𝐒𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐓𝐄 || Narnia x The Hunger Games Crossover

Chapter Six

The next two days flew by in a blur. Lucy tried everything she could possibly get her hands on, visiting each station at least once and focusing especially hard on wilderness survival and archery, with a dash of throwing knives tossed in, though she found them a great deal more difficult than wielding a bow.

Occasionally she and Caspian ended up at the same station, or she found herself sitting somewhere with Eustace and Jill, the latter of which kept to herself if she joined them at all, but proved to be nearly as clever as Eustace with mechanical things.

They made for decent time-passing conversation, never touching any really important topics, only whatever they were learning at the moment, or the other tributes.

In fact, this was how she found herself on the morning of the third and final day of training, perched atop an artificial log flipping through a book on fire-starting while Eustace lay flat on his stomach rubbing one stick into another, trying to get a spark, and Jill sat cross legged across from him, watching but not participating except to throw out the occasional critique or comment.

"Alright, alright," said Eustace, "Stop nagging, will you?"

"I'm just saying, you should move your hands down while you spin it. I'm the one who already did it correctly, remember?"

"How can I forget when you haven't stopped gloating?"

"She's right," said Lucy, butting in without looking up from her book, "It says here you're supposed to move your hands down."

She'd grown accustomed to their constant bickering, and knew Eustace's bark didn't have much of a bite behind it.

He squinted up at her. "Are you here to help or model?"

She scoffed and shifted in her silky off-shoulder blouse, a strip of pale midriff showing between the ribbons that bound her soft pink skirt and flowing white top. "I can do what I like with my final days, thank you very much."

The delicate material lent a confidence to her figure, one that said quite the opposite of final days, though she'd fallen slowly and steadily into Eustace's morbid sensibilities, if only to throw them back at him.

Polly had beamed yesterday morning when she first emerged in real Capitol getup, quite the shift from baggy shirts and slacks.

"Yes, you're a very pretty corpse," he drawled.

"Thanks."

Eustace huffed and kept trying with his sticks, this time moving his hands down.

Lucy closed the book and glanced around the gym, busier now than it had yet seemed in three days as tributes squeezed in their last minute training for individual assessments, when they would each receive a public score based on their performance. Lucy already knew she would save the obstacle course for her assessment, so instead she packed as much time into other areas as she could before the opportunity disappeared.

Across the gym, Caspian hunched over a table at the edible plants station as if cramming for an exam.

By now she'd memorized most of the tributes' names: twelve year old Gael from Nine, chubby-cheeked with berries at the edible plants station; the career girls Edith and Ivy, twirling spears like batons; and of course the loud and self-confident Rabadash, who'd apparently taken the invitation that Caspian turned down, and spent most of his time showing off in front of Susan.

A few other small groups stuck together, but Eustace guessed they were mostly truces as opposed to real alliances, bound to dissolve as soon as the Games actually started. Still Lucy couldn't help watching them, especially the golden-haired Lilliandil and her district partner, a handsome (or really, Lucy might even have called him pretty) redhead named Peridan.