thearena | Arena 12 - The Spaceport

Arena 12 - The Spaceport

As usual the Tributes are woken up early for the start of the arena, leaving the Tribute Centre before dawn. A few hours ride in a hovercraft delivers them to their destination where their excited prep teams will outfit them in skintight suits that are colour coordinated by District (D1 is White, D2 is Red, D3 is Orange, D4 is Aqua, D5 is Purple, D6 is Pink, D7 is Light Green, D8 is Blue, D9 is Yellow, D10 is Dark Green, D11 is Lavender, and D12 is Black) over which they will be put into what is instantly identifiable as a spacesuit, complete with oxygen tank and helmet before being loaded into the tubes.

They rise up into what appears to be outer space and immediately upon emerging from the tubes Tributes will find themselves floating upwards with a length of rope the only thing holding them to their podiums. The countdown crackles out from speakers built into each Tributes helmet.

20

19

18…

The Cornucopia sits in the middle of a dusty crater with buildings surrounding it, made up of a number of chained down cases and cubes in limited numbers. Cubes which sharp-eyed Tributes will note look like they fit into the slots beside the doors that lead into the spaceport.

8

7

6…

The mirrored visors of the uniformly white spacesuits make it impossible to tell friend from foe. Tributes fighting for goods will have to risk harming their friends but the alternative, floating off into space or suffocating when their oxygen runs out, leaves them little choice.

3

2

1…

The gong rings out and the countdown’s voice announces, “the Arena is now open” before the line goes dead. The Games have begun.

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The brutal public execution broadcasted stays firmly lodged at the forefront his mind for the dream-like stretch of time he spends standing numb and heavy on the pedestal as the counter ticks away, feeling that icy trickle of dread through his gut as he looks round at others in anonymous white spacesuits. As he’s left to grasp at the cold, sharp-edged reality of his situation.

He hears his pulse thudding deafeningly against his eardrums. Hears his breath rasping in his throat and feels the weight of the sweat clinging to his chest and tries to will himself to be ready for something no human being should.

2
1

The arena wasn’t just something talked about, a distant threat. Not anymore. It was here and it was now. It was people clawing their suits and helmets off inside the space station. It was some already chasing one another, cartilage and bone crunching under frantic blows and blood dashed against the walls. Someone screams. He stares blankly a moment before scanning the area for Clem, for Nick. For familiar faces that he can’t find amid the struggling, scattering tributes. Adrenaline races through him, shaking him, and all his whirling thoughts finally click into place.

Go.

He takes off, tearing down the halls of the spaceport looking for cover. For a weapon. For anything to keep him alive long enough to find his people.

- - -

It happens so fast, one of the airlocks sealing off while he’s rushing the doors and leaving him pounding desperately against them. An alarm flashes and he twists around wide-eyed, blinking the message on a panel to a sharp focus:

Oxygen leak detected. O2 level present: 99%
95%
92%

Luke’s throat dries up, sweat prickling the nape of his neck.

No no no --

He searches every inch of the airlock over and over, sick with frustration and on almost on the edge of tears as he struggles to fight down the animal panic rising into his throat, his chest tight and hurting fiercely. He slams his hands sore against the doors, again and again, huffing, hissing curses, until despair finally overtakes the wild determination gripping him and he lets himself slump forward, metal cool against his sweating forehead. He closes his eyes, taking a moment just to suck in hungry lungfuls of air through his lips. There’s nothing he can use. Nothing he can do for Clem or Nick or Beth. No escape.

72%
67%

At least this time death is coming quietly, without a violent struggle. No scorchingly cold water filling his throat, tearing into his lungs. No one else in danger and drifting within sight but beyond his reach. Just him fading as time slips away from him and chaos rages uninterrupted on the other side.

If he still had his helmet on, Venus would have kept going as she slinks past, having extracted herself from the chaos for a moment. The battle, people chasing each other down and beating their brains out, strangling them, drags and dissipates down the hall. She stops because she can tell from the size that none of those forms destroying each other are the person she's looking for. She hears slamming against the airlock door and she runs up next to it, hoping it's Kankri so she can save him.

It's easier to leave someone to die when you can't see anything human bared, when the body language of desperation and defeat is blurred out by the puffiness of the spacesuits and when the visor keeps you from making eye contact.

When you don't have a name to assign to someone.

"Luke?" His name escapes her mouth before she realizes that it's a binding curse. She wonders if he can hear her on the other side - he must be able to, she thinks. She can see him sweating and knows almost by instinct that he's running out of air.

Dark thoughts jostle and crash against each other, cycling endlessly. Slowing, though, as heaviness creeps into his bones, his body suddenly achingly tired. He can feel the end edging closer and his pulse spikes, heart strugglingly punching against his ribs. He’s not ready to die.

Not like this.

