A/N: So uh. Wow. I mean, hey hey! You guys ready for Day 3? I know I am! (I mean seriously after that wait how could I not be.) Some news: I'm going to try and make the POVs more even from now on. Last chapter was REALLY Maximus and Serena-centric, and while that does make sense due to most of the action and conflict in the chapter circling around them, but Futura and Nyso ended up getting shafted. I'm sorry about that. And also about this bullshit delay! School is being very not Gucci to me right now. But Christmas break's allowing me to zoom through this chapter and hopefully I'll have another up before it ends, as after this getting chapters out monthly is going to be difficult cuz curriculum. I honestly can't believe I'm getting this out before 2019. But no more downer-isms! Let's get on with the show! Today we'll be visiting with a waif from 11, a certain member of a half-dead alliance, one of the Big Bad careers, and Miss Kickass Pitchfork!

Finlay Ardun, District 11 Female

The urge to run like a dog is a powerful one.

It stays with me, tugging at my calves and thighs and sides. Run, rabbit, run run run. Sometimes I like to think it's my mother's ghost. Other times I remind myself it's just instinct. But most of the time I just render it as a temporary longing, an urge that will fade soon enough.

But this is the third day in the arena, and I still want to take to the sky like a songbird. I'm not sure if that excuse works anymore.

Running is a risky idea. I should conserve my energy for when there's someone on my tail. My loud footsteps would be a beacon for careers. I just can't afford it. But… if I'm going to die anyways, why should living longer be my first priority? I know I don't have a snowball's chance in hell. Not that I've ever seen a snowball, really, but I know about them. My mom would tell me all about the falling, if fleeting whiteness that graced her more than once in Five and that she had managed to catch a watery glimpse of one perfect day in Eleven. But that's another thing I shouldn't be thinking about.

I want to live, though. I can't believe it, can barely justify it to myself, especially seeing as I've only been attached to life by a faint string for so long. But when it comes down to the wire, I guess I just want those few precious extra seconds.

And so I walk.

There's comfort in that anyways. My heartbeat is… calmer. Calmer is the right word. No frantic butterflies in my ribcage, no wild rabbits or anything. Just a beating heart. Just a surprisingly sane frantic insanity that everyone here takes on.

I walk straight into a mirror tangled up in my thoughts.

As it collapses beneath me, I think that if I'm still alive in a few minutes I won't count this as my smartest move! Not that I make a lot of those! The reflective surface flinches when I crash into it, and absorbs me. And I can feel gooey silver plasma envelop me, simultaneously icily hot and burning cold, a cocoon forming around my… damp skin. And it becomes so, so obvious that I'm going to suffocate! That, ironically and I'm sure hilarious to some Capitol folk that my suppression of desires that would get me killed led to me… getting killed! A sort of bitterness rises to my throat, (along with vomit as I'm about to die), a bitterness compounded with a sordid sense of humor I've never felt before, and then I die.

Except, no, I don't. I burst free from my cocoon, and feel air on my face.

I open my eyes, and powdery gilded dust floats off of my body in clouds. It's warm. It's warm, and it's snowing.

The world around me is lush and green, saturated with colors and smells, and yet it's snowing. White flows to the earth, returning to grass and seed. And me? I collapse, facedown onto this dirt pollinated with snow. I'm in a rainforest. And the sun is shining, and it's green and warm and everything smells really nice, and somehow, despite everything, despite the logical fallacies there, despite the urge to run like a dog and prove that it isn't real, it's snowing.

It's snowing in this beautiful rainforest because the gamemakers are idiots and prefer aesthetics to realism and for some reason, without any preamble or sense to it, I decide that being alive is okay for now.

Gareth Barkely, District 7 Male

"There's nothing you could have done."

Ajax doesn't tell me that. I tell myself that. Part of me wishes, desperately, for any reassurance from him, or, fuck, even just acknowledgement of my existence. And another part of me realizes how selfish it is. Why should he care? Preston and Quinn are dead. What do my feelings matter in the face of that! Why should they matter?! Everything I've said and done, everything that's happened renders them so spectacularly selfish and meaningless and unimportant that I am downright disgusted with myself, but I want to hear those words all the same. I want to breathe them in. I want forgiveness, I want a reprive, I want to be distracted from all of this, I want it to leave me alone-

But I can't leave well enough alone. I failed to protect them. I failed to protect them and I can feel loathing overwhelm me, clear as anything.

And it comes to me through the blue.

