It felt like he was on the inside of an industrial rock crusher.

His chest was feeling the torment of being beaten more than it would have liked, and his heart was beating erratically, pumping the body's much needed blood. He was struggling to breathe as it felt as if his chest was being constricted and his head was pounding profusely. It didn't help that he felt as if he was going to faint and that he could barely keep his fists up as his breaths became ragged.

He had pucked once already, but that didn't take away the sensation of bruises beginning to form on his face. He knew that in a few hours his face, chest, and arms were going to be a mess of black and dark purple due to the relentless assault. And to make matters even worse, he knew that he was bleeding. He didn't know how much he was bleeding since the heavy and chilling rain did a pretty good job of washing the blood from his wounds, but god did it sting. And if he weren't soaked to the bone, he would have assumed that his clothes were sticking to him because of how much he was sweating.

Glaring at his opponent, who was just as beaten as he was, Thor Houghton wondered just how much longer this conflict was going to go on for. How much more fighting was deemed necessary until they could finally quit. But as quickly as the thought came up, he just as quickly realized what a retarded question that was.

He didn't know how long they had been fighting for, but the bastard refused to give in. And he sure as fuck wasn't giving up either. And there was a reason for that. A reason that had everything to do with the reward of winning the the punishment for losing. And even though he hated the people that would give out the rewards and punishments, he knew that there was nothing he could do about. At least, not in his current location in the present.

Both of them looking like they were fighting to the death due to how physically damaged they were and the way their clothes were slicked with wet mud and dirt due to them getting down and dirty with each other. Hell, unwashed mud was still on their exposed faces, and Thor could feel some of the thick substance seeping into the cut at the crown of his head. His shoes were soaked through and his socks felt like they were made of wet mud.

Surrounding them were the academy instructors and their fellow academy classmates, all yelling out various comments and obscenities. All of them were getting a surge of high intensity emotions that came with watching two thirteen year olds beating the absolute shit out of each other. Though Thor had unintentionally been unfocused on them and had hyper focused on his adversary.

"What's the fucking hold up?" One of the academy instructors bellowed over the student chants and the pouring rain. Somehow, that had broken through his hyper focus, and he could now hear the chants and everything else in full force. "You pussies already done? You all finished? If this is the best that you can do then you're both god damn pathetic pieces of clay pussies that deserve to crumble to pressure and dissolve in the fucking rain!"

"I ain't... A... Pathetic... Piece of... Clay!" Thor opponent exclaimed with a hoarse voice could barely be heard. "Especially... Not towards... Some... Fucking... Jack rabbit!" The only reason Thor didn't interrupt him was because he was physically incapable of uttering a single word.

"Then beat him!" The instructor demanded. "Crush him under your heel and make him beg for mercy!"

As his fighting partner recovered some of his breath, Thor unbuttoned his thin jacket and held it limply in his hand like an overly long wet rag.

"I'd like... To see the... Faggot... Try it!" Thor declared with and equally hoarse voice before he gazed his opponent square in the eyes. "Or maybe... Instead of a... Dick in the ass... You can have... A girl... Shove... Something in there... Instead. Heard you... Can't decide... Between the two."

Thor could see that he had struck a nerve with the boy. A big one at that. The boy gave out an enraged, yet ragged, war cry before he charged. His moves were already clumsy due to the fatigue, but it became even worse since he had became angry. It was exactly what Thor had expected.

The boy gave out a wild, powerful swing which Thor managed to dodge despite his own battle fatigue and hazy vision. Thor navigated under his enemy's arm and threw the wet jacket onto the boy's face. The boy hadn't expected Thor to throw his jacket onto his face and reacted in shock. It gave Thor more than enough time to grab each end of his jacket and wrap it around the boy's head like a head scarf.

With his opponent now, literally, swinging around in a blind rage, Thor only needed to hold the jacket with one hand to prevent it from falling from his head as he used his free hand to beat his face in. The crowd went wild as Thor punched the blinded boy over and over again before he pulled him to the wet and muddy ground with all his might.

The boy struggled, now trying to claw the wet jacket off his face as Thor knew what was happening to him. The boy felt like he was drowning due to how tight the fabric was pressed against his mouth, and with the amount of water hammering down onto the jacket, it probably felt like he was under a waterfall or something.