And yet against every trembling, adrenaline-charged fibre of his being he feels himself lean more heavily against the door, breathing and breathing, eyes pressed shut against the sensation of the airlock spinning. The last thing he expects to hear is a voice so close to him, filtering through metal and panic-fog and growing air-hunger. It tugs at him and he can’t quite place it - - and he lifts his head, gaze sharp with fresh awareness when he finds Venus staring back through a small window.

He knows her. Remembers the apples she paid for with her card, remembers their talk of a cure supplied by the Capitol and of a boy stabbed in the face in an act of self defense. Venus, from Georgia.

Luke blinks and looks down, all around, and then back at her, lips parted, his palm pressed flat against the glass and the pads of his fingers going white. He shakes his head uselessly. What could she do?

She knows that if she walks right now - if she nods her head, looks sorry and then keeps on her way - Luke won't really blame her, not logically, at least. He would believe her to be a good person helpless to come to his aid.

But what happens when he watches the footage later, when he sees her walk away and then teleport to safety somewhere else? How can she look him again in the eyes, not knowing if he's yet seen how she abandoned him to suffocate? The next time they meet, if they meet, will apologies tumble from her lips or justifications or denial?

She should know better. Luke winning will be on a road slicked with the blood of other people, more deserving people, teenagers and younger who've done this stupid charade five, six times each. She remembers Kankri dying in her arms and then waking at night time and again with tears in his eyes, pleading her to protect him from another Arena. She remembers Ellie's empty bedroom, cleared out already by Avoxes.

Luke from North Carolina.

How many people does she have to let reach the finish line before her own people make it there?

She shakes her head at him and turns away. And she takes one step, and then another, and each one sounds less like footfall than like a sucking sound of a lung half-filling with air.

She closes her eyes and wishes herself anywhere but here, and when she blinks into existence and opens them right next to Luke, she can't remember if this is where she intended to end up.

For the moment that she lingers there, her mind turning, he’s searching her face with hazing-over, dully pleading eyes, what flicker of hope he had for an impossible rescue quietly snuffed out. His hand squeaks down the window as he watches her step back, watches her go. And he turns away too, dizziness pressing him into a corner of the airlock, his body sliding down before he knows it. But he’s only distantly aware of the unforgiving hardness of the floor beneath him while his lids droop and he struggles uselessly to catch his breath. He knows he can’t. Just as he knows he’ll be gone when he gives in and lets his eyes close for longer than a blink.

They say one’s life flashes before one’s eyes as they’re slipping away. But his mind is too thick and muddled and spinning too fast to let him see it come and go.

He doesn’t know what compels him to loll his head up, to stare up into the harsh glare of fluorescent lights. But when he does he realizes he’s not alone, not anymore, and he feels his stomach clench with a level of startled surprise that he just hasn’t the strength to sustain. The flicker and firing of synapses slows down and it all feels so far away, the pulsing red of the alarm, Venus standing there.

But she isn’t there. Not really.

Because when he blinks she’ll disappear and he’ll be alone again, just another casualty in the Games. One of the luckier ones, he thinks, letting his head drop to his chest.

It's hot in here, dizzying even within a few shallow breaths. Venus crouches down and grabs Luke's hand.

"Hold on. Keep your eyes closed."

Teleporting with Venus is like stepping into a water lily of images, each petal a location overlaying another, a thousandfold and stretching out into infinity. It's natural to her to reach out (and within, and through, and from) and pluck one out of the options presenting themselves in countless dimensions. It's also, to say the least, incredibly disorienting for someone to witness if they're not prepared.

Reality bends around them, warping lot air over hot pavement, and soon enough they're in the hole between dimensions and on the other side. They pop into being in a hallway, and before she even checks to make sure he's alive, she's jumped to her feet to make sure no one else is here.

There's no sound, no lasers or fireballs lancing towards her, no gunshots or screams. It's the cold silence of space, wherever it is in the Arena they are. She gets back down to her knees.

"Luke. Luke, are you with me?" She pats his cheek, checks for his pulse. His skin is hot to the touch.

The easiest part is keeping his eyes shut when she takes him by the hand and wills them into being somewhere else, someplace where the air is no longer so thick and stifling and the sweat sticking to his skin begins to cool. He hears himself gasp, hungry for air, for life, her voice hovering on the fuzzy edges of his awareness. Feels a hand tap his pale, slackened face, light and insistent, bringing him back little by little. Feels fingers press dully into his throat just under the corner of his jaw after a moment, his pulse spiking behind them. His lashes stir, eyes moving, rolling, his gaze struggling to pin itself onto something. But he finds her again, eventually. And a dazed, puzzled frown creases his brow as he brings her into focus.

“H… How...?” Luke rasps, chest aching with every grateful lungful of air.

"There you are." His eyes lock on hers and yes, yes, he's conscious. Good. "It's okay, you're safe. Take a deep breath. Take twenty."

