Spring

"Could Have Been Me"

~I wanna live better days

Never look back and say

Could have been me

It could have been me~

Ethan Faber

Seven canons fire off, one following the next. My bloodied hands shake as I steadily climb to my feet. A shudder runs through my body as I do and I shake my head, holding tightly to the dagger in my hand as I make my way to the center of the Cornucopia.

Pierre is there, pacing back and forth and swearing to himself as he punches the shallow wound that cuts through his thigh. Everly is close by, silent and unresponsive as she digs through a med-kit. From the opposite side of the cornucopia, Ainsley and Ariya are walking up, Ariya with a big smile as she twirls her dual bowie knives in her hands and Ainsley with a blank expression.

Both of their weapons are bloodied. Arno arrives next, his hands empty as he leans up against the metal hull just beside where Ainsley and Ariya are seated, cleaning off their weapons. May is the last to show, a bow slung over her shoulder as she walks up, unplugging her ear buds and plopping down on the floor criss-cross.

Pierre grunts as Everly throws a disinfectant spray on his wound and tosses him a bandage. He unravels it all the same, though, his eyes focused on that as he begins to speak in a cold tone.

"Anybody want to explain why District Six was able to take a little jog right through the middle of the cornucopia without catching a blade to the gut?"

Nobody answers. Everly walks over and takes a seat beside Ainsley and Ariya, joining them in cleaning her weapon. I stay standing awkwardly at the outside of the circle, eyes shifting around the group uneasily.

Ainsley is finally the one to speak up, her voice cold and closed-off. "There were seven canons. Seven kills and seven of us. We were all busy."

"I got two," Ariya says casually, staring at her reflection in the silver blades. She frowns, then goes back to cleaning them.

Pierre grunts. "So then who the fuck was just sitting around on their ass doing nothing?"

His question is met with silence. Most of the group looks at me and I try to ignore that reflex, holding up my bloodied hands as I look at Arno and May. Arno is hardly paying any attention, tracing his hand against the metal hull. May is the same, carefully folding up her ear buds and placing them back in her case. Once that's finished she sucks in a deep breath and looks up, but Arno beats her to the punch.

"It was me," he says, shrugging nonchalantly. "I was gonna go after the girl from Five, but May beat me there. Couldn't find anybody after that."

"Couldn't find anybody," Pierre repeats bitterly. "Did you try using your eyes?"

"If you weren't busy playing around with your kill, we wouldn't have to be worrying about this at all right now," Every says plainly, not so much as looking up to meet Pierre's gaze. "You're lucky I was there to warn you or there'd have been eight cannons just now."

Pierre doesn't look happy to have that pointed out, but he doesn't continue the argument either, just giving another grunt and going back to tending to his wound. We fall into silence, and that leaves me stuck with just my thoughts. I look down at my hands and see the blood beginning to dry.

"I'm going to go to the lake quick to clean up," I say suddenly, making to stand up. "Anybody coming with?"

Nobody looks up from their weapons. I'm ready to just walk off on my own when Ainsley sighs and stands, nodding her head. "Yeah, I'll go with."

"I'll secure our camp," Everly says, standing up as well. "Make sure that nobody is hanging around nearby. Somebody come with me."

Arno grabs hold of a spear and nods. "Sure."

"District One can set up camp for us then," Ainsley says with a tinge of false sweetness. Nobody seems eager to shoot anything back at her and so it's left at that, all of us making off in our separate directions.

Ainsley and I make our way down the hill in silence. It's hard not to notice the way Ainsley veers away from the right side of the hill, where the crippled boy from Ten is still laying in the dirt.

The slow incline quickly turns to a steep drop and both of us have to slow down, carefully stutter-stepping down to avoid tripping and rolling all the way down to the water. It slows down our progress, but we still make it there before long all the same.

There's hardly a rush. Now that the adrenaline has run still and the fear has cooled, everything seems almost painfully quiet. I wish I could say it was calming and peaceful, but the silence just makes everything feel so much worse.

Because there's no escape from the thoughts that I want so badly to just ignore. I killed a twelve-year-old. My hands drove a dagger into her heart while she screamed for me to not. I've always known that I'd have to kill. I've always known all those little kids that can't fight back would have to die. I just never imagined myself being the one to do it.

