Y 184-09-01 T 13:32:41

Day 2

A control booth, clinical and white, but the screens were drenched in pixelated blood. Other screens, the ones at Seneca Crane's fingertips, thrummed with the heartbeats of the tributes he watched.

"Is he dying?"

The Chief Medical Officer looked up from her place at the Gamemaker's pit.

"He took a deep stab wound there. Preliminary signs suggest no pneumothorax, no hemothorax- I can't tell too well, but I'd hedge my bets on a number of broken ribs from the force of the spear. And now he's taken the spear out there's no tamponade effect, so we might have a slow death from blood loss on our hands."

"Unless he finishes him off," Seneca hummed thoughtfully. "Keep some cameras on Cesal; pan camera 42

up above him the sky was so blue and the sun was so warm and there was a light, pleasant breeze tickling his arms but something felt wrong, something wet at his stomach, something-

Cesal looked down, and found he was lying horizontally on the ground, and he could see where his skin had puckered and ripped from the force of the spear that had torn through his body. It wasn't there anymore, but instead it was replaced by his own blood, spilling from his torn torso just where the ribcage ended, staining his grey jacket red. Cesal tried to get up, to assess the damage, to try and remove the horrifying feeling of blood, but he found he couldn't move- he could barely breathe. Cesal tried to speak, but his voice carried no force, his lips moving instead in dumb oratories.

If he could speak, he would have said that he didn't want to die like Dane Twill, not like this, anything but

this was a nightmare made flesh. Quint had pulled out the spear as quickly as he could, had dropped it on the ground like it had burned him, but it couldn't unmake what he had done. The tribute was mouthing words where he lay on the floor, but Quint couldn't tell what he was trying to say.

If his grandfather was still alive, if someone had remembered the ill, elderly, helpless man that had raised Quint apart from him, then he had just watched his only grandson stab a helpless tribute for no reason other than bloodlust.

Not for the first time, but certainly with the most bitter emotions he had ever felt, he wished his grandfather was dead. He didn't want him to have seen this. He'd rather his grandfather dead than have to face him after what he had just done.

The tribute on the floor, his grey jacket stained in blood, made an effort to speak. His eyes had been rolling in his head, but now, though glassy and dazed, they were fixed on Quint. He knelt, despising it, wanting more than anything to get out, to pretend this had never happened, but he knelt anyway and placed his ear as close to the tribute's lips as he dared.

The tribute's voice was little more than a breath with a shape. His lips barely moved, and so most of the plosives from his words were missing. But Quint still heard it.

"Please. Not like this. Please. Not like this. Please. Please-"

The tribute didn't even seem to know that Quint was there anymore- his eyes were directed to the warm blue skies that weren't real, his words now only a litany of breathed pleas to the artificial light. Quint pulled back, kneeling in the blood. Around him were the bodies of the mutts he had killed. He didn't feel sorry for them- they were the twisted creations of the Capitol, and he was happy to have killed them, but beneath him laid the body of a district boy, someone who was as much a victim as him, someone who didn't deserve to die.

He didn't deserve to die.

Quint raised his lips to the uncaring heavens and yelled with everything left in his lungs.

"HELP!"

His voice felt a mockery of the tribute's, only minutes ago; minutes? Had it been minutes? It felt like

hours, like Cesal had left hours ago. Emil knew that wasn't true, but it sure as hell felt like it. It was strange- he didn't like having an ally, especially one who, if he could, would probably kill him at a moment's notice. But, in an arena designed for killing, alone and without a weapon other than a fake showerhead torn from a fake bathroom, Emil felt vulnerable. He had heard some sound a few minutes ago, and he had jumped out of his skin- it was too far away to discern the sound, but the shape of the word had seemed familiar. Still, Emil knew it would not be Cesal-he wouldn't be dumb enough to shout anything in the midst of a silent, echoing city- and he had hunkered down again, amidst the showroom furniture of white and black and a modicum of grey, clutching his showerhead a little tighter.

