guillotine dreams, peeta mellark

CHAPTER ONE

     There is a moment in the games when you realize whether you are going to win or lose. It creeps out of the shadows, hands grappling onto your arms and either pushing you forward towards a ladder or pulling you into the ground. The ground where a casket lay waiting for the right moment to slam its lid down, trapping you within the walls of that box to signify that it was over.

For Greer, it was a splicing pain. A fire set ablaze in her stomach as the steel cut straight into her - through her - a horrible gasp escaping her as she met his eyes.

Flint Kutler. Only sixteen but he was a Herculean force, angry eyes with an angrier gash now running down the side of his face. The walking personification of what the citizens of The Capitol viewed as a warrior. For the entire games he had utilized an axe, larger than what he ever swung back in District Seven but a familiar weapon in his hands nonetheless. Yet then on the final day, Flint Kutler took the sword from corpse of the boy from District Two.

He had hunted her down, and for almost a full day Greer Cromwell had done nothing but run as the remaining tributes fell one by one by one. She was already hurt, already bleeding, but she was nowhere near dead.

But the chase, this cat and mouse game that the final two tributes were playing, it was not the final battle that the people of Panem were looking for. How lucky they were that Seneca Crane still had a few tricks up his sleeve.

How unlucky Greer Cromwell was that the very same screen in the sky that would display the face of the dead tributes at night now displayed the exact location of the two living tributes. How unlucky Greer Cromwell was that the arena physically grew smaller as boundaries cropped up behind her to prevent her from running. An arena split into four quadrants to match each season, all with their own barriers to push her right towards Flint Kutler - mounds of unscalable ice, poison trees, even a plunging river she wouldn't be able to cross in time if she tried.

And she tried. But the second the boy from District Seven shot out from the impending forest of poisonous doom, Greer's only choice was to run.

He was stronger, but she was far faster. That was the thought that shot through her head as her feet slipped and slid across the grass - she was running towards the cornucopia. Why was she running towards the cornucopia? That was it, she was running away and he was running right after her, and if she looked up she would see the screen showing the two blinking dots representing the two of them so close together they were almost one, almost blending together, almost-

There is a moment in the games when you know that it's over. Greer's back hit the metal of the cornucopia. The sound of Flint's sword scratching against the cornucopia as he stabbed it straight through her made every hair not already standing up on her arms do so. He looked at her as he did. Greer saw him smile, a sickening, bloody smile, and it was over. Greer felt the hands of death yank her down into her own casket.

They didn't close the door.

Flint Kutler pulled his sword from her with a sickening tear, tossing the weapon to the side as the girl from District Twelve toppled to the ground herself.

And he was so sure that he had won, so sure that the hands that gripped onto his arms were pushing him to the ladder leading to victory. Pronouncing himself a victor, turning with his arms out and a glorious look on his face that broadcasted 'do you see what I did?'.

He was expecting the people of The Capitol to be proud of him - they would be.

Greer Cromwell had one single arrowhead in her pocket. She could feel it stabbing into her leg now, the chase having jostled it out of its spot. Haymitch had told her that if she could get a bow in the arena but not a knife (or if she lost said knife, with was much more plausible), to snap the arrowhead off of just one of the arrows, and keep it in the event she was ever trapped and needed a short range weapon.