I'm sleeping. In my dreams, it's Fedya I'm maiming. I swing at him with crowbars, with baseball bats, with fire. I'm him, swinging at me. I lose all my teeth to the flood of blood and puke coming out of my mouth, Fedya begs me to kill him. The girl I've killed kills me.
The girl I killed and I sit quietly in a peaceful meadow, talking of the mountains we can see in the horizon and what might lay beyond them.
I wake up to a loud sound and a scream. I jerk awake and fall out of the couch. The girl is gone. The world spins around me as I get up and I fall over trying to get away from whoever is attacking me. Bile rises in my throat as I stumble. Another scream, now a groan, followed by what sounds eerily like my name.
I whip around. The world spins and my sight is blurry, but the orange head by the window is familiar. For a second I think it's a hallucination, until he speaks again.
"Freya", Fedya wheezes, as the rope of my trap pulls his head down. I kick into gear, the adrenaline enough to get me to him in time. The girl's knife is still there. I take it and cut the rope. The armchair falls and Fedya lifts his head, gasping for air as I pull him into the apartment through the window.
"Sorry, sorry - Sorry", my voice sounds hoarse, breaks as I speak. We scramble in for a hug, Fedya not minding that my trap almost killed me, me not minding that he's covered in blood. I sob and squeeze him for dear life, to convince myself he's real and alive, that i'm not dead, that he's with me. My murder was worth it. She can't kill him. No one will be allowed to kill him.
"How did you-" I find myself out of breath suddenly, having to take a deep one, swallowing on the bile in my throat. My temples are pulsating. My ear hurts. "-find me?" I finish.
Fedya looks out of the window like he's looking for something. Someone. "A sponsor told me where you are. I didn't know they could do that, I just - I just came here, to get you, I was…"
His speaking fades out as he sees me properly. He looks me over, paling a little. I can't look good, then. I look down. I'm covered in more blood than he is.
A cold hand touches my forehead. "You're burning", he says, worry lacing his voice. There's irony in his tenderness to me, our embrace when our clothes are red with other's lives.
I catch his hand and remove it. "I'm fine", I tell him, but I'm not sure what compelled me to lie. I'm not fine. My heart beats hard in my chest and my arms feel weak and shaky. There's a churning nausea in me, a heaviness in my breathing. Fedya's fingers brush my ear and I jerk back, the pain travelling down my neck and across my face. I grit my teeth. I'm going to die in here anyway, who cares?
"You're not fit to run, Yeya", he mumbles.
"Run? Why would we have to run? I've spent basically the entire game in here, I..." I hold back a wave of nausea.
"Someone's hunting me. One of the careers. Like a shadow. He never attacks, just slowly comes for me. We have to leave. He's going to figure out where we are. " I don't ask him why someone's hunting him. To be prey has become second nature, though I've been predator too.
We don't have time to figure out what to do next. A deep rumble is heard in the distance, followed by a shaking beneath our feet. It quickly rises in power, the doors swinging on their hinges, the walls creaking with it. A crack forms on the ceiling, dust raining down on us. Fedya pushes me toward the door without a word, and I get what he's saying. Run. I leave my bags behind.
I almost fall over on my way to the door. The ceiling collapses where we'd stood only seconds ago and I book it down the stairs. I slip and fall on the way down, trying to catch myself on the railing. Instead I make a somersault and hit my shoulder on the wall once I reach the bottom, the telltale sound of it popping out of its socket travelling up my neck to my inner ear. The pain makes me see white. I might scream or might not. I'm not listening. Fedya doesn't stop to ask me if I'm okay, simply grabs me by my other arm and pulls me out the door.
On the street we can see the high-rise buildings around us swaying. Back and forth like they're kites in the air, moving slowly across the clean, blue sky. Smoke and dust rises in the air. Another cannon is heard. Then, as we get up to move away from the collapsing building, another. Seven of us left. As far as I know. I don't know for how long I'd slept after I'd killed the girl from district seven, nor how many had died while I was out.
I look to Fedya to ask him to help me up, to put the arm back in place, but he's looking away from me at something a little bit away. He's got something unreadable in his eyes, something I've never seen before. His jaw is set and his eyes glazed. I realize I've never seen him scared. He's got that stubbornness to him, still, like he refuses to be afraid. That's what's going to make him win. I'm sure he can make it. If he just tries.
My determination falters as I look over. One of the careers - one of the ones I'd seen before - Diamond, I think, one of them called him - he's coming toward us, walking at an almost leisurely pace. He looks almost amused, and I can't help but imagine him as the reaper himself, in a black coat and a skull-like face. He's tall, pulling his sword after him over the asphalt like it could be a scythe, seemingly completely unbothered as the buildings shake and turn to dust around him.
"Come on", Fedya snaps, "We have to go!" I realize he's yelling at me. Pulling at my arm. I snap back from my mind back into my body, once again aware of the pain. Everything seems to be pounding at the rate of my heavy heartbeat. I let him pull me up, dragging my eyes from our reaper. I start running. I have to. There's not really a choice, so I rely on my adrenaline, grab my loose-hanging arm with the other, and run.
