And here is the last chapter of the arena. Tonight, we have a victor. And also a runner-up of sorts...

To Sparrow.


She'd once mentioned to me that you can't depend on anything in the arena. I'd thought she meant tributes, which, at the time, I understood. My experience with Seed taught me that. Hell, my experience with her taught me that. But foolish me thought, though subconsciously, that things like the palms were there to stay. Things like the Cornucopia. The floaty clouds that I might have called beautiful once. I thought they were a constant; something that, no matter how screwed up its inhabitants became, stayed exactly unchanged and ever-present.

I was a fool.

One huge bluster of wind was all it took to make these "solid" things turn to flame-like images. Untouchable. Two-dimensional. Unreal. And it only took another gust of wind to wipe them all away completely. Just snuffed out. Gone.

As I stood in the middle of nothing and nowhere, I mused idly at where they went. Or did they even go anywhere? Were they here to start with? Where does fire go when it's extinguished? Certainly not back to the Capitol. I doubt the mutts and palms and Cornucopia were sent back to headquarters for next Games. Wherever they were, they weren't coming back.

I was jealous.

That single thought spiked up the usual war inside me, the one that raged between the part of me who would welcome that sort of blissful nothing and the part who would be shamed to take another unnecessary life in this horrible event. My life wasn't worth taking, I figured, promptly followed by its twin screaming that my life wasn't worth living.

Someone outside my own thoughts spoke. "This is impossible… no, no, no they'd never do this…"

It was a girl. Not her, as I'd been foolishly hoping, but a Career with length in her legs and fear in her eyes. Fear in a Career, I mused. How unusual. This must be a bad situation if a Career is afraid.

I almost reached for my beloved and painfully new scythe before realizing it wasn't there. There wasn't anything. Just the girl. And me. Two lives prepared to be shaved down to one.

Her piercing blue eyes shot straight through me in barely controlled panic. "I have to kill you," she said out loud, as if confirming the fact to herself. Or maybe asking for my consent. I didn't give it.

Then she reached for something small in pocket, something I wasn't expecting but watched with sidetracked curiosity anyway.

"Hey," I croaked, vaguely surprised that my voice still worked. "I have one too."

She watched in astonishment, as I pulled out my own little blue stone from the depth of my worn shorts. She stared at our matching marble-like rocks for a moment before speaking slowly and taking a few steps away from me. "This is how they found us… the mutts, I mean. You have one, I have one… Neveah must have, but how…"

Her brow crinkled as she continued to back away from me, her voice getting slightly louder with each step. "Wait... the Eight girl had one, too! I thought her ring looked large, when we ran into them… they must have switched the original stone with this thing when they checked her token… I get it now!" She tossed her hands into the air uselessly and tilted her face to the sky with a single triumphant laugh, as if she could speak directly to the Gamemakers. "Neveah must have killed that girl and touched the stone by accident—things only started to get weird when I touched mine, and you must have had yours before then—Clever. Clever, clever, clever Capitol… All three of the stones activated together somehow made that herd of things… And they did what you wanted. They narrowed it down to just two, but how are you going to mess this up for me now? Is it going to… to…" She sputtered for words, still addressing the sky. "To rain acid? And we'll have to take cover under each other's bodies? Will there be more crazy mutts? Walking corpses? Tidal wave? Are you really just going to let me off the hook this easy?"

Her newly lit gaze fell on me, a good twenty feet between us now. "Kill a tribute with your bare hands… Not something I ever thought I'd need to do, but desperate times call for desperate measures…"

And she began pacing steadily toward me.

"I really don't want Cal to kill Sparrow… That might make me hate her a little bit…"

The Career girl froze in her steady stalk toward me and glanced up at the limitless sky. The thin female voice swept the blank expanse of arena like the breeze had back when there was one. Just as its echo faded, it rang out again, this time from the opposite direction.

"Still want Cal to win…"

It was slightly different that time, like a sister to the previous one. The Career girl continued scouring the skies as if she could see the speakers if she squinted hard enough.

"Go on, then…" the first voice wavered. "Do something, Sparrow…."

I tottered a step forward, unsure of what exactly I could do without any weapons. As much as I'd wanted my scythe before, it was nothing like the yearning for something in my hideous, hideous hands that I went through in that moment.

"I don't really want Sparrow to win…" the first droned. "He is really broken…"

"I'm fully anticipating a Four versus Eleven showdown…"

Showdown? Like, graphic fight?

