LII: The Games - Day Eleven, Morning.
Vadric Gaerwyn, 17
Tribute of District Six
There is something out there. Vadric isn't crazy.
They're almost certain Pharix has called them so at least once—it would be more strange to think that he hadn't. He certainly thought it, so why not voice it? It wasn't as if he was wrong for it, either. Vadric knew, when looking at the world around them, that it was the singular most truth they knew.
But they know what exists in their head, the horrors that crawl through their brain and pick it apart, and they know what's out there too. It's all the same.
Vadric isn't sure where to look—behind her, where she's so certain something is going to emerge, or forward. Levi always seems to be ahead of them. Most people would consider that a good thing. No one behind you, no knife in the back. That's what he did to Sander. That's what he could so easily do to them.
If Vadric could keep an eye on him that wouldn't happen, right? No knife between the shoulders if they can't get behind you. Of course, that all boiled down to the idea that Levi would do just that, and not anything else. It was just them and a trained Career who could, in any respect, kill them without blinking. Didn't matter what way they happened to be facing.
Every instinct was telling them to turn tail and run while they still had the chance, but that means running back into the arms of whatever lurks behind them. With each passing minute their suspicion grew stronger, the paranoia more real.
Sometimes nightmares were real and they followed you down the hall. Sometimes they're right in front of you, too.
It's going to happen. The way he's moving, hand drifting down to his side, the belt…. the blade, curved and pointed in their direction. Vadric lets their feet slow, drifting to a stop in a state of near-silence. It's the first thing they've done in a long time that feels truly right. Ahead of them, they watch Levi's feet, continuing to move in the same imitation of steadiness that they've held for so long. All they can do is beg, plead, pray. Just keep walking. Walk around that next corner and never look back. Everything would be so much easier.
He sees the precise moment in which Levi realizes he's no longer being closely followed, and not a second later he slows, neck craning as he looks back over his shoulder.
"Vadric?"
He's going to kill them.
They take half a step back, but their legs feel like they're made of cotton, too weak to properly hold anything up. Able to be sliced through in a split second. Levi's eyes flicker, and Vadric can't tell what emotion seems to be filling them, can't quite decipher what they're truly looking at.
"What are you doing?" he asks. "It's okay, hey?"
Except it can't be. Things are never just okay for them. Maybe in another life, another time, Vadric could have had a friend.
But not here.
"I don't want to die," they stammer, unsure if the words actually make any sense. Levi's eyebrows furrow, his hand raised in their direction once again. With every second that passes, they wait for it to be filled with the blade.
"You're not thinking straight," Levi tells her. "You're not… you haven't slept, alright? Not in a while."
Is that what this is? No, it can't be. It fucking can't be. Vadric has lost it before in every way that matters, but not right now. Levi has every reason to do it with the numbers dwindling, with the realization that Vadric isn't someone he wants around. Why would he keep a hold on dead weight? He's not that good—no one is.
It could be true, but no, no it's not. That's the one thing they have to keep a hold on. If nothing else, just that.
Whatever was once in Levi's eyes vanishes at the next blink, something darker bleeding into them. It's the shift Vadric was waiting for, the moment where they truly knew. When his hand descends, all of the options play out in their head, the ways this could end. Most of them come to a point where Vadric is on the ground, bleeding out nice and slow, cut in all the right ways. Dragging themselves away from some unknown entity, ripping themselves open in an attempt to escape a fate that continues to come for them regardless.
But this… this is something they can change. It won't be a recurring nightmare.
Levi steps forward. His hand is still moving, but Vadric is moving faster. They don't have a choice otherwise. Like they said—forwards or backwards, and only one is an option.
The feeling of a hilt in the palm of their hand is as foreign as it was twelve months ago, but the look on Levi's face isn't. It's nothing more than shock, unfiltered, eyes widening and mouth opening in silent horror a moment before Vadric buries the knife in his throat and he chokes, blood spilling from his lips.
