A/N: Don't have a lot to say. I'm being punctual, so good for me! Thanks for your support, remaining like three people still reading this. On to day six! Fun fact, we're pretty much at the halfway point of the Games now. We're getting into the territory of Real Good Shit. Well, realer gooder shit, as in my opinion there's been some good shit already.

Ajax Walker, District 8 Male

You would think the worst thing about being in a teenage gladiator death match would be the part where it's a teenage gladiator death match. And don't get me wrong, the part where you're constantly waiting for the ball to drop and a psychotic fuckboy to chop off your head is bad, but in spite of how it's presented, the actual games themselves don't involve you constantly running for your life. No, the Hunger Games is about waiting. And with waiting brings ennui.

Essentially, I am so goddamn bored.

"Dude. I spy." Gareth quirks his head over to me, like a curious golden retriever. In the corner, hands still bound, Chablis groans loudly. "Not an invitation for you!" I call out. She rolls her eyes anyways. "Fine." Gareth huffs.

"I spy, with my little eye…" I hum, stretching the words with visceral texture, "…something flat and silver."

Gareth blinks. "Is it an item of clothing?"

"Nope."

"Okay, is it behind me?"

"Yep."

"Uh, is it in one of our open bags?"

"Nope."

"…Can I see myself in it?"

"Yep."

"Ajax, is it a fucking mirror?"

"Ding ding ding!" I cheer. "We have a winner, ladies and gents!" Chablis snorts. Entirely unladylike, and unbefitting of that whole anorexic femme fatale thing she's got going on, but she doesn't acknowledge the slip-up. "Oh come on!" She proclaims. "There's nothing here but mirrors! You are a hack." "The hackiest!" I laugh. Gareth just pouts, bearing a surprising resemblance to a squashed tomato. "You are unbelievably awful at I spy." He mocks. "I'm unbelievably awful at I spy?" I splutter. "You're the one who took four fucking tries to guess that it was the only thing in this place!" Chablis is howling with laughter at this point, apparently choosing to ignoring her image entirely. Gareth flushes, which doesn't help the tomato resemblance. "I hate you people."

"Me next, me next!" Chablis cheers, eyes glittering and devious. "I spy, with my little eye, something red and stupid."

"I'm not even going to dignify that with a response." Gareth grumbles.

The two of them go back and forth, pushing and pulling, laughing and snapping, although Chablis does most of the laughing and Gareth does most of the snapping. I lean back and let the two bicker. The ennui never stops, of course, but it can be combated.

In the back of my chest, my heart beats frantically, broadcasting to me that my life can snuff out at any moment. But I ignore it, for now.

In another, darker part, a bit too bitter to be my heart, a bit too emotional to be my brain, I whisper to myself that sitting here, making merry with my distant and still-raw ally and a psycho bitch from one while Quinn and Preston are cold and quiet, embalmed in their marble coffins, dust collecting between their joints and bones stiffening in rigor mortis, is a waste of time. That I should just curl into a little ball and wait for death to come, waiting to join them, waiting to lie in stillness and silence, boxed in by stone, eyes glassy and covered with the distant film of seeing nothing, hearing nothing, being nothing. I've heard people say that death is just like going to sleep, that you won't even remember the time in the dark with your brain all shut off. But somehow that's even worse. Because waking doesn't wait for you. Nothing waits. The world keeps turning and all that's changed is you, plucked out, like something with big hands and plastic scissors clumsily cut you out of a photo. Little bits of you still hanging on the edges. A hole where you should be.

I try to ignore that too. But existentialism and ennui go together like me and inevitable death.