But this time the sound came again. And it was louder, more desperate- the sound of the word was the same as what had been yelled earlier, he realised, as he heard it this time in clarity, and the word was 'help'.

Had he been thinking, he most likely would have recognised the odd timbre of the voice, considered his options and hid again. But Emil had been raised with a medic as a mother, and while she mostly sold medicines she also dealt with the occasional emergency, and Emil could respond to them with nothing more than muscle memory, and Emil did not think, he opened the door and

ran, Quint thought, but no, you stayed here, with him, you should run now before it's too late.

Still his legs refused to move, trapped under him where he knelt in a pool of ever-thickening blood. The scent of iron hit him in a nauseating wave, and he remembered with too-vivid detail the moment when he had closed the wound on Chal Detria's neck after Anna sliced it open. The blood had been the same, still crimson, still tacky and cloying, but the cut had been different- surgical, applied with just the right amount of pressure to cleave. A Career cut with a Career blade. Quint had felt little when he placed his fingers over the bloody cut- he didn't feel a lot, most of the time.

But now, right now, his fingers were shaking and his arms would not move them to the bloodied injury. He could save the tribute by doing what he did to Chal, but he wasn't the one that had felt Chal's flesh rip open- he wasn't the one to have felt the surge of primal bloodlust.

He had done this- he had made the broken tribute on the ground. And he had no excuse other than the overwhelming, unutterably urge to kill.

Despicable.

Quint heard footsteps. He should run now. He didn't want to be known for what he had done, but, he reflected with stricken resignation, the cameras would be watching and his fate was already sealed. So Quint stayed. He watched. He listened as the footsteps came closer.

And then the Twelve tribute, his blonde curls bobbing as he ran, sped around the corner, a showerhead in his hand and a kind of instinctual determination in his eyes.

His determined gaze faltered as he took in the sight of dead mutts, of blood, of the discarded spear and the bleeding tribute and Quint kneeling in the middle of it all.

Quint had given up with running now. The only word he could impart was the same word he had yelled, and his throat was hoarse as he murmured it again, ashen-faced and streaked with crimson.

"-

help him, or will you not?" He's back in his mother's kitchen, for a moment, and a Peacekeeper lies bleeding on the floor. He has been attacked, by what he will not or can not say. Peacekeepers go to the same medics any other citizen does, and now he lies on Emil's kitchen floor. What force propelled him to their home, nobody can say, as whatever attacked him (maybe a boar- had he been outside the fence?) had kept a large portion of the flesh in his lower torso. He is barely breathing and certainly not listening. Emil's mother, calm as ever, puts the question to him again.

"Will you help him, or will you not, Emil? I'm leaving this to you now. You're old enough to find out what you should do when this happens."

But I'm just ten, he complains as the Peacekeeper's blood seeps into his shoes. /No, no, I'm- what am I-

He is seventeen, and Cesal lies on the ground in front of him, and it is his blood that is seeping into Emil's shoes. He remembers the tribute who is kneeling over Cesal. He remembers a lot. He knows Quint Barkwater's tousled brown hair and grey eyes and passive, angular face.

He does not recall it smeared in blood and drenched in fear.

"Help," Quint says again, his head dropping to Cesal.

Emil's shoes are wet. Cesal is his ally his tentative, tense, gang-member ally, who would probably kill him if he could. Quint looked like he was the one that had wrought this carnage of beast and man, and might reach for the spear if Emil came closer. Emil had the showerhead in his hand. If he was fast enough, he could kill them both.

Or he could let caution fly to the wind and help.

He is ten again and the blood soaks his shoes. His mother watches him as he hovers his fingers over a bandage, his eyes not leaving the Peacekeeper on the floor.

"Is he bad?" He asks his mother as he watches bloody froth rise to the armoured man's lips. His mother observes Emil carefully, with a detached curiosity.

"He is a Peacekeeper."

Yes is the unspoken word. Emil hovers his hands over the bandage.

"So, Emil- will you help him or not?"