And he falls and he's on the ground and—
And his hand is empty. Feeble. Twitching. He gasps, chokes again. Vadric can see the movement of the blade buried in his trachea, the blood as it rushes forward. That's familiar. His face is just like Avanti's, unable to comprehend what's happening, as if there's no sense of justification. There wasn't, for Avanti. She hadn't deserved what Vadric had done to her.
But Levi… he wasn't doing anything. Not swinging forward. Not reaching for her. Not doing anything but going rapidly still, even as the horror continues to fill his eyes.
Behind them, footsteps scrape over stone. Vadric doesn't turn, and yet the hair at the back of their neck stands to attention. It's there. It has to be. Levi goes still at their feet, but something in them still stares beyond her. Almost as if he saw it before Vadric ever did.
Was that it, all along? Was he reaching for them not to harm, but to save? But it can't be that, because if that's it, then Vadric…
No. No, he was going to do it. He was always going to do it. That won't ever change, no matter how long his hand remains empty.
Even if it's forever.
The only reality that remains, the solid truth, is what lies behind them. Vadric doesn't look. All their life they've known only hiding, running when they have to and avoiding the danger that lies around every corner. They don't need sleep, don't need solace. They just need to run.
They know exactly where to go. If the nightmare freely roams, then safety lies below.
They'll be safe again. They have to be.
Amani Layne, 18
Tribute of District Four
Amani closes the door behind him with hardly a soft click.
Ilan is sleeping, he tells himself. Sleeping, for once, even if his occasional, fitful mumbling keeps Amani from relaxing himself.
Since the beginning, Amani has felt that he was only meant for one purpose: to be their guardian. It's the one thing he's been able to do with what remains of his life, the good-for-nothing mess that it's been. He never wanted to believe his father was right, that he was the furthest thing from the prodigal son that had been dreamed of, but maybe all the whispers were right. And, maybe, he should have just died all those months ago. Made it easier for everyone.
That would mean Ilan would be alone, though, and Amani can't come to terms with a reality where that makes any sense. So, for now, even if he's lost one, he can still be a guardian to what's left. Even if it kills him.
With any luck, it will do just that.
The noises he's been hearing for hours now are of little concern to him—Amani would be more worried if he wasn't hearing them. The castle creaks and shudders with the wind. The walls groan, as if coming alive with the souls of a thousand dead monarchs. He's surprised the damn thing is still standing with how far the cracks stretch. It would be too much of a miracle for the entire roof to collapse and kill them all; the Capitol wouldn't let any of them, him in particular, off that easily.
They do need food, a mission that Amani finds himself halting the moment he hears a cannon. It's strange how quickly the realization hits him. For how hard he's struggled in maintaining a grip on the numbers, Amani knows instinctively what that means. Suddenly food doesn't feel like such a big worry. With eight of them left, how much longer can they really have?
No doubt they already had teams dispatched to Four in preparation for this moment, but he still has some hours to come to terms with what his father will say to those cameras. Amani doesn't doubt that he'll have the family in tip-top shape. Carrack is the only one he can hope will speak some amount of truth, talk about their friendship earnestly, because he cannot expect the same from anyone who lived under the same roof as him.
The urge to return to the room washes over him, to hide himself away from the impending dawn and what will come with it. Amani moves back to the low set of stairs that leads there, pausing as wind rushes down the hall. Shutters crack down the stone. The very floor beneath him seems to shift, as if expecting an earthquake.
But nothing comes down. Like he said, that's too easy. The wind only brings something else—infinitely more confusing, quiet in the way that it makes the hairs at the back of his neck stand to attention.
It almost sounds like voices.
Amani turns, though his efforts produce nothing but the same stretch of hallway he just came from. It's the same as before—same cracks in the walls, same worn-away stone floor. Each impeccable knight that lines both walls is right where Amani knows them to be. Unlike everything else, they're stubborn in their refusal to come to life.
