Oaken Mushroom- District Seven male (17)
Three hours until sunset.
Clair and I ran up and down the cubicle corridors climbing on the walls and knocking over partitions when we felt like it. Well, I ran, anyway. Clair kind of shuffled a little on the crutch we'd made of four taped-together yardsticks. Someone who spent most of their life inside didn't understand the feeling of running as far as you wanted and having more room ahead of you. The cubicles were the closest thing we had to a forest. If you squinted your eyes and sort of squinted your brain it was kind of like a weird alien version of home. It was good to run free and just play. But sundown was coming. Like cancer in remission but not cured it lurked in my bones waiting to remind me of its presence.
Two hours until sunset.
Two hours of life. How do you deal with something like that? Everyone does it eventually. To be an old man lying in bed and feel things going and know they're not coming back. To see the sun rise and know you won't see it set. To realize your hearing is gone and for the rest of your life it will be like that. To be aware of a beautiful and endless world that in a few hours will be without you. Any dreams you haven't achieved will never be achieved. Any regrets unspoken will be buried in your grave. No human can understand what it's like not to be alive. Every one of us has always been alive. How do you imagine something at odds with everything you know? But I knew it was coming. Either for me or for Clair it was coming.
One hour until sunset.
Time slips away from you. It's like a broken jar. The water is flowing out and you try to hold it but no matter how hard you grip it slips between your fingers. There's a finite amount of water and every bit that drips to the ground is lost. Just lost. Gone. And you have less time and there's nothing you can do about it and you look to the time that's left and it's flowing away too. Hours ago we had a whole day ahead of us. Now we sat picking at frozen hamburger patties we'd reheated and pretended to eat and pretended we weren't both thinking about it. That we didn't both know it was catching up to us like a hunter who walked behind a lion. It didn't have to be fast. It just kept following us, for it knew eventually it would reach us.
Sunset.
The sky, painted lightly with feathery clouds, was darkening. We'd noticed it was getting darker in the building long before the sun disappeared. We made our way up to the roof with some atavistic impulse to climb a tree and watch the night come. Cold heaviness settled in my stomach and bones knowing it was time. Time for one of us to die and one of us to say goodbye.
Knowing it changed something. Knowing there was no way out and death was coming changed me inside. It didn't make it painless or without fear. Humans are resilient. What we must endure we find a way to endure. My world was about to fall out from under me. I would never be the same. But somehow I felt a whisper of peace.
Clair Mushroom- District Seven female (17)
When I was little I thought the spokes of golden light that came from sunsets were glimpses of heaven. I thought for that short moment someone up there opened the veil between worlds and let people on Earth see what was waiting for them. Those spokes were there now in the sky, fanning out from the dark-red sun drowning on the horizon. Veins of pale fuschia outlined slender cirrus clouds that showed purple underbellies in a lightening gradient to their sides. Spots of golden-yellow, incongruous in how they seemed placed by a hand and not randomly by nature, shone like backlit amber. All of it faded with delicate patience to the darkness lining the horizon. Dark indigo welled up around the sun to swallow it and hide it until it rose again and to swallow one of us with it.
"It's time, isn't it?" I asked as the indigo band bled into the colors around it. I went cold at the question in my statement. I wanted Oaken to say it wasn't but we both knew he couldn't.
"Yeah. It's time," he said, sounding far too old.
"So what do we do?" I asked. All I could think of was to wait for a mutt. It could decide which of us to kill and the other could live knowing they'd fought it until their sibling let out their last breath.
"I love you," Oaken said. It was a small, quiet sound, like a tiny nesting bird sitting in the path of a cataclysmic wildfire and opposing it against all hope.
"I love you too," I said.
He jumped over the railing.
Oaken Mushroom- District Seven male (17)
I felt as light as air from the peace and relief in my heart. The Capitol offered no way out. The offered only a choice. As soon as I abandoned my hopeless efforts to find some other way, the choice was easy. In one liquid motion I put my knee up on the railing and stepped into nothing.