He is back in a street in the fake Capitol, and he kicked a fallen beast out of the way as he advanced. He looked Quint in the eye, and he dropped the showerhead, and he hooked his hands under Cesal's armpits.

"Get his legs."

Quint looked, at first, at the clanging metal. He watched the showerhead slowly spin to a halt on the cobalt paving stones. Then he stood up, as if for the first time, and he took Cesal's legs with strong mechanic's hands, and they lifted him into the

air, air above him and air below, and Cesal is free and flying, away from the pain, away from Dane Twill and the Games and the long-held memories of working as a child, of dragging his own fingers under a fabric-cutting blade, watching them drop amongst discarded threads like they were just meat. He is free of it all.

He does not want to be free of it all. He does not want it to end like this.

Unbidden, his eyelids shut, and for he drifts into a drug-free

sleep? Is he sleeping?" Quint asked between inhalations as they hefted the bleeding body through the cerulean-paved streets.

The Twelve guy had been looking behind him to keep from tripping backwards, but now he looked down at the wounded tribute between them. His jaw worked anxiously.

"It's not far now," he said in reply. He had said little to Quint over the short journey with the tribute's body; Quint sensed that he was being rightly suspected. Even if he hadn't carried out the attack (he had, he had done this, he had stabbed him), he was still oddly asking for help, supplying help, following the allies, Twelve boy and the injured tribute, home. Quint knew why he was doing it- he felt the pit of guilt in his stomach. Nobody else could see what injustice he had committed but him and the tribute he carried, and even if the boy had been conscious he would not be siding with his attacker.

The two of them pulled the boy over the threshold of a well-designed angular house, small windows letting in enough light, but only enough and nothing else. They laid him on the plush carpeted floor to bleed into it. The two of them panted where they sat.

Now Quint had to leave. The injured boy was in safe hands, the Twelve tribute seemed to have his head on enough to help him- they would be fine.

He did not leave. Finally having regained enough semblance of self to approach the boy's side without shaking uncontrollably, he pulled off his jacket, bunched it up and pressed the fabric tight against the wound. The boy did not move despite the obvious pain this would be causing him. The Twelve boy knelt, held two fingers to the tribute's neck.

"He alive?" Quint asked before he could bring himself to stop. The Twelve boy looked up at Quint again, suspicion in his eyes, before relenting.

"Yeah. Not by much, though. He's lost a lot of blood. Hold that there."

The Twelve tribute shrugged off his backpack and pulled out a large cotton sheet, which he unscrupulously tore into thin strips. He stripped the tribute free of a shirt and jacket, gently pulled off the bunched-up jacket applying pressure to the wound, then hovered over the laceration.

"Well? Can't you bandage it?"

Twelve guy's fingers shook as he took in the damage of the spear. Quint couldn't look.

"Something this big; hell, something way smaller, needs sterilising, but we don't have any water, and sure as hell none that's sterilised. We bandage this now, he might get infected and die even without the blood loss."

Quint could not look at what he had done. He shifted where he knelt, and his makeshift backpack bumped against his back.

He paused. He took off the rag-tied crate, untied it, undid the clasps. He gently lifted a clear Capitol medicine vial with its neatly printed chemical formula, and held it out to the Twelve boy for inspection. He looked

shocked, he really was, because this was probably the most valuable thing Quint could have found in the Cornucopia. It was an antibacterial, that much he could tell; antibiotics or antiseptic, he couldn't say, he didn't know enough of chemicals to know which this was, but he had to hope it was antiseptic and just administer it now. Emil laid a hand on Cesal's chest to steady himself, then gently dripped the liquid in the wound- but he pressed too hard as he sat up, and he felt something shift under

him and his chest is on fire, his ribcage screaming in pain. Cesal does not wake but the pain permeates his dreamless sleep with agony and he screams, he is-

screaming, make him stop screaming!" The Twelve boy cried as he ripped up more bandages from the cotton sheet. Quint was shaken to see the gutteral pain of the tribute he had stabbed, and unwilling to so much as lay a hand on the tribute, but he covered over his mouth dutifully. The tribute thrashed, and suddenly his hand slipped and was caught between the boy's teeth, drawing blood.

