Lucy tripped up the steps to the stone table and crashed at Caspian's side, bright red rivulets dripping down the corner of the table above him where he'd made sickening impact with the altar.
"Caspian," she gasped, her breaths coming fast in thick, smoky air as she pulled him over onto his back.
A breath of a groan escaped him, hair slipping away from his face as his eyelids fluttered, and she gripped his arm, jacket slipping to reveal deep gouges from his shoulder to his chest, blood spreading black through the fabric and pooling beneath him over the stone, trickling down the side of the dais.
"Caspian," she choked again, and distant dark eyes flickered up to find her, the boy's chest stuttering with another half-voiced groan as he struggled to draw breath, fighting against some invisible pressure before his eyes lost focus and fluttered back into his head.
"Caspian!"
The struggle in his chest stilled, and Lucy's heart skipped a beat, fumbling hurriedly along his throat for a pulse, fingers shaking under his jaw, detecting nothing but their own trembling as the desperation set in and she held the back of her hand over his mouth, half a centimeter from his lips.
A second later, the faintest ghost of a breath brushed her skin.
She gasped in relief and burst into tears.
Smoke burned her eyes, breathless, hitching, choking noises catching in her throat as she glanced desperately around the plateau, the dragon's hulking black corpse blurring and swimming in her vision, sprawled in a twisted, gnarled mound a few yards away.
Edmund's figure crept around the opposite side of it, kneeling over Jill's body.
Her narrow shoulders and rounded thighs lay tucked up as if she might only have been asleep, silhouetted dark against cracked grey stone, but her eyes glinted out from under her bangs in the fading orange light, still open, staring into nothing.
Edmund's pale fingers hovered over her for a second before slipping under the backpack straps and tugging them gently down her arms.
Short brown hair fell loose over the ground and her head lolled at the movement, too far, rolling around to her back, and Edmund turned away and clamped a hand over his mouth as if he would be sick, pausing there for several moments before breathing out slowly, stiffly, and bracing himself.
He grasped the strap again and tugged the rest of the way, pulling it free and standing quickly as he slung the bag over his shoulder, Jill's head rolling back around to her front, every bone in her neck shattered apart.
Edmund stepped away without looking back, and glanced nervously instead toward Caspian.
"Is he—"
"He's alive," sobbed Lucy, pressing shaking sleeves to her eyes and sucking in deep breaths. "I just— I don't know— what to—"
Edmund leaned over the dais and delicately lifted Caspian's jacket, ruby-red blood pooling over his once-white shirt where the monster's teeth had gouged deep trenches through his flesh.
He scanned the wounds with sharp eyes as if calculating an equation, face pale and impassive as a statue, and for a second Lucy remembered who he was, and a bolt of fear struck through her chest.
But then his concentration broke and he glanced around at their barren surroundings, making no move for the silver knife still shining in his belt. "It'll be getting dark soon, we should get out of the open."
Lucy blinked. "We? You're staying?"
He glanced at her, and hesitated before he sighed. "Come on, before I change my mind."
Lucy hauled herself up to her knees, then glanced through the smoke to the dark wall of pine. "What if there's another..." Her eyes flicked to the horrible carcass.
"Isn't one enough?" Edmund sighed, glancing up into the sky and glaring as if he could pierce the invisible camera feed into the gamemakers' headquarters. "We don't exactly have many options," he said, turning back to her. "Unless you wanna stay out here."
The setting sun cast harsh shadows over the landscape, bare stone stretching out in the strange, lonely light through the haze of dying flame. It seemed a more desolate and haunting place now than it had ever seemed under the noonday sun with twenty four tributes encircling its altar.
Lucy shook her head.
Edmund gripped Caspian under the arms, and Lucy took his legs where Edmund indicated with a nod, and together they heaved him off the dais with the sum of all their strength, hauling him as carefully as they could manage around the monster, toward the eaves of the forest as the sun dipped low beyond it.
Lucy tried not to watch the blood running down Caspian's jacket in tiny rivulets over weatherproof material, but the steady drip over uneven paving stones distracted her even as Edmund puffed and cursed his weight under the bulk of the work.
They aimed further south then the path they'd first taken into the trees, and they were both gasping for breath by the time they finally laid him clumsily on the dark forest floor in a small clearing, tight gaps in the trees overlooking the southern arena.
