Eris Rowan, 13

District Seven Female

Eris will admit: the last thing she ever thought she and Ashe would find at the top of the mountain is a basketball court.

But that's what they found. A basketball court. A basketball court woefully lacking in basketballs, but a basketball court nonetheless.

It feels safe even if the floor creaks sometimes. As long as she can't see how high up they are, she feels all right. She can sleep if she ignores the fact that the floor could give out on them at any moment and there still might be Careers waiting for them at the bottom and Lana—

Ashe had peeked out the first night they stayed there. When she came back, she'd been crying. She wouldn't say who the other cannon belonged to, but Eris can make a guess. She figures it was probably her District partner. There's no one else in the Games that would make Ashe that sad.

"We need to move on," Ashe says, dragging Eris back to the present.

For a moment, Eris doesn't reply. Her blinks. Every time her eyes close she hears the sound of Lana's bones snapping. It mixes with the sounds of her landing upon Erato, all of those years ago, and suddenly all she can hear is breaking.

"Huh?" she says, looking up.

"I said we should move on," Ashe repeats, raising an eyebrow. "Eris…are you okay?"

"Am I okay?" Eris exclaims. "Am I okay? Of course I'm not okay! Lana just—just—just died! And Ainsley just abandoned us! And Lyndie—Lyndie—Lyndie—"

Ashe bites her lip. "I know all of that, Eris. I was there. I saw it."

"So why aren't you bothered by it?!"

Ashe doesn't respond for a few seconds, as if she's considering her answer. "I…don't know," she settles on. "Maybe I am. Maybe I will be later. Maybe it's all just adrenaline that's keeping me going." She kicks at the unstable floor. "We should get going. We can't stay here forever."

"Wish we could," Eris mutters as she stands. "Maybe we should stay another day."

"We'll be out of food by then." Ashe shakes her head. "I know you're freaked out by…all of this, Eris, but we're going to be out of supplies by now. And I checked for Careers. They're gone. We're okay."

(They're not okay. Eris knows that. She's pretty sure Ashe does too, but she also knows that Ashe is better at pretending than she is.)

Eris chews the inside of her cheek, wringing her hands in nervousness. "Can't we just stay a little longer? An hour or two? It can't hurt if we just wait a little longer."

"We can't put it off forever," Ashe says. "Might as well just leave now. It's early in the morning. Most of the other tributes are probably still asleep. Or at least they're not out hunting. Now is a good time to go."

"It's still dark outside."

"The sun is coming up." Ashe crosses her arms. "Come on, Eris. We have to do this sooner or later."

Eris clenches her fists. "No. You're right. I can do this."

Ashe smiles. "Yeah! Of course you can."

"I've made it this far," Eris continues, talking more to herself than to Ashe. And she has; she's thirteen and she's made it further than ten of the tributes. She's made it further than Lana and Lyndie. She's made it further than Ottilie, Jayce and Navarro. She may have only achieved a six in training but she's almost to the top twelve. She survived the bloodbath, she evaded the Careers and Push the Talking Trashcan. She can climb down a measly little mountain.

Even if that means facing her greatest fear in life.

After all, she has to conquer it at some point. Now seems like as good of a time as any.

She takes a deep breath, straightens her posture, and says, "Okay. Yeah. Let's go."

Ashe grins and takes her hand. "That's what I like to hear!" Her smile falters as she pulls Eris across the court toward the door marked EXIT. Eris can see it better now, the conflicted look on her ally's face. Maybe Ashe isn't as okay as she thought she was.

They start down the rickety staircase in silence. The cut on Eris's arm, although mostly healed now, still stings from time to time. It reminds Eris that maybe she didn't survive Push the Trashcan as well as she could have. It reminds her that maybe she can't do this.

Eris is unaccustomed to true fear like this. Most things in her life that should scare her just make her angry. Fear makes her feel weak. If she acts angry at something, then everyone will think she's above it. It will give the world the idea that she's better than whatever is bothering her. But when she's afraid—when this kind of fear tears at her insides, clawing at her skin with unbound ferocity, it reminds the world that she is inferior to terror. When she is angry she rises above. When she is afraid she sinks below.

So Eris clenches her hands into fists and says, "This is stupid."

"Huh?"

"This is stupid. This whole thing. The Games. Everything." Eris digs her nails into the palms of her hands, but she's chewed them down to nubs.

(It could be Erato here, whispers a voice in her head. Remember? You volunteered for her. She never would have even gotten out of the Bloodbath. It's better you than her. Back home, all you did was take up space.)

Ashe makes a noncommittal noise in response.