No more than I deserve, really, Quint thought with numb detachment like he had never felt before.

He had made this pain with his spear. He had made this.

The Twelve tribute wrapped bandages, over and over, until he was- not happy, but adequately contented to stop wrapping. He sat back, and Quint extracated his bleeding hand from the tribute's mouth. He passed the vial to Quint with unspoken orders, and Quint obediently dripped the medicine into his wounded hand. He had no doubt that if it was thought unsafe by the Twelve guy he wouldn't have used it on the injured tribute. They sat in silence, Quint nursing his injured hand and horrified conscience.

"You're Quint Barkwater," the Twelve guy suddenly said. His blue eyes bored into Quint's.

"You're the Twelve tribute." Quint disliked admitting his shortcomings of not knowing the tribute's name when the tribute clearly did.

"Emil Reynolds," he said without preamble. He nodded towards the boy lying prone. "Cesal Nesbin."

Cesal. The boy he had stabbed had a name. Quint's stomach churned. His hand throbbed.

Emil did not seem to take notice of this. He looked Quint in the eyes as he slowly turned back to them in the spacious living room of the house.

"What the hell is going on?" He asked Quint. Quint shook his head and sat down. He couldn't

deal with this, not now. He wanted Quint to leave, he wanted to leave himself, he wanted to stop seeing the hellish tableaux of dead animals and bleeding children and blood, blood everywhere on the cerulean tiles.

But he hadn't left; he had helped Cesal, despite how unremittingly stupid it had been, because he knew it was right. And now, because he wouldn't leave, he had to deal with Quint, curled up in a crouch in their temporary home, eyes blank of anything, any emotion.

Emil recalled the moment Quint had saved Chal in the training centre. He hadn't displayed any emotion then, either, but that had been different. Then, Quint had been determined, if devoid of caring. But now- now all that remained was a glassy-eyed stare, looking out at nothing in the shadowed, bloodied living room.

Quint looked up, eventually. "Mutts," he muttered, something awful in his tone. "There were mutts."

Emil wasn't one for being confrontational, but right now Cesal wasn't in any state to do it. "I'm not dumb, Quint," he snapped. "That wasn't done by a dog."

Quint's eyes were haunted and his skin was pale. "I thought he was a mutt," he forced out between breaths. And then he looked down at Cesal and away, as if looking at the injured body hurt him too.

And that's when Emil knew he was lying.

"Okay," he said, shifting back to a beautifully designed cabinet, standing and placing his hand on the black-blown glass vase on the top. He acted casually, as if he was just absently fiddling with it while he spoke.

He knew liars. He had lied for years back at Twelve, and he knew every nervous tic of a liar because he had trained them out of himself. And Quint was a liar.

"So you thought he was a mutt."

"Yeah." Quint sounded like he was physically having to push out every syllable from the depths of his lungs.

"Yeah. Easy mistake to make," Emil said, fiddling with the heavy glass vase. His voice took on a sarcastic tone. "I mean, those things were waist high and had blades for teeth, and Cesal's waist-high and has blades for teeth too." He amended himself absently, nerves flickering over his countenance. "Well. He almost is waist-high, so I guess."

Quint didn't respond to the lame, nerve-fuelled joke. He had clearly registered the intent behind it. His haunted eyes flicked to Emil's hand on the heavy glass vase.

"I thought he was a mutt," he repeated, but his voice was fraying with the desperation it took to say it.

"You're lying, Quint." Emil was afraid, but he had chosen his course when he had dropped the showerhead and lifted up Cesal, and now he had to defend both himself and his ally. "You knew who he was when you stabbed him."

Quint's eyes flicked up again. They rested on the vase again.

Emil lunged.