Edmund dropped the backpack beside Lucy and collapsed at the base of a tree, and she dug out the first aid kit at once, along with the plain white cylinder labeled antibiotic.
It had proven magical enough so far, but what would it do to a fresh, gaping wound?
Shakily, she peeled back Caspian's jacket to uncover the glistening, deep gouges from his right shoulder to the middle of his chest, so thick with shining dark blood that she could barely distinguish fabric from flesh.
Her stomach turned, uneasy chills sweeping her body, but she brushed them aside. It wasn't as if she'd never seen bad wounds before.
She'd seen worse.
On corpses.
A distant, mechanical hum crept in on the edge of her senses, but she didn't look up until Edmund did, up past the treetops, up to the silhouette of a Capitol hovercraft glinting silver and gold in the setting sun.
It descended beyond the edge of the trees, and when it rose again the hangar doors in its belly closed around the shape of a small, delicate figure drawn up by its claw.
Jill.
Heat crawled into Lucy's throat as the craft disappeared again beyond the treetops, burning mist clouding her eyes.
But she blinked it back.
Trembling, she unbuttoned Caspian's tunic, fingers sliding over hot blood as she peeled the slick fabric from the wound, and then uncovered his abdomen.
Her stomach flipped.
Scars littered his ribs and upper abdomen, uneven stripes and nicks, all much older than the arena, tight and pale, thick, raised from the rest of his smooth flesh.
She stared for a second, blood trickling unhindered now over long-healed wounds; a kind that Lucy recognized, a kind that criss-crossed up and down his arms, too, no matter how she tried to ignore them, tried to believe his story about sparring.
Self inflicted.
"Help me lift him," she choked, forcefully averting her eyes as Edmund moved begrudgingly to lift his shoulders while she worked his sleeves off.
He made no comment on the scars, though his eyes lingered as she wadded the jacket up and pressed it to Caspian's chest against the bleeding.
A choked moan escaped his lips at the pressure, eyelids fluttering but not opening, head lolling to the side as hair slipped over his eyes, weak breaths turning quick and shallow.
She held it there, pressing the sturdy material hard into his shoulder as an alarming rush of blood spilled out from under it over his chest and into the bed of pine needles, Lucy's hands thoroughly coated in it, turning cold in the faint breeze that slipped through the trees.
It took several minutes for the flow to weaken, and then seemingly stop, though part of her wondered if he hadn't just run out of blood. She risked loosening the pressure to reach for her water bottle, uncapping it and spilling clear stream water over the wounds to another tiny choked noise of protest, so soft she almost couldn't hear it.
With the cotton of his tunic she sopped up the water as gently as she could, soaking the garment in even more blood, until at last she got a good view of the wounds themselves: three prominent gashes torn through jagged flesh, and a few smaller tears at the edges where the teeth hadn't pierced as deeply.
"I wonder if it was venomous," muttered Edmund, watching from the side.
"Oh, very kind, you are, let's not talk about that."
"I'm just wondering, I mean, that thing looked toxic."
"I said shut up," snapped Lucy, wiping her hands on the last clean scrap of Caspian's tunic before uncapping the antibiotic, and hoping desperately that it would do something, even against venom.
The thought ate into her mind like a venom of its own as she gently dabbed the pale cream over freshly torn flesh.
Caspian made no noise now, his shallow breathing unchanged. If anything, it grew softer, and she ached to do something else, anything else. But there was nothing else to do. They were stranded in a forest with no proper medical supplies, no one who really knew what they were doing, locked in a death trap while the population of the entire country watched in sick suspense and took bets on whether his heart would stop.
She clenched her jaw and carefully bandaged the area, putting Edmund to use again so that she could reach the puncture wounds beneath his shoulder blades, white gauze against feverish brown skin.
Her roll of bandages came away very much thinner by the time she tucked it back into the bag, and then there was nothing left to do but watch him breathe as dark red seeped through gauze in thick splotches, Lucy's heart hammering in her chest, eyes lingering on pale criss-crossing scars.
"You can't just leave that lying around," said Edmund, and she looked hazily up at him.
"What?"
