A/N: Yes, I'm aware, it's been four months. Sorry. Life's been kind of haywire/wild/bonkers, and I've had a ton of shit on my plate. Apologies are whatever though. At this point the update schedule is just permanently wonky. So instead of going on about how really sorry I am, I figured I'd start this one out by talking about how completely wild the experience of writing this has been.
A disclaimer: You don't need to read all this shit, if you don't want to. I just wanted to get some stuff off my chest. My story, my wild off-topic rambles, but you don't have to read them if you just want to get to the meat of the story already.
This story started in goddamn 2017. 2017, guys! I started it a month before I turned twelve years old. Getting into the swing of things is hard because of how completely my writing has changed. The story has twisted time and time again because plots I devised back when I was twelve or thirteen no longer seem viable to me as a fifteen year old. I hadn't had any actual writing experience, and it really showed. The early chapters are a mess, and if I had the time or energy I would completely rewrite them and redo most of the characters. Some of them seem inconsistent now because I'm attempting to write them the way I couldn't manage to back when I was eleven.
2017 was a frankly insane year for me. That was the year I traveled around the entire world with my family, and pretty much every chapter was written in a different location than the previous. You have chapters from New Zealand, chapters from the Netherlands, chapters from France, chapters from Costa Rica, and so on and so forth. And yet I managed to write much more than I'm managing now, settled down, for a number of reasons, the most obvious ones being that back in 2017 I was much more passionate about the story and I also wasn't struggling with the mental health issues that make me somewhat demotivated now. So, it's September of 2020, in a week I'm starting my sophomore year of high school, in the midst of a global pandemic, and I'm… writing fanfiction.
I still do write fic, despite updating this story once in a blue moon. I just do it on a different platform and for completely different works. Check out atiredonnie on AO3. Okay, there's my plug.
Anyways, yeah. I'm a different person. My writing is entirely different. But god dammit I am going to finish this thing and I am going to do my best to give every character the resolution they deserve. Okay? Okay.
Finlay Ardun, District 11 Female
Clay beneath my skin. Clay beneath my nails. Clay beneath me, every inch of me, a second coat of arms, a mask of red and gold and ancient brown. Beneath me, silt stirs, as if waking from a dream, the sleepy movement mimicking my own sluggish steps. My fingertips linger across a wide expanse of wet, burgundy earth.
I am invisible, I repeat to myself in the privacy of my own head. I am unfathomable. And in spite of it being a mantra I've used to keep myself sane over the last day or so, it's probably almost true. The beach I found two days ago expands almost endlessly outwards, a giant plantation of sand and sea. Or so I thought. As a matter of fact, with every step the ground grew richer, the sky saltier, the shoreline redder. And before I knew it I was trudging through wet felt like a melting desert, smoke and clay all mixed together in a boiling pot of sunshine hues. And yet the mud decorating my skin is cool, somehow.
A small mercy.
The point is, coating myself in the stuff has kept the flies – and other tributes – away. Over the course of the day I move, inch by inch, at a pace that burns me somewhere deep inside, a slowness rivaled only by glaciers, or so I've heard. I know I'm biologically programmed to run, but if I do, the exhaustion will set in, deep as bone, and my cover will blow away in the wind by the second. So I can't run. Instead I walk, and think about all the stories I want to tell to my children.
Not the children of the future. Chances are, I won't have children of the future. I've made it surprisingly far, but my luck has to run out sometime. If by some divine intervention I survive – well. The chances of me raising kids will be about the same. I can't live in a house made of gold. I can't live in the sheer emptiness of pearl and starlight and simple luxuries. If I win, I know I'll run. I know with every step I'll recall the whispers of my mother in the emptiness of my ear, and each one will just push me further, beyond breath, beyond my ability, beyond my exhaustion. I'll run until I steam at the edges and I'll collapse in the woods with nothing at all. They'll burn me down for that. And if they can't reach me, they'll burn my children.
And if I stay, the children will burn anyways. Whether from the arena because the children of Victors always help ratings or from my own neglect, it doesn't matter. But there isn't any potential happiness in their hypothetical lives. Not with me raising them.
