The world screeches to a dead halt.
Caspia's eyes meet Finnick's, infinite and infinitesimal, filled with so much of everything and too much of nothing at all. Then she's falling under Bellona's rage, Bellona driving her into the ground, knives stabbing over and over until there is more blood than girl. Finnick never knew so much blood could come out of a person. There's enough to paint the heavens any and every shade of red an artist could want, gathering in rapidly blooming puddles, spattered in a myriad of droplets, smeared in broad strokes across a concrete sky. A work of art in and of itself. It doesn't seem real. Finnick doesn't feel real.
Clang. The trident slips from Caspia's fingers.
The sound yanks Finnick out of his reverie and plunges him back into a reality so sharp and vivid he's sick with the enormity of it. What is he doing?
Loosing a terrible cry, Finnick swings the bladed shaft indiscriminately at the tribute, at the monster butchering his district partner. With her unnerving, catlike speed, Bellona flattens herself to the ground just in time and the blade goes whistling over her head, then whips up as Finnick lunges back to regain his balance. Bellona whirls around, crimson-spattered face radiant with bloodlust, and her incandescent gaze zeroes in on Finnick. She roars, a lioness reveling over her downed prey, and advances on Finnick with her bloodstained knife raised.
Finnick adjusts his grip on the curved blade and snatches up Ruby's shield, which is the first usable weapon he sees. He tries to grab Ruby's sword as well, but Bellona is already on the offensive, and Finnick is forced to devote all of his attention to her lest he join Caspia bleeding on the ground. The trident. He needs the trident.
"I'm sorry about Miles," he wheezes, just as Bellona's knife clatters against the shield. The impact jars Finnick to his bones, sending spasms of pain through his arrow wound. "He didn't deserve what he got."
For the briefest moment, Bellona's mask of fury slips, and a dreadful sorrow gleams through, keen and ruinous as her blade. Then it's gone, replaced by an expression of such profound hatred Finnick feels its burn more intensely than the flames surrounding them. "You don't know anything!" Bellona shouts, trembling with rage. "He was better than all of us, and now he's gone and I'm here, and I have to kill you!"
This time, Finnick isn't sure he hears fury as much as he does heartache. Involuntarily, he wonders if the former has been a symptom of the latter this whole time, if Bellona has not been angry so much as she has been mourning something she lost and will never find again.
Then he doesn't have time to wonder anything because he's dodging Bellona's next assault, grunting as the movement tugs his injury. He's got a couple of broken ribs for sure. While he's on the defensive, he studies his opponent's attack as he's been trained to do, noting the pattern of movements she uses most often. She's sloppier than usual, he observes. Sloppy and very desperate. He can exploit both, but his timing will have to be perfect. He deflects and maneuvers carefully to conserve his energy, searching for the right opportunity.
When Bellona brings her blade down, he swings Ruby's shield up, catching the hilt of Bellona's knife with the shield, and wrenches both in a circular motion. As Bellona goes careening sideways, Finnick drops the shield and dives for the trident. Then several things happen so rapidly Finnick's brain doesn't have time to process them as they happen:
Awful, breath-stealing pain as he hits the ground.
Finnick's hand closing around the shaft of his trident.
Bellona lunging at him with a feral scream. Lunging straight into the prongs of Finnick's trident, hugged between his dominant arm and his torso, propped up against the ground.
Bellona's eyes go impossibly wide, her blade falling from her grip with a clank.
"That was for Caspia," Finnick snarls, and wrests the trident from her body.
Bellona gasps, hands flying to the three gaping holes in her chest. She wobbles and crumples to the platform, mouth working soundlessly. Finally, she manages to spit out a single, vehement, "You—"
"I did what I had to," Finnick interjects coldly, planting his feet beneath him. With the help of his trident, he manages to rise, standing over Bellona while she tries and fails to mirror him. "I hope..." He trails off, and when he looks into Bellona's eyes, he finally sees the thing he's been searching for in her since the start of the Games: fear. And in the fear, humanity.
A quip from Mags arises in his mind then, bobbing amidst a torrent of adrenaline and vengeance: If it fears, it's alive. If it's alive, it can be killed.
He could draw this out. He could design a glorious and grisly conclusion for his mortal enemy, this lioness of District 2. He could go down in Hunger Games history as a monster slayer.
But the thing about slaying monsters is, the more of them you slay, the closer you get to becoming one.
So he clears his throat and says, in a voice so quiet the audience will have to strain to hear, "I hope your district honors you the way you deserve. Both of you."
Bellona does not or cannot reply.
Boom.
"Well, at least you can say I outlasted the lunatic."
Finnick turns to Caspia, whose breath rattles in her chest and dark eyes glower up at him, stubborn and challenging as ever. He doesn't remember falling, but somehow he ends up on the ground, collapsed beside her with nothing in his mouth but a litany of the same two words over and over, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"I know," is all she says back. Then her gaze drops to his midsection. "Better patch that up before you bleed to death."
"Ah, this?" Finnick chokes out a laugh, wrapping his arm more tightly around the wound. "I'll be fine. I'm always fine." He waggles his eyebrows, eliciting her signature eyeroll in response.
"Enough jokes, Finnick," Caspia rasps. "Get out of here. This fire isn't going to wait for either of us."
Fire? What fire? In this moment, nothing exists except Finnick and Caspia. Nothing else matters, because Caspia is lying on the ground and she won't get up and Finnick is still upright and most of his blood is still in his body. But he can feel its deadly heat encroaching on them, threatening to destroy their precious, fragile moment of peace.
