Literally just one POV to say I was at a family reunion for a week and now I work for three days so you all know I didn't die. See you in three days!
Tony Gear- A Night To Remember D6M
Sometimes you go big and sometimes you go home. In my case, in a pine box. But it was probably some type of plastic, honestly. Why do we even say "pine box"? Maybe back forever ago people used wooden coffins, or maybe they still did in Seven or the outer Districts. Anyway, last time around I went home. Unfortunately, I didn't think I could much afford a different strategy this time, with a hundred other Tributes with me. For someone like me to get home, we had to work a miracle.
My current miracle was rather modest. I was just trying to get over my aversion to blood. To do this, I was watching the nastiest, worst horror movies I could find. I didn't know much about horror movies, being averse to blood and all, so I was mostly going on guesswork. Headsplitter, with its cover art of an axe coming out of someone's eye, seemed like it might not be about quirky romance or an inspiring child genius.
Say what you want about my survival skills, but my guessing skills were on point. Headsplitter was, in fact, very bloody. From what I could tell, it was about a wilderness resort where some guy suffered a terrible accident with a badly-secured axe and took revenge for his scarred face by splitting everyone else's. It seemed like a straightforward plot, but I say "from what I could tell" because it was witnessed through my fingers over my eyes. They didn't really kill people for these things, right? They didn't just get poor District people and tell them they'd give their families money? You wouldn't guess anything else from how real it looked. I didn't know why the naked people were necessary, though. Surely the Capitol knew there was a difference between horror and porn? Why would you want to see naked people get killed? If that's sexy for you, you got problems.
Before the movie's halfway mark I knew I had made a mistake. I had to keep going, though, because the only thing worse than seeing the entire movie was stopping in the middle and not knowing if this headsplitter guy was just still out there. I must say, though, that the title was somewhat misleading. The guy did split heads, but many of them dozen-odd deaths were by other methods, some of which were almost comforting in how convoluted they were. Surely a real headsplitter would just get the job done instead of setting all that up. Finally, my persistence paid off, and I saw the headsplitter get pushed off into a ravine and fall onto his own axe.
Later that night, I sat staring at the ceiling, glancing now and then out the high-rise window. I did feel a little better about the blood. Seeing that much just made it cartoonish. If only I could convince myself it would be that way in real life...
At a sudden knock on the door, I jerked up and half fell off the bed.
"You going to bed?" Lancia's voice came through the locked door.
"Yeah," I called back. I'd eaten dinner in front of the movie, so she must have noticed I hadn't been around all evening.