THE FIRST HUNGER GAMES.
—ELINA MICELLI | 14 | DISTRICT FIVE.
〔 in a world gushing up blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.〕
»»—- —-««
Green grass stretched towards the centre of the arena and past it, neatly clipped and vibrant. It stopped only at the wall which was wooden and tall, and had a higher number of PKs stationed atop than anybody here had the time to count. Between the even ring of tributes, and a smattering of food-topped tables, were a myriad of gleaming weapons, knives, maces, and swords alike, scattered about like toys on the floor of a rich kid's bedroom.
It was all slightly underwhelming to Elina, who stood with her palms prickling as the voice counting down reached the lower thirties; she had expected more from the Capitol, who'd boasted about this spectacle for months following the reapings. If she wanted to die amidst blades of grass and nothing else, Elina would've scrambled through the wire fence surrounding Five and bolted to Nine, or Ten, or a district similar to those, and let herself be found out. Or she would die in the in-between; the unclaimed land, that stretched far and wide between the districts. Better dying there than here.
At least that would be her choice, she thought bitterly, eyes drifting from the PKs on the wall to the flash of movement at her right. Her palms prickled again. The countdown was only in the mid-twenties, and the only rule the Capitol had given them was to remain in place until it ended.
The girl clearly didn't care. There was no hesitancy in her steps; long, confident, strides towards the tables set up in the middle of the arena. Elsewhere in the circle, two boys had started to follow her lead. Elina's feet remained planted within the crudely drawn circle she was led to this morning, fear trickling down the back of her throat and pooling coolly in her stomach. Sweat beaded at the back of her neck; she had never been one to follow rules to the letter, but this was one she hadn't even thought of breaking. The weapons in between her and the food-topped tables were enticing, and the food even more enticing after days without, but they were also out of bounds until the Capitol said so.
Her unease was warranted and her reaction was instinctive. Gunfire was a more familiar sound to Elina than her own father's voice, after the war stole him away and all she was left with was fading memories. At the sound of it once again, her knees thudded against the ground and she curled in on herself impossibly tight. Distantly, she heard screaming. Her heart hammered in her chest, and intermingled with the screaming were all sorts of phantom sounds; shattering glass and splintering wood, frantic whispered prayers and the ever-constant roar of District Five's electric dam.
She forced herself to take a few steadying breaths, beating away the tendrils of panic that had started to seize her mind. As silly as it sounded, this was not the place. The fear still clung to her; an uneasiness that Elina couldn't shake, wrapping itself around her ribcage and striking deep into her heart. But she couldn't let it consume her. Just as she had pushed it away hearing the whistling of bombs all those months ago, she pushed it away now. In matters of life or death, Elina couldn't allow herself to crumble.
If she did, then she was never getting home.
Her knees protested as she slowly uncurled, trembling from limb to limb. She had never been so close to death before. Not so close that she could see it, anyway (Daddy and Oran went off to the front line to die, and the adults all agreed that there was no use in looking for survivors in the rubble of Grammy's apartment building). Elina had felt death, been affected by it, like everyone in Panem. There wasn't a home untouched, in any of the districts or the Capitol, she truly believed. Not with the scores of corpses the war left behind in its wake. She hadn't seen it though, not until now.
In the wake of it all, Elina could see death for what it was. Unfair and ugly and horribly gruesome.
She couldn't let it happen to her. Not here. Not like them; three bodies weeping red into the grass; three children who paid the ultimate price for their courageous disobedience.
Elina's breaths were ragged, her eyes teary, and her fingernails dug so hard into her palms that they left little half-moon shaped marks when she flexed her hands. The countdown had resumed again, from the top, but Elina couldn't tear her eyes from the three bodies. The girl—the first boy—the second boy. Her eyes flitted between them; wishing so desperately that she was being deceived.