I don't want to think about her, not when there's so much at stake, I haven't wanted to think about her for years, but I can't help it, I never could. Her at the doorway, brushing my hair tenderly behind my ears, eyes giant with love and pain and a soup of emotions I didn't understand. The sound of her frantic footsteps. The way the single shot echoed, an unbelievable sound, a sound that swallowed up the rest of my world and mangled it between ugly teeth. The doorway. The hair. The ears. And the whisper before she left me.
This is no way for a person to live.
Am I not a person? I can't help but run. It's what people do.
I let out a shaky noise between parted lips. Rake my silt-stained hands through my wet hair. Stop thinking about her. No more itchiness in your bones, no more inevitability of pain, just the stories.
I close my eyes.
The stories I want to tell my children, my alternate-universe children who will never know hurt or the ramrod silhouette of my back against the sky, won't have beginnings. Or endings, really. They will be ideas.
It'll be dark out, the moon a singular white beacon in an ocean of stars as rain rattles in the gutters. Every lamp will be on, and the walls will smell like blooming honeysuckle, calypso, jasmine, like I've snuck herbs between the boards. We'll be sitting on the couch, them half-asleep against my form, until I bundle them into my arms and fling us all to the carpet. And we'll all collapse by the fireplace, a hot tangle of freckled limbs, crooked smiles, giggles. They'll stare up at me with giant, luminous eyes, lamplight flickering in their pupils, and I will cup their little jaws and I will whisper-
An idea: You're warm and safe, and there will be pancakes for breakfast tomorrow.
An idea: You'll look for frogs by the creek tomorrow, and bring them into the house swaddled between dirty palms.
An idea: There are other worlds out there, but you don't need to worry about them. This is the only one that matters, because it's where you are.
Behind me, the impact of boots on earth. I blink, wind whistling in my ears, sweat congealing on my temple, every inch of my body screaming at me to run, run, run.
I ignore it. Some things you can't run from. I want to die thinking of people who will never exist.
I'll be tucking them into bed, palm of my hand flat against their cool foreheads as they whine for just one more story, just one more glass of milk, just one more moment of their lives before all the lights turn off in terrifying unison and the world drowns in the inky shadows it has built for itself. I'll smile into their newly-laundered pajamas, pink and blue cotton, and I'll indulge them.
An idea: You have a scar on your chin. It's from falling over on your bike. It doesn't hurt, and you can barely remember getting it.
An idea: You will eat apples that are yours by design.
An idea: The monsters in your closet were shot to death years ago. All that will haunt you in the darkness is the sound of your sister snoring.
Closer now. I want so desperately to take off, to become invisible, to shed my layers of auburn earth and live just a little longer. I don't. I remain. Someone is tucking my hair behind my ear. Someone's breath is hot on my forehead. Someone's palms are kissing my neck. My eyes are already shut.
My mother will tuck me into bed tonight. It's fine. I don't need to be scared. She's with me even now. Don't be afraid, Fin. You're bigger and braver than anything.
An idea: My mother is with me right now. Her hand is warm in mine.
I fall to my knees. Gnats bore into my eyes. I can't feel my hands. I can't feel my heart. I can't feel the oxygen in my lungs.
An idea: We're walking home together.
I thought it would go black, in the end. Instead it's white, piercing, blinding, bright as anything. It's okay.
I can take my time.
Teryn Gardner, District 9 Female
Okay, I'll admit it: I've made some mistakes.
I voice that thought out loud to Heavenly. She just nods, a strange, distant look on her face. I try to push down my discomfort at the shadows beneath her eyes, the low tilt of her lashes, the limp shadows her dangling hair casts on her bandaged forehead. It's been days since the incident with the Careers, but you wouldn't know that from the look of us. My stomach still burns on the regular, a hot flame cooking my insides to what feels like a soup, every exhale a new dimension of previously-unknown pain. Heavenly's face, while never entirely stable, is even more bizarre now, constantly shifting through a roulette of emotions like a pregnant horse on Morphling. Which just serves to remind me that Heavenly is addicted to fucking Morphling. So that's great.
I might not be the smartest person in the room at any given time, but I'm not dumb. I know that whatever gears are helping Heavenly operate are winding down to a halt, sap and sand muddying up the mechanisms. The light in her eyes flickers, a broken bulb, white hot and spitting sparks one second and cold, dark, damp glass the next. Whatever cheerful clown carousel is powering her brain is entirely fucking haunted. All of which just serves to prove the thing about making some mistakes.
