Chapter Text
The arena’s fake moon lit up the damp grass around the four tributes of district twelve. It was quiet, a thankful sponsor that sounded like Mags had gifted them enough food to share for the night. It was colder tonight, Haymitch had his tarp laid over Maysilee’s legs while she carefully aided Wyatt's slowly infecting wound. Thankfully, Lou Lou was at least able to sleep soundly by the injured boy's side.
It had been a grueling week, or two, Haymitch was struggling to keep track after the fifth night. They had slowly found each other one by one throughout the games, all wondering if they’d lost someone each time a cannon shook their core. The first two to find each other were Haymitch and Lou Lou. He had stirred her away from anything to touch, memories of a twitching rabbit by the river still fresh in his mind.
Deep down, Haymitch knew there were two reasons why Lou Lou became his top priority. Firstly, he knew Wyatt would have begged him to. He’d seen the way he’d constantly glanced at the girl from the cornucopia before the bell rang. And while he never witnessed what happened next, wasn’t sure if the dried splatter of blood on Lou Lou’s cheeks were the full answer, he felt inclined to fulfil Wyatt’s secret wish to keep her alive.
Second, all he could see was Louella McCoy. Except this was a version that had strings attached, pupils acting more like lenses of a camera than filled with a soul and automated words that repeated the same introduction line. Lou Lou used to be someone, a child to a loving family, feeding on seeded bread of district 11. There was too much of a mystery around her, too little to know, but enough for Haymitch to want to keep her alive.
It was a few days later of walking, hands held tightly to keep each other close and safe after an unfortunate turn of events with Ampert, did they run into trouble. Haymitch had kept Lou Lou safe, ready to take any hit this career was dreaming of inflicting, only for it never to come. The shot of a poisoned blow dart in the neck of the career had stopped any grueling action for the camera's eyes, all from a head of blonde hair carrying a weight of white cloak over her arms. Wyatt, alive but barely. When the danger was cleared she had dragged his unconscious body over to the two, relief clear on her face.
Since then they had set a camp, far up the hills and managing to find safety for the days they’d been there. Wyatt had woken sometimes, delirious and quiet with eyes that refused to believe what was going on. He seemed to firmly believe that he was already dead. Eyes that were dark and tired, imagining he was surrounded by his only friends. Haymitch had helped feed him some crumbled food mixed with fresh water whenever he woke up, but those eyes, they were so heartbroken.
Whatever hit he’d taken for Lou Lou at the start had gradually gotten worse over the days. Haymitch was thankful he had landed in the arms of Maysilee instead of someone else. While they couldn’t do much, they would at least help stop him from bleeding out.
During their little camping days with no one to talk to but each other, they had grown a lot more. Lou Lou would hum her songs from home when the stars shined above, lightbulbs flickering from high above. Haymitch would be in charge of feeding and keeping the others warm, his flint striker gaining a silver like smudge the more he used it. Lastly, Maysilee had taken the roll of stories while her hands used whatever they had to create some type of bandages for Wyatt’s back, usually from whatever tarp was okay to cut off and wash.
She would take the blood stained tarp off Wyatt’s back every night, rinsing it with rainwater they caught during the storms and wrap it back around while telling them about Merrilee. They’d learnt the little pranks they’d pull when the two were younger, swapping with each other in classes or getting away with lies by blaming the other. You could tell through her voice how much she missed her sister, but she’d step up on that stage again and again as long as it meant Merrilee would stay safe.
“Before I left to go up, she had whispered to swap places.” Maysilee admitted one quiet night in the arena, a cannon had gone off in the far distance moments before, but after checking with an unconscious Wyatt they were relieved to know it wasn’t him. Slowly, all four had been huddling closer each night, taking solace in the comfort that came from being together.
“Did you consider it?” Haymitch asked curiously, carving a small apple gifted by a sponsor. Each slip of its skin he handed over to Lou Lou, she seemed fond of the skin more than the actual fruit.
Maysilee shook her head firmly. “Never. I refused to even let it be a possibility.” She fiddled with the poisoned flowers she gathered earlier in the day, crushing them into a sticky pulp to stuff into her poisoned darts. Apart from the cannon from before, there were no more sounds that interrupted their peaceful sleep later into the night.
