peanut butter // [54th Throwback]

Arbor Halt —

He's only ever seen the Cornucopia in videos.

Shaggy brown hair in his useless eyes, florets of blood blooming in the slush at his feet as they rolled down his hunting knife and gave in to gravity. Blue in red — his district partner, the first tribute from District Twelve whose blood was on his hands.

Never in Arbor Halt's well-past-fifteen years of misery did he return to the Arena. Not once.

And yet, here he stands, a man grown and a man withered since the last time he's seen — no, since the last time either of these girls have seen him. He doesn't recognize their faces, not well — he'd never committed them to memory, had only seen them in the few clips and recaps he could not shut off quick enough.

Eyes closed, however, he knows that this was always meant to be his final resting place.

"Joke's on the devil," he muttered to himself, black words muffled by grey beard. "This hell wasn't half so bad as the one I left it for."

"Lucky bastard." This girl he can't quite place, though... though from inside the cornucopia, the cadence is just right, and from the recaps, this must be "Windy Mathers", he decides aloud, with her traps and —

"The fuck you just say to me? I'm fucking dead." His ears perk up because he may not know her face, but there's absolutely no mistaking —

"Zinnia Yaren," he remembers, a slim smile cracking his face. Fondly. Half the Games he'd spent scared shitless of the girl from District One, even as she and Ailia dragged his sorry ass half to hell and back. He'd gambled on her, on them, when she'd decided Archer wasn't worth keeping around, and for better or worse, it payed off. He'd won.