My momentum carried me forward as I fell. I tumbled over, looking first down at the ground and then up the side of the building as I flipped. Then I was looking up at the sky and at Clair falling after me.
Clair Mushroom- District Seven female (17)
My heart was faster than my mind. Before Oaken had leaned forward far enough to fall I was already leaping after him. I pushed myself downward off the edge of the building as I fell and dove headfirst toward him. The Gamemakers would have to do something. They couldn't have no Victor. I could only imagine they'd revive whoever hit the ground a second later. The way we were tumbling that was up to gravity. All I could control was how I went. As Oaken looked up and his eyes went wide at seeing what I'd done, I reached out and grabbed his hand.
A tightening sensation ran around my chest and hips. It was like an invisible giant had put his hand around me and was slowly gripping me. I started to fall more slowly- a disorienting feeling that the air around me was thickening until I was suspended in gelatin. Oaken, at first weightless from our identical motion, grew heavier and heavier in my hand. Butterflies exploded in my chest as it came together in my head. I latched on to Oaken's arm with my other hand as we came to a stop suspended in midair some hundred feet below the top of the skyscraper, me suspended by the force-field and Oaken suspended by me.
Oaken Mushroom- District Seven male (17)
There was nothing under me. I dangled heavily hundreds of feet in the air, the ground so far below me I couldn't make out sidewalk squares, pinned in place and in life by Clair's grip on my arm.
"Let me go," I pleaded. Clair hung above me headfirst, suspended in her strange position like we were both a recording that had been paused. Her arms were tensed with the strain of holding me.
"How could you?" Clair's voice was ragged and she was almost shouting. "How could you?!"
"How couldn't I?" My voice lacked Clair's anger. There was a quiet desperation in its place. "How could I not die for you?" All my life I'd been prepared for that. It was no sacrifice to die for my sister. It was the greatest accomplishment I could imagine.
"You don't get to do that!" Clair screamed. "You don't get to make that choice for me!"
"What?" I barely choked out. I didn't understand the panic and anger and pain lining Clair's face. I was doing this for her.
"Did you ever think I might want to die for you?" Clair asked. "That I love you as much as you love me?"
Guilt entered my mind and found slim purchase against the pain and love."I'm sorry," I said. "I just love you so much." My voice cracked and then broke to pieces. "Please. Please let me do this."
Clair Mushroom- District Seven female (17)
"You don't get to do that! You don't get to make that choice for me!"
I clung to Oaken as I poured myself out to him, my lacerated fingers burning at his weight on still-knitting flesh. Oaken, my brother, I'm your sister but I'm also a person. I have a voice. I have a say in this. It's not a gift to die for someone if they don't want you to die for them.
I could forgive it, for he didn't mean it, but Oaken had violated me. In throwing himself off the building he'd made the choice that he would be the one to die. He meant it in all love and devotion but I was his equal. I was not a child to be protected by him. I had a choice in if I lived or died and to take that from me was to strip me of my very humanity. I forgave him but I did not allow it.
"What?" Oaken asked, his tear-streaked face looking up at mine in confusion and pain.
"Did you ever think I might want to die for you? That I love you as much as you love me?" I asked.
My brother broke into pieces under me. I hadn't seen such agony since I saw a childhood friend cradled by her father after a falling tree snapped its bindings and crushed her. I'd never wanted to hear those sounds again.
"I just love you so much," Oaken wailed. I saw then that there was no need for more argument. Oaken was past the point where he could say anything coherent. We both were. No arguments, no logic, no reason, just a death that had to be.