The Career girl answered for me. She took the moment of my distraction with the blissfully arguing voices to sprint at me and leap in such a way that her full weight tackled my thin frame to the sand, crushing my already beat up shoulder beneath me in a dazzling array of pain.

"I am…. not quite as fond of Cal…"

The Career girl, Cal I assumed, seemed provoked even further by this last comment and jamed her elbow harshly against my throat. My windpipe wasn't crushed, but certainly not in the state it had been before.

"How can you live with yourself… training for such pain?"

Cal brought her fist down against my jaw, reminding me oddly of how she'd slapped me once… That part of me that wanted nothing more than to take all the pain it could before disposing of my useless existence welcomed the abuse and urged my limbs not to fight it. This is easy, it told me as Cal delivered blow after expertly placed and blindingly painful blow.

"If Sparrow wins, it's just a broken Victor…"

"I hope that Sparrow dies…"

Stars and blotchy darkness clouded my vision of the vast blue sky, Cal's hair-strewn head casting a dark shadow over me as I took my abuse silently. I must be close now… the sort of pain that I could only associate with death split through my consciousness in a blinding rage of metallic torture…

"Now I want Cal to win… Sparrow is too broken to win…"

"I lost my respect for Cal…"

"The Four is where my vote lies…"

"Stop." This was a new voice, masculine, strong, and firm. "Stop or we will engage negative magnetics."

Cal paused at the announcer's voice, but turned quickly back to me and delivered a solid blow my one of my cheekbones that felt like a broad nail being pounded into my face.

That was when it became odd. Something like a hugely heavy blanket pressed up against my bruised and bloodied front, pinning me further to the ground. Something similar seemed to have happened to Cal, but due to the fact that she'd been sitting up, the impact of the invisible blow sent her flying back six feet and landing heavily in the sand a ways away from me.

"Do not approach each other," the Gamemaker instructed firmly. "Stay where you are."

I let my head thud back against the sand as the weight lifted gently. My eyelids slid shut, leaving me alone in the darkness with my confusion and aching pain. How would I go about dying, I wondered to myself as I let the arena slip out of my thoughts. How would I tell myself to stop living?

To give up?

"On your feet, please, tribute."

No.

"On your feet, tribute."

I squeezed my eyelids together, refusing to acknowledge the woman's voice emerging from directly above me. I could smell the peppermint gum on her breath… a Capitol-ite.

"I can and will use force if you do not comply, tribute."

I cracked open my eyes with the utmost reluctance, cursing my body for its survival instincts.

"On your feet."

The woman standing over me was certainly from the Capitol—I recognized her as one of the Gamemakers behind the panel at the Training Center. She held an odd sort of electric device in one hand, her other placed impatiently on her hip. Every nerve in my body screamed its complaints as I struggled upright and rolled unsteadily to my feet.

"You can take me," I croaked to the Gamemaker, noticing the circular hole in the ground and recognizing it as one of the original starting plates that must have been since covered in sand. Trickles of the white stuff fell down the dark chute to what I knew was the launch room below… So very close this entire time but a complete world away…

"I'm not going to win this thing, just let me…" I buckled at the waist, accidentally catching sight of my hands and instantly nauseated.

"You may have one thing," she informed me mechanically.

I glanced up at her through puffy eyelids. "Anything?"

"You may have one thing," she repeated.

"May I have a person?" Something delicate and flighty stirred in my gut; a warmth that had long since been snuffed.

"You may have one thing."

"I'll have Aislin." My voice cracked painfully over the name I'd even been avoiding in my thoughts. "Bring her back, let her win—"

"The Capitol cannot reverse death. You may have one thing."

That flicker of hope, of warmth, was twisted into oblivion once more, doubling the hurt in its trail with the reminder of how things had once been.

"Choose quickly. You may have one thing."

I took a shattered breath that burned my throat.

"I want a life."

To my surprise, she didn't shoot down my request, but pressed a series of buttons onto her device and turned to face the entry chute expectantly. In moments, something small and shiny was tossed lightly out of the gaping hole and into the air before her; she snatched it expertly and turned toward me, offering the tiny vial on an open palm.

There was no mistaking the slightly cracked glass or tiny cork. There was even sand still clinging to its smeared sides. Aislin's medicine stared up at me, as innocent and as profound as ever.

"Take your object, and best of luck."

