It didn't take long to sort through the treasure hoard, as Lucy didn't fancy it a very nice adventure anymore, though she did reload her quiver and take a dagger on a nice belt.

Most of the food they found had either rotted or been crushed, but Edmund pulled out a few decent packages of dried fruit and dried meat still sealed away. He stuffed his findings into a new single-strap backpack, blue and a bit smaller than Lucy's, just adequate for carrying the bare provisions he managed to dig up.

Lucy tiptoed carefully around the ditch and avoided the rotting arm she'd stumbled upon yesterday, but Edmund investigated thoroughly enough to determine that the arm and the torn jacket were the only human remains left behind.

It seemed clear enough that the careers had not moved camp solely of their own volition, though the bonfire they'd spotted in the valley proved at least some of them were still alive.

That was their theory, anyway. As it turned out, Edmund had camped here with them for his first night in the arena, so that was how he knew the woods, at least as far as the river. And he also knew that there'd been no sign of a dragon back then. It must have come from somewhere else in the arena, or been set loose by the gamemakers when things needed spicing up.

Jill had been right when she'd said something else must have been entertaining enough out here.

"I suppose, on the bright side," said Lucy, "If this thing attacked out of nowhere, they must not have been prepared to leave. I mean, they couldn't have carried much off."

"Serves them right," said Edmund, "They can hunt their own food for a change."

Lucy nodded. "Maybe that's why it's been so quiet. They've been too busy for any other kind of hunting."

"I wonder how many of them it got," mused Edmund. "I hope it got Peter."

Caspian said nothing, perched atop the lip of the gully, making no effort to join in the search, and Lucy only handed him up a fresh sword so that they wouldn't have to retrieve his first from the dragon's mouth.

He remained quiet and detached even when they moved to the stream and Lucy insisted on checking his wound, unsure whether he should even really be walking, though he said again that he was fine, just tired.

When she peeled back the bandages she found the wound heavily scabbed over as if several days of healing had happened overnight. The tooth marks still dug deep through his shoulder, but they did not look in danger of infection, and she applied the cream again before bandaging much more lightly to save on supplies.

Edmund wandered off in search of berries, and Lucy splashed her face while Caspian washed the residual blood from his neck and collarbone.

By the time Edmund returned, Lucy had dug around in the undergrowth and found the same flowering tubers they'd been eating for days, and washed the dirt from their bulbous roots while Edmund tucked a fresh tin of berries into her bag along with the others.

Little white flowers piled up at her feet as she stripped them from the roots, reminding her unbidden of Jill, and an emptiness panged in her chest at the repeated realization that she was gone. Not just off wandering, not just checking some traps and about to reappear with a spring in her step and a fresh catch in her hands. She was gone, and she wasn't coming back.

Lucy wished her fingers knew the same skill that had made that flower crown. She wanted to at least return the favor.

When they walked back through the forest to their little clearing, she clutched a handful of the leafy baby lillies, and laid them beside Edmund's cross.

Now it looked like a proper grave.

"Where to next?" asked Edmund, breaking the oppressive silence as he glanced out past the trees, down into the south of the arena. "I've half a mind to try that valley, see how many careers are actually down there."

Lucy shook her head. "Too risky, they're still careers."

"Your golden boy didn't fare too badly against Edith."

"I had the element of surprise," said Caspian, speaking properly for the first time in an hour, though weariness laced his tone. "You try crashing down there in clear view of the whole valley and see how far that gets you."

Edmund scoffed, but didn't argue, even though he looked very much like he wanted to.

"Why not try heading west?" asked Lucy, and in the end this idea won out.

None of them had yet seen the western side of the arena, and none had a strong desire to linger in the places they'd already been. So they set out at a relaxed pace around the edge of the forest, and glimpsed for one last brief moment the plateau of the Stone Table.

The rising sun cast it in a glaring white brilliance that clashed harshly with the black dragon carcass and spattered dark stains across the stone, burned out soot and blood stretching from the dais to the furthest trickle down the edge of the hill.

