A/N: What's up gamers welcome back to another chapter of Mirror, Mirror! Yeah yeah, I know. It's been over a year and all that. HOWEVER, I really have no time for self-flagellation. I can tell you that I'm sorry and I suck, but that won't fix anything, so instead I'll just write the damn story. Capiche? Capiche.

Venie Hadley, District 2 Female

I can feel an itch running down to my bones.

It's not a very describable sensation, that. A scratching, a biting. The urge, the urge to hurry it the fuck up. The loitering, the wandering, the fearmongering… the tension between this pack of careers stretches like a fine layer of silk. Or mucus. Maximus and Serena as coconspirators, Taurus convinced he has thoughts in his mind- everything is out of balance, and I'm on edge because of it. I'm itching because of it.

I'm thinking about doing something very, very stupid about it.

Which is why I'm about to try and justify to myself the idea of it not being incredibly stupid.

Here's the thing: Serena and Maximus have obviously stricken up an alliance. And they aren't being covert about it at all. Always slipping off to talk, doing pushups together… it's either that or they're having an illicit affair. And with all of the sniping they do, I somehow don't think it's the illicit affair. (Unless that's the kind of shit they're into.) Meanwhile, Taurus is acting shifty. I've seen him fingering his axe, talking to it in a low, crooning tone of voice, casting glares off into my general direction like he's a witch cultivating his pot of malice. I have two days max before this barrel of monkeys fucking explodes, and I don't want to be a victim here. I have to take control of the situation.

I've lived so much of my life without that elusive thing, control. I've been controlled by my anorexia, my self-doubt, my sister's legacy, my parents- I've never lead myself, never held any power over myself that I didn't use to wound myself. Serena calls herself the leader, but I know that isn't the slightest bit true. I am the one with the real control here, the one with the leash. And I'm never relinquishing that leash. How could I even consider it? Why would I even consider it?

But I can feel the power being wrenched from me, bit by bit, like air being ripped from my lungs, like blood being stolen away from my veins. My entire spirit, savaged and ripped to pieces. Is that melodramatic? Yes. Is it an accurate representation of my turmoil? Also yes.

And I will do anything to reclaim that power. If I haven't made it clear already.

So, I begin to formulate a gameplan.

Currently, we're sitting in the hallway, our backs to mirrors, eating in silence and contempt. Serena and Maximus are next to eachother, and I can tell they're communicating nonverbally. Fucking amateurs. Taurus, meanwhile, is polishing his various assortment of blades, with the smuggest look of contempt possible adorning his brutish face. It's disgusting. I want every inch of my body to contort, get myself away from these people, wrench myself from the control I'm lacking… disconnect so easily my head spins. There's no… I can't…

My breathing's become shallow. I can feel holes opening in my chest, like a spoon is carving out bits from my chest cavity. I have to do something. I have to do something. I have to… do… something.

"Excuse me for a minute," I say, and the words wrenching themselves out of my mouth certainly don't sound like mine. They don't feel like mine on my slimy lips. Something is wrong with them. Something is wrong with me. But I'm not going to think about them now. Just what I'm going to do. Probably stupid. But as I reflect on the frantic, rabbitlike beats of my wheezing heart I realize it's more than needed. It's necessary.

"I have something I want to say," I say smoothly, grabbing control of my words once again, and my actions next are all mine. And I'll be proud of them, I think desperately, as my hands close in on my knife and my knife kisses Taurus' unsuspecting neck, kisses it all the way through and comes out on the other side dripping.

Taurus's head hits the floor. Serena and Maximus are gaping for a split second, and my body uses it against them- or is it me? I'm not sure of who's in control anymore. Right now, it doesn't matter. I'm scooping up Taurus' head, and I'm throwing it at Maximus, because he once made the mistake of telling me he played basketball. And that when someone throws something at him-

He catches it.