My daydreams never bogged down in details like that. It was always the interviews, the victory, the parades. The smaller moments were lost in the periphery, the triumph and heroism clearly in focus. But I don't feel like a hero. I don't feel triumphant.

We reach the lake and I dip my hands into the water, taking in a deep breath as I scrub away the blood. Ainsley has less to wash off than I do. She dips the edge of her shirt into the lake and squeezes, a few droplets of red trickling into the pristine blue.

"So," I say, reaching for some sort of conversation to take me out of my mind. "Who all do we have left to worry about, then?"

She doesn't look up from her task, her voice curt and distant. "Nobody too important. Azai and Kyler, both by themselves. Ceeja and Lakin."

"Feels weird that District Ten is already gone. I remember when we thought they'd be the last ones we put away. Guessing he didn't put up much of a fight, though."

She suddenly stands up, drying her hands on her shirt and plucking her Katan from the ground. Wordlessly, she starts up the hill again, the tip of her blade dragging against the ground as she marches up.

I dry my hands on the grass and then scramble to my feet, giving the area one last scan before following after her. The lake is just as still as the rest of the arena, only a few cloudy ripped from where Ainsley and I just washed off. A handful of rivers branch off, diving deeper down into the valleys below.

I shake my head, toss the dagger into the lake, and turn around, a light jog as I catch up to Ainsley and follow her up the hill.

Vesta Brigarde

Somehow, it feels even less real now than it did before. The arena is beautiful, a picturesque world that's almost too perfect to believe. The only thing tethering me back to reality is that I'm all alone. I rose into the arena beside a gaggle of unfamiliar outliers, not a Career or friend in sight. The backpacks laying in front of me might have almost been enough to tempt me, but the forest behind me quieted those temptations.

It's like spring in District Twelve. The trees are a bit taller and greener, the lakes more blue and clear, the bushes less lush with berries, but the feeling is the same. I wish that there were people with me, but the seven cannons that sounded off a few minutes into my jog into the forest were enough to make me feel glad about my decision.

I'm still holding onto hope, wishing that I'll look into the sky soon when the anthem plays and not see any familiar faces. All seven Careers would be a pleasant surprise. But either way I'll continue on. Either some of them survived and I stumble into them in here, or they're dead and I'll spend the Games alone.

It doesn't matter.

I don't know what it means, but walking through this forest all day has filled me with a confidence that I didn't know that I had. Like there's this piece of me that knows that I'll be walking out of here alive. It may not make sense, but I'm not going to argue with a feeling. Certainly not that one.

The sun has already turned over the horizon, and it's already easy to tell that the days here are going to be short. Towering mountaintops block off the horizon in the east and west, creating a long, dim sort of twilight that's only just now coming to a close. I'm guessing dawn will be the same.

It's pretty, though, so I don't mind. There's still enough light for me to walk through the thinly covered woods, and just enough visibility to spot any squirrels or rabbits hopping past. Tonight I'm not worrying about food, but it's something to keep in mind. Water was the bigger issue, and that one was solved before long. Plenty of clear, quick-running streams cut through the forest.

I followed one for most of the day, but now that the night is creeping in I've wandered away from it. That's one piece of advice of Tristan's that's still stuck with me. Sleep far away from fire, water, anything interesting really.

Eventually, I find a spot that fits that description to a tee, a rock overhang providing some shade and darkness that I nearly don't see on my first pass. I settle in, collecting a pile of leaves and dumping them onto the floor to create a makeshift sort of pillow. The temperature hasn't seemed to change a single degree since noon so I won't need a blanket for warmth, but the comfort of having something to hold onto wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

I imagine Wendy beside me, the leaves crinkling as we shift around in the dirt. It isn't the worst thought I've ever had, but I shove it aside anyway. Hugging leaves will be a plenty fine substitute. No use getting wistful about something I don't have when there's plenty here for me in the moment. A nice, sturdy log to use as a backboard, a big enough leaf pile to bury myself under, what more could a girl wish for?

That thought is answered with the sound of music blasting from the sky, and I crawl out of my hideaway just in time to watch the seal of Panem disappear and the first face take its place in the sky. I sit down cross-legged and empty my thoughts.

The bright, always-smiling girl from District Five Cambria Orwell is first. The girl that sat with Alyssane and nodded and held her hand for an hour on the first day of training while she had a panic attack. Her smile looks so much sadder in the picture than it ever did in real life.

