A/N: Firstly, shout out to my boy LordZagreus, who is the only one reviewing anymore LMAO, thank you man and to whomever else is still hanging around I wholeheartedly encourage you to drop a review because it makes my entire day and motivates me to write so much faster. Secondly, sorry that this took a month to come out. Refer back to the firstly – the lack of reviews makes the prospect of writing the next chapter really disillusioning and extends the process much longer than it should be. Although, to be fair, the wait is also probably because of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game that has almost entirely taken over my life. I caught a mahi-mahi today guys! Oh how the mighty have fallen.
And now, without further ado, on to Day Seven, a day that I have been looking forwards to writing for a long while. Please imagine I typed that with an ominous grin on my face, pressing my fingers together like a Disney supervillain. I guarantee you it will add to the experience.
Gareth Barkely, District 7 Male
It started over an apple.
The whole thing starts, and builds, and builds, and explodes, off of a fucking apple. Which is shameful enough in itself, really.
Saying that it started over an apple is a bit incorrect, though. To be more accurate, it started over the absence of one.
When your days are spent in a teenage murder death arena, you see, you start to pay attention to certain things. Certain things that can mean the difference between life and death. Like whether or not the carpet's slightly indented, because the slightest shadow could mean the imprint of a boot belonging to someone following you. Like your own heartbeat, whether or not it's sounding slightly louder than usual, beating slightly faster than usual, gauging whether or not it's trying to tell you something.
And you especially pay attention to food.
Life and death balance on Triscuits more than you'd like to admit. So, you count your Triscuits. You make note of every single one, the size, the shape, the dimensions. You go over tiny squares until your eyes blur over, until your head begins to burn with the constant wrinkling of skin, until the pads of your fingers are numb and smeared with food. You count the Triscuits, the disgusting, violently orange slices of artificial cheese, the cold, soggy cuts of dull salami. And you count the apples.
Last night, there were five apples. This morning, there are four.
So now that you know how often I count, you might be getting the idea that math prowess or not, the absence of an apple is something I've noticed.
Day 7 in our little personal fifth circle of hell, and something is ever so slightly wrong.
In the corner, Ajax throws cherry pits into Chablis's mouth. Her hair's messier than I've ever seen it, a halo of blond and split ends framing her still-sallow face. She lunges forwards for them, every time trapping the pits beneath her teeth, laughing and spitting them into the hollow of her palm. Ajax grins and sticks out his tongue, one eye squeezed shut, in a pantomime of a careful aim before he fires. Chablis twists herself into a delicate pretzel in her haste, and the pit rockets all the way down her throat. Her eyes widen almost comically. They lock eyes, and suddenly begin to laugh even harder than before, curling in onto themselves, Chablis still wheezing from a cherry-pit intrusion in her trachea.
"Chablis wins!" She crows, the very sight of smug success, flinging her bony arms upwards like she's suspended in that perfect moment before the crowd begins to cheer. Ajax snorts into his hand and reels back easy, loose, unrestrained. They didn't do this with the real cherries. We ate those slowly. We ate everything slowly.
See? It all revolves around food.
"Damn, they teach you that shit in One?" He teases, eyes sparkling. She grimaces, caught somewhere between silly euphoria and unfortunate memories. "No, in One they teach you to tie cherry stems into a knot with your tongue. These tricks I taught myself." Ajax laughs, limbs askew. "Impressive talent!" With a wink, he adds "On both counts." Chablis sticks out her tongue, still bright red with cherry juice. "I'm a self-made woman." "Hell yeah you are," Ajax exhales, entire face seemingly-permanently warped in a mask of mischief. Chablis blinks, taking a second to latch on to the double meaning. "Oh, you bitch!" She giggles, a note of high-pitched desperation sneaking in with the air of casual fun. Ajax, ever the perceptive bastard, notices. "Hey," she laughs, eyes flickering back and forth like a rabbit hopped up on cocaine, "I've already accepted that every facet of my being's elaborately constructed by myself and the various noxious influences in my life! It's not like you're announcing anything new and revolutionary here." Ajax frowns. "Hey, that's… not true. I mean, it doesn't have to be, if you don't want it to…?"