A soft chime interrupts my musing. Gareth and Chablis both whip around, immediately on edge, goose bumps panning across their skin. And, ever so quickly, the ceiling opens, offering us only a quick glimpse at sunshine before a bag falls and the ceiling closes up again. Gareth runs to it first, opening it with a sort of hunger that isn't physical – the need for information. A note, maybe? A word of advice? But there's none of that. Instead, there's a small box of bandages, two canteens of water, and, most pressingly, a porcelain dining plate covered in steak, dripping meat, cut in thick slices, bone and gristle and fat poking out from roasted skin. Chablis lets out a moan of anticipation at the sight of it, and doesn't even bother to clap her hands over her mouth and do that "blushing Barbie doll" nonsense she considers a prerequisite after she expresses any kind of emotion other than smug malignance and like, embodying femininity. Gareth just blinks, baffled, like he can't even begin to understand what's in front of him.

"Meat." Gareth says.

"Meat." I agree.

"Meat!" Chablis says, enraptured.

I dig in first, not even bothering with the tiny forks, just plunging my fingers into the mess of pink and brown, tearing off shards and cramming them into my mouth. "Barbecue sauce!" Gareth screams, and I dip my fingers into it rapturously, smearing it all about. My attractiveness quotient is plunging into the negative by the second, I'm sure, but I can't bring myself to care.

Chablis stumbles towards the feast, but then pauses. Caught. Her eyes flicker back and forth in obvious trapped agony. I beckon to her. Yeah, she's technically our prisoner, I guess, but I'm pretty sure she's not going to kill us at this point and I'm not about to let her starve. "I- can't eat it. Hands are tied. Whoops!" She blusters, eyes rattling with panic. I give Gareth The Look. He gives me another look, which I'm pretty sure signifies either "Go for it" or "What the hell are you waggling your eyebrows about." Either one. I make an executive decision, spin Chablis' toothpick body around, and, in a single fluid motion, untie her hands.

Gareth gapes. Chablis blinks like a gutted fish. "There!" I state cheerfully. "Hands are untied. Feel free to gorge yourself." Her eyes narrow. My eyes flicker down to her stomach, the tight fabric of her shirt and her jutting ribs, a xylophone of bone spanning across her nigh-concave waist. I know she's vicious. I know she's a killer. But she looks so fragile. Like a glass statue. I'm afraid that if I touch her every inch of her will come undone, that this faint veneer of trust will melt in my hands. I push the thought away, like I've done so many others already.

Tentatively, she takes a single bite, smearing barbecue sauce and grease all over her narrow chin. Her whole face crinkles up like crumpled paper afterwards, and she quickly hands it over to Gareth like the plate is burning her hands, but.

It's a start.

Finlay Ardun, District 11 Female

Anything sounds nicer if you mention that you're sunbathing after it. I've been in this horrifying teenage death match for almost a week now, and I'm sunbathing. See, doesn't that sound so much better?

I lean back on the sand, pretending the grit is the scratchy soap they gave me back in the capitol, the one that scraped against my bare skin but left me smelling and feeling like a very exfoliated princess for the first time in – basically forever, really. If I squeeze my eyes shut tight enough, maybe I can dream up a surfboard. Or a helicopter out of here.

I don't even bother. Too much false hope.

I grope for the mutilated coconut next to me. Found that sucker a day ago, snapped it in half, and now I'm living off the juices. It's hard to resist the urge to climb up the trees they fell out of, scurry up there and cling to the branches like they're salvation. It's what I know best, after all. But there's no cover, and perching at the top of a naked tree would only draw people to my location. So, for now, I remain on the ground.

Coconut juice. Delicious.

I think I've got it pretty good here. In the corner, observe, will you, a humble sandcastle. It looks just awful, like a thing a toddler slapped together with sausage hands, but in my minds eye it's a tall, tall tower, and I've built little sand princes and princesses to line the edges like delicate lace. Up in the sky, a mélange of colors, orange and pink and yellow all smearing together, fat clouds floating by serenely. I don't know how the gamemakers pulled this off, and I'm trying to not care about this. I'm actually trying to not care about anything. It's harder than it looks, and it already looks pretty damn hard.