Taurus's head lands squarely in Maximus' arms, and it would be nigh-comedic to observe the inevitable bugging out and panic that would naturally accompany this, but now Serena is running at me fuck fuck fuck

I scamper out of the way just in time, and she bulldozes past me like a fucking tank. Which is, I think scathingly, pretty much exactly what she is. How could I ever call myself fat with this bull around? I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to refer to other girls in derogatory terms like that, because self-actualization and female power or whatever, but seriously. If she's rampaging in my direction, I'm not exactly going to treat her kindly.

Serena slams headfirst into the wall, but it only puts her off for a second, and even that's a generous guess. Her fingers tighten on her trident as she whips it me-ways. I snarl in mixed frustration and fear, and leap downwards. Maximus drops Taurus' head. It makes a wet splat noise as it hits the ground- and Serena trips over it so comically I think I'm in a slapstick movie for a minute. She slams into the floor, hissing through gritted teeth, and Maximus spares her a second glance as she rolls through the long corridor.

Another mistake.

I lunge forwards with my knife, carving an arc through the air. Maximus manages to awkwardly maneuver around it, but it does cut through his arm, and I savor that shallow victory. But I'm not going to be savoring for long. He advances towards me, and out of the corner of my eye I see Serena scrambling up from the ground. In a second the two are side by side, weapons brandished towards me, not even thinking to turn their weapons on eachother.

It's really a shame, I think, as I slowly back up towards a mirror. It was nice to see them getting along. And there really could be a nice partnership there- the exact nature of their conflict, the two being practically equals, has also allowed them to work fluidly side by side without communication, on the same level. It was fun to watch. But I know some things that could be construed as… far, far more fun.

So it's with the slightest hint of regret that I pull out my trump card.

Serena Melenese, District 4 Female

"You think this is what they want?"

Maximus' trident is aimed towards Venie's pale throat, the tip just barely scraping her pale skin. I'm inches away from throttling her. Rage flows through my head, ebbing and increasing like a solitary wave. I don't understand why the bitch thought it would be in any way advisable to off Taurus in front of us, but she did, and now we're here. And there's no way she's going to worm out of it, so why is she even bothering to speak?

And yet.

"You think this is what they want."

I know who the "they" is, the they she's referring to. Hard not to. It's the eyes that're always on us, the eternal gazes that never let up.

Our rivalry has been set in stone from the beginning. It's not like I've invested a ton into it personally – that was more Maximus. But in the back of my mind, I've always known that the godlike figures we dance for revel in this, the kill, the hunt, the two equally matched powers facing off. They want a story. They want an ending, and not one that results in us shaking hands and smiling all nice-like. They want blood.

"They've got betting pools, you know." Venie spits, eyes button-black, face twisted into a snarl. "They've got money on who's gonna come out on top. Sure, you guys have been acting surprisingly decent to each other for a bit, but you think that's gonna quench them? It's always going to come down to a final fight like this. So come on. I'm not your enemy. Or at least, I'm not the one you have to shank to win the game."

What a goddamn viper.

An entirely correct one, but still. Viper.

I'm not stupid enough to think that Maximus suddenly trusts me. Or even that he suddenly doesn't hate me. But standing here, tension thick enough to be cut with a knife, the manipulative nature of Venie's words hanging like a pendulum, I can only pray that Maximus uses his brain here. That he recognizes just what it is that she's up to, and doesn't let his inflated ego get to him, and-

He's running at me with his sword. God dammit.

Maximus Vulcan, District 4 Male

It's respect, is what it is.

I think I finally understand. Why I haven't killed Serena yet. Why I don't just stab her in the back now. I hate her like anything, hate her like burning, hate her with malevolence and a rage that putters on in spite of everything. I didn't see it then, but I do now. She's a warrior, just like me, and all of the honor I've offered up to myself is pouring out onto her.

This is how it's meant to be, tentative friendship or no. Always like this.

