Alone With Your Thoughts
A/N: Hello, this is just a disclaimer, to remind you all, in case you forgot, that I don't own either Portal or The Hunger Games, and that's probably a good thing, all told.
I would also like to sincerely thank my readers for continuing to stick around! And, please, feel free to leave a review. I appreciate every single word of feedback, appreciation and criticism.
Thanks again for reading – now, enjoy this somewhat episodic chapter.
Noise was everywhere, but it wasn't loud enough to drown out Johanna Mason's thoughts.
What Johanna would never have confessed to anyone was that she wished Katniss Everdeen had looked at her, talked to her. She wished that, when they were talking about their talents – 'And by the way, fat old Haymitch Abernathy taking up leather? That image was just too funny, and too disturbing, to let go of ' – she'd wished that they would start to talk about their own talents, that maybe someone – like Katniss – would turn to Johanna and ask, "What's your talent?"
And then Johanna could have tossed her head back and refused to say. Or Johanna could have looked the questioner in the eye and given them a one-word answer that would baffle them even more. Keep 'em guessing.
No one had cared enough to ask. Not that she was surprised.
She was, however, pissed off that the Gamemaker, of all people, had somehow figured it out. Not only figured it out, but decided to parade it in front of the entire nation, making it a game for her life.
She wasn't sure if anyone outside of District Seven even remembered what her talent was supposed to be, let alone why she'd picked it and why she'd dropped it.
Probably the rest of Panem was laughing at her, right now.
The noise stopped and Johanna slowed to a halt, leaning over to catch her breath. She looked around. She was in a test chamber, surrounded on every side by turrets. At the moment she was in the blind spots of several platoons of turrets, each facing in different directions. She could almost see her path in front of her – a way to walk, a series of escalating platforms to leap through and fall through – with portals, of course.
She was still panting. God, she was getting too old for this.
The noise began again. The gun turrets came to life: "Hello? Who's there? Do I hear a waltz?"
The red beams of their sights flickered, darkening and brightening again, with the three-quarter time.
Johanna was going to punch someone for this.
She held the portal gun out in front of her like it was the arm and shoulder of a rather short partner. She counted off, "One… two… three… and…" And waltzed into the midst of turrets.
As long as she kept in time, kept on beat, and hit her mark, the turrets were lulled into a state of somnolence, unwilling to open fire. All Johanna had to do was step in time, twirl, pirouette occasionally, and stay perfectly in tempo. She kept her eyes darting to and fro, at the turrets, their sides pumping in rhythm, and at the elevated platforms, growing nearer and nearer, as she wondered how to coordinate the portals with the beat.
And Johanna Mason cursed the day she had chosen "Dancing" for her talent.
Waltz and Riptide -
'I'm going to die,' Finnick thought. He'd always been aware of the possibility, and he'd had his moments of terror, but this true, core-to-his-being fright was not something he'd felt since his last Game. Until the trident had fallen from the sky, he was just the pretty boy from District Four with the bad luck to be the oldest Career eligible in his year and sex. He'd lived each moment feeling like he was in freefall. And now the feeling returned, long-fall boots notwithstanding.
GLaDOS had returned him to a test chamber.
He solved the tests (conducted on a shifting floor that swayed and pitched like a boat in a storm) with as much of his attention as he could muster, trying to avoid the riptide of fear that never fully left him. He was alone, or as good as. District Thirteen, he was sure, had given up. Oh, he believed in the revolution's cause – believed in it with all his heart, as had Cinna – but he didn't believe in the District's alliance.
This matter boiled down, as did so many elements of his life, to Annie. No one from District Thirteen – that he'd spoken to – could understand why he insisted on rescuing Annie Cresta, for any reason other than sentimentality, and the desire to take away from Panem every last one of her Victors. To them, to the rest of the nation, she was nothing but gibbers and mutters, a broken doll, a broken weapon. Nothing inside.
Finnick knew better. So between Annie and freedom…
He swallowed. No, there was the riptide, waiting to drag him down.
"Your heart isn't in this, Finnick."
Her Voice jolted him out of his reverie. But he looked around, camera to camera, and heard nothing else, so he shrugged and continued the test. When he had first entered the arena she had taunted him and made disparaging remarks about his sexuality and District – nothing he couldn't handle. Now, though, she only gave him the barest of acknowledgements, stating the flattest of facts, such as the one above. It only cemented his certainty that she would soon be done with him.