Chablis jumps to her feet, hands and mouth moving rapidly, her entire body a wild conduit of panic electricity. "I mean, want doesn't really have anything to do with it! I've committed, that's all, I don't change, there's no need to shed an exoskeleton that works perfectly well-"
It all revolves around food. Cherry pits, cherry stems, eating meat with your hands. Layers of cheese and chunks of bread and pretty One girls vomiting it all up in porcelain toilets. And, of course, apples.
I stand up and begin to speak.
Ajax Walker, District 8 Male
Gareth unwinds himself from the ground, eyes flint-sharp, entire body ramrod-straight, a live wire. His hands are in fists, and when he speaks, his words grate, like someone's trying to play a vinyl on a breathing chalkboard. "No. You don't change. Not ever."
Chablis physically flinches, recoiling, and I start. My heart hammers against my ribcage, unable to understand why the atmosphere so quickly transformed from hospitable to venomous, unable to understand why and how everything went so entirely sideways so fast, but entirely certain of one key thing: Something very bad is about to happen. My blood screams it. The hair lining every available inch of my body shouts it from the rooftops.
Something very bad is about to happen if I don't stop it right now.
Chablis and Gareth stand in opposition to each other, frozen, vicious cardboard cutouts suddenly refusing to resemble the real thing. Gareth's teeth jut out from beneath his lip, biting down hard on his exposed skin, muscles contracted, holding their breath. His rather impressive eyebrows furrow, jack-o-lantern skin carved into patches of worry and fury both, knuckles flushed in righteous anger, white and pink and all bone. Dark crescents of black and purple skin underline his eyes, jarring smudges of bruising and sleep deprivation highlighting every inch of his upset and betrayal, upset and betrayal I can't even come close to understanding. Not here. Not now.
Chablis, meanwhile, has fallen in on herself, taking the defensive stance, sun-colored skin dotted with fear in the form of goose bumps. Her wild, uncombed mane of hair frames her terrified face, lion's hair for someone who couldn't look less like a lion's breakfast if they tried. Her shirt hangs from her, limp and flaccid, every open inch of her collarbone and elbows pointing outwards, like contradictory signposts, ridged with bone and concave hunger and omnipresent terror. She whistles through her two front teeth, a short, panicked noise, and the air shudders around her.
"She should've stayed tied up. She always should've stayed tied up."
Gareth bites first, all venom and single-mindedness. Chablis grimaces, no longer the pretty girl from One, no longer the thing she and everyone else thought she always was. Just an emaciated teenager trading barbs in a state of abject horror. "Yes, I get it, you're pissed that bondage playtime is over. But-" And she hesitates there, stuck on that word, unable to conjure up a justification for why she should be upright and walking freely. Gareth goes in for the kill.
"You thought you could just… what? Trade jokes with us, laugh with us, like we're all a bunch of pals? What was the plan here, Chablis? To rot here, to eat us up until we're nothing?"
Chablis flinches violently. Her entire body shudders as she tilts, an unstable pole pointing skywards. She plants her feet, suddenly trembling with what looks like rage, or something mimicking it. An awful, sick feeling dressing itself up all pretty in angry colors. "You don't know anything about me. You're just assuming I'm some tumor on your perfect little backside, aren't you? Think I'm here to ruin the sanctity of your alliance. What remains if it, that is."
I wince, painfully aware of how much the situation is spiraling out of control, knowing that if I don't intervene our entire dynamic's going to permanently shift in the worst direction possible. But I'm frozen, mouth gaping, just watching them go at it, two hissing cats in an alleyway fighting over a bit of dust that looks just like food.
"I don't have to assume. It's obvious. You're a goddamn leech from One, of course you'd steal from us, of course you'd try to suck the fucking life out of us both." Gareth snarls, face flushed bitter-red. Chablis laughs uncontrollably, her hands twitching at her sides, groping at her own skin and the fabric covering her up.
"Fuck you. I've been trying, okay? I've been trying."
