The Black Widow- A Hunger Games Fanfic

Night 1

My eyelids began to feel heavy within ten minutes of my watch shift starting. Every so often, I would prick my finger with the point of my knife, sending a little spark of pain up to my brain, just to keep me awake. It probably wasn't a great habit to get into. Not that I had alot of time left to form habits.
The more I thought about this whole dying in the arena thing, the more I realised that my surviving would probably be a bigger fuck you to Snow than me dying in here.
Since White and Burnie had died, I had known that I wanted to join them. In all those months, I had never questioned that even for a second. I knew that if I went on living, I would be living in Snow's world and he would never, ever let me go. I would be his slave until I died of old age alone in my mansion and then he would put my body in the graveyard in the Capitol where they put all the other dead victors and the people of the Capitol would mourn for a few months as if they had known me and forget me as soon as their new shiny toy came along.
But the bodies of dead tributes always got sent home.
It had never just been rebellion that had stopped me killing myself, it had been the knowledge that if I died, I would never go home. Never be buried in the soil of District 1 alongside the rest of my family. This had always been the plan.
But now there was another plan. A plan that I was willing to die to achieve. One that would stop anyone else from ending up like me. And yet, I was still going to give Snow exactly what he wanted.
He wanted the perfect career. Well that was the act I would die performing. He wanted twenty three dead. Well I would be one of them. He wanted the hunger games to continue. Well I had no control over whether they did or didn't after I was dead and buried. In some ways, I was doing everything that he wanted me to. And that just felt like that even in getting exactly what I wanted, I was still going to lose. I was still going to die as someone else. As the murderer he made me. As the Capitol's Black Widow.

The jungle was dark now that the sun had fully set. That nighttime just made me even more tired. My shift was probably over by now. After all, there was no way anyone could prove that it wasn't. I moved to wake Brutus, who was going to take the next shift, up. But as I reached out to shake him awake, a dark shape dropped onto my hand. I stared at it- the blob of black. But it was also red. And it had legs. Eight of them.
I stifled a scream as the black widow spider stared back at me, its teeth that would deliver a lethal venomous bite so close to my skin. In that sense, I was millimetres away from death. And then I felt them on my legs. I turned slightly to see a hundred spiders swarming into a blanket over my legs. I was visibly trembling as they crawled up me by the thousand, encapsulating me in a cocoon of venom.
I supposed this was the Capitol's sick idea of a joke. Snow probably put in a request.

I had known I had going to die in this arena, but I had always hoped it would be less painful than poison. Whatever the Capitol had in store for me was sure to be painful. And by no means fast.
A tear dripped down my cheek and the spider that had taken up residence on my face moved out of the way, right onto my mouth. More tears began to fall and the spider crawled up my face, into my hair, where it joined the other spiders in the hood they had knitted over my head.
I couldn't die yet, I realised, I still had so much to do. I couldn't let the plan fail.
My dad had told me once the story of his grandmother, who was a snake charmer. He said her voice had been so sweet that the snakes didn't bite her. I would just have to hope it worked the same on spiders.
I hummed the first couple notes of the song, afraid that if I opened my mouth the spiders would go in. The others snapped awake as soon as they heard my song.
They looked at me draped in a cloak of spiders. They looked at me begging for help. They looked at me and they ran.

Alone with the spiders, I commanded myself not to give up just yet. I begged myself not to fall and let the spiders bite me. But still my body resisted the command to stay upright.
Shaking, I continued to hum the tune of the nursery rhyme Dad had always sung me before I went to bed. After all these years, the words wouldn't come clearly to my head but it was the only song that I could think of a the spiders scuttled over me.
But with every note, the spiders stilled slightly so I had no choice but to keep humming.
I don't know how long I stayed there, immobilised by the innate instinct to stay alive, or at least to avoid pain. My body was painful from being still so long and my voice was croaky and not as pleasant as it had been when I started singing. But at least the spiders weren't crawling anymore.
But suddenly, my humming wasn't enough for them anymore and they moved despite the music. Terror filled me but the spiders didn't crawl up my body, instead, they crawled down. And away.
It was minutes after I could no longer feel the spiders on me that I dared to move. I drew in a deep breath, scanning around the jungle for any sign of them but they were gone. As if they had never been there at all.
Without a second thought, I threw my backpack over my back and sprinted in the direction of the beach. I had no idea what I would do now that I had lost my alliance, but I knew that I needed to get out of this jungle.