The two of them caught in the middle, tripped over Cesal's prone body, and went rolling to the side. Quint kicked the heavy glass vase from Emil's hands. Now neither of them had a weapon, but Quint had a height advantage, and while his arms were thin they were toned with the work of a mechanic, stronger than they looked. He pinned Emil to the floor, but

his energy was flagging from running from the mutts, his body was almost out of adrenaline, he hadn't eaten anything for more than a day, and god, god, he couldn't look Emil in the eye and kill him, not after everything he had done to destroy his honour already. Perhaps the honour of a tribute meant nothing to the crowds squinting at him through cameras, but it meant something to him, and they could put him in the arena but they couldn't make him kill, they couldn't, he wouldn't let it happen again-

He leapt, surged forward with all the energy left to him, and was out the door. He was running again, always running, but this time he was running from himself, from what he had done. He had helped save Cesal- maybe that would be enough, to atone himself in the eyes of the crowd, to the eyes of his grandfather. If his grandfather was even still alive.

He ran on into the summer sun as it beat down on him mockingly.

He wanted to survive. He had thought when he had begun the games that he would do anything to survive. But god, he didn't want to kill.

Emil, when his 'friends' in Twelve had started blackmailing him into making them illicit goods, had been afraid. But perspective changes everything, and now those useless fears were gone, replaced by other, more primal fears. The fear of survival. The urge to protect.

His back ached where Quint had slammed him into the ground, but he was alive, and so was Cesal, for now. He closed the door to the house- he dragged a heavy black cabinet across the threshold. He drew heavy velvet curtains, unheeding of their riches in the face of greater struggles. He knelt back down by Cesal.

He had done all he could- he was pretty sure Cesal had broken ribs as well, from how he had screamed when he had leant a little too hard on his chest, but there was nothing he could do for that. Cesal would be out of action for a long time, but there was nothing he could do about that either, not now he had opted to ally himself more permanently with Cesal. What Cesal would think of that, he wasn't really sure.

He looked back down at Cesal, covered in makeshift bandages, already beginning to spot with blood soaking through. If Emil had had any needles or thread, he would have sewn up the wound, but those were in short supply even back in Twelve, in his parents' supply of medical equipment. Cesal had still not woken up- Emil was starting to think he'd be missing sleep keeping watch while Cesal slept on- it was, he supposed, fair karma.

He had chosen this now, so he'd have to take the consequences.

Oddly, the prospect of it didn't terrify him as much as it should have.

Watching the sun pass lower to the horizon from a small gap in the curtains, Emil kept watch over Cesal as he slept.

Cesal reckoned he must have lost a lot of blood to be drifting this far, to be lost this deep in his subconscious. He wondered if he was dead, but lost in the state of heady trance between waking and sleep, he decided he didn't care. He had found himself in a nice enough dream, anyway- it was a gang thing, which was probably ironic somehow that gang stuff was what his mind considered 'nice'. Still, he spent more time with them than his family, and somewhere in his life they had become more family than his real one. It's a relaxed day, for once- a lazy afternoon, on a tiny patch of grass on the outskirts of the city, a few hours before the evening watch for the Reversers. He must be young here- fourteen, maybe? It would have been before-

He turns in the warm sunlight of District 8, the scent of fresh grass and warm tarmac, the feel of warmth under his battered flat cap. He squints into the sunlight.

Dane Twill, young and wan, his fatal stab wound scarred but healed where his shirt is opened to the summer sun. He stands in the tableau of the sun and the grass. He smiles.

"Hi, Ces."

If he had been awake, Cesal's panic would have overtaken him now, but he is asleep and woozy and all he can do is react.

"Dane," he murmurs.

"Feeling good? How's the stab wound?"

He had not felt it before, but now Dane said it a slow, burning flame felt like it was tearing his abdomen apart. He whimpered slightly, but in sleep the pain was dampened, and he stayed standing where being awake would have brought him to his knees.

Dane chuckled. "Sucks, doesn't it?" He glanced down at his own, torn and scarred, injury. "I didn't really enjoy mine much either."

"I'm sorry." Cesal doesn't apologise a lot. But when he does, he means it. And he meant it.

Dane shrugged, as if he hadn't died. "It's being in a gang, Ces. That's what happens. I was the Black Band running point for you, he was the Soiled Hand with a knife. It happens."

