HERE'S THE BULK OF THE IRONY: creating a human life takes much less effort than keeping it alive. A woman spawns a screaming infant girl, pink-faced and fragile, faultless and clean. Inflorescent into the rough hands of girlhood, she learns about her father's proliferating baggage, the burgeoning weight of the world that her mother carries on her back that she'll inherit once she's grown into her shoulders, studded with budding bruises that'll one day floweret into her parents' sins.
When you're young, someone tells you: Out there's a world built for the selfish. So you through life calculating all odds and learning to assume the worst of everything beforehand, grow a skin stitched together out of cynicism so it won't come back to haunt you later, so all the edges of the world stops making you bleed at each time you brush up against something. Nobody's going to have your back, no one but you. People won't understand you; they leave all the time, what makes you think you're any different? Beneath all the armour you never take off so the sun's blazing heat melds it to your flesh like a beetle's shell, you become this hard, cold creature and you don't look like yourself in the mirror anymore. Truth is, cynicism drains you as much as the darker parts of life does. Truth is, it takes and takes and takes away everything worth living for. Truth is, you see yourself in the mirror and you don't look like anybody at all.
When someone offers you a hand to pull you out of the dark, you take it. Because you've been holding onto knives for so long, slashing through the jungle of thorns, slashing other people to ribbons in battle each day to get ahead, your periphery is stained with the penumbras of sharp objects, your vision and skin saturated in so much blood you can't distinguish your fingers from your own silhouette, or where the darkness ends and where your own flesh begins. And finally—finally—you see the sun. You see the boy, but you can't tell if it's the sun in your eyes. Sometimes you think he is a mirage because he is the golden child, his smile lambent enough to shift the orientation of the gravitational field around him, but he is holding your hand and you're not burning. Forever was never an option before. Forever was a goal, something you had to work for, bleed for, cut yourself into the right shape for. Forever belongs to the monstrous, and you are a girl made of blades for teeth and a live coal in your chest. Everywhere you step, you drag that ball and chain. But he tells you about a life that is soft, a life that gives, a life that is nurturing—a tenderness you've never heard of before. One day, you'll stop fighting the world and start leaning into its touch. one day, you can take off your armour and you will not bleed. One day, he swears, he'll show you—no, he'll give it to you.
But, first, the life you know—the only one you've ever known—has to happen.
And then the boy is gone.
(Was your forever worth it in the end?)
* * *
"YOUR TOKEN," Alex frowned, "did you lose it?"
In the melee, she hadn't even realised that her bracelet was missing, but she felt its absence now, as Alex drew away, his hands turning hers over. Around her wrist, where the seagrass beads once pressed into her skin was a strip of cold emptiness, reaching down to the hollow feeling in her gut. Initially, the loss of the bracelet would've been insignificant. Iko hadn't realised how much she relied on it to bind her sanity together. Panic clawed at her chest. She was never getting it back now. She didn't think the Gamemakers would comb the massive arena for it just to assuage her.
"It must've fallen off when we were fighting off the mutts," Iko murmured, snagging her bottom lip between her teeth, the disappointment stinging. "We can't go back for it."
Just then, Alex tipped his head back against the wall, and Iko saw the strain in his face, the pain tugging at the corners of his mask, and her fingers curled around his tighter and she didn't want to let go. Alex rested his head against her shoulder and let out a shuddering sigh. Iko felt his breath hitch, felt his body go rigid one second before the tension dissolved.
"Man, I could fall asleep right now and never wake up," Alex laughed, but there was no humour in it. He was one of those paintings full of small errors, the kind you could only distinguish under a magnifying glass or if you searched it at every possible angle. Even then, you won't see them all at once. There were always a handful that evaded notice, slipping through your fingers like water, leaving behind only silt. On the surface, Alex was golden, perfect, this charming boy who wielded his charisma like a weapon, his smile a torch blazing to life in the darkest tunnel. Standing near him made you feel a part of something, even if you were unmoored and adrift. Between his palms were the hearts of people he'd never even met, and yet, the only one in his chest was the one stitched to her palms. Every now and then, Iko would notice the mask crack in periphery, a cursory glance, a sliver of a moment where her best friend's expression, his words, his look and his meaning wouldn't align. In those fleeting slices, Iko saw his pain.
Alarm jerked her out of mourning her lost district token, a shallow memory discarded now. What mattered more was right beside her, the too-warm body quickly cooling, his heartbeat weak in her palms. For the first time in her life as fear stroked a cold finger down her spine and traced the path of her ribs, its frost seeping into her bones, Iko could admit it to herself. She was scared. She was going to be left behind. Just not in the way she thought she would, or in the way that she'd fought so hard not to succumb to.
