Fleur Laveau- District Eleven female (18)
I wiggled my feet and squirmed at the pins and needles running through them. I'd sat on them wrong and they were asleep. Or it was because of whatever vitamin we were short on. I knew vitamin C could cause problems. I thought I remembered something about vitamin B could also cause illness, and calcium. It wasn't iron, anyway. I hoped the Capitol had something to make hair grow back quickly.
Part of it might just be how antsy I was. Doing nothing left me a lot of time to sit with my thoughts and there was a lot of dark stuff in there. In Eleven we knew there was more in the world than what we could see. There were things that carried on outside of this world. I hadn't said anything about it because I knew it was silly superstition and I knew that if I gave Walcott any inch of ground she'd jump on me with a million crazy supernatural theories, but it weirded me out being stuck in the building where I'd killed three people. If I was the superstitious type I'd wonder if a soul could get through a force field or if a soul even wanted to or whether it wanted to hang near the person who killed it.
I really am everything they said. A witch's daughter. A witch myself by blood. Someone able to deal death from any distance. Someone who mixed together arcane ingredients and made an elixir that killed three young men and women. An outsider might say anyone could do that- it was simply chemicals in a vat. And on one level it was. But there was also the fact that the right chemicals were there, that I happened to know them, and most of all that I was the one to think about it. Sometimes worlds come together. Something could be science and at the same time could be magic.
Walcott's hand in front of my face disrupted my thoughts. She grabbed the parachute I'd been so deep in thought I hadn't noticed.
"It's for you," she said. I opened it and found four blood oranges. Walcott made a cheery noise and took an orange. Funny enough, I wasn't really hungry, but I took one anyway and started to peel it. Then I set it down and said something I suddenly knew with great clarity.
"I'm going to die."
The room tilted around me. I was looking up at Walcott- two Walcotts, and I didn't know which was real. In between the Walcotts, in the doorway behind her, there was another figure, not doubled like everything else in the room. That means he's real, I thought distantly, maybe the only thing that's real. The man wore a black tailcoat and walked into the room with a crazy lurching gait, visible even around the wildly shaking room. Anyone in my family would know his painted face immediately, even before the smell of tobacco filled my nose.
But why? I thought. I didn't need to speak out loud to Baron Samedi. His body shook with his great belly laugh as his hand came out toward me. He opened his fingers with a flourish and revealed a bottle of rat poison, a crack glistening wetly all down its side.
I wasn't tingling anymore. I was still breathing in ragged bursts. Walcott's desperate screams reached my mind for the first time, though I'd heard them all along. Flashes of wild colors burst across my vision as I watched the Baron approach. That was how it ended, then. This was who I was. A true daughter of voodoo, one who knew that Baron Samedi wasn't evil. He was just a loa doing his job: guiding newly dead souls to what came next.
Alysanne Audren- District Six female (15)
It was good not to hear another cannon after I left Arroyo. It hadn't been easy to do. In the moment it had been my only choice but it wasn't what I had wanted. Arroyo was a good guy. I liked being his ally and I just plain liked being with him. I'd even wished things had been different and we'd met somewhere that a future would have been possible. The whole time I was running I was waiting to hear the second cannon that would pierce me deep. But it never came. Arroyo lived to fight another day- god forbid, to fight me another day- and I already had a new ally. One less likely to inspire feelings of that sort.
"So you've probably gotten in a lot of fights already," Lacey said, her carefully neutral tone giving me the choice between whether I wanted to wave the question off or engage it.
"Actually, not really," I said. "In the dojo, sure, but since the Games started I've only been in one real fight." I pointed at my still-swollen nose. "You can see how that went."
"As long as you're alive at the end," Lacey shrugged.
"Isn't that the truth," I said. A lot of good people had gone down. A lot of people I thought would probably last longer than me. But then, Lacey was still here, too. She probably thought the same thing.
"What about you? What's gotten you this far?" I asked.
"Not fighting," Lacey said.
I gave a little smile. Isn't that the truth? The whole idea behind martial arts is to fight when all other options are exhausted. The best fight is one you solve before it becomes physical. I was willing to use aikido against another human in order to preserve my life or to ward off their attacks but that wasn't what I'd had in mind when I learned it. I thought more about the discipline and culture it was steeped in and how it enriched a person and made them something better. When I was little and just starting to learn, I daydreamed about the day I could do a flying flip kick, not the day I first broke someone's arm. Martial arts was about the only discipline whose practitioners hoped that someday it would be unneeded.