I could die at any moment, but, see, not caring. I want to run away so badly, keep running like a wounded dog until they flip a switch in my head and I explode, a stepped-on tomato, a golem made out of meat and energy and flickering signals that someone pinched between their thumbs and folded in half like clay. And I'm not supposed to care, and I'm trying to not care, I really am, but my heart is beating like drums or a tambourine, and I remember my mother in the sunshine, I remember her deep brown hands and the way she laughed, like nothing meant anything. Her smile, too big for her face, like someone had lopped off a bit of extra skin at the edges to make it fit, and how she smiled crazy-wide all psycho-like to make the big kids back off when they started teasing me for scampering up to the trees when I got scared, I remember her running and falling and the neat little holes they made in her back, just like punching paper. I remember all of this, and I still want to follow in her ill-minded footsteps, which is deeply terrifying and makes me concerned for my own mental stability. And I'm sunbathing.

See, it all sounds so palatable when you add that on the end.

"Run, rabbit, run run run. When the sun comes up, you've had your fun." I hum absentmindedly. They like it when I sing. They send down pretty gifts. It gets just a little bit easier to remember that pain and cowardice hang around my shoulders like a shawl when they come. Doesn't matter that I'm singing folk songs of traitors and snakes. All that matters is that I keep going. And that I'm sunbathing.

The sun sets, and I drink, and I sing, and I try very hard to not run, rabbit, run.

Futura Light, District 3 Female

Okay, so, everyone I've tentatively allowed myself to care about is dead. Now what?

Hypothetical question. Posed to no one, for no one. Other than myself, but I already know the answer. I keep surviving. That's what I do, isn't it? That's what I promised myself I'd do? I am a machine, I am not a human being, if sacrifices are made than I will stand by and let them be made. It's not like I didn't know this was going to happen. I always knew that they would have to die. Not by my hands, never by mine, but somehow. In some way. And soon.

I prepared, I holed myself up in my room, I stared at tiny flashcards until my eyes blurred over, alone in the dark beneath sheets I didn't even know could be so soft. I read my own tiny, methodical print, reciting the proper emotional reaction to their eventual death, the way I would perform, the airs I would put on. I told myself I wouldn't cry. I said it was good to look strong. But not too strong. I would say some kind words. But not too kind. I am a machine, I am not a human being, I am what I am and what I am is someone with dry eyelids. Thou with dark eyelids, they whispered in the dark, I did, lines of Cambria on paper white and clean in a perfect square. And I stared at my repetition, and what I needed to say, and I hated myself.

And I can't stop now. Cambria, Ariel, I tried different fonts, I tried different words, I tried different ways. And I am not crying, I'm not crying, I'm not.

I remind myself that I'm just walking alone and downtrodden in a secular hallway. There's no reason why the cameras would be trained on my face. No one will see. The wetness on my face. The way I'm trembling, oh god, like tremors are flickering through the ground at this very moment, a chain of seismic activity unsettling me. Seismic activity. Focus. Focus. I know this. Earthquakes. Tectonic. Volcanic. Collapse. Explosion. Tectonic. Volcanic. Collapse. Explosion. Ring of fire. Fuji. Mountains, sky cracking open, rain pouring down, think of anything, anything but Cajsa staring up at me with her mouth in a perfect circle and a hole in her gut to match, anything but Crystaille's big smile up in the sky yesterday night, anything but Cajsa painting my nails with that stubborn look on her face as the purple slipped onto my cuticles, anything but Crystaille knocking hard on my door. Dropping my flashcards. Her telling me that she needed a hug, and that I needed one two, and that we would hug, dammit, and that it would all be just fucking fine.

And me standing there, and her arms around me, and my arms limp at my sides. Because I didn't know – because I still don't know – how to hug another human being.