"You were a kid." Cesal said. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth.

"So were you. You still are," Dane said. "You couldn't have saved me, and regardless of what you're thinking, what's just happened to you isn't some kind of karma for it. Karma isn't real. What's real is that there's assholes with knives, and they're to blame, not the ones trying to help. Not the ones they're defending. You're not to blame for letting me take the hit for you, Cesal. You need to figure that out."

Cesal had never sought benediction for watching Dane die for him. He had never realised he had needed it. He was a gang member, a senior one, but his eyes burnt.

"You died, Dane." But Dane just smiled, shrugged.

"Everyone dies some day. If you keep beating yourself up about people dying, you're never gonna live yourself."

Cesal sat back on the sun-drenched grass, laughing despite the pain and tears. "Not much chance of that, kid. You see where I am? I'm in the Games. I mean, hell. I chose to be in the Games."

"Yeaah. A bit dumb of you on that." Dane sat back with him, looking into the sky. "It's not worth making the same mistake I did by jumping in front of your superior too. I think you're learning your lesson now."

"No kidding. I mean, I can't- I don't- I can't kill anyone. I can't do that to anyone, not now, not after watching what death- looks like, you know? I can't let someone go through what you did." He laughed again, bitterly. His voice was soft and shaking. "If I can't do that, how the hell am I going to win?"

Dane shook his head. "People don't win the Games, Ces. I mean, it's up to you what you do, but I don't think that's what you should try to do."

"What, try to lose? Try to get killed?"

"You know as well as I do that killing isn't a game." Dane's voice, for the first time, was cold. "Don't try to win or lose. Don't play their game. Ally with that kid of yours. Refuse to kill. If that's what you are, don't let the Capitol make you something you're not."

"The Capitol got nothing to do with-"

"They have everything to do with it, Cesal." Dane stood up, and Cesal realised that the sun had gone. They stood in a void of the subconscious now, and it was colder. His abdomen hurt more, and now tears were flowing unbidden from his eyes. Dane kept talking. "Who the hell do you think encourage a gangland to keep shit in check? Peacekeepers! The only thing they enforce are weapons, so we don't try to kill each other until we get into the goddamn Games! The Capitol are the problem! They're why I'm dead, they're why you almost died, and if you and Emil and everyone else keep playing the fucking game, when do you think it's gonna stop?! Huh?! You think it's ever gonna stop?! Every year, kids are gonna die and kids are gonna kill and they're gonna feel like you do, Ces, lose sleep like you do, Ces, because that's how the game is played!"

Cesal was crying and the pain was too much. Dane stopped yelling. He went back to a relaxed, gentle tone.

"Ces." He was gentle now. "You can't bring me back. But you can get up. You can survive. And if you just stop playing their game, if you can do something to make my and your life worth something- then all these kids, they might not die in vain." He smiled at Cesal, that innocent smile that had followed him into death. "What do you say?"

Cesal could not speak yet, but he couldn't help but nod.

Dane smiled. "That's all I needed to know. Catch you on the other side, Ces."

He turned to go. Something finally occurred to Cesal.

"Wait!" Dane turned back curiously as Cesal called out.

"Yeah?"

Cesal looked into the eyes of Dane Twill, the boy he had watched die so many years ago.

"Are you real?"

Dane Twill laughed. "What do you think, kid?"

And with that, Dane was gone, and Cesal drifted finally into blissful, dreamless sleep.

You guys put up with a week of nothing from me, so have a triple-length chapter!

Which was. A bear. Literally. This one's been plaguing me for a week. When I've not been revising for exams, or doing exams, I've been working on this. Almost every section's been reworked at least twice. The only part I'm happy with is the Dane Twill section. I never edit, because I don't have the opportunity when I'm doing a chapter a day, but here I edited like my life depended on it.

I'm not happy with this, but I am proud of it.

So, thanks for waiting, everyone. Hopefully you liked it. As ever, thank you for reading this far.