"You haven't tried anything!" Gareth screams, and his entire body is boiling with self-justified madness, eyes dark and deep and hands cold and aching. "You haven't tried, you've only eaten at us. At every part of us. Try eating something fucking else for a change. Oh wait. You did."
No, no, no. This isn't right. This shouldn't be happening. Everything was fine. I just want everything to be fine again.
When I was five years old, I cut my finger open with a kitchen knife. I stared at it as it bled, picture of surprise, unable to fix it, unable to patch it up, unable to just make it all better. I was trying to help. The carrots were on the table, and Mom was hissing between gritted teeth, forehead slick with sweat, knuckles trembling on the hilt. And I reached out. Imploring. Wanting. And she thrust the blade down at the exact wrong time, and then she was screaming, and I was staring in open-mouthed surprise, completely unable to registering the blood and veins exposed to cold air. It wasn't serious – not as much as it could have been. She bandaged me up, and that was that.
The next time I helped in the kitchen, I made sure to only reach for the handle of the knife.
I got pretty good with knives. But I also got pretty good with helping. Dinner on the table, cats rescued in the streets, all of that feel-good stuff. You name it, I do it. When you're little, you don't know how to help anyone. You just reach out and hope you hit something in need. I thought, up until this point, that I had grown out of that stage. That I knew exactly what to say and do to just help. To make everything better.
Right now, sitting in between two screaming, vengeful people that I just want to be okay, with themselves and with each other, I'm five again. I'm young. My hair's longer, my fingers are stubbier, my eyes are huge and scared and wet. My finger's bleeding, and I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to do. But even then, that didn't stop me from trying. My finger is bleeding and my skin's split in two – was bleeding, was split in two – but the next time, I knew. How to help. What to do. Where to touch to make it all, infinitely, impeccably, better, until it stopped altogether.
And so, not knowing, in the dark of how to fix this, all of this, I reach out.
My finger's bleeding.
I'm bleeding.
Gareth is screaming and Chablis is sobbing, horrified, and she's gasping like a dying fish and I'm numb.
And I'm five, and I'm in the kitchen, sitting on a stool with my eyes drying. My mom collects me in her arms, every inch of me, every bare length of skin, my body curling in hers, warm and grasping. Her fingers run through my hair, nails scraping against my scalp, whispering into my still-wet cheek. The blood stops, plastered up. I no longer drip on her newly-swept kitchen. I no longer drip on her apron.
I breathe her in. "Ajax." She murmurs, eyelashes kissing mine. "When you grow up, you're going to know just what to say, and just how to help. Not now. Maybe not even soon. But you will."
I don't really get it. I lean into her.
Everything explodes into white.
Chablis Brochetto, District 1 Female
Who the fuck does he think he is?
In the background of my rage, my mind whispers, urgently, calculating. Telling me what to say. When to say it. How to phrase it. Don't you wanna hurt him? Don't you wanna play it cool? Don't you want to implore skywards for someone to listen? I've been working so hard, learning how to play the game, learning how to make something entirely out of my control eat right out of my hand. And over the past three days? Two? All of that has dribbled away. I'm weak – painfully so – and there's no solution to that, I've learned, other than beating that weakness to a bloody pulp with my bare fucking hands.
But – and here's the worst part, the perfect bow tying this mess up oh so neat – I don't want to. I should want to. I should want to reclaim what's mine, I should want to be dark and calculating again, but I don't. I want to flick cherry pits at Ajax and laugh and forget. I want to see the sun. I want to hug my parents. I'm feeling the most incredibly, unbelievably awful things and I just keep wanting them. I don't want the feeling to leave me. I don't want them to leave me.
So I just gotta leave them first, right? That's the imperative, that's the crux of the thing, that's the conclusion we all eventually arrive at with our hands folded and our brains scouring for another option. I leave first. I laugh and toss my hair in a motion so violent one would think it would be responsible for the snapping of a neck, and I wink. I lay myself out on the table, an elegant hand of cards exposed to the Powers That Be, and I go. Because we've gotten to the point where any option is just an avenue down to hurting, and the only thing I have left to cling to is my pride.
