Set Fire to the Rain (Part III)
Title: Set Fire to the Rain
Category: Drama/Horror
Rating: FRT
Pairing: Prentiss/Doyle, Morgan/Prentiss (if you squint)
Summary: Emily Prentiss has done the unthinkable - a Capitol girl who volunteered to compete in the annual Hunger Games to save her best friend from a sure death.
Author's Note: AU. Based on The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, though not technically a crossover. Written for the cm_bigbang.
Derek groaned as he rolled over onto his stomach and attempted to raise himself onto his hands and knees, coughing hard, blood bubbling along his split and swollen lips.
He remembered searching the woods, a little worried that he had stumbled upon a cougar or a bear or some other aggressive beast, judging by the noise it was making, and then... He wasn't sure what had happened then, but judging by the way his entire body ached, he'd gotten into some sort of fight.
He tried to get to his feet so he could figure out where he was and how to get back to Emily and the others. But before he could, someone came rushing to his side and attempted to force him to lie down again.
He stubbornly resisted the hands on his shoulders, intent on regaining control of the situation. “Derek, lie down!” a female voice - not Emily - demanded, “You're going to bust your stitches open!”
Hearing that, he gave in and lay back down. “What do you mean stitches?” he asked, confused about how he'd gotten stitches in the middle of the arena. With a second thought, he added, “And who the hell are you?”
He was answered with a container of water being pressed to his lips. “Drink this. You've lost a lot of blood and we need to get some fluids into you.”
“Answer me!” He was starting to get flustered. “What's going on?”
“Calm down,” the girl urged, moping his brow with a handful of wet moss and, judging by the sting, cleaning a few wounds. “You were attacked by that District Two boy...you're lucky he didn't wait around to finish you off. You wouldn't have lasted much longer if Will and I hadn't found you.”
“And who exactly are you?”
She stopped what she was doing and moved to allow him to see her clearly. “Jennifer, District Eleven. Call me JJ.”
“Why did you save me?” The question that was bugging him the most about this whole situation.
She pressed a finger to her lips - they couldn't safely discuss it when there were Capitol camera everywhere. Instead, she lifted his shirt to expose his wound, swatting his hand away with sharp reflexes when he tried to stop her, and continued cleaning him up.
“You're going to have to be careful for the next few days - we did the best we could to patch you up, considering the supplies we had. But I'm more worried about infection.”
“How exactly did you stitch...”
He was interrupted by distinctly accented male voice as someone else entered the shelter - he assumed this was the Will the girl had mentioned. “They're army ants. We ran into a nest a few days ago, kept a few of them to use as a weapon, but they come in handy as a quick suture.” The look on his face must have been quite disgusted because Will quickly explained, “You just hold 'em by the head, let the pincers grip the edges of the wound, then snap off the body. They're not poisonous and they've got an antibacterial secretion.”
Derek was still concerned, but JJ stuffed a wad of bread into his mouth and demanded he rest.
******
Emily had learned to read Matthew pretty well, for the short amount of time that they’d actually spent in each other’s company. But she wouldn’t have had to read him in order to learn that he didn’t really trust Ian. He made no secret of the fact.
But whatever it was that made Matthew so skeptical, Emily just couldn’t see it. And Matthew would do anything for her, so he continued to go along with her. Not without suggesting nightly that they cut their ties to Cindi and Ian and make off on their own...but he stayed with them nonetheless.
Emily had always sworn that she was never going to fall for any man, but Matthew had held onto hope. He could see that she was falling for Ian, though, even knowing that there was no possible way this could end well for all of them. He wanted to believe that it was the stress of the Games that was wreaking havoc with Emily’s sensibilities and that if things had been different, she would never have given Ian a second look if they’d met in any other situation.
She wasn’t like most girls - and even less like most Capitol citizens - and that’s what drew him to her. It also made her nearly impossible to predict and that was where the problem lay. Maybe she was just playing Ian for sponsors (they’d certainly been receiving a lot more gifts since he’d joined their party), but he just couldn’t be sure.
He swore to himself that he’d never truly trust Ian; that he’d never sleep while Ian was awake, that he’d never leave him alone with Emily, that he’d never go unarmed in Ian’s company. The expression Emily would shoot him whenever he acted suspiciously towards Ian cut him deeper than any knife ever could, but as much as she thought she was protecting him, he had sworn to himself to protect her even more. So he continued to be vigilant and forced himself to endure her glares.
He just hoped he’d have a chance to explain himself to her before his cannon went off.
Ian, on the other hand, seemed to find it almost amusing the way he would hover distrustfully in the background like Emily’s little guard dog. He would smile knowingly and soothe Emily’s displeasure with assurances like ‘Let him be, Love, he only means to show that he cares.’ (Matthew hated the way he called her ‘Love’, ever so slightly condescendingly and sickeningly self-assured...but he hated even more the way it made Emily’s cheeks tinge the faintest pink and immediately seemed to have her eating out of his hand.)
Matthew simply couldn’t understand how Ian had managed to worm his way into Emily’s innermost circles of trust. She didn’t trust anyone, Matthew wasn’t sure that even he had earned her utmost confidences. And yet, this boy from District Two, the one that everyone in the Capitol favoured to win without even trying, the one that they’d seen snap the neck of the little District Eight boy at the Cornucopia had Emily practically worshipping him...
He was starting to think that she wasn’t nearly as hardened and unfeeling as she so desperately wanted everyone to believe...maybe she really was just a fragile little girl who wanted nothing more than to have somebody care about her more than anything in the world.
The worst part was that he knew he could’ve given her that...if only he had been given the chance to try. And now he would never know because he would die long before Ian. He and Emily were always cursed to never be more than a question mark.
******
Each day the ring of mountains became steadily steeper, funnelling the tributes into the valley - but it also directed the wildlife into the valley as well. Whether it was the increased wildlife or Gamemaker intervention, the food sources were drying up with exponential speed. And while they'd been getting more sponsor gifts since Ian had joined them, they couldn't survive on the gifts alone.