But she wasn't: the Capitol had made it clear; the tributes were to play their game the way the Capitol wanted them to. If they didn't, they would end up like the three kids in front of them. Surrendered to the ugliness of death in a shower of bullets.
Elina drew a sharp breath. Not me , she thought, sluggishly, her brain working overtime to process the events that had just occurred, that won't be me. And she had never been so damn sure of anything in her short and pitiful life. It wouldn't—couldn't—be her; she would play their game so damn well that the only way she would die was at the hands of one of her fellow districtmen. The Capitol had taken away her father and her brother and her grandmother and Elina thought of her grieving mother; her ever red-rimmed eyes and the way that she still dusted Oran's room, and cleaned the lenses of the glasses that her husband would never wear again, and set five places at the dinner instead of two and tried to recreate Elina's grandmother's recipes with varying success.
The Capitol had taken enough from her; a woman who had slaved for them; who did what she was supposed to, and never complained. They marred her childrens' childhoods with their bombs, cut down one with bullets, and reaped the other's name and dragged her to the Capitol to die a brutal death on live television.
Elina could not let that happen. The echoes of screams still rang in her ears; the bodies in front of her lay limp and still and terribly gruesome. She could feel her mother's phantom touch, spindly fingers grazing her forehead as she tucked a stray curl behind Elina's ear; she could see her daddy in the hallway, all too proud, puffing his chest out and promising to be home soon; she could smell the faint must of Oran's bedroom, now forever unoccupied, and a stark reminder of the best friend who had once been so close, and who she would never see again; she could taste her Grammy's cooking, hearty and warm even in the throes of the war; and she heard them all, saying her name over and over, pleading and desperate and frenzied. Wishing her well. Wishing her home.
She thought of them, and she made a promise: I'll play, and I'll win. For you.
Elina blinked, wiping her tears on the edge of her sleeve. She sniffed, loudly, sucked in a shivering breath and before she could even attempt to get her bearings, the countdown hit zero.
»»—- —-««
Half of them moved and half of them didn't.
Elina had always been drawn to shiny things. Back home, she had been likened to a magpie by more people than she cared to count; drawn to glimmers and glints, obsessed with things that were treasures to her and nobody else. When the sun started to set and her homework was done, and the PKs on duty were just nearing the ends of their shifts and had no desire to enforce anything that would force them to draft up paperwork, Elina would take to the slick cobbled streets and she would chase the setting sun, and the treasures it revealed to her until her pockets were full to bursting.
But what she found had always been harmless; copper coin, broken jewellery, smashed pocket watches. Junk to anybody else. Her father would roll his eyes sky-high; her mother would shake her head as a fond smile tugged at the corner or her lips; Oran would sort through it and pocket all of the loose change, an act that Elina pretended not to notice (and after the war took him away, she left them in neat piles on his bedside table).
They were, besides the coins, useless. Trash. Items better suited to the gutters she found them in than the shelves mounted on Elina's wall and the equally cluttered shelves of her bookshelf and the overflowing drawers of her desk.
They were everything that the knife beside her boot was not. Still, her fingers curled around the handle, plucking it from the grass as if it was just another one of her trinkets she was taking from the streets. She would hold onto it as if it were—if anybody else in this place wanted it, they would only get it over her dead body.
Her next stop was the tables. The blue tablecloth hung almost down to the floor, and Elina stopped just short of it. Her free hand shot out towards a hunk of bread—not even a full loaf—mouth watering. The Capitol hadn't bothered to feed them for as many days as they were trapped in their dark basement. Anything would be welcome—even a plate of peas and green beans. She stuffed the bread haphazardly in her pocket, reaching out for a tiny bag of fruit flakes, and then a bruised banana.
A scream pierced her ears, and she turned around just in time to see a mace crack into the skull of a boy just behind her. He crumpled like a sack of potatoes, still screaming, and the mace connected again with a sickening, squelching, thud. He wasn't screaming anymore; the muffled noise coming from the grass was more animal than human. Guttural.
