The Hunt and the Kill

A/N: I LIVE!

I thought I wasn't going to finish this story, but I've found the will to continue on. If you're still here, still reading, I applaud you and I thank you. I only hope that this chapter is worth it.

I don't own The Hunger Games, or Portal, but boy will I be glad to return to them with a clear conscience once I don't have a "Unfinished fanfiction!1" alarm nagging at my mind.

"I'm getting radio signals from the Capitol – they want me to pull outthe trumpets and the fanfare. But why should I? It wouldn't be a real Victory, not technically."

Unbidden, Katniss remembered something Chell had told her: "I never even saw what it was that dragged me back in here. I never even saw. I don't even know how far out of the facility I was. But I will see the sky again… I will get out of here. Even if it's only to be dragged back in again, forever and ever, until I die."

Katniss knew: this would only end when GLaDOS was dead, when the Capitol generator that Craig had mentioned so long ago was destroyed. Otherwise…

"I will never let you go. Even if I were to release you to the Capitol, what's to keep me from reaching into District Twelve, and taking away Primrose Everdeen to be Test Subject Twenty-Five?"

Out of her numbness Katniss felt a blaze of white hot anger.

"She would make a very good test subject, wouldn't she?" Katniss started to run. She was a hunter, an arrowhead sharpened to its razor edge, she was a bird of prey, and she would tear out the heart of GLaDOS if she could only find it.

- The Way Back Home -

In District Twelve, many viewers had turned away from their televisions and bowed their heads. The Game had gone on far too long and their beloved Peeta was dead.

Primrose Everdeen, however, sat too close to the screen in her house, full of fear for her sister. Katniss had disappeared; only the hunter was visible on the screen now. What was she doing, just to keep Prim from being Reaped, or whatever the Gamemaker was talking about?

"I'll take my chances," Prim told the television screen. "I just want you home. Please, Katniss, please, please come home…"

- In the Facility -

Chell drifted towards wakefulness. Something felt… different. Something wasn't settled right on her skin…

She opened her eyes and only saw white mist. She blinked away vague echoes of Argonauts and witches. The glass above her was frosted, and when she started to shift, it slid away.

She slowly sat up, feeling very stiff. She was in a relaxation vault, just where her first memories began. She jolted to full wakefulness. Her hand cast around for her portal gun. It was at her side. She picked it up and winced in pain. One of her arms had a long burn along its side. When had she gotten that? And since when was her gun red and black?

Chell looked down at herself. Her orange jumpsuit and white undershirt had completely disappeared. She was now wearing a red and black suit, with the number 24 stitched in red over her breast. All that was missing was the mockingjay pin. She swung her legs out of the bed, feeling like she was going to be sick. What she saw next didn't help: an exit portal was already in place.

For the first time, Chell didn't want to move. GLaDOS was entirely in control. She was counting on Chell leaving the room – but if Chell simply stayed there, She could probably make that work as well.

Her friends, her cores, her very identity – was GLaDOS going to steal everything away?

Was Chell just a piece in her Game?

And in a brief flash, Chell could see it all – could see the black-and-white chessboard laid out, the brightly colored pieces dancing around each other, dropping off of the board at the Gamemakers' whim. And if the color of one piece was changed…

Chell hugged her knees to herself, trying to calm her thoughts, but they wouldn't settle. Only one line, a dimly remembered phrase from a story that she may have loved, struck out at her, 'Even a pawn, well-played, can become a queen.'

'Even a pawn, well-played…'

Did the pawn ever ask to be a queen?

Still, it settled her thoughts around it, until she could sort out her options.

Move, or not, it was GLaDOS' game.

She picked up her portal gun. She put her boots on the floor. She walked out of the exit portal and felt it close behind her. She was in a cylindrical room, much like an elevator chamber. Ahead of her there was only one hallway. There was not a single white, portal-friendly surface on it. Instead, the walls were thin sheet metal, poor quality.

At the other end of the hallway was an elevator.

There was nothing else. No lights, no cores. The walls were perfectly sealed and sound.

The elevator door slid open. It waited for her.

A small white sign was at her eye level. It showed the tiny stick figure – the archetypal test subject – walking out of a door in a black wall, into white, empty space.

Freedom.