Ian had insisted on doing the hunting and foraging alone, despite the fact that both Cindi and Matthew had more experience and knowledge when it came to gathering edible plants. Matthew made no attempts to hide his loud, angry rants about his distrust of Ian's motives and suspicions of what he was really doing while he was supposedly looking for food.
In fact, he was becoming increasingly certain that Ian was trying to secure his victory by gaining their trust in order to get them out of the way. It had gotten to the point that he refused to eat any food that Ian foraged for them and he begged the others to do the same.
And as his paranoia increased, Emily's frustration with him grew as well. She loved Matthew like a brother and wanted very much to protect him, but she just couldn't understand his suspicions and they were starting to get on her nerves.
******
Ian had insisted that he had found a patch of berries that hadn't yet been infiltrated by tributes or the herd of deer that had managed to outrun the predators.
But as she lay pinned to the ground by Ian who was doing everything in his power to stop her from escaping the safety of their hiding place, Emily was seriously wondering whether they hadn't inadvertently wandered into a Gamemaker trap.
They'd been busy filling their stomachs and their packs with berries when a strange sharp clicking reverberated through the surrounding woods. Not to be deterred from a bountiful food source, they'd continued gorging themselves, writing the noise off as nearby wildlife.
That is, until an extremely large scorpion - nearly twice as big as any of them - came skittering into the clearing with speed seemingly at odds with the number of legs. With a flying leap, launched itself at Cindi with foreclaws spread wide, looking easily capable of crushing a human skull as effortlessly as if it were made of butter. It latched one of its massive claws around her throat, choking off the scream she made, reducing it to a small mewl.
Ian had immediately grabbed Emily around the waist and threw her over his shoulder, then backed slowly and quietly into the trees. When they were safely concealed by a dense clot of underbrush and rocks, he set her back on the ground and turned to peer cautiously out at the fight.
When she had recovered from the immediate shock, she opened her mouth to ask him what he was doing and why weren't they out there fighting, but he seemed to sense this and clapped a hand over her mouth.
Matthew had rushed to Cindi's aid, aiming his bow and loosing shot after shot, but the scorpion's plates were dense as rock and the arrows deflected without so much as scratching the chitin. Realizing that his arrows were of no use, he started looking around in vain for something he could use against it; he had a small hunting knife hanging from his belt, but what he really needed right now was a sword or a spear, neither of which he was proficient in and both of which were in Ian's possession and he was nowhere to be found.
In desperation, he began picking rocks off the ground and throwing them at the arachnid, aiming for its red eyes that glowed like hot coals in the shadows of the forest. This only seemed to make it angrier and it began shaking Cindi like a ragdoll.
As Emily lay pinned to the ground, four more scorpion mutts emerged from the trees and she tried desperately to scream against Ian's hand holding back her cries. Their tails visibly dripped with venom as they swished through the air like whips with distinct snapping sounds.
It was immediately clear that Matthew wouldn't stand a chance against four mutts and Emily was thrashing wildly against Ian, mumbling pleas for him to help, but he was impervious to her begging. They both knew there was nothing he could do even if he had wanted to.
Several of the scorpions appeared to hold him down while another used its tail barb like a knife, slicing him slowly like a gourmet animal carcass at the butcher. Each slice filled him with poison which caused him to writhe and twitch in pain with the most horrible yowling cries.
And he still he fought with every ounce of strength, beating their shells with his fists and demanding they let Cindi go, as if they could understand what he was saying.
Before the mutts had a chance to finish off their prey and come looking for more, Ian once again had Emily in his arms, one hand still firmly clamped over her mouth, and they were retreating the way they'd come with deliberately placed steps to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The cannons fired just as they reached the safety of their cave and Emily's legs buckled out from under her as Ian finally set her down, sinking to the rocky floor where she pounded a fist against the ground, weeping and cursing him out with every foul word she knew.
******
Part of her knew that she shouldn’t be laying here, head in his lap, sobbing helplessly while he stroked her hair, telling her that it wasn’t her fault.
But it didn’t really matter what he said...she’d come here with the sole purpose of keeping Matthew alive and she had failed. She’d watching him being ripped to shreds, fighting against Ian’s grip on her, trying desperately to reach her best friend and unable to break free.
“Just leave me here,” she told him once her sobs faded into uneven breathing and sporadic hiccups, at the peak of her self-pitying. “Or better yet, put me out of my misery. I’ve got no reason to stay alive now that Matthew is gone.”
In a moment of weakness, he found himself wanting to apologize for having lead her friend to his death. More and more, he found her getting under his skin and he was angry at himself for letting himself become invested in her.
But he let the moment pass unheeded. “You are your own reason to stay alive,” he told her sternly. “You have nothing left to prove to Matthew or anyone else - you did your best to protect him, but you knew from the beginning that he still only had a one in twenty-four chance of surviving. That’s not on you.”
She remained unconvinced.
“What about for me, Love?” he asked gently, kissing the palm of her hand. “Would you stay alive for me?”
She stared at the spot where the touch of his lips seemed to have burned into her skin for what felt like an eternity before she looked up to where his eyes were waiting, trained on her as if she were the only thing in the world that existed in that moment.
When she looked into his eyes, she couldn’t help it. She nodded and felt her eyes inexplicably filling with tears again as he kissed her.
******
Emily fell asleep that night curled up against him, her head on his chest and he was very much conflicted.
He knew he was letting her get far too close. He'd gone into the agreement with her mother with the plan that as soon as it was wise to get rid of her, he would kill her just like he'd killed so many other tributes.
What he hadn't counted on was her finding a way past his walls and his guards and planting herself firmly in his head. He hesitated to say that he was falling for her because admitting it would make things so much more complicated, especially if his plan was to kill her in the end.
He was starting to doubt that he would be able to do that when the time came. He was also beginning to wonder if that hadn't been her mother's plan all along, knowing that he would plan to kill her and that he wouldn't be able to.
******
There was a point in the Games where everyone hit the wall, a point where you started to drown in the vastness and confusion of the sheer mental exhaustion. It wasn’t a matter of if you reached it, but when.