Lacey and I both looked up at the sound of a sponsor gift. I saw her District number embossed on the bottom and stayed sitting as she snagged it. She set it between us and opened it.
"Wow. That's just how they eat in the Capitol." I'd been thinking the same thing. The fat slice of cake that lay on its side in the box was the blingiest cake I could ever have imagined. It had five differently colored layers divided by four different fillings, from a normal-looking frosting to some sort of jelly studded with fruit pearls. It was joined by an ombre rainbow frosting decorated with chocolate pearls, sugar sand, a tuft of cotton candy, and piped jelly.
That's probably just a normal evening for them. The only thing most Capitolites would never have experience with was the rapier laying alongside it.
Arroyo Cardoso- District Four male (17)
If I was up in the sky looking down at the Games, I wouldn't be the one I picked to win.
It was kind of a dark thing to admit, but really it was true. I wanted to win and I'd do my best to win, but I really wasn't the noblest pick. I wasn't the hardest worker here- that would be Tulsi. I wasn't the one with the purest motivation and backstory- that was Quarla by a long shot. I wasn't one who didn't deserve to be here and fought an underdog race to get this far, like the outliers. I didn't even have a family I needed to win for. My family wasn't rich but we weren't starving. My parents didn't want me to volunteer. I just did it out of selfishness when it came right down to it.
My parents wanted me to better the family legacy. What they meant was something like being a lawyer or a doctor or a business owner. I didn't know how to tell them I couldn't do that. I tried. I really did. The real truth was that I wasn't smart enough. I would study for hours upon hours. I would seek out our school's tutors and listen to their strategies and help. I did any extra-credit assignment I could. And at the end of all that, I'd finish the class with a C. Everyone thought it was because I was a big partier and just didn't care about school and I let them think it. No one wants people to know they're dumb.
It's not the end of the world being dumb. I had plenty of other things going for me and I even had plenty of achievements. It was just that they were all in the physical realm and the final achievement in that world is volunteering for the Games. I would always be proud that I got picked. My sister Lupe was also a great Academy student and even got picked to transfer to Two and be a Peacekeeper. My other sister ran a successful furniture store. But I was the only one who made it to the Arena. That was my place to shine. I wasn't good at thinking ahead far enough to worry about what would happen if I died. But either way, win or lose, I would know I could be proud of making it this far.
Look at you, getting all sentimental. But what else was there to do? I didn't have allies anymore. I was a people person. I got my energy from being with others. I liked talking and listening to them and doing things together. But my allies were dead now, all but Alysanne. I missed having friends around. The only bright side was that Alysanne and I split without violence. I hadn't wanted to fight her. I'd wanted allies so badly because I knew I didn't have all the skills needed to win the Games. I'd wanted Tulsi and Alysanne with me because they were as smart as I wasn't. It blew me away how early Tulsi went. And then it was just me and Alysanne. Somewhere along the line I found myself wishing we'd met outside the Arena. I think if we'd met somewhere else we still would have been friends without the Arena forcing us together.
I had a lot of things to be happy about. The Games were more than half over. The stiffest competitors were already gone. More or less it was a race between me, Alysanne, Flint, or maybe Edward. There was no single person left that I couldn't fight. In a week or so I could be back home. I could be drowning in riches and ladies and gents and putting the Arroyos in the history books. If I won- when I won, I thought in my heart- I'd know I wasn't my own first pick. But I wasn't my last pick, either.
9th place: Fleur Laveau- Thallium poisoning
I never know if I'm being super obvious or super obtuse. My experience with the Survivor idols led me to err on the side of subtle, but I thought someone would pick up pretty quick that Fleur got poisoned since I mentioned the rat poison bottle was damp. Thallium rat poison isn't largely used anymore precisely because it can be absorbed through the skin. It takes longer than described here but does result in sudden hair loss, neuralgia in extremities, vision irregularities, hallucinations, and seizures. I thought it was an apt way to tie her heritage and development into her death and hopefully emphasize that voodoo is a religion, not a cartoon. The subcultures that would be found in different Districts is a underused theme, so thanks Sparky for bringing back some culture and exploring how past and present parallel in forced labor and how people preserve their heritage despite it.