DTT: Round One, Dmitri vs Grim

I don't deserve to be here. I'm not one of them.

Adder's knife plunges into my side as she exclaims about freeing Panem. The world greys itself out, taking my will to push back against her along with it. I think of my brothers in those moments before blackness, praying to god that they wouldn't fall into delusion like some of the people I shared my last breaths with.

Low hums radiate from the darkness. Shards reattach themselves into my view, repairing my sight block by block. I see the world through a green filter I'd remembered all too well. An army jacket I wrapped around myself when I was cold or just wanted to feel him when he was away. The knife in my hand still drips Adder Ames's blood as if it had never left my palm.

The world is reconstructed before my eyes, but there's still something completely abnormal about it. It's not the same as I left it when even the lands left undamaged by the war were still tattered in disrepair. Pristine is the best way to put it. This is what I imagined fine dining in the Capitol to be like when I was a boy. Except, well, there are no tables, just a ring with myself on one side and a blonde woman on the other side.

"Did you bring me here? Did you do this to me?"

"...No?" I stammer, head shaking confusedly.

She swipes. "You're going to die here if that's what has to happen."

I jump to the side, out of the way of her frustration. "No! No, I'm Dmitri. From the Hunger Games. District Two, you know? I didn't do this to you."

The tip of my blade flickers in the corner of my vision. "But if it's a fight you want, then fine." I swing at her, just as I did Adder only a few minutes ago.

The knife doesn't so much as pinch her cheek. There is an emptiness in my gut as if I'm still bleeding out from the shots Adder and the other girl had forced into me. I watch as she pieces together the words I speak as if it's from a new language. "District Two, that was my home, too." My foot leaves the taped ring. Studying her face, memories of District Two come flooding back. My brothers and I would watch the outside from my bedroom on the second story, the war unfolding before our eyes. Who were the loyal ones, and who were the rebels? Her face, though, I can't place it. If she was from District Two, it certainly wasn't my side from which she came.

"Maybe we could've met under different circumstances. In a different life." She disrupts my focus, plunging the shimmering blade into my chest. I can't decide whether it hurts or not. Of course, it's a knife burying into my stomach, but no part of my body feels real. The joints that flinch on instinct are string moments away from ripping in two. "Ow."

She reminds me of Adder, I think. Beyond the fact that they're both women from District Two. They both fight as if that's what they were born and raised to do. "Were you a rebel too? Is that how you got stuck in here?" Maybe the Capitol realized I was their golden boy after all, and they're letting me fight the rebel scum for fun. "Trying you out for the 2nd Hunger Games?"

If this is a loyalty test, I'll prove myself to be the number one boy.

"What if I was?"

Then I'd have to kill her. The thing about the Dark Days in District Two was that nobody was on the same page. We had the most Capitol loyalists. We armed ourselves and gave everything, for some of us our lives, for the Capitol rule. Selfish people thought an uprising would solve all our problems. Create peace and fairness.

Fairness. It didn't seem so fair when rebels waltzed into my home and shot Ma n' Pa for keeping a few Capitol soldiers in our basement.

"What if I wasn't?"

If she wasn't a rebel, then I doubt she'd be here. Why else would she be getting punished in the ring?

"Would it matter?"

"Yes." I whisper. Immediately. Instinctively. Her knife slices at my neck, and every piece of me winces in reaction. It should hurt. Pain should hurt. My throat growls as any throat that just got painfully slashed should.

The bones in my neck crack back upright to respond in full. "Yes. Are you loyal to the Capitol or a rebel to them? Whose side are you on?" Until she gives me a satisfactory answer, the fight must go on.