All things considered, Emily should have broken down long ago. Even she would readily admit that; she was possibly the least prepared tribute in the history of the Games. No one believed that she had any business in the Arena (not even her, if she were honest with herself). Whether because of that or in spite of it, she didn’t find herself running out of will to live until much later than anyone could have anticipated.
When she finally did, it hit her like a ton of bricks and there was nothing she could do but lay down in her path and let the sheer enormity of hopelessness overtake her.
Ian was at her side, trying his best to get her back on her feet - he had to keep her alive until it was only the two of them if he wanted the sponsor gifts to continue. There was only a handful of them left and by his best estimates, the Gamemakers would be anxious to get things over with in the next day or two. He only had to keep Emily going for a short while longer and then she would no longer be his responsibility.
“Up you get, Love, we can take a break once we reach water,” he promised, attempting to get her to support some of her own weight, seeing as she was currently like a ragdoll in his arms.
“What’s the point?” she asked quietly, her eyes hazy and unfocused.
Ian sighed and glanced over his shoulder, uncomfortable with how exposed they were. Part of him was tempted to just leave her there if that was what she wanted.
As if reading his mind, she told him, “Go ahead and leave me. It’s what you want to do.”
“I don’t... I never...” she started to contradict, but she didn’t let him finish.
“Or better yet, kill me.”
The frankness of it took him aback. Even though they all went into any alliance with the knowledge that they would have no choice but to kill each other before the end, there seemed to be a moratorium of sorts when it came to speaking of it.
“It’s what you’ve been planning from the very beginning, isn’t it?” She sat up and looked him in the eye, all traces of her defeatedness suddenly gone. “Tell me the truth,” she demanded.
“It isn’t that simple, Love.” He kneeled before her and took her hands in his, doing his best to become his most charming self.
“It is simple,” she contradicted, “It’s very simple. You lead Matthew and Cindi to their death. You killed Derek, didn’t you? You looked me right in the face and took me for a fool!”
She was asking, but she didn’t really need the answer.
Something in him seemed to snap in that moment. “You want the truth? Fine. Only one of us was going to make it out of here alive. You knew that, I knew that, they knew that. Your mother knew that. That’s why she asked me to look after you - she wasn’t just going to let you throw your life away for some boy from District Nine. She promised she’d make my life a little easier in the Arena if I kept you alive. And that’s exactly what I did. And I’d do it again.”
She pressed her balled up fists against her eyes and gritted her teeth, trying to suppress the urge to lash out and hit something. “I’m such an idiot,” she muttered.
“You can’t have honestly believed that the Capitol was going to let one of their own die while letting some rebel descendant’s whelp survive.”
Ignoring what he’d just said, she snapped, “I can’t believe I let you sweet talk me into believing that you actually gave a damn about anyone but yourself! Things were going just fine until I crossed paths with you and then my own stupidity threw a wrench in the plan. I fell for all your lines, I wanted to believe you actually liked me, but all you cared about was earning my trust so that you could kill the people who I cared about!”
The accusations flew rapidly and he had a feeling that they were going to lose him a lot of sympathy from the viewers, but he couldn’t bring himself to deny them, seeing as how they were all extremely true.
She ran her fingers through her hair in frustration, knotting her fingers in the tangled locks. “I killed them,” she breathed, “I might as well have given the death blow...it was my own recklessness that brought their death upon them.”
He opened his mouth to say something - anything - that might quell her distress, but he couldn’t quite manage without admitting the blame lay purely with him.
She turned to him, her eyes wide and glistening with approaching tears. “If you ever cared for me at all, I’m begging you...kill me. Please. I can’t live knowing that I let them die. You’ll get what you wanted, you’ll win. I don’t want to win if it means carrying this guilt with me.”
It was true that it had been his plan to eliminate all the others and then, when it was too late for her mother to do anything to stop him, he would kill her, leaving him the winner. But what he hadn’t counted on was growing to feel so attached to her. He knew how everyone viewed the tributes from District Two: heartless, soulless automatons bred solely for the purpose of killing. He supposed he had more or less lived up to that expectation thus far, but he was having trouble disentangling himself from the confusing web of thoughts as far as Emily was concerned.
He was no longer sure he could kill her, now that it had come down to this.
******
“Hurry up,” JJ urged as she dropped an armload of logs beside Blackwolf where he was placing them with surgical precision to form a carefully constructed pyramid. He'd instructed them which woods would burn the hottest since they only had a short time to heat the surrounding air.
“Are you sure this is what we're supposed to do?” Will asked, pausing to wipe the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. “If we're wrong and the deadline passes...”
She shushed him with a gesture of her hand, then tossed him a potato. “You tell me what else this is supposed to mean.”
“That we're hungry,” he shrugged, giving her a cheeky grin.
She raised an unimpressed eyebrow and snatched the potato out of his hand. “Then they would've sent us a number we can distribute between the five of us equally. Now shut up before we get into trouble.”
Derek gave them both a quizzical look, handing his collected tree bark with which to start the fire to Blackwolf. “Don't you think the fire is big enough already? I mean, they're just potatoes...we're not cooking a turkey dinner or anything.”
He'd expected the comment to elicit a laugh or at least a smile, but it got no reaction other than getting him shoved back in the direction of the trees and a command to collect some more tinder.
He was on the edge of the clearing when a sudden thought caused him to turn back, frowning. “What about Emily? We're going to find her, right?”
Blackwolf was instantly distracted from his task. “She's Capitol. She is why we're here right now and she is what we're fighting...”
Derek didn't let him finish before he tackled headlong into Blackwolf and landed several punches. Taken aback, it took Blackwolf several moments before he could recover from his shock enough to fight back.
“Don't you talk about her like that!” Derek hiss from between gritted teeth. “You don't know her! Just because she's from the Capitol doesn't mean she's anything like them!” Blood was flowing copiously from Blackwolf's nose at this point, though he had managed to land a few punches of his own and Derek's eye was already nearly swollen shut.
JJ was shrieking at them to stop, but Derek was too busy seeing red. Clyde and Will physically had to pull him off of Blackwolf before too much damage could be done.
