd thought that James had been killed, she'd almost been killed, she'd narrowly escaped, and then there was the rule change.
When the flashlight had fallen down the hill in her direction, she had dropped her bow and lunged for it, using their momentary distraction to her advantage. She knew that if she aimed the light at them, then they wouldn't be able to see her. So she did, turned off the light after she'd temporarily blinded them and then she slunk off to the side while they tried to work out which one of them was dead.
Lily had been sure it was Emma until she'd seen 2's picture in the sky. Though she would have guessed at the rule change that both tributes from 1 were still alive. They may have made the rule change because of her and James, and she believed that they had, but they wouldn't have done it like that if they were the only team left. She was pretty sure both tributes from 10 were still alive too. She hadn't seen or heard anything from them since they got here. She couldn't remember much about them from before either.
She wanted to be excited about the rule change, she wanted to hope that she could get James back to his family. She was pretty sure, at this point, that was the only way she could go home and not be completely broken; by bringing James with her.
She had been sure that James was dead until she heard Ludo tell her the rule change too. She hadn't seen his picture in the sky last night, but she hadn't been fully conscious despite her best efforts and she'd passed out before the end of the anthem.
She should have been excited about the rule change. For what it meant for James as well as for her.
But she didn't think that she was going to get home anymore. She didn't think that James was going to find her in time, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to travel far if she found the strength of will to crawl out of her hiding spot. She wasn't even sure if she could stand. Between the explosion and the fall into the rocks, she was pretty banged up.
She really hadn't gone far from where she'd fallen. She'd quickly realized that that wasn't an option. She had felt blood trickle out of her ears and knew that her concussion was worse than she'd thought. She'd thrown up and realized that there was blood on her abdomen too. And that everything hurt a lot more than she'd realized when she'd been running for her life.
She had edged along the pile of rocks she'd fallen into, until she found a wedge where she figured she could hide until morning.
But then morning came and went, and she hadn't been able to convince herself to move yet.
There was too much blood and no medicine in the arena and her breathing sounded like that of a dying coal miner.
She closed her eyes and more flashes of men dying in her home washed over her. But this time she saw her mom hovering over them, her worried eyes filling with frustrated tears.
Her eyes shot open but she could still see her mom, and she knew that she was giving the screen the same look whenever they showed Lily. She knew that she was quietly muttering under her breath, telling Lily to get up, because she'd heard her mom say that to dozens of dying men. Only a few had ever listened, but all of them had wanted to. Lily wanted to.
She didn't want to die like this. She'd spent so much time thinking about how she didn't want her death to be a spectacle for the people of the capital to fawn over, but she didn't want to wither away quietly either.
James had risked his life to get her the bow that she'd used to upset the entire game, Moody had orchestrated a love story for her and James so grand that the gamemakers rewrote the rules for the first time in history. She had so many people around her that were trying to keep her alive, that were rooting for her, and if she laid here between the rocks until her wounds did her in, then she was letting them down.
She began to try and steal herself as she made the decision to get up. She didn't know how far from the river she was, or if James was still waiting for her there, but she knew that she was going to try. That had probably been the real point in changing the rules. They couldn't tell James where she was, so they had to motivate her to get up off her ass.
She ground her teeth together and then pulled her legs up, bending them at the knee so she could drag herself out. It was slow going, but her legs weren't injured, and they did most of the work, so she'd almost convinced herself that she had been making a big deal out of nothing.
But then she was lying beneath the trees, her raspy breathing getting drowned out by the birds and the crinkling leaves that Lily was on top of, and she rolled onto her side to push herself up and black spots started dancing in her vision.
At least one of her ribs was definitely broken. And there was a gash in her stomach. Now that she was out in the open, she could tell that she couldn't hear well out of her right ear, but it was no longer bleeding.
The black spots didn't go away as she stood up, leaning heavily against a tree. Her bow was on the ground at her feet, the arrows spilled out of their sheath and Lily thought she was going to cry at the effort it took to kneel down and put them all back.
She had no way of knowing how long it took her, but she had almost passed out twice, and her body had tried to get her to throw up again, but there was nothing left in her stomach to heave up. She hadn't had anything to eat or drink since yesterday morning when she'd left James.
When she was standing again, she gave a quiet breath of laughter. "You better be at the fucking river," She muttered, for the capitals sake she supposed. They wanted her to go and find James, so she should let them know that that was her plan.
She pushed herself from one tree to the next, leaning against them to catch her breath and moving painfully slow. She knew she was heading in the right direction, she wasn't sure how she knew, but she knew. She also wasn't afraid of the gamemakers making any sudden changes at the moment. They wouldn't change the rules to get her on her feet only to have something jump out and swallow her whole.
There wasn't enough tension in that kind of death for them.
oOo
It had to have been hours before she could hear the river. She actually did cry then, both because she couldn't hear it until she could also see it, and because she was so thirsty and in so much pain and so hot. The water was a godsend.
She nearly collapsed on the riverbank, her bow clattering against the rocks as it fell out of her hands. She scooped the water greedily up to her mouth and drank two handfuls. And then she lost her balance and fell over.
"I'll just rest here then," She sighed, stretching out her hand so that it was in the water and then pulled it up to her forehead. She was burning up.
Lots of things caused a fever. She knew that. It could be the broken bones or the dehydration or some other small and manageable problem. But it seemed more likely that it was the gash she hadn't been able to look at.
She wasn't going to try just then, she just kept cooling off her hand and then bringing it to her forehead.
She'd made it to the river, she was out in the open.
It was up to James to find her now. She slipped her other hand into her pocket and clamped it down over the bit of paper that Moody had sent her on the second day. She held it tight and hoped that she'd done enough now.
Star-crossed.
If there was any sort of truth to it, he would find her.
It just might be too late.