Anthem - Day 8 IC

I should be used to it now, the sight of blood spraying across the snow. I should be resolute against the screams of children dying, breathing their last breaths.

Light from the control room's screens paints my features sharper in the dark and I shut my eyes against the replays and the news updates playing on every screen. I am overwhelmed by information. A mechanical man living in a mechanical age, but I know so well how it feels to breathe a last breath, to look death in the face and feel grateful that the pain would be over soon.

I had never paid much attention to the games before. Where I grew up, there was no television. When I was freed from there, the games was never worth my attention. The Fenwicks always had more important things on their minds and I was no exception.

Until now, it was like any other sport to me and therefore, irrelevant.

I stare at a screen dully, watching Bella Rose take a spear to the eye again and again. Blood sprays across the snow in an arc, too dark and too real. Blood never looks like that in films. Everything is a joke in comparison to this. I know she has died too soon but that feeling is repetitave, expected now. They all have. The spear pins her to the ground, a butterfly caught for display; just as beautiful, just as fleeting.

Dymas falls when he takes his own axe to his chest, having eaten the mushrooms that Nil left as a joke, sending him on a trip too heavy for this fight. Blood drips from it where it stays wedged into his chest, long after Finley has left him. I suspect the axe is tainted now by the death at the hands of it's weilder.

When we collected his body, now in a cold drawer beneath me in the basement, the axe was set aside to be archived. A weapon such as this one was too memoriable. They would make toys of it and children would play at being Dymas, the career from four who fell to his own axe.

On the next screen, Violet Salazar, the girl who had proudly proclaimed that she wouldn't need sponsors is slayed by Aeson, the deranged boy from six. That confidence did not follow her nito battle but it did get her much further than expected. I wonder how jacinta must have felt in that moment, as I'm sure the rest of the world did too. She won't be left alone, reporters will fall on her like vultures, hoping to catch a tearjerker for the tabloids tomorrow.

The last career falls, bringing the last canon's blast for the day on the screen beside Violet. Even in death Euley is graceful, hair spread in a halo on the rusted red snow. Slain by a tribute from twelve, it's somehow poetic.

She could have been great if her talents hadn't had to be wasted in the arena. Her training station echoes in my mind and I watch her all over again. She'd known how to put on a show and now she was dead at half my age. I hadn't barely lived then. Now she never would.

I watch each screen as their deaths replay again and again, eyes flicking back to the children that still live, huddled in the dark, eaking out any warmth that they can.

A rush of relief fills me. They'll be dead soon.

This will be over soon, this endless torment will end.

What kind of monster begs for the death of children?

The kind that has his freedom in sight.

I play the anthem, watching the faces of the dead flash across the sky and it somehow has become less real now. The horror I have felt has become numb and I know that something in me has been broken. I am no longer a rookie Gamemaker, I am a piece of a puzzle, a conformed man.

I gaze at Aeson's screen as the anthem plays, searching for some sort of reaction from this cold boy. When Euley's face lights up the screen, I am surprised to see one. He punches into the snow hard with his broken hand, a groan of pain falling short in the blanketed quiet of the snowy night.

And just like that I am reminded that even the devil feels pain.

I watch them all into the night, cherishing their final moments for them. Some sleep fitfully, others like the dead. Perhaps they soon will be. There is a mild feeling settled in my stomach and I strangely feel at peace. I think of the tributes below me, twenty of them, cooling in the dark. They no longer have fear or feeling of want or need. They have found their freedom, their peace.

And I feel derangment eating away at this sleep-deprived brain.

I think of the gun in my desk drawer.

Perhaps mine will come soon too.

[dars]