Elina hadn't known what she expected. She had known this would happen; she had made the choice herself during the fatal countdown: she would play the game, and there was no way she would go down without a fight. But seeing it, right in front of her; barbarian and bloody, not at the hands of the Capitol but a boy who couldn't have been much older than her, arms shaking with exertion as he lifted the mace above his head for the final blow, froze the blood in her veins.
She wasn't thinking when she lunged for him. He hadn't even seen her—too busy focusing on his defenceless victims and the bloody pulp that was now his skull. Elina had never cared much about right and wrong; her morals, especially as the war raged, blurred and crossed lines as she saw fit. She cared about what benefitted her over all. But this? It was wrong, and she knew it was wrong, and she couldn't find it within herself to care.
It shouldn't have been her fight. She shouldn't have gotten involved. Yet, she did, and no sooner than her knife had pierced the mace-wielding boy's gut, did he let out a similar wounded noise to the boy he had just killed, and fell atop of him. His blood covered Elina's hand and her blade, and she gritted her teeth and started to scarper away towards the wall and the precarious safety it offered her.
»»—- —-««
She hadn't killed him.
It hadn't taken long for people to flee to the perimeter of the wall, away from the carnage that had resulted in a multitude of bodies. Elina had pressed herself against the wall so hard that it hurt and even though she tried not to, her eyes found the two boys and their bodies. An indeterminate amount of time later, she watched as one of them started to twitch.
It was at the mercy of a girl—or a figure who Elina assumed was a girl—that put him out of his misery. She had been pacing around the ring of painted circles, back and forth and back and forth, and her head whipped to the side at the slight movement and then she was there, above him as he pitifully tried to drag himself away, and she speared him on the tip of her already bloodied blade.
Elina was almost shocked at the amount of them willing to kill. In her head and in the confines of that gloomy Capitol basement, so dark at times that Elina had found herself wondering whether she had gone blind, she had thought that most of them would not do it. Half of them had spent that time together in the basement in floods of tears. Some of them had whispered: "what if we just didn't fight? They can't make us." And even then, before she knew about the trigger-happy PKs on the top of the wall that had seemed like the stupidest idea of all. Elina had known what she was going to do; she had made up her mind after the initial announcement, and again in the dingy darkness of the cattle cart she was thrown in after her name was reaped, and again during the announcement, and a final time now, as she cautiously watched the figures of the others.
It had been too dark down there to tell exactly who they were, but Elina would bet the coins on her dead brother's bedside table, and all of the junk scattered across her bedroom, that the ones whispering were the ones who were dead. Too many of them had been ready to pounce on them. Some were even keen.
Had Elina been keen? Had she stabbed that boy because she wanted to? She hadn't needed to. He had been so focused that he hadn't seen her until it was too late—it was plausible that she could have turned and ran and he wouldn't have even batted an eyelid. He hadn't died at her hands but he'd suffered at them, and they were still stained with his blood.
There was a voice in the back of her head, sharp and disgusted and too much like her own: "It was wrong, and you knew it was wrong, and you didn't care."
Her fingers flexed around the handle of her knife. Her breath rattled in her chest and her throat. Her eyes were teary and blurry. The voice was right; she was right. Elina didn't care about the boy. She cared about herself and her lonely mother and she cared about getting home. But she didn't care that the boy was dead, and she didn't care about the blood on her blade or her knuckles or her wrist, just as the Capitol didn't care about their bullets or bombs or families ripped apart.
»»—- —-««
The bread and the banana and the fruit flakes burned a hole through Elina's pocket faster than they should have. By late afternoon she had nothing left and a growing, gnawing, hunger that felt as if it was eating her from the inside out. She had been used to it before; seven days of the near-constant pangs. But eating it seemed to have reset it, and her eyes couldn't tear themselves from the tables and the meagre amount that was still remaining.
