1.
She woke up and everything was chaos.
The sounds assaulted her ears, making up curl up on her side with her arms wrapped around her head to muffle the noise. It had been silent before. Always silent. Only the boy's occasional murmurs as he talked to himself in his corner of the room.
The silence had been natural. Velvety. Reassuring.
The noises were scary.
She was moving.
That awareness came next.
She was moving but it wasn't coming from her. She was being rolled, she realized, on… something. She was being rolled and the clatter of the wheels was a part of the surrounding cacophony. Then, there was the whooshing of heavy metallic doors sliding open and then closed as they rolled past, and the shouts. Words were being tossed loudly back and forth. Things were being moved. Passed around. More clanking sounds, more barked nonsensical orders, more of those unbearable noises…
"Finnick!" someone screamed in the distance. A woman.
The gurney came to a stop, there was a grating sound – metal on metal – the shushing of a curtain being closed and two voices became clearer as gloved hands pulled at her, trying to force her to uncurl, trying to…
She wasn't sure.
"Who's that?" the first one asked.
"No clue." the second answered. "She was in Mellark's cell so they grabbed her too from what they told me. Maybe one of the other victors?"
"Miss, can you tell me your name?" the first one asked, crouching down to be at her level. She barely had time to glimpse the face of a man, blond hair and dark eyes, before something blinding was flashed in her eye. She whimpered and curled up tighter. "She must still be feeling the effects of the gas. Jane Doe it is for now. Alright, Miss, I need you to lie down for me."
But she wouldn't.
Curling up was safe.
They forced her to stretch anyway.
She tried to struggle but the two men were strong and she felt… She felt weak. Limbs lacking strength and coordination.
They cut the clothes off her back, leaving her naked and exposed. And still the gloved fingers probed at her without pity or remorse.
"The wounds are old. They seem mostly healed." the blond man declared after a few minutes. "I'll take a closer look later but for now what I really want is a head scan. The drug should have worn off by now and she doesn't look all that responsive."
She looked around in a panic, not really understanding what they meant but instinctively knowing she needed to get away from them.
The walls were grey. The ceiling was grey. The floor was grey. She was trapped in a corner, fenced in by machines and a thin curtain…
She had words for everything she saw but the words didn't really have meaning, the words were nonsensical because she didn't need them in her world. She wanted her world back. This was… This was scary and noisy and…
The second man placed a hand on her arm and she startled badly, scrambling to a sitting position, hugging her legs close to her chest if only to mask her nudity from view.
"Easy, Miss." he said soothingly. "We're here to help. Let's get you into a hospital gown, okay?" The first one was scribbling in a sort of folder and not paying her any attention anymore. The second man held out a paper thin thing. "You're safe now. Do you understand? We won't hurt you. We just want to help." She remained unresponsive, eying him warily and he turned to the other one. "Doctor, it might be easier if we sedated her."
The blond man glanced from him to her as if considering it and then made a small face. "Her pupils aren't as reactive as I would like. She might have a concussion. Sedating her would only make it worse. No drugs, no meds until I'm sure what's going on with her. Run the usual tests too."
The second man forced her arms through the sleeves and then tied up a knot at the back of her neck.
"It's okay." he promised once he was done, in a soothing voice. "We just have to…"
Louder screams came from the left, beyond the curtain, and she pressed her hands against her ears again, overwhelmed.
"Mason's crashing!" someone called and the two men ran at once to where the commotion was taking place, leaving the curtain gaping open.
The place was terrifying.
People were walking around all clad in grey, there were men and women with guns… Her stomach churned. That was bad. Really, really bad. She needed to get away from the people with the guns as well as from people with lab coats on. Both were equally bad. Her instinct demanded she ran and so that was exactly what she did.
She climbed off the gurney with caution. Her legs were shaky. She had never tried to stand up before. Not since she had woken up lying in that room with the boy who talked to himself. She tried to take a step and almost tumbled over.
It was slow progress to leave the curtained area, clinging to everything that could hold her up, and then… Then, it was simply worse.
Nobody paid any attention to her. They were hurrying around with no time for indecision. They knew where they were headed. They knew what they were doing. They had a sense of purpose she could barely understand.
It made her head spin.
She found a quieter corridor and followed it, hugging the wall until she found a door. The handle turned easily under her hand.
There were a few rows of shelves in there, it was a supply closet of some sort probably, but it was empty and quiet so she dragged herself to the wall furthest from the door and huddled in the corner, pressing her forehead against her knees. She just wanted some quiet. She wanted her room. She wanted the boy who never looked at her, never addressed her, never acknowledged her. She wanted her world back.
Her heart was racing so fast in her chest, each inspiration made her dizzy.
She was shaking.
She was a little cold but, above all, she was terrified. She really wanted to go back to the room with the boy. She missed his presence. It had been reassuring somehow. How was she going to find her way back to her room? Why had she been taken away?
She vaguely wondered if that was what birth felt like: being torn away from a quiet familiar place where you remained in a sort of stasis only to be tossed in a violent noisy environment. The thought was too difficult to pursue though and it slipped through her fingers, leaving her with a headache.
She wasn't sure how long she had been rocking on herself in that corner before a new loud noise made her whimper and clutch her head again. It was a siren, an unrelenting alarm that kept dying down only to kick up again like a giant irritating wave crashing on the shore only to draw back and crash again…
What was a wave? What did it look like?
She had images and words swirling in her mind but she couldn't make sense of them. Her head felt like it was splitting in two. She gripped her skull harder in her arms, applied pressure in a vain hope it would relieve…
"Please cease all activities and return to your compartment." a robotic voice demanded after a few minutes. "Please cease all activities and return to your compartment. This is not a drill. Please cease all…"
People were running around outside her hiding place. Feet stomped on the grey floor, there were shouts and screams…
She heard the words 'Jane Doe', 'possible spy', 'dangerous', 'capture'…
And on and on the shrill robotic voice kept on talking, assaulting her senses. "This is not a drill. Please cease all activities and…"
Tears rolled down her cheeks and she sobbed silently into her knees, certain somehow that it was her they were hunting. Certain, too that once they would catch her… She accidentally pressed against a dark bruise on her shin and gasped. They would hurt her, wouldn't they? She didn't want them to hurt her. She didn't want them to…
The door to her hiding place was flung open and she huddled harder against the wall, willing herself to melt with the concrete. She dared one glance up and found one of those men in grey with a gun aimed straight at her. She bowed her head again, pressed her forehead against her knees, shut her eyes tight…
"On your knees!" the man barked and she couldn't stop the whimper at his loud voice. "Hands behind your head!" There was a bit of silence – or what would have been silence if that robotic alarm hadn't kept repeating its message. "I'm not saying it again. Surrender or I shoot. On your knees. Hands behind your head."
She was shaking so hard her teeth were chattering.
It would hurt if he shot, she knew.
It would hurt if he decided to grab her.
It would hurt if…
It would hurt.
She waited.
She waited for the bullet or the fists or…
So, who can tell me were we are? Three cheers for the one who figures it out :p What did you think? Please let me know your thoughts!
(ff does not send me the reviews anymore so I will check manually but you might want to read or at least comment on AO3 where I can also reply to your comment directly... I have no clue if people even get alerts anymore on this site...)