Finnick's Games - The 65th Hunger Games

Chapter Nineteen

Applause - taken from some grand viewing space in the Capitol and deposited in the arena - fills the air. It's disorientating. The clapping, the cheers, the exclamations of joy. How can applause be the response to the fresh corpses that lie at my feet? To the furious tremor that's overridden my nervous system? The deep gashes in my body and the blood that coats me like a lobster tail slathered in butter?

A ladder dangles in front of me. I grasp onto it and I'm frozen in place, but they can't stop the blood from flowing out of my wounds. I'm lifted through the trapdoor of a hovercraft. The bright morning light of the jungle fades away and I lie on a cold hard floor in blinding darkness.

Consciousness is difficult to grasp to. I'm attempting to keep hold of it but it slips away from me easily. Being awake comes in waves. Men in sterile suits lift me into another room. The table beneath me is so hard it's painful on my bones. The lights in this room are bright, but they're nothing like the jungle sun. These lights are cold and clean and invasive. A woman in a lab coat is sticking a needle in my arm. Whatever she injects into my bloodstream makes me sleepy. I stop grasping and let myself slide away.

***

It's impossible to know how many days pass. For an indiscriminate period of time I drift in and out of a muddled haze. At some point I know I'm no longer on the hovercraft; the room no longer feels like it's gliding and shifting. The bed becomes softer underneath me. The clean-looking people who drift in and out of my muddy vision change. But the lights are still too bright - when I wake up for what feels like the thousandth time, the first thing I think is that I want to ask them to turn them off. Or at least dim them. But I spend my waking moments alone, and I'm knocked out again before I can get the message across.

The tight harnesses holding my body down to the bed don't even register until much later. I stare down at the metal cuff around my wrist. When I twist my arm, a bright red mark on my skin is revealed. I must be fighting against the restraints in my sleep. That would explain why I feel so exhausted every time I wake up.

Eventually, I'm given food. The Avox girl who brings it to me is the same one who I once threw a knife at. "Can you dim the lights?" I ask. All she does is shake her head before she disappears.

I'm being watched. It's why they floodlight the room 24/7. I don't even eat the food. I occupy myself for the next hour by staring at every detail in the room, searching for the cameras. Nothing. The walls are bare. The corners empty. But I still know that they can see me. Just like how they could see me in the arena.

The arena. It feels so distant and also so fresh. Slowly, as my awake periods begin to outlast my asleep periods, the memories start to trickle back. But it isn't so much the memories as it is the feelings that haunt me. Burning, pinpricking pain on my skin as maggoty mutts burst from inflamed bites. Fear choking me while I run from killer vines that slap against the jungle floor. Hot lizard breath on the back of my neck. Squidgy, smacking sounds of Lucian being eaten alive. Adella's flesh giving way to the sharp points of my trident; forcing the prongs through her ribcage and into her lungs.

I dry-heave into my lap and then I pass out again.

***

If this is what winning feels like, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

What feels like several days are spent in unbearable despair. I'm in complete solitary confinement; my social life is restricted to the odd passing of an Avox. I don't even see the nurses and doctors - and there must be plenty of them, since I seem to have been patched up perfectly. There isn't much else to do besides take inventory of my physical wellbeing. My face feels perfectly normal - not mauled and shredded like it was on the final day in the arena. The bite scars that peppered my arms have completely vanished. There's no more pain on my thigh, where Elasis so savagely cut me. And the hollow feeling of my skin sticking to my bones - that's gone now, too. I feel healthy again.