They all still thought it to be strange, to get to live in the same spot for so many days with no event. Just what was going on out there?
One day, it seemed whatever they were doing to help Wyatt had started to pay off. He wouldn’t talk, but he’d be awake and observing everything around them. Sometimes he’d stretch his legs out and move his feet around like some odd little exercise. Other times he’d lay on the grass with his eyes on Lou Lou without blinking much, scaring Haymitch into constantly thinking he’d died like that.
For a while it appeared that this was the way to go, grouped together after connecting the remaining tarp into one long blanket and taking turns sleeping in shifts. High up in the mountains, unaware of the danger of a young girl brandished with an axe approaching their way. Regardless, Haymitch found himself more unnerved by the chances of having to kill his friends if they are the last to remain alive.
It had been the morning when the final turn of the second quarter quell began. Wyatt was strong enough to stand, but he hadn’t spoken a word since. They had all agreed to start packing their items away the less tributes that were left. Maysilee had been counting and keeping track of names. Their decision to finally move came from realising poor Wellie was alive somewhere. She was yet another duckling that Haymitch wished was with them, her doe like eyes still remembered from the training arena.
Together as four, they descended down the mountain carefully, with breaks to make sure Wyatt didn’t overexert himself. Every now and then they’d hear the sound of an unfamiliar creature squark or growl, unsure if it was ever the same one. Haymitch kept guard at front with a blade in hand, Lou Lou walked behind him with her head down watching her shoes make prints into the dirt ground. Behind Lou Lou was Wyatt and Maysilee, the boy walked slowly with his hand clasped tightly around his token like it was his lifeline. The blonde behind him stared holes into the blood stained streak on the back of his clothes, as if some kind of mark of doom that Wyatt could die any minute.
When a young scream erupted from the arena, Maysilee was first to ready herself with her blow dart It was clear who the voice came from. Wellie, poor, sweet Wellie. Against their unspoken promise to not split up, Haymitch was the first to break it as he sprinted off in the direction of her scream. Maysilee wanted to shout his name, but bit back her tongue and clenched her hands into fists.
What could she do? She couldn’t leave the others alone. With a stressed sigh she kept Wyatt and Lou Lou close to her before setting off in the direction Haymitch ran off too.
Half way down the hill she heard the sound of a sharp axe dive into stone multiple times, no doubt Silka’s choice of weapon hacking into the ground and missing Haymitch’s flesh time and time again. When Maysilee and the others passed a bush, she could finally see them down below, covering Lou Lou’s eyes before the girl could see just beside the fight, was the headless body of Wellie.
It took a lot to keep her stomach in check, but Maysilee knew this was a fight she couldn’t help in. Silka was not only strong but calculative. It would take one miss of a dart for her target to change from Haymitch to Maysilee, and with two other friends relying on her for safety, she couldn’t risk it.
But god, did her feet slip when Silka’s iron axe slashed into Haymitch’s stomach. The small amount of food they’d shared together this morning was ready to shoot back up. It was only when she took a step down the hill did Wyatt grab her by the arm, silent and shaking his head.
She knew how he thought after the days together now. We can’t risk losing you too, Maysilee.
Keeping hidden by a well grown bush, it wasn’t long before Haymitch’s scuffed steps brought him back up the hill. Only he didn’t stop, he kept walking, away from them hidden when it was obvious he saw them by a glance. What the hell was he doing? The answer came in the form of a wounded Silka chasing after him, her blind rage towards the boy tunneled her vision enough that she never saw the three huddled away like a pack of frightened animals.
It took all of Maysilee’s strength not to abandon her friends, even if the only target was running further away. But she knew well enough that the second she walked off, the games would drag Wyatt and Lou Lou six feet under through whatever trick they had prepared for them. Gas, bombs, animals with a thirst for blood, every way to die was on the table if she left them alone for even a moment.
So she sat in the bushes, head on Wyatt’s shoulder while her arm slinked around Lou Lou to keep her from wandering off, eyes closed and praying that if she hears a cannon in the next second, it won’t be Haymitch. Therefore, the moment that fateful boom signalled an end to either a friend or a foe, Maysilee tightened her hold around the young girl and willed the tears in her eyes to not fall.