But he can hear something. Whispers coalescing into one massive rush, his ears ringing with the sound. Amani can only catch bits and pieces, words like nothing and die and hurt, nothing concrete enough to be an actual sentence. But who the hell is he trying to kid? There are no voices because no one's there. His brain is turning against him, which means he's gone insane, maybe, tipping right off the ledge—
He's not too far gone.
He ascends the stairs, eyes resolutely ahead; the door is right there. He never should have left in the first place. On either side of them, the knights seem to grow closer, their shadows encroaching on his own. Amani knows they're not moving with the same certainty he knows that he's still breathing, but the tricks the mind can play are damning.
They drove him to this, didn't they? This, and evidently so much worse.
Amani resists the urge to kick over the nearest knight and send its silver-plated steel scattering across the floor. The noise is too much. Waking Ilan isn't worth it. And what will kicking it over do, when Amani can hear what they'd really say?
The gaps are easy enough to fill in. You deserve to hurt like this. You are good for absolutely nothing. Instead of putting everyone through this misery, why didn't you just do everyone a favor and die when you were supposed to?
He really is insane, isn't he? Must be, with everything that's happened. There's no possible way he's still standing otherwise.
Amani reaches for the door, hands reaching, grasping, yanking it open with a breath of relief that shakes his entire body. He hasn't felt relief so strongly in, well… Amani doesn't know how long, truly. Possibly never.
None of that compares to the freedom he feels when he realizes the noises have stopped. Rather, the voices. He steps away from the door if only to put distance between himself and the idea of them.
Ilan still lies, semi-peacefully, where Amani had left him in the first place. Amani wishes he could stay there forever. The last thing he wants, amidst all this horror, is for the other boy to confront what remains. The voices. The falsities. That should be for Amani to bear alone.
The idea is wrong. He should want for more, even just for himself. He should want to escape it all rather than shoulder it.
Amani thinks it's too late for that now.
Ravi Fusain, 17
Tribute of District Twelve
He's heard things—ugly things.
Ravi has yet to decide if it's better or worse than the silence. The cold, all-consuming. The empty spaces at his side.
When the night finally quiets he finds himself confronting a yawning darkness, a series of steps leading into nothingness. The only noise remaining is so soft he could be imagining it.
What's down there is beyond him. What he's supposed to do is beyond him.
Ravi has little recollection of what has happened since. No clue as to the time that has passed, or where his feet have taken him. Ravi doesn't even remember leaving the room in the first place. There must have been some sort of odd, scrambling action. An almost inhuman thing. Hands clawing at the ground, feet tripping over themselves. Anything to get away.
Now here he stands, seemingly at the edge of some great precipice, and the thing is, Ravi already knows what he's facing. He can practically smell the death, the faint rot of it. It's all too familiar. Every few steps he can spot a drop of blood or two, a macabre trail that winds haphazardly down and away.
There are choices, of course. Logical actions. Ravi knows what he's going to before his feet even start moving, and his eyes only recognize the change when his surroundings grow darker, all at once. He's already halfway down the stairs. Ravi knows what's going on—he's compartmentalizing, trying to usher in numbness rather than confront the reality he left behind. In this wake of numbness, he's losing everything else. The hours. The places.
That seems to be for the best, he can admit.
The noise he's been hearing becomes more pin-pointed as his feet, aching from lack of rest, come to rest at the uneven stone floor lining the cavern. It's breathing. Quiet, but simultaneously heavy. As if someone is trying to quiet it, but struggling.
Tell him, exactly, why he still feels a deep compulsion to find the source of the noise, whether it be a person or something else. It's in the blood—to root out the trouble, to come up with a way to fix it. Or, in his mother's case, to find a way to end it.
Ravi doesn't know which he's planning on as he moves beneath the first archway, passing the first tomb set into the wall. It's like nothing he's ever seen before, this macabre display of death, so grandiose in comparison to the simple rows of crosses that lined Twelve's fences, the unimpressive wooden coffins eventually rotting into nothing.