******
Despite Emily's continued insistence that he leave her to die, Ian found himself unable to leave her. He'd known for days that he was letting himself get too close to her, despite his determination to remain impervious to her charm.
Now, he was about to pay for his weakness, apparently, as an alarm sounded from seemingly all around and he watched disbelievingly as a hummingbird jet appeared in the sky above them. The world around changed dramatically as what had previously only been blank sky became a series of other mountain peaks as far as the eye could see.
He was confused, looking about for an explanation when Emily leapt up and shot him an accusing glare. “What the hell did you do!?” she demanded, “Do you know what they do to people who piss off the Capitol?”
Before he could answer a crowd of a half dozen or so tributes came flat-out sprinting towards them and Ian immediately felt his protective instinct kick in. Without a word, he attempted to grab Emily and sling her over his shoulder the way he had on previous occasions and head for the forest to hide. He may have been strong and skilled with a weapon, not to mention the favourite to win, but he knew his chances of successfully fighting off that many opponents at once were slim at best; he needed to get the two of them to safety until he had made sense of exactly what was happening right now.
Emily apparently had other ideas, though. “What are you doing!?” she shrieked, fighting against his grip on her. “Put me down! What's going on?”
Her tirade was interrupted by someone calling her name, causing her to stop fighting, filled with disbelief. The owner of that voice was dead. She was sure of it. Ian had told her so.
She couldn't help it - she called back. “Derek? Derek, what's happening?”
His voice increased in urgency. “Emily! Stay there, we're getting out of here!”
She fought harder against Ian's arms around her. “We're getting out of here,” she whispered, somewhere between a question of disbelief and a relieved sigh.
He was still sure it was a trick, refusing to let her go lest they reach her and carry her out of his reach, beyond his ability to protect her, where his promise to take care of her would be broken. But anything further he might have done was interrupted when a current shot through the water of the arena and the one foot he had in the river was immediately sent into spastic convulsions, causing him to fall to the ground and drop Emily headlong into the dirt.
“Run,” he strangled out as the convulsions travelled up the length of his body, “Emily, go...”
But she wasn't listening. “They're going to save us, Ian,” she insisted, pulling him out of the water, refusing to release her grip on his hand.
There was a ladder hovering somewhere nearby and she was sure that if she could just get ahold of it, everything would finally be alright. The tributes that had been running towards them had all reached the ladder and were climbing towards the jet. Derek's voice was shouting at her, urging her to save herself, straining to be heard over the thrum of the jet engines.
The last thing she remembered before losing consciousness was the feeling of a wooden rung under the fingers of one hand and the sweaty palm of her other hand sliding against Ian's as she fought determinedly to save them both.
******
Emily returned to consciousness and almost immediately emptied the contents of her stomach over the side of the gurney she was strapped to, leaving her throat burning, since her stomach had been full of nothing but acid and a little dirt she’d managed to swallow during the scuffle.
Tears burned at her eyes as she attempted to work up enough saliva to spit the sourness out of her mouth. She coughed as her lungs seemed to reel from the shock of the violent reaction of her body.
There was the sound of an air-locked door opening and footsteps crossing the floor to where a curtain blocked her from taking stock of the room in which she was currently housed. She couldn’t remember anything that had happened after she’d pleaded with Ian to kill her and she had absolutely no idea where she was right now. She couldn’t really bring herself to care anymore.
Metal slid along metal as the curtain was pulled back and she quickly shut her eyes again, not particularly caring to have a conversation right now.
“Hey, Princess,” a voice murmured, work-worn hands brushing her dishevelled hair away from her face. “You pull a Whiskey Pete?”
She lay in silence for several moments, planning to act like she hadn’t heard, until the words sunk in. There was only one person in the whole world that called her princess...
She sat straight up, causing her stomach to heave painfully again and it felt like her entire body were trying to turn itself inside out. He pressed a gentle hand to her shoulder to guide her back down to the bed, then found some button out of her sight that brought the bed into a sitting position.
“You’ve gotta relax or you’re gonna bust your stitches open,” he warned her. “You’re already in for a long recovery, if I were you, I wouldn’t make it any worse.”
Her head was spinning from the effort of trying to make the things he said fit in with her knowledge of the situation in which she found herself. “Where?” she managed to croak out of her parched and stinging throat.
“We’re on a jet...we’ve gotta get out of dodge because the Capitol is sure to be pretty damn pissed about the stunt we just pulled.”
“What stunt?” she demanded in her raspy voice, getting distressed. “What happened? What’s going on?”
“Shh,” he soothed, trying to get her to lie back down. “You’ve gotta calm down or your doctors aren’t gonna let me in here anymore.” Her stern unimpressed glare, one he was no stranger to getting, brought a grin to his face. “I’m not supposed to tell you until they’ve deemed your stress levels low enough to handle it...I don’t tell it very well anyway, there’s some people you’ve gotta meet and they’ll do it justice.”
She sighed unenthusiastically, lips pursed, crossing her arms over her chest as she laid back.
He couldn’t help but laugh a little at her pouting. “Cheer up, Princess.”
She turned her head so that she could look at him with a steadfastly cheerless expression. Another question struck her and she couldn’t help but ask, even knowing that Derek probably wouldn’t be thrilled to hear it. “What happened to Ian?”
Sure enough, it was his turn to look displeased. “I don’t know - I was knocked out when they lifted me, Jayje, and Will into the jet. The Capitol probably got to him first.” Seeing her brow knit with concern, he couldn’t help but try to assuage her distress a little. “But I wouldn’t worry...District Two is the Capitol’s pet, I can’t imagine them laying a hand on anyone from there.”
******
“What are we going to with him?” Aaron Hotchner, District Twelve’s mentor, asked the room at large as he stared through the two-way mirror that looked into Ian Doyle’s cell. “We can’t just keep him locked in here forever.”
“We’ve got no choice,” Jason Gideon argued. “The Capitol is going to want him back. He’s the best weapon we’ve got against them. To let him go would be foolish.”
“I’m not talking about letting him go,” Hotchner pointed out, “We could always just kill him. He’s too dangerous.”
