Worth it | F.O.

XXIV

Crop was alive but he didn't know for how long that would last. Nor how long he had until he took his last breath. Not what would cause it, and certainly not what would come after. 

Simply because he, raised in his world, only held the belief - though more of a hope, really - that at the very least it was somewhere better. And it did help that he couldn't very well imagine anything worse. Things were looking bleak and as overcast with dangerous probable and improbabilities as that programmed sky. 

Life was nothing more than a fight for survival to those that had run with the echoes of death and blood shed chasing them into the forest. The very instant that gong rang in his ears with a final thud as to the reality they all faced, he had been running as fast as his feet could carry him. It had been especially terrifying trying so very hard not to trip in the sinking mud and hidden, reaching vines so desperate to wrap around his ankles. He could've sworn he had even seen one move. 

It was safe to say that he had gotten out of there as fast as humanly possible. Crop hadn't even, much to his guilt, watched to see where Nivea had gone, much less how she was doing. His only priority at the time had been getting the hell away from there and into the relative safety of the cloaking shadows and winding uncharted paths. He charted that uncharted land of shadows and manmade threats for a near hour after that, his every step squelching and crackling with all that lay underfoot. 

With every step of his own, he flinched. Every intake of breath and shift of the fabric on his back near gave him a heart attack and his heart never stopped racing so very loud and distracting in his ears, not once. It didn't seem to help that he hadn't even paused to snatch a single thing from the mud around the cornucopia and so, in the fading light of overcast gloomy skies, Crop was left defenseless, not a weapon in sight. 

Not even remembering what Nivea had said about using a mere straw as a weapon, which surely meant that anything could be used as one, helped as he didn't feel that anything of the vines, trees, and bushes could be of use in that sense. He may have scored rather high in the training evaluation but left without a single knife, he was as good as useless, a dead man walking. 

The woman he had come to fear and admire in the very same instance was much smarter than he, he realized as he regretted his lack of foresight, for even she who had seemed to already know basic survival skills had taken it upon herself to remain prepared. He had been idiotic to think that he would be fine when left without a knife because he was too much of a coward to dash to that small dagger laying only ten or so feet from where his platform had been positioned. 

But he had been scared. Shit, he was still scared, terrified even, especially after that girl had died before their very eyes in not even the split second of a split second. And though Nivea acted as if the very idea of the games didn't phase her, he knew that some part of her would and had been too. 

After all, he had seen the blood of that other girl, even younger than her, cover her skin in a stark crimson. He, even from that far away, had most definitely been affected. And he could've sworn there had been true, unfiltered horror in her eyes when it had truly dawned upon them all what had happened, who had died, and how what very little of what was left of her remains painted the elder girl's right side. 

That was only the beginning of the trauma he knew they would all come to harbor wherever they ended up. And as soon as those eleven booms rang for him to hear, even huddled in the hollow trunk of a tree blanketed in vines in a brief security to the ever-present threats, he knew wherever had greeted them with open arms. He knew that they had crossed to that place he, ironically, prayed to be better than this. 

It was nothing short of horrifying, the realization that they were all already dead. Just like that, that twenty four that had once stood together and yet so far apart in the training room, on those chariots, on those platforms ending one before she could take a step into a chance had been more than halved. Not to mention how those of that very surviving half were to be blamed for it, for the lives she cut from this world in a mad dash for survival.