against all odds // hunter-gatherer v badder bitches v ezra

[lance]

You travel back to locations lost, a familiar and unfamiliar path treading at your toes in tandem. A last known location, a shortcut across the arena - to a storm of petals in the distance, the location of your first demise.

The location where Steel, left on her literal last leg, was left behind.

There's a sense of wonder as you trek, a sense of deja vu. One day out from resurrection and there are still ticks, still bits and pieces of yourself that you're struggling to regain a connection with. Feeling has gradually returned to your body - feelings of fatigue, but also feelings of life. Your movement expanded as the bloodflow gradually returned to your limbs, your energy somewhat replenished after a good night's rest in the Cornucopia's shadow, and exertion seeped into your bones like the first workout after a particularly strenuous day of fighting - painful, tiring, but ultimately so, so rewarding.

It's not a short trek, even as the swirling maelstrom of petals comes into view. Or maybe it was and you just were that tired - and who could blame you, after having fought a Career to the brink of death, losing an appendage and a fair amount of blood in the meantime, and all after literally dying? It was the hardest trial you had ever faced in your lifetime, but you'd survived. Persevered. And now, you had to prevail.

But as you plod on, doubts begin to fill your head for the first time. What if Steel wasn't in the midst of the petal storm where you'd left her? She couldn't have died alongside you, if your hypothesis was correct and you were only sent down beneath the earth upon death. But what if she had died, alone and scared, while you were busy granting Nine - Kestrel, her name was - a merciful death, while you were fighting for your death, and eventually life, with Emmett? What if she had crawled away, hiding, scared, and alone, to a different area, where she thought you dead and gone and was waiting for someone or something - death or otherwise - to claim her?

It's a fool's errand, to try and find one girl in the vastness of the entire arena. But, you never really thought highly of your own decision making in the first place, and right now Steel was probably the only person in the arena that would not attack and kill you on sight. And that made finding her all the more imperative.

Unfortunately, it is not her that you find first, but a trio of other shapes instead. Two boys you recognize as being from Two and Seven, a girl you not only recognize but realize you know by name as well - Terra, from Six - and more and more are you certain that Steel couldn't possibly be here, for either what remained of her ability to run on one leg would have kicked in or someone like those prowling tributes would have found her first-

But then you keep looking. And you find you're far from the only person to stumble across the three. There's the boy from Three, someone you'd only ever seen from afar, on his own. And then, hovering above the ground, one of her legs clearly fake-

Steel!

Your heart hammers in your chest as you realize the gravity of the situation. Even if gravity is the very thing that Steel herself is defying right at this moment. You may not know much about Seven or Two, even if you have a haphazard guess towards the latter given both what you've seen about his family on the television and the typical attitude of Twos, but you know all too well about the details of Terra's nature. A girl like Steel, missing a leg, and in plain sight? It'd be like sharks smelling blood.

And you decide you cannot allow that. Broken, battered, and bruised that you are, Steel is the one friend you've found in this arena. The one person that has seen you above the ground when choices actually had a bit of weight attached to them and decided that assistance would be prudent instead of murder.

So what if death didn't stick. So what if she was merely sent down below to experience the same trial that you did instead of truly dying. She's your ally. And daresay, maybe even your friend?

You cannot stand by and just watch her get butchered.

So you take your knife in your good hand, your left hand, set your sights squarely on Terra, the girl from six, and with a yell of "Don't you dare touch her!" you lunge forward.

kenji attacks terra; knife

A3SlVuG5iOknife

2126 -- Shallow Cut on Right Calf -- 3.5 damage

shallow cut reroll from emmett's pts boots, day 4

knife

2115 -- Stabbed in Bicep -- 8.5 damage

knife·knife

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

There were two faces in the sky that night.

The girl, JJ couldn't recall leaving any sort of lasting impression. In fact, he realized he couldn't even remember which district she was from, exactly. The boy from One was a surprise, though. He'd expected someone like him to take the gold like his last name would demand, and he didn't dare to consider what a Capitol favorite's early death might mean for someone like JJ, who was supposed to be one of the first gone. Because hope was a sickness in times like these. He knew that. He resented it, but it was true: the second he allowed himself to dream of life outside this arena, his would be the next face to light up the sky just as it was always supposed to, and then all would be right in the world according to anyone whose opinion mattered and JJ would be nothing more than a lost statistic somewhere on some spreadsheet that someone thought was important. But that wasn't the only thing he was trying not to think about.