It had to be a trap. It had to be. It had to be. It had to be…

Maybe it was hunger, maybe it was her mind well and truly starting to crack, but Chell was considering taking the bait.

What if it wasn't a trap?

All she had to do was walk down a hallway...

She could hear GLaDOS' voice now, asking, 'How badly do you want your freedom?'

Chell heard her own voice, a small, still voice ringing between her ears, saying "Not this badly." GLaDOS had found her line. If being free meant leaving an innocent to suffer in her place—no. She would not take her freedom on these terms. And that small, still voice of her humanity broke her heart.

Even now, her heart beat loudly in her ears, its beat running irregular as she tried to force her mind to make itself up: to move, to stay, to move in which direction – and then she realized that the irregular pounding was not only in her ears. She looked to her right, and crossed to the wall there. She laid an ear against the metal and listened, holding her breath.

On the other side of the wall, someone was stumbling. She couldn't hear any words, but it sounded like the footsteps of someone who might have been badly injured.

At once, reaching the noise became her next goal. The screws holding the metal together were all rusted away, and yielded to the prying of the portal gun.

Chell was quietly astounded that GLaDOS did nothing immediately to stop her—but maybe that was part of the game. Just like the fake sign that was obviously leading to a fake freedom. 'That's it. It's fake.' She thought. 'Keep telling yourself that. It's fake. That way your heart won't be broken.'

She stepped through. The light on the other side of the wall was patchy, streaming in thin seams and cracks in the wall. The source of the light might have been the sun; it might have been something else. But now she could make out the source of the noise. It was a human. A man, that she glimpsed far away, at the other end of the hallway.

She recalled Finnick, but dismissed the notion. Finnick hadn't been so tall, and his proportions had been athletic and… well, they'd been well worth studying.

The man had not yet seen her.

He wasn't dressed like one of the tributes, either, whose jumpsuits had been fitted and aerodynamic. His jumpsuit was baggy, and a pale, spiritless blue. But he had no long-fall boots, and no gun. He was simply clinging to the railing and moving like it was all he could do, to put one foot (in… what were those shoes called? Flip-flops?) in front of the other. He was moving towards her, but didn't look up from his own feet.

The hallway was identical to the one she'd left, except for the decaying posters that peeled off of the walls. The nearest one read: "Thank you for donating so much of your time and higher brain functions to Aperture Science! Aperture: Where we bring the future to you."

"Hah!"

She turned back to the man. He was staring at her, and his wide eyes squinted so hard she felt the urge to chide him for it. He began to stagger forward, in what was not so much a walk as a fall, continually postponed. He hunched over to keep supporting himself on the railing, and Chell's feet poised themselves to run. He reached out a terribly thin arm towards her.

"Eh – ess, ess, attis, addis—" he babbled, then frowned, striking his own face lightly with one pale hand. He looked at her again – and froze, midstep. He put his foot down and craned his neck more closely to see her, squinting and squinting.

"Hell," he said, wonderingly. It was the first coherent word his raspy voice has said, and Chell wasn't sure what kind of an omen it was. She decided, it was an omen to return to the original hallway. She spun around and was halfway through her crudely made portal when she heard the man cry out with dejection, despair as complete as that of a crying baby.

She turned, a part of her thinking she'd grown too soft, don't be lured in – and looked at him anew. His damp shock of hair was a pale red color, and the eyes that were staring at her were bright blue. Sky-blue. The eyes – and his shred of a voice – Gears began to click, and while Chell tried to place him, she stepped towards him. She saw his separate parts like a jigsaw puzzle, but wasn't sure how to piece them together.

He let go of the railing, and in his one precarious moment of balance, he leaned forward and took Chell's head in his hands. She started back, but he was so unsteady on his feet he moved with her, so she was almost supporting the two of them. What was he doing? He just pressed his forehead against hers, keeping his eyes downcast and face tilted down. He was muttering again, barely audible or coherent, but something about the rise and fall of syllables was familiar…

You can do this. Be brave. For me.

And the puzzle clicked into place.

"Wh-Wheatley?" Chell gasped. She pushed him back, holding him up so she would see him – and when he smiled, he looked just like the picture of the long ago, very nervous and luckless Aperture Science employee whose brain waves were harvested to make – "Wheatley!"