Lucy turned away, blinking the black spatter from her vision, and the boys followed her in the opposite direction along the eaves of the forest.

They traced it west, slipping a little deeper into the trees when the sun beat down overhead, and though they took many breaks, they made good time across several miles of pine before they came in late afternoon to the western edge of the forest.

And beyond that, beyond the last solitary pine silhouette, stretched a perfectly flat expanse. Not jagged like the rest of the desert, but truly flat, miles of cracked stone stretching as far as the eye could see, rising into some kind of mountains or hills in the far distance.

"No point trying to cross that till the morning," said Edmund, "Might as well camp now and get an early start."

Nobody argued with this, and they turned back to find a good place amongst thicker woods.

Now that they were all well armed, they felt a great deal more comfortable building a fire, and left it burning well after they'd roasted the wild roots like potatoes, and finished the meat from two days ago before it went bad.

Twilight fell and a chill set in, and Caspian said "Let me take the first watch."

"What? No, you need to rest," Lucy argued, "I can do it."

"I've slowed us down all day, let me at least be useful now."

"That is true," put in Edmund, rather unhelpfully.

Lucy pursed her lips and looked at Caspian, prepared to talk him down from the idea, but the look in his eyes brought her up short, just as it had that morning, churning in her stomach before she could even place the cause for her unease.

Her silence stretched out for a second too long before she shrugged, and Caspian stood and stalked to the edge of their campsite, fire crackling low as he settled against the opposite side of a sturdy tree facing west, his back to them.

Edmund flopped onto his back, orange light flickering over his features, and the easy, slow breaths of sleep came over him almost instantly.

But even when Lucy curled up in the warmth of the fire's glow, every security she could possibly wish for in the dagger on her belt and the bow propped a little further off, she couldn't seem to relax. Something like a heavy dark cloud pressed on her, as it had all day, though now in the silence nothing else distracted from its weight.

Caspian must have been tired, of course, but why did it feel like something else clung to him, even more potent than exhaustion? Something hollow, shrouding the light in his eyes, gnawing into her soul whenever she met them.

She rolled over, and something poked her side.

She felt for a stone but found none, and then dug into her pocket, pulling out the lighter, the fishing line, and the gold pin she'd taken from Caspian's clothes last night.

She breathed out.

With a burst of resolve, she sat up, carefully rising and creeping across the floor of pine needles, her shadow announcing her presence just before she stepped up next to Caspian.

He wiped his face quickly, but still she caught the glitter of tears in his eyes, and her stomach flipped over.

"Sorry, I just— these were in your pocket." She unfolded her fingers and held out the trinkets, seeming now like very pathetic excuses to invade his solitude. "I took them out before washing your things and… forgot about them."

He glanced up slightly and took them from her hand, gazing vacantly as he turned them over with his thumb.

That feeling of wrongness settled in her chest even heavier than ever, and she almost turned to leave before he spoke.

"You promised you wouldn't do that," he breathed, dangerously quiet, almost trembling. "You promised you wouldn't sacrifice for me." He clenched his hand into a fist around the trinkets, staring into the middle of the air instead of meeting her eyes. "You shouldn't have done that."

She furrowed her brow, hesitating before sinking gingerly to sit beside him, rough bark at her back, dim firelight flickering beyond the shadows. "Why not? Don't you want to be alive?"

He let out a low breath, and she watched his face with churning confusion, his impassive mask giving no hint of a reply as her eyes drifted down to his fist, white scars peeking out from his sleeve.

He pulled the cuff down too late, the irony of her question striking with instant, sickening regret.

Was this all because she'd seen his scars?

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"

"I stopped a long time ago. It wasn't— It's not like that."

"You don't need to tell me."

"Yes I do," he said with abrupt and intense earnesty. "Yes I do. I'm a coward, and I'm weak, and I'm nothing like my father, and I've only been trying to pretend—"

"Caspian," she snapped, fear stabbing into her gut at his rush and his tone, glancing around for the cameras that must have been focusing on them with greedy intent. "You… you hit your head really hard, maybe you should just rest for now."