In spite of the pain lashing up her mutilated arms, Iko scrambled up, kneeling in front of Alex now, and reached up to push his head upright. She slapped her hand against his cheek frantically. "No. You can't. Alex, you cannot fall asleep now. You hear me? Don't you dare close your eyes," Iko snarled, cradling his face in her palms. Alex's head lolled and her heart gave a lurch. With shaking hands, Iko reached down to pull his shirt up and nearly choked on her shock as she noticed the two bullet wounds in his abdomen, the blood soaking his skin, the heaving flesh as he struggled to breathe. How he'd managed to muster enough strength to fight off the mutts and save her should've been impossible. She swallowed, not caring that the devastation on her face was in plain sight. Anyone could tell now, what he meant to her. How much he mattered to her. Despair raked its ruthless talons down her lungs, shredding the air in her breathless voice. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Alex laid a hand on her wrist, and Iko nearly flinched from how much it burned. "It doesn't matter."
(In the end, no matter how bright he burns, the sun is also just a star, and all stars collapse and lose their fire.)
"What do you mean it doesn't matter?" Iko seethed, a hand hovering over his bullet wounds, trembling with uncertainty. She felt Alex's lambent eyes on hers, fixing her with a watery stare. With a horrible start, she realised that there was nothing hiding what was between them now, the way he was looking at her, with all the tenderness of the world that she'd never been given, with every beat of his heart, with his armour laid down.
"I'm not gonna make it," Alex said, matter-of-factly, his tone unbelievably level. No secrets between them now. "You need to win this, Iko. You're going to go home."
"No," she hissed, desperation clawing at her chest. Panic surged through her veins, a hurricane ripping up the floorboards in her chest, a home now quickly draining of its sole occupant. "No, it's not time yet. It's not your time."
"Iko," Alex said, his tone infuriatingly calm. "Stop."
"No!" Iko shook her head, feeling the world slowly slipping out from beneath her feet as his ragged breaths grew shallower and shallower every passing second. "It's not fair. It's not. You're not— I'm not ready. It's not time yet. Please, please, please. Stay with me, Lex. Don't go. Don't leave me here. Don't leave me alone."
"Listen to me," Alex panted, slurring his words a little, delirious with pain. His abdomen was solid under her palm, bloated from infection, "Are you listening? Sage is out there. She's hurt. If she's smart, she won't try to take the arrow out of her arm. She'll be weaker than you, but she's still bigger. She's still deadly. She still thinks you're a leftie thrower. You still have that card to play. Win for me, Iko. Come here," Alex whispered now, weaker, much weaker, and Iko felt her heart give a sickened throb. Numb, Iko leant in until his lips brushed her ear.
"I love you."
On reflex, Iko recoiled so violently, Alex winced in agony. Morning was approaching. They hadn't slept all night, and even though Iko saw the light creep in under the door, she felt the darkness closing in.
Her gaze was cutting, knife-bright and sluicing through his as she hissed, "You can't say these things."
Alex sighed. "Sage already said it out loud. Everyone knows, so I don't care anymore. You hear me? I don't give a fuck whether or not people back home will paint me in shame. I don't care about them. I have nothing to lose. We've denied ourselves too much for these Games, I'm not giving up my last chance to say something I should've said years ago. So, yeah, fuck it. I love you. I've loved you since we were children. I love you. I wish I said it more, and I wish I could've been braver." Iko couldn't deny the tremor in his tone, the unshed tears thickening his voice, the unchained emotion roughing his words, scrubbing down her armour, pushing past the iron she'd wrapped round her heart. Alex reached up to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, but his touch was weak, and she leant into it before pressing her forehead against his, as he said, "I wish we had more time." His breath was a love letter fanning warm against her neck.
She felt herself starting to cry, but she knew she couldn't. Curling her fingers around his tighter, tighter, tighter, as if they were children again, lying on their backs on his bedroom floor unaware of what the future held for them. Alex coughed, blood slipping out from the corners of his mouth, but there was no fear in his eyes. Screwing her eyes shut, Iko saw the ledge approaching, and her heart galloped as if she were running right towards it as she turned her mouth to his ear and whispered, "I love you, too."
Even though they were on the ground, curled around each other, his body cradled in her lap, she felt herself falling, falling, falling.
How was this fair?
Alex swallowed, his jaw clenching as his lids fluttered. Iko's heart shuttered with it.
"This isn't goodbye." Alex smiled, a tear slipping out from the corner of his eyes as he touched a hand to her cheek, thumb brushing away the wetness beneath her eyes. "Don't cry, Iko. Not for me. I'm happy, see? The girl I love loves me back." He coughed again, agony tugging at the edges of his features. He smiled, but there was nothing happy in it. "Name one of your kids after me."
Iko rolled her eyes, sniffing. "I hate children."
Alex laughed weakly, more amused exhales than sound. "I know."
For a dangerous moment, she felt a sob lodging in her throat. "You better be waiting for me on the other side."