There were two faces in the sky that night. Helle's was not one of them.

He thought back to the anthem on that first night, when no faces had appeared and Helle thought that, maybe, the girl she had killed was not really dead at all. He'd told her there was nothing they could do- they all had. And now he hated himself for it, because what if they were wrong and she was right and now it was her who was lost somewhere all alone and scared and wondering where everyone went?

He swallowed the lump in his throat and allowed the rain and Terra and Will's breathing to lull him to sleep.

The next morning, he woke with a start. The storm must have raged on all night long because now there was this: water slowly and steadily beginning to trickle into the tent. He moved and could feel the saturated earth beneath the tent smush like mud and he sighed. They'd slept through a flood.

"Guys," he called, rousing the others, "We gotta get the tent pulled up before everything gets fucking wet."

He only realized then how swollen his eyes were. He'd been crying in his sleep.

That hardly seemed fair.

The storm of petals mixed with the subsiding rain felt somehow more dangerous as the group prepared to move on. Large puddles tens of feet wide dotted the landscape, flowers of pink and red and blue drowning along the murky surfaces.

He'd been shoving one of his knives into his waistband when he heard the call- "Steel!" and the boy appeared, seemingly from thin air, like a ghost. The metal of his knife smiled in the light as if it had teeth.

"Shit, shit shit!" he gasped, desperately fumbling for a weapon. The boy had called for someone, which meant he wasn't alone. JJ could feel his heartbeat quickening. He couldn't lose another one. He couldn't. He wouldn't.

When his fingers finally found the morning star on the ground next to him, he turned on his heels just in time to see another figure emerging from the petals.

"Go away!" he demanded, darting for the boy.

He screamed as he raised the weapon in the air: not afraid in that moment and he swore he didn't think he would ever be afraid again. The spikes of it made a hollow-sounded THUD as it collided with the intruder's chest, and the boy fell in a way that told JJ he wouldn't be getting back up.

Breathless and in shock, it was all he could do to turn to Will with eyes full of too many emotions and, at the same time, not nearly enough.

"I'm done being a victim," he said.

[ jj attacks ezra, morning star ]
vBngCv03xZspiked blunt
[ 14191 -- CRUSHED CHEST -- 40 damage ]

spiked blunt

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

[ im a lil tipsy writing this so pls pardon any errors xo ]

I curl around JJ like a lifeline.

I know that he probably doesn't actually really want me to, know that Will has been the one that he turned to every night for comfort, for somewhere warm to lay his head, but—losing Helle leaves something hollow in my chest that I don't know how to make sense of. Just the same, when Emmett's face shows up in the sky, I'm very suddenly aware of how much I had cared for him, no matter how much I had tried to provoke him and taunt him and—ruin him, I realize quietly. I'd tried to ruin him. I've never grieved before, not really, didn't even grieve for the girl that I used to be when I killed my stepdad with a pair of kitchen shears to the neck.

But still, lying there in the dark, despite a lifetime of sleeping on my own, the absence of Helle makes me want to scream. So I cling to JJ, try and tamp down the sense of unease and anger that starts to boil in me every time I think about Will, and Meredith and Will, and the promise that he wouldn't kill her even though her ally had just killed Helle. Helle, who had done only right by us, who had been kind and taken care of each of us in her own way, worked her witchy magic to do what she could to protect all of us. I don't know if I really believe that she was cursed, but she had magic in her.

That much I'm sure of.

And the arena reminds me of her magic when all of us wake in the morning, step out into the storm and realize that the entire place has slowly started to sink. It feels like my mourning made corporeal, like the pain and anger that's flooding me has flooded into the entire god damned arena.

But the surprise at the water doesn't last long before there's three other tributes emerging from the horizon and have to rub the sleep from our eyes. 

We all scramble to come back to ourselves, to prepare ourselves to fight, and it takes me a long moment to fully realize that it's Kenji who's gouged his knife into my bicep. The pain there is hot and horrible and nothing I haven't experience before but it still—hurts. I remember him on the rooftop, throwing himself over the edge and grinning through the pain, laughing at him, thinking he was hilarious. Thinking that in another life, I'd have wanted to be his friend.

