A shattered mind, you decided, was a beautiful thing to witness.

Oh, you've seen cracks before, gazed upon the hints of madness both forced to the surface by your own coercing and already festering well before you'd ever laid eyes upon it. It wasn't difficult to find idiots back in Eight, those with more money than common sense that laid eyes on your cousin and found it easy to be talked into supporting him. The satisfaction you got from outsmarting them came every time one of his fights ended with you a bit richer and them slack-jawed and empty-pocketed was priceless.

Jacynth Voclain was something else entirely. Her cracks had already widened well before you'd met her within the arena, and the shattering of her sanity along with the trajectory of her life dipping into madness was exquisite. She'd stopped your spear mid-stab (which had actually caused a jolt of fear within you because you forgot just how fucking strong Careers were), then laughed an insane laugh and, far from turn it against you, had driven it into her own chest - all to prove a point.

Even today, you're not quite sure what it was she was trying to prove. She was still dead a sunset and sunrise later, and you were still absent a major thorn in your side on your route towards home. But, you'd learned long ago that there was no arguing with insanity, no convincing the brainwashed that their ways are wrong - and if Jacynth's own twisted version of victory involved a suicide with your own weapon, then who were you to complain?

Your trek out into the unknown had cost you two allies but gifted you six glittering shards of ice much more like the weapons you'd utilized in the training center instead of the spears you lugged around. It was a conscious choice as well as a practical one - sure, you'd spent the better part of the last few days intentionally making sure your throws were less than stellar to lower the expectations of ally and enemy alike, but there was still an annoyance to be found when you had actually tried to kill someone - like with Twelve, like with Jacynth - and your results were somehow worse than when you were flubbing it. So the ice knives represented familiarity, smaller, more compact, and somewhat easier to use than the spears.

With you and Charlie returning to the Cornucopia, your faithful beasts in tow but minus two warm bodies you'd initially set out with, it marked a turning point. You'd counted the faces in the sky - not quite as many as the previous day, but enough. Seen Jacynth and Vervain join the boy from Seven and the girl from Eleven who had journeyed with the group that had ultimately killed Mona - and if your math was correct, their faces marked a full half of the arena dead as a doornail.

Interesting to note that your plan was nearing the endgame of its phase - keep yourself healthy and fresh while using the others as shields to maximize your chances of reaching the end - you had also passed an important checkmark noted by any who took a healthy interest in Games-related statistics; there was now no possible way for you to place worse or die sooner than your cousin had.

Ike O'Nyle had placed twelfth, dying on the sixth day against a boy from Eleven when he'd tried to take on the wonders of modern technology with nothing but his own two hands. All you had to do to beat that was wait, let another tribute die or another day pass by to avoid that strange coincidence - but what did you care about beating some sort of record? Twelfth, twenty fourth, or second, dead equaled dead. Ike was dead, along with the boy who had killed him and so many others of Games' past and potentially Games future as well.

His namesake, the wolf from the beginning, still tottered at your feet, tongue lolling as you arrived back at the Cornucopia - another equivalent, for Ike had been killed at the place it had all began as well.

You would not be so unlucky. You were not nearly as foolish as your hard-headed cousin had been.

Plans within plans, layers within layers. That's why you'd kept to the sidelines of any fight you found yourself in, tempered your expectations accordingly so that your allies did the hard hitting. An ally to murder instead of its enacter; hence why Jacynth notwithstanding, you still found your hands clean and your soul pure from any kid that had found their way in the arena.

That was not a surprise. You never were supposed to until the end, anyway.

Layers within layers, plans within plans. Paint yourself as a silent observer without much skill, and you'll get ignored in favor of louder, more threatening individuals.

A plan that comes to a head with an ambush, the only warning coming in the form of three words - “Damn it, Shy!” - as a familiar brown shock of hair reveled as the boy from Two, followed by the ever-talkative boy from Eleven each appear from the shadows. One comes from the front, the other from the back - and in seconds, Charlie Smith from Six has been pierced from opposite ends by two separate blades.

Another shield, utilized perfectly on the path to your victory. Another sacrifice, whose blood must spill for yours to continue to flow.

But it wouldn't do to saunter away and let Charlie be butchered as you walked off. What would stop the boys from coming and finding you and finishing the job, then? Fight your way through here, maybe even help Charlie with another dosing of murder, and that's one more ally you have by your side - one less potential enemy to strike you first instead of the other way around.

Besides, Charlie Smith is not Jacynth Voclain. She's someone who's proven herself strong, reliable - the perfect muscle to guard you had you both been born in Eight or Six. Or, perhaps, even a step further - someone you might have truly considered a friend.