But here's the thing about loyalty. It's not given, it's earned. You can't just blindly trust every person in your life. In Nine, that's how you end up rotting six feet below the earth. But once that trust is established, to shatter it like porcelain is a symbol of cowardice. And it's stupid to continue to value Nine's bizarre life philosophy when I'm fighting for my life, but I can't help it. It's beaten into every one of us. When you put your life into the hands of another, it's there forever.
My life teeters in Heavenly's cupped hands. Big mistake. And yet it's not even honor stopping me, not even tradition, because I know I'm difficult and stubborn and irritating enough to overcome it if I have to. But when Heavenly smiles it's like a dam bursting, like the sun shining down, all of that corny shit. And none of this is her fault. She didn't ask to grow up the way she did, nor to have the life she had. What kind of person am I if I at least don't try to help?
And that's what I do, because I'm an idiot. Heavenly wanders around the arena in a daze, alternatingly miserably violent and terrifyingly soft, a human soup of blood in her ears and on her tongue, and I just follow her, trailing behind, the afterimage of her waning sanity, playing stupid games and waving around the goddamn Magic 8-Ball in hopes that something will click and the madness muddying up her mind will drain away. Heavenly fidgets with her nails, scraping at the skin, peeling away bits of herself in hopes that it'll reveal something I know I'll never comprehend, and I just let her do it.
The most recent game to distract from the crippling inevitability of Heavenly's mental and emotional decline and my likely death: "Famous Last Words."
It's pretty simple. While we walk in lazy, looping circles, ever so often one of us will blurt out a sentence that could hypothetically be the last one someone ever says. Chances are one of my stupid jokes will be the final thing I ever mutter on this mortal coil, so I might as well profit off of that. And every second I keep my mouth shut, waiting for some kind of response or comeback from Heavenly, the more likely it becomes that "Okay, I'll admit it: I've made some mistakes." will be my final words.
Heavenly remains silent as we march through the sand, water inches away, the horizon a bizarre shade of dark red, like the area we're marching towards is made out of raw meat. I immediately regret that thought the second I have it. A single drop of sweat runs down my temple like an ant walking itself to the grave.
Another. It won't make anything better, but I can't imagine staying quiet for another fucking second, not with the sky above me so violently blue, not with Heavenly's lips a thin line practically carved into her skin, not with the future expanding in front of me like a fortune I don't want told.
I open my mouth to speak.
"Everything is going exactly to plan."
Heavenly turns to look at me, the curve of her face jagged, the rotation of her limbs awkward, stilted. Her head tilts back, slowly but surely, until she's glaring at me in a fashion that's almost upside-down, strands of hair dangling like seaweed. Something inside of me whispers, fingers down my spine, seagulls crying in the distance.
Here's some more famous last words I think up in that moment: Something very bad is about to happen.
Every hair on my arm stands up. Heavenly's eyes flick lazily over my body, a goading, syrupy gaze, and I cease to feel like a human being. In a millisecond I'm an object, pliable and empty. It's not the first time. In the Capitol, we were all objects, playthings for rich people in garments woven from cruelty, betting on human beings they didn't understand, beady eyes purveying their cattle. Some of us were held in higher esteem than others, but to the ones that determined our fates, we were all to some degree replaceable. Not blood screaming in me to work my will, not the bones that line my insides and insights, not the heart that burns with feeling after inescapable feeling. But this is the first time I've felt it from Heavenly, and from her it feels unbelievably wrong, like a thousand clocks ticking backwards, ever so slightly out of sync all the while. I don't feel like a human being – just the soft animal of my body, a vessel for having and holding, and the quiet dissection Heavenly performs on me beneath lidded eyelids is a sensation I never want to feel again if I can help it.
I jerk away from her line of sight, almost tripping over my feet as the silt shifts, redder, darker, wetter. Heavenly blinks and then sighs, an inhuman rattling noise exiting her mouth, and begins to walk again. I follow. I begin to allow myself the thought that the interaction is over, that whatever it is that's grasped Heavenly has let go, when-
"Famous last words." Heavenly whispers breathlessly. "Please don't hurt me. I didn't do anything to you."
She starts forwards briskly, eyes inhumanely wide as if in a trance, staring out at a dot on the horizon. Static electricity begins to hum in my ribcage as my eyes narrow and I realize just what exactly that dot is.