Even with all that, it didn't stop the instructors from telling Thor to hit him some more. To bash his face into the mud and sit on his face and other things of that nature.

Thor didn't do that, but he didn't free the boy from his prison until nearly a minute later. By the time his unwrapped his jacket from the boys head, the boy was hacking out water from his mouth and struggling to even breathe. It didn't take much to see that he couldn't even move as breathing was a monumental task. Meanwhile, the instructors and the other classmates were laughing at him. Mocking him for losing against jack rabbit Thor Houghton.

Thor was putting on his wet and dirty jacket when one of the instructors came at him with a pissed off look in his face.

"Houghton!" The instructor roared, stopping less than two feet away from the teenager. "When you were told to press his face into the mud by your instructor, why did you not do it?"

"Go fuck yourself," Thor told him in an act of defiance. "I won." Thor never saw the punch to his face that he received from the adult and found himself on the ground. He knew that he should have expected it, and he had, but he didn't have the stamina to care. Almost.

"Little shit!" The instructor shouted before he gave out two kicks to Thor's already battered chest. Thor didn't cry out in pain, though he very well wanted to. "You think you know better than us? When we tell you to do something you damn well do it! No exceptions!"

"Fuck you, I won without your damn advice." Thor responded before he felt another kick to the stomach, causing what little air he had stored up to whoosh out.

"And you call your little dance a proper fight? I saw no less than five openings that could have fucking destroyed you! You think you're solid? You ain't shit. Someone who's an oilier streaker could beat your pussy ass in the arena. And let's not even get into those glass circles and sea stains. So when we tell you to do something, you damn well better do it and show some fucking respect!"

"Fuck your respect." Thor managed to crock out before the heel of a boot meet his face. Thor gave out a cry of pain before he was roughly picked up the the back of his jacket.

"You think you're fucking solid?" The instructor roared before he shoved Thor just enough to make him stumble, but not enough to make him fall. "Think you're fucking better than us? Then fight me! Fight me and show that you aren't as pathetic as the sticks that I broke in the arena!"

Thor had fought him, and it would have been an understatement to say that he lost.

He had been destroyed. And to add salt to the wounds, he was instructed to run around the academy until he couldn't even move anymore. Not that he really could move as he could only crawl at the pace slower than that of a baby's. Not that the instructors cared as they screamed profanity at him and kicked him when they deemed he was moving too slow or they thought he was giving them lip. Which was quite often and only half true.

Just don't fucking understand it. Thor thought as he looked at his cutlass sword that was being heated up in the fireplace. As they said in their own words. We're a warrior race. Not like those clay ass sticks. So they teach us how to fight and how to utterly crush the competition. Born to kill and all that shit. And they, for all the violence they tell us to do, they still want us to fucking respect them. Why should I respect a bunch of arrogant bastards that teach us to be hardcore and utterly disrespectful to everyone. Everyone but them.

Thor considered it a huge double standard as they could be as rude and violent to them as they pleased, yet, they had to show them the upmost respect. Unless you wanted a punch to the face, a boot in your nuts, or an excuse to make them tell you to do a hundred push ups or something else they demanded you do.

What does respect have anything to do with what they teach us anyway?

And then there was the Capitol as well. No matter what they did to you they still demanded respect. Like how they demanded that Roxanne and Marble still give them respect, even after everything they had done to Marble, and threatened to do to Roxanne and Stanton.

What did the Capitol ever do to gain our respect?

Among those thoughts, he wondered if that was just the remnants of his conduct disorder speaking, or if they were really his own thoughts. After all, he hadn't found anyone else like him. Not even among the other academy dropouts. It was just another thing that made him wish that Roxanne and Marble were still alive and could teach him without worry.

Thor looked at his sword and saw that it was practically glowing a fiery orange, so using his right hand, which had been wrapped with his black sweatshirt, he pulled the glowing weapon out of the fireplace and saw that it was, indeed, glowing. He could feel the threatening heat radiate off of it. Perfect. He thought before he turned to Terra, who had removed her camouflage jacket and long sleeve shirt to expose what was underneath.

