self para / / space breath
Rhea doesn’t have time to look up and admire the skies. The stars are invisible from the Capitol and its lights anyway. This immediately makes no sense to her, but she imagines it’s a simulation. She imagines this is an exciting opportunity. She doesn’t regret pulling strings to be Reaped. She really doesn’t, she shakes her head and lies to herself.
No, instead, Rhea purses her lips together. It’s difficult to breathe under such a costume, and it’s the skin she’ll be wearing for the rest of her life or until enough people die. Either way, brutal. It makes her real skin, deep deep underneath, crawl. The black can swallow them. And it will. She’s sure it will. Immediately, she dreads this, although the apparent lack of insects serves as comforting enough for her not to lose it on spot.
Before her stand the other tributes. It’s insane. The countdown never comes, but somewhere in time, as they all keep waiting, Rhea figures out there’s a tick, a something with rhythm and sense. When it stops, people start moving, jumping, making an air bridge between the pods they found themselves in and the shining Cornucopia. The lights never blinded her, but at this point, she cannot look in the direction of the gap, in the direction of everything dangerous. There it is, one jump to count for all steps she’s ever taken. One jump that could potentially end it all.
Rhea braces herself, closes her eyes shut, and dives in. The floor underneath her soles she can hardly feel, but she is alive. There are no stars here as well -- which is a disappoint, though not a very educated expectation. Someone else -- someone taller -- grabs her arm. It’s a boy with a plan, and it takes her two seconds to recognize he is a Career. All the panic alarms ring off. The boy breathes something into his helmet and, to Rhea’s surprise, she can hear it microphone-clear.
“Sorry, dear, Capitol always goes first.” He’s pitiful in his tone, and he pulls her hard to push her off the platform for no reason other than a thirst for survival. Rhea finds herself hurt and offended. There is virtually no chance for her to pull through, but she cannot have done all this just to die in the first moments. Breathing heavily, she glues to him. She tries to cling to him. The air is weird. She grabs at his shoulders, not to be sent off to a slow and painful death.
In his attempt to shake her off, he moves just a little closer to the edge. It’s all she needs. In a moment of inspired, accidental quickness, she presses the button to his helmet, which bursts open. He goes purple almost immediately. It takes less than fifteen seconds. No cannon announces his death, but he drops to his knees. He lets go of Rhea. And Rhea just stands there in sheer shock, waiting for something else to happen, with no guidance and suddenly no recollection of being in the Hunger Games, as her hands do, for the first time, real harm. For a second, this is less, less important than living or dying. Of course, the shock lingers, but she has to move as most of the other tributes jumped close enough to her, too.