Serena ducks beneath my outstretched arm, sliding backwards across sleek ice and carpeting. Her trident meets the curve of my sword. Parry. Duck. Slash. Cut. She exhales, a sharp huff of mixed exasperation and bitterness, and punches me in the face, lightning fast, non-dominant hand. My head snaps back. Stars fill my vision, white-hot and dizzying. My soft flesh parts like a gate opening as her trident shreds through my left shoulder.

I violently fling my head forwards, forehead connecting with hers, sending her stumbling backwards. I advance, ignoring the pain, ignoring the torn skin and blood because all that matters is the culmination. The apex of rivalry, of hatred, of battle. All that matters is her and I am all that matters. She stares upwards, dead cold, skin blossoming dark bruise-violet. She's vicious. I adore it.

She snarls, lunging forwards like a wild animal, teeth sinking themselves in my already-ruined shoulder and scraping upwards towards my exposed throat. I shriek and bury my extended fingers into her eye sockets until she screams and reels backwards, trident extended, cutting at me blindly. My sword slices through the front of her shirt. A red line extends from one corner of her chest to the other, a gaping smile. She howls and with a sudden, fluid, breathless movement, latches on to me and flings me, sending me spiraling backwards, body colliding with yet another fucking mirror. It shatters.

Serena Melenese, District 4 Female

Motherfucker.

Shards of glass and starlight explode outwards, a maelstrom of reflection and sharp edges. He explodes too, rocketing towards me. It hurts too much to remember which end of the trident's the killing one, so I just thrust it at him and hope.

Wrong end. But this works too, I think, slamming the makeshift metal staff onto his body again and again and again, hearing bones crack, watching ligaments tear. He screeches and dives for me, and the two of us hit the floor at the speed of sound.

Maximus Vulcan, District 5 Male

I dig my fingers into her throat, encircling her tanned neck, pressing down on the windpipe as she wheezes. Her knee shoots upwards, and my stomach collapses in on itself. I let go, just for a second, and it only takes that one second for her steel trident to punch upwards, three neat holes forming in my abdomen. I screech, delirious with pain and pride, wet with blood. This is what I was meant for. I was never here to win. I'm here to have the last fight I'll ever have.

Serena Melenese, District 4 Female

Maximus lunges for his sword. I grab on to his legs, biting and tearing at every inch of exposed skin, restraining him as he flops in my grasp, hot blood flush against my stomach. His palm closes over the hilt of his sword, and he strikes, wet blade entering me again and again. I feel my ribcage part and my lungs collapse.

"Piece of shit…"

Maximus Vulcan, District 4 Male

"Good way to go out, isn't it?"

I spit out my teeth. They rattle on the ground, like dice, or bones. I kneel for salvation, in prayer, in arrogance I have earned. Serena curls in on herself with a shudder, hissing and dripping scarlet.

My temperature is low, and it's getting dark.

Serena Melenese, District 4 Male

Human beings aren't capable of seeing every pretty color there is. Just a few. Something drains out of me, and I can see it all, brilliant, vibrant, bright. I am no longer human. I am no longer breathing. I am no longer anything.

In the distance, like twin playing cards propped up against each other, two cannons fire at once.

Nyso Torrent, District 5 Male

Something's following me.

From beneath me, it devours. Something in the mirrors, something in the corner of my eye. Something is waiting. Something is longing. Something is looking for something to eat.

For someone to eat.

No one told me stories when I was little. Piece of shit dump-ass orphanage, why would they? So I came up with stories to tell myself. Happy ones pissed me off, and still do. Sunshine and fluffy bunnies and things I'll never have. Sad ones made me think thoughts better disregarded. So I turned to scary ones.

I'm a withering coward, which is part of why I did it. I guess I thought that my weakness meant that I wouldn't come up with anything horrible enough, incomprehensible enough, eldritch enough to actually send me scrambling for something to hold. And I didn't.