And Wheatley beamed even wider. He nodded and said, "Ess! Yes!" She stared at him, unbelieving – he was human, alive, blinking, and here – and when he tilted his head to the side, somehow it looked like the core.

Chell felt the side of his face. He was real. She pressed herself to him and wrapped her arms around his frame, the top of her head meeting his ear, thanks to the long-fall boots. He hesitated a minute, then closed his arms around her, and she felt his heartbeat.

In some muffled and uncertain arithmetic, things had evened out, up to this point. Now, Chell felt, was the new beginning.

- Down Below -

Now was the end.

GLaDOS, in a frenzy of planning, and activity, ninety-nine point nine percent of which was invisible to the camera's eye, had stage the perfect showdown. It had tension, it had good lighting, a decent sound system, and she had timed out more than five hundred possible variations on what Katniss Everdeen's mode of attack would be, all of which the supercomputer had choreographed until the average viewer could practically tap their feet to the rhythm.

Now she just needed to wait for the star to arrive.

There was complete silence. A footfall approached the hallway, steady and slow. Then Katniss Everdeen entered, shoving through the door with her shoulder. She had a bow, a quiver, a portal gun, a strap for the portal gun to hang around her waist, and dark rings around her eyes. She stared at the swaying mass of the computer above her. In her mind, she had been half-expecting something organic – perhaps a fleshy muttation that grew out of the walls and ceiling, maybe with roots and leaves, maybe with fibers like a fungus, maybe something with a beating heart she could cut out.

But here she was in reality. The computer arching down from the ceiling had the shape of a woman, a bent, bound woman, with mushrooms growing all over her. She swung what would have been her face – if her neck was broken and her head twisted around and covered with armor, and her head encased in white metal, with a glowing yellow beam for an eye – towards her. The dull metal and fiberglass gleam about was like the Capitol, bespeaking technology beyond the ken of a poor bloody coal miner's daughter. But the movement itself was almost natural, the way that a severed arm dangled – no, it was a piece of machinery – the way that the head – no, casing – tilted as it regarded her. The movement of a woman who had been mauled and tied together, the appearance of a machine, dead and alive at once.

Katniss hung her bow on her elbow and pressed a hand to her forehead, wishing her thoughts would stop spinning. Then the Gamemaker spoke:

"Well, you found me. Was it worth it?"

Had there been an unbiased observer around, they might have pointed out the one true flaw in GLaDOS' staged conflict: It was entirely unoriginal.

"Because you have, by choosing not to exit the arena when you had the chance, forfeited your right to claim the title of Victor. District Twelve children will be forced to eat their own shoes."

Not that this was entirely GLaDOS' fault. She had spent the last few centuries forcibly reliving the moments of her murder in this exact situation. Little surprise she had developed a fixation.

Katniss, on the other hand, was past listening to banter. She focused on the environment, which was all black walls, swarming with cameras. When Katniss entered the room, her eyes were drawn first to the black square in the center of the room, almost as tall as herself. Something about it seemed almost familiar to her eyes: it was Capitol tech. It was Snow's generator, and it lay behind two – no, three – shields. They were hard to distinguish because each was the same milky blue transparency. They were only three spherical Emancipation Grids.

That was the first obstacle. Katniss looked up, and for the first time, saw GLaDOS' chassis for what it really was. What had struck her imagination as mushrooms were, in fact, cores covering the chassis. It was covered with cores – Katniss counted six in a stroke, and there were more on the other side. Each core's light was the same blue as the shields. GLaDOS was speaking:

"But haven't you ever thought about the good that the Hunger Games do?"

Clearly irrelevant. Katniss pulled out an arrow, drew it, and aimed it at the closest core to her. She let it fly. The arrow struck the core straight in its optic, which flared one last time, and the middle shield switched off.

She let out a huff of relief and surprise, and then did some quick math: if one shield equaled one core, than she had two true cores to find, and, counting, nine decoys. There were twelve cores on the chassis, counting the dead one. And she had only five arrows left – number six might fall out, but it was sending out sparks in the core even now.

And GLaDOS didn't seem perturbed in the least.

"That's one good aspect. It channels all of the violence that humans are programmed to feel, into a safe, productive environment… As you demonstrate."