The girl who had been pacing by the circles had retreated. She was halfway between the wall and her previous position, sitting on the floor with her long legs outstretched and her sword across her lap. Elina couldn't tell if she was looking at her or not; her head was down, but wispy strands of her chestnut coloured hair obscured her eyes. She could be looking straight at Elina and Elina would be none the wiser unless she got closer.
It was a slow decision. A full thirty minutes at least. Elina ping-ponged her two options, back and forth in the chasm of her skull; she could go, or she could stay. If she went, the girl could kill her. If she stayed, then hunger could kill her. These Games had been off to a riveting start, but they had dropped as steeply as the edge of a cliff. What if this was it? What if the means to an end was a war of attrition?
Then the girl nearest the tables would win, Elina's conclusion was resolute. And that couldn't happen. Because that girl was not her, and she would not look after Elina's mother. She wouldn't even think about her or the lonely dining table with five places and only one, very sad, woman. Elina knew this, because after she won, she wouldn't think about her opponents' mothers or fathers or brothers or grandmas, either.
Nobody turned their heads as Elina slowly rose to her feet. Nobody rushed to stop her as she took quick, careful, steps towards the centre of the arena. Elina got past the circle they had been standing in earlier, towards the tables and was stuffing almost anything she could reach into her pockets when her head exploded with starry pain.
»»—- —-««
The sound that Elina made as she teetered and eventually toppled was nothing short of a pathetic mewl. The grass was dewy below her cheek. There was something dribbling down the back of her head and soaking into her collar. A terrible headache was already starting to hammer. When the shock had worn off and the adrenaline took over, Elina knew that she couldn't stay down. She tucked her arms to her chest and pressed her arms together, and rolled under the table for a quick reprieve. There was a frustrated grunt in her absence. Elina answered with another sad squeak.
The back of her head collided with the underneath of the table in her haste to stand up. She cursed, and her hand flew to the back of her head and the blood of the boy she had stabbed was joined by her own, wet and alarming to see. Angrily and blindly, the blade of the sword jabbed underneath the tablecloth. Elina pitched herself away from it and, unwittingly, back into the open.
Whatever food was in her pockets was more than certainly crushed, but that didn't matter—Elina would eat it even if it had been smeared with mud and stomped on with a boot. She popped up from behind the table, her hand flashing out to grab a tiny little cupcake, and the girl on the other side growled whilst her face reddened. A little bit of an overreaction, Elina mused, but she was smart enough to keep her mouth shut and turn tail and run.
Every step correlated with a clap of thunder in her head. She knew she couldn't run forever; the wall was rapidly approaching, and so, when she was close enough that she could reach out and touch it, Elina turned sharply and her boots pounded against the grass and she careened forwards at a pace driven only by the desperation gushing primally through her veins.
But she knew that she couldn't run forever. She had been rash and stupid and now she was facing the consequences. The realisation settled in Elina's chest; heavy and potent. She thought of her mother and, in a move that could have been seen as just as rash and stupid as the decision that had got her in this position in the first place, Elina hit the floor and curled into a ball.
»»—- —-««
The girl did exactly as she hoped; she didn't stop, and her lower legs slammed into the base of Elina's spine, and then she was flying through the air and landing with a terrible thud. Aching and shaking, Elina staggered to her feet and towards the girl who didn't even have the chance to open her eyes before Elina had killed her.
The left-over adrenaline pumping through her veins; the vision of her mother and her sad eyes and four empty chairs: Elina let it consume her, root itself deep inside of her, and when it was done and faded away, she was more blood than human.
»»—- —-««
In the Capitol they had been kept in the dark for so long that Elina thought she'd gone blind. At the time it had sent a silvery barb of terror through her. Now, she wished it were true. It was hard to ignore the bodies, and particularly hard to ignore the ones you were responsible for.