Her now exposed chest and stomach was nearly as pale as her face and hands, but even more so. It showed just how much she was out in the sun, which Thor guessed wasn't much. But despite that, her stomach was toned, but not overly so, as expected from academy training, if not in the lesser degree. It made her black sports bra and the crimson blood stand out from her pale skin and made the scars blend in better.

With Thor wearing only his black t-shirt, he could he almost wanted to compare scars.

"I stick to my statement before," Thor said to his district partner. "Some colour on you would make you look a lot better. And your breasts are small enough that you barely need a bra."

"And I still say that you don't need pants since there's nothing to hide there." Terra countered flatly. Thor let out a little laugh before he started to talk again.

"Okay, but in all seriousness," he said as his face turned to once that was indeed, serious. "Ready?"

"No."

"Too bad. Get ready." Thor instructed before he reached for the glass shard in her side before Terra moved out of his way.

"Go away." Terra demanded in her monotone voice.

"Come on Terra, you know that this needs to be done." Thor said waving around the glowing sword almost nonchalantly, almost branding Terra a couple of times by accident.

"You were right."

"Yeah. I am right, so get over here."

"No. You WERE right." She said, doing her best to empathize on the were part of her sentence. It was something that Thor almost didn't pick up thanks to her near emotionless voice.

"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" He asked in mild annoyance.

"About you saying that I wouldn't like you plan."

"Well I told you that you weren't going to like it."

"Then you should have known that I wouldn't like it."

"I took your silence as you were going to go through with it."

"My silence meant I agreed with you."

"Agreed with what? That you were going to go through with it?" Thor asked, getting a little more annoyed that he didn't understand what she was talking about.

"That you knew that I wasn't going to like your stupid plan."

"It's not stupid." Thor told her. "We can't just keep those shards in you. I mean, if we had a needle and thread, or some quick clot powder it'd be different. But we don't have any of that, and we sure as hell don't have any arrows with us, so this sword," he said as he raised the blazing hot piece of steel. "Is the best we've got." Though even he was willing to admit that it was a little big for cauterizing.

"I still don't like it." Terra responded. To which Thor let out a disgruntled grunt.

"Terra, you're still in the academy, right?"

"Why?" She asked.

"I've forgotten something from the academy," he told her as his plan formed. "And it's been bugging me as of late. Can you remind me the academy creed about injuries?"

Terra then thought for a moment before she started to narrate the words.

"I will not let the fear of pain turn me away. I will not be consumed by the fear of pain. I will walk willingly towards the pain as I inflict it upon my enemies. For our body is strong. Pain is all in the mind, for our body is more solid than our mind gives it credit for. Our enemies are clay, for they let the thought of pain consume them in fear. They are unwilling to face the pain. But for us, the proud warriors of District Two, we don't fear the pain. For pain is weakness leaving the body."

"Precisely." Thor said with a smile.

"Wait... What?" Terra asked before Thor ripped the glass shard out of her neck an instant before she screamed and Thor applied the burning sword onto her neck wound, causing Terra to make her scream blood curdling. Thor swore he heard more emotion in her screams than she normally used while talking.

Thor heard the sizzling of flesh being burned for just a second before he brought the sword off of Terra's neck. Just in time for Terra's arm to miss the hot steel blade and cup her burn.

"Just think of how much weakness is leaving your body now." Thor said with a chuckle as he smelt cooked flesh.

"I knew it!" Terra shouting, somehow still staying monotone as she clutched her burned neck. "I fucking knew it you ass!"

"Ah, don't be such a bitch and get ready for the next round."

"You think that after that I'd willingly want that to happen again?" Terra asked. "It hurt more coming out than it did going in!" To which Thor answered almost immediately.

"No." He then ripped the glass shard out of her side and cauterized the wound with his hot sword, causing Terra to give out another blood curdling scream. The sizzling of skin occurred again before Thor pulled it away before Terra could burn herself more than necessary. "There, all done." He announced proudly before he felt a fist hit him across the face before he found himself sprawled out on the floor.

It surprised him. Mainly because he hadn't expected Terra to be able to hit so hard.

"You dick! You fucking dick! I should shove that sword up your ass!" She said in her best angry voice.