Then her face is gone just like she is, the girl from Six taking her place. She's a less familiar sight, but a handful of memories still scamper across my brain. Mostly her and her district partner, joking around and pretend sword fighting with the spears while they trained.

Alyssane is next. It's hard not to feel a pang of sadness at that. She was scared of her own shadow during training, but every time that I told a story she would sit and watch with the biggest smile on her face, like nothing in the world could bother her. I wish she was here now, so I could tell her another smile on the timid and fearful face that's staring down at me.

It doesn't get any easier. Cyrus comes next, the bolder (though that was a strong word for him) of the two District Nine boys looking proudly down on the arena with a puffed-up chest. Elias follows him, and the two boys who reminded her so much of the rest of the Brigade are gone.

Thom's face is one she was prepared for. The boy was dopey and never seemed to fully be there, his head always lost up in the clouds. But I couldn't blame him for that. Before the accident he would always start each day of training by offering to help any of our group if they wanted to train with him. Even after his leg was broken and he had to know what was going to happen to him he spent his last couple of hours of the last day sitting with Basila, Cyrus, and Elias, smiling and patiently pointing out which berries were safe to eat.

The final face belongs to the other boy from Ten, Jedediah. Out of all the faces he's the one I'm least ready to see. While he and Thom were too serious, too focused on hitting dummies and swinging swords, to stick with me and all the rest of us, that first day of training, where we were all still settling into our new world, they sat down with us at lunch. I don't remember much of what any of us talked about, but I remember Jedediah when he talked about his family. No amount of concentration would manage to bring any names or details to my head, but I don't need to know any of that to know that he cared about them and took care of them in a familiar way.

Then his face drops, the music abruptly stops, and the sky is cast back into a much blacker darkness than before. I crawl back into my hideaway, rest my head on the leaves, and close my eyes, hoping that I dream of something simple. Stories by the fire, run-ins with Gator, warm hands on cold winter nights.

Nothing more than that.

May Redding

The campfire crackles, casting all of our faces in a shadowy light. The moment the anthem ended and the faces were taken out of the sky, it was like somebody turned off the light switch in the arena. It didn't take long for Ethan and Everly to throw together a fire to keep up at least a little bit of visibility.

Not that we'll need it. We did a plenty good job cutting apart the competition at the bloodbath, or whatever competition was left. Well, everybody except for me, that is. Because of course after everything I've said, all that bravado and confidence and bragging I stood there and froze. A single release of the string and I would have bagged our single biggest competitor. But I couldn't. I was too scared, or weak, or something, whatever it was doesn't matter.

It wasn't even like I had to be up close and personal with them. Ainsley stabbed the boy with a broken leg, Ethan stuck a dagger into a twelve-year-old's gut, even Arno killed the orphanage volunteer from Five. And then he lied and said that it was me that did it.

It's been hours since the bloodbath and I still haven't been able to track him down to ask about it. It's like he's been avoiding me, taking on whatever odd job will put him far away from me and leaving me with Pierre and Ariya. I keep on expecting them to push me down, call me a liar and a coward and say they know that I couldn't do it. That they always knew that I wasn't really a Career. That Ainsley was always right. That I'm just a stupid kid in over her head.

But there's been none of that. It's been just more of the same, like nobody else is feeling a single bit different here in the arena than they felt before. Pierre bellows out a deep laugh, leaning in close to the fire as he tosses a handful of twigs onto the pile.

"Ariya," he announces. I laugh along with Ethan and Arno while Ariya eyes him suspiciously. Ainsley peers back from her watchpost and rolls her eyes, while Everly doesn't flinch a muscle.

"Well then, what'll it be," I roll out in a deep announcer's voice. I take hold of a dagger and hold it by the blade over the fire. "Will Ariya learn the truth of the twisted inner-workings of Pierre's mind? Or will the dagger yet again handle first into the ground and leave Ariya desperately researching through our supplies for alcohol for the fourth time tonight." I turn to Ethan, holding the handle in front of him like a microphone. "What says District Two?"

"Handle down." He laughs. "I hope so, too. We already know Pierre too well, I don't need any more details."

"You heard it here first, folks," I say into the microphone. "District Two and District One finally achieve unity in agreement over Pierre sucking."