He scoffed, laughing almost ruefully. "You think I'm mad." He fell silent for a long moment which scared her even more, and then breathed "I suppose I may be mad."

"That's— that's not what I—"

He shook his head, forcing a pained smile that might have been a grimace as the shimmer returned to his vacant eyes. "You're just like him, you know."

"Who?"

"My father. He thought he could help everyone, he thought he could save the world. Maybe that's what I saw in you, back then, maybe that's why you plagued me with such a foolish hope."

"Cas—"

"I hate it, and I hate you, and I can't live without you, and it's going to kill you, just like it killed him."

Her heart skipped a beat and Caspian trembled, squeezing his hands together to stop the tremor as he gasped a short and shaky breath. Lucy blinked, grasping for something to say but catching on nothing, struggling even to understand his words.

"I told you not to sacrifice for me," he whispered, fighting with measured, forced breaths, dark eyes burning holes into the forest floor.

Lucy's stomach churned. I hate you, and I can't live without you. "I'm not trying to— it's not—" It's going to kill you, just like it killed him.

Her head spun.

"Would you quit trying to save everyone for just five seconds?"

How was this about her? Why would he care about her? No, it couldn't be that, this was about his father. He was just tired, he wasn't making sense.

"He didn't mean to leave you," she said at last, as if he were a child, as if he really were mad.

"Yes he did."

"How can you—"

"He volunteered." Caspian's voice broke and he propped a hand over his mouth.

Lucy blinked. "What?"

He took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out, as if controlling a storm inside, running both hands over his face before gazing up into the branches, eyes shining. "My father. He volunteered."

"But— You never said anything about— I mean, on the balcony…"

"I didn't know."

Her brows twitched in confusion.

His voice came out very small. "Polly said it, before the interviews. She thought I knew. She didn't mean to…"

He bit his lip, and her mind flew back to his distant air backstage, lost in his own world she'd imagined to be nerves; then the silence which had descended afterward, the gaping chasm between them when she had so desperately longed for distraction.

"He volunteered… for Miraz."

Lucy's eyes snapped up to him. "What? Your uncle?"

He nodded, and scoffed angrily, dark mirth slipping through standing tears. "I guess that must have been his great sin. Nothing quite knocks your pride like letting somebody else die for you."

Lucy only stared, trying again to process his words, what they meant. His uncle? His cruel, ruthless uncle? "They were brothers, my father was older."

All at once she saw that boy again, the spitting image of Caspian under glittering Capitol stage lights; but this time the drab grey of District Eight's town square cast his image in harsh relief, shoving through the crowd to reach a younger boy, wild desperation flashing in black eyes. "I volunteer as tribute!"

She imagined the shock that must have registered on every face in that crowd.

Had he thought for even a second before those words tore from his throat? Had he even considered what they meant? Or had he only seen his little brother walking up to that stage and thrown his life away in a split second of heroism? To save the boy who would grow up holding a grudge? The boy who would grow up to torment his own precious baby son?

"I wanted to be like him so badly. My whole life, that was all I ever wanted, and I can't, I can't be like him, I'm not good, I don't want to be good."

"But you are good," breathed Lucy, gazing up at him as heat pricked at her own eyes.

"No," he snapped, "I ran, I hid. You turned back."

And at last, she understood. "Jill wasn't your fault."

He grimaced and looked down. "Yes, she was."

"No, Caspian you can't—"

"If I had gone back… just for a second— I didn't even think of it, I didn't even— I just ran."

"Anyone would have—" The second the words left her mouth, she realized her mistake.

"You didn't. You're just like him."

"It's… it's not the same, and anyway, you— you almost died for me, aren't you forgetting that?"

"Because you're all I have! Don't you see? You're everything— I can't— It's the only reason I allied— Don't you know—"

"No, I don't know! Because you never tell me anything!"

"Because I'm a coward," snapped Caspian, "That's why I chose you, because you're a distraction, because being with you is the only time I'm not scared out of my mind, because I'm selfish and I need you and I can't let you— you're the only one I can really—" He choked and swallowed, and rubbed his eyes with a frustrated sigh.

