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Treech tries to avoid the dead tribute’s flesh, but Tanner hauls the body up sharply by the armpits, retracting the tribute’s trouser leg at the very moment Treech’s hand closes around their ankle. Cold, waxy. His grip will probably leave bruises.
If Tanner scowled when Coral ordered them to haul the corpses into the centre of the arena, he looks happier put to work. He scoops the smaller tributes up with ease, supporting their upper halves like the lumberjacks in Seven hold their friends after a night in the bar. Treech manages the rear. In honesty, he doubts he has the stomach to stand on the other side; his breath sticks as the tribute’s head, nodding gently on their route towards Coral and Mizzen, lolls against Tanner’s chest.
At last, the dirty deed is done. Treech sits a little way off from the pack, leaning against one of the upturned slabs of rubble. Coral is berating somebody – probably Tanner – but he is too exhausted to listen. He managed to suppress his horror during the bloodbath and the pursuit through the tunnels. He swung his axe, for the first time, intending to kill, and he would be lying if he said he had not meant it. But bloodied and tired and stinking in the bittering cold, his fingers blistering where they clutched the dead tribute, Treech could cover his face with his hands and cry.
A mass of brown fabric slumps to the ground beside him. Treech has never quite fathomed how Tanner can be at once solid and extraneous. His clothes are a knot of hessian, leather, and woven cotton confusing the muscle underneath. Treech imagines tearing into him, ripping aside layer after layer and finding only more material, then nothing, just air, like a rag doll stitched from tablecloth scraps.
“You alright?” Tanner is watching him.
Treech straightens and a rough knuckle of rubble digs into his back. He could lie, act tough, play it smart. “I’ve never touched a dead body,” he says instead. “I’d never seen one until the Capitol. I know that’s stupid, what with the war. I guess I was lucky.”
“Nobody here is lucky,” Tanner says. He clicks his tongue, something soft and wet leaving his palate, the same sound Treech heard him make while shifting the tributes and earlier, settling down for the last night in the zoo. He read it as pleasure or satisfaction then. Perhaps it is more involuntary.
The silence stretches between them.
“If it helps, I think this is new to all of us, except maybe Reaper and his peacekeeper.” Tanner busies his boot with uprooting a small rock. “I killed plenty, but never like this.”
“What do you mean?”
Tanner meets his gaze. “We have a few animals of our own back home. Horses, a dairy cow. Good creatures. They get sick and killing them is the kinder thing, the loving thing, and there’s a way of doing it. Most importantly, you don’t leave them. My Pawpaw said that’s your cost. You have to stay with what you kill until it passes.” He frowns. “The slaughterhouse is work so I don’t count that.”
“And the arena?”
He flinches as a pair of hands reach towards his throat, but Tanner only adjusts his neckerchief. His touch feels hot, much nicer than the dead tribute’s. “My Pawpaw believed love can be bloody because or bloody despite,” Tanner says.
Treech remembers Lamina on the beam. “Is there a third option?”
He shrugs. “I ain’t known one. Can’t imagine a love that ain’t a bit bloody.”
“Don’t love me, then.” The words escape before Treech can think. He wanted them as a joke, a weak attempt at friendliness. He almost turns the axe on himself.
To his surprise, Tanner laughs. “That’s what most folks decide.”
Gripping the trident, Treech comprehends two things. First, under Tanner’s clothes was always just a body, and it bleeds like everybody else. Second, Tanner’s Pawpaw is right about love.
Bloody because. Treech’s limbs have felt discomfortingly weightless since Coral stabbed Tanner, so he has to anchor his foot on Tanner’s thigh or else he won’t have the strength to follow through. His hands tightening around the trident, Treech realises he will smell the metal on his fingers for however long he has left to live. The motion is easy – a small miracle. Tanner’s gut is eager to release its hurt, although his hand seizes the wound, trying to contain the life or simply for comfort, Treech doesn’t let himself wonder. The trident slides out with a sound like Tanner clicking his tongue but sickeningly louder, and besides, Tanner is preoccupied with other noises, whimpers and tiny, terrified sobs that deafen Treech until he wants to kneel beside him or break his neck, whatever will end it quicker.
Bloody despite. Because Treech leaves, he isn’t sure whether Tanner knows what he did was love. He could not pay his cost. He didn’t stay. Removing the trident might as well have been cruelty, not mercy, and maybe it was. In the arena, motives and morals are just ragdolls, just air. Real are Tanner’s gasps behind him and the little Eight girl ahead, her trainers kicking up desperate puffs of dust as she sprints towards the tunnels. Looking back a third time is impossible. Treech could not bear to see the body, so recently proven, lie still.
The pack recede into the distance, and Tanner’s vision blurs to a single point: the red of his blood on the heel of Treech’s boot, the last beacon in a darkening world. The only kiss they will ever understand.