I have to be better. I have to. The feeling of being depended on is an indescribable emotion, the lightest and most incredible feeling I've ever felt. From the very beginning, I hated being needed for something. My family, my evil witch of a stepmother insured that I would lack this emotion, that I would never feel this euphoria. That control over me wasn't something I wanted.

But that was because I could never do it.

Because I was such a horrible failure and every task fell apart in my hands, because I never did anything right for Ivy and because nothing I ever did was right in their eyes I began to believe that I hated the weight of responsibility. But when I was with everyone earlier, before the bloodbath unfolded and something inside of me did too, irreparably, I realized that they depended on me and I finally cared enough to try for them, cared enough about them to care about myself and trust in my ability to protect them, the ability that had prevented me from protecting Ivy, even if she said she didn't need my help.

So I need to be better. I need to be better so I can deny this revulsion at the emotion of being depended on, so that I can feel the indescribable love and hope that comes with being needed by people who care about you for whatever reason, who love and trust you for whatever reason.

I have to be dependable so I can feel it again.

My reverie shatters as we make our way around a corner, and Ajax speaks. "Hey, is that…"

A slim figure with a head of tawny blond hair, tying a knot of string around the corner of a mirror. Vaguely familiar, vaguely… terrifying?

The girl from One.

There's a very pregnant pause as we stare at eachother. It's common knowledge she's a coward, but right now… she doesn't at all look the part. She looks surprised at seeing us, sure, but not the slightest hint of fear twists her lovely face. The seconds stretch on, a staring match. Tension bites at my skin, when finally-

"Shit."

She blurts out those words with frustration, as her brow creases. "I should have cried. I really, really should have cried, and scampered, and I should have run- but I'm not fast enough anymore, I'm so tired-

I'm going to be completely honest here. As we stand in our makeshift Mexican standoff, I have no idea what's happening. Even I can feel the threat hanging in the air, and I'm an oblivious guy, but yeah, I have no idea what's happening. I don't think Ajax does either, if I'm being honest. Chablis is holding all the cards, but I don't know what makes those cards relevant. I don't know how scared I should be.

But considering the glazed over, exasperated and the slightest bit deranged glow in her eyes, I think the answer to that just might be very.

Malice emanates from her glare. I'm just thinking we might want to run away, like right now, when she falls.

It's quick. Her eyes roll back in her head and she collapses, her legs suddenly too weak to support her any longer. She hits the ground with a thunk, her hair spilling every which way. The only thing that alerts us to her survival after a brief moment of panic is the wheeze in her breath.

Ajax and I stare at eachother. I know he wants us to leave her here to die, alone and spread-eagle in a hall of mirrors, not even conscious to remember herself dying. And I can't blame him. In fact, I'm never going to blame him for anything again.

But I have to prove I can be responsible with something- anything again. And if I fail, I'll fail to save this person I don't care about, and couldn't possibly. It's like a trial run.

I nudge her unconscious body with my foot.

Going to be one hell of a trial run.

Taurus Black, District 2 Male

I still stand by my statement from long ago that emotions burden you. They're petty, meaningless things that tie you down to obligations you're better off discarding. But some primal feelings mean something to you. Some emotions that ravage you are relevant ones. Love? Trust? Unimportant.

But the thrill in your blood when you catch a spider in your web, when the fly crawls to it's demise.

That's the feeling the reverberates more than anything else. One that cannot be denied. And I wouldn't dream of denying it. The passion that drives me to kill, towards fame is born there. When a source is so potent, so important, I wouldn't dream of smothering it.

It's important to stay objective, to play the game to win. But if you fail to lose yourself in a glorious miasma of bloodthirstiness, what kind of warrior are you? You deserve no victory, you deserve no power if it isn't a delight for you. Your leadership might make everything worse for everyone else, but if you yourself trust in it and wring any kind of impossible joy, than it's yours to win. You bested it.

I can feel myself rising above my compatriots each and every day now. My pathetic colleagues are nothing more than the flattest and most irrelevant of obstacles, a limp and weak challenge to inject some drama into the fare that nevertheless will be no burden at all.

The clock ticks. The mirrors shift. We discover where they lead. We, the Careers, will continue to pillage and burn under the guise of equality. But we all know who stands superior.

I deserve leadership because I taste it more than anything else. The blood in the earth.

All they taste is a victory that they'll never have.

Teryn Gardner, District 9 Female

What a crock of shit.

I can feel these words extending beyond me into infamy. Because really. If I survive this ordeal, through some incredible miracle, what's going to be engraved in my head is: "What a crock of steaming hot shit."