Together they step out into the crisp, early morning air. In the distance, the sun peers over the horizon as if it's watching them, bathing the arena in red light. Eris squints against the onslaught of sunshine.

"Nice morning," Ashe comments conversationally. She glances at Eris's face and pats her on the shoulder. "Hey…just, don't look down."

Eris nods but her eyes are drawn there anyway. It's far. It's farther than she fell before. If she falls now she doesn't doubt that she'll die.

But for some reason it doesn't scare her. No. No, it makes her mad. Anger flares in her chest, making her heart beat fast, and she says it again, "This is stupid."

"So you've said," Ashe says, impatience beginning to creep into her voice. She slings a now-empty popcorn bucket over her shoulder, likely to get it out of the way. She eyes Eris as she does this. "We're going to be fine, Eris. You've faced off against worse things than a mountain."

Eris glares at nothing in particular and starts to climb. Ashe, seemingly bewildered, doesn't follow.

As she goes, Eris shakes her head, anger clouding her thoughts. All of these years she's so been afraid of this. So afraid to climb a goddamn tree. What kind of a fear is that? She's spent years running from the only thing that keeps her District afloat, and for what? Guilt? Regret? Paranoia?

Besides, it's not like there are any twigs to grab this time. Nothing that's going to snap. The only thing that can fail her now is herself, and when has she ever done that before?

"Be careful," she hears Ashe say above her. The sounds of scuffling follow, telling her Ashe has begun to climb as well.

Eris scoffs. "When am I ever not carefu—"

Her feet slip. Her grip on the mountain slackens. The ground disappears from beneath her. Air rushes past her face. And suddenly she's falling. She's falling. She's fallingfallingfallingfallingfalling—

She dimly hears Ashe's scream, watches her ally reach for her in vain in slow motion. The wind that whips through her hair loses force, loses speed, and it's almost as if she isn't moving at all.

(But she is. She is. She's falling. She's falling and this time there is no one to break her fall.)

—If she falls now she doesn't doubt she'll die—

—Doesn't doubt she'll die—

—She'll die—

She falls, a scream lodged in her throat that no one will ever hear. There's no air to breathe, nothing to grab, no fail safes, nothing to stop her from falling and falling and falling, down and down and down and down—

Back home, in District Seven, she imagines her class at school is watching right now. Erato is probably in the square, surrounded by well-wishers as they watch her plummet. Erebus, just nine, may not even understand it. Her father won't know for hours, not until he comes back from the woods, where he'll find himself with one less mouth to feed.

She wonders how they'll all feel. Erato will be blaming herself. Erebus just won't get it. Her father may not even care—or maybe he will. He did always say that Eris looked like her mother.

(Now she'll get to know, now she'll get to see more than blurry images of a blonde woman, now that she's going to die.)

The scream claws its way up her throat and forces open her jaw, stumbling out in a cacophony of anger and fear. She chokes, unable to suck in air around the relentless manifestation of terror echoing through the arena. Her eyes water, forcing her to blink around grit and tears, and all she can hear is the pounding of her heart. It thuds in endless ragtime, hammering against her chest as if trying to escape the confines of her skin. The steady beat, beat, beat is the only thing that grounds Eris to existence, that reminds her that she's not quite dead, even if she will be soon. Even if she's falling and it is so much worse than she ever thought it would be because she's falling and—beat, beat, beat.

Beat. She sees trees rushing past her, breathes the cleansing air of District Seven.

Beat. Ashe continues to reach for her as if she could save her.

Beat. Erato must be watching her back home, bound in her wheelchair, eyes following Eris's descent with startling familiarity.

Beat. Synthetic sky hangs overhead, turning in a synthetic red in a synthetic sunrise.

Beat. Eris falls through snapping branches and rustling leaves.

Beat. Eris falls past roaring toboggans and white monsters with claws.

Beat. Eris falls.

Beat. Erato does not break her fall.

Eris slams into the hard cobblestone ground with a resounding thud-snap and she knows nothing more.

The fall is long, but it could never be long enough.

Calista Abbey, 18

District One Female

The cannon shot attempts to draw her out of her pain filled haze, but within a few moments she's disappeared back under the fog. Somewhere deep in her consciousness she kicks herself for being so vulnerable, knowing that anyone could slit her throat right now with her own weapon and she wouldn't notice until she died.

Everything is dim, everything is dark, and Calista is terrified.

Not that she would ever admit it. Calista isn't weak. But she is scared.

Because she's so vulnerable. Tiny little Lyndie Franklin with her broken arm, were she still alive, could come along and kill her with ease. In this state, Calista can barely put up a fight.