He nodded toward the blood-soaked bundle of Caspian's clothes. "Unless we're trying to attract another flesh-hungry hellbeast."
"Alright, alright, just give me a chance—" Heat rushed up behind her eyes in sudden frustration, burning at the back of her throat, snapping in her late-set panic. "I'm trying—" She breathed out, giving up on the argument before she could even articulate a coherent sentence. "And, it— it was a dragon."
"It was a mutt."
"Well, it looked like a dragon to me."
"Not everything is a fairytale, Pevensie."
"I know," she snapped, and hiccupped back a sob as she clamped her wrist to her mouth, hands still streaked red, the shock of it all washing over her in the calm of the forest.
She grabbed the clothes and stood, crunching into the underbrush.
"The river is north of the—"
"I can find it on my own," she spat, and crashed into the darkness as hot tears blurred her vision, snapping over twigs without a care for the noise.
If any other beasts did live nearby, they would have no trouble finding her, but at this moment, she couldn't bring herself to care.
Trekking up around the treasure-filled gully, she cut straight through the same beaten down trail the dragon had caused with its bulk as it first approached, and the terror of such a thing fell numb on her skin, as if dashed against an impenetrable shield.
She crashed carelessly through the destruction until she reached a rushing stream in the twilight of the trees, a swath of snapped saplings cleared out around it where the beast must have been drinking, or perhaps bathing, when they had walked unwittingly into its territory.
She knelt at the stream's edge, and at the last second she had the presence of mind to dig through Caspian's pockets before plunging the jacket underwater.
Her smeared bloody hand came out clutching a small spool of fishing line and a lighter—the same she'd handed him in the caves after picking over Corin's body—and a small, circular, golden pin she'd never seen before, framed in the shape of a bird clutching an arrow in its beak.
His district token?
She turned it over in her fingers, smearing blood over gold, perfect delicate lines glimmering in the pale light. Why had he never shown it to her? He'd seen her token, it seemed only a fair trade between friends.
You be careful, Lu. This isn't exactly the best place for friends.
And all at once, before she could hold it back, the swimming heat slipped down her cheeks and she choked on a sob that shook her shoulders, struggling to draw in a shuddering breath only to squeak and sob again, and she sat back onto the shore clutching a handful of trinkets as blood trickled down her wrist and every inch of her body gave up.
Jill's last shriek of "Lu!" echoed with the force that had knocked her out of harm's way, the jarring shock of stone striking her again with the singular knowledge that Jill Pole had saved her life.
Intentionally or not, that split second decision to break apart had cost Jill her future.
The snap of bone, the cannon blast, the body crumpled to the ground and leaking red under mousey brown hair.
Why?
Her chest constricted and she coughed, choking on the pressure of tears in her throat, gasping for air through desperate sobs that refused to loosen their grip on her core.
With shaking hands, she rinsed the trinkets and slipped them into her own pocket, pressing the wadded tunic and jacket into the stream as her shoulders shook, a dark cloud billowing out from them.
Saltwater spilled into her mouth as she rubbed blood from cotton; too much blood.
An eternity of cloudy water drifted past, filled with shaky gasps until her mind went cloudy too and any amount of time might have passed before the nightly noises drifted in again and she realized her sobs now hitched without noise, breathing softly with the water's steady rippling, exhausting herself long before the churning sea in her stomach had fully spilled.
She shivered in the breeze, pulling the clothes from the water and squeezing them as tight as she could to wring them out, dousing herself with a great deal of cold water in the process before she gave up and hauled herself back onto the path, crunching desolately through dark trees with an empty pit in her gut, face flushed and sensitive and most certainly ruined. But the girl who would have cared about puffy eyes and pink cheeks seemed to have vanished, leaving in her place only a shell, only a swirling weariness and thinly shrouded questions too dangerous to answer.
The sun had set by now, but her eyes adjusted to the darkness, moonlight filtering through scattered branches by the time she stepped back into their clearing and hung Caspian's things up to dry on a low branch.
Edmund leaned against the twisted roots of a pine tree and didn't look up when she knelt to check on Caspian, broad sternum still rising and falling faintly beneath stained bandages.
She glanced over his scars, and shrugged off her jacket in spite of the sharpening chill in the air, draping it across his exposed torso and tucking it loosely under his waist.