The Gamemaker returned to the shoot and waited patiently beside it as I stared at the vial I'd lost not too long ago. Almost silently, a plate filled the gap and she stepped cleanly onto her ticket out. Perhaps it was the light, or the fact that my right eye was swelling terribly, but I could have sworn she'd flashed me the tiniest of smiles before she dropped down the chute and the hole disappeared.

I turned slowly to where I knew Cal was waiting, every muscle of my being protesting with all its might. She stood expectantly right where she'd fallen, but she now had a brand new, gleaming trident in her grasp. Not one of the arena's steel and wood versions, but an expertly crafted weapon that reeked of death.

I glanced down at my puny bottle, sitting amongst the trash of my putrid hand. Was I supposed to take it? Maybe it would kill me. That wouldn't be entirely unwelcome, I decided as every joint from my hips down abused me thoroughly for trying to walk.

A new sort of energy glinting in her already blood-lust flooded gaze, Cal swung her weapon expertly into a position that would be perfect to skewer me on. I uncorked my bottle.

She threw her trident.

If time could choose when to be speed up and slow down, it decided to make those last few moments happen in a rapid-fire sort of rush. First thing I was aware of was the deadly weapon flying straight for my throat with uncanny aim; next, even more pain than before, enough to almost spot out my vision altogether and earning a sort of animalistic roar of raw agony that split the eerily calm air like her trident, I was sure, was splitting my neck… but no blood. Another cry; this one not mine, and not of pain but frustration, and the girl approached me again. The putrid hands that brought such hatred straight to my chest had somehow kept the bottle captured in them… I brought it up, just as the Career girl leaned down over me to dislodge her weapon and deliver the final blow… and the tiny amount of liquid still contained in the vial splashed straight out of the glass and across her face, seeping solidly into her wide gaze and sending her wheeling back instantly, clawing at eyes that I couldn't see and wailing in such a way someone might if they were getting a limb sliced off slowly…

Then silence.

Then a cannon.

And trumpets that sliced my oversensitive mind into unthinkably dismal bits… And then the slow, slow realization that breath was still flowing feebly through my lungs, and that that miraculous beat in my chest still pumped.

I have nothing to die for, I realized as the novelty of a heartbeat truly sank in. Twenty-three people have died to get me to where I am now. Twenty-three families will be mourning tonight. Never seeing their children again.

Why should I make that twenty-four?

Never will I forgive my hands for what they have done. Never will I forget the light leaving the eyes of the only girl I've ever cared for. Never will I take the life of another.

And never again will I doubt the value of my own.


Callista Cade, District Four

"I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be." -Douglas Adams


A/N: And fin.

Let me take advantage of the fact that you may figure that it's the last arena chapter and you should probably read the AN, and throw in some interesting factoids about these Games...

There is a chapter between Chapters 26 and 27 that I did not include for a reason... no one tribute's perspective could cover all that happened, with Sparrow finding his stone and finally getting his scythe, and finding the mutts, Neveah had a little slice of panic, and Cal had a lot more thoughts and musings about "back home." I'll probably post this mini-chapter (if anyone wants it) after the last chapter of Sparrow's post-Games settling.
The next chapter should answer a lot of your questions ("Why did these random Gamemakers interfere?" "C'mon, that medicine wouldn't have killed her." etc, etc).

Changed my mind.
A sequel is happening... I'm such a pushover. That, and FF is a great place to stretch and flow with your writing style. Tweek a little, flex a little. Look for my call for tributes (again, I'll only accept ten. And I don't think it'll be first-come-first serve this time... unless I get extremely impatient).

Factoid: Around chapter 10-ish, I seriously considered changing this fic's title to my original idea, And This One Will Hurt... but I didn't because I thought it would cause too much confusion for what it's worth. I'm crazy busy right now, as you could probably tell from my none too quick updates, and am fast at work at my own original novel and a couple of one-shots in a few different categories...

If anybody's interested, I have a HP series that's prepared to be posted as soon as my HP beta is done with it. And a Mortal Instruments one-shot that will be up in the very near future.

When I first started out with LYGB, I was sure there would be maybe 20 chapters and I would be over the moon if I got 100 reviews. Check out that little number up top, folks. A little more than 100, I think. My first call for tributes was on my last day of summer break... and now it's approaching the end of the school year fast. This is the second longest-term writing project I've ever done.

As always, review. You have to have something to say after that interesting little finish. I would love to hear it, even if you just spout abuse at me. Our final chapter should be up within the week. Oh, and don't forget to mention if you'd be interested in chapter 26.5 or not in your review.

May the odds be ever in your favor.
Topsy