Sometime during the night, a silver sponsor parachute dropped pain meds near the Cornucopia, but Calista refuses to take them. Shad left them on a crate in her hazy line of sight, where they sit hours later, taunting her.

Why don't you just take one? they say. You'll feel so much better once you do.

But she won't. To take pain medication would be to admit she is in pain, and she isn't. She's fine. It's just a small injury. She'll be all good in a few days, and then she'll be back on her feet like Shad. It's not that big of a deal.

Not that big of a deal? Your goddamn hand has been chopped off! the pain meds argue.

Shut up, Calista thinks, painstakingly rolling over so she can no longer see them. Out of sight, out of mind. If only the same worked for her hand.

Or lack thereof, as it is now. It screams in pain, even hours after the fact, and all Calista can do is suffer through it.

(Of course, she could take the pain meds. But she won't.)

And thus, Calista Abbey drifts. She occupies a space somewhere between awake and asleep, living and dead, oblivious to the goings on around her. She's fairly certain that Bayou and Scoria came back at some point, telling tales of little girls, crunching bones and teacups, but it could have been a pain induced hallucination. She can't be sure anymore.

In her half-conscious state, District One haunts her. Silvera Prowess laughs and laughs at her stupidity, jeering at her for managing to get her entire hand cut off in her quest for spite. She chases her through golden woods, taunting her for her failure, saying over and over again, "I would have been better."

Next comes her father, all sharp edges and harsh looks. He stares at her in their house in One through blond bangs, arms crossed, disappointment hanging in the air between them. He shakes his head, muttering something about a son, and then he levels his gaze with her and says, "You should have been better."

And then it's Ryder, in a park somewhere that she vaguely remembers. He's sitting on a blanket with a picnic basket. Sunlight dances on his cheeks, lighting up his face in a way that makes even Calista melt, but he's not smiling. He's chewing on his lip, and he sheepishly says, "You…could have been better."

Always "be better." Never "be best." She can never be best.

For an indeterminate amount of time, Calista's world is consumed by home. Silvera laughs, dancing around her in circles. Her father stands a good distance away, arms crossed, slowly shaking his head. Ryder watches with that same sheepish look on his face, as if he disapproves of the method but understands the motive.

Calista stumbles away, shoving Silvera aside with a stump that spews blood, yet no matter how many times she hits Silvera with it she is never stained red. The blood splays off of her, and when Calista rounds on Ryder, the same thing occurs. Untouchable. Unblemished. None of them are in the Hunger Games—of course they can't be stained red, they've never killed anyone. They haven't lost a hand, they don't have any blood on them.

In a rare moment of lucidity, Calista peels her gritty eyes open and tunes into the conversation being held beside her.

"Who'dya reckon that cannon was for?"

"Must be one of the little girls who were on the mountain. Didn't you hear them yelling?"

"Hm. Guess I did. Why didn' you do after 'em?"

"Didn't want to go in alone. Can't leave the Cornucopia in the care of the Ones. They're both incapacitated."

"Shad's not bad. Not anymore."

"Still. Depending on who showed up, he might not be able to take them a fight. I didn't want to risk it."

"Ah. 'Course. Makes sense."

"What're talkin' about?" Calista slurs, attempting to roll over. She presses her stump against the pavement and for a moment is lost to agony. When she finds herself again, Scoria and Bayou are looking at her as if she just grew a third arm.

(One of those might be beneficial right about now.)

"Huh?" Calista says. "Did you say somethin'?"

"I said, "Welcome back to the land of the living"," Scoria says, messing with a knife blade. "You've been out for a while. Making all kinds of ungodly noises too."

"Mm," Calista hums, glancing down at her heavily bandaged wrist like her hand might have grown back. The edges of her vision are blurry and Bayou and Scoria keep shifting in and out of focus. With every breath her stump pulsates with pain and again she thinks of the pain meds. Someone must have moved them while she was unaware, because they're right in front of her face, slightly tilted as the bottle is stuck between two cobblestones.

"Calista," Shad says from her other side. "Just take the pain meds already."

"Oh! Oh, so you can—can—" Calista struggles to sit up, attempting to ignore the pain that tries to claim her consciousness. "attack me while I'm unawares? How stupid do you—you think I am?"

Shad doesn't say anything, but after a moment he appears in Calista's field of view. He kicks the bottle over, causing the lid to pop off and several pills to spill onto the ground.

The taunting changes to mocking, and Calista glares and rolls over. She faces off into the arena, staring toward Tomorrowland with a hardened gaze. But her anger doesn't last long. Her lack of energy combined with the still deafening pain makes it difficult to feel anything for very long.

