I remember the smell of lemons and the sound of rain.
Soft stitches and straw hair without a bloodstain.
Good times passed off as old, forgotten things.
No longer shiny and new and tied up in strings.
But that's where we started, not where we ended.
Before the arrows of slaughter our lives we defended.
And all it came down to was one final noise.
The softest of sounds from a small, dying boy.
There wasn't a clear moment. Not before, and not for long, long after. But it no longer mattered. Whether his grip had been tight or grown lose through the painstaking minutes, whether his eyes were narrowed and blurred by tears or squeezed shut in aching prayer, American Elm had slipped through his fingers with eyes wide open.
The canon ringing through the glade was no different than the twenty-six that came before it. It shook the stone ceiling no harder, rumbled no lower. Grass trembled around Upton's form, the entire cavern echoing back the sound to a single pair of deaf ears. They were not focused on the crashing boom but on the cold body in his grasp, head pressed down in vain against soft, chapped lips that Upton could only imagine tasted like sap from a maple tree, sticky and sweet. But with every ebbing second of the echo dying away, reality sunk into pale, snow white flesh. They probably tasted of nothing more than bitter, coughed up blood. He'd never know, though, for Upton had missed his chance.
An odd taste between regret and relief settled on his tongue instead. The longer he leaned down, the more Upton was sure of it. American's parted lips no longer breathed out or in. There was no wheeze of air, neither delicate nor labored and irregular as it had become in the last few moments. Every one of which must have been agony that Upton had ignored, drunk on the lasting strands of hope he had clung to like a life raft beneath the dark, suffocating stone above. Now, they slipped away. Old and forgotten the second they had been proven wrong - Upton lost his grip on the only thing keeping him alive.
His knees, still tucked beneath him to keep Meric's head up, collapsed. His body fell onto the stone floor covered by a thick blanket of green. One of the first instances of green he had seen since he had died the first time, trapped in a rickety, dark house with black oil clinging to his skin and seeping in beneath his ribs, filling his body up with a tar that weighed down and froze his purpling skin.
It didn't feel different now, dying again. His features remained blank, aching for an emotion as his chin tilted toward a thin slit of sunlight. For a warm, blisteringly painful smile that came when American had held his hand for the first time, whispering ever encouragement under the sun. For a hot, streaky mess of tears to mold his face in horror until he couldn't see the damage had been reeked, the damage he had caused. For something bitterly cold and mangled in rage, like when he had shoved Aspen with every ounce of strength left in his limbs. But with each thought, the emotions passed away until all that was left was an ache. An empty, open ache for something more. More than being left alone again, more than the endless darkness.
And in his moment of need came no stranger, no savior of blinding light to hold his hands and raise him to his feet. There was nothing but a familiar security. To Upton, it was closer to his heart than hope, older than love, stronger than lasting bonds. It smothered the ache as a wet rag over dying embers, hiding the flickering flames searching for more and settling for less - settling for nothing.
Numbness spread as blood did. Dark, sticky, and suffocating, it started from the seed in Upton's chest that no longer beat. Where a garden once had flourished and been ravaged by fire and death and loneliness, where a single flower had curled up around his ribs and bloomed for the first spark of daylight it had seen in years, was slowly overwhelmed. It worked its way out after, tendrils of black calm seeping through blood and sliding around limbs. Gripping snow skin and pulling it down until it was a blanket of warmth Upton's body was basking in.
So thick, that Upton almost didn't feel the actual warmth, notice the spread of sunlight, real sunlight across his burning, bloody, battered form. It had started out as a single slit that Upton had collapsed beneath, something written off as his imagination. Now, it was gaining speed, more and more falling into the chasm of the cave system below. The first few drops landed on Upton, his freezing, frail limbs began to tense against the sudden heat, hotter than lava scorching inches away from his flesh. They then traveled out, finding American's form next.
His skin had never appeared paler. What had so long been known to Upton as gentle, tan skin with the rough feeling of bark across calloused fingers was now weak. Draining of life and color and put directly beneath a widening maw of deadly, blinding white light washed Meric out. He was pale. The gash in his stomach that had torn and ripped through his shirt was no longer a terrifying, blackened crimson but the soft, glittering red of cherries ripe for the picking in the early fall. Blue eyes stared straight up at the incoming light, lighting themselves up more but in a deadened, hollow way as if they had been made of glass, rolled and rounded, and shoved painfully into the sockets to mimic a limp doll.