A girl. Wrapped in mud and silt like a second skin, red as earth, but undoubtedly a human being. I gasp, wind whistling in my ears. Heavenly continues to walk forwards.
It's the girl from Eleven. The one that stayed up in the ropes for the entirety of training and looked down at us with giant dark eyes like a baby bird. Small and unassuming, faster than the crack of a whip in summertime air. Her eyes are closed. Her breathing is shallow. Her body of sand and stone will not protect the softness of her hidden skin. More than a body. More than her guts. I follow Heavenly, always a step behind, lurching forwards. My body and myself – we are separate. I impose myself onto the body. I tell myself to run.
Famous last words: Something very bad is about to happen.
Heavenly's hands are soft and white and torn like broken fruit. Her nails are pink. Her mouth is pink. Her fingers are long and full of throat.
Something very bad is about to happen.
There are three bodies in the desert. I'm one of them, and I am shaking, sweating, gnats eating at my perspiration, rough and desperate sandpaper. The other body is raw pulp and motion, reaching through heat and space to do a job. The final body is dying. There are humans in these bodies. I am not a body. We are larger than bones. The human leaks from the final body. My eyes are my own. With my mouth that speaks for me, I lean over and vomit.
In the sky, the seagulls seem to howl with grief.
A body turns to me. There is someone within the body. Of that I am sure. Her eyes are like broken glass. Her hands are still so soft.
"One down." She breathes. She is walking away. The girl from eleven is dead. I'm alive. I just let Heavenly kill a person. I'm surrounded by wet red clay and a body. The body encircles everything. The body overwhelms the earth. I am an organism. I am alive and so is my body.
Heavenly is walking away.
My traitorous body follows.
Venie Hadley, District 2 Female
Being a total winner should feel a lot better than it currently does.
Maximus and Serena are dead, at the hands of each other. Taurus, the blundering idiot, is a headless corpse in a box somewhere. The list of competitors who actually stand a chance against me is practically nothing. The game is in the bag.
And yet I still feel so empty.
I'm sure there are a lot of psychological reasons for this. Somewhere out there there's a good, validating explanation for why I feel this way. And yet I'm walking through hallway after identical hallway, every reflection of myself an act of violence, and with every step I just remember that there are more to come. I feel like something inside of me has been ripped out, and I absentmindedly rub my hands over my skeletal arms looking for the hole as I walk. If I'm sliced open, what color will I be? The logical side of the brain says red. My own experiences with corpses up until this point say red. But my insides say blue and black and cold violet, that if they are revealed to the world they will drown themselves in dark oil.
Poison. That's what it is. A metaphorical poison freezing me over, like a fistful of flowers in my lungs, burning tinfoil in my throat. I remember the nickname Lady Nightshade and laugh to myself. How far-off the interview seems now, the delicate gems embroidering the edges of my dress, the sensation of baking in hot artificial light. My entire world has shrunk to the monotony of the halls, the emptiness in my stomach, and the unbearable sight of my own face, the merest glance of my visage curdling my insides like spoiled milk.
Spoiled milk and oil. Feels like that's all that I am anymore.
If I were a different kind of Career, the solution to this problem would be to win the games, or, alternatively, to kill something. But I don't think that's going to do it. For whatever reason the vulnerable feeling of flesh parting beneath my blade feels like it won't do anything for me, not anymore. It used to provide a sensation of power. Of ownership. And yet here I am, still a vessel for misery after succeeding at my largest gambit for personal pride yet. A simple kill isn't going to do it.
I turn the corner and freeze.
Gareth Barkely, District 7 Male
The girl in front of me is a Career. That should bother me, but it doesn't. Nothing does. Here is what I am: One sentence.
I'm going to kill her.
Not the girl in front of me, dangerous though she may be in spite of her nearly anemic appearance and slumped gait. The eyes are all you need to determine that there's something vicious there, dark and skittering like a beetle in an alleyway. The girl in front of me might need to be killed, might lunge at me batlike and thus demand for her blood to stain the elaborate carpeting, but she's not the one who I want to die.
Chablis. I'm going to kill her.