Category: Drama/Horror
Rating: FRT
Pairing: Prentiss/Doyle, Morgan/Prentiss (if you squint)
Summary: Emily Prentiss has done the unthinkable - a Capitol girl who volunteered to compete in the annual Hunger Games to save her best friend from a sure death.
Author's Note: AU. Based on The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, though not technically a crossover. Written for the cm_bigbang.
Derek groaned as he rolled over onto his stomach and attempted to raise himself onto his hands and knees, coughing hard, blood bubbling along his split and swollen lips.
He remembered searching the woods, a little worried that he had stumbled upon a cougar or a bear or some other aggressive beast, judging by the noise it was making, and then... He wasn't sure what had happened then, but judging by the way his entire body ached, he'd gotten into some sort of fight.
He tried to get to his feet so he could figure out where he was and how to get back to Emily and the others. But before he could, someone came rushing to his side and attempted to force him to lie down again.
He stubbornly resisted the hands on his shoulders, intent on regaining control of the situation. “Derek, lie down!” a female voice - not Emily - demanded, “You're going to bust your stitches open!”
Hearing that, he gave in and lay back down. “What do you mean stitches?” he asked, confused about how he'd gotten stitches in the middle of the arena. With a second thought, he added, “And who the hell are you?”
He was answered with a container of water being pressed to his lips. “Drink this. You've lost a lot of blood and we need to get some fluids into you.”
“Answer me!” He was starting to get flustered. “What's going on?”
“Calm down,” the girl urged, moping his brow with a handful of wet moss and, judging by the sting, cleaning a few wounds. “You were attacked by that District Two boy...you're lucky he didn't wait around to finish you off. You wouldn't have lasted much longer if Will and I hadn't found you.”
“And who exactly are you?”
She stopped what she was doing and moved to allow him to see her clearly. “Jennifer, District Eleven. Call me JJ.”
“Why did you save me?” The question that was bugging him the most about this whole situation.
She pressed a finger to her lips - they couldn't safely discuss it when there were Capitol camera everywhere. Instead, she lifted his shirt to expose his wound, swatting his hand away with sharp reflexes when he tried to stop her, and continued cleaning him up.
“You're going to have to be careful for the next few days - we did the best we could to patch you up, considering the supplies we had. But I'm more worried about infection.”
“How exactly did you stitch...”
He was interrupted by distinctly accented male voice as someone else entered the shelter - he assumed this was the Will the girl had mentioned. “They're army ants. We ran into a nest a few days ago, kept a few of them to use as a weapon, but they come in handy as a quick suture.” The look on his face must have been quite disgusted because Will quickly explained, “You just hold 'em by the head, let the pincers grip the edges of the wound, then snap off the body. They're not poisonous and they've got an antibacterial secretion.”
Derek was still concerned, but JJ stuffed a wad of bread into his mouth and demanded he rest.
******
Emily had learned to read Matthew pretty well, for the short amount of time that they’d actually spent in each other’s company. But she wouldn’t have had to read him in order to learn that he didn’t really trust Ian. He made no secret of the fact.
But whatever it was that made Matthew so skeptical, Emily just couldn’t see it. And Matthew would do anything for her, so he continued to go along with her. Not without suggesting nightly that they cut their ties to Cindi and Ian and make off on their own...but he stayed with them nonetheless.
Emily had always sworn that she was never going to fall for any man, but Matthew had held onto hope. He could see that she was falling for Ian, though, even knowing that there was no possible way this could end well for all of them. He wanted to believe that it was the stress of the Games that was wreaking havoc with Emily’s sensibilities and that if things had been different, she would never have given Ian a second look if they’d met in any other situation.
She wasn’t like most girls - and even less like most Capitol citizens - and that’s what drew him to her. It also made her nearly impossible to predict and that was where the problem lay. Maybe she was just playing Ian for sponsors (they’d certainly been receiving a lot more gifts since he’d joined their party), but he just couldn’t be sure.
He swore to himself that he’d never truly trust Ian; that he’d never sleep while Ian was awake, that he’d never leave him alone with Emily, that he’d never go unarmed in Ian’s company. The expression Emily would shoot him whenever he acted suspiciously towards Ian cut him deeper than any knife ever could, but as much as she thought she was protecting him, he had sworn to himself to protect her even more. So he continued to be vigilant and forced himself to endure her glares.
He just hoped he’d have a chance to explain himself to her before his cannon went off.
Ian, on the other hand, seemed to find it almost amusing the way he would hover distrustfully in the background like Emily’s little guard dog. He would smile knowingly and soothe Emily’s displeasure with assurances like ‘Let him be, Love, he only means to show that he cares.’ (Matthew hated the way he called her ‘Love’, ever so slightly condescendingly and sickeningly self-assured...but he hated even more the way it made Emily’s cheeks tinge the faintest pink and immediately seemed to have her eating out of his hand.)
Matthew simply couldn’t understand how Ian had managed to worm his way into Emily’s innermost circles of trust. She didn’t trust anyone, Matthew wasn’t sure that even he had earned her utmost confidences. And yet, this boy from District Two, the one that everyone in the Capitol favoured to win without even trying, the one that they’d seen snap the neck of the little District Eight boy at the Cornucopia had Emily practically worshipping him...
He was starting to think that she wasn’t nearly as hardened and unfeeling as she so desperately wanted everyone to believe...maybe she really was just a fragile little girl who wanted nothing more than to have somebody care about her more than anything in the world.
The worst part was that he knew he could’ve given her that...if only he had been given the chance to try. And now he would never know because he would die long before Ian. He and Emily were always cursed to never be more than a question mark.
******
Each day the ring of mountains became steadily steeper, funnelling the tributes into the valley - but it also directed the wildlife into the valley as well. Whether it was the increased wildlife or Gamemaker intervention, the food sources were drying up with exponential speed. And while they'd been getting more sponsor gifts since Ian had joined them, they couldn't survive on the gifts alone.