It's funny the way our brain works. How when in stressful, unbelievable situations our mind forms connections to the most asinine things and phrases. Our brains go haywire with stress and madness and begin to create memories that never leave you, triggered by specific conditions. The most benign of words or objects can leave you huddled into a ball, sobbing like a baby because of fears you thought you had discarded and experiences you never asked for. But nobody really asks for the Hunger Games, and those who do are told from the beginning that this is everything they've ever wanted, everything they've ever aspired to, simultaneously tamed and made bloodthirsty, turning their loyalty to a place and group of people who's never cared about them except to the extent of making them their war dogs. In the past, it was impossibly tragic to me. Now, I still see it as a tragedy of mass brainwashing and propaganda forced onto vulnerable children, but it's harder to be sympathetic when the people most affected by this awful doctrine is yourself, in the sense that you are so totally going to be murdered and eviscerated by one of these desensitized child gladiators. It's a horrible thing that they've been trained, abused, and shaped by forces who love them only as the person they've sculpted and groomed them to be, but they aren't the ones being murdered most of the time. They're doing the murdering, they're killing us, and the act of extending a hand to them and understanding the lack of autonomy they have is easier when you aren't pinned to the ground by their knives, as I am right now.

What a crock of shit, my brain reprises as Venie's foot digs itself in my back, her knife tracing the flesh beneath the thin and not at all protective layer of my clothing. I know that I'm not going to be alive long enough for my brain to fuse together this traumatic experience and that goddamned line into a buddy cop sitcom of trauma, but if I was I know it's not the point of the knife I'd remember. I need a miracle, but rather than coming up with one I keep ruminating on this brain that's no longer going to be functioning very very soon, and the systemic dehumanization of Careers of all people.

Stupid fucking brain, please panic so I can get out of this situation.

Next to me, Heavenly wheezes like a deflating balloon, her head coated in a sheen of sweat like the goddamned morphling junkie and complete wreck of a person she is, that slowpoke for whom I hold nothing but contempt for right now, who tripped and fell and now is the reason I'm going to fucking die, that I'm never going to feel or do or believe in or love or lust after or hate or yell or scream or cry or become sick or sing or dance or think or write or read or see the people I love without question, without reason, that my brain is now transforming into hate because of how they couldn't save me, they couldn't do something for me, anything ever again. It's this absolute seething fury I feel for Heavenly right now that alerts me to the fact that I've begun to actually care for the wretch. I hate her so much and I hate him so much, my little brother, the light of my life and I don't know why I am the way that I am that leads me to think such scathing thoughts, god I can't believe I used to think I was nice. I used to think I was kind and sweet and had a heart of gold beneath that temper but I don't. I am just fucking awful, I am this completely unbearable person that doesn't deserve to breath and speak and be alive but despite everything really wants to. Am I not kind? Am I not sweet and just and protective over these people who never deserved goddamn anything and am I not heaving for breath right now, crying out in pain as Venie's heel digs into my back?

Well. I know the answer to that last bit.

"We haven't gotten prey for a while," Venie croons. Her breath fucking stinks. I can't smell it, prostrated beneath her like this, but believe me, I can tell. "You'll be delicious." Taurus grunts in affirmation. I can imagine the pair from Four rolling their eyes now. Her knife bites into my skin and I hiss, but that's nothing compared to the sudden shock of the point bursting through my skin like goddamn Alien. I scream out, part pain, part terror, and part relief because a movement this clumsy means Venie has to have been startled, and startled she is, because I'm no longer pinned to the ground. I climb upwards clumsily, my back dripping like a leaky faucet and I very quickly notice several things, all of which are about to come together and form what the cool kids like to call a big problem.

1. Serena is screaming at Taurus and pulling him off of Heavenly, yelling something along the lines of "We kill them, we don't rape them, you psychopath!"

2. Serena and Maximus were standing close next to eachother muttering something under their breath, so Serena lunging forwards to restrain Taurus caused Maximus to stumble backwards, sending him into Venie.

3. That movement sent Venie forwards, causing the point of her knife to enter my back and cleave apart my skin like butter. Now Venie is leaping to her feet and running towards me and oh god oh what the fuck ooooooowwwww shiiiiiiiiittttt that's a knife and it's in my stomach jesus Christ it huuurts aaaauugghh

4. Taurus is yelling something about conquest and prizes and uuuHUUAAARGH I DON'T CARE IM BLEEDING LIKE A STUCK PIG AND OH GOD MY INTERNAL ORGANS ARE SOUP HOLY SHIT

5. I am now headbutting Venie in the face and she's going down much easier than I thought she would (what a fucking glass cannon) but now my head hurts and my stomach is hahhhhhuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugghhhhhhhhh okay okay okay okay okay okay okay wow adrenaline holy shit what the fuck how am I alive and ruhnnnnnnnnnning

