At first, Castiel was relatively fine. Watching her permanently still face with an expression that Dean had never witnessed before, he sat next to Claire's body. It was strange, like a look you'd expect to see as a parent gazed down at their newborn child and welcomed it into the family. But Castiel wasn't watching a newborn, or even his own kin. He was looking at a dead girl that he had only just met a few days ago.

For whatever reason, the look still filled Dean with a strange calmness. Despite the fact that they had only just met, despite the fact that they were destined to kill each other, Castiel loved Claire. A single tear escaped from the corner of his eye as the sudden beauty and intense sadness merged before him. Quickly batting it away, he rose to his feet. They had work to do.

"Cas?" he asked hesitantly, not wanting to tear the boy away from his friend. "They need to take her, Cas."

Without warning, the boy turned his explosive blue eyes towards Dean. A pain like that of a jagged knife pierced Dean's heart as Castiel stared up at him. His increasingly aqueous eyes exposing a world of depression and fear, this boy was beyond broken. Never in any of the recordings of past games had Dean ever seen anything like it before. In the tapes, he had watched murderous careers and crazed, determined underdogs, but never this. Never kindness. But in that moment, he knew it had to have been there.

Bubbling up until it stung like poison in his throat, hatred welled inside Dean. No one would see this. The gamemakers wouldn't allow it.

"Okay," Castiel finally responded, looking back at Claire. "I'll carry her out."

The smaller boy lifted his friend and ally up off of her makeshift bed and carried her through the mouth of the Cornucopia. Dean watched as he walked into the center of the cavern, knelt to the ground, and placed Claire on the cold, gravelly floor. The boy hovered for a moment over the girl and whispered something Dean couldn't hear. Finally, he returned to his feet and screamed.

Tearing chunks of stone and dust off of the walls and ceiling, the sound of the wail erupted through the caves. More than anything, it pulled at Dean's chest. Dean had never heard such pain, not once in his entire life. Again, he wondered how many times such a thing had graced the games, remaining completely unbeknownst to the public.

Castiel's howl ended as abruptly as it had begun. He returned to the cornucopia as if nothing had happened, the beautiful look vacant from his now dull blue eyes. The boy brushed past Dean, his shoulders hunched and rigid.

"What is even in these boxes, anyways?"

The sound of the boy's deep, crushed voice would haunt Dean for the rest of his life.

.o0o.

Sam knew that a few days had gone by without a death, but he had no idea how many; all he knew was that they weren't playing the anthem anymore. As far as time went, he tried to measure it with other things. The amount of times they stopped. The frequency of Rod's coughs. The increasing audibility of the rasping noise his dry throat made whenever he attempted to breathe.

That was, until a canon went off. The group froze for a moment as if to digest what it meant for them, the complete silence speaking volumes between them.

A captive in Maria's death march, Sam trudged on. Occasionally, he would talk to either Maria or Rod about pointless subjects – life in District 4, what it was like to train as a career, how they had come to be in this terrible situation. Sam soon learned more about the inner workings of the games than he had ever cared to know. Sure, people had always suspected that certain Reapings were rigged, but Maria and Rod's was an obvious fraud. Maria had trained for the games since she was young, but Rod was expected to grow up to run their family's fishing business – one of the district's most successful. Both of them would bring in a good deal of money to their family through their individual futures.

But when Maria finally volunteered, she was completely unprepared for what was going to happen next. Rod's name was called, and no one volunteered in his place – not even the boy who had willingly trained beside her all those years. Maria quieted down after she mentioned that day, only answering direct questions for the rest of the group's journey.

Rod, however, only grew more and more vocal as the trip continued. Loud rasping coughs shook the tunnels, echoing for what were probably miles in every direction. If Sam had had any sense in him at all, he would have noticed what this volume meant for their group, what dangers it could impose. Looking back, he fully suspected that Maria must have realized that the coughs were far too loud for such a volatile game.

She must have.

Regardless, she was still the first to hear the end as it approached. She stopped in her tracks, holding up her hands to signal that Sam and Rod should do the same. Rod followed her lead almost immediately, releasing a nervous cough. In his dazed mental state, Sam took much longer to stop.

Just long enough to hear panicked boots break into a sprint.

"We aren't alone!" Maria practically screamed, pulling a compactable spear from her belt and expanded it with the most terrifyingly precise and swift motion Sam had ever seen. Maria was a career; there was no doubt about that.

Had she been your average career, Sam had no doubt that the scene would have unfolded differently. Maria would have seen Argus Bos running at them from the hidden tunnel that happened to be directly adjacent to where they had stopped. She would have turned and drove her spear into his gut, killing him almost instantly. They would have taken the jug of water he had fixed to his back with two tight handmade straps and continued on their way, complete and healthy.

But they didn't, because Maria wasn't.

Instead of reverting to her years of combat training, Maria turned her back on the hidden path and turned toward Rod. In the two seconds it took for her to push Rod into a crevice in the wall, she rewrote the group's fate. Sam watched as she chose her family instead of her better judgment, and in this situation, she chose wrong.

Argus hit her at full speed, knocking the spear from her hands and throwing her against the wall. In the blink of an eye, the boy from District 10 drove a small knife into the older girl.

Sam dove to the ground, looking away just as Argus moved to pull the knife out of her stomach and turn his way. Luckily, Sam didn't have the same ties to Rod as Maria had; he just had his primal instinct to defend himself. His long fingers closed around the spear where it laid abandoned on the ground. Quickly, he twisted on his back to face Argus once more, holding the spear out in front of him.

Argus didn't stop, and the spear pierced him at the base of his chest. Sam felt the spear slice through the boy and puncture the jug or water, sending it cascading down on him like a waterfall. Leaving an empty shell with spiked hair the color of fall hay, the world seemed to freeze as all life drained from the boy above Sam.

Scrambling away from the body as disgust and fear built up in him, Sam rolled out from under the boy. He had just killed someone. Every fact and figure he could remember about the boy rushed into his mind in a relentless wave. Argus had been his age, and if he remembered correctly they had both gotten exactly the same score, 8. Everything he knew about the boy he had just killed led right back to Sam. They were more or less the same person.

Except Sam had chosen to compete in these games.

The sickening silence was broken as Rod finally pulled himself from his hiding spot.

"Maria?" his voice broke with childish concern as he stared down to where Argus had left his sister crumpled on the ground. She was dead, Sam could tell from his position against the wall. His suspicion was only confirmed as Rod angled his small ragged flashlight at her unnaturally pale face.

"Maria?" he repeated, but she would never respond. With little effort, Sam was able to pull himself up off the ground and move towards Rod.

"Come on, we need to keep moving. If he was here there could be others," Sam put a kind hand on Rod's shoulder and was pleasantly surprised when he didn't shake him off. Two more shots of the all too familiar canon rang out around them.

"Okay."