So without much fuss Calista drifts again. She chews on the inside of her cheek until blood fills her mouth, which she promptly spits onto the pavement. Somehow none of her allies notice, or maybe they do and they don't care.

(She doesn't doubt that Scoria thinks her a lost cause. Clearly she thinks that both Calista and Shad are dead men walking. Of course, she might be right. Maybe Calista is a dead man walking. It's not like she can tell. Or that she would ever admit it.)

The sun is the only thing Calista can really make out as she drifts, eyes half-shut, everything blurred and fuzzy. The sun is rising in the sky, slowly climbing up to its peak, and the day promises to be a hot one. For a moment, Calista is glad to be clad in only shorts and a t-shirt.

For a moment, she forgets. For a moment, she stops feeling pain. For a moment, everything is okay.

"Just take the goddamn pills, Cal," Shad growls. "Stop being so stubborn."

"Don' call m' Cal," Calista mumbles into the ground, shifting slightly as if to shut her allies out.

"You're not beating anybody by refusing to take them."

"If you keep tryin' to convince me, 'm gonna think you've poisoned 'em," Calista answers. "Just leave me alone."

"I—"

"This is a stupid argument, Shad," Scoria snaps. "Why do you even care? If she wants to stew in misery, let her."

"I just…I…" Shad trails off, seeming uncertain of where he was going. "Whatever."

Calista listens to his heavy footfalls as he limps away. She shuts her eyes, trying to ignore the pain and not "stew in misery", but as soon as she thinks about it, the pain is worse.

She heaves a sigh, rolls over, and reaches for the bottle.

Bayou Hacksom, 18

District Four Male

(TW for suicidal thoughts)

He let the arena make him a monster.

He let the arena make him a monster.

He picked up a child—a fourteen-year-old, the same age as his sister, what if it had been Etienne he'd thrown into the teacups?—and launched her into spinning chinaware. The sounds of her bones crunching, of her blood splattering, of her scream of agony ring in his ears. They serve as a never-ending reminder of what he did—of who he became. Of what he became.

Bayou said he would let the arena make a corpse out of him before it could make him a monster—he said that, didn't he, shouldn't he hold himself to that? The knife that rests on a crate nearby suddenly looks mighty tempting.

(It would be so easy. He could snatch that up and slam it into his heart before anyone could stop him.)

(Not that he thinks his allies would stop him if they could. He knows that Scoria thinks him a simple-minded sheep. He knows that Calista and Shad think he has no chance of winning. He also knows that they're wrong, but that has much less bearing on their relationships.)

He finds himself wondering if every Career before him has felt this way. Almost all of them, in the whole one-hundred, fifty-year history of the Hunger Games has made a kill. Did they all suffer in the way he suffers? Or did they brush it off and ignore that it ever happened?

And if they did, how did they ever manage it? How did they not all just fall apart?

That seems so easy. Falling apart. He could do that. He could do that without even thinking. It would barely take a few seconds to let go of his pride, let go of his hope, and break. It almost sounds tempting.

But Bayou has too much riding on these Games. Not just his life, but his whole status back home. There are almost no Backwater Victors. So Bayou has to prove to District Four that it can happen. He can manage that, can't he?

He used to be sure. He used to be sure of a lot of things.

Just to take his mind off of his thoughts, Bayou sits up straighter and says, "So…what's the plan?"

"Plan?" Scoria says, surveying their camp. First she looks at Calista, draped across a sleeping bag on the cobblestones, stump curled to her chest. Then she glances at Shad, who went to brood at the other end of the Cornucopia several hours ago and hasn't returned since. Maybe they should worry about him, since he's injured and all, but there's a distinct part of Bayou who doesn't care like he should. "What do you mean, "plan"?"

"Well…what are we gonna do next?" Bayou says. "We gotta have a…a new plan, righ'?"

Scoria seems to contemplate it. "For now, we stay here. I don't think any of us should go out to hunt alone, and Shad and Calista are in no shape for a fight. For the next day or two, we bide our time. Rest up, wait for Shad to be mostly recovered."

"He can walk already," Bayou says. "Besides, what big threats are even left in the arena?"

"The boy from Nine can't be ignored," Scoria says. "That little girl from Eleven killed someone in the Bloodbath. We shouldn't overlook that. And the girl from Twelve. Her training score was high."

"What about your district partner?"

"Seriously?" Scoria says. "He's twelve. I'm not afraid of him and you shouldn't be either."

Bayou only hums in response, fiddling with the hem of his shirt.

The afternoon passes slowly. None of them have anything to do but listen to the strange noises Calista makes in her pain-filled haze. At least she seems to be having more pleasant dreams since she took the pain medication.