6. Heavenly has extracted herself from the quarrel between Serena and Taurus that's now extended to Maximus yelling at him as well and Taurus brandishing a big scary axe and I'm grabbing her hand and she's yanking at my arm and we're running away away away and I hate everything and myself and the gaping hole in my stomach but the knife is keeping it in and I have to trust in Heavenly and the knife to hold my organs in place and the ability of my brain to keep chugging on and to form these connections to tell me what to do in the future, the ability of humanity and myself to keep RUNNING despite that FUCKING KNIFE IN MY STOMACH HAAAUAGH and I have to trust my legs and little brother and the Careers to continue being incompetent idiots who never deserved this, who were taught from the beginning to be like this and feel like this and kill like this and never knew better, never could form words that didn't taste like blood on their tongues or believe in ideals that didn't encourage hate and masculinity and spite for those who never deserved the consequences of that poisonous shit idealogy and ooooowwww god I am not coherent enough for this.

I just need to keep running and going and trusting in Heavenly in myself, trusting the people I hate and trusting the knife that hurts me and the dogs that savage and kill me I need to be and trust and love in hate, trust in hate as the force that makes me love and yell and live and run and something something hoe I'm barely sentient everything hurts so much and I'm just hightailing it out of there with the brain in my head changing the spotlight, changing the ideas and concepts, switching around the memories I don't need and replacing them with fear and speculation and the wide and uncontrollable everything and the words I know will never leave me now, the words linked to me in a nigh-Pavlovian fugue-

"What. A crock. Of shit."

And sure, I might be possessed and fatigued by phrases I care so little about and fuss and bother at me like what a crock of shit but as I run with my insides sloshing and my hands clutched in Heavenly's and my future unclear and foggy there is a silver lining and the silver lining is- the silver lining is- the silver lining is-

Venie has got to have one hell of a headache.

A/N: Self Hate: The Chapter. Seriously though, these kids have som S. That might be my fault though. It's really cathartic to write about hatred and negative emotions as a way of purging your own, and I get to use some really florid languages and insults, which is yeah, always it's own special brand of fun. Also, holy shit, wow, a chapter that covers self-loathing that doesn't have Nyso in it? It's a Christmas… well, not miracle, because I like Nyso even if writing him is really hard, but it is a Christmas unnatural happenstance. Well. Not a Christmas unnatural happenstance by chance, but an unnatural happenstance that happens post-Christmas season, although by this point I might just be falling down a semantics rabbit hole that I have no business falling into considering how little I know about semantics, like, in general. I just say whichever words look funky and right and hope they're grammatically correct. Please do not rely on me for writing advice of any kind, I am a major disappointment on that front, and also the rest of them. All of the fronts are imbued with my own special flavor(s) of suck, from Cranberry to Key Lime to recently-diagnosed ADD. ANYWAYS! My readership has without a doubt decreased from the last time I took a several-month-long break, although that time was a much more offensive go-around the crutch of the announced hiatus and I am somehow even better of a writer after this 2/3 month break than my 8 month one (although that might have a fair bit to do with the fact that I've been actually writing, just… not this fanfiction haha), and at this point I don't know if legitimately anyone is reading anymore. So I implore you, if you're reading, pretty please review. The amount of joy I find myself dealing with when I get a review is like twice my normal serotonin intake, so please do, even if it's brief. BUT HEY, a long comment would be even better! So, any predictions, thoughts, compliments, criticism or flat out hate please hand to me on a silver platter because, y'know, motivation fuels me, water is wet etc etc etc. Who do you think is going to kick the bucket next? There is at least one death coming next after this bloody dry spell, I'll promise that much, so drop a prediction at the door! What do you think will result from Gareth and Ajax's tentative alliance with Chablis and why is it her betraying them? (I mean really, this is Chablis. Let us be reasonable here folks, she's not going to be nice to these schmucks just because they saved her from dying of malnutrition. It's really a question of when she's going to stab them in the back.) On a scale of mildly irritating to mind-numbingly boring, how obnoxious and uninteresting is Taurus? (No, you cannot answer with "He's interesting." We know you are lying.) Things between Teryn and Heavenly are certainly fraught now, and the Careers just might have a vendetta against the pair now from escaping their endless wrath (LOL u guys are the most ineffective troupe of clowns ive seen in a while you killed like one guy, get over yourselves) That sounds like it might kind of be important later. Well, whatever the topic is that provokes your interest, drop a review and I'll see you next time, hopefully before winter break ends for DAY 4!