What we were. Are. What she was. And now won't be. They're faces and dirt and mold and little mites living in their eyeballs, and I know this, I know that a body decomposes slowly over time, but the hair and nails still grow, and the skin withers away, and I'm tired of knowing. I'm tired of being the smart one. I'm tired of having it all under control, because it's gone. This shit is so far off the handle. It's in Mexico by now, that's how far off it is. My shit is wrecked.

No one pities a bit or a circuit or a 1 or a 0. No one pities a random number generator. It's so much better to be that. No one pities a victor either. And if I keep crying, if I keep being so damn pitiable on the floor like this, I won't be a victor.

In the distance as my brain fizzles out, I hear a soft sound. Like a whisper through a flute.

I look up, startled, my cheeks still stained with tears. For a brief second, I catch a glimpse of sunlight, before the ceiling snaps shut again, and something drops between my feet. A worn leather bag, small, tied with a bit of familiar-smelling rope. I reach for it gently, still shaking, still seismic in my uncertainty and tremors. Geological plates shifting between my ribs, flat disks of dirt slotting in and out. A puzzle I'll never hope to solve. These miserable things I feel.

Inside, two cards, two flat cookies. One misshapen thing made out of wheat and studded with nuts, one plumper sugar circle. My fingers grasp at them desperately, like there's something secret there, like someone's about to tell me how and why to act via cookie. I eat them so quickly I barely taste it. Then I turn to the cards. On each one, there's just one word.

The first one says TEN.

The second one says EIGHT.

With cookie crumbs decorating my mouth and grief traveling throughout my entire body like I'm a conductor for the goddamn thing, I, of course, cry.

Teryn Gardner, District 9 Female

Back at home, back when there was a bit of rhyme and reason to my life, I would get a sort of.. pang. It almost always came when I was in bed, eyes scrunched tight, waiting for sleep to claim me. A strange hunger developing in my gut. Sleep wouldn't come with that panicked, all-consuming hunger there, so I would creep out from beneath the sheets, bare feet cold against the sun-rotted wood, and ever so carefully I'd perch on the windowsill and haul myself up, muscle by muscle, inch by inch, onto the weathered red brick of the roof, rust and stone rubbing my bare knees and palms raw. The moon is always huge in District 9, always enormous and white and ravenous. And up there, cold air on my bare skin and sneaking through the fine layer of my nightgown, I would close my eyes and imagine I had the entirety of human history at my fingertips, ready to be sped up or slowed down or zoomed in on. And I scrolled through the cycles of the moon, watching it go concave, then convex, fat and then skinny, full and then ever so hungry. In the dark space beneath my eyelids I would observe. The way it moved. The way it changed.

What I'm getting to here is that right now, in a place where I cannot see a moon that's dull and drowned out by artificial light anyways, I get my fill of the waxing and the waning from Heavenly.

"You're bleeding." She says dreamily, hands hovering over my back like she's aiming to play piano on my spine. "Yeah, no shit I'm bleeding." I spit. "I got shanked in the back less than a week ago." She's behind me, so I don't see her face fall, but I can imagine it, her eyelids lowering and mouth curling into a little pink frown, a wrinkle of hesitation marring her wide forehead. I immediately feel bad. Being a dick to Heavenly when she's like this just feels wrong, somehow. Like kicking a puppy, even when half the time she's bitterer and more sour than I am, entire body seized up into a living ball of tension, ready to summon some unholy growl from the inner most reaches of her throat. "I should replace your bandages." She says suddenly, fingers splayed flat across the expanse of my back. "But if I do, is it the same wound?" She laughs, in a small, sad sort of way, like she's told an inside joke no one's around to understand. I grimace. "Heavenly, you just changed them. Like, two hours ago. They're fine."

She swivels around to me and for a moment I can spot a glimpse of lucidity on her face, a stern playfulness I learned to expect in the first few days of our partnership back in the capitol but now rarely appears. "Why don't I consult our wise old oracle, then", she says smugly, and with a surprising flourish reaches for the goddamn magic-8 ball again. God, I hate that thing. She shakes, eyes narrowed, focusing so entirely on the blue water sloshing around that someone can probably straight up murder me without her noticing. I don't find this to be a particularly reassuring thought.

