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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Anna flinches away from his annoyance, dropping her gaze, her cheeks flushing a little bit. Suddenly she feels stupid, and it's not a feeling she likes. "I just...I don't know. I just sort of assumed you didn't like me much anymore." It's a testament to her lack of romantic experience, really. She averts her gaze, setting about getting her space suit down below her knees. There, that's good enough, he can get to her wound without her jostling it much further.

He kneels down next to her, and Anna braces herself, trying to forget their bickering for just one moment. She lets out a whimper at his warning, but doesn't have time to properly anticipate the pain before he's going ahead and trying to clean it up. Anna's whole body tenses, and she lets out a pained howl that echoes throughout the corridor they're in.

This better make for good viewing, at the very least.

Bro is trying to distance himself from this emotionally so that it's easier, his expression hardening, his jaw set firmly. It's difficult though, when she howls in pain like that. It's true, it makes for damn good viewing, but that doesn't make it easier to hear her in such pain. His attempts at trying to clean the wound aren't doing much good, either because of how bad it is.

Still, he can't give up and he keeps at it. Before too long, though, despite his attempts at trying to end the earlier conversation, he apparently just doesn't have it in him not to ask what he blurts out.

"So, he's gone." It's a statement, his voice devoid of much. He feels really damn bad about what happened to Kristoff, it's not something he would've wanted regardless of what he might've been feeling for Anna. "Must make you even angrier at me, huh?" He hopes not, but he has to fish around for her feelings or else it'll drive him crazy. "But let me tell you, if you think for a damn minute that this is what I ever wanted, then you're wrong."

Anna rides the waves of hurt as best she can, whimpering every now and again between hisses of pain. Her ears are ringing, partly thanks to the weird pressurized atmosphere inside the station, and partly thanks to the blood rushing to her head, the adrenaline coursing in response to the pain.

And then Bro brings up Kristoff, and she feels a pang in her chest, a completely different kind of hurt. "Yeah," she pants. "He's gone." She has no idea where he is, either, what happened--if he wasn't interesting enough for their needs. If he's dead or alive. And even if her romantic feelings toward him hadn't been as strong as she'd thought, she still never wanted to see him gone. Dead.

Her head rolls onto her shoulder and Anna looks up at Bro's face, wishing this conversation wasn't happening but knowing that it has to. "I'm not--mad at you," she manages. "It's not your fault, you didn't do anything." For a moment, she chews at her lip, trying not to jolt as his cleaning hits a particularly painful part of her wound. Her voice gets especially quiet.

"I know. I know, you wouldn't--wouldn't want that." Her eyes close, resting just for a moment. She's not even thinking about how her words are sounding, the way they're coming out. "It was stupid, all of it. You can just forget about it, if you want."

Well, that's unexpected. Considering how she'd acted last arena, he'd thought she would definitely somehow blame him for this or think he'd be glad about what happened to Kristoff. Now she's just saying to forget about it?

Bro scoffs as he shakes his head. "Forget about it? It ain't that easy, princess." He tosses the bloody sleeve to the side, too soaked to do anymore good. "I mean, we've had what- a month to stew over what happened? I dunno about you, but after all that stewin', I'm pretty tender." There's a part of him that knows he should just let it go, but he isn't Elsa.

"It ain't easy to just forget having it all thrown in my face like that, made to feel like I was just some asshole you thought was trying to come between you and your man." Like, yeah he'd nearly kissed her, but he'd backed up and realized he was wrong. He'd only been trying to be her friend after that.

Anna flinches at the sight of all that blood; even after everything she's been through, it's not an easy thing to see. Her own blood, slowly leaving her. It turns her stomach, and she tears her eyes away from it, her face noticeably paler as she looks back up at Bro.

"I wasn't trying to throw it in your face," she insists, mustering up the energy to be stubborn somehow. "I was just--surprised. And I didn't know what to say, so I. Well, I said the first thing that came to mind, which was 'I have a boyfriend.'"

She lets her eyes close again after that, because it's taking a lot of energy to talk that much, and she slumps visibly against the wall. Ugh. She doesn't have the will to go through all this all over again.

"Yeah, which everyone and their mother knew already," he says, sounding more and more annoyed by the second. He won't actually admit it, but he's fishing around for an apology that she still hasn't actually given him. It's probably childish, but damn.

He also knows that he needs to do something more than just clean the wound with a basic bit of fabric, so that requires going to find something. Without a word, he stands up. "Look, I- I need some air. The stink of your blood is too much and this talk's giving me a headache." Of course right now he isn't going to admit that he's leaving specifically to go get something to help her, because he's too petty like that. He turns and starts to walk away, wishing not for the first time that shit could just go back to normal.

While they've been talking, Anna has been fiddling with the case she'd brought in from outside. She opens it up with her eyes half shut, feeling around and only cracking them open when her hand closes around something solid and, well, dangerous-feeling.

It's a Taser.

She only knows the name of it from the vague attention she's payed to weapons training, only seen it used in passing on screens playing old Arena footage, but she knows what it does.

Anna looks up when Bro rises, and something boils inside her--not anger, but something like it. And she can't even bring herself to say anything, like don't go or don't leave me. She just raises her arm, almost mechanically, aims the Taser at his rear end, and presses the button.

He'd seen her fiddling with her case, but he couldn't have imagined what she'd do with it. His mind is on far too many other things to even think that she's gonna do anything to get him to stay. In his opinion, him leaving is for the best, otherwise he might say things that he would regret, and he isn't sure if they would be angry or something else entirely. It feels like on both ends, there are words left unsaid by the both of them and if they could just get them out-

But it's not going to happen, he's too prideful to do that. It's especially not going to happen, because the sudden shock in his booty area catches him quite off guard and then suddenly he's falling forward, unable to control the muscles in his lower half. He lands on the ground, ass jutting out and his body limp as he lets out a heavy, pained grunt.