Ian had insisted on doing the hunting and foraging alone, despite the fact that both Cindi and Matthew had more experience and knowledge when it came to gathering edible plants. Matthew made no attempts to hide his loud, angry rants about his distrust of Ian's motives and suspicions of what he was really doing while he was supposedly looking for food.
In fact, he was becoming increasingly certain that Ian was trying to secure his victory by gaining their trust in order to get them out of the way. It had gotten to the point that he refused to eat any food that Ian foraged for them and he begged the others to do the same.
And as his paranoia increased, Emily's frustration with him grew as well. She loved Matthew like a brother and wanted very much to protect him, but she just couldn't understand his suspicions and they were starting to get on her nerves.
******
Ian had insisted that he had found a patch of berries that hadn't yet been infiltrated by tributes or the herd of deer that had managed to outrun the predators.
But as she lay pinned to the ground by Ian who was doing everything in his power to stop her from escaping the safety of their hiding place, Emily was seriously wondering whether they hadn't inadvertently wandered into a Gamemaker trap.
They'd been busy filling their stomachs and their packs with berries when a strange sharp clicking reverberated through the surrounding woods. Not to be deterred from a bountiful food source, they'd continued gorging themselves, writing the noise off as nearby wildlife.
That is, until an extremely large scorpion - nearly twice as big as any of them - came skittering into the clearing with speed seemingly at odds with the number of legs. With a flying leap, launched itself at Cindi with foreclaws spread wide, looking easily capable of crushing a human skull as effortlessly as if it were made of butter. It latched one of its massive claws around her throat, choking off the scream she made, reducing it to a small mewl.
Ian had immediately grabbed Emily around the waist and threw her over his shoulder, then backed slowly and quietly into the trees. When they were safely concealed by a dense clot of underbrush and rocks, he set her back on the ground and turned to peer cautiously out at the fight.
When she had recovered from the immediate shock, she opened her mouth to ask him what he was doing and why weren't they out there fighting, but he seemed to sense this and clapped a hand over her mouth.
Matthew had rushed to Cindi's aid, aiming his bow and loosing shot after shot, but the scorpion's plates were dense as rock and the arrows deflected without so much as scratching the chitin. Realizing that his arrows were of no use, he started looking around in vain for something he could use against it; he had a small hunting knife hanging from his belt, but what he really needed right now was a sword or a spear, neither of which he was proficient in and both of which were in Ian's possession and he was nowhere to be found.
In desperation, he began picking rocks off the ground and throwing them at the arachnid, aiming for its red eyes that glowed like hot coals in the shadows of the forest. This only seemed to make it angrier and it began shaking Cindi like a ragdoll.
As Emily lay pinned to the ground, four more scorpion mutts emerged from the trees and she tried desperately to scream against Ian's hand holding back her cries. Their tails visibly dripped with venom as they swished through the air like whips with distinct snapping sounds.
It was immediately clear that Matthew wouldn't stand a chance against four mutts and Emily was thrashing wildly against Ian, mumbling pleas for him to help, but he was impervious to her begging. They both knew there was nothing he could do even if he had wanted to.
Several of the scorpions appeared to hold him down while another used its tail barb like a knife, slicing him slowly like a gourmet animal carcass at the butcher. Each slice filled him with poison which caused him to writhe and twitch in pain with the most horrible yowling cries.
And he still he fought with every ounce of strength, beating their shells with his fists and demanding they let Cindi go, as if they could understand what he was saying.
Before the mutts had a chance to finish off their prey and come looking for more, Ian once again had Emily in his arms, one hand still firmly clamped over her mouth, and they were retreating the way they'd come with deliberately placed steps to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The cannons fired just as they reached the safety of their cave and Emily's legs buckled out from under her as Ian finally set her down, sinking to the rocky floor where she pounded a fist against the ground, weeping and cursing him out with every foul word she knew.
******
Part of her knew that she shouldn’t be laying here, head in his lap, sobbing helplessly while he stroked her hair, telling her that it wasn’t her fault.
But it didn’t really matter what he said...she’d come here with the sole purpose of keeping Matthew alive and she had failed. She’d watching him being ripped to shreds, fighting against Ian’s grip on her, trying desperately to reach her best friend and unable to break free.
“Just leave me here,” she told him once her sobs faded into uneven breathing and sporadic hiccups, at the peak of her self-pitying. “Or better yet, put me out of my misery. I’ve got no reason to stay alive now that Matthew is gone.”
In a moment of weakness, he found himself wanting to apologize for having lead her friend to his death. More and more, he found her getting under his skin and he was angry at himself for letting himself become invested in her.
But he let the moment pass unheeded. “You are your own reason to stay alive,” he told her sternly. “You have nothing left to prove to Matthew or anyone else - you did your best to protect him, but you knew from the beginning that he still only had a one in twenty-four chance of surviving. That’s not on you.”
She remained unconvinced.
“What about for me, Love?” he asked gently, kissing the palm of her hand. “Would you stay alive for me?”
She stared at the spot where the touch of his lips seemed to have burned into her skin for what felt like an eternity before she looked up to where his eyes were waiting, trained on her as if she were the only thing in the world that existed in that moment.
When she looked into his eyes, she couldn’t help it. She nodded and felt her eyes inexplicably filling with tears again as he kissed her.
******
Emily fell asleep that night curled up against him, her head on his chest and he was very much conflicted.
He knew he was letting her get far too close. He'd gone into the agreement with her mother with the plan that as soon as it was wise to get rid of her, he would kill her just like he'd killed so many other tributes.
What he hadn't counted on was her finding a way past his walls and his guards and planting herself firmly in his head. He hesitated to say that he was falling for her because admitting it would make things so much more complicated, especially if his plan was to kill her in the end.
He was starting to doubt that he would be able to do that when the time came. He was also beginning to wonder if that hadn't been her mother's plan all along, knowing that he would plan to kill her and that he wouldn't be able to.
******
There was a point in the Games where everyone hit the wall, a point where you started to drown in the vastness and confusion of the sheer mental exhaustion. It wasn’t a matter of if you reached it, but when.
