The Beasts of Us [A Hunger Games Fanfic]

LIGHTS VI. Joy.

The day before the Reaping, she'd watched Kit dragged to the post and whipped for trespassing. He'd looked up at her, stripped to the waist and his eyes wide and full of pain, and he hadn't looked away the whole time. She'd known at that moment that he'd been waiting for her to do something, not just about the whipping, but for a kiss or a touch or something, anything, to show him that she cared. And she had cared. She had cared right up until the moment she'd seen that look on his face.

Still, he didn't know that. And the Careers didn't either.

"He's got nothing if he hasn't got me," she told Heather, as they waited for the pair from Ten to arrive in the hall. Frankly, Joy thought they could go on without either of them. The girl was insipid and the boy was just a sack of nothing. "I've got to get back to him."

"How sweet." Heather was standing bolt-upright, her dog-daemon sitting by her feet with his ears and tail pricked up.

"I won't stop at anything."

Caspar glanced over at her. He was more relaxed than his district partner, more likely to be caught smiling, but she'd seen him batter the instructors at every station they stopped at and she had him down as one to avoid fighting with unless he was asleep. "You and the rest of us," he said.

"Kit means more to me than anybody else," she said, in case they'd missed the point.

Not too surprisingly, Lin was the only one who was actually listening to her. The rest were exactly what she'd expected from Careers; disinterested, self-absorbed and desperate to show off their abilities at every opportunity. None of them looked like they'd ever been short on food. The others treated her in a way she found slightly patronising, but Lin, with his tousled hair and affable smile, had accepted her straight away. If she was going to get close to the group, it would be through him. And while she was doing that she could present herself as an ally: too motivated - and therefore useful - to be an easy target, not strong enough to be a realistic threat. With any luck they would keep her around, hoping to make good use of her, while she was planning how to see them off. Once the Careers were down, getting rid of what remained of the rest of the tributes would be easy.

That was the plan, anyway. So far she hadn't made much headway with the rest of the Careers. Lin was her best chance at that.

He was standing next to her, just a fraction closer than anybody else would, with his monkey-thing-daemon slung around his waist and watching her with wide, otherworldly eyes. "I'm sure he's missing you a whole lot," he said.

"Not as much as I'm missing him." She sighed. "But I'd rather he be home and safe than here with me."

Lin gave her a sympathetic look and mussed her hair. "Must be nice, having a boy worth fighting for. Say, look at those two!"

It was the two from Six; the girl with her fox-daemon and her hair scrapping around her shoulders and the quiet, calm eighteen year old whose daemon looked like a small wolf with startling blue eyes. They were sitting some way apart from the rest of the group, muttering to each other. There was nothing odd about them that Joy could see. "What about them?" 

"There'd better be a Peacekeeper between their rooms, that's all I'm saying."

Caspar chuckled, so she judged it wise to laugh too. The noise attracted Sapphire, who had been busy pretending to ignore them all, and who whipped around to glare at them. "Haven't you got better things to think about?" she snapped.

Stunner rolled his eyes and tweaked his topknot. "Don't mind Sapphire," he laughed, "she's only jealous."

"Try focused."

He waved it off with another laugh and turned to Lin and Joy. "She's such a spoilsport. I say: good on them, having some fun while they still can. Do you think they actually are? She's not exactly gorgeous, is she?"