"You live, and I'll meet you when you're ready." Alex's eyes drew shut, and Iko fought the urge to scream at him to open them, give her that fierce look with an ocean's worth of emotion in them again, look at her in that way that made her skin feel as though it were melting off her bones, that look so unbearable she never wanted to see it again except now. Now, she'd take anything, as long as she could still feel his heart beating instead of slowing under her palm. Alex dragged in a ragged breath, the shallow rise of his chest tearing a chunk of something out of her, and each subsequent breath that grew shallower and shallower taking more and more from inside of her until she wasn't sure she had anything left to give. Alex didn't open his eyes again, but she heard him, loud and clear in this dingy room, his voice a command, soft but brutal.
"I want you to do one thing for me when you win," he said, his lids fluttering slightly, his words slurred. "No more of this. No more killing. No more violence. Do better. Okay? Promise me. Do better."
And then the dam broke. Iko couldn't speak. Didn't trust herself to. Instead, she nodded vigorously, even though he wasn't looking anymore. All her life, Iko had geared herself towards this. The Hunger Games. Training until her hands bled, until the scars on her body grew their own scars, until she had no room left inside her for anything else but the undying fight. Love, she'd always scoffed at. Girls like her couldn't afford such a ridiculous notion. But love, she knew now, love that was still clawing her heart raw.
When she felt his grip go slack, saw the life leave his body, amber eyes shining, dimming, snuffed. Jaw pulling tight, then going still, his final mask stripping away. She felt her entire world stop spinning. Felt it all crumbling away. Felt her heart shatter into smithereens. At first, she felt nothing. Just the feeling of falling, those few seconds in suspense, stomach in her throat, heart in her teeth. And then she felt it all hit her at once, and the agony tore through her like a shockwave of nuclear fire, a thousand knives tearing tissue, biting bone, a pain that not even the loudest scream could capture.
The canon that blasted through the air sounded like the shattering inside her amplified.
They were Careers. They were soldiers. Their hearts could not feel because they were raised to excise such impractical things with the first weapon they held. And what was not there couldn't be broken. As the light faded from his eyes, Iko realised with bitterness in the back of her throat that this was a loaded notion. Another lie they've been fed in the breeding mill of champions. And even though Iko had promised herself that she would never break her conditioning, had promised herself that she would never forget what she would be risking if she showed even the slightest shred of weakness, the blood on her hands didn't change one fundamental thing.
She was still seventeen, after all.
And the boy she loved had died in her arms.
It was this dawning realisation that cut the shackles and unleashed something raw and primal in her.
Staking her fingers into his shoulders in a futile attempt to quell the quaking in her arms, Iko laid her forehead against his stilled chest.
And let a roaring scream that tore out of the abyss deep inside her that startled the birds in the trees. Everything she'd buried spilling out into the open. Rage and grief erupted from her chest. In that moment, she didn't care how she looked. Didn't care that the whole of Panem was watching her break down over a boy she'd simply referred to during her interview with Caesar as a challenge. Didn't care that she was alerting every lethal predator within a mile radius of her location. Didn't care that she was showing weakness as the tears dripped down her face, as she screamed her throat raw, as she tore herself up from the inside and threw all of her hard work away. She didn't care. Because all she knew was that she'd finally witnessed the forbidden thing that she'd always wondered—how the light looked as it faded from his eyes—and now that she had, he was dead. The boy she loved—the only person she had ever loved, and the only person to ever have achieved the impossible in loving her—was gone forever.
"Come back to me," Iko whispered, sobs racking her chest. She drew in a ragged breath. Eyes squeezed shut, she pressed her forehead against his, as though wherever he was now, she might be able to follow. They have never been apart this long. Why was he still gone? "Come back to me."
* * *
WHEN PEOPLE SPEAK OF THE END OF THE WORLD, they usually mean complete obliteration of the planet. As in, total annihilation through collision course and dinosaur extinction. As in, when the solar system explodes and takes everyone down with it. When the sun eventually collapses into a supernova and rips apart this gravitational network, all traces of humanity will wink out of existence with the rest of the burning planets. The blackhole will swallow the Earth and they will call this the end of the world as we know it because this is the only world we know, the only place where their existence has made any dent in the cosmos. Because humans are narcissistic creatures obsessed with the centripetal ideation of the centrifugal universe revolving around them.
That is not how Iko sees it.
Albeit, it may feel like it. That reality is crumbling as the supermassive black hole tears the solar system apart, the trees are disintegrating, ripped out of the ground, the ground racking with seismic explosions, a hellfire bursting out of its molten prison at the Earth's core, consuming the land in a vengeful fury. It might be just as painful. There is no denying this pain, this fissure in her chest, a gaping chasm opening up in the abyss. She's fooled herself long enough into believing she is a separate entity from everyone else, that her genetic disposition dictates that empathy does not bind her, does not misguide her, she's forgotten that, at her essence, she's human too. Fragile moments like these rarely come by and Iko has only ever felt it once, as a child, where she bared her neck to the wolf's teeth, vulnerable to everything including inevitability.
