Victor's Crown: A Hunger Games Story

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿 [𝟮𝟮]

The world screeches to a dead halt.

Caspia's eyes meet Finnick's, infinite and infinitesimal, filled with so much of everything and too much of nothing at all. Then she's falling under Bellona's rage, Bellona driving her into the ground, knives stabbing over and over until there is more blood than girl. Finnick never knew so much blood could come out of a person. There's enough to paint the heavens any and every shade of red an artist could want, gathering in rapidly blooming puddles, spattered in a myriad of droplets, smeared in broad strokes across a concrete sky. A work of art in and of itself. It doesn't seem real. Finnick doesn't feel real.

Clang. The trident slips from Caspia's fingers.

The sound yanks Finnick out of his reverie and plunges him back into a reality so sharp and vivid he's sick with the enormity of it. What is he doing?

Loosing a terrible cry, Finnick swings the bladed shaft indiscriminately at the tribute, at the monster butchering his district partner. With her unnerving, catlike speed, Bellona flattens herself to the ground just in time and the blade goes whistling over her head, then whips up as Finnick lunges back to regain his balance. Bellona whirls around, crimson-spattered face radiant with bloodlust, and her incandescent gaze zeroes in on Finnick. She roars, a lioness reveling over her downed prey, and advances on Finnick with her bloodstained knife raised.

Finnick adjusts his grip on the curved blade and snatches up Ruby's shield, which is the first usable weapon he sees. He tries to grab Ruby's sword as well, but Bellona is already on the offensive, and Finnick is forced to devote all of his attention to her lest he join Caspia bleeding on the ground. The trident. He needs the trident.

"I'm sorry about Miles," he wheezes, just as Bellona's knife clatters against the shield. The impact jars Finnick to his bones, sending spasms of pain through his arrow wound. "He didn't deserve what he got."

For the briefest moment, Bellona's mask of fury slips, and a dreadful sorrow gleams through, keen and ruinous as her blade. Then it's gone, replaced by an expression of such profound hatred Finnick feels its burn more intensely than the flames surrounding them. "You don't know anything!" Bellona shouts, trembling with rage. "He was better than all of us, and now he's gone and I'm here, and I have to kill you!"

This time, Finnick isn't sure he hears fury as much as he does heartache. Involuntarily, he wonders if the former has been a symptom of the latter this whole time, if Bellona has not been angry so much as she has been mourning something she lost and will never find again.

Then he doesn't have time to wonder anything because he's dodging Bellona's next assault, grunting as the movement tugs his injury. He's got a couple of broken ribs for sure. While he's on the defensive, he studies his opponent's attack as he's been trained to do, noting the pattern of movements she uses most often. She's sloppier than usual, he observes. Sloppy and very desperate. He can exploit both, but his timing will have to be perfect. He deflects and maneuvers carefully to conserve his energy, searching for the right opportunity.

When Bellona brings her blade down, he swings Ruby's shield up, catching the hilt of Bellona's knife with the shield, and wrenches both in a circular motion. As Bellona goes careening sideways, Finnick drops the shield and dives for the trident. Then several things happen so rapidly Finnick's brain doesn't have time to process them as they happen:

Awful, breath-stealing pain as he hits the ground.

Finnick's hand closing around the shaft of his trident.

Bellona lunging at him with a feral scream. Lunging straight into the prongs of Finnick's trident, hugged between his dominant arm and his torso, propped up against the ground.