In District Seven, you don't get a lot of things. You get the inevitability of a life filled with unsatisfying, painful labor. In my case, you get a stepmother that treats you like a servant and a distinct feeling you're lacking personal fulfillment that permeates your entire life and every action. But you don't get anything you want. You don't get a future doing the things you adore. Most likely you don't get a future, period. You don't get friends with the ability to stay in your life, you don't get the sensation of positive expectation wonder or even fucking basic contentment when the sun comes up.
Here's the things I've had taken from me: a future, no matter how miserable it might've been. A loving family environment. Preston. Quinn. And now Ajax.
At some point I have to start doing the taking.
The girl in front of me is practically dead on her feet, but she readies her knife anyways, with what almost looks like bored irreverence. She's a trained killer, groomed to sow death, to act as a violent and bloody instrument. It doesn't matter. I won't allow myself to die. Not until she does. Not until I take from her too, that piece of shit prick who has known nothing but fulfillment, but having her entire life. I'll rip her apart. And I know I'll manage it because if I don't there's nothing left for me.
The irreverence in the Career's eyes. The monotony. The idea that for her, killing me would be just another thing she did today, just another step forwards. I need that, I think suddenly, blood boiling in my veins, I need that disconnect. I need to understand how this violence can be done like an everyday chore.
"You don't want to kill me." I say firmly. She blinks. "Interesting thing to presume of a Career!" I roll my eyes in return as she begins to pick at her nail with the tip of her blade. "I'm not stupid. I know you're looking for something. I don't know what it is or where you'll find it. But you certainly won't get it by murdering me."
She doesn't look up, only continues to curl her lip at her own warped reflection in the metal of her knife. "I might."
"You won't. You might get it from me in another way, though."
Finally, she looks up, dark pupils contracting hungrily. I continue. "There's someone I need to die. After she's gone, you can kill me, I don't care. But until she's gone I won't die. Doesn't matter what you do to me. Eat my guts with your canines, it won't matter. I'll keep living."
She lowers the knife from her face and moves, with a wild, unbelievable swiftness. In a second the metal is cool against my forehead, the very tip digging into my skin. I stare at her. Maybe in a second the knife will bury itself to the hilt in my brain. Maybe in just a moment all of my neurons will drown in my own blood, a flickering system of failing stars and broken memories. It won't matter. I'll continue moving. I continue talking.
"Teach me how to kill like it's as easy as breathing."
I do not say please. It isn't a request. If she says no, she dies. Either way, I keep living.
"Okay." She says flatly, removing her knife from the intimate position it previously occupied with my forehead, the slightest hint of vicious humor in her practically gentle smile.
"Let's show you the ropes."
EULOGIES:
9th: Finlay Ardun, District 11 Female- Strangled by Heavenly.
Finlay. Finlay, Finlay, Finlay. [repeats your name until we all die of heat death.] You were the first tribute ever submitted to this SYOT, and I really appreciate you for that. At the beginning I didn't quite get you, I think, but the more I wrote the most I began to understand what exactly it was you were trying to communicate by the nature of your existence. There's a ton of baggage there! You were a rebel, an odd one out, but instead of leaning into that, you were scared of your instincts to go against the man, to the extent where teaching yourself not to do something incredibly self-destructive was a task in itself. Your issues with your mom were heartwrenching, to see how a well-intentioned woman failed you by leaving you to struggle on your own and imprinting a possibly-genetic, possibly-societal need to run away from your problems in you. You were a breathtakingly fascinating tribute and person, but unfortunately, this is where your story ends. Thanks twowingsforever for a valuable insight on generational trauma and childhood rebellion that refuses to leave you.
A/N: And then there were eight. So, thoughts? Please do review, because I guarantee if you do the next chapter will come out like… a month sooner lol. What the hell is wrong with Heavenly? What's the resolution to her story going to be? And what about Teryn? How long can her alliance with Heavenly possibly last after that? Speaking of alliances, whatever the hell Venie and Gareth have going on can't be healthy. Or stable. Now that he's getting some professional murdering advice from the snake of the year Venie Hadley, how do you think Gareth's psyche is going to hold up? And for that matter, do you think crafting Gareth into an instrument of violence will actually help fulfill Venie as person? Let's be honest. The answer to that last one is probably no. But there's always a chance! Anyways, post your predictions, send me hate reviews about how bad my prose is, whatever, just review. See you next time!