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People shit themselves when they die. They don't tell you about that in Training. Once your life slips away and your heart stops beating, all of your muscles loosen. Unfortunately enough, your bowels empty as everything begins to decay. Nobody really tells you about that special little fact until you see it first-hand. That sort of bodily process doesn't have a particularly cinematic appeal. Imagine a prince going to plant a final kiss on his true love's lips, his eyes watering from the stench of her underwear. Or a witch being hanged for her crimes, only for the crowd to silence as drips of stinking fluid dribbled down her legs. It isn't attractive. So, they snip it out of movies and pretend that it doesn't exist.
The first time that Plume saw it happen was in the arena. Correction: she smelled it first. Her knife had lodged in the chest cavity of a Career tribute. The boy had been separated from his pack. He had chased after Plume with the pretense of her being an easy target, a quick kill for the entertainment of the Capitol. Just as he was about to cave her head in with a mace, Plume brandished her dagger and, in one clean thrust, sent it right through his ribcage into his heart. Actually, Plume wasn't sure if she had hit the heart or not. All she knew was that the blood ran down her hands like snakes and that she watched him fall to the earth in agony as the life faded from his eyes. Maybe she had hit a major artery. Maybe she had just hit a pressure point.
Plume sat there for a long while, trying to catch her breath and regroup her mind. The Capitol hovercraft usually came by to pick up the bodies after five minutes or so, but this was at the beginning of the initial Bloodbath. In that case, they waited for the bloodshed to cease before daring to collect the corpses of children. The boy had died with his eyes open, his last breath spent screaming his lungs out. When he finally stopped breathing, Plume was in disbelief. She didn't even know the boy's name, and yet she had drained the life from him. Did he have a family? Did he have a future?
Plume's thoughts were almost drowned out by the other screams from around her. The Cornucopia was only a hundred yards to her right, and the battle was still raging. Idling was foolish, Plume knew. She should've been running in the opposite direction, trying to separate herself from the Career pack and other tributes who could snap her neck with a single jerk of their wrists. But his eyes were open. Two blue marbles, staring vacantly at her small figure huddled on the ground. His eyes were open. And he was staring at her. It was as if he was pinning the blame on her with his eyes, calling her a murderer. Plume's hands were sticky with his blood.
And then she smelled it. The putrid odor that permeated from his slacks. Plume gagged on the air. The arena did little to calm her nerves. It was a wisteria forest, an arena embellished by magnificent blooming trees and brilliant scents of wildflowers mixed with honeysuckle. The arena seemed covered in a golden haze, a small paradise nestled in the Capitol. She had just spilled blood on the flower petals that littered the dirt. It seemed unfitting. Fecal matter mixed with honey. Blood splattered on baby pink azaleas.
