they've broken me darling;i'm all ruined now.:|:.Kite

Water filled his shoes from the holes on top and went rushing out through the back. Kite ran, as fast as he could in the rooted swamp, following the sounds of the tree.

"Wait," he called out, fingers reaching forward, "Come back!"

It didn't seem to want to listen to him and Kite heard it getting further and further away. The sound of it's leaves rustling as it walked grew quieter and quieter with each step until Kite could no longer hear it at all. He stopped then and bent over, breathing hard. He listened but all he could hear was his breaths, shallow and quick.

"Celia?"

There was no answer, no sound of movement.

Oh.

Kite had forgotten that running meant going away and usually that meant getting lost.

He stood still in the swamp trying to decide what to do. He knew that if you got lost you were supposed to stay in one spot and hope for the best but the problem with that was that Kite didn't know if they'd look for him. What if they decided that they were better off without him?

After a moment he decided to find a bit of dry ground to sit on. His legs hurt from all the running in the swamp water and his brain hurt from working too hard to keep the memory of what he'd just done out of his mind.

Kite sat there quietly for a moment, splashing his feet absentmindedly in the swamp water. Birds chirped overhead and he felt the sun on his face. For a moment it almost felt like home. Home was hard to remember. He could recall the scent and the sounds but the feel of it was nearly gone. He'd spent cold nights in four and he'd spent some nights in fear but it hadn't been anything as bad as the arena.

He was covered in someone else's blood without reason.

Kite knew he would not make it out of the arena alive.

He was destined to die here, he could feel it in himself just as everyone else could. Four hadn't had a victor in many years, with so many great careers before him he had no chance of escaping alive.

He sat on the hard packed dirt quietly, listening to the sounds of the morning with the air of the condemned. There were no goodbyes to be made, nothing to say to the water and trees that he hadn't already whispered to it in his sleep. He was glad to die in a place as beautiful of this but he only wished he could smell the ocean air one last time. He wished he could eat fish instead of grass.

He tugged his back pack off and reached in, hands searching for food. He'd taken all he could carry of the dead body he'd tripped over and he'd felt the weight of a canteen as well as something small and round. He licked his lips, weighing the full canteen in his hand. He hadn't been this thirsty in a very long time. He remembered one year in four when there'd been a water ban and everyone had had to boil water.

Finding water then had been hard, he didn't have a way to boil water unless Boss gave him some.

Even if he was thirsty, he still had to be careful.

He brought the small round thing up to his nose and sniffed it carefully. It smelled sharp, chemical. While everyone else stared at pictures of plants and memorized them, Kite had gone to each station and listened carefully, feeling the items in the medical station, smelling plants and items.

It was an iodine tablet.

He would have to wait fora half an hour and then he could finally have a drink. The thirty minutes would be agonizing but Kite did not mind, he was very good at waiting.

He popped the pill into one of his canteens and pulled the mutt meat out from the day before. Or had it been the day before that?

Dane had been to kill the mutt.

Dane was dead now.

Kite held the meat in his hands for a moment, Canteen resting against his side. He heard a splashing in the distance and he wondered what it was; perhaps a mutt or maybe a tribute.

The splashing moved on.

He brought the meat up to his mouth, it had been cooked carefully on a fire the night of the killing but Kite wasn't sure if it would still be okay to eat. If it wasn't, he was going to die within the next few days anyway and he was hungry. It was good reasoning. He took a bite of the meat and chewed carefully. It was flavourless and stringy but it was one of the most delicious things Kite had eaten in the past week, which was not saying much.

He took another bite and hummed quietly to himself. He had no way of telling time, but he was a good counter and he also knew if he hummed 'twinkle twinkle little star' about sixty-eight times then it was around the same amount.

The swamp sounded beautiful, mother nature was writing her own music. Kite knew that the arena was completely fabricated but life had a strange way of taking over if one let it. It was already claiming it.

He reached up while he chewed and scratched his face, fingers running over encrusted dirt and blood. It was uncomfortable, even though he'd been homeless he'd liked to find a way to clean himself at least once every few days, he'd never been so dirty in his life. Kite reached into his bag again, this time his fingers found some leaves. He must have picked them up from the body.

If they were poisonous he didn't care much. He put them in his mouth with his next bite of meat, the combination even better.

He smiled at nothing in particular and turned his face up towards the sun, strangely happy.

He could die in the next ten minutes and he didn't think he'd mind much.

He'd always wanted to travel a bit and he'd gotten to do a lot recently. Not many people could say that.

Rooting around, his fingers wrapped around something else.

He pulled it out of his pack in confusion, brow furrowing at the strangeness in his hands. It was small and sort of rectangular with rounded corners. It felt waxy and when he drew his nail down it, some of it became stuck under his nail.

Kite brought it up to his nose and sniffed it experimentally, nearly dropping it in excitement when he understood what the smell was.

Soap.

When he died it wouldn't matter if he was clean or not.

He shrugged out of his pack, dropping it roughly on the dirt and then wiggled out of his clothes, unconcerned with the forest around him. His shirt was so encrusted that it was nearly impossible to get off, particularly with the burn on his neck. He grimaced in pain but did not slow down. He had to push the cuff of the handcuff under his sleeve first but was able to pull it off easily. His pants were off in moments and his underwear followed just as fast.

He set his crown made of flowers and his sunglasses to the side carefully, the scars around his eyes were barely noticeable under the dirt.

The sun was warm on his bare skin and the swamp water, despite being stagnant still held a slight chill. He slipped his feet back into his shoes and knelt in the swamp, rubbing at his skin and hair with the soap, using his nails to clean himself. He laughed aloud at how good it felt just to be clean for once.

His body was bruised and sore from the difficult days in the arena but after eating he felt better. Soon he could have a drink of water too.

He ran his fingers through his hair with the soap and felt a sticky strangeness in it. It wasn't blood but it was moist and when he brought it to his nose it smelled of iron.

He did not want to know what it was, he threw it far into the swamp.

He decided not to think about it and dragged his clothing into the swamp water to scrub clean as well. The soap smelled of lavender and vanilla ice cream. It was comforting to him, fond and faraway in this place.

He lost count of how many times he'd hummed the song so for good measure he decided to hum it twenty more times.

After he was done washing he spread his clothes out on a rock and lay back on the ground to dry.

The sun was warm and his belly was full, soon he'd have a drink of water too.

He was happy enough.

He wondered if everyone else was okay.

He thought about Basil and Danny too.

He wasn't sure what to do. Last time he'd seen them, Danny had told Kite to kill her, but he didn't think he could. He could feel her death on her ribs, the tender skin there from bruising. She was dying, she knew it. Kite didn't think he had to be the one to kill her, he didn't want to.

He sort of hoped she'd be the one to kill him though, her or Basil.

He was worried that Scout or Celia wouldn't be gentle enough.

Celia was very excitable about some things, death being one of them.

Kite sighed in exhaustion from all the politics and death. He tried not to think about the feeling of shoving a person's eyeball through their brain with a pointed stick.

It wasn't working.

He shut his eyes and slept.