All things considered, Emily should have broken down long ago. Even she would readily admit that; she was possibly the least prepared tribute in the history of the Games. No one believed that she had any business in the Arena (not even her, if she were honest with herself). Whether because of that or in spite of it, she didn’t find herself running out of will to live until much later than anyone could have anticipated.
When she finally did, it hit her like a ton of bricks and there was nothing she could do but lay down in her path and let the sheer enormity of hopelessness overtake her.
Ian was at her side, trying his best to get her back on her feet - he had to keep her alive until it was only the two of them if he wanted the sponsor gifts to continue. There was only a handful of them left and by his best estimates, the Gamemakers would be anxious to get things over with in the next day or two. He only had to keep Emily going for a short while longer and then she would no longer be his responsibility.
“Up you get, Love, we can take a break once we reach water,” he promised, attempting to get her to support some of her own weight, seeing as she was currently like a ragdoll in his arms.
“What’s the point?” she asked quietly, her eyes hazy and unfocused.
Ian sighed and glanced over his shoulder, uncomfortable with how exposed they were. Part of him was tempted to just leave her there if that was what she wanted.
As if reading his mind, she told him, “Go ahead and leave me. It’s what you want to do.”
“I don’t... I never...” she started to contradict, but she didn’t let him finish.
“Or better yet, kill me.”
The frankness of it took him aback. Even though they all went into any alliance with the knowledge that they would have no choice but to kill each other before the end, there seemed to be a moratorium of sorts when it came to speaking of it.
“It’s what you’ve been planning from the very beginning, isn’t it?” She sat up and looked him in the eye, all traces of her defeatedness suddenly gone. “Tell me the truth,” she demanded.
“It isn’t that simple, Love.” He kneeled before her and took her hands in his, doing his best to become his most charming self.
“It is simple,” she contradicted, “It’s very simple. You lead Matthew and Cindi to their death. You killed Derek, didn’t you? You looked me right in the face and took me for a fool!”
She was asking, but she didn’t really need the answer.
Something in him seemed to snap in that moment. “You want the truth? Fine. Only one of us was going to make it out of here alive. You knew that, I knew that, they knew that. Your mother knew that. That’s why she asked me to look after you - she wasn’t just going to let you throw your life away for some boy from District Nine. She promised she’d make my life a little easier in the Arena if I kept you alive. And that’s exactly what I did. And I’d do it again.”
She pressed her balled up fists against her eyes and gritted her teeth, trying to suppress the urge to lash out and hit something. “I’m such an idiot,” she muttered.
“You can’t have honestly believed that the Capitol was going to let one of their own die while letting some rebel descendant’s whelp survive.”
Ignoring what he’d just said, she snapped, “I can’t believe I let you sweet talk me into believing that you actually gave a damn about anyone but yourself! Things were going just fine until I crossed paths with you and then my own stupidity threw a wrench in the plan. I fell for all your lines, I wanted to believe you actually liked me, but all you cared about was earning my trust so that you could kill the people who I cared about!”
The accusations flew rapidly and he had a feeling that they were going to lose him a lot of sympathy from the viewers, but he couldn’t bring himself to deny them, seeing as how they were all extremely true.
She ran her fingers through her hair in frustration, knotting her fingers in the tangled locks. “I killed them,” she breathed, “I might as well have given the death blow...it was my own recklessness that brought their death upon them.”
He opened his mouth to say something - anything - that might quell her distress, but he couldn’t quite manage without admitting the blame lay purely with him.
She turned to him, her eyes wide and glistening with approaching tears. “If you ever cared for me at all, I’m begging you...kill me. Please. I can’t live knowing that I let them die. You’ll get what you wanted, you’ll win. I don’t want to win if it means carrying this guilt with me.”
It was true that it had been his plan to eliminate all the others and then, when it was too late for her mother to do anything to stop him, he would kill her, leaving him the winner. But what he hadn’t counted on was growing to feel so attached to her. He knew how everyone viewed the tributes from District Two: heartless, soulless automatons bred solely for the purpose of killing. He supposed he had more or less lived up to that expectation thus far, but he was having trouble disentangling himself from the confusing web of thoughts as far as Emily was concerned.
He was no longer sure he could kill her, now that it had come down to this.
******
“Hurry up,” JJ urged as she dropped an armload of logs beside Blackwolf where he was placing them with surgical precision to form a carefully constructed pyramid. He'd instructed them which woods would burn the hottest since they only had a short time to heat the surrounding air.
“Are you sure this is what we're supposed to do?” Will asked, pausing to wipe the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. “If we're wrong and the deadline passes...”
She shushed him with a gesture of her hand, then tossed him a potato. “You tell me what else this is supposed to mean.”
“That we're hungry,” he shrugged, giving her a cheeky grin.
She raised an unimpressed eyebrow and snatched the potato out of his hand. “Then they would've sent us a number we can distribute between the five of us equally. Now shut up before we get into trouble.”
Derek gave them both a quizzical look, handing his collected tree bark with which to start the fire to Blackwolf. “Don't you think the fire is big enough already? I mean, they're just potatoes...we're not cooking a turkey dinner or anything.”
He'd expected the comment to elicit a laugh or at least a smile, but it got no reaction other than getting him shoved back in the direction of the trees and a command to collect some more tinder.
He was on the edge of the clearing when a sudden thought caused him to turn back, frowning. “What about Emily? We're going to find her, right?”
Blackwolf was instantly distracted from his task. “She's Capitol. She is why we're here right now and she is what we're fighting...”
Derek didn't let him finish before he tackled headlong into Blackwolf and landed several punches. Taken aback, it took Blackwolf several moments before he could recover from his shock enough to fight back.
“Don't you talk about her like that!” Derek hiss from between gritted teeth. “You don't know her! Just because she's from the Capitol doesn't mean she's anything like them!” Blood was flowing copiously from Blackwolf's nose at this point, though he had managed to land a few punches of his own and Derek's eye was already nearly swollen shut.
JJ was shrieking at them to stop, but Derek was too busy seeing red. Clyde and Will physically had to pull him off of Blackwolf before too much damage could be done.