He drifts closer—to what, Ravi doesn't know, but his eyes come to rest on the near-shapeless mass curled on the floor, pressed tight into the corner where the wall meets tomb, nearly blending into one. He sees the unusual jut out of an elbow, a knee hooked up to catch the edge of the dying torchlight. They shudder just enough for Ravi to tell that they aren't dead.
"Are you," he starts, his voice failing as soon as he truly hears it. Scratchy with disuse, sounding too much like the victim of smoke inhalation. And what could he say? There is no asking if they are okay. He knows the answer.
The figure at ground-level jerks to life, head slamming back into the coffin—he sees Gideon for a moment, the boy's head cracking back into the plank-lined tunnel before he slumped to the ground. But this person looks up at him, life flooding their eyes, hands flailing out and finding nothing. In a moment of panic Ravi's feet slip backwards, his own hand drifting down to his belt, but the machete—
The machete is…
Right where he left it.
Ravi can't admit where he left it.
Vadric looks up at him, and Ravi has no choice but to look back, finding their hands stained red much like his own. He has no idea how long this staring match continues until Vadric's eyes flicker away, perhaps satisfied that they're not going to be immediately murdered.
Their voice is weak, hesitant. "I think I… I think I did something I shouldn't have."
The lump in Ravi's throat grows—he thinks he's liable to choke on it. "Me too."
Vadric nods, eyes still fixated elsewhere. There's comfort in that, the idea that someone else is in the same situation. For Vadric there is, at least. Ravi finds nothing of the sort. He aches, the grief tangible in a way he didn't think possible. Even for his own mother it didn't hurt this badly, didn't manifest itself in such a way that it became difficult to walk. Hunger gnaws at his gut, but Ravi hardly feels it. He left everything behind in that room, a place there's no returning to. The only thing to his name in the waterskin pouch at his belt, empty save for a few drops. Ravi doesn't remember emptying it, but he must have if he's still standing. The logical explanations for it otherwise end there.
"I'm sorry," he murmurs, unsure why Vadric needs to hear those words over anyone else. For disturbing them, maybe. No one comes down here with the intention of being discovered.
Ravi's feet begin to carry him away. Vadric shuffles, he hears that much, and their voice is hardly any louder. "I don't know where he is," they admit cautiously. "Be careful."
Ravi blinks, but even the admission isn't enough to break through his exhausted haze and force alarm. "Who?"
"Richard. It's empty. He's up there, I think."
He lets all of the words rotate around in his brain, but produces nothing concrete as an explanation. Finally he allows himself to look back at Vadric, but their attention is fixed solely on the great stone lid that has been left ajar, casually pushed to the side. What was once a final resting place has been laid bare, its emptiness much more vast than humanly possible.
He's not sure what his expression must be, but there's no one to see it. Any chance at worry vanishes when he steps forward again, and the pain in his feet becomes too overwhelming to ignore. Ravi carries on only until he's out of Vadric's sight and finally allows himself to collapse, the stone scraping against his legs. The wall of the mausoleum is cold and unforgiving against his temple, but Ravi doesn't have the energy to lift it.
Sleep will come eventually, he knows, whether Ravi wants it to or not. He can only go on for so long. Even now his brain continues to race, images replayed over and over. The thump of Kai's body as it rolled off the cot onto the floor. The blood bubbling in Zoya's mouth. It's such an unkind symphony.
And it's exactly what he deserves.
Weston Katsouris, 18
Tribute of District Six
It's almost as if someone is playing a trick on him.
And ha, isn't that the most comical thought—Weston isn't the victim of foolish jokes or half-hearted attempts to mess with him. He's the one that does them. He concocts the plans. He sees them through.
That's what happens in theory, of course. The truth of the matter is that he's alone, hasn't seen a soul in days, though it feels like years, and he can't be certain whatever he unleashed has actually done anything. It should have happened by now, and Weston should be out of here.
For whatever reason, he's still stuck wandering. In his head he wishes, practically pleads, for something to give. There is an end to this.
Somewhere, on the wind, a voice responds to him that it's not coming today.