He rolled his eyes at the nearest camera, and continued to test, avoiding the sewage water twenty feet below that would kill him for some unspecified reason. It filled the Testing Chamber with a foul stench, but Finnick, who spent part of his life mired in the odors of fish guts, seaweed, and cold sea breezes, and the other part drowning in Capitol perfumes of every sort, found he didn't mind.
Finnick completed that test, and moved on to the next. A cannon went off, but there was no news as to whom it represented. Just another face taken away from the Resistance, and from the Capitol. Finnick heaved a sigh, taking note of a gaping hole in the wall that he was walking past. Up ahead, there was another. In lieu of focusing on the death, he focused on the holes. Through them, the steel girders supporting the wall, and wires of mangled machinery, were visible.
He had passed by the fourth hole, and the doorway to the next testing chamber was in sight, when he heard a scream. It was coming from the broken place in the wall. He froze, not daring to believe what he had heard. He turned.
The scream sounded again, followed by words – "Finnick! FINNICK!"
Finnick ran. He didn't even think, didn't try to reason how impossible it was, how wrong, how it had crossed a line even Snow wouldn't cross – he tore through the ravaged wall, leaping over broken metal and dizzying gaps, and when he heard the scream again – "Finnick! Help me!" he answered, "Annie, Annie, I'm coming!"
Towards the Long-Term Storage Vaults –
Wiress climbed, and climbed, and climbed.
She counted every step, every rung, every platform. That was her only measure of marking time. Even though Beetee had helped her, years ago, to break the habit of counting, she counted.
She would find him.
'And what then?' she thought. 'Find him, and die? Find him, and try to break open into the computers again? We'll die if we do that. We'll die anyway. We were dead the minute the Quarter Quell was announced.'
Cold at her back. Winds from somewhere unseen.
Colder still, behind her, the glare of the camera, keeping a steady pace with her, always.
The path grew clearer before her. She followed, her brain supplying numbers as easily as her feet took each step.
Through the numbers, she thought, 'The Computer wants me to find Beetee. The Gamemaker wants to unite us before she kills us. Kills stupid useless crazy Wiress, was never any use to anyone at all.'
'She'll kill me,' Wiress thought, her jaw set and her hands trying to shake away their tension. 'But I'll find Beetee first.'
Ahead of her she heard a hsssss, like of steam escaping a valve. "Good morning! You have been in suspension for –"
Wiress heard someone yell "Beetee!" and didn't realize until she was running at full tilt that it had been her. She heard the camera chasing after her, closer and closer. She could almost feel the attention of Panem zeroing in on her, closing in like a flood, the waters waiting to engulf her.
A door was open ahead. 'It's a trap.' Wiress gripped the doorjamb so her momentum propelled her into the foyer of a small room, garishly and shabbily decorated with a cheap tropical mural and a dead television screen.
There was a stripped mattress in the center of the room, and Beetee was lying, half-on the mattress and half-on the floor, like a little boy refusing to go to school. He wasn't dead.
"Beetee—" Wiress knelt by him, pulling him up, "I found you, it's me, it's Wiress. I found you, and it's time to get up now, Beetee, time to get up."
She looked at him, from his feet (unshod from their long-fall boots), to his feebly twitching hands, to his face. His eyes were trying to focus on her. Maybe he was trying to smile, but his mouth twisted in a horrible spasm.
'Gassed. Neurotoxin, like Chell warned us,' Wiress thought, still stroking Beetee's hair and ear with a soothing, automatic gesture and saying nonsense about school and leaving and going home. 'Underfed. Immune system, compromised. He's going to die. He's dying. He is dead.'
But Beetee wasn't dead, and he finally managed to speak, causing the storm of Wiress' thoughts to fall completely quiet, and focus on him.
"Wiress – it's okay! It's okay, She knows. The game is up. It'll be okay. Wiress, glad to see you."
His voice faded. Wiress' hand stilled at his temple. Her eyes never left his face. His face had stopped its spasms and grown slack. He looked up at her for another minute, and then his eyes unfocused. She felt his heartbeat fade.
Wiress started to shake. She reached out and closed his eyes completely. She couldn't stop shaking.