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Sometimes, the hunger games change their rule book as quickly as the next sunrise, adding and taking away different possibilities that could determine that year's victor. More often than not, these rules are only placed to feed the growling audience that chanted for change after falling particularly fond of certain tributes, or for the sake of their bets.
During the twelfth day of the second quarter quell, such a change had happened yet again in the audience's hearts. For double the tributes, there was no telling if citizens would care about all of them. Although each tribute had their own ways of standing out, in an arena of forty-eight, it was difficult to keep track of them. Except to the surprise of everyone, watching the four tributes of district twelve slowly form a home within themselves through the way they fed each other, sang, tended wounds and slept huddled like a family of birds in a nest, it thawed their frozen hearts.
The minutes after the cannon fired and Maysilee heard the walking of a stumbling figure, her mind already picturing the bloodied Silka holding her brother's head in her hands, was she instead surprised when a hand nudged her to open her eyes. She didn’t want to trust it, even if it meant her last moments alive were the darkness of her eyelids. But the hand on her arm persisted, until a voice spoke.
“Maysilee..” Wyatt whispered by her ear, the first word he’d spoken in what might have been weeks as he shook her arm gently. That alone was enough for the girl to finally crack open her eyes. To her fear the first thing she laid her eyes on was her reflection in a blood stained axe, until she saw it held by the boy she’d been so worried about. He lived, oh god he lived.
“Haymitch-” she choked up, removing herself from the other two to stand. Her legs shook but it was better than whatever hunched over posture Haymitch had going on, arm tight around his stomach to fight the blood threatening to spill out. Even still, he gave a cocky grin and accepted the careful hug Maysilee gave him.
With the biggest danger of the games wiped, though by Haymitch’s eyes it must have been heavy on him to deal with Silka, the days they had alone to their thoughts provided a small ounce of sympathy for careers the more they realised they were just victims like the, the group settled into the same routine as before. Maysilee checked Haymitch’s wound, winced at how deep of a gash it was. While the girl wasn’t sure how bad Wyatt’s was on the first day, only managing to find him passed out around the second night, she knew this was bad.
Yet she tried her hardest to at least keep his guts from falling out.
It felt natural now, for the four of them to huddle around the newest hurt friend and care for them. Lou Lou helped Maysilee with the same emotionless look in her eyes, a thought briefly passing Haymitch about how desensitised she was to this, while Wyatt searched through their packs for anything to eat. The work was enough to forget where they really were, what the real situation was now. They were the last tributes, and only one was allowed to be victor.
On the other hand, that was only the current rule established for this year's games. The change happened the morning of Silka’s death. Haymitch had begun to run a fever similar to Wyatt the first few days he was injured, but this was far more worrying. He struggled to eat and keep anything down, sometimes whispering to the three to just kill him already so one of them could win. He was losing life by the second, knowing the chances of bleeding out of infection were highly likely.
Outside of the cameras, every eye from Panem was growing a love for them. There was something special about the four, their slowly forming family becoming popular as the days went on. Popular enough that when Haymitch looked paler by the minute, weak and coughing up blood, the chameleon coloured citizens roared for their survival.
Then, that night in the arena, the second quarter quell announced the change in rules. An announcer's voice spanned the whole of the arena hesitantly informing the final four that they would win. No explanation, no details to the suddenly confused remaining tributes, because it wasn’t important. All that was important was keeping an audience. And because of popular demand, their lives were saved.
The news briefly stunned the group. In the blindness of the dark, they found each other's hands, holding tightly. This could be the trick. The games were sly like this, any change in rules could just be a white lie, enough to lower their defences before they strike with something new. But time passed agonally with nothing new. It wasn’t until the familiar humming of the hovercraft broadcasting its arrival did some of the tension in their grips relax, metal claws ready to snatch them away into a place crueler than death.
Because this didn’t mean their sealed fates were free from death's binds. Earning the capitol's endearment enough to tilt the games in your favour was as secretly forbidden as any other trick the capitol covered once citizens grew bored enough to forget. The targets burned into the backs of their skin only grew.