It made the world feel surreal, imagined even. So long spent beneath the world, the real world, trapped in an inescapable realm that was nothing but bloodshed and pain. Lacking rain and sun, but mimicking snow. Where monsters without faces skittered up across the roofs of walls and familiar faces swam in pools of memory. Where strangers became allies and friends and fell to enemies and rose to something more, only to fade away. Where cold had reigned as an unopposed leader, shaking trembling hearts and destroying them from beating again, turning snow white skin to red and delicate stitching hands to violent killers.
The sun filled out into a full circle. Beams split apart the large, grassy field in its entirety and revealed the other bodies left without breath. Each was encircled with a halo of their own blood, black grass spread out even farther. It looked like an infestation, so much of the cavern's beauty spoiled by the sickening, wet, moldy darkness that cropped up to overtake it. Upton had been a part of that. He knew he had killed people, he knew he had killed more than one, and not just in this room either, but looking at the mangled, bludgeoned faces and torn wounds through thin skin, he couldn't recall a single one of them. The only name he knew was that of the boy's empty husk laying by his side.
Upton took American gently back into his grip. His warmth had drained away, now as cold as the hands the boy was used to holding. The heat instead came from above, beating down too warm, too bright. Hiding, almost sheltering his friend's form, Upton curled both arms around American as a new sound hit the horizon. That of one he hadn't heard in weeks or maybe months, for however long they had been trapped underground in the arena. It hurt his head, thumping deep and stirring a headache locked back in the frail boy's skull so painful that he chose to ignore the incoming hum and bent heavily over the body in his arms.
Dirty, bloody hair mingled with blonde straw, forehead pressed to forehead, uneven breath mixed with absolute stillness. Upton held on. And though the numbness was heavy on his shoulder, he clung to the edge of his sanity there in the blackened, ruined grass with his body curled around the only thing left he had. He didn't notice when the announcement came or the ladder fell or the crowd, away in a land he could no longer understand nor belong in, cheered. He only knew when the cold shadow swept in and hands met his grip that American was taken.
And when he was ripped away, Upton screamed.
Fierce and bloody and terrified, it came from his lungs as a piercing, painful expel of air. Everything surged in a final, indescribable moment of anguish. Pain, fresh and brutal, slammed Upton down in a wave and dragged him out to sea. He was barely conscious or aware. Aware of his nails, bitten and cut and bleeding, digging into bark-like skin and leaving long, impressionable claw marks deep in the body. The boy screamed despite the hands around him, despite the fight being useless. He wasn't thinking. He wasn't breathing. Only screaming, until the lining of his lungs broke and grew raw, until blood warmed his mouth and choked him on the taste of blood. Until his energy gave out and he was forced to collapse, eyes fresh with a new wave of tears that obscured his vision until it was nothing but green and black spots and then white. Until the numbness finally found its way to his head, and with thickly coiled black tendrils wrapped around his neck to cut off his airflow, it pulled Upton's head under the waves.
After that, it didn't matter.
Not winning, not breathing, not the fact that he was still alive, still moving when everything else had died. It was a blur. The ride, the recovery, the slow fade of his hands and arms from blue, purple, and red back to the familiar, painfully pale skin he had worn before the caves. When people would speak, he wouldn't listen, when they would tug, only his body would respond. An adjustment phase. That was what someone had called it, something that had wormed through the barriers of stone and rock and flesh and bone he had built up to contain his mind.
That, he didn't understand. An adjustment until what? He was already to the other side, where it was peaceful and calm and people fell away in lieu of a blinding, cold, white light. If it had mattered at all, Upton wouldn't have been able to handle it. He wouldn't have put on the suit made of fine stitches of fabric, and he wouldn't have stepped up to the podium that was waiting for him, along with a blinking red light. There were people's faces, but none he recognized, none he cared for. There wasn't a single thought in his head either, not of something to say.
Upton had never been one for the spotlight. He'd never stridden to speak in front of people, never excelled in plays or gotten up in front of his class on thin, wobbling legs where his knees looked like large, knotted wood compared to the twigs that held him up. He'd always found the experience frightening, and terribly lonely - especially when the last warm hand in the world had let go of his so recently. There was never anyone to support you up there except the own soles of your feet and the podium to grip onto. So, Upton gripped it with all the feeling left in his fingers. They were still damaged, of course, bandages wrapped tight around them for risk of exposure, where a large, identical scar lay on either side from Aspen. It hurt to close them too tightly, to sew too quickly, but that didn't matter. Upton had not picked up a needle and thread since the day he kneeled in front of American.