"I wouldn't attack you," I say, voice hollow. Is that who I am? All that I am? The girl that would be willing to kill anyone? He's—he's not wrong. But it's a hard truth to realize. "I wasn't going to attack you," I go on, eyebrows furrowed. My target was going to be the other one, the one alone, the one that I didn't know and hadn't had to ever think about—Kenji and his ally, I think her name is Steel, I wouldn't touch them unless we were the only ones left.

But then JJ is trying to play hero but he has the wrong target and then the kid is fucking dead, chest caved in, and all the breath leaves me as I dive towards him. "We're leaving," I say, gritting my teeth and grabbing JJ at the elbow. I look at Will, eyes hard. "None of us is fucking dying today."

[ ms terra flees dis fight ]

[✨ zozo.]

Underneath the blare of the anthem I hop, skip, jump - hover, crash, collapse onto the ground. Another anthem, another faceless sky, I don't bother to look up as I cough up air and shake off the ground shock in my palms. I'd thought that if the kids from the 82nd could do this then I could too, but every crash-landing is one step closer to a broken bone, a punctured lung, a wound ripping open, another breakdown in the dirt. Hop, skip, hover, land on my arm and my head and very nearly my sword. Each time gets a little easier, each landing teaching me something new - tilt my toes every so slightly, hold my arms out to balance myself in the air and manage a few metres before awkwardly clunking back down to the earth and landing on my back.

Strange, I think, as the song keeps singing out into the night sky - and when I open my eyes I see the flash of a girl's face disappear. Then another appears: Emmett, the grip around my sword instinctively tightens at the memory of him. Two dead, maybe more - it makes sense. There were at least two cannons when we fought those creatures.

With a great sigh I watch him disappear. I was wrong to think of him as a deadly career. Surname and muscles and all, he'd only ever treated me kindly even when I made my wary known. It doesn't seem right to feel guilty in this place. Being selfish is acceptable. But I can't help but feel heavier as I get up again and bend my knees, launching myself into the sky. The air feels heavier, the sky confirming what we all knew was coming: death. Silly of me to assume we'd make it out like the 80th. Silly of me to think I could find Kenji.

But his face wasn't in the sky. Neither was Nikolai's. I haven't seen Emmett since the Bloodbath, no other tributes since the ones that slaughtered Kenji, so I can only guess that the arena holds more secrets than I have discovered. With that in mind, my heart anxious to return to places I know familiar, I grit my teeth and my sword and tilt my body forwards to carry me back to the tornado of petals.

_____________________

I crash to the floor one last time and wake to a swirl of red, blue, purple and gold. The sharp wind kisses me awake and I stir against the hard ground, muscles and bandaged wounds aching with every movement. A beautiful place to wake, were the howls of air not so ferocious and the memories of Kenji crumpling to the ground not so close. 

No time to waste, I make use of the noise to drown out the permanent whir of my boots and tackle my transportation. Today I hover a little more steady, the rush of wind against my back a gentle nudge as I steer myself forward rather than battling against it. Landing on my good leg takes time but I manage, taking most of my body weight with a bend of my knee and allowing my makeshift limb to gently touch the petal-scattered floor, finishing off with a stab of my sword into the ground to steady the landing.

It's not perfect, but it works. As a child I never wished to fly. I much preferred the solidarity of the earth, but after a while I understand why everyone longed for the sky. My leg, for starters, appreciates the rest. There's something quite freeing about rising and falling with a point of my toes or a dig of my heel into the air, letting the wind guide me and the multi-colour petals where it wishes us to go. My heart sings to find Kenji and I hope the arena can tell, even if I still feel a small loss at Niko's polite decline.

I get it - Perdita kept him alive. Took a chance on him. Was his Kenji. Leaving her would be as much of a betrayal as letting her kill me that night. Niko's too good for me to force him to do something like that and even if I wanted to, I'm too broken and weary to force him to follow. Being selfish for wanting to stay alive is one thing. Being selfish for wanting to risk another's is something else entirely.

He'll be safe with her for as long as he can be. At least that's what I told myself last night in order to fall asleep. She'll look after him and he'll look after her and I've got to finish what I started. Kenji, dead and yet not. Alive and no where to be found. I'll find him, even if it kills me. Even if it's in death. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because he spared me on the first day when I was an easy target. Because he threw himself in front of a sword when it should have been me falling against their blades. Because I owe him that much. Because...

because if I don't find him, then I don't understand how to play this game - and we're both as good as dead if that's the case.

_____________________

I don't see them until it's too late.