"Finnick..." Caspia's once mighty frame now heaves with the effort of inhaling, and when she coughs, Finnick has to help her turn her head so she won't aspirate her own blood. Lying next to Finnick, she has never looked smaller. Or younger. The observation strikes Finnick like a physical blow.
"Be quiet," Finnick says. He can no longer sit up straight; his muscles are involuntarily contracted around the arrow wound, stooping him over in a distinctly uncomfortable position. "Save your strength."
"Finnick, look at me."
He has no choice but to pause, bloodstained trident still in hand, and meet Caspia's steady gaze. She looks more peaceful than Finnick has ever seen her. Fury and fright rise in him all at once, a potent combination that crawls up his throat and burns. "It's all right. I made my choice. Now you have to make yours."
"I'm tired of making choices," Finnick replies. His voice cracks, but he can't bring himself to care. "I'm tired of trying."
"What about your parents?" Caspia croaks. "What about Mags? Try for them."
"I will," Finnick replies instantly. If Caspia had asked him to throw himself down the pyramid stairs, he would have. If she had asked him to stand there until the flames consumed him, he would've gladly become a living torch, happy in the knowledge his incineration was keeping Caspia warm. It terrifies him, this newfound devotion. It's a noose of his own making, tied around his neck.
"You'd better," Caspia murmurs. Her voice is almost imperceptibly soft. "You're too good not to."
An urn cracks open in Finnick's chest and sickening grief surges forth, filling him from his head to his toes. He's never been so scared in his entire life. "Don't say that," he mutters, unable to inhale deeply enough to force out louder sound. "I'm not...I can't—"
"Shut up. Just shut up and listen to me." Caspia's eyes are too somber, too distant now. If she were an errant lifeboat, Finnick would simply swim out and grab her, pull her back in to shore. But she isn't, and all Finnick can do is stare, stare and drown in a flood he cannot escape.
"When you win, don't lose that good heart of yours. They're hard to come by these days."
"Don't leave me here," Finnick finds himself pleading. He's on his knees beside her, anguish a lumpy, aching thing lodged in his throat. It'll consume him whole, he fears, eat away at his insides until he's nothing more than a hollow shell, a mere remnant of the vibrant creature he once was. "I'm not strong enough to do this without you."
"Don't think I have much of a choice," Caspia says, the corners of her mouth pulled back in a pained grimace. "Now get out of here, Golden Boy. Win the Games. And remember me, yeah? Remember." She gives him a last bloodstained smile, genuine and defiant as ever. Unbroken. Then she closes her eyes and doesn't open them again.
Finnick tries to say her name, to call her back to him even for a moment, but all that comes out is a mortifying sob. Jaw clenched so tightly it aches, he stays at her side, hands clenched against his bleeding chest, until the cannon booms.
Finnick has to move fast or he will end up a victim of the fire still roaring just beyond the platform's boundaries. He gathers Caspia's and Bellona's backpacks and the mysterious sponsored blade and the unopened gift, but it soon becomes apparent that he won't be able to travel fast enough with everything he's carrying, not in the state he's in. So he drops the blade in favor of the backpacks and the drawstring bag meant for 10.
Hefting his supplies over his shoulders and back, Finnick starts down the steps of the Cornucopia, using the foam to clear a path in front of himself. Even with the foam, Finnick chokes on the thick smoke hovering in the air, his eyes and nose streaming. Oil-fed flames, angry at having been extinguished, lick hungrily at his skin on either side of his newly made pathway. He stumbles along as fast as he can, supplies knocking against his already battered body, and tries not to gag as the smoke creeps down his windpipe. Between the oil rain and the smoke, Finnick is blind.
Then he makes it to the trees and the smoke disperses a bit, but Finnick doesn't stop. He barrels onward, spitting blood and oil from his mouth, impervious to the vegetation slicing and scraping his flesh.
"Alabaster!" It's Ruby, chasing after him with nothing more than a long knife and an expression of pure loathing on her face. Finnick has no doubt about the state of their alliance now. "I found him!"
Abject panic gives Finnick a final spurt of energy and he drives himself forward with a desperate gasp, every nerve alight with the anticipation of a blade sinking into his back. A thousand invisible knives stab his lungs with every step, but even this is nothing compared to the all-consuming terror of being caught by the tributes from One.
Something, someone grabs him—Alabaster—but Finnick sheds all but one of the bags in his possession and charges onward. Something hard knocks into the pack on his back—a knife? Finnick doesn't bother to check. All of his thoughts and actions have been narrowed down to a single objective: The river. In the river he can escape. In the river he is home.
Why do tributes always run? he'd wondered just a day before. Even when they have no chance of survival, why do they flee?
Now he knows: It's because they have no choice.
The white noise of a swift, powerful current registers dimly in the back of Finnick's mind and he slows down, mud sucking at his heavy boots. As suddenly as they begin the trees disappear, forcing Finnick to stop completely when he realizes what lies ahead: Unlike the gently sloping banks he's become accustomed to in this arena, there are no banks here. Only a sheer drop into the river. This section of the river runs through a gorge—precipitous and alarmingly high.
The water below churns foamy white, an apparent warning to anyone willing to listen. With his injury and no idea how deep the water is, will he survive the swim? He sheds the backpack, unwilling to risk even the slightest burden weighing him down. The trident, however...
"Odair!" Alabaster bursts from the tree line, sword brandished.
Finnick jumps.
He doesn't so much hit the water as the water hits him. It's a physical slap to every inch of his body, shoving water up his nose, jostling his brain inside his skull. Dazed, Finnick only has one thought before the current tears him away:
There is no safe place in this arena. Not even for a tribute from District 4.