when you should be dreaming [Tom]

The Games break time. That happens sometimes anyway; Aranica doesn't lose track of time so much as find herself once in a while reeling in the sudden, acute feeling that time has lost track of itself. Decades after the painful, vague space following her Games, it's neither new nor difficult to work through. But it's always worst in this handful of days where, simultaneously locked to the Arena clock and swept up in the perpetual whirlwind of screens and cameras and papers, she would barely know the day if not for the Anthem.

On paper, someday, the first day of the 79th Hunger Games will look uneventful. Practically bloodless. In the moment, it's a frenzy of gore and shouting that Aranica would hate if she had the emotion to spare. Ping Lanhua dies in an instant that lasts forever, but there's no time inside of it to mourn. Aranica can't take her eyes off the screen for more than a handful of breaths, and she spends most of those looking at paperwork as the first round of post-canon sponsors, having seen their chosen tributes avoid dying on a mine, finally start sending in money.

After the children scatter she slides shoes back on, tucks her umbrella under one arm, and finishes signatures as someone leads her half-seeing into an interview with some podcaster who wants to hear her updated thoughts now that she's seen Gabriel and Cassia in action. She bullshits her way through it with practice but not ease, thinking of Ping with a spear in her eye and Carex with a falchion in his eye and biting back a fifteen-minute scream because trusting Arbor and Heron and Stella doesn't make it easier to sit here crawling through the seconds while their tributes—while all twenty-three tributes—hurtle toward danger.

After the interview Bellezze meets her at the door, demanding to celebrate the Twelve tributes' survival. Aranica humors the blatant attempt to make her eat a meal as long as she can do it next to a television, but she's barely three bites into her sandwich when someone else fetches her for a paperwork snag with Gabriel's sword.

(Twenty-four years ago, she never could have imagined these tiers of bureaucracy. It's still hard to wrap her head around seeing all that pain condensed into papers and numbers. She thinks her hands smell of ink, but can't tell through the haze between her mind and her body and the other part of her mind whether she's imagining it.)

Somewhere in the haze, the Anthem passes. Only Ping's face appears, and Aranica hates being able to feel relieved at seeing it, but how can she not?

As one after another the tributes settle in for the night, Aranica jams herself into the corner of a viewing room couch and dozes. Practice and anxiety keep her awake enough to jolt upright every time someone walks by or an announcer raises their voice, but nothing comes of it until, overdue and too soon, she opens her eyes to Bellezze shaking her and scolding her for not changing her clothes. To her room, then, to mechanically change into the outfit laid out there, new umbrella and all—one thing, at least, that she doesn't have to think about.

She makes it back to the television in time to see Cassia and Zion kill an oculin, Cassia ducking blows as gracefully as she did on the first day.

Gabriel dies.

Aranica gives herself one long ragged breath with her hands pressed against her eyes before she pulls out one of the drafts she keeps pocketed, one she personalized for Gabriel two days ago, and reaches for a pen to finish it. That always feels vaguely dishonest, but not having something ready by the time a reporter reaches her feels worse. The tributes and their loved ones deserve better than her tripping into saying the same thing every time, even if at the heart of it there's only so much to say: I'm sorry. You aren't mourning alone. They won't be forgotten.

The winner of the race is the same podcaster from yesterday. Today someone on the other end of an earpiece keeps her updated on the feeds, and once Aranica has given her statement the podcaster passes pieces to her for comment. None of it is surprising: casual gloating and clumsy condolences, followed by people angry at Gabriel for wasting their money, as though a life is somehow worth less than a backpack or a bet. She answers on autopilot, filtering her anger, until the podcaster finally signs off and tucks the recorder into her pocket.

"Off the record, you're holding up better than I expected."

Aranica holds her acorn. "Cassia is alive."

The podcaster gives her a considering look. "Still have your hopes up, huh?"

Cassia and Zion having food, without even having to pay blood for it, is a good sign. So was Gabriel making it to last night unscathed and armed.

"Of course," she hears herself say, and all but runs out of the room. In the hallway she skirts as pleasantly as she can around conversations that might as well have come straight from the feeds, and blatantly ignores her rock telling her to slow down, because there's no time to slow down. She has to keep an eye on Cassia. She has to check with the rest of the Twelve team to see what's happening with the rest of Gabriel's money, and check on Stella while she's at it—not everyone takes the first death under their watch poorly, but no one really takes it well. She wants to see her family. She has to—

You have to eat, the rock cuts in, firmer than before. That sandwich was a long time ago for a human.

That pulls her up short, because fuck, is that really the last thing she ate?

Y—

I know the answer, she says, only noticing after the fact that she's snapping.

The rock gets as close to huffing as Aranica thinks it's capable of, but doesn't argue when she still insists on checking on Cassia before anything else. She takes that as understanding, and compromises by going straight from the television to the dining hall instead of looking for her team.

For once, the time issue sort of helps. She won't skip offering a smile and a quiet thanks to the duo restocking the tables—one of whom gives her a tiny wave as strained as Aranica's smile, and the other of whom unaggressively but completely ignores her existence—but she can't afford to stare at the long tables, trying and failing to guess what her stomach will accept, the way she does during training. Instead she grabs the largest container on hand and shoves in anything in her field of view that looks portable. When she catches up with the rest of the Twelve team—or whoever she finds first, anyway—she can offer them something, and if that still leaves too much then she can eat sometime tomorrow without wasting time on another trip here.

It's a good plan. The rock agrees, which is probably why she fails to realize until she makes it down four hallways, feet automatically leading her back the way she came from, that she forgot to think about where to look.

Momentum broken, Aranica finds herself floundering in exactly the way she meant to avoid in the dining hall. Picking a place to start shouldn't be difficult, but her thoughts slide off one another between fast-slow-fast heartbeats. She can't hold onto any of it, can't even move her feet when she tries.

Just a moment here, she tells her rock, absently cradling the food and her umbrella against her chest and staring down the empty hallway ahead. Nothing is any less urgent than it was five steps ago, but leaving this spot feels like a task in and of itself now, and she just—needs a second. That's all.



Title song is Metric's "Ending Start," but this was mostly written while listening to Thao & Mirah's "Hallelujah," which probably explains something about why the tone of it is not remotely what I was aiming at when I started outlining*.

*tfw you outline a post in line with the site timeline for once but then you take three weeks to actually write it so it ends up set a little in the past anyway