SWAN UPON LEDA; hunger games

chapter 4

    By time the world has gone silent, two canons have echoed through the air.

    Leda lays silently in the snow, Birdie's body strewn out a few feet away. Malachi's is not far from her, either. She shouts when a hand lands on her shoulder, arms blinding reaching out and shoving away.

    It is Cassius, she realizes, pulling her up from the snow. But he is not killing her. He is not even trying to harm her. He is speaking to her, eyes wide, shaken.

    "I didn't—" Leda gasps. She takes a step back from him, hands settling against her chest. She cries. She cries for the massacre that just occurred. The slaughter. "I—"

    Cassius nods. Wipes at his forehead, which is covered in blood. The same with the rest of his face. He is ashen and shaking. His skin is ice cold, just like hers.

    But the blood on his hands is worse. The blood that is not his own. But Athena's.

    She is a few feet away, sitting against the base of a tree. There is a dark, bloody patch of her clothes. A machete lay a few feet away, near Malachi. Athena's eyes are gaunt and empty, yet her chest just barely rises and falls.

    She looks between Cassius and Leda, accepting defeat like a tree accepts losing its leaves. She nods and says, "It's okay."

    Cassius crouches in front of the girl and grimaces at the sight of her wound. Presses his hand to it, as he had just minutes prior, but this time, in his other hand, he grasps a knife. He points it at her heart and drives the blade home.

    A third canon reverberates around them, and Leda no longer feels anything when it does.

———

    They have not looked away from one another, not for the entire hour in which they have sat in silence, a few feet between them. Snow was falling from the sky in large clusters, caking into Leda's hair like flour when tossed into the air. She could feel it clinging to her eyelashes, and everytime she blinked, just for a brief moment, she would get just a little colder.

    "Are you going to say anything or psycho-analyze me this whole time?

    Leda blinks. Stares blankly ahead at Cassius. And smiles. "I thought you were insane like Malachi and Birdie."

    "Me? Insane?" Cassius grins.

    She can't help it. She laughs. It bubbles in her chest without any hesitation, and, soon, Cassius also begins to laugh. Loud and boisterous. They sound like children again. Laughing, carefree, not worried about the possibility that they're names, out of so many, are the ones to be called in the Reaping.

    "I think we're all a little insane." Cassius murmurs. Their laughter has disappeared now, cast away in the wind. "I never thought...I never thought that I'd be thrown in here."

    Leda was surprised by that. Most people, depending on their status and intelligence in District's 1 and 2, are trained to fight and kill, to get selected for the so-called honor that is the Hunger Games. So she asked just that: "Did you want to be picked? For this?"