"It is decidedly so!" She giggles, drunk on triumph and possibly also the noxious alcohol fermenting in that stupid thing. She's happy, though, and I can see the fullness in her eyes, even if just for a moment, so I roll with it. Lord knows I've humored wilder things from smaller kids. She returns to my back and begins to pull back layers upon layers of gauze, until the mess of ruined skin, drying blood, and yellow bruising is free for anyone to see. I bite down hard on my lip as she reapplies, patching me up like I'm a stuffed doll just barely lacking enough stuffing to go on. When she's done, she pulls back, retreating, the thin lines making up her body and bones and feeble limbs retracting and I know that she's waning again.

And for Heavenly, the waning mainly comes in the form of the peeling.

I'm pretty sure it's part of why she's so eager to change my bandages all the time too, but, inevitably, whenever something in her shrivels up and goes into hibernation, whenever her entire disposition rots as quickly as a dying moon in imagined time lapse, she begins to peel. Beneath the red carpet lining these vast halls is old, old floorboard. Old enough that it crumbles away beneath her nails like dust. She pulls at it, absorbed in it, and I watch. I can't refrain from watching. It's almost hypnotic, the way she does it. Hooking her nail under the faded paper. Pulling it backwards, like she's reeling in a fish, like she's calling for the sun or the stars to join her in the dirt. Depositing the thin line of flooring into our bag, like she'll need it, like it has any kind of practical use. And doing it all over again.

When Millard bit at his nails, I spent a full week slapping him every time his mouth reached at his fingers. It's what any good big sister should do. But even as I watch the tips of Heavenly's fingers burn away with friction, even as dry blood accumulates around her cuticles, I can't begin to stop her. I can't begin to even try. I don't know where the starting line is for this kind of situation, where you line up all pretty with the racers and losers-to-be. How can I?

I'm already helping her in a way that hurts to do. A way that makes me scared for my safety and hers as well. That first day as I unpacked our precious bag, spread out our prizes like a deck of cards, I left out one integral thing. Something that I know every drop of blood in Heavenly's body is screaming for.

The bag was right in front of me at the beginning. They knew I'd go for it. They knew I'd grab it. They knew that whatever was in that bag, Heavenly would see it too. And that's why they did it.

Deep in my pocket, beyond all observation, shoved into hopeful neglect, a vial of pure morphling sits and waits for the world to start.

I help myself to some peanut butter. It's going to be a long day.

A/N: So, yeah, it's been a year, and like last time, few people are sticking around. Still can't blame anyone for abandoning this story, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop writing. So I'm going to use this space to do a bit of reminiscing instead. When I started this story in 2017, I was 11 years old. 11! That's insane! In exactly two weeks, I'll be 15. So much has changed for me over the years, and my 11 year old self can't even begin to understand the scope of that. Like, I have a stable friend group now, which is wild, a girlfriend, which is even wilder, and also the world has completely shut down as a pandemic rages across the globe. My entire life has changed so significantly since 2017. Looking back, I can hardly recognize myself in the words I wrote back then. I've changed so much as a person and a writer, and if I had the chance to go back I would do so much so differently. So, basically, what I'm trying to say here is that if you've stuck with me this entire time I am baffled but also honored by your loyalty, and my own personal evolution as a human being and a storycrafter hasn't put you off, somehow. So thanks, and here's to much personal development in the future, though hopefully not via not writing for a year. Anyways. What do you think about Gareth, Ajax, and Chablis' developing friendship? Is Finlay going to have even more of a mental breakdown than she's already having? How about Heavenly, she sure seems mentally stable. And what about that funky cool morphling, huh? I bet Heavenly's going to have a really neat response when she learns that Teryn's been hiding it from her. Let me know your thoughts and predictions in the comments, and see you all next time!