Not everyone in One's rich. I am, of course, but not everyone. For every sparkling socialite with her own tasteless margarita brand lounging on a ottoman, for every golden-haired child with servants to put in her diamond earrings for her, there's ten old men in the dark, half-blind, cutting away at jewels worth more than every failing organ they have inside of them. Ten pretty girls who weren't quite pretty enough slipping in those diamond earrings. It's nice to pretend that the Capitol's favorite children all live in the lap of luxury, but the world doesn't work that way. For one person to be at the top, ten at the bottom have to support them.
People will tell you that it's their fault that they're there. That they just didn't work hard enough. Hell, a few months ago I would be one of those people. But I've realized recently that it's nobody's fault, not really. There always has to be someone to hold up the pyramid, and when the dice are rolled and the card is flipped sometimes, without any say or input on your part, it turns out to be you.
But anyways. Class analysis aside, the fact of the matter is that not everyone's patenting a knockoff Chardonnay. And the leftovers, the bits and people that fall in the cracks? I mean. They don't want to be there. No one does.
What I'm saying is that in One you carry around a fucking knife. Doesn't matter your position on the social ladder. Doesn't matter if you're at the top or at the bottom, eating the dust and shit from the above-goers' shoes. Wherever you are, whether you have a garbage can worth more than all the guys who empty it combined or a failing kidney, you carry a knife.
That's why there's a knife on me now. You really never leave One. I certainly didn't. There's the top dogs and the bottom dogs, and I don't know what I am right now but everyone carries a knife. And Gareth is snarling like the big fucking man he thinks he is, but I know for certain that he doesn't have a knife in his pants. Bitch didn't grow up in one.
"You haven't tried!" He spits. "You've only eaten at us. At every part of us. Try eating something fucking else for a change. Oh wait. You did."
He delivers this like it's supposed to mean something to me, like it's supposed to have weight, and it does, but not the part I suspect he's intending. Motherfucker. He thinks my ribs jutting out of my skin are a riot, huh? He doesn't get the pain or the planning or just how much it hurts to stick to the path of nonconsumption for the sake of a role I'm constantly failing to maintain, even now, when it matters more than ever.
I'm certain I'm steaming, now, flesh broiled red, hot waves of smoke sloughing off my body. I hate him. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, and I know how stupid it is to hate, how hatred never wins anyone anything, how hatred leaves you bleeding and only indifference can possibly save my sorry skin now. But I can't help it. I hate him and I burn with hating. I'm fairly certain it's the only thing holding me up. Distance is less and less attainable by the minute, the distance I need from this situation and attachment, the only thing capable of salvaging my image and keeping me alive for more than a day. The distance in myself I've cultivated is growing, surprise surprise, more distant by the minute. I am here, and I hate it. I am here, and I despise my presence.
"Fuck you!" I howl. "Don't touch me."
My hands tighten on the knife tucked behind me, swaddled in spare cloth. Fingers sweaty. Understanding that I'm barreling towards the point of no goddamn return.
"Oh, touching's an issue with you, now, huh?" He growls. "You dirty thief, who the hell do you think you are? You're a snake, you're nothing, you don't understand trust, just eating at people who are better than you."
Better. Thinks he's better. Thinks he's smarter, thinks he's a planner. Everything burns away. The panic tears off neatly. Nothing but conviction now. I'm almost glad that it's come to this.
I lunge forwards.
And Ajax moves.
Nobody in One just carries a knife, you see. The weapon is useless if you don't know how to wield it. You've got to know to aim the blade downwards and cut up when you're already embedded in the skin, pull it out once it's dragged from the bottom of the stomach from the top so the blood's freed. You aim for damage. You aim to kill. If you don't succeed, it's over.
So the knife enters the bottom of his stomach, just above his pelvis, and extends upwards, a messy, bloody line, until I pull it out shaking.
Him, of course, being Ajax. To clarify.
Gareth screams and Ajax stares at me. His eyes are wide. I distinctly remember my hands wet with moisture, damp with sweat, but now they're dry. Everything is dry. I want to speak. But there are no words. There is nothing but the knife, and Ajax, on the floor now, and Gareth, screaming. And then there are words, but they are only sounds. Nonsense and apologies that I don't mean because in a way killing him is almost a relief. It confirms what I've thought this whole time.
