Breathe in, Breathe out • F Odair² •

XXII

"It's time for you to go."
•∘♔∘•

Athena woke up suddenly. She kept her eyes closed. She felt like the weight was still pressing down on her chest. She struggled to breathe, gasping and all but hyperventilating for several moments until she realized nothing was pressed against her chest and suffocating her. All the same, it took her several long moments to remember how to breathe properly and compose herself. Even when she was a little more calm, she still felt like there was something pressing down on her, like ghosts were trying to push her down until she sunk through the floor and disappeared into nothingness. It was suffocating in its own way, even as she continued to breathe. She was trying to think straight, but something kept clouding her mind, forcing her to fight just to stay awake. She took a moment to brace herself, before opening her eyes. She squinted at first, against the light of the sun - but, no, it wasn't the sun, she realized once her eyes had adjusted to it. It was artificial light.

She wasn't in the arena anymore. She was somewhere seemingly far away from that jungle, away from the explosions and the fires and the lightning strikes. She was, instead, alone in a plain white room, lying on a fairly soft bed with a thin sheet covering her. Instead of the jumpsuit, she was in a white hospital gown. Someone had cleaned her up, because the parts of her that she could see were free of the dirt, blood and sweat that came with the arena. When she brought a hand to her hair, she found that even that was soft and clean and free of any tangles. They must have also fixed her injuries, because as she moved her body bit by bit, getting movement back in her body by sections, she found that there was no pain. It was gone now. It sort of felt like a distant memory, something so far away. Maybe it was. Athena didn't know how long she had been passed out. Her necklace was still around her neck, blue spinel pendant and golden ring still intact. She had a few tubes sticking in her arm that were hooked up to all sorts of complex-looking machines. Some were either taking blood or providing her with it, or both, it was sort of hard to tell. Another was injecting her with some clear, translucent liquid she recognized immediately as morphling. That explained why it was so hard to stay awake and think straight; Morphling was a powerful sedative and was known to cause hallucinations. Right now, though, she didn't need sedatives; she needed to remain conscious and think clearly. Knowing that this might bring the pain back and not particularly caring, she brought her hand to her arm and removed the needle injecting her with morphling from her arm.

As soon as the needle left her veins, an alarm went off. It was a high-pitched beeping noise that sounded over and over, evidently signalling something to someone. That she was awake, perhaps. Or that she was misbehaving by not allowing them to sedate her. She tried to bring herself into a sitting position, but she was held down by a wide restraining belt that was attached to the bed. It was all she could do not to panic. She was being strapped down to the bed and the alarm that had gone off when she removed the needle was still beeping incessantly, beginning to remind her horribly of the clicking of the insects in the jungle (maybe they hadn't left the jungle at all? Maybe this was some sort of trap? Maybe the morphling was taking effect and this was all one long, vivid hallucination?). Someone would be coming to find her because of this beeping and she had no idea who that someone would be and she had no way of getting away if they were a threat.

This only brought her right back to the question burning in her brain. Where was she? This didn't look like anywhere in the Remake Center or the Training Center. Was she in District Thirteen, then? She frowned at the thought. She didn't know why, as she wasn't sure exactly what she had been expecting, but this was not what she imagined District Thirteen to be. They must know she was on their side, so to speak. Why would they be strapping her down? Perhaps for the same reason they strapped down new victors the first time they woke up after leaving the arena. Were they frightened her mind would still be in the arena and she'd go rogue and hurt someone, be it another person or herself? Considering when she had woken up she had almost had a meltdown because she had thought she was still trapped under the wreckage of the arena, perhaps that wasn't much of a stretch. She still wasn't reassured.