She was in some sort of limbo. A precursor to hell, she was certain. Her heart wouldn't stop hammering; her head felt as if it might explode; and her chest seized and her lungs felt frozen, and sucking in a rattling breath expended more energy than it ought to. And her mind was torn; the ever-familiar, "it was wrong, you knew it was wrong, and you don't care." followed by the new and scary, "it was wrong, and you knew it was wrong, and you do care."
For the first time since the beginning of the war, Elina acted her age: she cried and she cried. She hugged her legs to her chest, and she thought of her mother and her father and her brother and her grandmother and let out a lamenting wail. The evening dragged into night, and she did not even touch the food that broke her. She crumbled the cupcake into dust, in a flash of hot rage when even the darkness couldn't hide the body, the evidence. And then she cried some more.
Some of the others decided to take the coward's way out. As lost as she was, even Elina was hanging on. She had stopped crying by the time they enacted their stupid plan, having watched one boy cautiously approach a girl, and the two of those approach another girl, until they were a strong group of five. At first, Elina thought they were teaming up—that they would start charging to this side of the arena, to her and the only other boy, but they didn't. The five of them barely gave Elina and the copper-haired boy a cursory glance.
And then they started to scale the wall.
The gunfire was immediate and unrelenting. Elina screeched as she watched it; the volley of bullets picking the children off one by one. The horror spurred her exhausted limbs into moving. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape to. In District Five they had made a tent in the kitchen; a small table, and a blanket, and pillows, and during the war they would hide in there and her mother would sing and Elina would hang onto every soft word. She tried to imagine it now, almost blind from panic, as she lurched and stumbled. It didn't sound right. Her mother's voice was too distant, and warped, somehow, and, in a miserable pile of limbs when she finally collapsed, Elina could still see the bodies.
Every single one.
»»—- —-««
When Elina woke up, she could not breathe.
She didn't even remember falling asleep. It was still dark when her eyes snapped open, and the grass was dewy on the back of her neck, and there was someone over her—the other boy—and she couldn't breathe.
His weight was heavy on her knees, and his hands tight around her throat. She tried to scream but all she could do was choke; pathetic rasps that barely permeated the early-morning air. Her vision blurred. Her lungs screeched.
Her fingers, ever-obedient, found the handle of the knife, painful against the base of her spine where she had tucked it in the waistband of her trousers between the girl and before the gunfire.
The boy caterwauled as it pierced his flesh. First his bicep, and second his shoulder. The pressure around her neck released, and for a terrible moment all Elina could do was gag and retch and draw in breaths that felt like she was filling her lungs with sharp and shattered grass. Then, she rolled over and towards the boy and she started to stab him and stab him and stab him.
There were no trumpets and no fanfare to meet her at the end. Only the PKs, dressed all in white. Elina saw them coming and she tried to run, but they were stronger and faster and with the urgency that they gripped her and pinned her down, she was convinced they were coming to kill her. Put her down, as if she were a rabid animal or a secret-spilling mockingjay.
That was how the Capitol saw her anyway; ruthless, and bloodthirsty, and a brutish caricature of the little girl she no longer was, or would ever have the chance to be again.
Beginning quote by Aberjhani.
I put poor little Elina through the wringer. She's an old OC of mine; put to paper back in 2014 in a horror of a story that will never see the light of day. I'm so glad I got to flesh her out and explore her here, even if it meant breaking her beyond repair. I'm aware that this chapter in particular, of the few I have written, is rather disconnected and has things that don't make sense. This is the First Games: I wanted them to be somewhat confusing (although I hope they're still legible), and remember that the cameras and the audience see things that Elina didn't. You might be asking "Kitty, why did some tributes fight for their lives only to get themselves killed by doing the dumbest thing imaginable by climbing that wall?" And to that, I say: you'll see. It will be important, and it will come into play, I can promise you that. You can bank on things like that in upcoming chapters too-I firmly believe that the Hunger Games came to how they are in the trilogy through trial and error. We will see that, eventually, and I'm super excited about it!