Lucy sat frozen, rigid with her back to the tree, as if turned to stone.

"You're… the only thing that makes me feel brave, and I don't know why— I just thought, maybe, I could… but even then it's just— I'm just— I'm terrified of losing—" He let out a shuddering breath. "I'm so afraid."

"We're all afraid," she tried to breathe through constricted lungs, but he cut her off.

"No, I'm terrified." And at last the tears slipped down his face, fingers trembling in vain to hide their shining tracks. "All the time. I can't move. I can't breathe. I can't sleep if you're not there. They think I'm this— this contender— but I see him in my dreams every night and he's dead, and I hate him, and I hate myself for hating him, and he left us, he left us on purpose, and I just keep thinking— we could have been a real family, my mother— she— now I understand why she—"

His breaths rushed in faster, betrayal and hatred eating him alive through black eyes.

"She had all these pills, she was sick, that's what they said, a sickness. But it wasn't in her body." He shook his head quickly, almost vibrating, fist tightening. "I never understood why she would want to— why she— but— now— now I wish she'd taken me with her."

"Oh, Caspian," breathed Lucy, "You don't mean that."

"I do mean it, I mean it, why should I be alive? What's the point? I'd be happier dead, I'd be happier never born! I hate him, I hate him, I hate him," he choked through hitching breaths. "Why did he have to be such a hero? Why did he want to leave us? Why did he want to leave me?"

"He didn't want to, of course he didn't, he said so himself!"

"What?"

"In his interview, they played it after ours, did you never see it?"

He shook his head again. "Couldn't— never— I tried, once, couldn't—"

"He loved you, Caspian, no matter what he did, he said he didn't regret it, having you that young. He wanted to come home."

"S-so why didn't he?" choked Caspian, "If he loved me so much, why d-didn't he come home?" And then his shoulders shook too hard to speak, and he buried his head in his hands as he dissolved into silent sobs.

Heat pressed in thick behind Lucy's eyes as she reached over to rub his uninjured shoulder, wordless comfort in lieu of the words that wouldn't come, overwhelmed as the boy who'd always seemed so solid shattered into a thousand pieces.

"Come here," she murmured at last, and he slumped into her arms, burying his head in her shoulder as trembling hands gripped her like a lifeline and she rubbed his back, hyperventilating gasps cracking into clipped sobs, stuttering, heartbreaking and desperate, bottled up for weeks, years, a lifetime, grief once carved into flesh now muffled in her jacket.

"It's okay," she breathed into his neck, fingers threading gently through the ends of his hair. "You're not weak, it's not your fault. You were a child, they were supposed to take care of you."

Her own throat tightened at the words even as Caspian's sobs redoubled.

As a child she'd watched mothers with their babies and wondered why hers didn't want to hold her, didn't want to bounce and shush her when she cried like the other women did. Everyone knew she'd been abandoned. At least real orphans actually had parents, once, but she had nothing, not even a name. Lucy Pevensie had been assigned out of a registry, just as made up as everything else about her life.

She thought she was the lucky one, thought maybe one day they would come back to get her. But then she grew old enough to learn that children were a burden, and families a luxury. Not that Housemother ever said it, but you didn't need to be told to know you weren't wanted. Even Mrs Preston had never really been motherly.

Sometimes she wished her parents were dead, wished it was as simple as that.

"It's not your fault," she breathed, fingers trembling as she stroked his hair, eyes burning in a haze as she spoke the words no one had ever spoken to her. "It's not your fault they left."

His shoulders shook as if his soul itself were pouring out, and she clutched him tighter, half sitting in his lap now, wrapped up in his arms as the minutes washed by in a sea of bitter, aching release.

"He didn't mean to leave." Barely a whisper. "I'm not going to leave."

Had it been his grief talking or had it been true? "You're the only thing that makes me feel brave."

"You're all I have."

