Ruby D'Arcy, D1
This had to be a first. I hoped it was a first. It was bad enough to be in the Games and know I would never have a normal life. I would never get married or have kids, because I was never going to win. Worst of all, I was in love with my ally, and he was in love with me.
We were such an odd pairing, too. I was the mayor's daughter. I got voted in because people hated how rich and callous my father was. I got voted in for having too much money. Aurum was a common pickpocket. He got voted in for having too little money. He was the last person on Earth anyone, especially my father, would want me associating with, but he was the only reason I was still alive. At the Bloodbath, Nero came right at me. If Aurum hadn't thrown a rock at his face and distracted him, I would have been just one more cannon.
I did my part in keeping us alive, too... sort of. I had a lot of enemies in One, obviously, but I had one very powerful ally. My father must have callen in all his favors to send in as much food as he did. Twelve people were already dead eight days into the Games, and only three of them were Bloodbaths. Two more screamed before they died, and the glow I saw before the cannons showed it was the dogs that did it. The other three, I suspected, died of plain starvation, and those deaths were just starting.
"It's pretty messed up, isn't it?" Aurum said. We were sitting under a tree pretending it gave us shelter when it was a skeleton, like everything else in the Arena.
"The Games?" I asked.
"That too, but I meant the voting thing," he said.
"Yeah, that sucks all around. I didn't even do anything. My dad was already rich before I was born," I said.
"Yeah, you got it rough. At least I really am a pickpocket," Aurum said.
"That's a stupid reason, though. You were the worst person in One? Not one of the kids who would have killed for a chance to... kill? Why didn't they just vote for a Career?" I asked.
"I wish they had. Except then I wouldn't have met you," he said.
"Smooth as glass," I said.
"Gotta keep up the sponsorships," he said. But I could tell it was more than that. Maybe I wasn't worth going into the Games, but it wasn't just a sponsorship thing. I wished it was. I'd rather have been hungry than lose someone I cared about.
I thought there would be an elegaic end to our strange love story. Instead it ended like a novel my english teacher would have sent back for revision. Aurum went out to look around, I heard a cannon, and he didn't come back. I wanted to say it was just a passing infatuation- just young love that would have faded eventually anyway. We'd never know if that was true, though. We didn't live as long as our love.
Some Victors won by outfighting, some by outthinking, and some by outlasting. Some were still the butt of endless jokes, like Toby or, to some extent, Cornflower. A prouder girl would have wanted to win on her own merit, but I didn't care. I knew I didn't have any merit of my own. Aurum brought all the sponsors except my father, and he kept me alive until he died. Without him, it was my father keeping me alive with the food he sent. When he ran out of money a week and a half in, the food stopped coming. The only part of my Victory I could claim as my own was being the slowest to starve, mostly because of the head start they gave me. It took four weeks for Nero to die. They hauled me out at the end, too weak to even walk to the hovercraft. The only thing I could call my own was seventy-two pounds of bone and skin. By then, my heart must have weighed almost nothing at all.