against all odds // hunter-gatherer v badder bitches v ezra

[ im a lil tipsy writing this so pls pardon any errors xo ]

I curl around JJ like a lifeline.

I know that he probably doesn't actually really want me to, know that Will has been the one that he turned to every night for comfort, for somewhere warm to lay his head, but—losing Helle leaves something hollow in my chest that I don't know how to make sense of. Just the same, when Emmett's face shows up in the sky, I'm very suddenly aware of how much I had cared for him, no matter how much I had tried to provoke him and taunt him and—ruin him, I realize quietly. I'd tried to ruin him. I've never grieved before, not really, didn't even grieve for the girl that I used to be when I killed my stepdad with a pair of kitchen shears to the neck.

But still, lying there in the dark, despite a lifetime of sleeping on my own, the absence of Helle makes me want to scream. So I cling to JJ, try and tamp down the sense of unease and anger that starts to boil in me every time I think about Will, and Meredith and Will, and the promise that he wouldn't kill her even though her ally had just killed Helle. Helle, who had done only right by us, who had been kind and taken care of each of us in her own way, worked her witchy magic to do what she could to protect all of us. I don't know if I really believe that she was cursed, but she had magic in her.

That much I'm sure of.

And the arena reminds me of her magic when all of us wake in the morning, step out into the storm and realize that the entire place has slowly started to sink. It feels like my mourning made corporeal, like the pain and anger that's flooding me has flooded into the entire god damned arena.

But the surprise at the water doesn't last long before there's three other tributes emerging from the horizon and have to rub the sleep from our eyes. 

We all scramble to come back to ourselves, to prepare ourselves to fight, and it takes me a long moment to fully realize that it's Kenji who's gouged his knife into my bicep. The pain there is hot and horrible and nothing I haven't experience before but it still—hurts. I remember him on the rooftop, throwing himself over the edge and grinning through the pain, laughing at him, thinking he was hilarious. Thinking that in another life, I'd have wanted to be his friend.

"I wouldn't attack you," I say, voice hollow. Is that who I am? All that I am? The girl that would be willing to kill anyone? He's—he's not wrong. But it's a hard truth to realize. "I wasn't going to attack you," I go on, eyebrows furrowed. My target was going to be the other one, the one alone, the one that I didn't know and hadn't had to ever think about—Kenji and his ally, I think her name is Steel, I wouldn't touch them unless we were the only ones left.

But then JJ is trying to play hero but he has the wrong target and then the kid is fucking dead, chest caved in, and all the breath leaves me as I dive towards him. "We're leaving," I say, gritting my teeth and grabbing JJ at the elbow. I look at Will, eyes hard. "None of us is fucking dying today."

The way she looks at him today, Will Johnwayne is pretty sure that Terra is mad at him. The fact that he's figured that much at least is a miracle in itself, but it's beyond his abilities to figure out what for. He has his guesses: He's received gift after lavish gift from Capitolite benefactors who've likely as not staked unfathomable sums of wealth on his ability to outlast the others. One such gift, his beautiful bone-hilted dagger, did not bury itself deep enough in Cyro Krane's neck. Most likely, though, it's because his body was not the one in the path of the blade that put Helle in the ground. The Johnwayne boy has enough experience with all the different flavors of resentment to know that grief-born grievances are bound by logic the least.

It's okay. As long as he doesn't wake up with a knife buried in his stomach, it he doesn't mind it — he's used to ice — and instead he wakes up the odd man out from the middle-district cuddle puddle, and then again to the flood.

JJ rouses them, looking wrecked, but as high-strung and panic-prone as ever. Will is less concerned with the water than the sleep he's missing out on — it's not like he's never been soggy before — but generously refrains from grumbling too much as they pack up the camp.

The thunderstorm sees to it that keeping their gear from getting too wet is a wasted endeavor, but he swallows his complaints even when the feathers of his decorative wings cling to his back, even when the straps holding his vambrace begin to chafe against his shirt, even when the airborne petals adhere themselves to his rain-soaked head.

Idly, he wonders how the unread letter in his pocket is holding up against the rain, if the ink has bled illegible into itself, if the folded up water-and-blood-color drawing pressed against it has rendered the whole thing red.

He's so busy pawing the bits of flower off of his face mask that he hardly notices when a handful of other tributes enter their vicinity. Words are exchanged, and Will slides up his rose-covered mask in time to see JJ heave his mace into the chest of a boy he doesn't recognize. He doesn't need to hear the cannon sound over the distant thunder or to see the wound at all to know that this boy is dead; it's written on JJ's face before his momentum comes to a complete stop.

He doesn't hear the words exchanged with the other kids on the scene — each of them looking worse for wear than Kill Will and his ilk — but he groks the meaning well enough. Terra grabs JJ by the elbow, tugging him from the scene, tugging something near the Johnwayne's intestines, and the words rush in all at once as Will's brain catches up to present: "None of us is fucking dying today." "I'm done being a victim." "Let's go." "Don't you dare —" "I wasn't going to —" "We're leaving." "Go away!"

Nobody wants to fight today but Will Johnwayne, and no one is giving him much choice in the matter. He sighs and stashes his dagger back in his cloak, too tired today to pursue his would-be prey. "Fine," he agrees. No one — else — is fucking dying today. If that's how it needs to be, so be it.