Either way, at the end of the day her life benefits you more than her death, at least right now. So you take the first knife of ice in your hand and ponder the two boys in front of you.

The deceptive threat, the Career, the boy from Two. The talkative revolutionary, the fiery underdog, the boy from Eleven. Both notable on your threat list. Both with a strength that you are not sure you have the power to match one on one.

“Guess there’s a reason we keep coming together,” says Eleven, and you smirk in response.

"Perhaps," you reply, fiddling your knife from one hand to the other. "After the display we gave a few days ago, it's no wonder the Capitol brought us back for more."

Two, Eleven, Two, Eleven. Two. Eleven. Which do you strike? Which represents a greater threat to your plan?

You decide with the hand of fate, letting your knife sail through the frostbitten air to bury itself in a stream of warm red blood.

⚔️

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel,
and until after they rebelled they cannot become conscious."

The wings of fate chose the boy from Eleven to smite, the boy who had entered the fight on the fourth day shouting platitudes about revolution and carving into Mona with an almost rhythmic precision. He was like you, in a sense - an underdog many had clearly underestimated, given his prowess and the fact that you still stood on opposite sides of a battlefield two days after the numerous injuries you'd dealt him alongside your fallen ally left a trail of blood in the snow.

His body seemed mostly put back together, if his spirit seemed a little more subdued. Far from the fire you'd seen in him before, he seemed calmer this time, mellower, even as his blade - the one Mona had wielded, you note - carved another chunk of flesh and blood out of Charlie, this time around her leg. A far superior display when compared to your own ill-fated attempt at murder with your own new weapon - though your knife had cut, it was a far cry from the devastating blows that Charlie and your respective opponents were dealing and receiving in turn.

Logic states that you should not be worried, yet. No one, not even the most prodigious Career, could pick up a weapon they'd never seen before, let alone used, and turn into an instrument of death right from the get go without a fair bit of luck filling their sails. Your new knives might be more familiar, more like the metal blades you'd fought and killed with back in the training center, but they were still different - made of ice instead of steel, crude instead of finely hone, yet they sit almost comfortably in your mittened hands - one in each, with three more at your side waiting for their own chance at blood.

You glance at Charlie, see her starting to stumble even as her trademark snark that you'd grown to appreciate remains strong. As fast as the attacks came, as heavy as her own first blow landed, the human body is only conditioned to take so much. Even the warrior's spirit must be extinguished eventually, lest it burn through any and every thing that crosses its path.

“Sometimes in life you have to make the best of bad choices.” Eleven speaks again while Two remains curiously silent, making you realize you haven't heard a single word that the reanimated corpse from Two has uttered the entire time you've been in the same proximity with him. Is that a side effect of being pushed to the brink of death and revived again, or was it a conscious choice made in the light of a truly unique situation?

The unspoken question doesn't interest you for long, so you refocus your attention back on Eleven.

“No one’s ever going to be perfect. Least of all revolutions." You raise an eyebrow - for again, that was different rhetoric than the fire that had burned through Mona two days prior, even if the color of the flame remained the same. "You can’t change anything if you aren’t willing to get messy.”

Stronger yet more restrained, quieter yet more focused, the boy from Eleven finds himself a paradox in every sense you bother looking. And again, your mind travels back in time, to another boy from Eleven who had interacted with one named O'Nyle that had displayed a shocking similarity - cowardly yet tough as steel, weak as glass yet strong as a mountain, one who had countered your cousin's fiery spirit and then claimed another soul as his own before meeting his end to a girl from his own home.

The deja vu would have unnerved you had you not already numbed yourself to emotions like fear and hatred.

"Interesting way of looking at things," you comment lightly, as if you were talking about the weather on a nice stroll instead of dueling to the death in a frigid arena. "Not so different from my own, actually."

Hadn't you taken ahold of your own fate, defied everything you had known, to seize your fate with your own hands and take ahold of your destiny instead of being washed away by the tidal wave of certain doom?

The boy from Eleven was more like yourself than you thought, even beyond the lofty role of talented, headstrong underdog from a lower district. He was smart, and skilled, and could adapt from years of the same to a role better suited for him in the span of a few days - just like yourself.

In another world, perhaps that would be enough to earn your respect.

In this one, all that does is make him dangerous.

So you bring one hand back, aim right for the boy from Eleven a second time, and fling your knife of ice at him without any hesitation holding your muscles in its paralyzing grip.

⚔️

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel,
and until after they rebelled they cannot become conscious."