I came up with rooms just like these, though. Rooms that went on, and on, and never stopped, that never even considered stopping. Rooms that extended like hands, like a roll of tape, like twine, unspooling. Rooms that you found when you stepped ever so slightly wrong, rooms you found when for just a moment the ground beneath your feet wasn't as solid as it should be.

Nothing waited in those rooms. Just more rooms, behind every door, silent and coated in flaking yellow paint. Nothing stirred. Nothing watched. Nothing wept for me. I wandered until I collapsed on the ground and died. And the story always ended like that.

This is worse. This is so much worse. Because if there's anything more viscerally unsettling than halls upon identical halls of tension, it's halls where you can constantly see your own fucking face.

The thing I know is following me? The thing padding softly in lock-step, the thing that wheezes ever so faintly like a deflating bagpipe? The thing is here to kill me, because it's the fucking Hunger Games, but, somehow, it helps that it's there.

I slow to a stop. What's the goddamn point?

Nyso to the right of me seems to agree. Looking at him is just a reminder of the fucking garbage I feel and look like. Slick with sweat, flush with bitterness, pasty, ratlike face hollow and smoke-dry. Chapped, thin, smiling lips.

Smiling lips. Wait a goddamn minute.

Like the halls, the thing in the mirror extends.

My hands. My concave shoulders, my flintlike eyes, my ridges of bone poking out of my damaged flesh. The thing wearing my face unfolds like a goddamn paper crane, body breaching the thin line that separates me from him, the translucent barrier presenting my own face to me at all times.

His lips part, and I notice a very important difference – my teeth? Not that sharp.

I decide to do the reasonable thing and run like hell.

Stumbling over my own feet, I set off, desperate and aching, the holes in my shoddy leather shoes widening with each desperate lunge through the hall. The thing whimpers like I do, gasping like it feels my pain, cries and rages while it pursues me in a reflection of my worst and most naked parts. As I run, I doubt that I have any other parts. It's just me and the ugliness that permeates through every inch of my skin. Just me and my awful body sprinting away.

My vision blurs, sweat and tears swimming across my cone of vision, the world reduced to a haze of blending blue and white, wet, reflective paint draining and mixing.

I don't see the dead end.

My body slams into a mirror, and expects pain upon contact, expects to stop. But I don't stop. The mirror folds and I keep running and suddenly the air is different, no longer stale, heavy with salt. Sand crunches beneath my feet and the sound of waves crashing break the nothing previously echoing in my eardrums. The thing still follows. I still hurdle towards safety that's never, ever coming, because the beach is flat and wide and I understand very quickly that I will run until I cannot run any longer, and then I'll die. And that's when a part of my brain I'm very familiar with speaks up. A part of my brain that sounds more like a child than I already do, which is a lot. A petulant, squeaky part, that tells me, in no uncertain terms, that it's not fair!

And it isn't, really. It never has been. It sure as hell isn't fair that I grew up packed like fish in a sardine with wailing, grubby children. It sure as hell isn't fair that my eyes are too narrow and my face is too sour to be swept up by wanting parents. It sure as hell isn't fair that I'm here, now, running for my life and absolutely, positively, seconds away from being dismembered as penance for a centuries-old war that no one in this lifetime was there to witness. And it isn't fucking fair that the thing that's supposed to kill me is wearing my face. Oh ha ha, remind me of the things I hate the most about myself while I drown in my own blood. Isn't that just fucking fair?

It really, really isn't.

I turn on my heel.

The thing wearing my face, whatever the hell it is, wasn't ready for that. It was ready for my to run and sob, but not for this. Not for me to do what I do best, which is, of course, flinging myself at someone infinitely more physically gifted than I am with full intent to rip out their throat with my teeth.

The thing makes a soft noise when it hits the sand, like an exhale. My hands dig into its hair and I pull, until it reaches the water.

I thrash as I drown myself. I watch my own face contort in pain. I stare with awful rage as I choke and I splutter and I die.