At least not for him.
Weston isn't sure what exactly he expects when he finally descends to the bottom floor after hours spent searching above. The same as before—vast emptiness, unchanged windows and doors. To the credit of the environment, it is unchanged. The only difference Weston finds after a series of turns is a shadow on the floor some fifty yards down, recognizable almost immediately. It's difficult, after so long working with them, not to understand the sight of a body. He can thank Freddie for that, as well as the dozens of people who came after him. All different, but reduced to the same unimportant mass in the end. Corpses for the dirt.
He has no hesitation in walking towards it, but that's before. Weston can recall the last time he actually, truly paused before having to deal with this sort of thing. It all goes back to Freddie in the end. Who could blame him? There was a sick amount of morbidity in dealing with the body of your dead best friend.
This wasn't his best friend, would be an insult to call it that. But this is Levi.
And Weston hesitates.
He forces his feet forward, even as his heels beg for purchase back on the ground. There's nothing to be fucking scared of, now is there? It's Levi, alright, but he's dead. This isn't some Capitol-made horror movie where dead bodies come back to life and pop back up to scare the protagonist. He's just dead.
Has been for a while, too, by the looks of it. The blood has drained from his face, rendering his skin a ghostly white, and when Weston reaches out to touch his arm he finds an unfamiliar stiffness, his muscles locked tight as rigor mortis begins to set in. He's not yet frigid, though—it's only been a few hours.
The pool of blood gathered beneath his gashed throat is still wet, trembling in the wind. The knife that caused it is lodged firmly. Probably straight through the carotid. There's enough blood to warrant it, at least.
For someone to have gotten him like that, they were close. And for Levi to be otherwise injured, for there being no signs of a struggle, he didn't see it coming.
Weston wasn't even trying, at least not subconsciously, but his effort not to fixate on the knife has made him hyper-aware of it. Somehow he recognizes the handle—the shape of it, the length. He's seen it before. He removed all of Jordyn's weapons before he left, and Levi made off with his own, so there's only one reason Weston would recognize it.
It doesn't seem feasible. It's fucking Vadric. The same terrible little creature he found cowering beneath a desk, avoiding the world around them. They're not cold-blooded—at least Weston didn't think so. Not like he is.
With a start, Weston realizes he's still holding onto Levi's arm, and he releases it with a shake. There was no reason to even touch him in the first place; Weston could tell what state he was in long before that. So what's his deal, then? There's no use in trying to cling to what could have been. Weston shut the door on that himself. So what if he didn't have to be alone this entire time, if he could have had something truly good for once in his fucking life. It was never going to work. Weston has to focus on what does, the mechanics of it all. What he's good at.
But one of the things he happens to be good at, he knows, is burying people. Should he? Is that still his life? Weston isn't even sure he could find a way outside, let alone a way to carve down into the earth with something other than his bare hands.
It's risky. No, it's plain old fucking stupid. He's not dragging Levi to a better place even if that's what he deserves. It's not like he did it for Jords—why the hell should he start now?
Weston rises to his feet. Every instinct in his body tells him to get back down on the floor and do something. He can't just leave him there, not like that. Exposed to the elements, lying in the open. The state of him by the time he's removed won't be anything his family will want to see.
But there's nothing Weston can do. Not if he wants to live. He turns, setting his feet on a straight course away from the body. That's not him anymore. It can't be.
Even if he hates every bit of it.
9th. Levi Alcandre, District Two.
A massive congratulations to our Final 8 - Tova, Sloane, Amani, Weston, Vadric, Ilan, Casia and Ravi - and of course their respective submitters. Unless you hate this decision and want me dead for it, which is nice and also I don't care.
Our chapters are dwindling massively now. Our next one will be a break of sorts, and then we're on a speeding train to our victor. I hope everyone enjoys the ride even if it's not quite as quick as I had hoped. Thank you as always for your kind comments, encouragements, and hilarious memes. They fuel me onwards even if I don't act like it. ❤︎
Until next time.