"Well, now where are the sponsors supposed to come from?" quipped Edmund flatly.
She glanced back at him, then down to Caspian's still form, collarbones exposed where her small jacket couldn't quite reach, and rage surged inside her.
The fact that Caspian's body might have been an object of interest for other reasons hadn't even occurred to her yet, and the slightest hint of embarrassment converged with overwhelming anger at the thought of the Capitol crowds, the women crying in front row at the interviews.
"They've had enough of a show," she spat, and tucked the jacket just as far as it would go before glancing over Caspian's face and brushing the hair from his forehead.
His dark lashes rested as peacefully as if he were asleep on the Capitol balcony, but she'd never felt further away from that place than she did at this moment, helpless and pathetic for all to see, none of the hope or foolish surety she'd felt under those city lights. Clinging, as always, to someone who could not save her. To someone she should never have risked knowing in the first place.
She breathed a deep and shaky sigh, and moved at last to settle against a tree opposite Edmund, eyes drifting to the backpack, but she had no appetite, and no energy to dig through their provisions.
Silence settled between them, a stark contrast from last night's chatter of magical rabbits and golden pools, and Lucy tangled her fingers around her knees.
Edmund's knife flashed almost invisibly in the moonlight, carving at a bit of branch in his other hand. Again, it struck her just how easily he could have killed them both, if he wanted to.
"Why did you stay?" she asked quietly, and her voice cracked.
He shrugged, almost offhandedly, but his words came out stiff, thin. "Now we're even."
She watched his blade twirl, shaving paper-thin curls of wood into a pile at his feet.
"This isn't a permanent arrangement," he added after a minute, "So don't get any ideas. I just hate owing people."
Lucy nodded absently.
Wouldn't want any personal feelings tangling up our straightforward death match. That would just be silly.
"You do know you're supposed to be killing us, not saving us, right?"
She almost lashed back, but no retort came to her defense.
He was right.
Defiance and shame clashed like warring winds in her chest. She should have known she couldn't really play this game. Sure, she could perform, she could entertain, but when it came right down to it, she could never really do what needed to be done.
She should have abandoned Caspian. No one could survive out here weighed down by an injured ally. What if another monster turned up? What if another tribute found them? Would she stay behind then?
She should have focused on keeping herself alive, accepted the inevitable. But Lucy Pevensie just had to care.
"Winning was never really the goal," she muttered, inadvertently echoing Jill, and her stomach turned.
Edmund watched her. "What is the goal?" he asked after a few minutes, his voice dropping off faintly. "Why'd you bother with me?"
She shrugged. "I don't know."
It didn't even sound true.
Of course she'd only been weak. Of course she'd only wanted to help when not a single soul had asked for it. Of course she just couldn't stand to watch anyone suffer, even if that only caused more suffering in the long run.
Edmund gazed at the ground, but after a long while, he spoke again. "My dad used to work on the trains."
Lucy's eyes snapped up to him, heart jumping at the sudden personal detail.
He glanced at her and then quickly away, carving another strip from his branch as the moonlight splashed over his dark hair and sharp, statuesque features.
"I went after school to help him. I could climb into small spaces, fitted the night vision cameras where he couldn't reach, that kind of thing."
"Night vision cameras," whispered Lucy, mind humming in confusion to puzzle out what he was getting at. "Like the lizards."
He nodded slowly, speaking distantly. "That was why they moved us to hovercraft assembly. We were the best in the plant, everyone said so, and it paid more, too, climbing up into the hangars, into the ships strung from great huge chains and wiring the cameras into their bellies."
He barely even sounded like himself, unnervingly detached.
"I was late, the day the accident happened. Just a couple minutes late. If I'd been there, it might have been me, instead of…" He paused, knife hesitating over the wood before taking another calculated swipe. "They hadn't anchored it to the chains properly. Lazy night shift buggers. And when one of them broke… all of them broke. The stain was on the floor for three weeks. Barely anything left to bury. Anything recognizable, anyway."
Lucy never tore her eyes from him, and after a few moments she had to remind herself to breathe. "How old were you?" she asked softly.
"Twelve. That was my first dead body. You said yours, now I said mine."
Now we're even.