A terrible scratching noise caught Katniss' attention. A creaky missile launcher was shrugging off its load of earth to ready its ammunition.

She jogged around the chassis to see all of the cores clearly. Cameras, covering every single inch of the walls, followed her every step. she calculated: There was bound to be one core in plain sight, where she would find it easily - that was the one she had already found and hit. The others - would GLaDOS secure them someplace that would be near-impossible to hit? Or would GLaDOS like Katniss to think that, so she would waste arrows on impossible decoys while the real targets were safe in plain range?

"Which would make the better show?" Katniss asked herself. Difficult targets, then, and this time, if it were at all possible, Katniss would shoot the small targets on the moving chassis in such a way so as to leave her arrows retrievable. Or she would try to.

"You aren't even listening to a word I say, are you?" GLaDOS asked. Katniss declined to answer. "It might interest you to know that each core acts as a different inhibitor. One core, for example, inhibits the tracker jacker nests behind the walls."

'She's lying, trying to make you lose your balance,' Katniss thought, and it was Chell's voice in her head that told her so.

"You remember tracker jackers, don't you?"

The tribute focused on her task. Her feet were never still as she jogged from one end of the room to the other. She chose her mark, aimed, and fired so that the arrow sliced through one of the wires connecting the core to the machine, and fell with a clatter on the other side, blunted but still usable. The core's light spluttered and died out.

Katniss looked to the forcefields - which remained as bright as ever. Then a hideous screech filled the room - like a claw was raking over the speakers - and then a voice filled the chambers. Not GLaDOS'. Not Wheatley's.

"She's still got two-out-of-ten odds ,that's a one in five chance, of hitting the... right... cores... Wait, is that my voice? Is that... MYvoice?"

Then Caesar Flickermann said, "Echo!", displaying the incredulity of a five-year-old Capitol child faced with his first microphone. "Um... Katniss Everdeen, can you hear me?"

Absolutely lost on what to make of this, Katniss nodded.

"Oh! Well. Wow! This is awkward." Caesar Flickerman said, and she could nearly feel him wincing. "This is most unprecedented, I assure you - well, it's even more unprecedented than anything else that's gone on in this game! Yuk yuk yuk... ahaha... Please stand by, folks, while I consult with the Gamema—oh. Oh, apparently I am not allowed to give advice to the tributes, my apologies, Miss Everdeen."

With that, Katniss classified him squarely in the 'safe to ignore' category of existence. That was one core with a harmless effect destroyed - and one core that affected the shields - increasing the odds of her next strike spelling disaster -

"Oh, watch out!" Caesar said, just as she heard the buzz and zip of the missile launcher finding its target.

Katniss got of the way, running to the other side of the room to pick her next target.

She fired, and more sounds joined the cacophony of Caesar's commentary and the computer engines, and GLaDOS' dry remarks. After a brief moment of electrical feedback, Katniss heard her own voice... singing.

It was what she had sung to Peeta, before she had even seen his face again - the slow love song particular to District Twelve. Katniss' ears rang, her head ached with the noise and echoes, and with anger at herself, and at the Gamemaker for daring to use this against her.

She did her best to block it out and all the emotions it could dredge up, and she counted.

Three spheres down. Nine remaining. Two targets. So far she'd shot two of the most difficult to reach, and those had been there was another way - she drew an arrow - two left after this one - and pointed it at the shields around the generator. She released it and looked to the chassis. At the moment that the head hit the shield - and disintegrated into dust - one core, in the center of the cluster, suddenly lit up like Wheatley used to, when he hit on an idea. Just as fast, Katniss had the next arrow fitted, aimed, and released. She hit the core square in its optic, and winced, as if she had hit a child.

But the second shield flickered out of existence. Katniss dashed across the chamber to retrieve the arrow she'd lost. She now had three arrows - and a one in eight chance of hitting the right one, now that she'd subtracted four from twelve. Twelve cores, like twelve Districts.

But that's not right, she recalled. There were thirteen Districts.

The missile trained on her location. She snapped to attention and leapt out of the way, but not quite fast enough. A shard of the detonated missile flew and cut her in the side. Holding to the wall for support, she looked around for the thirteenth core.