"As tempting as that sounds, I'll have to decline." Thor told her as he stood up with a groan. Nice hit. She isn't as clay as I though. Thor then threw his sword to the side since he didn't want his sweatshirt to catch on fire and walked over to his duffle bag and threw his district partner his bottle of water. Terra immediately cracked it open and began to apply some to her burn areas. "The academy never told us how painful mending our own wounds could be." Those stitches are still a fucking bitch.

"The academy prefers stitches and the like." Terra told him.

"Don't I know it." Thor replied as he scratched his face, remembering having to stitch most of his own wounds closed. "Makes me wonder if the medics were originally clothers or something the way they stitch our faces closed."

Terra only let out a hum of agreement as she rubbed water over her burn marks. She only used the minimum amount of water she deemed necessary, which wasn't very much, before she re-sealed the bottle and threw it back to Thor, who in turn, poured some onto his sword before he put the bottle back in his duffle bag. "Ready to go?" He asked as he grabbed the now steaming sword in sweatshirt rolled hand.

"Yeah." Terra answered before she put on her clothes.

"All right," Thor said when Terra was finished dressing herself and the two of them were walking towards the exit. "Let's find Dayta and Marsha."

It wouldn't have taken a genius to know that she was terrified.

Not only was she in the arena, but she didn't really know what was going on. Sure she knew the basic rules on what was going on, but other than that, everything was just left up in the air for her to wonder about. No bloodbath, no cornucopia, just waking up with a duffle bag beside her and having to approach the arena from there.

Sure it could be seen as an advantage, but because of the unfamiliarity of it, it only made her more afraid of what was to come. It left her with more questions than she would have expected. After all, weren't you supposed to be escorted to the arena, given arena clothes and participate in the bloodbath as you collected supplies? Instead, she had been shot by peacekeepers, knocked out, and left in her denim jacket and denim pants.

After waking up and finding her duffle bag, Soya had found that she had been given food, water, and a weapon. A hacksaw that she considered more of a joke than anything else. But it was far from funny to her. No. It was more like some kind of sick, sadistic joke that the gamemakers had thought of. Because in her mind, giving her a hacksaw meant that the gamemakers really wanted the tributes to suffer.

Soya imagined her, or another tribute, using the handheld saw to rip through flesh with it's serrated metal teeth, causing the victim to be consumed in complete agony as they slowly died.

That was the beginning of her hell in the arena. It only became worse as she wandered aimlessly around the abandoned food stands and the other various attractions of the arena. It reminded her of the summer festivals back in District Eleven when food stands would be erected up and citizens would attempt to sell products and produce in order to try and make some extra coin. Though more often than not a bartering system was used.

It made it even more surreal as it was like an abandoned District Eleven summer festival stand. But mixed in with some Capitol elements.

It made her think of home. It made her want to go home. And because of that, she had felt the buzzing and light headedness that came with wanting to wander even more aimlessly thanks to her dissociative fugue. And while she knew that anxiety triggered it, there was little she could do to calm herself down, despite her best efforts.

It didn't help that she had been chased by some red shirted people that she didn't recognize. They had threatened to kill her, and that made her more scared. But she managed to escape, and was grateful that she didn't have to get into a confrontation with them, as that would have made her anxiety rise even more.

But when she thought that she was going to be able to calm down, even just a little, she heard someone screaming. She made the mistake of looking, and saw a figure that had been engulfed in dancing flames.

It cast an eerie glow as it thrashed around wildly like a moving fireball.

That caused her to scream and flee from that area in an instant. She feared that she was in someone's wire territory and they were someone that fire wired.

Now she was hiding in one of the empty food stands, shaking violently with fear as she wondered even more what in the fuck was going on. A game with no bloodbath, no cornucopia, an arena that reminds me of home, tributes that I've never seen before, and now a person on fire? How much more fucked up can this get?

As tears flowed freely from her eyes, she looked like a pathetic sight. A big girl that was muscular from all the hard labor that District Eleven demanded of her. The calluses on her hands showed that she wasn't afraid of doing the hard work, even if the tracker hive made her uncomfortable. Yet she was trembling like a scared animal and was crying like a small child. Her sobs were audible and with the way her eyes looked behind the waterworks could only be described as shock.