The only reason she'd told Biddie's story was for the cameras, and she almost said as much; but then, of course, this was no different. He would never tell her any of this of his own accord.
Instead, she asked "What did you do after that?"
"Went back to work, of course." He gave a mirthless smirk. "I'm the best in the plant, you know. And somebody's gotta put food on the table."
"You have siblings?"
"Just Mum. She can't work, though, she's…" He waved his hand in front of his eyes. Blind. "Factory accident. Long time ago."
Lucy nodded, watching his knife work mechanically, imagining the life that had made him so angry, so eager to prove himself; imagining what he might have been without all that. Without the burden of provider falling to him, an adult at age twelve. The same age she'd run away and clawed a life out of the ashes, or more accurately, out of the cotton dust, making her way on factory pay that barely afforded food and clothes for a mouse.
Edmund brushed the shavings off his strangely shaped piece of wood, and picked up another crudely carved slab nearly identical, which he must have finished while she'd been washing. He slotted them together like two halves of a jigsaw. They caught slightly, and he carved another bit off before snapping them together.
They formed a shape almost like a blocky sword.
"What is it?" she asked quietly.
He turned it over. "People back home call it a cross. I don't know why. It comes from the old world. I don't mean fairytales, I mean… the world, before, the one our ancestors came from."
Lucy nodded.
"Mum says it means hope, but they only put it on graves, so I don't suppose I ever understood that part…" He reached down into his shirt and pulled out a string, a necklace made of strong cord, with a small pendant affixed at the end, smooth and glossy. In the faint moonlight, it glinted the same shape.
He ran his thumb over it, and suddenly she imagined a woman doing the same, every day for years, tracing the simple token under well worn fingers, seeking its shape with touch instead of sight.
"You'd get along, the two of you," he scoffed.
Lucy wanted to ask about her, his mother, but that seemed a step too far, even for the cameras. Instead she only asked "Is she okay?"
Edmund glanced at her, and eventually gave a noncommittal nod. "She's staying with family."
Suddenly Lucy felt bad for asking after all. She didn't want to imagine how he knew that, how he'd arranged such a thing, what those goodbyes must have looked like.
A minute or so later, he asked "You got anybody?"
Her mind flew at once to Marjorie, to those last horrible moments, the door clicking shut and blocking out the bright yellow of her best friend's lopsided bow for the last time.
No, she didn't have anybody. But before she could open her mouth, Caspian flashed to mind instead.
She faltered.
The boy on the train, the boy in the chariot, the boy on the balcony, the boy disappearing before she could get a straight answer out of him, the boy in her restless dreams, the boy crushing her to his chest in the caves, the boy dragging her out of nightmares, the boy whose soft stories rumbled under her ear, who noticed when she didn't sleep, who played along so well even she would've believed they'd been friends for years. The boy whose sleeping figure might have been a corpse, had a cannon boomed at any moment.
"Not at home," she said simply, and Edmund's eyes flicked to Caspian, then back again.
He said nothing.
The blast of horns exploded through the night and Lucy jumped as the national anthem shattered the silence of the forest.
Above the trees, the Capitol seal flickered to life, and dissolved a few moments later to form Jill's image, partially shrouded by pine branches.
The light of it cast Edmund's face in a technicolor glow, glinting in dark eyes, illuminating his stony expression. And when the image vanished, it left the silhouette of short brown hair and narrow shoulders burned into Lucy's vision.
They sat in silence for several minutes before Edmund hauled himself to his knees and crawled to a patch of shallow earth where the moonlit arena lay beyond the trees, stabbing the cross down into the underbrush, the distinctive shape standing up black against the pale nighttime world. A marker without a grave.
He moved back to his spot and flopped onto the pine needles with an arm behind his head, but something hung between them in that moment. An air of defiance. Almost rebellion. Just the faintest taste of it, lingering in the shape of the cross, a statement, no matter how simple and silent. A moment in which even the illusion of the arena could not quite crush their humanity.
And then the cricket song wafted back in, and Lucy curled up against her tree as the moment passed, no mention of taking shifts, and she turned to watch Caspian breathe until her own puffy eyelids grew too heavy to hold themselves open any longer.
She woke to bright sunlight dappling through shadowy branches, and shifted, aching, against her tree, sitting up to rub her face and stretch her offending shoulder.