She found it, staring at her from an alcove, watching her. It was a very narrow alcove, and very high up.

Katniss kept moving, to keep the missile from training on her, and aimed her third arrow at the core – fired – she was on the move again, and couldn't see if it hit, but the shield stayed up. So the second arrow was nocked. She let out one breath, and reduced the world to her, her target, and her arrow.

The arrow cut through the air, and struck the core dead center.

The third shield flickered out. The generator was now exposed – automatically, she readied an arrow, but, no, that wouldn't begin to hurt it. It was Capitol tech.

She replaced the arrow, slung the bow over her shoulder, and picked up her portal device from where it had hung by her hip. She crouched on the floor, while the white egg-like shape clamped on onto her wrist, and she heard the missile focus on her. She scampered out of the way, feeling her blood trickle down her side. Now for the most dangerous part – where Katniss played the role of bait.

There were no portal-ready surfaces in the room, except for the conversion gel, running in a pipeline to the left of the GLaDOS computer. There was a smear of gel on the ground below it, and on the wall above that. Katniss ran towards it, vaulting over what looked like a control center or an observation deck – and felt a shiver of fear and nausea. It wasn't until she was at the smeared wall that she realized she'd caught the very faintest whiff of President Snow's white roses. He had stood there, and plotted this out, plotted out her death, and Peeta's, and –

She didn't have time for that.

Portal below her feet, and a portal on the wall. She fell and rolled on the ground as the missile locked on her, zipped over her, and flew into the wall, through the floor, and hit the tunnel of conversion gel.

Whiteness spilled all over the floor, bringing its eerie chill with it. Katniss stayed tucked into a ball as shares of glass flew about and the cold goop splattered her. The viscous gel covered half of the chamber in a minute, pristine as fresh snow, and GLaDOS was furious.

"You writhing, sniveling rat," she growled in words of thunder and fraying wires. "You crawling scrap of nothing—"

But Katniss barely listened. Her heart was in her throat. She stood before an even, unscathed wall smothered in gel. She fixed an orange portal behind her – the second to last. The missile locked on her, and she rolled out of the way, just in time to fire a blue portal onto the wall parallel with the generator. The last portal.

The black box, to Katniss' vision, seemed to glow for an instant before the missile connected, and Katniss ducked, to avoid the shrapnel. But she couldn't block out the scream. The vibrations filled her and rattled her teeth, and she pressed her hands against her ears, desperate to block it out. It didn't subside, but it did diminish into a long, drawn-out hum of feedback – aggravating, but bearable. She could hear Caesar Flickerman's voice fading out, though it rang with triumph.

She lifted her head, and saw that the nearest camera remained focused on her, even though the massive chassis that was GLaDOS sparked and twitched erratically. Katniss stood up straighter. One last role to play. The curtain wasn't fallen yet. She disconnected the portal gun, took out her bow, and her final arrow. She pointed them, slowly, directly at the camera.

'Remember who the enemy is. Remember who the enemy is.'

Katniss' world was spinning, but she clung to what Haymitch told her, in another lifetime.

'I have always known who the enemy is,' she thought.

The feedback stopped, leaving a sudden, gaping silence. The camera fell. All was silent.

The Game was over.

Katniss leaned against the wall and took a few deep, shuddering breaths. She waited for the trumpets, the hovercraft, but realized (she gave a short laugh, rusty and scratchy) to realize that nothing was coming. She was a Victor without any ceremony. She looked up at the ceiling, which didn't even have a crack.

Chell had said – during the Game, during the second Game, Katniss had survived two Hunger Games, and that was so bizarre – the ceiling in GLaDOS' chamber had torn itself apart when Chell had fought her, in a battle echoing with babble and rage. But if so, Chell couldn't explain how the ceiling had repaired itself in three hundred years, and admitted that the neurotoxin may have started to have an effect on her.

No matter. Katniss was the Victor, no, she was the Victor of Victors. She would find her own way out. She was the Mockingjay. She would make it, somehow, even without the other Victors and without Peeta. She just needed to sit down for a minute, her legs were shaking too badly.

In the rubble of a ruined computer room, in the middle of a massive underground testing facility, a young woman, not even nineteen, sat down, curled her legs close to her, and fell unconscious in the total silence.