Slowly, his shaking calmed to trembling, sobs calming into deep, shuddering breaths, still hitching but not violently, the tension going out of his body as if consumed at last by true exhaustion, forehead resting heavy on her shoulder.

He leaned there unmoving for several minutes, breathing, until at last he sat up straighter and pulled back as Lucy slipped to the ground on the opposite side of him, both of her legs tucked up against his chest as he wiped his face, hand over his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he breathed, almost inaudible.

"Don't be." She pulled his hand away from his face and turned his raw, shining eyes to meet hers, broken, lost, ashamed. "And… Being afraid doesn't make you a coward. Just so you know. You have a choice, you can be whoever you want to be. Not what they expect you to be, not him. You don't have to be him."

Caspian breathed out and looked down into the void of the air. He shook his head slowly. "Why are you like this?" he rasped. "Why didn't you leave me?"

There it was again. "Why'd you bother with me?"

"You're all I have, too, you know." She sighed, and forced a small smile. It didn't seem the cameras mattered much anymore. No need to keep up the act. "I'd be nothing without this alliance. You saved me from my own stupidity after that training score, I don't care what the reason is."

"You should care," he murmured.

"I don't."

His shining eyes flicked up to meet hers again.

Why?

"You…" She sighed, drawing a deep breath, almost as if steeling herself, bracing for something she hadn't even known until this moment. "You remind me of someone. I told you about her… in the caves."

Recognition flickered in his eyes.

"Her name was Bridget." The name caught in her throat. "Biddie… She would have been your age, now." This thought almost brought her up short, but she forced her way through it. "She'd been living with her grandmother until she came to the orphanage, and she brought all her stories with her. Fairy stories. That was the first time I heard them. She felt… safe. Warm. I could tell her anything, and she never thought I was crazy. Even when we talked about magical lions swooping in to save us from all our troubles."

The faintest flicker of a weary smile twitched at Caspian's lips.

"That's how you make me feel. You listen, even when I sound like a lunatic. You… you make me feel sane, I guess, I don't know…" She shook her head. "I'm sorry, this sounds stupid."

"No it doesn't," he breathed. "I understand."

She smiled weakly up at him. "See?" She breathed a slow sigh. "Jill said I shouldn't make friends out here… and she was right, I know she was right. But you're the one who picked the stupid ally who can't let you die. I'm your curse now, and you're not getting rid of me."

Caspian choked on a weak laugh.

"That and I owed you."

He shook his head, eyes dancing between tears and hidden laughter. "That's not actually how any of this works."

"Shut up. Just don't waste my effort." She interlocked their fingers and squeezed his larger, warmer hand.

He glanced down at them, sighing as he leaned back against the tree, wiped his eyes with his wrist again and stared into the darkness of the forest, the flicker of the fire dying low, branches rustling in the faintest breath of wind.

Lucy rested her head against Caspian's shoulder, too easy, as always, too comfortable. As if he really were Biddie, as if she could shelter in his warmth from the rest of the world, instead of drawing even more eyes to them.

What must the Capitol think of them now? Surely they'd turned away any serious sponsors. But just for one moment, Lucy couldn't bring herself to care.

At last, Caspian breathed "What are we supposed to do now?"

About our images?

About our survival?

About the inevitable death of any kind of friendship formed in the arena?

Lucy shifted to gaze into the forest. "Forget the future."

His next breath came out hopelessly. "How?"

"Just…" Her mind wandered back to the ivy-clad walls of District Eight, to the path she'd always walked to school, skipping over cracks in the sidewalk and pretending they were branches on a forest floor, blocking out the smoke stench with imagined peppermint pine. "Imagine… green."

His beard caught in her hair as he glanced down at her.

"I used to imagine I could escape into it."

"The wilds," he murmured. She'd told him that much on the balcony, under a setting sun reflected in a hundred skyscrapers.

She nodded into his shoulder. "I imagined if I could just climb to the top of the mountains, I would look down and see it all before me. Valleys and rivers and wild trees. If I could only speak to them, they would wake up and take me away with them."

"Drinian would say you'd lost your marbles," said Caspian with a weak smile in his voice.