Someone could kill her now and she wouldn't have the strength to fight back. Loss digs its hungry canines into her and rips a hole the size of the boy lying in her lap from her chest. Nothing will fill it and she will go months, years, centuries carrying this hollow cavity around, not bothering to search for something to patch this space because there is no one else like the boy with amber glass eyes and a smile that could dismantle the stars. It is with this melancholy afterthought that she knows she will drag around this pain like a pregnant woman unable to part with the corpse of her dead foetus. Not because there's nothing there anymore, but because of the knowledge that there was anything there in the first place.
Once upon a time, she wondered what it'd be like to have the light fade from his eyes. A question followed by the echo of denial, a stone tossed into the abyss she turns her back from because she does not need to know, nor will she ever want to. Of course, this day had to come eventually. She'd known it the second he'd stepped up on stage during the Reaping. Just not like this.
Not like this.
This is the way the world ends. With someone else's blood on her hands and his head cradled in her lap. With the light fading from his eyes and the warmth draining from his body. There wasn't a time she could remember that the boy in her arms has ever been anything else but warm—all radiant charm and star-bright smiles. Some days she feels like modern Icarus in his presence, daring herself to fly higher and higher under his incendiary gaze until the melting wax burns against her back and she takes the plunge into the gaping ocean. Some days she wishes she were the moon, in some other galaxy, never touching, never governed by his gravitational pull.
They used to call them binary stars. They never saw one without the other, always holding onto each other even when parted by a crowd. From interlinked pinkies—"I'm here, I'm not going anywhere"—to shoulder pressed against shoulder while laying on hardwood floors speaking the gods into existence to lingering gazes across the room to ensure nothing has come to harm each other. Divinity marks this bond. There has always been something untouchable about this empyrean pair. In another life they might have been Kings and Queens, perhaps God and Goddess.
But with all stars, they will collapse. And with binary stars, one or the other might collapse and the supernova will take the other with it and it is then that they will learn. They might die for each other, they might kill for each other. But they will also tear each other apart.
At the end of the day this is her only thought arising with unforgiving clarity amidst the chaos: Oh. So this is what it looks like, to have the light fade from his eyes. You got him killed— no. You have killed him.
Now you know.
* * *
NO REAL FIGHT IS BOUND BY FOUR WALLS. It doesn't end in a doorway or at the end of the track or when you wash off the sweat and the blood. Fights end with defeat, and death is the only defeat a warrior understands. From the moment you decide that you were born to fight with every shred of grit and steel and fire in your blood, the cosmic mettle of your purpose is tested, and you will be broken and damaged in countless ways until you are beaten. Every breath, every step, every choice made by your free will is enemy action.
Numb, Iko reached into Alex's pocket and withdrew the walkie-talkie, one hand still clasping his, still unwilling to let go, even if his body had gone cold. Grief sharpened into anger, a rage that sliced through her veins, adrenaline blotting out the pain in her shredded arms. Exhaustion threatened to ebb darkness into her vision, but the furious inferno eating up every inch of the darkness within her kept her upright, kept her mind sharp.
Iko pressed the button on the side of the walkie-talkie and raised it to her lips. "Sage," Iko said, her tone level, thunderous as a volcano on the verge of erupting, magma swelling at the pit of her throat. She didn't recognise her own voice. It was more than a snarl—it was iron, forged by pain, by grief. Her hands were steady now, ready for knives. "Sage, if you can hear me, if you are hearing this, I'm coming for you. I'm going to find you, and I'm going to tear you apart limb from limb. Mark my words, you pathetic piece of shit. Watch your back."
Then she released the device.
Silence lapsed over her, a wave drowning every sound of the arena. A beat passed as Iko stared down at Alex's face, traced his features with a finger, and from the lack of feedback on the other end, she assumed Sage had lost her walkie-talkie.
Until a burst of static crippled the quiet.
"Game on, Two," Sage's smug voice leaked through the receiver, stoking the flames licking at Iko's gut. "Game on."
AUTHOR'S NOTE.
tbh..... i contemplated leaving out alex's confession..... but...... we all need this, okay? we do. we need this. it is essential to iko's redemption arc later on in the sequel that will emerge once i finish Mania.
ANYWAY. let's do a poll:
if u want me to resurrect alex in Fire (the last book of this trilogy), say aye. (bc i have a Way to resurrect him. bc its My fic and i can bend the laws of physics if i want to. but i wanna see who would want him back first. either way iko's character arc will remain the same no matter the outcome of this poll)