I don't change. I can't. And if I stay unchanging, I live. Ajax doesn't. But I do.
Ajax is undone. Gareth is undone. And I am running, knife in my hands, platitudes trailing behind me.
Rodrick Olivier, District 9 Male
Red. Blue. Yellow.
Colors. Names. Words. Times. I know them. I know them. I know them. I know them. Colors on a wheel. Turning. Spinning. Axis. Time.
Eyes everywhere. Always looking at me. Stop looking at me. Stop looking at me. Stop looking at me.
I am everywhere. There I am, and I am young. I am smiling. That is not me. That is not who I am. There I am! I am bleeding. That is who I am.
One fish. Two. Red. Blue.
Rodrick, do you like the stories? Do you like the colors? I made them myself for you! Remember that I love you. Remember what I make for you. Crawl up on to my lap, dove, that's right, just like that. Don't let anyone tell you not to cling, you here? Clinging is an important survival instinct. We all cling to those we love, for the sake of not losing them. But I will not leave you. Cling, but I won't leave you. One fish. Two fish.
Damn brat. That's me. I am the boy who stole and paid. Or am I boy? I think I am a thing. I think I am a fish. I think I am not living.
You can be everything and anything you set your mind to. A prince. Or a princess, if that's what you wanna be. You're a hopping frog? Lovely! Just remember, you are always who you say you are. Nobody knows you better than you. Maybe someday someone will call you a fish, when you are really a little human boy, or vice versa. Remember to tell them otherwise. It's your body! You know best. No one else has the right to your body or to tell you what it is.
One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue fish.
They run. I catch them. They run. I catch them. I long for blood. I smell it. I am it. That is what I am.
I hit hard. That's what they told me. The first time in the pit, in the dark, in the stone and cold, they told me that I hit hard. But they hit harder. And I lost my teeth. They sounded like coins when I spit them out. I lost my blood. I lost something special, then. It drained out of me, like a faucet on full blast. I'm still looking for it. What is it? Is it still in the pit? Is it waiting?
Or was it inside her? I cut her open because I knew how. That's why I cut everyone open, really. But I didn't see it. Maybe it was in deeper. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. Maybe I opened her up and it saw me and it left. Maybe it doesn't want to be a part of me anymore.
I will always be with you. I will always be a part of you.
I am missing something. I am a fish, I am a boy, I am right here and I am right there. I do not know what I am, but I am here and I am bleeding. And they are bleeding. And they will bleed.
One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish! Darling, love will save the day.
Love will save the day.
EUOLOGIES:
10th: Ajax Walker, District 8 Male- Stabbed by Chablis
AJAAAAAAAX! You weren't going to die here originally. No, Gareth was going to take your place. But I found a better role for him, and unfortunately that means you got the axe. I'm sorry, Ajax, really, I am. It's no secret to anyone that I loved you. You were the perfect charming fuckboy, the dazzling sweetheart with a surprising level of emotional intelligence, a need to see the best in people, and an unwavering drive to prove and better yourself. You were unendingly charismatic and deeply dynamic and every second I was writing you was a second I was having fun. But playtime's over, boys. NO FUN ALLOWED. Okay, there will still be some fun, because I'm incapable of restraining myself, but the Arena will be darker without you in it. Thank you, Ajax, for your giant heart, your prettyboy smile, your impeccable sense of comedic timing, and how hard you worked to see the good things in everyone you met. And thanks No-role-models for this excellent boy.
A/N: Ajax is dead! FeelsBadMan. Please, I am asking you very politely to pretty please review. What do you think about Ajax's death? Was it a good move, or am I a Fool and Ajax should've been our victor? What about Chablis? She sure seems to have regressed an awful lot, which probably isn't good. And what about Gareth? He seems pretty unpleased with this turn of events, which is fair. Dude keeps losing allies. Oof. Please, give me your predictions and expectations or I WILL cry because seriously reviews are so motivating. See you all next time!