He'd mentioned Drinian on the balcony, too, his roommate. Best friend, he'd corrected.

"I'd take it as a compliment, though, he puts up with me well enough." He breathed in and out deeply. "Mine was always the voyaging knight."

"What?"

"My escape. You left out most of it yesterday."

Yesterday.

How was that only yesterday?

"I imagined I could sail away to strange islands… discover places nobody had ever seen before… break spells… fight dragons…"

A weight dropped into Lucy's stomach.

"I hated the ending, though."

She furrowed her brow. "When he saves the sleeping maiden? But that's the best part."

"They never got to be together."

"Well… I suppose that's part of the tragedy," she said. "The best stories always do have a bittersweet sort of longing to them."

"I like happy endings," said Caspian bluntly.

Lucy smiled.

"My nurse made up a different version for me, just because it upset me so much. She said the spell could only be broken by true love's kiss; and the knight, loving the woman upon sight, kissed her, and she awoke and loved him too, and they were married."

Lucy hummed in thought. "It does sound made up."

He nudged her in protest. "All stories are a little made up. Perhaps the knight and the maiden went on many more adventures, and their happiness was far from the end. There are still plenty of chances for tragedy to strike, does that satisfy you?"

She scoffed. "I don't want tragedy to strike, it's just… realistic, I suppose."

"That's rubbish. Why should our fantasies be just as bad as reality?"

She smiled, sighed, and conceded. "Alright, the knight and the maiden go on many more adventures and live happily ever after."

"Thank you."

They fell back into silence, but more comfortably this time, his warmth at her side, sturdy shoulder under her cheek, as if they were anywhere but the arena, as if they really were lost in the wilds without the population of the country watching them.

Everything she'd ever called home felt foreign now compared to this. It didn't even make sense, and perhaps one day she would have to wake up from this dream, but at least it would have been a good dream.

A great while later, Caspian opened his hand full of trinkets that Lucy had by now forgotten about. He shifted the gold pin in between his thumb and forefinger, turning it over so that it glinted in the moonlight.

"His district token," he murmured, and Lucy blinked to focus on it. "He still had it when they shipped his body back."

She swallowed and looked up at him, but his expression was calm, almost tranquil, distant.

"It was the only thing I took with me when I ran away." He passed it to her, and she took it reverently with small fingers, gazing more carefully at the delicate details in the metal, a pendant which had already seen an arena, which had already survived beyond its wearer.

"A mockingjay," she said softly.

"How do you know?"

"The crest." She traced it with her thumb nail; a remnant of the ancient world, a bird so clever and so gifted in song that some even said they had minds of their own.

Lucy herself had been called 'stubborn as a mockingjay' on several occasions, and she rather liked the idea of a creature who survived against all odds, no matter how many times the Capitol tried to eradicate it. They still existed, in some parts of the country. Or at least, that was the rumor.

"Old Cornelius down by the tracks said he saw one, once," said Caspian.

"In Eight?"

"Mm. He always was one for strange tales, though. Drinian thinks he's lost his marbles, too."

"I think Drinian needs an imagination."

Caspian laughed. "Try telling him that."

Lucy smiled, and handed the gold pin back, but Caspian closed her fingers around it.

"Keep it."

"Caspian," she breathed, "You can't give me this."

He only smiled wearily, and pushed it back toward her. "It suits you better, anyway. Please."

She bit the inside of her lip and looked up into his clear, black eyes, tranquil certainty gazing back at her. He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

With a sigh, she looked back down at it, perfect tiny details etched into the weight of real gold, and reluctantly pulled her other hand from his fingers to pin it to the lapel of her jacket.

He gave a small smile when she looked up for approval.

"Happy now?"

"Blissfully."

She shot him a dry smile before settling back into his shoulder.

"Shouldn't you be sleeping?" he asked after another short while.

"Maybe. I think it's warmer here, though. The fire's died."

Caspian glanced over his shoulder toward their campsite, embers glowing against Edmund's sleeping silhouette. "I suppose it has."

And he made no more argument after that.