For all of her tough appearances, there was a reason that she had soft, yet sun baked, facial features instead of the normally rough features that were commonly associated with those from her district. It wasn't because of her lack of physical strength. Far from it. It was that she tended to avoid things that made her overly anxious. That especially meant that she avoided confrontation when all possible. Even in a district where the peacekeepers were brutal and seemed to have a sadistic fetish for whipping people.

But conflict is everywhere here. Soya thought as she continued to tremble. Those red shirts. The other tributes. This whole arena is just one big cloud burst. I don't belong here. I can't handle much more of this. Hell, I could barely handle being back home out in the fields. How am I supposed to remain calm and sane in this place?

Soya hoped that her family and friends wasn't watching her. Especially her siblings. She didn't want them to see their big sister losing her mind so quickly, so disgracefully. Not when they were already being made fun of because she was a coward and they usually had to bail her out of cloud bursts. Older siblings are supposed to protect younger siblings. Not the other way around.

And while she knew that any of her sisters would be a better tribute in the arena, she still wouldn't want to swap herself out so that they could have a better chance of winning. Because that's all it was. A better chance.

Maybe I should fight. Soya thought, but then felt the scars on her back aching tremendously. Along with a flood of memories. That quickly made her give up the idea of sawing someone's head off.

I don't want to fight. Soya thought as she sobbed even harder. But I don't want to die either. I want to go back home and be with my family. My friends.

As she was sulking and thinking about her home and friends, Soya didn't hear the commotion that was occurring around her. Instead, she felt it. She felt it when a seemingly great weight fell on top of her, causing her to scream and kick as she waved her hacksaw around in fright. The weight rolled off of her, making the first two swings hit nothing but air. The third, however, she felt resistance and heard something being torn. It was then followed by a scream before she looked to where she had swung, and saw a figure clothed in a orange and black sweatshirt. The sweatshirt wasn't in the best condition, and neither were the dark denim pants they were wearing. But what startled her wasn't the fact that they had literally jumped on her. Or the fact that most of their face was obscured by their hood. It was the fact that they were clutching their chest.

The fabric of their hoodie had been torn open, and out was leaking out a mixture of white cotton and a dark red liquid that Soya could see, even in the dusk like sky, was blood. Soya was horrified that the diagonal wound was much better than she expected. It probably extended from their right nipple to their left hip bone if she was seeing it correctly.

The girl couldn't believe what she had just done. She just looked on in shock at the fact that she had sawed a person's chest open.

"Stay away from me!" The hooded figure cried out before they leaped out of the stand and ran away. Soya was too in shock to notice that the figure had fled as she continued to hold her now bloody hacksaw in her hand in front of her. She continued to tremble, only noticing that there was nobody in front of her when a new face appeared from outside the stand, looking down at her.

"Another one?" The female in a red shirt screamed out in mild surprise before she made a grab for Soya.

Soya, yet again out of fear, swung the saw at her opponent, and unlike the first attacker, she felt resistance on her first swing. Not only that, but she fully saw the damage that her saw had done as the woman screamed and pulled her hand away due to Soya sawing into the flesh between her thumb and index finger.

The woman clutched her injured wound as her thumb couldn't decide whether it wanted to dangle or not as blood sprayed out of her hand.

That was when Soya decided to follow her first victim and flee the scene. All the while, she felt the buzzing of her anxiety threaten to consume her. Please. She begged. Please don't. And while there was little she could do to retain her identity, she could hope that she didn't lose it and wander aimlessly.

The torment was not only blinding, but complete and total as he ran around the arena in a compete disregard to the world around him.

It would have been easy for someone to try and finish him off, and even easier to spot, due to the fact that he was he was practically a moving, screaming, human bonfire. Not that he would have particularly cared at that point in time as he couldn't even think of anything else besides the fact that he was in agony.

Carver ran around, crashing into empty stands in a frenzy until he finally fell to the ground and started to remember the basic standard procedure in the case you found a part of you on fire. Stop, drop, and roll. So Carver did just that in an ungraceful fashion, but the fire wasn't going out quick enough for him since the ground was more of a concrete blacktop than dirt.

Growing increasingly desperate as the flames were threatening to melt his face off, Carver clawed at what was left of his quilted jacket and tore it off his torso, taking strips of his own flesh off in the process.