Voices on the wind, my head spins to my left, right, twisting my body around to try and find the source. "Shit shit shit" "Go away!" "Don't you dare touch her!"

"Kenji?!" I scream into the wind, plumetting toward the ground as fast as I can. "Kenji is that you?"

A crack! snaps through the air and then I see them: a pack of tributes I don't recognise. One bleeding crimson down her arm, one's flail swinging from impact, and another crumpled on the ground unmoving.

A canon fires as I land and it throws me off, gasping into the wind as I hobble forwards. "Kenj-"

His knife coated with blood, limbs wrapped with bandages, hair jittering and dancing in the wind, and his chest rising and falling with life. Unexplainably, impossibly, Kenji is alive.

But from the look on these tributes faces he may very well be dead.

"Kenji let's go," I gasp as I reach him, a white-hot hand grasping at his arm to tear him away from the group. The last time this happened I watched him die, begged him to stay as he bled out onto the floor, screamed and cried as they pulled him up into the sky. Like hell am I going to let them do that to me, to us, again.

"I wouldn't attack you," the girl begins, frowning, "I wasn't going to attack you." - and I want to believe her, but a boy is dead at my feet and their iridescent weapons glare at me like a warning sign.

"Come on!" I beg to my friend, already hovering in my place and leaning back toward the storm. I couldn't force Niko to leave, but  I'll die trying to make Kenji see sense. "Come with me, please!"

steel flees with kenji
does some things in maint!

thank you tom for the gorgeous table <3

[aya]

The way she looks at him today, Will Johnwayne is pretty sure that Terra is mad at him. The fact that he's figured that much at least is a miracle in itself, but it's beyond his abilities to figure out what for. He has his guesses: He's received gift after lavish gift from Capitolite benefactors who've likely as not staked unfathomable sums of wealth on his ability to outlast the others. One such gift, his beautiful bone-hilted dagger, did not bury itself deep enough in Cyro Krane's neck. Most likely, though, it's because his body was not the one in the path of the blade that put Helle in the ground. The Johnwayne boy has enough experience with all the different flavors of resentment to know that grief-born grievances are bound by logic the least.

It's okay. As long as he doesn't wake up with a knife buried in his stomach, it he doesn't mind it — he's used to ice — and instead he wakes up the odd man out from the middle-district cuddle puddle, and then again to the flood.

JJ rouses them, looking wrecked, but as high-strung and panic-prone as ever. Will is less concerned with the water than the sleep he's missing out on — it's not like he's never been soggy before — but generously refrains from grumbling too much as they pack up the camp.

The thunderstorm sees to it that keeping their gear from getting too wet is a wasted endeavor, but he swallows his complaints even when the feathers of his decorative wings cling to his back, even when the straps holding his vambrace begin to chafe against his shirt, even when the airborne petals adhere themselves to his rain-soaked head.

Idly, he wonders how the unread letter in his pocket is holding up against the rain, if the ink has bled illegible into itself, if the folded up water-and-blood-color drawing pressed against it has rendered the whole thing red.

He's so busy pawing the bits of flower off of his face mask that he hardly notices when a handful of other tributes enter their vicinity. Words are exchanged, and Will slides up his rose-covered mask in time to see JJ heave his mace into the chest of a boy he doesn't recognize. He doesn't need to hear the cannon sound over the distant thunder or to see the wound at all to know that this boy is dead; it's written on JJ's face before his momentum comes to a complete stop.

He doesn't hear the words exchanged with the other kids on the scene — each of them looking worse for wear than Kill Will and his ilk — but he groks the meaning well enough. Terra grabs JJ by the elbow, tugging him from the scene, tugging something near the Johnwayne's intestines, and the words rush in all at once as Will's brain catches up to present: "None of us is fucking dying today." "I'm done being a victim." "Let's go." "Don't you dare —" "I wasn't going to —" "We're leaving." "Go away!"

Nobody wants to fight today but Will Johnwayne, and no one is giving him much choice in the matter. He sighs and stashes his dagger back in his cloak, too tired today to pursue his would-be prey. "Fine," he agrees. No one — else — is fucking dying today. If that's how it needs to be, so be it.

will flees (insofar as he was ever in a fight in the first place)

[lance]

not me deadass realizing during the wee hours of friday that i forgot to flee LOOOOOOL

anyway in case it wasn't obvious, dis do be a filler flee tho

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

filler!

[jj flees]