When I – when the thing wearing my face stops moving, I haul it up. I raise up my worn-through shoe, slowly, purposefully, and bring it down on that face, my face, twisted and masklike with death and drowning. My head pops like a rotten pumpkin.

I sit down in the sand. I stare up at the setting sun. And of course, with my own blood settling on me like a second layer of skin, I cry. Again.

Eulogies

13th: Taurus Black, District 2 Male- Decapitated by Venie [D2]

TAURUS. Two words: YOU. ASSHOLE. From the very beginning, you were an asshole, and you were an asshole up until the end. But rest assured you fulfilled a very important role. Mason couldn't fill it cause he was Bloodbath fodder. Maximus couldn't fill it cause he was too busy being actually relevant to the plot (and smart. Kind of.) Serena and Venie couldn't fill it because they were legitimately complex. But you- you served as the perfect mindless voice of the legion, a mouthpiece for the eternal dickwad Career trope. And it was necessary. Thank you No-role-models for submitting the quintessential career- the Too Big For His Britches.

12th: Maximus Vulcan, District 4 Male- Spork'd by Serena [D4]

Fun fact: it says you died before Serena, but in actuality you two died at the exact same time. I couldn't help it. Even in death, you two are indistinguishable. Honestly, your arc was absolutely perfect and it's the thing I'm most proud of writing so far. From the very beginning you differentiated yourself from Taurus and Mason by simply being BETTER than them. You were smarter, you were stronger, you didn't trade your "common sense" stat for brass balls, etc. But in order to prove you were truly the strongest career, you felt you needed to defeat your district partner. And that was the center of your conflict. Because Serena was your equal in every possible way. Your equal in scoring, in training, and in death. And the way you became tentative friends until Venie fucked everything up? SO GOOD. I am such a talented writer. This rivalry, and then not-rivalry, was such a great idea. I am the humblest person ever, clearly. Honestly? You could have been a victor. I thought about it. You could've killed Serena (or killed Venie, I guess) and went home and just been this badass, deadly smart villain you always were and absolutely knock the socks off of everyone. But it didn't work out like that, and I'm sorry. Anyways, thank you Adithya23 for this malleable and very kickasshole tribute!

11th: Serena Melenese, District 4 Female- Impaled by Maximus [D4]

Yet another cat to let out of the proverbial bag! Schrodinger is quaking. You were mine. Well, technically, you were my sister's, but for all intents and purposes you were mine, and there was no way you'd win. I know you were very well liked, and I'm honestly sorry I couldn't let you win or get a bit further, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles. You were great! You were kind and intelligent and despite being a career, didn't revel in cruelty. But you weren't perfect. Before the Games you were pretty naïve, and had some mental and emotional issues that made it occasionally difficult for you to form strong connections with people like your mother, or to empathize with them. But you did your best to project this image of a strong, collected, and loving young women, and that added just more dimensions to you. You might've been filler, but in the end you turned out just as complex as any of the other tributes. Your rivalry and then weird friendship with Maximus was fun to write, like I said in his eulogy, and it truly was poetic justice that you went out the way you did. These eulogies are only getting harder to write, geez- and you aren't even someone who's death I'm afraid will be disappointing! AAAAAAAH! [Spontaneously rips out all of my hair]

A/N: Oh boy. I just did that. And now you guys probably hate me for killing off most of the careers (or at least Serena. Taurus and Maximus weren't exactly well-loved.) Well tough tiddies! That's how things worked out. But, nah, actually, no tough tiddies here. I can understand why shaking things up so quickly might be surprising or worrying, but Venie has reasons for doing what she did, and I have reasons for doing what I did. This story isn't improvisation- specific little details have changed, but there are many, many things set in stone. Honestly, you guys are probably gonna be more mad at me for the "not updating in a year" thing than you're gonna be for me killing the careers off. Anyways, just sit tight, cause we got a plan up in this bitch.