He threw the jacket away and continued to roll on the concrete ground as he slapped himself, trying to snuff out the fire that was eating him alive. Pieces of flesh tearing off onto the blacktop in the process.

By the time the flames had been snuffed out, he could barely even move. The only reason he even attempted to move in his tortured form was to feebly crawl behind a stand so that he wouldn't be completely out in the open. And even when he wasn't moving he was in immense pain beyond anything that he could even comprehend.

Smoke was still rising from his body like meat on a hot skillet as he could feel his flesh peeling off of him and still sizzling. His back, where Nick had thrown hot oil, had began to sprout painfully large off yellow blisters. More than half his hair had been sindged off, but that was the least of his problems as his throat and nostrils felt as if it had been seared and he could taste and smell smoke, blood, and charred skin.

His eyes stung, and he could only see through one eye due to the fact that the liquids in his left eye had began to dry and crust over. Even just breathing was a difficult task as he continued to hack of smoke from his parched throat. His upper body was now a mixture of ugly red and black, crispy flesh.

In short, he looked kind of like a freshly burned Nick but with one non-functioning eye.

He couldn't believe how the situation had turned. It was supposed to be a simple task. Rush into the food stand and kill whoever was inside of it. Instead, he was in the most unimaginable agony of his life, and to add insult to injury, he had lost his weapon and all his supplies. No doubt Nick was living large because of that.

It was something that Carver struggled to comprehend as he was larger and stronger than Nick was. Yet somehow, that boy not only kicked his ass, but utterly humiliated him when the odds had been entirely in his favor.

Back in District Seven people knew not to mess with him. There was a reason that elms didn't pick on his siblings. If they did and he showed up they stopped. And if they didn't, they got beaten up. And those were District Seven elms. So how in the world could an electronics geek from one of the physically weakest districts beat him?

The man wouldn't have called himself a predator, but he definitely didn't consider himself to be prey. But when it came to it, he knew that he'd have to become a predator in order to survive in the arena. And because of his strength, his ability to either bludgeon someone or split them in two with an ax, and to resist blows, along with the evidence that came about in the Capitol, he considered himself more than just a predator in the arena. He considered himself the apex predator.

Breathing laboriously, Carver could just sense that the aviators were laughing at him for losing to such easy prey. And that only pained him more. They had thought that he was a sure winner. His escort even told him so and told him that aviator sponsors had high hopes for him and were more than willing to spare some money on him on his road to victory. So why was he in this position? Where had he fucked up?

Carver could only moan as his thoughts and energy depleted rapidly and he wondered if he was going to die. He wanted to close his only functioning eye, but was afraid that if he did, he'd die.

Fuck. Why?

The only good thing that he could manage to think of was the fact that he couldn't feel most of his upper body, but he didn't dare look to see what had been done to him in fear of what he'd see.

Carver continued to half breathe half moan before he saw a silver parcel land directly in front of him by a white parachute. And even though it was barely three feet away from him, Carver had to use what little energy he had with a monstrous amount of effort just to get his finger tips to touch it. The cold metal, for some reason, seems unforgiving hot as he struggled to pull it towards him.

When he was able to finally get it close to him, it became a difficult task to even take the top off of the disk shaped pot. Inside he found a small disk shaped container and a note. Through his hazy vision, Carver just barely made out the words that were written on that small sheet of paper: Don't disappoint us again.

Carver grabbed the sponsor gift and tore the lid off, taking bits of his finger flesh in the process, and found that it contained some kind of light pink jelly product. He recognized what it was. Capitol burn ointment. Carver would had smile and thanked his sponsors, but he was in too much pain and could only focus on his own survival.

Carver scooped up as much of the ointment as he could in one hand and began to smear it all over his face. He then spread it over as much of his burned body as possible, feeling the cold and tingling remedy start to take effect.

Carver used all of it before he gave out a groan.

There is still hope. He thought. And next time, I won't disappoint them.

The teen then managed to close his one, still functioning, eye, finding some semblance of comfort in the darkness before he passed out into a blissful slumber.

A/N: Hey guys, I haven't been feeling very well as of late, so writing this was pretty hard. It doesn't help that things are happening with my mom and a mutual friend of my brother and I. Different things are happening to my mom and our friend of course.

Anyway, thoughts are appreciated.