in the bone area of your skull | fleur, day 6

She retreated into the dark of the shed once the area had cleared out, wood creaking beneath her feet as the door clicked shut behind her. The air smelled of mildew, and Fleur convinced herself that this was the reason she couldn’t breathe, not the dreadful feeling that had left its teethmarks in her chest. It’d been barely 24 hours without Thread, and now it was twenty odd minutes without Thad, no one to hear her ragged breaths in what was a once a halfway point between here and flight. No one around to see her moment of weakness. She hated it.

She removed her drawstring from her back, skin grazing the crusty red handprint she’d left there days earlier, and began to feel for her bandages. The gauze unspooled by pure muscle memory alone, not by any conscious act, and she removed off just enough to wrap around her torso. Her fingers shook as she attempted to remove her shirt — which at a real camp would probably be so far out of regulation with all the damage it had withstood — and treat the wound. She tried one, two, three times to secure the bandage around her abdomen, only for it to slide down or the knot to come undone, or, or —

Fleur threw the bandages to the ground with a frustrated grunt, the sound barely echoing through the room. She stared straight ahead for a while, fists opening and closing at her sides. Eventually, she stretched one hand to her side, fingertips brushing against the wall, feet starting forward. She felt along the wall until she found the space where one wall met another, and the moment her bottom began its descent to the ground, the tears began to flow. Pitiful sobs filled the silence in rapid succession as Fleur slumped in the corner, knees to her chest and forehead braced against the wall.

It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t supposed to be so fucking hard — sure, she’d given up on “easy” at the reaping, but Fleur never expected, never wanted to become attached to anyone in this forsaken place. Yet, in the absence of that joy, the quiet moments of feeling understood, the knowledge that at least someone was in her corner, she was left to confront the staggering disregard she held for the people that dared to pop her painfully optimistic bubble. The contempt she’d had for Bellamy and Liara. The sheer disgust she’d felt towards Mauve, and the burning need to turn the suffering she’d inflicted onto others on her. The blinding rage she’d felt, now, thirty odd minutes ago, toward the tributes that had collectively decided Thad’s life was worth nothing, that Thread’s life was worth nothing.

A voice at the back of Fleur’s head piped up, ”everyone’s acting for their own survival,” and the ease with which she dismissed the idea should have been startling, but of course it wasn’t. She didn’t care why the other tributes did what they did, didn’t care who they might want to go home to, no matter how hard she tried, no matter how much she thought she should. None of them deserved it. (Neither did Fleur, but she knew that already.)

Every transgression against them was a necessary evil. Every transgression against her was personal.

How many of them were left, anyway? She hadn’t been counting the cannons, and the faces in the sky left her memory as soon as they wormed their way in. She’d yet to see Avriel among the dead, but who knew what’d be there once night fell? Quietly, she hoped he would go before she saw him again.

After what felt like an eternity, oxygen began to return to Fleur’s lungs, and her cheeks burned a little less. She allowed herself ten more seconds before rising to her feet, returning to where she’d abandoned her medical supplies. She patched herself up. She released her hair from disheveled, waterlogged braids and tied it into a ponytail with Thread’s scarf. She wiped her face dry once more.

If Fleur died here, it wouldn’t be because she begged for it. Her legacy would be cemented here, not as the heir to the Adroxis throne, but as someone who fought until the very end.

She had a game to win.