He did, however, always wonder what had happened to the body, where it would go. American had no family left from his district, not after what had happened to them. No close friends that he had mentioned either. There would be no one that wanted a pair of glassy blue eyes, bloodied brown hair, and a cold, lifeless corpse that held hands with the roughness of bark. It was likely to rot away in a wooden box, never to see the light again. Not that American would know. His lasts moments had been shrouded in darkness, covered and stifled from the sight of life since the moment that he had been tossed into the caverns. He hadn't seen the sunrise with Upton, the moment that Upton had fought and strived for, had fought to get him to.
He wasn't strong enough. Not ever, had he been strong enough. So why did it matter now? Crying seemed to be all that Upton knew how to do. Stinging hot, a single tear rolled down his cheek. Upton expected more. He waited, hands gripping the podium, eyes in pain, but nothing more came out. The redness was carved into snow-white skin now. Deep tracks of rawness lay under his eyes, and even though they were masked with heavy pounds of makeup Upton could still feel them. He winced every time he blinked, knowing that the skin was far from healed, too delicate to try and speed up the process with. But all the tears he was hoping would come, would shake his body and distract him from the void that had opened up and swallowed his dead heart and all of the ribs inside. They blurred the world, and for the few minutes or hours they came was a moment he could rest, could know that not all of his insides had been swallowed up by an everlasting apathy.
The speaker crackled. Upton didn't know when his lips parted, glued together by a lack of use and terror. He didn't even think of the words at first, didn't try to stop them either. "I miss him." Simple, dull, and frigid as they cross his weak lungs. There was a pause, murmur, a terrible shiver that wracked through Upton as he tried again, but his lips flapped wordlessly, following the flag that sat in the field as it snapped back and forth in the wind as he tried to find words. But there weren't any.
He didn't know the people that died. He hadn't even known them when he had killed them or they had tried to kill him. He knew their hair color, their wounds, he knew their faces in his nightmares when he woke up in a cold sweat unable to move or breathe, but that was it. Only Aspen and American came to mind, and they weren't fully formed either. They were abstract, the way Aspen had tucked her brown hair behind her ear, had swung an axe with a fierce spirit, had carved a visible reminder into his body for the rest of his life and rotted herself away from her core. American was even fainter, he was a trembling feeling, a shiver that made Upton's knees weak, he was a feeling of warmth, comfort, but he was only feelings. Things that no longer held the comfort they once had in Upton's heart. Each of the other tributes was less than a feeling, less than a scar, they were only shadows rotting in boxes quick to be forgotten, and soon he would be too.
It was the weight that carried him off the stage after Upton finished. He wasn't sure if he'd accomplished a speech, or even spoken at all after it happened, he just knew that he was lead down, away from the stage, and that he watched his district pass by. Their faces watching him, and his watching theirs, but a divide had driven them all away, long before he was ever reaped for the games. It led to a lonely walk back to his house. A house he didn't recognize nor understand, one without the smell of lemons coming from the kitchen counters, one without a sister to watch over, one without a cat waiting to slip beneath his heels, and one without a stone floor to hold a boy's hand on. It was empty, serene. He didn't deserve that.
The only sound was Upton's own footfalls as the weight bared down. It made it hard to breathe, harder still to strip the suit off and watch the bandages fall away as the faucet began to pour. There was something soothing in the sound like the rain had turned vicious as it beat mercilessly against the porcelain. Upton dipped a hand in and watched as a slim stream of blood met it. Even the pressure, as delicate as water could be, was enough to split open the wounds. Droplets running down his arm, tugging at the thin, blonde hairs there brought a smile to Upton's smile. An unimaginable smile, too weak and sweet to be resisted after so long. The last time he had smiled was for American. He had meant to save that for him.
Hopefully, it was forgivable.
Upton stood up and turned off the faucet once the water was high enough. His limbs were shaky beneath the weight holding down his shoulders as he dipped a leg into the bath and felt warm chills race up through his spine. The relaxation melted his bones until he had slipped in, hanging the delicate wounds of his hands over the edge.
It felt like hope, in a strange, symbolic way. The way it would swaddle you in warmth, in security. Wrap around worn limbs and loosen the tension into a place they held faith in. And Upton had already drowned once, he had hopelessly drowned on the beautiful idea of hope. Waded in to his neck and left it to submerge him. When that hope was gone, it had killed him.
His skull was empty, and his heart was hollow.
"I don't want to be left alone again."
The warm smile of American Elm's lips. A blossoming of hope.
"You won't."
And what a beautiful lie it had been, one that Upton would keep.