Everything is so much calmer without Ottilie around. Bayou never was very fond of her, and her absence is more glaring than he expected it to be. The long stretches of uneasy yet tensionless silence could have never happened with Ottilie still in the picture. She probably would have found something to complain about, or an argument to start, or some reason to be generally annoying ten times over by now.

Bayou almost misses it, just because he would have something to think about other than the…that. Maybe if Ottilie were still around, there wouldn't be such deafening silence clogging the air between Bayou and his allies.

He decides that he hates silence. When it's quiet, his mind has only one thing to do: fill the air with the sounds of phantom cannons, hatchets slashing flesh, bones crunching and blood dripping, and suddenly he just can't take it anymore.

"Say somethin'," he commands Scoria, fists clenching around the edges of his shirt, "I don' care what. Jus' start talkin' and don' stop."

Scoria doesn't oblige. She looks at him like he's lost his mind, but he hasn't. Not fully, at least. He still has most of his screws, even if a few of them went with the girl from Three.

(God, he doesn't even know her name. He killed her and he doesn't know her name.)

"Come on, Scoria," Bayou says. "Humor me."

Scoria's continued silence makes him want to rip out his hair, but he suppresses the urge and stares her down.

"Well, if you're so desperate for conversation, why don't you talk about something?" Scoria says, picking at a nail with carefully manufactured idleness.

Bayou wets his lips, starting to take apart the hem of his shirt, just to have something to do with his hands. "How did it feel?" he asks. "The first time you killed someone."

Scoria freezes, seeming to take a long period of consideration before choking out an answer. "We're not going to talk about that."

"Okay." Bayou looks down, noticing that one of his fingernails has dried blood on it. He wonders where it came from. He wonders if it belongs to him, and if it doesn't, which poor soul it came out of. Shad, perhaps? Or maybe when the girl from Three splattered blood all over the place, some splashed onto his fingers. He stands up, reaching for a bottle of water, quickly cleaning it off.

(But it doesn't wash away the blood on his hands. It never will. This kind of blood is more than physical. It's stained into his very being. He'll carry it for the rest of his life.)

"It was horrible."

Bayou looks up, surprised, attempting to meet Scoria's eyes, but she averts her gaze.

"My first kill. It was horrible."

Bayou leans forward, curious to what she's going to say next.

"It was my…a friend. My father…my father made me kill him."

For the first time, he sees Scoria not as a cold, hardened killer, but an enigma. A puzzle with bent pieces, a code that could be solved.

The sound that Scoria makes is a close approximation of a laugh, and it's the closest to laughter that Bayou has ever heard from her. "I can see him, right now, in my mind's eye, cursing me with his very being. But he's a horrible man, and the world should know. Everyone should know that my father made beat a boy to death because I grew attached. Everyone should know what he did!" She stands, voice echoing through the arena as she raises it in anger. Then she turns to Bayou, eyes once again cold and emotionless. "You should watch your back. After all, the last person I spilled my life story to ended up beaten to death."

She stalks away, but Bayou doesn't miss the fact that her hands are shaking. He regards her in a different light as she moves toward Shad, leaving him alone with no one but Calista as company. She's not a one-dimensional killing machine like he thought she was, much like he's not a simple-minded idiot like she believes.

"Huh." He doesn't realize he said it aloud until he hears it echo back at him, returning the word over and over again.

At the very least, it covers the sounds of hatchets and shattering teacups.

A/N: And with that we are down to twelve. Any surprises in the final twelve that you didn't expect to see? Who do you think will go next?

EULOGIES:

13th Place – Eris Rowan, District Seven Female. Fell to her death from the Matterhorn.

Oh, Eris, my beloved. Eris was one of the first tributes I received for this story, and from the moment I read her form, I knew I had to have her. She was a tribute who flipped the script on the average District Seven tribute, and she enticed me by being a young volunteer with a good motive. Those are hard to come by, but Eris did all of it so well. I adored her and loved writing her, and writing her death did make a bit sad. All of these tributes have been in my head for two years now, and Eris's death is kind of making me realize that. RIP.

ALLIANCES:

They Are Not Having a Good Time: Calista (D1F), Shad (D1M), Scoria (D2F), Bayou (D4M)

Less Sad Lesbian + Even Deader Weight: Afandina (D10M), Ishtar (D12F)

Also Not Having a Good Time: Ashe (D11F)

Defo Having a Breakdown: Ainsley (D9F)

Definitely an Equinophobe Now: Everett (D9M)

Not Vibing: Wonder (D2M)

Besties With Donald Duck: Sterne (D5M)

Director of Bad Decision Making: Tam (D10F)

Until next time,

Amanda