There was so much I wanted to say to Oaken as my tears fell and landed on his face. The one who died had the easier role. No more pain. No more regret. No living with half your soul torn away. The one who died was remembered as a hero who gave the ultimate sacrifice. The one who lived spent the rest of her life as a reminder of the one who was lost. Every time my parents looked at me they would think of Oaken. Oaken wanted to give me decades of life. Every day for every year of those decades I would bear the weight of someone who had died for me. I would feel that obligation to live up to this gift and the regret of having had the chance to make that same sacrifice and letting it pass me by. I would forever doubt my love to a brother whose life I had valued less than mine. I had to always carry the memory of choosing that my brother would die.
Oh, Oaken, this isn't a gift. You want to give me the greatest gift you can. I love you for it. But your greatest gift is my greatest pain.
I could have said all that to Oaken. It might have changed his mind. But I chose not to. I looked down at my brother, still pleading on everything he could think of for me to let him go. I felt his fingers warm in mine. I asked myself how much I loved him.
"I love you," Oaken said again.
"I love you too," I said.
I let him go.
Oaken Mushroom- District Seven male (17)
I had a short life. Seventeen years I was on this earth. I had a short life. Less than ten seconds I fell through the air. I thought of all the things I would miss. My eighteenth birthday. A romance, if that had been in my fate. Clair's wedding day. Holding my own child. Growing old. Laughing and loving and crying and living. My parents. Trees upon trees upon trees.
Clair faded above me, still hanging in the air. She would have to go on without me now. I was somewhere she couldn't follow. I was glad I could see her above me because in my last moments I had only myself. My life was intertwined with hers but in this I was my own person. We weren't the same person. We weren't joined by nature. We were twins by birth but love was a choice. And for my love I would sever even my twin.
Clair Mushroom- District Seven female
I had ten seconds left to love my living brother. I loved him as he fell through the air and grew smaller so quickly I ached. For my love for him I watched him reach the ground. My brother splattered. Far down below me there lay a fanning carpet of red around the shape of a human.
I was a Victor. I was bereaved.
2nd place: Oaken Mushroom- Impact
Oaken's form said that if he and Clair were the final two he would die before letting her die. I filed that away in my head and right away had a finale idea if that happened to work out. Somewhere in the Games I decided to use it. However, I did some tailoring. One of my biggest peeves in stories is when a male character does something for a woman "for her own good". It's very noble to want to sacrifice yourself for someone else but to make that decision unilaterally is a massive, massive violation of your benefactee's autonomy. So I bent the idea to point that out and show Oaken recognizing that and respecting it while still allowing him to make the sacrifice. He acted with nothing but noble intent. Oaken was his own person with his own hobbies and relationships but of course his most intimate was with the person he had been with since birth. The Hunger Games mentioned that sibling love rarely goes deep enough for one to volunteer. But some people have that love and may Oaken be remembered for it. Tinks sent in both Oaken and Clair and I enjoyed them both (plenty of readers wanted Oaken to win). Either could have won but the form is the form.
Victor: Clair Mushroom, District Seven female
When I first got this batch of forms I had no idea who I wanted to win. After some consideration the only names that came to mind were Clair and Lacey (there were plenty of other good Tributes who could have won, those were just the ones I had ideas for right away). I ended up going with Clair because of the story I could make out of it. This was the Games where I let myself make unconventional decisions. Having twins in the final two was unusual and an intriguing story idea. Having a day spent idly at the finale was unusual and had story potential. But the image of one twin holding the other aloft a thousand feet in the air as they both jockey to be the one to die could work only once in a million stories and I could not pass it up. This is what I was gearing toward when I killed Alysanne and Lacey against a lot of popularity. Here's hoping it came through. Tinks has been with me a long time and has sent a dozen fan-favorite mostly Amazon ladies. All through this story I thought it was kind of funny it ended up being Clair who won instead of Des or Jezzebel or Akari from his fiercer submissions. But Clair was fierce. She had a violent streak that she barely kept down and she got some serious battle wounds throughout her fights. Most of her lack of fights is because the Careers died so early and many of the other strong competitors did as well. So Tinks, at last you have your place in my history. I've been looking forward to it as much as you have.