"Flip the damn dagger," Pierre says, stifling a laugh.

"Aye, aye," I say, shooting him a salute before flicking the dagger high into the air. I take a few quick backpedals and watch as it buries itself into the ground, the handle bouncing harmlessly against the grass."

Pierre bellows out an even louder laugh.

"Fuck that dagger," Ariya says, kicking a bit of dirt at it and nearly killing our fire in the process. "May, tell Galavant to sponsor us a coin so we can get some actual fifty-fifty. Or even better, another handle."

"You're not drinking while you're on watch," Ainsley calls back, unamused.

"Well it's a good thing I'm not on watch, then," Ariya says lightly. "I need plenty of sleep to be on my best outlier-hunting behavior bright and early tomorrow morning."

"Everly and I have been on watch since we came back from the afternoon hunt," Ainsley says sternly. "It's someone else's turn to take over, especially since none of you seem to want to actually just go to sleep."

"I'll take first watch," I chirp up brightly, flashing a smile at Ainsley that she rolls her eyes at. "It'll be fun."

Pierre grunts and stands up, stretching out his limbs. "Ainsley's right, we should get some rest. We're not going zero for two on hunts, I want at least one kill tomorrow. Arno, take the first watch with May, Ethan and me got second."

"And what about Ariya?" Ethan asks.

"Like she said," Pierre says, slapping him on the back and flashing a toothy smile. "She needs her beauty sleep."

Ethan shakes his head dejectedly while Ariya curls a suspicious look at Pierre and murmurs something about really not wanting to know what the question was. Everyone settles in quick after that, sleeping bags claimed and fire put out in just under a minute, leaving Arno and I to trek out to the "watchtower" at the top of the metal hull of the cornucopia, just within earshot of the rest of camp.

Arno is his usual unbothered self, sitting down calmly and staring at the treeline with a bow held loosely at his side. My hook sword is in its sheath, a dagger at my belt and a bow of my own sitting to the side.

I drop down, legs folded over as I blow a raspberry and rest my head glumly on the palm of my hand. Things are quiet for a while, the only sound of the arena being the faint hum of crickets in the distance.

Minutes pass, then Arno taps his fingers against his knee and hums. "Couldn't sleep?" He asks.

"What?"

He shrugs. "Figured that's why you volunteered for the first watch," he says simply.

"Yeah, well." I bristle, rubbing my arms as a chill runs through my body, the arena suddenly feeling ten degrees colder. "Just hard to stop thinking."

"Right." He nods. "I get that. Doubt I'd be sleeping if I wasn't on watch right now. Don't know how any of them are doing it."

"I'm sure they're fine," I mutter. "I wouldn't worry about them if I were you."

"It's a bit of a flaw of mine," he says nonchalantly.

I finally can't take it anymore. I turn my body to face him and lower my voice, dropping it to a harsh whisper that I'm sure nobody back at camp will overhear. "Why the hell did you lie and say you didn't kill anybody?"

He shrugs, still doesn't look at me. "Why'd you lie and say you killed somebody?"

"Can you stop answering everything I say with stupid cryptic messages and questions. Just, talk like a normal person for once and answer my question."

He peers over at me, his eyelids half-closed as he tiredly shrugs again. "I didn't do it for any reason. Just figured somebody wasn't answering for a reason and knew if I fessed up everybody'd forget all about it by the end of the day. Which they did."

"Yeah, well," I crunch around the words in my mouth, swishing it back and forth before eventually pushing it out. "Thanks, I guess."

"Don't mention it," he says.

"You neither," I reply quietly.

He laughs at that, chuckling to himself as he goes back to looking out at the dark trees. I do the same, sliding away from him and hugging my knees, my eyes glazed as they tiredly fall over the treeline.

A/N: End of day 1. A bit of a sneak-peak into it this chap, but as you'll continue to see in the coming chapters, there's a reason I didn't show any training povs from Kyler or Vesta's perspectives. Official Placements down below for you stat nerds like me.

24th: Jedediah (killed by Everly)

23rd: Alyssane (killed by Ethan)

22nd: Elias (killed by Ariya)

21st: Cyrus (killed by Ariya)

20th: Kiera (killed by Pierre)

19th: Thom (killed by Ainsley)

18th: Cambria (killed by Arno)