#(also there's an easter egg in which plant Begonia shows to her)

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WHG Final: Snow

Welcome to Snow’s final installment in the Writeblr Hunger Games, featuring some (reasonable) assumptions and a reunion with @ratracechronicler​‘s Begonia Rex! (and mentions of @concealeddarkness13​‘s Leanda!)

Her consciousness returns like the drip of an IV, in steady drops of awareness filtering the fog from her mind. It’s still nighttime, branches silhouetted against the moonlight as she stares upwards, the grass cold on her back. She presses a hand to her head, feeling for the bruise where Nyr had knocked her out. Should probably get that checked out, she thinks groggily as she pushes herself up to one elbow. Could be a concussion…

The area seems deserted. “Hello?” she whispers quietly, vision blurring slightly as she stands. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

But the only sound that reaches her ears is the faint rustling of leaves, the chirping of insects in the dark. The clearing is surrounded by flowers, which she dimly recognizes from her books shouldn’t all be growing there—in the wrong place, and in the wrong time. “Anybody?” she calls out, louder this time. “Am I still in the Arena?” Silence. “Where am I?”

There were stories, which she’d never put much stock in, that when you died there was still a journey left to take. That you woke up on one side of a great obstacle and had to find your own way to the judgment that awaited you. If indeed you ever found it. The priest she’d spoken to during that slow afternoon in the hospital, recovering from a kidney infection, had told her that everyone’s trial was different—some found themselves on one side of an impassable desert and others at the bottom of unclimbable mountains. 

And some, she thinks, find themselves back in the Games. Trapped in an inescapable Arena with nowhere to go. What’s my judgment going to be?

No. Nyr had refused to kill her. Hadn’t she?

But if she was still alive, if this was all part of some grand conspiracy to escape the Games, then why was she still in the Arena? Nyr had said that they were evacuating the other tributes, ensuring they made their way home—and this isn’t home. Nowhere close. Instead, the forest of the Arena closes in around her, dark and impenetrable, lit from above in ethereal, silvery light.

She makes her way along a small path, towards the faint sounds of a river. A figure kneels next to the bank, tending gently to a small plant, a half-empty flask of water sitting beside him. A familiar streak of red runs through his hair, and she feels her shoulders slump. “So you’re here too,” she says quietly.

He turns, a grin spreading across his face. “Snow! You made it! I said I was going to run into you again, didn’t I?” he says cheerfully, his last remark seemingly addressed to the flower.

Not quite the reaction she expected—but then, it is Begonia. “Shame it has to be like this.”

He frowns. “What are you talking about? We made it out of the Games, both of us. I don’t think you or I were trying to win, so isn’t this just what we were hoping for?”

“No! You’re dead, and if you’re dead and we’re here then I must be dead too…” Saying it makes it real, solidifies it from a half-formed nightmare into what feels like a tsunami, deep and cold and trying to pull her under. “And—I know what I told Nyr, but I didn’t really—I wasn’t thinking it would be like this-“

“I’m not dead.”

“What?”

“I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m not dead. I know I’ve been sort of pretending to be, but I’m not, and I don’t think you are either.” He offers another smile, motioning for her to sit next to him, a gesture which she hesitantly accepts. “Did Nyr not tell you? About how we’re trying to help all the tributes make it out alive?”

She holds up her hands, trying to make sense of it all. “No. Yes. She told me, but what are we still doing here?”

“Oh, it’s a project Leanda and I have been working on,” he says excitedly. “She has all the video footage, but I’m sure if we asked I could get some to show to you. A sort-of mock nature documentary of all the plants the Capitol brought here. A way to show off all of the living there is in the Arena, not just the killing.”

And there it is. She takes a breath, staring at the light reflected in the water. “I—I killed someone. Threw away my oath and killed someone. Harker, her name was. District 7.”

He doesn’t say anything for a second. She had expected him to be angry, somehow, or even just distant. After all, he had trusted her, that very first night, with reassurance that the Games would never turn her into a killer, and she had betrayed that. She had built him a memorial, to show to the Gamemakers that there was still something human left in the Arena, and discarded that just as easily. Instead, he merely asks “What happened?”

It’s easy to talk, for she sees it every time she closes her eyes. “I…it seemed like there was nothing left to do. Nothing left to fight for except what the Games told us to—and so I did. The Feast happened, and she must have been poisoned, and it was killing her. So I killed her—but it wasn’t to be kind, to end the pain,” she says, cutting off his response. “I wish it was, but it wasn’t. I was scared, and it felt like there was nothing I could do, and none of that is justification…”

“It’s not justification. It’s the Games.”

“I—don’t understand. It might have been the Games, but I was still the one who-“

“No.” There’s an edge to his voice that she’s never heard before. “Don’t think that way, Snow. Maybe I am just the plant guy, but—here, look,” he says, turning back to the flower he’d been nursing. Its brilliant red leaves are stained with brown and black, visibly sagging, a petal falling to the ground. “Sarcodes sanguinea, from the mountain ranges. It’s dying. It was never meant to survive here.”

“So what?”

His gaze is earnest and almost pleading. “We’re not meant to survive here either. They tell us that, from the very start. For everything that’s living here, that we’re trying to show off just to make the Capitol stew, there’s five that aren’t because of their efforts. Like Sarcodes here—no chlorophyll. Without the fungus, it physically can’t keep going. Are you going to blame it because it doesn’t have the resources it needs?”

The metaphor might be a touch heavy-handed, but she still allows herself a small smile. “No. That’s…that’s one of the first rules of the ER. No questions besides the necessary ones, and no blame. It doesn’t matter why they’re hurt, why they’re sick. Just that we can help.” She speaks as a doctor for the first time in days, and—to her surprise—finds herself believing it. 

“Exactly! Now, I think we could probably make space for you in the documentary—Clearly-Not-Snow, or maybe Artificial Snow…”

She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but…I can’t. I can’t stay here any longer. I need to be done with fighting, done with the Capitol and the Districts for-“ She hesitates, checking for a watch left back in District 8- “well, I don’t know how long.”

“You’re leaving,” he says.

“Yes,” she says sadly. “I don’t know where. Somewhere far away. But you said you worked outside Panem, too, right? Outside the Districts, on the very edge of the border? Who knows, maybe once this is all over—if it’s ever all over—we’ll see each other again there. Can only be so many people roaming the outskirts.”

He laughs. “You’d be surprised. I don’t have anything to give you right now, except good luck, so I’ll give you that.”

“Thank you.” Snow moves to go, then stops, looking back. “Really. Thank you. I don’t think I’d have made it through the Games—or after them, even—without you.”