She glanced quickly at Caspian, afraid for a split second that she'd missed a cannon in the night, but his chest rose and fell softly under the shroud of her jacket, and she sighed.
A noise on her left drew her attention to Edmund, kneeling over the backpack and digging through it to pull out their water bottles.
"Figured I'd have a wash," he said as he stood and walked into the trees in the direction of the stream, waving the nearly empty bottles to indicate he would fill them, too, and she watched him go, waking up a little more.
She struggled to her feet and paced a few stretches of the clearing to bring the life back into her aching muscles, pressing the cool backs of her hands to her flushed face, and then she checked Caspian's hanging clothes as she passed them and found them dry.
Gently, she took them down and knelt beside him, pulling back her draped jacket and uncovering the scars and his bloodstained bandages.
Even without Edmund there to help, she slipped his open tunic under his neck and pulled it down behind his back with only a little struggled lifting, pulling the sleeves up again over his arms, and buttoning it over his abdomen from the bottom, carefully securing each button until she tugged a little too hard over the bandages and he breathed a soft half-caught moan, eyelids fluttering.
She paused, watched him, and her heart almost stopped as his breathing grew stronger and he shifted his head slightly, eyes fluttering slowly open, hazy and distant as they drifted along the canopy overhead, and at last fixed on her.
He blinked and gazed, almost unseeing, as if unsure whether she was part of a dream, and it took several moments for the situation to work itself through the mind behind his eyes.
"Lucy?" he mumbled, and she nodded, a clipped laugh of relief bursting from her throat, heat flooding her already aching eyes.
He winced as he shifted to put pressure on his right arm and sucked in a sharp breath.
"Careful," she murmured, "You're hurt, I almost didn't think you would— I mean, don't move too fast, let me finish— or you can, I suppose, if you're awake, I just didn't expect— you know, hey, I said be careful!"
"You talk a lot," he mumbled with a faint, weak smile as he propped himself up on his left elbow instead and glanced down at the bandages, at the shirt half-buttoned, scars just barely out of view. And then his eyes flew up to hers again, a stab of fear striking through them, the realization of what she must have seen.
"It's okay," she said reflexively, reaching out to slow him as he forced himself up into a sitting position and squeezed his eyes shut with a groan of instant regret. "Take it easy, you lost a lot of blood, just relax."
He breathed out slowly, and she almost thought he would pass out, but he glanced down again after a moment and winced as his hands moved to button his tunic the rest of the way.
"I'm sorry," she said, "There wasn't really another way to—"
"S'okay," he mumbled dismissively, and she bit her lip.
He sat for several moments in silence as he finished, and then simply breathed, eyes unfocused, and she fought the urge to steady him again even though he gave no sign of losing consciousness.
"How long was I out?" he asked at last, voice weak, running his left hand through his hair as he regained his bearings and peered around the forest.
"Just overnight," she said, "Not too long. They really had no business calling that stuff an antibiotic, you should've been—" She paused when he glanced at her and her heart jumped with an uneasy feeling she couldn't quite name. "...out a lot longer," she finished lamely.
Something about his blank, removed expression made her insides squirm, though of course he would be disoriented and tired. But something else tugged at her, something that didn't feel quite right, even aside from all that.
"Are you okay? How do you feel?"
"Fine," he mumbled. "Tired." That seemed more accurate. "Thirsty."
"Well that's easily fixed, Edmund's just out filling the bottles."
"Edmund?" He furrowed his brow, confusion and disbelief clouding his eyes just as footsteps crunched through the forest again, and a moment later Edmund stepped into the clearing, bottles in hand, hair dripping.
"Yeah, I'm still here. Surprise."
Caspian looked at Lucy as if seeking an explanation, but she could only give a small smile.
"Stranger things have happened, I suppose."
He glanced at Edmund as the boy tucked one of the bottles into the bag. "No they haven't."
Edmund stood again and passed a bottle to Caspian, which Lucy took for him. "I'm flattered by your vote of confidence. Are you good to move? I wanted to poke around the hoard a little more but I don't think we should hang around here too much longer."
"Yeah," said Caspian, though he didn't look it, and didn't sound it, taking the bottle from Lucy. "I'm good."