My heart seems to fight my body as we run. I fight my legs to keep them going, but I keep stumbling and falling. The earthquake is over for now, yet it feels like it's stuck to my knees, making them bend and give up time and time again. I end up stumbling over a piece of rubble, an insignificant little thing of a brick, and I stay down. The earth smells like dirt. Even though the asphalt is hard and the rubble makes it hard to run, even though I can't see anything green anywhere, it smells like earth. Like home. I imagine falling asleep, pretending like nothing of this is happening. I spit out some bile. My heart keeps racing, but no matter how much I try to get up, it's like my body won't listen. A certain sense of doom lays itself across my chest like a blanket. I'm sick. The fever might just take me before anyone else does.
I'm going to die.
Distantly, as if through water, I hear Fedya screaming my name. Yelling at me to move. I try. I lift my arm, bend my legs, and crawl. Forward. I tell myself that I just need to go another meter, then I can lay down - and once I've crawled that meter, just another one. My ears are ringing and there's dust in my nostrils. I can't use my arms. I hear the sound of metal clanging, distantly.
I wake up. How long was I out? There's still rubble all around me. My body feels hot. What woke me out of my temporary lapse of consciousness? I've thrown up. Or perhaps the bile I'd been trying to swallow down just dribbled out against my will? A hand on my back and words I cannot make out. I try to turn around to fight off my attacker, but Fedya simply kneels down and pulls me to his chest.
I hang there, limp. It's awfully quiet. I can feel the shakes of the body against mine. He's crying. Why is he crying? My hearing clears out as the softness of Fedya's body slotted against mine brings me back. He's shaped like me, perfect for a hug. I'm not hugging him, my arms hanging limp. He's careful not to touch the hurt one, I realize, slowly lifting the healthy one to hug him back.
Behind him, where I can see if I look, lies Diamond. He looks threatening even in death, though I can't tell what killed him from here. He's bent over a piece of rubble, eyes staring vacant into the never-changing, blue sky. I curse the sky for it's blueness, then, how it cannot change even in death; it doesn't mourn us like rain can, nor does it celebrate our success with a real sun. It's just blue, vast and cold. I lower my head and hide it against Fedya's shoulder. He's crying. I rub my free hand across his back to soothe him like I used to do as a child. No tears grace my eyes anymore. I can feel death will come for me; soothing him is the least I can do.
We're too scared to sleep inside one of the buildings again if there's another earthquake. In this piece of the arena the buildings are standing, untouched by the earlier earthquake - however, we're too scared to sleep close to buildings as well in fear of the odd muttations who seem to be dancing along the walls like 2D shadows, searching for someone to pierce. Instead we've made ourselves comfortable between two cars parked alongside each other in the middle of the road. He rolled up a couple of trash bins on either side, shielding us from view. I was too tired to tell him everything else was shielded from our view, too, now.
With Fedya's shirt bunched up under my head, I stare into the unyielding sky. It's still blue, just darker. It looks almost hazy; really nothing like a sky at all when you truly look. There are no stars, and it carries just slightly too much of a purplish tint to truly be the sky. Somewhere beyond it, the true one lingers; never to be seen by my eyes again.
I can feel my fever ravaging through my body, drawing violent shaking out of me. Somehow I've been oddly clear-headed since Fedya killed Diamond, but my ear didn't get any less infected. It's leaking pus, the skin around it allegedly turning black, if I was to believe what Fedya had to say. It'd necrotize until I was dead, then, I supposed. Unless a sponsor was kind enough to give me medicine. What then?
"You have to win", I finally say, instead of whining of how much my body ached like I used to do when I was sick at home. "You have to do anything it takes." I'm stuttering between my teeth.
Silence. Fedya looks up from whatever he's been doing. He's close to me, sitting leaned against one of the cars with his legs thrown over mine. "You know I can't promise anything", he says, but I can tell that he's thinking about something.
I catch his hand. It feels cold in mine, but I don't think he actually is. It's me who is too hot. I hold him tightly. My arm aches where he put it back in its socket, my fingers weak. "I'm not asking", I tell him, "You have to."
I remembered all the games we'd played with the other children when we were younger. He'd always won. Again, and again, and again, until he'd been accused of cheating and not allowed to join the playing anymore. I'd been fully aware of his cheating, yet I'd stood by him, sworn up and down he'd never lie, that he was simply that good at winning. I still stood by it. He was good at winning, just not following the rules. Maybe he'd find a way to hack the games, a loop hole.
He lays down beside me. We stare at the unblinking sky together. If I just turned feverish enough, maybe I could imagine that it wasn't hard concrete but our small bed at home and the holes in the ceiling we'd pretended were constellations.
He points to nothing, "The hammock", he says, naming one of our constellations, "The cat-with-a-way-too-big-tail…"
I can't help but giggle, pointing to another empty part of the sky with shaking hands, "The dad." Another one. "The mockingjay."
Fedya is about to say something more, but a familiar beeping interrupts him. He all but flies to his feet to look for the source of it. I watch him climb the car's roof, then come sliding back down seconds later with a little, metallic something in his hands. A sponsor item. I look at it with hope and dread. Please, let it be medicine. Please, anything. I watch Fedya open it, trying to read his facial expression. He looks disappointed. I close my eyes as he crouches down.
"It's fever suppressants", he says, "Pain killers."
It's nothing, then. Pain killers won't save me from the infection ravaging my body. It might even make me worse, if the fever doesn't get to fight the sickness off.
"That's what I was hoping", I tell him, and reach out to swallow what I've been given. The Capitol doesn't even have to shove things down my throat anymore. I swallow willingly at this point.