No. She had to stop. There had to be something. Something to do other than just sit here, staring. Her eyes focused on the mattress. There, a task, however small. She lowered Beetee's head, braced her arms under his shoulder and his knees, and hoisted him onto the bed. Fortunately he had been spare and thin; even so it was a painful effort. She straightened out his legs, folded his hands over his chest. And the storm of thoughts started up again, telling her she was being crazy, just copying what Katniss Everdeen had done in the last Game, that nothing she could do would make any difference to Beetee anymore.
Finally, she stepped back from the bed, where her mentor, ally, teacher, and friend lay, still, out of anyone's power to be hurt.
Why couldn't she stop shaking?
A cannon fired. Beetee's cannon.
The sound of it brought Wiress to her knees, to the floor. He was gone.
But it also snapped her out of her own thoughts. And she realized she wasn't shaking: the entire room was vibrating.
Wiress flashed back to her Victory Tour, when she had visited District Six, and the ground had shook, setting her off-kilter, curled up in a corner of the shining ballroom where the Feast had been held.
'Duck and cover, Wiress, remember, don't panic, just duck and cover.' Beetee had said that. So Wiress curled up in a tight little ball as the room –
Was lifted.
Through the gap between her hands she could see bits of the wall flaking off, ripping apart to show the skeleton of the room, and she could glimpse movement. The room was being moved, taken away – was soaring even now through the Facility –
Wiress hung on, counting every single second and half-second.
She could feel the room swinging, spinning, maybe this was the death that the Gamemaker had finally planned for Wiress, for her to simply be smashed between walls like a bug, to die together with Beetee – No. That'd be too kind – and she wondered if Beetee's body would rest in the position she'd lain for him. God damnit. Nothing lasted. Nothing Wiress had ever done, or could ever do, would change anything—
There was a horrible grating noise, a screech that drowned out Wiress' thoughts, and the rattle through her bones, of the room skidding to a grinding halt.
There was silence, and stillness. Wiress just started to uncurl herself when a hissing, mechanical noise entered. She tensed up again. There was a moment of noises – a few buzzes, clicks, and softer thump noises. And then there was a small voice, very similar to a gun turret's voice:
"Thank you for choosing Aperture Science Inter-Facility Monorail. Have a Pleasant Day."
Wiress still kept silent, hearing those words over and over again, until the noises ceased. When she dared to uncurl herself and sit up, Beetee's body was gone from the mattress. In its place was a portal device.
Wiress stared at the portal gun – black with a blue stripe, it had been Beetee's, not her own – and then looked around. The room – now in a very sorry state indeed – had been lifted to a Docking Station. There were doors around, and it was well-lit enough, and totally deserted. They appeared to be on the rim of a cliff. Wiress walked towards the edge, looking down the precipice towards the dizzying fall below. A floor was distantly visible.
Massive size, constant new terrain, and a malicious intelligent more deadly than any mutt: truly, this was the perfect arena for a Quarter Quell.
Then why did Beetee say "It's okay – She knows"?
Wiress tried to answer the question, leaning slightly back and forth on the balls of her feet at the edge of the precipice. She could almost hear the gasps from the Capitol as she played chicken with gravity. She glanced over her shoulder, just to make sure of the camera.
Why would he say that? He was dying. His brain had been poisoned. Nothing that came out of his mouth would make sense, in those circumstances. He might not have even been talking about the Computer. He might have been talking about President Coin, or Katniss Everdeen.
"The game is up."
What did he mean, 'the game is up'?
It meant nothing. It was the insane ramblings of a dying fool.
"No!" Wiress yelled at the gap in front of her. And then, again, "NO!" so loud her voice echoed. Again, she yelled "NO!" loud and long, so her voice reverberated in the chasm.
She covered her mouth. She'd forgotten she could make sounds like that.
More quietly, she said to herself, "There has to be a reason. There will be a reason, even if I have to make it up entirely by myself. Why did he say that? The game is up –"
She thought, still swaying slightly on the balls of her feet. Ideas, half conclusions and half guesses, swung through her mind. What if Beetee was the one who triggered the change in GLaDOS, who triggered her complete shift of the arena, her introduction of neurotoxin. But how did he trigger it? What did he say?
"She knows – the game is up."
What if GLaDOS was surprised to learn that it was a Hunger Game? What if Snow had tricked her into hosting the Quarter Quell? How would She react to being tricked?
'She separated the Victors from each other. She wanted to restore the original status quo,' Wiress thought. 'She also separated the Victors from Chell. And she led me to find Beetee. Did She want me to hear that message?'
