.live it out! {katie toute seule//day7}

After six days in the Arena, Katie Morven had been finally learning how to play the game. The rules, she had decided, were really quite simple: the first was to sate physical necessities (since to not do so would be death, and somehow that did not seem to be the point - why would it be?) and the second was to not notice the increasing lack of people, because thinking about it was...prohibitive. Maybe they were all hiding, she'd thought. Or just somewhere else by chance. Katie even considered the idea that they'd been avoiding her because of some petty dislike. There was a third rule, too - not to remember what life was like before the Hunger Games - but that one was negligible to the girl because she did not have the ability to break it.
Those had been the rules.
And then Katie Morven killed Zuka Faybi.
It was awful, far too awful - up until that point she'd been able to ignore, reject, deny the existence of death and killing and everything, but now - she was dead and there was no way to fix it. Seconds melted into anxious minutes as Katie knelt by the limp body, unsure, eyes clouded. Still in denial; stillstillstill but she had to move, had to go, because the hard ground hurt under her knees and every millisecond spent in nonmotion built upon the frustrated void in her chest pulling her away as it had pulled her for days. On and on, Katie had walked relentlessly from place to place, because when had staying felt like an option? Movement was the only way to satisfy the apathy monster because staying meant giving in to sure insanity. A girl of poignant emotions was now being stifled by a need to live. But she followed rule number two, followed it like a law, because not doing so would have broken number one.

Slowly the girl rose to her feet and began to walk; but murder had bound her. Dead as she was, Zuka was still holding Katie in the area with fingers that slipped but refused to unclasp.
The seventeen-year-old was able to walk maybe thirty yards before she realized that she could walk no more. Tethered.

Yet when she returned, knowing somehow that return had to be done, the body was gone.

No. No no no, I did not imagine a girl lying there, no no no, mayb- she's just been taken, maybe she- what if I-? no no no no no! forget, just forget, there's no use, there's no use.
That was the moment Katie Morven broke, irrevocably, the second rule. Because she did not forget, could not forget, and for once in her life was forced to realize that she had done something really really terrible which could not be wiped from her mind or anyone else's - and so how could she not notice? People were disappearing from the Arena but it wasn't because they were safe or home or even hiding; it was because they were dead. Killed. And she'd done that, she'd taken this fucking inhumanity of a weapon and made herself an extension of it!
Katie had let herself become an extension of her own fear, and now Zuka Faybi was dead.

Opening her rucksack numbly as she sat down on the red-damp ground, the seventeen-year-old wept bitterly. She wept for the loss of a teenage girl like herself, she wept for the boy from the other eon day - did I kill him, too? I thought he was just passed out - but mostly, selfishly, Katie wept for herself. It was a collapse of the system; while she consciously comprehended it only as the breaking of a rule, the truth was that she had broken a pact inside herself to do the right thing in every situation. Always she had clung to what was good and moral, because it made her side of the argument all the easier to justify and her over-active conscience all the easier to placate; but this was one side that no one could argue for. The system broke down and began to crumble, and Katie crumbled with it. Her expression melted into shudders and tears, shoving mushrooms into her mouth and bitterly enjoying the way they complemented the salt coming from her eyes. Too much was too much. The blood on her ground, the vivid and permanent images in her mind: this was not going to go away: not now, not ever. Gasping in a halting but enormous breath as if it were her first after near-drowning, the girl sunk into a new bout of sobbing that left her prostrate on the ground, curled up on her side with chin almost touching her knees, unable to breathe because her nose was clogged and inhaling from her mouth meant tasting blood in the air.

Soon, Katie thought, there will be no one left.
I will be utterly alone.
And I will have to break rule number one.

Failing to rise from fetal position though she knew (urgently) that she should, Katie vomited. Yellow-brown liquid and chunks of half-chewed mushrooms dribbled down the side of her face and fell with reluctance to the ground. She attempted to swallow, but that only doubled the taste in her mouth, leading to another round of throwing up. Pitifully, the girl was too tired and devastated even to twist enough to avoid getting vomit on her own face; stubbornly, she wondered what the use of such an action would be, given that her face was already peeling with burns and caked with dried sweat, blood, and tears. She tried to go to sleep but could not; the stench was unbearable.
So finally Katie rose enough to drag herself to a (slightly less blood-muddied) spot a few yards away that did not reek of vomit, taking her rucksack with her. A few deft, if shaking, moments later the top was off her water bottle and the girl drank desperately, keenly aware of that sensation from a few days before of sandpaper-throatedness and the acid burn left over from her fit of nausea. Water helped, and maybe it always would - it was a pretty neat substance - and soon the teenager passed into a fitful unconsciousness brought on by overwhelming misery and days of exhaustion.