SEVEN. [Yaa]

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It wasn’t until she was safely away that everything sank in.

Deimos Lasner was dead.

Her number one idiot.

She couldn’t get the picture of it out of her mind. One second he had been staring straight into her, just about to say something, and the next.. he wasn’t. The tears and the blood remained on his face like scars, and he would never be able to wipe them away. He wouldn’t cry again, or smile again, or laugh again. Wouldn’t turn to her with another dumbass comment that she could roll her eyes at.

Yaa, I –

Yaa, I –

Yaa, I –

His last words played in her mind on a loop. But what was he going to say?

Yaa, I want you to take my token back home.

Yaa, I don’t blame you.

Yaa, I’m sorry.

She could let herself think of anything so long as it eased her mind. That maybe – just maybe – he believed that she was completely capable of making her way back to District Seven to give his token to a loved one. That he understood she was next to useless in battle and didn’t blame her for it, didn’t blame her for the way she inadequately wielded her weapon to defend him. That he, at the very end, was sorry he couldn’t stay longer. Sorry that he was leaving her, leaving Mik and Andal, leaving his family and friends and everything he had ever known.

Yaa wasn’t going to be the same. She had passed through that invisible barrier between blissful ignorance and harsh reality, and the world just wasn’t going to let her pretend that these people would still be with her from day to day. In the end, that was the problem with the way Deimos Lasner had looked at her: somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that he would die. If she had indulged herself and let any flicker of a feeling slip through the cracks, she would have fallen, would have stayed right there by his side and fought those two killers with her bare hands even if it meant her own head rolling in the dirt. Even as the situation stood, her mind felt like it was imploding to the point of no return, thoughts crashing against each other in complete chaos except for an unwavering phrase repeating itself like an echo.

Yaa, I –

Yaa, I –

Yaa, I –

I – I what?

She told herself that it didn’t matter. He was dead. It didn’t matter. They were just words.

Holding the button down on her walkie talkie, she breathed in and then out again, readying herself to say something that she wasn’t sure her allies would even be able to hear.

”You guys,” she began, voice a whisper. ”I don’t.. I don’t know if you’re there, or if you can hear me, or if you’re even alive.. but Deimos is dead.” She paused. Breath in, breath out. Steady. ”The boy from Twelve chopped his head off.”

She didn’t want to hear what they had to say in reply, so she shoved the walkie into her rucksack and hoped that the other supplies would muffle any noise. Maybe they were alive, and maybe they weren’t; she couldn’t think about any of it with the anger burning so violently through her mind. And what if she had stayed? What if she had retaliated? Deimos’s life had been beyond saving, but she could have fought. If nothing else, she could have attacked his killers in a last ditch effort for revenge, could have done something, but she only ran. Even with a weapon as menacing as a scythe, she couldn’t kill anybody. The death she had caused in the Bloodbath had been a fluke, a small scratch that had shoved the girl past the point of survival. Nothing she did could save anyone. Hell, she probably couldn’t even save herself if the situation demanded it, and she felt completely and utterly powerless.

Among other things.

More than anything, Yaa wanted to do something. Anything. She was beginning to learn her limits, and if she could not fight, the least she could do was prepare for the worst. Sitting there in the dirt between the stalks of the bizarre tree, she stitched up her wounds and did the only thing that made sense.

She looked towards the sky and yelled. Not to pray to her mother’s God – he could do nothing for her – but so the cameras would be able to see her face clearly as she made her request. She didn’t care if the Capitol was watching her so long as her mentor was somewhere out there, listening and taking notes.

”Here, listen to me! I need supplies, just like we talked about.”

Please, please let me have sponsors. At the very least, she figured the odds were decent. She was a pretty girl with a big shiny 10 to her name – won by cleverness alone – but the Capitol didn’t have to know that. They could believe anything they wanted about her for all she cared, so long as the money was landing in her mentor’s pocket.

And then it was time to wait.

The first thing she did was investigate the wound she had received in the fight. It hadn’t even come from a weapon, but from one of the bizarre plants snapping forward into her face. Her tooth was gone, and when she touched the spot where it fell out a stab of pain surged through her gums. When she pulled her fingers back, blood had gotten underneath her fingernails and covered her hand almost entirely, but she didn’t move to wipe it off.

Instead she smiled and used her blood to paint a ragged-looking 7 on her forehead and down her nose.

A few moments later, her items began falling from the sky. They fell one by one, and when she looked up she couldn't actually tell where they were coming from. A Capitol hovercraft? She imagined the people up there, tossing them to the ground one-by-one with alarming accuracy as if the parachutes were programmed to land within five feet of her.

And so she set to work.

[Uses first aid for -3, needle and thread for -5, receives a shovel, 6 ropes, 2 tarps, and 4 tripwires]

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