A new conclusion occurred to Wiress. It was so absurd, at first, so completely ridiculous, that at first she wanted to laugh, but the conclusion started to take other thoughts, facts, notions, and warp them around itself.
She wanted the Victors to escape. She was ending the Game on her own terms.
Wiress shook her head. "Now, Wiress. You're crazy. Everyone knows, you're crazy."
But the idea wouldn't go away. And she finally turned back from the precipice and looked at the portal gun on the bed.
Beetee was gone, on his way home already to District Three.
It was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven steps to reach the portal device.
For Beetee's sake, and for her own, Wiress would find out the truth. She gazed up again at the vast space below and above the Docking Chamber, picked a – the one that would demand the fewest steps to reach – and set off through it.
Chasing the Impossible –
Wherever Annie was, she was moving. Or someone was moving her.
Finally, Finnick felt that he was actually gaining, that her voice was staying in one place. And he could hear her saying, "I can't see, I can't see, where am I? Help, someone!"
He yelled, "Annie, just stay calm, I'm on my way!" as he fired a portal to cross a gap between catwalks, hardly even noticing his surroundings except to cross them as quickly as possible. "Annie, I'll be with you in a minute, just breathe and think of the – think of…"
He'd come to a dead end. The hallway was shorter than he'd expected, and there were no doors. Then –
He heard sobbing, from behind him. He turned and retraced his steps, more slowly now. And he found a door, one he hadn't even noticed the first time through this area. Annie's voice was coming from the other side.
He tried the door. It was locked.
"Finnick!"
"I'm here, Annie! Just calm down – think of the sea, I'm going to get you out of there."
He looked around, brain instantly categorizing what he could and could not use. There was, far below, a white patch on the floor – it looked like a glop of Conversion Gel – and there was another patch on a far away wall. If he conserved velocity and –
"Finnick? I can't feel my legs. I – I'm scared, Finnick, it's so dark in here."
"I'm – I'm coming, Annie, just hold on."
He retraced his step, found a sufficiently sized chunk of loose wall, and hauled it over with the portal gun. Then, carefully, he fired two portals – one at the patch in the floor, and one at the patch on the wall.
"Annie?" he said to the door. "If you can, please just stand back. I'm going to try to break the door down."
No answer, but he could imagine Annie biting her lower lip and nodding hastily, like she had a way of doing. He dropped the chunk of wall into the lower portal, and stood well back from the door as the chunk sailed out of the wall portal and hit the door with a tremendous SLAM.
Let the odds be kind, please don't let that have hit Annie – but it had knocked the door loose. Finnick tested it, and pushed with all his strength. It gave way.
Light spilled into the entirely darkened chamber. "Annie!" Finnick called. "Are you okay?"
"Aaah! What is that – oh, it's light. Oh, it's you, Finnick. Finnick! I'm so glad to see you—"
He could hear her voice, but where was she? There was a twitchy teal light in the corner, but no sign of a human –
Finnick froze. His hand groped for a lightswitch, and he found one, and flipped it on. He stood in a small janitorial closet, with mops and brooms, spray bottles filled with foul-smelling liquids, and, in one corner, a wriggling, agitated Personality Core.
"Oh my god!" She said, her voice high-pitched, quavering with joy, "I knew you would rescue me, Finnick, I knew you would!" The lids of her optic dilated and contracted to match perfectly with her words. Her optic itself glowed with a sea-green light, with a faint spiral pattern.
Finnick took a cautious step towards her. "Annie?" he asked.
"Yes, it's me – I don't know how I got here, the last thing I remember they were interviewing me about you and I was refusing to say anything and started to cry, and when I woke up I was here, and I can't feel my legs, and – and, Finnick, I'm frightened. What's wrong? Why do you look like that?"
Finnick couldn't even begin to imagine what his face looked like right now. He was probably the only person in Panem who didn't know, considering that he saw, peeking between the handles of the broom, a camera lens.
But through his shock, and confusion, and horrible, paralyzing fear, he knelt down and laid a blistering hand on the hull of the Personality Core. At worst – he couldn't even think of at worst. At best, this was a horrible, sick joke. But here – in front of him – Annie needed him. It came down to that. As always.
The minute he touched her, she seemed to grow calmer, grow still. He cleared his throat, and said, "I'm just surprised to see you here, that's all. But you don't need to be scared. I'm here, Annie… I'm right here."