A Dangerous Game

Chapter Seventeen: Condolences

"I'm sorry."

"How are you holding up?"

"Such a shame, she was a sweet girl."

All Finn heard were condolences. He was in the Hummel-Hudson residence when it had happened. Everyone was huddled around the old television set that had been in the Hummel family for nearly three generations. Despite a large dent in the top left corner and the slight discoloration of the screen, the set was in surprisingly good shape. Good enough at least to watch the Games in their apartment, instead of trudging down to the city square through the rain to watch the show on the huge public screens.

He had had a horrible feeling that entire day that something was wrong. It wasn't until he went home from the factory to watch the mandatory review of the day's events in the arena that he found out. Her death wasn't shown until about half way through the episode. But still he knew. From the minute Caesar Flickerman's face appeared on the screen. From the first images of the flood and the first announcement that two tributes had died that day, Finn knew. Rachel was gone.

He accepted the fact. Even though it felt like his heart was being torn apart the second that they entered that cave.

It was over.

Rachel was gone.

Finn left the room as her death was shown. He could still hear her, thrashing in the water, screaming. He could hear it all through the thin wall as he sat out in the hallway, his head in his hands, crying. He returned only when there was silence to see her smiling face on last time when her picture was shown at the end.

Rachel was gone.

Flickerman narrated a few clips from her time in the Games, replayed her interview. Then it was over. Finn would never hear Rachel's voice again, never kiss her and never hold her. He would see her again, of course, when her body was returned to District Eight. But she would never sing again. She would never tell him that she loved him, even though he would spend the remainder of his life loving her. She was gone.

The next day at work, his friends gave him pats on the back and gentle words of comfort, but it meant nothing.

Rachel was dead. Gone. Forever.

Nothing had meaning anymore. Nothing without her. And when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose, right? Nothing to lose.

Now, Finn wasn't the sort to come up with plans, but on occasion a sudden brilliant one would come to him. Like the time he had stuck a bag of dog poop to the underneath of the chair of a particularly nasty teacher and got away with it and she had spent the whole class trying to figure out where the vile smell was coming from. That had been a particularly good plan. And the one he had now was even better.

He would need help of course, but it was just a matter of who he could trust. There was only one person he could think of who would be feeling Rachel's death almost as badly as he was… someone who would want to revenge her death.

But also, unfortunately, someone he didn't get along with well.

Jesse St. James had dated Rachel before Finn did. While it may have been true that Jesse and Rachel hadn't exactly ended on the best of terms, it was public knowledge that he still had a soft spot for her. He would defiantly be mourning her death. When Jesse was younger he had been notorious for causing trouble, but no one could ever catch him for it. Once the Peacekeepers had come close to catching him for removing his name from the Games' lottery and Jesse had vanished before they could arrest him for it. One day he was there, the next no one knew where he was or what had happened to him. Some said that he was dead, killed quietly by the Peacekeepers. Others argued that the Peacekeepers would have made a spectacle of his death as an example for others and claimed that he had survived.

And then there were rumors that Jesse was currently residing in the abandoned city. But the perpetrators of these rumors kept quiet about their identity, because technically no one was supposed to know about the city. It was out of the District's barriers, where no one was supposed to go, but the fence surrounding District Eight had fallen to disrepair long ago. It was common place for children to go to the city to play in the rubble. Jesse had claimed to have found a library filled with books about the time before Panem. A time of freedom. No one believed him and no one dared to explore the remaining buildings of the city, because it was said that they were haunted. It was bad luck to even be in the city, but to go in the buildings could place you under a curse; it could invite the city's ghosts to follow you home. Kurt had once been dared to go in one of the abandoned factories; he had nearly been killed by tracker jackers. The buildings were haunted.

Jesse had never believed any of this, however, and it would only make sense that he would be there. Which meant that Finn had only one course of action; he needed to go to the abandoned city.