******
Despite Emily's continued insistence that he leave her to die, Ian found himself unable to leave her. He'd known for days that he was letting himself get too close to her, despite his determination to remain impervious to her charm.
Now, he was about to pay for his weakness, apparently, as an alarm sounded from seemingly all around and he watched disbelievingly as a hummingbird jet appeared in the sky above them. The world around changed dramatically as what had previously only been blank sky became a series of other mountain peaks as far as the eye could see.
He was confused, looking about for an explanation when Emily leapt up and shot him an accusing glare. “What the hell did you do!?” she demanded, “Do you know what they do to people who piss off the Capitol?”
Before he could answer a crowd of a half dozen or so tributes came flat-out sprinting towards them and Ian immediately felt his protective instinct kick in. Without a word, he attempted to grab Emily and sling her over his shoulder the way he had on previous occasions and head for the forest to hide. He may have been strong and skilled with a weapon, not to mention the favourite to win, but he knew his chances of successfully fighting off that many opponents at once were slim at best; he needed to get the two of them to safety until he had made sense of exactly what was happening right now.
Emily apparently had other ideas, though. “What are you doing!?” she shrieked, fighting against his grip on her. “Put me down! What's going on?”
Her tirade was interrupted by someone calling her name, causing her to stop fighting, filled with disbelief. The owner of that voice was dead. She was sure of it. Ian had told her so.
She couldn't help it - she called back. “Derek? Derek, what's happening?”
His voice increased in urgency. “Emily! Stay there, we're getting out of here!”
She fought harder against Ian's arms around her. “We're getting out of here,” she whispered, somewhere between a question of disbelief and a relieved sigh.
He was still sure it was a trick, refusing to let her go lest they reach her and carry her out of his reach, beyond his ability to protect her, where his promise to take care of her would be broken. But anything further he might have done was interrupted when a current shot through the water of the arena and the one foot he had in the river was immediately sent into spastic convulsions, causing him to fall to the ground and drop Emily headlong into the dirt.
“Run,” he strangled out as the convulsions travelled up the length of his body, “Emily, go...”
But she wasn't listening. “They're going to save us, Ian,” she insisted, pulling him out of the water, refusing to release her grip on his hand.
There was a ladder hovering somewhere nearby and she was sure that if she could just get ahold of it, everything would finally be alright. The tributes that had been running towards them had all reached the ladder and were climbing towards the jet. Derek's voice was shouting at her, urging her to save herself, straining to be heard over the thrum of the jet engines.
The last thing she remembered before losing consciousness was the feeling of a wooden rung under the fingers of one hand and the sweaty palm of her other hand sliding against Ian's as she fought determinedly to save them both.
******
Emily returned to consciousness and almost immediately emptied the contents of her stomach over the side of the gurney she was strapped to, leaving her throat burning, since her stomach had been full of nothing but acid and a little dirt she’d managed to swallow during the scuffle.
Tears burned at her eyes as she attempted to work up enough saliva to spit the sourness out of her mouth. She coughed as her lungs seemed to reel from the shock of the violent reaction of her body.
There was the sound of an air-locked door opening and footsteps crossing the floor to where a curtain blocked her from taking stock of the room in which she was currently housed. She couldn’t remember anything that had happened after she’d pleaded with Ian to kill her and she had absolutely no idea where she was right now. She couldn’t really bring herself to care anymore.
Metal slid along metal as the curtain was pulled back and she quickly shut her eyes again, not particularly caring to have a conversation right now.
“Hey, Princess,” a voice murmured, work-worn hands brushing her dishevelled hair away from her face. “You pull a Whiskey Pete?”
She lay in silence for several moments, planning to act like she hadn’t heard, until the words sunk in. There was only one person in the whole world that called her princess...
She sat straight up, causing her stomach to heave painfully again and it felt like her entire body were trying to turn itself inside out. He pressed a gentle hand to her shoulder to guide her back down to the bed, then found some button out of her sight that brought the bed into a sitting position.
“You’ve gotta relax or you’re gonna bust your stitches open,” he warned her. “You’re already in for a long recovery, if I were you, I wouldn’t make it any worse.”
Her head was spinning from the effort of trying to make the things he said fit in with her knowledge of the situation in which she found herself. “Where?” she managed to croak out of her parched and stinging throat.
“We’re on a jet...we’ve gotta get out of dodge because the Capitol is sure to be pretty damn pissed about the stunt we just pulled.”
“What stunt?” she demanded in her raspy voice, getting distressed. “What happened? What’s going on?”
“Shh,” he soothed, trying to get her to lie back down. “You’ve gotta calm down or your doctors aren’t gonna let me in here anymore.” Her stern unimpressed glare, one he was no stranger to getting, brought a grin to his face. “I’m not supposed to tell you until they’ve deemed your stress levels low enough to handle it...I don’t tell it very well anyway, there’s some people you’ve gotta meet and they’ll do it justice.”
She sighed unenthusiastically, lips pursed, crossing her arms over her chest as she laid back.
He couldn’t help but laugh a little at her pouting. “Cheer up, Princess.”
She turned her head so that she could look at him with a steadfastly cheerless expression. Another question struck her and she couldn’t help but ask, even knowing that Derek probably wouldn’t be thrilled to hear it. “What happened to Ian?”
Sure enough, it was his turn to look displeased. “I don’t know - I was knocked out when they lifted me, Jayje, and Will into the jet. The Capitol probably got to him first.” Seeing her brow knit with concern, he couldn’t help but try to assuage her distress a little. “But I wouldn’t worry...District Two is the Capitol’s pet, I can’t imagine them laying a hand on anyone from there.”
******
“What are we going to with him?” Aaron Hotchner, District Twelve’s mentor, asked the room at large as he stared through the two-way mirror that looked into Ian Doyle’s cell. “We can’t just keep him locked in here forever.”
“We’ve got no choice,” Jason Gideon argued. “The Capitol is going to want him back. He’s the best weapon we’ve got against them. To let him go would be foolish.”
“I’m not talking about letting him go,” Hotchner pointed out, “We could always just kill him. He’s too dangerous.”