She sits back on her heels and feels her pulse in her throat. She's teleported too much in the last hour. It feels as if she's holding back a sneeze, except that it's every cell of her body. She closes her eyes and tries to tamp down the energy running through her veins, threatening to rip her a thousand ways.

After a few seconds her powers calm down. She opens her eyes and looks back at Luke as he recovers.

"Let's just go with superpowers." She reaches over and brushes some hair off his forehead, getting into his eyes. "You okay?"

In a world with trolls, a world that has now thrust him into outer space or some highly accurate simulation of space with the intention of watching him fight tooth and nail for survival, ‘superpowers’ is just about as good an explanation as any. Day by day, fewer and fewer things seem within the realm of impossibility -- and in the end, maybe it’s not the ‘how’ that matters so much as the rescue in itself.

He had seen her turn away, felt his stomach drop a little more with every step placed between them. But here he is out in the hall he remembers passing through - a pervasive, eerie silence in the air like the stillness of a frozen lake before that bone-snap of cracking ice - only because she had committed herself to doing something of no benefit to her. He’s under no illusion that everyone would do the same if they could.

When her question comes he wills himself to nod before he finds the breath to answer, faintly and then more reassuringly. The brush of her fingers is unexpectedly tender and out of place and he lifts his head, considering her with worn, confused eyes. Vividly remembering mom's kindnesses the days he had missed school laid up in bed with a fever. Reminded of Nick dropping off homework and chewing absently at his thumbnail while pacing a hole through his bedroom rug and wondering when he’d be able to come out and play again.

“Yeah…" He shakes his head clear, tries to, his chest hurting in a different way. “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks -- thank you.” There is no waiting for his dizzy spell to pass or wasting this second chance at life she has given him. He braces a hand against the nearest wall and carefully pushes onto his feet.

"Don't mention it." He may be thanking her for saving him, but the part that stands out to her is the few seconds when she walked away. She wonders if a real person, a really good human being, would have even questioned coming back for him. He's done nothing to her but be vulnerable and run up her credit card a little, and yet she was convinced she was leaving him there for a solid few moments.

She knows there are people that would have left him there, of course - but she also knows that trying to separate herself from them has been a trial she's been fighting for the last year or so. She's got as much blood on her hands as any of them, but she's not the scum of humanity, not a sociopath with a crown of bone and flesh, right?

Right?

And as if embracing that mercenary role, she puts on an act like this was all part of a plan. She glances out of habit over each shoulder, and above them, making sure there's no immediate threat before she asks: "before you got locked in there, did you see a little troll kid run past? I'm looking- I'm looking for someone."

Head clearing little by little, he pauses to lean against the wall a moment and watch her work through thoughts and emotions he can only guess at until she tosses a question his way. Between having met Initiate up on the roof while lounging with Nick and having a description from Joel still bouncing around his mind, he has at least a general sense of what trolls look like to be able to answer more helpfully. Although the answer he gives her isn’t the one she’s looking for.

“Can’t say I have.” He shakes his head, lips thinning. “M'sorry.”

And while he can’t know for sure what her motives are for seeking the ‘troll-kid’ out, he’s inclined to believe that she’s asking not in the interests of hunting him or her down but to protect him or her. More than anything else he’d just rather not think of kids being slaughtered by other tributes - adults, especially - despite the reality of their situation and the circumstances being what they are.

She nods. She figured as much. What with the spacesuits and the chaos of the airlock doors, it's been near impossible to find anyone. She can only hope Kankri isn't one of the spacesuits outside, floating with globules of blood in silent statis.

"Look, Luke..." She pauses and presses her lips together before collecting her space helmet again and holding it on her hip. "You seem like a decent guy. I hope I'm right about that. My game this time is to take out anyone who starts gunning for the kids, and believe me, I can do it. Consider that a warning."

Not because she suspects him, but because it's a statement for the cameras as well as him. She has a mission this time - a storyline, for the audience, a tantalizing tale about whether or not she'll keep to that. She turns to go.

Luke straightens from the wall, holding her gaze neutrally as he does, unflinching.

‘My game this time--‘

If eking out a living for two years in a post-apocalyptic wasteland has taught him anything, it’s to err on the side of caution and not to dismiss a warning that comes his way when there’s no knowing whether it’s a bluff or not. He doesn’t answer, doesn’t assure her that he isn’t looking to have the blood of kids on his hands, because he doesn’t have to. At the end of the day it’s what he does - and what he doesn't do - that means the most.

He blinks thoughtfully, watching her turn away again, for real this time. And after pulling in a long, steadying breath he takes off in the opposite direction, doing his best to tamp down the adrenaline-fueled restlessness as shock subsides and his being alive has a moment to sink in. Too much time has been lost already.

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Arena 12 - The Spaceport

Luke - locked to Venus (spoilers whited out)

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this thread is punching me in the heart

GOOD

Re: GOOD

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