Everything feels numb.

Especially his feelings.

He hates everything and nothing is okay.

She got him good. She got him good and he's never been more impressed and angry in his entire life. On one hand, well played. On the other, his fucking ass. It's never going to get a break here, is it? Is he just doomed to have it wrecked in every arena?

"F'ck you," he grumbles, his voice muffled by the fact his cheek is pressed awkwardly against the ground, unable to really move still.

Anna lets out a gasp as soon as she realizes what she's done. She's not sure how it happened; it was like her brain shut off and her body took over, like an automaton. Grunting through the pain in her leg, Anna shifts forward, crawling toward Bro with gritted teeth.

"Oh my god. Oh my god, Bro, I didn't mean to--" She pauses, trying to compose herself, because her leg hurts so bad it's making tears spring to her eyes unwarranted. She catches his grumbling and her eyes narrow, and she pauses in her crawling.

"Fuck me? Well--w-well fuck you! I can't believe you were about to leave me here by myself!"

Of course she didn't mean to, it's so amazingly easy to just accidentally taser someone like that. Who is he to get mad about it, when it was clearly something she hadn't meant to do? Oh bullshit, he doesn't believe for a second that it wasn't premeditated. She'd probably been itching to do it for the last several minutes, she knew damn well what she was doing, she-

Whoa.

Did she just- yeah, she sure did. If he were in a different kind of mood, it would be really damn impressed. As it is, he's only mildly so. He'd had to weasel out a curse from her before, now she's doing it of her own volition, it's kind of startling in a good way. But more importantly, she's actually angry at him for trying to leave to go get her medical supplies. Granted, she didn't know he was going to do that, but it still makes him feel a little salty.

"Hrrrgh," he growls, exasperated and angry all at once. He shifts his head as best he can so his voice isn't muffled, thankfully his muscles are slowly starting to go back to normal. Slowly. Too damn slowly. "Make. up. your. mind." He says slowly, his voice shaking a little from all these damn things he's feeling. "You want me to stay or you want me to go, cuz you're givin' me so many fuckin' mixed signals these days. Makes it hard to wrap my head around how I feel my own damn self- and for your info, I was goin' to get shit to treat you, so cut the pissy princess victim act."

Anna sits back, landing a bit ungracefully on her bottom in an attempt not to tear her wound open even wider, letting out a choked sound in response to the pain. "I--" What he's saying rings painfully close to home, because she realizes that making up her mind is exactly what she can't seem to do lately.

Her mouth opens, then closes, while she seems to consider what exactly to say. And all she can come up with at first is, "Is your butt okay?"

Which sounds really dumb, so she quickly follows up with, "I'm so sorry, I don't know what's gotten into me lately." She squeezes her eyes shut, willing all of this external atmosphere away--wishing it was just the two of them, so they could just hash all of this out.

"I just--I'm so confused about, well, everything, but you especially. I just want to follow my heart, but it's hard when--well, when I can never tell what you're thinking."

Is she serious? It's hard to be angry when she follows up with stupid shit like asking if his butt's okay. Why is she so damn frustratingly endearing, especially at the worst possible times? And then she goes to apologizing and it's so damn sincere and earnest that he has even more of a hard time staying angry with her and it kind of just melts into a hollow numbness as the ability to move begins returning to him at a bit of a quicker rate, enough that he can shift into a sitting position.

His ass feels a bit numb, it better stop that soon.

And then she tosses the blame into his court, and he can't even feel annoyed by that either, because honestly? It's true. He's hard to read sometimes. His jaw sets firmly and his mouth almost opens to speak, to say- say what?

That his desire to protect her from the dangers of Panem has evolved into something much deeper than that? No. No, not here- not now. Maybe not ever, because that would probably just make everything even more complicated and he doesn't want to face that. His life isn't about deeper feelings, it's about keeping people at arm's length. The only kind of relationship he gets involved in is something casual like Jolie, and even then he's come close to fucking that up by letting things go deeper. That's why keeping people away is so much better in the long run. Especially here.

"You wanna know what I'm thinking?" he asks, avoiding looking at her. "I think you need something better to treat that cut with, so unless you want to bleed out, I should go find something for you."

By now, Anna's just wishing this were over. This miserable arena--less than an hour in, and she's already done with it. If only Black Tom had finished her off properly. But no--she just had to survive. Had to have one more conversation with Bro that's just ending in confusion and the heaviest feeling in her heart.

She's in love with him.

She's in love with this idiot and neither of them can give each other a straight answer about it and it's eating her up inside to know that there's a possibility they're both avoiding just because it might hurt. Because getting attached is too dangerous.

So she doesn't bother getting her hopes up when he replies, and it's best that she doesn't, because right on cue, he's avoiding again. Anna slumps to the floor, voice a little hollow, ringing in her ears where the pressure is closing them off.

"Oh. Right. Thanks."

"Yeah."

That's all he says, and it's said gruffly. He knows damn well that it wasn't the response that she'd been hoping for, just as it's not the response a part of him had wanted to give. But what can he do? He can save her life, that's what he can do. Just the same as he'd tried the very first time they'd met. Except this time, he's going to do what he can to make sure she doesn't die or that he has to mercy kill her again.

Bro avoids casting one last look her way before he heads off to find stuff to fix her up with. Things become easier the further away he gets from her, like there's a thick air of confusion around her that makes it hard to think clearly. Once away, he can better focus and shove everything else back.

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Arena 12 - The Spaceport

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